Articles

In the UK, the use of “superinjunctions” to prevent media from publishing intimate details about the private lives of public figures has been widely condemned by free speech advocates, who see them as a privilege of the wealthy and inimical to the public interest. A recent parliamentary report has, however, endorsed the judgement of the British courts, even recommending that breaches of privacy by online media be “filtered”. Leading free speech expert Eric Barendt defends the report against its critics.

Although migration has a long and varied history in Europe, it tends to be treated solely as a present-day issue. Why the reluctance to historicize the subject? Particularly since migration history offers a way to replace narrow, national narratives with one that is properly European.

Free speech advocates opposed to the prohibition of hate speech tend to underrate the harm hate speech causes, argues Jeremy Waldron. Where it exists, such legislation upholds a public good by protecting the basic dignitary order of society.

To argue for hate speech legislation on the basis that it protects the dignity of individuals is to confuse an interest with a fundamental right, argues Ivan Hare. Not only is legislation ineffective, it helps disseminate the very thing it intends to suppress.

Denunciation of Günter Grass’s poem “What must be said” typifies a fundamentalist understanding of antisemitism that operates outside the realm of fact, argues Antony Lerman. If the poem is so heinous, what response would ever be appropriate to genuine antisemitism?

Serbia’s neo-fascist political establishment is the target of Svetislav Basara’s satirical novel Mein Kampf, from which not even the country’s modernizing figures emerge unscathed. Not surprisingly, the reaction has been one of irritation, writes Ivan Telebar.

The opening ceremony of the London Olympics, themed “The Isle of Wonders”, will offer a pastiche of national identity in which the darker sides of the British psyche are lost in a multiculturalist high-kitsch spectacular, anticipates Phil Cohen.

From tenement to prototype: the monumental apartment buildings of nineteenth-century residential districts, often former rental barracks, today offer potential for a form of “vertical densification” that goes beyond the loft extension, writes Ida Pirstinger.

The suicide of a pensioner outside the Greek parliament, the latest in a series, sums up the mood of a population confronted with the steady erosion of its rights. Victor Tsilonis wonders whether tomorrow will be just another day in Greece’s “predestined” future.

Lack of truly political decision-making and the demise of philosophical objectivism have landed Europe in the situation it is in today, argues Marcin Krol. A lesson could be learned from Poland, where a tradition of economic liberalism and rural pragmatism has enabled the country to weather the crisis.

Intellectuals have been accused of failing to restore a European confidence undermined by crisis. Yet calls for legitimating European narratives – combined with nostalgia for a golden age of Europeanism – remain faithful to the logic of nineteenth-century nation building, argues Jan-Werner Müller. What, then, should Europe’s intellectuals be doing?

Poised on the verge of Union membership, Croatia has replaced the historical revisionism of the 1990s by a memory politics avowedly based on “European standards”. Yet are those standards met and, more to the point, is the Europeanization of memory synonymous with a critical approach to the national past?

As cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose was principally responsible for commissioning the cartoons that ignited the Danish cartoon controversy in 2006. In an extract from his book Tyranny of Silence, he argues that the erroneous presumption that anti-Semitic propaganda was directly responsible for the Holocaust resulted in a post-war consensus on banning hate speech that has ended up its own worst enemy.

Gerard Delanty is one of Europe’s leading figures in the field of sociology whose work encompasses a variety of theoretical themes and subjects. The first of his numerous books, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (1995) was a significant, timely and challenging contribution to the European discourse. Almantas Samalavicius asks Delanty to revisit the ideas set forward in this thought-provoking, polemical work.

Central European responses to the euro crisis have been marked by a total absence of regional solidarity, writes Jacques Rupnik. Differing national situations explain varying perceptions of the crisis’ risks and remedies and can be seen in terms of political lessons learned.

Ever since Tom Wolfe in a classical 1970 essay coined the term “radical chic”, upper-class flirtation with radical causes has been ridiculed. But by separating aesthetics from politics Wolfe was actually more reactionary than the people he criticized, writes Johan Frederik Hartle.