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Articles published in Eurozine
From unidimensional to multidimensional thinking
The European tradition of abstract thought as mastered by Kant must show the way in thinking about the State, argues Romualdas Ozolas, a founder of the Lithuanian Sajudis movement. [more]
Doom and gloom
Asked how they see their country ten years from now, only a third of Hungarians say that it will be a successful European country. "Hungary's political elite, its intellectuals and its media bear enormous responsibility for this negativity," writes Elemér Hankiss. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Austria
Anything but a "German appendix"
Austrian novelists are still referred to as Germans despite recent critical and commercial success. From the new narrative "miracle" to the darkly humorous "writer's novel", Daniela Strigl finds a contemporary Austrian scene at the top of its game. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Hungary
Mastering history through narrative?
In the first essay in the Eurozine "Literary perspectives" series, Gábor Csordás reads the newest Hungarian novels. All share a concern with narrative, holding out to the reader the hope of mastering history. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Death and the resurrection of God
Thoughts on the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"In the Western-Christian European space, the twentieth century can be called the century of 'death' and the 'resurrection of God'." A special role was played by the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who provided a critical response to the question of Christ. Tomas Kiauka reconstructs the consistency of his thought. [more]
"Why Nietzsche today"
Despite the major criticisms to be made of Nietzsche's philosophy, his writing on morality and politics continues to raise important issues, writes Bela Egyed in an introduction to a series of texts first published in Kritika&Kontext. [more]
Literary perspectives: The Netherlands
"Profound Holland" and the new Dutch
The new need for security in the Netherlands is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction evokes the "profound Holland" overturned in the 1960s; and Arnon Grunberg, whose portrayals of male disintegration withhold any such reassurances. But a parallel strand of contemporary Dutch literature sidesteps such concerns: novelists and poets with migrant backgrounds introducing new styles into the Dutch literary repertoire. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
The non-efficient citizen
Identity and consumerist morality
Consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom. In the consumerist system, the individual who asserts him or herself through authentic freedom is regarded as a non-efficient citizen. [more]
Mobile citizenship?
The "new mobility" implies new freedoms as well as new privations. The biographies of Bulgarian migrants reveal how the horizon of departure has become a basic dimension of the world. Mobility, writes Ivaylo Ditchev, will need to be taken more seriously in the anthropology of citizenship. [more]
Nietzsche's anti-democratic liberalism
A Nietzschean politics is less a critique of political events so much as a diagnosis of the forces and tendencies driving them -- and therein lies its liberalism, writes Béla Egyed. [more]
The heaviest burden
Nietzsche and the death of God
Nietzsche's response to having lost faith, but not being able to live without it, was to invent the figure of a new creator -- someone who could bring together Man and World once again. In order to do this, man had to begin to think through his own existence: the heaviest burden of all. [more]
National populism versus democracy
Given the failure of the leftist projects of the twentieth century, it is telling that far-right populism is more anti-democratic in the new democracies of eastern Europe than in the West, writes Antony Todorov. Is populism identical to the crisis of democracy or rather a symptom of it? [more]
An amorphous society
Lithuania in the era of high post-communism
"High post-communism" in eastern Europe is defined by efforts to control collective memory, political discourse dominated by abstract concepts, and the cult of entertainment -- a view from Lithuania. [more]
Literary perspectives: Ukraine
Longing for the novel
In Ukraine, the demand for engagement with the recent past has produced a series of novels that are better described as autobiographies. But, asks Timofiy Havryliv, is autobiography equal to the task? [Lithuanian version added] [more]
The re-transnationalization of literary criticism
Critical discussion of foreign literature serves as a source of information not only for readers but also for the "trade". When that discussion disappears or becomes one-sided, this has consequences for the literary institution as a whole. [French version added] [more]
Literary perspectives: Estonia
Waiting for the Great Estonian Novel
While the Great Estonian Novel has yet to be written, the range of fiction in Estonia is sufficiently wide to serve as an indicator of the post-communist country's hopes and fears, anxieties and obsessions. [German and Lithuanian versions added] [more]
Between mimesis and non-existence
Lithuania in Europe, Europe in Lithuania
Cultural and political life in Lithuania is marked by what Homi K. Bhabha, speaking of postcolonial nations, called "ironic compromise". The Lithuanian is "almost a European but not quite". [more]
Shopping town USA
Victor Gruen, the Cold War, and the shopping mall
Victor Gruen's "shopping towns" were supposed to strengthen civic life and alleviate women's lives. But within a decade they had become the architectural expression of the policy of gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Global museums in the twenty-first century
The Guggenheim foundation and the rhetoric of cultural planning in Vilnius
The fact that a Guggenheim museum is being planned for Vilnius is indicative of the conviction that "de-provincialization" can only be achieved by taking part in global projects. Meanwhile, the cultural demands of the local population go unheeded. Vilnius is not Bilbao! [more]
What does Nietzsche mean to philosophers today?
Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal, and irrelevant, or radical, prescient, and misunderstood? Six philosophers answer Kritika&Kontext's questions on Nietzsche. Their responses make one thing clear: Nietzsche still divides opinion. [more]
Controlling words
Press and publishing concentration in France is exceptionally high yet there is barely any protest from within the sector itself. Media monopolization is by no means only a French issue, however: throughout Europe and the US, profit has become publishing's bottom line. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
The populist moment
Unlike the extremist parties of the 1930s, the new populist movements do not aim to abolish democracy: quite the opposite, writes Ivan Krastev. What we are witnessing is a conflict between elites suspicious of democracy and increasingly illiberal publics. [more]
Simulated cities, sedated living
The shopping mall as paradigmatic site of lifestyle capitalism
If the imperative of consumer capitalism is "lead us into temptation", then the shopping mall is its cathedral. Increasingly, city centres -- or "brand zones" -- are adopting the mall aesthetic. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Nicolas Sarkozy, Gramsci reader
New power and the temptation of hegemony
Nicolas Sarkozy has professed admiration for the Gramscian notion of "cultural hegemony" -- political domination via domination of ideas. The difference is that Sarkozy seeks hegemony not over ideas so much as values. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Radical demophilia
Reflections on Bulgarian populism
Populism in Bulgaria feeds off two phenomena: a pure hatred of political parties and the constant emphasis in the public discourse on an alleged contrast between ordinary people and the political elite. [more]
Religion, European secular identities, and European integration
The rapid process of secularization in western Europe has not diminished the unease with which Europe considers Islam and Muslims in its midst. In this benchmark essay from 2004, José Casanova argues that the "Islam problem" is an indicator of the disparity between liberal and illiberal strands of European secularism. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Transition or transitions?
The transformation of eastern central Europe 1989-2007
"Incomplete regime change", "interrupted revolution", "geo-political paradigm shift"... Accounts of the transition in eastern central Europe have tended to emphasize particular features to the exclusion of others. Elemér Hankiss pieces together a mosaic of interpretations of transition. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Bathroom tales
How we mistook normality for paradise
The shortage of toilet paper alone may not have brought down communism, but it's an apt metaphor for a system unable to fulfil people's basic needs. Although Slavenka Drakulic's bathroom is better stocked these days, she's still prone to doubt. Was the normality she and her fellow eastern Europeans longed for just another false paradise? [Turkish version added] [more]
Who are the citizens of Europe?
Current citizenship laws in the European Union vary dramatically. The tension between freedom of movement and national legislation on citizenship has the potential to create serious conflicts, writes Rainer Bauböck. [Hungarian version added] [more]
On paradoxes, principles, and illusions
"The self-regulating market", "democratic capitalism"... Audrius Dauksa is not convinced. The gap between rhetoric and reality is plain to see: so why aren't politicians looking? [more]
The cultural bases for economic success
Why are there rich and poor countries? The relative prosperity of immigrant groups internationally suggests that it isn't geography, climate, or economic policy that decides the success of a country, but culture. [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Reasons for the current upsurge in memory
Over the past quarter century, social structures have undergone a sea change in their traditional relationship to the past. Pierre Nora examines the roots and causes of "memorialism". [Hungarian and Lithuanian versions added] [more]
Must we respect religiosity?
On questions of faith and the pride of the secular society
Secular society's "supermarket of faiths" principle appears from religion's standpoint to be indifferent and mistaken. Jan Philipp Reemtsma searches for the basis for the respect between believer and non-believer that can prevent this tension from becoming intolerance. [more]
The forgetting museum
An obsession with memory blinds us to the abuses of memory, and to the uses of forgetting, argues the British psychoanalyst and author. [more]
On Reason
Reason's greatest rival is not religion, but revolution, writes Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush. "The first resource that is squandered in a revolution is rationality and the last thing that returns is rationality. If it ever returns." [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Equally criminal?
Totalitarian experience and European memory
Whoever wishes to give European society a political identity will rate the discussion of disputed memories as highly as treaties, a common currency, and open borders. [more]
International, global, transnational: Just a matter of words?
Does a threat to the legacy of the international age lurk in the term "transnational"? [Lithuanian version added] [more]
Experimental electronic music and sound art in Lithuania
Drone, glitch, clicks'n'cuts... Lithuania has a varied electronic music scene whose influences are global. An overview. [more]
New towns on the Cold War frontier
How modern urban planning was exported as an instrument in the battle for the developing world
The New Towns designed by Constantinos Doxiadis were supposed to inculcate democracy in the Developing World. Today, these urban neighbourhoods have become something quite different to what the architect anticipated: Baghdad's Sadr City being a striking example. [German version added] [more]
Ethics in the globalized war
With hi-tech weaponry reducing the risk of battlefield casualties -- at least on the side of those owning it -- traditional warrior virtues have become the preserve of the lone suicide attacker. [more]
Minsk: The Sun City of Dreams
Gateway to the communist empire or stage set utopia? The architects of Minsk's "imperial style" didn't have the city's residents in mind, writes Artur Klinau. [more]
Civilization theory and collective identity in the postmodern-globalized era
In a prescient essay from 1988, the late Lithuanian sociologist Vytautas Kavolis argues for the centrality of the concept of "civilization" in debates on postmodern global conditions. [more]
Modernization, globality, and nationalism as cultural endeavours
An essay by the late Lithuanian-American sociologist arguing that the idea of the nation retains its validity alongside processes of modernization and globalization. [more]
The hunger for ideas on the glutted theatre market
Consumer-led theatre policy has brought a decline in standards. Today, central Europe's most creative directors are asking some fundamental questions about the nature of theatre. [more]
Unspeakable
"The only way to speak of the whole is to learn to say nothing." How literature and philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Woolf, have approached the unspeakable. [more]
Belarus: Hopes for democracy and doubts about national identity
Hopes for democracy in Belarus will remain unfulfilled until a clear national ideology acceptable to the whole of society arises as an alternative to the prevailing Russophilia, says Lithuanian commentator Stasys Katauskas. [more]
Art criticism in practice: Art theory recycled?
