Poland’s turn to the right has refocused attention on the roots of the region’s illiberal democracies. Anton Shekhovtsov considers the implications of these developments for Europe as a whole.
Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity was triggered by the government’s decision to postpone signing the long-awaited Association Agreement with the European Union. Protesters on Kyiv’s streets chanted “Ukraine is Europe!”, and waved EU and Ukrainian flags side-by-side. Two years after the victory of the Maidan protests, what is left of this pro-European idealism? Ukrainian journalist and essayist Mikhail Dubinyansky takes stock.
There is a genuinely European future for central Europe, insists Michal Koran. But it won’t come to fruition without a frank look at the deficiencies that accompanied the transformation of central European societies during the last two decades.
The intensified wave of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa is threatening to unravel the very foundations of European ideas of full citizenship, asylum and refuge, says Arjun Appadurai. But there must be a richer cultural road to legal and bureaucratic solutions currently being debated.
As in so many cities on the European periphery, Kosovo’s capital Pristina is fundamentally shaped by emigration. Jonas König explores the departure city, where provisional structures become long-term solutions, and translocal spaces and networks are ever-present.
The fascination of a borderless world has rapidly worn off in an age of accelerating mobility, writes Ivaylo Ditchev. As forms of mobility become increasingly collective, the crisis of the liberal border-machine deepens and political decision-making is thrown into disarray.
Mainstream literature on globalization tends not to take the uniqueness of each locality seriously enough, says Thomas Hylland Eriksen. He explains how the anthropology of climate change is responding to the need for an analysis of the global situation seen from below.
In the age of Google Earth and the Human Genome Project, tensions between information processed by machines and the human capacity to tell stories have intensified. Ragnild Lome traces the evolution of these tensions in literary and visual culture from the mid-twentieth century onward.
In a wide-ranging discussion of European identity and regional separatisms, scholar of European ethnology Ullrich Kockel considers how competing memories need not lead to conflict but can be turned into a creative force through cultural engagement based on mutual respect.
Self-censorship is even more harmful than censorship by the state, argues British writer and philosopher Roger Scruton, for it shuts down conversation completely. The damage done to public discussion of the most pressing issues of the day can be seen on both sides of the Atlantic.
When Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, interpersonal interactions were not yet directly part of the culture industry. But now that they are, it would be wrong to assume that the technologies of the big data revolution come with built-in ideologies, writes Lev Manovich.
Central Europe no longer exists, only East and West, as it used to be. That is the condensed version of the combined wisdom of many western analysts and commentators these days, writes Erik Tabery, editor-in-chief of the Czech weekly “Respekt”. From a Czech perspective, Tabery is certainly concerned for his country’s neighbours. But he also wonders why the West is quite so alarmed at what is happening in the East.
As part of a special focus in “L’homme” on gender and Cold War visual cultures, Nadège Ragaru goes behind the scenes of Konrad Wolf’s feature film “Zvezdi/Sterne”, to look at how the film’s Bulgarian and German partners conceived of the “Jewish catastrophe” and imagined gender roles.
Whatever happened to the lively and apparently healthy democratic process in Central Europe, during the decade that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall? Answers are more likely to be found in economic circumstances, argues Enda O’Doherty, than supposedly innate tendencies to reaction.
The European integration project urgently needs reconstructing from the bottom up, argues Wolfgang Streeck. This means taking into account the crucial importance of nations and nation-states as the principal sites of democratic self-government.
Wojciech Przybylski takes stock of the threat posed to privacy and human rights in Poland, following the country’s slide into constitutional crisis.