Articles

As the struggle between democracy and a dream of some kind of return to the past deepens in Europe, Adam Zagajewksi contemplates the passage between ideas and action in the real world, wherein lies the old European – and not only European – wound.

As president of the European Council, Polish politician Donald Tusk has been at the centre of one of the most challenging years in the history of the European Union. Since taking office in December 2014, he has faced an economic crisis in Greece, the conflict in Ukraine and growing Russian aggression in the East, and, since last summer, the largest influx of migrants and refugees Europe has faced since World War II. Most recently he has struggled to reach a compromise with the British government to avert the possible withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU.
Born in Gdansk, the heart of the Solidarity movement, and a founder of Poland’s liberal Civic Platform party, Tusk was prime minister of Poland from 2007 to 2014. As president of the European Council, one of his main tasks is to reconcile the competing views of the various EU member states whose leaders – as members of the council – are responsible for the union’s most important decisions. Michal Matlak spoke to him at his office in Brussels.

Can Yanis Varoufakis turn his bid to democratize the European Union into a mass social movement? And if so, will it be able to deliver a political turn similar to Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s? Political scientist Michal Sutowski assesses the chances of DiEM25 succeeding.

Today’s mass-produced Russian science fiction is brimming with motifs of imperial revenge, the “rewriting of history” and a cult of military aggression. Moreover, writes Konstantin Skorkin, the imperial visions of science fiction authors have turned into a guide to action.

When Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill met in Havana, for one part of the Catholic Church the past seemed to be repeating itself, writes Katherine Younger. In the nineteenth century, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church found itself in the middle of both diplomatic negotiations and ideological clashes between the Vatican and Russia – and it is again today.

Though Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 moved at breakneck pace, it followed a long anti-Ukrainian propaganda campaign. Katerina Sergatskova describes the growing mutual alienation between the inhabitants of the peninsula and mainland Ukraine.

The political discourse on LGBT rights has shifted in Ukraine after the Maidan and as a result of the conflict with Russia, which aggressively promotes “traditional values”. However, writes Maria Teteriuk, the efficacy of recent legal reform concerning LGBT rights, introduced as part of the visa-free deal with the EU, remains to be seen.

Poland’s turn to the right has refocused attention on the roots of the region’s illiberal democracies. Anton Shekhovtsov considers the implications of these developments for Europe as a whole.

Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity was triggered by the government’s decision to postpone signing the long-awaited Association Agreement with the European Union. Protesters on Kyiv’s streets chanted “Ukraine is Europe!”, and waved EU and Ukrainian flags side-by-side. Two years after the victory of the Maidan protests, what is left of this pro-European idealism? Ukrainian journalist and essayist Mikhail Dubinyansky takes stock.

There is a genuinely European future for central Europe, insists Michal Koran. But it won’t come to fruition without a frank look at the deficiencies that accompanied the transformation of central European societies during the last two decades.

The intensified wave of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa is threatening to unravel the very foundations of European ideas of full citizenship, asylum and refuge, says Arjun Appadurai. But there must be a richer cultural road to legal and bureaucratic solutions currently being debated.

As in so many cities on the European periphery, Kosovo’s capital Pristina is fundamentally shaped by emigration. Jonas König explores the departure city, where provisional structures become long-term solutions, and translocal spaces and networks are ever-present.

The fascination of a borderless world has rapidly worn off in an age of accelerating mobility, writes Ivaylo Ditchev. As forms of mobility become increasingly collective, the crisis of the liberal border-machine deepens and political decision-making is thrown into disarray.

Mainstream literature on globalization tends not to take the uniqueness of each locality seriously enough, says Thomas Hylland Eriksen. He explains how the anthropology of climate change is responding to the need for an analysis of the global situation seen from below.

In the age of Google Earth and the Human Genome Project, tensions between information processed by machines and the human capacity to tell stories have intensified. Ragnild Lome traces the evolution of these tensions in literary and visual culture from the mid-twentieth century onward.