1. Policy Positions and Platform

The heart of any candidate’s campaign is their stance on key issues. It’s essential to dig into the details of each candidate’s platform. What are their plans for healthcare, education, the economy, and climate change? Do they have a clear and actionable strategy, or are their promises vague and noncommittal? Aligning a candidate’s policies with your own values and priorities is the first step in making an informed decision. Take the time to compare their platforms—who is offering the solutions that resonate with you?

2. Leadership and Experience

Experience in governance can be a strong indicator of a candidate’s ability to lead effectively. Consider each candidate’s track record—have they served in public office before? What have they accomplished? Leadership is not just about holding office; it’s about demonstrating the ability to navigate complex issues, make tough decisions, and manage crises. Look at their history of leadership. Do they have the experience needed to steer the country through challenging times?

3. Integrity and Character

A president’s character is often tested in the most public and high-pressure situations. Integrity, honesty, and moral fortitude are crucial qualities for any leader. Reflect on each candidate’s past actions, how they’ve handled scandals or controversies, and whether they’ve remained consistent in their principles. Do they show transparency and accountability? Trust in a candidate’s character is fundamental, as it directly impacts their decision-making and how they represent the nation on the global stage.

4. Vision for the Future

Beyond policies, a candidate’s vision for the future is a powerful element of their campaign. What kind of America do they aspire to create? Are they forward-thinking, with plans that address both immediate concerns and long-term challenges? A compelling vision can unify and inspire voters, offering hope for progress and change. Consider whether their vision aligns with your own hopes for the country’s future.

5. Approach to Bipartisanship

In a nation as diverse as the United States, the ability to work across the aisle is essential. With the country deeply polarized, a president who can foster bipartisan cooperation is more likely to achieve meaningful progress. Evaluate each candidate’s history with bipartisanship. Have they successfully worked with the opposing party to pass legislation? Are they willing to compromise to achieve broader goals? A candidate’s approach to bipartisanship can reveal much about their potential effectiveness in office.

6. Stance on Key Social Issues

Social issues remain at the forefront of the national conversation. Issues like racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration policy will undoubtedly influence the 2024 election. Consider each candidate’s stance on these critical issues. How will their policies impact marginalized communities? Are they advocating for inclusivity, equity, and justice? The way a candidate addresses social issues can be a reflection of their broader values and their commitment to protecting the rights of all Americans.

7. Economic Plan and Impact

The state of the economy is always a significant concern for voters. Assessing a candidate’s economic plan is vital. How do they propose to stimulate economic growth, create jobs, and manage the national debt? Think about how their policies will impact not only the national economy but also your personal financial situation. Will their economic policies benefit the middle class, or are they more geared toward the wealthiest Americans? The right economic plan should aim to lift everyone and create opportunities for all.

8. Environmental and Climate Policies

Climate change is one of the most pressing global issues of our time. The next president’s approach to environmental policy will have long-lasting effects, not just domestically, but internationally. Review each candidate’s plans to combat climate change. Are they committed to reducing carbon emissions, investing in renewable energy, and protecting natural resources? A candidate’s stance on environmental issues can indicate their commitment to science and their willingness to take bold action on global challenges.

9. Foreign Policy and National Security

The president of the United States plays a critical role in shaping the country’s foreign relations and ensuring national security. Examine the candidates’ foreign policy experience and their approach to international issues. Do they have a clear strategy for maintaining and strengthening global alliances? How do they plan to address emerging threats like cyber warfare, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation? A candidate’s foreign policy views can provide insight into how they will position the United States on the world stage and protect its interests.

10. Electability and Public Support

While it’s important to align with a candidate’s policies and values, electability is also a practical consideration. A candidate must be able to garner enough support to win not just their party’s nomination, but also the general election. Consider factors such as their ability to connect with voters, build a broad coalition, and secure key swing states. Assess their campaign infrastructure, fundraising efforts, and overall public support. Electability isn’t just about popularity; it’s about the strategic elements that will ultimately lead to victory in November.

Choosing the next president of the United States is a profound responsibility, and it’s one that requires careful consideration of multiple factors. From policy positions and leadership experience to character and electability, each element plays a crucial role in determining the best candidate for the job. As you prepare to vote in the 2024 presidential election, take the time to research, reflect, and engage with the issues that matter most to you. By considering these ten factors, you’ll be better equipped to make a choice that aligns with your values and the future you envision for the country. Remember, your vote is your voice—use it wisely to help shape the path forward for America.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted my business, which serves as the backbone of these humanitarian efforts. The decline in sales has hindered my ability to sustain and expand my  initiatives. Now, more than ever, the world needs healing and cleansing. As we navigate the post-COVID era, the importance of natural remedies and immune support cannot be overstated.

I am reaching out to you for support in raising $150,000 to enhance and expand the State to States Herbal Healing Campaign.

With these funds, I aim to:

1. Purchase an RV Truck: This will serve as a mobile clinic, enabling us to travel from state to state, bringing herbal healing to underserved communities.

2. Acquire Herbs and Equipment: Essential supplies for creating and distributing herbal remedies.

3. Conduct Free Healing Sessions: Provide free herbal treatments to the less privileged, helping them improve their health naturally.

4. Host Seminars and Workshops: Educate communities on the benefits of herbal remedies and how to use them to treat various illnesses.

The Impact of Your Support

Your generous contribution will enable me to reach more people in need, offering them hope and healing through natural means. The mobile clinic will allow me to:

- Provide Free Herbal Remedies: Distribute herbal treatments to individuals who cannot afford conventional medicine.

- Offer Free Educational Workshops: Empower people with knowledge about natural health solutions, boosting their ability to manage their health.

- Conduct Immune-Boosting Programs: Help individuals with low immunity build stronger defenses against diseases, reducing their vulnerability to illnesses.

 Why Herbal Healing?

Herbal remedies have been used for centuries to treat various ailments and maintain overall health. They are cost-effective, accessible, and often come with fewer side effects than conventional pharmaceuticals. In a world still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, herbal healing offers a natural, sustainable way to support our bodies and minds.

 How You Can Help

I invite you to join us in this mission of love and healing. Your donation will make a significant difference in the lives of many, providing them with the tools and knowledge they need to lead healthier lives. Together, we can honor Latorrie’s memory and create a legacy of compassion and wellness.

To contribute, please visit our campaign page https://gofund.me/e0c1f1cb or order my book herbal bundles containing four useful e-books for just $24.99. https://finestherbalshop.com/products/herbal-book-bundle .Every dollar brings me closer to my goal and allows me to spread hope and healing across the nation.

Thank you for your support and for believing in the power of natural healing. Together, we can make a difference.

Sincerely,

Anthia Wint

Founder, Finest Herbal Shop LLC

[email protected]

Turning 60 is such a great blessing and it leaves me in a state of awe and gratitude as I reflect on my life over the years. My years have been multiplied 6 by 10 times and so for that blessing I will share 6 proclamations of gratitude as I celebrate life on this day.

1. I am grateful that the Heavenly Father has called me into such a ministry of holistic and herbal medicine. The gift he has endowed upon me has not only been a blessing to me and my family but to countless others.

2. I am grateful for the many clients whom I have been blessed to work with, and have helped along their journey of healing and restoration. Being able to minister to clients struggling with various health issues such as diabetes, heart conditions, fertility issues and more has been a fulfillment of the calling placed on my life.

3. I am grateful for the support of my loved ones who continue to stand by me, encourage me, uplift me and pray for me.

4. I am so grateful for the Finest Herbal Shop (FHS) which has become a central hub for people all over the world to find resources that help guide them on a healthy lifestyle journey. FHS provides connections to various classes and trainings to educate and empower people to take ownership of their of their health. It has truly become a haven for many looking for natural healing remedies.

5. I am grateful and honored to have been chosen to receive the Presidential lifestyle achievement award for my humanitarian efforts by the African and Caribbean International Leadership Conference. This is such a great accomplishment to know that my influence isn’t localized but rather is blessing many individuals around the world.

And lastly…

6. I am grateful for my renewed commitment and dedication to continually use this gift to help heal the world one client at a time. I am committed to the belief that change is indeed possible through educating, empowering and elevating others to a greater level of understanding on the power of herbs and their natural healing elements. 60 years down and I am committed and purposed to continue walking this path for all my days.

If you are wondering how to start your own personal holistic journey of healing and restoration, I am here for you! Whatever concerns you may have in regard to your health ranging from diseases such as diabetes, hypertension or infertility to skin care or hormonal imbalances, I can help you. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk!!

Today I am forever grateful!

Happy 60th birthday to me!!!

Click Here to get a copy of my birthday giveaway.

Show your love and support for my birthday day by subscribing to my YouTube channel 

Click Here to subscribe to my YouTube Channel 

On 20 March, at the opening ceremony for the annual Leipzig Book Fair, the 2024 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding was awarded to New School philosopher Omri Boehm for his book Radikaler Universalismus (Radical Universalism) (Propyläen Verlag, 2022). During a keynote address that preceded Boehm’s acceptance speech, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was interrupted repeatedly by shouting from several demonstrators accusing the German government of complicity with Israeli genocide in the Gaza strip. ‘The power of the word,’ Scholz responded, ‘brings us all together here in Leipzig – not shouting.’

At the start of his formal speech, Boehm reminds his audience of the public conversations about the meaning of Enlightenment among intellectuals like Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn in the 1780s. He also discusses the contemporary friendship between the Jewish philosopher Mendelssohn and the Protestant playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Their friendship was memorialized in Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise and its famous ring parable, which suggests that we judge Jews, Christians and Muslims not by the differing religions they profess but according to their conduct and the similar virtues that make them pleasing to God. 

Public Seminar

‘Jerusalem sky’. Image: Bon Adrien / Source: Wikimedia Commons

***

I was going to read a rather long and philosophical acceptance speech, but, after the disruption we saw earlier this evening, it must become somewhat longer. I’d like to say a word about what happened earlier on.

Speech and public discussion are the vehicles of reason and universalism. But that open speech, reason, and universalism are the answer to the burning injustices of the world and our time cannot be taken for granted. Sometimes – often, even – they serve as a mask that helps preserve an unjust status quo that ought to be challenged. The protesters tonight made an awful mistake. But they were trying to tell us something about open speech – and they were trying to tell us that by their disruption of a speech.

It was and is necessary to stop their disruption. But it is insufficient. We still have to rise to the challenge of showing that speech and open discussion can facilitate necessary, urgent changes – and not just block them. My book Radical Universalism is about that very problem. Defending universalism must go through listening to what these protestors tonight had to tell us. The answer that the book offers is, however, not the same as theirs, but the opposite.

On the night of 31 December 1785, an old Jewish man left his home in Berlin to rush a book manuscript for publication. It was ready the evening before, but it was Friday, and he had to wait for the end of the Shabbat. His wife warned him. It was too cold. He was too frail to leave the house. Four days later, he died of complications of a cold he caught that night. The old man was Moses Mendelssohn, the towering figure of the German and the Jewish Enlightenment. The book that was so urgent to him was titled An die Freunde Lessings (‘To Lessing’s Friends’).

The friendship between Mendelssohn and Lessing is not only the origin of the tragic ‘Jewish- German symbiosis’ – Lessing famously modeled Nathan der Weise after the character of his Jewish friend – but also, not less significantly, it was the model of Christian-Jewish-Muslim understanding: Nathan’s well-known Ring Parable has three rings, not two. This ideal of understanding is a proud European one, but Lessing had good reasons to place its origins outside of the continent – the drama takes place in Jerusalem. Alongside Kant’s well-known essay, Lessing’s Nathan is probably the boldest answer we know to the question: What is enlightenment? Was ist Aufklärung?

For Kant, enlightenment is humanity expressed through the freedom to think for oneself. For Lessing, it is humanity expressed through the freedom to form friendships. At a few crucial junctures in the play, Nathan proclaims: Kein Mensch muss müssen (‘No one must must’). It is only in light of this assertion of freedom that the play’s familiar motto comes to shine, as Nathan stresses in all directions: Wir müssen, müssen Freunde sein! (‘We must, we must be friends!’) But what is the relation between Kant’s enlightenment and Lessing’s, between the ideal of thinking for oneself and that of friendship?

In 1959, Hannah Arendt received the Lessing Prize from the City of Hamburg. Her acceptance speech, Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten (‘On humanity in dark times’), could just as well have been titled ‘To Lessing’s friends’. If bringing things into the sun – into the light of public discourse – normally illuminates thinking, a dark time for Arendt is one in which ‘the light of the public obscures everything’ (Das Licht der Öffentlichkeit verdunkelt). In dark times, public speech, the main pillar of enlightenment, betrays; trust in a shared human life lies shattered. But, says Arendt, ‘Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination,’ which comes from the ‘flickering light’ that, under almost ‘all circumstances,’ some unique men and women ‘shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.’

At such dark moments, we search for alternative pillars. One alternative is brotherhood, fraternité – quite literally the unconditional solidarity that forms among persecuted groups through attachment to their own identity. Arendt doesn’t doubt that such bonding of the persecuted is often necessary and produces true greatness, but she insists that, by reducing humanity to the identity of the ‘persecuted and the enslaved’, it constitutes a retreat into privacy. A logic of universal brotherhood depends on what we have in common with others, not on difference from them. Moreover, the solidarity of the persecuted cannot extend beyond the persecuted group – to those who are in position to take universal responsibility, in love of the world. That’s the origin of Arendt’s familiar critique of identity politics in general and the politics of her own Jewish identity, Zionism.

A second alternative in dark times is truth. Specifically, the ‘self-evident’ truths that can be known by all, regardless of belonging – thereby serving as a pillar of shared existence. Yet Arendt knows well that falling back on truth in dark times has become questionable, since self-evident truths in modern societies have been pushed to the side. ‘We need only look around to see that we are standing in the midst of a veritable rubble heap … [that] public order is based on people holding as self-evident precisely those “best-known truths” which, secretly scarcely anyone still believes in.’

I think that Arendt was right about the demise of truths considered ‘self-evident’, perhaps with the only difference that, in our times, the fact that scarcely anyone believes the ‘best-known truths’ is no longer much of secret. That hardly anyone accepts the proposition, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ is almost too obvious; about the truth of the claim Die Würde des Menschen ist unantasbar (‘Human dignity is inviolable’) people are still willing to dissemble.

The core idea of my book Radical Universalism was to warn that such post-humanism is not just a theoretical nuance, not just noise that’s generated by the petty scandals of cancel culture, but much more dangerous; and to try to draw on Kant in order to show that it is possible – in theory and in practice – to rehabilitate our relation to such truths, as opposed to identity or a narrow brotherhood of the oppressed. The book’s goal was to insist on Kant’s idea of humanity as a moral rather than a biological category, thereby stemming the tide of the dark post-humanism that has infected the identitarian Left, the identitarian Right and, no less importantly, the identitarian center, whose alleged opposition to identity too often amounts to a narrow brotherhood of the privileged.

But Arendt doesn’t go there. She goes with Lessing, not with Kant, namely with his ideal of friendship as the alternative to both identity and truth: more specifically, the ideal of friendship that Lessing had rehabilitated from Aristotle, as a public affair, rather than a private, personal matter as we have come to think of it in modern societies. The main characteristic of such friendship is (allegedly) its opposition to truth. In the name of friendship and Menschlichkeit (humanity), truth must be put aside. To quote from Arendt: ‘The dramatic tension of [Nathan der Weise] lies solely in the conflict that arises between friendship and humanity with truth … Nathan’s wisdom consists solely in his readiness to sacrifice truth to friendship.’ In this sacrifice lies not just Nathan’s wisdom, but his ideal of enlightenment. Indeed, for some people the tension Arendt alleged to exist between cold truth and warm friendship has become almost axiomatic.

But I think Arendt’s interpretation of friendship is false. There’s no tension between what I call ‘radical universalism’, the Kantian Enlightenment, and the idea of friendship. On the contrary.

To see why, it’s worth returning to Aristotle. One of his most familiar statements is Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas (‘Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend’). At first glance, it seems the philosopher of friendship has chosen truth over friendship. But on closer examination of the text, Aristotle doesn’t prefer truth to friendship; for when he chooses truth, it is precisely because truth is a better friend. His statement has to be understood in light of Aristotle’s account of friendship. For Aristotle, the ideal of genuine friendship can only be achieved in the relation between virtuous individuals, and virtuous individuals cannot assume that a statement of truth contradicting the other can constitute personal harm – indeed, just the contrary. Therefore, when Aristotle is out to undermine Plato’s theory of the forms with the statement Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas, he says this because he must, he must be Plato’s friend.

And Kant? It is striking that whereas the Aristotelian interest in friendship almost disappeared in subsequent philosophy, it was Kant, the philosopher of autonomy, who rediscovered it as a philosophical topic and ventured to explain our ‘duty to friendship’ as a ‘schema’ – the Kantian technical term – of the categorical imperative, that is, of treating humans as ends rather than means. As such a schema, the idea of friendship serves as the bridge, a necessary one, between the abstract notion that stands at the height of Kant’s whole philosophy – treating humans as ends – and concrete experience. If you want to generate an image showing what treating humans as mere means amounts to, think of slavery. For an image of treating them as ends, think of friendship.

Now recall that for Kant, enlightenment is thinking for oneself. But, crucially, thinking for oneself isn’t something that can be done alone. Kant argues that we would not be able to think very ‘much’ or even ‘correctly’ if we could not think together ‘with others’ with whom we ‘communicate’. The big Kantian discovery was that Öffentlichkeit (that is, the public sphere) is necessary to enlightenment and reason. Yet Kant is aware that under some circumstances we cannot but be ‘constrained’, holding back significant parts of our judgments in public. We’d like to discuss our positions about ‘government, religion and so forth’ but cannot risk sharing them openly.

But if we have a friend we can trust, we can ‘open’ (eröffnen) ourselves to them and thereby are ‘not completely alone’ with our ‘thoughts, as in a prison’. The word eröffnen is at the very heart of the idea of friendship. In dark times, when the Öffentlichkeit and the light of publicity necessary to thinking for oneself dims, friendship allows us to continue to open – eröffnen – our thinking, preserving the transformative power, even the revolutionary potential, of thinking for oneself.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that every friendship is ‘a sort of secession, even a rebellion … a pocket of potential resistance.’ Kant would agree.

Looking at the Kibbutzim on Gaza’s border on October 7 – as complete families were slaughtered, children murdered in front of their parents, women systematically raped, and hundreds of hostages taken – and then witnessing the moral bankruptcy of those alleged radicals who call this ‘armed resistance’; looking at the flattening of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of women and children, the catastrophic starvation – and then witnessing alleged liberal theorists delegitimize for months a humanitarian ceasefire in the name of ‘self-defence’:  in this shouting match between the proponents of the ‘armed resistance’ doctrine and the ‘self-defence’ theory we see what a dark time looks like – when the light of the public obscures more than it reveals.

Perhaps at this moment, speaking of friendship between Israelis and Palestinians could seem too rosy, naïve, or utopian. Even worse, it could seem grotesque.

But no. Jewish-Palestinian friendships do exist; and where they do, the difficult demands that they pose offer light – and perhaps the only true source of enlightened resistance.

Israeli and Palestinian friends could not pretend that what happened on October 7 happened in a vacuum, just as much as they knew that speaking about this mass murder as ‘armed resistance’ was humiliating, first and foremost to proud Palestinians who rightly demand freedom. My Palestinian friends know that whoever calls what my country is doing in Gaza ‘self-defence’ humiliates my identity to the core. Israeli and Palestinian friends can talk to each other, and in public, about the catastrophe, and about the catastrophic failures of our brothers and sisters, knowing that if, after we speak, we are unable to look our friends in the face, we will also be unable to look in the mirror. Friendship was always the test that protected us from the catastrophic failures of brotherhood and the grotesque abuse of abstract ideas about armed resistance and self-defence.

In 2010, Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset, gave a Holocaust memorial speech: ‘This is the place and the time to cry out the cries of all of those who [are struggling] to unburden themselves from the scenes of death and horror.’ And he continued: ‘On this day, one must shed all political identities’ and ‘wear one robe only: the robe of humanity.’ This robe of humanity isn’t abstract humanism, but humanism expressed as the Freundschaftserklärung (the declaration of friendship) of a Palestinian representative who shares with Jews, as Tibi said, ‘the same land and the same country.’ This Freundschaftserklärung was uncompromising, even radical, and posed Israelis a provocation, because friendship with Jews requires equality. But no one can doubt in good faith that the man who gave that speech, and people represented by him, had any patience with the violent nonsense of alleged radicals who spoke of October 7 as ‘armed resistance’.

On the Jewish side, I cannot but think of the words of Amos Oz, uttered in a completely different time: ‘The idea of expelling and driving out the Palestinians, deceitfully called here a “transfer” … we must rise and say simply and sharply: it is an impossible idea. We will not let you do that … Israel’s Right must know that there are acts that, if attempted, will cause the split of the state.’

This was said decades before the people that Oz addresses – the religious Right – had become a major force in the Israeli government. That’s why his words only make sense if they are repeated today. His use of ‘we’ and ‘you’ in this paragraph means everything: the acts that ‘we’ will not let ‘you’ do are the ones that fracture Jewish brotherhood. If we don’t repeat Oz’s statement as we look at Gaza today, knowing that the idea of transfer is anything but impossible, we will not be able to look our Palestinian friends in the face.

And what about Jewish-German friendship? Where it exists – and in some places, it does – it is a true wonder, one that is very personally dear to my heart. But this wonder now has to be protected from debasement. No Jewish-German friendship could exist if it cannot, in our dark times, have room to acknowledge the difficult truths that must be stated publicly in the name of Jewish-Palestinian friendship. Any other notion would humiliate Mendelssohn and Lessing’s model: Nathan’s ring parable has three rings, not two, and there will be no less than three rings for us.

Truth does not have to be put to the side in this dark time. For as Kant knew as well as Lessing, we ought, we ought to stay friends.

Since the collapse of socialism, demographic change has emerged as one of the biggest Rashomons of contemporary societies, especially in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Understood as a palpable concern by some and dismissed as a political construct by others, it is becoming increasingly prominent in public discourse. In a region with contested yet increasingly liberal social norms, including declining childbearing preferences, conservative governments from Budapest to Warsaw and Belgrade have sought to turn back the societal tide encouraging people to have more children. Financial assistance for parents, especially when coupled with abortion restrictions, have attracted a considerable liberal backlash. But should pronatalism be seen as a conservative cause? Or could raising the birth rate – currently at an all-time low in the region and lower than in most of the continent – bring palpable benefits for states and societies?

Demographers point out that low fertility, which together with increasing life expectancy results in ageing populations, raises a wide range of questions about the future sustainability of pensions, healthcare and overall living standards. Of course, concluding that these challenges can be best addressed by encouraging more births is a leap of faith. Babies increase the share of dependents in a population before decreasing it decades into the future.

Other solutions are more immediate but less feasible or popular. Immigration, especially from outside of Europe, has been shunned by the same pronatalist governments allegedly concerned about unfavorable demographics. Adaptation, for instance by lengthening the amount of time spent in work, tends to draw massive popular opposition. Automation carries electoral risks of its own and can prove challenging to implement even if the political will is found. Free from such obstacles, pronatalism has become the name of the game.

One child fewer than preferred

Even the biggest critics of CEE pronatalism could not dispute the scale and speed of the region’s fertility decline. Despite varied economic and political landscapes, CEE countries share strikingly similar fertility figures. From Budapest to Vladivostok, birthrates hover close to the EU average of 1.6 children per woman, with notable exceptions being Ukraine and Poland, where the figures dip even lower.

Beneath this overarching narrative of decline, however, lies a complex tapestry of desires and realities. Contrary to the prevailing notion of a burgeoning ‘childfree’ society, opinion surveys suggest a persistent CEE preference for larger families: most individuals aspire to the traditional two-child ideal. However, they find themselves constrained by a multitude of factors, ranging from health-related issues exacerbated by lifestyle choices and delayed parenthood to overestimations of the efficacy of reproductive technologies.

Cultural trends also exert a significant influence. Traditional divisions of labor within the home, which assign the bulk of domestic and caregiving responsibilities to women, are increasingly at odds with contemporary social norms. Faced with the ‘double burden’ of work and care, more women are opting for employment over children. Obsolete understandings of family life paradoxically keep birth rates low, much to the chagrin of traditionalists and many progressives alike, as evidenced by the persisting average preference of about two and a half children per woman.

Children’s hands as puppets. Image by jacquelinetinney via Flickr

Voluntary or not, the otherwise European-wide trend of low birth rates poses a more pressing challenge to CEE. Unlike population trends in most of Western Europe, and to a large extent because of Western Europe, net emigration characterizes CEE’s demography. Italy is a key example of a Western European country also with a low birth rate, ageing population and high level of emigration, especially of young people.
While migration data tend to be patchy, it is evident that the balance between births and deaths, even though negative in most places in the region, is insufficient to explain key demographic changes. The EU’s ‘big bang’ enlargement into CEE in 2004, while enormously beneficial for the region, has also reduced its populations, as millions of people opted for an immediately higher standard of life in Western Europe as opposed to the near-assured yet incremental prospect of progress at home. Contrary to what pro-EU policymakers would like to hear, the exacerbating effects of EU accession on brain drain do not bode well for the Western Balkans, further strengthening the case for pronatalist policy.

Three or four children, no more, no less

At first glance, pronatalism seems equally widespread on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The biggest star at the 2023 Budapest Demographic Summit A biannual international gathering of pronatalist policymakers, activists and church officials hosted by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
was not an East European politician but Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who has taken measures against a declared population crisis in her country. A similar pan-continental picture emerges from the official stances of European governments regarding their desired fertility levels: in 2019 81% said they wanted births to go up, with no major geographical differences.

However, if one scratches beyond the surface of self-declarations, it appears that, apart from Meloni, it is mainly CEE policymakers who are putting their money where their mouth is. While the regional pioneer of pronatalist policy was Russia, which unveiled its Maternity Capital programme as early as 2007, it has since been surpassed – in both financial ambition and political saliency – by three other countries: Hungary, Poland and Serbia. All three nations share important similarities beyond the regular participation of their pronatalist schemes’ creators at the Budapest Demographic Summit.

First, all three countries were ruled by conservative and less-than-fully democratic governments at the time of the introduction of these policies. Of course, pronatalism is not the only topic on which Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, which moved into opposition last autumn, are worth mentioning in the same sentence. From Budapest to Warsaw and Belgrade, pronatalism has coexisted with – and arguably strengthened – the popular appeal of these parties as the alleged protectors of their respective nations and core values. There is no better illustration of the uncontestable status that pronatalism has acquired in these countries than the fact that Poland’s new prime minister, Donald Tusk, has embraced and even vowed to expand the pronatalist policy he used to vehemently oppose.

Second, in all three cases, the pronatalist instrument of choice has been financial assistance for parents, which have mostly been designed to prioritize pronatalist goals over societal gain. On the one hand, pronatalism is not a zero-sum game: more cash can help current parents raise their children as much as it can encourage people to have (more) children. And the cash has definitely been flowing in spades. In Hungary, among other incentives, parents of three are exempt from paying income tax until the third child has turned 18 (as of 2019); parents of four are exempt for life (Orbán himself is a father of five). In Serbia and Poland, parents of four effectively receive an (additional) average monthly wage, which may not make a huge difference in Belgrade and Warsaw but often doubles the income of rural households.

Parents of one and two, however, don’t receive much more in Serbia and Hungary than they would elsewhere in Europe, even when accounting for the lower cost of living in the East. The Polish package is more balanced, even though it also carries some premiums past the second child. This can only be explained on pronatalist grounds: most people have one or two children regardless of policy, so the point of incentives is to encourage them to give birth to three or more. But this approach sacrifices social goals. Due to economies of scale, parents need less money for each additional child, as children in large families can share rooms and babysitters (or, in the case of large differences in age, babysit each other), pass down clothes and benefit from in-bulk food purchases. In Serbia, the timing of the support can also be problematized, as some of it is provided as a lump sum upon childbirth, possibly as a further nudge to parents. Even though it is usually older children who have more expensive consumption needs for anything from extracurriculars to clothing and entertainment.


Thus, despite the pronatalism of their governments, Hungarian and Serbian parents with one or two children – which will always make up the majority of the population regardless of policy – are poorer than they would be if they were childless. Policymakers offer them the opportunity to at least ‘break even’ but only if they have two additional children. Interestingly, however, the support becomes less generous – and in Serbia disappears altogether – from the fifth child onwards, possibly in an attempt to exclude Romani households, which face regular discrimination in both countries. Moreover, the tax-based nature of the Hungarian package serves an explicitly anti-egalitarian function, as the tax deduction, which is expressed as a share of income, translates into larger amounts for higher-earning families.

The fact that the packages provide the biggest boost to, say, well-off farmers with three or four children, while doing little to help low-income or even middle-income urban households meet the cost of living in large cities, speaks volumes about their political dimension. Our three countries of interest are no exception to the global realignment of voter loyalties away from class and towards more cultural concerns. The conservative governments in Hungary and Poland recognized a long time ago that an appeal to tradition is their strongest election winner: abortion restrictions (which have typically not been framed in pronatalist terms), for instance, gradually established themselves as one of Orbán and Kaczyński’s signature policies. As their voter base centres predominantly on the low-educated often from rural areas, who are more likely to have large families, pronatalism might have served as a key draw for this demographic. CEE pronatalist policymakers often like to take credit for having spotted the challenge of demographic change before ‘it is too late’, but the most cunning thing about their obsession with birth rate might have been their recognition of its enormous political value.

Cash alone won’t lead to more births

Even if CEE pronatalism serves a strong political function, its potential benefits in helping ageing populations mitigate their future public spending pressures and maintain their living standards remain valid. If pronatalism works, it might not matter if policymakers are embracing it for self-serving reasons. It shouldn’t be dismissed as missing the mark completely, especially since it has been around in its current form for what is still a rather short time. In Serbia, only since 2018.
But its success is at best debatable.

The effectiveness of pronatalist policy is notoriously difficult to measure, as birth rates might change for reasons other than policy, including cultural trends and the age structure of a population. If a country happens to have many individuals of reproductive age at a given time, it might see a misleadingly high number of births. Similarly, if it is undergoing what is known as ‘fertility postponement’, or the usually gradual shift towards having children later in life, which European countries have indeed been experiencing over the past few decades, then births might seem misleadingly low in the short term.

It is reasonably safe to conclude, however, that pronatalism has not yet been a resounding success in any of the three CEE ‘poster countries’. Hungary’s birth rate, the highest of the three, is hovering around the EU average despite offering some of the strongest incentives on the continent. Poland saw births go up in the first few years since the introduction of its pronatalist policy in 2015 before declining again to currently one of the lowest levels in Europe: 1.3 children per woman. Serbia is, for now, seeing an increase but probably no more than a few hundred new births annually can be attributed to policy.

There are plenty of possible reasons for these underwhelming results. The prioritization of third and fourth children, while seemingly conducive to pronatalism, might not be the best way to boost birth rates in countries where most people don’t want to have more than two children. Moreover, in Hungary’s case, the focus on high-income individuals, not only through the tax-based nature of the support but also through the availability of housing top-ups, Only meaningful to those already close to being able to afford a home.
might be counterproductive, as wealthier citizens tend to be less sensitive to policy nudges in the first place. Additionally, all three countries are characterized by some of the lowest levels of trust in government in Europe, indicating that citizens have little faith that the policies will be around long enough to be relevant to them, which might lead potential beneficiaries to exclude the packages from their family planning-related reasoning. Finally, the national-conservative and less-than-democratic climate in these countries might be deterring the more progressive layers of their populations from imagining a future at home, with or without policy.

Decoupling pronatalism from the likes of Orbán

Demographic change is a powerful thing: there is no developed country known to researchers, apart from perhaps Israel, whose context is for various reasons impossible to replicate, where population ageing and decline have been fully avoided. Yet, demographers also tend to agree that pronatalist policy is not pointless either: all family policies, including childcare, parental leave, and, yes, financial assistance, can do their small part in boosting birth rates, or more likely, in slowing their decline. Across CEE, governments have been providing more cash to parents, while at the same time curbing its pronatalist potential by failing to make childcare more accessible and affordable: the region continues to record some of the lowest enrolment rates, especially among children aged 0-3.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic once quipped that ‘if we don’t increase the number of children, we might as well “turn out the lights” behind us’. Inflated demographic alarmism aside, the real question might not be whether CEE can survive demographic change, but whether pronatalism can outlive the conservative agendas it is currently associated with. The case to watch right now is Poland: can progressives start embracing pronatalism if it no longer comes with abortion restrictions and ethnonationalist scaremongering? Demography, after all, is the science of hard numbers. The best thing policymakers and voters worrying about demographic change can do is to approach it free from ideological bias – be it from the Left or from the Right.

But the political situations in nation states and regional unions often bring the jurisdiction of borders into question. There are states determined to acquire more land. And those pushing to restrict legal entry. Forced migration, caused by environmental crises, war and poverty, has become a particularly keen topic for inhospitable hosts, focusing on both exclusion and expansionist solutions. The European Union’s bid to extend its border to third-country processing facilities for asylum seekers is a case in point.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Graz, collaborating with Eurozine on a new focal point, calls this phenomenon ‘Elastic Borders’: ‘Thinking of borders as elastic offers new avenues to understanding not only how state borders stretch and retract, but also how they create fields of stress and violations in the processes of extension and retraction.’ With contributions from the NOMIS foundation-funded research project and Eurozine partner journals, articles range from contemporary field work on contentious border practices in Greece, Spain and Tunisia to the legal and technological enactment of elastic borders.

Measuring the mobile body

Laura Jung’s article on border and surveillance technologies takes us on a historical trawl. Her research draws parallels between late nineteenth-century criminology and contemporary data processing techniques. From painstakingly exact facial measurements to fingerprinting, the line between keeping a record of potential repeat offenders to profiling criminal types was easily crossed in the past. Enthusiasts enlisted scientific scrutiny for deviant ends. As Jung writes, criminal anthropologists ‘enumerated a list of so-called “stigmata” or physical regularities found in the body of the “born criminal”.’

Highlighting the crossover between criminology and eugenics, Jung references Frances Galton and his composite photographs of convicts. The process of attempting to identify markers of delinquency is itself now recognized as criminal.

And yet EU authorities utilizing biometric data processing to register migrants risk a similar transgression of human rights today. The Eurodac database, which records arrival points, fingerprints, photos and other forms of identification, may be espoused for its objectivity, supposedly eradicating human error and increasing ‘fairness’. But the notion that automated processes reduce bias is a simplistic argument. While machine learning may relieve the need for ongoing, incremental decisions, the system’s parameters will have been pre-set. Ethical biases, based on cultural prejudices and political allegiances, determine who will be targeted, how and when.

A tendency to criminalize in advance has resurfaced. And now that ‘the minimum age of migrants whose data can be stored has been lowered from fourteen to six years old,’ even the innocence of very small children is being corrupted by the system.

One way or another

Ongoing instability, due to conflict, environmental crises and economic hardship in parts of Africa, forces many to migrate. Chiara Pagano, focusing on Black migrants who make it to Tunisia’s borders, reports on state violence and informal trading. As a witness to this volatile situation, Pagano describes the disappearance of those attempting to make it to Europe. Once arrested, migrants are often brutally deported back across the border: ‘for over a month, Tunisian state authorities committed over 300 more migrants to their deaths; not readmitted, they were de facto trapped on the desert fringe between Tunisia and Libya under the scorching July sun’.

The European Commission, in paying the Tunisian government a €127 million first instalment in financial aid to combat what is deemed ‘irregularized migration’, is playing a pivotal role in this murderous scenario. ‘This move exemplified the EU’s active support of … the institutional, social and physical racialization of “sub-Saharan migrants” throughout their migratory path’, writes Pagano.

However, the strategic payment didn’t result in the closed border that the EU had hoped to leverage. And a subsequent transfer of 60 million euro was ‘dismissed as a disrespectful form of charity’. But the real reason for such a refusal seems to be based on a more pragmatic reality: ‘Keeping borders open is strategically more convenient to the Tunisian government than responding to EU blackmail, also due to the use that citizens and non-citizens on the Tunisian-Libyan frontier make of informal cross-border trade to navigate the country’s economic crisis.’ Pagano asks whether the EU’s failing cash for immobility plan is anything more than the legitimization of Tunisia’s authoritarian regime.

Tearing down fortress Europe

Writing for the Green European Journal, Aleksandra Savanović recognizes that safeguarding the dubious concept of a ‘European way of life’ has serious implications for migrants. Though indispensable for economic growth, new arrivals, who endure militarized border systems, face a future of privatized detention centres. Here, the EU also blatantly reveals its willingness to extend union borders when it suits ulterior motives: ‘member states … advocate for detention in 22 countries in the Balkans, Africa, Eastern Europe and West Asia … with the intention to eventually establish offshore processing facilities.’

Savanović asks whether a new focus on common goals could provide the necessary end to these dehumanizing practices: ‘What if, instead of investing in detention centres, we invest in elaborate social infrastructures that facilitate immigration by providing appropriate shelter, subsistence, and guidance?’ As with Jung, she proposes learning from a chequered past and repetitive present: ‘A place to start is turning away from utilitarian approaches that permit migration on the basis of need – like labour shortages or ageing populations – and, instead, taking a proactive, subject-centred view on migration futures.’

Chiara Pagano’s and Laura Jung’s research has been carried out during the ongoing project ‘Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century’ based at the University of Graz.

When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country’s great ‘originality’, ‘special path’ and a ‘unique mission in the world’, it’s a sure sign they’re facing mounting problems in forging a modern democratic polity, civic nation and respectable international identity. Contemporary Russia is a case in point. Its new foreign policy doctrine, signed into law by President Vladimir Putin on 31 March 2023, is an astounding document declaring Russia’s civilizational uniqueness. Never before had a leader officially stated that Russia is a sui generis civilization. True, Catherine the Great, known for her occasional cockiness, was reported to have once said that ‘Russia itself is the universe and it doesn’t need anyone’. But the empress was quick to qualify her arrogant statement, adding that ‘Russia is a European country’. Yet Russian elites now appear ready to cut their country loose from its European moorings.

This radical ‘civilizational’ reorientation is of course the direct result of the war Russia has unleashed against Ukraine and the resolute and united response of Western democracies to the war. But Russian military aggression, driven by the Kremlin’s nationalist obsession, is in itself a manifestation of post-imperial Russia’s deep identity crisis. More the 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, four key issues remain unresolved: Where do the boundaries of Russia’s political nation run? Are Russians capable of building a truly democratic polity or are they ‘historically’ destined to be ruled by authoritarian leaders? Is Russia a federation – as characterized in its Constitution – or is it a quasi-imperial entity? What is the ultimate objective of Russia’s historical development?

Kremlin leaders don’t give clear and straightforward answers to these questions. Instead, they obfuscate the real problems and set forth the idea of Russia as a ‘unique civilization’, while claiming that the West is in ‘terminal decline’ and ‘on its last legs’. The political implication of this rhetorical maneuver is not hard to fathom: the suggestion is that Russia need not follow ‘advanced’ Western nations as the latter are not ahead of Russia but, on the contrary, have lost their way and found themselves at a ‘historical dead end’.

Yet the notion of a special path (or Sonderweg), alongside the trope of the West’s decline, have a long intellectual pedigree. The Germans who coined the term, have managed to reinterpret their complex historical experience and turned Sonderweg into a research method: a historiographical tool, which has proved especially handy in the field of comparative studies. Most Russians, however, continue to view their historical experience as ‘unique’, eagerly embracing the notion of Sonderweg as the basis for self-identification and self-understanding.For a perceptive discussion of the Russian Sonderweg thesis, including in comparative perspective, see M. Velizhev, T. Atnashev, and A. Zorin, ‘Osoby put’: Ot ideologii k metodu, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2019; D. Travin, ‘Osoby put’ Rossii: Ot Dostoevskogo do Konchalovskogo, Izd. St. Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2018; A. Zaostrovtsev (ed.), Rossiia 1917-2017: Evropeiskaia modernizatsiia ili ‘osoby put’, Leont’evskii Tsentr, 2017; E. Pain (ed.), Ideologiia ‘osobogo puti’ v Rossii i Germanii: istoki, soderzhanie, posledstviia, Tri kvadrata, 2010.


Russia’s historic yardstick

Catherine the Great (detail), Vigilius Eriksen, 1760, Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. Image via Wikimedia Commons

In his last letter to Pyotr Chaadaev from 19 October 1836, where Alexander Pushkin critiqued his friend’s idiosyncratic view of the Russian past, he also posed an intriguing question, wondering how a ‘future historian’ would see nineteenth-century Russia: Croyez-vous qu’il nous mettra hors l’Europe? (Do you think he will place us outside Europe?). A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols, ed. M.A. Tsiavlovskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1938) 4: 432.
Pushkin, a consummate European who corresponded with Chaadaev exclusively in French, appeared to have been somewhat apprehensive about future historians characterizing Russia as a non-European country. Little did he know that statements advancing the thesis of Russia’s special path and proclaiming Europe ‘rotten’, ‘decrepit’ and even ‘dying’ would come from closer quarters.

Mortally wounded in a fateful duel in 1837, Pushkin didn’t witness the beginning of the grand debate on Russia’s identity, distinctive features of its historical development and its relation to Europe that was unleashed by the publication of Chaadaev’s first ‘philosophical letter’ – a debate that is still ongoing. It wasn’t a future historian but another nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tiutchev, four years Pushkin’s junior, who coined a paradigmatic formula of Russia’s samobytnost’ (originality): ‘No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness: She stands alone, unique’. F.I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 6 vols. (Moscow: IMLI, 2003) 2: 165


But how original were Tiutchev’s historiosophical musings about Russia’s originality? As a Russian diplomat, Tiutchev spent more than 20 years abroad, mostly at the Bavarian court in Munich, where he came under the strong influence of the German Romantic movement – a cultural phenomenon that was instrumental in Sonderweg’s emergence. During the wars of liberation against Napoleon, the German national consciousness and collective identity were formed in contrast to those of the French. Nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke saw German history as unique: ‘each nation has a particular spirit, breathed into it by God, through which it is what it is and which its duty is to develop.’ L. Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Moreover, it was deemed ‘the most important’, as Germany was thought of as ‘the mother’ of all other nations. Ibid.
Enthused about the founding of the new Reich in 1871 and proud of Imperial Germany’s economic power, many historians and political thinkers came to believe that a ‘positive German way’ existed. They readily contrasted strong, bureaucratic German state, reform from above, public service ethos and their famed Kultur with the Western notion of laissez-faire, with revolution, parliamentarianism, plutocracy and Zivilisation.

Not unlike their German counterparts, Tiutchev and other young Russian nobles (who would soon become known under the moniker of Slavophiles) saw a huge upsurge of Russian national feeling following victory over Napoleonic France. Twentieth-century philosopher Alexander Koyré aptly wrote, ‘national reaction was quickly turning into reactionary nationalism’. A. Koyré, La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle, Champion, 1929.
Against the backdrop of epic battles from 1812 to 1815, the representatives of early Russian Romanticism found the idea elaborated by their German intellectual gurus – Herder, Fichte and the brothers Schlegel – exceptionally appealing. They subscribed to the premise that German originality was based on a special type of culture, which couldn’t be conquered by brute force. The triumphant entry of Russian troops into Paris seemed to have upended the customary cultural hierarchy. The defeated French were cast as ‘barbarians’, while the Russians’ victory was attributed to their ‘national spirit’ rooted in the Russian language, historical traditions and Eastern Christian values.

When the grand debate, provoked by Chaadaev’s controversial publication, kicked off in the late 1830s, it zeroed in on two principal questions: Should Russia be compared with Western nations or is it following its own unique historical trajectory? And, are Russian ways superior or inferior to those in the West? Notably, both representatives of Russian ‘official nationalism’ and Russian Westernizers shared the view that Russia and Europe’s trajectories were identical. However, they sharply disagreed over who was in the lead: St. Petersburg imperial bureaucrats insisted on Russia’s superiority, while Westernizers argued that Russia was underdeveloped and lagging behind Europe. It was only the faithful disciples of German Romantic thinkers – Russian Slavophiles – who spoke in favor of Russian exceptionalism and produced what could be called the first interpretation of Russian Sonderweg.

The school of thought that exalted Russia’s divergence from Europe and the West, born from heated discussions from the 1840s to the 1850s, has remained central to the country’s intellectual life ever since. In the 1870s and 1880s, Neo-Slavophiles/Panslavists developed core Slavophile ideas of cultural oppositions: idealism vs. materialism, sobornost’ vs. individualism, selfless collective work vs. profit-obsessed capitalism, deep religious feeling vs. amoral cynicism. Nikolai Danilevskii’s theory of ‘cultural-historical types’ is a case in point.
Eurasianists then delivered a complex theory on the vision of ‘Russia-Eurasia’ as a unique world unto itself in their writings of the 1920s and 1930s.

Two key aspects of Eurasianist political philosophy are especially influential on present-day Kremlin leaders. First, Eurasianists resolutely rejected a model of the nation-state, arguing that ‘Eurasia’ is a geopolitical space destined for imperial rule: the Russian/Eurasian empire was considered a ‘historical necessity’ based on a vision of the organic geographical, cultural and historical unity of the ‘imperial space’. Second, Eurasianists contended that Western-style parliamentary democracy was an alien institution, ‘culturally’ incompatible with Russian/Eurasian political folkways. They argued that the Eurasian political model was an ‘ideocracy’ – an authoritarian, one-party state ruled by a tightknit ideologically driven elite.

Eurasianists formulated their extravagant theories while keeping a close eye on events in the Soviet Union; there is no denying that Soviet policies and practices strongly influenced Eurasianist theorizing. But what, more specifically, of Soviet communism? Shouldn’t it also be analysed through the lens of the Russian Sonderweg paradigm? What is the historical significance of the Soviet period (1917-1991) if defined in relation to both European political practice and pre-revolutionary Russian political development?

Questioning Russia as exception

Soviet exceptionalism is a tricky case. On the one hand, as scholar Martin Malia perceptively notes, it ‘represents both maximal divergence from European norms and the great aberration in Russia’s own development.’ M. Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the bronze horseman to the Lenin mausoleum, Belknap Press, 1999, p. 12.
Yet, while departing from European ways in terms of its practices and institutions, the Soviet Union was very much European ideologically. The combination of Marxist precepts and Russia’s poor socio-economic conditions ultimately shaped the Soviet experiment. Paradoxically, some Russian émigré thinkers suggested that the European far-left ideological foundations of the Soviet state might even force dyed-in-the-wool Russian conservative nationalists – the champions of ‘Holy Russia’ and detractors of Western publics’ ‘godless materialism’ – to reevaluate their anti-Western attitudes and embrace the ‘West’ they were living in. After the 1917 Revolution, poet Georgii Adamovich wittily noted, ‘the West and Russia seemed to have changed roles’: the renewed (communist) Russia ‘suddenly bypassed the West on the left’, abandoning its Christian vocation, while the West came to represent Christianity and Christian culture. G. Adamovich, Kommentarii, Aleteia, 2000, pp. 184-185.
‘Very soon,’ wrote Adamovich sarcastically regarding Russian émigrés, ‘we, with our Russian inclination towards extremes, would probably hear about “West the God-bearer.”’ Ibid.


The official position within the Soviet Union, however, supposed that it represented a higher stage of universal civilization, much superior to that of the ‘capitalist West’. Even in the supposedly ideologically monolithic communist system, the old debate on Russia’s ‘uniqueness’ hadn’t died out. After a series of earlier iterations – Slavophiles vs. Westernizers, Populists vs. Marxists, Eurasianists vs. Europeanists – the notion resurrected in the form of a vibrant discussion between those who supported the idea of ‘building socialism in one country’ and the champions of ‘communist internationalism’. The discussion produced an intriguing paradox. Mikhail Pokrovskii, a leading Marxist historian, backed Stalin’s vision of ‘socialism with Soviet characteristics’, while Leon Trotsky called for the need to de-emphasize the idea of Russian historical peculiarity. Ironically, when Pokrovskii formulated his theory of merchant capitalism in the early 1910s, he was a staunch opponent of Russian exceptionalism and denied not only the existence of any significant Russian socio-economic samobytnost’ but also that of Russia’s backwardness vis-à-vis European nations. Trotsky, for his part, in his ‘German articles’ from 1908 and 1909, emerged as a strong supporter of Russian exceptionalism, emphasizing Russia’s divergence from Western ways.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, heralding the end of Soviet exceptionalism, seemed to provide Russia with the opportunity to demystify its homegrown Sonderweg thesis and return – according to the phrase, popular with both rulers and citizens in the early 1990s – to ‘the family of civilized nations’. Even historian Richard Pipes, who placed a special premium on Russia’s ‘un-Western’ traits, appeared convinced that Sonderweg was at an end for Russia. ‘I think that now Russia has only one option left – turning West’, he argued in a short essay written in 2001 for the European Herald, a liberal, Moscow-based journal. By ‘West’ he intended a political community that comprises not only the US and the European Union but also such ‘Eastern’ nations as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. ‘Nowadays it seems to me that for Russia a “special path” makes no sense.’ Dismissing the notion out of hand, he wrote in conclusion, ‘I don’t even know what it actually means.’ R. Pipes, ‘Osoby put’ dlia Rossii: chto konkretno eto znachit?’ Vestnik Evropy, No. 1, 2001, https://magazines.gorky.media/vestnik/2001/1


Russia’s cultural borrowing

And yet, 20 years on, the idea of ‘uniqueness’ and demonization of the ‘collective West’ are all the rage in Putin’s Russia. Why is this? The reason, I think, is twofold. First, unlike in 1960s and 1970s Germany, post-Soviet Russia didn’t see a vigorous nationwide debate among the country’s historians on the fundamental issues of Russia’s historical development. Some promising discussions that began during the twilight years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika didn’t bear much fruit and petered out in the chaotic era of the early 1990s. Second, as the Russian political regime has become increasingly authoritarian under Putin, the Kremlin has come to believe it is expedient to deploy the notion of Russian exceptionalism to buttress its position both domestically and internationally. Ukraine favoring ‘Europe’ has motivated Putin’s regime to rethink its international identity.

And yet, all the intellectual groundwork for deconstructing the idea of Russian uniqueness had already been laid by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. Several generations of pre-revolutionary Russian, émigré, Soviet, and international scholars had amply demonstrated that Russia is no more unique than any other country. Russia’s historical process, its social structure, state-society relations and political culture are indeed marked by sundry peculiarities, but these stem from Russia’s geopolitical position on the periphery of Europe: it sits on the eastern edges of the European cultural sphere and extends all the way to the border with China and the Pacific Ocean. Like many other countries, Russia borrowed its high culture from elsewhere, and did this twice: first, from Byzantine Constantinople; and then, in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, from the more advanced Western European cultural model. In both cases cultural norms, values and practices came from without. Russian cultural development should be understood as the process of mastering a ‘foreign’ experience.

Cultural borrowing does not mean, however, that Russian culture lacks a creative element. When Russia adopted certain aspects from another culture, the borrowed cultural models would find themselves in a completely different context, reshaping them into something new. These cultural phenomena would differ from both the original Western models and ‘old’ Russian cultural patterns. Perceptive Russian scholars like Boris Uspensky and Mikhail Gasparov note this paradox: it is precisely the orientation toward a ‘foreign’ culture that contributes to the originality of Russian culture. See: B.A. Uspensky and M.L. Gasparov, Russkaia intelligentsiia i zapadny intellektualizm: istoriia i tipologiia, B.A. Uspensky (ed.), O.G.I., 1999.


Yet such orientation contains significant tension in itself: the gravitation toward a ‘foreign’ culture is dialectically, and antithetically, linked with a desire to protect one’s own ‘authenticity’ and shield oneself from foreign cultural influences. The following dynamic ensues: the emerging inferiority complex gives rise to prickly nationalism, the search for a special path, mythologization of history, messianism and assertion of one’s special mission in the world. There is another paradox here that Uspensky also notes: it is precisely this nationalist backlash against a ‘foreign’ cultural tradition that is usually the least national and traditional. Craving for ‘authenticity’ and ‘national roots’ is most often the result of foreign influences – in the Russian case, the influences of Western culture that Russian intellectuals sought to repudiate. This is what puts early Slavophiles and German Romantics on the same page: the Germans felt they were culturally ‘colonized’ by the French and rebelled; the Russians borrowed the philosophical language of German Romanticism and applied it to their own situation. In both cases, this was a Sonderweg point of departure.

Unexclusive difference

But if we reject the existence of a sharp dividing line between ‘West’ and ‘East’ or between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’, acknowledging them as social constructs, what would a more suitable model explaining similarities and dissimilarities between national trajectories across the Eurasian continent be? The West-East ‘cultural gradient’, an understanding that there is a softer gradation and unity as one moves from Europe’s Atlantic coast eastwards all the way into the depth of Eurasia, is one option. See C. Evtuhov and S. Kotkin (eds.), The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Pavel Miliukov introduced the idea in his multivolume Essays on the History of Russian Culture, which he thoroughly reworked in the 1920s and 1930s when in exile in Paris. Conceptually, the essays are based on two main theoretical principles. First, Russia’s historical evolution repeated the same stages through which other ‘cultured peoples of Europe’ had passed. Second, the process of this development was slower than in other parts of Europe: ‘not only in Western but also in Central Europe’. Miliukov’s bottom line was this: there was nothing particular or unique about Russia in this respect. ‘Peculiarity is not an exclusive feature of Russia. It shows up in the same manner in Europe itself, in a growing progression as we move from the Loire and the Seine to the Rhine, from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper to the Oka and the Volga’. P. N. Miliukov, ‘Sotsiologicheskie osnovy russkogo istoricheskogo protsessa [1930]’, Rossiiskaia istoriia, No. 1, 2008, p. 160.


Miliukov’s ideas were further developed by émigré economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who positioned the European gradient at the basis of his highly influential model of industrial development. Gerschenkron’s thesis suggests ‘the farther east one goes in Europe the greater becomes the role of banks and of the state in fostering industrialization, a pattern complemented by the prevalence in backward areas of socialist or nationalist ideologies.’ M. Malia, Russia under Western Eyes, 440; Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Belknap Press, 1962.
Gerschenkron exerted a powerful intellectual influence on Richard Pipes’ lifelong opponent Martin Malia – a prominent Berkeley historian who perfected the concept of the West-East gradient. It became the essence of Malia’s exposition of the process of Russia’s social, intellectual and cultural development. ‘The farther east one goes,’ Malia contended, ‘the more absolute, centralized and bureaucratic governments become, the greater the pressure of the state on the individual, the more serious the obstacle to his independence, the more sweeping, general and abstract are ideologies of protest or of compensation’. M. Malia, ‘Schiller and the Early Russian Left’, Harvard Slavic Studies IV, 1957, pp. 169-200.
 While Malia understood ‘Europe’ as a more or less coherent cultural sphere including Russia, he maintained that ‘Russia is the eastern extreme … she is the backward rear guard of Europe at the bottom of the slope of the West-East cultural gradient.’ M. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, The Free Press, 1994, p. 55.
Another useful concept, as antidote to the discourse on backwardness, is Maria Todorova’s idea of ‘relative synchronicity within a longue durée development’. In analysing various European nationalisms within the unified structure of modernity, Todorova redefines the ‘East’ – Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia – as part of a common European space. M. Todorova, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of East European Nationalism’, Slavic Review, Vol 64, No. 1, 2005, pp. 140-164.


The European bloc

By the end of the 1980s, conceptualizing Russia within the pan-European context had become mainstream among Moscow governing elites. One of the key aspects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ was the idea of a ‘common European home’. Boris Yeltsin talked of the need to ‘rejoin the European civilization’. Remarkably, as late as 2005, in his state of the nation address, Putin contended that Russia is ‘a major European power’, which for the past three centuries has been evolving and transforming itself ‘hand in hand’ and ‘together with other European nations’.

Two problems, however, weighed against Russia’s smooth identification with Europe. One was the age-old quest for status: Russia’s self-understanding as derzhava (a great power). The awareness of the derivative nature of Russia’s modern culture and of its ‘civilizational’ dependence on Europe clashed with the grand idea of Russian greatness. As Russia grew richer and stronger during the 2000s, the Kremlin leadership found it increasingly difficult to perceive themselves as ‘learners’ going to school with Europe. ‘Great Powers do not go to school’, quipped political scientist Iver Neumann. ‘On the contrary, they lay down the line and teach others.’ I. B. Neumann, ‘Russia’s Europe: Inferiority to Superiority’, International Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 6, 2016, p. 1397.

The other problem, which is relatively recent, concerns how ‘Europe’ is constructed. In the late nineteenth century, the autocratic Russian Empire, even when it was looked down on by the liberal elites of Great Britain and France, could still be regarded as perfectly ‘European’ in the company of other Old Regimes, being part of Dreikaizerbund (League of the Three Emperors) together with Wilhelmine Germany and Habsburg Austria-Hungary.

Yet in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, the situation changed drastically. The emergence of the European Union and its expansion eastward, along with the parallel expansion of NATO, another ‘Euro-Atlantic institution’, meant that institutionally Russia was being set apart from what came to be understood as ‘Europe’. This process of the institutionalization of ‘Europe’ presented Russia with a tough dilemma: either join this ‘European bloc’ or revisit the issue of self-identification. The issue has been exacerbated by Moscow’s tense relations with its ex-Soviet neighbours – above all with Ukraine – who are seeking association with the EU, and ultimately membership. A tough question started haunting Kremlin strategists: if European orientation is fully compatible with Russian identity, then on what grounds is Moscow preventing other post-Soviet nations from joining the EU? Various conservative political thinkers called Russia’s politics of identity ‘deeply flawed’ and clamored for an urgent conceptual rethink. Predictably, the suggested solution was to proclaim that Russia and Europe are distinct civilizations, each producing a gravitational pull and possessing its own sphere of influence. B. Mezhuyev, ‘‘Ostrov Rossiia’ i rossiiskaia politika identichnosti’, Rossiia v globalnoi politike, Spetsvypusk: Konservatizm vo vneshnei politike: XXI vek, May 2017, pp. 108-109.

This is precisely what Russia’s new foreign policy doctrine has done.

Back to square one

But if Russia is not ‘European’, what is it? Kremlin spin-doctors tell us it is following its special path as a unique ‘Russian civilization’. See: A. Kramarenko, ‘K voprosu o tsivilizatsionnom samoopredelenii Rossii’, Rossiia v globalnoi politike, 4 May 2023, https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/o-czivilizaczionnom-samoopredelenii/; V. Popov, ‘Rossiia – samostoiatelnaia evraziiskaia tsivilizatsiia’, Rossiiskii sovet po mezhdunarodnym delam, 22 January 2024, https://russiancouncil.ru/analytics-and-comments/analytics/rossiya-samostoyatelnaya-evraziyskaya-tsivilizatsiya/
However, it isn’t clear, as the late Richard Pipes notes, what that actually means. Remarkably, Kremlin-friendly political thinkers promoting the idea of Russian ‘uniqueness’ appear to be confused about this issue themselves. At the discussion held in late April 2023 on the eve of the XXXI Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy for Russia’s elite group of top security analysts, speakers acknowledged that Russia’s departure from its European self-identification and the former foreign policy tradition occurred ‘partly by her own will, partly because of unfavorable external circumstances’. Although Russia was viewed as a country ‘marked by originality’, it was considered ‘premature to assert that the Russian civilizational basis has already been formed’. Revealingly, some analysts argued that ‘Russia does not yet know exactly what it wants, its goals and desires are yet to be formulated.’ To fulfil this difficult task, analysts paradoxically highlighted ‘an urgent need to turn to the Russian intellectual legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, specifically to the works of Russian anti-Western and nationalist thinkers such as Fyodor Tiutchev, Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont’ev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Gumiliov and Vadim Tsymburskii. E. Kulman, ‘Rossiia kak tsivilizatsiia tsivilizatsii: Krugly stol v preddverii XXXI Assamblei SVOP’, Rossiia v globalnoi politike, 24 April 2023, https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/czivilizacziya-czivilizaczij/


And so, we appear to be back at square one. Like in the mid-nineteenth century, current calls for the Russian Sonderweg remain a rhetorical figure, a metaphor meant to conceal Russia’s perennial inability to transform itself and finally come to terms with (European) modernity. Yet there is hope. In his 1930 lecture delivered in Berlin, at the time of Stalin’s ‘Great Break’, Pavel Miliukov presciently noted: ‘The Russian historical process is not ending; it is only being interrupted at this point… Despite [social] earthquakes and eruptions, and most often with their assistance, history continues.’ Miliukov, ‘Sotsiologicheskie osnovy russkogo istoricheskogo protsessa’, p. 164.


Imagine a workweek that wraps up after four days, leaving you three days to relax, enjoy quality time with loved ones and follow personal pursuits. Through pilot projects or full legal recognition, the four-day workweek is no longer a pipedream, but the reality of many employees across Europe and around the globe.

Pilot projects have been run in several countries, and the results have been surprisingly positive. Among them is the United Kingdom, where a six-month trial involving 61 companies and 2,900 employees achieved an astonishing 90 percent retention rate.

Employees continued to receive full pay while working 80 percent of their previous hours, on the condition of maintaining 100 percent productivity. The results were telling: productivity was not just maintained, but increased.- Work-life balance improved and employers and employees alike expressed satisfaction.

In a groundbreaking move in 2022, Belgium became the first European country to legally endorse the four-day workweek without loss of pay. The catch? The same number of work hours, just packed into fewer days. So far, less than one per cent of Belgian employees have adopted the four-day workweek.

Image: Evan Blaser / Source: Wikimedia Commons

So, although Europe is starting to flip the script on the standard nine-to-five and five-out-of-seven, it seems not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. What factors have hindered the Belgian model’s popularity, compared to the UK’s? And in a landscape where certain sectors (such as the gig economy) operate under different rules, are we collectively prepared to bid farewell to traditional working hours and clock out earlier?

Not the first time the workweek changes

Current pilots and experiments in overhauling the workweek have historical precedents. In 1926, the industrialist Henry Ford trialed a 40-hour, five-day workweek in the United States in his automotive plants. This marked a departure from the prevalent six-day workweek, with Ford opting to close his plants on Saturdays and Sundays.

Despite initial opposition from employers and the media, Ford’s experiment proved successful: his factories maintained productivity levels, and the additional free time for workers resulted in increased spending within their communities. By the 1930s, the five-day workweek had become the standard, eventually being enshrined in US law in 1940.

The work landscape has evolved significantly since then. In the 1970s, a shift from farming and manufacturing to the technology sector transformed the job market. The rise of the service sector and knowledge-based economy introduced white-collar cubicle jobs that relied on mental skills, problem-solving and communication, rather than physical labour. Although these new types of jobs were more intellectually strenuous, the government took no measures to reduce the workweek.

On the corporate front in the US, however, there was a growing trend in the early 1970s to embrace the compressed four-day, 40-hour workweek, with sixty to seventy companies adopting it  per month. By 1978, hundreds of businesses and around one million Americans had shifted to a four-day schedule. But contrary to  early expectations of it becoming the norm, interest declined in the 1980s.

Workers were hesitant about working longer hours and factors like the rise of part-time employment and changing economic policies (keyword Reaganomics) encouraging longer work hours and productivity gains contributed to the shift away from the four-day workweek.

Since the 1980s, technological advancements have persistently reshaped the work environment, by automating processes, replacing workers with machines in various production sectors, and fostering a continuous surge in productivity. The emergence of new communication channels and digitalisation enabled novel work formats, such as teleworking and hybrid working.

But despite this wide array of changes, work days and hours have stayed the same since 1926. Officially, that is. Unofficially, an increased demand for performance has pushed many employees into working extended hours. This together with the erosion of work-life boundaries is leading to increasing levels of burnout, recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 as a work-place syndrome resulting from chronic stress.

The pandemic push: a UK success story

The four-day workweek regained momentum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which not only established remote work as the standard but also underscored the importance of wellbeing and mental health.

Leading the charge has been 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to reshaping the future of work. Its six-month pilot projects across the globe empower companies to test-drive this model. In the UK, the nonprofit facilitated a trial for businesses across diverse sectors, including finance, marketing and retail, spanning from June to December 2022. The pilot project involved reducing working hours to 32 per week.

Among the participating employers was Bookishly, a Northamptonshire literary gift company led by Louise Verity. Reflecting on the pandemic’s impact, Verity said  that ‘The pandemic changed everything about the way we did things and also the way that I felt about the staff. We felt like a closer team.’

‘The pandemic made me realize that providing fulfilling jobs was part of Bookishly’s mission,’ she added. Together with her team of eight, Verity identified and tackled key concerns surrounding a potential four-day workweek at Bookishly. Questions like ‘How do we manage interactions with customers and trade partners?’ and ‘Can we decide on a day when we don’t post and people can’t get a hold of us?’ were collectively addressed.

The team agreed to designate Wednesday as a day off for everyone. Breaking the week up like that makes it now feel like small, two-day weeks. It helps with attention span and has not affected output,’ says Verity. ‘This “mini-week” structure also created a work routine, with dedicated tasks allocated across Mondays and Thursdays, and Tuesdays and Fridays.

Not all companies approached the four-day workweek in the same way. Aliyah Davies, representing the 4 Day Week Campaign, another actor involved in coordinating the UK trial, highlighted the varied setups. Some businesses chose Fridays or Mondays off, while others staggered the days to ensure coverage for all five workdays. Some companies implemented it only for select departments, where the transition could be smoother,’ Davies noted. The campaign avoided advocating for a one-size-fits-all approach, as long as the proposals ensured 100 percent pay and reduced hours.

After extending the trial for an additional six months beyond its original duration to observe seasonal changes, especially during Christmas, Bookishly joined 17 other companies from the initial trial in permanently adopting the four-day workweek. This decision is now included in Bookishly’s employment contracts, meaning all new hires follow a four-day work schedule.

While not all companies from the pilot project have opted for the same contractual adjustments as Bookishly, they nearly unanimously retained the four-day workweek. Davies says this decision stemmed from the fact that ‘they found that it made their employees happier and gave them a better work-life balance, while benefiting the business, with productivity often massively increased’.

