Articles

Paradox is the predominant mode in recent articles on 1989. As historical distance brings greater perspicacity on the past thirty years, so received ideas clash with facts, sharpening the focus for real contradictions.

Eastern Europe is clearly part of a global populist wave, and is now part of the western right-wing populist imaginary as the bedrock for ‘pure’ European values. Only by looking at ‘1989’ from a new angle can we see how populist governments’ rejection of a ‘decadent’ and ‘imperialist’ West merely continues a communist stance, despite their strident anti-communist rhetoric.

Soviet, Polish, and Czech women were active but sidelined members of pre-1989 dissident groups. This not only kept up conventional gender roles, but shared them with the regimes they were fighting against, a fact concealed by their ‘vernacularized’ concept of human rights.

It was assumed after 1989 that eastern economies would easily take up western-style capitalism without a ‘third option’. Their transformation was far deeper and more brutal than if socialism had collapsed two decades earlier. As a result, the free movement of labour and capital after 2004 produced lopsided developments, and after the turbulence caused by the 2008 financial crisis the EU became unwilling to reign in new member states’ illiberal governments.

Celebrated playwright and theatre director Matthias Lilienthal talks about the past, present and future of what he calls the ‘theatrical mode of production’, the new forms it might bring about, and the new audiences attending radical theatre productions.

Norway’s cultural journals are driven by the voluntary work of idealistic writers and editors and survive on generous gifts and subsidies. This same idealism, however, allows them to document key trends and act as a ‘zeitgeist archive’.

Attitudes towards immigration are said to be split down an East–West divide, but it is western Europe that has traditionally feared ‘invasions’ from the East and that responded to EU enlargement in 2004 with restrictions on labour migration. Now that eastern and western Europe are more deeply integrated than ever before, the defining question will be how Europe negotiates immigration from outside its borders.

Although on the rise, popular engagement with EU politics is still a poor reflection on European democracy. International coverage maintains a narrow focus, despite important and uneven developments in national politics throughout the Union. Eurozine’s series on the EP elections addresses this deficit.

After May’s elections, Prague saw the largest public demonstration since the Velvet Revolution. The country now hosts the strongest Pirate Party in Europe, while Spain provides the largest national component in the S&D bloc. Norway may yet become Europe’s green battery, as Belgium faces a great divide.

In order to become a force for the future, the European Left must rediscover a politics of class that combines social solidarity with radical economic critique. Challenging exclusory discourse on immigration is central to this process of renewal, argues political scientist Lea Ypi in an interview with ‘Il Mulino’.

Peak populism could be said to characterize the political dynamic in all three countries, as Finns express the greatest dissatisfaction with the Right. But changes may well be on the horizon in Hungary and Bulgaria too, as the limits to euroscepticism become increasingly clear.

In an interview with Andrea Pipino, Romanian historian Lucian Boia talks about Romanian identity from its Roman-Dacian beginnings through Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule, modernization, fascism, communism, and the paradoxical present, in which this extremely nationalistic country has no openly nationalist political party.

Police violence, mass detentions, internet shutdown, arrest of opposition candidates: the reaction to the latest protests in Moscow has been an overreaction even by the standards of the Russian authorities. It seems that the government has good reason to be afraid of putting its popularity to the test. But is it advised to ask what next, given the sheer weight of resistance to democratization in Russia?

Despite far-right parties’ criticism of EU sanctions on Russia, at national levels they lack the foreign policy leverage to be of direct use to Moscow. The strengthening of the far-right bloc in the European Parliament is also unlikely to alter the EU’s position. Does this mean that Russian influence on European politics is negligible?

Following changes to UK immigration law in 2014, the documentary ‘The Romanians are Coming’ promised the truth behind the headlines. Diana Georgescu finds a more troubling picture of Romanians, tied up with longstanding prejudices applied to eastern Europeans generally and Romani people in particular.

Though their approaches are very different, Hannah Arendt and Anselm Jappe take similar positions on the ambiguities of modernity and revolution. They not only analyse the contradictions of ‘modernity’, but show that the modern situation undermines the conditions for its existence, pointing towards its own revolutionary transformation.