Culture
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Vertical occupation | Eurozine
[ad_1] Wars have many beginnings, but they refuse to end — history is merciless in giving this lesson to us again and again. Amid the ten-year Russian war in Ukraine, this thought is unbearable. Despite all odds, we need the idea of victory to hold us together in a shared effort of moving through the horrid reality of loss and…
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The Moscow connection | Eurozine
[ad_1] Kaja Puto: Where does the German left’s sympathy for Russia come from? Reinhard Bingener: In Germany, we have four leftwing parties: the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Greens (Die Grünen), the Left (Die Linke) and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Each has a slightly different attitude towards Russia. In the case of the SPD, the 1960s…
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Warehousing children | Eurozine
[ad_1] From the public school superpower Finland to arch-capitalist Britain, education varies widely across Europe. Across this spectrum, one factor remains constant: early childhood education constitutes a necessity for most families, as it defines the future of their children’s academic careers. You can also listen to the show in podcast format: What we recognize today as nurseries and kindergartens originate…
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Four-day workweek: Dream or reality?
[ad_1] Imagine a workweek that wraps up after four days, leaving you three days to relax, enjoy quality time with loved ones and follow personal pursuits. Through pilot projects or full legal recognition, the four-day workweek is no longer a pipedream, but the reality of many employees across Europe and around the globe. Pilot projects have been run in several…
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Back to square one | Eurozine
[ad_1] When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country’s great ‘originality’, ‘special path’ and a ‘unique mission in the world’, it’s a sure sign they’re facing mounting problems in forging a modern democratic polity, civic nation and respectable international identity. Contemporary Russia is a case in point. Its new foreign policy doctrine, signed into law by President Vladimir…
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No longer a footnote | Eurozine
[ad_1] In the early days of March 2022, as Russian troops were approaching the outskirts of Kyiv, international media were focused primarily on the Ukrainian frontlines. Journalists paid little attention to the informal meeting of EU leaders at Versailles, nor to the document they adopted. The insipid language of the declaration differed little from past EU statements about Ukraine, expressing…
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What happened to solidarity? | Eurozine
[ad_1] The Swedish welfare system has become unrecognizable, writes Niklas Altermark in Fronesis. Once based on solidarity between the working and middle classes, recent decades of government have fragmented the once progressive system. ‘The result of this transformation is a welfare system designed to serve the interests of the economic elite,’ Altermark argues. The rot set in during the 1990s,…
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Tearing down Fortress Europe | Eurozine
[ad_1] Migration is one of today’s most powerful, and most entrenched, imaginaries. The word conjures up images of walls, borders, police, uncertainty, destitution, misery, and death. Migration is most commonly discussed as a menace, an unwanted but “necessary evil”, a reluctant sacrifice offered at the altar of economic health. Political discourse around migration is saturated with fear. Migrants are framed…
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Forerunners of the free market
[ad_1] In economic terms, state socialism is usually associated with the monopoly of an authoritarian state over core elements of the economy such as trade, the distribution of resources, and the regulation of wages and prices. Yet, limited forms of legal private enterprise – often in the form of micro-craft and retail (family) businesses –existed sporadically in some state socialist…
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Too busy surviving | Eurozine
[ad_1] At one point in his 1984 essay ‘Permission to narrate’, Edward Said described urging family and friends in Beirut to record what was happening during the Israeli siege two years previously, in order to tell the world ‘what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “antiterrorism”’. They paid little attention, Said recallled. ‘Naturally, they were…
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