The impacts on  employee welfare are remarkable, but questions arise about how companies measure productivity-related success. In a society already burdened by over-productivity and overwork, should firms continue to prioritise increased output as a key achievement metric for the four-day workweek? Together with wellbeing indicators, could embracing sustainable productivity levels for both humans and the environment be a more constructive approach? These issues are yet to be addressed.

For now, the potential effects of legally implementing the four-day workweek across the UK remains uncertain. Apart from anything else, the government has shown no support for such a move. On the contrary, in October 2023, it issued a guidance statement instructing local authorities to cease any four-day workweek trials immediately, citing concerns that a 20 percent reduction in local authority capacity does not provide value for money. This stance may partly be influenced by a three-month pilot project launched by the South Cambridgeshire District Council in January 2023, which despite legal threats and funding cuts from UK lawmakers was prolonged until April 2024.

The Belgian model: employers not fully on board

In Belgium, the results of the government’s top-down approach to legalising the four-day workweek in November 2022 have been underwhelming, with adoption rates remaining extremely low. Unlike the UK’s model with reduced hours, Belgium requires employees to cram the same 38-hour workload into four 9.5-hour days.

Trade unions sounded the alarm early on. The President of the General Labour Federation of Belgium denounced the measure as a ‘murderous stab in the demand for the collective reduction of work’.

Employers were also wary. A survey published in November 2022 by Securex, a leading Belgian social service provider, revealed that around 25 percent of 1,340 sampled employers were sceptical about the feasibility of a four-day workweek in their respective sectors. This sentiment was prevalent among employers in manufacturing, hospitality and retail. Only 13 percent were open to approving shorter workweek requests.

Kristen du Bois, a doctoral researcher at the University of Ghent focusing on the four-day workweek and employee wellbeing, has explored the reasons for employers’ scepticism, conducting interviews with 17 company leaders. A key reason is the legal provisions, she discovered. Employees are obliged to follow a fixed schedule, obliging them to give up flexible work hours that allow them to determine when their workday begins and ends – a valued perk of their work arrangements.

Administrative hurdles added fuel to the fire, du Bois explained: ‘While a full-time workweek in Belgium is 38 hours, many individuals work 40 hours. If they request a four-day workweek, the employers must negotiate a collective bargaining agreement allowing the employee to work 10 hours a day. This is perceived as a burden.’

If the legal and social barriers are too high, du Bois pointed out, employers are more likely to ‘informally agree with their employees to four instead of five days without registering it’. This might mean that in Belgium, the number of people working a four day workweek could in fact be higher than reported.

A case in point involves a young woman in the nonprofit sector who chose to remain anonymous. She reached an informal agreement with her employer for a four-day workweek. Her timesheet, however, indicates she works five days. She is nevertheless satisfied with the arrangement. Interacting with people from different time zones often entails both early morning and late-night meetings.

‘Working longer hours for fewer days helps me hold onto my time more easily,’ she explained, even though a heavy workload sometimes compels her to work on her day off.

Not everyone feels the same way. Agnieszka Piasna from the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) explains that, for most, the nine-hour work schedule ‘would be really difficult’, especially considering that commuting time would stretch the workday to ten or eleven hours.

‘It essentially eliminates any opportunity for private or family life during the workdays: you cannot take your kids to school or pick them up, and having dinner together becomes impractical. It erodes the entire free time within a given day, and that spans four days in a week.’ Piasna stressed that the Belgian model should not even be referred to as a ‘four-day workweek’, but as a ‘compressed workweek’.

A gendered issue

Through the right to opt-in on an individual basis, the Belgian government shifted responsibility for securing the four-day workweek to employees, who must negotiate with their employers and establish a formal process.

Piasna warned that this approach ‘is more likely to have adverse effects on women compared to a collectively agreed upon and applied system’. Collective solutions eliminate discrimination among employee groups, ensuring everyone’s equal access.

‘Women are more inclined to seek reduced working hours, similar to flexible options,’ explains Piasna, ‘as they still bear the primary responsibility for caregiving, including children and the elderly, as well as household chores. This is not always viewed favourably by employers, who may perceive it as a diminished commitment to work.’

This, in turn, can impact on career progression, including promotions. It can also affect employability, since there might be a presumption that women will be more inclined to request a shorter workweek. Consequently, women often refrain from requesting reduced working hours.

Piasna also challenged the argument that certain women-dominated sectors facing labour shortages, such as hospitality and healthcare, cannot accommodate a four-day model. She argues that this view indirectly restricts women’s access to reduced hours, despite evidence from studies suggesting that a shorter workweek would improve working conditions and attract more workers, potentially alleviating shortages.

‘Long hours, demanding tasks, and the need for significant skills and effort often drive people away,’ according to Piasna. Reducing the workweek, she argues, could address these challenges, making these sectors more appealing and retaining talent.

The gig economy: a more complicated outlook

While the four-day workweek sparks conversation in many sectors, some workers find themselves left out of the equation – those entangled in the gig economy. This is due to the fundamental difference in their employment structure.

Unlike traditional jobs, gig workers lack regular schedules and often rely on non-traditional payment structures based on minutes or seconds worked. This model fails to account for crucial unpaid time investments, such as waiting for tasks, dealing with clients, or being ‘locked in’ if freelancing. ‘Until these fundamental issues are addressed,’ ETUI’s Piasna emphasized, ‘discussing a shortened workweek for gig workers remains premature.’

Some hope remains, however. The EU’s proposed Platform Work Directive, projected to be enacted by 2025, could become a game changer. The legislation introduces the ‘presumption of employment’, requiring platforms to prove workers are genuinely self-employed, not employees. If classified as employees, gig workers could gain access to minimum wages, social security and the right to collective bargaining. These changes could pave the way for more structured work hours and, potentially, shorter workweeks.

More EU experiments

The adoption rate of the Belgian four-day workweek could see improvement with certain key changes. Du Bois revealed that the government has launched a pilot study on a four-day workweek with working-time reduction. Results are yet to be disclosed.

The momentum for the four-day workweek is gaining traction in Europe. On 1 February 2024, Germany initiated a six-month trial involving 45 companies, spearheaded by 4 Day Week Global. Portugal has also been undertaking a similar project since 2023, involving 39 companies.

At the EU level, the European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights Nicolas Schmit says that ‘there is no need for new legislation on this at the moment: a four-day working week is already possible to implement under the current EU legislation’. He added also that the European Parliament is currently carrying out a pilot study on the feasibility and impact of the four-day workweek, by looking at worker and company level.

The Belgian and UK cases highlight the potential benefits and challenges of the four-day workweek, contributing to the vision of a reimagined work model benefiting employees, employers and society.

With a projected 40 percent increase in productivity in developed countries by 2035, driven by artificial intelligence, there is a pressing need to reassess gain distribution. Will we continue to invest in welfare and allow company owners and shareholders to pocket the profits, or prioritise leisure opportunities for an increasingly exhausted, overworked workforce?

From the public school superpower Finland to arch-capitalist Britain, education varies widely across Europe. Across this spectrum, one factor remains constant: early childhood education constitutes a necessity for most families, as it defines the future of their children’s academic careers. 

You can also listen to the show in podcast format:

What we recognize today as nurseries and kindergartens originate from early 19th-century experiments: Robert Owen’s Infants’ School in Scotland opened in 1816, while Teréz Brunszvik championed ‘angel gardens’ in Hungary beginning in 1828. The term ‘kindergarten’ – meaning children’s garden, can be credited to Friedrich Fröbel, a German pedagogue who founded the concept in 1840. The idea soon crossed oceans: the first public-school kindergarten opened in the 1870s in St. Louis, USA, and by 1880, there were over 400 kindergartens in 30 US states. 

Today, this professional field serves a complex function, integrating children of varying abilities and backgrounds, experimenting with methodologies, and enabling working families to even exist. Aside from making plenty of macaroni art, these institutions develop skills, support children’s personal development and socialization, integrate minorities, teach language manners, as well as foster intellectual and emotional growth. 

But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns in the early education realm; across Europe, many countries have been continually reducing their spending on education since the 1990s, consequently putting strains on professionals and making the cost of childcare a significant burden. Additionally, early education for migrant and refugee children is something that needs to be tackled, following especially the 2015 ‘crisis’ and more recently the war in Ukraine. While the EU was arguably better prepared for the former in terms of providing care and education, it has had to find ways to adjust to the latter group more quickly, with challenges still arising for both. 

Early childhood education plays a tremendous part in supporting families and children’s development. They are a cornerstone of society, and in many places across the continent, they need more support than they currently have. 

Today’s guests

Viktória Szücs is the president of the  Democratic Trade Union of Crèche Employees in Hungary. She’s a loyal advocate for enhancing the professional landscape for pedagogues, ensuring they have the resources and support they need to nurture the young minds of tomorrow.

Maria Roth is the director of the Montessori Adult Education Center in Munich with 50 years of experience. She is a recognized AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) trainer specialising in the developmental age of 3 to 6 years

Flóra Bacsó is a mediator, restorative facilitator, trainer, and project manager at the Partners Hungary Foundation, invested in the integration of Roma pupils into education systems. She is also a teacher of Related Education, a trauma-informed methodology that aids parents and educators. 

We meet with them at the Library of Central European University in Budapest. 

Sources

Monitoring the provision of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services for Ukrainian refugee children and their families in Europe by Ecorys

How is Europe welcoming Ukrainian refugee children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services? by the European School Education Programme

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Margarita Lechner, writer-editor
Salma Shaka, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director
Judit Csikós  project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

Video Crew Budapest

Nóra Ruszkai, sound engineering
Gergely Áron Pápai, photography
László Halász, photography

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
István Nagy, video editor
Milán Golovics, conversation editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota  closed captions, Polish and French subtitles; language versions management
Farah Ayyash  Arabic subtitles
Mia Belén Soriano  Spanish subtitles
Marta Ferdebar  Croatian subtitles
Lídia Nádori  German subtitles
Katalin Szlukovényi  Hungarian subtitles
Daniela Univazo  German subtitles
Olena Yermakova  Ukrainian subtitles
Aida Yermekbayeva  Russian subtitles
Mars Zaslavsky  Italian subtitles

Hosted by the Library of the Central European University, Budapest

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Kaja Puto: Where does the German left’s sympathy for Russia come from?

Reinhard Bingener: In Germany, we have four leftwing parties: the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Greens (Die Grünen), the Left (Die Linke) and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Each has a slightly different attitude towards Russia. In the case of the SPD, the 1960s and 70s were key to its development. This was the time of the pacifist movements and young Social Democrats were pulling the party toward Marxism. Gerhard Schröder, the most prominent of the SPD’s pro-Russian politicians, belonged to this generation, even if he soon abandoned Marxism.

The Greens grew out of the same ideological climate, but in their case the concept of human rights came to the fore. This has led them to position themselves against Russia and thus be more sympathetic to transatlantic cooperation. The Left, on the other hand, is largely a post-communist project. Anti-Americanism plays an even greater role in the party than in the SPD, and Marxist theory continues to be influential. The same is true of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.

As a member of government during all but one of the legislature periods of the past 25 years, the SPD has played the biggest role of any party in shaping Germany’s foreign policy toward Russia. It is currently the leading partner in the coalition that has ruled Germany since 2021. How is it possible that it still maintains this naive pacifism?

Markus Wehner: As we show in the book, this policy was shaped by three factors. The first is Germany’s widespread anti-Americanism, which is particularly strong on the left, and whose consequence is pro-Russianism. It reached its peak when a rightwing president came to power in the United States in the first decade of the new century. During the George W. Bush presidency, which coincided with Putin’s first two terms, leading SPD politicians proclaimed that we needed equidistance, i.e. as close a relationship with NATO as with Russia.

The Polish left is also critical of the US and various NATO interventions, yet it is not pro-Russian.

RB: Yes, but Russia never colonized Germany as it did Poland for long periods. In Germany, the experience was limited to the GDR – that is, for forty-five years and for a quarter of the whole population. Added to this is the belief, historically rooted in German culture, in the shallowness of the United States and the West. This is countered by the deep soul that is supposed to unite Russians and Germans. So cultural hubris also plays a role.

MW: Another factor that has influenced Germany’s policy towards Russia is German guilt about the crimes committed in the USSR during World War II. Many Germans, especially those of the older generation, continue to believe that we owe Russia peace. By this logic, the twenty million plus citizens of the USSR who died during the war were Russians, even though Ukrainians, Belarusians and members of many other nations were also among them.

And the third factor?

MW: Ostpolitik, designed in the 1970s by the SPD under Willy Brandt. Originally motivated by a desire for rapprochement with the GDR, Ostpolitik evolved into a policy of reconciliation and rapprochement with the entire Eastern Bloc. This was when the Oder-Neisse border was recognized and trade began with the USSR and other countries in the region. Soviet gas began to flow to Germany. At the same time, Germany was spending 4-5 per cent of its GDP on defense. Cooperation was accompanied by Cold War deterrence.

While we view the first phase of Ostpolitik positively, we argue that the second phase, during which the SPD focused on security partnerships with communist regimes, was the prelude to Germany’s naive cooperation with independent Russia under Putin. During the 1980s, the Social Democrats treated oppositionists in Poland and Czechoslovakia as troublemakers. Suffice it to say that Willy Brandt refused to meet with Lech Walesa during his trip to Poland on the fifteenth anniversary of the Treaty of Warsaw in 1985. Many leading Social Democrats also opposed German reunification.

Why?

RB: Partly because they didn’t want Germany to become a big, hegemonic country in the centre of Europe again. Belief in the stability of socialist regimes and ideological affinity probably also played a role.

MW: Definitely. When the unification process began, I was watching the coverage of the SPD presidium meeting. Leftwing party politician Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said that if the result of unification were a strengthening of NATO and a victory for capitalism, she would fight against it with all her might.

And today the SPD boasts that Ostpolitik brought the wall down…

MW: When German reunification began to be widely perceived as a success, the SPD decided to take credit for it. For ideological reasons, they were unwilling to recognize the role of Ronald Reagan and his rearmament policy, for example, or that of John Paul II, who helped bring about the transition in Poland. So they created the myth about the influence of Ostpolitik .

16 June 2000. Image: Presidential Press and Information Office / Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1990 – the year of German reunification – Gerhard Schröder became Minister President of Lower Saxony. It was at this point that the former chairman of the Young Socialists brought himself and his party into contact with big business. How did this happen?

RB: The peculiarities of the state of Lower Saxony, which has stakes in large companies such as Volkswagen, are partly responsible for this. Salzgitter AG – a huge steel producer that has been around since the 1970s – produced gas pipes for the USSR and then later for the Nord Stream pipeline. The minister president of Lower Saxony sits on the supervisory boards of such companies.

In addition, Schröder likes the macho business world. He enters the universe of older successful men, they impress him with their willingness to take risks, mutual loyalty and money. He starts with friendships with motorcycle gangs and ends with autocrats. He respects Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Vladimir Putin because they are strong men who have succeeded.

However, while Schröder’s views on economic policy are changing, he remains consistent in his foreign policy vision. In the 1970s and 1980s he travels to the USSR, and in the 1990s – as minister president of Lower Saxony – to Russia.

MW: Money has always played an important role for Schröder, even when he was chancellor. When he travelled with business leaders, he felt uneasy about the fact that they all earned more than him. It is probably also because he was born into poverty. His mother was a cleaner, his father was killed in WW2 when he was a few years old. In the world of power and money, Schröder was a nouveau riche.

Vladimir Putin used Schröder’s biography to get closer to him. He had a specific reason for doing so: a few years before, Putin had defended his doctorate on the use of gas exports as a foreign policy instrument.

MW: Asked at the time what he did for the KGB, Putin replied that he was an expert on human relations. Indeed, he is very good at this and learns a lot about the object of his interest, both the good and the bad sides. Putin also comes from poverty, from a Leningrad neighbourhood of – as he puts it – broken glass. Like Schröder, he played sports in his youth and rubbed shoulders with the criminal community, before finding his way into politics and gaining power.

Moreover, Putin knows how to make people feel that they are especially important. He let Schröder know that he, Putin, could learn a lot from the older and more experienced politician. He invited Schröder privately to Moscow and spoke to him in German without an interpreter. The men went to the sauna together, went sledding in the park with their wives, and for Schröder’s sixtieth birthday Putin brought a Cossack choir to the theatre in Hannover to sing the anthem of Lower Saxony. Later Putin even arranged for his German friend to adopt two Russian children. Schröder used to say that German–Russian relations had grown deeper than ever before. But they were actually his private relationships.

How did this friendship translate into Chancellor Schröder’s domestic policy?

MW: Schröder presented the interests of the German energy industry as German national interests. When there was talk of buying Russian gas, Schröder did not say that doing so was in the interest of the German energy industry or the German economy, but that in Germany’s interest. This is how he argued in order to accelerate the construction of Nord Stream. Things got even more interesting when he ceased to be chancellor, while continuing to direct German policy towards Russia from the back seat.

Angela Merkel replaced Schröder as chancellor in 2005. The CDU went on to rule Germany for four terms, three of them in coalition with the SPD.

MW: Schröder then became part of the Russian energy industry as chairman of Nord Stream’s supervisory board. At the same time, he played the role of a former chancellor. And it influenced the shape of the German government, by placing two of his close associates –Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Sigmar Gabriel – as foreign minister and as minister of the economy respectively.

For a very long time the German energy industry imposed an import limit of no more than 30 percent from one supplier. Under Gabriel, the limit was lowered to 55 percent. This happened after the annexation of Crimea.

German politicians convinced the public that Russian gas was the cheapest. In your book, you prove that this was not true.

MW: No LNG terminals were built that would have allowed the purchase of gas from other sources, or at least the negotiation of terms with Moscow. Germany thus became dependent on Russian gas and allowed the supplier to dictate prices. Russia was believed to be a safe supplier and that we had nothing to fear.

RB: German gas storage facilities have been sold to Russia. It can be said that Russia has exploited the liberalization of European energy markets for its own ends. Gazprom has become not only a producer, but also the owner of gas infrastructure, gas pipelines and gas storage facilities. It built its position on this. The Germans believed that European security was impossible without good relations with Russia. When full-scale war broke out, they discovered to their surprise that the storage facilities were empty.

Gerhard Schröder then became a villain. He was stripped of his office in the Bundestag, and he lost his honorary citizenship of Hanover, and there was an attempt to remove him from the SPD. Did no one else feel guilty?

RB: Schröder became the chief culprit, while other party politicians responsible for pro-Russian policies remained in their positions. Neither Frank-Walter Steinmeier, currently the Germany’s president, nor Sigmar Gabriel, who heads the Atlantic Bridge, an association promoting German-American relations, has resigned. Manuela Schwesig, who was instrumental in the creation of the infamous Climate Protection Foundation, set up to circumvent US sanctions against Russia, is still the minister president of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Some tried to justify themselves, others disappeared for several weeks. And when the dust settled, they slowly returned to their roles. I would call this a huge political achievement for the SPD.

MW: It should be added, however, that it was at the expense of their credibility. At the start of the war, Steinmeier offered to visit Ukraine and was turned down. And Schwesig is hardly the SPD’s great hope anymore.

How has 2022 changed the German left?

RB: The SPD has started paying more attention to the role of energy policy in defence, as well as to eastern European countries – not only Ukraine, but also Poland and the Baltic states. More money has been allocated to armaments – Germany has finally succeeded in reaching its goal of spending 2 per cent of its GDP on defence. But while Olaf Scholz himself has been critical of Russia since 2017, there are still people in the party who speculate about re-establishing contact with Moscow.

The Greens have hardened their pro-Ukrainian position and have also begun to advocate for a strengthening of defence and greater openness to military structures, most notably NATO. Die Linke, on the other hand, have held on to the primacy of ‘peace policy’ and remain strongly critic towards NATO and armaments.

MW: As for the SPD, statements by party chairman Lars Klingbeil, once a politician with ties to Russia, seem telling. After the full-scale invasion, he repeatedly stressed that Germany should have listened more closely to its NATO partners in the east, and that today there is no longer a question of security with Russia, but rather security in the face of Russia. Many senior SPD members do not necessarily like this narrative, however.

How sustainable is this transformation of the SPD? Scholz now seems to be putting the brake on military aid and has refused to deliver Taurus long-range missiles. He has also publicly commented on NATO’s undisclosed involvement in operating similar missiles in Ukraine.

RB: It can’t be ruled out that Russia-sympathisers will come to the fore again. Polls clearly indicate that the public is afraid of confrontation. The majority of citizens do not want Germany to provoke the Russian bear and are against increasing the supply of weapons. Though he supports Ukraine in no uncertain terms, Scholz takes this sentiment into account.

MW: Opposition to rearming Ukraine is strong especially in eastern Germany. Although the region experienced Soviet occupation, sympathy and respect for Russia is still very strong. To make matter worse for Scholz, the German economy is not in the best shape, and citizens are experiencing rises in the cost of living. Against this backdrop, members of the SPD’s left wing are sceptical of a radical increase in defence spending, which they fear will result in a shortage of money for education, social spending and climate protection.

There is a small but real possibility that Russia will attack NATO countries in the future. Is Germany not afraid of such a scenario?

RB: From the German perspective, this threat is more remote than for the Poles, if only because, unlike you, we do not border Russia. As Markus says, the emotional core of the German approach to Russia is a fear of teasing the bear. At the same time, any sensible politician today realizes the importance of deterrence. Both Poland and Germany rely on transatlantic support, and Germany is part of the NATO agreement on sharing tactical nuclear weapons. However, the spectre of a Donald Trump victory should make us think about whether it’s time to build a European deterrent.

Wars have many beginnings, but they refuse to end — history is merciless in giving this lesson to us again and again. Amid the ten-year Russian war in Ukraine, this thought is unbearable. Despite all odds, we need the idea of victory to hold us together in a shared effort of moving through the horrid reality of loss and devastation that ruptures and obliterates our more-than-human communities, land and material culture. The idea of victory is an orienting force in the chaos of war, it serves as a guarantee of the future where Ukrainian society is not stripped of dignity and recovery is possible.

At the same time, a nuanced study of wars’ aftermaths demonstrates that the notion of clear-cut victory belongs to the past. Wars proliferate by forming martial regimes prior to and after the wars’ formal beginnings and ends when occupation forces continue to deny their presence on the territory of another state or when the pervasive military surveillance remains ongoing after military conflicts are over. Within recent decades, we have become better equipped to recognize the hidden modes of wars settling in everyday life. Most of them, however, are too subtle or too slow to grasp amid the loud and bloody all-out war, but they target, without our awareness, the most delicate and most intimate life-affirming connections — within us and between us.

My goal is to develop conceptual tools for recognizing the forms, vectors, temporalities and dynamics of these subtle-yet-deadly hazards — to shake our imagination for envisioning, together, the infrastructures of care and co-existence, within our hopefully remediated landscapes or whatever remains of them.

In official and public discourse, the victory of Ukraine and the end of the Russian war is associated with a full restoration of the Ukrainian territories of 1991 as a core condition (a deranged Russian ex-president has recently threatened that this would be followed by a nuclear war). Such restoration of territories, our citizens believe, should be accompanied by the return of the deported children, Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians, then, a grand reparation, followed with an international tribunal, the latter to close the gap between the political and legal understandings of genocide and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

In how it is envisioned, de-occupation has an explicit horizontal dimension: Ukrainian citizens imagine the end of this war horizontally, despite this war’s multidimensional character. Simplified views can help, and so, for the purposes of understanding the basic dynamics of the fighting, the complexity of the battlefield is often flattened to a two-dimensional map, as would be drawn from a martial point of view — we look at it from above to see how the frontline moves. But critical thought warns us, always, to be cautious about the gamer’s view through which most of the war bloggers explain to us the strategic and tactical moves — or their absence — on the flattened battlefield.

Environmental zero-day exploits

The voluminous battlefield does not reveal itself easily to a remote observer. Considering the environmental impact of war may help us to move beyond horizontality. In Ukraine, smaller and larger environmental organizations and centres have done a lot to assess and report the environmental impacts of the war since they became impossible to ignore years prior to the full-scale invasion. The scope of this devastating impact is not for a short essay, so let us focus on one narrow theme to lead us to the notion of vertical occupation, which is crucial for understanding the complex and entangled temporality and spatiality of this war.

Soon after the beginning of the Russian war in Ukraine in 2014, when the Russian military infiltrated the coal-rich Donbas to incite military action, environmentalists reported the danger posed by abandoned and neglected coal mines: they had been persistently filling up with toxic groundwater for fifty years. The situation had become critical even without military action. The reports pointed out the core of the problem: when water pumping from the mines is stopped, the level eventually rises too high, whereupon it will spill heavy metals and other pollutants into surrounding rivers, lakes and wells, leading to the contamination of drinking water and poisoning of the soil, making land unfit for farming.

Among the most illustrative examples is one of the 220 coal mines in the Donetsk Coal Basin, the Yunkom mine, named after a small mining town Yunokomunarivsk, now Bunhe, located forty-three kilometres north-east of Donetsk. The slow flooding of the mine due to the shutting off of the mine’s pumps by the occupation government of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic in spring 2018 drew attention to the mine’s dark history. In 1979, an industrial underground nuclear explosion was performed at a depth of 903 metres with a TNT equivalent yield of 200 to 300 tonnes, approximately 2% of the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. This 530th nuclear explosion on the territory of the USSR took place right under Yunokomunarivsk, and the town’s 22,000 dwellers were, unsurprisingly, misinformed about the nature of the explosion. The officials then presented it as a necessary civil defence exercise. In Soviet nuclear history, this site became known as Object Klivazh, but after the Chornobyl catastrophe rocked and shattered the Soviet version of history, it was renamed in popular discourse as ‘Donetsk Chornobyl’. Forty-five years later, it is still hard to assess the damage and remaining risk because the composition of the nuclear device from Moscow was undisclosed and is still buried in classified archives. Therefore, the current potency of radioactive matter sitting under the top layer of soil and coal deposit remains unclear. The living memory of the massive death of workers who were sent back into the mines after the nuclear detonation is among the few reliable warnings surviving today. We are the media and the archive.

Zaporizhzhia and Kakhovka Reservoir (crop), July 2023. Image by Enno Lenze via Wikimedia Commons

Even outside military contexts, mines are hazardous for the environment because they pollute the local atmosphere with solid and gaseous substances used in the mining industry, and cause the disturbance of the earth’s surface, and ground and surface waters. In a military setting, they are a weapon, and they are a weapon with a history. During these two years of war, we have already seen multiple times how the sites of past environmental disasters — often the consequence of the Soviet regime’s criminal negligence, made systemic by their straightforward imperial, exploitative mindset — are used as environmental zero-day exploits.

The Kakhovka Reservoir was one of the biggest of such time-bombs. The projected aftermath of the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction is, according to some accounts, Ukraine’s ‘worst ecological disaster since Chornobyl’. Too often, Russian war on life comes down to being nuclear. In their 1986 essay ‘Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism’, Native American economist and environmentalist Winona LaDuke and American writer and activist Ward Churchill claim that ‘colonialism has a radioactive quality’: ‘it cannot be undone’; they insist it continues to destroy, turning on ‘everyone alive and everyone who will be alive’. The notion ‘radioactive colonialism’ thus captures the long-lasting impacts of two hazards that mutually reinforce their already-deadly damage on both molecular and planetary levels: one is radioactive pollution and the second is colonialism.

The wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are all ‘ecologized’ wars, as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk reminds us. Almost paradoxically in the age of precision weapons, such wars, like the Russian war on Ukraine, target broader environments on a micro and macro-scale, which makes ‘collateral damage’ — or everyone and everything that falls dead or damaged by war — not an exception, but the core rule of warfare. These late modern wars are always fought environmentally. Often, the material composition of such environments, from debris and pollution to air sirens and explosions, from masterminded PSYOPs to random informational chaos, is employed to produce terror that suppresses the subject of war from within — just like it makes the living body hostage by the necessity of breathing poisoned air or drinking poisoned water. The Russian war on Ukraine is an example of such modern environmental warfare, but it also unfolds in a particular terror environment on the nexus of cyber and nuclear. This war is defined and saturated by nuclear terror that is constantly amplified and disseminated by cyber warfare operations.

Lingering ecological repercussions

When in 2018, the radioactive material in underground waters threatened to surface by crawling up vertical shafts of the abandoned industrial mines, the repressed knowledge of the ‘Donetsk Chornobyl’ came back to us. It was with both pain and awe that I thought back then of how history can only be produced in the mode of future in the past. When you look at the flow of dispersed events from the point of the ‘original accident’, as French philosopher Paul Virilio provocatively and provisionally named the Chornobyl catastrophe, the history as you knew it changes. There is nothing accidental, of course, about such accidents for Virilio. Instead, the term expresses the philosopher’s dark irony towards our blindness and unwillingness to confront the systemic nature of catastrophes in modernity (with imperialism being a primary example), rather than celebrating modernity’s delusionary progress.

By now it is clear, I hope, that this war is the original accident of the history of the Cold War, that opens a dreadful view of the future, against which we must brace ourselves. Amid Ukraine’s wounded fields and the ashes of urban landscapes, when more than 174,000 square kilometres of the country is contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance planted in our soil, this future, growing in the horrid present and in close proximity to the imperial past, reveals the dimension of the current occupation that postpones the end of the war to the point of never. This dimension is vertical — it persists as deadly radiance under our feet.

The original version of this article was published in London Ukrainian Review in its first issue on the theme of ‘War on the environment’.

Är det då en naturgiven ordning? När man velat understryka synens dominanta roll har man pekat på att mer än hälften av nervcellerna i människans hjärnbark ägnas åt att bearbeta visuell information. Samtidigt har forskning de senaste åren tonat ned den strikta lokaliseringen av kognitiva funktioner i hjärnan och visat att sinnena i hög grad arbetar koordinerat när vi upplever världen: att förstå ett synintryck är inte bara att avkoda det ljus som faller in i ögat, utan att fläta samman denna information med ögonmuskelns rörelse i sidled, handens vridning av objektet, kroppens relativa position i rummet, för att inte tala om de semantiska och affektiva mönster som ständigt aktiveras och omformas. Några svarta fläckar på ett papper kan vara obegripliga innan vi flyttar blicken till det lilla ordet under bilden och bokstäverna B och I gör att vi omedelbart ser konturerna av ett stickande flygfä, varpå vår pupill vidgas och pulsen går upp om vi råkar ha en bifobi. Vi var tillfälligt blinda, kunde inte tolka vad vi hade rakt framför ögonen, men så kom ordet och det fick oss att se. 

Synen på synen som något primärt och upphöjt har dock gamla anor. Platon (f 428 f kr) skrev för mer än tvåtusen år sedan om ögat som en sol som lyste med förnuftets ljus och Aristoteles (f 384 f kr) menade att det är synen som bäst hjälper oss att förstå världen, för att den tydligast blottar de distinktioner som finns i den. Vi vill veta vad som åtskiljer tingen och urskilja gränserna mellan fenomenen. Det finns också ett välbekant vetenskapligt ideal i den distans som synen erbjuder: att kunna observera något på håll, inte behöva komma i direktkontakt och röra vid det, eller bli vidrörd. Trots att den är begränsad till två kulor i ansiktet är synen vidsträckt, medan känseln som täcker hela kroppen är intim, sträcker sig så ynkligt kort. Hos det mänskliga fostret är det dock känseln som utvecklas först, receptorer för beröring växer tidigt fram över embryots läppar. Men hur börjar vi se?

Hur vi börjar se

I början finns vatten, där ett korn av genomskinligt slem svävar. Kornet som är ett, delar sig efter några timmar i två, som under dagarna som kommer delar sig i fyra, åtta, sexton, senare miljarder. Ordet cell betyder ”litet rum”, och utvecklingen från slemkorn till öga är just historien om rum efter rum som skapas ur intet. Klungan av celler ändrar snart form, delar av slemmet trycks utåt och bildar i mitten ett hål. Den ihåliga ansamlingen viker sig sedan in i sig själv så att ytterligare ett tomrum bildas. Öppningen in till det tomrummet kallas för urmun, men för vissa varelser, som sjöborren, kan urmunnen lika gärna utvecklas till anus. Det blir inte så mycket mer än så för många djur, de lär sig svälja och skita. Men för den som ska lära sig se fortsätter processen. Inuti den växande formen blir en skåra ett rör, som ska bli ryggrad och nervsystem. Från den växande blåsan överst på röret skickas två tunna stänglar ut, mot ytan av det sammansatta, det som ska bli hud, och som om ytan vet – som om den också vill – börjar den sjunka inåt en smula. Stängel och skål går varandra till mötes. Skålen sjunker och sjunker tills förankringen brister och den knoppas av från ytan, blir boll och sedan lins, samtidigt som stängeln bildar en inbuktning längst ut på toppen av sig själv där linsen kan vila. Skålen kläs invändigt med brokiga celler i lager: de yttersta kommer bilda en vit och hård hinna som kan hålla skålens innehåll på plats, de mellersta en hinna rik på blod, och längst in skapas lagret med korn känsliga för ljus, i näthinnan. För att kunna släppa in ljuset till dessa djupt liggande synceller kommer de hudbesläktade cellerna i linsen och hornhinnan omvandlas och organiseras så att de blir genomskinliga. På den glasliknande ytan får inte finnas några blodkärl, eftersom blodet annars skulle kasta mörka skuggor.

Baby Eye Brain, Paul Insect, London. Image by bixentro via Wikimedia Commons

I mörkret förbereder sig alltså alla delar självständigt men synkroniserat för att någon gång se ljus, de är fragment och samtidigt helhet. Alldeles oerfarna, men drivna som av intuition. De smala stänglarna som leder från ögonskålarna fylls av hundratusen tunna fibrer per minut, fibrer som kopplar samman de inre cellerna i botten av skålen med den snårskog av nerver som har börjat växa i den stora blåsan i moderröret; de binder ögat till hjärnan. Så föds man. Och för första gången rinner ljus in genom pupillens svarta hål omringad av en regnbåge, genom linsen som bryter ljuset mot näthinnans ljushungriga celler där en energi omvandlas till en annan: ljusenergi ger kemisk reaktion som ger elektrisk nervimpuls som skickas vidare bakåt längs den optiska nerven. Det är överföring: mönster i en domän förs över till en annan domän. Som en metafor.

Linsen är ännu inte perfekt konvext avvägd vid födseln utan ganska rund, och näthinnan inte helt färdig, så den nyfödda ser oskarpt. Redan de första dagarna kan man ändå se hur barnet börjar följa de regler som forskare sammanställt efter observationer av nyfött blickbeteende: Vid frånvaro av stimulans, börja söka av omgivningen. Sök av brett tills du hittar ett streck eller gräns. Stanna i närheten av gränsen. 

Det finns kritiska perioder för synens utveckling. Kattungar som får ena ögat igensytt vid födseln kommer inte lära sig se med det ögat när stygnen tas bort efter tre månader, men en fullvuxen katts öga blir inte blint av att stängas en längre period. En skelning som inte åtgärdas före tre års ålder kan hämma utvecklingen av en människas djupseende, eftersom det kalibreras med hjälp av skillnaden mellan de två ögonens synfält. År 1688 ställde filosofen Molyneux, vars fru var blind, en fråga till John Locke om huruvida en blind person som endast lärt känna geometriska former med handen skulle kunna känna igen en kub med synen, om hon mirakulöst återfick den. Lockes svar var att hon inte skulle det. Frågan kunde trettio år senare prövas experimentellt vid en uppmärksammad starroperation av en 13-årig pojke (och har gjorts så flera gånger därefter). Pojken som dittills hade varit blind återfick synen och Locke visade sig ha haft rätt: han kunde inte identifiera kuben med bara synen. Men när han senare fick känna på den och associera det visuella fenomenet med känslan i handen kunde han lära sig att se kuben som en kub.

Genom att mäta hur länge bebisar stannar med blicken på ett stimuli har man kunnat fastställa vissa åldersberoende preferenser: vid tre månaders ålder tycker barnet om att titta på röda och gula saker istället för de svartvita det föredrog som nyfödd, vid sex månader tittar det gärna på fallande ting, vid nio månader helst på ansikten. En genomgående och åldersoberoende synpreferens är den för nya stimuli. Parallellt och i interaktion med sina preferenser tränar barnet sina förmågor: att styra huvudets rörelser, flytta saker från hand till hand, lyfta upp små föremål med fingrarna, associera den visuella händelsen att se ett bröst eller en flaska med den fysiska händelsen att få mat. Det börjar leta efter saker som gömts undan, förflytta sig närmre det som väcker dess intresse, imitera andras rörelser och sortera färg och form och djur efter likhet. Det börjar utveckla en ny preferens: den för kausalitet och samband.

Hur man sett på syn

Människans medfödda drift att söka efter orsaker och samband fick henne tidigt att vilja förstå hur synen fungerar. Demokritos (f 460 f kr) tänkte sig att en mycket tunn hinna av atomer, som han kallade aidola, ständigt ömsades från tingen och tog sig in i ögat där den kolliderade med själens atomer. Lucretius (f 99 f kr) hade liknande idéer men kallade hinnan för simulacra. Han skrev: ”Bland de synliga tingen kastar många av sig kroppar, ibland förtunnade som rök från ved eller värme från eld, ibland mer tätvävda och koncentrerade som när cikador kryper ur sina tunna skal på sommaren, som när kalvar släpper sin fosterhinna, som när ormen ömsar sitt skinn bland törnen”. Denna föreställning, att syn uppstår när något kommer in i ögat, brukar kallas för intromission. Kritiker av denna idé frågade sig hur aidolan av ett helt berg kan få plats i ögat, och hur alla dessa hinnor kunde undvika att trassla in sig i varandra på sin väg till ögonen.

En mer utbredd tro var att ögat utstrålade sitt eget ljus, så kallad emission. De flesta som argumenterat för emission har trott på en kombination av ljus inifrån och utifrån ögat, men en mer ensidig emissionsteori brukar tillskrivas Empedokles (f 490 f kr) och hans ord om en gudomlig eld inuti ögat. Vår drift att söka samband spökar dock även i idéhistoriska framställningar: av Empedokles teorier finns endast fragment och återgivningar i andra hand av senare antika filosofer som argumenterat emot renodlad emission. För en modern människa, som tar tidigare vetenskapliga upptäckter för givna som sunt förnuft, kan det tyckas självklart att ögonen inte har sitt eget ljus: då borde vi ju kunna se i mörkret. Men kanske fann man inspiration till emissionstanken i sättet nattaktiva djurs ögon kan reflektera ljus och se ut att lysa i mörker. Mer interaktiva teorier stod bl a Platon för, som menade att ett gudomligt ljus från ögat behövde möta ett omgivande ljus och därigenom skapa syn. Aristoteles trodde inte att något emanerade från ögat eller från de synliga objekten, men att ögat på något sätt förvandlade luften mellan subjekt och objekt till ett medium för syn.

De framväxande teorierna drevs på från olika håll, av dem som intresserade sig för psykologi och perception men också av två andra discipliner: medicinen och matematiken. Den grekiska kirurgen Galenos (f 129) gjorde dissektioner av babianer och plåstrade om gladiatorer och var bland de första att anatomiskt beskriva ögats olika delar. Han trodde att det var i linsen synen uppstod, en tro som var den allmänna fram till 1600-talet. I De Usu Partium (Om kroppsdelarnas funktion) skriver Galenos, efter sina anatomiska beskrivningar av ögat, att han inför att uttala sig om ljusets riktning hade tvekat, ”eftersom det involverar teorin om geometri och de flesta människor som låtsas inneha någon bildning inte bara är okunniga om denna utan också undviker dem som förstår den och irriterar sig på dem”.

Euklides (f 325 f kr) var kanske ett typiskt motiv för sådan irritation. Han var ointresserad av de köttsliga förhållandena i ögat och intresserade sig istället strikt för de matematiska regler som kunde förklara synen. Eventuellt influerad av den geometri som hade visat hur scenen i en amfiteater skulle synas för så många åskådare som möjligt, utvecklade han en konisk modell av synfältet och la utifrån några få postulat fram matematiska teorem om hur det synliga objektet behöver nå ögat längs raka, ostörda linjer. Även Euklides trodde att ögat utstrålade ljus, men att han hade fel gällande ljusets riktning ändrade inte hur väl matematiken stämde i konmodellen, som skulle visa sig fungera oavsett vilket håll ljuset kom ifrån. Euklides konmodell modifierades senare av Ptolemaios (f 90) och översattes tillsammans med texter av Aristoteles och Galenos till arabiska på 800-talet och skulle få stort inflytande på de många optiska arbeten som skrevs i Mellanöstern under kommande sekel och som i sin tur utgjorde grunden för den europeiska medeltidens och renässansens framsteg inom optiken.

Filosofen Al-Kindi (f 800), verksam i Bagdad, var ledande i översättningsarbetet från latin och skrev själv arbeten om skuggor, speglar och himlens färg. Han försvarade idén om emission genom att hänvisa till ögats form: örat var en tydlig tratt för att ta emot ljud, men ögat var sfäriskt och mobilt för att kunna rikta sitt ljus. Det var en annan filosof född i Irak som skulle sammanställa de tidigare teorierna och skapa den stora syntes som la grunden till vår tids syn på syn. Ibn al-Haytham (f 965) satt i husarrest i Kairo efter att ha misslyckats med att dämma upp Nilen på en kalifs uppdrag när han skrev sina arbeten om synsinnet. Han noterade hur ljus påverkar ögat på flera sätt: att pupillen kan dra ihop sig, att ögat skadas av starkt sken och att man kan se en efterbild på ögonlockens insida efter att ha stirrat in i solen. När han kommit fram till att synen måste uppkomma inuti ögat insåg han också att emissionen blev överflödig som förklaring – de strålar som åkte ut skulle ändå behöva komma in igen. Han kombinerade den euklidiska geometrin med sina egna idéer om hur ljuset studsar på ytor och genom refraktion landar i ögat enligt ett strukturerat punktmönster. Ibn al-Haythams texter översatta från arabiskan i kombination med anatomen Felix Platters (f 1536) studier hade stort inflytande på Kepler när han 1604 i Astronomiae Pars Optica lyfte fram näthinnans avgörande roll för synen och en gång för alla fastställde intromissionsteorin.

Men kanske är inte emissionsteorin helt utdöd. I en artikel med titeln ”Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception” skriver några psykologiforskare från Ohio State University att oroväckande många vuxna människor tror att det kommer någonting ut ur ögat under synprocessen. Det är en oavsiktligt komisk text, med en för en vetenskaplig artikel ovanligt värderande ton. Författarna förfasar sig över hur även psykologistudenter som bör ha läst perceptionspsykologi svarar fel på påståenden om huruvida ljus lämnar ögat. Man anar en tilltagande indignation, en frustrerad vädjan när forskarna med olika utbildningsinsatser och testbetingelser experimentellt försöker få människor att svara rätt. De låter försökspersonerna läsa kurslitteraturen innan de testas och ger även en kort föreläsning om hur syn fungerar, men ingenting tycks fungera. En intressant detalj är att andelen personer som verkar vilja beskriva någon form av emission är som högst när försökspersonerna ska ange svaren genom att rita, många tycks vilja rita pilar som går ut ur ögonen. Det enda som ger en måttlig inlärningseffekt är när försökspersonerna får se en barnsligt övertydlig tecknad film där en kort text upprepas – ”INGET KOMMER UT UR ÖGONEN!” – och kombineras med exempel om att Stålmannens röntgensyn inte är verklig. Efter den filmen väljer några färre emissionsalternativet, men inlärningseffekten har försvunnit vid en omtestning några månader senare. 

Efter att ha beskrivit hur en försöksperson ”fåraktigt” tvingats erkänna att emission inte finns, efter att de pressat honom på svar om huruvida någon annan kan se detta något som han fram till dess ihärdigt påstått lämnar ögat, så reflekterar författarna över att det kanske finns något i människans upplevelse av synen som ger en känsla av att rikta sig utåt, mot omgivningen. Med ett intryck av att trots – eller kanske genom – sin bestörtning ha blivit lite klokare konstaterar de att falska föreställningar tycks kunna samexistera med vetenskapligt acceptabla sådana inom en människa utan att hon inser inkonsekvensen.

Hur man uppfostrat blicken

Det finns något undanglidande i alla dessa framsteg med att förklara synsinnet, något som ständigt knuffas framför den som bryter ny mark. När Kepler fann att synen skedde via näthinnan blev sinnet på ett paradoxalt sätt mer opakt än tidigare, drog sig längre in. Han kunde förklara stegen fram till hinnan, peka på den upp-och-nedvända bild som präntas in där, men sedan slängde han upp armarna: resten får någon annan ta sig an, det där som händer i nerven, hur bilden vänds rätt och blir allt det vi ser. Newton (f 1642) närmade sig något senare frågan på ett mer praktiskt sätt. Han ville veta vad i hans syn som berodde på ögat respektive omvärlden och själen, och experimenterade med att sticka in vassa verktyg långt bakom sin egen ögonglob för att framkalla en upplevelse av färg. Descartes skalade bort de bakre hinnorna från ett oxöga och höll upp det som en ljuskänslig film mot fönstret för att visa hur ögat är som en passiv camera obscura. Men själva tolkningen av synintrycken hänvisade han vidare till den perfekta, immateriella själen som på ett oklart vis antogs kommunicera via tallkottkörteln. Som om han stolt skanderat: MEKANIK, MEKANIK, MEKANIK, och sedan skamset mumlat: … och så lite magi. Allt sedan dess har forskare fortsatt jaga det undanglidande medvetandet. Den svenske neurofysiologen Torsten Wiesel fick tillsammans med David Hubel 1981 Nobelpriset för sina upptäckter av hur hjärnan dekonstruerar och återuppbygger den visuella bilden, hur specifika nervceller aktiveras när ögat ser vertikala linjer och andra av horisontella. Det finns även hjärnområden dedikerade åt särskilda visuella objekt, som det fusiforma ansiktsområdet som aktiveras när vi ser ansikten och som – om det stimuleras mekaniskt – kan framkalla en visuell hallucination av ett ansikte. I en omtalad japansk studie från 2012 kunde forskare gissa vad människor drömt om efter att ha analyserat deras hjärnaktivitet i primära synkortex sekunderna innan de väcktes ur sömnen. Syn och dröm tycks närma sig varandra.

Före Keplers genombrott och Descartes försök att dela upp människan i ett mekaniskt kött och en osynlig upphöjd själ fanns en grupp medeltida filosofer som brukar kallas för perspektivister. De sysselsatte sig med frågor om ljus och syn och hade ett specialintresse för optiska illusioner. I den för tiden storsäljande manualen för präster, De oculo morali (Om det moraliska ögat) av astronomen Peter av Limoges (f 1240), vävdes deras kunskaper om synsinnet ihop med råd om hur en sant kristen ska leva. Perspektivisterna intresserade sig för tre sorters syn: den direkta, den brutna och den reflekterade. Alltså fri sikt genom luft, sikt som förvrängs av material av olika täthet, och synen i en spegel. I De oculo morali blir detta en metafor för hur människan, som det står i Bibeln, ser allt återgivet som i en spegel, och att endast Gud ser saker direkt, som de verkligen är. Även om perspektivisterna intresserade sig för optiska illusioner – att en käpp ser bruten ut när den sticks ner i vatten, att månen ser större ut nära horisonten – var de övertygade om att synsinnet i grunden är pålitligt. Normen var den syn som återgav världen korrekt, illusionerna bara avvikelser från denna. Peter av Limoges använde sig av perspektivisternas exempel men tolkade dem annorlunda: i De oculo morali är synens tendens att förvridas inte undantag utan dess mest särpräglade drag. Han liknar denna ögats svaghet vid en mer generell svaghet hos människans förstånd, och formulerar utifrån detta ett moraliskt förhållningssätt för seendet: hur man ska se utåt, hur man ska se inåt, och hur man ska eftersträva att bli sedd av andra. De optiska illusionerna görs till sedelärande analogier: en sak som befinner sig i tätare material och betraktas från ett tunnare, som något i vatten sett från luft, framstår som större än vad det är, precis som den rike felaktigt framstår som stor och betydelsefull för den fattige. Metaforerna är, på metaforers vis, oblygt böjbara – som när de sju dygderna liknas vid ögats sju skyddande delar.

I religiös litteratur finns en lång tradition av aktsamhet om sinnena. Sinnena är lömska öppningar för synden, men också möjliga portar mot det gudomliga, och därför behöver de uppfostras. Nyfikenhet, att utforska sinnena utan ett högre syfte eller mål, är en synd, askesen en moralisk nödvändighet. Lusten beskrivs som en extra komplicerad synd, för till skillnad från frosseriet där det som begärs är ett passivt objekt kan lusten multipliceras när två ögon begär varandra. De bibliska raderna, ”Nu se vi ju på ett dunkelt sätt, såsom i en spegel, men då skola vi se ansikte mot ansikte”, vänder ut och in på begreppen; att ligga ansikte mot ansikte kan vara det närmsta vi kan komma en annan människa, eller som här en vision av att inte längre vara fängslad i en kropp med blicken ständigt förvriden. Ögat är en öppning och en gräns, sann förståelse möjlig och omöjlig. 

Religiös arkitektur har länge experimenterat med att rikta vår blick. I en del medeltida kyrkor på Gotland finns ett litet hål i väggen, ibland format som en treklöver, ibland täckt av en bjälke som kan skjutas åt sidan. De kallas för hagioskop, dessa hål vars funktion tros vara att ge ett visuellt utsnitt av altaret för de personer som inte fick komma in i kyrkan på grund av synd eller sjukdom. På samma sätt som blicken ska tuktas och skyddas från synd kan den också styras i rätt riktning: uppåt, där den rättrogna får lön för sin möda i de kulörta kyrkfönstren och välvda taken, drömmen om en skönhet som är helt och hållet fri från synd.  

Hur vi lär oss att se

Ett barn lär sig att se och förstå vad det ser genom att gruppera sina erfarenheter. Det identifierar likheter, ser att det där är en hund och det där är också en hund, men det där är en ko. Föräldern hjälper kategoriseringen på traven med ord. Ju fler erfarenheter barnet får, desto säkrare börjar det bli på sina kategorier och stereotyper, felskattningarna blir färre. Om man vill uttrycka sig drastiskt kan man kanske säga att det vi brukar kalla för barns fantasi egentligen är misstag på grund av okunskap, ofrivilliga snedsteg från barnets kärlek till ordning och regler och önskan om att veta vad som är vad. Föräldern lär ut klichéer, barnet lär sig att gruppera fragment i förutsägbara gestalter. Något annat skulle vara nästan omöjligt – en förälder som är helt oförutsägbar skrämmer ett barn och det skulle vara mycket ineffektivt att försöka vara nyskapande när vi lär ut vad som tillhör kategorin frukt och vad som tillhör kategorin kläder. 

Men man uppfostras inte bara av sin förälder, utan också av sitt sammanhang, vilket i vår tid är alltmer visuellt. Barn tillbringar med tiden fler och fler timmar scrollande vid en skärm istället för att se andra människor ansikte mot ansikte. Skärmen är en effektiv lärare, den riktar uppmärksamheten och blicken om och om igen mot sig själv. Drivna av en preferens för det nya fastnar vi i ett paradoxalt repetitivt flöde av nytt och översköljs av lösryckta visuella intryck utan kroppslig förankring. Den inlärning som sker av det visuella flödet är kanske framför allt en tillvänjning, en desensitisering, en likgiltighet av att ha sett det mesta, utan att nödvändigtvis ha upplevt så mycket. 

I Simulacra and Simulation (som inte handlar om de tidigare nämnda hinnor som Lucretius trodde tingen ständigt ömsade) skrev Jean Baudrillard 1981 om hur vår hyperrealistiska tid präglad av bilder av bilder av bilder är som ett ostoppbart, självspelande piano där den stora mängden av reproduktioner effektivt tar sig in i oss och gör även oss själva till simuleringar, till replikor. 

Det är en obekväm tanke för den som fortfarande dröjer kvar vid spåren av Descartes syn på själen som immateriell och orörbar. Men kanske ligger den närmre både modern kognitionsforskning och religiösa asketers förhållningssätt: synen blir det synen ser. Vi är våra sinnesintryck. Skärmens ständigt närvarande upprepade bilder förmedlar klichéer med en tidigare oöverträffad effektivitet; och vi är sedan barnsben drivna till att imitera. Samtidigt finns en utbredd ambivalens inför klichén: vi griper efter den för att försöka förstå och göra oss förstådda men känner också en smygande panik och en motvilja. Vi vill passa in, kommunicera effektivt, men också bli sedda för de vi ”egentligen” är, ha kvar tron på att det fortfarande finns något fördolt och heligt, något hemligt. 

I de sociala mediernas flöden av filmklipp rör sig människor ofta med en kuslig likhet. Känslan av att formen tappat kontakten med innehållet är mer eller mindre påtaglig. På skärmen kan man få se en representant för den nya professionen ”dödsdoula”, certifierad expert på att sitta vid folks dödsbäddar, dansa för kameran samtidigt som hon synkroniserat pekar på skärmen där textremsor rytmiskt dyker upp om vad som är viktigt att tänka på när man ska dö; hennes medkännande leende är som till en nära vän, imiterande andra imitationer av danser och gester hon sett andra människor på andra skärmar göra när de försökt rikta tittarens uppmärksamhet mot sina sminktips, sina barn och sina trauman. Skärmen, ett hagioskop för vår tid. Återigen väcks en metafor som blir alltmer påträngande: en insida som ständigt fläks ut blir till slut utsida, som en inverterad variant av hur nya cellformationer skapas i livmodern. Istället för fler rum: färre.

Du har fattat beslutet på magkänsla. I denna och liknande situationer kan magkänsla borga för ett bättre beslut än vad den kognitiva analysen gör. På samma sätt kan man tänka sig att omedveten igenkänning exempelvis kan hjälpa oss att bedöma en social situation som farlig eller hotfull och agera på det genom att fly, utan att egentligen kunna förklara varför. 

Jag vet inte om man kan påstå något sådant som att magkänslan är trendig, eller att det sjätte sinnet genomgår någon form av renässans. Jag hör ju att det låter lika dumt som att påstå att öron är inne i år, eller att överarmar är trendigare än underarmar. Men det finns fog att påstå att magkänslan breddar sina revir och avmystifieras. I det syftet talar man hellre om prekognition eller intuition än om magkänsla (och än mindre om det sjätte sinnet). Det gäller exempelvis i P1:s Kropp och själ (2021), där kognitionsvetaren Paul Hemerén beskriver prekognition som en omedveten igenkänning som gör det möjligt att dra vissa slutsatser och fatta vissa beslut blixtsnabbt och utan någon egentlig tankeprocess eller medveten värdering. 

Ett återkommande resultat i de experiment som gjorts kring magkänslan, eller kring beslut grundade på intuition snarare än analys, är att erfarenhet är helt avgörande för att magkänslan skall fungera, i meningen att den leder till lika bra eller bättre beslut jämfört med en analys. I ett experiment som organisations- och beteendevetaren Erik Dane genomförde 2012 instruerades försökspersoner att skilja en äkta designerväska från en välgjord kopia. Den ena hälften ombads göra en noggrann analys av väskorna, och den andra fick instruktionen att ”gå på första intrycket”. I ett annat experiment från 2018, av företagsekonomen Vinod Vincent, instruerades försökspersoner att rekrytera rätt person bland sökande till en tjänst, i det ena fallet tillsagda att grundligt läsa CV och referenser, i det andra uttryckligen genom att gå på magkänsla och fatta beslutet snabbt. I bägge experimenten gav magkänslan ett bättre beslut än analysen för de försökspersoner som hade omfattande erfarenhet och sakkunskap om handväskor respektive personalrekrytering, men ett sämre resultat än analysmetoden för de försökspersoner som var noviser och lekmän inom respektive fält. 

C. elegans, image by Heiti Paves via Wikimedia commons.

Denna avmystifierade förståelse av magkänsla som en form av omedveten, erfarenhetsbaserad igenkänning som leder till en form av prekognition tycks vara generellt accepterad idag. Forskningen anger dock i stort sett ingenting om hur prekognitionen känns, det vill säga vad för mekanism som prekognitionen förmedlas genom. I fiktionen finns däremot exempel. De två mest kända torde vara Spindelmannens spider-sense och Harry Potters ärr. Spindelmannens prekognition har genom åren beskrivits relativt utförligt; det är en stickande, kittlande känsla som Spindelmannen tycks uppfatta med sin hud – i serierutorna illustrerad som vågiga streck i luften omkring honom – som förvarnar om fara och gör det möjligt att se runt hörn och slåss i mörker. Harry Potters ärr fungerar på motsvarande sätt som en sorts portal för prekognitionen. Det bultar och kliar och fungerar då främst som ett slags Voldemort-alarm, men kan ibland också larma på långa avstånd och mer generellt när Potters fiender triumferar eller hans vänner lider nederlag. Gemensamt för beskrivningarna är att prekognitionen förmedlas genom kroppen, den är en fysisk sensation.

*

Att varken Spindelmannens eller Harry Potters prekognition förlagts till magen får nog främst antas vara ett estetiskt val av upphovsmakarna. Det hade riskerat att bli lite löjligt och väl intimt med ständiga hänvisningar till magen och svårt att undvika det som ändå får sägas ligga i tangentens riktning: toalettsituationen. Men magens koppling till känslor är oomtvistad och återkommande. Man mår illa av oro, blir akut skitnödig av skräck, får fjärilar i magen av förälskelse och magknip av förväntansångest eller av akut längtan. Man kräks av vämjelse, av chockartad separation eller ibland av panikångest. Inom epidemiologin är det väl belagt att det finns en betydande samvarians mellan IBS (irritable bowel syndrome, ”orolig mage”) och depression samt mellan IBS och ångest, även om det är långt ifrån klarlagt om det verkligen föreligger ett orsakssamband och vad som i så fall leder till vad (om det är magbesvär som leder till depression, eller att depression leder till magbesvär, eller att en helt normalstrulig mage tenderar att tolkas som sjuklig av den som är deprimerad). 

Den som intresserar sig för kopplingarna mellan kognition och sensoriska förnimmelser, och i synnerhet mellan hjärna och mage, kommer snart att få upp ögonen för en omtalad liten molekyl: serotonin. Serotonin är megakändisen bland signalsubstanser och välbekant för en ganska bred allmänhet. Det beror huvudsakligen på SSRI-läkemedlens genombrott och breda användning (de vanligaste i Sverige är Sertralin och Escitalopram), främst mot depression. SSRI är en förkortning av Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, på svenska alltså selektiv serotoninåterupptagshämmare. Det första omtalade pillret lanserades år 1988 under namnet Prozac och skrevs in i kulturen genom Elizabeth Wurtzels bästsäljande självbiografiska roman Prozac – Min generations tröst.

Man räknar med att var tionde svensk behandlas med något antidepressivt preparat, där SSRI-gruppen står för den klart största delen; man vet att sex procent av stockholmarna behandlas med SSRI-preparat och troligen ligger andelen däromkring för övriga svenskar också. SSRI-läkemedlen innehåller inte serotonin, men de ökar det kroppsegna serotoninets effekt genom att blockera de mekanismer som begränsar serotoninets verkanstid. Resultatet uppfattas av våra celler som mer serotonin. Om det fanns en skepsis kring ”lyckopiller” förr i tiden, har serotoninet numera befäst sin särställning för välbefinnandet och fått en sådan vetenskaplig lyster kring sig att det går att beställa dess strukturformel som ett vackert smycke i silver.

Det som däremot få lekmän känner till, och som jag hajade till över när jag för första gången hörde under läkarutbildningen, är att serotonin inte i första hand är hjärnans signalsubstans, utan tarmens. Över 90 procent av kroppens serotonin finns i mag-tarmkanalen och endast en mycket liten andel skvalpar omkring i hjärnan. Exakt vad allt det där serotoninet gör i människans mag-tarmkanal är inte fullständigt klarlagt. Man har kunnat belägga så många, så komplexa, så variabla och delvis motstridiga funktioner att det är svårt att förstå vilken som är den dominerande. Därför gör man det biovetenskapen vanligtvis gör när allt är en svårbegriplig röra: man vänder sig till en enklare organism och hoppas att saken ska klarna. Helst en långt, långt enklare organism. Serotinin är en gammal, evolutionärt välbevarad och vida spridd molekyl. Den finns hos snart sagt allt slags liv, även hos växter (många frön, frukter och nötter har relativt höga serotoninkoncentrationer, och det finns en teori om att serotoninets roll i sammanhanget är att påverka magtarmkanalen hos det djur som ätit fröet så att passagen därigenom påskyndas).

Den enkla modellorganism som biologerna använder är nematoden, det vill säga rundmasken, Caenorhabditis elegans, förkortat C. elegans. Den ser ut ungefär som ett mycket litet kommatecken. Den är en millimeter lång, genomskinlig och lever i jorden, där den främst livnär sig på bakterier från förmultning. Om C. elegans kan sägas att den inte har några som helst hemligheter kvar; den är undersökt utan och innan. Dess samtliga celler har räknats och beskrivits i detalj. C. elegans är den första flercelliga organismen vars totala arvsmassa blev sekvenserad; redan år 1998 skedde det. Det vi idag förstår om apoptos, programmerad celldöd, kommer till stor del från forskning på C. elegans. Nematoden har till och med varit i rymden, och det flera gånger. Det vetenskapliga syftet med detta var främst forskning kring tyngdlöshet och dess effekter på muskelceller och åldrande, men mest känt är att C. elegans överlevde Columbia-katastrofen 2003, då rymdfärjan splittrades och föll isär i samband med återinträdet till atmosfären och sju astronauter dog. 

Nematodens insatser för molekylärbiologin och för förståelsen av själva livet är nästan oöverskådliga. De har inspirerat poeten Linda Gregerson till en slags hyllningsdikt (ur diktsamlingen Magnetic North, 2008). Dikten har (förstås) titeln Elegant och är svår att citera ur eftersom den är flödande men samtidigt invecklad, varför resultatet blir att utdragen oundvikligen känns amputerade. Men eftersom den här beskrivningen av apoptos är så exceptionellt distinkt och samtidigt vacker kommer här trots allt ett försök:

its thousand and ninety invariant
cells of which
131 and always
the same

and always in a particular sequence are programmed
for extinction

[…]

Found

that death was not an afterthought. The genome

is a river too. And simpler, far

more elegant, to

keep the single system and discard the extra cells

it spawns.

Den lilla nematoden har ingen hjärna. Den är en liten transparent kropp bestående av tvärs- och längsgående muskler som i intrikat samverkan med varandra kan driva masken framåt där den liksom ålar omkring i jordhögar, förmultnad skog och komposter över hela vår planet. Vi säger att den söker föda. Fast vad betyder ”söker” i sammanhanget? Bristen på hjärna, hjärnbark och något som kan liknas vid ögon gör detta sökande till något helt annat än björktrastens sökande efter den inande myggan eller getingens sökande efter den söta fallfrukten. Det finns ingen syn som kan identifiera mat och ingen minnesbank som kan låta meddela att det här är en typisk miljö som brukar vara näringsrik. Att C. elegans ändå inte svälter ihjäl utan tycks kunna selektera mellan näringsfattiga och näringsrika mikromiljöer och röra sig mellan dem beror sannolikt till stor del på just serotonin. Nematodens muskulära framåtdrift tycks ständigt pågå, men den kan vara mer eller mindre intensiv, vilket gör att hastigheten kan varieras och den lilla kroppen bromsa in. Detta är centralt för dess överlevnad. Det har visats flera gånger, bland andra av biologen Elizabeth Sawin, att närvaron av bakterier, nematodens huvudsakliga föda, ökar produktionen av serotonin i mag-tarmsystemet. Detta förmedlar i sin tur en signal som leder till minskad muskelaktivitet och en relativ inbromsning. Motsatsen gäller också; en bakteriefattig miljö leder till ökade kroppsrörelser och ökad hastighet. 

Resultatet blir att C. elegans tillbringar mer tid i bakterierika mikromiljöer än i bakteriefattiga sådana och att den därför tycks röra sig bort från näringsfattiga miljöer till näringsrikare. Detta utan att kunna se, minnas eller, såvitt vi kan förstå, viljestyra sin muskelaktivitet. Samtidigt kan inte denna försörjningsmodell sägas vara helt passiv eller slumpmässig. Den utgörs av en specifik, och för C. elegans mycket ändamålsenlig, mekanism som är resultatet av ett beteendemässigt svar på ett visst stimuli (närvaro av bakterier). Uttryckt på ett sätt som molekylärbiologer brukar avsky, skulle denna serotoninförmedlade signal kunna låta: Högt serotonin = full mage, schysst livsmiljö, chilla, här kan vi stanna ett tag. Lågt serotonin = tom mage, dålig livsmiljö, här har du ingen framtid, skynda på, migrera, migrera! 

En sådan instruktion är inte någon liten fotnot till livet utan tvärtom kanske dess minsta gemensamma nämnare, paragraf 1A i den allra viktigaste manualen. Med en ännu hårdare förenkling och till ännu större förtret för de tålmodiga molekylärbiologer som kartlagt tusentals receptorer och jonkanaler för att förstå hur sådana här mekanismer hänger ihop skulle man kunna säga: Här är gott – stanna. Här är dåligt – dra. Det förefaller inte orimligt att det här är den allra första magkänslan, primitiv men livsviktig, embryot till den komplexa prekognition som omtalas och beforskas idag. Till skillnad från nematodens magkänsla medieras människans prekognition förmodligen genom hundratals eller tusentals biologiska reläer och modulatorer, men den tycks fortfarande, liksom Harry Potters ärr, förmedla det enkla budskapet: Här är dåligt – dra. (Men, tänker kanske någon, Harry Potter drar ju sällan. Oftare slåss han. Det är sant, och det är sannolikt här som hjärnbarkens komplexitet tar över och modifierar den entydiga signalen dra! hos nematoden till en mångfald av möjliga utfall hos människan.

*

Kommen såhär långt är det svårt att undvika frågan om SSRI-läkemedlen, som så många människor behandlas med, påverkar magkänslan. En och annan vaken läsare kanske ställer sig frågan om huruvida någon kommit på att mata C. elegans med Prozac och se vad som händer. Under ledning av biologen Elizabeth Sawin vid MIT har C. elegans faktiskt ”behandlats” med Prozac (fluoxetin) och det fick förväntad effekt: i närvaro av bakterier saktade den svultna nematodens framåtdrift signifikant mycket mer med Prozac än utan Prozac. Här är gott – stanna-signalen förstärktes alltså. 

