Articles

We speak about the differences between North and South as though they explain everything. In the process, age-old prejudices again penetrate the European consciousness and shape how we think about the world.

Speculation is based on the belief that housing prices will keep increasing and there will always be a bigger fool willing to pay a higher price. Anita Aigner looks into the culture of responsibilization and the policies that turned real estate ownership into pure, abstract investment.

Campaigns to remove monuments commemorating racism, slavery and empire are criticized for attempting to erase history. But anti-racists protesting the public prominence of these statues are challenging what history is remembered, in order to make way for a fresh lens on the past.

Education under neoliberalism – a contradictory mix of competition and austerity promoting vaulted excellence over grounded learning. Cornelia Klinger highlights awards ceremonies appropriating the names of famous historic achievers as prime example of capitalist commodification masking old and new sociopolitical inequality and injustice.

Does the comfort of the quarantined consumer outweigh the life and safety of the slaughterhouse workers who cannot afford to stay home? The recent coronavirus outbreaks in meat processing plants pose a dreadful question.

Coronavirus further intensified the fetishization of science. Experts are being cast as saviours; orderly lines of masked marketgoers mimic religious processions, and daily press conferences function as mass. But metrics have to be relieved from spiritual obligations.

From anti-vaxxers to terrorists, people often look for hidden causes which match the magnitude of the collapse they are facing. Uncertainty and public distrust are fertile ground for conspiracy theories. When used to legitimize violence, however, such narratives are more a strategy than psychopathology.

Environmental destruction and social oppression have always gone hand in hand. Colonialism and slavery are deeply connected to the ongoing ecological crisis, so to address it, Europe’s whitewashed past must be recast and the demands of the colonized taken seriously.

Vladimir Putin’s anger and jealousy has taken down many proactive leaders throughout Russia – and left the country vulnerable to crisis. The oil price war against Saudi Arabia backfired, and a recession was already in motion when coronavirus hit the country.

Insufficient housing in growing cities is a pressing issue, for which the German right blames migration and proposes exclusive free-market solutions.

Europe’s uncoordinated reaction to the pandemic and the controversies over the European Recovery Fund have again revealed the political fissures between East and West. COVID-19 will pass, but other external threats will not.

Despite ’60s slogans, making love does not stop one from making war. On the contrary: violence and sexuality are intertwined in dominant masculinity, and the hurt this causes is often denied and unaccounted for. How should we interpret the ambiguous links between lust and hostility?

Our slowed-down, cooled-down, scaled-down lives during the pandemic are evidence that quality of life does not depend on high productivity and frantic consumption. Suddenly, it has become respectable – and realistic – to talk about reforming society and the economy.

The US has no monopoly on under-serving and over-policing minorities. Police brutality is reported from the French suburbs to the Bulgarian countryside, and neo-Nazi resurgence is threatening European Roma in Hungary and Ukraine. Europeans must not wait for another horrific murder to draw attention to our own systemic racism.

Finding time and space for literature and reflection: Mererid Puw Davies’s poetry review advances the merits of literary fragmentation that cuts chronology and slots into layered lives.

The Movement for Black Lives has influenced public opinion about racism in American life, changed policy, helped reduce police violence and reshaped the politics of social justice. Finally, the wider public is coming to understand the need for a radical political transformation.