Twenty years ago, the finance ministers of the eu member-states agreed in Maastricht on founding a monetary union. On new year’s day ten years ago, the euro was introduced. Anniversaries all round, then. Still, few have felt like celebrating. The euro crisis has the continent firmly in its grasp. This issue of IWMpost looks at the state of the EU present and future (p. 16–18).
In the crisis, events are dictating actions. Yet politics needs to be more than crisis management. It needs to place events in a larger context and generate discussion. Without agreement over “which Europe”, over the quo vadis, over the European common good (however one defines it), calls to politicize the Union, ubiquitous these days, will be futile—regardless of institutional reforms. Good reason, then, to see Europe’s future not as being severed from problems like social inequality and from the question of the state of democracy, understood not as a source of legitimacy for governments but as a participatory way of life for everyone. These issues are central to the contributions of Cornelia Klinger, IWM Permanent Fellow, and Pierre Rosanvallon, Professor at the Collège de France and speaker at the 2011 Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture (pp. 3 and 5).
Last autumn saw thousands demonstrating on the streets of New York, Athens, Madrid or Santiago de Chile. The success of the Occupy Movement, though short-lasting from today’s perspective, was partly the result of the successful linking of a political agenda with the topic of “human rights”. Aryeh Neier, President of the “Open Society Institute” founded by George Soros, talked at the IWM in November 2011 about the human rights movement as a political force (p. 24)
The revolutions of the Arab Spring are, in turn, exemplary of what Rudolf Vierhaus called the “contemporaneity of history and the historicity of the contemporary.” Writing and thinking about history as a means of better understanding the present is something that has been done at the IWM for the past thirty years—often with transnational points of reference. An example par excellence is the book Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, Yale historian and IWM Permanent Fellow, written here at the Institute. The history of the murderous excesses of the Stalin and Nazi dictatorships in the bloodlands, the area of Europe stretching from Poland to Belarus and Ukraine, open up a new perspective on Europe’s common past. This issue of IWMpost documents a discussion between Snyder and historian Sybille Steinbacher (p. 14).
Download the IWMpost 108 as a PDF
Contents
News
Sorge – Arbeit am guten Leben / von Cornelia Klinger
Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture
Rethinking Equality in an Age of Inequalities / by Pierre Rosanvallon
Conference on Borders
Bordering Communist and Post-Communist Europe / by Jessie Labov
Communism as Golden Age? / by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Conference on Eastern European Capitalism
On Transformation and Normality / by Phil Hanson
Anything New? / by János Mátyás Kovács
Lectures and Discussions
Books in Perspective
Inside the Bloodlands—a discussion between Timothy Snyder and Sybille Steinbacher
Special: Europe in Crisis
Europe and the Threat to Open Society / by Ivan Krastev
Ein anderes Europa–Interview mit Klaus Gretschmann
From the Fellows
Sad Truths About Serbian Media / by Ivan Angelovski
The Sense of an Ending: Putin and the End of “No-Choice” Politics / by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Fellows and Guests
Varia, Publications, Articles and Talks
Guest Contribution
The Human Rights Movement as a Political Force / by Aryeh Neier
In Memoriam: Ralf Dahrendorf
Making Freedom Possible / by Krzysztof Michalski