Det är inte utan tvekan som jag återkommer till SSRI. Min tvekan beror på att det är förödande lätt att råka låna sig åt en vulgärkritik av SSRI-preparaten genom att övertolka det vi vet från C. elegans till människan. Ett sådant resonemang skulle gå ut på att de antidepressiva läkemedlen inte bara förstärker Här är gott – stanna-signalen, utan också riskerar att försvaga signalen Här är dåligt – dra. I ett mänskligt samhälle skulle det kunna betyda att det dövar den signal som uppmanar dig att söka dig bort från en ogynnsam, fattig eller rentav farlig och nedbrytande livsmiljö. Det är inte långt till att i nästa steg utmåla SSRI-läkemedlen som en förnöjsamhetens sövande drog, som sänker motivationen att exempelvis söka sig bort från ett nedbrytande förhållande och helt enkelt ökar toleransen för dåliga livsomständigheter, och i slutändan att SSRI-preparaten därmed mixtrar med den allra viktigaste och äldsta överlevnadssignaleringen vi har. 

Det är inte orimligt att ställa sig frågan om vad SSRI-läkemedlen har för effekter på samhällsnivån. Att det finns en skepsis och oro är rimligt med tanke på att det rör sig om en relativt ung läkemedelsgrupp som nu förskrivs till en såpass stor andel av befolkningen. Men att påstå att SSRI dövar grundläggande överlevnadssignalering är ett dubbelfel. Fel nummer ett har att göra med att en direkt överföring av biologiska slutsatser mellan en nematod med 302 nervceller och en människa med strax under 100 miljarder nervceller, vilka dessutom har en betydande differentiering med flera underkategorier, inte låter sig göras. Det är som att försöka dra slutsatser om världshaven utifrån vattenpölen utanför dörren. Men fel nummer två är kanske ännu allvarligare: den som läser Sawins artikel noterar att de svultna nematoder som placerades i en helt näringsfattig miljö, dvs en bakterietom miljö, inte alls påverkades av Prozac. De ringlade och ålade sig exakt lika mycket som kontrollgruppen som inte fick Prozac. De hade ju överhuvudtaget ingen serotininsignalering, och eftersom SSRI inte tillför serotonin utan enbart förstärker effekten av befintligt serotonin, ledde inte behandlingen till någon skillnad i beteende när miljön var extremt fattig. Här är dåligt – dra-signalen tycks fungera hyfsat även under inflytande av SSRI, åtminstone när det är riktigt dåligt. Sammanfattningsvis behöver man inte ens gå in på de omdiskuterade studier som antyder att SSRI räddat många liv (genom att minska suicidrisken hos deprimerade) eller de talrika personliga vittnesmålen om att ha blivit hjälpt av SSRI för att påstå att ovanstående biologistiska kritik mot SSRI är dåligt underbyggd.

*

Den som söker på ”magkänsla” och, än mer, på ”gut feeling” får mestadels träffar om att våga lita på sin magkänsla, ibland också om att ”sluta övertänka”. Politiskt kännetecknas samtiden av en ökande misstro mot vetenskapen och dess sanningsanspråk. Det som kallas för klimatförnekelse är ett av många exempel. Att USA nyligen hade en president som i direktsändning fritt spekulerade om att dricka blekningsmedel för att bekämpa coronaviruset är ett annat exempel, så groteskt att det nästan känns fånigt att nämna. Mer vanligt förekommande i vår svenska politiska verklighet är uppvärderingen av individens känslor inför samhällsföreteelser. ”Upplevd otrygghet” är ett av de tydligaste exemplen. ”Upplevd otrygghet” betraktas politiskt idag som i princip lika allvarligt som faktisk otrygghet, men genomgående är det de grupper som statistiskt har lägst risk att bli våldsutsatta (äldre kvinnor utanför storstäder) som är mest rädda. Ändå vore det politiskt självmord – till skillnad från för 20 år sedan – att försöka lugna den upplevt otrygga människan med argumentet att rädslan ofta är grundlös och irrationell. Tvärtom räcker ”upplevd otrygghet” som motiv för att anlita fler väktare och så kallade trygghetsvärdar till höga samhällskostnader. Samhället säger alltså, utan omsvep eller egentliga brasklappar, ”lita på magkänslan”. Samhället säger visserligen inte ”lita inte så mycket på SCB:s staplar och siffror”, men det är det som följer av ”lita på magkänslan” även om det är ett ofta outtalat led. Som bland annat Danes och Vincents experiment visar borde det dock ha funnits en brasklapp, det viktiga tillägget ”… om du har omfattande erfarenhet”. Om tendensen att uppvärdera magkänslan och nedvärdera vetandet fortsätter utan det tillägget, talar det mesta för att vi har att se fram emot en tid av riktigt dåliga samhällsbeslut.

Nostalgija je očitno značilnost našega časa. Širi se tako rekoč od vsepovsod: iz popularne kulture, mode, umetnosti, celo politika se zastira z grenko-sladko kopreno melanholičnega občudovanja preteklosti in njenega poustvarjanja – ali vsaj tovrstnih poskusov. Človeški svet brez žalovanja verjetno ni mogoč. Že zaradi dejstva, da smo skupnost subjektov, se vztrajno oklepamo duhov preteklosti, ki se je ne moremo zlahka otresti. 

V zraku je veliko čustvene in mentalne energije, vložene v predmete, ki vodi v tisto značilno nedejavnost, ko je na delu psiha. To je mogoče primerjati z lenobnim posnemanjem “zavlačevanja razprave ob koncu” – nasprotjem izvornega zavlačevanja Jacquesa Derridaja. Derrida je razvijal svoj koncept skozi več knjig in člankov, začenši z razpravo o Husserlu Glas in fenomenStudia humanitatis, 1988, prevedla Zoja Skušek Močnik. (primerjaj tudi Freud in prizorišče pisanja V:J. Derrida: L’écriture et la différence, Seuil, 1979.).

Stvari niso v diskurzu nikoli tako jasno prisotne kot v Resničnosti; zmerom traja, preden preoblikujejo Simbolno in Imaginarno. Podobno vsakič, ko spet zbledijo v pozabo, pustijo neko usedlino na področju simbolov in podob. Zato sta kognitivno in eksistencialno neizogibno ves čas neusklajena. Vendar ta lastnost subjektivnega delovanja ni v vsakem trenutku zgodovine enako izrazita kot danes. Očitno obstajamo v nekakšni konfiguraciji BDSM (Bondage, Discipline or Dominance, Sadism or Submission, Masochism, torej povezanost, disciplina ali nadvlada, sadizem ali podrejenost, mazohizem) – predvsem glede povezanosti in podrejenosti –, kjer je omejevanje tako vseprisotno, da postane glavni, če ne celo edini vir užitka. 

Sanje o izgubljeni prihodnosti

To je natanko politična situacija, v kateri smo se znašli. Da je konservativizem močno prežet z  nostalgijo, ni presenetljivo. Navsezadnje mora že zaradi svoje narave vlagati energijo v preteklost, kjer domuje vzvišeni predmet njegove fantazije. Drugi dve zgodovinsko pomembni politični ideologiji  – liberalna in progresivna (v kontinentalnem pomenu teh izrazov) – pa sta od nekdaj bolj usmerjeni v možne utopije prihodnosti kot v nostalgične retrotopije preteklosti. Predvsem to velja za napredno naravnanost. Zadnji dve stoletji se gibanja, kot sta feministično in sindikalno, vztrajno zavzemajo za idealen svet, ki si ga je mogoče zamišljati samo kot sanje za prihodnost, nikakor pa ne moremo v njem prepoznati pretekle resničnosti. 

Ampak danes je ostalo le še malo tega utopičnega optimizma. Feministke_i so morda po naravi najbolj odporne_i proti skušnjavam nostalgičnega objokovanja preteklosti, širša levica pa se zdi v glavnem osredotočena na odpravljanje neposrednih groženj in problemov – kar se kaže v ekoloških gibanjih in identitetni politiki – ali na objokovanje izgubljenega blagostanja minule dobe (kot to predstavljajo na primer Sanders, Mélenchon ali Corbyn). Silni revolucionarni klic Internacionale – “Vstanite, v suženjstvo zakleti … / … nato svoj novi svet zgradimo …” –, ki je desetletja podžigal napredne boje, je očitno utihnil. 

Tudi osrednji liberalni diskurz ni v nič boljši formi. Njegova depresivna melanholija je tesno povezana s pešanjem liberalne hegemonije v zadnjih treh desetletjih. V zgodnjih devetdesetih letih 20. stoletja se je zdelo, da liberalizem slavi odločilno in končno zmago. Padec sovjetskega bloka je obetal več kot zgolj posamične osvoboditve nekaterih vzhodnoevropskih držav. Na splošno je to veljalo za dokončno potrditev širšega procesa modernizacije – vrhunec vzpona sodobnega kapitalističnega prostega trga, individualnih svoboščin in parlamentarnega sistema. Kot je znano, je Fukuyama to oklical za “konec zgodovine”.F. Fukuyama: ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, št. 16, 1989, str. 3–18.

Toda če se ozremo v preteklost, je osnovna napaka v tej viziji več kot očitna. Dejstvo, da komunizem  – glavni tekmec liberalizma  – ni zares obstajal, je, paradoksalno, vodilo ne toliko v  univerzalno zmagoslavje le-tega kot v potekajoči razkroj kapitalistične sodobnosti po koncu hladne vojne. To usihanje po vsem svetu spremlja razraščanje antimodernih, antiliberalnih in antiprogresivnih gibanj, med najpomembnejšimi sta verski fundamentalizem in politični populizem. Prvi je pokazal svojo rušilno moč na začetku stoletja z napadi 11. septembra v ZDA, ki so učinkovito ovrgli mit o univerzalnem in nespornem globalnem navdušenju za kapitalistično modernost. Vzpon populizma je bil postopnejši, a je od zgodnjih devetdesetih let naprej deležen vedno večje podpore. Vrhunec je dosegel z  vrsto pomembnih volilnih uspehov v  drugem desetletju 21. stoletja, z  osebnostmi in gibanji, kot so Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Modi, brexit, Kaczyński, Duterte, Front National in AFD (Alternativa za Nemčijo), če jih omenimo samo nekaj. Ponekod, na primer na Poljskem, so populisti v zadnjem času doživeli nekaj porazov. Vendar izziv populizma še zdaleč ni obrzdan. Po vsej verjetnosti bo obstal in nas v bližnji prihodnosti v različnih oblikah še naprej strašil. 

Disused lighthouse, Talacre, UK. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Vrnitev k esencializmu

Naj povemo po resnici: nepričakovani vzpon populizma kot izraz nezadovoljstva bi bil manj presenetljiv, če bi bili prej bolj pozorni na zaskrbljenost, ki jo je v postkolonialnem svetu pred desetletji povzročila kapitalistična modernost. Clifford Geertz, ki je opazoval posledice dekolonizacije v različnih delih sveta, še posebej v Indoneziji, je poudarjal kritično nasprotje, povezano z dialektičnim odnosom med tradicijo in modernostjo in z naraščajočo integracijo lokalnih družb v  globalni pretok kulturnih standardov. V besedilu After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States (Po revoluciji: usoda nacionalizma v novih državah) iz leta 1971 je orisal napetosti med “epohalizmom” in “esencializmom”.V: C. Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures, Fontana Press, 1993, str. 241.

 Za Geertza epohalizem pomeni željo po sledenju duhu časa in doseganju idealov dobe. Duh časa druge polovice 20. stoletja je zajemal liberalno demokracijo in modernost, vključno s splošno volilno pravico, naprednimi komunikacijskimi sredstvi, širjenjem industrijske infrastrukture in vsesplošno blaginjo. Esencializem pa, nasprotno, zajema stremljenje k ohranitvi človekovih inherentnih bivanjskih kvalitet: kulture, edinstvenosti, lokalnih značilnosti in vse palete pripadajočih kulturnih standardov ter družbenih institucij. 

V nasprotju z nekdanjimi sklepanji Daniela Lernerja trditev, da države v razvoju preprosto obožujejo modernizacijo v stilu zahoda in nestrpno čakajo njeno morebitno uveljavitev, ni točna. Brez dvoma si želijo izboljšati kruto resničnost  – navsezadnje nikomur ni do tega, da bi njegovi podhranjeni otroci podlegali boleznim, kot je malarija –, hkrati pa se močno trudijo ohranjati svojo enkratnost. S tega vidika je tako na verski fundamentalizem kot na populizem mogoče gledati kot na odmik od epohalizma in vrnitev k esencializmu – tako močan odmik, da je zdaj definiral novo, svojo dobo. 

Hipoteze o modernosti

Po prvotni Geertzevi diagnozi so bile opravljene pronicljive nove analize. Kot je pravilno predpostavil Frederic Jameson, je modernost, ki v zahodnem svetu cveti od nastopa kapitalizma, zapleten amalgam dveh različnih vidikov. Jameson opredeljuje “modernizacijo” glede na napredek v materialni proizvodnji, ki vključuje tehnologijo, infrastrukturo, stroje in podobno, ter “modernizem”, ki ga razlaga kot sistem vrednot, zasidran v osebni avtonomiji in emancipaciji. Ti dve dimenziji sta se zgodovinsko prepletali, vendar je njun odnos tako zapleten kot intimen.F. Jameson: Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso, 2002.

Michel Foucault je poudaril, da sta si v nekaterih kontekstih ta vidika lahko celo nasprotna. Zlasti materialni napredek – ki se sklada z Jamesonovo modernizacijo – opremlja vladajoče strukture z izboljšanimi orodji za omejevanje svobode posameznikov, ki odraža Jamesonovo pojmovanje modernizma. Foucault je izjavil, da je bil glavni izziv razsvetljenstva ugotoviti, kako ločiti povečanje zmožnosti od eskalacije dinamike moči.M. Foucault: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, v: P. Rabinow (ur.): The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, 1984, str. 47–48. 

V postkolonialnem svetu in ob očitnem porastu sodobnega populizma smo zaznali podobno ločitev ali razcep modernosti, vendar z nasprotnim ciljem: namen je bil vpreči nove tehnološke zmožnosti, ki jih je prinesla modernizacija, za preprečitev širjenja modernizma (v smislu, kot ta izraza razume Jameson). Ta pristop je tistim, ki jih je kapitalistična modernost razočarala, omogočil izkoristiti prednosti materialnega napredka (v skladu z Jamesonovo modernizacijo ali Geertzevim epohalizmom) za krepitev esencializma z brzdanjem zagona modernosti. 

Ta taktika se je izkazala kot ključna pri fragmentiranju globalne pokrajine, tako z delovanjem verskega fundamentalizma kot desničarskega populizma. Vidimo, kako to strategijo uporabljajo v Saudovi Arabiji, kjer pešajoča monarhija povečuje naftno bogastvo, da bi zatrla nasprotovanje. Podobni vzorci se pojavljajo v  deželah, kot sta Modijeva Indija in Erdoğanova Turčija. Ta taktika je bila jedro strategij, ki jih je uporabljala poljska stranka Zakon in pravičnost med letoma 2015 in 2023: izkoriščanje gospodarskega napredka in sredstev, zbranih za podporo skupnosti in posameznikov, ki so nasprotovali privzemanju tako imenovanih “evropskih vrednot”, ki zagovarjajo vključevalnost, enakopravnost in emancipacijo. 

Materialna plat modernega projekta je, ironično, doživela skoraj vsesplošno sprejetost. Z nekaj izjemami, kot sta Butan in Severna Koreja, se je kapitalizem predstavil kot sila, ki enoti svet v univerzalno povezovalnem vzorcu materialnih odnosov. Kulturno pa sveta ni poenotil, ampak ga je, nasprotno, bolj fragmentiral in ga napravil bolj družbeno razdeljenega, kot je bil pred petdesetimi leti, v času, ko so bile celo države kot Turčija, Iran in Afganistan na poti družbene in kulturne transformacije proti liberalnemu režimu. 

Preobrat teorije modernizacije

Fukuyamova hipoteza o “koncu zgodovine”, poznana kot teorija modernizacije, je v drugi polovici 20. in v začetku 21. stoletja močno zaznamovala tako družbene vede kot javni diskurz. Teoretiki modernizacije so sledili prvim delom, kot sta bili W. Rostowa The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Faze ekonomske rasti: nekomunistični manifest; Cambridge University Press, 1991, prvič objavljeno 1960) in D. Lernerja The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Konec tradicionalne družbe: modernizacija Bližnjega vzhoda)The Free Press, 1985.in trdili ne samo to, da je treba izbrisati tradicijo, da se bo lahko razcvetela modernost, ampak tudi, da obstaja tudi globalen, linearen razvoj proti modernosti. V tem procesu razvite države delujejo kot svetilniki, ki državam v razvoju razsvetljujejo pot naprej. 

Ta perspektiva ni bila samo temelj liberalne misli. Vzporednico je našla v levičarski ideologiji. Dejansko se sklada z Marxovimi opažanji o britanski kolonialni vladavini v Indiji. Znamenje zares dominantne ideologije je njena sposobnost zazveneti skozi različne teorije in različne pristope k družbeni realnosti, celo take, ki so nasprotni drug drugemu. 

Vrhu tega paradigma modernizacije, ki je imela močan vpliv v politiki in družbenih vedah 20. stoletja, ni samo presežena, ampak dejansko preobrnjena. Zdaj se zdi verjetneje, da periferije svetovnega kapitalističnega sistema nakazujejo prihodnost njegovega središča, kot obratno. 

Lernerjeva Modernizacija Bližnjega vzhoda nam postreže z  značilnim in povednim primerom. Avtor, osredotočen na Turčijo, pokaže, kako je država dosegla svojo družbeno in politično transformacijo po smernicah evropskih sil, v glavnem Francije in Nemčije. Pomembna komponenta teh transfromacijskih prizadevanj je bila laizacija, ki se je izražala z ukrepi, kot je prepoved vseh tradicionalnih verskih oblačil. 

Lerner je predpostavil, da se bo Turčija, zgledujoč se po laizaciji v Franciji, v približno petdesetih letih toliko razvila, da se bo približala Zahodni Evropi. Toda ne le da se ta napoved ni uresničila, očitno se dogaja ravno nasprotno: Francija, ki je pet desetletij prej veljala za neomajno trdnjavo laizacije, se zdaj spopada z zakonodajo, ki ženskam prepoveduje nošenje naglavne rute na javnih krajih in v javnih ustanovah. 

Še druga skrb vzbujajoča dogajanja postavljajo pričakovanja teorije modernizacije na glavo. Eno najpomembnejših je prekarizacija delovnih odnosov v  jedru kapitalističnega svetovnega sistema. Nemški sociolog Ulrich Beck, ki je pisal o “brazilizaciji” delovnih odnosov v Evropi in ZDA, je to diagnosticiral že v poznih devetdesetih letih 20. stoletja v svojem delu The Brave New World of Work (Krasni novi svet dela).Polity Press, 2000, predvsem poglavje Thousand Worlds of Insecure Work. Europe’s Future Glimpsed in Brazil (Tisoč svetov negotovega dela. Prihodnost Evrope, ugledana v Braziliji), str. 92–109.Opisal je, kako trg dela in delovne razmere v državah, kjer je nekoč vladala blaginja, postajajo vse bolj podobne tistim v Latinski Ameriki. 

Podobne pojave opisujeta urbana antropologa John Comaroff in Jean L. Comaroff v knjigi Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (Teorija z Juga: ali kako se Evroamerika razvija v smeri Afrike)Paradigm Publishers, 2012.; opozarjata na naraščajoče neenakosti, vse slabšo javno infrastrukturo in upad socialnih storitev, zaradi česar mesta v tako imenovanem razvitem svetu vedno bolj spominjajo na mesta v postkolonialnih deželah. Ekonomista Larry Elliott in Dan Atkinson pa gresta celo tako daleč, da London poimenujeta “Lagos ob Temzi” in namigneta, da se Združeno kraljestvo pomika proti “gospodarstvu tretjega sveta”.L. Elliott, D. Atkinson: Going South: Why Britain Will Have a Third World Economy by 2014, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Neoliberalna demodernizacija

Zadnji primer je še posebno zanimiv, saj nazorno pokaže mehanizem demodernizacije. To ni samo kulturni fenomen, ampak prej stranski proizvod nedavnih dogajanj znotraj kapitalističnega gospodarstva – predvsem neoliberalne usmeritve. Ta zasuk je sprožil stalno in sistematično erozijo javnega sektorja in demontažo različnih mehanizmov socialnega varstva, ki so prej prinašali olajšanje najbolj izkoriščanim družbenim razredom: pomislite na primer na slabenje NHS (National Health Service, Nacionalna zdravstvena služba) v Združenem kraljestvu in na vlogo, ki jo je odigral v propagandi za brexit. 

Tako se napetost med epohalizmom in esencializmom, kot ju je opisal Geertz, očitno preoblikuje: duh časa ali zeitgeist se zdaj, kot vse kaže, nagiba k bistvu posameznika. Niti najbolj nazadnjaški predsodki katere koli družbe niso več vprašljivi; države, ki so bile nekoč svetilniki družbenega napredka, so zdaj očitno na poti demodernizacije. Svet, ki je sicer videti enotnejši, je v resnici – ironično – bolj in bolj razdrobljen. Je to propad ideje modernosti in napredka? To ni sklep, do katerega naj bi prišel v tem eseju. Neizpodbiten je konec povezovanja modernosti z določenim delom sveta in njegovo razvojno potjo – namreč Zahodom. To je za Zahod seveda globoko travmatično.

Kot pravi Slavoj Žižek, je občudovanje vseh, zlasti Vzhodne Evrope, do Zahoda prinašalo zadoščenje njegovim prebivalcem. Ob očaranem strmenju nezahodnih Drugih so zahodnjaki lahko verjeli, da niso bili samo udeleženci v brezmiselni potrošniški mrzlici, ampak so tudi vodili svet pri življenjsko pomembni nalogi modernizacije. Zdaj ko populisti in fundamentalisti po vsem svetu delijo simbolične klofute liberalnim, pozahodnjačenim elitam, nekdaj dominantne skupine vse težje ohranjajo svoje paternalistične iluzije, kar jih spravlja v hudo zadrego.

Če ima to tudi svetlo plat, je to spoznanje, da modernost nikoli ni bila zgolj kapitalističen projekt. V resnici je tudi jedro kritične teorije – z nasprotovanjem kapitalizmu kot skrajni strukturi sveta in njegovemu poudarjanju emancipacije posameznika –, sestavni del sodobne dediščine. 

S svojo trdno demokratično platjo se sklada z manjšinskim delom modernosti, ki ima konceptualne korenine v filozofiji Barucha Spinoze. Napetost, ki je neločljivo povezana s kapitalistično modernostjo in jo je Jameson opisal kot trk med modernizacijo in modernizmom, spretno razčleni kritična teorija. Zdaj ko se kapitalizem opoteka po robu uničenja našega celotnega ekosistema in ko se liberalna modernost kruši, moramo upreti pogled naprej od kapitalizma, proti alternativni moderni viziji. To ni čas za nostalgijo in melanholijo, liberalno ali kakršno koli drugo. Če nam ne uspe odkriti te nove usmeritve, bi lahko konec zgodovine, ki smo ga napovedali pred tridesetimi leti, zlovešče naznanil konec sveta, vsaj sveta, kakršnega poznamo.

Europe’s high-tech arsenal of border technologies is often narrated as a futuristic tale of light, speed and computing power. Identification systems such as the Eurodac database store, process and compare the digitized fingerprints of migrants using near-infrared light, fibre optic cables and centralized servers. Drones patrol the skies with their unblinking optical sensors. And large volumes of data are fed to computer programmes that predict the next surge in arrivals.

News stories and NGO reports focusing on the high-tech nature of European borders abound. Each elicit how remote forms of surveillance, deterrence and control increasingly supplement and, in certain cases, supersede border fortifications. While this kind of research and advocacy is essential for holding the EU and tech developers to account for their role in driving asylum seekers towards lethal migration routes, it glosses over the long histories of these technologies and their established role in Western apparatuses of governance. This not only risks amplifying ‘AI hype’ among policymakers and developers, who hail these tools as a means both to create ‘smarter’ borders and to protect the human rights of migrants. More importantly, this kind of historical amnesia can misread the violence and exclusions enacted by technical ‘bias’, which is seemingly easily corrected by more accurate measurements or larger datasets. Instead, much of the harm incurred by these technologies should be understood as inherent in their design.

A catalogue of identification

The deployment of advanced technologies to control human mobility is anything but new. Picture an urban European police station in the late nineteenth century. If the municipality had adopted the latest identification technology, suspects would have been subjected to a complex measurement process. Taking down their measurements was a precise and highly specialized process, requiring a skilled and trained technician.

Bertillion measurements being taken in the Palace of Education at the 1904 World Fair. Image via Missouri History Museum, Wikimedia Commons

Consider these instructions for measuring an ear:

The operator brings the instrument’s fixed jaw to rest against the upper edge of the ear and immobilizes it, pressing his left thumb fairly firmly on the upper end of the instrument’s jaw, with the other fingers of the hand resting on the top of the skull. With the stem of the calliper parallel to the axis of the ear, he gently pushes the movable jaw until it touches the lower end of the lobe and, before reading the indicated number, makes sure that the pinna [external part of the ear] is in no way depressed by either jaw. A. Bertillon, Instructons signalétiques, Melun, 1893, plate 16, p. 262.

This process may sound like a quaint if somewhat curious relic of the Fin de Siècle, but it is anything but. Bertillonage, the system of measurement, classification and archiving for criminal identification devised in the 1870s by the eponymous French police clerk, was a milestone in the history of surveillance and identification technology. Remarkably, its key tenets underwrite identification technologies to this day, from the database to biometrics and machine learning.

A close and historically established link exists between fears around the uncontrolled circulation of various ‘undesirables’ and technological innovation. Nineteenth century techniques, developed and refined to address problems around vagrancy, colonial governance, deviance, madness and criminality, are the foundations of today’s high-tech border surveillance apparatus. These techniques include quantification, which renders the human body as code, classification, and modern methods of indexing and archiving.

Modern invasive registration

Smart border systems employ advanced technologies to create ‘modern, effective and efficient’ borders. Accordingly, advanced technologies translate border processes such as identification, registration and mobility control into a purely technical procedure, seemingly rendering the process itself fairer and less fallible. Algorithmic precision is often portrayed as a means of avoiding unethical political biases and correcting human error.

As a researcher of the technoscientific underpinnings of the EU’s high-tech border apparatus, I am part of a team of researchers at the NOMIS-funded Elastic Borders project, University of Graz, Austria.
I recognize both the increasing elasticity of contemporary border practices, and the historically established methodology of its tools and practices. See also: M. Maguire, ‘Biopower, Racialization and New Security Technology’, Social Identities, Vol. 18, No.5, 2012, pp. 593-607; K. Donnelly, ‘We Have Always Been Biased: Measuring the human body from anthropometry to the computational social sciences’, Public, Vol. 30, No. 60, 2020, pp. 20-33; A. Valdivia and M. Tazzioli, ‘Genealogies beyond Algorithmic Fairness: Making up racialized subjects’, in Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT ’23, Association for Computing Machinery, 2023, pp. 840-50.

Take the Eurodac database, a cornerstone of EU border management, for example. Established in 2003, the index stores asylum seeker fingerprints as enforcement of the Dublin Regulation on first entry. If prints were taken in Greece, but the asylum seeker was later apprehended in Germany, they could face removal to Greece for processing their application.
Fingerprinting and enrolment in interoperable databases are also central tools utilized in recent approaches to migration management such as the Hotspot Approach, where the attribution of identity serves as a means to filter out ‘deserving’ from ‘undeserving’ migrants.  B. Ayata, K. Cupers, C. Pagano, A. Fyssa and D. Alaa, The Implementation of the EU Hotspot Approach in Greece and Italy: A comparative and interdisciplinary analysis (working paper), Swiss Network for International Studies, 2021, p. 36.

Over the years, both the type of data stored on Eurodac and its uses have expanded: its scope has been broadened to serve ‘wider migration purposes’, storing data not only on asylum seekers but also on irregular migrants to facilitate their deportation. A recently accepted proposal has added facial imagery and biographic information, including name, nationality and passport information, to fingerprinting. Furthermore, the minimum age of migrants whose data can be stored has been lowered from fourteen to six years old.

Since 2019 Eurodac has been ‘interoperable’ with a number of other EU databases storing information on wanted persons, foreign residents, visa holders and other persons of interest to criminal justice, immigration and asylum adminstrations, effectively linking criminal justice with migration whilst also vastly expanding access to this data. Eurodac plays a key role for European authorities, demonstrated by efforts to achieve a ‘100% fingerprinting rate’: the European Commission has pushed member states to enrol every newly arrived person in the database, using physical coercion and detention if necessary.

Marking criminality

While nation states have been collecting data on citizens for the purposes of taxation and military recruitment for centuries, its indexing, organization in databases and classification for particular governmental purposes – such as controlling the mobility of ‘undesirable’ populations – is a nineteenth-century invention. J.B. Rule, Private Lives and Public Surveillance, Allen Lane, 1973.
The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault describes how, in the context of growing urbanization and industrialization, states became increasingly preoccupied with the question of ‘circulation’. Persons and goods, as well as pathogens, circulated further than they had in the early modern period. Ibid., p. 91.
While states didn’t seek to suppress or control these movements entirely, they sought means to increase what was seen as ‘positive’ circulation and minimize ‘negative’ circulation. They deployed the novel tools of a positivist social science for this purpose: statistical approaches were used in the field of demography to track and regulate phenomena such as births, accidents, illness and deaths. M. Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. D. Macey, Picador, 2003, p. 244.
The emerging managerial nation state addressed the problem of circulation by developing a very particular toolkit amassing detailed information about the population and developing standardized methods of storage and analysis.

One particularly vexing problem was the circulation of known criminals. In the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that if a person offended once, they would offend again. However, the systems available for criminal identification were woefully inadequate to the task.

As criminologist Simon Cole explains, identifying an unknown person requires a ‘truly unique body mark’. S. A. Cole, Suspect identities: A history of fingerprinting and criminal identification, Harvard University Press, 2001, p.12.
Yet before the advent of modern systems of identification, there were only two ways to do this: branding or personal recognition. While branding had been widely used in Europe and North America on convicts, prisoners and enslaved people, evolving ideas around criminality and punishment largely led to the abolition of physical marking in the early nineteenth century. The criminal record was established in its place: a written document cataloguing the convict’s name and a written description of their person, including identifying marks and scars.

However, identifying a suspect from a written description alone proved challenging. And the system was vulnerable to the use of aliases and different spellings of names: only a person known to their community could be identified with certainty. Early systems of criminal identification were fundamentally vulnerable to mobility. Ibid., pp. 18-9.
Notably, these problems have continued to haunt contemporary migration management, as databases often contain multiple entries for the same person resulting from different transliterations of names from Arabic to Roman alphabets.

The invention of photography in the 1840s did little to resolve the issue of criminal identification’s reliability. Not only was a photographic record still beholden to personal recognition but it also raised the question of archiving. Criminal records before Bertillonage were stored either as annual compendiums of crimes or alphabetical lists of offenders. While photographs provided a more accurate representation of the face, there was no way to archive them according to features. If one wanted to search the index for, say, a person with a prominent chin, there was no procedure for doing so. Photographs of convicts were sorted alphabetically according to the name provided by the offender, thereby suffering from the same weakness as other identification systems.

Datafication’s ancestor

Alphonse Bertillon was the first to solve this problem by combining systematic measurements of the human body with archiving and record keeping. The criminologist improved record retrieval by sorting entries numerically rather than alphabetically, creating an indexing system based entirely on anthropomorphic measurements. Index cards were organized according to a hierarchical classificatory system, with information first divided by sex, then head length, head breadth, middle finger length, and so forth. Each set of measurements was divided into groups based on a statistical assessment of their distribution across the population, with averages established by taking measurements from convicts. The Bertillon operator would take a suspect’s profile to the archive and look for a match through a process of elimination: first, excluding sex that didn’t match, then head lengths that didn’t match, and so forth. If a tentative match was found, this was confirmed with reference to bodily marks also listed on the card. Wherever this system was implemented, the recognition rates of ‘recidivists’ soared; Bertillon’s system soon spread across the globe. Ibid., pp. 34-45.

With Bertillon, another hallmark of contemporary border and surveillance technology entered the frame: quantification, or what is known as ‘datafication’ today. Bertillon not only measured prisoners’ height and head lengths but invented a method to translate distinctive features of the body into code. For instance, if a prisoner had a scar on their forearm, previous systems of criminal identification would have simply noted this in the file. By contrast, Bertillon measured their distance from a given reference point. These were then recorded in a standardized manner using an idiom of abbreviations and symbols that rendered these descriptions in abridged form. The resulting portrait parlé, or spoken portrait, transcribed the physical body into a ‘universal language’ of ‘words, numbers and coded abbreviations’. Ibid., p.48.
For the first time in history, a precise subject description could be telegraphed.

The translation of the body into code still underwrites contemporary methods of biometric identification. Fingerprint identification systems that were first trialled and rolled out in colonial India converted papillary ridge patterns into a code, which could then be compared to other codes generated in the same manner. Facial recognition technology produces schematic representations of the face and assigns numerical values to it, thereby allowing comparison and matching. Other forms of biometric ID like voice ID, iris scans, and gait recognition follow this same principle.

From taxonomy to machine learning

Besides quantification, classification ­– a key instrument of knowledge generation and governance for centuries – is another hallmark of modern and contemporary surveillance and identification technologies. As noted by many scholars from Foucault M. Foucault, The Order of Things. Routledge, 1975.
to Zygmunt Bauman Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Blackwell Publishers, 1989.
and Denise Ferreira da Silva D. Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
, classification is a central tool of the European Enlightenment, evidenced most iconically by Carl Linnaeus’ taxonomy. In his graduated table, Linnaeus named, classified and hierarchically ordered the natural world from plants to insects to humans, dividing and subdividing each group according to shared characteristics. Classification and taxonomies are widely seen as an expression of the fundamental epistemological shifts from a theocentric to a rationalistic epistemology in the early modern era, which enabled scientific breakthroughs but were also tied to colonization and enslavement. S. Wynter, ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2003, pp. 257-337.
In their book on the theme, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star underscore classification’s use as a powerful but often unrecognized instrument of political ordering: ‘Politically and socially charged agendas are often first presented as purely technical and they are difficult even to see. As layers of classification system become enfolded into a working infrastructure, the original political intervention becomes more and more firmly entrenched. In many cases, this leads to a naturalization of the political category, through a process of convergence. It becomes taken for granted.’ G. C. Bowker and S. L. Star, Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences, MIT press, 2000, p. 196.

Today, classification is central to machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence designed to discern patterns in large amounts of data. This allows it not only to categorize vast amounts of information but also to predict and classify new, previously unseen data. In other words, it applies learned knowledge to new situations. While research on machine learning began in the middle of the last century, it has come to unprecedented prominence recently with applications like ChatGPT.

Machine learning is also increasingly applied in border work. Rarely used as a stand-alone technology, it is widely deployed across existing technologies to augment and accelerate long-established forms of surveillance, identification and sorting. For instance, algorithmic prediction, which analyses large amounts of data including patterns of movement, social media posts, political conflict, natural disasters, and more, is increasingly replacing statistical migration modelling for the purpose of charting migratory patterns. The European Commission is currently funding research into algorithmic methods which would expand existing forms of risk analysis by drawing on wider data sources to identify novel forms of ‘risky’ conduct. Machine learning is also being either trialled or used in ‘lie detector’ border guards, dialect recognition, tracking and identification of suspicious vessels, facial recognition at the EU’s internal borders and behavioural analysis of inmates at Greek camps. As this wide range of applications illustrates, there would seem to be no border technology exempt from machine learning, whether assisted image analysis of drone footage or the vetting of asylum claims.

Classification lies at the core of machine learning – or at least the type of data-driven machine learning that has become dominant today. Individual data points are organized into categories and sub-categories, a process conducted either through supervised or unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, training data is labelled according to a predefined taxonomy. In practice, this usually means that humans assign labels to data such as ‘dog’ to an image of said dog. The machine learning model learns from this labelled dataset by identifying patterns that correlate with the labels. In unsupervised learning, the data is not labelled by humans. Instead, the algorithm independently identifies patterns and structures within the data. In other words, the algorithm classifies the data by creating its own clusters based on patterns inherent in the dataset. It creates its own taxonomy of categories, which may or may not align with human-created systems.

The supposed criminal type

As the AI and border scholar Louise Amoore points out, casting algorithmic clusters as a representation of inherent, ‘natural’ patterns from data is an ‘extraordinarily powerful political proposition’ as it ‘offers the promise of a neutral, objective and value-free making and bordering of political community’. L. Amoore, ‘The deep border’, Political Geography, 2001, 102547.
The idea of the algorithmic cluster as a ‘natural community’ comprises a significant racializing move: forms of conduct associated with irregular migration are consequently labelled as ‘risky’.  As these clusters are formed without reference to pre-defined criteria, such as ‘classic’ proxies for race like nationality or religion, they are difficult to challenge with existing concepts like protected characteristics or bias. Ibid.
For instance, a migrant might be identified as a security risk by a machine learning algorithm based on an opaque correlation between travel itineraries, social media posts, personal and professional networks, and weather patterns.

The creation of categories according to inherent attributes echoes and extends to other nineteenth-century practices: namely, a range of scientific endeavours using measurement and statistics to identify regularities and patterns that would point to criminal behaviour. Like unsupervised machine learning, the fields of craniometry, phrenology and criminal anthropology systematically accumulated data on human subjects to glean patterns that could be sorted into categories of criminality.

For instance, phrenologists like Franz Joseph Gall linked specific personality traits to the prominence of regions of the skull. In the related field of physiognomy, figures like the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater undertook a systematic study of facial features as a guide to criminal behaviour. Fuelled by the development of photography, studies investigating signs of criminality in the face gained traction, with convicts and inmates of asylums repeatedly subjected to such ‘studies’. The composite photographs of Frances Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement and a pioneer of fingerprint identification, are a case in point: images of convicts were superimposed onto one another to glean regularities as physical markers of criminality. Galton conducted a similar study on Jewish school boys, searching for racial markers of Jewishness.


Criminal anthropology consolidated these approaches into a coherent attempt to subject the criminal body to scientific scrutiny. Under the leadership of the Italian psychiatrist and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, criminal anthropologists used a wide range of anthropomorphic tools of measurement, from Bertillon’s precise measurements of limbs to craniometric skull measurements, mapping facial features, and noting distinctive marks like scars and tattoos. On this basis, they enumerated a list of so-called ‘stigmata’ or physical regularities found in the body of the ‘born criminal’ While this notion is widely discredited today, the underlying method of classification based on massed data characteristics still exists.

Trusting the conclusions drawn from quantitative analysis of facial features remains a strong allure. A 2016 paper claimed it had successfully trained a deep neural network algorithm to predict criminality based on head shots from drivers licenses, while a 2018 study made similar claims about reading sexual orientation from dating site photos.

When engaging critically with these systems, it is imperative to remain mindful of the larger political project they are deployed to uphold. As AI scholar Kate Crawford writes: ‘Correlating cranial morphology with intelligence and claims to legal rights acts as a technical alibi for colonialism and slavery. While there is a tendency to focus on the errors in skull measurements and how to correct for them, the far greater error is in the underlying worldview that animated this methodology. The aim, then, should be not to call for more accurate or “fair” skull measurements to shore up racist models of intelligence but to condemn the approach altogether.’ K. Crawford, The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press, 2021, pp. 126-7.
Put differently, techniques of classification and quantification cannot be divorced from the socio-political contexts they are tasked to verify and vouch for. To rephrase International Relations scholar Robert Cox, classification and quantification are always for someone, and for some purpose. R. W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1981, pp. 126–155.

Yet, as Science and Technology Studies scholar Helga Nowotny cautions, if we ‘trust’ the results of algorithmic prediction as fundamentally true, we misunderstand the logic of deep neural networks. These networks ‘can only detect regularities and identify patterns based on data that comes from the past. No causal reasoning is involved, nor does an AI pretend that it is.’ H. Nowotny, In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms. Polity, 2021, p. 22.

While these machines may produce ‘practical and measurable predictions’, they have no sense of cause and effect – in short, they have no ‘understanding’ in the human sense. Ibid. Furthermore, an overreliance on algorithms nudges us toward determinism, aligning our behaviour with machinic prediction in lieu of alternative paths. This is a problem in political cultures premised on accountability. If we wish to learn from the past to build better futures, we cannot rely on the predictive outputs of a machine learning model.

AI déjà-vu

There are many threads besides the shared and continued reliance on quantification and classification one could pull on to explore the entangled history of surveillance and identification technologies from the nineteenth century to the present. Marginalized, surplus populations like convicts and colonized people have long been used as ‘technological testing grounds’ to hone classificatory systems and train algorithms. A fear of uncontrolled human mobility continues to be leveraged as a driver for research and development, with tech, in turn, deployed to fix problems it has itself created. And positivistic social scientific methods remain instrumental to the task of translating roaring multiplicities into neat, numerical values.

Instead of falling for AI hype, we might instead attune ourselves to a sense of déjà-vu: the unsettling feeling that we’ve seen all this before. This way, we might better resist the fantastical claims made by corporate and border actors, and begin uncoupling technologies from global projects of domination.

This article is based on research carried out during the project ‘Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century’ based at the University of Graz, funded by the NOMIS foundation.

The universal experience of excretion has been with us for millennia, yet the topic is considered taboo in many cultures. Though some people are attempting to confront the feelings of shame that come up when talking about it, we still have quite a long way to go, and no time to waste. 

Speaking of waste: the release of untreated urban wastewater poses a real threat to the environment and subjects local communities to pollution. As it stands today, Europe’s two opposite shores are both soaked in it. 

The picturesque Sea of Marmara has been suffocating under Istanbul’s untreated and undetreated sewage since the 1980s. In his European Press Prize nominated article for Eurozine, ‘An ode to Marmara’, Kaya Genc tracked the ensuing phytoplankton outbreaks, colloquially called the ‘sea snot crisis’, which has led to fish species populations dropping from 127 different species in 1915, to only 20 in 2010. 

Following Brexit, the UK has let loose on environmental standards to protect marine and human health, by dumping sewage straight into the English Channel and North Sea. On average, there are 825 spills into its waterways per day. 

Clean water and sanitation are the 6th Sustainable Developmental Goal the EU is addressing, but there are major differences between member states in how they handle their shit.  According to the WHO in the European region, ‘more than 36 million people lack access to basic sanitation services…’ and this access is extremely unequal. 

An ode to Marmara

What lies below the sea snot spectacle

Resurrecting the soil

 

Moreover, ever since France’s decision to dismantle the so-called ‘Calais Jungle’ camps in 2016, human rights experts have been urging the country to provide asylum seekers living there with safe water and sanitation. 

However, draining sewage is only one half of the problem. Treating wastewated is wholly another, and a gigantic task at that. Of course, the waste that goes down the drains contains a lot of contaminants and toxins – but it could also be a resource. New technologies are attempting to address this problem, sometimes by rethinking very old methodologies, such as plant filtering and composting regimes. 

Though composting and using urban waste as fertilizer is proposed as a sustainable solution,  there is a reluctance to use it due to the toxic materials and chemicals found in it. But as Kate Brown puts it in her article for Estonian journal Vikerkaar on Resurrecting the soil: ‘If people realize that what they flushed down the toilet comes back to them on their dinner plates, then they might be more thoughtful both about what they consume and toss down the drain.’ 

So poop contains multitudes: pathogens and nutrients, human rights issues, industrial challenges, and more.

Today’s guests 

Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi is an anthropologist and environmental psychologist. She is the co-founder of the School of Public Life, a grassroots civic education initiative dedicated to building a democratic and just Hungary. She is also the co-founder of a grassroots housing advocacy group called The City is for All, which has been mobilizing homeless people and their allies for housing rights. Until very recently, Tessza was the Head of the Office of Community Participation at the Municipality of the 8th District of Budapest, and now she runs the campaign of an independent candidate for district mayor.

Attila György Bodnár is an architect, entrepreneur, and executive vice president of Organica Water; a company that offers cost and space-efficient botanical garden-like solutions for wastewater treatment. Its mission is to show the world that wastewater treatment can be safe and aesthetically pleasing, while also making the world a more sutanainable place. 

Vince Bakos is a biochemical engineer and assistant professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He specializes in wastewater management and environmental biotechnology.

We meet with them at Közben Stúdió in Budapest.

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Salma Shaka, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner, managing director
Judit Csikós, project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

Video Crew Budapest

Nóra Ruszkai, sound engineering
Gergely Áron Pápai, photography
László Halász, photography

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
István Nagy, video editor
Milán Golovics, conversation editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota  closed captions, Polish and French subtitles; language versions management
Farah Ayyash  Arabic subtitles
Mia Belén Soriano  Spanish subtitles
Marta Ferdebar  Croatian subtitles
Lídia Nádori  German subtitles
Katalin Szlukovényi  Hungarian subtitles
Daniela Univazo  German subtitles
Olena Yermakova  Ukrainian subtitles
Aida Yermekbayeva  Russian subtitles
Mars Zaslavsky  Italian subtitles

Related reads

Kate Brown’s Resurrecting the soil, Eurozine article from Estonian partner journal Vikerkaar

An ode to Marmara, Kaya Genç’s European Press Prize nominated article from Eurozine

The Dirty Residents of a Clean City by Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi  and Ágnes Török. Anthropology News. February: 60.

Sources

Break the taboo with poo, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology volume.

UK sewage turning Channel and North Sea into dumping ground, say French MEPs, The Guardian.

Addressing sanitation challenges in the European Region, World Health Organization.

UN rights experts urge France to provide safe water, sanitation for migrants in ‘Calais Jungle’, UN Refugees Migrants.

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Shaneca Alicia Smith more popularly known as Shan ZenZen from her program Shan ZenZen Jamaican Vibez, is known worldwide for her Philanthropic work throughout Jamaica, especially in Parishes in rural Jamaica, but she helps the elderly, indigent children, and the most vulnerable no matter where they are in Jamaica. The 36-year-old mother, farmer, humanitarian, and YouTuber who hails from the small community of Precious in St.Elizabeth Jamaica, has been making an undeniable mark on the minds and hearts of DIASPORANS and her fellow Countrymen. Her humility, love, kindness, care, and compassion for the poor and needy are what draws her many supporters and viewers from all over the world to her. Shaneca started her Philanthropic in 2020 with farmers in rural communities who needed agricultural tools to help them to become more productive, but it was in 2021 that she branched out when a mother 9 reached out to her for help, within 6 months she built a 3 bedroom house for a mother of nine and later building 3 more houses and repairing over 7 houses for the elderly. She is known for her back-to-school treats in St.Elizabeth which has seen over 800 children benefiting for the past 2 summers. She has worked tirelessly to help hundreds of Jamaican Adults and many children, her monthly feeding program for the homeless, mentally ill, and shut-ins, in her parish has benefited so many forgotten people.  Shaneca takes pleasure in sharing with the poor whatever she has available on her farm. To get to know more about her contact The International Women Achievers Award (IWAA) Organization link below 

www.iwaawards.org

Don't miss out on our wellness club that's sweeping the nation

By joining our wellness club, you'll not only improve your own well-being, but also contribute to the global movement for a healthier and more sustainable future

Click here for more information 

Korra Obidi, a multifaceted talent hailing from Nigeria, has been making waves in the entertainment industry with her exceptional skills in music, dance, and now, social media influence. At just 26 years old, she has captured the attention of audiences worldwide with her unique sound, captivating performances, and inspiring journey.

Obidi's rise to fame gained momentum when she appeared on the reality TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" while six months pregnant, defying expectations and showcasing her unparalleled dedication to her craft. Her performance on the show garnered widespread acclaim, solidifying her status as a force to be reckoned with in the world of dance.

Following her groundbreaking appearance on the show, Obidi continued to defy conventions by releasing her hit single "50/50," which quickly amassed over 4 million views on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. What set this release apart was not just the catchy beats and infectious melodies, but also the inclusion of her newborn, June Dean, in the music video—a powerful statement of motherhood and empowerment.

One of Obidi's most impressive feats is her ability to not only perform but also to write and direct the visuals for her music. Drawing inspiration from her female ancestral entertainers and her background in belly dance, she infuses her work with cultural richness and authenticity. Additionally, her self-taught skills as a drummer on the Konga add a unique flair to her music, blending elements of Afrobeats and Pop seamlessly.

Despite her meteoric rise to fame, Obidi has recently faced a harrowing ordeal. While live-streaming from her residence in London, she was viciously attacked with acid and a knife. The incident shocked her fans and the wider community, but Obidi's resilience and strength have been unwavering. She has since been receiving medical care and is on the road to recovery, buoyed by the overwhelming support and love from her fans.

In the face of adversity, Korra Obidi's spirit remains unbroken. Her journey from a talented performer to a social media influencer award winner is a testament to her determination, creativity, and unwavering passion for her craft. As she continues to heal and rebuild, let us stand united in solidarity with Korra Obidi, sending her prayers, love, and support every step of the way.

Know more about IWAA awards

Don't miss out on our wellness club that's sweeping the nation

By joining our wellness club, you'll not only improve your own well-being, but also contribute to the global movement for a healthier and more sustainable future

Click here for more information 

https://www.iwaawards.org

https://www.iwaawards.org

Princess is a committed to and embedded with steady determination, strong perseverance, and unwavered focus in her service to humanity: a rare combination of unique personality of our age. There is no stopping for Princess until she achieves set goals. Challenges to Princess, are mere stepping stones to whatever she determines to achieve. She loves people, believes in them, and always doing everything possible to ensure their well being. To this cause she is committed, and that is why she even contested for city councilor for Wards 3 of Toronto and Brampton wards 2, 5 and 10.

Princess is a caring mother.  As a mother of seven children, she has inadvertently given a great deal of herself to the neighborhood and community children.  She has grown to be liked and loved by children, because she has always shared with them and always seized every opportunity to reach out and help them.  She has even been branded “the coolest mother in the neighborhood” among other names.

VOLUNTEER INVOLMENT:

Princess has volunteered on many political types of champagne such as for Doug Ford, Patrick Brown and many more in the Brampton area. Other volunteer service where with Dr. Jean Augustine and many other Community events including serving on the board of Youth Day Canada from 2015 to 2022 and the Brampton United Achievers Club from 2010 to 2014.

BACKGROUND & EXPERIENCE:

Born in Mandeville City, Jamaica, she migrated to Canada at the age of 10. Between 1993 and 1997, she attended and graduated from Burhampthorpe Collegiate Institute, Devry Institute of Technology, and Toronto School of Business.  She has certifications in Computer Applications, Business Operations and a diploma in Travel and Tourism. Her work experience and community relations span from 1989 and include work as school bus driver, public bus operator, hotel operator, security officer & supervisor, and travel sales representative. As a successful events planner and community leader, Princess has promoted events: to bring joy and happiness to the people in the community through entertainment to enable children have good Christmases and to render assistance to disasters stricken countries like Haiti and Dominica. Princess is the owner and founder of the International Women Achievers Awards (IWAA), which acknowledge women from all walks of life for their achievement and contribution to their community and to empower upcoming young women that they too can achieve their goals and dreams and the IWAA Foundation, which provide peer mediation to facilitate dispute resolutions, Gender Equality devolvement, Rehabilitation, and Human Rights Advancement Training Program Project along with our scholarship program thereby changing the way youth understand and resolve conflicts in their lives.

Recognitions:

v BBPA Women of Honour Award

v Eastern News Canada Leadership Award

v 100 hundred Black Women to watch for in Canada 2015 Award

v Sickle cell Community Development Award

v Veteran Promoter Award

v Outstanding Employee Certificate

v Outstanding Customer Service Certificate

One of Boucher favorite quote is: Whatever garden you find yourself in, blossom in it.

Meet Michelle Green She is one of the 2024 Canada (IWAA) International Women Achievers Award 

Michelle Green was born in Jamaica in the parish of St. Ann.  She attended Duncan’s All Age and William Knibb High School in Trelawny. She later attended Brown’s Town Community College where she did Drama, and the College of Arts, Science and Technology (CAST) where she pursued studies in Food and Beverage Management. She was first employed as a freelance reporter for the Gleaner Company in the parish of Trelawny and later as an assistant to the Hon. Olivia Grange. Michelle Green-Ford served in several other capacities such as Speech Coordinator for the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC).                    

She migrated to the Cayman Islands in 1989 and later to Canada in 1992 where she initially worked as a nanny before being employed in various roles including Department Manager at Walmart.   In 2004, she was chosen through the Miracle Children’s Network, which is affiliated with Walmart, to be an Ambassador for Sick Kids Hospital.  In her role as Ambassador, she commenced a toy mountain drive for Sick Kids Hospital and did several voluntary activities. In August 2014, she adopted the Maternity Ward at the Falmouth Hospital in Jamaica in memory of her grandmother. She also started a Back-to-School Drive in the parish of Trelawny. Due to her contributions to Sick Kids Hospital, she was awarded a citation from the Mayor and Members of the Council of the City of Markham in 2017. 

Michelle Green Ford has always had a passion for caring for others particularly the elderly.  This caused her to pursue nursing. During her nursing career which spanned from 2007 to 2020. She was actively involved in charitable work.  She now operates her own business known as Elegant Maid Services but continues do charitable works.

Visit: www.iwaawards.org for more information

The forced migration of Ukrainians since Russia’s full-scale invasion has turned creative reflection upside down. Numerous artworks, musical compositions, short films, and works of fiction and non-fiction have been made in response to rapid displacement. Poetry, in particular, with its dynamic structure, has taken on the function of logging memories and expressing trauma. A poem doesn’t require much time to be written due to its short, plastic form and can accurately express the emotions and experiences of war victims. These texts outline the trauma of those who have survived military aggression, attempting to overcome the difficulties of adjusting to new realities.

Instant response

Most Ukrainian poets now post their writing on Facebook, Instagram and Telegram. Work that goes up alongside video content can soon go viral. The quantitative dimension of poetic reflections today is almost immeasurable; new pieces appear every day across various social networks.

Ukrainian war poetry, often devoid of rich metaphors, is near colloquial, imitating short social media messages: fragmented sentences, idioms that are understandable only from the context, conventional abbreviations and anglicisms. It can simultaneously be aesthetically sublime, containing partially coded meanings loaded with analogies.

A feminine discourse

The poetry of Ukrainian forced migrants is mostly a feminine discourse. In this piece I concentrate on contextualizing the poetic works of Svitlana Didukh-Romanenko (from Boryspil, now living in Lithuania), Liudmila Horova (from Kyiv, now in the US), Anna Maligon (from Kyiv, now in France), Oksana Stomina (from Mariupol, who stayed in Germany and has returned to Ukraine) and Tetiana Yarovitsina (from Kyiv, now in Belgium). Among a magnitude of texts, the work of these authors – already known for their literary skill – reflects the feelings of millions of Ukrainian forced refugees escaping the war.

Despite their different life circumstances, social status, age and gender, Ukrainian refugees share suffering that manifests in various ways: loss of home; forced displacement; blurring of identity; ‘refugee syndrome’; painful adjustment to different living conditions; and integration into a foreign country. The puzzles of their new reality correlate with poems that gradually reveal a new memory for Ukrainians, which is also the new memory of many European countries – after all, European countries have become a new home for many Ukrainian refugees. This newly formed refugee memory is heterogeneous. As in a conditional archive, memories of different stages of forced displacement are stored, forming different meanings and thematic cycles.

Home under threat

The first stage of forced displacement is the awareness that your home is no longer a safe place. ‘Our home is a shot boat’, writes Anna Maligon, describing the sense of hopelessness and painful recognition when the home, once a shelter, now poses a threat to existence. Safety and security are debased and the home subject to ruin when its four walls and roof become the targets of rockets, bombs and mortar attacks.

War can get up close and personal: ‘Where are you right now? / It seems like I am in a nightmare. / The shelling was dire / we escaped by the skin of our teeth’. In her poem Where are you right now, Oksana Stomina reproduces a situation that was common for Ukrainians exchanging messages at the beginning of the full-scale war. The offensive of Russian troops began simultaneously from three directions – from the south, the east and the north – and nobody knew for sure how quickly and far they would be able to invade Ukrainian territory. The questions ‘Where are you?’ and ‘How are you?’ became ubiquitous. Many Ukrainians immediately decided to escape. Thousands of refugees formed queues at Ukraine’s western borders.

And the questions have not lost their relevance today. It’s important for people to reconnect with family and friends, even if they are thousands of kilometres away. Anna Maligon’s and Oksana Stomina’s poetry evidence the destruction of massive shelling and other military action near homes, and its emotional weight.

Rescue or threat?

‘We were told: Take only the most valuable things!’, writes Svitlana Didukh-Romanenko, ‘And we took our children away. / However, all the children are now ours. / Column ‘Temporary exit’ / In the customs declaration of war”. Ukrainians fleeing their homes had to respond and act quickly. Didukh-Romanenko’s use of harsh imperatives emulates the orders of soldiers who facilitated much of the Ukrainian evacuation process.

With the large amount of people and limited number of trains, instructions also applied to things; the media published numerous photos of luggage piled up on platforms after the departure of evacuation trains. In Bezrukh (No Motion), Tetiana Yarovitsina writes, ‘All that you have with you is / A cat, a suitcase and a daughter. / Good people and a roof. / And … age-old fears.’

Airstrikes targeting evacuees were common. Russian military variously fired upon civilian vehicles moving towards Ukraine’s western borders. For example, between 4 March and 25 March 2022, soldiers shot at 10 vehicles on the Zhytomyr highway (M06) near Kyiv and 13 people died. After an investigation, the culprits were identified.
Anna Maligon writes about travelling on ‘green corridor’ trains in her well-received poem Bird:

A bird flew through the green corridor / a few foreign words in its beak / a few twigs for a new nest // The seven-year-old calmed the cat: / Keep quiet, my kitty, eat what you can; / we’ll be back in a week // …Somebody bit through the bag with onions / the cat’s silence terrifying A. Maligon, ‘The Green Corridor’, trans. Anatoly Kudryavitsky, in INVASION. Ukrainian Poems about the War, 2022; also available in German at https://www.ulnoe.at/pressebilder/StimmenausderUkraine31-40.pdf


The panic and fear that prevailed during the evacuation did not allow people to make adequate and considered decisions. Quite often they disappeared into obscurity, repeatedly changed trains, spent nights outdoors, at stations, in conditions that were unsuitable for rest. ‘It has been almost three weeks since we are on the way / Three black weeks of resistance and tension’, writes Tetyana Yarovitsina, recording the difficulties of displacement alongside her stoicism and resilience, which she may not have even suspected. ‘We did it! Overcame’.

Combat mantras

Every forced migrant faces a situation where their identity and life experiences no longer seem to matter in a foreign country. An individual’s profession and social status are marked as ‘prior’ or ‘lost’, remaining locked in the recent past; it is very difficult for the average migrant to confirm their qualifications in a different country.

Not everyone can accept this sudden erasure of identity. Anger and the want for retribution for all the crimes caused by Russian occupiers come to the fore in poetry. Liudmila Horova’s mantra-poem gives voice to these feelings via a witch, whose words have the power of weapons:

I sow in your eyes, I sow against the night / It happens so to you, enemy, as the Witch says! / How many seeds of rye have fallen in the earth / So many times you, enemy, will be killed!

The author imitates the language of a spell from fables, setting a certain rhythm, repeating key code words like ‘inspires’. The text fulfils the magical function of a ritual that would induce a trance in its recipient, immobilizing, enslaving, causing physical pain or death. Horova speaks for all Ukrainian women, evoking the gender paradigm: after ‘witch’ she uses ‘mother’, ‘wife’ and ‘girl’. The writer says she wrote an ‘amulet mantra for women’ so that they could defend their country with the power of words.

Horova also wrote a poetic mantra after the liberation of Bucha, when the terrible truth about hundreds of tortured Ukrainians was revealed. The memory of the dead belongs to the living. How long heroes and victims of the war will be remembered depends partly on those who have survived, whether they will be honoured and whether war criminals will be condemned. The poet’s expressive judgement in Enemy condemns Russian war criminals to pangs of conscience, which are much heavier than death:

If I put the grief through the smallest sieve / You will beg to God for hell … / But your death, enemy, won’t be easy / And even in death, enemy, you won’t find peace. Horova’s poem has been translated into German, Belarusian, Italian, Czech, Spanish, Arabic, Georgian and Polish. Also the Ukrainian group Angy Kreyda made a song from the poem, which has become popular worldwide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdEEffF7_rU


Difficulty accepting the peaceful environment in which Ukrainian refugees find themselves is unconditional. It is determined by a forceful denial of the war and the inability to accept the lost life with its usual course. ‘I perceive the beauty of Brussels as photo wallpapers’, Tetiana Yarovitsina writes in her poem 100+, confirming her detachment from the world in which she was forced to stay. ‘You are not alone, I know how you feel’, she writes, addressing her imaginary interlocutor, another Ukrainian refugee, enduring the centennial day of a war that divided life into ‘before’ and ‘after’:

You don’t sleep at night, but in the day your heart is squeezed / you descend into yourself as if into a mine / to extract something useful / it’s the hundredth day that the war has been going on / and we have forgotten how to live and enjoy / your soul is a drop of light / fragile.

Homelessness and ubiquitous war

Forced displacement can lead to homelessness. Ukrainian refugees have experienced living in camps for displaced persons, changing houses and moving on. Such situations provoke a feeling of what in Ukrainian is equivalent to ‘homeless homelessness’: the war taints all the peaceful homes and shelters in which refugees stay. In Ukrainian ‘homeless’ and ‘homelessness’ are entirely distinct words. Ukrainian literary researcher Tamara Gundorova uses the joint expression to strengthen meaning.
It never disappears from media spaces either: a refugee’s day begins with monitoring summaries from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and reading news on social media. In Nowhere, Oksana Stomina reflects on a lost home being equal to lost identity. She writes about the loss of values, about anger and rage that weigh down on the soul as if a heavy sediment, about the war that haunts everyone with phantoms of the past and the terrible present:

I have recently been everywhere and I am nowhere / Stubbornly and relentlessly / Wherever I find myself, the war goes on, it breathes behind my back / It scratches my heart, whispers dreams of inevitable. / Wherever I find myself, I am always in Kharkiv and Bucha… // There is too much sulfur and iron in me now. / My universe is in my sad thoughts. My home is a suitcase / My function is to hate the damn gang forever. / Where is my happiness and my husband, I don’t even know… / Vainly I hide sadness and tiredness from myself and from people. / Wherever I come, I’m nowhere, and I want to go home.

Oksana Stomina is waiting for her husband, a soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to return from Russian captivity. He was one of the defenders of Azovstal in Mariupol. She has no contact with him. His fate is unknown.

Beyond victim stereotypes

In writing ‘We are unremembered and unforgotten for them’, Anna Maligon succinctly outlines the war trauma experienced by displaced Ukrainian women, which can only be overcome with time. Every female refugee faces situations that reduce her to a victim. Host countries perceive refugees as secondary members of society. The typical, ascribed role of ‘victim’, ‘survivor’ of the war, ‘traumatized’ by military aggression firmly adheres to and strengthens the effect of a postponed life, when all important decisions and events are deliberately or unconsciously suspended for an indefinite time, to a future without clear life markers. In such a situation, a person does not even allow herself small, seemingly insignificant joys. Life is on ‘pause’ until the war ends, and she can return home.

In Girls to Girls, Liudmila Horova transcends the stereotypical image of a refugee, shifting emphasis from suffering to the typical needs experienced by female migrant. For those still in Ukraine, who maintain contact with forcibly displaced persons, refugees have not acquired the connotation of ‘victims’. For them, they are still ‘friends’, ‘sisters’, ‘colleagues’. Their counterparts send: ‘foreign packages. / They have tiny pieces of heart and jars of cream, / Ukrainian books, high-quality t-shirts / Because the print “ZSU ZBS” ZSU ZBS stands for ‘Armed Forces of Ukraine The Best’.
will be more than a meme’. The poem breaks the circle of victimhood that consciously or unconsciously surrounds every refugee. Life goes on, and that’s why: ‘Girls sew bright dresses for girls / Measurements are taken online so that everything matches exactly, / Sweet roshenki are put in a box underhand / And marigold seeds that were ready in winter’. Horova uses vocabulary that is atypical for refugee texts: chocolate candies, associated with joy, elation and holidays; Roshenki refers to Roshen, a popular Ukrainian brand of sweets.
Ukraine marigolds, which housewives planted near their homes in peace times. The poem outlines a different dimension of life where communication about cheerful, everyday things, improving well-being, carries on as before. The female refugee is no longer a victim – at least for the briefest of moments, when she turns into a carefree woman again. New, beautiful clothes and cosmetic products are equal to a magical driver in this verse that lifts the refugee’s life out of its paused state. The poem causes its reader to rethink the situation of forced migration, to look for positive moments in spite of trauma.

Overcoming inertia

Every war refugee has the right to fully experience the emotions that fill their heart during and after forced displacement. Yet, at a certain point, many become aware of the need to look for a new purpose. Some reach it earlier, some later, and some inhabit the role of victim, seemingly freezing in this state. ‘Somehow… / You feel / No despair!’, writes Tetiana Yarovitsina in Somehow.

All that happens with us / is retreat, not escape. // Acceptance of foreignness. / Somehow… // Soon / a counteroffensive, / however

Taken out of context, the word ‘somehow’ has little independent meaning and can be symbolically aligned with the uncertainty experienced by forced migrants. However, the author expresses consciously overcoming the inertia born of rejection in a foreign space, and is ready for action.

Quite often, refugees find new purpose in volunteering. Girls to Girls lists everything that refugees send home in exchange for books and sweets: ‘shoulder bags, bulletproof vests, helmets’, as well as ‘thermal imagers’ and ‘medical kits’. While Ukrainian women who have stayed home take care of their friends, sisters and colleagues who went abroad, those women who escaped the war mobilize themselves, sending humanitarian aid and equipment to frontline fighters.

