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KRYTYKA 11-12/2013
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In "Krytyka" (Ukraine) Volodymyr Yermolenko considers the differences between two Europes against the background of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. One is a Europe of rules and regulations; the other is a Europe of faith, driven by spontaneity and emotions. Ukrainians should not limit the European idea to the national narrative; instead they should extend the national idea to the European one: "We should go even further", continues Yermolenko, "the European idea has to be raised to a global level. The events now taking place in Ukraine should awaken in the European Union the realization that it has a global mission". Yermolenko suggests that the Ukrainian protest movement should not be interpreted exclusively in the national context. Rather, it has to be understood as "part of global history", as "part of the evolution of Europe itself". What Ukrainians can give to the EU is to re-awaken Europe's vision. The Euromaidan protests can offer a reinforced faith to the Europe of rules and regulations and, thus, complete it. "The Europe of faith and the Europe of rules have a lot to say to each other. We can already hear them. I hope that they in their turn will find the strength to hear us and to realize that they are in need of our faith, just as we need their rules".

A black and white world: Oksana Forostyna discusses the rapid development of Ukrainian protest society during the course of Euromaidan, from an infantile to an adult community. Forostyna suggests that Euromaidan leaves Ukrainian intellectuals with no choice between participation and non-participation: "the world is not as nuanced as it seemed before. The world turned out to be black and white".

At the same time, "this mythical time, this simplicity, this clear boundary between the good and the evil, this concentration of generosity, devotion and desperation on the one side, and of malice and ignorance on the other, will sooner or later come to an end [...] New meanings will stay; they have already filled the forms that were previously distant to many: the anthem, the lyrics of which are now known to hundreds of thousands; faces and names of the heroes, who are now referred to in the slogan 'Glory to the heroes!' in Ukrainian and Russian; the national flag, which has lost its formal meaning and become a flag of hipsters and doctors, managers and students."

The full table of contents of Krytyka 11-12/2013

<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/krytyka/issue/2014-04-07.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/yermolenko.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-02-06-yermolenko-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/forostyna.html>

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PROSTORY 8 (2013 /2014)
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The strongest piece in a special issue of "Prostory" (Ukraine) entitled "Documenting Maidan" is an ambivalent personal account by curator and art critic Nataliya Tchermalykh. Just like a big part of the Ukrainian Left, Tchermalykh was initially sceptical about the Euromaidan protests. The banner combining the Ukrainian and EU flags, which became a symbol of the protests, she found at best oxymoronic: "You must agree it is rather strange when, in combination with the flag of one of the world's biggest political unions, the flag of a huge and very poor country becomes a symbol of a civil protest on its own territory, especially when the relationship between these two entities has always been rather vague."

But on 21 February, the last day of Yanukovych's reign, she could feel how the urge of the people on the Maidan to participate in and shape politics had "moved from being purely intellectual to something physical". And also her approach changes; the initial scepticism gives way to something else: "It's true that this entire time, the number of social and economic demands has not increased. But at the same time, several months of direct collaboration have proved that an alternative economy works: any social imperative can be solved by the improvised distribution of goods, speeded up a hundredfold by social networks, mobile phones and the mobilization of volunteers: warm clothes, hot food, legal advice, medical supplies, difficult operations... Three months of Maidan is a demonstration of the victory of a spontaneous micro-economy over macro-corruption. And you get the feeling, just a little bit more, and we'll have done it. It was probably then that I began to associate myself with the protests."

The full table of contents of Prostory 8 (2013/2014)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/prostory/issue/2014-04-04.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/tchermalykh.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-09-tchermalykh-en.html>

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OSTEUROPA 1/2014
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"Osteuropa" (Germany) also features several articles on the situation in Ukraine. In a text on "Operation 'Russian Crimea'", originally published in Novaya Gazeta, military expert Pavel Felgengauer notes that the Ukrainian government refrained from any military action when Russian soldiers invaded Crimea: "The new Ukrainian leadership has just won, after having spent three months in the cold of Maidan. They put their trust and hope in the moral power of their protest and are now convinced that the one who fires the first shot will lose."

The Polish extreme Right: The announcement that Ruch Narodowy (The National Movement) will participate in the upcoming European elections means that the Polish extreme Right has reached another level, write Eva Spanka and Andreas Kahrs.

