Eurozine ReviewEurozine2013-12-18Europe's sense of humanity?New Humanist goes up against the emotional barrier around Europe's sense of humanity; Kulturos barai raises the crucial questions on Ukraine after Euromaidan; Blätter contemplates the world after Snowden; Merkur foresees a future of newspapers in both print and pixels; Arena questions the logic of the Nobel Committee; Host opens a literary can of worms concerning the state of contemporary Czech literature; Osteuropa surveys the history of homosexuality and homophobia in eastern Europe; NZ critiques the discourse on sexuality in post-glasnost Russia; Varlik shows how Deleuze was played out in Gezi Park; Revista Crítica takes on the ecological challenges that democracies face globally; Fronesis explores the meaning of home and homelessness; and Esprit takes stock of world history in a polycentric world.
Please note: next Eurozine Review out on 15 January 2014!
New Humanist 4/2013Daniel Trilling steps in as Caspar Melville's successor to introduce a new-look New Humanist (UK). The winter issue seeks to nurture the courage in its readers to question everything.Every wave: Ahead of the UK lifting working restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians in the new year, Kenan Malik writes in defence of diversity. Reviewing critical works on immigration by David Goodhart, Paul Collier and Christopher Caldwell, he finds "all insist that Europe today faces a unique danger. All the arguments recycle the panic expressed in response to every wave of immigration" throughout the twentieth century.Not only is it wrong to make immigration responsible for Europe's social ills, writes Malik. What's worse is the cruel irony in the widespread refusal to recognize one particularly lethal source of real danger: "Since 1988, some 20,000 migrants have died trying to enter Europe, two thirds of them perishing in the Mediterranean. And what have European nations done in response? They have continued to strengthen Fortress Europe and charged fishermen who saved drowning migrants with aiding illegal immigration. [...] Fortress Europe has created not only a physical barrier around the continent, but an emotional one, too, around Europe's sense of humanity."/XML/infobox/eurozinerevbox.htmA local twist on the Shake: "If you want a snapshot of the clashing social forces in the Arab world, look to the images of the Harlem Shake, Middle East style", writes Rachel Shabi. She prefaces her analysis of how political Islam failed so spectacularly in power with reference to "what began at the start of the year as a global online video craze -- an eye-rolling song-and-dance meme, with myriad variations posted on YouTube":"Two years after the popular uprisings that had unseated widely loathed dictators in both countries, Egyptian protestors took their dance spoof to the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo, while in Tunisia's capital, officials from the Islamist-dominated coalition government tried and failed to stop a local on the Shake".The underlying link between developments in both countries being what "Islamists have got wrong, this idea that you can make present-day post-revolutionary countries more pious, more conservative, more observant than they want to be. [...] Identities don't work like that".The full table of contents of New Humanist 4/2013
Kulturos barai 11/2013Tatiana Zhurzhenko concisely summarizes the situation in Ukraine in a newly written preface to a discussion in Kulturos barai (Lithuania) of Ukrainian politics originally published before Euromaidan commenced: "The ruling Party of Regions tries to play the old 'East vs West' game, mobilizing the pro-Russian sentiments in eastern and southern Ukraine. While EU politicians still wonder what went wrong, Moscow is waiting for the weakened Ukrainian regime, unpopular at home and isolated abroad, to fall into its open arms."The ensuing discussion with Tomas Kavaliauskas provides the background to questions not necessarily explicitly posed but that are now more prescient than ever. These Zhurzhenko outlines in her preface:"If it is true that a new nation was born during Euromaidan, will the Russian language continue to split it? Do we need a civic, liberal Ukrainian nationalism, which would also speak Russian and embrace the East and South? How can we dismantle the present semi-authoritarian regime, which uses "selective justice" for excluding and punishing political opponents? If Yulia Tymoshenko were released from prison, what would be her role in Ukrainian politics? Why do Russians still see the Ukrainian protests through the old imperial lens? Would a pro-Ukrainian lobby in Russia be possible?"Also: Algis Mickunas on eliminating world poverty without imposing western models; Wade Rowland, author of Greed Inc., in conversation with Almantas Samalavicius; and Julius Keleras reports from the Seventh World Association Haiku Conference in Medellin, Columbia, where he was the sole European participant.The full table of contents of Kulturos barai 11/2013