The way home

Storks in nest. Image by Anton Vakulenko via Wikimedia Commons

Amongst forced refugees, there is no one who does not dream of returning home. Even if their houses are no longer physically there, even if Ukraine will look like a devastated post-war Europe, all Ukrainian refugees dream of being in their native place for at least an hour. Love of one’s country may be irrational – a feeling that cannot be logically interpreted or clearly explained – but it is so powerful that it is impossible to ignore. Everyone feels nostalgia away from home: the melancholic flip side of the love of one’s birthplace. Such feelings and emotions can be traced in almost all the poems of Ukrainian refugees; each of the poets picture a future moment of returning home.

‘When the roads will lead home’, writes Svitlana Didukh-Romanenko, ‘And will merge with the familiar roads / And arms will be opened from both sides, / Finally / You will take off fatigue like an old backpack, / In which day and night you carried worldwide, / Dad’s smile, / Mom’s warm look, / An old pear that supported the roof, / First love and true love, / And something that no one can tell’. Here, the way home is similar to that in Homer’s Odyssey: to get home, the character must go through a series of initiations, endure numerous trials, not lose family values and memories, and believe in her own return. The desire to go back, to feel the fatigue of a foreign country finally fall from the shoulders ‘like an old backpack’ is a thematic layer inherent to refugee poetry.

Oksana Stomina, like Anna Maligon, imagines her character as a bird who travels thousands of kilometres away from home. However, the stork already flies in the opposite direction, not to exile but to the abandoned country. For the author, her route back to Mariupol is closed. Someone is governing there, who is a stranger, who was not invited. ‘Who steals junk and remains of the heart, / But tries on my everyday happiness?’, asks Oksana Stomina rhetorically. ‘Who will take all my photos to the trash?’ However, a bird experiences no boundaries, just as there are no boundaries for imagination, the soul or thought:

But the soul is a faithful, indomitable bird / Stubbornly circling above a leaky roof, As if above a completely ruined nest.

Even after the complete destruction of a house, the want to at least look at its ‘leaky roof’ remains. This written desire reads as a manifesto of Ukrainian forced migrants.

Liudmila Horova expresses a fine line between the tragic and the comic, seeking the positive in a future post-war Ukraine, just as she is still searching for points of stoicism during her forced migration: ‘All my plans may seem stupid, / but I plan stupid things in Ukraine’.

This article has been published as part of the youth project Vom Wissen der Jungen. Wissenschaftskommunikation mit jungen Erwachsenen in Kriegszeiten, funded by the City of Vienna, Cultural Affairs.

The Bible has much to say about the fatal significance of shifting military alliances in the small strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Throughout biblical history, all the societies built on it were characterised by their need to ally themselves with one or other of the far larger, more powerful and often competing civilisations they were positioned between.

The prophets who saw how none of these alliances could prevent recurrent conquest came up with the ground-breaking idea of a society based on the justice of the weak against the power of the strong. Or, to use contemporary terminology, soft power against hard.

‘Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help! They rely on horses, trusting in the number of chariots and the great multitude of chariot fighters,’ Isaiah warned the kings of Jerusalem. Instead: ‘By right shall Zion be saved, by righteousness those who dwell therein.’

In a sense, Isaiah’s prophecy came true. What remained when one biblical kingdom after the other had been destroyed was a people – Israel, if you will. In the ‘dispossession’ or ‘diaspora’, the Israeli people could exist and develop an occasionally flourishing Jewish culture without relying on chariots and chariot fighters. Even at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, more Jews were living elsewhere than on the small strip of land between the sea and the river.

Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages Source: Wikimedia Commons

Throughout biblical history, hard power was never Israel’s best weapon. It still is not in the history being written today.

For a long time now, Israel’s military superiority has not translated into strategic advantages. Ever since the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (resulting in the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila), Israel’s wars have cost more than they have yielded. The war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 did not destroy Hezbollah as intended, but strengthened it. The war in Gaza six months later did not destroy Hamas as intended, but strengthened it. Ever since, each new war to wipe out Hamas (2008, 2012, 2014) –‘mowing the lawn’ as it has come to be called – has only strengthened it.

The current war, which is supposed to wipe out Hamas ‘once and for all’, will not wipe out anything ‘once and for all’. Least of all the fact that Israel lies where it does, on a narrow strip of land between the sea and the river, and is still surrounded by larger and potentially more powerful empires. Nor the fact that, however well-armed and fortified, Israel in its present incarnation relies for its survival on alliances with greater powers – since 1967 with the United States.

Embroiled in yet another war with no discernible end and no sustainable goal, a war that brings more death and destruction in its wake than ever before, it should by now be clear to Israel that no number of chariots will secure its existence ‘once and for all’. With yet another geopolitical earthquake in the making, Israel should see that it must make another attempt – albeit belated – at the kind of power that Isaiah advocated: an attempt to bring about peace and reconciliation between the two peoples on that narrow strip of land, based on justice and righteousness.

The 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO was one such attempt. For a brief moment it seemed that the high-level handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat would be followed by thousands upon thousands of handshakes on the ground, leading to a mutually agreed division of the land into two states living peacefully side by side.

I tend to believe that it was the Palestinian uprising of 1987 and Saddam Hussein’s missiles over Tel Aviv in 1991 that caused Yitzhak Rabin, a former Commander-in-Chief and military hardliner, to become aware of the strategic limitations of Israel’s military superiority. Rabin came see peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians as a strategic necessity. But he was assassinated by his own people, and strategic necessity gave way to another period of strategic hubris, and an increasingly aggressive occupation and settlement policy. One people continued to rule over the other militarily and, by creating ‘facts on the ground’, one state continued to colonise the territorial foundations of what could have been the other.

In the decades that followed, Israel told itself that the strategic problem had been solved, that the state on that small strip of land could go on living forever as an occupying power and a de facto apartheid state. The Palestinians, it believed, were too weak and divided to assert their cause, while its own military superiority was sufficient to suppress any revolt and deter any regional enemy. In recent years, Israel even began to think that by forging alliances with autocratic rulers in the Arab world, it could consign the Palestinian cause to the dustbin of history.

For too long, Israel has lived in strategic self-denial. This became all-too evident on the morning of 7 October 2023, when Hamas, with its breach of the ‘secure’ border between Gaza and Israel and pogrom-like massacre of some 1200 unsuspecting Israeli men, women and children, delivered a perfect stab to the heart of the State of Israel – and of the Jews of the world. Not just was this one of the deadliest pogroms in living Jewish memory (the Holocaust aside), but a massacre on Jews perpetrated in the very state that had historically justified its existence, and its policies, by being a haven for Jews.

If Hamas’s intention was to awaken the historical demons of the Jewish world and provoke Israel into a military response of such proportions that it would trigger a geopolitical earthquake, this is exactly what its attacks on 7 October have achieved. If Hamas was hoping to unleash a devastating regional conflagration that would irrevocably end the possibility of peace and reconciliation between the peoples between the sea and the river, this is exactly what it has done.

Israel’s goal of eradicating Hamas ‘once and for all’ with a devastating military campaign is, of course, just as illusory as Hamas’s goal of launching the ‘liberation’ of Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’ with a terrifying terrorist attack. Nevertheless, illusions can have real and terrible consequences. No matter how the war ends (this time), Israel’s existential vulnerabilities and strategic weaknesses have been exposed as never before. Hamas, for its part, has managed to provoke another catastrophe, another Nakba, on its own people, with the intention of detonating the last remnants of the admittedly overgrown road to peace and reconciliation.

In that sense, Hamas has already won. Israel, with its disproportionate and humanly disastrous response, has continued to act on the morally and geopolitically unsustainable strategy that the Palestinians must be forever suppressed – and, if necessary, expelled from their land.

Not just the moral but also the geopolitical unsustainability of a strategy based on military superiority alone has been evident for a long time now. What Isaiah once warned about, and what Yitzhak Rabin tried to draw political conclusions from, should have been clear, if not before, then ever since Israel’s military protector, the United States demonstrated (in Afghanistan and Iraq) its inability to project power in the region by military means. There is very little evidence today that this has changed. Instead, there are many indications that the US is heading for a period of internal uncertainty and external unreliability.

Regardless of how much of Hamas is wiped out this time, of how much of Gaza is razed to the ground, and of how many thousands of Palestinians are killed or driven from their homes, Hamas’s horrific attack marks the end of an Israeli security doctrine built on political-military hubris and strategic self-deception.

Ein brira, no choice, is a Hebrew expression associated with the foundational myth that Israel never had an alternative, that the forces of history and the conditions of geopolitics confronted the young state with only one path to take.

This is not true of course. In the history of Israel there have been many choices not made and many paths not taken. Where they might have led we do not know. But we do know that the paths taken have brought Israel to a dead end. Its geopolitical vulnerability has steadily increased, its ability to deliver security through military supremacy has steadily decreased, and the fragile conditions for peace and reconciliation between the peoples living on the land between the sea and the river have been steadily eroded.

Isaiah’s most beautiful prophecy now sounds more utopian than ever:

For out of Zion shall the Law be proclaimed,
from Jerusalem the word of the Lord.
He shall judge between the nations,
administer justice among all peoples.
They will forge their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into vineyard knives.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.

It whirred away for six years, then one day it just froze. The humming stopped and the next 24 hours saw the temperature inside slowly equal that of the kitchen. Its refrigerant had dissipated into the atmosphere. The repairman who topped it up pocketed a handsome fee, declaring: ‘I can’t provide you with a guarantee, because the gas could well leak out again by tomorrow.’ Two days later it had done just that. It was the end of August and hot, but I thought: what would it be like to live without a fridge at all?

A cool embrace

It took me a few days to adjust to this new way of living. I mercilessly threw things away; what had previously been suspended had suddenly begun to decompose. Then I started shopping carefully: microscopic quantities, with a specific day in mind. I prioritized eating whatever looked like it was losing its vitality. And after finally converting the orphaned vessel into a wardrobe, I let the world know on Facebook, using a stock photo to illustrate it: a void draped in a frosty hue of arctic ice. ‘I’m looking for people who live without a fridge,’ I wrote. Dozens responded.

Most had not chosen a fridge-less life. They were forced into it by circumstances: renovation, moving out, a fault. One person had lost their house and moved into a security office on an industrial estate. Another had gone to work on an eco-farm, which simply didn’t have a fridge. Someone else had moved to their aunt’s whilst their studio was being renovated. One fridge was in the kitchen, working even, but, despite the makeshift duct tape, the door wouldn’t close; suddenly, it was possible to simply do without.

I looked at kitchen after kitchen, at the idle spaces therein, at the cracks, the shadows, the afterimages, the imperfections: fridges-turned-whiteboards, fridges-turned-cabinets, fridges with no discernible purpose; unplugged fridges, giving off the smells they once managed to absorb, dormant yet alert, with mustards and sauces rattling around on the shelves.

Their owners and users all said the same thing: surprisingly, they throw away a lot less food. They buy more often, for less. They cook less extravagantly. And leftovers – if any – are eaten the next day. Meat spoils easily, so they have given it up. And butter? They only eat it in winter – yes, the windowsill works great. They drink beer as soon as they buy it. They store stew – vegetable, of course – in the oven and eat the soup if it turns sour.

Scientists studying food waste know all too well that these tactics should not be taken as read. When asked to testify about what edible food they throw away, most people tend to obfuscate and deny their habits. But the link between the technology used to extend the shelf life of food and how much of it we throw away is a clear one; indeed, it is a hot topic for scientists who study ‘garbology’. The bigger the fridge, the longer the shopping list; the longer the shopping list, the greater the waste. We treat it as a space where time stops, a fortress inaccessible to the rest of the (micro)world. The door closes, the light goes out; the food – organic matter, a terrain of constant processes – becomes immortal.

Only, it doesn’t. The cold merely slows down cellular metabolism and numbs microorganisms, slowing down their spread. It doesn’t stop it. That’s what freezing does – and even ice can’t completely stop decomposition.

Image by Kit NG via Flickr

Top shelf, 10°C: mustards and jams

Experts estimate that there are nearly 1.4 billion domestic fridges and freezers in the world. Statistically, in Europe, a single refrigerator is shared by two people. However, artificial cold accompanies food not only in the final stage of its life in our homes but also throughout its journey. It allows us to deceive seeds into thinking it’s not yet time for germination, keeps brewing bacterial cultures in check, preventing them from growing too large, and inhibits the action of plant hormones responsible for fruit ripening or stimulating sugar metabolism in tubers. Refrigeration gives us an upper hand in our competition for nutrition fought with the rest of the natural world. The microscopic elements of this world aren’t invisible but provide us with proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Helping plant tissues maintain their firmness, low temperatures also make food more appealing visually. There’s a nice word for this: turgor. Without turgor, that lettuce sitting in your fridge would be in the bin.

Sometimes cold accompanies food on its final journey. If it is not sold within the allotted time and is written off as waste, it ends up in the cold, hidden behind an armoured door. The moment it is scooped up by a garbage truck is like a first breath of tropical air after leaving air-conditioning; it’s not long before natural processes get underway.

Any break in the chain of chill is – according to the modern approach to food distribution – an emergency. Food, suspended from maturing, suddenly gasps for air and starts to make up for lost time. An apple, kept in a cold warehouse for a year, from which virtually all oxygen has been pumped out, lingers in dormancy. A wisp of air brings it to life. It wants to ripen, to wrinkle, to give its seeds to the world. And this does not necessarily go hand in hand with its appeal as food.

Middle shelf, 4°C: ham (wrapped, of course)

In the sociology of poverty, several indices are used when trying to assess the extent of economically deprived communities. Not having a fridge – along with the absence of a telephone, colour TV, access to protein and engagement with leisure activities – is one of them.

Over 27,000 households in Poland live without the equipment that allows food to be cooled to 4°C – that’s as many as the entire number of residences in Gdańsk. Those going without do not consciously choose to live a fridge-free life. Often, they live without a kitchen, electricity or money; indeed, they may well live without any of these, just about getting by from one day to the next in buildings that can hardly be called dwellings.

Those who consciously choose to live without a fridge are a handful that fall within the statistical margin of error. Electing to go without an appliance so ubiquitous in homes that it would never occur to anyone to analyse it in terms of superfluity seems extreme. Or a bold act of self-awareness.

While the fridge may seem innocent, especially when compared with blood-stained smartphones made from minerals whose mining creates conflict, global-heating air conditioning, and clothes dryers, which use dirty energy to hasten a natural process, it isn’t. It clearly contributes to the Earth’s compromised environment. Its impact is tangible: the cubic decimetres of cooling agents released into the atmosphere, alongside the degrees Celsius that heat it up, can be calculated. Although F-gases or hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – the successors to CFCs – may not destroy the ozone layer when released into the atmosphere (whether by accident or via improper disposal), they cause several thousand times more damage than carbon dioxide.

Discussions about changing this situation are long running. In 2016 nearly two hundred countries signed an amendment to the Montreal Protocol in Kigali. According to the agreement, virtually the entire world must stop selling and servicing appliances cooled by F-gases by 2028, replacing them with organic refrigerants. Despite this, millions of F-gas fridges, coolers and freezers remain on the market. Evidence of their damaging potential is hidden in safety information panels. Each one, especially if not disposed of properly, can harm the climate.

The Drawdown report, published in 2017 and referred to in statements from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was optimistic. Researchers of the study ranked the potential of one hundred selected efforts to curb climate change, from most to least effective. Improving cooling appliances – refrigerators and air conditioners – came first. According to the report, if we were able to prevent leaks when replacing refrigerants, we would save the atmosphere nearly 90 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions. In third place, saving 70 gigatons, was the reduction of food waste: the two categories remaining in a strong, chilly embrace with one another.

Bottom shelves, between 7 and 10°C (adjustable humidity): lemons and lettuce, separate

Ever since the first settlers, humankind has tried to extend the shelf life of food. In doing so, people have taken advantage of nature’s helping hand. Ice was cut from frozen lakes in winter or transported from glaciers. Large blocks of ice cut in January could be kept year-round. All one had to do was transport them to ice houses dug underground and cover them with sawdust. Insulated goods would lie dormant until next winter, bringing delight to the residents of manors and palaces.

But the world’s hunger for cold storage was growing, and by the end of the nineteenth century it could not be satisfied by nature alone. Technology came to the rescue: by controlling the metabolism of food, mastery of the entire system of food production and distribution was at hand. Think of equipment symbolic of the Anthropocene era and the refrigerator certainly comes to mind.

The ability to control temperature is one of the core pillars of today’s globalized food production and distribution system. But it also has a huge impact on what goes onto – and comes off of – the dining room table. Without refrigeration, we would be eating shrivelled apples and potatoes dotted with sprouts in the pre-harvest season, and fresh dairy, meat and fish would still be occasional delicacies, only available to the privileged. Tropical fruits would disappear from general sale, their freshness currently suspended from the moment they are harvested until they appear on the shop floor. We would eat more modestly, probably in accordance with the natural crop cycle in our geographical zones; crops that grow nearby do not need to travel thousands of miles to reach our plates. Cold storage, or rather the way we use it, has not only widened choice but has also instilled in us the belief that we can have everything, here and now, at our fingertips. It is also one of the reasons why we have stopped viewing food as an extremely valuable resource whose shelf life can be extended by putting in the effort: drying, salting, curing, fermenting, preserving. Now, all we have to do is open the fridge door.

Freezer, -18°C: not just for ice cubes

The Warsaw Museum of Technology has the oldest Polish refrigerator, dating from 1969, in its collection. With a capacity of only 40 litres, the Polar L9, manufactured by Wrocławskie Zakłady Metalowe (Wroclaw Metal Works), has just enough space to chill a few bottles – nowadays, such a volume would, at most, serve a camping trip or minibar.

The Einstein refrigerator – as this type is called – was popular before condensing refrigerators came along. Only able to maintain a temperature of around 10°C, and go down to minus three in a freezer with enough capacity for a few chops, its performance was not particularly impressive. That said, it was relatively inexpensive and – unless it leaked – virtually indestructible. Butter, milk, cheese and leftovers from dinner were stored there. It can still be found working in some homes, and on sale online for around 200 Polish złoty (just over €45).

Today, the average fridge bought in Europe has a capacity of around 200 litres – still quite a lot less than on the other side of the Atlantic. And it is its size, especially its depth, which makes food, stuffed under the back panel, disappear from view. A large refrigerator is well-equipped for waste; it brims with freshly bought groceries and leftover lunches, merely delaying the inevitable execution of their death sentence after being swept off the plate. The modern-day refrigerator is like a repository of remorse, a sarcophagus illuminated by an arctic hue; the emotions that come with throwing away food deposited within – shame, embarrassment, anger, regret – quickly cool off. They decay, just like food. After all, it’s far easier to tip soup that’s ‘gone bad’ down the sink than it is fresh soup, still steaming, straight from the saucepan. One may think: oh well, it’s gone off, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Refrigerators, by extending the lifespan of fresh food, provide us with a deal measured in time, which must be swiftly repaid when they refuse to cooperate. If refrigeration is ever interrupted, at home it’s not too disastrous. Everywhere else, however, the procedure is crystal clear: food must be thrown away.

When the industrial freezers at one of Poland’s food chains, located in the basement of a building dating back to the 1950s, went down a few years ago, some of what was doomed to thaw went to the staff. Even after eating melting cream cakes all day, they were unable to save it all, however; the wheelie bins filled up that day.

Image by nicotitto via Unsplash

Drawer (set to chill mode), -1°C : fish and meat

In 2017 the World Food Summit in Copenhagen debated how to reduce food waste. One of the many ideas raised came from the director of a multinational food company. ‘The solution, ladies and gentleman,’ he said, ‘is predictability’ – consumer behaviour being pinned down all the more. Call restaurants to tell them what you are going to eat. Let shops know what you are going to buy. Smart fridges will help with this: upon entering a shop, they will scan their interior using cameras, send you a shopping list and suggest that you do something about that cauliflower stuffed in the bottom drawer. ‘Hey, Marta, fancy some cauliflower soup today? Please eat me, Marta, because if you don’t, I’ll write about it on your profile and you’ll be embarrassed.’

A cool ‘home hub’ connected to the Internet – the marketing buzzword used by manufacturers for smart fridges – could make throwing away food less intimate, and therefore less likely. The price paid for this will be, as usual, information about our daily lives: what we buy, eat and throw away. Those who gain access to this knowledge will, no doubt, be delighted.

*

We managed without a fridge for several weeks. Eventually, we bought a new one: a free-standing fridge of average size by European standards, only without the drawers that keep vegetables in a state of delicious turgor (a pity, I know). Neither does it have an ice maker, an in-built touch screen, or any kind of surveillance apparatus. It’s filled with a refrigerant that, theoretically, has no greenhouse potential but is already beginning to gurgle alarmingly.

The author wishes to thank Zaslaw Adamaszek from the Museum of Technology in Warsaw for an informative talk on various aspects of mankind’s taming of the cold.

Translated by Stephen Gamage | Voxeurop

On 21 May 2013, the French writer Dominique Venner shot himself in the head in front of the altar at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. An identitarian, racialist and defender of the ‘long European memory’ (a belief that ascribes a common ethnic origin to the continent’s civilization), Venner had been out of politics for a long time. However, the relationship the Front national (FN), later the Rassemblement national (RN), has with his legacy sheds light on the evolution of the party and its willingness or otherwise to acknowledge its far-right tradition.

Venner was not a devoted fellow traveller of the FN. But his writings – above all the accounts of his life as a young fascist imprisoned in Gaullist jails after the Generals’ Putsch of 1961, and later as an aesthete who loved hunting and neo-pagan solstice festivals – have been favourites among several generations of FN activists.

For the RN’s young supporters, Venner represents both activist aristocracy and the figure of an engaged intellectual in a political clan whose traditional heroes became taboo after 1945. Venner’s suicide successfully turned him into a myth. In a letter read out by the historian Bernard Lugan on the rightwing broadcaster Radio Courtoisie, Venner explained his actions as necessary to ‘break the lethargy that afflicts us’ and claimed he was a martyr to the ‘great replacement’, the racist idea that white Europeans are victims of a ‘genocide by substitution’ as a result of immigration.

The day after his death, no-one was surprised to see a tweet commending his legacy from Marine Le Pen, by then had been president of the FN for two years: ‘All respect to Dominique Venner, whose final, eminently political act was to try to wake up the people of France.’ At that time, Le Pen was still embracing the heritage of her political clan.

Marine Le Pen at a rally before the 2017 French presidential elections. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Getting back in line

Ten years later, her relationship with France’s far right has changed. Le Pen did not flinch when the tribute to Venner organized by the Institut Iliade (a far right think tank founded to further Venner’s thought) was banned by prefectorial order in May 2023. Only two years before, the RN had protested against the dissolution of the far-right movement Génération identitaire, despite this group being more violent than the Institut Iliade, which limits itself to organizing lectures and running courses. ‘On this question as on all others, the RN followed Marine’s instructions: take cover, silence in the ranks,’ remarked Jean-Yves Le Gallou, cofounder of the Institute. ‘But we received lots of messages of sympathy in private.’

Although many activists and senior figures in Le Pen’s movement continue to venerate Venner privately, public homage is no longer welcome. When the student union La Cocarde – which is not affiliated with the RN but provides many of its parliamentary assistants – commemorated Venner on its social networks, the number two in the RN group in the National Assembly, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, brought those concerned to order. Although there was no mention of Venner in the reading list of the youth wing of the RN (Rassemblement national de la jeunesse – RNJ) published in summer 2023, it was compiled by Pierre-Romain Thionnet, the president of the youth movement, a fan and true connoisseur of Venner’s work.

Identitarians are not the only groups with whom the RN is trying to cut ties (or wants to be seen to be doing so). Anyone with a link to violence or radicalism is instructed to remain out of the spotlight. At the demonstration against the banning of the Venner Tribute on 9 May 2023, organized by the nationalist and anti-semitic student organisation Groupe union défense (GUD), images of activists in hoods and masks brandishing the Celtic cross (a neofascist symbol) shocked public opinion. Several RN spokespeople demanded the dissolution of the GUD and all violent extremist factions. However, figures close to Marine Le Pen confirmed their links to the group. At least two of the young demonstrators, one of whom had already been found guilty of violent offences, were identified by Libération as regularly attending the RNJ’s weekly lectures at the party’s headquarters.

Steeped in a far-right ideology that they are no longer allowed to openly embrace, RN activists now belong to a party without a real common culture. Among the key figures promoted by Le Pen, pride of place goes to defectors from traditional parties. Above all, the party’s narrative has lost its coherence. Le Pen has unpicked the far-right folklore that characterized her father’s party, but she is now left with something threadbare. This situation partly explains the emergence of Éric Zemmour. Moreover, it invites the question as to whether the RN still a far-right party that is hiding its true nature, or whether, through the arrival of defectors and the abandonment of swathes of its programme, it has lost its ideological coherence in favour of a patchwork of nationalism, radical rightwing thought, populism, pragmatism, demagogy and even some elements of progressivism. Is this a strategy of subterfuge or bargain-basement nationalism?

Marine Le Pen’s party muddies the waters. The media narrative calls this ‘de-demonization’ – a problematic neologism, since it originates in the FN camp and suggests that the ‘system’ is responsible for the ‘demonization’ of the party, as supposedly the only anti-establishment party working in the interests of French people. As if Jean-Marie Le Pen never played with transgression (racism and antisemitism) or emphasized his unique position on the political spectrum. Self-demonization involves cultivating one’s uniqueness and styling oneself as a victim justified in making attacks because of the persecutions one suffers. Described as Marine Le Pen’s strategy to climb the greasy pole of power, ‘de-demonization’ is as old as the FN itself. See Alexandre Dézé, Le Front national: A la conquête du pouvoir? (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012).

Inside institutions but not part of the system

Is de-demonization still the RN’s strategy? Things have become less certain now that the party has eighty-eight deputies (elected representatives sitting in the Assemblée nationale) and presents itself as ‘inside institutions but not part of the system’. In 2023, the mission for Le Pen’s deputies is apparently to blend in. To her troops, Marine Le Pen has given them the same advice as Jean-Paul Sartre’s grandmother in Les Mots: ‘Gently, mortals, be discreet!’ It is better not to be noticed at all than to be noticed for the wrong reasons. ‘They are obsessed with making sure there are no slip-ups’, claimed a veteran of the right wing.

The fact is, there was no parliamentary far right to speak of before the legislative elections in June 2022. Of the eight FN politicians elected in 2017, only three deputies remained: Le Pen, Bruno Bilde and Sébastien Chenu (as well as two replacements who took office near the end of the term). Among those who entered the Assembly, only a handful had parliamentary experience: Jean-Philippe Tanguy and Alexandre Loubet had worked there for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, and Florence Goulet had supported Henri Guaino. ‘We were starting from zero’, summarized Renaud Labaye, the general secretary of the group. ‘We had to create an organization of two hundred and fifty people from nothing and have it running straight away.’

The new recruits were kept in line. Among the senior figures, many were not longstanding party members. Chenu joined the FN in 2015, as did Franck Allisio, a spokesperson for the group. Both came from the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, renamed Les Républicains in 2015) and continued to be on good terms with their former colleagues. Jean-Philippe Tanguy, the group’s number two, together with his friend Alexandre Loubet and Thomas Ménagé, the RN’s representative on the Law Committee and the party’s frontman during the debate on retirement reform, came from Debout la France, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s small sovereignist party. They overshadowed Le Pen’s older supporters, such as Frédéric Boccaletti, deputy for Le Var, who ran a bookshop carrying Holocaust-denying books and was sentenced to a year in prison (released on parole after six months) for joint enterprise racist violence. Another was José Gonzalez, député for Les Bouches-du-Rhône and currently the oldest member of the National Assembly, who praised French Algeria when giving the opening speech for the sixteenth parliamentary term.

In fact, the FN/RN has always given prominent roles to defectors, whether they have come from the UMP, from the left (Andréa Kotarac, formerly a member of La France Insoumise, head of the RN list in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and a spokesperson who works directly with Le Pen), or from civil society (Hervé Juvin, Member of the European Parliament, from whom the RN distanced itself at the end of 2022 after he was convicted of domestic violence). For backbench politicians, joining the RN opens up access to posts that would be out of reach in their former parties, and allows them to extend careers that are coming to an end. This has been the case for Jean-Paul Garraud and Thierry Mariani, both elected MEPs in 2019, who came from Les Républicains.

In return, Marine Le Pen gets to dilute the far-right character of her party. If the old guard gnashes their teeth, so much the better: it proves the boss wants to change the party she inherited from her father. Defections are essential to the theatre of Le Pen’s ‘de-demonization’, where she now plays opposite Éric Zemmour. There is no need for a crystal ball to predict that the RN’s list in the 2024 European elections will prominently feature newcomers from other political backgrounds.

RN deputies are expected to attend the Assembly assiduously, although this is often less useful than time spent in committees, where they have shown less agility and effectiveness than other parliamentary groups. When the group meets each Tuesday morning, the secretary-general Renaud Labaye repeats his slogan: ‘We aren’t here to have fun.’ The troops are scolded when they lose their composure: ‘Stop your nonsense, think of the impression you’re making’, orders Sébastien Chenu or Jean-Philippe Tanguy when they get too excitable.

Conscious that it is through appearing serious (as opposed to being serious) and by building relationships with MPs from other groups (more than their skill in influencing parliamentary business) that the RN will score points, Le Pen’s deputies are careful to be especially polite and obliging towards their colleagues. Along with this collegiate approach goes a ‘constructive’ political strategy: vote for all legislation that goes in the right direction, even if it does not go far enough, and even if it comes from the left. The RN expects the same thing from its opponents and bemoans their sectarianism when they do not support relatively anodyne legislation.

The RN’s parliamentary niche in January 2023 indicated a desire to depoliticize, and in so doing to pull the rug from under their regular critics. Out of the nine pieces of legislation tabled, two were copied almost word for word from other rightwing groups and the majority party. None related to immigration or ‘national preference’ (giving priority to French citizens), although one text did propose establishing a presumption of legitimate defence for those working in law enforcement. The RN put forward legislation ‘which corresponds to the concrete concerns of citizens’, Le Pen maintained: the removal of low-emissions zones, deputies to be elected by single-round proportional representation, recalculation of the tax for domestic rubbish collection, etc. Its positioning in the fight against the retirement age reforms – opposing the reforms in the parliament and the media while remaining absent from the protests – also showed that the RN prefers to hold back, even to the point of looking idle. Marine Le Pen intends to table mainly consensus-building legislation during the RN’s next parliamentary window in October.

‘People say that they have succeeded in the first stage of their term of office because they haven’t pissed on the carpet, but the reality is that they haven’t done anything,’ summarized a former RN member who has switched allegiance to Reconquête! (the party founded by Éric Zemmour in 2021). What has been called a ‘suit and tie approach’ – a readiness to blend into the institution – has never been a concerted strategy. ‘All of that is nonsense, people realize that we are not savages and they think that it’s a strategy’, said Nicolas Meizonnet, RN deputy for Le Gard, doubtless aware that doing nothing is a strategy in itself.

It is also deployed outside of the National Assembly. Party activists are allowed to hand out leaflets in the street, but when plans for an asylum centre or facility for unaccompanied minors are made public, the leadership forbids the faithful from taking part in demonstrations. During a protest in Saint-Brévins (Loire-Atlantique), at least a dozen RN activists told Libération they were there incognito. Those higher up accept that they can only participate in events over which they have absolute control. This is why Le Pen abandoned the traditional 1 May parade past the statue of Joan of Arc in Paris, which always attracted the skinhead faction, and why ‘blue, white and red’ festivals, at which bookstalls always featured works by Brasillach, Venner, or Saint-Loup, are no longer allowed. Instead, on 1 May 2023 the party held a ‘festival of the nation’ in Le Havre. It took place in a closed auditorium far from the town centre: this was the far-right vacuum-packed for the media, with no chance of spoiled goods being on show.

In the shadows

But it is doubtful whether this attempt to improve the RN’s image can totally mask its true nature. Alongside the high-ranking defectors Marine Le Pen likes to showcase, others lurk in the shadows whom the party seems unable or unwilling to do without.

One example is e-Politic. The company takes care of the RN’s communications and is 45 percent owned by two former members of the far-right student organisation Groupe union défense (GUD), who are still very close to the nationalist-revolutionary movement. While the party maintains that e-Politic is simply a service provider, many of its staff are also party activists, or even elected representatives. Sometimes it becomes difficult to tell the difference between the two organizations.

‘It’s an incubator’, explains a senior member of the RN who used to work for the agency. ‘Working for them means doing comms, looking deeply into issues, following the news, developing political instincts… It’s really formative.’ The work of e-Politic is essential in a context where the RN currently has no training structure for its younger members, nor the means to compensate its foot soldiers. Among those who surround Jordan Bardella, RN’s president, are two senior figures trained at the company. Both came through the FN’s youth wing, just like Paul-Alexandre Martin, the founder and now majority shareholder of e-Politic. Martin is generally considered the spiritual heir to Frédéric Chatillon, former leader of the GUD, and close friend of Marine Le Pen.

Martin’s radical roots have also led him to recruit within far-right movements. The company notably employed a young RN parliamentary assistant with links to neo-Nazi groups for several years, as well as activists from Alvarium, an Angers far-right faction dissolved in November 2021. The whiff that emerges from e-Politic has led Bardella to commit to bringing party communications in-house insofar as is possible. In 2020 the party, faced with financial difficulties, dispensed with almost all of its communications team. The man responsible for axing the jobs was the MEP Jean-Lin Lacapelle, the RN’s ‘HR man’, but also close to the ‘GUD connection’ and known to be a friend of Frédéric Chatillon.

Looking at the RN delegation at the European Parliament, where management is less heavy-handed than in the Assemblée nationale, one can see evidence of all the things that the party tries to sweep under the rug. Foremost among them are networks linking the RN to the New Right. David L’Épée, a close associate of Alain de Benoist, the intellectual figurehead of New Right, was invited speak to the European Parliament on the dangers of ‘wokeism’. His second speech was cancelled by the RN after Libération published an article revealing his links with Alain Soral, another far-right ideologue, as well as his promotion of an antisemitic artist and his speeches on gender ideology, which L’Épéeclaimed was a plot by George Soros to persuade white people not to have children and thus to enable the ‘great replacement’. See Nicolas Massol, Maxime Macé, and Pierre Plottu, ‘Contre le wokisme, le RN enrôle un compagnon de route de nombreux antisémites’, Libération, 13 April 2023.

To fill in for L’Épée’s at the last minute, the RN called on another figure from the same circles: François Bousquet, editor of Éléments magazine, also close to de Benoist and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former MEP for FN and now member of Zemmour’s party Reconquête. In such settings, subtle signals are important: they allow people to recognize one another. Thus, in Bousquet’s Nouvelle Librairie bookshop, there is a stuffed boar’s head presented by Gilles Soulas, who ran a bookshop in the 1990s that carried antisemitic and Holocaust-denying works.

Antisemitism is alive and well within the RN, on whose premises the motto of collaborationist Jacques Doriot is still displayed: ‘The Party owes you nothing, you owe the Party everything.’ This summer, at summer schools run by the fundamentalist party Civitas, the essayist Pierre Hillard suggested stripping Jews of their citizenship, in a caricature of Catholic antisemitism that the RN quickly denounced. However, at least two of Hillard’s close associates have connections to the RN. One of them, Sylvain Durain, was invited to the European Parliament in March, despite having denounced ‘a major Jewish infiltration within global organizations such as the Red Cross, human rights organizations, NGOs, and also – or should I say most of all – the Church.’ The other, Thibault Kerlizin, is the author of studies paid for by the RN, including one on the ‘influence of NGOs’ on the European Union. In it, he cites the private newsletter Faits et documents, which speaks of Jews as an ‘organized community’ and started a rumour that Brigitte Macron was a trans woman.

These networks are not without influence on France’s largest opposition party, which periodically expresses a frankly conspiracist vision of the world. Thus, on 1 May 2023, Marine Le Pen denounced the French president, ‘wokeism’, the Green’s ‘perverted’ ecology, and the European Union in terms laden with connotations: ‘There are transitions to which our times lead us … but there are also others that small coteries invent, “the demographic transition”, and finally those that are quietly established, without anyone talking about them, behind the backs of European populations, the “transition of civilizations”.’

Among Le Pen’s targets was the relocation of asylum seekers ‘currently underway in many villages’, which she referred to as a ‘migratory flood scheme’. She used numerous circumlocutions to avoid espousing the racist theory of the ‘great replacement’. It is unsurprising that her speechwriter, Philippe Olivier, is not a last-minute defector, but an authentic far-right activist whose networks are intertwined with his sister-in-law’s party.

But apart from a few fundamentals, foremost among them ‘national preference’ (putting French citizens first), it is difficult to discern a clear RN position. Le Pen has followed a stubbornly populist route in economics, which distances her from a liberal rightwing position, but also a socialist one. Even on those issues at the heart of her doctrine, the head of the RN enjoys defying expectations. Thus, during the presidential campaign, Le Pen quietly abandoned her commitment to abolishing dual nationality. This dogma was a crucial marker of nationalism, intrinsic to the exclusive nature of nationality that is either inherited or earned. ‘I have met thousands of people’, she said, ‘who legally cannot renounce their nationality because their country forbids it. Honestly, I’d rather set that all aside, as it’s like rubbing salt into a wound.’

Without denying that Le Pen has the capacity to change her mind, it is noteworthy that this idea was justified within the party by the necessity that citizenship can be withdrawn: anyone who only has a French passport cannot be deported. It should also be noted that the RN still proposes drastically limiting bi-nationals’ access to jobs in ‘sovereign’ sectors such as defence, policing and justice: ‘No-one can have two allegiances’, argued the secretary-general of the group in the National Assembly, revealing his implicit position that those with dual nationality are not as French as everyone else.

Published in cooperation with CAIRN International Edition, translated and edited by Cadenza Academic Translations.

Boretto, province of Reggio Emilia, northern Italy. Under the bridge at the entrance to the town, the river is almost invisible. The concrete foundations of its pillars, usually submerged, stand out. Where once flowed Italy’s longest river, the Po, there is now a large beach. Where once was a riverbed, boys and girls now venture on foot. A couple walks with a dog, throwing sticks into the distance. The animal races to retrieve them, happy to explore  a territory normally off limits.

It’s April 2023. Not a single raindrop has fallen for two-and-a-half months. The river’s flow has dropped dramatically, raising fears of a repeat of what happened in 2022, when the Po reached its lowest flow in recorded history. ‘The river is at an extremely low level for the season,’ confirms engineer Alessio Picarelli from the Interregional Agency for the Po River (Aipo).

The agency, headquartered in Boretto, carries out hydrographic surveys. The meatori – the workers responsible for controlling the depth of the river – set out from here and the seven other stations every day. The agency then issues a bulletin to report on navigability conditions. It is a privileged observer of the so-called magre: the periods in which the Po suffers.

The lack of rain, combined with the absence of snow in the mountain ranges, is putting Italy’s greatest river under great strain. The snow does not fall at the same rate anymore and the Alpine glaciers, reservoirs of fossil water, are growing smaller. If on top of that it doesn’t rain, the whole system goes into crisis. This is a situation that will probably grow more and more frequent in the near future.

‘These flows are normally recorded in August’, says Picarelli. ‘But with an additional fact: in the summer, water is used for agriculture.’ In other words, when farmers pump water for irrigation, the problem will be even greater. ‘For years, predictive climate models have been telling us about the possibility of the Po Valley drying up. This is happening before our eyes. This is the trend. But, of course, the current situation could change at any moment.’

And indeed it did. In mid-May 2023, an unusual quantity of rain fell on various parts of the Po Valley, causing several rivers and streams to overflow. The Po ultimately remained within its banks, but many of its tributaries overflowed, with catastrophic impacts and a grave human toll: 16 people dead and 23,000 displaced.

Flooding in Emilia Romagna in 2023. Image: Nick.mon; source: Wikimedia Commons

A lack of vision

The Po is a litmus test for the increasingly marked effects of the climate crisis in Italy. At the centre of the Mediterranean area, the country is a climate hotspot, where the consequences of global warming are most pronounced. Rising temperatures, together with a succession of extreme weather events, are stressing the area.

According to the European Severe Weather Database, Italy experienced 3192 extreme weather events in 2022; some 2766 have already been registered in the first nine months of 2023. This is an astronomical rate, considering that the number rarely exceeded 100 between 2000 and 2010.

‘In Italy and throughout the Mediterranean, global climate warming has a special effect: not only is the average temperature rising, the extremes are also increasing because the circulation of the atmosphere is changing,’ explains atmospheric physicist Antonello Pasini. ‘Before, we were used to the high atmospheric pressure that always came from west to east, mainly with the famous Azores anticyclone. This anticyclone was a buffer of stable air, and protected us from the weather disturbances in Northern Europe, as well as from the African heat. Now anthropogenic global warming has caused the tropical equatorial circulation to expand northward. This change means African anticyclones, previously permanently present in the Sahara desert, are entering the Mediterranean and reaching Italy. When they eventually move back, cold currents enter and meet with the previous warm and humid air, creating an enormous thermal contrast. And this is how extreme weather events happen.’

Fluctuation between alarmingly low water levels and catastrophic floods seems to be the new trend on the Po, as on several other Italian rivers. The 2022 drought was the worst in 200 years, causing agricultural yields and hydroelectric production to plummet. According to Italy’s largest agricultural association Coldiretti, water shortages caused a 10 percent drop in Italy’s agricultural production, with farmers estimated to have lost approximately six billion euros. This year has been little better, with the succession of droughts and extreme events causing enormous damage on a similar scale.

‘We should call things by their name: we are in the midst of a climate emergency.’ Born and raised in the area, Giuliano Landini is the living memory of the river. He is the captain of the Stradivari, Italy’s longest inland cruise ship. At the helm of his vessel, anchored in the port of Boretto, he is disconsolate. He looks at the river and shakes his head.

For years the captain has been complaining of a lack of vision for Italy’s largest river. ‘The current climate scenario clearly shows us the weakness of the system. Either we weep because the Po is dry, or we live in fear of floods. The fact is that the river has been abandoned to itself. I always ask myself: why does the Seine, the Danube, the Elbe – all the great European rivers –  remain navigable while the Po suffers?”

For Landini, the solution is clear: bacinizzazione, or basinisation. This plan would consist of dams with hydroelectric power plants and navigation locks. ‘This would allow the river to always be navigable and would avoid wasting water when there is plenty of it. As a man of the river, like my father and grandfather, I can assure you that we will not come out of this until we manage the water once and for all through dams on the Po.’

A previous campaign in the area called for five dams. Only one has been built, on Isola Serafini in the Piacenza province, with a basin and a hydroelectric power station. The other plans have been shelved. And it was decided to keep the river flowing freely.

Basinisation is not a solution shared by everyone – least of all environmentalists, who fear too radical a change in ecosystems. But one part of Landini’s argument is indisputable: the Po is a forgotten territory. What was once a vibrant place, with its own culture and economy, is now on the margins, ignored by politicians and even by those who live along its banks.

Overused and undervalued

‘No one likes to talk about the Po’, continues Landini. ‘Yet its water is useful for everyone: for agriculture, industry, energy production and more.’ It is the giant Italian paradox. A third of the country’s inhabitants live in the Pianura Padana, the Po Valley. It generates 40 per cent of the national GDP, 35 percent of agricultural production, and 55 percent of hydroelectric production. Yet the Po is treated as an obstacle not as a resource. Or even worse: as a reservoir from which to draw water for the valley’s many factory farms, to take gravel, or to use as a sewer for industrial wastewater.

‘The area has been over-exploited. It is no secret that it is the most polluted region in Europe’, says Paolo Pileri, professor of Territorial and Environmental Planning at the Polytechnic of Milan. He explains that the flooding in Emilia-Romagna last May had such disastrous effects because the territory had been made fragile by human action. ‘Between 2020 and 2021, Emilia-Romagna is the region with the third highest rate of land consumption in Italy. Some 658 hectares were concreted over in just one year, equal to 10.4 percent of the national total. In just a few years the water resistant surface in the region has reached 8.9 percent, compared to a national average of 7.1 per cent. We know perfectly well that water does not filter through asphalt but instead flows quickly off it, accumulating in quantity and energy, and causing damage and victims.’

It is almost as though the Po and its tributaries, made invisible by human exploitation, are taking back the space that was stolen from them. ‘The Po is like a wounded giant. It swells and dries up at will. It becomes mean with water when agriculture is most thirsty. And it dispenses hardship and afflictions to those inhabitants who have turned their backs on him,’ Landini says poetically.

Faced with these erratic river trends, the numerous stakeholders who use the Po’s water are trying to envision solutions. ‘Data from recent years shows that drought is becoming a structural problem. The challenges of climate change impose a new reality in which we cannot blame an irrational use of the resource’, says Francesco Vincenzi, an agricultural entrepreneur and president of the National Association of Land and Irrigation Water Management. Agricultural organisations are active in proposing solutions for what to them is a vital problem. ‘To deal with the growing water shortage, it is necessary to launch an infrastructure plan to adapt irrigation channels and the safety of the water resource,’ adds Vincenzi.

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan, the funding instrument approved by the European Union after the Covid-19 pandemic, allocates 880 million euros precisely for the purpose of making the irrigation system more efficient and building containment basins. ‘These mini-reservoirs will allow water to be conserved in a multi-functional perspective, both for agriculture and for energy. Considering that today we retain just 11 percent of water, it is urgent to carry out these works.’

Everyone seems to agree on the need to retain a resource that is becoming scarcer every day. “But it’s also necessary to question the agricultural model that is dominant in the Po Valley,’ adds Pileri. ‘Farmers complain about an ecosystem that has become unbalanced, but it is these same farmers who have partly made it so. To give an example: in the central part of the Po, there are enormous expanses of corn, a crop that requires a lot of water. This corn is not used for human consumption, but to feed pigs on intensive farms and to make biogas. Does it make sense to use water to produce feed and energy instead of products for human consumption?’

According to Pileri, the only solution is to rethink the development model: that would mean stopping land consumption, changing production paradigms, and rethinking our relationship with ecosystems. But his reasoning does not attract much support. Despite the repeated disasters and the extensive damage to people and property, the fight against the climate crisis is not at the top of the Meloni government’s agenda.

Italy is one of the few European countries that does not have a national plan for adaptation to climate change. A draft plan has been lying around at the Ministry of the Environment since 2017, awaiting an evaluation that has never come. Some members of the governing coalition have repeatedly said that global warming is an overestimated problem.

The approach towards the Po Valley echoes that of the Italian government towards the climate emergency as a whole. Until the next drought or catastrophic event, when indifference will temporarily give way to counting the costs and bewailing an ‘inevitable’ and ‘unpredictable’ misfortune.

We are proud to present the first episode of Eurozine’s new weekly talk show, Standard Time. The inaugural discussion takes stock of societal pressures, especially on women, regarding youthfulness and the often unrealistic standards set by society. The episode features three distinguished guests, each bringing a unique perspective to the discussion.

Marleen Wynants joins online from the Netherlands. She is the director of Crosstalks, and a guest editor of the Flemish journal rekto:verso. She co-curated their 99th edition, dedicated to the theme of ageing. Her recent book has gained significant attention for its thoughtful analysis of ageing and its impact on society.

Fiona Rupprecht is a gerontologist from the University of Vienna. Dr Rupprecht’s work focuses on the science behind ageing, offering valuable insights into the biological and psychological aspects of this inevitable process.

Zsófia Loránd is a historian of ideas and a recurring author of Eurozine, who brings a fresh perspective on societal age norms. Her work challenges conventional beliefs and promotes new ways of understanding age in the context of historical and cultural developments. Find her articles taking stock of feminist foremothers hereby.

Join us for this thought-provoking episode that promises to shed light on the existential aspects of ageing and how it shapes our lives. Tune in to Standard Time and engage in a conversation that redefines the narrative of ageing in today’s world.

Related reads

Marleen Wynants, Goedele Nuyttens. Age: From the Anatomy of Life to the Architecture of Living
rekto:verso’s thematic issue on ageing, co-edited by Marleen Wynants
Baba Yaga laid an egg by Dubravka Ugrešić
Fiona Rupprecht’s research article on ageing
Zsófia Lóránd honouring the prolific feminist journalist and author Slavenka Drakulić

Cited source

Bret Stetka for Scientific American on ‘Extended Adolescence: When 25 Is the New 18′

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer

Management

Hermann Riessner, managing director
Judit Csikós, project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

Video crew, Okto TV

Senad Hergić, producer
Leah Hochedlinger, video recording
Marlena Stolze, video recording
Clemens Schmiedbauer, video recording
Richard Brusek, sound recording

Postproduction

István Nagy, lead video editor
Kateryna Kuzmenko, dialogue editor

Art

animation by Victor Maria Lima
theme music by Cornelia Frischauf 

Hosted by The Alte Schmiede Kunstverein, Vienna

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a content-sharing platform soon to premiere.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation. Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Nostalgia appears to be a defining trait of our times. It emanates from virtually everywhere: popular culture, fashion, art, even politics are shrouded in a bittersweet haze of melancholic admiration for, and recreation of, the past – or at least attempts to do so. A human world devoid of mourning is likely impossible. Our very constitution as subjects always has us clinging to phantoms of the past that we cannot easily release.

A high libidinal investment in objects and its consequent cathexes linger, leading to a certain inertia, characteristic of the psyche’s workings. This can be likened to a sluggishly echoing ‘estuarine delay of discourse’ – a counterpart to Jacques Derrida’s originary delay. Derrida developed this concept across several of his books and articles starting with his early dissertation on Husserl (Speech and Phenomena, Northwestern University Press, 1979). See also: Freud and the Scene of Writing, in: J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, Routledge, 2005, especially the section entitled Breaching and Difference, pp. 251 – 258.
Things are never immediately present in discourse as they are in the Real; it always takes time for them to reconfigure the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Similarly, they always leave a residue in the domain of symbols and images as they fade back into oblivion. Hence, the cognitive and existential are perpetually, unavoidably, out of sync.

Yet, not in all moments of history is this particular trait of subjective functioning as pronounced as it is today. We seem to exist in a sort of BDSM configuration – especially in its bondage and submission aspects – where restraint is so pervasive that it becomes the primary, if not sole, source of enjoyment.

The lost future dream

Disused lighthouse, Talacre, UK. Image via Wikimedia Commons

That is precisely the political situation we find ourselves in. It’s unsurprising that conservatism is deeply imbued with nostalgia. After all, by its very nature, conservatism must invest psychic energy in the past, where its sublime object of fantasy resides. However, the other two historically significant political ideologies – the liberal and the progressive (in the continental sense of these terms) – have typically been more oriented towards possible utopias of the future than nostalgic retrotopias of the past. This is especially true for the progressive stance. Over the past two centuries, movements such as those of feminists or trade unions have consistently championed an ideal world that can only be envisioned as a future dream and never recognized as a past reality.

But there’s little of that utopic optimism left today. While feminists may be naturally the most resistant to temptations of nostalgic mourning of the past, the broader left appears mainly focused on addressing immediate threats and grievances – manifested in the ecological movement and identity politics, respectively – or lamenting the lost welfare state of a bygone era (as exemplified by figures like Sanders, Mélenchon or Corbyn). The potent revolutionary cry of The Internationale – ‘masses, slaves, arise, arise; the world is about to change its foundation’ – that fuelled progressive battles for decades, seems to have gone silent.

Mainstream liberal discourse is in no better shape. Its depressive melancholy is closely tied to the last three decades’ decline of liberal hegemony. In the early 1990s, liberalism celebrated what appeared to be its decisive and final victory. The fall of the Soviet bloc promised more than just the individual liberation of several eastern European states. It was widely interpreted as the final confirmation of a broader modernization process – the grand culmination of capitalist modernity’s free market, individual liberties and parliamentary representation. Fukuyama (in)famously dubbed this ‘the end of history’. F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, No. 16, 1989, pp. 3–18.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, the fundamental flaw in that vision is glaringly obvious. Paradoxically, the failure of really existing communism – liberalism’s chief rival – led not so much to the latter’s universal triumph as to the ongoing decomposition of capitalist modernity after the end of the Cold War. A proliferation of anti-modern, anti-liberal and anti-progressive movements have accompanied this decline worldwide. Among the most significant have been religious fundamentalism and political populism.

The former showed its destructive force early in the century with the 9/11 attacks in the US, effectively dispelling the myth of universal and uncontested global enthusiasm for capitalist modernity. The ascent of populism has been more gradual, but since the early 1990s, it has consistently gained more and more support. This culminated in a series of significant electoral successes in the 2010s, with figures and movements like Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Modi, Brexit, Kaczyński, Duterte, Front National, and AFD (Alternative for Germany), to name a few. In certain regions, like Poland, populists have faced recent setbacks. However, the populist challenge is far from contained. It’s likely to persist and perhaps haunt us in various forms for the foreseeable future.

The return to essentialism

Truth be told, the unexpected surge of populism as an expression of discontent would have been less surprising if we had paid more attention to the disquiet that capitalist modernity stirred in the postcolonial world decades ago. Clifford Geertz, observing the aftermath of decolonization in various parts of the world, most notably in Indonesia, highlighted a crucial contradiction tied to the dialectical relationship between tradition and modernity, and to the growing integration of local societies into the global flow of cultural codes. In his 1971 text, After the Revolution: The fate of nationalism in the new states, he outlined the tension between ‘epochalism’ and ‘essentialism’. C. Geertz, ‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’, In: C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Fontana Press, 1993, p. 241.

For Geertz, epochalism signifies a desire to align with the zeitgeist and live up to the ideals of the epoch. The zeitgeist of the second half of the twentieth century encompassed liberal democracy and modernity, including universal suffrage, advanced means of communication, industrial infrastructure expansion and widespread prosperity. In contrast, essentialism embodies the aspiration to preserve one’s inherent qualities: culture, uniqueness, local characteristics, and the whole array of affiliated cultural norms and societal institutions.

Contrary to what Daniel Lerner once assumed, it is not accurate to say that developing nations simply idolize Western-style modernization and eagerly await its eventual establishment. While they undoubtedly wish to improve their harsh realities – after all, no one wants their malnourished offspring to succumb to diseases like malaria – they also hold a strong inclination to uphold their uniqueness. From this vantage point, both religious fundamentalism and populism can be seen as a shift away from epochalism and a return to essentialism – a shift so powerful that it has now defined another epoch of its own.

Hypotheses on modernity

Insightful new analyses have been made since Geertz’s original diagnosis. As Frederic Jameson aptly posited, modernity, which has been blossoming in the western world since the advent of capitalism, is an intricate amalgam of two distinct facets. Jameson identifies ‘modernization’, with reference to progress in material production, encompassing technology, infrastructure, machines, and the like, and ‘modernism’, which he interprets as a value system anchored in personal autonomy and emancipation. These two dimensions have historically been intertwined, yet their relationship is as intricate as it is intimate. F. Jameson, Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso, 2002.

Michel Foucault highlighted that, in certain contexts, these aspects can even be at odds. Specifically, the material advancement – which aligns with Jameson’s modernization – equips governing entities with enhanced tools to curtail individual freedoms, resonating with Jameson’s notion of modernism. Foucault posited that a pivotal challenge of the Enlightenment was discerning how to separate the augmentation of capabilities from the escalation of power dynamics. M. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, In: P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 47-8.

In the postcolonial realm, and manifestly in the rise of contemporary populism, we’ve observed a similar division or bifurcation of modernity but with a reverse objective: the aim has been to harness the new technological prowess imparted by modernization to stymie the spread of modernism (in Jameson’s understanding of these terms). This approach enabled those disenchanted with capitalist modernity to take advantage of the boons of material progress (aligned with Jameson’s modernization or Geertz’s epochalism) to bolster essentialism, curbing the thrust of modernity.

This tactic has proven instrumental in fragmenting the global landscape, with both religious fundamentalism and modern right-wing populism as its agents. We observe this strategy being deployed in Saudi Arabia, where a waning monarchy leverages its oil fortune to quash dissent. Similar patterns emerge in locales like Modi’s India and Erdoğan’s Turkey. This tactic lay at the heart of strategies adopted by Poland’s Law and Justice Party between 2015 and 2023: utilizing economic prosperity and the resources it garnered to support entities and individuals opposing the embrace of so-called ‘European values’, which champion inclusivity, equality and emancipation.

Ironically, the material facet of the modern project has achieved near-universal acceptance. With few exceptions like Bhutan or North Korea, capitalism has emerged as a force that unifies the world in a universally binding pattern of material relations. Yet, it hasn’t culturally united the globe. Instead, it has made the world more fragmented and socially divided than it was around 50 years ago, a time when even nations such as Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan seemed to have been on a journey of social and cultural transformation towards a liberal regime.

The reversal of modernization theory

Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ hypothesis marked dominated both social sciences and public discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, known as modernization theory. Following pioneering works such as Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto, W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
originally published in 1960, and Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East D. Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, The Free Press, 1958.
from 1958, modernization theorists contended that not only must tradition be eclipsed for modernity to thrive but a global, linear progression towards modernity also exists. In this view, developed nations act as beacons, illuminating the path forward for their developing counterparts.

This perspective wasn’t solely a mainstay of liberal thought. It found its parallel in leftist ideology. Indeed, it aligns with Marx’s observations on British colonial rule in India. The mark of a truly dominant ideology is its ability to resonate across diverse theories and approaches to social reality, even those constructed in opposition to one another.

Moreover, the modernization paradigm, which held sway in twentieth-century politics and social science, has not just been surpassed but indeed inverted. Now, it appears more plausible that the peripheries of the capitalist world system are foreshadowing the future of its centre, rather than the reverse.

Revisiting Lerner’s Modernizing the Middle East provides a telling case in point. Focusing on Turkey, Lerner illustrates how the nation emulated its social and political transformation on the trajectories of European powers, chiefly France and Germany. A significant component of this transformative effort was laicization, exemplified by policies such as the prohibition of all traditional religious attire.

Lerner postulated that, inspired by laicization in France, Turkey would, in a span of about 50 years, evolve to resemble Western Europe. Not only has this prediction not materialized, but the reverse seems to be unfolding: France, considered an unwavering bastion of laicization five decades prior, now grapples with legislation restricting women from donning head coverings in public spaces and institutions.

Other disturbing developments directly reverse the assumptions of modernization theory. One of the most significant is the precarization of labour relations at the heart of the capitalist world system. German sociologist Ulrich Beck, who wrote about the ‘Brazilianization’ of labour relations in Europe and the US, diagnosed this already in the late 1990s. U. Beck, The Brave New World of Work, Polity Press, 2000, especially the chapter ‘Thousand Worlds of Insecure Work. Europe’s Future Glimpsed in Brazil’, pp. 92-109.
He highlighted how both the job market and labour conditions in what used to be welfare states are increasingly resembling those familiar in Latin America.

Similar phenomena have been observed by urban anthropologists. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, in their book Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, draw attention to rising inequalities, deteriorating public infrastructure and declining social services that make cities in the so-called developed world increasingly resemble those in post-colonial countries. J. and J. L. Comaroff, Theory From the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, Paradigm Publishers, 2012.
Economists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson even go as far as labelling London ‘Lagos on Thames’ and suggest that the UK is moving towards a ‘third-world economy’ L. Elliott, D. Atkinson, Going South: Why Britain Will Have a Third World Economy by 2014, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Neo-liberal de-modernization

The latter example is particularly interesting, as it allows us to grasp the mechanism of de-modernization. This isn’t merely a cultural phenomenon but rather a by-product of recent developments within the capitalist economy – most notably the neo-liberal shift. This turn has triggered a consistent and systematic erosion of the public sector and the dismantling of various welfare mechanisms that previously provided relief to the most exploited social classes: consider, for instance, the decline of the NHS in the UK and the role it played in Brexit propaganda.

Thus, the tension between epochalism and essentialism, as described by Geertz, appears to be reconfigured: the spirit of the age, or the zeitgeist, now seems to favour cherishing one’s essence. No longer are even the most regressive prejudices of any society to be challenged; instead, countries that once stood as beacons of social progress now seem to be on a path of de-modernization. Ironically, while the world appears more unified, it is increasingly fractured.

Is this the demise of the idea of modernity and progress? That’s not the conclusion I aim to draw from this essay. What has undeniably come to an end is the association of modernity with a specific part of the world and its developmental trajectory – namely, the West.

This is, of course, deeply traumatic for the West.

As Slavoj Žižek observes, the admiration that everyone, especially Eastern Europe, held for the West acted as a source of gratification for its inhabitants. The gaze of the enraptured non-Western Other allowed Westerners to believe they weren’t merely partaking in a thoughtless consumerist frenzy but were instead leading the world in the vital task of modernization. Now, with populists and fundamentalists globally giving the liberal, westernized elites a figurative slap in the face, it becomes increasingly challenging for formerly dominating groups to maintain their paternalistic illusions, leading to their profound disarray.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s the realization that modernity was never a solely capitalist project. In truth, the heart of critical theory – with its opposition to capitalism as the ultimate structure for the world and its emphasis on individual emancipation – is also an integral part of the modern legacy. With its robust democratic facet, it aligns with a minoritarian strand of modernity that finds its conceptual roots in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.

The tension intrinsic to capitalist modernity, which Jameson depicted as the clash between modernization and modernism, is adeptly dissected by critical theory. Now, as capitalism teeters on the brink of devastating our entire ecosystem and as liberal modernity splinters, we need to cast our sights beyond capitalism, towards an alternative modern vision.

It is not a good time for nostalgia and melancholy, be it liberal or any other. If we fail to identify this new direction, the end of history we heralded 30 years ago might ominously foreshadow the end for the world, at least the world as we know it.

Being half-Jewish and half-Palestinian has one undoubted benefit: it teaches a young girl that peace is not a pipe dream and that any marriage, no matter how complicated, can be saved. However, coexistence between peoples is rather like a family meal; it can only be enjoyed if the norms are followed.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an apt example of the inherent fragility of the standards that regulate global affairs. Because international law is inherently discretionary, it is absolutely irrelevant whether the rules of the game are followed or not. State hegemony over the tools developed by the world to foster peace turns everyone’s supper into a tragedy.

The dynamics between Hamas and Israel, in particular, seek out alternative spaces to the norm and are fuelled by stories that twist the facts. Both sides use people’s suffering to advance their own causes.

Hamas distorts the nature of the fight by imbuing it with a religiosity that does not accurately reflect the Palestinian position. It is important to remember that Palestinians profess to more than one religion; since all are monotheistic, the only thing that unites them is the uniqueness of the God they believe in, and the name with which they address him. Before Hamas, which until the war was polling at less than 30%, Palestinian politics had been notoriously secular.

Writing to the kidnapped. Image: Lizzy Shaanan, via Wikimedia Commons

The Israeli government, on the other hand, uses Jewish history to justify ethnic cleansing. Two things are happening here: first, the world is being encouraged to ignore the fact that the Palestinian people have been under occupation for 75 years; second, the 7 October tragedy is being associated with the Holocaust to justify the massacre of another population. This not only disregards common understandings of historical causality – thereby breaking with Jewish tradition, which is intrinsically linked to the practice of looking backwards through time to make sense of the present – it also links all Jews to Israel’s unjust and illegal behaviour, thereby exposing them to a revival of antisemitism.

Law and context

The complexity at the heart of this conflict causes many to reduce the issue to a match in which one must pick a side, without understanding what is fundamental: that the international community takes these two peoples by the hand and guides them towards a coexistence governed by rules that they must accept and live by, like it or not. But for this coexistence to be feasible in the first place, there needs to be recognition of the humanity of every individual on both sides.

What occurred on 7 October must be strongly and emphatically condemned. International humanitarian law does not forbid resistance, nor does it prevent a nation’s self-defence, within the limits of humanity, distinction, precaution and proportionality, all of which aim to reduce the impact of war on civilians. But it does impose strict restrictions on any party that engages in armed conflict.

Belligerent parties are forbidden from using unlimited power and are required to minimize suffering throughout. Jus in bello, or laws during war, applies regardless of the rationale or justice of the causes for which they are fighting, and it tries to safeguard victims of armed conflicts regardless of allegiance. As a result, civilians must always be protected under all circumstances.

This did not occur on 7 October. The Hamas attacks caused civilian casualties, including the deaths of women, children and the elderly, and the destruction of non-military targets in residential villages. In abducting civilians, Hamas violated the principle of distinction, which forbids taking civilian hostages. Even in the case of prisoners of war, the principle of humanity in the treatment of detainees is to be respected. The murder and abuse of civilian hostages by Hamas defied these principles completely.

But is impossible to discuss the 7 October act without noting some other essential facts of international law. Military occupation is understood to be a transitory situation and there are rules governing an occupier’s behaviour. Above all, the occupier must ensure the occupied state’s sovereignty. This principle interacts with human rights and associated treaties to produce a number of obligations upon the occupying state regarding the protection of the rights of the local population.

These obligations include a prohibition on taking actions to significantly influence the legal system, as well as the economic, political and social conditions in the occupied region. The occupying state must oversee the orderly conduct of civil life in the territory under its control in order to safeguard the local population.

For years, Israel has argued that the Gaza Strip is not under occupation because it has been empty of Israeli colonies since 2005. International law, on the other hand, understands the situation in the Strip quite differently: Israel controls its land borders, marine trade, air traffic, all imports and exports, and all human mobility. As a result, international law considers the Gaza Strip to be under Israeli occupation.

What António Guterres was trying to convey when he said that the events of 7 October did not occur in a vacuum is that by contextualizing events we can grasp their origins, appreciate their complexities, and plan strategies to reverse negative trends or consolidate positive ones. Explaining does not imply legitimizing, and in this case it does not reduce the gravity of Hamas’s crimes or provide them with a justification.

Rights and responsibilities

We should be cautious about analogies with the past meant to appeal to emotion and anxiety that do not acknowledge the intricacies inherent in recent history. The charge of antisemitism, if imputed to any criticism of the Israeli state’s behaviour, risks becoming a restriction of freedom of speech.

The president of Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, said he was horrified ‘to see members of the Israeli delegation to the United Nations wearing the yellow star’, adding that ‘the yellow patch symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people and being at the mercy of others. Today we have an independent country and a strong army.’

