The Economic Crisis as a Chance for a New Beginning

European-wide we are nowadays confronted with a continually increasing mass unemployment, with poverty and environmental damage - phenomena which furthermore show a highly unbalanced regional distribution. The decline of individual industries and types of production has spread over whole cities, communities and regions.

The actual forms and effects of the crises vary from country to country but not, however, their basic structure. We call it a split economy - divided into zones of prosperity on the one hand and crisis regions on the other.

The subsequent disintegration of the pertaining social and economic mesh which was often perceived as an omnipotent and ever-present framework can, at the same time, be understood as a chance for a new beginning.

For this to happen, a change in perspective is required: away from the dominant, exogenous-oriented philosophy of development and towards independent strategies for economic self-help and local development.

The many original ideas and forms of economic self-help which have already developed throughout European crisis regions represent more than just a temporary response to an emergency: they involve positive, future-orientated proposals which contain the germ of a new, community- and solidarity-based economy.