A European patriotism can be generated only through political acts that create a sense of solidarity, says historian Pierre Manent. If invocations of Europe are to be anything but vacuous, Europe needs to be decisive in defining its interests and demarcating its boundaries.
The eurocrisis is a logical consequence of the way the Eurozone was constructed, writes John Grahl. A dogmatic belief in the intrinsic stability of market economies left competitive imbalances ignored as easy credit provided the illusion of growth. The current attempts to stabilise the Eurozone are inadequate: a Europeanisation of debt is necessary.
Isabel Hernández analyses the astonishing autobiographical account of the seventeenth century nun Catalina de Erauso: After having been forced by her family to enter a convent, she seized the first opportunity to run away and embarked on a long voyage. Dressed as a man, she travelled through Spain and then set off to South America where she enrolled in the Spanish army and actively participated in the colonization of the Americas – “entirely a masculine realm”, as Hernández puts it.
Reviewing the Venice Biennale in its totality is impossible, writes Barabra Fässler, who approaches the critic’s monumental task by selecting three specific motifs: the problem of light, the notion of nation and the principle of interaction.
“Sometimes I think these people no longer care,” says the mayor of a small village in northeastern Hungary. “They have crossed every limit”. A reportage on relations between Roma and the majority offers little reason to be optimistic about an improvement in the current, dire situation.
The only clear thought to seep through the numbness and nausea after 22/7 was the relief that an ethnic Norwegian was responsible, writes Samtiden editor Cathrine Sandnes. Not because she feels vindicated, but because she is grateful for all the things that are not happening out on the streets.
A decade after the destruction of the Twin Towers, we need to resolve that “Islam”, as a singular noun, or “Muslims” as a collectivity are simply not good things to think with or about, let alone for or against. Stephen Howe tracks the tremors after 9/11.
Faced with the costs of the splintering of the euro, EU governments will, however reluctantly, have to agree to deepen not weaken integration, writes John Palmer, former European editor of “The Guardian”. And most voters will agree.
Today’s literary and political climate in Hungary reminds László Garaczi of the communist 1980s. In an atmosphere compulsively and perversely imbued with politics, it is difficult to speak intelligently about the issues of the community.
The concentration camp is still popularly viewed as a distinctly national-socialist phenomenon. The focus on Germany has prevented a broader analysis of the prevailing ‘camp culture’ in the first half of the twentieth century, argues Richard Overy. Camps were widespread geographically and began well before the coming of the Third Reich. They reflected abrupt changes in mass politics, ethnic conflict and ideological confrontation following the dislocations caused by the Great War and became an expedient (and cheap) way of isolating those deemed to be biological, social or political outsiders. The perpetrators in all countries with camps saw themselves as heroic defenders of a threatened system. Victims need to be given a more positive historical narrative, to be better able to understand the traumatic consequences of exclusion and incarceration.
Were the riots in the UK a political upheaval of the poor? No, says Kenan Malik, the riots were not protests in any way. Instead they revealed that a second kind of poverty stalks Britain: moral poverty. The UK has become a nation of isolated individuals.
Can Europe really break apart? Yes, of course it can, writes José Ignacio Torreblanca. Few times in the past has the European project been so questioned and its disgraces so publicly exposed as now. It’s time to stop looking the other way.
Poets abound in Brno’s literary history, but a prose monument to the Moravian capital has yet to be written. Two neglected stories by native son Milan Kundera, set in post-war Czechoslovakia, fill the gap, writes Jirí Trávnícek.