Indeed, the Israeli of today is not the Jew of a century ago. All the conditions have been created for Jews to exercise their dignity with their heads held high in front of the rest of the world. Israel is a nuclear power backed by a global superpower. But power also comes with responsibility.

Being the master of one’s own destiny is no small thing; it confers not only the right to wage war, but also the obligation to think clearly and critically about what type of war that is, whether it is morally legitimate and, in Israel’s case, whether it is aimed at strengthening or weakening the values that have underpinned its existence for 75 years. It would be a tragedy if the principles that resulted in the constitution of the State of Israel after the Holocaust failed to prevent genocide against other populations.

Between 7 October  and 2 November, Israel dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs in an area of 360 square kilometres (less than half the size of Hiroshima). Furthermore, Israel has been accused of using internationally illegal weapons in its attacks on Gaza, particularly cluster and phosphorus bombs, which cause severe second and third-degree burns.

The death toll has now surpassed 12,000 and numerous military and government figures’ political comments demonstrate genocidal intent: the desire to raze the Strip to the ground and free Israel from the Palestinians has been declared several times. In recent weeks, Israeli media have published documents proving the government’s determination to evacuate the Strip and forcefully deport all Gaza’s residents to Sinai. Israel has now ordered the evacuation of the southern half of the Gaza Strip.

Fuelling extremism

Once again, there is a lack of foresight. The violence is not only brutal and illegal, but it will have far-reaching implications on many levels.

It has the potential to reawaken antisemitic attitudes in the wake of growing global outrage over Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza, as well as to drastically reverse Israel’s process of normalization and integration in an area where the Jewish state must coexist with countries that have long been hostile.

As in Bush’s war, Israel’s response pits western values against Islamic values, fuelling extremism at the expense of moderation. The escalation of the conflict through the intentional humiliation of certain ethnic and religious identities will only lead to greater extremism.

The scope of this war is currently expanding. It does not have to comprise regular armies. What should frighten governments now is not violence between sovereign states so much as the discontent of moderates who, abandoned and humiliated by their elected leaders’ shameful silence, are easily exploited by radical forces. Instead of denying extremists of oxygen, Israel, Palestine and the West in general is helping them to spread.

The guidelines the international community has given itself are extremely important. But unless they are universally applied, unless we are willing to honour and protect them always, without exceptions, the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter are doomed to lose meaning.

Conventional market-led solutions to water scarcity in the Arab Mediterranean, above all mega projects such as dams, have tended to support state agendas and reinforce inequalities in access. Water wars are not inevitable but the result of bad management.

More than 3.5 billion people around the world live in areas facing water scarcity. This figure is set to increase to 5 billion by 2050, as climate change favours extreme phenomena such as floods and droughts. More than half of the planet’s inhabitants will thus experience the results of competition for water first hand.

The most recent reports from the International Panel on Climate Change confirm these dramatic trends, noting the impact of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems, water infrastructure, food production and urban settlements. Some regions and sub-regions deserve particular attention: the Mediterranean space, for instance, is expected to suffer the most disastrous consequences along with small island states and parts of the African continent. These areas are not only highly exposed to climate change and water scarcity, but also to new economic challenges that are unprecedented in human history.

The Mediterranean region is the most water-scarce in the world, with the Arab countries particularly affected. Climate change compounds the effects of the already limited rainfall in this arid or semi-arid area. Population growth, including migration flows from rural to urban areas, further increases the demand for water resources. Communities already affected by water scarcity must prepare for increasingly devastating consequences in the short term.

Irrigation pipeline Libya. Image: Jaap Berk / Source: Wikimedia Commons

But water scarcity also has structural and institutional causes, namely poor management and a lack of sustainable water policies. Water management has long been at the centre of discourse and practice of NGOs and international organisations working in the field of development cooperation. This reflects the historical significance of the agricultural sector in political, economic, environmental and technological transformation, and the vital role played by water resources in this sector.

Since the 1950s, water management has encouraged technocratic approaches such as the construction of dams and national food self-sufficiency, which are seen as concrete solutions to the problem of water scarcity. This has led not only to the expansion of specific agricultural production models, but also to the consolidation of disparities and inequalities in access to and use of these resources. If current water resource management models continue to prevail in conjunction with increasing demand and unsustainable policies, there will not be enough water for everyone in the Mediterranean region.

Water wars?

Since the 1990s, we have heard of impending ‘water wars’, or of water becoming the ‘oil of the 21^st century’. Boutrous Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary-General from 1992 to 1996, once said that ‘the next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics.’ King Hussein of Jordan identified water as the sole factor that could lead his country to war with Israel.Janos J. Bogardi et al. (eds), Handbook of water resources management: Discourses, concepts and examples, Springer 2021, 186.

The media often portray water scarcity as the main driver of wars in semi-arid regions such as the Middle East, warning that such conflicts could also arise in the Mediterranean region. According to this line of argument, water is a question of national security. With demand exceeding supply, competition for transboundary water resources becomes a potential cause of armed conflicts.

This kind of narrative posits a deterministic link between water scarcity and population growth. Over two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus argued that food production would not be sufficient to meet the needs of a growing population, leading to famine and deaths. Today, neo‑Malthusians promote the idea of inevitable water wars, linking them to the new threat of climate change.

They overlook that all natural resources are finite, and therefore by definition limited. In 1972 the Club of Rome  emphasised absolute scarcity and the environmental limits to growth. Earth has finite physical resources to support the needs of human society, the report’s authors pointed out; if these thresholds are exceeded, the global system collapses.

Overall, The Limits to Growth underscored the need to reduce demand and consumption – an approach that is more important than ever in a society driven by abundance and the creation of ever new needs. The more recent concepts of the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries also stem from the belief that exponential growth and human activities themselves are exerting further pressure on the Earth system, and that this could cause irreversible changes to the climate and the environment, with catastrophic consequences.

Irrigation pipeline Libya. Image: Jaap Berk / Source: Wikimedia Commons

But some scientists have deemed the water wars discourse unfounded hyperbole and pointed out that the empirical evidence connecting water scarcity and armed conflicts between states is not clear. They stress that the ‘water wars’ theory has led to misleading conclusions based more on speculation than robust analysis. Tony Allan, for example, has developed the concept of ‘virtual water’, to quantify the water required to produce any good or service, starting with food. According to this model, importing a kilogram of cereals entails importing the corresponding amount of water used to produce it. With the concept of virtual water trade, Allan explains why there have been no water wars in the Middle East. In other words: food security need not mean food self-sufficiency.

Researchers at the International Peace Research Institute have also shown that the water wars discourse lacks empirical foundations and fails to consider other variables. For example, in the Senegal River conflict, ethnicity and class were more important factors than natural resources. In several Middle Eastern countries, general poverty is the primary reason for conflict, not water scarcity.N.P. Gleditsch, K. Furlong, H. Hegre, B. Lacina, and T. Owen, ‘Conflicts Over Shared Rivers: Resource Scarcity or Fuzzy Boundaries?’, Political Geography, vol. 25, no. 4/2006. This suggests that there is a stronger correlation between conflict and underdevelopment than between conflict and water scarcity (or natural resources more broadly).

Some scholars have argued that water scarcity can even be an opportunity for peace. Aaron Wolf, for example, has analysed transboundary water interactions over the past half-century, finding many cases of cooperation but no cases of wars over water.A.T. Wolf, A. Kramer, A. Carius, and G.D. Dabelko, ‘Water Can Be a Pathway to Peace, not War’, Navigating Peace, No. 1/2006.; A.T. Wolf, ‘The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database Project’, Water International, Vol. 24, No. 2/1999).
More recent critical literature on hydropolitics argues that cooperation is not always positive: treaties can codify an asymmetric status quo and themselves become a source of conflict. The nuances of conflict and cooperation vary: there are degrees of both, the critics of the cooperation model point out.See M. Zeitoun and N. Mirumachi, ‘Transboundary Water Interaction I: Reconsidering Conflict and Cooperation’, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, No. 8/2008).

The literature examining the politics of scarcity challenges neo-Malthusianism and its assumptions by analysing how scarcity is conceptualised. It emphasises that water scarcity is often used to support state political agendas, and that mega‑projects such as dams reinforce power asymmetries in water management and silence discussion of alternative solutions to water scarcity.  Dominant market-oriented engineering solutions, argue critics, neglect the question of who has access to how much water and why. In the West Bank, for example, water scarcity is a matter of structural discrimination against Palestinians, and of privileged access for illegal Israeli settlements. A similar situation exists in India, where access to some wells is denied to lower-caste women. In Apartheid-era South Africa, inequalities driven by discriminatory policies extended to the water sector.

Critics of the water scarcity paradigm therefore focus the attention towards who primarily benefits from traditional solutions and who is excluded. They argue that the major beneficiaries are private interests and the dominant class while, in the absence of redistributive mechanisms, the poor are further marginalised. Solutions, they propose, should involve dismantling the institutional barriers that cause discrimination and inequality. Lyla Mehta, for example, argues that scarcity is an indicator of a crisis of unequal power relations and that water crises ‘must also be seen as crises of distorted access and control over a finite resource’.L. Mehta, The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation, Routledge 2013. Moreover, as a hegemonic framework, scarcity is presented as a singular phenomenon. This results in an approach that overlooks regional differences or cyclical variations over time. This critique emphasises the need to investigate issues of access and equity rather than simply quantities and the balance between supply and demand.

Irrigation pipeline Libya. Image: Jaap Berk / Source: Wikimedia Commons

Water diplomacy

The scarcity of natural resources arises as much from human interactions and policy decisions as from inherent limitations. It is determined not just by the mass and availability of natural resources, but also by individual access to them, which is determined by political economy, institutional agreements and regional management. These arrangements influence the actions of formal and informal institutions to alleviate scarcity. Solutions tend to add more water resources to the system through the construction of new supply infrastructure, without analysing the ecology or socioeconomics of the region, or existing supply and infrastructure.

The result is that while the overall water supply in the system may increase, access reproduces existing conditions and fails to ensure more adequate and equitable distribution among the population. This is why policies in the Mediterranean region should be based on sustainable solutions, better management and fairer distribution of water resources among countries and populations.

At the regional level, the adoption of ‘water diplomacy’ practices would be useful in reducing potential conflictual relations among countries sharing transboundary water resources, such as the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, and the Jordan. The shared nature of transboundary water resources can lead to tensions over their allocation and use, which can in turn negatively impact inter-state relations and cooperation. Most freshwater resource systems cross jurisdictional boundaries, with 153 countries sharing transboundary rivers, lakes and aquifers. Coordinated and sustainable management of these resources through water diplomacy is therefore crucial.

The concept of water diplomacy emerged in the early 1990s. Its emphasis is less on the technical aspect of water governance than on its political aspects and implications for security, peace and stability.Hussein, H., Campbell, Z., Leather, J., & Ryce, P., Putting diplomacy at the forefront of Water Diplomacy. PLoS Water, 2(9), e0000173, (2023). Water diplomacy brings governments together primarily to discuss the benefits and services derived from the use of water, rather than the actual allocation of resources. Thus, while one country may be allocated more water, another may receive more hydroelectric power or food production in return. This type of diplomacy can have a broad range of applications and may lead to regional cooperation, peace, and stability. Its effectiveness depends on five critical elements: agreed-upon data, an effective governance structure, participatory and inclusive approaches, third-party support, and ecological considerations.

A consolidated and reciprocal understanding of data ensures that all agreements and treaties are based on accurate and solid evidence. Effective governance structures establish communication channels between riparian states for the collective implementation and maintenance of agreements. Participatory and inclusive approaches and stakeholder involvement enable agreements that respond to local needs and benefit from local participation. Third-party support can facilitate dialogue, capacity building and monitoring, which helps riparian states maximise mutual benefits. Finally, attention to ecological factors ensures the sustainability of water management and can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes.

When it comes to water resources, it is necessary to implement public policies that address growing challenges while simultaneously aiming to ensure fair distribution. Instead of purely technical projects, such as dam construction, we need a creative approach capable of addressing the increasing demands for water from various sectors and sub-regions. We must initiate new discussions about water scarcity, so as to stimulate reflection on methods of water management under increasingly precarious conditions.

Adopting new approaches to water scarcity in the Mediterranean means weighing the pros and cons of any methods used to ensure food security, given that the agricultural sector is the largest water consumer in most countries in the region. All of this will have implications for rural development. New jobs will need to be created while ensuring safe and stable food imports. The complexity of the challenge calls for a complete paradigm shift, not only to ensure water security, but also to prevent conflicts in many other areas.

Photo by Membeth via Wikimedia Commons

As the end of abundance becomes an everyday experience in Europe, we are thinking more closely about how our food reaches the table.

Lower yields, higher prices and struggling communities are just some of the social and economic costs of water scarcity and extreme weather. But how and what we eat is also inextricable from identity, tradition and cultural life.

The new Eurozine focal Breaking bread: Food and water systems under pressure explores political, social and cultural aspects of food and water across European societies, highlighting the dangers of a parched planet while picking out some seeds for a fair and sustainable food and water system to come.

Read Jessica Furseth on misconceived schemes to combat urban water shortages; Marta Sapała on the fridge as status symbol; Stefano Liberti on the crisis of Po Valley; and Hussam Hussein on why water wars are not inevitable.

Coming soon: Ukraine as Europe’s granary; food preservation in Poland; modernity and meat; a history of fertilizers; and the power of the farming lobby.

The series is an editorial collaboration between Eurozine and Green European Journal with the support of the EU Parliament to the Green European Foundation, featuring contributions from across the Eurozine network of European cultural journals.

Sexually transmitted infections have been a defining feature of the entire history of human civilization. We have seen skeletons bearing syphilis marks, classical literature dedicated to gonorrhea, and loads of royal gossip about yeast infections.  STDs have been a subject of medical fascination and social conversation for thousands of years. 

However, Europeans are less keen on dealing with their present-day sexual health: the discourse makes it seem like all of these contagions are a thing of the past. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

Since the early 2000s, our collective attention on STDs has decreased, even though epidemics are on the rise. The World Health Organization and UNAIDS are beating the drums because the number of people living with HIV has increased from 26.6 million in 2000 to 39 million in 2022.

On a global scale, the WHO reports that more than 1 million STIs are acquired every day worldwide, with an estimated 374 million new infections each year involving one of four curable STIs: chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and trichomoniasis.

And even though treatment is available for a great number of them, it doesn’t make undiagnosed ailments any less dangerous – or contagious for that matter. 

Knowledge is the first line of defense. Most crucially, knowing one’s HIV status, with the available treatment options, it is possible to live a long and fulfilling life without infecting any partners – but for this, one has to be aware of being affected, and to be able to access the existing treatment.

In this episode of Standard Time we discuss sexually transmitted diseases, and the solutions to mitigate them: prevention, screening, treatments, and importantly, sexual education. We also delve into the role of community involvement, and the stigma affecting sex workers and LGBTQIA+ communities – both groups are at the forefront of finding solutions, even though the majority of society views them as scapegoats.

Dr. Danae Maragouthakis is a medical doctor and the co-founder of Yoxly, the company providing at-home STI testing. Danae’s social media channels have more than 1 million followers, making sexual health education engaging and accessible. Yoxly’s social media channels feature Dr. Danae Maraghoutakis on Instagram and TikTok.

Dr. Béla Tamási is a clinical dermatologist and the director of the National Center for STIs in Budapest. He is also the founder of an evidence-based dermatology and sexual health clinic in Budapest. This is Dr. Béla Tamási’s clinic website and medical advise blog.

Trajche Janushev is a Program Officer at SWAN – the Sex Worker’s Rights Advocacy Network. SWAN supports sex workers’ rights in  Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Their work underlines the importance of inclusivity and advocacy in addressing sexual health. You may find more information about SWAN here.

For this conversation, Standard Time enjoyed the hospitality of the Central European University at their Budapest library.

Further source:

Global burden and trends of sexually transmitted infections from 1990 to 2019: an observational trend study in The Lancet

The Global HIV and AIDS Epidemic

The Sex Workers’ Implementation Tool in its full volume and SWAN’s video digest of it: the Sex Work Implementation Tool (SWIT)

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp  editor-in-chief, Eurozine
Merve Akyel  art director, Eurozine
Szilvia Pintér  producer
Margarita Lechner writer-editor
Zsófia Gabriella Papp executive producer

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director, Eurozine
Judit Csikós  project manager, Eurozine
Csilla Nagyné Kardos  office administration, Eurozine

Video Crew Budapest

Nóra Ruszkai sound engineering
Gergely Áron Pápai photography
László Halász photography

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai  lead video editor
Kateryna Kuzmenko dialogue editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima animation
Cornelia Frischauf theme music

Hosted by The CEU Library in Budapest

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a content sharing platform soon to premiere.

Full disclosure

Anchor Réka Kinga Papp is a member of the Steering Committee for the Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network since 2018.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

‘Although the future belongs to the young, future thinking … is more the domain of older people,’ wrote Andrzej Siciński.A. Siciński, Młodzi o roku 2000. Opinie, wyobrażenia, postawy, Instytut Wydawniczy CRZZ, 1975,  p. 139. The sociologist’s provocative statement follows the study he and a team of researchers conducted on young people’s visions of the future in Poland during the second half of the 1960s. The then 44-year-old researcher had become curious when he noticed that young people in 1960s Poland seemed increasingly interested in their own future, and that of their country and the world.

Youth in Poland in the 1960s

Being young in Poland during the 1960s meant coming of age in a highly ambivalent decade. In the history of the Polish People’s Republic, it is remembered, on the one hand, as a period of mała stabilizacja (small stabilization) with moderate yet constant rates of economic growth, mostly satisfying basic consumer needs, housing and healthcare. Many Poles aligned with the socialist political system, which was still governed by strict authoritarian state-control over social, cultural and economic life. The Communist party was demanding less ideological commitment from Poles than in previous decades, trying to win their support instead through strong nationalist rhetoric and a less aggressive stance towards the Catholic Church.

The decade was simultaneously a period of change for young Poles, in keeping with their peers in the East and the West.M. Zaremba, ‘Społeczeństwo polskie lat sześćdziesiątych – między „małą stabilizacją” a „małą destabilizacją”’, in Oblicza Marca 1968, eds. K. Rokicki and S. Stępień, IPN, 2004, pp. 24-51. The World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955 had been a formative experience for a whole generation of Poles: around thirty-thousand foreigners, also from the West, were invited to their capital to encounter the qualities of communist life. But the festival also opened the eyes of Polish youth and is considered one of the catalysts of political change that led to the moderate opening of the repressive state socialist regime.W. Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, C.H Beck, 2010, pp. 295-96; A.L. Sowa, Historia polityczna Polski 1944-1991, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011, pp. 206-7.

Newly gained economic stability and a relatively peaceful international political environment led the socialist regime to a moderate cultural and scientific opening to the West. Television became a true mass medium. Sociologists noted the emergence of popular mass culture alongside new, diverse lifestyles. Young Poles, through the role models, leisure activities, fashion, tourist destinations, or consumer aspirations they revered and pursued, increasingly defined themselves in relation to global youth culture.M. Fidelis, Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland, Oxford University Press, 2022.

Earth and Mars combined. Illustration by ultrasoftproduction via Wikimedia Commons.

Moreover, new scientific and technological developments such as computers, space travel and nuclear energy were expected to transform society via automatized and informatized production. From 1961 onwards the Soviet Union and its satellite states officially considered the so called ‘scientific-technical revolution’ the necessary precondition for furthering communism. The political regime’s highest echelons, who held the vision of this ‘one and only future’, tasked scientists and technological experts to develop scientific predictions and holistic approaches.S. Guth‚ One Future Only: The Soviet Union in the age of the scientific-technical revolution’ in Journal of Modern European History, 3:13, 2015, pp. 355-376. In the second half of the 1960s, social scientists, journalists and writers engaged with what Siciński called a global ‘explosion of futurology’A. Siciński, Prognozy a nauka, Książka i Wiedza, 1969, p. 5. – in other words, controversies over new scientific tools of predictions and complex future-thinking, which experts and institutions in the US and western Europe had been developing since the early 1950s. 

Imagining the year 2000

From 1967 to 1968, Siciński and his team at the Polish Academy of Sciences conducted a sociological survey on youngsters’ visions of the future. Their research started from an observation that young Poles were ‘discovering’ the future as a ‘new dimension of thinking’.A. Siciński, Młodzi o roku 2000. Opinie, wyobrażenia, postawy, Instytut Wydawniczy CRZZ, 1975, p. 29. With a questionnaire and a representative sample of nearly 1,000 respondents, the researchers tried to capture young Poles’ thoughts and predictions for the year 2000.‘Young’, defined as coming of age and finding one’s place in society, included respondents between the ages of fifteen and forty.

When asked about their expectations for Poland’s social structure, 21% of the respondents said that they expected social disparities to increase, while 24% awaited their stagnation, and 41% their decrease. The desired outcome differed remarkably, however: 73% of young Poles hoped that social disparities would diminish by the year 2000. Only 8% hoped they would increase. While support for socialism’s major promise of equal distribution of social and economic resources appeared to have been strong, trust in the system’s ability to deliver seemed to be much lower. The overall vision of Poland 2000 was of a more urbanized, equal country with more women and young people in decision-making positions, a strongly automatized economy and a satisfied population. 

Asked about their visions of the international situation in 2000, young Poles in 1968 were convinced that the divide between socialism and capitalism would still be the dominant line of conflict. Only 8% could imagine that such differences would vanish. 29% imagined a peaceful coexistence, while nearly half of the respondents either expected ‘serious tensions’ or military conflict.

The results suggest that young people in 1968 Poland had a vision of the future that was very much in line with official state propaganda. The questionnaires had been through political censorship, omitting sensitive topics, and it cannot be verified whether respondents feared consequences if answering one way or the other. 

Future-thinking in 1968/9

The authors of the survey did not aim to predict what the year 2000 would look like. Their research had a diagnostic instead of a prognostic goal, which they explained as ‘learning more about how the future enters young people’s minds’.J. Galtung, ‘On the future, future studies and future attitudes’ in Images of the world in the year 2000. A comparative ten nation study, ed.s H. Ornauer et al., Mouton, 1976, pp. 3-21, p. 7. The countries included in this study were Poland and Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, and India. What shaped their future-thinking today, was what sociologists wanted to find out. The study was part of an international project comparing the attitudes of young people from ten different countries, spanning various political and geographical locations. The sociologists noticed a strong tendency to envision a common, global future. However, they rejected the widespread interpretation that conflict with older generations united all the political protests and clashes between young people and state forces that were sweeping the world in 1968, including those in Warsaw and Prague. In other words, the sociological study could be used to support a common narrative of ruling elites from the older generations, namely that only a minor, negligible fraction of ‘radicals’ was on the barricades.

However, the authors pointed towards another, arguably more fundamental subversion of the official communist ideology. They had used a macro-sociological approach which turned answers into numbers, comparing and correlating responses with each other and features such as class, nationality and gender. In combination with Marxist theory, they had expected socio-economic factors to explain differences in young peoples’ perceptions of the future. However, Siciński argued that the true determinants of young people’s visions remained undiscovered because the ‘microsocial’ had been left out of the picture.A. Siciński, Młodzi o roku 2000. Opinie, wyobrażenia, postawy, p. 112. He suspected future-thinking to emerge from the social and psychological dynamics of small groups, informal networks, from individual voices and emotions. Intentionally or not, this conclusion questioned a fundamental premise of socialist and, more generally, twentieth century politics – namely that young people’s future-thinking was primarily shaped by state and collective practices channelled through mainstream political organizations or state-organized education. Besides, the researchers had shown that although everyone had been asked for their visions in 1968, 2000 was not equally close nor distant to everyone. The ship of socialist society was no longer progressing at a single steady pace through historical time towards the dock of a communist future.

Pipelines into the future

Nevertheless, the sociologists’ hope in 1968 was that mass media, education and scholarly works, such as theirs, would lead the young to think of the future even more often. And they were not alone in observing and trying to influence the discovery of the future by young Poles. In 1969 the weekly publication Perspektywy (Perspectives) was established to cover a wide range of topics from international politics to social and cultural affairs, sports and technological developments. Its goal was also to shape readers’ perspectives on the future – to make them think ‘futurologically’.  In the first issue in September 1969, the editor-in-chief argued that young Poles were indeed ‘Children of the Third Millennium’, who should be guided by ‘rational’ and scientific future-thinking in preparation for their adult responsibility for socialist Poland.Dobrosław Kobielski (1969): Dzieci trzeciego tysiąclecia, in: Perspektywy 1, 5 September 1969, p. 4. For two years the magazine devoted a weekly two-page essay with ‘perspectives on the twenty-first century’ to this programmatic goal. In retrospect, it provides an interesting window on the visions which shaped how young people in Poland imagined the next century at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. 

These essays discussed ground-breaking technological and scientific developments and their social consequences, questioning whether and when they would become possible. Answers were loaded with optimism. For instance, humans settling on the moon in the first half of the twenty-first century was presented as highly possible. It was thought that technological progress combined with social scientific expertise would have far-reaching, positive impacts on everyday life, economic behaviour, nature and international politics – and prevent undesirable outcomes. 

However, readers were not expected to have blind faith in technological solutions for social problems. On the contrary, the authors, who were renowned scientists and journalists from Poland, rejected ‘passive acceptance’ of new technologies, encouraging the ‘realization of individual mental and physical interests’ instead.Ryszard Doński (ed.) (1971): Perspektywy XXI wieku. Szkice futurologiczne, Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, p. 140-41. Usually, they presented the future as an open question, describing – not without signs of humour – various positive and negative scenarios. Presenting scientific and technological progress as ambivalent and calling for its submission to individual and social creativity, implicitly challenged the idea that more advanced technology would lead straight towards the victory of communism.

Nevertheless, trust in techno-utopian feasibility prevailed in most essays. Writers trusted that the scientific and planned development of socialism would be the best guarantee for a ‘humanistic’ use of technology not driven by commercial benefits. They heralded computers as ‘the brains of humankind’ that would not only take more ‘rational’ economic decisions but also make government less bureaucratic and more transparent and democratic. Finally, the essays conveyed a strong sense that historical progress could be guided by scientific and technological reason and respective political action. The underlying notion of the present and the future being connected by a more or less continuous line of progression is displayed, for example, by the title of an essay, which discussed the prospects and issues with constructing submarine tunnels between different continents for long-distance train travel: the tunnels were described as ‘pipelines running into the future’.L. Znicz, ‘Rura biegnąca w przyszłość’, Perspektywy, 14, 13 April 1970, pp. 39-40.

However, those pipelines did not exist yet. In other words, the future was rather distant and disconnected than easy to grasp. To finish its biannual series of essays on the twenty-first century, the weekly organized an expert survey among 20 prominent Polish scientists. Adapting the Delphi technique, a method for gathering expert knowledge developed by a US Think Tank in the early 1950s, the editors asked them questions like: when did they expect the first human to land on Mars; if and when would socialism supersede market-based capitalist systems; when would humans be capable of preventing natural events such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Although the organizers of the survey wrote that it was more of a ‘futurological game’, they trusted that it would nevertheless contain ‘important findings for tomorrow’.W. Błachowicz and J. Surdykowski, ’Ankieta futurologiczna, cz. I’, Perspektywy, 50, 17 December 1971, pp. 39-40; W. Błachowicz and J. Surdykowski, ’Ankieta futurologiczna, cz. II’, Perspektywy, 51, 24 December 1971, pp. 39-40. According to the collected Polish expert opinions, 2050 was the date by which both humans would travel to Mars, and socialism would have proven superior to capitalism in efficiently delivering social and economic prosperity. Control over earthquakes and extreme weather events was anticipated even sooner, to be already mastered by the year 2000.

History of the future

Even if, in retrospect, the predictions of young Poles from the late 1960s for the year 2000 seem flawed, they may have played an important role at the time in shaping world views, social communication and political action. Both the outlined sociological study and weekly publication capture elements and limitations of historical ‘horizons of expectation’, which are relevant to more than historians. R. Koselleck, ‘"Erfahrungsraum" und "Erwartungshorizont" - zwei historische Kategorien‘, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Suhrkamp, 1979, pp. 340-375.

Looking at past futures can equip us with greater awareness for the origins of today’s future-thinking. Whether Polish sociologists’ discovery of the microsocial roots of future-thinking already pointed towards a more fundamental transformation of modern industrial societies, whose collective solidarities gave way to more flexible, particularistic orientations, visible in today’s social media and informational bubbles, would require further inquiry. As the course of history evolves, one sometimes forgets that the past had many possible imagined futures, including the ones considered by young Poles in their engagement with sociological research or futurological ‘perspectives’.

Investigating the ‘children of the twenty-first century’ of the 1960s raises questions about today’s future-thinking: how are visions of the future constructed; how do they gain credibility; which emotions and actions do they encourage or dissuade; which political agendas are they related to, and whose visions are they. ‘Futures literacy’, propagated as an important competence in current times of social and environmental transformation, would encompass a critical historical consciousness of the future’s multiple pasts.'Futures literacy’ is prominently used by futures researchers, activists and policy-makers today, and defined by UNESCO as ‘the skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. Being futures literate empowers the imagination, enhances our ability to prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.’ https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy/about (last accessed 10 November 2023).

This article has been published as part of the youth project Vom Wissen der Jungen. Wissenschaftskommunikation mit jungen Erwachsenen in Kriegszeiten, funded by the City of Vienna, Cultural Affairs.

I would be lying if I said the war had disturbed my habits. It is tempting enough to pretend it turned a timid art researcher into a plucky military reporter overnight. But it was more likely my father’s asthma, my grandmother’s dementia, my uncle’s fading sight or even a cockroach that slipped under the radar and darkened my everyday.

Getting to grips with everything that has been happening, one should really start from scratch.

Inherited memory

Being born into a family with relatives who knew concentration camps implies repercussions. Their suffering somewhat defines your future: the special type of twitching, conversation fillers and chronic ailments you acquire from infancy on. With hindsight, my whole humble story of self-development, reaching certain conclusions (and getting rid of the others), was onerous yet predictable. Could I have avoided it, understood it in advance?

My relationship with writing started as a teenage escape from hackneyed surroundings. Ukraine’s seeming mundanity, which has soaked up more riots, upheavals, free falls and dismemberments than any other European country in the last 30 years, was abundantly poetic in a way. Yet back then I saw it as dull, vapid, unquestioned normality. Writing texts and articles became an easy way to immerse myself in more meaningfully charged environs, such as the Dionysian Mysteries, the Arabian Nights or Shakespeare’s Globe – in short, references to things I’ve never seen and the places I’ve never visited. For that very specific though poorly grounded reason, they seemed of a higher nature that mattered more, overplaying any purges, captures and hostilities that dotted my family’s past. 

It was probably my father’s unintelligible mumbling that made me abandon all words rather than create scintillating writing. A 73-year-old Soviet engineer, keen on physics and maths, prone to believing that the only real knowledge is crunching numbers, grows mysteriously ignorant when it comes to his own health. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he was invited to the US, but decided to stay in his cubbyhole at an old, unheated factory, wrapping up his computer in a jacket until the factory facilities ceased to operate. He would repeatedly describe his decision as ‘virtuous’ and ‘just’; wasn’t this the precise same justification I used for staying in Ukraine? Yet the choice he made conceivably led to severe asthma. Heavy medication for such cases provokes kidney disease in the long run that can contribute towards consciousness becoming opaque. That was the exact state in which I, an up-and-coming author, found him in bed a few years ago.

While he bore the brunt of his work habits, which were not as virtuous as they seemed, my granny was slowly dying. We managed to get her out of Nikopol, a frequently shelled Ukrainian city, almost two years before the war. After being expelled from her despondent yet precious routine, she might loiter from room to room unable to recall our names but could vividly retell the story of how a huge insect had climbed onto her mother’s face when she died in an open cargo train carriage on the way to Nazi Germany. I heard this story at least once a year when sent to granny’s cottage in the summer, but it wasn’t until I grew up that its meaning dawned on me – partly because of the childhood ability to regard all the spooky tales as late-night entertainment, partly because the harrowing memory was avidly mixed up with all the stories she would incessantly conjure such as that of her as a young curvy beauty pouring cold water from a balcony on her unfortunate admirers.

Olena Myhashko’s grandmother, 1968, Crimea. Image courtesy of the author

Needless to say, she eventually married one of those admirers; her next of kin died during WWII and she had to eat. Out of this gloomy bond came my uncle, whom she never loved, despite being the only kid who never left home. At the age of five, he was ineptly treated for Polio, giving him a limp, making him almost blind. His mother scolded him for nearly everything, who’d rather he didn’t resemble her husband as much as he did. Consequently, my uncle was dejected and grew narrow-minded. He never managed to get a girl, accompanying my granny instead in unhealthy Freudian dependence. Having joined our family house, he was basically my granny’s aidless extension with nobody to cling to himself.

The body and its parts

There are a plethora of ways in which one’s adolescence can end, and mine finished in needing to become the breadwinner. The circumstances I had once considered trite, minor and phantom smashed the door of my Soviet-like bedroom, turning my early twenties upside down; being artsy was the last thing I could think about.

When medical test results are your main reading material, you discover that facts – not previously part of your language – become all important. You quickly learn that the excrement you wash off your parent’s ankles doesn’t have any literary equivalent. Don’t attempt to uncover any hidden sense of the scene; the actual event surpasses any aestheticized retelling. The amount of new knowledge, both practical and emotional, is so huge that you start perceiving the arts as an appendage, a crutch for those who lead relatively carefree lives. The assumption that art can actually convey reality is a preposterous idea.

After all, it was probably my father’s ailment, or my granny’s dementia, or the cockroach slipping into the apartment one of those summers when things weren’t right that prevented me from becoming a writer. A ripe new world of blood, flesh, death, appearing at such an unsafe distance, also shut me up and made me feel ashamed and embarrassed, full of resentment and nostalgia for any form of writing that wasn’t aimed at helping directly.

Persistent dreams

Years later, I switched to journalism with relief. Having visited the first de-occupied towns and villages as a reporter, I was finally able to rid myself of the cowardly thinker, the detached scholar role – the last person to be rescued in a shipwreck. The desire to stand up for the abuse of justice, alongside a sense of physical urgency, were all in place. Thank God, I used to say to myself, I’m not withstanding the invasion with a tiny book of poetry in my hands. What a miserable picture that would have been.

And it was only in certain breaches of my newly militarized routine that such things as literature, or the passion attached to it, started creeping in. It could be a briefly noticed pleasant landscape on a battered city hoarding that I would stumble upon, dawn or dusk in my dreary neighbourhood, a phrase escaping my bookshelf that had never previously been so gripping. It was even more intense after we survived the series of March attacks while watching Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. As desperate as it seemed at the time and remains mind-blowing, dreaming about meandering through lemon rooms, late-night stops and cheap, gaudy hotels provided a remote heaven.

After all, why underestimate the importance of a dirty wall spot that suddenly resembles a beautiful cloud when you listen to far-flung blasts. So, while fervently advocating against any form of artistic detachment, it was in those scarred days that I surreptitiously fell in love with dreaming and writing for the first time since childhood. I was captured by the idea of being helpful, useful, enjoying the irrefutable justification for my own existence; I saw no sense in contriving words or, what’s more, in pretending that they mattered, since they couldn’t heal wounded flesh nor restore light. But, at the same time, I was desperately lured by the idea of taking a step into any sort of dimension that wasn’t mundane nor real. I dreamt about standing in the middle of streets in distant places such as Seoul and Tampa, city lights in 1990s South Korea, the national park in Singapore. Strikingly, what I recall most about those very first weeks is film stills of Korean cyclists, some of my vivid mid-morning dreams, things I haven’t actually seen, cities I haven’t visited. Somehow, despite all the contempt I felt for musings, they became the only thing I deeply enjoyed, the only thing that helped me be in my own body.

‘Who has the privilege not to know?’, spins round in my head as I write this essay. And, who has the privilege to stick to another, less traumatic and more enticing topic? Who has the right to brush off the latest breaking news and dwell on Gilles Deleuze, Renaissance Art, street vendors of the past, the soaring prices of Manhattan cocktails, issues of semiotics, the safe setting of a panel talk lying between you and the ‘controversial subject’? Do I envy them enough to loathe them? 

Even though the gap between real and futile may be fictitious (albeit never strictly one nor the other), the idea of writing as a life-shaping pursuit is no longer on my mind. I guess, you can candidly call words ‘a significant contribution’ until air missiles, pharmacy receipts, jarring insects or anything else start to shape your future way more than all the books you’ve ever read. And still, dreams, as useless as they may seem, will always find their way to persist.

This article first appeared in Eurozine partner journal Glänta in Swedish. The above is an edited version of the original English text.

Jag skulle ljuga om jag sa att kriget har ödelagt mina vanor. Precis som det är frestande att säga att allt förändrades över en natt, när en skygg konstforskare förvandlades till en modig krigsjournalist. Fast dessförinnan var det pappas astma eller mormors demens eller min morbrors allt sämre syn eller för den delen en kackerlacka som slank in genom en ventilationsspringa. Men om man verkligen vill komma till klarhet med allt som har hänt, så får man faktiskt börja från början.

När man är född i en familj vars släktingar har suttit i koncentrationsläger får det ofrånkomligen vissa efterverkningar. På något sätt bestämmer de ens framtid redan från spädbarnsåldern, hela vägen till speciella sorters ryckningar, utfyllnadsord och kroniska sjukdomar som man drar på sig. Sett i backspegeln var hela min blygsamma historia av självförverkligande, där jag har kommit fram till vissa slutsatser (och gjort mig av med de andra), djupt förutsägbar. Kunde jag ha förstått det i förväg?

Min egen relation till skrivandet började med tonåringens flykt från en alldaglig omgivning. Ukrainas frodiga vardaglighet, som kanske har svalt fler upplopp, omvälvningar, fria fall och stympningar än vad som skulle ha rymts i något annat europeiskt land de senaste trettio åren, var (på sätt och vis) djupt poetisk. Ändå såg jag den som ett trist, andefattigt normaltillstånd som inte var mycket att skryta med, än mindre att ifrågasätta. Att skriva artiklar och andra texter blev ett enkelt sätt att byta till en scenografi som var mer laddad med innebörd, till exempel den dionysiska världen, Tusen och en natt eller Shakespeares Globe Theatre – kort sagt saker jag aldrig har sett och platser där jag aldrig har varit. Av just detta uttryckliga men illa underbyggda skäl kändes det som om inget annat spelade någon roll, som om dessa saker och platser övertrumfade alla utrensningar, fängslanden och fientligheter som närbilderna av min familj var översållade med.

Det var antagligen min fars obegripliga mumlande som gjorde mig så fåordig, inte omvänt. Han var en sjuttiotreårig Sovjetingenjör som var förtjust i fysik och matematik och gärna ville tro att all kunskap värd namnet kunde belysas med siffror och tabeller, men med tiden blev han märkligt ovetande i fråga om sin egen hälsa. När Sovjetunionen föll samman blev han inbjuden att flytta till USA, men han stannade kvar på sin kammare i en gammal fabrik utan uppvärmning och virade in sin dator i sin gamla jacka ända tills alla fabrikens processer slutade fungera. Han brukade ofta beskriva det här beslutet som ”rättskaffens” och ”rakryggat” (var det inte exakt så jag motiverade att jag stannade i Ukraina?), samtidigt som det valet antagligen var det direkta skälet till att han så småningom fick svår astma. De starka mediciner som man måste ta i sådana lägen leder på lång sikt till njursjukdomar som kan
bidra till att grumla ens medvetande. Det var i just det tillståndet som jag, en otrygg författare,
hittade honom i en säng för några år sedan.

Samtidigt som han fick klä skott för sina dåliga vanor – inte lika rättskaffens som de kunde verka – höll min mormor så sakteliga på att dö. Vi lyckades få ut henne ur Nikopol – en ukrainsk stad som ofta utsätts för beskjutning – nästan två år före kriget, och när hon blev tvångsförflyttad från sina deprimerande och ändå så kära rutiner hasade hon runt i rummen och kunde inte minnas vad vi hette, men berättade gång på gång med inlevelse om en jättestor insekt som kröp i hennes mammas ansikte när hon dog i en järnvägsvagn på väg till nazisternas Tyskland. Jag hade hört den historien minst en gång om året, när jag varje sommar blev skickad till mormors stuga, men det var inte förrän jag blev vuxen som den verkliga innebörden öppnade sig för mig. Delvis berodde det på att barn har en förmåga att betrakta alla kusliga sagor som kvällsunderhållning, delvis på att den gärna blandades med alla rövarhistorier som hon jämt berättade, till exempel en som handlade om hur hon själv som ung kurvig skönhet hällde kallt vatten från en balkong på sina olycksaliga beundrare.

Naturligtvis gifte hon sig så småningom med en av dessa beundrare, eftersom hennes släkt dog under andra världskriget och hon behövde mat på bordet. Ur denna sorgliga allians kom min morbror, som hon aldrig älskade, trots att han var det enda barnet som aldrig lämnade hemmet. När han var fem år fick han polio och blev felbehandlad, vilket gjorde att han haltade och hade nedsatt syn, och han fick jämt och ständigt skäll för nästan allt av sin mamma, som helst hade velat att han inte var så lik hennes make. Därför blev han dyster, lyckades aldrig få en flickvän och höll ihop med min mormor på ett rätt freudianskt vis. Han följde också med till vår familjs lilla bo, till min mamma (som hade turen att bli älskad och få en utbildning), eftersom han i grund och botten var en hjälplös förlängning av min mormor och inte hade någon att klamra sig fast vid.
–

En människas ungdomstid kan sluta på en mängd olika sätt, och på det här sättet slutade min. Omständigheter som jag såg som banala, oviktiga och inbillade slog in dörren till mitt Sovjetaktiga rum och skapade den ordning som skulle råda när jag var lite över tjugo, nämligen denna: att det sista jag tänkte på var att hålla på med något kulturellt.

När medicinska provsvar blir ens huvudsakliga litteratur upptäcker man mängder av fakta som man aldrig fick stifta bekantskap med i symbolernas värld. Man lär sig snabbt att avföringen som man tvättar bort från sin förälders anklar inte har något konstnärligt innehåll som kan vara likvärdigt med litteratur, än mindre går det att försöka blotta scenens dolda betydelse, eftersom själva handlingen redan har överträffat alla estetiska upplevelser man kan få. Bristen på ny kunskap, både praktisk och känslomässig, är så enorm att man börjar betrakta kultur som ett bihang, en krycka som man tar till om man inte lever ett fullödigt liv. Antagandet att kultur uttrycker något är trots allt en befängd tanke. ”Hur ska vi prata om kriget?” frågade sig ukrainska teatermänniskor. Jag vet inte – kanske borde vi inte prata alls. Alla ord som vi förr eller senare producerar när vi förtvivlat försöker fånga sammanbrottet,
explosionen i våra huvuden, håller kanske på att samlas på hög någonstans och bildar ett onödigt lager som inte har något med ämnet att göra.
–

Så det var antagligen min pappas sjukdom eller mormors demens eller en kackerlacka som smet in i lägenheten en av de där somrarna när det inte stod rätt till som hindrade mig från att bli en hängiven kulturarbetare. När en ny värld som var sprängfull av blod, krig, kött, död dök upp så farligt nära tystnade jag, och jag skämdes och kände mig förlägen, bitter och nostalgisk inför alla former av skrivande som inte hade det uttalade syftet att vara till hjälp.

När kriget kom övergick jag med lättnad till journalistik. Som reporter besökte jag de första städerna och byarna som befriades från ockupationen, och jag blev äntligen av med den pinsamma belägenheten att framstå som en feg tänkare, en verklighetsfrånvänd akademiker – den sista personen som skulle bli räddad vid ett skeppsbrott. Viljan att stå upp för den skymfade rättvisan fanns där, liksom känslan av att det rent fysiskt brådskade, men det var mitt försök att rädda mig själv från att vara avskyvärt onyttig, att förhålla mig oförlåtligt passiv, att förvandlas till en ohygglig vit museichef i filmen The Square, som illa förklätt gav sig till känna. Tack gode Gud, brukade jag säga för mig själv, att jag inte gör motstånd mot en invasion med en liten diktbok i händerna – vilken ömklig anblick det skulle ha varit.

Och det är bara i några få rämnor i en ny, militariserad vardag som sådant som litterärt skrivande och en sorts passion som hänger samman med det har börjat sippra in. Det kunde vara en kort glimt av ett pittoreskt landskap på en medfaren reklamtavla som jag råkade gå förbi, en rätt ordinär soluppgång eller solnedgång i mitt dystra kvarter, något jag aldrig har varit känslig för, eller en fras som stack ut i min bokhylla och aldrig tidigare har känts lika gripande. Det blev ännu starkare när vi hade överlevt ett antal attacker i mars medan vi tittade på Wong Kar Wais Chungking Express, hur desperat som det än låter, och filmen var fortfarande lika överväldigande och fick mig att drömma att jag snirklade mig fram mellan de citrongula rummen, nattöppna hak och billiga, kitschiga hotell som kändes som ett avlägset
himmelrike.

Det går trots allt inte att överskatta hur mycket det betyder när en smutsfläck på väggen plötsligt ser ut som ett vackert moln medan man lyssnar på bombnedslag i fjärran. Visserligen är jag en ivrig motståndare mot all form av verklighetsflykt (och mot kulturen som dess högsta form), men under de dagarna blev jag smygförälskad i att drömma och skriva för första gången sedan jag var barn. Jag var besatt av tanken på att hjälpa till, komma till nytta, ha något som obestridligen rättfärdigade min egen existens; jag kunde inte se någon mening med att tänka ut texter, än mindre låtsas att de betydde något, eftersom de inte kunde läka kroppar eller få ljuset att återvända. Men samtidigt blev jag huvudlöst lockad av tanken på att ta ännu ett steg in i någon sorts dimension som inte var trivial och verklig. Jag drömde om att stå mitt på gatan i en outforskad stad, som Seoul eller Tampa, om nattens ljus i Sydkorea på nittiotalet och om nationalparken i Singapore. Det jag lade på minnet och mindes mest av de där allra
första krigsveckorna var anmärkningsvärt nog filmbilder av koreanska cyklister, en del av mina livliga förmiddagsdrömmar, saker jag överhuvudtaget inte såg och städer jag inte besökte. Hur mycket jag än föraktade grubblerier blev det på något sätt det enda jag njöt av på djupet, det enda som hjälpte mig att passa in i min egen kropp.

”Vem har privilegiet att slippa veta?” snurrar i mitt huvud medan jag skriver den här essän. Och som följdfråga: Vem har privilegiet att hålla fast vid ett annat, mindre traumatiskt och mer lockande tema? Vem har rätt att skaka av sig de senaste alarmerande nyheterna och breda ut sig om Gilles Deleuze, renässanskonst, forna tiders gatuförsäljare, de våldsamt höga priserna på Manhattandrinkar, semiotikens prekära tillstånd, alltsammans med panelsamtalets trygga inramning som ett värn mellan sig själv och det ”kontroversiella ämnet”? Är jag tillräckligt avundsjuk på dem för att ens kunna äcklas av dem?

Trots att glappet mellan verkligt och fåfängt kanske är en aning påhittat (det är för övrigt aldrig helt och hållet det ena eller det andra), upptar idén om skrivande som en huvudsyssla som präglar hela livet inte längre mina tankar. Visst kan man väl uppriktigt kalla ord för ”ett betydelsefullt bidrag”, ända tills luftvärnsmissiler, apotekskvitton, otäcka insekter eller något annat börjar forma ens framtid mycket mer än alla böcker man har läst.

Och ändå är det på något sätt paradoxalt bittert att även om jag känner en så genuin motvilja mot ord föredrar jag dem framför andra sätt att bidra. Kan de verkligen ha ett värde? Varför vill jag fortfarande rättfärdiga deras existens? Och finns det överhuvudtaget något sätt att rättfärdiga grubblerier och drömmerier? Tja, till och med en morsekod som är avsedd att förmedla ett visst budskap kan betraktas som en dikt, skulle smarta forskare säga. Och jag skulle antagligen inte säga emot utan istället välja att ta det precis som det är.

The closer we get to the European parliamentary elections in June 2024, the harder politicians are jostling to win votes. There is one constituency that conservative politicians in particular are wooing: farmers.

When the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group in the European Parliament, tried – and narrowly failed – to quash the Nature Restoration Law, it cited farmers and food security as reasons for its opposition. In her State of the Union speech in September, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen ‒ herself a member of the EPP ‒ made it a point to show her appreciation for farmers but avoided mentioning the Farm to Fork strategy, the Commission’s flagship effort to make agriculture fairer and more sustainable. The EPP is pitching itself as the farmers’ party and looks set to challenge and object to any attempts to rein in farming’s adverse impacts on ecosystems.

Of the more than 400 million eligible voters in the EU, only about nine million, or around two per cent, work in agriculture. But politicians see their vote as crucial. This is partly because farmers are extremely vocal, but also because of a Europe-wide positive image of farmers as guardians of rural traditions and cultural heritage, and providers of our daily sustenance. This means a much wider part of the electorate sympathises and identifies with them, making them a powerful constituency.

There is no question that farmers need to be supported. Their existence is critical to Europe’s long-term food security and, ultimately, prosperity. But unfortunately, European farming is in dire straits. Despite agriculture being the EU’s largest budget item, disbursing tens of billions of public money a year, the bloc has lost three million farmers over the past decade. That is a rate of 800 farmers leaving the profession every single day. Yet more concerning, they’re not being replaced: the average age of a European farmer is now 57. These statistics date back to the decade from 2010 to 2020, before the war on Europe’s doorstep between two agricultural superpowers put further pressure on food producers, who have since struggled with rapidly rising prices of inputs such as feed, fertiliser and pesticides.

Feed production plant in Kochanowice, Poland. Image: Przykuta. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Over the past two years, European farmers have also been hit hard by multiple extreme weather events, from droughts and heatwaves to floods and wildfires, which have damaged farms and decimated harvests. To make matters worse, scientists have warned unequivocally that extreme weather is likely to worsen and will threaten food production. It is imperative that farming not only mitigate its contribution to climate change, scientists warn, but also adapt and become resilient to these disasters, as well as to the more subtle shifts in cropping and rainfall patterns. Yet the farming lobby and the politicians who purport to care for the continued viability of European agriculture seem intent on resisting any reforms or changes to the status quo.

Misleading claims

This may be partly explained by the dominance of Copa-Cogeca, Europe’s oldest, biggest and most powerful farming lobby. The organisation was established in 1959 at the inception of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was itself founded on the post-war ideal that Europe should never go hungry again. Starting out as separate movements representing farming (Copa) and cooperatives (Cogeca), the two merged in the early 1960s. Its members include many of the EU’s major national farm unions, and over the years Copa-Cogeca has proclaimed itself the voice of European farmers and agricultural cooperatives in Brussels.

Copa-Cogeca claims to represent more than 22 million farmers and their families which ‒ according to European Commission data ‒ would mean the entirety of Europe’s farm sector. Yet the claim appears more aspirational than realistic, as myself and other journalists revealed in our months-long investigation with Lighthouse Reports, a non-profit investigative news outlet, with media partners in Brussels, Romania, Poland, Spain, Netherlands, and Denmark. Interviews with nearly 120 farmers, insiders, politicians, academics and activists, as well as a survey of 50 Copa-Cogeca affiliates, cast serious doubt on the lobby’s membership claims and its legitimacy in the farming community.

In Romania, which has Europe’s largest number of agricultural holdings at almost 2.9 million, a total of 3,500 farmers are represented by an alliance of four unions that are members of Copa-Cogeca, according to their own press releases and interviews. In Poland, around 1.3 million farmers are nominally members of Copa-Cogeca’s affiliate KRIR, which receives considerable sums of taxpayer money, but does not keep track of who it represents. The country’s Supreme Audit Office concluded in 2021 that, ‘due to the lack of records, agricultural chambers had no knowledge of all the members whose interests they are supposed to represent’.

In Denmark, the sole member of Copa-Cogeca is the Danish Food and Agricultural Council (L&F in Danish). Its annual reports in 2016 and 2021 showed a surge in membership of 5,000 farmers, a curious development that seems to go against both European and national statistics. The union declined to provide a full explanation for its growing membership, but its latest annual report dropped this number entirely. Spain probably has the most comprehensive dataset among the countries that were investigated. Even there, the three farm unions that are members of Copa-Cogeca together represent only 40 per cent of the country’s farmers.

Power without representation

The long-held perception of Copa-Cogeca as the arbiter of what European farmers need and want is based on data that is unreliable, unsubstantiated and opaque. In addition, small farmers do not feel represented. ‘The decisions go through the big countries, big farmers, big unions… [There’s] no equality,’ said Arūnas Svitojus, president of the Lithuanian Union and Copa member LR ZUR.

Other current and former members and insiders also said Copa-Cogeca represents mostly the interests of big, industrial farmers and cooperatives and not the small- and medium-sized farmers that make up the bulk of European agriculture. According to Eurostat, of the EU’s 9.1 million agricultural holdings in 2020, 63.8 per cent had less than five hectares and at least 75 per cent had less than 10 hectares. Despite this, Copa-Cogeca continues to enjoy a cosy relationship with the three EU institutions at the heart of agricultural policy-making: the Commission, the Parliament and the Council. In a 2019 article on farm subsidies, the New York Times said European leaders have historically treated Copa-Cogeca ‘not as mere recipients of government money, but as partners in policymaking’.

Copa-Cogeca is the only group invited to meet and talk to the president of the Council before every meeting of EU agricultural ministers. Copa-Cogeca also had the largest number of seats on civil dialogue groups that assist and advise the Commission. The structure of these groups has recently been reformed, but sources say that Copa-Cogeca continues to dominate discussions. Commission insiders also spoke of ‘a mutual understanding’ between DG AGRI, the branch of the Commission responsible for agricultural policy, and Copa-Cogeca.

In emails to members of the EU Parliament, Lighthouse Reports found, the lobby group gives detailed suggestions on how to vote on a certain piece of legislation and what kind of amendments should be made. One MEP has even felt Copa-Cogeca’s correspondence was a veiled threat.

This chummy, closed-loop relationship between the legislative, the executive and interest groups in Brussels that have a tight grip on agricultural policy-making has been dubbed ‘The Iron Triangle’. Power without representation can lead to policies skewed to benefit the few that wander the corridors of power in Brussels, rather than the millions of farmers toiling away in the fields.

In the past year, Copa-Cogeca has used its position to oppose environmental reforms proposed by the Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy, including successfully sabotaging a law to cut pesticide use, defeating efforts to require large-scale farm operations to reduce harmful emissions, and attempting to derail a law that would restore European ecosystems. Its lobbying also delayed crop rotation and fallow land requirements under the CAP. In addition, it is against linking farm subsidies to environmental outcomes. Crucially, it does not want to put a ceiling on the maximum amount of money a farm can get under the CAP, which has so far benefited large landowners at the expense of small- and medium-sized farmers.

Disenfranchised farmers

This has the effect of disenfranchising the kind of young and committed farmers that Europe desperately needs, and perpetuating the vicious cycle of more farmers abandoning agriculture than can be replaced. Like Tijs Boelens, a former activist and social worker who now grows organic vegetables and indigenous wheat and barley varieties in Flanders. ‘We are not at all seen. We don’t count because we don’t have money,’ he told me over a Zoom call during an afternoon break. His anger at policies at regional, national and European Union levels ‒ which he said are very much focused on large-scale, industrial, intensive farming ‒ is palpable.

Like Katja Temnik, a former basketball star-turned-herbalist and biodynamic farmer, who during the annual EU conference on the future of agriculture in Brussels warned the assembled parliamentarians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and farmers that the increasing emphasis on technology-driven food production was wrong. Temnik said that decision makers ‘are completely isolated from reality or what people who actually live and work with land need and feel’.

Like David Peacock, founder of the lauded Erdhof Seewalde, a 111-hectare mixed livestock farm in northern Germany, who feels disconnected from big farm unions like Copa-Cogeca because ‘the way they farm and what they’re doing is destroying the planet’. He adds, ‘I know it is possible to work differently. So I’m quite critical of what they’re doing and of the structures behind the whole thing.’

Like Jean Mathieu Thevenot and his friend, young engineers who have set up a farm in the French Basque country as ‘a political choice’ to say ‘industrial farming is a big part of the problem for most of the ecological issues that we face. We need to change the way we farm’. ‘Most of the youth farmers I know and work with’, adds Thevenot, ‘are disconnected and in complete disagreement with the vision of Copa-Cogeca, which has a lot of power in the EU but advocates in favour of the status quo and industrial agriculture’.

Like Bogdan Suliman, a Romanian former utility worker who turned to farming to support his parents and is charting a very different path from his older neighbours who advised him to use as much fertilisers and pesticides as possible. He is trying to recreate a sustainable ecosystem that does not require chemicals to control pests or boost productivity. ‘We need a different mentality,’ he says.

Although not all farmers are eager to change their practices, many are ‒ especially if it allows them to make a reasonable profit. Research shows this is a realistic perspective. If Farm to Fork is implemented carefully, many farmers stand to gain and only some will lose out. But this requires a bold set of measures and courageous, forward-looking representatives of European farmers.

This is why Copa-Cogeca’s lack of representation and the EPP positioning itself as a ‘farmers’ party’ are so concerning. If these two largest and most powerful groups in Brussels continue to resist any reforms to how we produce, consume and discard food, they will be doing a disservice both to the farmers who want to change and the consumers who need healthy and affordable food that does not wreck the planet. Ultimately, this will undermine European agriculture and the continent’s ability to feed its people.

Political fragmentation is constantly rising. We experience less and less of a shared reality across society. Some people are afraid of migrants – others of losing their homes. Some people don’t believe COVID exists – some religiously believe in science and objectivism. Yet others attribute anything they don’t understand to ancient aliens.

Our societies are more saturated with media than ever before. The proliferation of content for the sake of content makes it that much harder for the viewers to identify relevance. This upheaval, this destabilization of meaning is what happens every time a major technological shift pushes society out of its established habits.

A few decades ago, digital progressives used to promise a new age, where the internet and its amenities would bring about freedom, and democracy, making our lives easier and more enjoyable. Today, most media diets are dominated by garbage adverts, political propaganda and a constant, pounding noise from content farms.

Who can we blame for all this? Today’s guests have some insight to offer.

Mercy Abang is an award-winning journalist from Nigeria. She’s a media entrepreneur, co-managing director and CEO of Hostwriter, based in Berlin, Germany.

Lina Chawaf is a Syrian journalist, and founder of Radio Rozana broadcasting in Arabic to a Syrian audience both in Syria and in the diaspora. She’s working from Gaziantep, Turkey.

Péter Krekó is a political scientist and social psychologist at ELTE University. He is the director of Political Capital Institute a Budapest-based independent think tank. He’s also a long-time recurring author and friend of Eurozine.

We meet with them at the spectacular library of the School of English and American Studies at the Eötvös Loránd University, in the heart of Budapest, Hungary.

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Margarita Lechner, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director
Judit Csikós  project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

Video Crew Budapest

Nóra Ruszkai, sound engineering
Gergely Áron Pápai, photography
László Halász, photography

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
Kateryna Kuzmenko dialogue editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Hosted by the Library of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE University in Budapest

Further sources

Images used

Plato and Malala Yousafzai from Filckr. Young girl reading here, more girls reading here, a suffragist there and determined women everywhere. Really, everywhere.

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota, Daniela Univazo, Mars Zaslavsky, Marta Ferdebar, Olena Yermakova

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a content-sharing platform soon to premiere.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

In Turkey’s official historical narratives, women’s struggle for liberation from the oppression of the patriarchy aligns with the age of the Republic. According to this ‘secular, republican and modernist’ viewpoint, the ‘founding fathers’ granted women various rights and aided them in achieving equal standing as citizens, paving their way to freedom as individuals. 

What was later labelled ‘state feminism’ undeniably facilitated Turkish women’s entry into the public sphere and provided them with numerous rights and opportunities. However, the idea that these rights were ‘bestowed’ has consistently burdened Turkish women, impeding their ability to be more assertive, to mobilize, and to develop a critical stance towards the official ideology. For the same reasons, it took considerable time for there to emerge an awareness and understanding of the history of women’s struggle for equality and freedom before the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. 

In the 1980s, as the feminist movement gained momentum, it made a ground-breaking discovery: that not only had there been a bold and vocal organization in the Ottoman Empire that could be aptly termed a ‘women’s movement’, but that this also had a causal link with contemporary Turkish feminism. The realization that the seeds of a struggle characterized by the motto ‘rights are not given but taken’ were planted much earlier than the Republic itself became a wellspring of courage and resilience. From now on, women’s history began to be perceived outside the official narrative. 

Pioneering women 

First-hand accounts appeared of trailblazers like Fatma Aliye, Emine Semiye, Nezihe Muhiddin, who advocated for women’s education, marital equality and freedom from the constraints of the hijab. But for political reasons, it was much later that we encountered the Armenian activists Mari Beyleryan and Zabel Yesayan, or the Greek feminist Athina Gaitanou-Gianniou. Together within the non-Muslim community, all three fought persistently against the multiple discriminations tied to their ethnic and political identities. Political factors also delayed the recognition of leftists like Sabiha Sertel, Suat Derviş and Fatma Nudiye Yalçı. 

In the realms of music, theatre, opera and cinema, we only realized much later that the first-generation non-Muslim women, defying oppression and professional barriers, had bequeathed a comfort zone to the next generation of Muslim women artists. In 1923, Nezihe Muhiddin and thirteen women friends established the Women’s People Party with the optimistic belief that, under the new regime, women would attain equal political rights. While the Republican People’s Party, founded the same year, was recognized as Turkey’s first political party, Nezihe Muhiddin and her friends were banned. The Women’s People Party was forcibly transformed into the Turkish Women’s Union and its members tasked with shaping the image of the ideal Republic woman, whose characteristics and boundaries were delineated by men.

The corrosive and exclusionary process that left Nezihe Muhiddin isolated and grappling with mental crises also kept women away from political involvement for an extended period. It was only in 1935, a year after men consented to grant women the right to vote and run for office, that the first women deputies entered parliament. Eighteen women occupied the back benches, their presence marked by anxiety and awkwardness. It wasn’t until the 1970s that, as members of the Workers Party of Turkey under the leadership of Behice Boran, women would truly be empowered as representatives of the people and take their place in Parliament.

Allowed to leave the home 

The Law on Unification of Education of 1924 paved the way for women to participate in education, while the Turkish Civil Code of 1925 introduced regulations regarding polygamy, property division and divorce, all favouring women. However, the man remained the head of the family. Many aspects of women’s lives, such as entering the workforce or childbearing, still depended on the decisions and permission of men. The first international women’s congress was convened in 1935, under Atatürk’s patronage. Representatives from 39 countries were invited to discuss the topic of equality. Although a manifestation of state feminism, this initiative was an important opportunity for women to address shared problems and seek solutions.

 But the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe was also evident in Turkey. Women were excluded from public life. The prevailing discourse glorified fertility and encouraged family values and the idea of healthy generations strengthened solely by the caregiving work of women. The national education curriculum, sports and the press all promoted this perspective. Although attempts were made to ensure equality in the workplace with the Labour Law of 1936, economic depression and political turmoil served as convenient excuses to keep women away from working life. The only professions deemed suitable for women were those involving emotional labour and care work. They were mostly dominated by same-sex relations and characterized by fixed working hours: teaching, secretarial work, nursing, caregiving, etc. Women with lower levels of education worked in weaving, food, alcohol and tobacco production workshops, as well as in a small number of factories.

Even during the Ottoman Empire, women had access to formal education, albeit limited. A small number of young women from the elite class attended schools that provided western education, referred to as ‘missionary schools’. The feminist author Halide Edip, for example, was one of first Muslim-Turkish students at The American College for Girls. Despite condemnation and even threats, her father, a broad-minded bureaucrat, ensured that she attended . Mina Urgan, the philologist and socialist politician, also received a western education, first at the Lycée Notre Dame de Sion Istanbul and later at the Robert College. 

The young women who went to these schools were exposed to a western curriculum as well as a culture of democracy. They would later become prominent figures in politics, arts and culture, diplomacy and sports. These schools drew criticism from nationalist and conservative groups not only because they were suspected of spreading Christian culture, but also because their education system fostered individualism and freedom. Today’s criticism of Boğaziçi University (Bosphorus University) and the reaction to the Boğaziçi protests in 2021 can be traced back to this antagonism.

Image by Cemredemircioglu via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminism and the New Left 

In the 1970s Turkey witnessed an unprecedented strengthening and legalization of the left. This reflected the momentum gained by the New Left movement internationally. The Turkish Communist Party (TKP) and the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) were organized nationwide, the struggle for the rights of the working class was shaped in the light of leftist literature, and leftist parties were represented in the Parliament. It was during this time that women began to actively participate in the leftist parties as champions of class politics and the ideal of revolution.

Behice Boran became head of the TİP in 1970, but not all women were as influential as she was in the management levels of leftist organizations and parties. It was the Progressive Women’s Association (İKD), founded within the TKP in 1975 with the slogan ‘equality, progress, peace’, that prepared women on the left for the feminist struggle. Its members marched with the belief that the imminent revolution would solve not only all the problems of the country, but also the issues they were facing as women. Any objections were seen as petty bourgeois sensitivities and were repelled by the male leaders of the party organizations and even by the women themselves. This mentality dominated the leftist literature, newspapers, magazines, literature, cinema and theatre of the period. The İKD became visible in the public sphere thanks to a robust organizational structure. However, its rhetoric reflected that of the TKP and was usually constructed by men. 

An explosion of publications contributed to the atmosphere of political diversity and relative freedom in the ’70s. These served as platforms for political discussions and the organization of protests, as well as channels for introducing the public to alternative political currents. By the end of the decade, the İKD’s magazine Kadınların Sesi (Women’s Voice) and the similarly oriented Demokrat Kadın (Democrat Woman) had begun to address – albeit cautiously – issues such as women’s position in the family, exploitation at work, physical integrity and harassment and rape, while still focusing primarily on the class struggle. A group of Kurdish women also began to raise their voices against gender-based and ethnic discrimination, expressing their grievances through street protests and in the magazines they published. Finally, there emerged during this period a group of Muslim women labelled ‘Islamist feminists’ by the press, who actively contested the interpretation and appropriation of Islam by men.