Poland's rightwing extremists have long been ignored, at home as well as abroad. And this although they, according to Spanka and Kahrs, rank among the most dynamic rightwing movements in Europe. In November 2013, nearly 50,000 participated in the "March of Independence" in Warsaw. "We will become a force that leftists, liberals and gays will fear", said leader Robert Winnicki when The National Movement was founded in 2012.

With aggressive anti-EU rhetoric, The National Movement thrives on an EU scepticism that is now growing also in Poland. However, concludes Spanka and Kahrs, the rightwing milieu is meanwhile so consolidated that the result in the EU elections is far from decisive. Even if the National Movement fails to get more than the three per cent necessary to be represented in the European Parliament, their representatives have already become acceptable in the public sphere: they are regularly appearing on television, spreading the racist and homophobe ideas.

The full table of contents of Osteuropa 1/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/issue/2014-04-08.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-09-kahrs-de.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/kahrs.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/spanka.html>

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NEW EASTERN EUROPE 2/2014
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The Maidan and Putin's powers dominate "New Eastern Europe" (Poland) this quarter. Analysis ranges from the failure of the UN Convention against Corruption to prevent grand political corruption in Ukraine to the Obama administration's reset policy towards Russia.

Kundera's Central Europe: Clearly much has changed since Milan Kundera's now famous essay "The tragedy of Central Europe" was published thirty years ago. As Samuel Abrahám observes in one of two essays exploring the relevance of Kundera's Central Europe today: "No post-communist society has paid any attention to it and each country has been busy transforming itself in isolation, directing its attention to Brussels or Washington and only marginally to its neighbours."

Jonathan Bousfield picks up on the predominantly literary dimensions of Kundera's essay and interviews three award-winning contemporary novelists who spent their formative years in Kundera's Central Europe. Tomás Zmeskal, an author of Czech and Congolese descent whose Love Letter in Cuneiform Script won the EU prize for literature in 2011, remarks that Central Europe remains a "historical curiosity rather than a current concern". However, talking to Miljenko Jergovic, it transpires that in contemporary Croatia, "the idea of Central Europe still hovers in the background whenever cultural identity becomes the subject of public debate."

But it is a conversation with Yuri Andrukhovych that leaves Bousfield with the impression that Ukraine is the last frontier of Kundera's Central Europe, "where the struggle between a society that aspires to pluralism and an unforgivingly mono-cultural rival is witnessed with indifference by the rest of the continent."

Hungary and more: János Széky on the historical roots of contemporary Hungarian nationalism; and, on the 15th anniversary of the NATO bombardment of Belgrade, articles on cultural developments in Serbia ranging from hip-hop artist Marko Selic's latest track to happenings at Supermarket, Belgrade's first concept fashion store.

The full table of contents of New Eastern Europe 2/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/neweastern/issue/2014-04-07.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/abraham.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/bousfield.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-07-bousfield-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/jergovic.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/andrukhovych.html>

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FREE SPEECH DEBATE, MARCH
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In an article in "Free Speech Debate" (UK), Eric Heinze rejects the classical liberal defences of free speech, let alone newer libertarian ones. "The strongest case for free speech", he writes, "is grounded on specifically democratic principles, which must not be confused with Millian, liberal ones." As such, Heinze believes that "hate speech bans can never claim a legitimate role in fully fledged democracies".

This is not least because these democracies "have developed many buffers to intolerance, absent in weaker democracies". Thus, while social scientists diagnose multiple causes of discrimination, Heinze concludes, they "have never traced hate speech uttered generally within the public discourse of [fully fledged democracies] to anything like the levels of mobilization that hate speech is able to prompt in weak democracies."

More on Free Speech Debate
<http://www.eurozine.com/associates/freespeechdebate.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/heinze.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-09-heinze-en.html>

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SPILNE 7 (2014)
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"Spilne" (Ukraine) devotes an issue to the Second World. In an interview conducted before Euromaidan commenced, social anthropologist Don Kalb discusses the future of capitalism in eastern Europe. For it is the rise of China and India, and economic stagnation in the West, Kalb argues, that makes political mobilization in both Ukraine and Russia so important. Anticipating the rise of the Right in Ukraine, Kalb prognosticates:

"They might actually produce something similar to the mobilization of the Right in Hungary and Poland; and this might in turn give the Left some courage to go beyond third-way niceties. I'm not saying I'm optimistic, and I don't like these guys, but there may be a political logic in place that could lead to useful larger claims and to more democratic outcomes in the slightly longer term."

