Gagarin, the Eurozine podcast

In this edition of the Gagarin podcast, we talk with Per Nyholm, a seasoned journalist whose multiple visits to Ukraine’s front line provide stark, first-hand insights, critical of Trump’s bullish intervention. The Danish reporter also holds strong views on the US President’s land-grabbing plans for Greenland.

Clock times and social times conflict across much of Europe. Timekeeping is a deeply political matter, and João Lipinsky Nunes of Better Times takes issue with them.

The Active Amputee blog’s Björn Eser believes that the way we go about prosthetics should change. He’s a lover of the outdoors, even more so since his amputation, but he takes issue with the limits of social and medical support for disabled people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

How is whiteness constructed and why is it so fragile? What’s at stake in discussing colonial memory for eastern Europeans? Do they actually eat a lot of cabbage?

The EU needs to prove itself the champion it has long been projected to be, argues André Wilkens in our interview about recovery funds, cultural transformation, budget lines and bank holidays. The director of the European Cultural Foundation also addresses his own pandemic experience as a migratory cultural agent.

When does political pressure reach its breaking point? As censorship methods get subtler, eastern European journalists rely on the popular support for independent journalism to stand their ground against rampant Orbánization.

The events of 1989 unleashed a world of discovery. Economic determinism was replaced by imitation of the West. Was that process authentically spontaneous or were eastern Europeans staging a script they did not write? Either way, imitation created a crisis of identity, the consequences of which are still unfolding.