Pronatalism has become a populist vote winner for right-wing parties in Central and East European countries. Demographic imbalances, involving youth migration, ageing populations and immigration resistance, have sparked a series of baby-making policies. But are financial incentives in Hungary, Poland and Serbia enough to reverse the trend of decreasing birth rates?
It has become axiomatic in our distrustful age that truth stands in tension with friendship. But the traps of identitarianism require that we rehabilitate our relation to truth – and understand it not as the opposite of friendship, but its very condition.
From the English Channel to the Sea of Marmara, Europe’s seas are soaked in sewage. It might not be the best topic for polite conversation, but managing human waste is the single most important urban necessity – and that’s why we’re talking all about it on the Earth Day episode of Standard Time, premiering at 7 PM CET.
New border and surveillance technologies are being lauded for their accuracy and fairness. But how ethical can forced identification be? Late nineteenth-century enthusiasts of pinning down the ‘born criminal’ enlisted scientific advances to sinister ends. Might biometric data processing that registers migrants entering the EU risk a similar transgression of human rights today?
Perceiving war as a series of strategic manoeuvres delineated on a map renders a horizontal view of conflict. And projecting an end to fighting is fundamentally restorative. But deep pollution, as is occurring in Ukraine from Russia’s radioactive colonialism, warns of a more persistent dimension with long-term environmental impact.
Even after the disgracing of Gerhard Schröder and Scholz’s trumpeted Zeitenwende, German Social Democracy has been unable to dispel suspicions that it continues to sympathise with Russia. The authors of a recent book discuss this ignominious history, in which Schröder was the main but by no means only actor.
From free school meals to the privatization of family policy, early childhood education can be heaven on earth when it works well, or a hellscape when it is dysfunctional. Kindergartens are on this week’s episode of Standard Time, premiering today at 7 PM CET.
Pilot schemes show that the four-day week can increase productivity while significantly improving personal wellbeing. So what is holding back this long mooted reform? Comparison shows that some models are more popular than others among employers and employees alike.
Vladimir Putin insists that Russia is a unique civilisation state. But behind this assertion of ‘Sonderweg’ or a ‘special path’ lies a complex series of social constructs. Questioning the geopolitical metaphor dividing ‘West’ and ‘East’, ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’, points to a recurring battle with transformation.
Western Europe’s historical denial of Ukraine’s Europeanness stemmed from the same imperialist root as Russia’s denial of Ukraine’s national existence. Against this background, the EU’s recent change of heart is momentous.
Safeguarding the dubious concept of a ‘European way of life’ has serious implications for migrants. Though indispensable for economic growth, new arrivals, who endure militarized border systems, face a future of privatized detention centres and offshore processing facilities. Could a new focus on common goals provide the necessary end to dehumanizing practices?
Private enterprises founded by diaspora Poles with seed capital from the West produced a range of consumer goods for the domestic market in the late Polish People’s Republic, blowing a ‘wind of change’ into the planned economy over a decade before the transformation.
At one point in his 1984 essay ‘Permission to narrate’, Edward Said described urging family and friends in Beirut to record what was happening during the Israeli siege, in order to tell the world ‘what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “anti-terrorism”’.
Are robots replacing us? For translators, this prospect is quite realistic. Though machine translation can be useful with simple and direct text, it still has a lot to catch up on to eliminate language barriers and understand subtle meanings. Publishing across languages on today’s Standard Time episode.
It is often maintained that the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ expresses a genocidal and antisemitic intention. But this is generally not the case. On the contrary, the slogan has historically been used to articulate a wide variety of political strategies for Palestinian liberation.
From plov to pilaf, hundreds of versions of the same charismatic dish are a testimony to civilizations and culinary memory, from Central Asia to east and south-east Europe, and across several empires.