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.
From introducing feminist literature on the pages of a semi-pornographic magazine to challenging the self-image of the socialist state of Yugoslavia: journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulić has broken ground in many fields in her native tongue even before rising to international renown.
A bill on Animal Welfare is currently making its way through the UK parliament. If passed, non-human vertebrates would be recognized as sentient. But would this mean that animals have the same or similar rights to humans?
A common currency, a single passport and a European anthem: all were originally the ideas of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. But though the founder of the pan-Europa movement was ahead of his time in many ways, impatience with institution-building meant his concrete achievements remained limited.
Coup attempt or assertion of supremacy? It is still not clear what has happened in Kazakhstan. Whatever the case, the hijacking of the demonstrations has severely damaged prospects for the country’s democratization.
Unlike their nineteenth-century precursors, anti-European intellectuals in Russia today are neither engaged in dialogue with the West, nor do they realize that their ideas about European decline are themselves derivative.