Articles

Almost overnight, Ukraine ceased to be a “kingdom in the middle”. Now there are only three options left, writes Ivan Krastev: sign the agreement with the EU, as the majority of Ukrainians want; join Putin’s Eurasia, as the endangered political elite desire; or go bankrupt.

Social media extend the range of participatory acts open to citizens. The result can be unpredictable leaderless mobilizations involving massive numbers of small donations of time and effort. And although the vast majority fail absolutely, a few succeed dramatically.

Democratic transition in post-Communist east-central Europe was primarily facilitated by external developments including the fall of the Soviet Union and European integration. Today, in the absence of any such favourable exogenous factors, it remains to be seen whether democratic institutions have grown strong enough in the region to withstand undemocratic and illiberal currents induced by the economic crisis.

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.

As the 25th European Meeting of Cultural Journals commences in Oslo, it is timely to remember that cultural journals have long facilitated a level of intellectual exchange indispensable to societies that put stock in democratic and cosmopolitan spirit. And, as ongoing crisis overshadows the upcoming European elections and the European integration project risks being reduced to the task of reaching formal economic goals, the contribution of cultural journals to a European public sphere is more important than ever.

In the EU’s newest member state, an anti-homosexuality campaign has succeeded in forcing a referendum on the constitutional definition of “marriage”. Typical of a reactionary trend within Croatian civil society, it should warn other countries against failing to form political responses to social frustrations.
Updated on 5 December 2013: Croats voted overwhelmingly in favour of defining marriage in the constitution as a “union of man and woman”.

Beyond do-it-yourself politics, short-lived mass protests in the metropolises and a further swelling of the ranks of the popular right, the democratization of democracy is still possible, contends Claus Offe. But not if political life remains locked within the “prison of the market”.

The legacy of the European Capital of Culture project of 2012 in Maribor is characterized by the project’s steady implosion, writes Boris Vezjak. After the hype and the corruption, and in the absence of any new infrastructure whatsoever, the city has learned its lesson.

For the time being, it seems that nothing on Earth is capable of reducing the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. But if the global consensus among scientists as to the causes of climate change is not enough to effect change, what is?

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita was once smuggled through customs in suitcases. Tim Groenland tells the unlikely story of how Nabokov’s classic ever came to be published in the first place and then go on to become a commercial success.

It’s never been more difficult to form new political movements that do justice to the connection between the local and the global, as well as the abstract and the concrete. Olav Fumarola Unsgaard on the rise and fall of the social forum movements of the past two decades.

There can be no doubt that cultural journals need to take gender into account in the context of their daily activities. But, write Marc-Olivier Padis and Alice Béja, associated procedures should also be adapted to the journal’s size and mode of functioning.

Hiring staff and selecting contributors is dependent on quality, qualifications and specialist skills but not gender, writes Dialogi editor-in-chief Emica Antoncic. Gender-oriented quotas are therefore not an option and would not deal with the root causes of inequality anyway.

Merkur have confronted the predominance of male contributors to the journal with an issue produced exclusively by women. That this had little lasting impact may rest upon the essay genre itself, together with gender-specific time economies and even expectations concerning quality.

Genero focuses on feminist theory, which means that a majority of those working on the journal are women. However, the publication is committed to publishing quality articles written by authors of both genders, writes deputy editor-in-chief Katarina Loncarevic.