Eurozine Editorial

What started thirty-five years ago as an informal meeting of European editors became the basis for Eurozine, founded in 1998 as an online cultural journal and editorial network. To celebrate this double anniversary, Eurozine has published a print anthology spanning the project chronologically, thematically, generically and geographically.

Cultural journals have played a crucial role in the formation of the public spheres in Europe and beyond. Yet their future form and sustainability is by no means clear. Looking at journals’ history helps understand where they are headed. Introducing a new Eurozine focal point in collaboration with the Working Group on Periodicals Research.

Themes discussed at the 28th European Meeting of Cultural Journals, held in Tartu, Estonia, 20-22 October 2017.

Against the background of civil protest in Ukraine, the production of the public sphere was the subject of three days of debate at this year’s Eurozine conference, held in Oslo from 29 November to 2 December, and co-organized and hosted by the Norwegian Association of Journals and Eurozine partner journal Syn og Segn.

The western political representatives who met Putin in Moscow on 9 May to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II were confronted by a version of history very different from their own. The event highlighted the way in which the comfortable historical consensus long obtained within and among western European countries has been undermined after the eastern enlargement. For Russia, this will mean breaking the taboo surrounding the Great Victory if relations with its neighbours are to be harmonious.

The European integration project has made the discussion about transnational spaces for cultural and political debate acute. Can there at all be a common Europe without a pan-European public sphere, where potentially common values and ideas can be formed and transnational political institutions can find their legitimacy?

Our understanding of the field of translation studies has in the recent years taken on many more meanings and now encompasses spheres beyond the usual textual dimension: Translation today is as much about the translation of cultural, political, and historical contexts and concepts as it is about language. This focal point, which draws upon talks and lectures held at the 16th Meeting of Cultural Journals in Belgrade, includes articles on the recent developments and future trends of translation and new critical theory on translation, as well as texts that apply these concepts to case studies, for example, of Serbia and Turkey.