Articles

The extent of a person’s freedom is determined by the status of their passport. For people who live outside the EU’s charmed circle, travelling not only earns them the distrust of the country they wish to leave, but also of the country they wish to enter, writes Nelly Bekus-Goncharova.

The position of printmaking within the contemporary visual arts has shifted a long way. Once grouped with what was known as “the applied arts”, a category which includes ceramics, craft-based woodwork, and jewellery, the hegemony of painting and sculpture as the sole claimants to the term “fine art” is at last being broken.

Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal, and irrelevant, or radical, prescient, and misunderstood? Six philosophers answer Kritika&Kontext’s questions on Nietzsche. Their responses make one thing clear: Nietzsche still divides opinion.

In the course of his life, Victor Gruen completed major urban interventions in the US and western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. Anette Baldauf describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called “shopping towns” were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl. Yet within a decade, Gruen’s designs had become the architectural extension of the policies of racial and gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia.

Violence is a relationship, not a “thing”; nor does it submit to typologies. Nevertheless, that does not mean that violence cannot be studied and its present-day occurrences located. According to Gérard Wormser, the violence of the contemporary global system is constituted by the fact that one-third of the world’s population may be considered useless in terms of the collective existence of the rest.

What role should Norway play on the world stage? Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo) met the Norwegian foreign minister at the beginning of the new year to discuss his vision for Norway’s foreign policy. “I want to seize the opportunities where Norway can really make a difference,” says Gahr Støre. He emphasises that he has no desire to politicise Norway’s position as an “energy nation”, but points out that parts of Norway’s foreign policy are nonetheless based on “taking care of traditional interests” and that the interests of Norwegian industry provide opportunities to influence authoritarian regimes. He stresses that Norway cannot use its oil wealth to create a better world, but that the international political development and the climate changes pose major dilemmas. “The international economic system needs to be changed,” says Støre.

“It is almost as though freedom and flexibility is being designed out of the Internet, where previously they were essential.” Gus Hosein of Privacy International on how the Internet is turning into a data goldmine for governments that want to keep track of their citizens.

The Turkish government’s move to lift the ban on headscarves in universities is part of an ongoing discussion on a new constitution that has the potential to decide the country’s future and would potentially introduce democratic change. With a view to EU membership, too, the constitution must find a post-Kemalist form.

The controversy surrounding Benedict XVI’s speech in Regensburg in 2006 centred around what Muslims claimed was his misrepresentation of Islam. However, as Olivier Abel points out, the Pope’s criticism was directed less at Islam than at Protestantism, with its twofold spectres of sectarian utopia and consumer individualism. Nevertheless, in asserting that his Church alone was following the right path, the Pope was simply fulfilling his role: the real scandal was the way the speech, with its anti-rationalism, was warmly received by so many intellectuals.

How does the European Union handle the relationships between confessional faiths and the unified body that it is striving to bring about? Being inherently pluralistic, it is incumbent upon the EU to develop a new form of secularisation.

Impoverished German children dream of the USA; one Greek person in four is behind with their most basic bills; sixty per cent of the poor in Romania have outdoor toilets. Cracks are appearing in Europe’s beloved image of itself as the egalitarian alternative to the United States, writes Per Wirtén.

When “stand-up philosopher” Slavoj Zizek calls for “repeating Lenin” or praises Robespierre’s defence of terror, some observers might be tempted to ask whether his entire intellectual oeuvre is not just some kind of act. No, says John Clark. “It’s not just a pose; it’s a position.”

The first victory of populism in Bulgaria, argues Svetoslav Malinov, was the rejection of the conservative constitution by liberals shortly after independence in 1879. In the contemporary period, it has been the rhetoric of former tsar Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who became Bulgarian prime minister in 2001, that set the precedent for the rightwing populism currently purveyed by Volen Siderov, leader of the Ataka party. Despite Siderov, xenophobia is not a dominant feature of Bulgarian populism. Instead, populism in Bulgaria feeds off two phenomena: “a pure hatred of political parties” and the constant emphasis in the public discourse on an alleged contrast between ordinary people and the political elite. This goes so far as to make the elite subservient to the people, an attitude for which Malinov coins the term “radical demophilia”.

Toni Negri discusses the significance of urban space for new forms of opposition. The city, he says, is where the “political diagonal” intersects the “biopolitical diagram” – where people’s relation to power is most pronounced. Negri’s interlocutors are involved in exploring “soft” forms of activism, urban projects that create collectivities on micro, neighbourhood levels. Negri is critical of “soft” forms, however, preferring rupture and revolution over accumulation and gradual change.

David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries have attracted massive audiences around the world, but have sometimes failed to endear themselves to academics. Laurie Taylor turns the microscope on to the man who’s brought us life on earth, in the freezer, under the oceans, and in the undergrowth.

Press and publishing concentration in France is extraordinarily high. Allegedly, French ownership sees off foreign competition; in fact, the owning corporations are international. Media monopolization is not only a French issue, however: throughout Europe and the US, profitability has become the bottom line. So why is there barely any protest from within the sector itself?