Faced with the commercialization of art criticism, contemporary eastern European art critics must become activists, reclaiming public space for debate. [more]
Baltic battleground
Protests in Estonia about Russian war memorials are the latest expression of a fiercely independent Baltic identity. Hostility towards Russia has simmered in the Baltic countries since the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1944, following four years of brutal Nazi occupation. [more]
The energy of transit
Theatre in non-traditional spaces
Performances in disused industrial buildings, prisons, foyers, or on the street: in central and eastern Europe, experimental theatre is booming like in western Europe in the 1970s. [more]
The art critic as art historian and sociologist
The Lithuanian experience
Where does the art critic fit in the current "crisis of criticism"? A look at the situation in Lithuania as a model for worldwide trends in art criticism. [more]
Babel is not the last word
A conversation with Natalie Zemon Davis
"What I care about is having found ways to get evidence for and tell the stories of people often passed unnoticed or treated as a statistic -- to make their stories speak to bigger issues in historical life and change." [more]
The demiurge of the European Union
The demiurge of Europe is in thrall to the erratic forces of realpolitik. A platonic look at the future of the EU. [more]
The unbearable lightness of change
On political fatalism and the challenge facing Lithuanian intellectuals and artists. [more]
Dealing with the recent past
The tensions between memory and history
The variety of victims' personal memories does not warrant an "anything goes" approach in historical accounts of the more recent European dictatorships. [more]
National identity, culture and globalisation
Lithuania wakes up to a new social and cultural reality
In the academic and intellectual debate in Lithuania, globalisation and Europeanisation are often regarded as deadly threats to the national culture, an "evil mission". Almantas Samalavicius looks at the arguments and proposes a completely different concept of identity. [more]
The price of boredom
Daiva Tamosaityte's view on the past and future of a united Europe. [more]
Europe's East as spiritual space
Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christianity. Are these the only cornerstones of European culture? [more]
Artistic freedom, the safety valve
The concept of freedom has moved from an abstract idea to more down-to earth, practical matters. [more]
Stopping by the roadside
A word of thanks to French geographers
Thoughts about Eastern and Western Europe recorded in Vilnius, 'not far' from the geographical centre of Europe. [more]
Intellectuals in post-communist Lithuania
How has the social and political standing of intellectuals changed? [more]
A society model according to President Paksas
Lithuania is getting ready for the PR-age
The lasting crisis of President Rolandas Paksas calls for an analysis of Lithuania's political and social life. [more]
Memory and amnesia in a postcommunist society
Dealing with the legacy of the communist past in Lithuania. [more]
On the concept of the collaborator
Towards a definition of the "collaborator" during the Soviet era. [more]
America talking to itself
A note on American philosophy
Has American philosophical thought lost its relevance by becoming too self-obsessed? [more]
Renouvellement de l'identité culturelles de la nation lituanienne: Rôle de l'église
Vilnius' archbishop Backis questions national identity in a changing society and explores the possible role of the church. [more]
Historical choice: Europe or gray zone?
Laima Kanopkiene and Bronys Savukynas talk to Prof. Edvardas Gudavicius.
A discussion portraying Lithuania's mood before the EU-referendum. [more]
Europe without an end
A provocative discussion of the conflict between cultural relativism and universalism. [more]
The European Union: A danger to the nation state and national identity?
Negative sentiments in Lithuania against the EU has led to comparisons between the EU and the former Soviet Union. But are they justified? [more]
George Orwell: The anatomy of fanaticism and hatred
On the virtues and possibilities of 'liberal' nationalism. [more]
The burden of freedom
Lithuanian media during the transition
A decade into its existence as an independent state, has the Lithuanian media learned how to make use of its newly found freedom? [more]
Spirit and the end of art
Has the end of art arrived? Norman Lillegard reflects on philosophical thoughts about art and searches for the spirit in it. [more]
Print techtonics
The position of printmaking within the contemporary visual arts has shifted and the hegemony of painting and sculpture within the category of "fine art" is at last being broken. [more]
Lithuanian theatre in 1990-1999
A sociological study
In looking at the context of Lithuanian theatre in the 1990s, Rasa Vasinauskaite looks back at the aesthetic experience accumulated in preceding decades. [more]
Eastern Lithuania in Lithuanian culture of memory and politics
The problem of relations between historian and creator of memory