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When Croatia’s first Green Party (OraH) emerged, many held high hopes that it could consolidate its position as a Green alternative in Croatia’s political landscape. However, it has struggled to overcome the obstacles it has faced, as well as to resolve its own internal flaws.

In this interview, commons scholar Silke Helfrich discusses the connection between degrowth and the commons, and how these two concepts can help us build a sustainable economy.

To what extent were the outcomes of the recent plebiscites held in the UK determined by the formulation of the question and the method of counting votes? If these are significant factors, this points to some puzzling quirks in the country’s voting system, as well as some far-reaching flaws in its democracy.

Mass migration is the 21st century’s revolution – leading, in turn, to a counter-revolution which threatens the core idea of the European Union. The refugee crisis has resulted in the reinforcement of stereotypes that Eastern and Western Europe already held about each other.

The case of the small village of Trun in Bulgaria – threatened by a new gold-mining project – is a stark illustration of how the interests of biodiversity, nature and ordinary people living in the area can simply be dismissed. A proliferation of such projects could have a serious impact on the ecology of the entire region, as well as contributing to a global impact on the climate.

What has transpired in Britain since the Leave campaign won the Brexit has only shown how easily the veneer of civility and conviviality can be peeled back to reveal the virulence of racism and xenophobia seething under the skin of British social life.

Brexit has been a shock. It wasn’t the European Union that smashed the trade unions, depleted Britain’s social housing stock and then went on an orgy of privatisation, but Brexit has handed complete, unregulated control over to those who did, and the potential consequences reach far beyond Britain’s borders.

This spring students in Amsterdam occupied their university, sparking similar protests in many other cities from the UK, to Canada, to Montenegro. What was the cause of this unrest and how did the protest come about? A reconstruction.

Unlike many other post-communist countries which experienced fragmentation and instability, Croatia’s party system has retained its basic stability for a long time. Yet a significant section of the electorate has sought an alternative – and as a result a succession of new political actors have emerged, with varying degrees of success. But how are they likely to fare at the country’s September parliamentary elections?

It’s difficult to point to a time in recent years when European integration was not under pressure. Yet presently, the problem-solving capacity of the European Union definitely seems to be exhausted, for two crises simultaneously challenge it: the Euro crisis and the Schengen crisis. But the calculation that two crises cause double trouble might be […]