Articles

Carl Henrik Fredriksson remembers a no-nonsense European bridge-builder.

Every day, people risk their lives on epic journeys across the Saharan desert and the Mediterranean Sea, in search of safety and a better life: often only to be confronted with the buttresses of Fortress Europe. Eurozine presents highlights from Stories without borders, the exhibition series first displayed in Conversano, Italy from 11 September to 5 October 2014.

A journey in which there is no stereotypical marginality but that is full of humanity, balanced between the existential difficulty and the joy of living: this is the journey that viewers of Emiliano Mancuso’s work embark upon, writes Renata Ferri.

Over the past 14 years, about 17,000 immigrants have perished in the Mediterranean, trying to overcome the material and virtual walls that surround the European Union today. That’s 60 times the number of people who lost their lives attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 28 years.

In 2013, the seemingly hopeless task of bringing art to the provinces finally started to bear fruit in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine. One year on, the activists, artists, journalists and writers responsible are exiles in their own country, writes Konstantin Skorkin.

The region is bustling with brilliant young minds in the world of arts and ideas. Anna Wójcik reports on a new project that profiles the most innovative among them: the culture challengers who, in the way that the intelligentsia once did, pick up and run with the key transformational ideas of our times.

Recent controversy surrounding Budapest’s proposed “Monument of Occupation” leads Hungarian philosopher J.A. Tillmann to reflect on perceptions of space and time in central Europe. And the sinister convergence in how public space and national media are currently managed in Hungary.

How much in common must a community have? Quite a lot, says Eurozine’s Carl Henrik Fredriksson. At the very least a common public sphere. Because without it, Europe’s publics will be easy prey for those who know how to play the strings of history.

Why is it that those in power cannot think outside the categories of economics and techno-science when faced with the spectre of widespread joblessness and natural disasters caused by an excessive reliance on techno-science? Sajay Samuel says it’s time to stop and reflect.

Reckless military interventions in other countries’ affairs are becoming the norm globally. So what hope for international law? After all, argues Rein Müllerson, when it comes to bending and breaching international law, Russia has no lack of excellent examples to follow.

In interview, Krakow poet Ewa Lipska offers a rich portrait of her homeland’s literary heritage: from fighting the communist regime, when books were everything and some poetry volumes had print runs of 10,000, to writing this year for the Polish rapper O.S.T.R.

Should anti-democratic populism continue to cast a shadow across the continent, Europe may well succumb to a creeping process of disintegration, warns Jan-Werner Müller. Now is the time for renewed political engagement, if Europe’s democracies are not to start slowly corroding from within.

Memories of World War I are being recycled, restaged and transformed for the future. And a common historical frame allowing European nations to remember their stories collectively is within reach: an opportunity we cannot afford to squander, writes Aleida Assmann.

The new European debate on laws, borders and human rights was the subject of this year’s Eurozine conference, held in Conversano from 3 to 6 October, and co-organized by La Fondazione Giuseppe Di Vagno and Eurozine partner journal Lettera internazionale.

The Tornio River forms the border between Sweden and Finland, and flows into the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea. Throughout the ages, writes Rosa Liksom, the world’s travellers have navigated the river with a view to finding out about the mystical North.

Does anyone feel genuinely at home in the age of global gentrification? Probably not, writes Agri Ismail, certainly not if the experience of the Kurdish diaspora is anything to go by. But so long as a Swedish song plays in an Irish pub in a chain hotel in Kurdistan, some sense of security remains.