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Security and Stability in Germany’s “Zeitenwende”

By William Glenn Gray

“The world afterwards is not the same as the world before,” intoned Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the Bundestag on February 27, 2022. In Berlin, the Russian assault on Ukraine reversed fundamental assumptions about the nature of international politics.

 

Europe and NATO Since Ukraine

By Carl J. Strikwerda and Ruud van Dijk

Scholars of Europe from both sides of the Atlantic assess some of the impact of the war between Ukraine and Russia on NATO, European institutions, and individual European countries. Will NATO get stronger or weaker as the war persists in a stalemate and populist and isolationist political parties assert themselves in member countries? Will the renewed unity among EU members persist in the face of the obstacles lying ahead in Europe?

The Impact of the Ukraine War on the Transatlantic Relationship

By Abraham (“Bram”) Boxhoorn

The impact of the Ukraine war on the transatlantic relationship and Euro-Atlantic institutions (EU and NATO) can be only conditionally assessed at this time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a number of consequences in European international affairs. Some European countries suffered more than others due to the self-imposed sanctions.

February 2024

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum.

The Spirit of Parochialism and Imperial Teleophilia

By Branislav Jakovljević

One of the key insights emanating from works on parochialism in Serbian culture is that the province and the empire constitute a dialectical couple. The empire is at once a negation of palanka and a full realization of the spirit of palanka.

The Return of the Russian Gulag

By Oksana Ermolaeva

The Gulag has demonstrated a remarkable continuity based on the cultural foundations of pre-revolutionary Russia. This continuity is seen not only in the “serfdom syndrome” repeatedly cited by memoirists but also in the way inmates have lived. The tragedy of Russian history lies in the fact that numerous inherent features of the repressive Soviet system have been resurrected on a massive—if openly unarticulated—scale in present-day Russia.

November 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Jennifer Ostojski, Aslihan Turan, Hélène B. Ducros, and Oksana Ermolaeva.

Thinking Eurasia Now

By Arina Rotaru

Beyond religious and economic divisions, the question of the differences between Asia and Europe has remained constant in attempts to define Eurasia. While warning of the reactionary potential of Eurasianism, this feature looks into possibilities of convergence between Europe and Asia.

Two Divided Countries in the Divided Supercontinent: Hungary and Ukraine in Eurasia

By Chris Hann

For those who insist on classifying Europe as a separate continent, Eurasia has come to mean a fuzzy interface covering more or less any expanse eastwards of the territories where Western Christianity has spread. For people in the political West, such a Eurasia has strongly negative connotations: it is authoritarian, and its prevailing values are incompatible with liberal freedoms.

September 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Taylor Soja, Elizabeth B. Jones, and Hélène B. Ducros.

Homelessness and Poverty in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth B. Jones

While policymakers rightly blame the COVID-19 epidemic, the war in Ukraine, and persistently high levels of inflation for the lack of progress in alleviating homelessness and for the dire shortage of safe and affordable housing in many places, these factors have exacerbated rather than created a complex problem that touches a wide array of people at different life stages and under various socio-economic conditions.

Homelessness and EU Citizenship in a Borderless Europe

By Dion Kramer

The vast majority of EU citizens experiencing homelessness originally left their home country with the aspiration to find (better) work abroad and improve their quality of life. This fact helps us to connect homelessness to the very raison d’être of the freedom of movement principle in the European Union.

How do We Talk about Housing Equality in an Increasingly Unequal Europe?

By Lindsay B. Flynn

Inequality is one of the defining issues of our time, and social scientists have consistently confirmed that housing is a key driver of contemporary inequalities. How then, should we talk about housing as part of a constellation of economic and social inequalities plaguing contemporary Europe? There are at least three ways to probe this question.

July 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

A Roundtable on the European Capitals of Culture

By Anastasia Paparis

The general objectives of the European Capitals of Culture program are to safeguard and promote the diversity of cultures in Europe, highlight common European cultural features, and enhance citizens’ sense of belonging to a common cultural area.

May 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum, Oksana Ermolaeva, Hélène B. Ducros, and Sorcha de Brún.

The Politics of Postmigration

By Markus Hallensleben and Moritz Schramm

The concept of postmigration has allowed for a rethinking of migration studies, the political borders of Europe, and the ongoing history of colonialism.

Decolonizing European Memory Cultures

By Katrine Sieg and Hélène B. Ducros

Academic specialists, artists, activists, and museum professionals have engaged for at least two decades in the project of “decolonizing” the memory cultures that shore up European identity.

An Anticolonial Museum

By Ana Sladojević

The anti-colonial aspect of the museum was mainly anchored in the prevailing socialist and nonaligned discourse of the time.

Conference Dispatch: An Anticolonial Museum

By Emilia Epštajn

The conference aimed to bridge the professional gaps between scholars, researchers, artists, and curators and use the museum as a meeting space for different experiences and expertise and for communication with the public.

February 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Oksana Ermolaeva, Arina Rotaru, Brittany Kennedy, Angela Cacciarru, Vanja Petričević, and Hélène B. Ducros.

The Banality of World War “Z”

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya

This essay illuminates how—in the words of Nietzsche—“the use and abuse of history” (and of cultural memory) in Putin’s Russia has naturally led to what Hannah Arendt so brilliantly coined The Banality of Evil.

Breaking through the Latest Regulatory Plans of the Climate-Friendly Energy Union and Reaching the New Ambitious Plans of the European Green Deal

By Maria Dolores Sanchez Galera

The new Green Deal shows how the EU is striving to update a wide range of instruments and adopt new policies to boost the transition towards a new economic system and an energy and industrial transition through four main pillars: carbon pricing, sustainable investment, a new industrial policy and a just transition.

May 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

Building Sustainable Water Futures

By Pauline Münch and Jörg Niewöhner

In the Anthropocene, more-than-human habitability on this planet is at stake. Societies must develop ways of existing within planetary boundaries.

Securitization of Identity

By Lesley-Ann Daniels

The war in Ukraine has brought Europe together as a political project with countries opening their arms to fleeing migrants. Likewise, when the Libyan regime collapsed in 2011, the previous controls on migration failed and people smugglers took advantage of the chaos to send thousands out to sea in flimsy boats.

April 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.

From De-securitization to “Flexicuritization” of Migration Strategy in Greece

By Georgia Dimari and Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis 

Research on the Greek migration experience has shown that new concepts are necessary in order to describe both the weaknesses of the current response mechanisms and the need to identify and formulate more specific solutions to the problems induced by massive migration and refugee flows since 2015.

When Minorities Become a Threat: From 9/11 to the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Andrea Carlà

Since the turn of the century, the concept of securitization has not only become a recurrent theme in scholarship on minorities in regard to both so-called “old” (national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious) minorities, as well as new minorities stemming from recent migratory flows.

February 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews, Temenuga Trifonova, and Hélène B. Ducros.

 

Mastery and the Banksia Tree

By Prudence Gibson and Sharon Willoughby

Banksia serrata (B. serrata) is a species of native Australian tree that catches stories of colonial dominion, botanical naming controversies, and Indigenous knowledge in its branches.

On Becoming Lichen

By John Charles Ryan

In its radically-open otherness, lichens materialize more-than-human wisdom—the knowledge of the world expressed by intelligent beings other than humans.

Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World

By Vicente Raja

To show that (at least some) plants are able to exhibit goal-directed behaviors to cope with their environments may have dramatic implications for our understanding of plants as biological systems, but also as cognitive, or even sentient systems.

In a Europe of Waters

By Matthew D. Miller

A hydrocentric mapping of Europe’s rivers, seas, and watersheds yields a refreshingly defamiliarized continental cartography

Living with Bear

By Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Our largely rationalist discourses leave us without tools for reciprocal forms of communication with the nonhuman. How do we go about opening ourselves to such exchanges? Poetry might be a better vehicle for exploring the uncanny.

Animals as Dark Tourism Attractions: A Prototype

By David A. FennellBastian Thomsen and Samuel R. Fennell

Dark tourism, or thanatourism, is a complex subset of the tourism industry, which capitalizes on human death and suffering from human and environmentally induced events.

November 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews and Hélène B. Ducros.

Rethinking the Human in a Multispecies World

By Hélène B. Ducros

Non-human, more-than-human, other-than-human, posthuman, transhuman, anti-human, multispecies, transspecies—all are terms that have been circulating in the humanities and social sciences, but have lacked clarity in their definitions, interpretations, purposes, uses, and range of application.

Displacement, Memory, and Design

By Ava McElhone Yates, Maria Höhn, and Chase Estes

Across Europe and the US, large scale projects addressing the history and memory of displacement are underway. All of these efforts are concerned not only with rectifying the prevailing historical narratives but also with using design as a way to tell a more appropriate and inclusive narration.

October 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

From ‘Trophy’ To ‘Patrimony’: Material Feelings and Proprietary Emotions in Post-WWII Kaliningrad

By Olga Sezneva

While the fate of the German population displaced in the former East Prussia, today’s Kaliningrad Oblast, has attracted considerable scholarly attention, less is known about the property and personal belongings left behind or “proprietary emotions,” and material feelings of Kaliningrad’s new occupants.’ What emotional responses did the forcibly acquired things produce in their new owners? How did these feelings initially form and gradually change, and under which conditions?

European ‘Code Unknown’ Cinema

By Peter Verstraten

Traditionally, art cinema has been used as a term of endearment to pit European cinema as the “good” object against Hollywood as the commercial giant.

“Kultur Als Kopfkino:” Hermann Glaser’s Critical Visions for the Arts and Social Entertainment: Translating German “Culture as Civil Right” for the European Project

By Irina Herrschner and Benjamin Nickl

The blueprint of a house precedes its construction. That much is clear. With a European Project that started in 1950 as the European Coal and Steel Community, a common culture was that blueprint, and it was meant to construct a union of all and for all: in a shared culture that was alive and thriving.

Europe’s Moving Images

By Randall Halle

Already during World War II, leading European cultural figures oriented themselves toward a post-war future in which a federation of Europe would become a reality.

