Eastern Europe as such was never “backward” and marginality is the least of the region’s problems, argues Daniel Chirot. While some countries have shaken off the “post-communist” tag, in others it remains apt; meanwhile, new disparities are generating a leftwing revival that show pronouncements of the end of ideology to have been rash.
The modern consciousness as crisis. This was Reinhart Koselleck’s premise in his famous study of the origins of critique in the Enlightenment and its role in the revolutionary developments of the late eighteenth century. A commentary on a work of historical hermeneutics whose relevance remains undiminished.
Why does Europe find it so difficult to remember the facts of migration, both voluntary and forced? Reluctance to address the more noxious aspects of collective European identity impedes an engagement with migration history, argues Claus Leggewie.
Croatian novelist Dejan Sorak’s latest protagonist, a Machiavellian secret policeman, serves to critique the political system and ideological matrixes, writes Gjorgje Bozhoviq.
Even Ukrainian cultural journals have become the target of “raiders” – shady groups working on behalf of powerful interests who use bogus property claims to close down businesses. The biggest raider of all is the Yanukovych government itself, says Mykola Riabchuk.
Spaniards in their thirties have grown up in enviable circumstances: democracy, a generous state, material wellbeing. Now the crisis has returned them to a cruel reality: that they may have to live with less than their parents did. Whether they alter their expectations or try to stop the clock will be decisive, writes Ramón González Férriz.
Researching Yugoslav Roma music, Philip Knox and Nat Morris tour the Balkans in search of the real thing. They find it in Skopje, in the person of Esma Redzepova – the self-styled Queen of Gypsy music. From the ghetto to a Nobel prize nomination, Esma claims never to have produced “anything but Roma music of the utmost purity”.
Jean Améry, writing in 1965, famously called torture “the essence of the Third Reich”. Why should Améry, the Holocaust survivor, have emphasized torture over the annihilation of the Jews? His choice can be understood in the context of French public debate on the Algerian war, argues Dan Diner.
The persistence of belief in witchcraft, illustrated by the tragic case of Kristy Bamu, stems from a notion within mainstream Christianity of evil as active, independent agent, argues Sarah Ditum. Yet is another battle against religion the best response?
In the UK, the use of “superinjunctions” to prevent media from publishing intimate details about the private lives of public figures has been widely condemned by free speech advocates, who see them as a privilege of the wealthy and inimical to the public interest. A recent parliamentary report has, however, endorsed the judgement of the British courts, even recommending that breaches of privacy by online media be “filtered”. Leading free speech expert Eric Barendt defends the report against its critics.
Although migration has a long and varied history in Europe, it tends to be treated solely as a present-day issue. Why the reluctance to historicize the subject? Particularly since migration history offers a way to replace narrow, national narratives with one that is properly European.
Free speech advocates opposed to the prohibition of hate speech tend to underrate the harm hate speech causes, argues Jeremy Waldron. Where it exists, such legislation upholds a public good by protecting the basic dignitary order of society.
To argue for hate speech legislation on the basis that it protects the dignity of individuals is to confuse an interest with a fundamental right, argues Ivan Hare. Not only is legislation ineffective, it helps disseminate the very thing it intends to suppress.
Denunciation of Günter Grass’s poem “What must be said” typifies a fundamentalist understanding of antisemitism that operates outside the realm of fact, argues Antony Lerman. If the poem is so heinous, what response would ever be appropriate to genuine antisemitism?
Serbia’s neo-fascist political establishment is the target of Svetislav Basara’s satirical novel Mein Kampf, from which not even the country’s modernizing figures emerge unscathed. Not surprisingly, the reaction has been one of irritation, writes Ivan Telebar.
The opening ceremony of the London Olympics, themed “The Isle of Wonders”, will offer a pastiche of national identity in which the darker sides of the British psyche are lost in a multiculturalist high-kitsch spectacular, anticipates Phil Cohen.