Welfare and Social Issues

In an interview with GEJ, Hungarian sociologist Agnes Gagyi explains why struggles differ from East to West, and why the educated middle class has become so prominent in today’s movements.

Introduction by the Editorial Board

Prohibiting cannabis has been a failure. The number of consumers is constantly high, cannabis is available for everyone everywhere. In Germany, over 2.3 million adults are using cannabis. Twenty-two per cent of teenagers aged 15 to 16 are known to have already used the substance. In response, the German Greens have designed an alternative plan to regulate and control the cannabis market.

The left is ideologically exhausted. But this is just as true for the right, no matter where you’re looking, whether it’s at the buzzwords of the FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria), at UKIP, the Front National or the radical-primitive opposition of the Tea Party in the United States.

The UK faces a housing crisis. It is this crisis, and the growing number of evictions that are mobilising people to campaign on housing. A group of young mothers fights back with direct action.

TTIP and the other bilateral agreements of its kind are part of a political power struggle about influence and profits. But who are the players and the main winners in the distribution poker? A historical analysis demonstrates that, when transparency and reliable information are absent, citizens are usually the ones who lose out.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, the French and European responses have focused on security and how to reinforce it. At the same time, far-right movements are making gains across Europe, attacks on mosques have increased and a distorted secularist discourse is leading to further marginalisation of religious groups.

An old friend once told me that being a decent person means having a guilty conscience. And there is enough to feel guilty about as 2015 unfolds. Ethical uncertainty over how a liberal society should deal with the intolerant has become strikingly evident following the murders of four French Jews in a kosher grocery and twelve editors and staff members of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine located in Paris, by partisans of al-Qaeda and, its rival, ISIS.

Against the backdrop of the Pegida protests, politicians in Germany must finally recognise that Islamophobia is a form of racism. Unfortunately, most decision-makers in this country are still a long way off doing that, says Armin Langer, co-ordinator of the Salaam-Shalom initiative in the Berlin district of Neukölln.

In the protest movements that have emerged since the financial crisis, from Occupy in the US to the Arab Spring, social media has gained new significance as a method of communication, both between activists and as a means of bringing the message to the rest of the world. The protests which took hold in Turkey last year were no exception – but how has the situation developed since then, and how have the authorities responded?