Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
Centre-right parties across Europe are announcing the failure of multiculturalism. We are witnessing a co-ordinated revival of Enoch Powell's idea of the aggressive outsider out to dominate the rest; only now race and immigration are being played out on the terrain of culture and religion
We should not cut ourselves off from the many counter-hegemonic and inclusionary strands in the democratic tradition that can be found as much in the West as in the East and the South.
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
The Europe that is dying is the one that remains hostage to its past. Another Europe is not only possible but is in fact fast becoming an urgent necessity. This would be a Europe of vitality, open to connections, that has let go of its civilisational conceits
We needn’t disavow the insights of contemporary democratic theory to explore the intuition that they have been deeply shaped by the experience of democracy in one part of the world, and that this might produce inadvertent gaps or weaknesses in the theory.
Europe’s leaders are reversing their historically generous role in assisting countries out of criminality and fascism. What we are seeing now therefore strikes at the heart of the European project not just the euro.
Our guest editor introduced his special feature on the ‘Uses of Xenophobia’, on Europe Day. Here, he maps the new relevance of an open and shared commons to a continent that is once again meeting economic, political and cultural insecurity with a resurgence of aggressive political demagoguery
In an interview with journalist Olena Tregub, political scientist Andreas Umland argues that Ukrainian integration into the European mainstream is of crucial importance, both for Ukraine and the EU. In his view, alignment with Europe should become Ukraine’s top priority.
Why is widespread social anxiety fuelling xenophobia rather than criticism of neoliberal capitalism? What role has the state played? Have we arrived at the paradoxical situation where the best we can do is to call on the state to do its job?
The convulsions in the Arab world in 2011 are creating a new political and social reality. But what will be its character? Tarek Osman identifies three factors that are shaping the possible future.
Just as Iraq’s Prime Minister was putting the finishing touches on an authoritarian edifice in the best Arab tradition, the whole model comes crumbling down.
