 Thank you very much for inviting me again. As you rightly said, I sort of have two areas of work. One is about war and conflict and security policies and the other is about civil society and social movements. I was going to start with a point. There's a very nice book by Auric Beck that has just come out called German Europe. In the book he says, Monetary union without political union wasn't a mistake. Now everybody is saying we should never have established a monetary union without a political union. It was deliberate. The idea was to create material interests in political cooperation. And I think that's actually a very important point because maybe if we do have a hope, it's people being very scared about what would happen if monetary union collapsed. It was, if you like, according to him, an extension of the Monet method. And the Monet method, as many of you will remember, was we're going to create Europe by economic cooperation of various kinds, steel, coal, agriculture, and eventually the politics will follow. And it was based on the assumption of what was known at the time as the permissive consensus, namely that we trusted our elites and they could go ahead and do what they liked. And actually politics was really neglected and that, I think, is the problem today, that the permissive consensus is evaporating. And the question is actually, are the material interests in political cooperation strong enough to preserve and extend the European Union? What I want to talk today about is some research that we undertook at my unit last year. And the aim was to try and uncover a new political basis for European Union. And, well, in a minute I'll tell you what we concluded. But then I want to reflect a little about the problems of political legitimacy and the ways in which we maybe do need to reconceptualise Europe if we are to have a hope of generating a new political basis for the European Union. So we called the study Subterranean Politics and we used the term because we weren't quite sure what we were looking for. And we used the term to refer to a range of new and interesting phenomenon outside the political mainstream. And I didn't want to use the term civil society, partly because people tend to associate civil society with NGOs. And we tended to think about NGOs and I'll come back to that later as actually part of the elite as institutionalised politics. But also we wanted to be able to include new political parties which are usually considered outside of civil society like the power party, like the five star movement in Italy. And we didn't want to use the term social movements also because we wanted to look at political parties but also because there's such a big scholarly literature about social movements in civil society that there's a whole theoretical apparatus about how you go about studying these phenomenon and we wanted in a way to start afresh. So what we did was we had seven field teams across Europe at looking at the emergence of Subterranean politics in different cultural contexts. And we had four country teams looking at Germany, Spain, Italy and Hungary. We had one global city which was London. Actually we started off with a UK study and then we realised London was so different from the rest of the UK that we decided it was going to be a city study. And we had two trans-European studies. One looking at grassroots activism, the other looking focusing on movements against austerity. So what I'm going to tell you really is what came out of those studies and I just want to really make five points and then I'll come back to the issues of political legitimacy. The first point which our chair mentioned was bubbling up or resonance also. Actually what we observed in Europe was not necessarily bigger or more extensive or more organised or more transnational than in the past. I mean I've been running this Global Civil Society programme at LSE and we've tracked things like the movement against the war in Iraq, climate change, the World Social Forum and in many ways they were just as big. But what was interesting about the events of 2012 was the way they hit the mainstream. And I'll just give you a few little examples of that. One is that in Germany for example those people who were protesting were known as Wutberger, angry citizens. But actually it wasn't a term invented by the people themselves. It was invented by the press. And Wutberger became the new word of the year in the official German language society, the Gesellschaft für die Deutscher Sprache. And similarly, Indignados, which was the name given to the Spanish protesters, was not invented by the Spanish protesters. They called themselves the 15th of May movement. It was invented by the press explicitly referring, and some of you maybe have read this because it's really wonderful, a pamphlet by Stefan Hessell who was a French World War II resistance hearer. Also one of the drafters of the Declaration of Human Rights in his 90s who wrote a passionate pamphlet called Andignébu, Be Indignant. It's actually translated into English as Time for Outrage, but I think it sounds better in Andignébu. And so the press called them Indignados, the people who got indignant, which was actually an invented noun apparently. So that's one example. The other example I was going to give you was Occupy in London. Actually it was quite small, it was about 100 people, and most of them had either been in climate change camps as we discovered when we interviewed them, or they'd been sitting outside Parliament Square for 10 years protesting against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you may remember that you saw them when you went, but nobody took any notice of them at all. But when they moved into the square mile and set up camp, suddenly they became a focus of mainstream interest. They caused a crisis in the Church of England which could not be a more establishment organisation with no less than three officials, I think, resigning because there was an argument about whether they should be allowed to stay or not. Bankers passed by and gave them money and even, which most activists wouldn't even dream of, they got invited to write an article in the Financial Times. So this is to give you... So what I really think is the first point I really wanted to stress, and of course it's reflected in also the rise of new parties, political parties like the Pirate Party in Germany, the five-star movement in Italy, is that what was really significant was the way it was bubbling up, the way it resonated. I have no idea whether it's bigger or lesser, but people took it seriously in a way they