Modernism promised a bright future. But adventure soon became routine – the early Crystal Palace experiment since reflected in shopping malls and office blocks. Now ‘shit experiments’, rolled out by tech oligarchs and authoritarian governments, utilize neuroliberalism, taking advantage of human malleablity. Can anything of social experimentation be salvaged to build on ideals of welfare and basic income?
Articles
Habermas’s insistence on the need for negotiation with the Putin regime stemmed from a failure to comprehend the eastern European experience of totalitarianism. The argument that regime change is not a legitimate policy option for the West is not groundless. But it is historically wrong.
Habermas understood that the possibility for German–Jewish dialogue after the Holocaust depends on commitment to universal law. But when the past demands silence about the present, that possibility is denied. On the contradictions in Habermas’s exemplary cosmopolitan project.
Both emotional and uncanny, sincere yet ironic – contemporary British-based composers are pioneering a new aesthetic: musical metamodernism.
Recommended topics
Different kinds of incomplete
On refusal, erasure and the right to remain unfinished
Which Iranian artist in exile isn’t asked how their work relates to oppression, protest and war? How can creatives overcome colonial expectations of intelligibility? Opacity – questioning transparency’s supposed purity – becomes a technique of survival and a form of protection, as in the work of Chohreh Feyzdjou.
Stigmatized during socialism, LGBTQIA+ people in Slovakia continued to face political and social adversity in the following decades. Two veteran activists reflect on the campaign for equal rights after ’89 and why it remains as necessary as ever.
Hungary’s elections will be decisive for the future of the anti-EU pressure group MCC Brussels, the European arm of the Fidesz-associated Mathias Corvinus Collegium. How would an Orbán defeat impact on the illiberal international?
Even if the Iranian regime manages to stay in power, it will no longer have the means to achieve its hegemonic ambitions. The current war has brought Israel closer to its goal of becoming the centre of gravity in the Middle East.
Eurozine review
An ambicolonial war
Krytyka 11–12/2025
Russia’s ambicolonial war of cultural erasure; the democratisation of Ukrainian national defence; the imagined Orient of the Soviet underground; literature and the vernacular.
Language and democracy
La Revue Nouvelle 2/2026
On the emancipatory gap between words and things; language, authority and resistance; metaphors of politics; educators under strain.
Experiments
Glänta 3–4/2025
Contrarian pleasures; the art of science; parameters of the erotic; poetry as ongoing experiment.
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.