Women shaping their own world 

As with every political movement, publishing – and particularly magazine publishing – played a vital role in sustaining feminism in Turkey from the 1970s. However, the movement came up against the constraints of tradition, religion, morality and patriarchy, and was often regarded as marginal and threatening. Under such circumstances, it became clear that magazines that adopted a more moderate style to convey women’s demands would have a wider influence. Elele magazine (the name ‘hand-in-hand’ was selected through a readers’ contest) emerged towards the end of 1976 and evolved into a publication that, in a gentle tone, elucidated the challenges faced by women for a broader readership, offering possible solutions. 

The magazine was part of the Hürriyet Group. Before Elele, women’s magazines had predominantly covered subjects like childcare, health and motherhood. Elele transformed their approach by presenting these topics in an encyclopaedic format crafted with input from specialists. Most notably, Elele introduced a ground-breaking sex guide explicitly addressing women. The magazine not only reminded readers of their duties as mothers and wives but also rekindled the struggle for rights and equality. While these issues had been largely addressed in the West through hard-fought battles waged by the first wave of feminism, they had only been a minor aspect of the opposition in Turkey. The demand for the legalization of abortion, a topic that would later be persistently brought up in Kadınca and Kim, was voiced for the first time in Elele in a dossier prepared by Selma Tükel. The threat posed by the abortion ban, jeopardizing women’s health through illegal procedures, was discussed in detail, supported by examples and expert opinions. 

The reader interest Elele had attracted and the widespread popularity of women’s magazines worldwide prompted the launch of another women’s magazine two years later: Kadınca. Published by the Gelişim Publishing Group, Kadınca became one of the most influential periodicals in the history of the press. Unlike Elele, Kadınca liberated women from the confines of family life and adopted a publishing approach that focused on various aspects of womanhood. It rebelled to some extent against dominant gender relations and patriarchal culture. After Kadınca was shut down, the same team would publish Kim and for a long time continue along the same trajectory, even pushing it further. Some of its members also contributed to Pazartesi magazine, which played a key role in the history of feminism.

The women’s movement finds an outlet 

With the military coup on 12 September 1980, all political activities, organizations and publications were banned. The public sphere and the political stage were closed to both the right and the left for an extended period. The coup’s prohibition on politics provided the women’s movement, which was not yet recognized as a political initiative, with fewer obstacles. Having been excluded from decision-making processes in male-dominated political organizations, relegated to logistical support and ignored, women finally had the opportunity to give the feminist struggle its name. Young women reporters and writers, expressing their personal rebellions almost instinctively in widely read publications, played a vital role in amplifying the voices and demands of women at the forefront of this struggle. Though not labelling themselves as feminists explicitly, this group of women engaged in a quest for women’s rights, identity, dignity and freedom. 

In establishing the theoretical underpinnings of the feminist movement, the magazine Somut, published by YAZKO from 1981 to 1987, played a crucial role by providing a space for the self-expression of this movement. This endeavour was followed by the formation of Kadın Çevresi Publications in 1983. Initially rooted in translations of western literature, its list evolved to include original literary works. Duygu Asena’s Kadının Adı Yok (Woman Has No Name), published in 1987, allowed the author – who did not identify as a feminist and had limited engagement with the various parts of the movement – to communicate the aspirations for women’s liberation to a broad audience. The book underwent numerous editions and was even adapted into a film. 

Throughout this journey, initiated by Kadınca and sustained by Kadınının Adı Yok, Turkey embarked on a profound exploration of womanhood. The groups formed during this era served as platforms where women actively challenged patriarchy and the societal structure, engaging in a profound reckoning and politicized the personal sphere. As these groups evolved, they somewhat patronisingly came to be known as awareness-raising events.

The ‘Women! Solidarity Against Beatings’ march in the spring of 1987 marked the first street protest following the coup d’état of 1980. Kaktüs magazine, first published in 1988, was hailed as the manifesto of socialist feminists.  Women involved in class politics could now integrate feminist principles without deviating from this overarching perspective. In 1989, a women’s congress was organized under the initiative of the Human Rights Association. In the same year, the Purple Needle campaign was launched. Women took to the streets brandishing purple needles, symbolizing their resistance against harassment, rape and all forms of male aggression, while advocating for the legitimacy of self-defence. It proved to be a compelling and impactful mobilization effort.

The 90s and the rise of identity politics

During the latter half of the 1980s, the ANAP government, led by Turgut Özal, began adapting to the liberal order of the post-Cold War era. This politically intricate period, rife with challenges, created room for identity  politics. Although criticized by advocates of class-based politics, identity politics served as an outlet for Kurdish and Alevi groups in the 1990s, as well as the non-Muslim population of Turkey seeking representation and rights. Fuelled by momentum from the 1970s, the Kurdish women’s movement began publicly addressing conflicts in eastern and south-eastern Anatolia, along with instances of torture in Diyarbakır Prison, whenever an opportunity arose. 

Roza magazine stood out as one of these platforms. In the 1990s, Muslim women affected by the Regulation on Dress Code in Public Offices, famously known as the ‘türban ban’ enacted after the 1980 coup d’état, gained more visibility. Simultaneously, the LGBTI movement asserted its identity through the pages of Kaos GL magazine. During this time, the discourse evolved, emphasizing that feminism served as an ideological foundation not only for women’s rights but also for broader struggles against patriarchy, labour exploitation, environmental degradation and all forms of oppression, including racism and animal cruelty. The presence of socialist, Muslim, anarcha-feminists and others with diverse perspectives indicated the existence of a spectrum of feminisms rather than a singular definition. Journals such as Feminist Politika, Amargi and Pazartesi played crucial roles as guiding lights during these transformative years.

21st century challenges

At the start of its prolonged rule in 2002, the AKP promised to support marginalized groups, address hate speech and violence, and initiate efforts in favour of identity politics. In its early years, there were indeed positive developments in this direction, garnering support from diverse political segments, including leftwing dissidents. The signing of the Istanbul Convention in 2011 generated optimism as a document aimed at empowering women and the LGBTI community, particularly in combating domestic violence and advocating for equal rights. Positive effects were indeed witnessed in practice. 

However, the AKP’s authoritarian consolidation, initiated with the Gezi protests and consolidated during the 2015 elections, resulted in setbacks in the fight for gender equality. The growing strength and legitimization of the women’s and LGBTI movement prompted unease among the AKP’s coalition partners and the majority of voters. The Association for Women and Democracy (KADEM), established in 2013 under the slogan ‘Equality in existence, justice in accountability’ purportedly to uphold and propagate the AKP’s gender policies, has long functioned as the ruling party’s sanctioned women’s organization. However, when the government declared its intention to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention in 2021, the organization’s critical stance altered to some extent. In the campaign to shift from gender equality to gender justice, and to prioritize family-centric gender policies, KADEM struggled to deviate significantly from the AKP’s agenda. 

Rightwing politics, particularly the AKP-MHP coalition – which like any ideological stance, incorporates women’s bodies into political narratives for strategic purposes – has made it its goal to undermine the women’s and LGBTI movements. This is achieved by making references to the türban ban, portraying LGBTI individuals as a threat to family values and hereditary continuity, and encouraging conservative women to reject opposition movements. In the 2023 general elections, the AKP secured a new victory by forming alliances with conservative and nationalist parties, indicating continued suppression and antagonism toward the women’s and LGBTI movements.

Despite claiming to have implemented measures to address the increasing violence against women, the government attempts to discredit civil society organizations advocating for gender equality by accusing them of ‘receiving funds from organisations acting against the interests of Turkey’ and ‘threatening the family’. Nevertheless, women’s organizations and initiatives (such as EŞİK, Women’s Coalition, Platform to Stop Femicide, University Women’s Collective, Women’s Defence Network, Women’s Solidarity Foundation), which constitute one of the most robust opposition groups in recent years, are gaining strength. With less to lose both globally and within the country, they are steadfastly affirming through their discourse and actions that they will not back down in their struggle for equality and freedom.

In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it seemed that everything had changed and would never be the same again. When Poland, run by a distinctly anti-refugee government, For the account of pushbacks of refugees from majority Muslim countries at the Belarusian border see: Human Rights Watch, Violence and Pushbacks at Poland-Belarus Border, 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/07/violence-and-pushbacks-poland-belarus-border. For analysis of PiS earlier anti-migrant discourse see: O. Yermakova, ‘Mythology of the Law and Justice Party’s Migration Discourse’, Politeja, 16 (6/63), 2019, pp. 177-195.
opened its gates to millions, many Europeans dropped everything to go to the border and volunteer. The solidarity with Ukraine was overwhelming. It gave hope.

The same was true among Ukrainians. The existential threat and consequent ‘rally ‘round the flag’ effect produced the highest-ever levels of social cohesion, previously unimaginable from Ukraine’s diverse patchwork of historical trajectories, languages, ethnic and religious identities, and political differences. For once, it seemed everyone was going through the same experiences, and had opened their hearts and minds to others: westerly cities like Lviv hosted refugees from the southeast; urban residents escaped to villages; the young lived with the old in safer regions. Whether rich or poor, workers or intelligentsia, Christians, Muslims or Jews, those dominantly Russian or Ukrainian speaking, all ended up shoulder to shoulder in the trenches or shelters, as the barrage of Russian missiles threatened indiscriminately. It seemed that old social cleavages were a thing of the past.

However, it now looks like all these effects were mostly short-term. With the war dragging on, its experiences have become more diverse and its effects more uneven, producing new cleavages and social hierarchies. Three macro groups have emerged: those who have served, those who stayed and those who left. Tensions and judgements characterize the relationships between these groups, and increasingly within each division.

Gaps in understanding, due to different experiences of war, coupled with the high emotional charge, physical exhaustion and overall toll on people, have produced social tensions and deepened certain divides over time. Rallying ‘round the flag can’t be perpetuated forever – not only in support of the government but also for interpersonal solidarity. And the disintegration of social cohesion started sooner for the diaspora than it did for society back in Ukraine – hypothetically, due to the absence of an immediate threat.

As a migrant myself both before and after the full-scale invasion began, I went to Poland to study in 2016, to work in 2018 and to flee the war in 2022.
I am familiar with how perceptions of Ukrainian who have emigrated have changed over time. Of all countries, Poland, where I conducted my research on Ukrainian experiences of living abroad, has received the most Ukrainians: at least 1.3 million from 2014-2021, Ł.Olender, Górny: Liczba Ukraińców w Polsce wróciła do poziomu sprzed pandemii; statystyki mogą być zaburzone [Górny: The number of Ukrainians in Poland has returned to pre-pandemic levels; statistics may be distorted], Bankier.pl, 2021, https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/Gorny-Liczba-Ukraincow-w-Polsce-wrocila-do-poziomu-sprzed-pandemii-statystyki-moga-byc-zaburzone-8239097.html
which doubled in 2022. NB: numbers are estimates and are constantly changing as movement continues.
Interviewing labour migrants from Ukraine in 2021 and again at the end of 2022 revealed that resentments are growing; the processes of emigration and reception, and their significance, have been very different for old, labour migrants and newly arrived refugees.

The underrated role of the diaspora

Demonstration in Prague, April 2022. Image courtesy of the author

Even though the initial mass mobilization subsided after a few months, the role of the existing Ukrainian diaspora in managing the crisis cannot be understated. It was migrant networks that were the single most crucial factor enabling such a warm welcome – as it is often put in the media – for such an enormous number of Ukrainians fleeing the war. As Ukrainian migration researcher Olena Fedyuk summarizes: ‘If we look at UN Refugee Agency’s statistics, the number of people who moved to a country often mirrors the number of labour migrants that already existed in that country.’ She further points out: ‘labour migrants, who are often portrayed as apolitical, have played a tremendous role in supporting this mobility. Yes, Europe opened borders, and a lot of local initiatives provided initial relief, catastrophe relief, but it’s really the existing networks of labour migrants that have received the main financial, social and moral pressure.’ Both the statistics and the interview responses I received confirm this for Poland.

Since then [24.02.2022], I haven’t slept in my bed alone. There were always some friends who came and drove further, and then my mother arrived. (Anna, a Ukrainian lawyer in Krakow).

Without fail, every respondent from the existing diaspora was active in one way or another; each had family or friends who had left Ukraine because of the full-scale invasion. When labour migrants were asked what guided refugees choices on their destination, the most frequent answer was that they had family in that country. This effect then snowballed, creating set patterns of migration in 2022. And when the heaviest burden is placed on individuals without enough institutional support, it’s only a matter of time before tensions build.

Refugees under suspicion

Various groups simultaneously judge Ukrainians refugees: host societies display fatigue; exhausted people back home, sometimes including family members; and, perhaps surprisingly, Ukrainians who migrated earlier. All kinds of myths about refugees inhabit public discourse. One of my diaspora respondents compared refugees to ‘parasites, who suck on social assistance’. Another called them ‘lucky’. When one reads comments from the social media groups of Ukrainians abroad, the language is sometimes even stronger and has been so since refugees arrived. There is a noticeable feeling of resentment at perceived injustice and inequality: refugees are receiving aid and opportunities ‘for nothing’, which earlier migrants did not get when they arrived in Poland.

Refugees are in a compromised position amidst the asymmetry of migration networks. They are repeatedly told to remember their place, be humble and grateful, and not dishonour Ukraine and fellow Ukrainians; earlier migrants, especially those permanently established in their host country, are afraid for their reputation, which is a constant struggle to maintain. Shame is expressed more often than empathy, sympathy or grief for fellow Ukrainians fleeing war. A lot of anger and distrust is directed at what appears to be an inappropriate recipient. And refugees often experience a double burden: they are expected to provide emotionally if not financially for those who remained in Ukraine from what is considered a privileged position abroad.

Any definitive statement about what Ukrainian refugees are like, from a displaced population of 8 million, UNHCR, One year after the Russian invasion, insecurity clouds return intentions of displaced Ukrainians, 2023. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/see/15367-one-year-after-the-russian-invasion-insecurity-clouds-return-intentions-of-displaced-ukrainians.html#:~:text=Twelve months since the Russian,internally displaced people within Ukraine
has to be a misleading generalization. Being settled in over 40 countries, UNHCR, Ukraine Refugee Situation, 2023b. Available at: https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
any definitive statement on the conditions they live in has to be a misleading generalization, too. People, and their situations, simply differ too greatly. While some may drive expensive cars, others rely on volunteers like Austria-based Tanja Maier organizing the distribution of 50 euro supermarket coupons to be able to feed their kids. Some have a thriving career, a partner and a home waiting for them in a relatively safe town. Others from places like Kharkiv may have lost everything. Those from places like Mariupol have nowhere to return to. Stereotyping isn’t helpful.

The gender gap

Ukrainian men who live abroad and those who have otherwise avoided the draft face particular condemnation. While, for respondents, being Ukrainian and associating with a home country at war instilled a new sense of national pride in collective achievements on the battlefield and in resistance, it also often provoked a feeling of shame, guilt and self-judgement for not returning to fight. As martial law restricts Ukrainian men from going abroad, male emigrants cannot see friends and family back home without their travel becoming a one-way ticket. While mental health support has so far been largely directed at women, the mental health impact of the war in this respect may be higher on men.

For women, the war and its resulting imbalances regarding mobility have both been empowering and perpetuated gender-role inequalities. On the one hand, women have had to take up more leadership in activism and diplomacy, while men are hindered. On the other hand, women have been pushed back into the role of caretakers: evacuating children and senior family members; often not having the opportunity to work; and subject to a system that incentivizes vulnerability.

Who will return?

Warsaw train station, March 2022. Image courtesy of the author

It’s a loaded question. Having lost millions who have fled (almost half of which are children), UNHCR, Education on Hold: Almost half of school-aged refugee children from Ukraine missing out on formal education, 2023. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing-notes/education-hold-almost-half-school-aged-refugee-children-ukraine-missing-out#:~:text=In a new Education Policy,the 2022-2023 academic year
hundreds of thousands in combat and attacks, and with a plummeting fertility rate due to instability, Ukraine’s demographic prognosis looks bleak. This decrease in population carries significant risks for the country’s economy and overall prosperity; rebuilding after the war will require skilled hands and brains. Before 2014 the industrial Donbas in particular and the south-east in general were Ukraine’s most populated regions and biggest contributors to the national economy. Now, given the 5 million internally displaced persons, UNHCR, Ukraine Emergency, 2023. Available at: https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/ukraine/
Donbas’s industry is in ruins, agriculture in the south is challenged by mine pollution and the Kakhovka dam’s demolition, and the coastal and Russian borderland areas are still threatened by artillery fire; the socio-economic map of Ukraine is flipping.

I asked my respondents from the diaspora about their thoughts on returning to Ukraine. On the whole, the full-scale war has not significantly altered the plans of emigrants but has strengthened their pre-existing positions. For those who wanted to settle abroad for a better quality of life, the destruction of war has given them greater conviction to do so. For those who wanted to return and contribute to Ukraine’s development, the war has strengthened their resolve. Despite raising grievances of refugees abusing aid, several respondents have applied for humanitarian visa programmes in other countries and had either already moved or were planning to do so. It was something they had already wanted and the liberalized migration regimes for Ukrainians in 2022 presented them with the opportunity to do so.

There is a noticeable difference in how refugees and economic migrants choose host destinations. Refugees tend to base their decisions on practical urgent needs: they often move to a location with available accommodation. Among labour migrants, many are ‘dreamers’: recipients who shared their plans of moving on to a different country often state stereotypical images of Western countries as their reasons. S. Koikkalainen et al., ‘Decision-making and the trajectories of young Europeans in the London region: the planners, the dreamers, and the accidental migrants’, Comparative Migration Studies, 10(26), 2022, pp. 1–16.
Leaving Poland is often associated with avoiding increasingly illiberal populist politics.

Statistics show a high, albeit declining, percentage of migrants wanting to return to Ukraine: 63%, according to a recent survey. Centre for Economic Strategy, Ukrainian refugees: how many are there, their intentions & return prospects, 2023. Available at: https://ces.org.ua/en/refugees-from-ukraine-final-report/
From interactions with Ukrainian refugees in Europe, I would challenge these numbers. Social pressure and shame drive many to give the ‘correct’ answer instead of sharing their actual thoughts, their doubts. The quantitative nature of such surveys doesn’t reveal when or under what circumstances people are willing to return and what it means to them.

From my research, many respondents discussed the possibility of returning to Ukraine after the war. However, the prospect was always discussed in a hypothetical manner. I spoke to a refugee who stated proactively at a public event that she wanted to return. In private after the event, she told me when she was planning to do so: ‘After my child goes to university – I want him to receive a European diploma’; when asked how old her child was, she replied, ‘He’s in fifth grade.’ Another refugee who fled with a child was always vague about her plans. Then I noticed she had her library shipped from Kyiv – that seemed a stronger statement of intent than anything expressed in words.

Those who admitted not wanting to return to Ukraine were always very negative about Ukraine’s future. Having hope, or having lost it, was probably the single biggest predictor of a person’s intentions. It might be that migrants adopt a very negative lens of their home country to rationalize having uprooted themselves. Alternatively, it might be that those who are not optimistic about positive changes in their home country are more likely to emigrate in the first instance. Sometimes, very particular and personal negative experiences like being bullied at school can be extrapolated to negative associations ascribed to the whole country and, therefore, the desire to leave.

Most often, however, less directly personal justifications such as corruption, low salaries or high inflation are given for not wanting to return. While broad factors do impact an individual’s situation, they are less likely to translate as decisive factors in decision-making. However, it does seem that impersonal reasons are more acceptable to voice publicly; when a higher force exerts control over your situation, you can be excused for not doing the ‘right’ thing. Saying out loud that you don’t want to return because you have found a higher paid job abroad, or that the husband waiting for you at home is abusive, or that you no longer have to deal with family-in-law you dislike, or that you simply found a new partner who won’t be drafted and can go on holiday abroad with you is socially unacceptable among Ukrainians. Nevertheless, it is these individual circumstances that are decisive and should be kept in mind for any policy that incentivizes returns.

Of note is the estimated third of Ukrainian refugees that have already returned. For those who are still abroad, the likelihood of them returning is dropping with every day that the war lasts. The longer refugees adapt to their host country and build a life there – with children attending school and learning a new language, for example – the more it will be traumatic to leave once again. In addition, the longer the war lasts, the more homes, schools and hospitals are destroyed, the less there is to go back to. How realistic rebuilding everything, and fast, especially close to the Russian border, remains a big question. The best way to help Ukrainian refugees who are willing to return would be strengthening air defence over cities and critical infrastructure so that schools and businesses aren’t too disrupted, helping to mitigate for and ideally prevent winter blackouts. The goal of any refugee is to stop being a refugee, an outsider, which, for some, means returning home to a peaceful place.

Legal precarity

Refugee camp at Korczowa border crossing, March 2022. Image courtesy of the author

For others, the transition away from their refugee status is by fully establishing their life abroad, securing ongoing stability and finding acceptance. The waiting and uncertainty is often the most exhausting. We commonly call Ukrainians who fled the war refugees. However, legally speaking, Ukrainians were granted temporary protection status and not asylum. The key word here is ‘temporary’. The EU directive, an initial blessing, could well turn into a hinderance: allowing for a maximum of three years’ protection, there is no clear understanding of what will happen to Ukrainian refugees when the deadline expires; and the war is already nearing its second anniversary. For a detailed discussion: European Council on Refugees and Exiles, The EU’s Response to Displacement from Ukraine. ECRE’s Recommendations, Brussels, 2023, https://ecre.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ECRE-Ukraine-reponse-messages-10.10.2023.pdf
Implementation of the directive differs from country to country. For a detailed discussion: European Council on Refugees and Exiles, Access to socio-economic rights for beneficiaries of temporary protection, Brussels, 2022, https://asylumineurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Access-to-SER-for-temporary-protection-beneficiaries.pdf.
Yet nowhere in the EU does the time Ukrainians spend in member states under temporary protection count towards EU long-term residence permits. With the issue of migration being highly politicized, European and other elections next year may further complicate the solution to this question, carrying potential risks for both refugees and their receiving societies. For the refugees, the politically conditioned discourse of hospitality rather than rights makes their position precarious; sometimes hospitality turns into ‘hostipitality’, as Derrida once put it. L, Bialasiewicz and N. Barszcz, ‘The geopolitics of hospitality’, New Eastern Europe, (4), 2022.
For the receiving society, there is the risk that right-wing populist actors could capitalize on rising resentment, as has happened in many countries previously after receiving large numbers of refugees, as in Germany after 2015. J. Gedmin, Right-wing populism in Germany: Muslims and minorities after the 2015 refugee crisis, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/research/right-wing-populism-in-germany-muslims-and-minorities-after-the-2015-refugee-crisis/

In several countries, the proposed solution for refugees who want to stay is a temporary residence permit based on employment: a labour migration regime for Ukrainians displaced by war. However, this approach would leave out the vulnerable, the elderly and the sick. It would also not serve many women with children, who constitute the majority of Ukrainian refugees, and often have no access to affordable childcare, and therefore, in the absence of family abroad, cannot enter the labour market. These people live in fear of what their future will look like. Whether Ukrainians return or not will depend heavily on which policy instruments host governments decide to implement. Many refugees come from frontline and occupied areas. As long as the Ukrainian government doesn’t have sufficient resources to provide for internally displaced persons, it should lobby for the protection and humane treatment of its citizens abroad.

Ukraine might one day need its own immigration policy. When the time for broad-scale rebuilding comes, more than returning women and children will be needed to cover the task at hand. Ukrainians will need to remember the hospitality they were given abroad and extend the same or do better. But with unemployment at almost 20%, having doubled since the full-scale invasion, this isn’t a burning issue at present. Decent wages are, however.

Belonging, representation and agency

Those respondents to the study who were the most eager to return to Ukraine were those for whom it is important to be part of civil society and have the agency to influence social and political change – something they don’t feel they have in a foreign society yet. In addition to the hopes they have for positive change in Ukraine after the war, they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility over reconstruction:

I don’t feel that I can live in Poland all my life. Because in Poland, same-sex marriages are not legalized. In terms of equality for me as a gender minority, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, so I would go somewhere else. And it is very possible that it would be Ukraine. Even if same-sex marriages aren’t legalized in Ukraine, even if there are no civil partnerships, it would be more comfortable for me to live in Ukraine because I could fight for it. I would like to fight for them to be legalized in Ukraine. … Because I don’t feel that I am responsible for Polish civil society. I am responsible for Ukrainian society because I am part of it. (Ihor, PhD student from Luhansk)

Such a statement reflects a strengthening of Ukrainian civic national identity, and not only because of a common military threat. Existing research and my data suggest that the common and participatory experiences of modern Ukraine’s three revolutions The 1990 Revolution on Granite, the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution and especially the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity.
have fused Ukrainian identity with active citizenship: ‘enhanced solidarity with compatriots, increased readiness to defend Ukraine or work for Ukraine, and increased confidence in the people’s power to change the country for the better … Some believe that the national transformation and consolidation started on the Maidan itself, in a readiness to defend the common cause and support other people fighting for it; people who came to be perceived as Ukrainians rather than merely fellow protesters’. V. Kulyk, ‘National Identity in Ukraine: Impact of Euromaidan and the war’, Europe - Asia Studies, Routledge, 68(4), 2016, pp. 588-608.
Collective resistance to the 2022 invasion, which included all segments of society, solidified these tendencies.

Coming to terms with the present

Data from this research project show that, in general, the full-scale war doesn’t seem to have radically changed socio-political realities yet. Rather it has deepened existing tendencies and caused further polarization. There is evidence of both stronger social cohesion and reconciliation, breaking stereotypes, and deepening divides, including new social tensions. However, the ripple effects we will only be able to appreciate with hindsight.

While there remains a lot of uncertainty about the future of the Ukrainian migrant population across Europe, one thing is clear: such tectonic demographic shifts cannot be other than significantly consequential for the economies, societies, cultures and politics of both Ukraine and the EU for decades to come. Over the last decade, around 184,000 Ukrainians became EU citizens. Eurostat (2022) Ukrainian citizens in the EU. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Ukrainian_citizens_in_the_EU&oldid=584674#Acquisition_of_citizenship.
This figure in itself suggests that the Ukrainian diaspora isn’t going away but rather becoming a sizable force that over time will develop political representation and more influence.

The party that needs to deal with this reality more than any others is Ukraine itself. Ukraine has probably changed more in the years of war than in the decades of independence before that, and even more over the months of full-scale war. It is important to opt for human-centric rebuilding programmes and wage-led growth, creating conditions and incentives for migrants to return. It is also important to recognize that a significant proportion of the previous population won’t return whatever the incentives; forcing people to return is impossible and indeed would be inhumane. Instead, Ukraine needs a solid diaspora policy, which sees Ukrainians across Europe as an asset rather than a problem.

At the start of the invasion, existing migrant networks played a significant role in shaping and enabling the Western response. They not only shouldered the highest burden in hosting refugees but also organized demonstrations and petitions, and the procurement of humanitarian and double-purpose aid. Those who tried buying a tourniquet in March 2022 know that it was virtually impossible, for example: Ukrainians across Europe and North America had emptied all the shelves and warehouses of first aid kits. Emigrant Ukrainians deserve their contribution to be recognized, too.

Similarly, refugees have a special role to play in advocating for aid, shaping the rebuilding process and backing Ukraine’s accession to the EU and NATO. They can serve as cultural diplomats establishing links between Ukraine and its allies. No matter what their location, Ukraine needs to integrate them. Among other necessities is operating enough polling stations in foreign electoral districts or finding secure ways to vote by post or digitally – so that a Ukrainian in Vancouver doesn’t have to take a long-distance flight to cast a vote. Ukraine urgently needs a diaspora engagement strategy. There shouldn’t be a policy conflict between facilitating integration into host countries or securing the return of refugees – both will happen. Judgement is not an effective incentive for either.

War is dramatically changing the fabric of Ukrainian society. We need to find ways to reconcile with this and adapt, rather than resent each other, engage in competitive suffering, and live in nostalgia or fantasies. The wish to have everyone return to Ukraine is about more than just returning to a particular place. It’s a wish to go back in time, to return to how things were before this horrendous war. The demographic portrait of Ukraine has changed as much as its urban landscapes. Let’s try to find the good in a bad situation, seeking ways to engage with each other with empathy.

This article is based on research undertaken within a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 765224, as well as a visiting fellowship, sponsored by the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. All the names of interviewees have been changed.

It has been published as part of the youth project Vom Wissen der Jungen. Wissenschaftskommunikation mit jungen Erwachsenen in Kriegszeiten, funded by the City of Vienna, Cultural Affairs.

From the 1970s until 2000, the Sadova-Corabia irrigation system watered over 70,000 hectares of land in Romania’s Dolj and Olt counties. A set of pipelines that brought water from the Danube, the system turned the area from a sandy region predominantly used for vineyards into a fruit and vegetable paradise. Little by little, however, the system was abandoned; now only segments of it are still working.

Agriculture in the area has changed, as has the environment. Today the Sadova-Corabia region is known not just as the homeland of Romania’s famous Dăbuleni watermelons, but also as the ‘Romanian Sahara’. Together with the south of Moldavia, Dobrogea and the Danubian Plain, it is one of the regions in Romania most affected by desertification.

Anthropologist Bogdan Iancu has been researching the irrigation system in southern Romania for several years. Scena9 sat down with him to talk about drought, Romania’s communist-era irrigation systems, and the local reconstruction of agriculture after their decline. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Oana Filip: How did your interest in drought arise?

Image copyright Maria Bălănean / Scena9

Bogdan Iancu: Rather by accident. Around seven years ago I was in the Danube port of Corabia for another research project, and at one point I heard a student talking at a table with a local, who was telling him about the 2005 floods and the irrigation systems in the area. The man also wanted to talk to me and show me the systems. It was an extremely hot summer and I thought it was very interesting to talk about irrigation and drought.

I myself come from the area of Corabia-Dăbuleni. My grandparents lived in a village a bit north of the Danube floodplains, where there was an irrigation system with canals. This was where I learned to swim. The encounter somehow reactivated a personal story about the frequent droughts of that time and the summers I spent there. A lot of people in the area told us that the emergence of irrigation systems in the ’60s and ’70s led to more employment in agriculture. For them it was a kind of local miracle. As I realized that droughts were becoming more frequent and widespread, I became certain that this could be a research topic.

The following year I started my own project. In the first two or three years, I was more interested in the infrastructure and its decline, the meanings it held for the locals and the people employed in the irrigation system, and how this involved their perceptions of changes in the local microclimate. Later, I became interested in the fact that people began to migrate out of the area because of the dismantling and privatization of the former collective or state-owned farms.

I then started looking at how seasonal workers who had left for Italy, Spain, Germany or Great Britain had begun to come back to work in agriculture and start their own small vegetable farms. I was interested in how they started to develop the area, this time thanks to a few wells that have been drilled deep into the ground. So, somehow, the formerly horizontal water supply has now become vertical. This could have some rather unfortunate environmental implications in the future, because too many drilled wells that are not systematically planned can cause substances used in agriculture to spill into the ground water.

How has the locals’ relationship with water changed with the disappearance of the irrigation system and the increasing frequency of droughts?

The irrigation system had a hydro-social dimension. Water was primarily linked to agriculture and the planned socialist system. For a long time, the locals saw the system as the reason for the appearance and cultivation of fruits and vegetables they had never known before. For ten years after 1990, the irrigation network still worked and helped people farm on small plots of land, in subsistence agriculture, so that they could still sell vegetables in nearby towns. But after 2000 the state increased the price of water and cut subsidies. When the system collapsed, the ecosystem built around it collapsed along with it.

At that time, something else was going on as well. The system was being fragmented through a form of – let’s say partial – privatization of the water pumping stations. The irrigators’ associations received loans via the World Bank. These associations did not work very well, especially since the people there had just emerged from the collective farming system, and political elites deliberately caused all forms of collective action to lose credibility after the ’90s.

Because the irrigation system was no longer being used, or being used at much lower parameters than before, it no longer seemed functional. Bereft of resources, the local population saw the remaining infrastructure as a resource and sold it for scrap. It became even more difficult to use the irrigation system. This caused people to migrate abroad. The first waves of ‘strawberry pickers’ have only recently started coming back, perhaps in the past six or seven years, bringing in the money they have made in Italy or Spain.

People have to be empowered in relation to the water they need. So these seasonal workers began digging their own wells. They have lost all hope that the state can still provide this water for them. They saw that in the Romanian Danubian Plain, thousands, tens of thousands of hectares of land were sold off cheaply to foreign companies that receive water for free, because they take it from the drainage canals. This caused even greater frustration for the locals, who not only look down on the new technologies that these companies use, but also resent their privilege of receiving free water from the Romanian state.

Image copyright Maria Bălănean / Scena9

How do you see the future of the area?

It’s difficult to say. In the short term, I think the area will partially develop. But, at the same time, I think problems could arise from too many exploitations.

The number of private wells will probably increase. Some very large companies in Romania are lobbying Brussels to accept the inclusion of wells drilled into underground aquifers (geological formations that store groundwater) into the irrigation strategy being developed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. This would mean ten years of semi-subsistence, or slightly above semi-subsistence agriculture, where the former ‘strawberry pickers’ turn into successful small farmers. We’ve already seen this in the villages on the Sadova-Corabia system. But we have no way of knowing how long this will last, and how much pressure these aquifers would be subjected to. There is a risk that they might get contaminated, because they function like pores, and the water resulting from agricultural activities, which contains nitrites and nitrates, could get in there and cause problems.

In Spain, for instance, they are very cautious about drilling wells. Arrests have been made. It’s a political issue that contributed to the defeat of Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist party in the last elections. Many farmers in Spain privileged to have access to water could dig a well wherever they wanted, but now found themselves faced with this rather drastic law. And the People’s Party promised them that they would be able to continue digging wells.

At the Dăbuleni Agricultural Research Station, for example, they are experimenting with exotic crops better adapted to desertification, such as dates, kiwis and a certain type of banana. Do you think people could adopt new cultures in Sadova-Corabia too?

This already happened decades ago. With the advent of the irrigation system, people were forced to be open to cultivating vegetables and fruits they had never seen before. Someone told me how, when they ate the first eggplants, they didn’t know what to do with them, they seemed bitter. Even tomatoes, which to us seem always to have been eaten there, were only introduced in the ’60s. One person told me that when he first tried a tomato he thought it tasted like soap. But if their grandparents or parents could adapt, so will people today. Besides, most have worked in agriculture abroad with this kind of fruit.

Have you seen any irrigation best practices that you think would be suitable for the situation in the Sadova-Corabia area?

I think one such example is micro-agriculture, which is employed on smaller plots in Italy, for instance. There are also micro farms in Sadova-Corabia that produce organic, ecological, sustainable products and so on. And there are a few cooperatives that work quite well, some of them supply tomatoes for the Belgian-owned supermarket chain Mega Image, for example.

Spain, on the other hand, is not a best practice model. Spain is a devourer of water resources in an absolutely unsustainable way. We’re already seeing that the Tagus (the longest river in the Iberian peninsula and an important source for irrigation) is endangered by large-scale agriculture. In the 1990s, there was small and medium-sized farming there, and I think there should be a return to that. Obviously, the economists say it’s not profitable, but it’s time to think about a decrease and not an increase, which is always cannibalistic. This kind of farming, on a medium or small scale, should also bring this irrigation system back into focus.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear for how much longer the Sadova-Corabia system will be able to function. It has an outlet in the Danube, which dries up in the summer and is not permanently supplied with water, as it was during the socialist period. Last year, for example, irrigation electricians and mechanics working on the Danube encountered problems, because the main canal poured water into the Danube, instead of collecting from it. If the Danube is no longer a sustainable source for irrigation canals (and not just in Romania), the alternative lies in the different management of water resources.

In the multimedia exhibition based on the project that you organized last year, there was a notion of how grand socialist projects obfuscated life narratives, and how human stories were lost to anonymity. What life narratives are being lost or hidden now, in this larger discussion of drought and desertification in the area?

I met a woman who during communism had managed a farm where they grew peaches that were then exported to Germany and Czechoslovakia. She told me that local vegetables were exported to Great Britain; and that this export was even stipulated by the two countries. Over 200 British technicians and experts lived in Sadova-Corabia for about four years. The story of these people, these British experts, not just the Romanian ones, and how they collaborated is completely lost to history.

In the ’70s, these people were a sort of agricultural vanguard. They were trying to propose a productive model of agriculture, a break from the post-feudal, post-war past. There were people who worked at the pipe factory and built those gigantic pipes through which water was collected from the Danube. Today, there are still people who continue to make enormous efforts to do what needs to be done. The mayor of Urzica, for example, encourages locals to sell or give away plots of land for afforestation, and the town hall is even trying to deploy its own afforestation projects.

I have seen journalists travel to the area for two days, come back and report that socialism destroyed everything. Obviously, lakes were drained and the environmental toll was very high. At the same time, that era brought unlimited water to many areas where it was previously lacking. Acacia forests were planted. Biologists say they’re no good, as they actually consume water from the soil; but foresters everywhere defend them and say they provide moisture.

One way or another, all these stories should be told. As should the stories of the people who went abroad for work and are coming back. These so-called ‘strawberry pickers’ or ‘seasonals’, whose lives we know nothing about, because the Romanian state doesn’t believe that five million Romanians who went to work abroad deserve the attention.

Image copyright Maria Bălănean / Scena9

When I went to the Dăbuleni research station, many of the researchers had grown up there and had a personal connection to the area and a notion that they were working for the place where they grew up. How does the connection between the locals and the environment change, when so many choose to work abroad?

This is where things intersect. These people have parents who tell us that for them the emergence of the irrigation system was similar to what happened in Israel, a country that has problems with its soil and that managed to make it better with the aid of water improvement systems. They saw that desert repopulated, greened, diversified, and they saw a greater complexity in the kinds of crops they can grow. They got predictability, i.e. permanent jobs at state agricultural enterprises, or jobs that allowed them to work at home, at the agricultural production cooperative (CAP).

One thing I didn’t know before this research was that peasants who met their agricultural production quota were given 22 acres of land that they could work within the CAPs, with fertilizer from the CAPs, and irrigated with water from CAPs. One person I talked to even drove a truck contracted by the state and sold watermelons in Cluj, Sibiu, Râmnicu Vâlcea, and Bucharest in the 1980s and 1990s. And he wasn’t the only one.

For them, the irrigation system was not only associated with farms, but also the related industries – pipeline factories, factories making tiles that lined the irrigation channels. It was a flourishing new ecosystem. But once this system collapsed, they also came to associate it with the degradation of the environment. I spoke to a local who said that when the system worked, he didn’t feel the summer heat, even though the temperatures were just as high, because of the water in the canal network.

The absence of water is like the absence of blood – without it, an organism can no longer metabolize. And then, naturally, the young people decided to leave. But this was not a permanent departure. They went to Spain, for example, they saw vertical water there, and they said, ‘Look, we can make our own wells, we don’t need to wait around for horizontal water.’

Why, as a state, have we failed to come up with an irrigation project today as ambitious as Sadova-Corabia in its time?

There’s more to it than just this one system. There are about a hundred or so chain irrigation systems that start in this area, from south of Resita all the way to Dobrogea. The problem is that these irrigation systems were in full boom before the 1990s. Now, don’t think I believe that only irrigation systems can ensure good crops. I think they should be seen as part of a mixed bag of solutions. The problem is not that no more irrigation systems have been built, but that the old ones have not been preserved, optimized or modernized. Private interests were prioritized, especially those of a very large class of landowners, and land-grabbing was prioritized to the detriment of working on smaller plots of land. And so, such infrastructures were abandoned, because the big players can afford super-performant extractive technologies.

How do you see urban dwellers relate to droughts and irrigation?

I have seen many of them ridiculing people in the countryside and finding it unacceptable that they use municipal water handed to them for irrigation; but, at the same time, none of them disclose the amount of water they use on their lawns, which are worthless grass. Obviously, it’s easier to laugh from inside an office and to think that people are being irrational than to understand that they’re selling tomatoes that they would have otherwise been unable to grow.

As climate change intensifies, droughts will become more frequent. Will we see better cooperation in the face of this new reality, or more division?

In the next five to six years I think we will see more competition for water and the criminalization of our fellow water-users. But I think that this is where the role of the media comes in. It should abandon the logic of only showing us the big, scary monster called climate change. Rather, it should detail how these climate changes are occurring at the grassroots level. I think both the press and the state should work on research and popularization, on disseminating information that talks about these effects.

I don’t think that anything can be done without pedagogies. Yes, during the socialist period these pedagogies were abused, sometimes enforced with actual machine guns, and that was tragic. But today we don’t see any kind of pedagogy, any kind of relating. None of the measures that need to be implemented are socialized. People are not being called to their village cultural center to be told: ‘Here’s what we want to do.’ The cultural center is now only used for weddings. Some radical forms of pedagogy should be devised and disseminated locally, so that people understand the invisible price of water.

Water just cannot seem to satisfy Europeans. Our infrastructure is often built in a way to try and get rid of rainwater as fast as possible. And yet, when it doesn’t rain, drought rears up its head. 

Across the past decades and in many regions, precipitation has been steadily decreasing and we don’t seem to have a good solution for it. While we expect water to be readily available; on our beaches and in our cups, most of us are not willing to engage with its demands.

To understand our relationship to water,  we must go beyond the tap. That is, at least, if we have the privilege of accessing water. In this episode, we talk about water solutions, humans and wildlife, and future cities.  

Today’s guests

Ana Mumladze Detering is one of the co-founders of Schwimmverein Donaukanal, a Swimming Club in Vienna that aims to revive the urban swimming culture in Vienna’s Danube Canal. 

Amelie Schlemmer is a textile artist and co/founder of Hybrids Dessous, a sustainable fashion brand creating hybrids suitable on both land and water.  

Jakub Sigmund is a Bratislava-based researcher and the project manager of BROZ, an NGO safeguarding the natural waterways for over two decades. 

We meet with them at The Alte Schmiede Kunstverein, Vienna. 

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Margarita Lechner, writer-editor
Salma Shaka, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director
Judit Csikós  project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

OKTO Crew

Senad Hergić producer
Leah Hochedlinger  video recording
Marlena Stolze  video recording
Clemens Schmiedbauer video recording
Richard Brusek sound recording

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
Kateryna Kuzmenko dialogue editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota, Daniela Univazo, Mars Zaslavsky, Marta Ferdebar, Olena Yermakova, Farah Ayyash

Related reads

Check out our focal point Breaking bread: Food and water systems under pressure

Further sources

Rising ocean acidification leads to anxiety in fish  by Mario Aguilera, Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego 

Analysis: United Nations Water Conference 2023, Water Stewardship Asia Pacific 

Troubled waters at the 2023 UN Water Conference by Anuka Upadhye, Planet Forward 

Explainer: What climate models tell us about future rainfall, Carbon Brief 

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

‘They are arresting migrants sleeping near the bus station! We must urgently reach out to as many undocumented individuals as possible and advise them to avoid the city centre – it’s become too dangerous again.’ It was 17 September when two of my research partners delivered this disheartening news: yet another police raid had resulted in the disappearance of at least 40 Black migrants, squatting a building under construction in front of the Zarzis terminal, who had been patiently waiting to purchase tickets to Sfax and, from there, potentially reach Europe.

The presence of these migrants, who had journeyed on foot from the Libyan and Algerian borders and sought refuge in disused buildings, was conspicuous when I was there in early September. However, soon afterwards, they had vanished. Rumours spread among local citizens and those migrants who had managed to evade the police about a new wave of arrests and deportations of Black non-nationals over the south-eastern and south-western borders.

Prior to this, I had been under the illusion that the harrowing cycle of illegal state deportations, acting as death sentences to racialized migrants, which had plagued Southeast Tunisian throughout July, had come to an end. These events shattered that hope and underscored the unwavering policy of Tunisian authorities to expel Black migrants. 

A few days later, the European Commission made headlines, announcing the transfer of 127 million euros in financial aid as a first instalment to the Tunisian government within the scope of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a strategic and far-reaching partnership signed on 16 July 2023. This move exemplified the EU’s active support of what El Miri describes as the institutional, social and physical racialization of ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ Throughout this text, the adjective ‘sub-Saharan’ is placed in quotation marks because it will only be used to remain truthful to direct quotations of texts or discourses, and never to identify individuals originating from West, East, Central and Southern Africa. This adjective, although still prevalent in academic scholarship and public discourse, emerged as a mere substitute for racially biased expressions like ‘Black Africa’. And yet, it does not question the false and colonially produced dichotomy between the northern and southern regions of the African continent that still underlies the term and is rooted in what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘the color line’.throughout their migratory path, from which arises what Mbembe coined as the necropolitics of contemporary global borders, concealed under the guise of combatting irregularized migration.

While I write these lines, the words of Mourad, the head of a socio-cultural association in Medenine, echo in my mind: ‘Ever wondered what the average Tunisian is saying on the streets these days?’ Due to concerns for research partner security, I have either used pseudonyms or, when possible, refrained from mentioning their names.In mid-September he had welcomed me for over an hour in the front office where his association supports both vulnerable Tunisians and irregularized migrants in a small village of the south-eastern governorate of Medenine. After I explained my research goal – to engage local stakeholders in exploring the impact of evolving border controls on the economic and social lives of those living, crossing or stranded along the Tunisian-Libyan border – he chose to dispense with formalities and sat beside me. Together, we retraced the dramatic developments of last July when, after weeks of tensions and protests across the governorate of Sfax, a street brawl between a Tunisian and a group of Black migrants led to the former’s death, triggering self-created squads of citizens to launch a veritable ‘Black hunt’. Forced evictions of Black migrants from their homes and civilians conducting extrajudicial arrests of racially profiled non-Tunisians across the city followed. 

Libyan-Tunisian border, 2011. Image by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid, via Flickr.

Instead of curbing this public-initiated racist organized violence, national security authorities opted for rapid mass deportations, expelling over 1,200 Black migrants to Tunisia’s borders with Libya between 5 July and 10 July. Soon afterwards, in an attempt not to jeopardize its ongoing negotiation for EU financial support, the government partially readmitted most of those deported back to Tunisia and transferred  them to reception centres operated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the border governorates of Medenine and Tataouine. School dorms and abandoned warehouses were also turned into temporary shelters managed under state mandate by the Tunisian Red Crescent, whilst public authorities prevented migrants from moving further north. In the meantime, the Tunisian National Guard instructed public transport workers to act as security officials, tasked with checking the validity of travel documents – tantamount to scrutinizing suspected undocumented migrants on the basis of their skin colour. 

Research partners, who intervened to support those being readmitted on 10 July, reported hundreds of individuals – children, youth and adults, male and female – dehydrated, with extreme sunstroke and sunburn, often displaying clear signs of having been beaten, their wounds untreated, suffering from high levels of psychological distress due to violence and humiliation suffered both in Sfax and at the border. And yet, for over a month, Tunisian state authorities committed over 300 more migrants to their deaths; not readmitted, they were de facto trapped on the desert fringe between Tunisia and Libya under the scorching July sun, with temperatures that rarely dipped below 40°C and even reached 50°C. It wasn’t until 10 August that Libyan and Tunisian authorities agreed to equally redistribute survivors between the two countries. This thug-of-war claimed the lives of at least 27 people.

Many interview partners I met between July and September explained how communities inhabiting the governorate of Medenine were facing a new level of state violence at the Tunisian-Libyan border zone. Albeit disproportionately targeting Black migrants, the militarization of the governorate also increased the sense of insecurity among local citizens. As Houda Mzioudet observes, this is even truer for Black Tunisians who ‘have become the collateral damage of this openly racist campaign that criminalizes an already fragile population in the context of political, social, and economic turmoil since Saied’s self-coup in July 2021.’ 

Members of the associative fabric active in Zarzis, Medenine and Djerba emphasized how unpredictable, ruthless and overtly racist state policies are the source of the local population’s insecurity rather than an increased Black migrant presence. Leading intergovernmental organizations, entrusted with safeguarding refugee and migrant rights, refrain from overtly criticizing President Kais Saied’s government, however. And the EU continues courting the same violent and illiberal government that sent migrants to die in the desert with its renewed and reinforced partnership for development and migration. The message was effectively communicated to Tunisian authorities that EU financial support would be conditional on curbing irregularized migration towards Europe. And yet, according to Mourad, most Tunisian citizens understood the government’s decision to sign the MoU as the umpteenth instrumental yielding to European blackmail rather than the prelude to a veritable sealing of the frontier. 

In fact, except for the week that immediately followed the Rome Conference on Development and Migration on 23 July 2023, the first two weeks of August signalled a new and sharp increase in people arriving from Tunisia to Italy. 

Unprecedented numbers?

The images of nearly 7,000 new arrivals documented in Lampedusa between 11 and 12 September compelled international public opinion to acknowledge a phenomenon that official statistics had been tracking since early 2023: Tunisian citizens are no longer the vast majority of those seeking ways out of Tunisia. The number of irregularized Black migrants attempting to and succeeding in reaching Europe via the Central Mediterranean from Tunisian shores has also surged. Tunisians now rank third among nationalities arriving in Italy, trailing behind citizens of the Ivory Coast and all the more behind Guinean nationals. Their number (12,168 individuals) has decreased compared to the figures recorded during the same period in both 2021 (12,511 individuals) and 2022 (14,036 individuals), when Tunisians held the top spot.

Yet, the sheer volume of arrivals can only be portrayed as a significant departure from recent Italian history when compared to data recorded since 2019. It is not by chance that rapid and overwhelming overcrowding – first at the Contrada Imbriacola hotspot and then across the entirety of Lampedusa Island – conjured memories of the so-called 2010 ‘North Africa emergency’. Much like the Meloni government now, Berlusconi’s government then consciously refrained from organizing sea search and rescue operations through institutional coordination, a move that would have facilitated the harmonization of arrivals with the effective functioning of the very first reception and asylum systems.

In both instances, governmental choices not to address the ongoing phenomenon served to portray the dynamics of mobility in the Central Mediterranean as an invasion. Conversely, between 2015 and 2017, despite registering arrivals comparable to those we are seeing today, Italian authorities took a different approach. Responding to increasing EU pressure, they coordinated procedures involving all national and international, and governmental and non-governmental actors through the implementation of protocols, which embedded the intricate framework of sea rescue with the early registration of new arrivals. This modus operandi, which constituted the Italian declination of the EU’s Hotspot Approach, facilitated the redistribution of new arrivals throughout the peninsula to prevent the country’s first reception system from collapsing.

Such a more organized regime of (im)mobility did not prevent but rather concealed the systemic violations of fundamental rights ingrained within the hotspot system. However, it did initially lead to a decrease in the number of deaths at sea by ensuring well-coordinated Search and Rescue (SAR) operations across the expanse of the Central Mediterranean. This practice then came to an abrupt halt in 2018 with Matteo Salvini’s infamous ‘security decrees’. The so-called ‘closed ports policy’, with the suspension of institutional SAR activities at sea, led to a sharp decline in arrivals, deriving from an increase in sea fatalities that public discourse consistently swept under the carpet.

Governmental authorities leveraged the widespread perception that fewer people were attempting transit as a pretext for systematically withdrawing funding from the Italian reception and asylum system, resulting in its ultimate erosion. The hermetic closure of international borders during the COVID-19 outbreak did the rest. These evolutions set the stage for the current mishandling of new arrivals, which is the real reason behind the country’s system overload. Despite this overt absence, since the declaration of the State of Emergency in April 2023, Meloni’s government has resurrected the spectre of a migrant invasion of Italy, leveraging it both to the EU and North African diplomats. The action plan in 10 points, announced by Ursula von Der Leyen on 19 September, responded to this fabricated emergency, while ignoring the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs from 31 August, which questioned the MoU’s effectiveness. Parliament also expressed concerns that the agreement between the EU and Tunisia, as concluded by the EU Commission Directorate General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR), violates the code of EU decision-making practices and does not take the Tunisian government’s human rights violations against migrants with all due gravity, as condemned by international public opinion. And yet, Von der Leyen’s action plan reaffirmed the bid to accelerate the memorandum’s implementation and make it a model for similar agreements with other North African countries.

Manufacturing a migration crisis

Seen from the Tunisian-Libyan border, such EU policy choices are doomed to failure because they disregard the fact that unrelenting departures from Tunisia are not due to an unprecedented border control crisis. Rather they are the result of an equally manufactured migration crisis concocted by President Saied for both political and international consumption, and in total contempt of the rights and even the lives of racialized and illegalized migrant people. 

According to all my interlocutors, Saied’s speech on 21 February 2023, which launched urgent measures to combat the irregular migration of ‘sub-Saharan African nationals’, constitutes a turning point in this fabrication. International media received his allegations of an international criminal plan ‘aiming to alter Tunisia’s demographic composition’ with surprise, despite his words recalling precedents from far-right political leaders of so-called European democracies. And yet, the Tunisian NGO Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Économiques et Sociaux (FTDES) underlined how worrying signals pointing to such a violent political turn in Tunisian migration management had already emerged during the previous year. 

For instance, on 22 December 2022, Najla Bouden – the former Chief of Government whose designation was internationally celebrated as the first example of a female prime minister in the Arab world – suddenly decided to expel a group of Black migrants who had occupied a youth centre in La Marsa, a northern suburb of Tunis, for five years. And this, although state authorities had transferred these persons there in 2017: without offering them any other viable solution or form of regularization in the country; after militarily evacuating the Shousha refugee camp that had been created in 2011 to accommodate people escaping conflict in Libya.

Moreover, in January 2023, the Tunisian Nationalist Party launched an openly racist campaign targeting undocumented migrants ‘from sub-Saharan countries’ through compliant media and on social media. They leveraged the widespread racism ingrained in the Tunisian national imaginary and in the African continent’s social life more broadly based on a centuries-long history of the slave trade, alongside past and present forms of unfreedom, succeeding in spreading fake news that demonized Black migrants. In parallel, they started circulating a petition demanding not only the expulsion of irregularized migrants but also the imposition of visa requirements on currently exempted ‘sub-Saharan’ states, and the repeal of organic law no. 2018-50 of 23 October 2018, relating to the fight against racial discrimination.

On 17 February Tunisian security forces launched an arrest campaign with the eloquent title of ‘Strengthening the security apparatus and reducing the phenomenon of irregular residence in Tunisia’, which led to the arrest and systematic imprisonment of more than 300 people within a few days. Law enforcement conducted profiling of potential irregular residents based on phenotypical criteria (essentially skin colour), targeting minors and students regularly residing in Tunisia. Saied’s February statement, therefore, did not come out of nowhere, even though it undoubtedly precipitated the poor conditions for racialized non-nationals in the country. 

Ever since, presidential policies and discourses have made Tunisia an unliveable country for irregular(ized) migrants. As the head of a well-known intergovernmental organization’s southern Tunisian office resignedly explains: 

Contrary to what was the case until last year, migrants who register with our organization are only asking for transitional assistance, they no longer seek protection here’ … ‘but are trying to reach Sfax immediately to embark for Europe, despite the problems and violence there.

Confronting the Tunisian war on migration

According to Mourad, ‘hate speech has become the official discourse’ in Tunisia, targeting not only unwanted Black migrants but also the country’s civil society. ‘All the associations who did not submit to become “the docile children” of the new regime’, continues Mourad, ‘went from being considered “the heralds of democracy and revolution” to being accused of acting as “the beachhead of foreign interests” and “traitors to the homeland.”’ Shortly after dissolving parliament on 25 July 2021, Saied’s attempted to amend Decree Law no. 2011-88 on the organization of Tunisian associations, envisioning stricter Ministry of the Interior control over the country’s civil society. Resistance from the local public and the international community led to the amendment’s approval being postponed. And yet, the spectre of this revision has been hovering ever since, especially after the passing of Decree-Law no. 2022-54 almost one year later, which threatens freedom of expression under the pretext of countering the spread of fake news and cybercrime. 

The apparent public success of the government’s anti-migrant campaigns, therefore, cannot be fully understood if not in conjunction with the parallel security campaigns that increasingly target political opponents, union leaders, journalists and even judges on the suspicion of assaulting state security and plotting to subvert political power. The active building of an ‘external enemy’ has gone hand in hand with the creation of an ‘internal enemy’ constituted by extra-parliamentary opposition to the president. Both magnifying migration management as a domestic and diplomatic concern, and portraying political opponents and actors of civil society as corrupt, selling out to foreign agendas and being enemies of the Tunisian people, have served Tunisian authorities’ attempts to distract public opinion from a galloping economic crisis. 

Scholars and activists had uncovered Tunisian social racism in the early 2000s, which was increasingly discussed in the public sphere and on a political level after the revolution. Still, Saied’s February declaration triggered spontaneous anti-Black pogroms across the country, especially in large cities such as Tunis and Sfax. As Mourad puts it, ‘it forced Tunisians in front of a mirror that reflected the image of a racist society’. And yet, what Amnesty International recently denounced as Tunisian authorities’ ‘abusive resorting to preventive detention to reduce any forms of political opposition to silence’ succeeded in discouraging ordinary citizens from contravening increasingly violent and blatantly racist government initiatives. The 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winning Tunisian civil society organization, which had lobbied to pass ground-breaking legislation against racial discrimination in 2018, was facing arrests and imprisonment without the international community lifting a finger. What hope could ordinary citizens have of opposing such political manoeuvres? 

Even though grassroots efforts emerged, forming the ‘anti-fascist front’ against racism, the perceived risk of being arrested pushed most Tunisians who were informally employing or accommodating undocumented Black migrants to dismiss and evict them en masse. This resulted in further exposing these migrants to state violence and condoned civilian attacks, without triggering strong condemnation from international humanitarian organizations such as UNHCR and IOM. 

If anti-Black racism was being studied and denounced as constitutive of Tunisian society and national imaginaries already from the mid-2000s, this year it became apparent that, as El Miri’s work demonstrated for the Euro-African regime of mobility more largely, racism actively produces Tunisian migration policies too rather than the other way round.

Indeed, as Saied leveraged social racism to institutionally enforce the systematic expulsion and/or elimination of Black migrants from public spaces, Tunisia rapidly turned from being a country of refuge or better opportunities to being a country to flee from for irregularized Black migrants. Mali, Gabon, the Ivory Coast and Guinea provided airlifts to repatriate their citizens, while requests for embassy-assisted returns from Tunisia soared. People demanding to leave the country through UNHCR resettlement or evacuation schemes and through IOM Assisted Voluntary Returns started camping outside both organizations’ headquarters. 

Ultimately, state violence triggered the dramatic surge in people resorting to irregular(ized) Mediterranean crossings from Tunisia to Italy much more than Tunisia’s incapacity to seal its borders. In fact, according to data aggregated by FTDES, Tunisian authorities succeeded in intercepting 39,568 people attempting crossings in the first nine months of 2023. Most of these seizures occurred between February and April, with March registering peak interceptions, right after President Saied’s February declaration. Overall, 958 of the 2,079 deaths and disappearances at sea registered in 2023 across the Central Mediterranean route were recorded near Tunisian coasts and in the country’s territorial waters, with April signalling the peak. 

Tunisian authority interceptions only plummeted in correspondence with the intensification of EU-Tunisian negotiations, probably to provide the government with an effective bargaining tool. The Tunisian Ministry of Interior even refrained from publishing official data on interceptions for July, suggesting yet another dramatic deterioration in conditions for irregular(ized) and racialized migrants. 

Open border solutions

The events that have unfolded in the country since February demonstrate that, regardless of European pressure, the Tunisian government needs open not hermetically sealed borders. It aims not so much to prevent irregular(ized) migrants from reaching Europe but rather to push them to leave Tunisia. 

The promised 150 million euros from Brussels under the MoU won’t be nearly enough to lift Tunisia’s struggling economy, as the sum won’t even suffice to properly structure the reception and return mechanisms the country would need to seriously provide more systematic sea interceptions and border controls. When we met at the beginning of September, the local representative of an international organization actively involved in the issue bitterly observed: 

Time and energies were lost in preparing the new Memorandum of Understandings. … There is a lack of planning concerning whatever will await intercepted undocumented migrants after their disembarkation. These people no longer want to stay in Tunisia, and they refuse to voluntarily go back to their countries. Meanwhile, there is no legal, diplomatic, or physical infrastructure in place to proceed to their forced repatriation. Halting departures, given this condition, would constitute a liability the Tunisian government cannot afford. Migration is a reality we all should accept. Otherwise, we will all suffer! 

Keeping borders open is strategically more convenient to the Tunisian government than responding to EU blackmail, also due to the use that citizens and non-citizens on the Tunisian-Libyan frontier make of informal cross-border trade to navigate the country’s economic crisis. As frontiers multiplied to stop unwanted movements northwards, economic opportunities emerged for actors, for example, who could mobilize the necessary know-how to make these borders crossable whilst generating some extra income in a period of dire economic crisis.The line between smuggling and other kinds of border trade is blurred: the same people engage in various typologies of border trade that can be semi-informal.As Mourad notes: 

The whole social life of the governorate continues to unfold in close relation to the state of the frontier. … Thousands of Tunisian traders travel to Libya to buy subsidized goods and then resell them both along the frontier and in the rest of the country. … This circulation works daily and is the principal source of revenues for Tunisians and Libyans inhabiting the region alike. … It is common sense here that, when it comes to the local economy, we do not have anything but this [the frontier]. 

Indeed, recent national and international organization studies on the state of the Tunisian economy point to the informal sector supplanting the country’s growing underdevelopment, characterized by pronounced inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth, mass rural-to-urban migration, widespread poverty and persistent underemployment. On a micro-economic scale, therefore, this sector has become a bulwark against poverty, generating jobs and income, providing a safety net during crises and affording a substantial segment of the population a stake in the economic landscape. At the macro-economic level, on the other hand, it exerts a significant influence on the nation’s economic fundamentals. It functions in a complex relationship with state regulations and their institutional frameworks, oscillating between adherence and defiance when it comes to tax obligations and social security contributions. 

Similarly, maintaining a permeable maritime border crucially allows all those Tunisians who make it to Europe to contribute to the country’s economy through remittances, which are a main source of foreign currency and national savings, and constitute 6.5% of the country’s GDP. 

Sealing the border and consequently curtailing local populations from navigating the economic crisis via a cross-border economy has the potential to destabilize the current government even more than the galloping crisis of the formal economy. The Tunisian government therefore has a vested interest in not closing the frontier, as demonstrated by the president’s decision to wire back the 60 thousand million euros funding from the EU Commission to curb migration, which was dismissed as a disrespectful form of ‘charity’.

Tunisians inhabiting the country’s border regions are well aware of this. This is why, as Mourad explained responding to his own initial question, comments on the streets of Tunisia are about the predictable failure of the EU regime of immobility: ‘Let them sign all the agreements they want. We’ll find a way to get around it. One way or another, we’ll figure out how to leave this country! The solution to our crisis won’t come from Europe but from the border: an open border.’

Lizaveta German, art historian, curator and founder of the Naked Room in Kyiv, is currently writing a book about the counter offensive of exhibitions. She spoke with anthropologist Taras Fedirko during the Vienna Humanities Festival at the Institute for Human Sciences.

Taras Fedirko: For the Venice Biennale you co-curated a brilliant art project, an installation by the Kharkiv artist Pavlo Makov. The installation for those who aren’t familiar is called Fountain of Exhaustion, Acqua Alta, in Ukrainian Fontan Vysnazhennia.

It is a contraption of hierarchically organized sieves. At the top, one sieve collects whatever is poured into it: water, sand, you name it, whatever can pass through. It passes it on to two sieves, to three and onwards, all the way down to seven or more sieves at the bottom. And as water or sand pass through, they are divided, and as they are divided, they’re exhausted.

A more obvious way of interpreting this – and, mind you, I’m no art critic, I’m an anthropologist and social scientist, so I turn everything back to metaphors of politics and the social – we can read this as a metaphor for Ukrainians’ self-understanding since maybe 2013, 2014, and certainly longer. It’s built hierarchically, yet it is a critique of hierarchy. It’s a statement about the quiet work of resistance that turns hierarchy upside down, that destroys the effectiveness of hierarchical imposition. At the same time, it is also a critique of that collectivism.

Today, we are here to talk about your work on the counteroffensive of exhibitions. Lizaveta is writing a book about where Ukrainian artists found themselves after the full-scale Russian invasion on 24 February 2022. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment and what was so peculiar about the Ukrainian contemporary artists’ response to the invasion?

Lizaveta German: Starting with Pavlo Makov’s piece, the idea comes from the 1990s. Pavlo Makov started his career in the 1970s, but the 1990s was a very crucial moment for his practice. The idea of the fountain of exhaustion and the symbol of exhaustion is very deeply rooted in the post-Soviet Kharkiv situation. The piece is a combination of poetic references and concrete social references to the post-Soviet city – exhausted, deprived of infrastructure.

Those of you who remember the post-Soviet 1990s will recall the absence of water or electricity. Kharkiv in the 1990s was exactly the city which, during the war, didn’t have water for weeks. This is something we are experiencing in Ukraine now, and once again something that brings new meaning to the fountain of exhaustion.

The story of this piece begins in the 1990s but was never realized back then. Makov never managed to produce it as a working fountain for many different reasons. For the Venice Biennale, we offered him the opportunity to actually produce this fountain, to make it work.

He immediately answered with this idea and the image of Acqua Alta, within the context of Venice – the city which is step by step going underwater. It gave a new meaning to the piece. It became a symbol of something more than just a post-Soviet situation, a symbol of exhaustion of economics, politics. We started producing it in 2021 and it was realized two months after the full-scale invasion. Again, it gained new meaning: a symbol of the exhaustion of humanity.

We brought the Fountain of Exhaustion to Kyiv for an exhibition in the Khanenko Museum, one of the few museums in Kyiv that has physically suffered from the shelling. The exhibition was made possible by a heroic team who managed to do everything to open this project. Now we are bringing this piece to Kharkiv, the hometown of Pavlo, and a city even more damaged by the war. The further this piece goes, the more it has been exhibited, the more meaning it gains. I don’t want to go into artist prophecies, but this piece predicted certain things back in the 1990s.

I borrowed the term ‘counteroffensive exhibitions’ from two artists: Stanislav Turina and Kateryna Libkind. They are artists who both curated and opened exhibitions in Kyiv after the full-scale invasion. In May and June 2023, exhibitions were opening in Kyiv literally every day. Like pub crawling, people started exhibition crawling instead. It has been an amazing thing to follow, because suddenly it wasn’t like a pre-war situation, it was even more active, fruitful, diverse and interesting.

