Réka Kinga Papp

Eurozine has had a very difficult year and is still a way from finding long-term stability. But we’re rebuilding the team and even starting an exciting new youth project. Thankfully, you, our readers, have stuck with us through the thick of it.

We moved office last week. We’ve had to contend with literal tons of physical memory from Eurozine’s almost forty-year history, and are yet to unpack it. It can either be a new beginning or a hibernation plan.

Excruciating pain and paralytic numbness alternate in an inhuman rhythm. As Ukrainian artists struggle to overcome exhausted tropes of warfare and martyrdom, others consider what it will take to bring the perpetrators to justice. But moral reckoning is an even more complicated business.

It would have taken a miracle for Viktor Orbán to lose the election. Hungary is a fortified kleptocracy where the ruling party has captured the state and controls 80% of the media. It certainly didn’t help that the opposition’s campaign failed to deliver a post-illiberal vision.

Anton Shekhovtsov tells about Russian imperialist mythology and how the insane propaganda of Ukraine’s denazification came about; the new status of Belarus as a mere vassal state; desertion as a political option; and how western elites have abandoned their alliances with Vladimir Putin – with a few notable exceptions.

Clinging to his nukes, Putin will only lose power if his own turn on him. It’s hard to predict when, if ever, the leaders he has humiliated and threatened into submission will do the basic calculus and find that obeying the tyrant will inevitably cost way more than defiance.

Distrust in authority is the fundamental reason for low vaccination rates across eastern Europe. But we shouldn’t think of anti-science as the expression of mere ignorance, nor primarily as a grass-roots movement.

Europe is facing a demographic crisis, resulting in suffocating labour shortages, and yet incoming migration is more and more rejected in mainstream politics. Can the EU come to terms with this great contradiction without an implosion?

The crisis has caught up with us, and now we’re asking our readers to invest in Eurozine to help us get through an exceptionally lean year in 2022. Eurozine has been offering outstanding content for free for over 20 years. Your support is crucial to maintaining this work and we are offering exclusive articles, recordings, events and merch to our patrons.

New COVID-19 variants keep the international public anxious, and this crisis, permeating all social, economic and political spheres, isn’t even in full bloom yet. Although impossible to contain, it also highlights many potential solutions, which had been lying around for a long time without the political will to act upon them. In gearing up for the much bigger turmoil of an ecological nature, we need to stop concentrating on global centres of power, and give more credit to young motivated people.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, learning and teaching have come under additional strain both at school and in the home, exacerbating existing weaknesses in the system. How to move forward – to diminish rather than increase inequality, to question the labour market’s hold over education and to uphold academic freedom — is critical for students, parents, teachers and society as a whole.

Journalism is steadily becoming less and less liveable, due to structural problems and political interference. From heroic poses to varying degrees of denial, each professional develops their own individual strategies to cope with sustained pressure.

How is whiteness constructed and why is it so fragile? What’s at stake in discussing colonial memory for eastern Europeans? Do they actually eat a lot of cabbage?

Since his return to power in 2010, Viktor Orbán has meticulously unravelled the rule of law and media pluralism, while holding the EU at bay. A short history of a decade’s attacks on the free press in Hungary.

The EU needs to prove itself the champion it has long been projected to be, argues André Wilkens in our interview about recovery funds, cultural transformation, budget lines and bank holidays. The director of the European Cultural Foundation also addresses his own pandemic experience as a migratory cultural agent.

As a historian his expectations are gloomy, but as a political writer his optimism is strategic: Timothy Garton Ash talks about the European Union’s internal flaws and debates whether crises and collapses are always necessary for renewal.