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RES PUBLICA NOWA 24 (2014)
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The selective use of force remains at the heart of politics and represents the essence of power – a fact that Europe is reluctant to recognize, argues Wojciech Przybylski in "Res Publica Nowa" (Poland). If Europe fails to grasp the connection between military and political might, "we will become a museum piece shunted from corner to corner by rising powers which may not look favourably on our civilizational model". In ruling out intervention, "we clear the way for others who will not hesitate in using uncontrolled, unlimited violence".

Developing the theme, Marcin Król claims that to distinguish between "hard" and "soft" power is to play games with language rather than say anything about the real world. Though the liberal tradition prefers compromise over war, "the liberal reaction is characterized by a charade: the lie that force is not being used when it is […] Sanctions bring suffering to populations rather than their leaders. Everyone knows this. Yet we continue to impose them because it seems a gentler way out of a hopeless situation."

So are liberal values universal? Are we prepared to enforce them? There is widespread reluctance to pose the problem, Król concludes: "We want to profess the liberal doctrine to the world, yet avoid confrontation with its opponents […] We must either build a defensive citadel or take on a mission. If we choose the second option, we must reach out for tools that include warfare and the use of force. There is no middle way."

Also: Timothy Snyder on "commemorative causality", the confusion between present resonance and past power that denies history its proper subject; and Marek Seckar's interview with former Red Army Faction member Karl-Heinz Dellwo and former Bewegung 2. Juni member Gabriele Rollnik.

The full table of contents of Res Publica Nowa 24 (2014)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/respublica/issue/2014-03-10.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-03-10-przybylski-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/przybylski.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/krol.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-06-06-snyder-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/snyder2.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/seckar.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-01-15-seckar-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/dellwo.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/rollnik.html>

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NAQD 31 (2013)
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"NAQD" (Algeria) focuses on the geostrategic situation of the Maghreb-Machrek and the Sahara-Sahel regions, fifty years after independence. Throughout the region people find themselves caught between tending to the wounds of the colonial past and dealing with an uncertain present caused by porous borders and fading territorial sovereignties – what Saskia Sassen calls "denationalized states".

Sociologist Alain Joxe deals with the logic of domination, as played out in the Middle East and North Africa during the "era of dematerialized and delocalized financial globalization": "This 'crisis' leaves behind the shreds of societies torn by their imperial past, shreds that have produced domestic tyrannies. Their wars of liberation resulted in managed militarisms and the onset of corruption, or in a prolongation of their status as subjected people – as organized indirectly by transnational corporations throughout Africa and Asia. All states were then suddenly delivered without defence to the immaterial mastery of credit, globally organized by the financial administration as indebtedness."

Joxe explains that it's mistrust in occidental democracy that underpins middle-class support for the ascendance of Islamist groups after the first steps towards democracy achieved during the Arab Spring. However, these groups will never be able to "ensure a future for either a democracy or a social republic, with their retrogressive values of a Neolithic Salafism".

Resurgent pan-Africanism: The political crises in Tunisia and Egypt, the French-backed coup d'état in Ivory Coast and the incessant war in Congo all sustain traces of the intervention of western powers, argues economist and geographer Bernard Genet. The resurgence of the pan-African discourse, which became merely a stylistic device after African independence, can now be seen as a "dialectical answer to the continuation of western intrusion." Genet hopes that African leaders can take advantage of the economic interest shown by China, Brazil and India: "All we achieved is an African continent that is no longer an 'occidental' chasse gardée."

More about NAQD
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-03-12-joxe-fr.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/joxe.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/sassen.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/associates/naqd.html>

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MERKUR 3/2014
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"Next episode playing in 15… 10… 5… 0 seconds" – a line with which Netflix subscribers watching TV series online will be all too familiar. For everyone else: welcome to the post-televisual age. As Simon Rothöhler reveals in his occasional film column in "Merkur" (Germany), TV is dead but quality TV series have a golden digital future. Indeed, Netflix, one of the fastest growing service providers, tripled its stock-market value in 2013 and has refined its algorithms to pick up on "personalized genres" ranging from "Fight-the-system political love triangle mysteries" to "Chilling action movies about royalty". With these systems in place, Netflix's own production, a political drama set in Washington DC entitled House of Cards, has been declared "the first big-data series".