hadn't before. The second point I wanted to make is that these demonstrations were all about politics. They're often treated as demonstrations against austerity, but they were fundamentally all about politics and that was true of absolutely everybody we interviewed. And perhaps the best proof of that is the fact that so much was going on in Germany, which wasn't suffering from austerity policies, and yet they had the demonstrations against the infrastructure projects in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, they had a march against the European Central Bank, they had activists' synonymous, they had a whole range of campaigns which we found in our German study and of course they had the Pirate Party. Also if you look at the slogans, so the Spanish slogans were things like a caro in every neighbourhood. They think this is democracy, but it isn't. They were all very political, they were all about trust and I think the final point I wanted to make on this in relation to the politics is of course that if this view that there's no trust in government, that it's really about restoring political legitimacy is very much confirmed by Eurobarometer figures which are quite shocking actually at the ones we cite in our study are from last year, this year even worse. I'm afraid I've still got last years. So overall in Europe only 24% trust their government. And of our country studies this range from 32% in Germany to 12% in Italy. And for political parties it's even worse. Overall only 14% of people in Europe trust political parties and the high is Germany at 15 and the low is Italy at 9 which is quite staggering actually. So and this kind of lack of trust we found whether you were talking about left or right it was fundamental sort of sense that we know we can trust our governments that motivated these different movements. A third point I wanted to make is and this is not true for all movements it's not true for the right wing populist movements but for many of the other movements there's a preoccupation with democracy but a huge feeling of loss of faith in representative democracy. A sense they think they represent us but they don't is this Spanish slogan I mentioned. And this sense that democracy has to be about more than voting that it has to be about participating and particularly in the squares the emphasis was on doing democracy themselves what we call prefigurative action imagining how democracy ought to be and with quite complicated assemblies, debates all this hand language which you may have seen to express approval how you conduct meetings all of this was very very important in the squares and was one of the reasons attracting people to the squares and I took one quote from a German who was involved in one of the occupations and he said it was videos of the Spanish assemblies on YouTube that motivated him to join and he said, my heart was beating I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying but I thought awesome they meet in a public square and they talk to each other so I thought that was a kind of very nice sense of what people felt now the fourth point I wanted to make is about the role of internet and Facebook I'm going to say this rather briefly for time reasons but basically all of these demonstrations, parties make use of social media and social media has hugely facilitated their mobilisation, Twitter, Facebook but what we thought was interesting was not simply the fact that I don't know, the Spanish assemblies were started by a group of bloggers what's really interesting is what it means for political culture and we put quite a lot in our report and it's something we want to look at further that if you engage through Facebook and the internet you actually think about politics in a rather different way and there's a lot of emphasis among the activists on things like horizontality, replaceability, leaderlessness I'm not sure how serious all of them are I mean some people complained that leaderlessness actually means there are leaders that you don't know who the leaders are but at the same time what is very interesting is the sense people have where you can go in and do your bit and then leave it to somebody else to take over that you... we called it the two point nought culture because the idea is that the earlier internet culture was about reading and searching and the new two point nought culture is about editing and writing so you can go in and participate and then somebody else can take over from you and this idea that you can participate a bit and it doesn't matter who you are and you can be anonymous is creating something very different and more extensive than before and I don't really know what the long term consequences will be I think another aspect of that is that for all activists which I found very interesting internet freedom is a key issue and process is a key issue for all of them what they're concerned about is building this new democratic process and they're less concerned about outcomes a lot of politicians criticise the activists for not having a set of demands and they feel that misses the point because the point is actually how you reach an agreement how you reach a decision not what that decision is and so process and how you involve people is absolutely key, especially for the panel and now the final conclusion that I want to talk about a little bit more was the one that was most disappointing for us is that among these sorts of people the people who participate in subterranean politics Europe by and large was invisible what do I mean by that? well of course we went out searching for Europe and that's why we ended up calling it subterranean politics because what we found was that among what you might call the elite NGOs, trade unions, intellectuals politicians who travel around Europe you can find dozens of appeals for a new Europe the manifesto of appalled economists and not the road to Europe there are so many and we actually have a subter... if you google subterranean politics you'll find our website which has a list of all these appeals but actually they're rather a minority and the appeals don't seem to have any resonance in the same way that subterranean politics does but among subterranean politics among the people that we interviewed Europe was simply not present we designed questions you know, what level of government do you think decisions ought to be taken which were designed to elicit a European response and Europe never came up and there were only a few exceptional cases the Greek demonstrations where things were blamed on the troika which was the European Central Bank