WHO WE ARE
The EMN is a space to strengthen the emerging municipalist ecosystem in Europe and its capacity for social and political transformation from the ground up.
We are a project that brings together organisations and individuals to create supporting structures and generates political spaces that want to promote municipalism, social and environmental justice, and the feministisation of politics.
We believe that the local scale is a key component of a bottom-up strategy to build and strengthen power in opposition to the neoliberal onset, which promotes nationalism, precarisation of life, and antidemocratic ways of wielding power.
OUR STORY
Since the emergence of the Spanish “Cities of Change” in 2015, there has been a renewed interest globally in the potential of local politics to achieve broad social and political transformations under the name of “municipalism”. All across Europe – especially in Spain, France, Italy, Croatia and Serbia, but not only – a new wave of politicians and policies are addressing global pressing issues such as social inequalities in access to essential means of social reproduction, the effects of the Climate Crisis, and the emergence of Far-Right nationalism. More importantly, the municipalist wave represents a promising way of building political power from the ground up by challenging how institutions are managed and experimenting with radical forms of democratisation and feministisation of the way institutional politics work.
These municipalist dynamics have been especially powerful on the European continent. Several international gatherings and summits held in recent years – such as international and local Fearless Cities events in Barcelona, Warsaw, Naples, and Belgrade, as well as The Future is Public conference in Amsterdam – have fostered an informal network of organisations, projects, and individuals interested in supporting the municipalist hypothesis. During one of these summits in June 2019 in Belgrade, some of the more active participants in this loose network developed the European Municipalist Network project as a collective strategy to strengthen this emerging ecosystem.
OUR VALUES
The principles that guide our work are: radical democracy, transparency, inter- and eco-dependence, commons, feministization of politics, solidarity, care, respect, autonomy, inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and continuous learning.
