The Utopia of the EU /// Susan George, Yanis Varoufakis, Franco Berardi Bifo ||| 12.5.2013.
12/05/
2013, 19:00h, cinema
Europa, 6th Subversive festival: "
The Utopia of
Democracy"
The Utopia of the EU
Moderator:
Igor Štiks
Croatia's accession coincides also with the deepest crisis in the
EU's history.
The Union that is about to radically redefine itself is, as the trends show, fragment internally into the core member states surrounded by the EU's internal periphery and, furthermore, by the EU's external periphery, most notably the rest of the '
Western Balkans' as the EU likes to call the
Balkan ghetto it surrounds. Croatia's accession is the event that symbolically and technically signifies, what we call, the enlargement of post-democratic
Europe: territorially, it enlarges towards another Balkan state and at the same time, structurally, it redefines itself as budgetary and managerial union of several levels of subordination with dubious democratic legitimacy, if any. What's the future of the postdemocratic Europe? And is a true democratic renewal possible?
Yanis Varoufakis
Political economist and a professor at the
University of Texas, Austin. After training in mathematics and statistics,
Varoufakis received his economics doctorate in
1987 at the
University of Essex. Before that he has allready began teaching economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the
University of East Anglia. From
1989 until
2000 he taught as
Senior Lecturer in Economics at the
Department of Economics of the
University of Sydney. In 2000 he moved to his native
Greece where he was
Professor of
Economic Theory at the
University of Athens. He is an active participant in the current debates on the global and
European crisis and the author of The
Global Minotaur:
America, the
True Origins of the
Financial Crisis and the
Future of the
World Economy (
2011).
Susan George
Well-known Franco-American political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice,
Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is a fellow and president of the board of the
Transnational Institute in
Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the
International Monetary Fund,
World Bank and what she calls their "maldevelopment model". She similarly criticizes the structural reform policies of the
Washington Consensus on
Third World development.
Franco Berardi Bifo
Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches. Some of these book are: The
Soul at
Work: From Alienation to
Autonomy (2009), Precarious
Rhapsody: Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha
Generation (2009),
Ethereal Shadows:
Communications and
Power in
Contemporary Italy (2009).
Igor Štiks
His fiction, academic work, poetry and essays have appeared widely in journals and reviews of the former
Yugoslavia and abroad. His novel A
Castle in
Romagna received the
Award '
Slavic' for
Best First Book in 2000. His second novel
Elijah's Chair (
2006) received both the Award "Gjalski" and the Award of '
Kiklop' for the
Best Fiction Book of the Year and it has been translated into a dozen
European languages. The theatre play based on this novel won the
Grand Prix of the 2011
Belgrade International Theatre Festival. His first collection of poems
History of a
Flood was published in 2008.
Recently in collaboration with
Srećko Horvat he wrote a political essay
The Right to
Rebellion --
An Introduction to the
Anatomy of Civic
Resistance (
2010). Igor Štiks is a postdoctoral research fellow at the
University of Edinburgh and the co-director of the Subversive
Forum in
Zagreb.
http://www.subversivefestival.com/foruml/7/223/en/the-utopia-of-the-eu