Overlapping crises, enforced political passivity, a new political normal: all things that gradually dismantle a democracy. Ferenc Laczó talks the death of democracy in a new episode of Gagarin.
Réka Kinga Papp
is editor-in-chief of Eurozine since 2018. She hosts Eurozine’s talk show, Standard Time, and Gagarin, the Eurozine podcast.
Papp is a Hungarian journalist, author and broadcaster, specialising in environmental, social and human rights issues. She published a book on sex work and prostitution in 2017: Aki kurvának áll: szexmunka sztorik (Once You Enrol As a Whore: Sex Work Stories, Kossuth 2017). Her corresponding article, The Bangkok of Europe was published in Eurozine.
She has anchored the Hungarian-speaking social science infotainment radio programme Professzor Paprika, and the indie political YouTube show Feles.
Articles
Russian aggression, climate disaster and technological singularity – it takes a professional optimist to seek the humanist potential in these threats. An interview with André Wilkens, director of the European Cultural Foundation.
Although it makes for a great dramatic effect, the theories of the sudden death of democracy disregard the gradual erosion and capture of institutions, and the role of the populace – argues political scientist John Keane.
The centuries-old debate over whether certain countries belong to the East or the centre of Europe has fairly little to do with geography. In this Gagarin podcast episode, anthropologist Iván Kalmár discusses privilege, race and cultural hegemony.
Well-intentioned appeals from the collective West to encourage cultural dialogue between victim and aggressor reflect existing power structures. Reconciliation, Kateryna Botanova explains, cannot be imposed from outside.
Eurozine has had a very difficult year and is still a way from finding long-term stability. But we’re rebuilding the team and even starting an exciting new youth project. Thankfully, you, our readers, have stuck with us through the thick of it.
We moved office last week. We’ve had to contend with literal tons of physical memory from Eurozine’s almost forty-year history, and are yet to unpack it. It can either be a new beginning or a hibernation plan.
Excruciating pain and paralytic numbness alternate in an inhuman rhythm. As Ukrainian artists struggle to overcome exhausted tropes of warfare and martyrdom, others consider what it will take to bring the perpetrators to justice. But moral reckoning is an even more complicated business.
Ukraine seems to be more dedicated to European unity than the EU itself. And despite the Kremlin’s best attempts to isolate Russians, a tipping point is inevitable. Until then, we must support cultural workers – their presence is crucial for meaningful change, argues André Wilkens on the podcast.
It would have taken a miracle for Viktor Orbán to lose the election. Hungary is a fortified kleptocracy where the ruling party has captured the state and controls 80% of the media. It certainly didn’t help that the opposition’s campaign failed to deliver a post-illiberal vision.
Anton Shekhovtsov tells about Russian imperialist mythology and how the insane propaganda of Ukraine’s denazification came about; the new status of Belarus as a mere vassal state; desertion as a political option; and how western elites have abandoned their alliances with Vladimir Putin – with a few notable exceptions.
Clinging to his nukes, Putin will only lose power if his own turn on him. It’s hard to predict when, if ever, the leaders he has humiliated and threatened into submission will do the basic calculus and find that obeying the tyrant will inevitably cost way more than defiance.
Distrust in authority is the fundamental reason for low vaccination rates across eastern Europe. But we shouldn’t think of anti-science as the expression of mere ignorance, nor primarily as a grass-roots movement.
Europe is facing a demographic crisis, resulting in suffocating labour shortages, and yet incoming migration is more and more rejected in mainstream politics. Can the EU come to terms with this great contradiction without an implosion?
The crisis has caught up with us, and now we’re asking our readers to invest in Eurozine to help us get through an exceptionally lean year in 2022. Eurozine has been offering outstanding content for free for over 20 years. Your support is crucial to maintaining this work and we are offering exclusive articles, recordings, events and merch to our patrons.
The obvious answers nobody wants
Endemic: focal point editorial
New COVID-19 variants keep the international public anxious, and this crisis, permeating all social, economic and political spheres, isn’t even in full bloom yet. Although impossible to contain, it also highlights many potential solutions, which had been lying around for a long time without the political will to act upon them. In gearing up for the much bigger turmoil of an ecological nature, we need to stop concentrating on global centres of power, and give more credit to young motivated people.