Cultivating dictatorship: With parliamentary elections in Hungary next month, András Bruck wonders whether the opposition can reverse the country's prospects. The point of no return, he writes, came on 2 January 2012, when Hungary's new constitution entered into force. That night, tens of thousands of people protested outside the Hungarian State Opera House, where a gala celebration was taking to celebrate the occasion.

"The stripping away of the rule of law continued the next day as planned, for the emerging dictatorship had already brought the system thoroughly into line: public TV cameras showed an empty Andrássy Avenue. The tens of thousands of protesters were nowhere to be seen! And instead of being fundamentally incensed, we merely acknowledged once again, in a cultivated manner, that those who should have protected us had lied to us."

Every order: Rasmus Althaus boxes German military and cultural history into a poetic prose piece on the previous two centuries of war and wits, beginning:

"1813, about two hundred years ago, the Allies (Prussia, Austria, Russia) came to blows with Napoleon in Leipzig. 25 years later, 1838, the Brothers Grimm began work on their German Dictionary, eventually published in Leipzig. By collecting German vocabulary, the Grimms sought to achieve philological unity throughout Germany, a linguistic self-confidence, a political and social unity by which the German countries, always quarrelling, could abide. The brothers underestimated the input required. Various editors continued to work (lastly, in parallel, in East Berlin and Göttingen) on the project until 1961 – the year the Berlin Wall was built."

Althaus concludes: "But every order has a secret life of its own."

The full table of contents of Merkur 3/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/merkur/issue/2014-03-06.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-03-12-bruck-de.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/bruck.html>

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NEW HUMANIST 1/2014
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"The humanist impulse not only liberated the sense of transcendence from the shackles of the sacred; it also transformed the idea of transcendence". In "New Humanist", Kenan Malik writes on the "humanization" of the transcendent in art from Dante to modernism. Great humanist art, according to Malik, evokes the ability of humans able to "rise above their individual physical selves" and to "project onto the world, and onto human life, a meaning or purpose that exists only because we as human beings create it." "If today we are uncomfortable with the idea of the transcendent, if many reject the idea entirely, while others can discover it only in a religious context, it is largely because we have a degraded sense of the human."

Maoism: The Chinese censors repressed reports about the domestic slavery incident in south London last year when it emerged that the victims belonged to a Maoist cult, writes Sam Geall of chinadialogue.net. Yet though the case might have seemed bizarre "even to China's most ardent neo-Maoists", "the Brixton faction's propaganda, at its height, is largely indistinguishable from the genuine article". Particularly Mao's "cosmic millenarianism" had little to do with conventional Marxism. "Despite the Chinese censors' eagerness to put the lid on the debate", the Brixton case "might have had something to contribute to a historical debate about the Mao era that has overlooked the weird, cultish underpinnings of its repression."

Epicureanism: Epicurus cited fear of the gods as a major cause of displeasure and defined the sacred as ideal tranquillity, desire for which was innate to all human beings. Whether this made him an atheist is a matter of interpretation, writes David Sedley, professor of ancient philosophy. Certain, however, is that Epicurus was not an "epicure" – in the sense of a lover of fine food: he warned against meat-eating and other extravagant pleasures liable to "enslave" one. And while Epicurus was indeed a hedonist, equating the good life with the enjoyable one, enjoyment was about moral virtue and not "the undiscriminating pursuit of every pleasure". How disappointing…

The full table of contents of New Humanist 1/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/malik.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-03-12-malik-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/newhumanist/issue/2014-03-06.html>

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NY TID 10/2014
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In Helsinki-based "Ny Tid", editor Fredrik Sonck notes how film review aggregators undermine the position of proper film criticism. The service provided by websites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, he writes, is a grotesque reduction of the intellectual work of hundreds of people into a simple verdict symbolized by a number. This number has nothing to do with criticism, "it contains no analysis, no questions and no context".

Yet these aggregated opinions have an aura of universal validity. The popularity of the aggregator websites suggests that they are credible and trustworthy. But they are not: "First of all, the selection is narrow. Most critics whose reviews are aggregated are American, and the films rated are mostly American."

