Europe Archives - Public Seminar

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

In an ancient forest, tourists and people on the move walk parallel paths

June 26, 2025 • by Inga Hajdarowicz

On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares ...

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

Politics

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Italy’s formerly fascist party aligns itself with American Republicans, British Conservatives, and Likud in Israel

October 3, 2022 • by Lucas Dolan

Giorgia Meloni now represents a cadre of European far-right leaders whose views are fully legible to the American Far Right. ...

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Europe & Central Asia

Is Putin Bluffing in Ukraine?

Though many Russians are anxious about Putin’s new mobilization of citizens to fight in Ukraine, some are also preparing to survive a nuclear conflict

September 28, 2022 • by Anastasia Shteinert

Putin’s nuclear threats provoked immediate reaction among leaders of Western countries, including Ukraine. The world community is concerned about Russian tactical nuclear weapons intended for use on a battlefield. ...

Europe & Central Asia

Different People

After fleeing war-ravaged Kharkiv, many have found refuge and hospitality in Poltava. How does it feel to be an internally displaced person in one’s own city of birth?

September 12, 2022 • by Andrei Krasniashchikh

The displaced can be recognized by their backpacks and the plastic bags they’re carrying, filled with humanitarian aid. Also, by their rapid pace. The displaced move fast: from explosion to explosion. ...

Feminism

When Fascism Is Female

In Europe, right-wing feminism is on the rise—and nationalist women are taking power

August 31, 2022 • by Sophie Boulter

This fascist “fire” that Meloni references and kindles is burning throughout Europe, and she is not alone in tending to its flames....

Past Present

Summer Travel and European Vacations

Past Present Podcast, Episode 334

July 12, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: American travel to Europe is back with such a vengeance that some are calling it “revenge travel.” Neil referred to this history of the “Grand Tour.” Natalia and Niki drew on this Hudson Valley magazine article about midcentury Catskills resorts. In ...

History

Steve Bannon and the Aesthetics of Catholic Romanticism

Why the populist Svengali wants to have a power base near the Vatican

April 15, 2021 • by Daniel DiMassa

_____ Steve Bannon would have you believe he’s a “gladiator,” but his exploits in Rome suggest a more apt historical analogy: clearly he is a Romantic. In August 2020, Bannon was arrested and charged with fraud for his involvement in the mismanagement of a crowdsourced fund to build President Trump’s border wall. ...

Steve Bannon and the Aesthetics of Catholic Romanticism

Democracy

Europe Reacts to the 2020 US Presidential Election

The resilience of American democracy gives us reason to hope

November 12, 2020 • by Valerio Alfonso Bruno and Parsi Vittorio Emanuele

Europeans have long awaited the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election with conflicting feelings of fear and hope. In Berlin, Paris, and Brussels, leaders have hoped that a Biden presidency might spur a renewal of transatlantic relations, while in Warsaw and Budapest, populist executives hoped for a second Trump ...

Europe Reacts to the 2020 US Presidential Election

Europe & Central Asia

Poland Slouches On

After a noxious and underhanded campaign, Poland’s incumbent president, representing the country’s illiberal ruling party, has clinched a narrow re-election victory. That gives the government three more years to dismantle the country’s democracy.

July 17, 2020 • by Sławomir Sierakowski

WARSAW -- In the second round of Poland’s presidential election, incumbent Andrzej Duda narrowly defeated Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. Though he carried just six provinces in eastern Poland, compared to Trzaskowski’s ten, and lost in medium and large cities, Duda’s support in villages and small towns was just enough to push him over the ...

Imaginal Politics

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Analytic or Continental Philosophy?

February 27, 2020 • by Chiara Bottici

Prima facie, it would seem that so-called “continental philosophy,” that is, the practice of doing philosophy by engaging in a conversation with authors of the past in the humanities style, is much better situated to convey an accurate image of the past than so-called analytic philosophy, which focuses instead on ...

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Europe & Central Asia

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

Populism on the retreat

December 5, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

Romania was one of the post-communist countries to join the neoliberal bandwagon slower than the Visegrad group and made it to EU membership just when the 2008 global crisis was about to break. For over a decade after the end of the brutal Nicolae Ceausescu dictatorship, old communist apparatchiks together ...

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

History

This Mess of Troubled Times

Has 1989 vanished beneath a mountain of interpretation and reflection?

November 26, 2019 • by Karl Schlögel

The processes set in motion by the disintegration of the socialist economy in eastern Europe eluded all analytical frameworks. It was a time of ‘wild thinking’, in which received ideas were reconsidered and values re-assessed. We are still living through this troubled era, writes the historian of the Soviet Union ...