Eyafjallajökull is the name of the Icelandic volcano used as the slogan of the meeting of all Nichi Vendola’s factories, held in Bari from 16 to 18 July, which included debates on employment, the economic crisis, the Mafia phenomenon, migration, new media and the future course of Italian and European politics.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the second Iraqi War, the word “freedom” arguably meant theft, neocolonization, military invasion, torture and uprooting. But democracy should be taken back and made to serve a politics of the alternative.

Either Europe will be reinvented as a radically new political space, or it will perish, argues Etienne Balibar in these theses

A candidate for the next presidency of the European Commission supported by all European socialists? That’s what the PES promised, but the latest European campaign underlined how difficult it is. Audio-interviews with MEPs.

The ‘democratic deficit’ in the European Union is one of the few things that almost everyone knows about it. We have started a campaign for the Parliament to insist that it has the dominant role in deciding the policies of the Union.

According to a survey conducted in 2005 by Eurostat, religion is a fundemental aspect of life for 53% of those asked. In general, 49.5% of European citizens are Catholic, 13.7% are Protestant, 8.6% are members of the Orthodox Church, 15.7% are Muslim, 0.4% are Israelite and 25.4% declares to be “not religious”. However, when it comes to mosques, then they all return to the fold and say: “yes, we are Catholic”

A somewhat overlooked part of the Lisbon Treaty is the European citizens’ initiative, offering the general public the opportunity to invite the European Commission to consider any legislation which has the backing of more than one million signatories. Could this be just the beginning of greater direct democracy in Europe?

The new president of the European Council is being selected in a thoroughly undemocratic way. Whoever it is should be accountable to the people of Europe, with a question time in the European Parliament as a minimum first step. European Alternatives launches a campaign for Presidents answerable to the People!

Despite a rhetoric of human rights and development, the European Union is still far from utilising its unequalled economic and commercial power for a fairer approach to global relations. Recently, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique signed individual new interim Economic Partnership Agreements. Oxfam and European Alternatives believe that these agreements seek to benefit rich-country exporters and firms at the expense of poor farmers and workers.

At least one of the two top posts in post-Lisbon Europe looks set to go to a Brit. But what effect will this have on the pro-Europeanism in the UK? Does it still exist?

Fashionable words come and go, but unfashionable ones just go. In Britain the word ‘pro-European’ – always a pariah word in the UK press and rightwing circles – shrivelled up and died a death early in this decade, with no-one but the small Liberal Democrat party to nurture it.