Articles

Last month, EU leaders met in Trieste and dutifully reaffirmed their commitment to the nations of the Western Balkans. Just as they did last year. And the year before. But this process is going nowhere, write André Liebich.

Writing in the 1940s and 50s, political theorist Hannah Arendt saw in the nascent European project an opportunity for political transformation in the aftermath of totalitarianism. But she also foresaw some of its potential weaknesses, writes Peter Verovšek.

When does forced labour become slavery? Dr Marc Buggeln explores this issue in the context of the most notorious examples from 20th-century history: the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag system.

The constitutional separation between church and state in Russia is being ignored, writes Boris Falikov. He asks why the Kremlin’s partnership with the Orthodox church exists, and just how far it extends.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faced down an attempted military coup in July 2016. But far from reinforcing democracy, in the year since then he has used the state of emergency to institutionalize an elective autocracy, writes Professor Ahmet İnsel.

Europe long overlooked the extent of Russian attempts to influence politics in the West through disinformation and cyber warfare. Now the opposite may be the case. Markus Wehner assesses the risks, and looks at measures being taken by the German government.

In just four years, the Republican Party has become the willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee called America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe, writes James Kirchick. It’s a sorry tale, but not altogether surprising.

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.