Articles

Since 2020’s ‘revolution with a female face’, Lukashenka has ramped up his neo-Soviet family policy while continuing to persecute women disobedient to his regime.

Despite a transatlantic exchange of far-right ideology, material interests are what bind the international of nationalists. Why transatlantic patterns in far-right strategy do not add up to a rightwing populist tide.

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?

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.

Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz was defeated by a grassroots movement that faced down systematic intimidation in an extraordinary act of popular mobilization. The attempt to restart democracy in Hungary stands a better chance of success than at any time since 1989. Caveats apply, however.

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.

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.

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’s handle on malleable human behaviour. Can anything of social experimentation be salvaged for welfare and basic income needs?

Habermas’s appeal 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 historically misguided. [Norwegian version added]

Both emotional and uncanny, sincere yet ironic – contemporary British-based composers are pioneering a new aesthetic: musical metamodernism.

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.

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?

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.

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.