Articles

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.

Let’s not confuse contemporary social atomization with freedom as a complex project that requires some degree of cooperation and mutual support, says César Rendueles. And reject, once and for all, the technological ideology that extols cooperation and community building only when these are mediated by digital technologies.

Sonja Pyykkö speaks to György Dragomán about the inspiration for his highly successful novel “The White King”, which has been translated into at least 28 languages and draws on the author’s experience of growing up in a totalitarian state, near the border between Romania and Hungary.

All but invisible in his home country, Sergei Dovlatov became something of a mythical figure among the Russian diaspora of New York. Indeed, Vladimir Yermakov compares the conundrum of Dovlatov’s life as writer to the two hands simultaneously drawing one another in Escher’s mysterious drawing.

From the planned rewilding of London’s Upper Lea Valley to performance indicator software designed to manage 663 of China’s largest cities, Warren Karlenzig knows what he’s talking about when it comes to urban sustainability projects. And yet he’s never been more daunted by the dizzying speed of growth and unfathomable scale of today’s cities.