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.
In keeping with its “big society” scheme, the British Conservative Party’s recently revealed alternative to New Labour’s “state-sponsored multiculturalism” replaces top-down cohesion projects with community activities promoting “mainstream British values”. The centrepiece of the new policy? “The Big Lunch”, where neighbours get together for a meal on the weekend of the Queen’s diamond jubilee. Ali Rattansi sees the initiative as the latest in a line of equally ill-founded attempts across Europe to blame multiculturalist policies for social fracture.
Conventional wisdom has it that violence is at least as prevalent today as it has ever been. Yet a vast body of evidence about the past shows incontrovertibly that the chances of an inhabitant of this planet dying violently have never been lower, writes Dan O’Brien, reviewing two new books on the history of violence.
Venice versus Lampedusa: travelling around Italy, Slavenka Drakulic observes one kind of Europe being replaced by another. Instead of attempting to conserve the cultural past, we should accept that migration will adapt much of what we consider “European” to its own image.
Europe’s leaders need to take a hard look across the Atlantic before they start dismantling the Union, writes George Blecher. Emulating the US would risk forfeiting all the things that make Europe the best of all worlds.
Unless countries reduce income disparities the next financial collapse is inevitable, argues economist Michael Kumhof. Perhaps a surprising conclusion from a senior researcher at the IMF. In interview he argues that equality is the best recipe against crisis.
With demands over the wage and welfare in austerity Greece deemed illegitimate because unaffordable, what shape can struggle take? Demetra Kotouza sees the all-out attack on living standards as producing a de facto opposition that can’t be cohered by ideologies of class.