Articles

The US Supreme Court’s ruling that the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay violate both American military law and the Geneva Conventions confirms what international human rights campaigners have been arguing for years. Some of the severest criticism has been directed at the spatial conditions in the camp – spaces that might be too hot, too cold, or too small induce in prisoners severe depression, anxiety, hallucinations, and loss of motor skills. Markus Miessen describes the increasing tendency for governments to create a legal “meta-level” where spatial and physical humiliation becomes everyday practice.

The postwar “democratization” of Iraq has often been justified by a comparison to the de-Nazification of Germany after the Second World War. However, the Allied postwar operation cannot be called an unqualified success, writes Heinrich August Winkler: the division of the country was the ultimate result of the Allied powers’ very different ideas of democracy. In West Germany, at least, the successful transition from liberation to freedom rested on the democratic traditions of the Weimar Republic. If the postwar developments are instructive at all, they are in showing that those who want to help other countries can at most help them to help themselves, writes Winkler.

Constantinos Doxiadis, the architect who during the 1950s and 1960s built new towns throughout the Middle East and Africa, was a leading figure in US Cold War policy. While hoping to inculcate democratic and free-market values in the developing world, the New Towns failed to take into account indigenous traditions. Today, Doxiadis’s urban neighbourhoods have become something quite different to what he anticipated: Sadr city, Baghdad’s giant slum, for example, where typhoid and hepatitis epidemics rage and which is now the backdrop for a new type of urban warfare. The most that can be said for Doxiadis’s New Towns, says Michelle Provoost, was that they had in mind an ideal – precisely what the US programme to restore democracy in contemporary Iraq lacks.

Historically, the rationalist critique of religion needed the means of mockery if it was not to become toothless, writes Christoph Türcke. But mockery was and is only rational when used as a weapon against power and oppression. It was the perception of the Mohammed cartoons as the West’s victorious mockery that so incensed the Islamic world. “It makes a crucial difference who caricatures the prophet – whether it is a Muslim or a non-Muslim Westerner. That is not to employ double standards […] Rationalism that wants more than simply to be right must learn to judge where its mockery begins to take on a triumphalist tone, one that insults the humiliated rather than unmasks pretensions.”

“Sport’s primitive allure provides a rare and necessary outlet for people desperate to rally behind a cause other than the national economy and making a living”, writes Tim Ochser, left cold by the spectacle of the Ice Hockey World Championships in Riga.

During the 1950s, policy makers in the Federal Republic of Germany, haunted by memories of the 1936 Olympics, endeavoured to keep politics out of sport. However, this position became untenable as the German Democratic Republic increasingly used sport for ideological capital. Under pressure from both the West German public and national and international politics, the Federal German government increasingly rose to the East German challenge. This culminated in the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, where the “modern Germany” was presented as a peace-loving, democratic, and European nation.

Instead of dwelling upon the catastrophes of the twentieth century, many Europeans ask if we should not thoughtfully “forget” them. However, the endurance of historical memory in the united Europe is demonstrated by contemporary political differences between European member states, which can be dealt with only if a European memory is developed. The difficulty here lies in paying due respect to the memory of the crimes both of National Socialism and of Soviet totalitarianism while avoiding a hierarchy of competing victim groups.

“For seventy years in succession, the Communists accused Western leaders of being Don Quixote. The latter did the same, accusing the Stalinists of being Don Quixote […] As you see, Don Quixote is always the loser, because the politicians who use his name are not on his level and have not a bit of his nobility.” Ismail Kadare on why Don Quixote belongs to Balkan folklore, how Cervantes first came to be translated into Albanian, and why today’s politicians should be banned from using the knight errant’s name as a term of abuse.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the politics of history in western Europe has produced a “hot” memory of the Shoah. In eastern Europe after 1989, the memory of Communism became “hot”, while the memory of the Holocaust remained as “cold” as it had been during Communism. Adapting the histoire croisée method of history writing – the focus on crossovers of different cultures, social groups, and historical events – Éva Kovács examines the mémoire croisée of the Shoah in the different political systems of eastern and western Europe.

At a time when neighbourly relations between nation-states dominated international politics, Carl Schmitt defined the political as the tension between friend and enemy. After 1945, states were expected to adopt a trans-national understanding and to step beyond their isolationist boundaries, a hope largely disappointed in Cold War hostilities. After a surge of popularity for concepts such as fluidity, migration, and fragmentation, polarity has returned to the stage of international politics, bringing with it renewed interest in neighbourhood. Associating neighbourhood with friendship, Hasan Bülent Kahraman looks at Maurice Blanchot’s theory of the “infinite distance” inherent in friendship. Turkey can and should, he argues, use this distance as a parameter in order to establish a productive relationship with the EU and the West.

France’s non-commemoration last year of the bicentennial of Napoleon’s great victory at Austerlitz was a sign of national uncertainty about the role of history and its relationship to the state.

During the riots in France in November 2005, much was made of the increasing religious radicalism of the Muslim youth. But it is not so much cultural difference and Islamism that is taking young Muslims to the street, says Turkish sociologist Ayhan Kaya, as a mass reaction to two centuries of colonialism and racism, compounded by recent poverty and exclusion. Does the bell toll for French Republicanism?

Residual authoritarianism and social inequality, be it in his native Austria or in the US, are both target and spur in Josef Schützenhöfer’s painting. Literary critic Klaus Zeyringer describes the artist’s development of a painterly aesthetic in keeping with his social-political commitment, first in the political paintings executed in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, and later in the work at the Steyr-Daimler-Puch and Semperit plants in Austria. Now, with the hegemony of abstraction losing its hold, Schützenhöfer’s “Social Painting” is having its day.