The New European Cinema of Precarity

  This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image.   “Precarity” and “the precariat” have become two of the buzz words in studies of neoliberalism’s restructuring of the global economy and of the human sensorium. Originally signifying a social condition linked to poverty, precarity now refers to the rise in flexible and precarious forms of labor, the growth of the knowledge economy, the reduction of welfare state provisions, the suppression

European Culture and the Moving Image

By İpek A. Çelik Rappas, Michael Gott, and Randall Halle

From the earliest days of film as a sideshow attraction to the present multiplatform mode of reception, moving images in Europe—in their broadest sense—have been imagining communities in various forms.

September 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.

Europe’s Pandemic Failure

By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh

Europe’s ever-closer union began with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1955, which was followed by the creation of the European Economic Community (1957) and eventually the European Union.

July 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews, Temenuga Trifonova, and Hélène B. Ducros.

History and Story in Amazon’s El Cid (2020)

By Anita Savo

Those who know anything about the Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1048–1099), imagine him as a crusader hero of Christian Spain. His popular image, on horseback with sword raised against a presumed Muslim foe, deliberately evokes the iconography of “Saint James the Moor-killer” (Santiago Matamoros).

Sustainable European Cities and Digitization

By Nicole Shea and Zsuzsanna Varga

This feature offers insights into developing the sustainability of European cities through a number of case studies of recent social and technological practices, while also foregrounding the role of the digital in modernization.

May 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Jean Beaman, Temenuga Trifonova, Nick Ostrum, and Hélène B. Ducros.

Anti-Roma Racism in Romania

By Marius Turda

The real labor of education begins with a question and finding an answer to it. Regarding the Roma, education is also essential in the un-making of anti-Roma racism.

Politics of Memory Under Two Pandemics

By Manuela Boatcă

During the first three months of lockdown in 2020, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERCC) identified twelve countries across Europe in which Roma communities faced movement restrictions or disproportionate impacts from emergency measures despite the lack of evidence of higher case counts in those communities.

The Belarus Crisis: How Can the EU Turn it Into an Opportunity?

By Vlada Șubernițchi

Belarus, 2020 Presidential elections: What could have been another ordinary rigged election won by the unchangeable leader of Belarus since 1994, Aleksander Lukashenko, this time turned out to be a promising chance to remove the “last dictator of Europe.”

December 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Nick Ostrum.

Race and Racism in Europe: The Urgency of Now

By Jean Beaman and Jennifer Fredette

Since the police killings of Breonna Taylor in March and George Floyd this past May, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the United States to call for an end to police violence—and, sometimes, the abolition of police altogether.

Peasantry and Rural Social Movements in Twenty-First Century Turkey

By José Duarte Ribeiro

Referring to the death of peasantry in the twentieth century as the “most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past,” Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 289) declared Turkey the last “peasant stronghold”

The Agrarian Reform in Italy: Historical Analysis and Impact on Access to Land and Social Class Composition

By Angela Cacciarru

The current Italian rural land tenure system is rooted in land reform that was implemented in the peninsula in 1950, known as the “Agrarian Reform.” The Southern Development Fund (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno) provided the funding that made carrying out this reform possible. Mezzogiorno is used to define southern Italy, which extends from Abruzzo to Sicily, and includes Sardinia.

Practicing Regenerative Design in Greece

By Evy Vourlides

I could not have anticipated my boots being layered with dirt for much of my eighteen months of PhD dissertation research. My initial project explored how young adults in Athens, Greece, navigated a precarious job market.

Where Are the Women in “Empty Spain”?

By Jeremy MacClancy

La España vacia, “Empty Spain,” is the contentious, popular term summing up so much of the nation’s countryside today: thousands of villages left with no inhabitants or only a few.

Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.

November 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth Jones.

Changing Ruralities in Germany

By Gesine Tuitjer

This story begins shortly after the Second World War and covers the tremendous changes, both economically and socially, that the rural areas of Germany have undergone until today.

Rurality in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.

Landscapes of Care and Isolation in the 21st Century: A Focus on Migrant Women in Italy

By Valeria Bonatti

Throughout much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, most societies witnessed a steady growth in life expectancy. In much of the Global North, but also in wealthier parts of the Global South, this generated and continues to generate a growing demand for affordable elderly care workers—a demand that many societies meet through low-wage migrant labor from the Global South.

Networks of Solidarity in Times of Crisis

By Matthew Brill-CarlatAva McElhone Yates, and Maria Höhn

Even in the more prosperous countries of the Global North, poor communities and communities of color—be they Indigenous, Black, migrants, or another minoritized group—are being ravaged by COVID-19 to a far greater extent than white and more privileged communities.

The Fabric of Healing

By Rachel A Cohen and Catherine Butterly

Violence against women and girls is a ubiquitous and pervasive problem, affecting about one in three women worldwide. The psychological, social, medical, and economic consequences are deep and enduring.

October 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic for the European Non-governmental Sector

By Răzvan-Victor Sassu and Eliza Vaș

The new coronavirus has drastically reshuffled both economies and societies in the past months. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has described the situation as being a “crisis like no other” with “an uncertain recovery” and a “catastrophic hit” to the global labour market, with more than 430 million jobs losses in the first two quarters.

Europe’s Essential Workers

By Ruxandra Paul

Migrants have always been both essential to modern economies and objects of suspicion, but the Coronavirus pandemic has brought this tension to a head both in migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries.

From Fake News to False Elections

By Agnes E. Venema

When Gabon experienced an attempted coup d’etat in late 2018, very few media outlets picked up on the fact that suspicion of a deepfake fuelled underlying unrest.

The Humanitarian Ideology

By Siraj Ahmed

Murderous Consent’s aim is, first, to critique political violence, whether hegemonic or revolutionary. The book’s aim is, second, to enunciate another politics that never legitimizes violence in any form. These aims could not be more profound, attempting, as they do, to overturn both Western political theory and contemporary geopolitical practice.

August 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.

A Roundtable on Marc Crépon’s Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

By Niloofar Sarlati

The global pandemic has simultaneously made visible and intensified longstanding economic and social inequalities across the world. Ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, people with disabilities, and the poor have been suffering at a much higher mortality rate and a more dreadful death. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have once again brought to light the systemic anti-black racism.

Murderous Consent: A Translator’s Note

By Michael Loriaux

It is true that dismantling myths of belonging presents no real challenge to the historian. All such myths labor to attribute some foundational homogeneity to collections of people that are very large and historically contingent.

The Autoimmunity of Murderous Consent

By Jacob Levi

The formulation “murderous consent” is striking because it confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: while most of us would not actively consent to murder, just as we would prefer to think that we do not condone violence, we are all participants in a range of systems of violence which we generally accept with resignation, passivity, and silence. Murderous consent is the operating principle of the modern state, which on principle it must vigorously deny for its own legitimation.

EuropeNow on COVID-19

In this series, we feature a spotlight on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its connections to European politics, society, and culture.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” and Life Beyond the Plague

By Alyssa Granacki

Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work. After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata—the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales—escapes ravaged Florence.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Mobilities

By Alexandru Pieptea

Although many EU countries have faced challenges brought on by the coronavirus, there are differences in the extent of required measures. Several countries have decided to take measures in terms of closing some or all educational institutions for varying time periods.

Placing Islam in European Studies

By John R. Bowen

Our views of European history and society ought to change as we pay greater attention to the long-term presence of Islam, especially in the Balkans and Russia.

From Past Practices to Future Directions in European Studies

By Hélène B. Ducros

As Europeanists ponder about the state of integration and disintegration of the European Union—under pressure from multiple crises and the “tensions and fractures” latent in the European project—it is only logical that they also interrogate their discipline and the ways in which “European studies” has been framed, as well as which “Europe” has been of concern to their field in practice.

A Roundtable on European Integration

By Mark I. Vail

The scholars in this roundtable explore, from a variety of substantive perspectives, the meaning and evolution of the concept of European integration and the tensions within it, interrogating an idea beholden to more than its share of conventional wisdoms, clichés, and airy nostrums.

Imagining Europe, Citizenship, and Scholarship in the Time of HIV/AIDS

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

The immense project of the history of HIV/AIDS in Europe has largely been unwritten. While attempts have been made to make sense of the historical impact of the virus in Western Europe, most transnational, comparative studies were done in the midst of the crisis with the goal of informing policy, and before effective treatment of HIV/AIDS became widely available.

An Empty Spain Filled with Ideas?

By Jeremy MacClancy

Instead of a standardizing policy to re-create long-term stable communities, we should accept variegated, patchy development, where settlements are occupied, but whose inhabitants are not necessarily lifelong, and where the high contrasts between the city and the countryside are drastically lowered.

Illusory Enlargement of the European Union

By Milos Rastovic

The future enlargement of the European Union (EU) has become a critical question for debate among its members. Whether the EU maintains its existing boundaries or expands to the East is a concern that divides many.

Europe in a Global Context: Geographical Perspectives

By Rafael de Miguel González

Europe, thus, has played an important geopolitical role, in particular through the European Union from the twentieth century on, even though the latter faces two major challenges to become a one and only voice in the world: a lack of political cohesion among its member states and limited European citizenship.

June 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, and Hélène B. Ducros.

Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García

This issue gathers a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship where all Europeanists have a place, whether they consider themselves European studies scholars, integration studies scholars, or European Union studies scholars.

Solidarity and Its Limits

By Anke S. Biendarra

While mutual support might work reasonably well on an interpersonal level, the Coronavirus outbreak is rapidly revealing the limits of solidarity when it comes to nation states, confirming that it is not a genuine “European” value per se, but is borrowed from the national political vocabulary.

A New Existentialism for Infectious Times

By Jennifer McWeeny

Much like Beauvoir and her famous entourage, we, too, are contending with an unexpected and catastrophic visitor. The coronavirus pandemic therefore allows us to enter the historical experience of these French thinkers more deeply than we have before.

