“Democracy” in post-communist Europe is strongly associated with high levels of state-sponsored social protection, indicating a culture far removed from the prevalent system of market-mediated private provision. The dissatisfaction with democracy expressed by the many not to have benefited from transition suggests CEE welfare states have a long way to go before they attain western levels of credibility. Their democracies depend on that gap being bridged.
Mira Meksi regrets the state of philosophy publishing Albania: secondary literature abounds but the original works themselves remain untranslated, and publishers operate a scattergun approach, lacking any sense of historical development in the field and responding entirely to intellectual fashion.
Jytte Klausen’s book “The Cartoons That Shook the World” (published by Yale University Press) is the first scholarly examination of the notorious controversy that erupted in 2006. Three years ago, she set out to unravel the genesis of the debacle and to analyse the cartoons and their impact. Last summer, several months before publication, Yale University Press unexpectedly took the decision not to publish the cartoons in her book.
Kafka’s home city has a lot to hide, writes James Hawes. The Czech capital’s architectural debt to greater Germany; its authoritarian past and history of anti-Semitism; even its most famous son’s penchant for pornography – these unwelcome truths are bad for business.
The Swiss vote to ban minarets has less to do with a “populist factor” inherent in referenda than with resentment at high-level corruption and the fear of social declassification. Celebrated by rightwing parties across Europe, the vote augurs more popular Islam-baiting to come.
Cultural sociology has frequently described the growing professionalization of culture as an inevitable manifestation of socio-economic rationalization. Yet the persistence of the amateur in contemporary culture contradicts this picture, writes Rasmus Fleischer. The three hundred year-old struggle between professional and amateur musicians in Sweden shows that cultural professionalism is not a simple expression of an all-embracing economic logic, but generated and sustained by specific institutions.
With his book about the Rwandan genocide, Philip Gourevitch has perhaps more than anyone influenced the way the conflict is viewed in the US and Europe. But his view is clouded by over-simplifications and a glorified view of the Kagame government, writes Swedish journalist Felix Holmgren.
Both Hutus and Tutsis committed crimes against humanity in the conflict in Rwanda, says author Marie Béatrice Umutesi in conversation with Swedish journalist Felix Holmgren. The international community first betrayed the Tutsis, then the Hutus.
Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere.
The entry of climate change into the media mainstream, as welcome as it is, nevertheless brings new problems. Journalists, campaigners and scientists discuss the implications of demand-led reporting, the exploitation of public misunderstanding, and the dangers of focusing on “charismatic megafauna”.
Estonia was ruled for centuries by the Germans, Swedes and Russians, who took turns to settle their accounts on the territory or arbitrarily lumped it together or split it with neighbouring areas. The narratives of the Estonian peasantry, the Baltic German gentry, the Swedish nobility or the Soviet functionaries, although running parallel, do not have a common addressee. The narrative told by Estonians in exile, in the second half of the twentieth century, is also not easily reconcilable with the story of their compatriots back home. The solution is a synoptic approach, says Tonu Onnepalu. Instead of striving towards a single, continuous and comprehensive historical narrative, at least three different histories in three different idioms must be read in parallel.
The literary field in Lithuania has established itself since independence, despite vastly smaller print runs and the onslaught of the mass media. Today, a range of literary approaches can be made out, writes Almantas Samalavicius, from the black humour and social criticism of the middle generation to the more private, realistic narratives of the post-Soviet generation.
Now that Marxism is dead and buried, so it is said, we can read Marx afresh. Yet to do so, writes Anders Ramsay, previous interpretations of Marx need to be corrected. In particular, that which sees money and credit as surface phenomena, based on Marx’s naturalistic understanding of value as being inherent in a commodity. This strand of Marxism overlooks the contemporary role played by credit in the reproduction of capital.
Environmental justice tends to halt at national boundaries, ignoring the correlation between environmental harm and other social factors such as race, gender and class. A more cosmopolitan notion of justice is required that considers the situation of individuals in cross-border and international contexts, argues Jonas Ebbesson.
Nothing was inevitable. If the Soviet Union had wanted, it could have easily stopped the process that led to the dissolution of the Communist bloc in 1989 – says Professor Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University. As he sees it, the changes were ultimately caused by three factors, neither sufficient in itself: the fundamental change in Soviet policy reflected in Mikhail Gorbachev’s commitment to promote far-reaching reform and avoid the use of violence in Eastern Europe, the willingness of millions of ordinary people to go out onto the streets to demand freedom, and the rapid demoralization of hardline East European leaders as they realized that the Soviet Union would not come to their aid against internal rebellion.