UPDATE: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

When the first edition of this booklet was published in spring 2014, few people could have predicted that TTIP would soon become one of the hottest political topics in Europe. TTIP has become a key political issue in many countries, with growing media interest feeding off public fear at the substantial dangers that the agreement will bring ...

TTIP - Why the World Should Beware

In cooperation with IATP, IPS, FOCUS and TNI.The trade and investment partnership TTIP, which is currently being negotiated between the EU and the US, will affect the whole world. But the other world regions, like the BRICS or the Global South are being excluded from the trade negotiations and hardly get attention in the debates around TTIP ...

Going for broke. Why financialization is the wrong fix for infrastructure

Building new infrastructure is no longer simply the talk of towns and communities in which various projects are to be implemented. Instead, it has taken on a new, awe-inspiring, global character.In Europe alone, the European Commission estimates that investment of up to €2 trillion is needed in transport, energy and IT infrastructure by 2020 ...

Energy Democracy in Greece

January 25, 2015 was a historic day: the people of Greece chose to break with austerity policies. They elected SYRIZA—the Coalition of the Radical Left—as the largest party in parliament, Alexis Tsipras will become prime minister. The importance of this victory for the left in Greece, Europe, and indeed the world should not be underestimated ...

Double Standards

Arbitration courts for investment disputes have been increasingly criticised, not only in the context of CETA and TTIP, two trade agreements currently planned by the European Union with Canada and the USA respectively. Both agreements include provisions that allow companies to sue states before international courts of arbitration ...

Climate Change and the Great Inaction

For decades now, the world’s governments have met with the stated goal of meeting the challenge of climate change with a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Years of talks have failed to bring about such an agreement. Faced with the enormous political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry, the world’s governments have chosen the path of least resistance: inaction ...

Natural Gas Lock-In

Gas plays a major role in current efforts to implement new energy and climate policies in the European Union. Proponents claim it as an important, clean energy source needed as a ‘transition’ fuel, while social movements and communities increasingly organize against dangerous gas fracking techniques and increased gas flaring across the globe ...

The Far Right in Europe

On the occasion of the European Summer University for Social Movements and in co-operation with Attac we prepared two workshops, both concentration on the situation of the far right in Europe.The first workshop will map the far right political subjects and analyse their different peculiar aspects in several European countries ...

Energy democracy in Europe

Already today, the energy transition in Europe is supplanting nuclear and coal power plants and will, at some point, be able to completely replace them. As Hermann Sheer incessantly emphasizes, this transition could also have positive social and political side effects.This study offers a general and easy-to-understand overview of vanguard energy democracy projects within the EU ...

Free Trade - Project of the Powerful

Americans and Europeans are negotiating a free trade agreement called TTIP. But why? Trade is already flourishing. Meanwhile, the real barrier to trade is not being addressed: currency speculation, which leads to extreme currency fluctuations and ad hoc price increases for export goods.If we are to understand the political obsession with free trade, we must look far back in history, beyond the current negotiations ...

Mapping Ultra-Right Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism within the Greek State Apparatus

This study does not cover ultra-right political culture in Greece in a general way, nor even Golden Dawn per se, but poses a simpler question: How is to be explained that Golden Dawn is being treated by the State as another organization in the mould of the “17 November” group, despite the obvious fact ...

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a comprehensive free trade and investment treaty currently being negotiated – in secret – between the European Union and the USA. As officials from both sides acknowledge, the main goal of TTIP is to remove regulatory ‘barriers’ which restrict the potential profits to be made by transnational corporations on both sides of the Atlantic ...

The rise of the neo-Nazi party ‘Golden Dawn’ in Greece

One of the most significant repercussions of the economic, social and political crisis in Greece is the emergence of the openly National Socialist group Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) on the Greek political scene. The organization arose only a few years after the Greek military junta (1967-1974), but until 2009 it existed only at the right-wing fringes of society, going mostly unnoticed by the general public ...

Energy democracy?

Content:1. Energy democracy? A socio-ecological transformation in the area of energy (Ulrich Brand)2. Socio-ecological transformation: dominant developments, resistances and alternatives – Energy as a crucial terrain (Ulrich Brand)3. The controversial energy turnaround in Germany: successes, contradictions, perspectives (Hans Thie)4 ...

Energy Policy and Resources Extractivism

Content:Ulrich Brand, Austria & Germany: Energy policy and resource extractivism: resistances and alternatives (background paper)Brian Ashley, South Africa: Climate jobs – the struggle of our timeSören Becker, Germany: Energy democracy and extractivism: Some theses on alternative forms of energy organisation in Europe (and beyond)Many Camara, Mali : Les énergies renouvelables : alternative crédible et durable à l'exploitation d'uranium ...

The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

"How can it be that the enormous amount of work and experience in peace practice accumulated by women and by many selfless men, who are all struggling in their own contexts for compromise and peace, has entered to such a small degree into the general strategies of conflict prevention and of positive ...

Socio-ecological Transformation and Energy Policy in Latin America and Europe

In the current multiple crisis of global capitalism, which is developing differently in different regions, a variety of real and potential breaks are emerging, together with search processes for ways to handle the crisis. One major factor to be taken into account here is that of the continuities – as, ...

A Post-capitalist Paradigm. The Common Good of Humanity

Rethinking the reproduction of life and the continuity of life on our planet from the perspective of the paradigm of the Common Good of Humanity is an urgent necessity in the current situation.There is need to analyze in depth both the concept at the basis of the paradigm and its implications, to increase ...

Socioecological Transformations - JEP

Due to the multiple crisis of finance and the economy, of climate change and resource depletion, of gender relations, societal integration and political representation, in recent years the term ‘transformation' has become more and more prominent. It has the potential to become a new oxymoron – like ‘sustainable development' and currently ‘green economy' – that opens up an interesting epistemic terrain which might lead to the formulation of diverge political strategies ...

Beautiful Green World. On the myths of a Green Economy

It will stop climate change and the extinction of species and in so doing will create high growth rates and millions of jobs: the green economy. It’s seen as a miraculous weapon. Through it, global capitalism will be stabilised. And then it will be sustainable as well. But what is the green economy? In it, policy parameters are supposed to ensure the flow of capital to make markets and economy «greener» and create «green» jobs ...