Focal Points

The fate of migrants and refugees attempting to enter Fortress Europe has triggered a new European debate on laws, borders and human rights. A debate riddled with the complex, often epic, narratives that underlie immediate crisis situations.

At a time when the global pull of democracy has never been stronger, the crisis of democracy has become acute. Eurozine has collected articles that make the problems of democracy so tangible that one starts to wonder if it has a future at all, as well as those that return to the very basis of the principle of democracy.

In the run up to the European Parliamentary elections in May, editors from the Eurozine network are reporting on national debates from across the EU. The aim is to compile a more detailed and comparative picture of the public mood than that usually provided by national media.

With trillions potentially having to be poured into national economies too big to fail -- Greece, Ireland, Portugal, even Italy and Spain -- the eurocrisis is threatening to overshadow the collapse of 2008. In a new Eurozine focal point, Jacques Delors, Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Daianu, Ulrike Guérot, Slavenka Drakulic and others discuss whether the EU is not only broke, but also broken -- and if so, whether Europe's leaders are up to the task of fixing it.

Twenty years after 1989, most former communist states in central and eastern Europe are members of the EU. Yet the transition from closed to open societies is far from "complete".

Drawing on affinities between Eurozine's publishing activities and the European Cultural Foundation's Connected Action for the Commons programme, we launch a new focal point exploring the prospects for a commons where cultural and social activists meet with a broader public to create new ways of living together.