Articles

Russian aggression, climate disaster and technological singularity – it takes a professional optimist to seek the humanist potential in these threats. An interview with André Wilkens, director of the European Cultural Foundation.

Calls to reform Germany’s public service broadcasters have been intense following the ARD corruption affair in 2022. A culture of corporate democracy substitutes genuine representation, while rigid hierarchies invite abuses of power. Greater civic participation must be enabled at all levels.

When flexible hours and remote working have become the norm, the public healthcare sector is struggling to retain workers who want a better work-life balance, better pay and less hierarchical workplaces. The system was not built with these demands in mind, write four French hospital directors.

Despite divisive nationalist politics, there are those who manage to overcome the odds, forming meaningful acts of solidarity. Eurozine’s new focal point ‘The world in pieces’ looks critically at what divides, tackling the complexities of destablized identity.

Ongoing discourse about a collective Belarusian identity since the 2020 protests tend to circle around nationalism. Those who oppose the regime and managed to escape are calling for horizontal societal structures, in solidarity with those imprisoned. Belarusian culture is more than language; it includes human rights, economic interests and everyday narratives.

Treasure trove or rubbish dump? In either case, oceans are being spoiled. Concepts from ‘mare liberum’ to ‘common heritage’ don’t safeguard the blue planet’s largest frontier from escalated seabed mining, industrialised fishing and waste disposal, nor global inequality and racialized violence. Could a democratic World Ocean Authority be the answer?

In April 2023 the Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. Here he explains why he is confident that the Putin regime will come to an end sooner than many think.

Kais Saied’s power grab in Tunisia did not take place in a vacuum. A combination of constitutional dysfunction, a self-serving party system and festering social tensions had left the country at breaking point. Now the man many hailed as a saviour threatens the achievements of the democratic revolution of 2011.

Memory as source of personal and collective resistance: on Yuri Dmitriev’s effort to document the history of the Mordovian GULAG while himself imprisoned in one of the penal colonies in the region, by a member of the Memorial Society.

How can a captured state be democratized? Who invented postmodern corruption? What does political humour have to do with political analysis? A Polish, a Romanian, a Slovenian and a Hungarian editor walk into a cooperative bar in Kraków to talk professional responsibility and personal survival tactics.

Ranging from influencers to opinion leaders and self-proclaimed experts, pro-Russian communities are consolidating in Poland. The Russian Federation not only supports these groups through the Polish-language sources it runs, but also has an influence on the activity of some of the people operating within them.

Even though socialist internationalism was the official ideology in communist Hungary, popular media at the time was teaming with nationalist narratives, hidden in plain sight. What does this contradiction explain about today’s politics?

The Eurozine series ‘The writing on the wall’ provides insights from analysts in Europe’s east into the political situation in their countries, over a year into Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

The success of recent protests against extractivism and ecosystem degradation in Serbia and Albania highlights the potential for democratic reinvigoration around ecological issues in south east Europe. But the EU has yet to prove it can act as a credible partner in this process.

Reforms that would bring Albania further towards EU accession remain hampered by corruption and lack of political will. Prime minister Edi Rama, now into his third term and without a serious challenger, embodies the contradictions of the West Balkan country’s hybrid democratic system.

If racism is ineradicable, as critical race theory argues, then combatting it cannot be about winning equality. No issue expresses this better than the controversy over ‘cultural appropriation’.