“Narrative tolerance” has encouraged an historiographic preference for witness accounts within European cultural institutions. Often, however, narrative authority continues to work beneath a blandly affirmative surface. Questions of reliability aside, is a witness-based history even able to fulfil the necessary task of narrating Europe’s political identity?
The positivist tradition of nineteenth century history, dominated by the idea of the nation and based on the archive, began in the 1970s to give way to a concern with recent history, in which the historical witness became paramount. With the past ceasing to be a body of knowledge and becoming a public issue, a new form of political influence has exerted itself upon historians. In the French case, the subject of colonialism is particularly controversial. Now more than ever it is crucial historians retain critical distance.
Germany’s politicians lack deep European convictions yet are susceptible to calls for a more strident role in Europe; and while the mainstream is unlikely to give up what it sees as the recipe for German success, “constitutional patriotism” could allow for greater Europeanization. Jan-Werner Müller talks to Esprit about German contradictions.
The challenge for a liberal democracy is to remain as such, argues Charles Taylor in conversation with Slawomir Sierakowski. Western democracies suffer two types deterioration: a misperception of really existing problems and a lack of vital tension between the demos and the government.
In eastern central Europe, the neoliberal “regime architecture” favoured by non-state actors is copied by the public sector, resulting in buildings with no representative function. To counter this trend, architects must serve as ambassadors of architecture and quality space.
The claim that Christianity provides the bedrock of Western culture might serve the interests of extremists, but it is a betrayal of a far more complex history, argues Kenan Malik.
Democratic upsurge in North Africa can combine with the renewable energy revolution to inject new life into the European project. Two-way developmental traffic across the Mediterranean would leave new generations in both North and South with fair chances of a good life, Claus Leggewie suggests.
If the politicians can’t find a solution, let the citizens. That’s the call of a group of Belgian intellectuals and activists. They have a detailed proposal: the G1000, a meeting in Brussels on 11 November 2011. One thousand randomly selected Belgian citizens will be given an opportunity to discuss, in all freedom, the future of their country. “Because democracy is so much more than citizens who vote and politicians who negotiate.”
The EU shouldn’t be surprised by the Tymoshenko verdict: its support of anything nominally reformist has been perceived as acceptance of a range of repressions. Tough measures are now needed if another authoritarian regime is to be prevented from forming on the EU’s eastern border, writes Mykola Riabchuk.
The first Turkish Gastarbeiter arrived in Germany fifty years ago. Since then their reception in German society has swung back and forth between enthusiasm and hostility. Yüksel Pazarkaya, who arrived as a student with the first wave of Gastarbeiter in the 1960s, summarizes the history of Turkish labour migrants in Germany, drawing conclusions for today’s renewed debate on integration.
Blue, muddy yellow or blood-red: the colour of the Danube varies according to history and geography. Never able to truly form the countries through which it runs into a single political entity, it nevertheless connects peoples and regions reconcilable only in dreams or poetry, writes László Földenyi.
Despite ceaseless social networking, the virtual rebel’s many hours of online agitation remain largely unproductive. Victor Tsilonis, editor of Greek journal Intellectum, says it’s time for some real-time.
Philosopher Jane Bennett explains what she understands by “vital materialism” and why the rhetoric of the religious Right led her to entertain the notion of an “undesigned order of materiality” that possesses “the dynamic, incalculable, awesome and awful qualities elsewhere ascribed to God, Geist or the human spirit”.
Sweden’s post-war image as frontrunner of egalitarianism and antiracism contains more than a trace of national and racial chauvinism, argue two whiteness studies scholars. As myths of the better Sweden fade, both Right and Left are consumed by “white melancholy”.
There are clear signs that Internet-radicalization was behind the terrorism of Anders Behring Breivik. Though most research on this points to jihadism, it can teach us a lot about how Internet-radicalization of all kinds can be fought.