a journal of research & art
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 Hélène B. Ducros
In the fall issue of EuropeNow, we feature an Author-Meets-Critics on Vichy contre Vichy, Une capitale sans mémoire by Audrey Mallet
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.
By Bertram M. Gordon
Mallet addresses the prewar history of Vichy as a spa center, reaching a turning point with the construction of a railway station under Napoleon III, which brought an extended clientele and made it internationally famous, evidenced in an article in the New York Times in 1876.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Susan Smith-Peter
Russians knew of the idea of civil society for nearly 150 years before the end of serfdom. In 1703, the first Russian use of the term drew upon Aristotle’s concept of a civil society that was contrasted to an uncivil, or uncivilized society.
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.
By Daniel Mengara
History owes the term “Françafrique” to François-Xavier Verschave, the late French human-rights activist who enshrined the notion in a number of groundbreaking books that provide an extensive background to France’s neocolonialist policies towards Africa.
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.
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.
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.
By Olga Chuprakova
Despite the prevailing trend to demonize Russia, we can find sincere sympathy for and understanding of Russia and the Russian people in the fiction of the bestselling British novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). Russia, Russian culture, and Russian identity are prevalent themes in twenty of her twenty-six novels.
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.
By Daniel Cohen
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, “philosemitism” has migrated closer to the mainstream of European societies, even in some cases in post-communist countries.
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.
By Morten Høi Jensen
The “white whine” has since reverberated across the country with increasing clamor, from the orifices of white nationalists to the offices of the White House.
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.
By Fulvio Attinà
The security policy of the states and the multilateral management of international security have gone through a remarkable process of transformation in the contemporary world system.
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.
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.
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.
By Alexandra Ba-Tin
Over the last twenty-five years, clear patterns were emerging in the Central and Eastern European region, showing that unlike in the Baltics and in Ukraine, Russian involvement in private and state energy sectors had been relatively low.
By Aude Cefaliello
If we want to deal with the challenges Europe faces and develop sustainable mechanisms to overcome them, it is necessary to understand the forces exercised at the decision-making level, for example in the relations between employers, unions, and European Union institutions.
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.”
By Morten Høi Jensen
There is nothing mystical or demonic about embracing dangerous ideas; they are existential choices, not spirits plucked from the sky.
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.
By Christopher P. Long, Susan Gass, and Koen Van Gorp
Academic isolation has long been impractical; in today’s world, it is impossible. At a time when yesterday’s bright new fact becomes today’s doubt and tomorrow’s myth, no single institution has the resources in faculty or facilities to go it alone.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
By Michal Kotnarowski and Michal Wenzel
On December 16, the Sejm debated on a number of bills, including one of the most fundamental laws, the budget bill for 2017.
By Phil Jackson
The true phenomenon of Eurovision is that, despite political divides and culture clashes, it has fostered European integration and togetherness.
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.”
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.
By Eamonn Butler
National identity and its cultural, ethnic, and constitutional components are now used to justify and shape political decision-making.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
By Arturo Desimone
“With all due respect for the talents of Mr. Kusuma, we have found no indication that his presence in the Netherlands is of any cultural importance.”
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).
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.
