There are two Europes, writes Volodymyr Yermolenko: a Europe of rules and regulations, and a Europe founded upon faith in the European idea. And of course, as recent events in Ukraine show, the European idea extends well beyond the formal frontiers of the European Union.
As the winter Olympics opened in Sochi amid controversy over Russia’s anti-gay laws, Tatiana Riabova and Oleg Riabov showed how official discourse in Russia brands “European sexual deviancy” a natural result of western democratic development; and Russia as the last bastion of “normalcy”.
A surge of state violence and the subsequent curtailment of citizens’ right to protest, combined with an expansion of the authorities’ right to use force: Kirill Rogov reveals how the “Putin doctrine” previously applied to protests in Russia brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war.
Aging is a common literary theme though overwhelmingly confined to male writing, writes Slavenka Drakulic. Does dementia provide a culturally acceptable, metaphorical replacement for women’s accounts of aging, and if so why?
Increased securitization and discrimination against migrants has neither reinforced the freedom, security and well-being of EU citizens nor curbed irregular migration, writes Eve Geddie. It’s time to change the European discourse on undocumented migrants.
Disputing the limits of free speech has played a defining role in Tunisia’s transition to democracy since the country’s first free elections in 2011. But, as Rory McCarthy reveals, there is more to the process than the polarized Islamist-secularist battle it is often presumed to be.
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.