Culturalist Perspectives in Social Analysis on Europe

By Timm Beichelt

The field of European Studies is not only constituted by its inner conditions, but also by the many different meanings attributed to it. European Studies are sometimes seen as one among many Area Studies, which implies cooperation of several disciplines in order to develop a somehow holistic approach to societal and/or cultural developments of a given territory.

The Afterlives of Refugee Dead: What Remains?

By Karen Remmler

Images of overcrowded boats have become iconic for the plight of refugees. At the same time, however, the portrayal of the overcrowding elicits a sense of the pitiful and helpless victims, masses, in need of saving from the humanitarians of the global north.

Colonial Histories at the Humboldt Forum

By Emi Finkelstein

The reconstruction of the major Berlin landmark has fostered debate about the ways in which Germany continues to come to terms with its (short but brutal) colonial past, particularly in reference to the repatriation of objects, which were looted during the era.

April 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Juliane Mendelsohn, Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, and Hélène B. Ducros.

European Art, Culture, and Politics

By Randall Halle

The European project is one that I have come to describe as dis/union—a dynamic of push-pull factors that remain constant. Precisely because there is a European project, the dynamic of union and disunion, contentious skepticism and optimism, pro and contra, which are part of all polities, obtains within the EU and at the broader European level.

Me Who? The Audibility of a Social Movement

By Sarah Cooper and Koen Slootmaeckers

The disparagingly fickle and fleeting attention of citizens often times serves to dilute the extent of actual change following public scandals, but it arguable that the mounting critical mass of cases of sexual assault and harassment now punctuating the media’s gaze opens a prominent window of opportunity for the social movement on the political agenda.

March 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

Opera, Exhibitions, and Empire: Czech Music and Identity on Display

By Christopher Campo-Bowen

First premiered in 1866, The Bartered Bride became the single most beloved of all Czech operas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critics and scholars praised the work as a symbol of Czech national character, emphasizing that its music flawlessly represented the essence of the Czech people, regardless of their education or class.

Far-Right Media Ecology in Norway

By Sindre Bangstand

The Norwegian case illustrates how crucially important it remains to take local and national context into account when studying the rise of far-right and populist right-wing political formations, and how mistaken the view that right-wing populism is inherently ‘anti-elitist’ and anti-thetical rather than instrumental to neoliberalism actually is.

Post-Imperial Permutations of the Hong Kong Protests

By Robert Kramm

In light of current phenomena such as the gilets jaunes in France, rising right-wing populism and nationalism all over Europe and social media undermining democratic discourse and the electoral system, the Hong Kong protests raise important questions also for a European audience.

January 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Mark Vail, Carol Ferrara, Nick Ostrum, Juliane K. Mendelsohn, and Louie Dean Valencia-García.

Remembering and Forgetting Vichy

By Richard J. Golsan

To today’s casual visitor, Vichy seems an attractive, prosperous provincial French town. One of Europe’s most celebrated spas, it has enjoyed a long and largely prosperous past.

Vichy: The Dark Legacy of an Accidental Capital

By David Lees

For historians of modern France, it can sometimes appear that all roads lead to the small spa town of Vichy. Such is the legacy of World War II in France that the four “dark years” of German Occupation and Vichy rule still cast long shadows over French society today.

The Town That Deleted Its Past

By Richard Carswell

The visitor to Vichy today will look in vain for the Hôtel du Parc, seat of Marshal Pétain’s government from 1940 to 1944. The building still exists. But there are no signs to indicate its former incarnation. It is now a block of offices, apartments, shops and the local tourist office, where an official will tell you—on request—that, yes, this was the site of the Hôtel du Parc. The only sign of the building’s association with the defunct regime is closed to the casual tourist.

Vichy versus France: A Defiant Refusal to Remember

By Kirrily Freeman

In this engaging book, Mallet examines the factors that shaped the wartime experiences of the town of Vichy (which was the provisional capital of France and seat of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government from 1940 to 1944), the responses of the local population, and the ways in which these experiences and responses have been remembered locally (or not remembered) since the end of World War II.

Life After War: Disturbed

By Amy Kaslow

This series transports you to a dozen countries, decades into their post-war years, providing historical context, spotlighting here and now conditions, and pointing to horizon issues.

“Translating Socio-Cognitive Models of Agency into Migration and Mental Health: A Framework for Individual and Community Empowerment” by Adam Brown and Evan Henritze

By Evan Henritze  and Adam Brown

The potential negative mental health consequences of forced migration is becoming increasingly recognized as an urgent issue in the context of international public health. Recent estimates show forcibly displaced people to be approximately 71 million worldwide. This crisis not only impacts those directly affected by forced migration, but also subsequent generations as well as non-immigrant populations of host countries whose health is closely associated with immigration policy.

A Conversation about Asylum Seekers in Germany and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen (2015) [Go, Went, Gone (2017)]

By Julie K. Allen, Chunjie Zhang, and Sabine Zimmermann

Inspired by an actual hunger strike conducted by African asylum seekers in Berlin in 2012, and published just as the Syrian refugee wave peaked in 2015, Erpenbeck’s novel centers on Richard, a recently retired Classics professor in Berlin, who befriends a group of African men trying to get the Berlin Senate to consider their applications for asylum and becomes gradually aware of the many challenges they face in trying to start their lives over in Europe.

October 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.

Narration on the Move

By Brittany Murray and Matthew Brill-Carlat

Together, these contributions indicate new ways to narrate forced migration, rooted in past actions of hospitality while remaining responsive to contemporary challenges. As these contributions demonstrate, the call to build sustainable models of defying borders is at the same time a call to rethink academic categories.

The Medieval University as Refuge

By Nancy Bisaha

As we witness one of the largest movements of people in world history, universities and colleges endeavor to provide refuge for scholars and students. They offer homes, short or long term, for people fleeing oppression, injustice, and poverty. They create a space for reflection upon the universal ideals of education and collective action toward attaining them. How and where did these notions arise?

Different and Related: Experiences from the Project “Monuments and Artworks in East-Central Europe Research Infrastructure (FoKO)”

By Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka and Emilia Kloda

The Mária Valéria bridge joins Esztergom in Hungary and Štúrovo in Slovakia, across the River Danube. Since its opening in 1895, the bridge has been destroyed twice, in 1919 and 1944. Decades of intransigence between the Communist governments of Hungary and Czechoslovakia mean that the bridge was not rebuilt until the new millennium.

European History Reloaded: The Case of Czechoslovak Communism

By Adéla Gjuričová

Even when reducing the issue to archives and other history-related footage, we miss an analytical understanding of what kind of material is actually attractive enough to circulate and how to find out. On what platforms and in what context does the re-use happen?

Likeable Pasts: Historical Urban Views on Facebook

By Piotr Kisiel

In the ever-expanding universe of Facebook, it is hard to keep track of all the features of the platform. However, it is one of its most basic functions that can be of interest to those working in “history from below” in the digital age.

Treasuring Medieval Manuscripts Then and Now

By Sarah Wilma Watson

The scope and framing of this collection raise a number of questions. How did these diverse “treasures” come to the UK? Why are these objects so valuable? And what does it mean that they are displayed in a “British” space?

Digitization of Memory and Politics in Eastern Europe

By Eszter Gantner and Olga Dovbysh

In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in digital technologies and their influence on the production of memory, history, and heritage, not only within academic research, but also in politics, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. The tendency toward selective history, heritage, and memory politics in the region manifests itself more and more in the digital sphere.

Thinking Heritage Digitally: Examples from Contemporary Serbia

By Stefan Trajković-Filipović

There are a number of ways in which one can explore the historical heritage of the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Apart from visiting museums or joining tours, a visitor can also download a smartphone application (available both for Android and iOS), titled Hidden places of Belgrade, developed by the Danube Competence Center, an association of tourism actors who are promoting Danube as a touristic destination.

September 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, Nick Ostrum, and Daniela Irrera.

Immigration Policy is Health Policy

By Elyas Bakhtiari

As rates of immigration have risen in recent years, so have questions and concerns about the health needs and care delivery challenges for newly arrived populations.

Public Health in Europe

By Sigrún Ólafsdóttir and Jason Beckfield

Health is a major political, cultural, and societal issue across Europe. While health and illness have, of course, always been a part of the human experience, the epidemiological transition from infectious, deadly diseases to the increased burden of chronic and mental health problems, has put various pressures and constraints on policy makers.

June 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.

The Multiple Ontologies of Surplus Food

By Megan Blake

Global estimates suggest that approximately one third of all food that is produced is wasted. Alongside this, a myriad of concerns, not least a concern for people who struggle to access food that is safe and healthy, has given rise to a host of organizations operating across the world that seek to move food that otherwise would be wasted from the commercial supply chain to the not-for-profit sector.

Brokers in the Fight Against Waste

By Isabelle Hajek

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the fight against waste in many industrialized countries. Discourses and documented analyses on growing masses of waste and their devastating consequences for natural and human milieus have received increased exposure.

Confronting Waste

By Hélène B. Ducros

Will we seize this moment as an opportunity to make strides in waste reduction and develop ecological solutions for surplus, unused, and rejected materials of all sorts, or will we simply seek out new trash havens elsewhere in the world?

Waste in Literature and Culture: Aesthetics, Form, and Ethics

By Susan Signe Morrison

Waste Studies offers ethical frameworks to pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste—material aspects of our world. As an aspect of the environmental humanities, Waste Studies expands traditional approaches of ecocriticism, once devoted to “nature,” a loaded and complex term.

May 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, and Daniela Irrera.

Reinventing European History to Show that Black Lives Do Matter

By Lydia Lindsey and Carlton Wilson

The xenophobic discourse that denounces the illegitimacy of a non-white presence in Europe is frequently justified by a denial of the historical contribution of non-white populations in the development of Europe, in particular, people of African descent.

