There is now wide consensus across the EU that after twenty years of deadlock a new approach is needed to the accession of the western Balkan countries. But political momentum for a 30+ Union will not translate into real progress unless the public administrations of would-be members undergo far-reaching reforms.
Articles
For the preservation of critique
Social democratic journals policy in Scandinavia
State funding for cultural journals in the Scandinavian countries is based on the belief that plurality of opinion is essential. Emerging in the ’60s in response to media concentration in small language spaces, the ‘Nordic model’ can be transferred to settings where reservations about state interference in the media leave journals without a lifeline.
Power over principle
Turkey’s skin-deep opposition
Power to the powerful, contempt for the weak: in replicating this rule of Turkish politics, the opposition CHP differs in no way from Erdoğan’s AKP. Indeed, in persecuting all critics of the Turkish state, the Islamists are simply re-enacting the republican legacy.
Recommended topics
Three years after the mass anti-regime protests in Belarus, the pro-Russian state continues to brutally repress all expressions of national identity. But people have not forgotten their experiences in 2020 and believe that Belarus’s long history of foreign rule is nearing its end.
Empire within?
Estonia and its Russians
Moves to disenfranchise Russian citizens in Estonia come against the backdrop of increasingly radical anti-Russian discourse and a tradition of national xenophobia. An Estonian-Russian responds.
Resignation towards the war in Ukraine ignores not only the ongoing atrocities but also their implications for underlying European narratives. Now is the moment to rethink political orthodoxies. Part of the series ‘Lessons of war: The rebirth of Europe revisited’.
For millions of children in Ukraine, many of whom have been displaced, war has brought trauma that will shape the rest of their lives. Yet children also surprise and encourage adults with imaginative ways of coping. For this father, they are the central heroes of a story of life in wartime.
Eurozine review
Incredibly independent
Positionen 3/2023
How can cultural journalism remain independent in an increasingly bleak economic environment? On the Nordic model of public funding for journals and what stops it from being exported; and why art and music criticism in Germany is being compromised by journals’ exclusive reliance on advertising.
No escape
Glänta 1/2023
On aesthetics, power and conflict: how war makes art seem useless while kindling one’s longing to escape; on a natural disaster made worse by despotism; reflections on the hidden state; mercenaries.
Sensitivity or censorship?
Host 6/2023
Perspectives on cancel culture: much ado about nothing or the coddling of the Czech mind? Also: Children’s literature without children – why the ‘child reader’ does not exist.
Focal points
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine poses the greatest challenge to Europe’s self-understanding since World War II. Contributors to the new series ‘Lessons of war’ take on this challenge and reflect on the possibility of a ‘Rebirth of Europe’.
The ‘great democratic revolution’ of modern times, as Tocqueville once called it, appears to be spluttering to a halt. Some observers, recalling the disasters of the 1920s and 30s, are suggesting that an anti-democratic counterrevolution on a global scale has begun. But is the writing really on the wall? Or does declinism prevent us from recognizing moments of democratic renewal?
Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. With the Maidan becoming history, the focal point ‘Ukraine in European Dialogue’ explores the new challenges facing the young democracy, its place in Europe, and the lessons it might offer for the future of the European project.
The focal point presents the findings of the project ‘Eurasia in Global Dialogue’ being carried out at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM). The focal point is an extension of the earlier focal point, ‘Russia in Global Dialogue’ that ran in Eurozine and at the IWM from 2012–2018.
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.