June marks the fifth month of Nuit Debout (Standing Night) a movement that sprung from earlier protests by young people against the French government’s labor law reform. On March 31, 2016, an informal group of a dozen citizens from Fakir, a left-wing activist magazine, used the #mars40 Twitter hashtag to ...
Norbert Hofer must have been shocked when he heard the final result. The right-winger lost a presidential election he seemed to have had in the bag. In the end, just 31,026 votes separated him from rival Robert Van der Bellen of the Green Party. The postal votes won it for ...
Most of the debate about the European refugee crisis revolves around whether the responsibility of handling them belongs to European institutions or to individual nation states, and, if the latter, which among them: the first country of entry (as the Dublin regulations established) or some other country. In this brief ...
In 1943 Hannah Arendt published a short essay in the Jewish periodical "The Menorah Journal" entitled We Refugees. She described in it a widespread refusal among Jews who had escaped the Nazis to call themselves “refugees." Having lost everything -- their occupation, their language, their family -- they ...
An exhibition now touring several cities in Europe is worth visiting and thinking about, as it reflects both the political and cultural sensibility of Europe. PIGS is curated by Blanca de la Torre, a Spanish art curator who develops projects throughout the world and understands art as a ...
The process of European unification is undergoing a deep crisis, certainly the deepest since it started at the beginning of the 1950s. In less than a year, the EU faced two major tests—first the Greek quarrel, then the refugee crisis -- that revealed its true face: a mixture of impotence, ...
Those seeking to explain why the response to foreigners on the part of Eastern Europeans -- in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and eastern Germany -- has been so severe and contemptuous have to take a look back.
It must have been shortly before we left for Germany, in 1980 or ...
The Committee in Defense of Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji, or KOD) appeared to start suddenly out of thin air. It is now the biggest mass mobilization of Polish citizens since the days of Solidarity 25 years ago. On the one hand, this is clearly a response to the electoral victory ...
On Saturday, January 9, 2016, people in Poland and Poles around the world once again protested the actions of the incumbent government led by Prime Minister Beata Szydło, the parliamentary majority, and President Andrzej Duda. The current situation has already earned entries in both Polish and English Wikipedia under the ...
It is 5.30 on a cold and rainy Monday evening in Dresden. To the casual tourist, there might be nothing extraordinary about the time or day of the week. The eerie tranquility of warmly flashing Christmas decorations, the ubiquitous smell of Glühwein, and the ingeniously crafted stands of the world ...
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