Articles

As the EU’s response to the Snowden leaks converges with European data protection reforms, new debates on privacy emerge at the European level: and the burning issue remains that of trust. Simon Garnett rounds up the latest developments to coincide with Data Protection Day 2014.

In an open letter directed to “friends and especially foreign journalists and editors”, renowned Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych states that it is those in Ukraine’s highest leadership that deserve to be labelled extremists, not the protestors on the streets. Yanukovych has brought the country to its limits and to stop protest now would be to live in a permanent prison.

Of course radical nationalists do not share the original goal of the Euromaiden protests: bringing Ukraine closer to the EU. But neither do their slogans and attacks invalidate the protests’ value as a manifestation of the democratic aspirations of the Ukrainian people, writes Volodymyr Kulyk.

After the Ukranian government rubber-stamped a series of repressive laws last week and further violence, the Ukrainian Centre of the International PEN Club releases a statement calling for support for Ukrainian writers and journalists, and solidarity with the Ukrainian people.

The media organization TED sells itself as one of a new brand of arbiters and brokers of innovation. And yet, writes Jason Wilson, TED’s preferred model of thinking is not the critical delineation of problems, or the formulation of better questions, but the closure of solutionism.

There is one central similarity between Euromaidan and other recent movements across the world: protesters’ self-reliance and distrust of politicians who pretend to represent them is what gives their movement its democratic credentials, but it is also a weakness.

A state apparatus that doesn’t function on the level of dogs can’t function on the level of people either, writes Slavenka Drakulic. This week, the Bosnian parliament votes on amendments to the law on animal protection. But what is in fact at stake is the continued dehumanization of society.

No wonder the Germans accepted the idea of Europe so readily after 1945, writes Rainer Hank: they did not need to change their habits of thought greatly. Moreover, widespread ignorance about this problematic continuity poses yet another threat to mutual trust in Europe.

Our language is our literary destiny, and ‘minority’ languages provide a special kind of sanctuary too, inaccessible to the rest of the world. But, there again, language is at its most powerful when it reaches beyond itself and starts to create an alternative world.
Eurozine celebrates Nobel Prize laureate Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk with her writing on her mother tongue – or in Polish: father tongue – from 2014.

As Russia and the EU jostle to gain the upper hand in relations with post-Soviet states, China looks to strengthen its position not only in central Asia but in the buffer zone between Russia and the EU as well. A case of back to the future for Eurasia, argues Adam Balcer.

What’s different about a place is what’s interesting, writes Canadian novelist Antanas Sileika. A proposition that raises all manner of difficulties, as well as presenting unique opportunities, when writing fiction based on Baltic history aimed at a North American audience.

Today, nothing suggests that Karl-Heinz Dellwo and his girlfiend Gabriele Rollnik differ from normality in any important way. They look like a common elderly married couple. They live in a cozy middle-class apartment in the center of Hamburg. They make great coffee and they have a cookbook by Jamie Oliver on the bookshelf in their kitchen. Yet, the appearances are misleading. Their fates have been very dramatic. Karl-Heinz Dellwo, now documentarist and publisher, is a former RAF member who directly participated in the death of two people. Child therapist Gabriele Rollnik is a former member of the anarchist Bewegung 2. Juni. She was involved in several kidnappings and prison break-outs. They both spent many years behind bars. Marek Seckar went to meet with them in Hamburg in order to hear about their past and present.

Today’s slick electoral machines have debased the idea of seeking political power, contends Soundings co-editor Ben Little. Which marks a sea change since the first decades after WWII, when local parties were intensely engaged in candidate selection and struggles over party resources.

The Internet and social media have so far provided a third of Ukrainians with digital connectivity. And, as a new era in Ukranian politics begins, new forms of sharing opinions will surely play their part in the struggle against what can now be called an ancien regime, writes Igor Lyubashenko.

Leading academics signed an open letter supporting the Euromaidan protests and European values at the turn of 2014. One might have expected a more critical and nuanced position of them, writes Volodymyr Ishchenko. For they ignore the role of the far right in the Ukrainian public sphere at their peril.

Poland is the only post-socialist country with a women’s movement worthy of the name, writes Teresa Kulawik. Should it succeed in establishing a transparent structure that can accommodate compromise, Kongres Kobiet could provide a model for the country’s political system.