Lars Josephsen, Editor

The CINEFOGO Network of Excellence is now entering into its last phase. The financial support to the Network from EU’s Framework Programme 6 will be closed by the end of August 2009.

Extensive information on the Network’s activities in the third project year (from September 2007 to August 2008) has recently been collected and put together in an Activity Report, which is mentioned in this Newsletter issue, where we also remind briefly about CINEFOGO’s two final conferences, that will be take place in Brussels in the coming spring. They will wind up important isssues from the Network’s research field, and both are aiming at stimulating ongoing dialogue and debate among scholars, civil society organisations and policy makers at the EU level. The first conference addresses ’Social rights, active citizenship and governance in the European Union’, and the second will focus on ‘Citizenship, governance and social quality’.

The weekly CINEFOGO E-letter has been published during the last 9 months. The E-letter announces all information on upcoming CINEFOGO events, such as conferences, seminars and other arrangements, and keeps track of CINEFOGO related networks, projects and institutions. Subscription to the E-letter can be obtained by writing to the Secretariat (cinefogo@ruc.dk).

In these years, civil society research shows increasing interest in examining activities driven by the Third Sector, dealing with a variety of welfare problems. A large conference on ‘The Third Sector and Sustainable Change’, jointly arranged by ISTR and EMES, took place in July 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. A brief account of the conference is presented below.

In December 2008, a conference in Copenhagen on ‘Social Innovation’, focused upon a special aspect of civil society, or perhaps more correctly, on organisations descending from the border region between civil society and the business sector: the social enterprises. These are providing goods and services with an explicit aim to benefit the community. Such organizations show new operational features and surprising problem solving capabilities. Extensive research efforts are dedicated to describe and understand their characteristics, and to map their spread. The Copenhagen conference was stamped by Nobel prize laureate, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who stated that social business constitute a new model for power reduction and employment generation, not the least in low-income areas. As such they provide an important supplement to humanitarian aid and to common enterprises. - A brief account of this event can be found below.

The Dialogue and Debate section adresses in this issue the question of Democratic legitimacy of the European Union. The topic has been, and is constantly contested; the debate is driven by many parties and takes place on a variety of public arenas at national and EU levels. The roles of civil society and public sphere are repeatedly highligted in this context. In the debate one finds not only national and EU-based political actors, but also a broad spectrum of participants, embracing policy interested individuals and private organisations, academic institutions, individual scolars, national and transnational interest groups, all kinds of media, and the general public.

The theme in question is difficult: Firstly, it is decisive which democratic model you adopt as the basis, i.e. which attributes you connect to your conception of democracy. Secondly, the notion of legitimacy has to be examined, - a task that is by no means easy. Several components of the term have been included, e.g. legal aspects (legality), normative justifications (input and output legitimacy), and legitimity through support expressed by citizens and/or authorities in relevant constituencies and states.

It is a great pleasure to CINEFOGO to present the Newsletter’s readers to the following two contributions addressing this important topic:

• an essay by Vladimír Špidla, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities (Brussels), on ‘Democratic legitimacy of the European Union’, and
• an article by Karel B. Müller, assistant professor at the University of Economics in Prague, titled ‘Featuring a European Civil Society. - European Demos and Democratic Deficit in the EU’.
  

Against this background, we invite the readers to participate in the continued debate.