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).
Simon Garnett
Senior editor at Eurozine. Co-editor together with Carl Henrik Fredriksson and Klaus Nellen of the Widening the Context: A Eurozine Anthology (2018). Translator and historian of postwar German political thought.
Articles
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Two new articles in Eurozine’s series on democracies in the east of Europe focus on countries particularly susceptible to Russian influence: Serbia and Moldova.
Death by stalemate: how terminal splits down the middle of electorates favour authoritarian interference; why democratising the ‘biosphere’ is not about conservationism; and François Fejtő’s thought before and after communism.
Ever since the French Revolution, all modern regimes that have claimed to be democracies have rested on some form of people power. Can we really be so sure of the principle that divides the democratic ‘us’ from populist ‘them’?
Very little information is available to the outside world about the situation for Ukrainians who have remained in the regions occupied by Russia since 24 February 2022. A new article in Eurozine provides a rare insight on life behind the Russian lines.
The arts are a source from which Ukrainian society draws its sovereign will. A compendious new issue of ‘Osteuropa’ explores that proposal in depth.
Europe is facing a vast humanitarian crisis. This time, there is a good chance that governments will rise to the challenge. If only because it is all too clear that uncontrolled mass migration is one prong in Russia’s hybrid war against ‘the West’.
Amidst the geopolitics, Ukraine lacks a sense of agency, observe two leading journalists of the Euromaidan generation. But cultivating confidence is difficult when journalism itself seems to have lost its bearings.
A pluralist mainstream requires a flourishing media ecosystem outside it. The mainstream has important democratic roles, but catalysing change is not one of them.
It is no coincidence that in both France and the US, nations uniquely proud of their democratic traditions, debates are emerging about constitutional reform. Recent articles explain why.