Dunja Larise

The project Democracy and Crisis in Europe explores the consequences of the Euro-zone crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe as interconnected phenomena, by demonstrating not only the weakness of European institutions and legal frameworks in providing quick, synchronized and sustainable solutions for and within Europe, but also the radical semantic openness of the one of the fundamental conceptual cornerstones of Europe´s political identity: The idea of democracy. This project discusses the questions, which arose around the Euro-zone crisis like who rules over economic and financial policies and politics and does the genuine democratic policy comprise a democratic decision-making and transparency in economic and financial policy? The refugee crisis adds the issue of cultural values to the already heated debate about the meaning of democracy. This project further addresses the issue of re-negotiation of the concept of democracy by analyzing first, what different political and societal interests act as agents in reshaping the meanings of concepts of crisis, democracy and culture and second, how the mutual inferences and cross-references of these concepts in political debate reconfigure their meanings and contents.