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We should not forget what exactly provoked the mass protests that eventually led to the fall of the old regime in Kiev: it was the then President Yanukovych’s sudden decision not to sign the Association Agreement with the EU. Ten years after the ‘Orange revolution’, the dramatic change of events in February 2014 have given Ukraine and Europe a second chance.

Despite some positive signs, the European economy remains extraordinarily weak. To escape deflation and solve problems like unemployment, what is needed is a whole new approach to getting money into the economy.

The 2007 financial crisis evidenced the weaknesses of the Eurozone. Since then, European policymakers have tried to save the euro and the European financial market. As consequence of the economic and political instability of the last years the European Central Bank has de facto gained more power vis-à-vis the other European Institutions and political actors. Today the ECB is fundamental for determining Member States’ economic policies in all areas, not only monetary policy.

Success or failure? That is the question supporters in Germany of an Unconditional Basic Income have to ask themselves following the end, on 14 January, of the European Citizens’ Initiative, which for technical reasons did not quite run for a full year.

The sovereign bail-outs of Greece, Ireland, Spain and other countries are often framed as loans handed out to the poor, irresponsible countries of the periphery by rich, responsible countries like Germany. They might come with very harsh conditions attached, but their aim is nonetheless to help the recipients. But is that really the case?

Popular protest may have saved Gezi Park, but elsewhere in Turkey the destruction on the environment in pursuit of private profit continues. The Green Though Foundation organised a conference to discuss the challenges posed by these developments and what they say about politics in modern Turkey.

Kogo naprawdę ratują pożyczki dla zadłużonych europejskich krajów?

Yann Moulier Boutang thinks of us as bees. Each day we pollinate millions of digital platforms producing intelligence, information and interactions that form the core of the new economy. As part of an on-going reflection on the form capitalism will take in the future, the magazine Usbek & Rica interviewed Yann Moulier Boutang, an economist close to the Italian philosopher Toni Negri and also to the French Greens.

Nearly 30,000 people took to the streets of Berlin on January 18, 2014 to protest the industrialisation of farming and the E.U.-U.S Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation. In addition to making their demands heard, the organisers gave a voice and a face to Agrarwende, a citizen movement that is gaining steam in Germany and that calls for a rethinking of agriculture.

Though many of the Commission’s reform proposals have been watered down, the Greens scored some notable successes in ensuring a ‘greening’ of the CAP. What are these, and what do they mean for European farming?