Articles

The Eurozine conference on “Changing Media – Media in Change” from 13-16 May 2011 brought fresh insights to debates on the future of journalism, intellectual property and free speech, and made one thing very clear: independent cultural journals are where reflexion and criticality combine with changing media strategies.

What has emerged in the Arab world is a thoroughly modern mass democratic movement, writes Seyla Benhabib. Speculations that Islamic fundamentalists will hijack the transformation process are motivated by a cultural prejudice that forgets the contentiousness at the historical core of western democracies.

The performance art of the 1960s and ’70s transformed acting into religion, writes Donatien Grau: pain, blood, and semen – they were doing it for real. The younger generation of performance artists are rejecting this heritage: their return to narrative is a way out of the mind-body dualism.

The harsh clampdown on independent reporting in Belarus in the run-up and aftermath of the presidential elections in December 2010 dashed any hopes that might have existed about a “European rapprochement”. A report by the Belarusian Association of Journalists reveals just how far the regime has deviated from any accepted definition of a free press.

In his new book, American atheist Sam Harris argues that science can replace theology as the ultimate moral authority. Kenan Malik is sceptical of any such yearning for moral certainty, be it scientific or divine.

1968 as world revolution and beginning of the end for the twentieth-century superpowers: Immanuel Wallerstein on the logic of global history from the Yalta Conference to the Second Iraq War. Based on a lecture given at The Vienna L’Internationale Conference, 27 October 2010.

Twenty-five years after the Chernobyl disaster, Barys Piatrovich recalls the tension of unknowing during the days that followed, his desperate attempts to contact his relatives in the zone, and the arrival of evacuees during Easter celebrations in his parents’ village. Today, barely any of the Chernobyl evacuees are still alive. Dispersed throughout Belarus, they died alone and unnoticed, statistically insignificant.

The new respectability of renewable energy creates the impression that a consensus on the energy switchover has been reached. Not true, warns the late Hermann Scheer: the fact is that spending on conventional sources is increasing worldwide. Nowhere is the pseudo-consensus exposed more clearly than in ongoing investment in nuclear power.

Forced to ratify the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungarian parliamentarians had planned to demonstrate their opposition through a show of unanimity. For historian Miklós Zeidler, the actions of dissenting MPs illustrate the distinction between a sense of injustice and false patriotism.

The male breadwinner model of the welfare state has given way to the adult worker model, however care work continues to be left to migrant women, writes Fiona Williams. The privatisation of care favoured by contemporary policy means wages are forced down among a group least able to negotiate.

Contemporary European politics is a building site that makes a lot of noise but on which nothing ever gets built, said German political sociologist Claus Offe at the concluding event in Eurozine’s debate series “Europe talks to Europe”. Pessimistic yet invigorating, the discussion featured prominent intellectuals and opinion makers from western and eastern Europe.

Women have been as vociferous as men in the Egyptian revolution. However their demands for an end to sexual discrimination are not universally respected. Is a new revolutionary patriarchy emerging in Egypt like in Iran after 1979?

On 12 April 2011, Yuri Gagarin’s space mission has its fiftieth anniversary. Much more than a mere historical mytheme of the Soviet Union, Gagarin’s journey reflects the triumph of technology in a century that believed in progress, writes Walter Famler.

Eurozine has been nominated for the European CIVIS Online Media Prize for integration and cultural diversity. The prize is awarded to Internet media outlets of “high journalistic quality” and is awarded on 14 April in Berlin. “Topical and pluralistic – here Europe talks with itself,” says the jury about Eurozine.

In the last decade, Flemish fiction has stepped out of the shadow of its Dutch “older sister”, writes Tom Van Imschoot. Despite authors’ individuality, trends can be discerned. The most prominent is the turn from metafiction towards various forms of realism, be it the regional, the semi-autobiographical or the “virtual”.

For the Bosnian Omer Hadziselimovic, being an immigrant in the US is to experience both regression and rejuvenation. Constantly translating between his old and new lives, he nevertheless finds that at some deeper level the differences start to disappear.