Eurozine Editorial

Literature can’t save the world, but it does provide insight into the behaviour that drives cultural trends. And given the anthropocenic tendency towards self-destruction, we need all the help we can get with cultivating solidarity, combating injustice and resisting censorship.

Trump returns to the White House at a time when the global stakes are higher than ever. What can be expected from his unpredictable foreign policy, and what does this mean for international solidarity, geopolitical stability and democratic values?

The difference between knowing from distance that war is being waged and living that reality couldn’t be more extreme. But can awareness of multiple repercussions turn protective disassociation from violence into active solidarity? ‘The Most Documented War’ symposium in Lviv, Ukraine, provides valuable pointers regarding engagement and responsibility.

On the 5 May, a Viennese public assembled on Judenplatz in the city’s First District to listen to the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm deliver his ‘Speech to Europe’, the third in the series following Oleksandra Matviichuk (2023) and Timothy Snyder (2019).

For a comprehensive and informed overview of the political situation across the EU just before the European Parliament election, check out new articles in Eurozine’s ‘Mood of the Union 2024’ series. Covering both the EU itself as well as its eastern European, eastern Mediterranean and global neighbourhoods, the articles provide some key takeaways.

The European Parliament elections on 9 June are a referendum on EU policy since 2019. Will voters give Europe the green light for further progress, or pull the brakes? A new Eurozine series measures the political atmosphere in the EU and its neighbourhoods at this crucial moment.

In a bid to implement its Rwanda legislation, the UK government is rushing to inhumanely detain refugees, instilling panic, impacting its politically sensitive border with Ireland. The EU, meanwhile, is planning off-shore processing facilities. And surveillance technology is proving just as invasive as past obsessions with the ‘born criminal’.

At one point in his 1984 essay ‘Permission to narrate’, Edward Said described urging family and friends in Beirut to record what was happening during the Israeli siege, in order to tell the world ‘what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “anti-terrorism”’.

Into its 25th year as an online cultural magazine, Eurozine can boast of a longevity unusual for an independent journalistic project of its kind. But 25 years testifies not just to longevity. Eurozine can also claim consistency.

Refugees coming to Europe face a de-humanizing process wrought with violence, both physical and structural. Protectionist rhetoric is being used to justify aggressive border regimes. And, in Gaza, already displaced civilians are being targeted while unable to leave Rafah –Israel’s escalation of bombardment, a breach of international human rights law.

If we define culture as a set of values and practices around which communities identify and cohere, then few things are more cultural than food. Where else is the narcissism of small differences greater than in matters gastronomic?

Returning champions and the future of Europe: our recap of this year and its most popular articles in Eurozine.

As the end of abundance becomes an everyday experience in Europe, we are thinking more closely about how our food reaches the table.

In this war, any standards of bellum justum are not worth the paper they are written on. More violence lies ahead, yet escalation is essentially a political choice.

Despite divisive nationalist politics, there are those who manage to overcome the odds, forming meaningful acts of solidarity. Eurozine’s new focal point ‘The world in pieces’ looks critically at what divides, tackling the complexities of destablized identity.

The Eurozine series ‘The writing on the wall’ provides insights from analysts in Europe’s east into the political situation in their countries, over a year into Russia’s attack on Ukraine.