Arche
Eurozine
Arche
2008-04-25
Abstracts for Arche 3/2008
In his article "The EU's limited response to Belarus' pseudo 'new foreign policy'", George Dura (Brussels) scrutinizes the history of the relationship between the Republic of Belarus and the EU following the oil and gas crisis in the winter of 2006/2007, which resulted in worsening Russia-Belarus relations and the freezing of the formation of the so-called Russia-Belarus "union state". The situation prompted the Belarusian authorities to use pro-European rhetoric and forced them to seek opportunites for economic partnership. Unfortunately, the potential of rapprochement can not be fully used due to the fears held by the Belarusian regime about its own long-term stability, a lack of coordination within EU political structures, and the hegemonic ambitions of the neo-imperial Russia.
Rashed Chowdhury (Montreal, Quebec), in "Barack Obama and the new American dream", sheds new light on the phenomenon of Barack Obama, using as the starting point Obama's book Dreams from my father: a story of race and inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).
Educationalist Uladzimier Mackievic , in his "The education reform: an apparatchik's game and profanation of knowledge" criticizes the ideas expressed in an article by the first deputy head of the Lukashenka Administration, Anatol Rubinau, in the biggest Belarusian newspaper "Sovyetskaya Byelorussiya", as incompetent and anachronistic.
Ihar Marzaluk (Mahilou State University) and Ales Smalancuk (EHU, director of the program "The History of Belarus and Cultural Anthropology") debate the genesis of Belarusian nationalism.
Vasil Auramienka, in "The new boundaries: whose doing is this?", continues the dispute on the issue of suicide and euthanasia started in ARCHE (12/2007).
Historians Andrej Vaskievic and Andrej Carniakievic (Horadnia) trace the way that 25 March, the day of the proclamation of the Belarusian People's Republic (BPR), came to be the national holiday of Belarusians in the interwar Poland. Also, a translation of Michael E. Urban's (UC Santa Cruz) "An algebra of Soviet power. Elite circulation in the Belarusian Republic 1966-1986" (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Reviews include Andrej Mirasnicenka (Belarusian State University) on Uladzimier Mackievic's "About education. Polemic sketches" and Gediminas Lankauskas (Regina University) on "Baltic postcolonialism" (On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics, Vol. 6. // Violeta Kelertas (ed.). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 464 pp.).