Despite a transatlantic exchange of far-right ideology, material interests are what bind the international of nationalists. Transatlantic patterns in far-right strategy are clear, but talk of a rightwing populist tide misses the point, argues Jan-Werner Müller in interview with Vikerkaar magazine.
Articles
Starving ethnic Ukrainians and Moldovans, fleeing 1930s collectivisation, became controversial refugees in Romania – if, that is, they survived Soviet riverside gunfire. The international press and politicians expressed outrage – until the Nazi regime became a greater threat, leaving Holodomor sufferers overshadowed by distant enthusiasm for Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.
Putting food on tables throughout Estonia’s Soviet era into nascent capitalism relied heavily on self-provisioning. Collectivisation’s ideological petro-chemical drive made retro modernity a repeated necessity. A family-orientated culture of small-scale farming became the staple of migratory generations and national productivity.
Originally an expression of minority awareness, the term ‘woke’ has been forced into a cultural corner. The European far right’s instrumentalization of difference as a threat to national identity leaves immigrants, Romani, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ people in an increasingly vulnerable position. How could this entrenched culture war be infused with democratic vitality?
Recommended topics
Under Xi Jinping the Chinese Communist Party has closed down the debate about the Cultural Revolution. However, its legacies are conspicuous throughout contemporary Chinese society, not least in the capitalist economy.
The vilification of Orbán in Europe became politically counter-productive in Hungary itself. Péter Magyar’s success is founded on a realistic appraisal of the concerns of Hungarian society rather than a moralistic politics of blame.
The US-Israel war on Iran has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora. A personal account of altercation in Sweden highlights the fervour of pro-monarchists versus the dislocation and loss inflicted by escalated violence.
Habermas’s appeal for negotiation with the Putin regime stemmed from a failure to comprehend the eastern European experience of totalitarianism. Why the argument that regime change is not a legitimate policy option for the West is historically misguided. [Norwegian version added]
Eurozine review
How small states can survive
Vikerkaar 4-5/2026
Why the rules-based order was never pure fiction; what Europe must do to remain non-aligned; lessons from Greenland; Jan-Werner Müller on Trump.
When human rights end
New Eastern Europe 3/2026
Answering the question whether human rights still matter; the sexism of Lukashenka’s ‘year of the Belarusian woman’; Ukraine’s election dilemma.
The new infinity
Merkur 4/2026
The challenge of regulating AI when it cannot be defined; AI and the devaluation of work; AI and the future of productivity; why engineered anthropomorphism is here to stay.
Focal points
Cultural reflections on contemporary warfare: from sanctions, human rights abuses and peace negotiations to recruitment, rearmament, autonomous weapons and civil protection mechanisms.
An ongoing series in Eurozine discussing questions raised by the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. The series offers a sample of articles published in the wider Eurozine network and represents diverse perspectives, including above all Israeli and Palestinian.
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.
Inspired by a lecture that Clifford Geertz delivered in 1995 at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, this focal point engages with ‘deep diversity’, ‘a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity and of uncenteredness’ rather than unified world order. It follows the launch of a research programme of the same name at the institute in January 2023.
