The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows just how misguided German Ostpolitik has been over the last two decades. Even after 2014, when it was clear that economic rapprochement had brought no normative changes to Russian policy, Germany went ahead with Nord Stream 2.
It was only after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 that NATO broke off cooperation with Russia. Until then, Ukrainians themselves were largely against NATO membership. To frame NATO as a security threat to Russia caters to Kremlin propaganda.
The Czech Republic’s Roma community continues to face inequality, racism and ostracization. Memorializing World War II concentration camps is essential recognition of genocide. But what of those murdered in a series of 1990s racist attacks?
A century after Sweden introduced suffrage for women, the country that invented ‘feminist foreign policy’ finally got its first female prime minister. Why the delay? Despite equality in parliament, old power structures still prevent women’s political ascent.
Amidst the geopolitics, Ukraine lacks a sense of agency, observe two leading journalists of the Euromaidan generation. But cultivating confidence is difficult when journalism itself seems to have lost its bearings.
Jürgen Habermas recently argued that the pandemic measures of the German government hadn’t gone far enough. To weigh the state’s duty to protect life against other rights and freedoms was unconstitutional, he warned. In the ensuing controversy, critics accused him of authoritarianism. Were they right?
Distrust in authority is the fundamental reason for low vaccination rates across eastern Europe. But we shouldn’t think of anti-science as the expression of mere ignorance, nor primarily as a grass-roots movement.
Ukrainians struggle to make their own voices heard over the geopolitical brinkmanship. Blitzkrieg tropes abound in international media coverage, but the people whose lives and livelihoods are at stake want to decide for themselves.
More than half a million Afghans were displaced in 2021, adding to many more forced to flee over decades of uninterrupted violence. But offers to accommodate Afghanistan’s ‘living dead’ are often conditional on obscure definitions of neediness.
The Orthodox Church is often said to be leading the anti-vax campaign in Greece. But in reality, the Church firmly supports government health policy. What, then, explains the prominence of Orthodox clergy in the protests?
Tackling climate change requires more care. Environmentalist slogans demand respect for Mother Earth. But does it make sense to gender a planet? How should nature be perceived? And what does ‘natural’ even mean within an ecofeminist frame?
When covering the invasion of Crimea and the war in Donbas, what motivated Nataliya Gumenyuk was her conviction that journalism could influence events. But now that geopolitics rules the day, she feels powerless.
Unpaid housework – forgotten by Marx, championed by the 1970s feminist Wages for Housework Campaign – has become a point of pandemic contention for working mothers. And care workers, mostly underpaid women with families, are facing the worst. Could vaccine mandates that sidestep the autonomy of workers’ bodies therefore be a stage too far?
How can decentralized art initiatives imagine a future for Europe? And whose future is being imagined there? The European Pavilion looks to create a space that transcends the confines of exclusivist tradition.
A pluralist mainstream requires a flourishing media ecosystem outside it. The mainstream has important democratic roles, but catalysing change is not one of them.
Prison was a central pillar of communism and an experience shared by generations of eastern Europeans. The USA today can also be described as a carceral society, its prison system the expression of a ‘new Jim Crow’. What does the comparison mean for the definition of the ‘political prisoner’? A conversation.