dispatch

By Alan Matthews

The rightward shift in the center of gravity in the Parliament and Council may favor farm income over environmental objectives.

By Nicole Scicluna

Long dismissed as “second order” elections, of little consequence to Europeans let alone anyone else, the EP elections will play a key role in shaping the EU’s trajectory over the coming years, including in foreign policy.

By Craig Willis and David Smith

In some member states, governance at national or regional levels has already threatened the rights of national and linguistic minorities.

By Pierre Haroche

I propose a three-phase periodization of the relationship between Europe and the world that could serve as a basis for future research into the global history of Europe. They correspond to three paradigms in the Europe–world relationship, three levels of the centrality of Europe in the world, and highlight the fundamental reversal by which Europe made the world and the world made Europe.

By Paul O’Keefe

In recent years Europeans have increasingly voiced concerns about the high levels of migration their respective countries are experiencing. In 2015, almost a decade ago, the European Commission’s Eurobarometer poll indicated that 58 percent of Europeans thought of immigration as the most pressing issue for the European Union.

By Pekka Tuominen

Helsinki can feel quite desolate on winter mornings. It is in January 2017 that I started conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Kontula, a district on the urban periphery of Helsinki with a notoriously negative reputation.

By Kirsten Wesselhoeft and Sam Cavagnolo

In 2023, an estimated 117 million people were displaced from their homes worldwide. Europe alone received more than 1.1 million asylum applications in 2023, 80 percent of which were still pending at the end of the calendar year.

By Majbritt Lyck-Bowen

The foundations for Goda Grannar were laid when a Christian pastor from the Södermalm congregation knocked on the door of the local mosque and asked if any assistance was needed to serve people who had fled from war and poverty and arrived at Stockholm’s central train station.

By Paul D’Anieri

Western leaders have sought to keep Ukraine on the periphery of European affairs for many years. It is now at the center of European concerns.

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.

By Jordan T. Kuck

The political leadership in Baltic countries is an antidote to the patriarchal propaganda emanating from the Kremlin. In addition to rebuking Putin’s machismo culture with examples of steady woman leadership, the Baltic states have also advanced on support for LGBT rights.

By Marc Jansen

The war between Ukraine and Russia can best be understood as the result of a profound shift over the last thirty years in the relationship between Russia and Europe, particularly the European Union (EU).

By Emilian Kavalski

From providing armaments and diplomatic support to hosting refugees and pushing their counterparts in Western Europe, North America, and beyond to offer more advanced weapons systems and include Kyiv in European and Euro-Atlantic organizations, the CEE states have been at the forefront of the Ukrainian support network.

By Djordje Popović

Difference may reside in the ecstatic essence of Dasein, in the arbitrary nature of language, in the interstitial space of hybridity and ambiguity, or in other equally abstract receptacles in which difference is supposedly spared the ravages of history.

By Matvei Yankelevich

Konstantinović poses the parochial spirit as a reactionary provincialism that shields itself from the world-at-large, as well as from linguistic creativity and history itself.

By Edin Hajdarpašić

Radomir Konstantinović published The Philosophy of Parochialism in 1969. I read this book twice: first in Sarajevo around 2002, in its original Serbian, and again in Chicago in 2022, just after it was published in English translation.

By Suzana Vuljevic

Penned in the 1950s and published at a time of rising nationalism in Yugoslavia, Serbian philosopher and writer Radomir Konstantinović’s (1928-2011) The Philosophy of Parochialism (1969) remains a keystone of Serbian and South Slavic literary-philosophical scholarship.

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.

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.

By Benjamin Bernard and Matthew McDonald

The exhibition moves beyond earlier models by offering the public a comprehensive survey of early print that places Gutenberg in his historical and geographic context. The visitor could easily forget that print would soon propel an upheaval within European Christendom.

By Vanja Petricevic

The fragmented character of asylum policies in European countries—coupled with a sustained lack of recognition of their specific need for protection—makes women more likely to become poor and homeless.

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.

By Anastasia Paparis

This article addresses how the European Capitals of Culture program has engaged the urban question and what the implications for the city of Eleusis are.

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.

By Erica Lehrer and Joanna Wawrzyniak

In singling out the ECE museumscape for decolonial attention, we are mindful of the pitfalls of pathologizing, orientalizing…

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.

