Ahead of Thursday’s EU referendum, Ben Little of Soundings (UK) looks beyond the daily diet of questionable and competing facts circulated by party political factions, and considers the deep-seated tensions that currently shape the United Kingdom’s fractured political landscape.
Public debate in Sweden on EU migrants has become particularly divisive of late, reinforcing misleading notions of who is considered “deserving” of welfare and who “non-deserving”. The authors appeal for a political community based on radically different principles.
There is a no-man’s-land between European post-democracy and notional national democracy that largely consists of grand coalitions of the political centre. It is here that European populism is flourishing and will continue to do so. Ulrike Guérot offers a corrective.
It’s not just Europe’s far right parties; the radical Left too has both personal and political connections to the Kremlin, write Péter Krekó and Lóránt Gyori. Moreover, the old “comrade networks” of Soviet times remain active.
States such as Norway or Switzerland have tended to relinquish sovereignty to the European Union without any prospect of co-determining the course that the Union takes, write Erik O. Eriksen and John Erik Fossum. Moreover, such states experience new EU treaties or reforms as “shocks” for which they are poorly prepared in comparison to member states. But these are not the only lessons that voters in the UK’s upcoming referendum on EU membership may wish to consider.
Once the preserve of eccentrics and cranks, cryonics is entering the mainstream. Is eternal life possible – or even desirable? Traversing the interface between transhumanist subcultures and high-stakes investment in novel technologies, Cal Flyn investigates.
Even a democratically elected president of the European Commission, or the elimination of the circus that is a European Parliament based in two cities, will not make citizens fall in love with the Union. What’s required, says Jan Zielonka, is a form of European integration able to meet the needs of societies put under pressure by current geopolitical tensions and the digital revolution.
In this excerpt from Anthony Barnett’s book project Blimey – it could be BREXIT!, the founder of openDemocracy (UK) argues in favour of the United Kingdom remaining a European Union member state. In the process, he reflects on the changing prospects for a genuinely democratic Europe, and on the role of digital and other new platforms in shaping European debate.
Russia’s democratic movement needs to develop a cultural and political strategy based on the following premise, writes Sergey Lebedev: that a systemic failure to deal properly with Soviet-era crimes has engendered the present-day authoritarian Russian state. This is the only way to end the damaging series of half remedies that has so far sustained the illusion of justice being restored.
Once considered a force of stability after the Yeltsin years, Vladimir Putin now depends on exporting instability and escalating international tensions in order to retain his grip on power at home. In the face of which, Garry Kasparov warns against complacency – at the same time as insisting that it is merely a question of time before Putin’s apparent show of strength gives way to dramatic change in Russia itself. Kasparov speaks to Luka Lisjak Gabrijelcic of Razpotja (Slovenia).
Once again, Turkey finds itself at the centre of a storm of conflicting international interests. As neither the deadly chaos in the Middle East nor the refugee crisis show any sign of letting up, the issue of Cyprus rumbles on. Meanwhile, the country’s domestic politics remain something of a minefield. Jim Blackburn of New Eastern Europe (Poland) speaks to Adam Szymanski.
As privatization displaces a sense of civic responsibility on both sides of the Atlantic, care-workers become ever more isolated. Martha Albertson Fineman insists that, rather than the gender of the person doing the care work, it is actually the care work itself that simply isn’t valued in today’s society.
Human emancipation was always a more complex issue than it might at first seem, and never more so than in today’s France. Historian Camille Robcis discusses the evolution of French Republicanism since the 1980s in relation to controversies over same-sex marriage, integration and racism.
Izolyatsia is a platform that promotes artistic and cultural initiatives. Its headquarters were in Donbas before war broke out, now they are in Kyiv. However, Izolyatsia’s values remain the same: to guarantee freedom of expression. Matteo Tacconi reports.
The conflict over YUKOS, between Russia’s two most powerful men at the time, became a turning point in post-Soviet Russian history, writes Tatiana Zhurzhenko. The expropriation of YUKOS opened the way to the annexation of Crimea a decade later; meanwhile, a new Russian masculinity was born.
After 100 days in power, Poland’s nationalist right-wing government expressed its desire to completely transform Polish culture. As the anticipated assault on the country’s national culture gets underway, journalist and activist Igor Stokfiszewski of Krytyka Polityczna considers the threat that this blinkered approach poses to the vibrancy and diversity of grassroots cultural initiatives.