The re-launch of a reconstructed eighteenth-century merchant ship was supposed to promote Sweden’s image as reliable trading partner with an immaculate past. But the failure throughout the project to acknowledge the colonial involvements of the ship’s former owner suggests a less complimentary story, writes Mikela Lundahl.
Gothenburg’s Franska tomten neighbourhood takes its name from a French warehouse established in the eighteenth-century through a colonial trade-off between the French and Swedish crowns. Today, the name’s origins are largely forgotten, writes Klas Rönnbäck.
The Leveson Enquiry into the UK hacking scandal is drawing to a close, yet the future of a new press regulatory body remains controversial. Enda O’Doherty asks what the enquiry’s findings mean for a definition of journalistic standards and the proper relation between politics and media.
Nowhere is the politics of history more vexed than in the conflict over the use of the name “Macedonia”. Valentina Mironska-Hristovska presents the Macedonian position, arguing that the Greek claim to the historical-cultural legacy of Macedonia is, at heart, paradoxical.
Sports journalist and historian Mihir Bose measures the lip service paid to civil rights by sports officials over the last 150 years against actions taken. Of all sporting associations, it is the rhetoric of the IOC that bears the least relation to reality, he writes.
Is FEMEN the precursor of a bold new protest pattern, asks Marian Rubchak, or has it been reduced to an organization of exhibitionists? As long as gender injustices multiply in Ukraine, the strength of FEMEN’s message remains undiminished: for the present, semi-nudity could be the most viable means of generating public dialogue on women’s rights.
Because Evangelicals still treat Mormons with deep suspicion, Mitt Romney has been deploying the language of “common ground” in his attempt to unite the Republican vote, writes Abby Ohlheiser. Alongside opposition to same-sex marriage, common ground includes a religious persecution complex.
Margaret Thatcher’s creation of her own “spectacle of perfection” has not gone unchallenged in subsequent biographies. Anneke Ribberink looks at the varying degrees of sympathy with which historians and journalists have portrayed aspects of Thatcher’s political persona.
When Roosevelt insisted that photographers and writers document the Great Depression, they produced lasting, iconic work that allowed America to doubt its myths but also to get back on track. So where, asks Alice Béja, are today’s Dorothea Langes and John Steinbecks?
Paralysed by predictable stand-offs between developing nations and the West, the Rio+20 Earth Summit failed to produce anything but vague commitments. Faced with the impossibility of consensus, governments and corporations opted for a go-it-alone approach. Reporting from Rio, Claudia Ciobanu discerns opportunities nonetheless.
Taking its criteria from the corporate sector, the UK Arts Council demands from the cultural organizations to whom it allocates public money compliance with indicators such as impact, effectiveness and financial viability. The publisher of “Mute” magazine, whose grant ran out this year, discusses the implications of a purely instrumental view of culture in policy-making.
“Triumphant historical unidirectionality is not only simplistic, it may also be extremely dangerous.” Rein Müllerson critiques both classical Marxism and free-market capitalism, with their faith in ineluctable progress, at the same time asking how far universal claims for social justice are reconcilable with the multipolar global system.
American priest, politician and social activist Bob Massie talks about how the writings of Ernst Friedrich Schumacher can inform a transition to an alternative economy and why the author of Small is Beautiful still has something to say to a secularized, European audience.
A psychology degree from Columbia, a career at Radio Liberty and a penchant for “alternative rock”, Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the image of the modern statesman. In interview with Ieva Lesinska, he enthuses about progressive online healthcare systems, citizens data rights and NATO military bases.
The revival of the parliamentary Left in France, Italy and Greece brings hope for an egalitarian turn in a European crisis management until now dominated by the precepts of austerity. Yet many citizens also fear that the zig zag course will nullify their previous sacrifices, warns Roland Benedikter.
The Greek media “failed completely” to predict the consequences of debt-fuelled reality loss, says journalist Stelios Kouloglou in interview with Intellectum editor Victor Tsilonis. The very sector whose job it was to burst the bubble played a major role in creating and preserving it, he argues.