Boxed In: Minority-Authored Films of Assimilation in an Irish Context

By Daniel Shea

The critical conversation concerning the migrant experience tends to focus on those countries on the front line: first-contact issues in Italy, capacity challenges in Germany, or right-wing responses in the United States. Ireland, at the edge of the EU and with only a fraction of the migrant refugee population, is often overlooked in context of conflicts in assimilation and minority status.

Survival within Survival in Ayşe Toprak’s Mr Gay Syria (2017)

By Ljudmila Bilkić

Sitting outside a tea house in Istanbul on a cold evening in early 2016, the Berlin-based Syrian journalist and gay rights campaigner Mahmoud Hassino discusses his intentions of sending the first Syrian gay man to Mr. Gay World, an annual international beauty pageant competition for gay men.

Shedding Waters: Cinematic Mediations of European Multiculture

By Matthew D. Miller

Once celebrated as a path-breaking project of peace, hope, and greater political cooperation in the new century, the unification of Europe under the auspices of the European Union appears, from the vantage-point of 2019, to be fraught with disunity, animosity, and peril.

Regional Identity in Contemporary Sardinian Writing

By Giovanni Dettori

In recent decades, the island of Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, has lived a cultural renaissance that has brought many Sardinian authors onto the national and international literary stage.

Coming to Terms with Controversial Memories in South Tyrol: The Monument to Victory of Bolzano/Boze

By Andrea Carlà and Johanna Mitterhofer

The richness of Europe’s cultural heritage and diversity is embodied in the striking monuments and historical buildings that dot the continent, but many of these artifacts also talk of difficult times and remind of the darker history of Europe—its wars, its violence, the sufferings of its people that lie behind today’s union of democratic nation-states.

April 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.

United in Diversity

By Randall Halle

“United in diversity” is the official motto of the EU. Yet this special issue appears at a moment when European unity seems distant, and diversity seems to foster disunion, conflict, and cultural clash, rather than accord. We may do well to recall that the motto reaches back to the immediate post WWII era and the attempts to overcome the cataclysm of the war.

March 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.

Forced Migration, Displacement, and the Liberal Arts

By Maria Höhn, Brittany Murray, and Nicole Shea

As institutions of higher learning, we are uniquely positioned to draw on our robust local, national, and international educational and cultural networks to prepare our students for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of forced migration and displacement. Indeed, the coming era of human movement will, without doubt, challenge our existing national and global institutions, and our students must be able to respond to these challenges with intelligence, compassion, and ingenuity.

Imagining Planetary Refuge

By Kerry Bystrom

From the Global North, and from Berlin specifically, the so-called “refugee crisis” and those seeking refuge from acute and structural violence are imagined through two key figures: the camp and the border. I will focus on the second.

#MeToo and the Weakness of Manhood

By Frederic Baitinger

The violence that underpins the sexual conduct reported by #MeToo has its roots in one of the most typical and commonly shared male fantasies: the fantasy of domination.

“I am Odysseus:” Tracing Mobile Desires and Resistance to Confinement Through Pseudonyms

By Árdís K. Ingvars

The common denominator within these stories is the elevated symbol of mobility (Salazar 2018). However, the stories around the names further reflect everyone’s fragility, thus illuminating the men’s wishes to be acknowledged as human beings with myriad experiences (Mallki, 1995), countering the defining criminalized image of men from the Middle-East in Europe. As Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) demonstrated, it is possible to trace power through shifting modes of resistance.

Nativist Nationalism and the Specter of Fascism in Italy

By Silvana Patriarca

The League wants to put the “Italians first.” But who are the Italians? Until recently, race was not mentioned explicitly when speaking of Italian identity. But these days even this post-Holocaust taboo seems to be on its way out, as the paranoid representation of immigration as an attempt at “ethnic substitution” and other language of this kind is spreading.

Italians First: The New Borders of European Humanity

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

Rethinking the Italian Self and normalizing its patriarchal core implies multiple approaches. Using religion as a tool of normalization of patriarchy, and re-establishing the infamous in critical feminist studies Madonna/Whore duality is one of them.

Photographing a Story in Negative Space: An Interview with Anthony Marchetti

Interviewed by June Brawner

I started this project by working with the few remaining photographs of Paul made shortly before my grandmother and her family left Europe for America. These provided actual evidence of this man, the missing person in my family’s narrative. I combined these family snapshots into a single piece titled Every Paul, presenting an accumulation of all visual evidence we still have of this man.

February 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, and Daniela Irrera.

Sanctions on Russia: Effectiveness and Impacts

By Nataliia Slobodian and Iryna Ptasnyk

We cannot expect sanctions to lead to surrender. The relevant question is rather: are sanctions changing the context in which Russia’s decisions are being made? Would we have achieved the Minsk package, even with its weakness of implementation, without sanctions?

Facing Floods in the Middle Ages

By Ellen Arnold

In the summer of 2018, a series of “hunger stones” in the Czech Republic’s Elbe River emerged, bearing warnings of the perils of drought and the vital importance of rivers.

Reflections on the Soviet Politics of Water in the 1930s

By Cynthia A. Ruder

If we consider the construction of the three European canals as part of the larger program to build a singularly Soviet space, albeit on the backs of slave laborers, then the consequences and subsequent apprehension of the canals remains no less important.

Climate Change, Water, and the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic

By Dagomar Degroot

These are momentous times in the history of our planet. Industrialized and industrializing nations, as well as  world-straddling corporations, are choking our atmosphere with greenhouse gases in such quantity that the whole Earth is warming with a speed, on a scale, unprecedented in the 300,000-year history of our species. Yet natural forces have repeatedly changed Earth’s climate during that long history, even before the onset of industrialization.

Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Water?

By Fernando Mercé

Today, there are approximately 4 billion people living in regions where the water supply is woefully inadequate. With about 663 million people without safe drinking water, scarcity has become a very real and complex challenge. Additionally, UNESCO estimates that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could fall under “water stress” conditions from increased demand and the impacts of climate change.

Desalination: Water for an Increasingly Thirsty World

By Geoffrey M. Geise

Within the next decade, water shortages are projected to affect 40 US states and effectively all Americans. The issue of water accessibility is not one limited to the US, however, as the problem of clean water availability has become more widely recognized in recent years. For example, the US National Academy of Engineering has recognized the urgent need to provide access to clean water as one of the “Grand Challenges for Engineering

Management of European Water Bodies: Approaching a Good Status?

By Ralf B. SchäferMira Kattwinkel, and Elisabeth Berger

Water has always been essential for human societies providing ecosystem services, such as drinking water, crop production through irrigation water, food, climate regulation, and recreation. The German sociologist Karl Wittfogel went so far as to suggest a connection between water and the evolution of the state, the so-called “hydraulic societies.” Today, water management is a key sector of environmental policy in Europe, and arguably the environmental sector with the highest aspirations.

A Legal Foundation: Critical to a Realized SDG 6 and Universal Access to Water and Sanitation

By Alexandra Campbell-Ferrari and Luke Wilson

It seems simple: water and sanitation are essential to life and livelihood, and thus everyone should have access to these basic necessities and services. But therein lays the challenge. They are services that demand resources, capacity, infrastructure, and governance to be safely and efficiently delivered. Services do not come free. And the reality is: it costs a lot to provide water and sanitation services, it is not easy to provide these services, and everyone should but not everyone can pay.

Water Quality Law in the US and EU: A Comparison of the Clean Water Act and Water Framework Directive

By Robin Kundis Craig

“Water management” can refer to several types of governmental activities. These include allocation of surface water use and depletion rights, allocation of groundwater use and depletion rights, control of surface water pollution, control of groundwater pollution, preservation or restoration of aquatic habitat and ecosystems, and regulation of development near and in waterbodies, including the destruction of wetlands and mangrove forests.

Water in Europe and the World

By Nicole Shea and Peter Debaere

Fresh water is essential for life. No plant, animal, or person can live without it. Because whatever we do requires a lot of water, cities and towns were initially built next to rivers or streams, and farmers grew crops where water was plentiful or accessible. Water abundance cannot be taken for granted any longer everywhere. A dry spell and record temperatures caught up with Europe this summer, testing farmers from Scandinavia and England as well as France, the Netherlands, Germany and southern European countries.

Seeking a Blue Urbanism: The Paradoxes of Blue Nature

By Timothy Beatley

We live on the Blue Planet, as oceanographers like Sylvia Earle remind us, but we are also increasingly the Urban Planet. How to reconcile these two realities, and how to integrate them into a unified vision of future cities is a major challenge and a topic I have been working on for many years.

The Governance of Transboundary Rivers Across the World

By Neda Zawahri

It may be argued that there is sufficient fresh water in our planet to meet basic human needs throughout the world, however, this water is unevenly distributed. For instance, regions containing large populations, such as the Middle East, North Africa, western portions of the United States, and northern portions of China all confront extreme shortages of fresh water.

“Make the Nation Look at our Demands:” The 2018 National Prison Strike and the Crises of Mass Incarceration

By Toussaint Losier

State officials did not simply build more prisons, but they commissioned increasingly secure, riot-proof facilities. These new prisons were designed to hold captive a population that might regularly exceed official capacity, while limiting the space in which imprisoned men and women might move about, congregate together, and, potentially, gain control of the institution.

Habitual Punishment: Family Detention and the Status Quo

By David Hernández

The problem with framing mass emigration of refugees and asylum seekers as one-off crises is that they demand one-off solutions—walls and fences, military deployments at the border, and deterrence that hinges on mass detention of families.

Notes on Teaching in Prison

By Julia Gardiner

I feel guilty, as usual, because I can leave and my students cannot. Razor wire glitters in the dark as I walk down the hill from the school building to the front gate. Not for the first time in my experience, I see a bus idling in the dark as women board, holding small bundles of their possessions.

Rationing Justice: Risk Assessment Instruments in the American Criminal Justice System

By Julie Ciccolini and Cynthia Conti-Cook

Naturally, in a system already primed for triage, actuarial risk assessment instruments are spreading rapidly. At nearly every stage of decision-making—including bail, program eligibility, sentencing, probation, prison classification, parole release and supervision—actuarial tools are assisting decision-makers to ration liberty and due process.

