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This article is a report of the Civil Society Forum organised by the European Economic and Social Committee and held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in October 2023. The conference took place on the basis of three panels held on implementation of the green agenda, democracy and participation, and education and youth policy, each of which are referenced below. First, however, the article addresses the keynote presentations, featuring also interviews conducted by the author, which explored issues such as co-operation, the extent to which government authorities in the western Balkans do (or do not) consult civil society in the course of policymaking, and the question of EU enlargement, an issue which has been more or less moribund for some time but which has been given a new lease of life as a result of the war in Ukraine and the applications of both Ukraine and Moldova for EU membership. The communiqué agreed at the conference emphasised the need for enlargement to the western Balkans in the interests of European peace, security and economic and social prosperity, but it is not yet clear how this will translate into policy.

This article explores a recent successful threat of industrial action at the ArcelorMittal steel plant at Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Building in interviews with trade unions leaders, the author locates the campaign against the background of the economic, political and social situation in the country as well as the difficulties these impose on effective trade union organisation which, with certain exceptions, exists at a low level particularly in the private sector. Other aspects also make trade unions unattractive, not least to young people. Consequently, examples of industrial action which are successful are not only are of practical assistance in raising the wages of the workers involved, they also provide powerful examples of the continuing logic of collective action and, thus, a strong motivation to seek out trade union membership. Furthermore, in a country beset by the political problems that Bosnia and Herzegovina has, examples of strike action - of workers simply getting on with their everyday normal lives - also act to reassert what is most important by documenting citizens in their lives as workers not as ethnicities.

The mythical hunt of the boar in ancient Greece is always embedded in conflict-riddled situations between heroes and Artemis, mostly against the background of city foundations. Single elements of the myth change in the course of times and political circumstances, but the deeper sense seems never to have been forgotten. Thus Heracles and the Erymanthian Boar as well as the Calydonian Boar Hunt form archetypical models for artificial aetiological myths in a series of Anatolian cities, starting with Ephesus in the 5th century BC and ending with Aphrodisias in an already Roman provincial environment. In the Julio-Claudian period the story even spilled over to the Latin West, serving as foundation myth of Virunum in Noricum. So this more or less episodical story is rather a good example of the persistence of structure in mytheven if hidden in contemporary reshapings. It tells the eternal story of the unavoidable conflict between acting human and vengeful deity. ; by Peter Scherrer