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The Christian and the Cosmos

The Puritan’s Grand Tour

June 3, 2018 • by Sara Georgini

Horace Bushnell needed a vacation. On the first day of July 1845, the Hartford, Conn., clergyman boarded the British packet-ship Victoria and set off for a salaried year in Europe. Weary from preaching trips to New York City, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Ohio, along with the publication of a prolific number of tracts, ...

Feature

Austrian Politics

Black and Blue

May 24, 2018 • by David Kretz

In December 2017, Austria got its new government, a coalition between the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), headed by the charismatic 31-year-old college dropout Sebastian Kurz, the world’s youngest head of state, and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) — European ally to France’s Front national and official partner of Putin’s party United ...

Feature

From Velvet Revolution to Velvet Dictatorship

Reflections on Democratic Regression

May 3, 2018 • by Adam Michnik

Let me start by describing how communism died. The first thing to perish was the communist faith. And this faith had two dimensions. It was a faith in the project of a just world, a world of solidarity and freedom. And it was a conviction that people had finally deciphered ...

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Two Europes, Not Quite the Same

Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in Eastern Europe

April 3, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Yugoslavia was in a state of bloody mayhem. Bullets whistled back and forth across the streets from the weapons of invisible shooters, snipers. But as the shells vied to wipe out passersby, reduce thousand-year-old bridges to dust, and the formerly ‘new’ philosophers vied to shame us, going out of their ...

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Democratic Crisis and the Politics of Social Media

Claire Potter on her upcoming Democracy & Diversity Institute course

March 25, 2018 • by TCDS

“One of the things that’s so interesting about Democracy and social media today is that it’s a paradox… I think all the possibilities for social media being a democratic space are still there, but recent history suggests that social media has also been complicit in foreclosing Democracy, not just in ...

Democratic Crisis and the Politics of Social Media

Europe & Central Asia

From Casting Director to Failed Coup

Unseating the Turkish military

March 6, 2018 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

The most recent period of competitive democratic politics in Turkey was bookended by two coups: those of 1980 and 2016. If the first heralded the re-organization of politics under the supervision of the military, the second instigated the transition to a civilian autocracy. The significance of the failed coup of ...

Europe & Central Asia

A Revolution in the Polling Booths?

The new constitutional order in Orbán’s “illiberal” Hungary

March 5, 2018 • by Mátyás György Endrey

In line with these ambitions, Orbán was also quick to announce that he considered the new parliament to be “a constitutional assembly,” tasked with setting the solid foundations for the new system in the form of a new constitution, The Fundamental Law, coming into force on January 1, 2012. This ...

Democracy

The Current Situation in Catalonia

Part two on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 4, 2018 • by Lucia Pradel

This piece is part of a two-part series. Part One is meant to contextualize Pradel’s essay. The Election on December 21st, 2017 The Catalonian independence movement won what appears like a clear victory on December 21. All the same, Ciudadanos (Citizens Party), a liberal pro-unity party that calls themselves “post-nationalist” won the majority ...

Democracy

Contextualizing Catalonia

Part One on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 1, 2018 • by Skyler Maassen, Lucia Pradel and Leng Wah Sing

In the early- to mid-twentieth century, repeated regime changes instigated the devolution of power from a centralized government to localized authorities. The desire for a stabilized, democratic form of government prevailed in the late 1970s with the fall of General Franco. Spain is comprised of seventeen autonomous regions. The Spanish Constitution of 1978, states ...

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For a Terrestrial Politics

An interview with Bruno Latour

March 1, 2018 • by Bruno Latour and Camille Riquier

This interview was originally published in Eurozine, February 6 2018. Between post-human globalization and nationalist withdrawal, the ecological question pushes us towards the earthly ground, argues Bruno Latour. Traditionally rejected by the Left as reactionary, ‘the question of belonging to a particular soil’ has suddenly become urgent. Camille Riquier: In 2015, you published Face ...

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Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

An open letter

February 20, 2018 • by Ewa Letowska

In the opinion of the Helsinki Committee in Poland, the two years since November 2015 have brought the greatest number of challenges and threats to human rights and freedoms of the entire post-1989 period. The Committee, as a civic initiative monitoring the violation of rights and fundamental freedoms since 1983, examines ...

Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

Feature

Neoliberalism’s Populist Bastards

A new political divide between national economies

February 15, 2018 • by Quinn Slobodian

This year, attendees at the World Economic Forum might have breathed a sigh of relief, believing that immediate threats to their existence had passed. Yet members of the so-called populist right in Germany and Austria entered parliament after big wins in elections at the end of last year. Their victories ...