Articles

This article investigates the point made my Maya Turovskaya in her article “The Soviet Middle Class”. Frumkina argues that while culture was a central concern, cultural status could not necessarily be conversted into commodities and services.

What is the current state of globalisation, how are we to understand the processes involved and where will a globalised world system lead us? These are some of the questions Boaventura de Sousa Santos aims to elucidate in a thorough and wide ranging essay.
Arguing that our current globalisation is indeed something unparalleled in history, Santos discusses the unequal economic and political realities between North and South which globalisation enforces. Globalisation is to be understood as a non-linear process marked by contradictory yet parallel discourses and varying levels of intensity and speed. Even states however have to adopt as the supremacy of the nation state is eroded, giving way to new transnational alliances and the convergence of the judicial systems as the supreme regulator of a globalised economy. Will all these processes usher into a new model of social development, or will this lead to the crisis of the world system as others fear?

As Slovakia is about to go to the polls in September, Samuel Abraham looks back at the pivotal elections of 1998. These elections, Abraham argues, signalled an end to the era of the “illiberal democracy” under Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar. But what has the current government learned from these elections and how well has it fulfilled its mandate?

The media landscape in Russia has undergone some dramatic changes in the recent years. Dubin analyses the effects on viewers and readers and how these changes affect the political and sociological landscape.

Based upon recent historical interpretations, Wittenberg analyses the 1917 – and 1991 revolutions in Russia. He argues that they share remarkable structural similarities.

The Russian sociologist Aleksei Levinson argues in this article, that the Russian society has learned to live with the Chechen war. Medical doctors, university professors and others benefit from it in indirect ways.

The authors of this essay question the statist response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and offer some vision of how the United States and other global actors might have and can still conceive of their possibilities for action under a cosmopolitan vision of political responsibility. They argue that a different response to the attacks, based on the rule of law and international co-operation, could have been equally effective to combat terrorism in the long run, and could have also opened the way to a more just and stable world order.

Analysing the process of reconciliation with the Communist past in Russia during the decade from the fall of Communism to the turn of the century, Alexei Miller finds that many of the most painful problems have not been touched on and it would be optimistic to say that Russia has to a fair degree extricated itself from communism in this respect. However, one should not forget, that, viewed from the point of its beginning, it has been an extraordinary process.

Under the banner of War on Terrorism, the russians have taken advantage of the license to kill, writes Anna Politkovskaia.

Over the last quarter century, every country, every social, ethnic or family group, has undergone a profound change in the relationship it traditionally enjoyed with the past. Pierre Nora looks at where this “memorialism” came from and why.

Volgens Slavoj Zizek kan in onze wereld – een universum van levenloze conventies vol dingen zonder wezen – de authentieke ervaring alleen maar een uiterst gewelddadige, schokkende belevenis zijn. Zoals 11 september. ‘Pas dan hebben we het gevoel dat we naar het echte leven zijn teruggekeerd.’

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has gained something of a cult following for his many writings – including The Ticklish Subject, a playful critique of the intellectual assault upon human subjectivity. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2001, he talked to Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann about subjectivity, multiculturalism, sex and unfreedom after 11 September.

Khazanov writes that Russia currently lacks a consensus with regard to the concept of nation, and that common identifications are very weak. In these conditions of social and political fragmentation, nationalism has become a very important factor in the country’s development.

After September 11, the weight of public opinion kept different, not just dissenting, ideas at bay, privately as much as publicly. To remain credible, intellectuals had to espouse, more or less gracefully, a much narrower range of accepted orthodoxies and platitudes than usual. Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert document here possible interpretations of what happened which, because of this specific constellation of culture-industry demands, never got a public hearing.