Articles

If all Serbs are to blame for what one Serb did, how are we to treat ‘tough but fair’ Europe, which, according to Slavenka Drakulic, rightly punishes Serbian students for the politics of their parents’ contemporaries?” asks playwright and slam poet Milena Bogavac.

Well-known journalist Danica Vucenic asks herself how she should bring up her daughter. “Not only what I’ll tell her, but if I’m going to teach her to bravely ask questions one day. I’m not sure that the generation Slavenka Drakulic talks about is ready for that.”

Belgrade has in the last years stoically accepted the attacks from various provincial intellectuals who deliberately forget that nations and cities are not guilty, writes publisher Natasha Markovic. “Someone who doesn’t know cannot be held responsible.”

The fact that Slavenka Drakulic has agitated the local public, proves only that the conspiracy of silence is widely accepted, writes translator and essayist Mirjana Miocinovic, defending Drakulic against her critics.

Discussing the topic of accountability for the war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia is important for Serbian society, writes Slavenka Drakulic. Summing up a debate around her article “Why I have not returned to Belgrade” in the Serbian newspaper Politika, she notes: “Many citizens of both Serbia and Croatia seem to believe that if they all just shut up for long enough, the problem will disappear. But it won’t.”

A recent exhibition at the British Library entitled Taking Liberties – on the struggle for freedom and rights throughout 900 years of British history – was impressive, writes Peter Linebaugh. But, he wonders, is it possible to discuss liberty while excluding the question of equality?

While the stars of Croatian “women’s literature” continue to forge their own styles, a new generation of post-feminist writers has emerged in the crossover between literature and journalism. One theme common to much new Croatian writing is the postwar experience, with authors using marginal characters to explore existentialist tensions between individual and society. Yet what really makes contemporary Croatian writing interesting is the variety of individual literary approaches, writes Andrea Zlatar.

Daniel Daianu, Romanian MEP and former chief economist of the Romanian Central Bank, criticizes neoliberal development policies that are too general, unqualified, and divorced from “concrete local conditions”. Instead, he pleads for market reforms that, while stimulating growth in poorer countries, are implemented “pragmatically”.

US financial experts are talking of cataclysm and anarchy, but what really worries them is nationalization, writes George Blecher. Meanwhile, at street-level, the crisis is having some unusual effects.

The lack of comprehension for historical as well as present day events on the Balkans has to do with the very different character of master narratives in east and west. If only the West would “try to create a context, to adjust its horizon of expectation” to the Balkans’ stories, and not vice versa, writes Goran Stefanovski.

When it comes to representing children, art and law are on a collision course, writes Anne Higonnet, and photographers are in the dock.

Media self-regulation has many advantages over the more intrusive forms of state legislation, argues Ioana Avadani. Not only would it help raise professional standards in Romania, it might create greater responsibility towards the public that now trust journalists so implicitly.

A former contributor to the Croatian weekly Feral Tribune writes that the paper was left to die by those who should have taken better care of it: its readers and all who cared for its lone, free, critical voice.

Those in central and eastern Europe who, after 1989, took the commitment to free expression seriously, and who saw the media as the handmaiden of democracy and the conventional watchdog on political and commercial power, today have become targets for new and subtler forms of censorship, writes Eurozine guest-editor Judith Vidal-Hall.

The initial probe into the murder of Nacional editor Ivo Pukancic in October 2008 indicated a disturbing level of entanglement between the criminal underworld, high-level politics and the media in Croatia. Several arrests and an informal state of emergency later, there are still no convictions. Journalist Drago Hedl, himself the recipient of death threats in November 2008, looks behind the scenes.

Even before ’89, Slovene journalists and civil society were fighting for the right to free expression and a media free of government control. This earned critical journalism great credibility and led to a situation in the 1990s, rare among other post-socialist countries, in which the media was protected from market forces by public subsidies. In the last decade, however, this has turned into political interventionism that, together with commercialization, stands between the Slovene media and true autonomy, writes Marjan Horvat.