As regards economics, Kalb would not be surprised if "in about three to five years time, about 40 to 50 per cent of the money in circulation [is] publicly provided." This, in the face of the FED now routinely injecting a trillion dollars into the market per year, and the ECB and Bank of Japan following suit.

"Capital", he concludes, "would be fine with more public coordination and control if its enormous risks would be reduced and it got some guaranteed revenues, let us say two per cent per year. But, instead of such a rational and realistic course of action you get bi-party nonsense around austerity or Keynesian expansion on behalf of the banks and the car industries, and the further consolidation of neoliberalism. Politics seems completely locked into the old fights around national states and their historical myths. [...] We are in fact close to a potentially socialist moment in the western system, where you can actually claim political sovereignty over capital accumulation and capital would not even be ready to fight it off aggressively. But the political imagination to do something with that moment is terrifyingly absent."

The full table of contents of Spilne 7 (2014)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/spilne/issue/2014-04-08.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-09-kalb-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/kalb.html>

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MERKUR 4/2014
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From civilizing force to root of all evil: the history of capitalism is also the history of the critique of capitalism, writes Jürgen Kocka in "Merkur" (Germany). For the economists and political philosophers of the Enlightenment, business and morality were not necessarily contradictory: capitalism (though it was not yet know as such) promised to bring not only wealth, but freedom from arbitrary state intervention together with respect for the liberty and responsibility of the individual. Despite growing inequalities in the "proto-industrialist" societies of eighteenth century England and Holland, absolute wealth was greater there than in other regions of Europe, whose populations continued to suffer famine and poverty until the mid-nineteenth century. This, together with the increase in political freedom, meant that "the promise of capitalism perceived by Adam Smith and his generation was based on real experience."

A century later, little remained of Enlightenment optimism. Anti-capitalism thrived across the political spectrum: liberals like Weber saw it as threatening human spontaneity, the Right combined anti-capitalism with illiberalism and, later, antisemitism, while socialists formulated the critique of capitalism par excellence as the commodification of human labour. Kocka explains the social-historical causes of "classical" anti-capitalism and compared it with its contemporary incarnation in an age of de-regulated finance, re-emergent inequality and pending climate catastrophe. His conclusion (perhaps disappointing for some): Since there are no inherent social, political or moral goals in capitalism, it cannot be criticized for failing to guarantee human happiness. Instead, capitalism can be made to serve various ends, "both good and bad". If capitalism no longer holds a promise, then it retains its usefulness, "particularly for the achievement of non-capitalist goals."

Also: Francis Nenik relates the extraordinary life of anti-Apartheid activist Edward Vincent Swart, who came from the small town of Heilbron in South Africa and made it all the way to Cambridge as a poet.

The full table of contents of Merkur 4/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/merkur/issue/2014-04-02.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-09-nenik-de.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/nenik.html>

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KULTUROS BARAI 3/2014
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In interview with Almantas Samalavicius, media theorist Arthur W. Hunt III warns against the "Sirens of distraction" that modern technology has yielded. Developments in the media combined with the latest portable devices, he argues, "push serious public discourse into the background and pull triviality to the foreground. They move us away from the Jeffersonian notion of citizenship, replacing it with modern capitalism's ethic of materialistic desire or 'consumership'."

Hunt, author of Surviving Technopolis (2013), despairs of the political landscape in his home country: "While Democrats look to big government to save them, Republicans look to big business. Don't they realize that with modern capitalism, big government and big business are joined at the hip?" His favoured solution being:

"A third-way economic ordering [that] would seek to revive the old notion of oikos so that the home can once again be a legitimate economic, educational and care-providing unit – not just a place to watch TV and sleep. In other words, the home would once again become a centre for production, not just consumption."

Multimedia history in the making: Sarune Trinkunaite considers the first attempt to remember the events of 13 January 1991, as Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union, on the stage, in the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre. Trinkunaite is not entirely comfortable with her experience of viewing the play on the first night and then having the option afterwards of returning home to view the selection of Lithuania's candidate for the Eurovision song contest together with events screened from Independence Square in Kyiv.

Also: Stunt performer, dancer and choreographer Rebecca Chentinell on the art of movement in an increasingly mobile and flexible world.

