The isolation of Belarusian artists means they fail to speak the conceptual language of the internationally networked artworld, writes Ausra Trakselyte. A recent exhibition in Vilnius – entitled “A Door Opens?” – aimed to change that by introducing Belarusian artists to the Lithuanian public.
In Germany as in Britain, the consequence of multiculturalist policies was social fragmentation, argues Kenan Malik. But a critique of multiculturalism should not be confused with the current wave of political attacks on immigrants and immigration.
The multiculturalism recently attacked by David Cameron bears little in common with the integration policies pursued by previous British governments, writes Cécile Laborde. What it does resemble is a securitization approach that places citizens under suspicion on the basis of their religion.
In Germany, conservatives criticize a pastiche of multiculturalism to justify authoritarian policies and deflect attention from decades of neglect, argues Claus Leggewie. Failure to recognize Muslims as part of society is to risk repeating an historical mistake.
“If that’s a march for change, then I have one of those every day!” In Algeria, unhealed social conflicts make a united front an unlikely proposition: to the advantage of the despotic regime. Ghania Mouffok listens to protesters but hears little revolutionary optimism.
Lukashenka’s departure from the path of liberalization required by the EU’s Eastern Partnership programme suggests Russian pressure, says David Marples. The Belarusian president may have been able to dispose of political opponents, but the country’s economic weakness poses a more elusive threat to the stability of his regime.
“Blaming the victim”, a phrase originally intended to critique the
attribution of social disadvantage to “inherent faults” of black Americans,
has since come to mean something else: the condemnation of self-designated
“victims” as manipulative. As Alyson M. Cole argues, this
new critique itself has highly prescriptive notions about the “good victim”.
Europe as outdoor museum? Threatened with extinction by all-consuming privatization and the pursuit of endless profit, self-musealization might be Europe’s only hope. Slavenka Drakulic has a scary vision of the future of the European way of life.
Spend and save? This was the contradiction that defined Obama’s State of the Union speech. Yet the US president’s efforts at conciliation can do little to halt the growing wave of bankruptcy, where the public sector is the hardest hit, writes George Blecher.
The welfare state as prop for capitalism? This time-honoured communist critique is too catagorical, argues Jir Pehe. Any credible approach to reforming capitalism entails not attacking the welfare state but supporting its extension on a global scale.
Among the most fatal aberrations of recent decades is that free-market liberals have assumed the mantle of economic competence, argues Robert Misik. The Left needs to go on the offensive and prove that egalitarian economies are also stronger and more productive.
Romantic valorization only partly explains the iconic status of German-Jewish intellectuals. Their resistance to ideological classification and tactics of critical displacement have attracted them to the post-modernists, whose impact they will probably outlast, writes Steven E. Aschheim.
International recognition offers a degree of protection to investigative reporters. But, writes Lydia Cacho, being in the limelight presents a new set of dilemmas.
The decimation of indigenous industry in central and eastern Europe has created a low-wage hinterland on the fringes of the highly developed core, writes Carl Rowlands. If the societies of central-eastern Europe are indeed in transition, it is very unclear what the destination will be.
The Dalai Lama as political institution is both powerful and vulnerable: powerful because political authority is supported by religious devotion; vulnerable because it is at odds with the political realities of Tibetans today. The Dalai Lama himself has suggested the institution may have outlived its usefuleness.