The vilification of Orbán in Europe became politically counter-productive in Hungary itself. Péter Magyar’s success is founded on a realistic appraisal of the concerns of Hungarian society rather than a moralistic politics of blame.
Articles
Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz was defeated by a grassroots movement that faced down systematic intimidation in an extraordinary act of popular mobilization. The attempt to restart democracy in Hungary stands a better chance of success than at any time since 1989. Caveats apply, however.
The US-Israel war on Iran has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora. A personal account of altercation in Sweden highlights the fervour of pro-monarchists versus the dislocation and loss inflicted by escalated violence.
Under Xi Jinping the Chinese Communist Party has closed down the debate about the Cultural Revolution. However, its legacies are conspicuous throughout contemporary Chinese society, not least in the capitalist economy.
Recommended topics
Habermas’s insistence on the need for negotiation with the Putin regime stemmed from a failure to comprehend the eastern European experience of totalitarianism. The argument that regime change is not a legitimate policy option for the West is not groundless. But it is historically wrong.
Modernism promised a bright future. But adventure soon became routine – the early Crystal Palace experiment since reflected in shopping malls and office blocks. Now ‘shit experiments’, rolled out by tech oligarchs and authoritarian governments, utilize neuroliberalism’s handle on malleable human behaviour. Can anything of social experimentation be salvaged for welfare and basic income needs?
Habermas understood that the possibility for German–Jewish dialogue after the Holocaust depends on commitment to universal law. But when the past demands silence about the present, that possibility is denied. On the contradictions in Habermas’s exemplary cosmopolitan project.
Both emotional and uncanny, sincere yet ironic – contemporary British-based composers are pioneering a new aesthetic: musical metamodernism.
Eurozine review
The new infinity
Merkur 4/2026
The challenge of regulating AI when it cannot be defined; AI and the devaluation of work; AI and the future of productivity; why engineered anthropomorphism is here to stay.
Which histories?
Il Mulino 1/2026
Learning from the past in the age of singularity; teaching history without lecturing; the uses of history of science; the enduring appeal of political history; Marcel Gauchet.
An ambicolonial war
Krytyka 11–12/2025
Russia’s ambicolonial war of cultural erasure; the democratisation of Ukrainian national defence; the imagined Orient of the Soviet underground; literature and the vernacular.
Focal points
Cultural reflections on contemporary warfare: from sanctions, human rights abuses and peace negotiations to recruitment, rearmament, autonomous weapons and civil protection mechanisms.
An ongoing series in Eurozine discussing questions raised by the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. The series offers a sample of articles published in the wider Eurozine network and represents diverse perspectives, including above all Israeli and Palestinian.
Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. With the Maidan becoming history, the focal point ‘Ukraine in European Dialogue’ explores the new challenges facing the young democracy, its place in Europe, and the lessons it might offer for the future of the European project.
Inspired by a lecture that Clifford Geertz delivered in 1995 at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, this focal point engages with ‘deep diversity’, ‘a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity and of uncenteredness’ rather than unified world order. It follows the launch of a research programme of the same name at the institute in January 2023.
