2012 seems to have been the year of the EU. This is the conclusion I drew after I started out by assuming this was a crisis of the Euro, which I realized was, and continues to be, a crisis of the entire economic and political project of the EU. (Read more...)

At a conference, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo claimed straightforwardly that politics in Italy had come to an end. As he put it, the two major political forces agreed on what was the most important thing to do right now, namely, to make sure that the policies of the technocratic and non-political Mario Monti administration – policies designed to save the economy of Italy – be kept going. Regardless of who wins elections in the future or what was happening in the country, all conscientious forces had better get on the bandwagon and pull in the same direction. (Read more...)

No matter how popular Oswald Spengler is deemed to become again due to Europe`s profound crisis, one thing does not allow me to take him seriously. True, he made many subtle points regarding the decline of Europe between the two world wars, yet one of the most dubious ideas defended by the author of The Decline of the West was on the parallel and separate existence of cultures. (Read more...)

Arnold J. Toynbee, echoing a great many historians, once asked: Does history repeat itself? Karl Marx wittily and caustically answered this question in the nineteenth century reminding us that it does, and even twice: once as a tragedy and then as a farce. (Read more...)

After the 2012 parliamentary elections, it is tempting to describe Lithuania as a victim of a series of ugly and unscrupulous manipulations undertaken by political cheats like Viktor Uspaskich and his party, the Labor Party, which is among the major winners of the elections along with Lithuanian Social Democrats and Motherland Union (Christian Democrats). Yet on a closer look it appears a simplistic perception of Lithuania’s political reality. (Read more...)

William Shakespeare is likely to have become a modern sensibility. Like Niccolò Machiavelli or his own contemporary and significant other, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare seems to have developed into a modern moral and political sensibility, a criterion of modernity, and even a symbolic design within which we perceive and interpret ourselves and the world around us. (Read more...)

George Orwell once offered an insight into the source of double standards applied to violence when it comes to European pacifists. When confronted with facts of violence at home, they take a stand immediately, leaving no room for doubt and ambiguity. Yet they choose to keep a blind eye, if not their eyes wide shut, on violence practiced not in the Western world, or at least not in democracies. (Read more...)