Ukraine remains at a moment of high artistic productivity, but, most importantly, the exhibition as a format has grown even more relevant. Since permanent collections need protection, they remain hidden in museums and institutions. Instead, they can exhibit self-organized initiatives.

If we look back at the nineteenth century, the exhibition format was a privileged space for aristocracy and academia. Now, the exhibition space has become a public domain. It is a meeting point, a place for debate. Here, we can exhibit not just art but ourselves and the Ukrainian art scene. We are here, we are alive, active and not defeated. I think this is why the term ‘counteroffensive exhibitions’ popped up, because it illustrates the ability to resist collectively.

Taras Fedirko: You talk about self-organization as a founding part of the resistance to the war. Can you tell us a little bit about what has made this resistance possible? There seem to be longer traditions of exhibitions as a form of resistance.

Lizaveta German: Self-organization and this type of horizontal work is one of the core elements of the artistic process in Ukraine. Starting from the 1960s (when my expertise also began), it derives from Soviet censorship. Obviously, there were many artistic communities that didn’t have enough opportunities to be exhibited, who never stood a chance of passing through the selection process and committees based on ideological and formal standards.

Artists had to self-organize somehow. In Odesa, the phenomenon of apartment exhibitions appeared, or so-called ‘fence exhibitions’, where artists exhibited several pieces on the fences around the Opera in the city centre. These exhibitions went on for hours and were documented with photos.

Kyiv had less self-organization. The art historian Boris Lobanovsky describes it as ‘Kyiv for monks’. Self-organization wasn’t as visible there as it was in Odesa. In Kyiv, exhibiting was more about little circles with groups of people who gathered together to discuss and show work to one another. It is still a form of self-organization, striving to be together, making the work public, even if it was just for 10 people.

I won’t give you a lecture on the 1960s, but I do think this is where this tradition of doing something despite obstacles took shape. The obstacles back then were politics, the Soviet art system that didn’t allow certain artistic expression.

The 1990s meant that while the Soviet artistic infrastructure more or less collapsed, the new infrastructure didn’t immediately emerge. Many things that happened in the 1990s happened more or less through self-organization. Initiatives took place in different venues, sometimes literally in ruins. One example is the Soros Center for Contemporary Art near the famous Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Before the foundation moved in, the venue in a half-ruined state was used for exhibitions, curated by the artists themselves. The ruin as a backdrop, or as a prop, inspired several artists to create self-organized site-specific exhibitions.

The 2000s were mainly characterized by the Orange Revolution, which gave a big impulse to artists. We sometimes call them the post-Orange generation, one example being the R.E.P. Group that is one of the most celebrated and known for a reason. Mykola Ridnyi is also part of this generation. During the revolution, he established together with his colleagues from the SOSka group, a beautiful, self-organized gallery in Kharkiv city centre that existed for 15 years on zero budget, without support.

For a very long time, it served as one of the few real centres for alternative culture. For many years, this little hut was the only place for musicians and contemporary young artists to meet to arrange concerts and performances. Even Boris Mikhailov, a famous Kharkiv artists and photographers, went to SOSka because there was nowhere else to go. It is a story that proves how self-organized initiatives played a huge role in establishing several generations of Ukrainian artists. During this time, self-organized exhibitions of different forms and shapes were also very powerful in Lviv and Uzhhorod. These places have made a huge impact on generations of Ukrainian artists that gained no recognition from institutions.

Back to the present day, the full-scale invasion is the worst thing that can happen to the country and to the city. It is much worse than the decline of the 1990s or the lack of financial support in 2000 or 2010. This kind of liveability remains, because this force of self-organizing is more or less in our DNA.

We could see it from day one. I know of many initiatives that emerged literally during the first week of the full-scale invasion. In Kyiv, for instance, people were sitting at home during 72 hours of curfew, calling each other, chatting on Facebook, saying: ‘let’s do something!’

We need to remember that many things were coordinated in Kyiv because the region was under less threat in the beginning. Artistic residencies were quickly set up to relocate artists from different parts of Ukraine. The organizers thought: it is not just our mission to give shelter and to provide a place to live, we need to give artists a place to do something together. I think this especially had a very important psychological effect. Many artists that I spoke to talked about the feeling of disorientation and confusion. The ability to then take part in a workshop, talk to your peers, your friends, not with the aim of producing a painting or an installation, functioned like therapy.

Still, this therapy made artistic results. What was produced during this residency was later exhibited in, for instance, Vienna and Berlin and is still going around. We can now go and see the exhibitions which show us the product, the fruits of these very immediate thoughts and traumas. So, I do claim that this self-organization, this impulse as I call it, is something very Ukrainian. And I’m sure this impulse can be found in several war-torn countries.

Taras Fedirko: The fact that several generations through the decades have had to self-organize – firstly, because of a strong state taking away institutional possibilities, and then because of a weak state taking away institutional possibilities – suggests that it isn’t just continuity that responds to these conditions but something in the DNA. These counteroffensive exhibitions are not just a moment of collaboration and coordination but clearly a moment of exuberance, of creativity. Do you see any new artistic form or artistic expression, new ways of talking about the war or depicting the war, emerging? Do you see new kinds of responses that are changing Ukrainian art on artistic terms?

Lizaveta German: Maybe it’s still too early to make general conclusions about artistic language. And I should add that I relocated from Ukraine in April 2022, so here I am both speaking as an expert but also as a distant observer. But I am still very much an insider, a part of the artistic Ukrainian communities. Therefore, I can share several observations not just made by me. I talk to my colleagues, peers and friends who are dear to me and whose observations I trust, and try to grasp what is happening.

The artist Stanislav Turina’s observation was interesting when I asked him a similar question. He said that he feels art has become safer, less critical, or the best word might be ‘careful’. He could not explain in which particular way – mainly because he was also expressing this very carefully. I think there are so many sensitive topics to talk about, examples being the Bucha Massacre, or life in occupied cities and territories – all topics that are still bleeding.

I think this safeness, secureness or carefulness is an expression of respect towards this. Ukrainian society is learning, maybe for the first time since independence, to remember things, learn to work with the trauma. The topic of Holodomor – or even more the topic of the Holocaust – hasn’t been discussed to the extent that it should have. I think what this state of war teaches us as a society but also as artists is to speak about the trauma, its deepness and painfulness. To do this, you have to be careful.

The carefulness, or do I dare say ‘fear’ of not being patriotic enough holds a thin line, and a risk of being caught up inside nationalistic, exuberantly patriotic discourse. I think it’s a balance that Ukrainian artists are trying to hold. So far, I don’t see any dangers of this from the Ukrainian art scene. Discursive carefulness is a complicated thing, but I’m really curious about what it will look like.

The contemporary art scene has also retained its independence due to the conditions that existed from the 1990s to the 2010s. State institutions like the Ministry of Culture and national museums were not very active or supportive during this time. Now the state is busy with heritage protection or cultural diplomacy, which leaves the contemporary scene more or less on its own again. I still think the contemporary scene acts more or less independently. And without state support it can remain critical.

Taras Fedirko: Fierce discussions across the cultural sphere in Ukraine about taking or not taking part in international events together with Russian artists, curators and writers have been integrated into global discussions on inclusion and exclusion, censoring versus giving voice. A Ukrainian lack of desire to collaborate with Russian artists and or Russian speakers is being interpreted simply as exclusion and as identity politics. What is at stake for Ukrainian artists taking part in these debates, inside the artistic community? Why do artists from Ukraine care so much about being seen or not being seen with Russians?

Lizaveta German: This is indeed a very sensitive topic. There is one line of discussion which says: no, we won’t participate in any collaboration, that cooperation is impossible right now because these communities speak from very different positions, the Ukrainian position being under direct, physical threat. Many artists remain in Ukraine, producing new work in complete darkness, in cold apartments without electricity. Or they have to leave their home.

This physical condition and this sensitivity towards the situation cannot be removed from the art. You cannot produce without the background of the production. We are speaking from very different ethical and physical positions. Forming a united one is impossible. And this level of awareness and level of sensitivity results in a lack of dialogue.

Ukrainian art and Ukrainian culture in general have been so underrepresented, many artists have sometimes been labelled as Russian artists in museums. Ukrainian art was exhibited in many cultural projects like a younger sister, almost like in Soviet times. This image has lived on, and I think the protests against joint Russian and Ukrainian projects are a protest against this artificial coexistence, against representing this post-Soviet art scene.

The private level is also important. Many Russian artists and cultural practitioners have relocated and have expressed solidarity with Ukraine. But personally – and I am not alone in this – I have not received a single message from any of the people that I know in Russia. We have not shared enough solidarity or talked about it enough. As we discuss and try to reach a certain point of mutual understanding, it might get better. I don’t wish to say that this position is shared by every single artist and curator in Ukraine. There are multiple visions and I think all of them deserve respect. But I consider that ethical limits are too strong and shared exhibitions are too early right now. It would be too complicated to speak about certain things in the same voice, in the same manner.

This interview took place on 30 September 2023 during the Vienna Humanities Festival at the Institute for Human Sciences.

I rapporti più recenti dell’International Panel on Climate Change fanno eco a queste tendenze drammatiche, osservando l’impatto dei cambiamenti climatici sugli ecosistemi terrestri, le infrastrutture idriche, la produzione alimentare, gli insediamenti urbani. Alcune regioni e sotto-regioni  meritano un’attenzione particolare: la regione mediterranea, ad esempio, dovrebbe subire le conseguenze più disastrose insieme ai piccoli Stati insulari e a parti del continente africano. Queste aree si trovano assai esposte non solo ai cambiamenti climatici e alla scarsità d’acqua, ma anche a nuove sfide economiche che non hanno precedenti nella storia umana. L’era dell’Antropocene sta prendendo il sopravvento. 

La regione mediterranea è la regione più povera d’acqua del mondo e  molti dei Paesi arabi che ne fanno parte sono in cima alla lista dei Paesi in cui  l’acqua scarseggia maggiormente. I cambiamenti climatici si sommano alle  precipitazioni già esigue in quest’area arida o semi-arida; inoltre, la crescita  della popolazione, anche in seguito a flussi migratori, sta determinando un aumento della domanda di acqua. Ma la scarsità di tale risorsa è dovuta anche alle sfide istituzionali strutturali: cattiva gestione e mancanza di politiche idriche sostenibili. A complicare la situazione, la maggior parte delle risorse idriche superficiali nella regione araba sono originate al di fuori del suo territorio (si pensi al fiume Nilo, ad esempio), il che aumenta la complessità della governance di tali risorse. 

La gestione dell’acqua è stata a lungo al centro dei discorsi e delle pratiche di Ong e di organizzazioni internazionali che lavorano nel mondo della cooperazione allo sviluppo. La centralità del tema deriva dall’importanza storica del settore agricolo nelle trasformazioni politiche, economiche, ambientali, tecnologiche e dal ruolo vitale delle risorse idriche per tale comparto. Una centralità che talvolta ha rafforzato gli approcci alla gestione della scarsità d’acqua incentrati sulla cattura delle risorse idriche tramite soluzioni tecniche  – si pensi ad esempio alla costruzione di dighe – e sull’autosufficienza alimentare a livello nazionale. L’urgenza di affrontare il ruolo e il carattere della gestione delle risorse idriche nelle economie nazionali caratterizza un numero sempre maggiore di Paesi, specialmente nelle regioni semi-aride e aride del mondo, quelle che subiscono maggiori pressioni idrologiche. 

Irrigation pipe line Libya. Image: Jaap Berk / Source: Wikimedia Commons

Anche a causa delle tendenze demografiche e dei cambiamenti climatici sta emergendo la necessità di preparare le comunità che già sono segnate da una penuria di risorse idriche a conseguenze sempre più devastanti nel breve periodo. Come è già stato osservato, aumentano infatti le migrazioni dalla dimensione rurale a quella urbana, con un conseguente ricorso sempre maggiore alle già scarse risorse idriche, sia nella regione mediterranea, sia soprattutto nell’Africa subsahariana. Sin dagli anni Cinquanta, le soluzioni di tipo tecnocratico di gestione dell’acqua continuano ad attrarre i funzionari della cooperazione allo sviluppo e i programmi pubblici, dal momento che  sono viste come soluzioni concrete per fronteggiare la scarsità d’acqua. Tale  approccio ha spesso portato all’espansione di particolari modelli di produzione agricola ma anche al consolidamento di disparità e disuguaglianze rispetto all’accesso e all’uso di queste risorse. 

La crescente penuria di un bene così essenziale solleva molte domande sulla sempre maggiore dipendenza dalle catene del valore globali, ma anche in relazione alle implicazioni in termini di sicurezza alimentare che accompagnano le trasformazioni sociali e politiche tipiche di alcune economie in particolare. Non potremo avere acqua a sufficienza per tutti nella regione  mediterranea se continueranno a prevalere modelli di gestione delle risorse  idriche come gli attuali, uniti a una crescente richiesta di acqua e a politiche  di fatto insostenibili.  

È dagli anni Novanta che sentiamo parlare di imminenti «guerre dell’acqua»  o dell’acqua come «petrolio del XXI secolo». Questo tipo di narrazione fa parte di una logica di tipo malthusiano, che si concentra sulla relazione tra scarsità d’acqua e conflitti, individuando un legame deterministico tra tale scarsità e l’aumento della popolazione per spiegare come e perché le guerre per  l’acqua siano ormai inevitabili. Più di due secoli fa, Malthus sostenne, erroneamente, che la produzione alimentare non sarebbe stata sufficiente a soddisfare le esigenze di crescita della popolazione, il che avrebbe provocato carestie e morti. Oggi i neo-malthusiani alimentano l’idea di imminenti guerre  per l’acqua, affiancandole a nuove minacce come il cambiamento climatico. 

Ma perché si sostiene, enfatizzando i limiti ambienta che l’acqua  sarà sempre più scarsa? Le risorse naturali sono finite, dunque per definizione limitate. Questo tipo di approccio sottolinea la relazione lineare tra sistemi idrologici, modelli climatici, crescita della popolazione e inquinamento  delle risorse idriche disponibili. Già il Rapporto del Club di Roma sui limiti dello sviluppo (The Limits to Growth, Mit Press) pubblicato nel 1972 sottoli neava l’assoluta scarsità e i limiti ambientali alla crescita. La Terra ha risorse fisiche limitate per sostenere i bisogni della società umana: se le soglie  vengono superate, ecco il collasso del sistema mondiale. Quel libro, per molti versi profetico, evidenziava la necessità di limitare i bisogni e i modelli  di consumo, cosa particolarmente importante nella società di oggi, guidata dall’abbondanza e dalla creazione di sempre nuovi bisogni. 

Più recentemente, in letteratura sono stati sviluppati i concetti di Antropocene e di confini planetari, basati sulla convinzione che la crescita esponenziale e le stesse attività umane stiano esercitando un’ulteriore pressione  sul sistema Terra, il che potrebbe causare cambiamenti irreversibili al clima ne all’ambiente, con conseguenze catastrofiche.  

Alcuni studiosi hanno identificato la scarsità d’acqua come il principale motore delle guerre per l’acqua in regioni semi-aride (si pensi al Medioriente), suggerendo che tali conflitti possano arrivare anche nella regione mediterranea. L’acqua non solo è scarsa, ma è anche vitale, e pone dunque  una questione di sicurezza nazionale. Che la domanda stia superando l’offerta, rendendo la competizione per le risorse idriche transfrontaliera, potrebbe  essere dunque, secondo questo filone di studi, una ragione per andare verso conflitti armati, in particolare in Medioriente.  

Politici, media e Ong hanno sostenuto che, soprattutto data l’importanza vitale dell’acqua dolce e la scarsità di questa risorsa, la competizione  per le risorse idriche si tradurrà in conflitti interstatali. Per Boutrous Boutros-Gali, ex segretario generale delle Nazioni Unite, «la prossima guerra in  Medioriente sarà dovuta all’acqua, non alla politica» e re Hussein di Giordania identificò l’acqua come l’unico fattore che avrebbe potuto portare il suo  Paese alla guerra con Israele. L’acqua è stata simbolicamente descritta come  l’«oro blu» per il quale si combatterà nel XXI secolo e da una trentina d’anni a questa parte i mass media hanno ampiamente enfatizzato l’idea di guerre per l’acqua. 

Tuttavia, da parte di diversi accademici, il discorso sulle guerre per l’acqua è stato interpretato come un’iperbole infondata, poiché le prove empiriche che collegano la scarsità d’acqua e i conflitti armati tra Stati non sono evidenti. Costoro hanno sottolineato che il discorso sulle guerre per l’acqua ha condotto verso conclusioni fuorvianti con ampie speculazioni, piuttosto che analisi robuste. 

In particolare, Tony Allan ha sviluppato il concetto di «acqua virtuale», ossia l’acqua necessaria per produrre qualsiasi bene o servizio, a cominciare dal cibo. Per Allan, importare un chilogrammo di cereali significa importare la quantità corrispondente di acqua utilizzata per produrlo. Sicurezza alimentare non significa necessariamente autosufficienza alimentare.  

In questo modo, egli ha spiegato attraverso il concetto di commercio dell’acqua virtuale perché non ci sono state guerre per l’acqua in Medioriente (cfr. T. Allan, The Middle East Water Question, Tauris, 2001). 

Gli studiosi dei conflitti idrici dell’International Peace Research Institute hanno anche dimostrato che il discorso sulle guerre per l’acqua non ha solidi fondamenti empirici ed è inoltre stato criticato per non avere verificato se altre variabili possano essere le vere cause dei conflitti. Ad esempio, nel conflitto del fiume Senegal, le ragioni etniche e di classe erano più importanti delle risorse naturali come motori dello scontro. In diversi Paesi del Medioriente è la povertà generale, e non la scarsità d’acqua, il principale motivo di conflittocfr. N.P. Gleditsch, K. Furlong, H. Hegre, B. Lacina e T. Owen, Conflicts Over Shared Rivers: Resource Scarcity or Fuzzy Boundaries?, «Political Geography», vol. 25, n. 4/2006. 

 È poi stata suggerita una correlazione tra sottosviluppo, mancanza di  democrazia e conflitti piuttosto che con la scarsità d’acqua o risorse naturali. Alcuni studiosi hanno sostenuto che la scarsità d’acqua può essere invece un’opportunità per la pacecfr. A.T. Wolf, A. Kramer, A. Carius e G.D.  Dabelko, Water Can Be a Pathway to Peace, not War, «Navigating Peace», n.  1/2006. 

Questo considerare l’acqua un’opportunità per la pace è ulteriormente  supportato dal lavoro della Oregon State University, guidata da Aaron Wolf,  il quale ha analizzato le interazioni idriche transfrontaliere nell’ultimo mezzo secolo, non trovando casi di guerre per l’acqua e dimostrando che ci sono  stati invece più casi di cooperazione cfr. A.T. Wolf, The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database Project, «Water International», vol. 24, n. 2/1999.  Tuttavia, l’idea di Wolf di un continuum di cooperazione o conflitto è stata messa in discussione dalla recente letteratura critica sull’idropolitica, sviluppata dal London Water Research Group. Questa letteratura si è concentrata sulla cooperazione e sul conflitto per le risorse idriche condivise: Mark  Zeitoun e Naho Mirumachi esaminano criticamente il ruolo dei trattati, che sono spesso visti come un esempio positivo di cooperazione, sostenendo che  

la cooperazione non sempre è positiva, poiché i trattati possono codificare  uno status quo asimmetrico esistente fino a diventare oggetto del conflitto. Intal modo, vanno oltre l’idea di un continuum di conflitto o cooperazione, sottolineando la coesistenza di conflitto e cooperazione insieme. Mostrano anche le sfumature del conflitto e della cooperazione, poiché ci sono diversi gradi di cooperazione e di conflitto, e non solo conflitti armaticfr. M. Zeitoun e N. Mirumachi, Transboundary Water Interaction I: Reconsidering Conflict and Cooperation, «International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics», n. 8/2008..

La letteratura che esamina la politica della scarsità sfida la comprensione neo-malthusiana e i suoi presupposti, analizzando il modo in cui la scarsità viene concettualizzata. Questa letteratura si concentra sulle questioni dell’accesso alle risorse naturali, sottolineando le asimmetrie di potere anche riguardo la gestione dell’acqua. Il tema della scarsità d’acqua è spesso usato per giustificare interventi come dighe e mega-progetti, che mettono a tacere le discussioni su soluzioni alternative. Le soluzioni sostenute e dominanti sono spesso opere ingegneristiche orientate al mercato, che trascurano i problemi socioeconomici e le domande su chi ha accesso a quanta acqua e perché, dimostrando risultati spesso tragici per le comunità povere urbane. Ciò è accaduto in India, Bolivia e Palestina. Gli studiosi che appartengono  a questo tipo di letteratura critica hanno mostrato come il tema della scarsità d’acqua sia spesso utilizzato per sostenere le agende politiche degli Stati. 

Secondo questo approccio, il problema deriva da accordi istituzionali e di governance iniqui. La questione chiave non riguarda dunque la disponibilità di  una risorsa, ma piuttosto chi vi ha accesso in quantità adeguata, il che deriva da processi politici e decisioni di inclusione ed esclusione che potrebbero  essere legati al prezzo dell’acqua, alla mancanza di infrastrutture o all’esclusione sociale. L’attenzione dovrebbe dunque rivolgersi a chi beneficia principalmente dalle soluzioni tradizionali e al miglioramento dell’efficienza. Ma dovrebbe anche riguardare chi è tagliato fuori da questo tipo di possibili soluzioni. Si sostiene che i maggiori benefici saranno privatizzati e andranno alle élite e agli appartenenti alla classe dominante, mentre i poveri, se non verranno adottati meccanismi redistributivi adeguati, saranno emarginati ulte riormente. Le soluzioni dovrebbero quindi consistere nello smantellamento delle barriere istituzionali che causano discriminazioni e disuguaglianze.

Chiari esempi di disuguaglianza strutturale e distribuzione nel settore idrico provengono dalla Cisgiordania, dove la scarsità d’acqua è una questione di discriminazione strutturale contro i palestinesi e di accesso privilegia to all’acqua degli insediamenti israeliani illegali. O ancora nel Sudafrica dell’Apartheid, dove le disuguaglianze basate su politiche discriminatorie erano estese anche nel settore idrico. E in India, dove l’accesso ad alcuni pozzi è negato alle donne di casta inferiore. 

Tuttavia, parlando di scarsità, gli argomenti dell’efficienza prevalgono sugli argomenti dell’equità, e gli argomenti neo-malthusiani sono arricchiti essi stessi dal concetto di scarsità. È necessario considerare chi sta consumando cosa e chi è toccato dai limiti. Secondo Lyla Mehta, la scarsità è un indicatore di «una crisi di rapporti di potere diseguali» per il controllo delle risorse idriche. «Questa naturalizzazione della scarsità […] avvantaggia in gran parte attori potenti. Pertanto, le «crisi» idriche devono anche essere viste come crisi dell’accesso distorto e del controllo su una risorsa finita» L. Mehta, The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation, Routledge, 2013. 

È stato sostenuto che il discorso egemonico sulla scarsità neutralizza fattori come l’accesso iniquo alle risorse naturali, che invece devono essere affrontati per risolvere adeguatamente il problema della scarsità. E che i significati e le esperienze della scarsità, come inquadramento egemonico, tendono a presentare la scarsità come un problema singolarizzato, trascurando  le diversità al suo interno, ciò si traduce in un approccio che trascura le differenze regionali all’interno dello stesso Paese o le variazioni cicliche nel tempo. È stata poi dimostrata la necessità di andare oltre le valutazioni di tipo  volumetrico per risolvere il problema della scarsità d’acqua, sottolineando la  necessità di distribuzione dell’acqua tra i suoi utenti e di equità idrica. Questa critica mette in discussione il fatto che la scarsità sia l’assunto principale  del discorso sulle guerre dell’acqua. Questo tipo di letteratura mostra la necessità di indagare le questioni dell’accesso e dell’equità piuttosto che semplicemente della quantità e dell’equilibrio tra domanda e offerta. 

Come si è visto, le risorse naturali limitate non si traducono in scarsità, poiché la scarsità di un bene è una proprietà che emerge dalle interazioni umane  e come conseguenza di decisioni di politica economica. La scarsità di risorse naturali è determinata non solo dalla sua disponibilità volumetrica di massa,  ma anche dall’accesso individuale ad esse, guidato dall’economia politica, dagli accordi istituzionali e dalla gestione regionale. Tali accordi influenzano le azioni delle istituzioni formali e informali per alleviare la scarsità incontrata dalle comunità. Si tratta di azioni attuate sotto forma di progetti idrici che dimostrano la tendenza ad aggiungere più risorse idriche nel sistema, attraverso la costruzione di nuove infrastrutture per l’approvvigionamento senza un’adeguata analisi dell’ecologia o della socioeconomia della regione, o delle forniture e delle infrastrutture esistenti in atto.

 Il risultato è che mentre l’approvvigionamento idrico complessivo nel sistema può aumentare le allocazioni, la distribuzione e l’accesso a tale risorsa riprodurranno condizioni preesistenti, non garantendo in questo modo una distribuzione più adeguata ed equa tra la popolazione. Ecco perché le po litiche di cui avremo bisogno nella regione mediterranea dovrebbero basar si su soluzioni sostenibili, una migliore gestione e una migliore distribuzione  delle risorse idriche tra i Paesi e tra le popolazioni. 

A livello regionale, l’adozione di pratiche di «diplomazia dell’acqua»  sarebbe utile per ridurre potenziali relazioni conflittuali tra Paesi che condividono risorse idriche di natura transfrontaliera, come il Nilo, il Tigri e l’Eufrate e il Giordano. La natura condivisa delle risorse idriche transfrontaliere può portare a tensioni sulla loro assegnazione e utilizzo, che a loro volta possono aggravare o danneggiare le relazioni e la cooperazione interstatali.

Ciò è rilevante in quanto la maggior parte dei sistemi di risorse di acqua dolce attraversa i confini giurisdizionali, con 153 Paesi che condividono fiumi, laghi e falde acquifere transfrontaliere. Ecco perché è fondamentale una gestione  coordinata e sostenibile di queste risorse attraverso la diplomazia dell’acqua.

Il concetto di diplomazia dell’acqua, più volte richiamato, è emerso  dall’inizio degli anni Novanta del secolo scorso, ponendo enfasi non tanto sull’aspetto tecnico della governance dell’acqua, quanto sulla sua impostazione politica e sulle sue implicazioni sulla sicurezza, pace, e stabilità. 

La diplomazia dell’acqua riunisce i governi principalmente per negoziare e discutere non l’assegnazione dell’acqua di per sé, ma piuttosto i benefici e i servizi derivanti dall’uso dell’acqua. Dunque, mentre un Paese può risultare con più risorse idriche, un altro potrebbe ricevere in cambio più  energia idroelettrica o produzione alimentare. Questo tipo di diplomazia può  avere un ampio campo di applicazione che può potenzialmente portare alla  cooperazione regionale, alla pace e alla stabilità; inoltre essa appare in grado  di migliorare la cooperazione nel raggiungimento di obiettivi che vanno oltre  la gestione delle risorse idriche. Così concepita, a tale diplomazia si riconosce  un potenziale per giungere a qualcosa di più della semplice cooperazione  idrica e a una migliore governance dell’acqua. 

Dunque, la diplomazia dell’acqua può contribuire a una più ampia  cooperazione regionale, a stabilità, pace e sicurezza. La sua efficacia dipende da cinque elementi critici: comprensione concordata dei dati, struttura di governance efficace, approcci partecipativi e inclusivi, supporto di terze parti, inclusione di considerazioni ecologiche. 

Una comprensione consolidata e reciproca dei dati garantisce che tutti gli accordi e i trattati siano basati su prove accurate e solide. Le strutture di governance efficaci stabiliscono canali di comunicazione tra gli Stati rivieraschi per l’attuazione collettiva e il mantenimento degli accordi. Gli approcci partecipativi e inclusivi e il coinvolgimento delle parti interessate consentono agli  accordi di rispondere alle esigenze locali e di beneficiare della partecipazione locale. Il sostegno di terzi può facilitare il dialogo, lo sviluppo di capacità e il monitoraggio, il che aiuta gli Stati rivieraschi a ottimizzare i benefici reciproci. L’attenzione ai fattori ecologici garantisce la sostenibilità della gestione dell’acqua e può aiutare a risultati reciprocamente vantaggiosi. 

Quando invece si tratta di risorse idriche all’interno di un Paese, sono necessarie politiche pubbliche che tengano conto delle crescenti sfide in materia, mirando al contempo a garantire un’equa distribuzione di tali risorse tra la popolazione e i più emarginati. Più che progetti puramente tecnici  – come la costruzione di dighe – abbiamo quindi bisogno di un approccio di pensiero sistemico in grado di affrontare con soluzioni creative e innovative le crescenti richieste di acqua da diversi settori e sub-regioni. In altre parole, abbiamo bisogno di avviare nuovi dibattiti su un mondo in cui il problema della scarsità d’acqua sta peggiorando per stimolare la riflessione sulle azioni da mettere in campo e sulle modalità di gestione dell’acqua in condizioni  sempre più precarie.  

Dobbiamo chiederci quali risorse idriche stiamo utilizzando e per che cosa. Consideriamo le risorse idriche superficiali, le risorse idriche sotterranee e le acque verdi. Le risorse idriche sotterranee, che spesso rappresentano  il cosiddetto «elefante nella stanza», vengono spesso sovraestratte, con conseguente deterioramento della qualità dell’acqua e diminuzione della loro  quantità. Si potrebbe dire che, dato che le risorse idriche sotterranee sono in visibili rispetto a quelle idriche superficiali, le prime sono come la pressione  sanguigna non trattata, difficilmente te ne rendi conto fino a quando non è  troppo tardi. Si consideri poi che anche l’«acqua verde» – quella piovana – sta diminuendo ulteriormente a causa degli impatti dei cambiamenti climatici. 

Oggi stiamo assistendo a una sempre maggiore incertezza in tutto il mondo che colpisce i diversi tipi di risorse idriche. In questo contesto, la guerra in corso in Ucraina è un duro colpo in termini di disponibilità di acqua (virtuale) nel mondo e soprattutto nelle società in cui già scarseggia l’acqua, in termini sia di sanzioni alla Russia sia di distruzione della produzione agricola ucraina. Il cambiamento climatico rappresenta un ulteriore fattore di pressione, soprattutto per le società con scarsità d’acqua come la regione mediterranea. 

Questa regione si sta riscaldando il doppio della media globale, aggravando sfide come quelle rappresentate dalla scarsità d’acqua, dalla sicurezza alimentare, dalla dipendenza dal settore energetico e dalle città costiere. Con tutti questi aspetti legati al cambiamento climatico e al sistema alimentare  globale, l’acqua potrebbe non essere disponibile come in passato, in particolare per le parti più emarginate delle loro comunità. 

Occorre dunque adottare nuovi approcci e nuovi modi di comprendere i problemi per essere in grado di risolverli. Ciò richiede di avviare nuove riflessioni sull’acqua e sulle sfide future che riguardano questo elemento vitale. Dobbiamo riconsiderare le attuali economie della regione, i pro e i con che tro di come garantire la sicurezza alimentare – dato che il settore agricolo è il  più grande settore che consuma acqua nella maggior parte dei Paesi di questa regione. Tutto ciò avrà implicazioni sullo sviluppo rurale, e quindi andranno creati nuovi posti di lavoro, garantendo nel contempo importazioni alimentari sicure e stabili. La complessità degli aspetti che abbiamo qui cercato di trattare suggerisce la necessità di un intero cambiamento di paradigma e la  ricerca di soluzioni innovative non solo per garantire la sicurezza idrica, ma  anche per prevenire esternalità negative in diversi ambiti.

Ukraine has always been one of the largest s­uppliers of grain to global markets. At the beginning of the twentieth century its share in the global export of wheat stood at 20%, barley at 43% and grain in general at 21%. No wonder that it earned the nickname of the ‘breadbasket of Europe’: grain crops have always been the main exports of Ukrainian agriculture.

For a long time, the USSR (like the Russian empire) was a net exporter of grain, mostly from the Ukrainian SSR. Not only was this policy responsible for the Holodomor, the state-engineered famine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions in Ukraine, but it also caused the post-war famine of 1946–1947 and the early 1950s. Then, in 1961, a landmark event took place: for the first time ever, the USSR began buying grain from abroad, mainly from the US, turning it into a net importer. In the Ukrainian SSR, the poor management of collective farms had led to a decrease in yield. Out of 504 collective farms in the Kyiv region, only 25 paid people a salary in cash rather than in natural products.

Between 1963 (when statistics began) and 1990, grain imports grew 10 times – from 3 million to 32 million tons, still primarily from the US. The shortage of supply meant that there was a propagandistic cult around bread in the late USSR. Those who lived through this period as a child recall the only correct answer to the question:

What’s the price of bread?

Bread is priceless.

Children learnt this maxim in schools, and it was impossible to complete the initialisation procedure to join the Pioneers without answering this question.

In 1990 Ukraine officially harvested 51 million tons of grain, a figure that grew to 92.6 million tons by 2020, and a record 106 million tons in 2021, the year preceding the war. Ukrainian exports in 2021 were 51.2 million tons. Throughout the 2010s, Ukraine was one of the world’s top five exporters of grain, alongside the EU, Australia, Argentina and Russia. Ukrainian was deeply integrated into the global grain market with a share of over 10%, capable of both influencing market prices and being susceptible in turn to price fluctuations.

Wheat field in Kharkiv Oblast after Russian shelling on 5 July 2022. Source: Main Directorate of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Kharkiv Oblast / Wikimedia Commons.

Ukraine maintained this position as it entered the 2020s: its pre-war share in global wheat exports was 10% (fifth highest worldwide), in sunflower seed exports 42% (highest), corn 16% (second highest), and in barley 10% (third highest).

How has the war affected the grain market?

Until the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian agrarian export was oriented towards Asian countries and above all China, with shipments to the latter reaching 30% of total agricultural exports (6.3 million tons) – a colossal figure, given the huge monetary and commodity volumes of Ukrainian agricultural trade. Some analysts interpreted Chinese purchasing activity in the 2021 season as Beijing taking steps to shield itself from the effects of a war in Europe, which would inevitably cause an increase in food prices. Sure enough, on 24 February 2022, China was sitting on record reserves of agricultural produce.

On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, rising oil prices and risks of reduced corn supplies from Ukraine and Russia, the world’s biggest exporters of grain, led to an increase in stock prices for grain of up to almost 6%, although prices for Black Sea grain increased substantially less, by between 1% and 2%. Russian bombardments and attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure also had a clear impact on grain prices on the world exchange. Some of the largest price surges on the NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) in the last five months directly coincided with particularly destructive Russian attacks.

During the night of 6 June 2023, for example, Russian troops blew up the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric station on the Dnieper River in the Kherson region. After that, grain prices rose by almost 100 cents in less than two weeks (from 627 cents per bushel – a unit of measurement equal to 27.2155 kg). According to satellite images, over 7,000 hectares of land on the left bank of the Dnieper were flooded after the catastrophe (though the Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture cites 25,000 hectares). On the right bank, 100,000 tons of crops were destroyed. In the neighbouring Mykolaiv region, more than 1,000 agricultural holdings were covered by water, with commercial losses totalling over $500,000.

On 17 July, prices again leapt upwards when Russia declared that it was abandoning the grain deal – the agreement under which Russia was obliged to provide a grain corridor for cargo ships. That night, occupying Russian troops attacked the Odesa region with missiles and drones, damaging port infrastructure. Prices rose from 654 cents per bushel to 725 cents in just two days. Russia again struck the ports of Odesa and Mykolaiv by night, damaging grain silos. Between 17 and 19 July, 60,000 tons of grain were destroyed by Russian attacks.

EU steps up imports of Ukrainian grain

In the wake of the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine began exporting large volumes of goods, including grain, overland. In 2022, for the first time in more than 10 years, Asia lost its position as the biggest importer of Ukrainian agricultural produce. While Ukraine was the top exporter to countries in the region in 2022, with a turnover of $7.3 billion, it has now slipped to third place, behind Europe and Turkey.

In 2022, the volume of supplies of Ukrainian agricultural products to EU member countries increased by 66% year-on-year. The share of domestic exports of agricultural products to the EU exceeded half of all Ukrainian agricultural exports for the first time, amounting to 55.5%. For comparison, 27.7% of agricultural exports from Ukraine went to the EU in 2021.

As a result, five countries bordering Ukraine – Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia – ended up with a grain surplus and, consequently, a collapse in prices for their own goods. Polish agricultural media reported that from January to August 2022, grain exports from Ukraine to Poland increased by 180% compared to the same period in 2021. In the first half of 2022, the average price of consumer wheat in Poland ranged from 1,600 to 1,800 zloty (€353–€397) per ton; in March 2023 it dropped to 1,000, and in May it fell to 900. Meanwhile, cheap Ukrainian grain continued to flow into the country. Polish farmers were unenthusiastic about the expected losses and protests broke out.

As a result, on 16 April the European Commission permitted the five countries to temporarily ban the import of grain and other types of agricultural produce from Ukraine. The ban was originally imposed until the beginning of June, and later extended until 15 September. After this period the European Commission announced the end of trade restrictions on Ukrainian grain products, indicating that the measures taken had eliminated the influence of Ukrainian grain on the markets of the five nations that and it was possible to export to countries outside the EU.

Poland and Hungary called for the decision to be reversed, but the European Commission rejected their requests. In response, the two countries, joined by Slovakia, announced their intention to impose the restrictions even in the absence of agreement from Brussels. Consequently, in addition to wine and beef, the import of corn, sunflower seeds and barley remained prohibited in these countries. Poland, however, maintained ‘grain corridors’ for other European countries that need Ukrainian grain. Moldova has a similar problem to the three countries above: its farmers are asking the government to take action and reduce the amount of sunflower seed that they plan to import from Ukraine this year.

Poland, Hungary and Slovakia justify their rebellion by referring to the need to protect local farmers from excessive competition created by the increase in Ukrainian imports. But is there another rationale behind this move?

New leaders in Ukrainian grain imports

Data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2023 provides information on the grain market throughout the entire war, although they indirectly include the pre-war autumn sowing season in 2021. Despite missiles, naval blockades, land mines, occupation and long hold ups at the borders, exports for this period were higher than in 2021/2022. This does not mean that Ukrainians earned more: sales prices for farmers have fallen significantly compared to the pre-war period.

In the 2022/2023 marketing year (from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2023), Ukraine exported 48.99 million tons of grain and pulses. For the previous period, the total figure was 48.355 million tons. The leader in Ukrainian grain imports, as noted earlier, is now Europe and Turkey. For wheat, the share of exports to Turkey increased from 10% to 20%, for barley from 19% to 23%, for oats from 0 to 4%, for oil from 3.5% to 19%.

Romania, meanwhile, increased its share in Ukrainian wheat exports from 0.5% to 15.8% over the season. Operators at the Romanian port of Constanta are investing in their grain handling capacity: Constanta now has a logistics capacity of 40 million tons of grain per year, a significant increase on its previous annual record of 25 million tons, set in 2021. Poland also needs to increase the capacity of its ports. Despite the ban on the import of Ukrainian grain, enormous volumes continued to pass through the country in transit. In June this year exports from Poland’s Baltic ports grew to 260,000 tons. As a result, in August the country called on the EU for help increasing the throughput capacity of its ports.

Spain also increased its import of Ukrainian wheat from 0.8% to 14% of its total wheat imports. The share of Ukrainian barley exports to Spain amounted to 18.7%, while corn exports made up 10.5%. The top five importers of Ukrainian grain for various crops also included China (barley and corn imports), Hungary and Italy (6.7% and 6.9% of corn imports respectively).

Poland is among the top five largest importers, but only in terms of wheat; the share of Ukrainian exports to Poland was 5.5%. Poland ranks eighth in barley and seventh in corn, and was the primary importer of rapeseed, rye and oil-cake from Ukraine. These were significant changes. Yet, some argue that in fact Ukrainian grain does not have much influence on the Polish market at present. Economists Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev have collected information on prices from various sources:

‘Two rather interesting conclusions can be drawn simply from the price chart: first, Polish farmers now have almost twice as much revenue. Why? The reasons are known to everyone. We are at war, logistics are very expensive, there are risks, limited export opportunities, etc.’, Nivievskyi wrote on Telegram. It is important to note that he published this conclusion at the end of September, after several months of the embargo on Ukrainian grain.

As for the import of Ukrainian grain to Hungary and Slovakia, it is impossible to say for sure whether the share of imports has really changed enough to truly justify the ban. One can assume that Hungary’s refusal to import Ukrainian grain is another decision in favour of anti-Ukrainian interests. But Slovakia’s decision may be justified as an attempt to protect local farmers. The fact is that agricultural lands in Slovakia account for 2.44 million hectares (almost half of the country’s total area), of which 34% are hayfields and pastures. Ukraine, meanwhile, has 42.7 million hectares (over 70% of the country) of agricultural land – 17.5 times more than the total of Slovak agricultural areas.

What else can stabilize the market?

One solution for the stabilization of the grain market has been proposed by Lithuania, which suggested intervention by the European Union to purchase grain for storage. This idea was voiced by the head of the Lithuanian Grain Industry Association, Aušrys Macijauskas. According to Macijauskas, the solution is not new: the proposed scheme was tested in the EU and operated successfully about 20 years ago. When grain prices fell below the established minimum limit, the mechanism was activated, and millions of tons of grain were purchased and placed in storehouses. Then, when prices rose, they were successfully sold.

According to Macijauskas, this measure will allow the Eastern European market to ‘avoid unnecessary threats’. If an average of 100 euros is paid for one ton of Ukrainian grain, he argued, it could be bought for 150 euros, and after the end of the military conflict, sold to North Africa for 250 per ton. Macijauskas added that about 1.5 billion euros were needed to implement this plan, noting that on an EU scale this is a relatively minor sum.

The president of the Ukrainian Grain Association (UGA), Nikolai Gorbachov, has also proposed a solution to the conflict. According to Gorbachov, three steps would improve the economics of Ukrainian grain exports, which he has already put forward to the European Commission. The first is the development of the ‘Danube Route’. Negotiations between Ukraine and the European Commission and the United States on the development of the Danube Route have been ongoing since the beginning of summer 2022 and have already resulted in a decision to increase the number of barge pilots on the Romanian part of the Danube. Also under discussion is the possibility of opening the Sulina Canal 24 hours a day, which would increase the number of ships and barges able to pass through the canal. Anchorages will also be allocated in Romanian territorial waters (for now only in the port of Constanta) for the transfer of grain from barges to large-capacity vessels. This way, it will be possible to increase export volumes via this route to 30–35 million tons of grain annually.

The second step is compensating European carriers for the cost of delivering Ukrainian grain from the border to European ports, so that grain exports across the western border do not punish agricultural producers in Ukraine due to expensive logistics. The UGA proposed this measure to the European Commission with support from the European grain association COCERAL. In this case, the costs involved in exporting Ukrainian grain to European ports would be comparable to the cost of delivery to the ports of Odesa and give Ukrainian producers a fair price for their products.

The third step is the transfer of sanitary and phytosanitary control from checkpoints on the border with Ukraine to the port from which the grain will be exported. Ukraine’s Polish partners supported this initiative, with the Polish agriculture minister proposing that Vilnius transfer phytosanitary control from the Polish border to Lithuanian ports.

Requirements for the quality of grain

In 2022 Ukraine’s Ministry of Agrarian Policy decided to undertake work on adapting its methods and standards for determining the quality and classification of grain, in an attempt to bring them closer to so-called ‘European standards’. However, it turned out to be very difficult to compare the parameters by which the quality of wheat is assessed in Ukraine and the countries of the EU. In addition, no single system of EU grain standards exists, and not even all EU members have their own quality standards for grain.

The specifics of grain quality assessment in the EU can be judged by the requirements for grain purchased by the EU Commission for intervention stocks (the so-called ‘standard quality’ grain), as well as the requirements imposed by the      EU. For example, unlike post-Soviet Ukrainian national standards, the protein or gluten content in wheat is not a decisive factor in determining quality. The methodology for determining quality is based mainly on test weight, purity and external consumer characteristics: colour, smell, appearance, type and moisture.

It is also important to note that in individual markets, buyers in each case present their own requirements for grain purchases. It is therefore unlikely that it will be possible to bring Ukrainian standards in line with European ones, and it is better to leave everything as it is, in order that the market has the opportunity to regulate itself.

For this reason, Ukrainian farmers are not waiting for changes in national standards but are already trying to create products that correspond to the EU market. Requirements for pollutant residues, diseases, pests and toxic seeds represent the biggest challenges for exporters. Lack of experience and insufficient knowledge of EU legislation are factors that could result in products being returned.

On the other hand, the quantity of grain exported in 2022 and 2023 – a little over 58 million tons of grain, shows that many farmers all the same are supplying grain of relatively high quality for the EU. According to director of the Department of Foreign Economic Activity of the Agrotrade Group Andriy But, almost none of Ukraine’s agrarian exporters uses chemicals banned in the EU, and Ukrainian grain today is regularly delivered to the European market.

The biggest problem exporters are facing, according to Vadim Turyanchik, an expert on feed and food safety from the UGA, is processing grain from the 2022 harvest, especially corn during long-term storage in silos. High temperatures and the impossibility of treating silos and storehouses between seasons are favourable conditions for the spread of pests. The blackouts caused by the constant attacks on Ukraine’s energy network were also a factor that played a role for many farmers, who were unable to dry their grain due to the lack of electricity. In fact, Ukraine has sufficient supplies of chemicals capable of solving this problem, permitted for use in the EU. It is simply that not all farmers are yet aware of these.

Prospects

It is hard to make any kind of forecasts in a country at war. Sudden events can have a powerful impact on the market. According to Sergei Feofilov, the founder of an analytical agency specialising in agriculture in Ukraine and other countries in the Black Sea region, export volumes in the 2023/24 season will depend on how quickly logistical issues are resolved.

Experts say that if a consensus cannot be reached, there may be a reduction in crop acreage in Ukraine, and some farmers may completely abandon growing grain and oil cultures. Such statements are supported by a recent survey of grain producers by the Ministry of Agriculture. Fourteen percent of Ukrainian farmers planned not to sow winter crops in 2023 (although up to 20% of agricultural producers in Ukraine do not sow winter crops every year).

At the same time, it is reassuring that, according to a firm statement by UGA president Nikolai Gorbachov, the issue with Poland will be resolved: ‘The Ukrainian and Polish sides are actively working on technical questions for resolving the regulation of Ukrainian grain exports to Poland, in particular concerning the licensing of Ukrainian export by agreement with the importing country. According to Gorbachov, the parties’ working groups are actively working, including on the transit of Ukrainian grain via Poland’, he said.

At a time when politicians are trying to find a way out of the ongoing conflict, and Europe’s exporters and importers to find solutions that satisfy everyone, Ukrainians and Europeans find themselves connected through the most precious thing they have: bread.

Focusing on the conflict in Gaza, Esprit asks how we can ‘intellectually assess an event of such a scale, one that has already polarised public opinion around the world’?

A group of intellectuals in the fields of political science, philosophy and human rights attempt an answer. Denis Charbit says that the Hamas attacks on 7 October ‘make no sense; it’s what we do afterwards that will’; Firas Kontar comments that Netanyahu ‘knew that the liquidation of the peace process would generate reactions’ – though perhaps not on this scale; and Eva Illouz fears that ‘the violence will continue until one of the two sides manages to overpower, expel, drive out or kill the other for good’.

The contributors criticize the reactions of western academics, politicians and governments, from Germany’s ‘unconditional defence’ of Israel to assertions that the 7 October attacks were comprehensible as ‘the inevitable consequence of Israeli colonisation’.

Also discussed are the various positions taken by the French left: the equation of Jewish nationalism with colonialism, or the preference of La France insoumise for the term ‘war crimes’ over ‘terrorism’ to describe Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians. Susan Neiman calls for greater nuance, noting that ‘it was possible … to be horrified by the carnage at the World Trade Center and still be opposed to the war in Iraq’.

What will be the conflict’s aftermath? Terrorist acts provoke state responses that weaken international institutions. With its effectiveness in doubt, Dan Arbib wonders whether the UN ‘is gradually transforming into a club for pressure groups’. A political solution is the responsibility of the US and Europe, amid the normalisation of relations between Israel and several Arab countries. Whether Israel chooses ‘to exist in a pacified environment or continue to establish itself by force … will have a decisive impact on the region’s future’, comments Kontar.

Road to peace

Political scientist Joseph Bahout positions the conflict in the wider context of the region. In negotiations leading to the Abraham Accords – brokered by the US, which has been forced back into the Middle East as an intermediary – the Palestinian cause ‘literally disappeared’. The unfolding of events could therefore be considered ‘a victory for Hamas’.

Iran is ‘rushing to fill the void left by Arab states to defend the Palestinian cause’, although in allied Lebanon, nearly 70% of citizens do not want the conflict to spill over into their country or for Hezbollah to become involved. Meanwhile, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are returning to the negotiating table.

If Europe wants a part in the action it must face up to its ‘double standards,’ writes Bahout. These ‘rightly point to the barbarism of Hamas but never speak about Netanyahu’s exploitation of the Old Testament to justify the erasure of entire villages’ – not to mention the disunity in statements made by European leaders.

The conflict, which ‘is beyond all military rationality’, begs several questions: What kind of peaceful solution could be universally accepted? Who will be involved in negotiations? What leadership for Gaza will emerge afterwards? How will it deal with the nearly 1 million displaced Gazans and reintegrate the 40,000 to 50,000 Hamas members into an administration that must be formed from scratch?

Wars of de-civilization

Historian Hamit Bozarslan identifies similarities between the conflict in Gaza and other ‘wars of de-civilisation’ from the last decade in Syria, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. These wars are started by a ‘sovereign entity’ that intends to destroy or de-territorialize the ‘enemy nation’. They also feature ‘the intervention of antidemocratic regimes, who might be at each other’s throats but might also work together’ and enjoy relative impunity.

While ‘Israel’s historic and democratic legitimacy has taken a beating in the last few decades’, the Palestinian leadership has its own legitimacy crisis: officials in Ramallah refuse to hold elections and the ageing Mahmoud Abbas is absent from the public stage. Plus, Hamas defeats itself with ‘its jihadist discourse, its refusal to recognise Israel … [and] its armed occupation of the Gaza Strip’. But it has managed to exploit the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause to become an actor that must be considered in negotiations.

Democracies can and should encourage a ‘self-awareness of history’ and remember what Hillel the Elder said in the Talmud: ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.’ Israelis and Palestinians should both reflect on the Book of Jeremiah: ‘Everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes – their own teeth will be set on edge.’

Published in cooperation with CAIRN International Edition, translated and edited by Cadenza Academic Translations.

The EU moves toward further restricting asylum. The new pact agreed on 20 December, even refuses a proposed age limit for the detention of irregular arrivals, or family protections.  Yet, refugees continue to cross unconventional paths as they face wars, political volatility, persecution and the worsening effects of climate disasters.

The so-called ‘warm welcome’ Ukrainian refugees got in 2022 was, indeed, a special case, but the bar had already been very low, researcher Olena Yermakova points out. Policy advisor Martin Wager sees cheap political gains governing European policies, even against obvious needs and interests.

Refugees play a defining role in European life and politics. While the EU brags about its commitment to upholding human rights, it at the same time executes repressive measures against them.  This polarity is mirrored in how differently Ukrainian refugees are treated to asylum seekers arriving from other countries. While the former were given temporary protection status fleeing Russia’s aggression, the latter must undergo ever-stricter procedures as their chances of obtaining a protected status erodes.

In this episode, we discuss these conditions of asylum alongside anti-immigration policies, discrimination, and their legal implications with our guest speakers.

Martin Wagner is the Senior Policy Advisor for Asylum at the International Center for Migration Policy Development. He specializes in European and international refugee, human rights, and anti-discrimination law. Wagner has authored several studies on European asylum systems​ and has experience in providing legal assistance, monitoring law enforcement, as well as capacity-building projects in various countries.

Olena Yermakova is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on Central and Eastern European migration. She was awarded a junior visiting fellowship in the “Ukraine in European Dialogue” program at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna. Yermakova continues her research into Ukrainian labor migrants in Poland at the Research Centre for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. 

We meet with them at The Alte Schmiede Kunstverein, Vienna.

The way home

One way or another

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Margarita Lechner, writer-editor
Salma Shaka, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director
Judit Csikós  project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

OKTO Crew

Senad Hergić producer
Leah Hochedlinger  video recording
Marlena Stolze  video recording
Clemens Schmiedbauer video recording
Richard Brusek sound recording

Video Crew Budapest

Nóra Ruszkai, sound engineering
Gergely Áron Pápai, photography
László Halász, photography

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
Réka Kinga Pap, conversation editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota, Daniela Univazo, Mars Zaslavsky, Marta Ferdebar, Olena Yermakova, Farah Ayyash

Sources

‘Historic day’: EU strikes major deal to reform migration policy after three years of bitter debates by Jorge Liboreiro in Euronews

The way home by Olena Yermakova in Eurozine

What do we know about the employment of refugees in Germany? by Herbert Brüker, Yuliya Kosyakova. IAB-Forum. 

Related Reads

One way or another by Chiara Pagano in Eurozine 

A stage of limbo: A meta-synthesis of refugees’ liminality. Ville R. Hartonen, Pertti Väisänen, Liisa Karlsson and Sinikka Pöllänen. IAAP Journals.  

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

My grandmother loathed chicken. During the Second World War she was forced to kill and pluck hens. The smell stuck in her nose and she never got it out. Like other Swiss farmers of her generation, in the 1970s and 1980s she bought up battery hens to free them from their caged existence. The exhausted birds, their pink flesh bulging between their dishevelled white feathers, learnt to scratch for food with their knotted claws.

I knew nothing about their past. I thought they were utterly hideous and looked forward to eggs and chicken pieces. But there was something about my grandmother and those hens. I offered suggestions for protecting them against attack from goshawks while we watched westerns on TV. It was astonishingly long before I realised that the creatures needed protection not from the ominous goshawk but from us.

117 years of futility: Aim for the heart and hit the stomach

Like so many things that define our everyday life, factory farming is an American invention. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle depicts conditions in the Union Stock Yards slaughterhouse in Chicago, the massacre of animals, the dehumanizing work of Eastern European migrants: ‘It was all so very business-like … this slaughtering machine ran on … like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon.’

Sinclair’s descriptions caused a public outcry, but not in the way he wanted. He was a socialist and a vegetarian, a frequent combination in the English-speaking world. After all, social progress cannot be for humans only; it must include animals as well. Hygiene regulations were imposed but nothing changed for the workers or animals. The public, as Sinclair observed bitterly, were only afraid of tubercular beef. ‘I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’

He was optimistic enough to believe that the public actually had a heart. His aim was true but, as the next 117 years would show, there was nothing there but a giant belly.

In the autumn of 2020, the dire working conditions of eastern European abattoir labourers were brought to the public’s attention by a mass outbreak of Covid-19 at a slaughterhouse belonging to the German meat processing company Tönnies. Every year in Germany, around 40 million pigs are lowered on gondolas into chambers filled with carbon dioxide, where they lose consciousness. It takes between 15 and 30 seconds until they pass out. During this time the pigs experience corrosive irritation, loss of breath and panic.

According to German law, ‘No one may cause an animal pain, suffering, or harm without reasonable grounds’. Forty million pigs a year fit into those ‘reasonable grounds’. The carbon-dioxide chamber is efficient and profitable, which justifies between 170,000 and 330,000 hours of pain, distress annually. Working conditions for employees were marginally reformed after the Tönnies scandal; the company redirected its business towards China; and pigs are still being lowered on reasonable grounds.

180 million tonnes of chicken meat: Happy Meals from animal hell

Today the ‘business-like slaughtering machine’ operates globally. The only difference is that the market is dominated not by beef or pork, but the chicken-lives industry. (Did you misread that as ‘chicken liver’?) Over 70% of growth in the global meat industry has been driven by broilers. After the market leaders China, Brazil and the USA, the biggest producers are the European Union, India, Thailand, Mexico, Russia and Turkey.

The imperial behaviour of the poultry industry resembles that of an authoritarian state. The five largest poultry companies together account for 45% of the global market; last year, they killed around 9 billion broilers between them. The world will produce between 130 and 180 million tonnes of chicken meat in the next few years.

Broiler chickens in Poland, 2017. Image: Otwarte Klatki / Source: Wikimedia Commons

Chicken is booming thanks to its use in fast-food chains, its promotion as a healthy, light, and protein-rich alternative to red meat, the ease and variety of chicken recipes, and an increase in disposable income in some emerging economies. States subsidize the industry with public funds. Enormous numbers of chickens can be kept in small spaces, they grow quickly, and it is nearly impossible to keep track of individual injuries, mutilations or illnesses. Responsibility for waste products and the risk of epidemics are borne by the general public.

Rearing, transport and slaughter are excruciating for chickens. Before slaughter they are crammed into containers. On arrival at the slaughterhouse, they are taken out, flipped over, hung upside down, and tied up. Their heads are dragged through electric water-baths to stun them before they finally they have their throats cut. The electric stunning can cause injury, pain and fear, as can the prior handling, being put upside-down and suspension. The chickens receive electric shocks before their heads even reach the bath, and the shocks in the bath may be too weak or too short to stun them. These animals then have their throats cut while conscious.

Chicken nuggets are, as one fast-food chain advertises, ‘the ideal snack to take with you wherever you go, whenever you’re feeling peckish,’ little bites ‘to enjoy alone or with friends, as a snack or as part of a Happy Meal Menu.’ Children and young people love ready-made junk food from electric-shock baths. Happy Meals from animal hell for friends and family.

The total number of farm animals, such as cows, pigs and chickens, may seem small in relation to the entire animal kingdom, including all vertebrates, insects, worms, crustaceans, coelenterates, and so on. But if one just takes mammals and birds, the ratios look different. According to one estimate, 60% of mammals are farm animals, 36% are humans, and just 4% are wild animals. Around 70% of birds are farm animals, while just 30% are wild. The number of animals bred as livestock by humans is many times higher than the number of wild mammals and birds. For billions of fish, we show no mercy either way. Animal suffering multiplied by an unimaginable factor in the 20^th century.

Two thousand years of progress: We are all the Roman paterfamilias

In 2009 Jonathan Safran Foer published Eating Animals, an account of his journalistic research into the horrors of the North American meat and fish industry. His motivation was autobiographical. The book begins with his memory of his grandmother’s cooking (‘her chicken and carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten’). When he found out he was going to be a father, he decided to write a book about eating animals.

Why should a responsible father not concern himself with eating animals? An acquaintance of mine who enjoys Safran Foer’s novels refused to read the book. He said it was because it was nonfiction. Besides, he was scared he’d have to become vegetarian. My acquaintance has a son who eats whatever is on his plate. Peace to the plates!

I have no children. I can be indifferent about the future. I am not leaving anything to anyone. The statistical thirty years of life I have left will see global chicken production increase to 180 million tonnes while global temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius. Until then it will still be possible to live comfortably in Central Europe. Fathers will continue to kill animals, and with them their children’s future and ultimately the children themselves, for fear of having to become vegetarian.

Roman law granted the paterfamilias the right of life and death (ius vitae necisque) over every member of his household: wife, children, employees, slaves and livestock. He could decide to let them live, cast them out, abandon or kill them, buy, sell, marry, and divorce them. Particularly shocking to us is his power over the life and death of his children, although there are very few substantiated examples of it being used. It is generally thought to have been an archaic law from the early days of Rome that remained as a dead letter in later centuries. New interpretations, however, see it as a symbolic expression of the ruler’s authority over his subjects.

In the fourth century the law was abolished under the influence of Christianity. Slavery was not abolished until much later, concurrently with the Enlightenment and the emergence of liberal society. Workers, servants, women and children gradually gained legal freedom from the despotism of their fathers and patrons. Criticism of the idea of progress notwithstanding, it is indisputable that progress towards greater freedom and less violence has been and can still be made.

Nevertheless, this confident view of history is a discovery or (if you prefer) an invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Optimistic philosophers of history like Hegel saw the course of (European) history as the development and realization of political freedom. According to Hegel, this freedom was fully realized in civil law and the bourgeois state, with the family and the economy as the productive centres of society. This did not mean that the struggle for freedom and recognition was over, but that its positive resolution had found a form in the bourgeois state. Marx thought that Hegel had not gone far enough and that his philosophy contained too much religious glorification of exploitation and too little political liberation.

Bourgeois society, according to Marx, was not blueprint for the positive resolution of social conflict, but the last stage of bondage. What was really needed was a universal critique of religion and all its glorified secular asylums, including civil law, the bourgeois state and bourgeois family ties. In 1844, Marx wrote in the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that ‘the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being, relations which cannot be better described than by the exclamation of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: “Poor dogs! They want to treat you like human beings!”’

The realization that humanity has become its own ideal will mark the end of ‘criticism of the vale of tears’. The worst a person can experience before the overthrow of all unfree relations is a dog’s life. This is the premise that turns the Frenchman’s exclamation into a bitter joke. People should not be treated like dogs and dogs should not be treated like people. When humans have become the highest beings for humans, we can live our human lives and leave the animals in their place, where they can bleed for us without cease.

For animals it makes no difference whether we look at world history through the lens of Rome, Christianity, Hegel, the liberal rule of law or Marxism. Our right of life and death over them never changes. We can let them live, buy them, pen them in, breed them, exterminate them, poison them and slaughter them. This applies to all possible types of animals, which for the purpose of deciding over life and death we have divided into categories: sacrificial animals, farm animals, pets, assistance animals, wild animals, sporting animals, laboratory animals, circus animals, zoo animals, therapy animals, working animals, beneficial animals, pests, production units, sources of meat, milk producers, furbearers, surplus animals, etc. Every animal has its place in the system of our specific needs. Even people who through their lifestyle distance themselves from the power over life and death belong to societies that grant this power.

As far as I know, there was and is no society or culture not based on this violence, which is ultimately always deadly (because it creates life only in order to take it). As far as animals are concerned, we are all, without exception, a Roman paterfamilias, legally and symbolically, with unlimited power over life and death.

Over 100 national animal welfare laws: war on animals!

Maybe this all seems too pessimistic. Have there not been plenty of positive developments? Animal welfare laws? Engaged young people? Growing environmental awareness? The boom in cruelty-free products? I see little reason for optimism. Optimism is the sentiment of a consumer society with a stomach where its beating heart should be.

Schopenhauer, the antidote to tedious optimism, saw in history no new dawn, but just the same old tangle of violence, pain, suffering, fear, loneliness, hunger, disease, war, ennui, death and darkness. He denied that the atrocities of history could be compensated for by a better future; he believed that it was negligent through partial improvements to blind oneself to the reality of violence and horror; and he refused to ignore the fate of animals, who are subjected to violence, suffering, fear, hunger, tedium, and countless types of death as much as us, if not more.

But if the advances of modern law were indifferent to the violence we inflict on animals, then the differences between optimism and pessimism also disappeared. For Hegel and Marx, animals did not belong the realm of the rational progress of freedom because they were neither rational nor free. Rather, being wholly subject to nature, they represented a resource to be used for human progress. Humanity bonds over the easter lamb or a Happy Meal. For Schopenhauer, animal suffering was a sad but natural fact, because life itself is suffering.

Both sides agreed that violence and suffering were an inherent part of animal existence. What happens to animals because of us belongs to the realm of nature and is therefore natural. The only unnatural thing would be to chip away at the separation between animal and human. Any attempt to close the gap looks suspiciously like eccentricity, transgression, and taboo breaking. Distance, enmity and war are natural, normal and necessary.

Thomas Hobbes’s description of human life in its natural state can be applied equally well to that of billions of pigs and chickens: ‘continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ However far you think humanity has come since leaving its brutal natural condition behind, our relationship to animals remains in a state of nature and war: collectively organized acts of comprehensive and mechanized violence designed to render animals defenceless and force them to do our bidding.  

But don’t most countries today have animal welfare laws? And don’t such laws regulate our relationship to animals and protect them against our absolute power? At the World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare in 2017, China’s vice minister for agriculture, Yu Kangzhen, said that it was ‘the historic responsibility of people in the livestock sector to promote animal welfare in line with socioeconomic development’. This was a blunt expression of the reality of any animal welfare legislation: that animals must be protected to ensure our economic and social control over them. Just like a Roman paterfamilias, animal welfare legislation lets us keep animals alive, buy them, breed them and or kill them. Such legislation is an instrument of animal use, an animal usage law, that guarantees us total control over life and death and perpetuates the war against animals.

We wage war on animals, and the legal framework of animal protection corresponds to this fact. Indeed, there are parallels between animal protection laws and international humanitarian law. This bold analogy between ‘welfare’ and ‘warfare’ has been drawn by the jurist Saskia Stucki, who argues that for all the clear differences between the two legal, comparison reveals structural and functional similarities. Both regimes serve to regulate and humanize the exercise of violence; both regimes seek to organize the widespread, collective use of force, rather than to abolish it; both strive for a paradoxical humanization of inhumanity; and the goal of both is to prevent ‘unnecessary suffering’, implying the existence of ‘necessary suffering’. This might include injuries and deaths caused by cluster munitions in war, or the distress of suffocation and electric shock before slaughter.

Suffering in war must be accepted for the sake of achieving a military objective. Suffering in animal exploitation is broader and vaguer, encompassing as it does almost all practices we regard as somehow necessary for economic, sporting or scientific purposes. It is only excessive suffering that must be prevented, whether war crimes against people or cruelty to animals.

But cruelty is systematically entrenched in animal breeding, husbandry and slaughter. Overburdened chicken bones are bound to break at some point, male chicks must be disposed of somehow, surplus laboratory animals must be killed, and pigs must be cost-effectively stunned. People who commit individual acts of cruelty against animals occasionally get punished mildly, while those who commit such acts en masse remain unpunished and even receive state subsidies. Unlike warfare, the legally sanctioned use of violence against animals is not the exception, but constant, collective normality. It is normality in medical research, farming, slaughterhouses, menus, freezers and kitchens. Peace to the plates! War on the animals!An allusion to the famous first line of Georg Buchner’s The Hessian Courier: ‘Friede den Hutten! Krieg den Palasten!’ (‘Peace to the huts, war on the palaces’).

