The first Turkish Gastarbeiter arrived in Germany fifty years ago. Since then their reception in German society has swung back and forth between enthusiasm and hostility. Yüksel Pazarkaya, who arrived as a student with the first wave of Gastarbeiter in the 1960s, summarizes the history of Turkish labour migrants in Germany, drawing conclusions for today’s renewed debate on integration.
Blue, muddy yellow or blood-red: the colour of the Danube varies according to history and geography. Never able to truly form the countries through which it runs into a single political entity, it nevertheless connects peoples and regions reconcilable only in dreams or poetry, writes László Földenyi.
Despite ceaseless social networking, the virtual rebel’s many hours of online agitation remain largely unproductive. Victor Tsilonis, editor of Greek journal Intellectum, says it’s time for some real-time.
Philosopher Jane Bennett explains what she understands by “vital materialism” and why the rhetoric of the religious Right led her to entertain the notion of an “undesigned order of materiality” that possesses “the dynamic, incalculable, awesome and awful qualities elsewhere ascribed to God, Geist or the human spirit”.
Sweden’s post-war image as frontrunner of egalitarianism and antiracism contains more than a trace of national and racial chauvinism, argue two whiteness studies scholars. As myths of the better Sweden fade, both Right and Left are consumed by “white melancholy”.
There are clear signs that Internet-radicalization was behind the terrorism of Anders Behring Breivik. Though most research on this points to jihadism, it can teach us a lot about how Internet-radicalization of all kinds can be fought.
The dark warnings of the Polish finance minister about the prospect of war in Europe if the crisis deepens were met with scepticism. But there is no call for complacency about where current, nationalist tendencies might lead, writes the editor of Adevarul Europa.
Is what is taken for critique today genuinely self-questioning or merely the confirmation of the moral consensus? In the neoliberal culture of the audit, has critique been deprived of its role as check on ideology? And does preference for impact-oriented research produce political compliance rather than independent critical thought?
The challenge is to find the words with which to counter the visions of purity harboured by the propagators of terror. Ola Larsmo on the recent spate of terrorist acts in Sweden and Norway, culminating in the massacre in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July.
The critique that Europe lacks representative legitimacy may well be correct, argues Ulrich Beck, but not when based on the principle of “no nation, no democracy”. Cosmopolitanization demands post-national approaches to democratic accountability in Europe.
Where the Mubarak regime was once the target of political graffiti in Cairo, now it is the interim council. But when there’s little to distinguish graffiti from burning flags, Yasmine El Rashidi is in two minds about its artistic value.
Freemarket disregard for the elementary moral truths of debt and obligation is to blame for the current crisis, says Roger Scruton. But the call for a return to economic morality is no endorsement of the financial fictions of the social democratic state.
Culture warriors like Anders Breivik style themselves as victims of an all-consuming political correctness administered by the “European elite”. Norway’s centre-right must confront its own role in the rise of this type of rhetoric, writes Jonas Bals.
It is high time to lift the aesthetic state of emergency that has surrounded witness literature for so long, writes Steve Sem-Sandberg. It is not important who writes, nor even what their motives are. What counts is the “literary efficiency”.
EU member states draw upon a reservoir of colonial discourse to assert superiority over the extra-European Other; western Balkan states compensate by turning the same discourse against neighbours lower down the ladder of EU accession, writes Tanja Petrovic.