By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh

The history of the European Union is a remarkable story of war and desolation being replaced by peace and seventy-plus years…

By Richard J. White and Hannah C. Gunderman

A fundamental cause of human neglect of, and violence toward, insects can be directly placed at the door of anthroprivilege, which, crucially, is learned behavior.

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.

By Charlène Dray and Jocelyne Porcher

Through the lens of sociology and animal performance studies, we consider here the specific presence and work of stage animals.

By Antonia Noll, Veronika Zaripova, and Ayham Dalal

Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof, 1938, children board a train to London. They wave goodbye to grief-stricken parents huddling on the platform. For many families, this was a last farewell; they would never see each other again.

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.

By Francesca Pegorer

Even in these pandemic-ridden winter months, Hermannplatz, in Berlin’s North Neukölln, is bustling with activity.

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.

By Audrey Célestine

It’s both an exciting and worrying time in French research. On the one hand, we’ve witnessed the multiplication of high-quality work on race in social science in the last fifteen years.

By Wyn Grant

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the European Union’s (EU) longest lasting policy. It is the policy that has arguably most greatly influenced European farmers’ decisions.

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.

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.

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.

By Cătălin-Gabriel Done

Between Romania and Hungary, for one hundred years, historical issues have impeded the development of consistent bilateral relations, even if the bilateral relations have the character of a “strategic partnership for twenty-first-century Europe.”

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.

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.

By Nikolina Zenovic

The long history of peoples and movements throughout the Balkans has situated Yugoslavia in a particularly interesting position culturally, geographically, and politically.

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.

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.

By Angélica Szucko

On March 25, 2017, the European Union (EU) celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, which established “an ever closer union” as a fundamental principle for regional integration.

By Mihaela Tofan

The financial crisis that took place during the first decade of this century pointed out that further financial mechanisms are necessary to emphasize the integration process of cooperation among EU member states.

By Kristin Dickinson

In October of 1932, just months before Hitler’s rise to power, the Turkish modernist poet Ahmet Haşim stepped off a train in Frankfurt am Main.

By Christopher Impiglia

As any student of history can attest, there are times when the voices of the past prove eerily relevant to the present.

By Elisabeth Pauline Gniosdorsch

The very notion of women in combat throws the boundaries between masculinity and femininity into question. The military is an important state institution and its gender assumptions and narratives are constantly referenced and reproduced in society as a whole.

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.

By Christina Isabel Zuber

In the late 1980s, when ideational explanations were on the rise, political scientists suggesting such explanations often had to defend their work against harsh critique.

By Jenny Barnett

“Visual culture,” Jane Lydon writes “can define boundaries between people, supporting perceived hierarchies of race, gender and culture, and justifying arguments for conquest and oppression.”

By Diogo Magalhaes

In recent years and with all four areas of European integration—economic, social, legal and political—facing a series of unprecedented and interconnected crises, the normative foundations of the integration process have been shattered.

By Rüdiger Müller

At some point in the days that followed, I remember my mother telling me that the wall was gone, and that my father had been promoted to managing director of his company.

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.

By Martin Kalb

Scholars have long understood youth as a social construct only partially connected to age. After all, youth often appears in history as a hope for the future or as a threat to contemporary society. Those studying policing and juvenile delinquency have wrestled with stereotypes surrounding young people.

By Amanda Garrett

There is no shortage of scholarly evidence to suggest that voters can be receptive to negative messaging concerning immigrants and other ethnic minorities. The idea of racially coded campaign appeals has long been discussed by academics, particularly in the case of the United States.

By Luke Wood

The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency marked the beginning of a new era of deteriorating relations between the United States and its core West European allies.

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.

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.

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?

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.

By Alexis Morgan

Civilization was founded on the presence of water. The two cradles of civilization—the Nile Valley and the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—were established around fertile river valleys that brought both the rewards of rich soils for agriculture, and perversely, the risks associated with the nutrient-laden flood waters.

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.

By David L. Phillips

Hate speech gives rise to hate crimes. Demonizing the other legitimizes violent extremism, undermining principles of an open society and cultural diversity.

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.

By Chris Allen

The far-right’s championing of free speech is an interesting albeit flawed development, an argument best articulated by Nesrine Malik. As she notes, free speech is no longer a value but as she puts it, “a loophole exploited with impunity.”

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?

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?

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.

By Barbara Manthe

They live in their own world. They proclaim their own state territories, which are sometimes only the size of a stately home. They reject the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and its legal system, arguing that the pre-1945 German “Reich” is still in force.

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.

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.

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.

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.