Publications
Ukraine at a Crossroads
The resolution on the situation in Ukraine recently adopted by the European Parliament signified that both Ukraine and the EU are at a crossroads. In all likelihood, this also signified the arrival of a new phase in relations between Ukraine and the EU. First and foremost, a long and difficult debate commenced and will continue in the EP. Almost everyone easily agrees that the Tymoshenko case is an obvious example of a politically motivated trial, yet Tymoshenko seems to have polarized opinion as a political figure. (Read more...)
Nationalism and Post-Empire Syndrome
The real threat to Europe and the world is the delayed collapse of old empires and the resulting formation of new hegemonic derivatives. Let us pity poor nationalism. All the calamities of the twentieth century have been blamed on it. (Read more...)
Post-imperialism
By Leonidas Donskis What exactly is meant by post-imperialism here? One could call it a strange state of affairs between politics and international relations, when former empires deny their colonial history but maintain their great influence in their former satellite states, which, under the guise of political correctness and good taste, are called friendly nations and traditional allies. Besides, post-imperialism cannot be imagined without a paternalistic and protective attitude to smaller or economically and politically weaker countries. (Read more...)
Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Our Troubled World
By Leonidas Donskis
Human rights and multiculturalism are no longer values in the world today. They have turned into words opening the door to politics. While Western human rights activists and politicians engaged in defending human rights actively strive to make human rights a core aspect of foreign policies, the founding fathers of the Russian human rights movement, Andrei Sakharov and Sergei Kovalev, denied Realpolitik from the bottom of their hearts, trying to replace it with an alternative value-and-idea-system which they described as a new universal, non-ideological ideology. (Read more...)
The dissonances of Realpolitik and human rights
By Leonidas Donskis The great Russian humanist, dissident and human rights defender Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989), whose 90th anniversary we marked on May 21, 2011, and in whose name the supreme EP award in the sphere of the defense of human rights was initiated, when asked about what kind of universal ideology could be adopted by humanity in the future, described the universality of human rights and our commitment to defend them as the only set of values and ideas capable of bridging the gulfs and reconciling the opposites. Otherwise, according to the patron saint of Russian and East European liberal dissent, we would be trapped in ideological fights and culture wars for the years and decades to come. (Read more...)
The Culture of Fear
By Leonidas Donskis Ours is a time of fear. We cultivate a culture of fear which is becoming increasingly powerful and global. Our self-revealing age, with its fixation on cheap sensationalism, political scandals, TV reality shows, and other forms of self-exposure in exchange for public attention and fame, prizes moral panic and apocalyptic scenarios incomparably more than a balanced approach, light irony, or modesty. (Read more...)
Do old-fashioned intellectuals and politics have a future?
By Leonidas Donskis An interesting discussion took place in the Frankfurter Rundschau (September 26, 1992). When asked by his interviewer whether intellectuals will succeed in maintaining their social significance, the Spanish literary critic and author, Manuel Vazquez Montalban (who is famous especially for his detective novels), wittily replied that “the connection between CNN and Jane Fonda will be the only organic intellectual in the world.” (Read more...)
From the Revolution of Dilettantes and to the Managerial Revolution
By Leonidas Donskis
The Lithuanian writer Ricardas Gavelis – an iconic though perhaps neglected author in his own country who was especially active in the 1990s once coined the term “the epoch of dilettantes” to describe the explosive proliferation of universities and colleges, both public and private, whose number sky-rocketed almost immediately after the country became independent. Without a shadow of a doubt, one could assume that this reflected a far wider tendency characteristic of the former Soviet “republics” in general. (Read more..)
Freedom and Democracy in Decline
By Leonidas Donskis Having listened to the 2011 Freedom House report on freedom and democracy across the world, presented recently in the Human Rights Subcommittee meeting at the European Parliament, the only conclusion that was possible to make was that freedom and democracy are in decline. I realize that this is at odds with the general wave of enthusiasm evoked by the chain of revolutions and uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, yet the Freedom House speakers in the EP were able to offer only such an assessment of things. (Read more...)
