On 10-11 November, academics, civil society representatives and activists gathered in Florence to attend the fifth European Civic Academy. This year’s event was held on the theme “Capturing the winds of change: how can democratic civil society drive systemic change?” The sessions covered a range of topics, but one message emerged again and again: our strength is in our unity, particularly when we face common challenges. It is in this same spirit that we must now come together to push for an enabling environment for civil society.
In recent decades, large-scale crises have affected Europe and the world, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine just the most recent examples. These multifaceted crises demonstrate the systemic nature of the challenges we face today, including climate change, social injustice and rising precarity, and the long-term consequences of conflicts. In this context, there is rising frustration among people all over the world, and this is too often channelled into reactionary and far-right politics. The winds of change are blowing. We must make sure they blow in the right direction – towards greater social justice, democracy, and equality.
It is around this central theme that European Civic Academy 2022 was held. How can we, as democratic civil society, capture this desire for a different world and drive systemic change? Over the two days, we heard insights from a diverse group of academics and activists on a range of topics. We discussed what we can learn from the social movements that have turned to electoral politics. We focused in on how to push for systemic change under “illiberal” governments. We also explored how to engage the disinterested, how to counter the normalisation of far-right narratives and how to create a culture of care within civil society, when so many activists suffer from burnouts, threats and even violence.
This year’s academy was held in the framework of 2022Firenze – a large gathering of civil society, marking 20 years since the first European Social Forum. In the opening session, ECF co-president Raffaella Bolini and Lorenzo Zamponi, assistant professor of sociology at the Centre on Social Movement Studies, looked back on the events of 20 years earlier. The session covered a range of topics, including how the alter-globalisation movement was born, how the climate emergency makes patience in activism more difficult, and how the anti-war movement today can overcome differences of opinion about how to provide solidarity to Ukraine. But if one message stood out from the session, it is that the fragmentation of movements in recent years must be reversed. We couldn’t agree more.
Creating greater unity starts with recognising the common struggles we face. As Professor Albena Azmanova argued in her keynote speech the following day, precarity is now so pervasive that it crosses class boundaries, and feeds fear of change exactly when it is most needed. Public anxieties, she argues, fuel far-right, xenophobic populism that calls for autocratic shortcuts to security. To counter precarity, rather than simply needing policies that deliver we need public measures that foster empowerment. For that, we need to eliminate the sources of precarity – the political ecosystem built around the profit motive.
Azmanova offered seven ideas for driving systemic change which revolve around this theme. They include building broad alliances, avoiding grand ideological labels that could alienate people, and recognising that, often, populist movements are rooted in valid grievances – it is their prescription that is wrong. You can read Professor Azmanova’s speech and read more about the event here!
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The discussions at European Civic Academy 2022 ultimately highlighted the importance of unity and alliance building. Facing shared challenges, we should take inspiration from the mass mobilisations of two decades ago and build broad networks of civil society and social movements across the world. Doing so requires finding the common ground and working up from there. It also means creating a truly enabling environment for civil society. In Europe, these efforts continue to gather pace. Next week, European Civic Forum and Civil Society Europe will convene CSOs from across the continent to build on this work. As Raffaella Bolini rightly told the European Civic Academy audience, “our strength is [our] capability to converge and create unity”. Our priority in the coming months is to do just that.