 

Damon’s Case and the Meaning of British Antislavery

By Padraic X. Scanlan

In practice, there was a law for the rich and a law for the poor in Britain. In the British Empire, there was a law for whites and another for everyone else. Courtrooms were officially blind to race, but racism was everywhere.

The Strange Career of the Artisanal Penitentiary

By Anne Kerth

The similarities between convict leasing and modern mass incarceration are uncomfortably clear: in both systems, convicts are cordoned off from larger society and coerced into the performance of menial labor, from which they gain neither profit nor personal advancement. In this version of history, slavery, convict leasing, and modern incarceration merge to form an unbroken legacy of American coercion of unskilled and easily replaced black labor.

Scottish Prisoners of War in Durham Cathedral: An Interview with Chris Gerrard

Interviewed by Christopher P. Gillett

Between June 9th and October 7th, 2018, the Palace Green Library of Durham University hosted the exhibition “Bodies of Evidence: How science unearthed Durham’s dark secret.” This display forms part of a much larger, interdisciplinary research project investigating the remains of seventeenth-century Scottish prisoners of war discovered in the grounds of the cathedral square in November 2013.

December 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Mihai Sebe (Political Science).

Crime and Punishment

By Christopher M. Florio and Nicole Shea

The study of crime and punishment is bound up with the study of a host of other subjects, ranging from social welfare to immigration to imperialism, from law to race relations to education. It is our hope that this issue helps readers to understand how crime and punishment have long been and continue to be entangled with virtually every side of human existence.

The Problem of Punishment in a Progressive Society

By Sarah Armstrong

Should mass imprisonment be applied as a general phenomenon that might arise anywhere, or should it be understood as a label for the unique experience of one country at one point in time? The distinctiveness of the US experience and the lack of a similar pattern elsewhere argue for the latter. No country in Europe has experienced post-war a scale of imprisonment (bar Russia with its gulag legacy) or a rate of growth anything like that observed in the US between the 1980s and 2000s.

November 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

Everyday Securitization: Prevention and Preemption in British Counter-Terrorism

By Tom Pettinger

The Prevent program tries to stop people becoming drawn into, supporting, or engaging in violence based on twenty-two supposed “signs of radicalization.”[4] The program has moved through several different iterations, focusing, in its early years, specifically on Muslim communities who were targeted with explicit funding, to a whole-of-society approach where specific community work has become less overt.

Preventing Extremism and Terrorism: Reporting on an Intervention in Secondary Schools

By Raymond SlotFrans Van AsscheSérgio Vieira, and Joana Vieira dos Santos

One specific psychological approach to understand the terrorist is not feasible, as terrorists differ widely in motivation, conviction, and objective. Consequently, trying to identify or profile terrorists within the general population based on psychological characteristics is a difficult task.

Britain First: Banned on Facebook but not Solved

By Lella Nouri

How do groups like Britain First use social media, and how does this result in such unprecedented popularity? Does social media bring out xenophobia in British society? Is Britain First really that popular? Is this thanks to its online strategy; and if so, what is their secret?

Mapping the Radical Right in Hungary

By Katherine Kondor

In a political environment so influenced by radical right elites, the number of radical right street-level and direct-action organizations is notable. Derivatively, in a county whose political atmosphere is becoming increasingly radicalized, on what grounds do radical right activist groups stand? In what way have the attitudes and aims of radical right street movements shifted in reflecting this change?

Between the “Street” and the “Salon,” the Local and the National: Mediating Intelligentsia and the German New Right in Dresden

By Julian Göpffarth

While Tellkamp and Grünbein are well-known figures in the German public sphere, and their debate received a lot of attention in the German mediascape, little attention is paid to less prominent, more local intellectuals. This is probably due to the tendency to associate the social concept of the “public intellectual” with a certain degree of grandeur or prestige, and a national or even global audience.

Protecting the Natural Environment? A Look at the Radical Right

By Bernhard Forchtner

When contemplating radical-right politics, whether past or present, few think about the fight against environmental degradation. Yet to consider radical-right perspectives on environmental issues and the natural environment more generally does provide an important insight into these actors’ ideas and practices.

October 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Thomas Nolden (Comparative Literature).

Hearing Hate: White Power Music

By Rob May 

The radical right is currently flourishing across the globe. Positioned at the extreme end of this ideological spectrum are Hitler worshipping neo-Nazis. Back in the 1980s, these white supremacists created their own genre of music – White Power – which has since become an essential ingredient of neo-Nazi skinhead propaganda.

Radicalism and Violence in Europe

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Nicole Shea, and Fabian Virchow

In this special issue, artists and authors take up these issues in a series of feature essays and works, short opinion pieces, and research reports, examining questions of radicalism and violence, prevention and intervention, and radicalization and de-radicalization across Europe and other parts of the world. The authors examine cases from Germany, France, Hungary, the U.K. and beyond, looking at social media, school-based interventions, the use of history by far groups, the role of public intellectuals, and more.

Terroir, Wine Culture, and Globalization: What Does Terroir do to Wine?

By Marion Demossier

Throughout the last decade, the global world of wine has seen a radical transformation, defined by the emergence of the concept of terroir as a space for renegotiation of past, present, and future ways of producing, selling, and consuming wine. But what is terroir? And why is it attracting so much interest from academics, producers, experts, and wine consumers?

Baltic Agriculture: The Political Economy of Extremes

By Anu Mai Kõll

Historically, the fate of the Baltic realm has been difficult. It served as a kind of Middle East of the North; inhabited by small ethnic groups with larger neighbors, which tended to play out rivalries fighting about their territory. German feudal lords, knights and barons, were a heritage from the crusades in Latvian- and Estonian-speaking areas in the thirteenth century.

“Let Them Eat Cake:” European Austerity, Food Insecurity, and Food Fraud

By Louise Manning

This article focuses on Europe and the interaction between food price spikes, economic downturn and political austerity, and the risk of reported food fraud. It is important to firstly consider the impact of the 2007-2008 financial crash on household food security and the role of food insecurity as a driver towards political instability.

Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Articulating a “Yes, BUT…!” Response to Lifestyle Veganism

By Richard White

One way to approach this question involves identifying and teasing apart two rather crude-but-important approaches of veganism. One is rooted in the “original” definition for veganism, which emerged in the UK in the 1940s. I will refer to this as “activist” veganism, one which inspires a more radical vision for veganism, encouraging greater critical reflection, awareness, and commitment to social justice issues than “the other” type of veganism, namely “lifestyle,” or “corporate” veganism

The Moral Economies of Agricultural Production and the Role of Property Relations

By Angela Cacciarru

How do diverse property systems work in order to ensure access to land and the management of local resource? What role do moral economies play beyond property? Von Benda-Beckmann and Wiber find these questions intriguing, and argue that property regimes cannot be expressed by any one-dimensional political, economic, or legal model: they are multi-dimensional and multi-functional.

From Disturbing to Disrupting? Cultured Meat and Early 21st Century Veganism

By Erik Jönsson

As a number of scholars have noted, cultured (or “in vitro,” or “clean”) meat is, today, a confusing technology, shot through with ontological ambiguity. What cultured meat eventually could become, and what cultured meat is today, are both uncertain. Moreover, in making sense of cultured meat in relation to (particular forms of) contemporary veganism, cultural and technological processes visibly entangle.

Food Citizenship? Collective Food Procurement in European Cities

By Cristina Grasseni

Collective food procurement defines the production, distribution, and consumption of food with a participatory dimension: for example community gardens, but also new entrepreneurship based on urban agriculture, as well as broader projects governing food markets or allotments at municipal level.

A Conversation About Urban Agriculture

By Christine Aubry and Baptiste Grard

Through this conversation, we can see that urban agriculture is an open door to delve into many issues around the functioning and development of urban environment: food provisioning, habitat fragmentation, soil waterproofing, waste recycling, well-being, social linkages, etc.

September 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).

Food, Food Systems, and Agriculture

By Hélène B. Ducros

The articles and interviews included here clearly convey that food stands as an entry point into a wide range of contemporary and historical debates that touch all humans. What is more, they also indicate that food operates as a spatial and temporal link across a complex web of interconnected social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, demographic, nutritional, and physiological topics

Superfood or Dangerous Drug? Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in the Late 17th Century

By Ken Albala

We are all too familiar today with the wildly exaggerated health claims made for so-called super foods. Often based loosely on clinical research, the underlying motivation for these claims is, of course, selling new products. Foods are likewise demonized with the same motives, here too pushing a new line and maximizing profit underlies the latest fad diets that ban whole classes of food.

Famine and Dearth in Medieval England

By Phillipp Schofield

While we have a general sense of famine events in this period and some inroads into exploring the extent and impact of famine and dearth, there is also a great deal we do not know about famine in the middle ages. In fact, our ignorance in regards to famine reflects a more general gap in our understanding of medieval society.

Anxiety in Our Times

By Jordi Torrent

Many studies and experts are pointing that the main reason of the increase of anxiety in our society (particularly in youth, but not only) are the uses we are making of contemporary media, in particular of social media.

Digital Strangers at Our Door: Moral Panic and the Refugee Crisis

By Sandra Ponzanesi

The status of Europe, which is supposed to welcome so-called “legitimate” refugees, is itself so very precarious at the moment; instead of identification with the needy, this has led to antagonism, ambivalence and fear, often erupting into pure xenophobia, expertly manipulated by right-wing demagogues and anti-immigration parties

Toward a Strengths-Based Approach to Mitigating our Anxiety Culture

By Beatrice L. Bridglall

It appears that our ability to moderate anxiety over accelerations in climate change, may hinge on what we believe and how we perceive this issue. Cognitive scientists suggest the value of reframing our mental maps in efforts to process our fears and dilemmas more constructively and positively.

Do Our Concepts of Bilingual Education Match the Anxieties of Migrants?

