Articles

Wojciech Przybylski takes stock of the threat posed to privacy and human rights in Poland, following the country’s slide into constitutional crisis.

A show of EU concern for developments in Poland can do no harm, writes Stefan Szwed, but ultimately the fate of the country’s democracy is for Poles themselves to sort out. And, luckily, crises often come with opportunities; Poland’s PiS challenge is stirring a new political awakening.

In terms of prompting domestic and foreign concern over the rise of illiberal democracy in the European Union, the new Polish government has almost outdone the Hungarian governments of the past six years. Cas Mudde considers the likelihood of EU sanctions against both Poland and Hungary.

Twenty-five years after the USSR’s collapse, writes Maria Stepanova, history has turned into a kind of minefield, a realm of constant, traumatic revision. As a result, Russia is living in a schizoid present where the urgent need for a new language is far from being met.

The main issue surrounding the ugly events on New Year’s Eve in Cologne soon turned out not to be the assault of women per se, but the fact that perpetrators were, in police parlance, of “Arab and north-African appearance”. However, writes Slavenka Drakulic, it may well be that the tears of the women in Cologne that night bring bigger changes to Germany and Europe than anyone could have anticipated, least of all the women themselves.

The Slovak writer and artist Matus Ritomsky provides some insight into the mood in Slovakia, as the debate about events in Cologne and other cities in Germany on New Year’s Eve continues across Europe.

Leading artists, curators and practitioners in the creative industries discuss the prospects for intellectual resistance in the most precarious of circumstances: where state institutions tend to strangle much-needed social critique and one must use every available resource to avoid submitting to one’s own fatigue.

Europe has become steadily more introspective since the financial crisis broke out in 2008, writes Andrew Wilson. Moreover, with the refugee crisis and the Paris attacks grabbing European and global media attention, and Russia suddenly becoming an ally in the fight against ISIS, it seems that Ukraine has become a topic of the past. But should the West lose focus, Ukraine’s chances of success will be very slim.

Filmmakers who push back at social conventions take risks with their careers and, sometimes, frighten their audiences. Nikki Baughan speaks to leading directors Susanne Bier (Denmark) and Haifaa Al Mansour (Saudi Arabia) about the importance of using the big screen to challenge ways of life.

The Treaty of Rome was the Copernican revolution in the history of European democracy, the moment at which nationalism and the nation were consigned to history. Since the Lisbon Treaty, however, national self-interest has returned to Europe, so that today the question is: who will determine Europe’s future – the universal or the one-dimensional European?

From the archive | With Facebook facing ever-growing scrutiny, Eurozine revisits Mark Frary’s report for ‘Index on Censorship’ on how tech companies decide which news items you see online.

Overthrow a dictator in the Arab world today and you’re far more likely to spark civil war than a liberal democracy. So the West shouldn’t be militarily engaged at all, says Michael Walzer. For it cannot create democratic polities where there is no social or cultural basis for democracy.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, a movement of Russian nationalists attempted to reshape the USSR in a Russian-patriotic spirit. Alexander Mikhailovsky considers the reception of this movement among intellectual circles at the time and whether its legacy still plays a role in official Russian politics today.

There is a real need to debate the post-Soviet space less as a single region and more in terms of individual autonomous entities, writes Taciana Arcimovic. Recent discussions in Narva made a valuable contribution toward meeting this need. Arcimovic reports on the first of five conferences organized by the platform Neighbourhood in Europe: Prospects of a Common Future. The conference series continues in Minsk from 7 to 10 December and Kharkiv from 10 to 12 December.

The twentieth century unleashed the spectre of statelessness into the world. Lyndsey Stonebridge explores how the modern history of refugees has shaped not only the lives of the stateless but also the lives, rights and securities of those who think of themselves as happily at home.

In an article first published shortly after the 13 November Paris terrorist attacks, investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed addresses the twisted logic of extremist ideologies; and how to break the continuum of violence that such ideologies seek to perpetuate.