Dunja Larise

The Euro-zone crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis unfolded the weakness of European institutions and legal frameworks in providing quick, synchronized and sustainable solutions for the problems Europe confronts and revealed the radical semantic openness of the one of the fundamental conceptual cornerstones of Europe’s political identity: The idea of democracy.  The Euro-zone crisis arose the question of who rules over economic and financial policies and does genuine democratic policy comprise a democratic decision-making and transparency in economic and financial matters? The refugee crisis sparked the debate about cultural values and their relationship with European democracy.

This project addresses re-negotiation and reconstruction of the concept of democracy in Europe as currently refashioned against the backdrop of the economic and refugee crises by analyzing first, what different political and societal interests act as agents in reshaping the meanings of the concept of democracy in Europe and second, how the mutual inferences and cross-references of the concepts of crisis, democracy and culture in political debates reconfigure their definitions and contents.