Introduction — In Search of Europe’s Future: Subterranean Politics and the Other Crisis in Europe

Abstract

There is a growing body of research and commentary on the current global crisis and its social and political consequences. The majority of these studies take ‘the crisis’ to be a financial crisis that has been unfolding since 2007,¹ sometimes reading and analysing it as a crisis of capitalism as we know it. The outcome of these analyses is diverse and rich. Yet, they share the assumption that the financial crisis is the context that guides their research in terms of the questions that scholars ask and in terms of how they assess current political activism. In a subtle way, then, the financial crisis has come to serve as a key frame through which current socio-political developments and happenings are explored; socio-political phenomena, such as recent protests like Occupy, are analysed and, not least, evaluated with regard to their relationship to the financial crisis (and its consequences), or as a reaction against or a failure to react to it.