Publications
Remembering a friend of the Baltic States
John Hiden, an eminent British historian and a dedicated friend of the Baltic States, passed away on August 10, 2012. (Read more...)
A Catalan-Ukrainian-Lithuanian Project: A Catalan Artist Who Speaks the Language of Modern Sensibilities
Antoni Miró is a unique artist who speaks the European language of modern sensibilities. He appears to be a great Catalan artist who is capable of rediscovering the mental, aesthetic and cultural bridges of Europe. In fact, the political and cultural boundaries of Europe do not coincide, and they never did. The tension between political animosity and cultural enchantment or that, say, between social catastrophe and cultural flowering, is always present. (Read more...)
The blind leading the blind?
Zygmunt Bauman, commenting on Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island,” singled out this novel of warning as a genuine dystopia of our time which exposes our frame of mind with its insecurities, phobias, and discontents. Most telling was his emphasis on what he described as a new sense of fatalism, powerlessness and helplessness in the face of the new pattern of technology and politics, the latter being merely a derivative and subordinate of the former. (Read more...)
It Happens Overnight
It happens overnight. Evil strikes suddenly. Like the kiss of death, it comes in many faces – as a promise of the restoration of the sense of pride, certainty, safety and security. It may come in the guise of pursuit of happiness. It may walk disguised as a romantic patriotism. As we have seen, it may assume the facet of an industrial faith in rationality and in the future of humanity. (Read more...)
Is Football just Another Name for Politics?
Bon ton for every fan is to rise and give his or her respect to the defeated team as if to say that they love and respect their team not only when it wins. Loyalty and fidelity is not about success; nor is it about reward. (Read more...)
Heroes by default
In May 2012, the Lithuanian government organized and supported the solemn reburial of Juozas Ambrazevicius-Brazaitis, prime minister of the Provisional Government (PG) of Lithuania. This short-lived cabinet restored Lithuania’s independence in 1941, yet it did not last long, although Ambrazevicius and his colleagues did their utmost to please Nazi Germany. The cabinet itself was the outcome of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), which voiced an anti-semitic agenda on the very first day of the June 1941 Uprising and which envisaged Lithuania as a Jew-free country. (Read more...)
European Stories
Politics becomes impossible without a good story in the form of a convincing plot or an inspiring vision. The same applies to good literature. When we fail a method in our scholarship, or when a method fails us, we switch to a story – this sounds much in tune with Umberto Eco. Where scholarly language fails, fiction comes as a way out of the predicament with an interpretation of the world around us. (Read more...)
Discursive handicap of Central and Eastern Europe
In his reflections on Central Europe and Kundera, George Schopflin, a British political theorist of Hungarian background who acts as a member of the European Parliament on behalf of Hungary, aptly described the phenomenon which he termed the discursive handicap of Central Europe and the disparity of linguistic and cultural voices of West and Central Europe. This creates an obvious asymmetry of power and prestige when it comes to the use of languages, discursive strategies, and interpretations. This is more than true with regard to identity politics and educational strategy. (Read more...)
The end of modern politics?
The question whether modern politics, the way it has existed for centuries, will survive the 21st century is no joke nowadays. The Manichaeism of the left and the right, which, in Milan Kundera’s words, “is as stupid as it is insurmountable,” and which is deeply grounded in Western Europe and North America, is much more than partisan politics. Had it been that way, it would have been quite safe to assume that no other way can be offered to deal with polarities and opposing visions of human existence than democratic politics with its ethics of rational compromise without losing one’s core principles, dignity and identity. (Read more...)
Do Ukraine and the EU Need Each Other?
The title of my commentary hardly accounts for anything other than sheer rhetoric. Does Ukraine need the EU? Of course it does — simple as that. The next question, then, would be whether – and if yes, to what extent – the EU needs Ukraine. Quite frankly, the EU needs Ukraine now more than ever. (Read more...)
Commercialism or a cult of brutality and power?
The amount of negative information, brutal images, and violence in the Lithuanian media raises the issue of whether the reasons behind publicizing this sort of information lie in extreme commercialism or in a disguised power cult? Many of us have noticed the inexplicable amount of negative information, brutal images, and detailed scenes and reports of violent acts in the Lithuanian media. (Read more...)
Minorities: The Precious Voices of Baltic Multiculturalism
Talking about the Baltic States, it is worth remembering that prior to World War II, Finland was also considered to be a Baltic State. That is to say, there were four Baltic States in prewar Europe. The fact that only three entered the 21st century is an irony of recent history. Yet some similarities and affinities between the Baltic States are too obvious to require emphasis. All three nations stood at the same historic crossroads after the WWI. All were linked to the fate of Russia in terms of (in)dependence and emancipation. All three existed as independent states from 1918 until 1940. (Reado more...)
The new Russia with the worn-out leader
By Leonidas Donskis That Russia is not the Soviet Union seems obvious to anyone more or less familiar with history and not devoid of a sense of reality. Yet what happened over the past months was much more than a sheer repetition of history or an echo of the Arab Spring, as we are inclined to think sometimes. (Read more...)
The New Class of Political Entertainers
Leonidas Donskis Dystopian literature depicted the nightmares of the twentieth century. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (albeit the latter qualifies for the club of the novels of warning to a lesser extent) anticipated those simulations of reality, or fabrications of consciousness, that were, and continue to be, deeply and strikingly characteristic of the modern mass-media world. (Read more...)
Individuals by default
By Leonidas Donskis My Finnish friend, a philosophy professor from Helsinki, once told me that Estonia for some of his colleagues is an example of the worst nightmare of libertarian politics. Such a remark, if publicized, would have dealt a blow to a sweet dream of Lithuanians to stand in the Estonians’ shoes enjoying Finland in the vicinity and celebrating 70 kilometers away from something radically different than postcommunist traumas and painful dilemmas. The dream was broken by my colleague like a house of cards. (Read more...)
Where does memory live?
By Leonidas Donskis Once I became witness to a stunning dialogue between a celebrity jazz musician and the audience. It happened on October 22, 2006 during the show of Arturo Sandoval, a Cuban-born American jazz trumpeter, in the Kaunas Jazz festival, Lithuania. A most revealing dialogue occurred after a couple of opening pieces which proved Sandoval one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of our time. (Read more...)
Liquid Totalitarianism
Leonidas Donskis The term “soft totalitarianism” is on the lips of many commentators. They imply that the European Union is not a democracy, but, instead, is a technocracy which walks in disguise as a democracy. (Read more...)
A Crisis of Liberalism?
The political matrix of Central and Eastern Europe opening up the political space for a bipartisan system with no authentic niche left for the liberals, allowed some catch-it-all or pocket parties set up by the new tycoons and those seeking political revenge to pass for liberal forces — and this was the real tragedy. (Read more...)
A new technocratic revolution or the end of modern nations?
By Leonidas Donskis We live in a time of obsession with power. As Zygmunt Bauman wittily noticed, the old formula of politics as a carrots-and-sticks strategy still holds, yet we, having seen in the twentieth century the worst nightmares of sticks, are likely to experience the domination of carrots nowadays. (Read more...)
A Dangerous Delusion
By Leonidas Donskis One of the most dangerous delusions of our times is a firm conviction of the European Left (and of its counterparts in North America) that Israel is a most, if not the most, troublesome and sinister state in the world that may cause a new world war. As if a new global war cannot break out at any minute in Kashmir, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Russia… (Read more...)