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 12/2013Blätter (Germany) contemplates the world after Snowden. In his article on the UK newspaper's role in the affair, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger strongly tips a new independent web-based reporting consortium. At the helm is none other than Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who came to be in receipt of the biggest leak of intelligence in history: "This venture, amply endowed with 250 million dollars by a Silicon Valley billionaire, will be fascinating to watch. It takes little to imagine that it will be eyed with some anxiety by the top echelons of the NSA and GCHQ. This, some of them will be thinking, is a new media venture out of their nightmares."Elsewhere, Joscha Schmierer considers the Snowden affair firmly rooted in the United States' response to 9/11, which has nourished the "digital complex of the secret services". This being the latest addition to the military industrial complex initially nourished by the Cold War, and which Eisenhower already considered a threat to democracy at the end of his presidency.Dangerous liaison: Nancy Fraser urges feminists to break off their dangerous liaison with neoliberalism:"First, we might break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorizes unwaged activities, including -- but not only -- carework. Second, we might disrupt the passage from our critique of economism to identity politics by integrating the struggle to transform a status order premised on masculinist cultural values with the struggle for economic justice. Finally, we might sever the bogus bond between our critique of bureaucracy and free-market fundamentalism by reclaiming the mantle of participatory democracy as a means of strengthening the public powers needed to constrain capital for the sake of justice."Also: Siegfried Knittel foresees the possibility of a balance of power in East Asia akin to Metternich's in Europe after the Napoleonic wars.The full table of contents of Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 12/2013
Merkur 12/2013Following Letras Libres' predictions concerning the future of the book in August, Merkur turns to the future of the newspaper. Süddeutsche Zeitung feuilleton editors Thomas Steinfeld and Lothar Müller refuse to join in the chorus of an apparent majority of "Adventists" who are convinced that the "ultimate triumph of digital over print media is imminent."Instead, they emphasize the hybrid publishing activities that newspapers have developed during the last two decades: "However, it is by no means certain that this is a phenomenon related exclusively to transition. It is just as likely, that the dual structure of print and digital media will persist. [...] In fact, the prospects for printed newspapers improve as a superfluity of online options becomes available, such that the limited editorial and technological options in print once again become appealing."Moreover, the printed newspaper has always had to compete against faster media, even before radio and television. The fundamental difference today is "that digitalization has already become part of the newspaper. First with regard to the production process, then in the distribution context".The full table of contents of Merkur 12/2013
Arena 6/2013The 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to Lars Peter Hansen, Eugene F. Fama and Robert J. Shiller. A balanced choice, some might say. Inconsistent, says Jon Weman in Arena (Sweden).Lars Peter Hansen's method for estimating parameters in statistical models has not been the subject of any debate in the public sphere. The other two, however, are more controversial. Eugen Fama is a free-market liberal economist, whose most famous theory is that of "efficient markets": markets, he claims, will always reflect all available information. Robert Schiller, on the other hand, has a decidedly more sceptical view on the way unregulated markets work. His main thesis is that markets are far from "efficient" and are instead influenced by both feelings and rationally processed information. He has even called the idea of "efficient markets" a mistake.The Committee has obviously regarded the two theories to be equally worthy of the award. But are they really? asks Jon Weman. The question is of course rhetorical: Fama, writes Weman, is "the perfect representative" of an economic science that has stuck to the efficient-market hypothesis for too long, despite empirical evidence pointing in the opposite direction. "Among social sciences, economics has a unique position and claims to be an exact science -- the fact that it has been included among the Nobel Prizes together with the natural sciences confirms this standing. But was the Nobel Prize in Physics ever awarded simultaneously to two contradictory theories?"Also: Tomas Lappalainen profiles Sven Lindqvist, one of Sweden's most influential public intellectuals. The Times Literary Supplement called him "one of the best storytellers in the historical profession today". Lappalainen picks up a quote from Lindqvist's 1957 pamphlet Reklamen är livsfarlig ("Deadly advertising") that is both characteristic of Lindqvist's to-the-point style and puts the last 55 years of debate about the workings of the public sphere in painful perspective: "It's unreasonable that half of the space in a newspaper is occupied by commandments and commercial values that the paper does not recognize as its own."The full table of contents of Arena 6/2013
Host 9/2013Host (Czech Republic) may have opened a literary can of worms with a polemical essay on the state of contemporary Czech literature by Martin Puskely. "Czech literature's greatest problem is the Czech writer, the person who holds forth on the indispensable wisdom of literature, but churns out only empty clichés feigning philosophical depth", claims Martin Puskely in an article inspired by Anis Shivani's essay "American fiction in dismal state" and dedicated to "Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for daring to do in real life what writers don't even dare to do in their imagination".Puskely lambasts post-1989 Czech fiction for glorifying the "holy cow of democracy" and failing to engage with serious social problems, such as poverty, inequality, child abuse and human trafficking. He regards the majority of the literary output of the past 25 years as either stuck in introspective reflection, focused on depictions of atomized society or promoting cheap anti-communism. By abrogating their role as seers, prophets and sages, contemporary Czech writers have "failed in a manner that would not withstand the trial of history". However, since an "Author" can be born only "out of an enormous negation, a drastic denial of fake values", Puskely believes that calls for a Czech writer who could "boldly shake hands with a Jonathan Franzen or a Salman Rushdie at a literary party" are still premature.Naive critique: Responding to Puskely's searing critique, poet, fiction writer and Host editor Jan Nemec finds the invocation of the Great Author rather infantile, similar to an adolescent's longing for the big love. Nemec defends a writer's right to reject ideological assignments and to delve into the dark and mysterious aspects of life, concluding -- tongue firmly in cheek -- that "Puskely himself would make quite a good literary character: a secondary school history teacher, a bright man with an obscure personal motivation, whose desire for justice and erroneous assumption that all sins of this world can be ascribed to the political order of society rather than to human beings like you and me, have driven him to the revolutionary tribune".The full table of contents of Host 9/2013
Osteuropa 10/2013Osteuropa (Germany) focuses on homosexuality and homophobia in eastern Europe. The Winter Olympics in Sochi are less than two months away and both individual athletes and national sports associations are torn over a boycott on the grounds of Russia's discrimination against LGTB people. The Osteuropa issue is not about Sochi, but provides a thorough background to the current media debate.In an article entitled "Eloquent silence", Dan Healy sketches out a history of urban homosexual subculture in Russia from the 1870s up until the Soviet authorities made homosexuality a criminal offence in 1934. Before Healy's period commences, homosexuality was hardly an issue and gay life did not necessarily conflict with received notions of heterosexual virility. This should not be confused with a liberal take on the subject: homosexuality was rather viewed as a normal outcome of the uses and abuses of power in a strictly hierarchic society.It was only in the cities of the late nineteenth century that a gay subculture evolved and the debate on virility and manliness started. For a short period between the end of Tsarist rule and the beginning of the communist regime, this gay subculture was tolerated but far from appreciated: "Despite the ambiguous official position of the Bolsheviks, it became clear to the Soviet police and sections of the judiciary that the feminization of men which homosexuality effected was a blemish not to be tolerated. A raid at a 'pederastic party' in Petrograd on 15 January 1921 ended with the detention of 98 sailors, soldiers and civilians, many of them in women's clothes. They had celebrated a tranvestite wedding and danced walzes and minuets."Also: Ulrich Schmid approaches gay cultural history from the perspective of Russian literature, emphasizing the potential inherent in homosexuality for political provocation and protest against the regime of the day; Evegenia Belorusets' photo essay on LGBT-families in Ukraine; Franz Schindler on sexual minorities in the Czech republic and Tomasz Kitlinski and Pawel Leszkowicz on homophobia and sexual tolerance in Poland.(For more on the LGBT community in Russia, see Sergey Khazov's article "Rainbow Russia", part the Eurozine focal point "Russia in global dialogue".)The full table of contents of Osteuropa 10/2013
Neprikosnovennij Zapas 90 (2013)In post-glasnost Russia, discourse on sexuality and integrity in public life is widespread but glaringly restricted, writes Aleksey Levison in Neprikosnovennij zapas. At the same time as modernity draws sexuality into a public space distorted by state intervention and control, sex education is suppressed. In the public imagination, sex is a social taboo unless discussed in medical terms, sold as pornography or treated as obscenity. Media discussion has been reduced to a conversation about "deviances" or "pathologies":"On federal TV, homosexuality and paedophilia (viewed alike as pathology or crime) delight the public like obscene jokes. In Russia, the sexual revolution is being outrageously distorted. The same is true of integrity in politics [...] Honesty is no longer a categorical value."Reactionary tendencies: Alek D. Epshtein reflects on the absence of gay art and culture in Russia, with only the rarest of exceptions such as the gay painter Konstantin Somov. "Two decades have passed since the repeal in Russia of the shameful article in law that punished consenting adult men for bodily intimacy. No gay art has been recognised by artistic, public or political institutions. Reactionary tendencies in the recent political development of the country have led to the legalization of homophobic clichés about the social inferiority of gays, making it impossible to view the future with optimism."The highest entity: Andrei Zakharov explores the effects of religious perception on cultural and technological development in China and the West. "How people imagine their gods determines the successes and failures of a civilization. The way in which the highest entity is understood defines people's approach to the world [...] The European God is effectively pure action, [... while] the Taoist order creates through inaction."Globalization, continues Zakharov, has "drawn Europe's Christian culture towards secularization while giving the Far East the opportunity to absorb key features of the western world view and [in economic terms] catch up with the West [...] In a sense, East and West have exchanged positions."The full table of contents of Neprikosnovennij zapas 90 (2013)
Varlik 11/2013In the first of a series of articles in Varlik (Turkey) inspired by Deleuze, Ilke Karadag explores how the nomadic lifestyle breaches and challenges the established codes and borders of settled lives and states. Ahmet Soysal finds the nomadic in Deleuze's own intellectual career, which he describes as an "extraordinary walkabout" from Hume to Nietzsche and through Kant to Bergson. And Fahrettin Ege looks at what Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Felix Guattari offered the Left in Turkey and elsewhere.In a more personal essay, Nilgun Tutal takes Deleuze as a prism through which to view acts of urban resistance as represented in Herman Melville's Bartleby and played out in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. Tutal concludes how "absurd" it is ever to think that the possibility for revolution has been exhausted.Nomad bard: Poet Haydar Ergulen marks the first anniversary of the death of folk musician Neset Ertas with an impassioned discussion of the "zombification" of the poet's memory. "Some people are damaged before death, some people after", he writes. "I think that Neset Ertas never suffered in life what he suffered after his death." Despite his centrality to Turkey's minority Alevi religious tradition, an artist who always refused state honours is now being assimilated to suit the needs of the majority Sunni religion, Ergulen says. With Turkey's Alevi path now as much a part of migrant communities in Germany and Holland as it is of Anatolian village life, perhaps it is time for the Alevi world to open its doors wider.Also: Cigdem Ulker reviews the latest novel by Kurdish writer Yasar Kemal. Tek Kanatli Bir Kus ("A One-Winged Bird") is "a portrait built with the words of the people of Anatolia," Ulker says. It finds the author trying to understand his own characters, rather than explain them, and "holds a mirror to the stances and responses of Anatolian people in the face of enigma, mystery and uncertainty".The full table of contents of Varlik 11/2013
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 100 (2013)The 100th issue of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais (Portugal), founded by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in 1978, is dedicated to the global ecological crisis and the challenges it poses for democracies."It's important to mention that the environment is frequently the object of a reductionist reading, sometimes considered only as the totality of exploited resources, and sometimes as a synonym for an uncontaminated nature in need of protection. In both cases, the importance of the dimension of 'space' is disregarded", write Giovanni Allegretti, Stefania Barca and Laura Centemeri in their introduction. The authors go on to emphasize concrete "space" in which people develop forms of organizing their material life, their work and their social relationships.Collaboration and self-organization: Céline Veríssimo visits the city of Dondo in Mozambique and, more specifically, its peripheries. The habitat that was created here in response to the marginalization of this landscape has been "adapted to integrate both farming and business, shaping a green and ruralized pattern of urbanization". Veríssimo suggests a reassertion of collaborative practices and spontaneously self-organized entities as a basis for sustainable living that may be also more immune to the effects of external crises. "As a consequence, urban expansion, a product of human habitats, can be a starting point for a new form of eco-development rather than a source of environmental decline and poverty."RCCS Annual Review: In the fifth RCCS Annual Review, the journal's online English-language collection of texts originally published in Portuguese during the past year, Malcolm Miles rethinks the "creative city" and Gaby Zipfel examines the relationship between sexual identity, violence and sexuality in and around war.The full table of contents of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 100 (2013)
Fronesis 42-43 (2013)Fronesis (Sweden) explores the meaning of home and homelessness. After employers lost interest in arranging housing for their employees over a century ago, writes Ingrid Sahlin, the private rental market blossomed, resulting in the need for political initiatives to find a balance between the supply of and demand for living space.However, after the conservatives entered power in Sweden in 1991, a new, harder attitude toward homeless people began to dominate, which Sahlin characterizes as "the liquidation of housing politics": "The discourse connecting homelessness to the deficiency and weakness of the persons affected has dominated since the beginning of the 1990s. This has counteracted any efforts towards a just housing policy. It is related to the discourse of the nineteenth century on the homeless as vagrants or unworthy poor people, but the 'inability to dwell' as a problem in itself has been constructed during recent decades.Guilt and responsibility: Kathleen Arnold looks at homelessness through the prism of Schuld (that is, Heidegger's concept of guilt). Arnold concludes that this guilt and "our commitment to the Other doesn't indicate a conflict, but a relation dealing with internal and external dislocation. [...] That which we owe the Other, the guilt we feel, can be neutralized in many different ways: by passing the guilt on to the Other (they are benefit cheaters, spongers, parasites and so on); by looking at all the problems in the world and determining that there is too much to be done (if you donate a little, it would not be enough, so why bother at all?); or by classifying Others as inferior people who do not have the same needs."Responsibility for the homeless is important as all people need a form of territory, writes Arnold. But above all because, in order to live together, everybody must have the chance to engage and develop politically. The responsibility is therefore twofold: "to guarantee the Other's subsistence, as the liberals traditionally did, but also to allow the Other dignity and individuality. These two elements", concludes Arnold, "can be described as 'justice'."The full table of contents of Fronesis 42-43 (2013)
Esprit 12/2013The focus in Esprit (France) is on writing world history in a polycentric world. What happens when Europe no longer has the monopoly on history? In his introduction, Marc-Olivier Padis asks:"Is what we are witnessing in Asia the affirmation of a rival view of development and power or merely a successful assimilation of lessons learned from the West? Does Asia's current ascendancy simply mean that the western model has been extended to the entire planet or is it rather a process of 'de-westernization', a withdrawal from western influence? Rather than a case of homogenization, many pundits see the current change as being a process of provincializing Europe, acknowledging its loss of centrality and seeing it henceforth as one peripheral element among many in a polycentric world."Civilizational rather than national: Philippe Minard rounds out the world history agenda: not only should it seek to abolish western ethnocentricity, it should also attempt to be transnational and multi-scale in its choice of subject, study neglected regions, view phenomena as civilizational rather than national, and widen the chronological spectrum. However, Minard also warns against another form of determinism: confusing the history of the globe with the history of globalization.A shrinking of the world: Nicolas Léger's article on 2666, the unfinished last novel by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, concludes the focus. The posthumously published novel is "global" in the sense that, whilst its action takes place in a fictional Mexican town, the focus and the protagonists are European, Chilean and Afro-American. Paradoxically, writes Léger, Bolaño sees globalization as a shrinking of the world that reduces it to a desert of absurdity in which humans feels alone, a world in which Europeans, trapped in their cultural heritage, can no longer live:"Once the unified and closed cosmos has been fractured, once the divine has withdrawn, what remains? As many worlds as there are individuals and therefore, at the level of the novel, as many characters. There is no longer any homeland for humanity: that, according to Bolaño, is the secret of our modern melancholy. Beneath each and every town lies an inhuman desert, a silent world that never expected anything from us."The full table of contents of Esprit 12/2013