the European Commission and the IMF and the demonstration against the European Central Bank in Frankfurt but by and large Europe was simply not there when we explicitly asked people what they thought about Europe we found differences that were both generational and geographical so older generation of activists by and large were rather pro-Europe and they saw Europe as very important in overcoming the legacy of 20th century wars and for them it was really important the younger generation, interestingly including UK young people took Europe for granted they said, you know, we travel around Europe with students in different universities we use the Euro, not in Britain but elsewhere we're part of the easy jet culture so they felt European but for them the European Union by and large was irrelevant to that feeling it was, if you ask them explicitly, they saw it as a neoliberal bureaucracy and you saw that there was also a geographical difference by and large Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans were more pro-Europe than people from France, Germany, Britain and particularly countries which had gone through a transition to democracy tended to be more pro-Europe now it's not that the activists were not internationalists on the contrary they were very internationalists I mean one of my favourite stories comes from the Barcelona Plaza de Catalunya which divided itself into three bits there was an Egyptian bit which discussed democracy there was an Icelandic bit which discussed the economy and there was a Palestinian bit that discussed justice and on the marches you saw no Spanish flags but you saw Egyptian, Icelandic and Palestinian flags so there was a lot of solidarity it wasn't that there wasn't solidarity but there just wasn't any interest in the European Union which was really a quite striking finding so now let me conclude because I know I was only meant to talk for 20 minutes I think the first point to make is that I do think the current crisis is fundamentally a political crisis I think the activists arrived to perceive it as a political crisis and I think it's about the collapse of the legitimacy of nation states which is extremely disturbing why do I think there has been this collapse in legitimacy well I think it's two reasons one has to do with globalisation which is that decisions that are supposed to be taken at a national level are actually taken in Brussels in the headquarters of multinational corporations in New York, in Washington and so however much politicians promise to do things they're actually confined by international agreements of various sorts and so it's extremely difficult you vote for a politician to change things and actually their potential for change is increasingly limited but I don't think that's the only reason so however perfect your democracy is nationally I mean if democracy is about the ability to change the decisions that affect your life and those decisions are not taken nationally then it doesn't going to mean that it's democracy but I also think we're coming to the end of a phase of history where the nation state was the dominant political form and there's a kind of sclerosis of the nation state it's got stuck in certain processes and ways of being and partly that stuckness is illustrated by the intermeshing of elites political, financial, media that make it very very difficult for ordinary people to penetrate that elite partly it's the sort of routines of bureaucracies and partly I think it's the technology of elections with all the emphasis on polls and focus groups politicians are focused on that tiny middle floating voter which means that parties are often not very distinct and it's very difficult to have a real, genuine public debate about things and that's why I do think the protesters' emphasis on process is so incredibly important that we do need different political processes so what does that mean? I mean if I'm right where are new sources of legitimacy for political authority to be derived from and could the European Union offer that alternative? Well certainly at the moment it doesn't and I think one of the things that came out is that the old narrative that people of my generation believe in that the EU was a peace project never again would there be a war in Europe never again would Europe become imperialist that narrative just doesn't resonate with the young so I think what we need is to think about how could the European Union become a kind of institution that actually protects democracy at local levels from the storms of globalisation makes it more possible for people because at the moment what the European Union is doing isn't exactly the opposite what the euro has done is removed the one mechanism of protection which is exchange rates but it hasn't offered another form of protection and so the question is how could it actually become a different sort of institution that does actually allow people to take control of their lives so I'm less interested in how do you democratise Europe though that would be good but more what sort of institution should Europe become if we see it not as a new nation state but as a kind of model of global governance a way of dealing with globalisation so that people can take reclaimed democracy and I think if you think of it that way then what it has to be is an institution that on the one hand taxis global bads like financial speculation like climate change carbon like multinationals who escape taxes and on the other hand promotes global goods like renewable energy health and education youth employment something of that sort so that the whole aim of it is not to be a bigger and better nation state which is what the United States is but rather to be a layer of political authority that could allow us to take back democracy not only at national levels but maybe at city levels and regional levels so is there a way that this could be achieved well of course I'm feeling very very doubtful I think this gap between the elites and subterranean politics is very difficult to bridge and I think we need a change in both I think Europe needs to become more visible to activists and activists actually do even though I do think process is important they do need to have they do need to be putting forward some alternatives they do need some policies and the elites have to introduce some of the changes that could resonate with the activists so not just the activists resonating with the mainstream but the elites resonating with the activists like atobin tax for example well will this happen who knows I mean I'm rather doubtful but I do think that's the way to go