As I write these lines today, on 6 June 2013, a disgraceful trial begins in Moscow. The so-called Bolotnaya case is all about twelve Russian citizens accused of attacking the police at the Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. On 6 May 2012, 70 000 protesters were authorized to have a rally against election fraud in Russia’s presidential elections. What happened next was that the police started provoking people, beating them up, and then arresting those who resisted the violence against peaceful civilians. (Continue...)
As I contemplate How The Light Gets In 2013 which will be held 1–2 June 2013 in Hay-on-Wye, Great Britain, I cannot help but recall everything I have written about the end of the world. Yes, there is no slip of the pen here, as I am going to talk in the festival about the touch of evil, the devil in politics, and the end of the university. The question arises — how can we imagine modern life without such things as hope, faith, and education? Is it possible to live here and now without books? Mapping the way in which I think and feel now about those things allows a glimpse of the contemporary world. (Continue...)
The American political theorist Mark Lilla once wrote a perceptive review essay on the New Right in France, which he entitled “The Strange Birth of Liberal France” (The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 1994). This title, if slightly paraphrased, would be tailor-made to draw attention to the adventures of liberalism in Central Europe. (Read more...)
Ukraine`s joining the EU would dramatically and irreversibly change the political landscape of Europe, end the division of Europe and close the saga of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. (Continue...)
Accepted and vilified, celebrated and rebuked by all, as François Villon would have had it, Machiavelli became a litmus test case for nearly every epoch in European history. Much remains to be done to reject numerous clichés and senseless accusations to fully understand and appreciate his legacy as a humanist, historian, political thinker, and a prophet of modern politics. (Continue...)
A quarter of a century has passed since 1988 which marked the beginning of the end of the former Soviet Union. The national rebirth movement of Lithuania, Sajudis, came into existence blazing the trail for Lithuania and other Soviet republics to freedom and independence. Gaining the momentum, consolidating symbolic power and authority, and making people believe that the time has come to change history and world politics restoring justice – all these magnificent things would have been beyond the reach if the Lithuanian media had not changed the public domain almost overnight. (Read more...)
The brain drain process is a painful challenge to Lithuania, as the country is losing the best of its young people, would-be scholars, artists, business people, probably – even public figures, policy makers and statesmen as well. (Continue...)
Lithuania is bound to confront one more challenge that arises from its domestic political clashes and cleavages. The center populist Labor Party, and the no less populist but rightwing the Order and Justice Party, have decided to merge, thus forming what they perceive as the third major political party in Lithuania capable of sharing the power structure and competing with the conservative Homeland Union and leftwing Social Democratic Party. (Read more...)
The Magnitski list becomes much more than merely a benign and disconnected political fantasy. After the United States Congress adopted this law, with its clear legal and political implications, Russia retaliated by prohibiting American citizens from adopting Russian orphans – a mean, regrettable, and ugly move from Russia’s side with a total confusion of political and humanitarian agendas. Now it is a decisive time for the EU to take a stand. (Read more...)
Gérard Depardieu is regarded as a symbol of France, and rightly so. It was deeply symbolic that he featured in Bernardo Bertolucci’s classical film 1900 along with Robert De Niro. Both of them were quite young in those days, both were to become a genuine embodiment of their generation, both fulfilled themselves as symbols of their respective countries – equally talented, charismatic, with a great scope of mastery ranging from comedy to drama. Both are endowed with a mystery of a smile – warm, playful, and unforgettable. Both are able to create a role using no text, simply with their eyes and body language. (Read more...)
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...)
Is European culture a fantasy? Is it more or less so than European politics? These are the questions that cross my mind over and over again when I try to think of how to reverse the ongoing tragedy of the EU – namely, its silent and slow demise, which is a fact of reality, to my dismay. (Read more...)
Is politics free of criminals? Has it ever been so? In fact, it hasn’t. Far from war criminals, who, as a cynic’s dictionary would suggest, are statesmen who lost the war (whereas the heroes solely remain on the winning side), felons squeeze into politics from time to time. Crooks, charlatans, various other dodgy figures and even mobsters become part of the classe politique. As the witty saying goes, the dividing line between parliament and prison tends to be quite thin. (Read more...)
We had long thought that cleptocracy is something safely distanced from Europe and, therefore, related to African and Latin American political classes. What strikes us now, however, is the fact that we witness its strong presence in Europe. What is happening in Eastern Europe now may well be described as the revolt of crooks, thieves and cheats who make up the political classes nowadays. (Read more...)