Also, the films that get the highest aggregated ratings are of a special kind: solid and fairly original but uncontroversial. "It can be human comedies like Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without a Past (2002) or pre-puberty love stories like Wes Anderson's mildly melancholic Moonrise Kingdom (2012). These are not uninteresting films, but the more or less unanimously positive reception is just so predictable. In contrast, Lars von Trier's truly uncomfortable Antichrist gets a rating somewhere in the middle when all reviews are aggregated – precisely because it stirs debate."

More about Ny Tid
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/nytid.html>

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OSTEUROPA 11-12/2013
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"Osteuropa" (Germany) focuses on east European youth (sub)cultures in everything from music to mobility. Alfrun Kliems picks up on the tensions between generations in a novel cum road story by Polish author Jacek Podsiadlos, in which a group of "world travellers" leave Poland for Bratislava hoping to encounter the leading light of the Czech underground, Egon Bondy. Kliems shows how the work, entitled Zycie, a zwlaszcza smierc Angeliki de Sancé ("Life, and specifically the death of Angelica de Sancé", 2008), makes a major contribution not only to the aesthetics of the underground but to a tradition of eastern European road stories ranging from Jáchym Topol's Sestra ("Sister", 1994) to Terézia Mora's Das Ungeheure ("The monster", 2013).

However, Podsiadlos's narrative also indicates how "ultimately, every underground becomes pop, while all pop carries within it a dose of underground" – a development that marks the opening of a new subcultural chapter. As Kliems remarks with reference to a 2012 issue of the magazine Przekrój, the generation of Polish poets to which Podsiadlos belongs is already being superseded by the next one around Konrad Góra, Szczepan Kopyt and Tomasz Pulka.

Generation nothing: Considering the literary careers of Irina Denezhkina (Russia), Serhiy Zhadan (Ukraine) and Miroslaw Nahacz (Poland), Matthias Schwartz takes literary circles to task for their limited attention span where "generation nothing" authors are concerned. The focus on the "negative" side of youth without prospects obscured the transition a young generation had to deal with after 1989: to a market society in which "every personal need and social interest would be permanently manipulated by advertising and consumption". According to one Polish essayist, this amounted to "mental warfare", a "life under the occupation of the media".

(For more on the works of Serhiy Zhadan in the Ukrainian context, see Peter Pomerantsev's article in Eurozine, "Sometimes we dream of Europe".)

The full table of contents of Osteuropa 11-12/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-03-12-schwartz-de.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/schwartz.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/issue/2014-03-11.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/pomerantsev.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-09-20-pomerantsev-en.html>

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GENERO 17 (2013)
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Women generally have been disproportionately affected by post-recession welfare cuts and a contracting job market, and Serbia is no exception, writes Tanja Ignjatovic in an article in "Genero" (Serbia). Women with violent partners face additional problems, since attempts to escape the relationship frequently lead to serious social and economic disadvantage. Although some authorities have made special provision for female victims of domestic violence, women's shelters, advice centres and the expertise to run them are in short supply. "Integration and coordination of services from various sectors (social welfare, education, health care, employment and labour, housing) need to be a key task if the needs of poor and socially excluded women are to be met," Ignjatovic concludes.

Female composers: Adriana Sabo notes the unprecedented number of women composers of western classical music in Serbia to have won prominence in the last two decades. Sabo discusses whether Hélène Cixous' concept of écriture féminine – a reflexive mode of writing where the author inscribes her femaleness in her work in order to "recognise the difference in men's and women's experiences, but aspire to establish equality between them" – might be extended to musical composition.

Examining a range of works from pieces for conventional choral and orchestral ensembles to experimental electro-acoustic or aleatoric works, Sabo concludes that even composers with an explicitly feminist message choose not to "present their sex as a factor at all relevant to their work", or to interrogate their own position as female composers in a conservative society. Their reluctance may be due to the fact that "compositional practice in Serbia stubbornly holds to the notion that music is an art that transcends social circumstances, and hence the individuals who create, perform or listen to it."

The full table of contents of Genero 17/2013
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/genero/issue/2014-03-10.html>

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VIKERKAAR 1-2/2014
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"Vikerkaar" (Estonia) addresses the question of evil. Professor of criminal law Jaan Sootak contends that it is not the law but the moral norms of society that establish where to draw the line between good and evil. Although the law draws many lines too, continues Sootak. Take the line of criminalization, for example, where an act considered morally reprehensible becomes punishable; to say nothing of all the attendant complexities concerning issues such as the length of the sentence received.

