Articles

“Whether you’re a Scot, of Scottish descent, or simply love Scotland”, Homecoming 2009 is for you (or so the advertising goes). Yet scotophiles should make no mistake: the reinvented Highland culture that emerged in the nineteenth century was but a “tame accessory to British unionism”.

Twenty years ago, the velvet revolutions swept communism from eastern Europe. On the other side of the globe, the Chinese government was cracking down on anyone who dared to speak out against the regime, with reprisals culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre on 4 June. In the twenty years since Tiananmen, writes Martin Hala, China has risen from the ashes by engaging the West economically and by manufacturing domestic, “patriotic” consent. But as the economic crisis deepens, writes Hala, these achievements might not be sufficient to make the “rising dragon” immune to history.

Six decades after the end of World War II, it is evident that history based on falsification is no history, said Valdas Adamkus, President of the Republic of Lithuania, at Opening address the 22nd European Meeting of Cultural Journals. “We cannot allow politically coloured revenge policies to re-enter historical science and replace our cherished values with technologies.”

In Romania, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives has been rendered toothless by political interference and its moral authority drained, writes Mircea Vasilescu. Meanwhile, former communist functionaries, in new democratic guise, still purport to be protecting “national interest”.

The dissident generation of the 1970s and 1980s produced a body of work unprecedented in Czech history, says Martin Simecka. Yet it is precisely the monumentality of this generation’s legacy that prevents the interpretation of the communist past going beyond self-diagnosis.

During communism, metaphoric language was the only way to negotiate censorship, recalls the poet and editor Kornelijus Platelis. Yet this experience left Lithuanians cut off from the common European culture of rationality, tolerance and self-irony. Regaining this “European attitude” is the task of cultural journals today.

One type of censorship comes to an end, but a new is developing, writes cultural theorist Dave Boothroyd. The power that corporations such as Network Solutions or YouTube wield produces a new form of subjectivity characterized by self-censorship.

Globalisation is leading to more belief, not less. “New Humanist” editor Caspar Melville talks to John Micklethwait, the editor of “The Economist” about his new book tracing the rise and rise of religion.

Jaroslaw Kuisz comments on two iconic Polish films that show the brutality, fear and loneliness that have accompanied the new political order. In Wladislaw Pasikowski’s “Psy” (Pigs, 1992) a former security service agent turned respectable post-communist policeman resolves to avenge the death of three colleagues. And in Krzysztof Krauze’s “Dlug” (Debt, 1999), two young businessmen, trapped into life as mobsters, commit murder, then confess.

Europeans, the world’s largest “people in spe”, must develop a pan-European historical awareness if only to be able to deal better with common political problems, argues Claus Leggewie. Yet a definition of European memory cannot be reduced to the Holocaust and the Gulag alone, no matter how central these are. It must also include the experience of expulsion, Europe’s colonial history and the Armenian question, for example, and be able to compare memories without offsetting each against the other.

Nancy Fraser explains how the shift from redistribution to recognition undertaken by political movements during the 1990s forms part of the “post-socialist condition”. The fall of the Soviet Union, she argues, not only brought the end of communism, but also sucked the energy out of most movements with social-egalitarian aspirations. Yet in an era of globalization, the change could also be seen as one of “frame”. Campaigners for redistribution are no longer constrained by the borders of the nation-state, and concentrate their efforts increasingly on inequalities between, rather than within, nations. Transnational activism is where Fraser now hopes challenges to the “post-socialist” common sense will emerge.

The EU has commenced a new, pragmatic stage of relations with Belarus: in February, Javier Solana met Alexander Lukashenka; now, the Belarusian president has been invited to a summit in Prague. Economic factors and the EU’s fear of “losing” Belarus to Moscow are likely to be the foremost reasons for the change of tack.

For those who calmly existed behind the Iron Curtain it was hard to even imagine arts festivals, writes Vaidas Jauniskis. But now, over the past two decades, festivals have flooded Europe as if a new religion. Vaidas Jauniskis compares the many festivals of Europe and wonders what the future of festivals will be like in Lithuania.

A number of recent cases have highlighted how “social dumping” can occur if companies register abroad so as to be exempt from collective labour agreements applicable in the countries in which they are operating. The European Court of Justice, called on to decide between the freedom to establish a business and the employment laws of individual member states, has been hesitant to rule in favour of employees. Disappointment at judgments may derive from the fact that the vocabulary of social protection often cannot be translated at a European level, writes Marc Clément: fundamental concepts are understood in different ways by Europeans, depending on their national culture. Before we ask the question of a social Europe, a legal solution to the co-existence of social Europes (in the plural) must be attempted.