Articles

In Slovakia, journalists’ hard won freedom after 1989 was rapidly curtailed by the authoritarian government of Vladimír Meciar. The media rallied again and played a key role in the victory of the opposition in 1998, only to fall victim to legal intimidation and corruption within their own ranks. But although the most serious challenges to press freedom have been seen off, a media culture free of the legacies of the past has yet to develop, writes Martin Simecka.

No one in eastern central Europe suspected that once the fight for independence was won, democracy would become a parody of itself, writes Tomas Kavaliauskas. Open disrespect for the public jars with the ideals of the Baltic Way that existed before and after 1989.

If the G8’s goal of limiting global warming to 2°C is to be more than just lip service, radical decisions will need to be taken at the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. An emissions-trading system based on a national per-capita emissions budget and tied to historical responsibility would offer enormous opportunities to developing countries and provide the key to a new low-carbon global order.

It’s hard to conceive of anything that the art market, worth 20 billion dollars in 2008, hasn’t yet consumed, writes Allesandro Ludovico. Italy as location for the exhibition “Art, Price and Value, Contemporary Art and the Market” is apt, given Italian artists’ unique response to the country’s priceless artistic heritage and the cultural influence that implies.

An historian can define European identity descriptively, as Krzysztof Pomian demonstrates in a tour of European culture since the first millennium before Christ. But the real controversy lies elsewhere, in the political question: what of the European past is worth preserving?

A nation attacked by terrorists or an oppressed minority whose legitimate grievances are brutally suppressed? However one interprets the recent violence in Xinjiang, it was far from unexpected, writes Nick Holdstock.

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

Poetry has lost the symbolic power needed to address shared values, writes Francesco Stella, having ceded this to other media such as pop music. On “the Semicerchio debate” and the search for a new poetic canon.

Working illegally in the West, eastern European women take care of “the logistics of bodily experience”, freeing western women to participate alongside men in business, science and politics.

“If you always want to end up the winner, if you don’t know that being in India already means that you’re a winner, you lose.” Hungarian novelist János Háy on the new global “playing field” and the “authenticity of penury”.

Pillar of UK theatre criticism Michael Billington and Portuguese director and critic Jorge Silva Melo met in early June 2008 to talk about plays, playwrights, and theatre critics. “For me, Billington is the definition of a theatre critic: alert, sharp, informed, more than an enthusiast”, writes Melo.

From the Eurozine archive: Antonin J. Liehm, founder of Lettre Internationale and former editor of the Czechoslovak journal ‘Literární noviny’, discusses the role of a European cultural journal before and after 1989 and explains why it is as important as ever to organize a concerted defence of culture.

The continuing repression of the independent media exposes the Belarusian government’s concessions to “European standards” for what they are: window dressing on a regime that has no intention of releasing its stranglehold on society any time soon.

For young Polish Jews, the historical injury of the Holocaust is often complicated by their grandparents’ participation in the communist project. Many of the twenty-somethings interviewed by Marci Shore reappropriated their Jewish identity after 1989, and grapple deeply with questions of inner-Jewish politics and their relations with non-Jewish Poles. Affection, hostility, passion… one thing emerges above all: contradiction.

Coming from a thoroughly secular Soviet background, the Russian-British novelist Zinovy Zinik first became aware of his “Jewishness” when he emigrated to Israel in the 1970s. In this autobiographical essay, Zinik describes how an unheimliche experience in Berlin thirty years later led him to investigate the enigmatic and chequered past of his Russian-born grandfather. An exploration of “assumed identity” in twentieth-century Jewish experience.

When it comes to the economy, the moral leadership Obama promised is conspicuously lacking. Will the US president and his economic advisors be willing to regulate a financial sector to which, for some, they are worryingly close?