Articles

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.

Blaming the American Way of Life for the ills of post-industrial European society is a poor excuse for Europeans’ own partiality to consumer pleasures, writes Petr Fischer. On a positive note, American individualism could teach Europe a thing or two about social solidarity.

Behind the recent attacks on multiculturalism is a false public memory of stable mutuality disrupted by the arrival of people of other cultures, writes Markha Valenta. A row over the absence of non-white characters in the English detective series “Midsomer Murders” says a lot about our fantasies of “home”.

Sociologist Mohammed Bamyeh was present at Tahrir Square throughout the Egyptian Revolution and was able to see the popular political will unfolding. Here he singles out key elements in the uprising and describes the social transformations they have brought about.

Russia’s authoritarian regime owes its tenacity to the reversal of two central communist precepts, writes Ivan Krastev. First, its abandonment of the ideology of public interest prevents it being measured against its own standards. Second, its policy of open borders diffuses protest potential from a dissatisfied middle class.

Lured by the promise of formal freedom, Lithuanian architects in the Soviet period colluded in the destruction of swathes of Vilnius’s historical centre. Once a rallying point of the independence movement, Vilnius’s Baroque and Gothic urban heritage is now subject to a new onslaught from local finance capital – and no one seems to care.