By Bàrbara Roviró and Patricia Martínez-Álvarez

Anxieties related to the parenting experience for migrant families are complicated by multiple factors, some of which are perceived as being life-threatening, and thus, at times, prioritized over any others (e.g., making a living, finding a home, having someone to care for their children, paying their bills, or avoiding police prosecution, among others).

Migration, Europe, and Staged Affect-Scenarios

By Paul Mecheril and Monica van der Haagen-Wulff

Lacan’s ideas establish the theoretical framework in which subjectivization and identity formation can be understood, not merely in the solipsistic process of the self, but rather as a constant “mirror dynamic.”

Robotics and Emotion

By Stephan Habscheid, Christine Hrncal, Jens Lüssem, Rainer Wieching, Felix Carros, and Volker Wulf

One of the commonplaces in the debate on technological innovation is that interpretations and expectations, emotions and assessments with which people encounter new technologies, differ considerably in cultural terms. In the public debate in Germany, for example, it is often claimed that robots in Japan are generally already anchored much more widely and consensus-based in society, and that instead of the fears, anxiety, and skepticism towards robotic technology, which are characteristic for Germany, trust in and gratitude towards technology prevail in Japan.

Anxiety Culture

By Nicole Shea and Emmanuel Kattan

The challenges of climate change, pandemics, mental illness, rapid technological change and its impact on work and individual freedom, migration and its social and political consequences are not always best understood under the prism of “crisis.” Rather, they seep into our collective consciousness, building on an increased sense of insecurity and powerlessness and shaping our relationships with others and the world.

Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs?

By Michael I. Schapira, Ulrich Hoinkes, and John P. Allegrante

There are many consequences of living in this state of anxiety on an individual or collective level. Invoking crisis or danger tends to speed up our thinking and lend a sense of urgency to our actions, but might this come at the expense of a deeper understanding of the changing face of our societies?

July 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Nick Ostrum (History), and Thomas Nolden (Literature).

Central Asia in the Age of Connectivity

By Alberto Turkstra

At a time when other regions and geopolitical hotspots are dominating the political and media headlines, Central Asia has been quietly taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities deriving from the region’s increasingly central role in the numerous connectivity initiatives and corridors that are traversing Eurasia, of which China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a primary example.

16+1: The EU’s Concerns of a Chinese ‘Trojan Horse’

By Eamonn Butler 

In July 2018, Bulgaria, fresh off the back of its EU Presidency, will host the seventh annual summit for “Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries.” More commonly known 16+1 Initiative, it is a diplomatic platform coordinated by China, to support institutional coordination of relations between China and sixteen countries from the Central and East European (CEE) region.

The EU and China: Prospects of Cooperation on Climate and Energy

By Alexandra-Maria Bocse

The EU also cooperates with China towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement in the framework of initiatives such the Clean Energy Ministerial, a global forum promoting policies and sharing best practices in order to accelerate the transition to clean energy.

Roads, Belts, and Connectivities: Chinese Silk Road Projects in New Perspective

By Madeleine Herren

Chinese news is presenting the new silk road project with a strong reference to a deep historical past, imaging the silk road as a bustling trading route established centuries ago. The narrative usually does not mention the very fact that the concept of a silk road in the sense of a coherent trading route only surfaced as recently as 1877.

The Politics of Studying Europe in China

By Ralph Weber and Silvana Tarlea

It is difficult to disregard the importance of the relationship between Europe and China. The European Union (EU) is China’s biggest trading partner and China is the EU’s second-biggest trading partner after the United States. In order to enhance and consolidate relations with China, the EU has provided considerable research funding to Chinese universities over the years.

June 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

Europe-China Relations

By Eamonn Butler and Nicole Shea

It has been more than 40 years since the first formal, diplomatic relations between China and the European Union (EU) were established. In the subsequent years, relations between these two global economic powerhouses have significantly developed, with both the EU and China publishing and implementing a number of communiqués intended to build and strengthen partnership.

Public Spaces, Urban Heritage, and Politics

By Cor Wagenaar

Only in the late eighteenth century, curing patients was identified as the primary function of hospitals, and the provision of clean air as the best tool to do so. This view was propagated by medical doctors and produced buildings in which medicine, paradoxically, only played a marginal role.

Linked by Research: Berlin and St. Petersburg

By Eszter Gantner

We consider urban interventions to be practices in which the most diverse participants make their socio-political positions and genuine private interests clear and visible and exert their influence on the public space.

Commoning in Action: Walking in St. Petersburg, Urban Gardening in Istanbul

By Ayse Erek

Debates on the shrinking public space in Istanbul are not new. Since the last two decades, they have been crystalized in relation to the topics such as the regeneration of old neighborhoods, protecting heritage, the right for the waterfronts and green spaces, as well as the public but unused spaces, revived with old or new ways of usages.

May 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

Contemporary Urban Research in the European City

By Nicole Shea and Eszter Gantner

By now, urban public spaces have become strongly contested resources in present European cities, where multiple agents are claiming the right to these spaces. Reacting to this development, this special issue concentrates on European cities, focusing on their public spaces, their histories and their rich heritages.

Soviet Communists on the Factory Floor: 1926–1941

By Yiannis Kokosalakis

The question thus remained; what did Lenin’s vanguard actually do? One of the most influential social historians of the Stalin period described party activism as a paradox, pointing out that the many thousands of communist rank-and-filers were representatives of political authority, but their activities brought them to conflict with functionaries of the state everywhere.

April 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Katrine Ogaard Jensen; Kayla Maiuri; Nordic Voices

New Nordic Voices

By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Kayla Maiuri

A selection of emerging writers from Nordic countries—Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Faroe Islands.

“Eurafrica” is Dead: In Fact, It Never Existed

By Veit Bachmann

The term “Eurafrica” invokes a global panregion that has long and pervasively been a fantasy of imperialistic geopolitics, yet that has never existed. First, the spatial construction of panregions is in itself problematic as it describes a “large functional area linking core states to resource peripheries and cutting across latitudinal distributed environmental zones” and is thus inherently exploitative and imperial. Second, it is superficial, incomplete, and possibly essentializing as it suggests a homogeneity that has never existed.

A Forgotten Colony: Equatorial Guinea and Spain

By Adriana Chira

In our geographic imaginaries, Spanish colonialism tends to be mapped onto South America. But the last Spanish colony to claim independence from Spain in 1968 was a territory in West Africa—Equatorial Guinea

Layering Over the Wounds of Algeria in Contemporary Pied-Noir Art

By Amy L. Hubbell 

France’s former French citizens of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs, include one of Europe’s largest diaspora communities in the twentieth century. This diverse group of people settled in Algeria during the colonial years, and after one-hundred and thirty years of French colonial rule, Algeria fought for and won its independence in 1962. The seven-year war was traumatic for both the Algerians and the French living in the colony, and nearly one million people crossed the Mediterranean during and after the war to make a new home in France.

Behind the Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean: Five Years After Lampedusa, Political Incoherence and Dysfunction Continues to Kill

By Anna Arnone and David O’Kane

Certain historical incidents can crystallize and condense the reality of an entire era. The mass drowning of at least 500 migrants, mostly Eritrean, near the island of Lampedusa on the third of October 2013, was one such incident. It was part of a wider set of political logics that characterize this era, logics that include those described by Barbara Pinelli in her ethnography of the conditions endured by asylum seekers in the reception centers of the Italian state.

Scrambling for Africa, Again: Germans in Kenya

By Nina Berman

Across the world, the effects of neoliberal capitalism and anthropocentric excesses act as stressors on people and their natural habitat. On the sub-Saharan African continent, neoliberal economic development, in conjunction with economic and political programs of authoritarian postcolonial rulers, have increased the economic and social precarity of the urban and rural poor.

A Brief History of Dutch in Africa

By Michael Meeuwis

Dutch has been present in South Africa since the establishment in 1652 of the first permanent Dutch settlement around what is now Cape Town. In the decades and centuries that followed, the Dutch spoken there, detached from its ancestor in Europe, underwent internal developments as well as influences from other languages.

March 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).

 

Beyond Eurafrica: Encounters in a Globalized World

By Hélène B. Ducros

With this special feature, EuropeNow confirms the web of connectivity that exists between nations of Europe and nations of Africa, as not only rooted in geopolitics and global economic flows, but also increasingly in global cultural flows, which support the enduring linkages and reciprocal influences between the two continents and shape the ways in which both Africans and Europeans apprehend the local and the global.

Globalization Under Fire

By Peter Debaere

Under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” Trump took every opportunity to call for more protectionism and to blame “bad trade deals” for the predicament of the United States.

Dark: Energy Politics in an Age of Latency

By Samantha Fox

Dark, with its drama centered on the consequences of nuclear energy production—social and economic consequences, in addition to those more speculative and supernatural—illustrates the degree to which changing energy politics serve as the backdrop to everyday life in Germany. One hopes that the show can export Germany’s attention to energy politics to an international audience.

The Rise of Nativism in Europe

By Jan Willem Duyvendak and Josip Kesic 

Wilders has not only dominated the public sphere in the Netherlands for more than fifteen years, but has also become a prominent voice in transnational anti-Islam circles.

The European Union, Spain, and the Catalan Question: An Affair Beyond the Spanish Border?

By Juan Andrés García Martín

Since the economic crisis began, Catalan nationalism has abandoned its traditional cooperation with the central government. This radicalization happened under the argument of lack of economic assistance, the impossibility of recognizing of its particularities, and political repression, leading towards a unilateral policy. Moreover, Catalan nationalism identified not only a foreign enemy — Spain — but domestic enemies — those who support unity with Spain.

Poland, a “Normal” European Country

By Agnieszka Pasieka

Among numerous questions that have been posed after recent electoral successes of conservative, right-wing, populist parties at least one seems to be repeated ad nauseam: “Who voted for them?” Whether this question is asked on the occasion of a dinner among friends, an academic conference, or a business meeting, it tends to provoke a somewhat comforting reaction: those who committed “such terrible electoral mistakes” were misled, driven by emotions (usually “anger” and “fear”), and deluded by hopes of economic gains.

