My refuge is humanity
Quote of the day
 Our writersEmail & RSSSign up to oD's editorial summaries email:
openDemocracy likes:
Navigation
|
 |
rise of the new rightA range of scholars, politicians and thinkers reflect on the disturbing rise of the far right across Europe in 2002. From campaigns to resist Berlusconi to commitments to multiculturalism and dissections of the allure of the sharp suited demagogue, our debate maps the co-ordinates of the landscape of European politics.
After his death, the appeal of Austria's rightwing populist leader will find new channels
The far-right advance in Austria’s election is a test for the polity but a burden for the country
The real story of Austria's general election is that the country's democracy has been taken hostage by the extreme right. Anton Pelinka, Austria's leading political analyst, explains. Read the rest of this post...
The success of Italy's football team in the world cup could inspire a renaissance in the country's public life, says Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
The centre-left revival in Italy has not extended to Sicily's regional election, but Rita Borsellino's campaign has highlighted a larger campaign for ethics and justice in Italian politics, reports Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
An election without a decisive result leaves Italian politics in limbo, report Sarah Pozzoli & Mario Rossi. Read the rest of this post...
Italy's knife-edge election result leaves its political future, and Silvio Berlusconi’s legacy, unresolved. Geoff Andrews reports. Read the rest of this post...
The worst of old Sicily – corruption, patronage, entropy – has become endemic in Italy itself under Silvio Berlusconi, veteran anti-mafia campaigner and centre-left candidate Leoluca Orlando tells Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
Italy's showman-leader has lost his touch, but have his centre-left opponents found the way to defeat him? Geoff Andrews reports on an unpredictable Italian election. Read the rest of this post...
The United States president is preparing to welcome Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to address a joint meeting of Congress. A bad move, says George W Bush's fellow Harvard Business School alumnus, Pierleone Ottolenghi. Read the rest of this post...
Silvio Berlusconi hopes that an intense media blitz will help sustain him in power, but Geoff Andrews finds that Italy's comedians and artists have other ideas. Read the rest of this post...
The career and achievement of the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is being celebrated thirty years after his brutal murder, but the political controversy surrounding his death haunts Italy still, says Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
Silvio Berlusconi began April an election loser but ends it as head of a reformed centre-right coalition. Sarah Pozzoli & Mario Rossi on the great survivor of Italian politics. Read the rest of this post...
The search for equality and respect by Roma people in Romania has produced a new generation of activists using creative, confident methods of expressing their identity. The leader of a Bucharest-based NGO, Florin Botonogu, talks to Julian Kramer of openDemocracy about the impact of social activism on Roma’s sense of their direction in modern Romania. Read the rest of this post...
Roma in the Czech Republic have been hit hard by post-communist industrial decline and social prejudice. In the eastern city of Ostrava, they display a survivalist spirit amidst grinding poverty. But how can Roma children succeed in an educational system based on institutional exclusion and contempt? Read the rest of this post...
The arrival of Roma on the political stage is often heralded as a mark of enlightenment and social progress. But the search for Roma nationalism and political representation is better understood as part of the regressive empowerment of ethnic and nationalist cleavages as an organising principle in European politics. Rather than top-down leadership, the Roma need grassroots campaigning for equality with their fellow-citizens. Read the rest of this post...
The condition of Roma people is a vital issue in negotiations over the accession of Romania to the European Union. Roma who leave in great numbers (claiming human rights violations) and those who stay (enduring multiple sources of social injustice) alike challenge democratic and social ideals in a context of far-right revival. An academic of Roma origin reflects on the tortured history of Roma in Romania, and affirms the need for a new discourse and practice of equality for Roma at the European level. Read the rest of this post...
As Silvio Berlusconi took on Italy’s presidency of the EU, his “kapo” gaffe in the European Parliament gave warning of fireworks to come. It was preceded by his coalition partner Umberto Bossi’s demand for cannon fire on illegal immigrants. Here a long-time observer of the new right in Italy tells the story of the rise of the Northern League, talks to Bossi, and reads the portents for the collapse of Berlusconi’s “House of Liberties”… Read the rest of this post...
The far-right Vlaams Blok gained ground in Belgium’s May 2003 elections on an anti-immigrant, nationalist platform. The journalist Nick Ryan spent time there with suits and skinheads. This extract from his book ‘Homeland’ tells the gripping story of their attempts to “save their identity” from “globalisation and mongrelisation” – a battle fought on the streets, in pubs and in the parliament. Read the rest of this post...
The public embrace between the prime ministers of Italy and Britain fills this Italian free market conservative with despair. For, he writes to the editor of openDemocracy, Silvio Berlusconi is leading Italy down a dangerous path, and one that has closed a historic opportunity - for the country to become normal. Read the rest of this post...
The old is dying, and the new cannot be born. The catastrophic defeat of Lionel Jospin and his socialist party in the recent French elections was more than just another swing of the political cycle; it reflects the Left’s lack of understanding of the society it aspires to represent. Only an honest engagement with its own society, with a globalised world, with a changed Europe, and with its own illusions, can free the French Left from the immense weight of its own past. Read the rest of this post...
The problem with the ‘velvet revolutions’ is that they were not revolutions at all. Hungary’s intellectual class needs to work out who its true friends are. Read the rest of this post...
Paul Gilroy’s work, “Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race”, challenges the way that categories of ‘race’ are routinely used and proposes an audacious new binding concept of ‘planetary humanism’. He elaborates the argument in an interview with Anthony Barnett, Bola Gibson and Caspar Melville of openDemocracy. Read the rest of this post...
The range of global political possibility has been transformed by post-cold-war turbo-capitalism. A new mapping of the political faultlines defines "high stakes", "shared values", and "natural orders" as competing versions of the European future. But could there yet be a fourth, involving the demise of the European Union itself?
Four prominent Italians present an urgent appeal in defense of Italian democracy which has already won 60,000 signatories. Read the rest of this post...
The gunshot that felled Pim Fortuyn reverberated around Europe and made the politics of the Netherlands a rare focus of world attention. But the assassination was, first and foremost, a shattering event for Dutch society. Over the next eleven days, and concluding one hour before the polls opened in the general election, Tjebbe van Tijen wrote this moving exploration of its national meaning. Read the rest of this post...
The political character and influence of the recently-deposed Hungarian prime minister is critically examined by a former colleague in the 1980s’ opposition movement. Read the rest of this post...
Hungary’s recent politics and closely-contested election have been dominated by its youthful prime minister. Whatever his political fate, he has played a historic role in reshaping his country’s identity after communism. Read the rest of this post...
The re-election of John Howard as Australia’s prime minister has been ascribed to a ‘wave of xenophobia’. But beneath the surface, does it owe as much to the failure of the opposition to articulate a desperately-needed fresh vision for the once lucky country? Read the rest of this post...
Harlem Desir’s hope that Europe will help create accountable institutions at the world level is challenged by the example of Italy’s Northern League. This anti-immigrant movement seems to embrace economic modernity while employing xenophobic language to reject the impurities of ‘globalisation’. Read the rest of this post...
|
|
|
Recent comments
5 hours 12 min ago
5 hours 21 min ago
8 hours 24 min ago
11 hours 1 min ago
11 hours 43 min ago
11 hours 47 min ago
11 hours 48 min ago
12 hours 1 min ago
12 hours 9 min ago
12 hours 25 min ago