Searching for the Europe of Czeslaw Milosz
By Leonidas Donskis
2011 is the year of Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004). The centenary of the greatest modern Polish poet allows us a glimpse of Eastern and Central Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. (Read more...)
Belgique mon amour…
By Leonidas Donskis Belgium appears as a small replica of the European Union. A nearly perfect embodiment of modern fears, phobias, uncertainties, and ambivalence, Belgium can break all kinds of conventional wisdom as a house of cards. To engage in cliche dropping when trying to portray this small, albeit ambitious and critically important to the EU, country is a pointless undertaking. (Read more...)
Europe’s minority parties: What manner of beast?
By Leonidas Donskis
The surge of ethnically-based political parties in Latvia and even more so Lithuania requires our attention and a look at the reasons that might be behind this phenomenon. (Read more...)
The Craving for Liberty in the Arab World, or What Happened to Us?
By Leonidas Donskis It was with sound reason that the French philosopher Andre Glucksmann has just recently exploded with devastating criticism of the European Union for its failure to support the spirit of freedom and the craving for liberty so potently manifest in the Middle East and in the Arab world. (Read more...)
The Source of Success
By Leonidas Donskis One of the most prominent and perceptive experts on the former Soviet Union, the French historian, philosopher, and political scientist Alain Besançon once suggested that “failure to understand the Soviet regime is the principal cause of its successes.” (Read more...)
Where Do We Belong Now?
By Leonidas Donskis Lithuania and Poland have many centuries of common history. From the Lublin Union in 1569 to the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, which was the kiss of death to both nations until the restoration of their independence after the First World War; both nations had a shared culture and a strong tradition of political liberty. Lithuanian history is inseparable from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a unique political entity that preceded the EU in more than one way. (Read more...)
Miracles Do Happen: Remembering January 13, 1991
By Leonidas Donskis Twenty years ago Lithuania paid a heavy price for having become the first rebellious and breakaway republic in the former Soviet Union. The kiss of death to the dying empire, the real coup de grace dealt by a small country to the last colonial empire in Europe, albeit disguised as a legitimate heir to the ideals of the Enlightenment and also as a trailblazer to the Left in the world, signified the arrival of the new epoch. (Read more...)
Twenty Years since 13 January 1991: Remembering the Winter of Our Discontents
By Leonidas Donskis Twenty years ago Lithuania paid the heavy price for having become the first rebellious and breakaway republic in the former Soviet Union. The kiss of death to the dying empire, the real coup de grâce dealt by a small country to the last colonial empire in Europe, albeit disguised as a legitimate heir to the ideals of the Enlightenment and also as a trailblazer to the Left in the world, signified the arrival of the new epoch. (Read more...)
The Unique Center in Gotland Island
By Leonidas Donskis There is a fine institution situated in Visby, Gotland Island, Sweden: the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (BCWT). I hold this Center to be the jewel of Swedish cultural policy and public diplomacy in the Baltic region. The BCWT is the Baltic region’s symbolic home, a place where Nordic and Baltic languages, literatures, and translators come together. (Read more...)
A Lonely Voice of Despair
By Leonidas DonskisDuring my last visit to Washington, D.C., where I participated in a timely and good conference on the historical memory and justice in Eastern Europe at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, I had a pleasant morning read of newspapers. Suddenly my attention was caught by the letter of a Russian journalist published in The Wall Street Journal (Friday, November 12, 2010). (Read more...)
We are Faster than History, yet Slower than a Lifetime
By Leonidas DonskisInterestingly enough, the “faster than history” idiom acquires a special meaning when dealing with social change in Central and Eastern Europe. The speed of time in what Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, each in his own way, described as “yet another Europe,” is beyond the historical, cultural, and political imaginations of Western Europeans and North Americans. (Read more...)