Between Nativism and Indigeneity in the Kabyle Diaspora of France

By Jonathan Harris

Nativism and nationalist populism, despite Macron’s 2017 victory over the Front National, are a significant part of contemporary French politics. Popular concerns about the weakening power of the nation-state to control the economic and demographic effects of globalization contribute to xenophobic, and particularly Islamophobic, attitudes in broader contemporary French state and society, predominantly directed at France’s large Maghrebi postcolonial diaspora.

Reflections on the Czech Election

By Jan Čulík

Zeman’s victory is a sign of the emergence of politics of parasitism as a mainstream political strategy within Central Europe in general, and the Czech Republic in particular. Both Miloš Zeman and most Czech politicians have realized that in order to gain substantial political support amongst voters, they no longer need to develop strategies for the solution of many of the existing, often intractable, social problems. The only thing they need to do in order to gain influence and money is to peddle fear.

The Essence of our Era: Yukio Mishima, Steve Bannon, and the Alt-Right

By Christopher Impiglia 

What the alt-right still lacks is a leader that can not only champion many of its ideals and bring them to the forefront of the political debate, but outright embraces it in return; despite flattering calls of “Heil Trump,” at Charlottesville, the president has increasingly distanced himself from the alt-right, most recently by ousting their mouthpiece—Bannon—from the White House, although his policies and consistent, racist comments continue to reveal clear alt-right sympathies.

The Power of Narrative: An Interview with Mikkel Rosengaard

Interviewed by Morten Høi Jensen

In democratic nations there is usually a multitude of narratives about people in power, but in these one-man dictatorships there’s just one, and its usually very warped and far-fetched. So I was very interested in the idea of Ceaușescu’s narrative in Romania, and of how one’s own narrative about one’s life clashes with that larger, overpowering official narrative. And then, of course, there’s the fact that, from a storytelling perspective, in a world in which these very rigid rules are imposed on you there’s much more at stake.

February 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

Nationalism, Nativism, and the Revolt Against Globalization

By Manuela AchillesKyrill Kunakhovich, and Nicole Shea

This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging.

December 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

Diversity, Security, Mobility: Challenges for Eastern Europe

By Nicole Shea and Peter Haslinger

In this special anniversary edition of EuropeNow, curators Peter Haslinger and Nicole Shea highlight the importance in research and culture of smaller central and eastern European regions. The research presented here assesses the concepts, paradigms, and methods for the re-evaluation of multi-ethnicity, diversity, and mobility in a globalized and “post-factual” era, and seeks to identify factors and agencies that help to explain the current trends towards the obsession with security agendas.

Russia’s ‘Myth’ of Equality in a Securitized Context

By Federica Prina

Russia is an exceptionally vast and heterogeneous country with high levels of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, and a complex federal structure. The Russian empire already saw an intermingling of peoples, encompassing Slavic, Scandinavian, and Asiatic groups, with various forms of hybridization, multilingualism, and cultural cross-fertilization.

Securitizing the Unknown Borderlands: Czechoslovak Subcarpathian Rus and Its Minorities

By Sebastian Paul

The Subcarpathian Rus is still a region for specialists. For hundreds of years, together with Slovakia, the territory of later Subcarpathian Rus embodied the northeastern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Until 1918, it was the neighboring region to Habsburg Galicia, and in the Interwar Period, it formed Czechoslovakia’s eastern borderland to the reestablished Polish state.

Why Europe Needs Political Economy

By Gregory W. Fuller

Fuller considers how European policymakers have relied too much on “mainstream” economic analysis in the design and re-design of eurozone governance structures.

The City is in Ruins

By Salvatore Settis

“The city is in ruins.” In European cultural memory, these simple words have, sometimes, a literal sense (either narrative or descriptive)—when we talk about wars, insurrections, and natural disasters, for instance. More often, they have a strong metaphorical relevance according two complementary directions.

The Accidental Keynesian: How Refugee Spending in Sweden Challenged Austerity, Put the Local Fiscal Houses In Order and Proved Beneficial to All

By Peo Hansen

“Despite Sweden’s sizeable refugee reception, its economy is doing exceptionally well.” This line has been repeated on countless occasions over the past year or so. By the government, experts, and pundits — from right to left. As the president of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation put it a little while ago: “Despite an unstable world and a refugee emergency, Sweden’s economy is performing very well.” Despite?

November 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Literature), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

Political Economy on TARGET

By Waltraud Schelkle

Albeit an arcane institution, TARGET, the cross-border payments system of the euro area, is a good example for how economics and political economy can be combined to advance our understanding of European integration.

The Crises of European Integration

By Erik Jones, Regine Paul, and Nicole Shea

The inescapable politics of knowledge production about and for a Europe in crisis demands scholarly transparency. In this issue, we consider the value and limits of their disciplinary perspectives in explaining the recent crises of European Integration. We nail our colors to the mast by arguing that a political economy approach is valuable – and ought to be cherished – for seeing more than just economics vs. politics at play in explaining crisis and navigating Europe’s future.

What Prospects for Change to Achieve a Sustainable EU Migration Policy?

By Elif Çetin

Europe is facing the largest humanitarian disaster since the end of World War II. Even though the European governments, in an attempt to address public feelings of insecurity about immigration, seek to project themselves as able to manage international migration effectively, the objectives and outcomes of their immigration and border control policies do not always overlap.

Narratives of Belonging: Polish Immigrants in the UK After Brexit

By Agnieszka Kulesa

Despite fears related to the increase in hate crime numbers following the EU referendum, and the uncertainty around their future residency status, immigrants from Poland will not abandon their established lives in the UK as willingly as the Brexit supporters would wish to see.

October 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Lillian Klein (Literature).

Governing the Migration Crisis

By Jennifer Elrick, Oliver Schmidtke, and Nicole Shea

We have seen two opposing trends across Europe: On the one hand, civil society has demonstrated a great degree of compassion with the plight of refugees, organizing local welcome committees and, in the Canadian case, even putting pressure on the government to accept more refugees from Syria as a fundamental humanitarian commitment of the country. On the other hand, the populist Right has exploited the influx of so many refugees for their political mobilization.

Lviv in Wartime

By John Lindner

I see only the two small feet of a child, who had just been previously feigning sleep, walk across the stage below a hovering curtain. They are met at the wings by a pair of adult shoes when the lights turn on for intermission.

A Transnational Place-based Label for the “Glocal Village”

By Hélène B. Ducros

By the early 1980s, some rural mayors in France came to the realization that their villages were dying. In spite of a strong attachment to the rural in the French collective imaginary, many factors had contributed to rural decline and exodus since the early twentieth century.

Europe and Island Tourism

By Godfrey Baldacchino

In the wake of the Greek “financial crisis,” some observers were surprised to note that the Greek islands, with their less-developed economic fabric, weathered the storm much better than their urban counterparts.

Ten Years After Romania’s Entry into the EU

By Aura Socol

When Romania joined the EU it implicitly assumed responsibility for adopting the euro. After ten years, contrary to what was expected, East European states including Romania meet the nominal criteria for being accepted in the Eurozone while states from the Eurozone itself do not.

September 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Julian Garritzmann (Political Science).

U.S.-E.U. Relations in the Face of Brexit and Trump: An Interview with Joseph Grieco

Interviewed by Daniela Irrera

Realism is certainly helpful in making sense of the recent return of great-power tensions. However, many important aspects of world politics today require close attention to domestic institutions and political processes—I’m thinking of the revolt against globalization and the rise of populism in Britain, the USA, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Tourism: People, Places & Mobilities

By Hélène B. Ducros and Katrine Øgaard Jensen

In Europe, from the time of religious pilgrimages or journeys to spa towns for thermal treatments, all sorts of people have undertaken recreational travel since at least the Middle-Ages, even if motivations differed. But, it is with the industrial revolution that tourism took on a new face with the practice of the tour. Later, the emergence of paid leave in many places gave the impetus for the first mass tourists.

Morten Høi Jensen

Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno

By Morten Høi Jensen

One of the central conflicts of Bellow’s novels is the apparent incommensurability of Old World thinking with the demonic pace of American society. The country’s big cities become a sort of battleground of Big Ideas. Bellow once wrote movingly of his discovery of the classics of European literature and philosophy as a young man darting about the streets of Depression-era Chicago.

Homonegativity in Eastern Europe

By Catherine Bolzendahl and Ksenia Gracheva

Stagnating and declining of tolerance toward homosexuality in Eastern Europe should be alarming to anyone taking note of changes in Europe. It represents not only disparate perspectives on sexuality and freedom of personal identity, but also signifies a cultural and political rift between Western and Eastern Europe that may be deepening. Growing intolerance could be a symptom of a dangerous divide between East and West, rooted in political disenchantment and subsequent mutual rejection.

The European Refugee Crisis and the Myth of the Immigrant Rapist

By Caitlin Carroll

In the “myth of the immigrant rapist,” white women’s bodies are seen as in need of protection by a paternalist state from the sexual violence of brown men. In the case of Europe’s refugee crisis, this protection took the form of closing borders and harshening immigration policies, including curtailing family reunification for refugees.

“A Beautiful Night with Marine:” Marine Le Pen and Gender-Hegemonic Charisma

By Dorit Geva

Why would FN members link such narratives of Marine Le Pen’s feminine and masculine virtues alongside their virulent criticism of the European Union, Muslim immigrants, and political elites? How is a woman who is viewed as the beloved political daughter, the quintessential femme moderne, and at the same time as the new Charles de Gaulle, treated as the most potent cure to France’s political and economic woes? Why, in sum, do populist supporters emphasize such gendered virtues in their everyday discourses around their beloved leader?

The Alt-Right

Produced by Daniel Goulden

In this episode of the EuropeNow podcast we explore the murky world of the alt-right, the online movement dedicated to opposing multiculturalism and globalization. We’ll take a look at how the alt-right formed, the factors that led to their rapid rise, and how they advance their motives. Welcome to the EuropeNow Podcast.