Sootak also turns to the necessity of offering the offender a route back into society: "Criminal law cannot set out to re-educate the individual, since the principle of human dignity requires that a person be given the opportunity to live according to his own image of humanity. Paradoxically, this means that under the rule of law a criminal law that respects the individual's freedom of choice must allow him or her the opportunity to cross the line between good and evil in both directions."

Domestic violence: Kadri Soo confronts domestic violence in the Estonian context, distinguishing between sexual and psychological violence: "Unlike physical and sexual violence", Soo writes, "psychological violence is not criminalized in Estonia, despite its dire consequences." Economic violence – where, for instance, one partner deprives the other of money or opportunities to earn it – is spoken about even less.

At another level, domestic violence can be distinguished by whether it is expressive or instrumental. While acts of expressive violence usually erupt out of a specific conflict, remain occasional and can be committed by both sexes, instrumental violence aims to establish and maintain control over the partner's (and children's) life. It usually escalates over time and arises from a patriarchal desire to dominate the family.

The full table of contents of Vikerkaar 1-2/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/vikerkaar/issue/2014-02-21.html>

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LA REVUE NOUVELLE 3/2014
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Homophobia, Islamophobia and fear of delinquency: La Revue nouvelle (Belgium) explores the social role of phobia. Even in a "rational" society, write Christophe Mincke and Renaud Maes, media-propagated myths transform collective fear into a political construct, creating scapegoats that threaten the prevailing moral, social or familial order. The state's response is to tighten security and spy on the individual, threatening freedoms rather than guaranteeing them. At the same time, social scapegoating is self-serving:

"Studies showing that strict classifications like 'homosexuality' and 'heterosexuality' are very recent social constructs do not go down well in the debate about the legitimacy of marriage between persons of the same sex. […] If homosexuals were allowed to become too socially normalized, what would differentiate then from heterosexuals? What would happen to heterosexual identity then?"

Islamophobia: In 2010, the Belgian parliament voted almost unanimously to ban the burqa. In parliamentary speeches proceeding the vote, writes Azzedine Hajji, the burqa was called "a security problem" because the person wearing it cannot be identified. "Everyone needs to know that anyone walking in a public place must be identifiable. Hiding the face not only involves problems of behaviour but also of public safety." There is an irony here, writes Hajji: banning the veil because it infringes on the liberty of Muslim women in fact serves the purposes of oppressive state security.

The full table of contents of La Revue nouvelle 3/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/revuenouvelle/issue/2014-02-24.html>

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BLÄTTER FÜR DEUTSCHE UND INTERNATIONALE POLITIK 3/2014
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France has asked its EU partners for support in central Africa; Germany has tried in vain to do a "no-spy deal" with the US; and the European Commission has refused to set national goals concerning climate protection. According to Jürgen Habermas – in a speech of 2 February to the SPD conference in Berlin now published in "Blätter" (Germany) – these are just three recent instances in which nation-states have shown they are incapable of acting effectively.

As to solving the nation-state's woes, Habermas has never been clearer: "The lack of leeway at the national level can only be compensated for at a supranational level." Having dismissed the ability of rightwing populists to take advantage of this situation, he concludes:

"For a supranational democracy, anchored as it was before in nation-states, we don't need a European 'people' but individuals who have learned that they are both citizens of their state and of Europe at the same time. In the context of their own respective national public spheres, these citizens can very probably participate in a Europe-wide formation of political will."

However the media "must fulfil a complex task of translation", which involves "mutually reporting on the discussions taking place in other countries on themes of common relevance to all Union citizens." Here, Habermas is mindful of how "globalized markets and digital connections mesh to create interdependencies through networks formed behind the backs of the collective actors" associated with the state.

Business and human rights: Until there is a binding international treaty that obliges global corporations to observe human rights, then the status quo will remain, contends Sarah Lincoln: "The corporations directly or indirectly involved in the abuse of fundamental human rights will almost never be brought to justice." Her argument is directed in particular at corporations based in Europe but operating in Latin America and Africa.

The full table of contents of Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 3/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/blatter/issue/2014-03-10.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/habermas.html>