Despite being well aware of the stakes involved in member states such as Hungary, writes Jan-Werner Müller, the European Commission still lacks fully convincing instruments to deal with constitutional capture: a government’s systematic weakening of checks and balances.
Poet and essayist Olga Sedakova takes her fellow Russian writers and intellectuals to task for responding with silence to the light emanating from the Maidan: a light of hope, of solidarity and of rehabilitated humanity. A light that Russia would do well to see itself in.
Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution and the impact of Beppe Grillo’s blog on Italian politics reveal how “Internet democracy” has opened a new phase of democratic innovation. The relationship between citizens and politicians may never be the same again.
The humanist impulse not only liberated the sense of transcendence from the shackles of the sacred, it also transformed the idea of transcendence itself. Kenan Malik on the humanization of the transcendent in art and literature, from Dante to Rothko.
In a timely opinion piece written prior to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Res Publica Nowa editor-in-chief Wojciech Przybylski contends that should Europe rule out the use of force, it will clear the way for others who will not hesitate to use military might to achieve their political ends.
Russia may have won Crimea but it has lost Ukraine, writes Vitaly Portnikov. At the same time, Ukraine has gained a whole world of sympathetic people who support the country in its fight for something that should in fact be just as much a necessity for Russia too: freedom.
Consensus among online communities may all too often prove fragile if not illusory. But, writes Kathrin Passig, as long as Internet users can adapt to groups that actually agree on only a select few issues, there is no need to lose faith in social media.
Historian Aleksander Babich, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, responds to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in this Facebook status update of 1 March 2014: and is forced to entertain the prospect of combatants burying one another in the common graves of their grandfathers.
The radical rightwing party Svoboda rose to prominence in Ukraine’s 2012 parliamentary elections as an alternative to the political establishment, writes Anton Shekhovtsov, expert on Ukrainian rightwing groups. But its role in Euromaidan may well amount to Svoboda’s swan song.
The main threat to the revolution comes not from Crimean separatism nor from far-right groups, writes Mykola Riabchuk. The biggest threat comes from within: from old habits and oldboy networks. New politicians are needed to avoid repeating the missed opportunities of 1991 and 2004.
Gender quotas were first discussed over thirty years ago; where they have been introduced, they have successfully offset structural discrimination against women. Evidence shows that nothing changes without gender quotas – so why do many countries still not operate them? Concentrating on the German situation, political scientist Beate Rössler re-states the case.
As the culture and the institutions of the Gutenberg Galaxy wane, Felix Stalder looks to commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks as a basis for remaking society in a more inclusive and diverse way, which expands autonomy and solidarity at the same time.
At the beginning of February, violent protests swept through Bosnia-Herzegovina: demonstrators clashed with police and government buildings were set ablaze. But then, independent citizens’ assemblies began to be organized to formulate demands to be made to the government.
Solidarity, one of the European Union’s driving concepts, has been abandoned in the wake of the eurocrisis, writes Dominika Kasprowicz: allowing the populist radical Right to bring to bear their own concept of solidarity, based on an anti-establishment stance and nativism.
Following the war with Serbia in the late 1990s, a construction boom transformed Kosovo’s capital city. This has in turn transformed the rhythms of everyday life, writes ethnographer Karin Norman, as has an influx of rural migrants, UN and EU personnel and relief workers.