Objective
Due to the rise of grassroots movements critical of globalization and the worldwide public outpouring of protest against the war in Iraq in 2003, the transnational dimension of protest movements has in recent years received attention from a broad audience outside as well as within academic circles. However, the diverse historical roots of many of today's transnational activist networks or NGOs are still surprisingly unexplored by the research community. Although the turbulent social movements of 1960/70s ar e increasingly viewed as social and cultural responses to emerging patterns of an economic, technological, and political globalization, their European dimension has only been analyzed marginally. To overcome this research deficit, the proposed series of co nferences wants to examine the impact these protest movements had not only in paving the way for a substantial change of the domestic systems, but also on the emergence of a (trans-)national civil society and a fundamental transformation of the public sphe re. By critically confronting their countries' official policies, protest movements and domestic dissent in Eastern and Western Europe questioned so-called geopolitical realities of a bipolar world they sought to transform. Therefore, these democratic tran snational networks served as catalysts for the rise of a perceived global community and a European civil society. The various forms of democratic participation they introduced are constantly being transformed by today's transnational actors and organizatio ns and thus continue to have an impact on European policy at a time of its enlargement and the ratification of its common constitution. For this reason, the proposed series of events aims to provide a comprehensive interdisciplinary training for early stag e researchers on European protest movements not only to make a lasting contribution to the European Research Area itself, but also for the European community, its common history and identity.
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Call for proposal
FP6-2005-MOBILITY-4
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