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who's in café europa ?Jorge Semprun, the Spanish writer takes us on a journey through three haunting moments in Europe's modern history. He is joined by Francis Rosenstiel in reminding us what happens to its people when Europe doesn't work. Gaspar Miklos Tamas accuses today's Europe of abandoning its Enlightenment principles. So it is up to Europeans to make it work. Yasemin Soysal and Richard Kearney give us insights into vital developments in education and citizenship. In the company of writers from Portugal, Scandinavia, or the former Yugoslavia, we look at icons and nationalisms, celebrations and personal odyssies.
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...
Francis Rosenstiel, like Jorge Semprun, survived the ravages of Europe’s twentieth century to play an honourable role in its post-war reconstruction. For him, the exalted rhetoric of ‘European humanism’ is vanity; what matters is real achievement in a newly-dangerous political sphere – a culture for “the democratic management of our vulnerabilities.” Read the rest of this post...
An EU-brokered agreement has at last consigned the name of Yugoslavia to history. Its disappearance is a story of personal loss as well as political tragedy. One of its children bids a dignified farewell – and asks what will remain of a noble idea. Read the rest of this post...
Radio Free Europe, a powerful weapon of the West during the Cold War, now occupies the former site of the (communist) Czech parliament. Its editorial direction has shifted from opposing the Soviet menace to accompanying its sister stations in the ‘war on terrorism’. As a result, its new home is under the protection of the Czech army. So why is everyone in Prague laughing? Read the rest of this post...
Fritz Groothues helps us to revisit the central subject of Café Europa – European identity – and to break the subject down into thinkable parts (not forgetting our emotions). Encouragingly, Café Europa contributions to date have touched on many aspects of the issue. Follow the links for a ‘hyperwalk’ through this part of the strand. Read the rest of this post...
From exile and incarceration to government and academy, Jorge Semprun both fully lived the disasters that fell upon Europe in the mid-20th century, and never stopped reflecting upon their meaning and lessons. His recent talk at the Institut Français in London was part of their compelling lecture series, “Europe, my Europe”. In it, Semprun offers us the essence of Europe via a journey through three haunting moments of its modern history. Read the rest of this post...
The modern history of the Nordic countries demonstrates that the ‘Nordic model’ is less an essential reality than the projection of an idealised ‘other’ by the rest of Europe. As the EU faces another range of ‘others’ to the south, does the always contested Nordic reality hold lessons for the attempt to release Europe into a new international role and set of relationships? Read the rest of this post...
Scotland’s capital city has discovered a lucrative way to celebrate the nation’s premier ‘calendar custom’. Is this the loss of local identity, or its conversion into global currency? Read the rest of this post...
The plurality of Europe’s nations, cultures and territories make European identity hard to define. This very lack of fixity is an asset, enabling the continent to avoid being blinded by opposition to a symbolic ‘other’. But as closer political association succeeds centuries of national rivalry and heroic narratives, how is the messy ‘European’ story being retold in school textbooks and curricula? Read the rest of this post...
The debate on Europe is missing a crucial dimension because the textures of our imaginative life are parochial and unconnected. We need shared, but provocative symbols and reference-points – perhaps even some carnivalesque statues – to enlarge our sense of the continents. Read the rest of this post...
Radical changes in the Irish-British relationship over Northern Ireland augur a wider shift in the locus of nation-state sovereignty - from territory to peoples. Will this mean an end to the politics of identity, with both ethnic nationalism and multiculturalism giving way to an enriching hybridity? This core argument from the continent’s west carries the pungent flavour of Café Europa. Read the rest of this post...
People are reassembling communities in the global public spaces between home, work, and country of origin. Researching her play about the hard road from Macedonia to London, a dramatist discovers the exile café to be not just a place of refuge, but a metaphor for the continent’s future. Read the rest of this post...
The EU has enlarged, not diminished, freedom for Portugal: the liberating end to a purely national destiny, even with jaqizimhos no longer on the menu. A Portuguese writer describes how a disco night and a visit to Morocco helped reinforce a borderless confidence. Read the rest of this post...
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