Articles

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.

The notion that fiction is a force for moral good derives from the age of revolution. But imaginative empathy does not always translate into egalitarian politics, argues Lyndsey Stonebridge. What do we want our books to do that we cannot?

Russia’s younger generation have failed to build upon the democratic achievements of their predecessors of the 1990s. Surveys show a reversion to Soviet-era conformism, whether as passivity and cynicism, or individualism and status obsession.

Pro-Kremlin propaganda spread through social media is causing a shift to the far-Right among Germany’s native Russian population. Nikolai Mitrokhin considers the implications for German politics in advance of the September elections.

Western Ukrainian intellectuals’ tendency to blame the Donbas for the war is based on a longstanding orientalization of the ‘Soviet’ Other. Reminiscences about erstwhile cultural diversity sit awkwardly alongside hostility to the East.

‘There are always more reasons for closing a cultural publication than for striving to keep it alive.’ A tribute to literary critic and novelist Mihály Dés, founder of the Spanish journal ‘Lateral’ and key figure in the Eurozine network, who passed away on 18 May.

The nationalist reaction to the refugee crisis of 2015 casts a shadow over the opening of the House of European History in Brussels. Will the new institution’s role be merely to display the vestiges of a common European cultural heritage?