Democracy

Once you make a commons together, you can have different political visions, but what you share is this desire to construct and protect the commons. Interview with Michel Bauwens, theorist and activist, co-founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation.

The turmoil the Italian political landscape has been traversing of late is particularly worrisome. Not so much for the political instability but more for the political blindness that it reveals and which risks destroying the fundamentals of the very idea of democracy itself. While the current government continues the politics of austerity imposed by the European Union, the reform of the political architecture is still missing.

Citizens are demanding more direct democracy, something that the political parties are resisting. However the economic crisis has changed everything and made the status quo no longer sustainable. In its wake, a number of new movements are challenging how political decisions are being made.

Despite being only a small part of their manifesto, the German Greens’ policy of ‘veggie days’ gave them the unfortunate appearance of being the party that ‘wants to ban things’.

“Right2water” is the first successful European Citizens’ Initiative and has got everyone talking about water. What accounts for the success of this initiative, and how can others learn from it?

A declaration of independence.

Are Greens republicans who ignore that they are republicans? And if so, what consequences may that have for their political doctrines?

We should recognise that the national context and legitimacy is here to stay for some time. We might overcome it one day, but not tomorrow. We therefore need to develop a new approach that allows for combining the national more legitimately and more democratically with the European.

In 2010 the Flemish nationalists became the largest party in the Belgian Federal Parliament for the first time. Does the rise in electoral support for the N-VA herald the end of the state of Belgium or can the country continue to adapt?

Belgian federalism and European federalism have reached the end of an epoch. Both have to be reinvented. To achieve this we must start from our shared interests and recognise the interdependence that links us. Environmentalists who have always been passionate federalists have to be the motors of this reinvention.