This conference will bring to Austin the leading figures of the new movement for Democratic Reform in Europe, including the former finance minister of Greece and author of the global bestseller, Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis, the recent French presidential candidate, Benoit Hamon, the rising Labour MP from Yorkshire, Chi Onwurah, the former Vice Prime Minister of Poland, Grzegorz Kolodko. These leaders will join distinguished academic experts including Kunibert Raffer (University of Vienna), Giuseppe Sacco (LUISS University of Rome), Brendan O'Leary (University of Pennsylvania), Jorge Uxo (University of Madrid) and Henning Meyer of Social Europe, among others.
This is the fourth in a biennial series of Texas conferences on European issues, which have in past years explored the crisis of the Eurozone, the Greek crisis and the relationship of the South American Summer to European problems. It will engage senior American experts as well, including Michael Lind, Jeremi Suri and James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin, Damon Silvers, Policy Director of the AFL-CIO, and Pavlina Tcherneva of Bard College, a leading advocate of Modern Monetary Theory.
An additional focus of this conference is the emergence of young leaders in addressing the European crisis. These will include Philip Pilkington of Ireland, Clara Mattei of Italy and the New School, Daniel Munevar (a Colombian resident in Sweden and former adviser to the Greek finance ministry), and Tuomas Malinen of the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Keynotes will be given by Benoit Hamon and Chi Onwurah, and a special panel will be devoted to the Democracy in Europe Movement, led by Yanis Varoufakis -- who is, in addition, a former member of the faculty of the LBJ School.
This program is supported in part by:
