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Articles published in Eurozine
In search of a post-communist future
How was it possible in too many post-communist countries that incredible riches accumulated in the hands of the parasitic few? Why is political power so often fused with wealth? Two philosophers search for an answer as to what went wrong in the post-communist world after 1989. [Russian version added] [more]
Kaliningrad's architectural heritage: An insider's view
What is the threat implied in the handover of the symbolically significant architectural heritage of the Kaliningrad region to the Orthodox Church of Russia? Local historian Anna Karpenko examines the social and cultural aspects of the conflict. [Danish version added] [more]
Markets and society
When high finance cripples the economy and corrodes democracy
The current financial crisis is not confined to economies, writes former Romanian finance minister Daniel Daianu. The erosion of the middle class, the spread of extremism and the threat to democracy are some of the more obvious social effects demanding attention. [Danish version added] [more]
Here am I, where are you?
Loneliness in the era of communication
The Internet has abolished loneliness, or rather got rid of its negative effects to a hitherto unimagined degree, writes Aleida Assmann. Borders between sociability and loneliness are shifting and the pressure of social conformity lessens as computer nerds turn into savvy heroes. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
The university in the twenty-first century
Towards a democratic and emancipatory university reform
Universities can regain their legitimacy only through radical democratic restructuring. Countering the brain-drain -- so far the main result of the transnationalization of education -- will only be possible by embarking on a counter-hegemonic process of educational globalization. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Celebrities: The new cultural elite?
Attention is the currency of the new media, which like any other asset is profitable only when possessed in sufficient quantity, writes Georg Franck. There is nothing democratic about celebrity culture, where the media have the sole power to appoint the new elite. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Genocides?
An interview with historian Ugur Ümit Üngör
The comparison of genocides is neither a crude equation nor an equivalence of evil, argues historian Ugur Ümit Üngör. Rather, comparative study enhances understanding of individual cases and counters political manipulation of genocide under hierarchies of uniqueness. [more]
Rewriting history in Kaliningrad: Facts on the ground
Why is the Orthodox Church of Russia reclaiming the castles and churches in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, appropriated in 1917? The question is posed by a Lithuanian "outsider" in the light of recent changes in the ownership of important heritage sites in Kaliningrad. [more]
Europe's periphery
The decimation of indigenous industry in central and eastern Europe has created a low-wage hinterland on the fringes of the highly developed core, writes Carl Rowlands. If the societies of central-eastern Europe are indeed in transition, it is unclear what the destination will be. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
The vanishing genius loci of Vilnius
Vilnius's Baroque and Gothic urban heritage was once a rallying point for Lithuania's independence movement following the architectural ravages of Soviet modernism. Now it is subject to a new onslaught from local finance capital -- and no one seems to care. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
On emotions
The correspondence between Algirdas Julius Greimas and Aleksandra Kasuba, 1988-1992
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman finds unstable families a threat to society. Anthony Giddens opens for negotiation and change. Dalia Leinarte finds Giddens more in keeping with the times and uses the correspondence between two Lithuanian intellectuals to illustrate her point. [more]
On the post-city
As global megacities render the urban grid and its certainties obsolete, societies of discipline become societies of control. Daniel Miller cracks open the password protected "post-city". [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Territory, identity, transformation
A Baltic-Balkan comparison
Lithuania and Bulgaria: subjected to neoliberal forces of disintegration, territorial identities in the regulated zone of market democracy that is new Europe re-pattern along altered lines of conflict. Ivaylo Ditchev and Tomas Kavaliauskas share Baltic-Balkan perspectives on the present. [Hungarian version added] [more]
European university reform
Ten propositions in search of an answer
What in the US has been a tradition of collaboration between universities and prosperous private business, in Europe risks turning into an acceptance of the dictates of the economy. On the "entrepreneurial university" and other myths of Bologna. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Talking about censorship and the lost world of samizdat
In 1980s Hungary, as in the USSR and other communist ruled countries, censorship and opposition to it was a crucial issue. A onetime dissident turned historian recalls the passionate debates at the time and establishes their continuing relevance in the post-Wall world. [more]
Bologna, or The capitalization of education
The German protests against the Bologna Process are the last opposition to what amounts to a cultural revolution, writes Richard Münch. The result of the exposure of German universities to purely economic demands will be an increasing hierarchization of educational institutions. [Spanish version added] [more]
The Bologna paradox
On the contradictions in the implementation of the Bologna Criteria
The Bologna Process is typical of a new dynamic of inclusion and exclusion in post-national Europe. Not only must the assumption be challenged that access to knowledge can be controlled via monetization, the reforms must also be placed in the context of Europe's selective border regime. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Lithuania: Universities on the threshold
A blind drive towards utility characterizes higher education policy in Lithuania. The only remedy on offer for the ongoing brain-drain is based on the logic of the market. Lithuanian universities are steadily going the way of the rest of "common property" after independence. [more]
In pursuit of the goddess
How one woman defied the odds to restore the feminist principle
Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas revolutionized ideas of "Old Europe" and reinstated the Great Goddess in her rightful place before the onslaught of the Indo-European male ascendancy dethroned her and left women mere consorts and companions. [more]
Neurocapitalism
The fear of depression, dementia and attention deficit disorder legitimizes the boom in neuro-psychotropic drugs. In a performance-driven society that confronts the self with its own shortcomings, neuroscience serves an expanding market. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
History and politics between Left and Right, East and West
Have fears about an upsurge of ultra-nationalism in eastern Europe brought the era of democratic idealism to an end? Opposition to last year's Prague Declaration on "European Conscience and Totalitarianism" reveals changing attitudes, writes Violeta Davoliute. [more]
Literary perspectives: Croatia
Post-traumatic stress disorder
A new generation of post-feminist writers in Croatia has emerged in the crossover between literature and journalism. Common to much new Croatian writing is the postwar experience, with authors using marginal characters to explore tensions between individual and society. [more]
Literary perspectives: Lithuania
Almost normal
The literary field in Lithuania has established itself since independence, despite vastly smaller print runs. Today, a range of literary approaches can be made out, from the social criticism of the middle generation to the more private narratives of the post-Soviet writers. [Hungarian version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Denmark
The contemporary literary reservation
Committed, critical writing in Denmark is emerging from its sheltered existence in a literary reservation, in doing so collapsing the boundaries between the literary field and the broader public sphere, writes Andreas Harbsmeier. [Swedish version added] [more]
Are newspapers still relevant?
It is not the Internet that is responsible for the "crisis of the press", but subordination of journalism to the market, writes the political editor of the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". For the first time since 1945, German journalism risks becoming trivialized. [Polish version added] [more]
Battlefield Europe
Transnational commemoration and European identity
A pan-European memory cannot be reduced to the Holocaust and the Gulag alone, no matter how central these are, and must be able to compare memories without offsetting each against the other. On the "concentric circles" of European memory. [more]
The meaning of network culture
As digital computing meshes with mobile networking technology, society is undergoing a cultural shift. In postmodernism, being was left in a fabric of intensities; today, the self is affirmed through the net. What does this mean for the democratic public sphere? [more]
Legacies of "Judeo-Bolshevism"
Scenes from post-communist Poland
For young Polish Jews, many of whom reappropriated their Jewish identity after 1989, the historical injury of the Holocaust is often complicated by their grandparents' participation in the communist project. [Swedish version added] [more]
History thieves
Thirty years after leaving Russia for Israel, an "unheimliche" experience in Berlin led Zinovy Zinik to investigate the chequered past of his Russian-born grandfather. An autobiographical exploration of "assumed identity" in twentieth-century Jewish experience. [Polish version added] [more]
Salvation fantasies
No one in eastern central Europe suspected that once the fight for independence was won, democracy would become a parody of itself, writes Tomas Kavaliauskas. Open disrespect for the public jars with the ideals of the Baltic Way that existed before and after 1989. [more]
"Go West..."
Myths of femininity and feminist utopias in East and West
Working illegally in the West, eastern European women take care of "the logistics of bodily experience", freeing western women to participate alongside men in business, science and politics. [more]
Holocaust: The ignored reality
Auschwitz and the Gulag are generally taken to be adequate or even final symbols of the evil of mass slaughter. But they are only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come, writes Timothy Snyder. [more]
Eurozine conference held in Vilnius
22nd European Meeting of Cultural Journals, 8-11 May 2009
The 22nd European Meeting of Cultural Journals was a resounding success, with over eighty representatives of cultural journals from Iceland to Bosnia, Ireland to Belarus meeting in Vilnius to discuss the subject of "European Histories". It is not often that participants of such events say that it caused them to re-adjust their world-view, yet this is what some have claimed. [more]
Still not free
Why post-'89 history must go beyond self-diagnosis
The dissident generation of the 1970s and 1980s produced a body of work unprecedented in Czech history, says Martin Simecka. Yet it is precisely the monumentality of this generation's legacy that prevents the interpretation of the communist past going beyond self-diagnosis. [Swedish version added] [more]
The geopolitics of memory
The controversy around the statue of the Soviet soldier in Tallinn in April 2007 provided a striking demonstration that memory politics is less about the communist past than about future political and economic hegemony on the European continent. [more]
Balancing the books
Sixty years and more since the end of WWII, eastern European experiences of subjugation are often glossed over. This creates misunderstandings that could be avoided by an awareness of a common European history. Then, solidarity rather than national prejudice would motivate public opinion on matters of European politics. [more]
Historical myths new and old
Surrounding the sixtieth anniversary of WWII were arguments that the suffering of eastern Europe goes unacknowledged. By implication, the memory of the Holocaust is a hegemonic discourse within the EU, rather than its binding principle. Here, a new myth is in the making: victimhood divorced from political context. [more]
The flood of festivals
Illness, cure, everyday life
For those who existed behind the Iron Curtain, it was hard even to imagine arts festivals, writes Vaidas Jauniskis. But over the past two decades, festivals have flooded eastern Europe as if they were the new religion. [more]
Places and strata of memory
Approaches to eastern Europe
The idea of 1989 as an annus mirabilis is too crude; rather, it was the result of a long incubation period that took a different course in each Eastern Bloc country. Karl Schlögel asks whether it is too soon to start talking of a "common European history". [more]
Literary perspectives: Sweden
Beyond crime fiction, handbags and designer suits
Recent literary debates in Sweden have dwelled, among things, on authors' love lives and penchant for designer handbags. Yet there is more out there if one looks: Hans Koppel's satire of suburban manners, for example, or Magnus Hedlund's explorations of human perception. [Estonian version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Northern Ireland
Shaking the hand of history
While the Northern Irish literary tradition is closely bound up with the experience of sectarian violence, contemporary Northern Irish writing defies the assumption that "the Troubles" are all there is to the country's literature. [more]
Made in Bulgaria
The national as advertising repertoire
In Bulgarian political discourse, to talk of the nation means to talk non-politically. Advertising makes visible this depoliticization of the national. [more]
Literary perspectives: Slovenia
A hollowed-out generation
Slovenian novelists are developing original responses to the experience of post-communist society, writes Ales Steger. While male novelists take a hyper-realist, social-critical approach, their female counterparts are creating fictions only loosely connected to contemporary time and space. [more]
From unidimensional to multidimensional thinking
The European tradition of abstract thought as mastered by Kant must show the way in thinking about the State, argues Romualdas Ozolas, a founder of the Lithuanian Sajudis movement. [more]
Doom and gloom
Asked how they see their country ten years from now, only a third of Hungarians say that it will be a successful European country. "Hungary's political elite, its intellectuals and its media bear enormous responsibility for this negativity," writes Elemér Hankiss. [more]
Literary perspectives: Austria
Anything but a "German appendix"
Austrian novelists are still referred to as Germans despite recent critical and commercial success. From the new narrative "miracle" to the darkly humorous "writer's novel", Daniela Strigl finds a contemporary Austrian scene at the top of its game. [Estonian version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Hungary
Mastering history through narrative?
Reads the newest Hungarian novels, Gábor Csordás that all share a concern with narrative, holding out to the reader the hope of mastering history. [more]
Death and the resurrection of God
Thoughts on the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"In the Western-Christian European space, the twentieth century can be called the century of 'death' and the 'resurrection of God'." A special role was played by the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who provided a critical response to the question of Christ. Tomas Kiauka reconstructs the consistency of his thought. [more]
"Why Nietzsche today"
Despite the major criticisms to be made of Nietzsche's philosophy, his writing on morality and politics continues to raise important issues, writes Bela Egyed in an introduction to a series of texts first published in Kritika&Kontext. [more]
Literary perspectives: The Netherlands
"Profound Holland" and the new Dutch
While the work of novelists Jan Siebelink and Arnon Grunberg reflect the new need for security in the Netherlands, a parallel strand of contemporary Dutch literature sidesteps such concerns: writers with migrant backgrounds are introducing new styles into the Dutch literary repertoire. [Hungarian version added] [more]
The non-efficient citizen
Identity and consumerist morality
Consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom. In the consumerist system, the individual who asserts him or herself through authentic freedom is regarded as a non-efficient citizen. [more]
Mobile citizenship?
The "new mobility" implies new freedoms as well as new privations. The biographies of Bulgarian migrants reveal how the horizon of departure has become a basic dimension of the world. Mobility, writes Ivaylo Ditchev, will need to be taken more seriously in the anthropology of citizenship. [more]
Nietzsche's anti-democratic liberalism
A Nietzschean politics is less a critique of political events so much as a diagnosis of the forces and tendencies driving them -- and therein lies its liberalism, writes Béla Egyed. [more]
The heaviest burden
Nietzsche and the death of God
Nietzsche's response to having lost faith, but not being able to live without it, was to invent the figure of a new creator -- someone who could bring together Man and World once again. In order to do this, man had to begin to think through his own existence: the heaviest burden of all. [more]
National populism versus democracy
Given the failure of the leftist projects of the twentieth century, it is telling that far-right populism is more anti-democratic in the new democracies of eastern Europe than in the West, writes Antony Todorov. Is populism identical to the crisis of democracy or rather a symptom of it? [more]
An amorphous society
Lithuania in the era of high post-communism
"High post-communism" in eastern Europe is defined by efforts to control collective memory, political discourse dominated by abstract concepts, and the cult of entertainment -- a view from Lithuania. [more]
Literary perspectives: Ukraine
Longing for the novel
In Ukraine, the demand for engagement with the recent past has produced a series of novels that are better described as autobiographies. But, asks Timofiy Havryliv, is autobiography equal to the task? [Estonian version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Estonia
Waiting for the Great Estonian Novel
While the Great Estonian Novel has yet to be written, the range of fiction in Estonia is wide enough to serve as an indicator of the post-communist country's hopes and fears, anxieties and obsessions. writes the editor of "Vikerkaar". [Russian version added] [more]
The re-transnationalization of literary criticism
Critical discussion of foreign literature serves as a source of information not only for readers but also for the "trade". When that discussion disappears or becomes one-sided, this has consequences for the literary institution as a whole. [Estonian version added] [more]
Between mimesis and non-existence
Lithuania in Europe, Europe in Lithuania
Cultural and political life in Lithuania is marked by what Homi K. Bhabha, speaking of postcolonial nations, called "ironic compromise". The Lithuanian is "almost a European but not quite". [more]
Shopping town USA
Victor Gruen, the Cold War, and the shopping mall
Victor Gruen's "shopping towns" were supposed to strengthen civic life and alleviate women's lives. But within a decade they had become the architectural expression of the policy of gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia. [more]
Global museums in the twenty-first century
The Guggenheim foundation and the rhetoric of cultural planning in Vilnius
The fact that a Guggenheim museum is being planned for Vilnius is indicative of the conviction that "de-provincialization" can only be achieved by taking part in global projects. Meanwhile, the cultural demands of the local population go unheeded. [more]
What does Nietzsche mean to philosophers today?
Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal, and irrelevant, or radical, prescient, and misunderstood? Six philosophers answer Kritika&Kontext's questions on Nietzsche. Their responses make one thing clear: Nietzsche still divides opinion. [more]
The populist moment
Unlike the extremist parties of the 1930s, the new populist movements do not aim to abolish democracy: quite the opposite, writes Ivan Krastev. What we are witnessing is a conflict between elites suspicious of democracy and increasingly illiberal publics. [more]
Controlling words
Press and publishing concentration in France is exceptionally high yet there is barely any protest from within the sector itself. Media monopolization is by no means only a French issue, however: throughout Europe and the US, profit has become publishing's bottom line. [more]
Simulated cities, sedated living
The shopping mall as paradigmatic site of lifestyle capitalism
If the imperative of consumer capitalism is "lead us into temptation", then the shopping mall is its cathedral. Increasingly, city centres -- or "brand zones" -- are adopting the mall aesthetic. [more]
Nicolas Sarkozy, Gramsci reader
New power and the temptation of hegemony
Nicolas Sarkozy has professed admiration for the Gramscian notion of "cultural hegemony" -- political domination via domination of ideas. The difference is that Sarkozy seeks hegemony not over ideas so much as values. [more]
Radical demophilia
Reflections on Bulgarian populism
Populism in Bulgaria feeds off two phenomena: a pure hatred of political parties and the constant emphasis in the public discourse on an alleged contrast between ordinary people and the political elite. [more]
Religion, European secular identities and European integration
The rapid secularization of western Europe has not diminished the unease with which Europe considers Islam in its midst. In this benchmark essay, José Casanova argues that the "Islam problem" is an indicator of the disparity between liberal and illiberal strands of European secularism. Hungarian version added [more]
Transition or transitions?
The transformation of eastern central Europe 1989-2007
"Incomplete regime change", "interrupted revolution", "geo-political paradigm shift"... Accounts of the transition in eastern central Europe have tended to emphasize particular features to the exclusion of others. Elemér Hankiss pieces together a mosaic of interpretations of transition. [more]
Bathroom tales
How we mistook normality for paradise
The shortage of toilet paper alone may not have brought down communism, but it's an apt metaphor for a system unable to fulfil people's basic needs. Although Slavenka Drakulic's bathroom is better stocked these days, she's still prone to doubt. Was the normality she and her fellow eastern Europeans longed for just another false paradise? [more]
Who are the citizens of Europe?
Current citizenship laws in the European Union vary dramatically. The tension between freedom of movement and national legislation on citizenship has the potential to create serious conflicts, writes Rainer Bauböck. [more]
The cultural bases for economic success
Why are there rich and poor countries? The relative prosperity of immigrant groups internationally suggests that it isn't geography, climate, or economic policy that decides the success of a country, but culture. [more]
On paradoxes, principles, and illusions
"The self-regulating market", "democratic capitalism"... Audrius Dauksa is not convinced. The gap between rhetoric and reality is plain to see: so why aren't politicians looking? [more]
Reasons for the current upsurge in memory
Over the past quarter century, social structures have undergone a sea change in their traditional relationship to the past. Pierre Nora examines the roots and causes of "memorialism". [more]
Must we respect religiosity?
On questions of faith and the pride of the secular society
Secular society's "supermarket of faiths" principle appears from a religious standpoint to be indifferent and mistaken. On the basis for the respect between believer and non-believer that can prevent this tension becoming intolerance. [more]
The forgetting museum
It seems self-evident that commemoration averts recurrence of that which is being commemorated. Yet an obsession with memory blinds us to the abuses of memory and to the uses of forgetting. [more]
On Reason
Reason's greatest rival is not religion, but revolution, writes Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush. "The first resource that is squandered in a revolution is rationality and the last thing that returns is rationality. If it ever returns." [more]
Equally criminal?
Totalitarian experience and European memory
Political differences between European member states can be worked out only if a "European memory" is developed. The difficulty lies in paying due respect to the memory of the crimes both of Nazism and of Soviet totalitarianism while avoiding a hierarchy of competing victim groups. [more]
International, global, transnational: Just a matter of words?
Does a threat to the legacy of the international age lurk in the term "transnational"? [more]
Experimental electronic music and sound art in Lithuania
Drone, glitch, clicks'n'cuts... Lithuania has a varied electronic music scene whose influences are global. An overview. [more]
New towns on the Cold War frontier
How modern urban planning was exported as an instrument in the battle for the developing world
The New Towns designed by Constantinos Doxiadis were supposed to inculcate democracy in the Developing World. Today, these urban neighbourhoods have become something quite different to what the architect anticipated: Baghdad's Sadr City being a striking example. [more]
Ethics in the globalized war
With hi-tech weaponry reducing the risk of battlefield casualties -- at least on the side of those owning it -- traditional warrior virtues have become the preserve of the lone suicide attacker. [more]
Minsk: The Sun City of Dreams
Gateway to the communist empire or stage set utopia? The architects of Minsk's "imperial style" didn't have the city's residents in mind, writes Artur Klinau. [more]
Civilization theory and collective identity in the postmodern-globalized era
In a prescient essay from 1988, the late Lithuanian sociologist Vytautas Kavolis argues for the centrality of the concept of "civilization" in debates on postmodern global conditions. [more]
Modernization, globality, and nationalism as cultural endeavours
An essay by the late Lithuanian-American sociologist arguing that the idea of the nation retains its validity alongside processes of modernization and globalization. [more]
The hunger for ideas on the glutted theatre market
Consumer-led theatre policy has brought a decline in standards. Today, central Europe's most creative directors are asking some fundamental questions about the nature of theatre. [more]
Unspeakable
"The only way to speak of the whole is to learn to say nothing." How literature and philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Woolf, have approached the unspeakable. [more]
Belarus: Hopes for democracy and doubts about national identity
Hopes for democracy in Belarus will remain unfulfilled until a clear national ideology acceptable to the whole of society arises as an alternative to the prevailing Russophilia, says Lithuanian commentator Stasys Katauskas. [more]
Art criticism in practice: Art theory recycled?
Faced with the commercialization of art criticism, contemporary eastern European art critics must become activists, reclaiming public space for debate. [more]
Baltic battleground
Protests in Estonia about Russian war memorials are the latest expression of a fiercely independent Baltic identity. Hostility towards Russia has simmered in the Baltic countries since the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1944, following four years of brutal Nazi occupation. [more]
The energy of transit
Theatre in non-traditional spaces
Performances in disused industrial buildings, prisons, foyers, or on the street: in central and eastern Europe, experimental theatre is booming like in western Europe in the 1970s. [more]
The art critic as art historian and sociologist
The Lithuanian experience
Where does the art critic fit in the current "crisis of criticism"? A look at the situation in Lithuania as a model for worldwide trends in art criticism. [more]
Babel is not the last word
A conversation with Natalie Zemon Davis
"What I care about is having found ways to get evidence for and tell the stories of people often passed unnoticed or treated as a statistic -- to make their stories speak to bigger issues in historical life and change." [more]
The demiurge of the European Union
The demiurge of Europe is in thrall to the erratic forces of realpolitik. A platonic look at the future of the EU. [more]
The unbearable lightness of change
On political fatalism and the challenge facing Lithuanian intellectuals and artists. [more]
Dealing with the recent past
The tensions between memory and history
The variety of victims' personal memories does not warrant an "anything goes" approach in historical accounts of the more recent European dictatorships. [more]
National identity, culture and globalisation
Lithuania wakes up to a new social and cultural reality
In the academic and intellectual debate in Lithuania, globalisation and Europeanisation are often regarded as deadly threats to the national culture, an "evil mission". Almantas Samalavicius looks at the arguments and proposes a completely different concept of identity. [more]
The price of boredom
Daiva Tamosaityte's view on the past and future of a united Europe. [more]
Europe's East as spiritual space
Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christianity. Are these the only cornerstones of European culture? [more]
Artistic freedom, the safety valve
The concept of freedom has moved from an abstract idea to more down-to earth, practical matters. [more]
Stopping by the roadside
A word of thanks to French geographers
Thoughts about Eastern and Western Europe recorded in Vilnius, 'not far' from the geographical centre of Europe. [more]
Intellectuals in post-communist Lithuania
How has the social and political standing of intellectuals changed? [more]
A society model according to President Paksas
Lithuania is getting ready for the PR-age
The lasting crisis of President Rolandas Paksas calls for an analysis of Lithuania's political and social life. [more]
Memory and amnesia in a postcommunist society
Dealing with the legacy of the communist past in Lithuania. [more]
On the concept of the collaborator
Towards a definition of the "collaborator" during the Soviet era. [more]
America talking to itself
A note on American philosophy
Has American philosophical thought lost its relevance by becoming too self-obsessed? [more]
Renouvellement de l'identité culturelles de la nation lituanienne: Rôle de l'église
Vilnius' archbishop Backis questions national identity in a changing society and explores the possible role of the church. [more]
Historical choice: Europe or gray zone?
Laima Kanopkiene and Bronys Savukynas talk to Prof. Edvardas Gudavicius.
A discussion portraying Lithuania's mood before the EU-referendum. [more]
Europe without an end
A provocative discussion of the conflict between cultural relativism and universalism. [more]
The European Union: A danger to the nation state and national identity?
Negative sentiments in Lithuania against the EU has led to comparisons between the EU and the former Soviet Union. But are they justified? [more]
George Orwell: The anatomy of fanaticism and hatred
On the virtues and possibilities of 'liberal' nationalism. [more]
The burden of freedom
Lithuanian media during the transition
A decade into its existence as an independent state, has the Lithuanian media learned how to make use of its newly found freedom? [more]
Spirit and the end of art
Has the end of art arrived? Norman Lillegard reflects on philosophical thoughts about art and searches for the spirit in it. [more]
Articles published in the partner section
Vilnius: The city as object of nostalgia
Lithuania's capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it "home". Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova. [more]
Print techtonics
The position of printmaking within the contemporary visual arts has shifted and the hegemony of painting and sculpture within the category of "fine art" is at last being broken. [more]
Lithuanian theatre in 1990-1999
A sociological study
In looking at the context of Lithuanian theatre in the 1990s, Rasa Vasinauskaite looks back at the aesthetic experience accumulated in preceding decades. [more]
Eastern Lithuania in Lithuanian culture of memory and politics
The problem of relations between historian and creator of memory
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