Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, has been described in the Norwegian media as a ‘suspect liberalist’. In a wide-ranging interview, Truls Lie, editor-in-chief of Eurozine network partner journal Ny Tid and Modern Times Review, asked him about dictatorships, his native Venezuela, anarchism and meritocracy.
The ethno-nationalist response to immigration entrenches the very alienation that it purports to overcome. In order to escape inertia and rejuvenate our societies, what we need instead is a politics of adaptation, argues sociologist Hartmut Rosa.
Andrei and Klymentiy Sheptytsky, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic clerics who resisted both Nazi and Soviet oppression, have played an important role in shaping Ukrainian political identity. Polish intellectual and diplomat Adam Daniel Rotfeld was one of the many children of Jewish descent sheltered in the Sheptytskys’ monastery during WWII. Here, he re-evaluates the biographies of the two brothers.
The break-down in the latest round of talks between Greek and Turkish Cyprus has frustrated hopes about an imminent end to the decades-old conflict. However, comparison with the Irish peace process suggests that a solution could still be a generation away.
Don’t fall for the official Russian line on WWII, historian Timothy Snyder warns German MPs in a speech at the Bundestag. In the debate over Germany’s historical responsibility for its wartime actions in Ukraine, ‘Germany cannot afford to get major issues of its history wrong.’
Western commentators have lambasted Ukraine’s decision to ban Russian media, TV and film. But Mykola Riabchuk argues that attacking the move as censorship ignores its context: namely, Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
The authorities in Spain are increasingly cracking down on public criticism, with comedians amongst those most at risk.
Political scientist Michael Freeden talks to Slovene journal Razpotja about rightwing populism’s sub-ideological fantasies, anti-liberalism and political dogmatism, and why there can be no such thing as a democracy without deficits.
Hippies are well known as a phenomenon of the West. But this counterculture, which inspired an entire generation, took root in an unlikely place – the Soviet Union of the 1970s.
Perhaps selfish driving isn’t just an irritating character flaw. It could indicate the need for a wider change in social attitudes.
Giving birth at home was only recently legalized in Hungary, and one of its leading advocates still faces prosecution. Attitudes towards birth touch on the history of medicine, the place of women in society, and why mothers feel compelled to pay bribes to have their children delivered.
Many things to many people, postmodernism is notable for the endings it has brought about in many fields. But is it now curtains for postmodernism itself?
Liberalism as an ideology and a political movement has failed to take deep root in Russian society. It had a chance to do so immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but today the chances for its rebirth are tiny. Instead, “systemic liberals” have become instrumental in ensuring the survival of a personalized power system.
The ethos of journalistic independence that flourished in the USSR during glasnost degenerated, in the following decades, into political partisanship and commercial opportunism. In today’s Russia, self-censorship and tact are regarded as survival skills in a much-diminished sector.
The dissident vocabulary of anti-politics is currently in vogue, but often misconstrued. The anti-political critique of ideology moves comfortably across the political spectrum, and today’s anti-politician can become tomorrow’s ideologue.
Across the Balkans, the process of de-Europeanization is all-embracing and radical. Miljenko Jergović warns of a new bout of conflict and urges Europe to re-engage.