Recognizing the Revolution: Thoughts on Genetic Distractions to Prenatal Care

By Shelley Grant

It is entirely possible that Europe, although in the midst of many grand debates on the acceptability of social sexual performances, is also unwittingly leading a sexual revolution on the microscopic level. The profundity of integrating the benefits of technology advances into pregnancy care may seem compelling. Yet, the incrementalization of pre-birth care may cause socially disorienting, disagreeable, and demanding effects.

 

The Gender of Power

By Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Kayla Maiuri, and Gill Allwood

Given the severity of challenges facing Europe, from Brexit and the Trump administration’s thinly veiled hostility to the EU and NATO, to the on-going influx of refugees and the rise of populism, writing about gender and sexuality might seem quaint, even indulgent to some people. They would be mistaken. Any thorough examination of the political, social, and economic situation of Europe in the early twenty-first century takes gender and sexuality seriously.

July 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Muireann O’Dwyer (Political Science).

The Role of Values in EU Governance

By Shumail Javed

“Human dignity,” Drowet makes the comparison, is “what the precautionary principle was in the 90s, and dignity is becoming the symbol of Europe in the European Framework of values.”

From Interinstitutional Competition to Interinstitutional Collaboration

By Stéphane Charitos, Christopher Kaiser, and Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl

In response to rapidly changing conditions in higher education, an increasing number of institutions of colleges and universities are exploring the potential for collaborative models of course and program sharing to help them meet their academic goals.

Collaboration in Refugee Education: Field Notes from Bard College Berlin

By Kerry Bystrom with Marion Detjen

The following “field notes” give a glimpse into the College’s engagement in education and forced migration since 2015, when our PIE-SC plans crystallized, by profiling one pilot project created with the current and future cohorts of students with a forced migration background in mind.

Sustainability & Innovation

By Maria Höhn and Nicole Shea

In this challenging time of governmental retrenchment—with its accompanying cuts to the Arts and Humanities—many foundations have been stepping up and pivoting their missions to a defense of democratic values and shared cultural heritages. At the same time, institutions of higher learning, think tanks, artists, policy makers, and NGOs have been reimagining their mission and innovating new models of collaboration not only among like-minded institutions, but across disciplines and national boundaries.

June 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Özden Ocak (Sociology).

Encircling the Now by Felix Meyer-Christian

By Felix Meyer-Christian

Within the context of the world-wide refuge crisis, as well as the rising populism in the U.S. and Europe, one can clearly observe a distinct re-politicization of artists and their works, and the question of how to deal with the current state of uncertainty and urgency has been strongly reinforced in artistic discourse.

Facing the Anthropocene

By Hélène B. Ducros

Our global dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, intense resource extraction economies, genetic manipulations, air, soil, and water contamination, and byproducts of modernity such as waste material like plastics and other synthetic polymers have caused great disturbances in the Earth ecosystems on which many species depend, including the human species.

May 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Kelly McKowen (Anthropology), and Mihai Sebe (Political Science).

Thomas Mann in America

By Morten Høi Jensen

Wary of the youthful temptations of novelty, Mann argued eloquently for a political-spiritual renaissance, a rekindling of faith in the long project of democracy. He reminded his audience that it was “your American statesmen and poets such as Lincoln and Whitman who proclaimed to the world democratic thought and feeling, and the democratic way of life, in imperishable words.”

The European Union at 60: The Future Will be Brighter Than Many Expect

By Roland Benedikter and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski

The European Union is marking the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which was signed on 25 March 1957. But is there a bleak future for the integration process? Roland Benedikter and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski argue that the EU is in a significantly healthier position than it appears, and that far from grinding to a halt, European integration will continue to be relevant in the coming decades.

Can We Talk? Neuroscientists and Humanists on Memory

By Angelika Bammer

The strength and potential of memory research arguably lies in its interdisciplinary scope: the fact that it brings people from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences together to identify problems and explore solutions. But this cross-disciplinary collaboration is often easier said than done.

World War I and Historical Memory

By Carl Strikwerda

World War I created a watershed in world history. It punctured belief in progress and radically shifted art, theology, psychology, and literature.

April 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

March 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Samantha Lomb (History), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma

By Nicole Shea and Turhan Canli

In political analysis, scientific inquiry, literature, poetry, language, and the arts, we examine the loss of culture and identity and the effects of trauma on the human mind, as well as the healing power of artistic expression.

President Donald Trump EuropeNow

Trump Against Europe

By Morten Høi Jensen

It would take many rigorous and carefully administered lessons in world history to cover the vast and chilling tundra of President Trump’s ignorance. European history might not be a bad place to start, however, especially if you believe, as President Trump does, that the European Union was created in order to “beat the United States when it comes to trade,” or that it is merely “a vehicle for Germany.”

President Donald Trump EuropeNow

Confronting the Terrorist/Refugee Narrative

By James Fitzgerald

This article critically interrogates the “terrorist/refugee” narrative that has become a mainstay of increasingly right-wing political and (social) media discourse. It contextualizes the conflation of “refugees” with “terrorists” by reference to logics of contemporary counterterrorism practices, which tend to securitize entire populations based on the threat that they might produce.

Untranslated Fire: Francophone Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks

By Arturo Desimone

The November 13, 2015 attack summoned unlikely mourners from the political elite. A towering human mausoleum rose above the French ground-zero, propped with flags of causes that were alien and alienating to the leftist ideology of the Hebdo family, whose hard-earned infamy had preceded them for decades, only to be trivialized into consensus and tricolor shrouds.

The History of Migration in Europe

Produced by Daniel Goulden

In this episode of the Europe Now Podcast, we take a look at the refugee crisis in Europe from a historical perspective. We’ll travel to the last ice age, the Roman Empire, and America during WWI to discuss other refugee crises and look at their effects.

February 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Ozden Ocak (Sociology), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).

Praise the Mutilated World

By Morten Høi Jensen

The experience of the people of Lvov is an important rejoinder to the resurgent ethnic nationalism now tightening its grip on Europe—with its nostalgia for some illusory cultural and ethnic homogeneity, for a lost golden age that never existed and to which it would not be desirable to return if it did.

Yet Another Greco-German Imbalance

Reviewed by Angelos-Stylianos Chryssogelo

The first half is a Keynesian analysis of the flaws of the Eurozone architecture; the second half is a condensed political program of how a country could negotiate and implement an exit from the euro.

Missing Chances for Change

Reviewed by Shawn Donnelly

Instead of focusing on stable prices as the benchmark of a working monetary union, Flassbeck and Lapavitsas argue for coordination of unit labour costs instead, following observations of how economic growth in Europe closely follows wage growth.

Calling to Arms But Leaving Ammunition Behind

Reviewed by Michele Chang

Written in an accessible style, this hybrid treatment risks not engaging extensively enough with economic theory (there are not a lot of references for the various economic arguments they mention, for example) to convince those who are not already sympathetic to their cause.

Borgen and the Double Bind: The Haunted Princesses of the Danish Castle

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

The series became a hit in many European countries and later in the USA. John Powers, a reporter from the US National Public Radio claims that Borgen is Denmark’s West Wing (but even better). Borgen harvested an impressive amount of international awards in various categories—ranging from Best Drama Series and specifically Best European Drama TV Series to the Outstanding Actress in the Drama Series by Sidse Babett Knudsen (better known to the audience as Birgitte Nyborg).

Brexit EuropeNow

Past Imperfect: The Brexit Gamble

By Jacob Høi Jensen

In their desperate attempt to promote a vision of a United Kingdom, which is based on a glorified and nostalgic interpretation of the past, Brexiteers have unleashed a process that risks upending the legal, economic, and political foundations of the modern UK. Furthermore, they have yet to offer a coherent and realistic vision of what will replace it.

January 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Julian Garritzmann (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

Sunlight and Arrows: Five Invocations for the Silent Muse

By Dan Beachy-Quick

In the summer of 2012, James Eagan Holmes walked from the midnight alley through the propped open door of the movie theater into which he would throw gas canisters and, wearing a black assault vest, his hair dyed an acid orange, he opened fire.

The Past Makes Its Appearance Once Again

By Christopher Impiglia

Mussolini’s skewed image of the past and his romanticizing of Imperial Rome, without considering its flaws and understanding the reasons for its downfall, ultimately helped lead to his downfall.

December 2016

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Hélène Ducros (Geography), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Neglecting Health Inequalities in Germany

By Nadine Reibling

Unlike other rich countries in Europe, such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, or the Netherlands, Germany has no comprehensive political strategy or program that specifically aims to reduce such inequalities. Political attempts to address health inequalities are limited to small health promotion initiatives targeted at socially disadvantaged groups.

Secularism and Religion: The Attempted Coup in Turkey

By Tayfun Kasapoglu

The power struggle between secularists and “Islamists” has marked the history of Turkish politics. In this struggle, the Turkish military has acted as the guardian of the state, staging coups and banning certain political parties and figures in order to protect the secular system of the country (Jung 2008).

Political Landscape in Turkey: Suspicion Against the Hizmet Movement

By Mette Fallesen

It is almost impossible to speak of Turkish politics without to some degree addressing the conspiracy theories regarding the inner workings of the state. By calling them conspiracy theories, I intend to draw attention to how they are formed and in what way they reflect on how the state is imagined.

The Politics of Health Equity in Europe

By Courtney McNamara and Jennifer J. Carroll

The essays presented in this special feature address the growing public and political concern over increasing levels of social stratification and reveal the political relevance of health inequalities across Europe. Specifically, we asked health inequality experts to reflect on some of the biggest challenges surrounding health inequalities in different European countries.

November 2016

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

What is Europe?

Produced by Daniel Goulden

Welcome to the EuropeNow Podcast. In this inaugural episode we try to answer the seemingly simple question: What is Europe? We’ll take a look at the geographic, historical, and political definitions of Europe and see if any of them are satisfactory. We’ll also take a look at the potential for the dream of a unified Europe and the threats to that dream.