Articles

Central and eastern Europe is boiling right now. Climate change is here to stay and dealing with it demands a new form of morality. It’s time to get those handheld fans out of grandma’s cupboard.

The conservative EPP and the Socialists & Democrats lost 71 seats between them in May’s election. Could this change the face of European politics? As Portugal exits austerity and Romania confronts corruption in politics, liberalism and populism thrash it out in France. The European centre will hold but must reach out.

Since censorship in state socialist Poland was more lenient than in other countries of the Eastern Bloc, a peculiar counterpublicity was formed between samizdat, émigré publishing and western radio stations which amplified the voice of dissent.

Climate change is the biggest story ever – and yet the media do not do it justice. To blame are a number of journalistic vices, from misinterpretation of the principle of neutrality to a failure to contextualize; from slavishness to conventional media formats to a tendency to individualize the problem. A new climate politics starts by resetting the media agenda.

What next for Britain and the EU? Though the Brexit Party will now be one of the largest national parties in the European Parliament, combined support for the ‘hard Remain’ parties is greater still. The EP election played out as a referendum on Estonia’s government too, while Latvia was spared a populist surge.

Can Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahdha secure the gains of the 2011 uprising and adapt itself to secular democracy? The coalition has been praised for its progressiveness as its new constitution enshrined sexual equality, omitted Sharia law, and maintained the separation between ‘mosque and state’. Leftists, however, fear that these are ‘fig leaf’ measures.

A clash of the titans is emerging in Eurozine, as the anniversary discourse starts to recount the cultural heritage and the political failures of 1989. Aleida Assmann heavily criticizes Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev; Holly Case and Ulrike Liebert offer resolutions.

The European elections have been key to determining citizens’ priorities, albeit with one significant caveat in Ireland. In Poland, voters clearly care more about social welfare than abstract issues like rule of law. And issues of real consequence for the Western Balkans may finally be addressed, now that the elections are over.

The trope of building bridges between peoples on opposing sides of a conflict often seems compelling, and infers an inevitable benevolence. Yet Mykola Riabchuk considers the strategy itself to be misguided, especially when those bridges actually separate people instead of bringing them together.

Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev argue that illiberal politics in central and eastern Europe should be understood primarily as a reaction to the ‘imperative to imitate’ the West after 1989. But to downplay the ideological substance of the new authoritarianism is reckless in the current situation, responds Aleida Assmann. Recalling the contribution of eastern European dissidents to Europe’s culture of human rights offers a corrective to the damaging myth of the ‘victorious West’.

For countries emerging from communism, the post-1989 imperative to ‘be like the West’ has generated discontent and even a ‘return of the repressed’. The origins of illiberalism in central and eastern Europe are pre-ideological, rooted in rebellion at perceived cultural humiliation.

The Labour Party’s surprising success in the Netherlands may merely have proven opinion polls wrong but the political earthquake experienced in Austria will clearly have lasting consequences. Both Austria and Malta happened to achieve gender equality among elected MEPs, prefacing a drive to achieve the same among appointments to top EU jobs.

In Romania, the commemoration of ’89 always means remembrance of those who died for freedom. But three decades since the fall of communism, responsibility for the victims has yet to be clearly established. Meanwhile, concerns about the rule of law appear more pressing.

Editors from the Eurozine network offer initial responses to the outcome of the European elections. First up are views from Bologna, Berlin and Maribor. As the Union itself seems less precarious than before the vote, new coalitions form to safeguard the climate on the one hand and nationalistic interests on the other.

The ‘containment’ argument fails to admit that, in order to reverse the Eurosceptic trend, Europe needs to confront its causes. Homilies about the rule of law will not do the trick. Addressing the rise of the right means reforming the European Union itself.

The erstwhile students of 1989 have recently returned to the streets of Bucharest, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest to defend what they achieved three decades ago. But could the tragedy of Central Europe that Milan Kundera wrote about so compellingly in 1983 be repeating itself?