A day without foreigners. This may seem a macabre commercial for the xenophobic Italian Northern League party, but it is actually the slogan of the general strike that has been called on 1st March by the migrants’ communities in Italy and France.

In this series of events organised in partnership with the LSE Forum for European Philosophy we invite thought provokers thinkers and scholars to reflect on key questions concerning the status of citizenship, the relations between Europe and the rest of the world and the question of the status of the migrant to Europe. Can there be a genuinely transnational demos?

Susan George is an author, Board Chair of the Transnational Institute, and Honorary President of Attac-France. This article is part of the Transnational Institute’s ongoing research in EU Trade Policy.

Althusius’s societal federalism presents a ‘bottom-up’, dynamic, participatory, consensual, and solidarist alternative to the static federal model of the European Union.

Seyla Benhabib is a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale, and director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and a well-known contemporary philosopher. She is the author of several books, most notably about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. Benhabib is well known for combining critical theory with feminist theory.

This conference is one of the first opportunities for citizens, civil society groups and academics to feed into the Commission’s thinking on democracy in Europe under Lisbon.

Climate change is not just an environmental issue – global warming affects social justice, poverty, and human rights. There are many discordant voices on how best to tackle climate change and reach a globally just agreement. Here we begin a series of confrontations by looking at the question of the carbon trading scheme, a system set up by the Kyoto protocol to allow companies to buy, sell, and trade pollution certificates.

The growth of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is renationalizing membership politics. Citizenship has historically grown and expanded through the claim-making and the demands of the excluded: the outsider has indeed the potential to expand the formal rights of citizens.

Sandro Mezzadra discusses the transnational experience of contemporary migrations, pointing to the necessity of a new interpretative paradigm in order to photograph the contemporary economic, political, and cultural inderdependences.

Is circular migration a way a rethinking third country development and the status of the migrant? Only if it is interpreted in a radical way which goes beyond economic indicators. A European Alternatives Research briefing by Danai Vassilaki