When during the growing transnational protest against the war in Iraq in 2003, Robert Kagan's infamous dictum of "Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus" gained wider currency, it did not only pinpoint the contrast and alienation between European and American attitudes towards international relations. If anything, it also highlighted the fundamentally different degree to which ideas represented by a transnational civil society and other forms of democratic participation had been able to influence political actors and decision-making processes within the European community in the course of its history. Due to the rise of grassroots movements critical of globalization and the worldwide public outpouring of protest against the war in Iraq in 2003, the transnational dimension of protest movements has in recent years received attention from a broad audience outside as well as within academic circles. However, the diverse historical roots of many of today's transnational activist networks or NGOs and their specifically European dimension are still surprisingly unexplored by the academic community. The Marie Curie Conference and Training Courses supported by the European Union explores these relationships and evaluates their potential impact on the future of European policies and identity, also with respect to implications for a common European foreign policy. A series of conferences and training courses examines the impact these protest movements had not only in paving the way for a substantial change of the domestic systems, but also on the emergence of a (trans-)national civil society and a fundamental transformation of the public sphere. They aim to provide a comprehensive interdisciplinary training for early stage researchers on European protest movements not only to make a lasting contribution to the European Research Area itself, but also for the European community, its common history and identity.