Authors writing about the Anthropocene and the Chernobyl disaster alike tend to slip into millennial scales and metaphysics. Historian Kate Brown suggests getting down to the particulars: the dates, facts and fate of people most directly confronted with the new radioactive reality.
During the early hours of 18 July 1936, General Francisco Franco declared a state of war and his opposition to the Second Spanish Republic. In undermining the Republican government’s ability to keep order, the ensuing coup d’état precipitated unprecedented open violence. Thus began the Spanish Civil War.
Europe has abandoned norms of equality and social solidarity in favour of market freedoms, writes Michael Rustin. A founding editor of Soundings (UK), Rustin considers the damage, disruption and antagonism caused by the neoliberal doctrines that dominate life in the European Union, and whether such trends are reversible following the outcome of the UK referendum.
Current usage of the word “populist” in the German and European media is beginning to obscure the alarming rise of xenophobia and authoritarian tendencies across the continent. In the face of which, Claus Leggewie argues that it’s high time for rhetorical anti-fascism to take a practical turn. This means meeting an urgent need for democratic participation to be extended beyond (but never used against) political parties and parliaments.
In an exchange dealing with critical issues of both sustainable media strategy and privacy, Matthias Streitz, managing editor of Spiegel Online in Germany, argues that ad-blockers merely aggravate the current crisis in which the media finds itself; while Richard Tynan, technologist for Privacy International, insists that people have a right to protect themselves and their data.
Will 23 June 2016 go down in history as having an equal but opposite impact to that of 9 November 1989? This is one of many questions that editors at Eurozine partner journals considered when asked for their initial responses to the Brexit decision, and its reception in their home countries.
If the financial crisis divided the EU between creditors and debtors, opening a gap between North and South, the refugee crisis re-opened the gap between East and West. What we witness today, writes Ivan Krastev, is not what Brussels describes as a lack of solidarity, but a clash of solidarities: national, ethnic and religious solidarity chafing against our obligations as human beings.
Whatever the result of Thursday’s UK referendum, neither popular disaffection with mainstream political institutions, nor the sense among large sections of the electorate of being politically voiceless, is likely to subside. Nor will it, argues Kenan Malik, until the reasons for that disaffection are directly addressed.
Whether the UK remains an EU member or not after Thursday’s vote, there’s no business as usual to return to for Britain, the EU or even the western world. So says the executive editor of POLITICO’s European edition, Matthew Kaminski.
Both Remain and Leave campaigns are equally culpable for the toxic mixture of ill feeling and scare tactics that has defined the build up to Thursday’s referendum, writes Benjamin Tallis. A British citizen who has spent most of his working life on the continent, Tallis bemoans how these dismal campaigns have obscured the fact that, for all its faults, the European Union remains the world’s most successful liberal project.
Ahead of Thursday’s EU referendum, Ben Little of Soundings (UK) looks beyond the daily diet of questionable and competing facts circulated by party political factions, and considers the deep-seated tensions that currently shape the United Kingdom’s fractured political landscape.
There is a no-man’s-land between European post-democracy and notional national democracy that largely consists of grand coalitions of the political centre. It is here that European populism is flourishing and will continue to do so. Ulrike Guérot offers a corrective.
Public debate in Sweden on EU migrants has become particularly divisive of late, reinforcing misleading notions of who is considered “deserving” of welfare and who “non-deserving”. The authors appeal for a political community based on radically different principles.
It’s not just Europe’s far right parties; the radical Left too has both personal and political connections to the Kremlin, write Péter Krekó and Lóránt Gyori. Moreover, the old “comrade networks” of Soviet times remain active.
States such as Norway or Switzerland have tended to relinquish sovereignty to the European Union without any prospect of co-determining the course that the Union takes, write Erik O. Eriksen and John Erik Fossum. Moreover, such states experience new EU treaties or reforms as “shocks” for which they are poorly prepared in comparison to member states. But these are not the only lessons that voters in the UK’s upcoming referendum on EU membership may wish to consider.
Once the preserve of eccentrics and cranks, cryonics is entering the mainstream. Is eternal life possible – or even desirable? Traversing the interface between transhumanist subcultures and high-stakes investment in novel technologies, Cal Flyn investigates.