Articles

Opposition to last year’s Prague Declaration on “European Conscience and Totalitarianism” reveals a change of attitude on the part of western Europe towards the East, writes Violeta Davoliute. Western fears about an upsurge of ultra-nationalism in eastern Europe suggests the era of democratic idealism has come to an end.

“Looking for loopholes in the law and exploiting them – this was the most that we allowed ourselves. And we got our kicks from showing the government the mistakes it had made in legislation.” Translated excerpts from the correspondence between Mikhail Khodorkovsky and novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, first published in 2009 in Novaja Gazeta.

In its contribution to the World Values Survey, the independent social research centre TÁRKI finds that Hungarians are distrustful, frown upon social inequality and think the welfare system is unfair. They are in two minds about breaking rules and are deeply committed to state redistribution. This places their values and attitudes closer to those of Eastern Orthodox countries than to the West. An interview with TÁRKI director György István Tóth.

While the role of technology in the political struggle in Iran and elsewhere should not be overstated, it should not be underestimated either. The “next generation” controls with which authorities aim to manage the Internet mark a shift from heavy-handed filtering to sophisticated multi-pronged methods. Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski on the attempt to normalise the exercise of power in cyberspace.

The Stockholm Programme, the latest in a series of EU agreements on security policy, was endorsed in December 2009. Based on the “principle of availability”, the Programme plans to enable the cross-border collection, processing and sharing of data on a massive scale. Supposedly promoting “openness and security”, it is a further step towards a hi-tech Fortress Europe, writes Christine Wicht.

For women, the lack of decent public toilets is an emergency. Public conveniences are the final battleground in the sex wars, the ultimate declaration of discrimination. From the latrine to the loo, the pissoir to the powder room, Sally Feldman explores the sexual politics of toilets.

The neurological turn in recent web criticism exploits “the obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness”. Geert Lovink turns the discussion to the politics of network architecture, exploring connections between the colonization of real-time and the rise of the national web.

Laura Restrepo is one of many contemporary Latin American authors seeking new routes for political writing. Her second novel Leopardo al Sol, about the Columbian drug trade, is an unholy alliance between high and low. Like their 1940s predecessors in the hardboiled crime genre, Restrepo’s women play a minor role, and at the same time are deeply menacing, writes Gabriella Håkansson.

Adorno has often been accused of elitism and ineffectuality, yet his ideas about art and nature gain new relevance as the environmental crisis forces us to rethink how we live. Camilla Flodin explains how Adorno offers an alternative, non-coercive understanding of nature.

The assumption of ownership as an absolute right is largely a creation of the nineteenth century, writes Jean-Claude Monod. Roman law separated abusus, the right to sell, give or destroy property, from usus, the right to make use of it, while medieval custom saw different groups holding complementary claims to the same resource. Today, there are signs of a gradual return to a less deregulated way of looking at our relationship with things.

After a decade of the Bologna Process, the reforms are a cause more for concern than for celebration. They embody a narrowly utilitarian turn in higher education policy visible not only in Europe but worldwide. In a philosophical critique of the pragmatic reduction of knowledge, Boyan Manchev defines the university as “locus of the unconditionally political”.

As the ideological frenzy of modernism gives way to “content management systems”, and as global megacities render the urban grid and its certainties obsolete, societies of discipline become societies of control. Daniel Miller cracks open the password protected “post-city”.

Ukrainian democracy is allegedly back to square one after Viktor Yanukovych’s election victory. Though reform will not take place as long as political infighting continues, Yanukovych is equally unlikely to drop the European rhetoric and defer to Moscow, writes Mykola Riabchuk. Ukraine’s leadership will continue to “muddle through” – for the time being.

Janez Potocnik, head of the Slovenian negotiating team during the country’s EU accesssion and as from February 2010 European Commissioner for the Environment, explains why a European perspective for the Balkan countries is essential for Europe as a whole, and the role of Sarajevo Notebook in cultivating dialogue in the region.

“Sometimes we forget that maybe we need to ask more questions about the situation we are getting into. Then we have the right to say no.” In 1999, forensic anthropologist Sue Black joined a British UN Forensic Team investigating mass graves in Kosovo, and has since been to Sierra Leone and Iraq. She talks to the journal Intellectum about how she came to work in warzones, and why, despite everything, she loves what she does.