Articles

Postmodern theory can be pretentious and overblown. But a new series of reissues calls for more than the glib rejection characterizing much of the contemporary Anglo-American humanities, writes Nina Power.

Two books dealing with the state security apparatus in communist Hungary emphasize the extent to which its members, from informants and their handlers up to high-ranking politicians, were subordinate to the Communist Party hierarchy. Clearly, a much wider circle of people than the network of agents were responsible for the disadvantages, and even vilification, suffered by thousands of people.

The terrorist, the hacker and the financier are the new pirates, taking advantage of the spatial revolution brought about by globalization. Carving out a new geography for themselves, they force legal institutions to change their responses: universal jurisdiction turns every judge into a pirate of the law.

In Slovakia, journalists’ hard won freedom after 1989 was rapidly curtailed by the authoritarian government of Vladimír Meciar. The media rallied again and played a key role in the victory of the opposition in 1998, only to fall victim to legal intimidation and corruption within their own ranks. But although the most serious challenges to press freedom have been seen off, a media culture free of the legacies of the past has yet to develop, writes Martin Simecka.

No one in eastern central Europe suspected that once the fight for independence was won, democracy would become a parody of itself, writes Tomas Kavaliauskas. Open disrespect for the public jars with the ideals of the Baltic Way that existed before and after 1989.

If the G8’s goal of limiting global warming to 2°C is to be more than just lip service, radical decisions will need to be taken at the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. An emissions-trading system based on a national per-capita emissions budget and tied to historical responsibility would offer enormous opportunities to developing countries and provide the key to a new low-carbon global order.

It’s hard to conceive of anything that the art market, worth 20 billion dollars in 2008, hasn’t yet consumed, writes Allesandro Ludovico. Italy as location for the exhibition “Art, Price and Value, Contemporary Art and the Market” is apt, given Italian artists’ unique response to the country’s priceless artistic heritage and the cultural influence that implies.

An historian can define European identity descriptively, as Krzysztof Pomian demonstrates in a tour of European culture since the first millennium before Christ. But the real controversy lies elsewhere, in the political question: what of the European past is worth preserving?

A nation attacked by terrorists or an oppressed minority whose legitimate grievances are brutally suppressed? However one interprets the recent violence in Xinjiang, it was far from unexpected, writes Nick Holdstock.

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

Poetry has lost the symbolic power needed to address shared values, writes Francesco Stella, having ceded this to other media such as pop music. On “the Semicerchio debate” and the search for a new poetic canon.

Working illegally in the West, eastern European women take care of “the logistics of bodily experience”, freeing western women to participate alongside men in business, science and politics.

“If you always want to end up the winner, if you don’t know that being in India already means that you’re a winner, you lose.” Hungarian novelist János Háy on the new global “playing field” and the “authenticity of penury”.

Pillar of UK theatre criticism Michael Billington and Portuguese director and critic Jorge Silva Melo met in early June 2008 to talk about plays, playwrights, and theatre critics. “For me, Billington is the definition of a theatre critic: alert, sharp, informed, more than an enthusiast”, writes Melo.

From the Eurozine archive: Antonin J. Liehm, founder of Lettre Internationale and former editor of the Czechoslovak journal ‘Literární noviny’, discusses the role of a European cultural journal before and after 1989 and explains why it is as important as ever to organize a concerted defence of culture.

The continuing repression of the independent media exposes the Belarusian government’s concessions to “European standards” for what they are: window dressing on a regime that has no intention of releasing its stranglehold on society any time soon.