After the global financial crisis, new eastern European democracies started to question the Western political, economic, and cultural models they had been copying since 1989. The resulting neoliberal legitimation crisis tends to benefit coalitions of right-wing populists; their promise of stability aims to deal with the psychological impact of the crisis on younger voters, citizens who never experienced a shortage economy and still aspire to a Western quality of life.
Articles
The healing effects of music
Positionen 121 (2019)
We recently welcomed the German magazine of contemporary music in the Eurozine network. Their latest issue offers a collection of essays, reportages and interviews on the topic of musica sanae – healing through music.
Sex in colonial empires and its legacy in Europe today
An interview with Christelle Taraud
Feminist historian Christelle Taraud talks about the patriarchal system for regulating prostitution in France’s colonial empire, a system made by men for men to reserve indigenous women for their own use and control the ‘unruly’ sexuality of men from honour cultures. These issues are covered in ‘Sexe, race, et colonies’ (2018), co-edited by Taraud, which has proved controversial in France for its unsettling imagery.
Made in the EU
Why workers are fleeing Romania’s garment industry
‘Sweatshops’ are usually associated with labour outsourced to east- and south-east Asia, but they exist inside the EU too. Gruelling working conditions in Romania’s low-pay garment industry, which supplies clothes for mid-market and luxury retailers alike, force many people to go abroad in search of a real living wage.
Recommended topics
Brexit is the price Britain is paying for the failure to hold an honest discussion about immigration, multiculturalism and Empire. But it would be a mistake to think that the UK’s problems are without equivalent elsewhere, writes Gary Younge.
Changing places
Notes for an essay film
After moving from Johannesburg (Jo’burg) to Gothenburg (Go’burg), filmmaker Jyoti Mistry struck up a friendship with someone who went the other way: Katarina Hedrén, who was adopted by a white Swedish family, and moved to South Africa as an adult. This deeply personal take on race shows how ‘colour-blindness’ denies that racial prejudice exists but robs people of colour of words to talk about the discrimination they face.
Soviet Atlantis
A melancholic fantasy of the post-Soviet subject
On the Cape of Tarkhankut on the western shores of Crimea lies an underwater ‘graveyard’ of statues from the Soviet past. The museum is a metaphor for how cultural memories are formed in a shared unconscious traumatized by loss and unable to adjust to the new order of things, writes Ilya Kalinin.
Big Brother to the rescue
Can artificial intelligence help in Ukraine’s fight against corruption?
The Ukrainian government has announced a scheme to use AI to fight corruption in the Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament. The technology, dubbed ‘Big Brother’, is supposed to detect MPs’ voting patterns and to flag anomalies. AI is used worldwide for a variety of anti-corruption purposes. So will it work here?
Eurozine review
The healing effects of music
Positionen 121 (2019)
We recently welcomed the German magazine of contemporary music in the Eurozine network. Their latest issue offers a collection of essays, reportages and interviews on the topic of musica sanae – healing through music.
Habermas, human rights and representation
Leviathan 3/2019
For some on the Left, Habermas’s concept of discursive democracy is a liberal project without critical potential. In ‘Leviathan’, Martin Saar defends a theoretical ‘style’ defined by openness and ambiguity. Also: towards a politics of human rights and a call for parliamentary gender quotas.
Towards a sociology of the lie
Mittelweg 36 5/2019
Just because there’s fake news doesn’t mean there’s never been political deception, and just because lying is universal doesn’t mean it’s not worth sociologists’ time. Contributions to the new issue of Mittelweg 36 look at examples including the ‘voluntary helper’, confidence tricksters and polygraph tests.
Focal points
The focal point presents the findings of the project ‘Eurasia in Global Dialogue’ being carried out at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM). It is edited by Clemena Antonova at the 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 and was edited by Tatiana Zhurzhenko. Further texts have been contributed by journals in the Eurozine network.
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.
When the Cold War came to a sudden end thirty years ago, the two halves of Europe declared in unison their intention to overcome the legacy of the division. Today, the hopes and ambitions of those heady days can be viewed as unrealistic at best. But is talk of a new East–West divide justified? A new Eurozine focal point asks what happened to ’89 in the intervening years.
Cultural journals have played a crucial role in the formation of the public spheres in Europe and beyond. Looking at their history helps understand where they are headed. A Eurozine focal point in collaboration with the Working Group on Periodicals Research.
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.