The full table of contents of Kulturos barai 3/2014
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/kulturos/issue/2014-04-07.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-04-09-hunt-en.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/hunt.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/samalavicius.html>

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REVOLVER REVIEW 94 (2014)
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On 7 April 1944, two Slovak Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, escaped from Auschwitz carrying notes meticulously documenting the workings of the Nazi death camps. It was from their report that the world first learned of the details existence of gas chambers and the huge number of victims, which included nearly 4,000 Czech men, women and children murdered there a month earlier.

The fate of these families is the subject of an article by Adam Drda in "Revolver Revue" (Czech Republic), extracted from his forthcoming book, Zvlástni zacházeni (Czech for the Nazi euphemism Sonderbehandlung or "special treatment"). Citing survivor testimonies, Drda highlights the stories of the large contingent of Czech Jews deported from Terezin in September 1943. On arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, instead of going through the usual "selection" – a process usually leading directly to the gas chambers – they were incarcerated in a "family camp" known as BIIb. For reasons that remain mysterious today, they were held there for six months before being murdered on the night of 8 March 1944. Yet as Drda points out, this, the largest mass atrocity perpetrated on Czech citizens during WWII, is rarely regarded as part of Czech national history:

"[Under communism,] the 80,000 Jewish dead from the Czech lands alone (the total from all of Czechoslovakia is higher) were subsumed under the heading of 'victims of the Czechoslovak people's struggle against Nazism', and it was deemed undesirable to mention the fact that they perished because they were Jews. The communist regime collapsed a quarter of a century ago: that should be long enough for attitudes to change."

Zbynek Hejda: Over a dozen Czech writers pay tribute to poet and regular Revolver Revue contributor Zbynek Hejda (1930-2013). Editor-in-chief Terezie Pokorná notes "the discrepancy between the public response – or lack thereof – to Hejda's collected works published in the last two years, that is, in the author's lifetime, and the bandwagon onto which the media sanctimoniously leapt as soon as he died, in the certainty that Zbynek Hejda was one of the greatest Czech poets."

The full table of contents of Revolver Revue 94 (2014)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/revolver/issue/2014-04-07.html>

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DILEMA VECHE 518-527 (2014)
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More and more European leaders are beginning to question one of the founding principles of the EU: the free movement of people. But the UK's restrictive employment laws for migrants has prompted critique on the Romanian and Bulgarian side.

"Dilema veche" (519) contains the open letter to David Cameron from Bulgarian EU policy advisors Eva Paunova and Stanislava Kunovska. They take a tough line on the British prime minister's op-ed in the "Financial Times" entitled "Free movement within Europe needs to be less free", in which Cameron warns Bulgarians and Romanians to think twice before coming to live in the UK. Paunova and Kunovska write:

"While it is common for populist politicians to turn to immigration as an issue to be tackled, especially in times of economic hardship, we find the rhetoric you use worrying, the language of 'finding' and 'removing' potential immigrants from the UK alarming. You have previously stated yourself that 'migrant communities' are 'a fundamental part of who we are' and that 'Britain is a far richer and stronger society because of them', yet you openly support an anti-immigration campaign whose slogan is 'Go home or face arrest'."

On the frontline: Upon the launch of Frontline Club Bucharest in mid-February, Luiza Vasiliu interviews Vaughan Smith (524), former war reporter and founder of the Frontline Club network – a platform that encourages independent journalism in sites of conflict. Smith has a special connection to Romania: Frontline News Television agency, the predecessor of the Frontline Clubs, specialized in war reporting for television and was formed in 1989 during the chaos of the Romanian revolution. Elsewhere, two of its founding members died reporting from conflict zones.

"If we, as a country, send our soldiers to war and believe that it's justified, why don't we understand that also a journalist may risk his life in order to be able to report what is going on out there in the world? I would never sustain that one single piece of reportage is worth paying for with a human life but I do believe that information is an extremely valuable good for society."

Further, Smith calls for civic responsibility and vigilance in the conflicts of the day:

"What is happening in Syria is abominable. The rest of the world doesn't do anything to solve the situation although we bear this responsibility. Syria should permanently be present in our conscience, in mine and yours. Those who believe that we can pass through our lives without being touched by such atrocities are wrong."

Also: Yudit Kiss draws a sad picture of Roma living conditions in Hungary (519), despite the "EU Framework for National Roma Strategies" initiated during Hungary's EU presidency.

The full table of contents of Dilema veche 518-527 (2014)
<http://www.eurozine.com/journals/dilemaveche/issue/2014-03-31.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/authors/kiss.html>
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-01-07-kiss-en.html>