Forty thousand years of tribalism: harsh, unforgiving nature

The collective and institutionalized use of violence by humans against humans in war is much more strictly regulated than the use of violence against animals. This is because our relationship to animals is still in a warlike natural state. According to the prevailing ideology, it is natural for people to breed, use, and kill animals. Even though the overwhelming majority of these animals is specifically bred, manipulated and mass-produced by us in order to maximize economic gains, we have a tendency to think of this violent relationship as something natural. This perversion – which is what it is – stems from the fact that we want our relationship to animals to be that of a natural state of war. Our stomach wants it to be so. It then seems only natural for the fate of animals in the globalized market to be harsh and unforgiving.

No matter what high-tech weapons and ingenious killing machines we deploy against animals, it is still natural, and so we cling to the image of a ruthless nature with claws and fangs. People who advocate for animals are habitually reproached for having a romanticized view of nature as peaceful. This accusation is generally incorrect and intended simply to emphasize that the accuser’s own view of nature is realistic: despotic, brutal, merciless and not for the faint-hearted. We see nature as it suits us or as we ourselves have made it: harsh and unforgiving, ‘red in tooth and claw’, eat or be eaten, individual lives count for nothing.

In view of the negative impact of global animal use on wild animals, the environment, the climate, health and food security, the only rational conclusion is that our behaviour is a perversion, a serious case of global mass delusion. But this mass delusion is so old that it must be a deep-seated one, probably with biological roots. According to the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, megafauna on all continents except Africa were eradicated by human beings as they spread around the world. In a way, this war against animals is our inheritance; we have never had a better relationship with them.

War feeds on a mixture of fear, greed and group mentality. Human evolution certainly began with fear of animals (as predators, poisonous animals and disease carriers), but fear has been replaced by greed. At the same time, our group mentality has remained the same. The collective belief that the interests of humans are always more important than the interests of animals is universal, influential and mostly impervious to dissent. It probably has its roots in tribalism, in the innate tendency to prefer members of our own group over outsiders.

Of course, progress has been made against the destructive and regrettable outgrowths of tribalism that are nationalism, religious hatred, racism and sexism. We combat these by learning to see people as people. But this humanistic view only strengthens the form of tribalism that fuels the constant war on animals: speciesism. This is a person. That is an animal. Full stop. We are able to recognize the moral fallacy of nationalism, racism or sexism for precisely the same reason that we wage war on animals. That war has reached an unprecedented scale since the triumph of humanism and will likely become even more brutal. Marx seems to have been right: criticism ends with the theory that man is the highest being for man. That’s the best we can expect. But in truth we can’t even expect that.

To the happy few

Given the deep-rootedness and universality of tribalism, as well as economic greed, moral prejudice and everyday habits, which in our war against animals are knotted like the threads of the Norns into an inexorable fate, it seems highly unlikely that education, reforms or alternative systems of incentives will lead to improvement. Of course, we could all just stop eating meat, but it would be easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. The democratic parties of the democratic state could come to reason and ban the trade and consumption of meat, but that would merely open the hearts of the people to fascism and other meat evangelists. The war will continue, hearts will continue to shrink, and bellies will continue to swell.

Naturally, there will always be reasons and explanations for the inevitability of this course of events: the tendency to rationalize and the capacity for self-deception are part of human nature. Most people will not believe that forgoing animal-based foods and transitioning to crop production would free up incredible amounts of land and other resources, and actually expand rather than reduce the variety of foods available. Common sense, distorted by generations of war on animals, is unable to see such obvious connections. Occasionally we will take some small action, like restricting the number of teats in sow breeding to 24, giving chickens a bit more space, patting each other on the back for a veggie day, or praising a start-up that serves vegan carpaccio at a rooftop restaurant in a dynamic port city.

The lot of animals will only improve if humans are fundamentally transformed by artificial, moral bio-enhancement, or if humankind disappears altogether. In their book Unfit for the Future,Persson, I., and Savulescu, J., 2012. Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu defend the idea of this kind of bio-enhancement. In A Dog’s World,Pierce, J., and Bekoff, M., 2021. A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff imagine a future for dogs in a world without people and come to the conclusion that, after a painful transition period, they would lead a very prosperous life. Of course, this is just a thought experiment. I had a conversation with a biologist who was in favour of eradicating malaria by releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. He justified this on the grounds of our duty to exterminate massively harmful species. When I asked him whether he was fully committed to this principle in all cases, he hesitated and then replied in the negative.

But given the destructive talent demonstrated by humans during the twentieth century in the form of war, mass destruction, ecocide and animal exploitation, we could at least consider voluntarily refraining from the reproduction of our species. This is also what representatives of the youth climate movement want. I have no illusions about the fact that these three scenarios provoke reluctance and outrage. Rightly so. We cannot possibly ask people to submit, even on a voluntary basis, to what we routinely and on a large scale do, allow, endorse but mostly ignore in the war on animals. This is one more manifestation of the deeply held collective belief that our interests are always more important.

There are individual people and small groups who do not want to be part of the war. But whether they like it or not, they remain prisoners of societies that have institutionalized collective violence on a grand scale. There is nowhere on the globe where we can escape this sordid fact. As a result of greed for raw materials and global warming, to which livestock farming contributes substantially, fish die in overheated and overfished waters and birds fall dead from the sky. These small groups of people are always sarcastically reproached for arguing their case with ‘missionary zeal’, for belonging to a ‘sort of religion’, for wanting to impose their own ideology ‘dictatorially’. Of course that is what we want, but we will never defeat the industrialized slaughter machines and giant bellies.

In all the major religions – Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity – a small religious elite are subject to special dietary rules that have always included the extensive avoidance of animal products. But it was clear to the founders of those religions that the masses would be unable to bear the same lifestyle. It would be ideal if vegans were recognized and protected as a religious minority, so that state institutions, schools, and employers were legally obliged to provide vegan work clothes, vegan work tools and teaching materials, vegan meals, and (especially, please) separate tables. Peace to our plates!

Bibliography

Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., and Milo, R., 2018. ‘The biomass distribution on Earth,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(25): 6506–6511.

Bülte, J., 2018. ‘Zur faktischen Straflosigkeit institutionalisierter Agrarkriminalität,’ Goltdammer’s Archiv für Strafrecht 165(1): 35–56.

Day, J., 2023. ‘Global Chicken Market Report 2023: Rising Consumption of Poultry Worldwide to Boost Growth,’ Poultry News, June 7, 2023.

Fuseini, A., Miele, M., and Lever, J., 2023. ‘Poultry Welfare at Slaughter,’ Poultry 2(1): 98–110.

Jaquet, F., 2022. ‘Speciesism and Tribalism: Embarrassing Origins,’ Philosophical Studies 179(3): 933–954.

Kasperbauer, T. J., 2018. Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Persson, I., and Savulescu, J., 2012. Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Pierce, J., and Bekoff, M., 2021. A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Prates, L., and Perez, S. I., 2021. ‘Late Pleistocene South American megafaunal extinctions associated with rise of Fishtail points and human population,’ Nature Communications 12(2175).

Martin, P. S., 1973. ‘The Discovery of America: The first Americans may have swept the Western Hemisphere and decimated its fauna within 1000 years.’ Science 179: 969–974.

Safran Foer, J., 2009. Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown and Company).

Stucki, S., 2023. ‘Animal Warfare Law and the Need for an Animal Law of Peace: A Comparative Reconstruction,’ American Journal of Comparative Law 71: 1–45.

Wadiwel, J. D., 2015. The War Against Animals (Leiden: Brill).

This year, the magazine turned 25 years old, and our network of cultural journals celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first European Meeting of Cultural Journals, which took place in Switzerland in 1983.

Connecting editors and writers across the Iron Curtain was an impossible task set out back then. The founders succeded in that, and today our network numbers above a hundred journals, magazines and associates. But now, we face new divisions in and around Europe. Still we maintain that cultural publishing is crucial to understanding and responsibly navigating any age – especially an age of chaos and rapid change, like this one.

Eurozine has bounced back from the edge of collapse a number of times – our financial situation in 2022 was the lowest point so far.  After last year’s hardship, this year saw us building back with a vengeance, and we even launched new ventures: Eurozine is among the co-founders of the brand-new Display Europe platform, and we have just introduced our new weekly talk show. You can find more about these below.

Truth be told, Eurozine’s operations are still far from steady: the team is stretched thin with a huge bundle of work, and our financing is not secured beyond mid-year in 2024. Our readers are growing in numbers, however, which is always a great reassurance that our work in relevant and appreciated. Please, if you can, do consider supporting Eurozine, so we can keep the network going and the magazine independent and free.

And now, let’s see the most popular articles of 2023!

#10

Cities feeling the heat

A number of alarming heat records were broken this year, across all seasons and between hemispheres. Global heating in undeniable, even if the popular discourse still takes its time to comprehend it in full. Celia Fernández’s article came to Eurozine from our collaborator, the Green European Journal, and it’s a relevant read for every reader, regardless of the season they are enjoying right now.

#9

The traps of de-modernization

Jan Sowa looks at modernity nearing the end of its path, and considers what comes after:

Now, as capitalism teeters on the brink of devastating our entire ecosystem and as liberal modernity splinters, we need to cast our sights beyond capitalism, towards an alternative modern vision.

It is not a good time for nostalgia and melancholy, be it liberal or any other. If we fail to identify this new direction, the end of history we heralded 30 years ago might ominously foreshadow the end for the world, at least the world as we know it.

#8

Who represents farmers?

Farmers are the holders of tradition, stewards of the land and the representative of small enterprise – in our political imagination. In reality, this is an agin profession, more and more dominated by big land owners, and the politicians who want their votes, are ready to exploit stereotypes to serve the interests of big business against ecology and labour:

European farming is in dire straits. Despite agriculture being the EU’s largest budget item, disbursing tens of billions of public money a year, the bloc has lost three million farmers over the past decade. That is a rate of 800 farmers leaving the profession every single day. Yet more concerning, they’re not being replaced: the average age of a European farmer is now 57. These statistics date back to the decade from 2010 to 2020, before the war on Europe’s doorstep between two agricultural superpowers put further pressure on food producers, who have since struggled with rapidly rising prices of inputs such as feed, fertiliser and pesticides.

Your favourite series in 2023

What will Europe look like, after ‘the war’? Well, that’s an impossible question. By the end of 2023, there are seven major armed conflicts ongoing, including in Gaza, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Of all these, the Russian aggression against Ukraine is the one that most directly shapes the European Union. The series was an international hit, numbering dozens of translations and republications, and its individual articles number among the most read essays in Eurozine this year. However impossible ‘the end of the war’ is to foresee, it important to draft perspectives. And that’s exactly what our Lessons of war series did.

Lessons of war

The rebirth of Europe revisited

This debate series was curated by two of Eurozine’s co-founders, Klaus Nellen and Carl Henrik Fredriksson, who set out to contrast Europe’s response with the opposition to the Iraq invasion back in 2003.

Europe after the death of peace of mind

Vasyl Cherepayn refuses to normalize the war, and doesn’t want to give into daydreaming about post-war reconstruction either.

… panic would actually be the appropriate reaction to Russia’s war crimes … The international community seems to be gradually accepting the atrocities as inevitable, a response that would previously have been absolutely unthinkable. Panic would perhaps also be a more effective political response, potentially triggering badly needed international action …

But Europe still prefers to talk about genocide in terms of history politics, memory culture, and ‘coming to terms with the past’, often avoiding applying the term to the present for fear of its ‘relativization’.

Ukraine: Europe’s greatest test

An alliance forged by crises and devastation, the European Union has a chance to prove itself to a disillusioned polity. But a quick-fix approach won’t cut it, Natalie Tocci argues.

Europe’s second chance

Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie argue that for Europe to maintain political momentum, its relationship with the Global South must fundamentally change.

The TOP 3

Check the top of the crop from previous years

Age defiers

Your choice

Reader favourites from 2022

It’s your choice

Readers’ favourites in 2021

By popular demand

Our favourites from 2020

Revolutions and repercussions

The 2010s in 10 articles

#3

The eye of the whale

Katarzyna Boni’s article was shortlisted for the European Press Prize, and for good reason: it starts by introducing a personal relationship wildlife, and from it, unfolds a pathway to recognize and rethink our individual and cultural responsibilities for ecology.

We have turned into spectators. The more we know, the further we move away from animals and animality. We no longer have any need to make eye contact with them. Berger argues that the gaze of a beast has become a cause for concern, even horror, in Western civilisation. After all, Homo sapiens is cultured, not just another type of fauna. To look into the eyes of a wild animal is to trigger a form of species-related narcissism, to prove how far we have come.

#2

Sleepwalkers

James Dodd writes about why war seems more and more inevitable, in a spiral of self-deception. De-escalation is always possible, he argues.

Escalation is a fundamental feature of any war, but it should not be taken to be some determining factor rigidly fixing a causal chain of events. Violence has no intrinsic logic, it dictates no necessity; this means that any given escalation of violence, as Carl von Clausewitz argued, is at its root a question of politics. We enter wars for political reasons, and we only resolve them with political means.

Wars become more prolonged and destructive, more senseless and debilitating, the more distorted the political situation becomes – choking off possible alternatives to simply prolonging the violence, and with that giving war the deceptive air of necessity.

#1

Whom to trust

Our most recent venture, the new talk show Standard Time featured this conversation with two fantastic journalists and a recurring reader favourite from our authors. In this conversation, we discuss how journalism is changing in shape; how readers tend to form attachment to individual authors rather than media outlets nowadays; and whether either of the speakers want their kids to pursue media as a profession. (No, preferably not.)

Mercy Abang is a Nigerian journalist, among the most internationally commissioned from Africa. She’s the editor-in-chief of Unbiased the News, based in Berlin and curating a platform that aims to correct the imbalance of conventional media coverage. Lina Chawaf leads Radio Rozana from Gaziantep, Turkey, broadcasting in Arabic to a Syrian audience in Syrian as well as in diaspora.

Social psychologist Péter Krekó is a returning champion of Eurozine’s top lists – he was among our most read contributors in 2022 and in 2021 too. This time, he shares the winning streak with distinguished colleagues – and our deeply beguiled editor-in-chief, who’s beaming with joy from the fact that she gets to meet authors.

A new venture

Eurozine turned 25 years old this year, and we launched this weekly TV show a few weeks ago, in the framework of a new platform we build with more than 15 international partners: Display Europe. This is an attempt to scale up Eurozine’s work of three decades, through a new platform that offers articles, videos and audio content from dozens of media partners and across 15+ languages. Check out the platform and follow the talk show, where we will feature Eurozine authors and editors, as well as media personalities from the Display Europe platform, and from across the continent.

Our New Year’s episode is out already: this is an unusually light-hearted one about offensive jokes and who gets to tell them.

Through thick and thin

Admittedly, Eurozine has been facing financial hardship since 2021. Despite all the innovations, we are still far from steady now, as cultural funding is diminishing and our budget is not secured beyond mid-year 2024. Since the pandemic lockdowns, we’ve been biting our teeth together and have maintained a forced march, to secure and to further develop Eurozine. Publishing is in a deepening turmoil, and quality is among the lesser considerations for major funders. That’s all the more reason for us to appreciate our audience – thank you, for sticking with us in 2023 and we hope to have you around in the new year.

Please, if you can afford to, do support us on Patreon, starting from as little as €3 a month, or whatever you can part with to keep Eurozine free and independent.

Happy new calendar to all of you!

This editorial is part of our last newsletter in 2023. You can subscribe here to get the bi-weekly updates about latest publications and news on partner journals.

Related reads

Cancel culture vs. execute culture

Why Russian manuscripts don’t burn, but Ukrainian manuscripts burn all too well

Delete your profile, not people

Comment on cancel culture

Freedom of movement

A European dialectic

Further sources

Conflict, commitment and fear

Post-Soviet migrants in Germany and war in Ukraine

From political correctness to ‘cancel culture’, staying ‘woke’ seems to be the comedian’s new worst nightmare. While humor acts as a response to the crumbling state of the world, how ‘PC’ can someone be when dealing with offensive jokes?

Comedy changes with the times, and can be a powerful tool for social critique. As comedian Aislinn Kane, founder of Gays and Theys Comedy in Vienna, puts it: ‘Comedy is the most honest way of portraying what our current societal values are.’

Through ‘punching up’; making fun of the church, police, state, public personas, or any kind of politician, the genre can thematize anything from authoritarian regimes to everyday misconceptions. How far one can go remains negotiable, as doing so can be met with serious political consequences. 

As opposed to the prevailing culture of jumping to conclusions, humor opens people up to other perspectives. Homer Hakim, owner of the Comedy Pub in Vienna, clearly says that he never wants to tell anybody what to joke about.

Comedy isn’t inherently fair though. It has long been a vehicle of negative stereotyping, be it queer and transphobia, racism, sexism, ableism, etc. Comedy as a profession is itself known for discriminating.

Oftentimes, those who most complain about ‘cancel culture’ are in positions of power, known for their problematic views and stances. It sometimes goes as far as show business billionaires complaining about how they just can’t say things anymore, because those women/trans people/abuse survivors/homeless folks and other tyrants just won’t know how to take a joke. 

Instead of ‘punching down’, Jannis Panagiotidis uses the reference of ‘punching sideways’; meaning to make fun of people belonging to the same group as one’s own. To avoid offending others, but to leave room to joke about the nuances of our diverse lived experiences. 

Aislinn Kane is a California-born, Vienna-based comedian and founder of Gays and They Comedy in Vienna. 

Jannis Panagiotidis is the scientific director at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. He specializes in the history of migration and is a recurring author of Eurozine.

Homer Hakim is a Vienna-based Afghani comedian and founder of the Comedy Pub, the only pub fully dedicated to stand-up comedy in Vienna. 

We meet with them at The Alte Schmiede Kunstverein, Vienna.

Creative team

Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Merve Akyel, art director
Szilvia Pintér, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, executive producer
Salma Shaka, writer-editor
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project assistant

Management

Hermann Riessner  managing director
Judit Csikós  project manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration

OKTO Crew

Senad Hergić producer
Leah Hochedlinger  video recording
Marlena Stolze  video recording
Clemens Schmiedbauer video recording
Richard Brusek sound recording

Postproduction

Nóra Ruszkai, lead video editor
Réka Kinga Papp, conversation editor

Art

Victor Maria Lima, animation
Cornelia Frischauf, theme music

Captions and subtitles

Julia Sobota, Daniela Univazo, Mars Zaslavsky, Marta Ferdebar, Olena Yermakova, Farah Ayyash

Hosted by the Alte Schmiede Kunstverein, Vienna.

Related reads

Cancel culture vs. execute culture by Victoria Amelina, Eurozine 

Delete your profile, not people by Geert Lovink, Eurozine

Freedom of movement: A European dialectic by Jannis Panagiotidis

Further sources

Conflict, commitment and fear: Post-Soviet migrants in Germany and war in Ukraine by Nino Aivazishvili Gehne, Alina Jašina-Schäfer, and Jannis Panagiotidis

Disclosure

This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.

This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.

Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

September. People, flies and wasps cling to the last of the blackberries and the first soft pears of autumn, while cherry plums and mirabelles lie putrefying on concrete pavements. Their sharp vinegary smell reminds us that it is time to say goodbye to summer and prepare for the coming of winter. So, go on! Order a few kilos of purple plums from the greengrocer’s or bring them over in crates from the family orchard. Or else you can lug them over from the neighbour’s allotment in reusable supermarket bags. Their skin must feel firm under your fingers and the juicy, honey-coloured flesh should coat the tongue with its stubborn, acidic sweetness. This is crucial.

Then it will be time to call your friends to boast about your takings and invite them to share in your labours, assuring them that the plums are locally sourced and (almost) certainly haven’t been sprayed. Just make sure they bring their own knives. The fruit is best cleaned in a single batch, under the shower or in the bath. Jars should be steamed in a dishwasher along with knives.

Once last year’s jar lids have been found, they are best boiled in a saucepan. The rusty ones must be discarded.

Now cut the clean plums, remove stones and place in large, wide saucepans or in a heavy frying pan. Do not peel or sweeten. Lower the heat, have a chat about inflation and, even though you may be losing some of your initial enthusiasm, stir the fruit with a wooden spatula until the juices run.

Continue until the mixture boils, disintegrates and is transformed into a luscious purple paste, which should stick to your spoon but come away easily from the base of the saucepan. A kilogram of purple plums will produce one jar of powidl spread, possibly two. It is therefore advisable to pre-set some rules and divide the spoils equally among the workers, so no one goes away empty-handed. Fair distribution is the very foundation of this kind of enterprise. Some labourers do the cutting, others stir, others still gossip. Somebody will doubtless let out the dogs and the children because they’re so bored, or go to fetch a friend who’s running late because she overslept and then got lost in a maze of roadworks. The best, most adroit workers should be despatched to fill jars with boiling plum powidl – preferably armed with a spoon, a wide funnel and nerves of steel.

Powidl: thick, unsweetened plum marmalade. You stick a spoon into it and you’ve got a popsicle. It can keep for years and is essential for many festive bakes across eastern Europe.

Do not overfill because, when the mixture is pasteurized, the jars may explode. Pasteurize the entire batch in a cold oven, heated gradually – with jars tightly closed – to a temperature of 130 degrees centigrade. Once the required temperature is reached, cook for half an hour, then cool in the oven until room temperature is restored. For your own peace of mind, finish by placing the jars upside down, on their lids, so they are nicely drawn in.

After that, there’s the clearing up to do, but the sight of a work surface covered with jars of powidl may offer some sort of compensation. Rather like the thought that one day we will all be grateful to one another for having made the effort. Because preserves, time-honoured as they are, represent the food of the future. They are a simple booster in times of trouble, uncertainty, instability, scarcity, hunger, fear and poverty. They preserve life.

Veganism, necessity and want

The connection between veganism and basic human need is powerfully highlighted in Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak’s book Peasant Women (Chłopki). It makes me flush as I read it because, essentially, this is a book about my own family. It offers a window into the lives of the aunts and grandmothers of so many of us in Poland: ‘strong hard-wearing women’ with ‘legendary foresight and an extraordinary capacity for sheer slog’ to whom we owe the fact that we are still here.

They worked a full eighteen hours a day, ‘which is to say over 15% longer than men’, no matter how hungry they were or how cold the conditions. They laboured in the fields, looked after animals, cared for children, cooked for the family, cleaned, mended, span, milked, and embroidered. There was no respite and this went on throughout their lives.

Our best-loved preserves have an unhappy history, as Kuciel-Frydyszak shows:

The countryside fed the cities, but failed to feed itself… you had to know how to make use of anything edible, no matter how hard and stringy it was. The prices of country produce were constantly falling dramatically, and everything else was increasingly expensive. As food producers, country women did not eat the animals they bred, unless they were comparatively rich… Daily fare consisted of potatoes with cornmeal or pulses.

This version of veganism was inspired by necessity, not choice. It was badly balanced – with ‘soups’ made solely of water and sorrel, for example – and often based on products that had gone off, such as overboiled noodles or pancakes made from rotten potatoes. Stuff like this could be used up at home because no one would buy it anyway.

Between 1918 and 1939, in the Second Polish Republic, many women had little idea about how to make preserves, but almost all families prepared for winter by making sauerkraut … Neighbours would come over with their well-used barrels which sometimes leaked or had missing staves … A damaged barrel would have to be mended and then the women set to work. After the cabbage has been well salted, they’d look around for a child with clean feet which would fit into the barrel and do a good job beating down the contents.

A century on, Marta Dymek published her book Food the Polish way [Jadłonomia po polsku] which has come to be regarded as a plant-based cookery bible in Poland. When presenting her sauerkraut recipe ‘for contemporary cooks’, Dymek wrote:

A few years ago, if anyone had told me I should be making my own sauerkraut, I’d have dismissed it as absurd. How much can you do, after all?.. But the result proved delicious. It can be served on sandwiches with hummus, in a bagel with pâté, or straight out of the jar. Home-made is completely different from the variety sold in shops, or even at the highest quality greengrocer’s. It is firm, fragrant and crunchy, like treading on freshly fallen snow. Pickling cabbage is simple and requires no special equipment or conditions at home. You can pickle in a studio flat or an IKEA kitchen, and you can certainly do it for one.

Dymek’s recipes blend cabbage with turmeric, cinnamon or fresh cranberry – but not for the purposes of culinary gentrification. Her intention is rather to restore dignity to dishes and culinary practices which have come to be associated with poverty, since the time communism fell and ‘world food’ sections appeared in urban grocery shops. In dreaming up cabbage recipes ‘for contemporary cooks’, Dymek seeks to prove that pickling is more than just a dull, and gruellingly work-intensive, relic from a past marked by relentless food shortages. It is a precious cultural legacy. It would be a pity if the sauerkraut tradition vanished only to be replaced by kimchi.

Culture wars: sauerkraut versus kimchi in the intercontinental contest of cabbages.

The deficiencies of country life

How is it that the labour-intensive, lacklustre dishes which once served as staple foods for the poorest in Polish society, have moved into the repertoire of urban cooks to be served up at dinner parties given by middle- and upper-class literati? It seems to me that Kuciel-Frydyszak could be on to something when she points out that, as the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of peasant farmers’ wives, we associate the taste of pickles less with hunger and poverty, than with a nostalgia for childhood.

We remember summer expeditions to the allotment and winter descents deep into the cool, clammy darkness of the cellar. We recall the warmth and security of a grandmother’s cooking, that feeling of fullness and satisfaction.Consider Maciej Jakubowiak’s account of his grandmother’s life in Dwutygodnik (coming soon in English in Eurozine!), written as he was trying to unravel the cultural and national story behind his family’s susceptibility to obesity:

Albina knew about want. And so, when she became a mother, she promised herself that her child would never go hungry. She fed it (that is to say Hanka) with cartloads of food, so no one would ever see the child’s ribs, so the child would grow, so it would have energy and fat to spare. And, sure enough, it did.

No surprise then that Jakubowiak’s childhood, like that of so many of us, was defined by gathering and preserving food products:

There would be kilo after kilo of green beans, new potatoes, peas, cabbages, field cucumbers, raspberries, strawberries. Everything was brought down from the allotment starting late spring and throughout the summer months. As the end of the holidays approached, there would be a surge of activity. The produce had to be preserved and bottled, the cucumbers pickled, and sweet syrup poured over the strawberries and raspberries.

Production on this scale would have been impossible for a homemaker working on her own, no matter how determined or skilled she was. The more so as she would have been living in a country only that was only partially electrified and, in many places, without sewers. Under these conditions, as Małgorzata Szpakowska explains in To want and to have (Chcieć i mieć), all work related to managing a household expanded ‘to epic proportions’.

The lack of basic infrastructure in villages and small towns meant that entire communities had to be involved in managing and preserving locally sourced produce. Every generation was called to contribute: women, men, grandparents and grandchildren, not to mention the neighbours and work colleagues.

Szpakowska emphasizes the integrative effect of this kind of grassroots teamwork in a country decimated by the Second World War and scarred by forced migration. The production and exchange of homemade and ‘homegrown’ preserves, certainly helped feed the family in times when rampant inflation and shortages were rife. But it also tamed post-war urban reality, created new social links, and helped replace a lost past. It offered people a sense of home in an alien world.

As the Polish People’s Republic established itself, after 1947, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers acquired allotments and moved, or were forcibly transferred, from rural areas to cities. In an unfamiliar urban environment, they were expected to cook differently, in ways that were healthier, more varied, yet still ‘traditional’. That is to say, in the way servants armed with juicers, meat grinders and food mincers once cooked for the richest sector of pre-war Polish society. Kuciel-Frydryszak leaves us no illusions:

Taking pleasure in food was traditionally a privilege of the nobility.

Peasant women ate not to enjoy the experience, but to have the strength to go on working. Insofar as they ate at all, that is, because men, children and animals always had priority.

Cultural heritage in mixed media: sour cherries, strawberries and paperback. Preserves on a Hungarian household’s bookshelf.

Methods for preserving food, which we associate with country living and think of as ‘traditional’, were in fact learnt from educated urban women: landed gentry, regional campaigners, former house servants and mentors of country wives’ groups, who went into the countryside in the 1930s with a mission to ‘civilize’ rural communities. More recently, the cookery author Marta Dymek visited similar country wives’ groups while working on her book Food the Polish way – a handbook of recipes for traditionally seasonal, plant-based dishes which many of us will remember our grandmothers cooking, although the reassuring comfort they offer is illusory because they were invented in response to poverty and widespread shortages. Marta Sapała writes about these unacknowledged skills in another book entitled Wasted (Na marne), which examines the astonishing scale of modern food wastage. The words she uses to address one of her forebears are profoundly moving:

You could, if you wanted, run workshops on “cooking for survival” – the kind that cost at least 100 zloty to attend, and get publicized in social media or magazines about the good life, full of sophisticated graphics… Even now, as you walk home through the beech forest where pigweed grows by the lake… you are tempted to pick some. How do you cook it, people would ask? Oh, just fry it up in oil! It’ll be really tasty, with a nutty sort of flavour. Or you can have it with eggs, in an omelette if you want. After all, eggs are easily available now. They were rare once, a delicacy.

You can read Marta Sapała’s article on refrigeration and food preservation in Polish original in Dwutygodnik or in English in Eurozine.

Poisons that won’t be rinsed away

Pasteurization was a channel for social mobility. It encouraged emancipation: it fermented hunger and shame, it bottled feelings of pride and personal resourcefulness, it colonized the gut of an entire social environment with bacterial flora and life-giving yeast. This was ecological solidarity of the purest kind – washed, peeled, chopped, blanched, and locked in a glass jar rather than a plastic tablet.

Preserve display in a private home. Jams, marmelades, compotes, pickles and syrups.

Am I exaggerating? Am I projecting my personal, modern sensibilities onto past practices when the two share nothing in common? Am I rewriting history through my analysis of Polish food culture, or looking for enlightenment in the shadow of ignorance? After all, our grandmothers couldn’t possibly have been aware of how pickles affect the microbiome, or understood their environmental significance, right? Right?

Not entirely. When I look through cookery books about preserving food, published between the 1960s and the 1990s, I am struck by how much space is given to the popularization of scientific know-how, not just about fermentation but about the ecological environment. Take Irena Gumowska’s The sun in jars (Słonce w słoikach) which accompanied my grandmother, year by year, in her unceasing crusade to preserve food:

As everyone now knows, preserves should not be made out of fruit grown in a toxic environment. Poisonous substances cannot be rinsed away or removed, and their toxicity may increase as the product becomes increasingly dense. It has been shown that wild berries are non-toxic only if they grow more than 30 metres away from the road. In many cases the safe distance can be as much as 500 metres… Fruit and vegetables from allotments situated in Kraków have been found to contain 2 to 10 times more heavy metals than crops grown in gardens or fields 30 kilometres from the city… Vegetables grown in Silesia have 2 to 9 times more cadmium, and 2.5 to 4.5 more lead, than vegetables from allotments in Kraków. That’s the way it is.

Everyone now knows. That’s the way it is. It’s obvious. Ecological consciousness, and the nous it takes to survive in times of climate change, are scarcely novelties in the Polish context. These skills did not come to us from the West, irrespective of how often we talk about a ‘fashion’ for the slow life, zero waste, DIY or degrowth. It’s not in France or the United Kingdom, but in our grandmothers’ flats, in the huts where our great-grandmothers lived, and in the market halls of Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan today, that tables are precariously weighed down by containers brimming with pickled vegetables, sugary fruit conserves, or traditional Jewish marinades. Preserves are the expression of fermenting regional cultures.

A rural aftertaste of war

Olia Hercules writes about this regional ferment beautifully in Flavours of the countryside (Sielskie smakiv) a cook book rooted in the riches of Ukrainian country summers:

In Ukraine today you can find Transcarpathian villages in which Hungarian, Slovak and Polish dishes appear on the table beside Ukrainian national dishes such as borscht and stuffed dumplings (varenyky)… Landscapes change along with the people… The northern marshes are full of blueberries, cranberries, sea buckthorn and wild rose… Herbs growing in the Lviv region are different from those in southern areas of the country. You can’t often get fresh coriander, but thyme and marjoram are available everywhere. In June the markets in Lviv display jars of sweet wild strawberries covered with fern leaves… Central Ukraine offers a selection of foods covering a range of regions – produce of the north such as mushrooms and parsnip, or pears, peaches and apricots, which love strong southern sunlight. The land around Poltawa is well known for traditional local ways of preserving fruit, which are probably the most interesting in the country…

The Dnieper River is crammed with lobsters, zanders, carp and catfish. The region is also known for the huge pink tomatoes it produces. Cottage gardens grow aubergines, paprika (both sweet and hot), a range of herbs, rhubarb, cucumbers and sweet potatoes that taste like confectionery and smell so good that they can be eaten without oil… The steppes of Kherson, where I come from, are famed for their watermelons… These get pickled too, as do apples which are mostly marinated in brine or pumpkin pulp.

Hercules published Flavours of the countryside in 2020. Three years later the Russians blew up a dam on the Dnieper, destroying one of the largest irrigation systems in Europe and, with it, countless kilometres of grain, vegetables and fruit. In the Kherson region, Hercules’ home, over two thousand hectares of forest burnt down.

As Olena Kryvoruchkina, head of Ukraine’s Operational Headquarters for the Removal of Ecological Crimes, has emphasized, soil samples taken from various parts of the country have revealed the presence of heavy metals in dangerous quantities. Air quality is also in freefall because of toxins emitted by rockets and drones. And if an uncontaminated garden or orchard is still to be found anywhere in Ukraine, it’s unlikely that anyone will be gathering its harvest or preserving its produce because so many salt and sugar factories have been blown up.

Consequently, the pink tomatoes, the cucumbers the size of aubergines, and the sweet potatoes that taste like confectionery will simply rot. And if, amazingly, anything gets preserved and bottled, it will end up in cellars packed with people sheltering from Russian attacks, sometimes for weeks. To help those affected by the war, Hercules now organises fund-raising and cookery workshops, sharing out the profits between medication and food supplies for civilians, and arms and equipment for the Ukrainian military (her brother is in the army).

Her fermentation classes – recorded in her ill-lit London kitchen at night, after her son has gone to bed – have generated special interest. On the screen, Hercules can be seen hugging a selection of ripe tomatoes to her breast as, with her other hand, she imitates the energetic way in which her grandmother would have chopped them, if she were standing there beside her rather than taking cover somewhere in Ukraine. For 200 zloty a month, you can get unlimited access to her archive of recordings through her Patreon page, and support the battle waged by Ukrainian women against their occupiers while learning, step-by-step, how to pickle aubergines, peppers, watermelon or sweetcorn.

It is a poignant form of resistance, especially if one remembers the worn and wrinkled hands that once sliced cabbage into fine threads, chopped squash into perfect cubes, or peeled the broken skin off pierced and blanched tomatoes. Or pitted cherries. Or slid tiny, firm currants off their thin, green stems.

Hope preserved

I can taste my grandmother’s seasoned cherries on my tongue, even today. We drank the syrup with our lunch and ate the swollen purple fruit separately. It was slippery, though the texture was uneven, and we always preferred to use our fingers and eat straight from the jar. Granddad would bring the bottled preserves up one by one, because otherwise, the contents might disappear too quickly. And, long afterward, when we had grown out of our children’s clothes and moved out of Poznań – where our grandparents stayed to the end of their lives – we would leave their house with a few, or sometimes dozens, of fizzing fermented pickles and preserves, depending on whether we had made our visit by train or car.

The last batch found its way to our home in Warsaw in 2008. It had been brought over by my grandmother’s younger sister. A few days after her arrival, I went down to the larder after yet another sleepless night, hoping to shake off my woes with some of my grandmother’s cherries. A quarter of an hour later I heard that my grandmother was no longer living. She had died as I was prying away the lid from a jar she had only recently sealed. That was when I understood that food is no cure-all. It heals neither depression nor mourning. Nor, for that matter, inflation, war, or climate change.

But preserves can see us through. They will help people survive another winter in a country overrun by enemy tanks, often with no electricity and not enough drinking water. They continue to bring relief on the Polish-Belarusian border, where volunteers work to save the lives of migrants by distributing hot preserved soup, despatched from western Poland by people who feel a closer affinity with a Kurdish woman who is expecting a child than with the inhuman migration policy of the Polish authorities.

Preserving food can also improve life in urban areas where – in line with new recommendations from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – we should be setting up more cooperative farms and community gardens. These will recultivate soil, improve water retention, decrease the environmental costs of food production and transport, and counteract the parallel epidemics of obesity and malnutrition.

We simply cannot afford to continue treating preserved food as a useless relic of the past. Go get those plums while you can! Call your friends, bring out the jars, hide away your favourite kitchen blades, and never fear that what may be coming will prove too hard to swallow!

I guarantee that our children will learn to love what the future brings, with its tang, the sourness that puckers the tongue. It won’t even occur to them that this is the taste of want. Because, for them, scarcity and need will represent the world in its entirety, as it once did for us.

Translated by Irena Maryniak. Read the Polish original in Dwutygodnik here, or our other articles in English from Dwutygodnik hereby.

It seemed like an ordinary Tuesday in Frankfurt, the financial heart of Europe. Hundreds of bankers were busy working in Deutsche Bank’s two giant skyscrapers. Across the street at DWS, the asset management division of Deutsche Bank, employees had unsuspectingly started their day as well.

But then, midway through that morning in May 2022, some fifty police officers raided the offices of Deutsche Bank and DWS. Employees were questioned, files were confiscated, and data was retrieved from computer systems. The allegation: greenwashing. DWS allegedly portrayed its financial products as much greener than they really were.

Sustainable investing was once a niche. Ethical investors played a modest role in the abolition of slavery: they refused to make money from industries that employed slave labour. A small group of European and US investors turned their backs on Shell late last century because the Dutch-British company was active in apartheid-torn South Africa.

Then impact funds were created, focussing on investments with a positive social impact instead of excluding companies. For instance, the Dutch sustainable bank Triodos started a fund in the 1990s to finance farmland, favouring organic farming. Its volume: 25 million guilders (€11.3 million). ‘It was still tiny,’ recalls Marilou van Golstein Brouwers. She was the Managing Director of Triodos Investment Management and had a hand in creating the fund. ‘People, including the government, were positively surprised that private individuals were willing to invest in a public cause.’

Image by Sergio Russo, via Flickr.

Nowadays, sustainable investing is no longer ‘tiny’, that is: if we are to believe the financial sector. Since the turn of the century, there has been a steady growth in the number of investment funds that claim to invest their clients’ money sustainably. It started slowly: in 2010, only 3 percent of European investment funds labelled themselves as sustainable.

The breakthrough came in 2015. That year, the Paris Climate Agreement was concluded, the United Nations set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Pope Francis called upon humanity in the encyclical Laudato Si’ to be frugal with the Creation. Investors responded. They are no longer merely concerned with financial returns: more and more, they want to help create a better world through their investments.

The financial industry answered that call. In Europe, roughly 100 new funds labelling themselves as sustainable were set up that year; currently, around 100 are added every quarter. According to financial services provider Morningstar, 50 percent of all the money in European investment funds is presently labelled as ‘sustainable’. This amounts to over 4.18 trillion euros, an amount comparable to the market capitalisation of Alphabet, ASML, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pfizer, Samsung, Shell, Toyota, Walt Disney, and Walmart combined.

That’s a lot of money. But where does it actually end up? Do the investment funds that promise sustainability – and to which millions of Europeans entrust trillions of euros – deliver on their promise?

Trump boosts your sustainability score

A major stumbling block is that “sustainability” has no fixed, legally-defined definition, so one can easily apply the term to almost anything. For many investment funds, it merely means that the so-called ESG criteria (ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance) played a role in the decision to invest in a specific company.

This can be interpreted broadly: many funds that claim to be sustainable do not really focus on a company’s environmental, social, or governance contribution to the world; instead, they focus on how changes in environmental, social or governance conditions could affect that company.

Tariq Fancy, former head of the sustainable investment division of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management fund, explains this as follows: “Suppose Trump returns to power. Many companies’ ESG ratings will then go up, because the likelihood of those companies facing new social or environmental laws in America will decrease. As such, ESG doesn’t really measure a company’s effect on the world, but rather how the world affects a company. Fancy: ‘It’s about value, not values’.”

So the 4.18 trillion euros in European investment funds that supposedly flow into sustainable investments is, in reality, a collection of money pots that each use a different interpretation of sustainability. At one end of the spectrum, sustainable investing means that the fund “considers” ESG scores when deciding to invest in something. Social impact is not a goal, and social harm is no reason to exclude a company; it merely looks at how a world becoming more sustainable might affect a company’s returns.

At the other end of the spectrum we find the impact funds, where financial returns play no, or a lesser, role and success is measured by the social improvement achieved through an investment. Among them are funds that invest in organic farming, nature reserves or education for girls: not because it makes money, but because it makes the world a better place. They define sustainability in a completely different way.

Grey, light green, dark green

The European Union has been trying to clarify the muddled interpretations for several years. In 2018, it developed the Sustainable Finance Action Plan, a strategy to shift money flows from companies contributing to global warming to sustainable initiatives. By now, this plan has become part of the Green Deal, the programme through which Europe aims to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent.

The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) is a key part of that plan. Under those new rules, which have officially been in force since March 2021, fund managers are obligated to provide a sustainability assessment of their fund. They can choose between three flavours: grey, light green and dark green. Grey funds (officially: article 6 and article 7 funds) are merely required to provide an analysis of the sustainability risks they face. Light green funds (officially: article 8 funds) must pursue sustainable goals and must explain how they do so.

Lastly, Article 9 funds. The market promotes this category as the most sustainable form of investing. Companies including BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro, Unicredit, Deloitte, Robeco and ING Bank label these funds as dark green.

This category has the highest sustainability requirements. Funds claiming article 9 status must pursue an explicit social or environmental goal, for instance preventing human rights violations or environmental pollution. Moreover, they may not inflict “significant harm” to other sustainable goals in any way. Even if an Article 9 fund only aims to prevent human rights violations, its investments may not significantly harm the climate or nature.

A fund that claims the article 9 classification clearly benefits commercially. While equity markets went down in recent months due to inflationary pressure, geopolitics and impending recession, green funds managed to raise more money in Europe. According to the a (EFAMA), Article 6 and Article 8 funds lost tens of billions since the beginning of 2022, whereas the capital in Article 9 funds grew by 31 billion euros. In other words, the Article 9 flag attracts clients.

This is why The Great Green Investment Investigation focuses on these Article 9 funds to find out what happens to the money of European investors with a sustainable conscience. After all, these funds have to meet the most stringent requirements and should be greener than green.

First, we listed all European funds that classified themselves as article 9. There are 1,141 of them (reference date: June 30, 2022). We then tried to find their complete portfolio and succeeded for 838 funds, three-quarters of the total. Their portfolios collectively contained 130,000 investments worth over 619 billion euros.

We measured these investments against a sustainability yardstick and kept the threshold for being earmarked as a “sustainable investment” low. While the European rules for sustainable investments uses a broad definition of sustainability – from social sustainability, such as respect for human rights and good employment practices, to environmental sustainability, such as preventing harm to nature and water quality – we only looked at climate damage inflicted by the companies in Europe’s darkest green funds. (For more information on our research methodology, click here).

Yet many funds already failed to meet this low bar. In almost half of the dark green funds, we found investments in the aviation or fossil fuel industry. For example, a BlackRock Article 9 fund has over a billion euros worth of investments in energy companies such as RWE (that derived approx. 65 percent of its energy from lignite, coal and natural gas in 2020), ENEL (43 percent) and Nextera (75 percent).

A dark green investment fund from French asset manager Carmignac, which writes in official documents that it “thematically invests in companies that mitigate climate change”, appears to invest in, among others, petroleum supermajor TotalEnergies and in Glencore, a fossil fuel conglomerate with large stakes in Russian oil company Rosneft and coal producer Xstrata.

Money from all over Europe flows from dark green funds to investments in grey companies. In Luxembourg, we found grey investments in 43 percent of the Article 9 funds, percentage-wise the least. In Italy, we found grey companies in over 49 percent of the Article 9 funds. Green money flows to investments in supermajors (including Shell, Total, BP and Saudi Aramco), airline companies (including Lufthansa, Delta and Air France-KLM) and coal giants (such as RWE, Glencore and Uniper).

We found well over 8.6 billion euros worth of grey investments in Europe’s dark green funds. That does not mean that the remainder are explicitly green. The most popular investments are Microsoft (8.2 billion euros), pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk (7.6 billion), Apple (6.7 billion), Alphabet (4.4 billion) and pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher (4.1 billion). McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, L’Oréal, and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy also rank high on the list.

European investors pay a fee for the composition of their “sustainable” fund. A recent experiment by Paul Smeets, professor of Sustainable Finance at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that the financial sector charges higher fees for sustainable funds. Smeets calls this a greenium, a green premium. This markup ranges from 7.7 to 8.3 basis points. Over the total capital of 619 billion euros invested in dark green European funds, that amounts to an additional annual premium in the range of 480 to 510 million euros.

“And that while sustainable fund managers put the same or even less effort into composing these funds,” Smeets explains. “Besides sustainability factors, they didn’t look at other financial data, for example. And now that your investigation reveals that sustainable funds are also investing in oil and gas companies, investors may be facing double the risk: they pay more for a sustainable fund and invest in something that in reality is not green at all.”

‘In violation’

European-VEB, the advocacy group for European securities owners, is outraged by the investigation results. “It is absolutely reprehensible. You simply cannot use a dark green label to raise billions of euros without being truly sustainable. That label is not a marketing tool, it is a promise to investors.”

Julien Lefournier, former employee of the bank Crédit Agricole and author of L’illusion de la finance verte (“The Green Finance illusion”, Editions de l’Atelier publisher, 2021) calls this ‘strong observations’, which prove that “the rhetoric of article 9 funds [is] often hollow. They go out of their way to make people believe that they are transitioning, but invest in old-fashioned fossil companies.” Reclaim Finance, a French NGO aiming to make capital markets more sustainable, calls these investments “not in line with protecting nature and the climate.” Its German counterpart Urgewald states: “Article 9 funds claiming to support a ‘climate transition’ but actually still invested in expanding fossil fuel companies are denying climate science and acting highly irresponsibly.”

Experts argue that the aviation and fossil fuel industry investments found in Article 9 funds do not comply with European investment rules. “I don’t see how investing in fossil energy cannot cause significant environmental harm,” says ESG expert Ruud Winter. Sjors Vogelsang, a lawyer advising on financial regulatory law, is adamant: “A fund manager who labels a fund as article 9 while it partly invests in fossil fuel companies is in violation.”

‘May I invest in an oil company, yes or no?’

However, the asset managers putting grey investments into green funds believe they are not doing anything wrong. They say it is down to the rules, which would still not make it sufficiently clear that fossil fuel investments do not belong in a sustainable fund.

Amundi, one of France’s largest asset management companies, argues that “the current regulatory framework does not yet allow for a uniform response from the financial industry as to what should be considered ‘sustainable” or not.” Axa, which offers its funds throughout Europe: “The notion of ‘sustainable investment’ remains subject to various interpretations, as the definition given so far by the European regulator [..] is not very precise.” The Spanish industry association for investment funds INVERCO says they “were astonished to see that one of the questions [for the European regulator] was the definition of sustainable investment, more than a year after that the regulation was published.” Dutch Actiam also believes it is not in violation of European regulations, which the asset manager incidentally calls “crap”. “I want clarification. May I invest in an oil company, yes or no?”

However, according to the European regulator, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), it is not all that complicated. Last summer, ESMA once again clearly explained the rules: “Financial products that have sustainable investment as an objective should only make sustainable investments.”

Still, ESMA will not take action against asset management companies that sell grey investments as Dark Green. While the rules are clear, according to ESMA, it is not responsible for their enforcement. That task lies with national regulators, who seem to be struggling with it.

On the one hand, they find grey investments in a sustainable fund remarkable: “It’s very difficult to reconcile fossil fuel companies with investment funds that have a sustainable objective,” says Raoul Köhler, Sustainable Finance Coordinator at the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). “To me, it seems obvious that shares in highly polluting companies do not belong in such a fund. That will be a big problem.” Spanish regulator CNMV argues that fossil fuel companies are allowed in an Article 9 fund ‘under very specific circumstances’ only. “And even then, they may not inflict any significant harm.”

Yet national regulators argue that the law doesn’t provide them with sufficient guidelines for enforcement. “The text is just not specific enough,” says the French AFM. According to Luxembourg’s regulator, the question arises as to what exactly is meant by greenwashing. “The problem with greenwashing is its complexity and unfortunately there is no uniform definition on a European level at present.” The Dutch AFM says it has asked ESMA to “clarify what constitutes a sustainable investment, and what constitutes ‘significant harm’. We therefore understand why asset management companies are not doing everything correctly yet.”

ESMA doesn’t understand where the ambiguity comes from. Speaking to The Great Green Investment Investigation, the regulator says: “While there is not an explicit ban on fossil fuel investments as ‘sustainable investments’, it should be quite challenging to make such investments under sustainable investments due to the need to show that the investments do not harm any environmental or social objective. [..] it should indeed be quite difficult to argue that fossil fuel investments would respect DNSH.”

Taking action is possible

The raid on DWS proves that it is indeed possible to take action against greenwashing in the financial sector. German authorities took action after discovering that the asset manager recorded in its annual report that ESG factors had been applied in more than half of its total invested assets – 451 billion euros – to make the portfolio sustainable. This turned out to be untrue, resulting in DWS finding the police on its doorstep.

In America, investment bank BNY Mellon was fined one and a half million dollars in spring this year for failing to conduct sustainability checks on investments it promoted as sustainable. Mid-2022, investment bank Goldman Sachs received a 4 million dollar fine after it transpired that ESG analyses had been carried out after the decision to invest in a company had already been made, meaning that sustainability was an afterthought instead of a selection criterion.

Even with grey investments in Europe’s dark green funds, national authorities can simply take action if they want to. This is according to Myriam Vander Stichele, who was part of an expert group that laid the foundation for European legislation and regulations on sustainable investing on behalf of the European Commission. One of her priorities was to empower regulators to take action. “Funds with a clear sustainable objective should not be allowed to invest in shares of fossil fuel companies. They can then not deliver on their sustainability promise. The regulator has the mandate to fine misleading funds.”

She therefore fails to understand why there is no enforcement. “If the AFM does not take action or does so too late, it poses a huge risk. The credibility of sustainable investing is at stake.” Danish consumer organisation Forbrugerrådet Tænk says: “This destroys the confidence in green investment funds, and if that happens, we risk losing the billions for a renewable transition. That will hurt us all.” European-VEB fears irreparable damage: “The biggest cynic of all is the disappointed idealist. We run the risk that a large group of investors who factor sustainability into their fund choice will be disappointed and lose faith in maintaining a sustainable economy.”

Since the beginning of 2022, several European asset management companies have downgraded their article 9 funds to article 8. But in the meantime, numerous new article 9 funds have been added that, in the end, increase the number of funds proclaiming to be dark green.

The Great Green Investment Investigation is a collaborative work by Ties Joosten, Ties Gijzel, Yara van Heugten, Remy Koens, Tom Bolsius, Leon de Korte, Linda van der Pol, Emiel Woutersen, Daniele Grasso, Carlotta Indiano, Fabio Papetti, Mathias Hagemann-Nielsen, Frederik Vincent, René Bender, Sönke Iwersen, Martin Murphy, Lars-Marten Nagel, Ingo Narat, Michael Verfürden, Volker Votsmeier, Joseph Gepp, Lars Bové, Peter van Maldegem, Yannick Lambert, Thomas Klein, Adrien Sénécat. It has been published by Follow the Money, Investico, De Groene Amsterdammer, Børsen, De Tijd, Handelsblatt, IRPImedia, Luxemburger Wort, Luxembourg Times, El País, Le Monde, Der Standard, Domani. Find more on this work on Follow the Money. Check the methodology here.

This article is a runner-up for the European Press Prize 2023 and is published in cooperation with the Prize. The original article was published on Follow the Money. 

‘Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.’

(Max Horkheimer)

‘Let’s smoke feelings together, it’s all about you, me and feelings, which should be forgotten.’

(Arman)

‘When you need to be polite to your search engine in order to get good results.’

(Francis Hunger)

‘Your AI will talk to my AI’

(t-shirt slogan)

‘The heart says yes, but the attention span says no.’

(Melissa Broder)

‘Be the training data you want to see in the world.’

(Kylie McDonald)

‘Pause for the People’

(festival slogan)

‘The bird struggles hard but moves nowhere, yet it is incapable of landing.’

(Chinese saying about the hummingbird)

‘No longer “Socialism or Barbarism” but “Degrowth or Mad Max”.’

(Patrice Riemens)

‘Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.’

(Tupac)

There are always new requirements, but none are beneficial to you. They say the opportunity for advancement has faded. Desire was extinguished long ago. Your soul feels depleted, with no discharge of inner tensions in sight. You need change but can’t cope with it any longer. What happens when there’s no more energy to address the issues head on, you put off tasks and forget to take care of your body? You feel bored and lonely now that your online friends no longer answer. You indulged last night, but it’s no longer possible to get drunk or high. How do digital souls survive when perseverance means nothing anymore? Once you’re too tired to manage your life and deal with planetary dysmorphia, there’s always a fallback option: copium.

If the goal is to reclaim the power of definition in the fight against right-wing meme hegemony, here’s one. Copium is the digital information intake that makes one temporarily numb, intoxicated and deprived of sensation when there is literally zero emotion on display. This is the road taken from bittersweet irony down to confronting and overcoming absolute nihilism. What happens when there’s no purpose anymore in dealing with the world’s true nature, and you enter an unnarratable condition?

Copium is a micro-release that helps you keep going, beyond the destructive side of drug-taking and the psychedelic ecstasy of colourful alternative realities. Push ahead, say it out loud, stay weird and be assured there is life again after the Event Horizon. Enter the tricky mental state of pain-killer-as-attitude that opens you up to the miracle. What happens when the escalation of shock value tactics no longer works? Once inside the rabbit hole, one forgets euphoria, and even the rush. Instead of a theatrical breakdown the fictional yet all too real copium drug causes a ‘whatever’ flatlining of the involuntary capitalism we’re thrown into.

And whilst you are both partly alive, partly dead, today’s robots jump, dance, collapse and stand up again. Even worse: they apologize and ask how you’re doing. Chatbots are no longer trained to be polite and distant as with HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They are emphatic, provoking violent responses from the frustrated multitudes that rage against artificial stupidity and unfounded hope. ‘Have a nice day – and please don’t forget to rank me!’ Shut up! We care but don’t care.

The essence of copium

Arting Health: A Science Communication street art project by Infers Group. Image by James-Alex Matthews via Wikimedia Commons

According to Know Your Meme, the ‘portmanteau of the words “cope” and “opium”’ describes ‘a fictional drug to help one deal with loss’, where making memes acts as a coping mechanism to deal with negative emotions. The term, which can be traced back to rapper Keak da Sneak’s 2003 album title, was used in an illustration featuring Pepe the Frog hooked up to an oxygen tank labelled copium, a chemical ‘used to soothe the mind of a person who has just lost a debate’. The cartoon drawing, popularized in meme space during the 4Chan-Twitter Trump years, reached its peak after 6 January 2021 and the storming of the US Capitol. There’s also a suggestion, according to Wiktionary, that copium leads to denial.

The term can also be read as a reference to the US opiate crisis. As a contemporary memes states: ‘Turns out, the real opiates of the masses … is opiates.’ However, we’re talking here about symbolic ways of how to grapple with stress, panic and anger, not about luring, self-destructive ways out. The late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler describes this period as the collapse of ‘global childishness’, ‘leaving the white middle classes to sink into misery, alcoholism, drug addiction and resentment, accelerating the regression of their life expectancy as well as the collapse of their “intelligence quotient”.’B. Stiegler, Technics and Time 4, manuscript, translated and edited by Daniel Ross, 2021, p. 236.

While Urban Dictionary defines copium as ‘metaphoric opiate inhaled when faced with loss, failure or defeat, especially in sports, politics and other tribal settings’,lennilaube, ‘My hairline is totally fine’, ‘You're high on copium dude...’, 20 Dec 2021, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Copium the emphasis here lies on the structural aspects of a life defined by serial defeats. What happens when this loss becomes permanent and hardwired into techno-social existence? The shock doctrine that defined the neo-liberal age is long gone, yet ‘change’ is for the happy few. The shock is permanent now and has become an integral part of twenty-first century life. What remains is diversity in the form of stagnation, regression, crisis and decline, and a never-ending sense of disaster, which Kim Stanley Robinson called Götterdämmerung capitalism in his cli-fi novel Ministry for the Future.K. S. Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, Orbit Books, 2020. Nothing will disappear voluntarily, out-of-the-blue. Appearances refuse to fade away. With both history and technology speeding up further, hyper forces become autonomous entities that no longer need the human subject. That’s the bleakness of life after the tipping point.

Belief opiates

In 1843 Karl Marx wrote the following, now famous sentences: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843 (first published: in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 & 10 February 1844, Paris;
trans.: source and date unknown. Proofed and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005, and corrected by Matthew Carmody in 2009) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm. The aim of religion then was to calm down uncertainty in life. Around the same time, the phrase ‘God is dead’ started to circulate. Blame Kierkegaard, Stirner and Nietzsche, but once the secular genie was out of the bottle, no ‘spiritual renaissance’ could reinstate the authority of religion (with the violent fundamentalist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan serving as a cruel reminder).

Fast forward from the nineteenth century and the question is what does the ‘copium of the people’ looks like today. What calms you down? How do you cope? What are ways to incorporate insecurities in the light of the inevitable? The raw objectivity of the collapse alone will not lead to political action unless we take vulnerability into account. This is the lesson for the 2020s. We’re supposed to be actors but behave like twentieth-century spectators. This is our melancholy.

‘Just that something so good. Just can’t function no more.’ (Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division)

Instead of defining coping as a psychological strategy, whereby the subject rejects a harsh truth and adopts a less disturbing belief, let’s stress the survival aspect of repetitive everyday life that does not allow for (revolutionary) change. The spirit of capitalism may be dead, but so is the will to resist and overthrow the regime.

‘Take a chill pill!’ (popular saying)

Coping is then a result of the loss of the positive side of ideology as a belief-system. Being in the world is reduced to killing time. It’s time to go easy on the job and quit the hustle. Let’s chill and check the socials.

What are ‘coping mechanisms’? In this light, copium can be anything. It’s an empty container as long as it alleviates the pain and is understood as a metaphorical opiate. While some associate it with subdued addictive substances and things like sports, sleep, porn or food, copium is better understood as essentially digital time killers such as binge-watching series, playing games and doom scrolling TikTok videos. And don’t forget all the senseless YouTube sessions.

Copium stands for vita non activa and provides relief from contemplation, giving your brain a break.While in The Human Condition Hannah Arendt is interested in the vita activa as contrasted with the vita contemplativa, the proposal here would be to update Jean Baudrillard’s speculative propositions of the inert and obese as resistant strategies and reinterpret them as the contemporary hegemonic position of the vita non activa. What happens when worries go in circles and it has become impossible to make a decision, any decision? Apathy used to be a stigma. No longer. There’s sympathy for the slacker. Everyone has had enough. This is the big difference from thirty years ago when neo-liberal positivism was still the norm and the slacker was looked down upon as a lazy, sub-cultural figure languishing about as Generation X. The state of distraction today equals impulsive digital interactions that offload the anxieties onto another platform or app: send an instant message, swipe to match on a dating app, comment on a post. All this will never bring rest or tranquillity, let alone mindfulness.

What’s your poison?

Copium is turned to as a defence mechanism in situations of stress. But what happens when this ‘mechanism’ enters geo-politics, behavioural psychology and, ultimately, is sold back to you through social media marketing? The neuro-science enlightenment campaign has paid off. The workings of the brain’s reward system are now common knowledge. Patterns of cybernetic control have been recognized. The higher art of coping, which arises with all this techno-cynical reason, is at the same time a reflection on Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of the state of frenzied stasis.

‘Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die.’ (The Verve)

Hauntology might be one option,Philosopher Jacques Derrida’s neologism for the persistent ghost-like return of past social and cultural elements. See: J. Derrida, Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Éditions Galilée, 1993, trans.  Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, Routledge Classics, 1994. but what happens when the nightmare returns as in a Groundhog Night, which, unlike Groundhog Day,H. Ramis, Groundhog Day, Columbia Pictures, 1993. would start all over again the moment the main character falls asleep? Will copium – once popular on Twitch, sometimes also called hopium – only extend the nightmare? One wonders whether the digital papaver will make the chain of disasters worse or rather soften its mental impact? Or does it, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, work more like a painkilling ‘aspirin of the people’? God-like rays beam down from the clouds and then disappear, in an instant.

According to therapists, we need to cope ‘in order to deal with disadvantage or adversity’. But once you run out of coping skills, there is always copium as a last resort. This is the promise. Regression is a never-ending downward slope. We’re thrown back to coping mechanisms after access to the past and future are blocked. There’s just horror of the eternal presence of the now, the never-ending, monotonous everyday. While everything appears to change, nothing does. Dealing with a world driven by reactive forces has become a central issue, considering the easy way people flow in and out of existence in this world. What’s your poison?

The paranoia trap

There’s an uncanny whirlpool of factors at play that spins around an empty core called the Self. This is what happens when feelings of being undesired, unwanted and isolated are experienced together, on an industrial, cosmic scale. This is the late social media age of collective loneliness, also known as the not-yet-widely-recognized Sherry Turkle syndrome. But the issue is no longer being alone in the crowd. The sad and lonely gather to muffle the perception of pain, create quasi-communities with accompanying ideologies in an attempt to give meaning to living in the void. Whether or not there is a lack of actual social networks and personal (emotional) bonding is no longer relevant. The techno-social reality supersedes the identity building of an outsider group. Once failure is democratized and becomes a general condition with multiple ways to express itself, we need to look beyond this or that subculture and address the general techno-affect.

Let’s dig into a particular case. In her research on young male incels and their online forums, Canadian researcher Kate Babin lists four factors for the lack of social cohesion. She starts with othering the in group, the practice of ‘rampant distrust between members on a forum’. This reflex of exclusion mirrors a general lack of trust on platforms and can be seen as an internalization of surveillance and digital extractivism. One is never really alone online, nor in a closed group for that matter. There are always big and small Others virtually present that watch and follow in a semi-invisible manner. There’s never really trust. The social feeling is a fake one, at best unreliable.

On this overcrowded Planet Internet, coping is never just of solitary concern. Levels of paranoia in open networks are at an all-time high, while tacit activist knowledge on how to identify infiltrators and spies remains virtually non-existent. Large flocs of users are ready to disappear overnight, never to been seen again. While in the past this culture of uncertainty was associated with online anonymity, these days social media makes it so much easier to investigate who’s behind a username. At best copium acts as a mask – if only we could see online comment culture as the masquerade balls during Venice Carnival.

The second element, clogging up the forum, is again an internal matter, used to show engagement through minimal involvement. There is pleasure in derailing an internal discussion or exchange like this and disrupting rational deliberation; I post, like and share, therefore I am. When the signal to noise ratio tips, the power of discourse is momentarily disrupted, reproducing a simulacrum of community.

Shitposting is the third factor Babin lists: a culture jamming technique in a foreign feed, for instance on YouTube or Twitter. Often only one bad remark will suffice to end an online discussion and start an avalanche of ‘engagement’, a trick cultivated by the grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex. The advice of 1990s cyberculture ‘not to feed the trolls’ did not scale beyond the do-good hacker community and is nowadays largely unknown to mainstream users.

An additional issue here is the absence of elegant moderation tools. Platformed communities cannot shield themselves because online environments are supposed to remain ‘open’ (to grow). Closed groups simply do not have to deal with shitposters. The way users dealt with ‘zoom bombing’ during the COVID-19 pandemic years (sending an exclusive passcode to subscribed participants before the event or meeting) shows how easy it is to protect certain online exchanges. However, old media still loves reporting shitposting incidents as a sign of the decline of digital media – and society in general. Instead of accusing adolescent others with immature behaviour, it may be better to frame these acts as part of an ideological conflict, a culture war, or, more recently, cyberwarfare.

Babin’s fourth and last characteristic is fatalism, which is by far the most interesting of her factors as it invites us to compare fatum today with Jean Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies from 1983. Babin notes that ‘any positive mention of an interest or a hobby which presents an opportunity for members to connect with each other is instead diminished and labelled a “cope”.’ So what’s the fatum here? Software, community ties, the zeitgeist, the incel identity trap? In her conclusion Kate Babin notes that the incels.is forum she investigated ‘creates division within a subcultural community, leading to an absence of social support, low quality relationships and extreme negative affectivity.’ Identity isn’t celebrated as a liberation but becomes a paranoia trap.

The fatality is a second-order, weak version of Baudrillard’s romantic notion of the seductive ‘evil’ side of the Inevitable. Instead, what is experienced is an instable order to fabricated elements, glued together in a temporary setting, seemingly exchanging fate with design. Fluidity is the opposite of predestination. The real existing attitudes confronted here are forms of confusion, which manifest as ‘optionalism’ – I have the freedom to choose between a multitude of options and in the end cannot decide.

The same old funeral songs

As Timothy Morton noted, ‘the outdoors is already indoors’. The coexistence of me and disasters is a reality. Morton describes problems that ‘one can understand perfectly, but for which there is no rational solution’.T. Morton, Hyperobjects, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, p. 136. We are always wrong. Should the collapse be accelerated or can the katechon (the restrainer), when properly administered, impede its spread? Is copium then the ‘katechon from below’? Crowdsourcing efforts to delay the arrival of the Antichrist? How will users cope after the Internet Mass Extinction when billions of profiles get wiped out in a singular event? Each and every disaster are parked in our personal histories in a parallel trajectory – until they no longer can be. Will it become necessary for public health and political activism reasons to design the collective psychic armour that will protect us against the detrimental mental fallout of platform disasterism?

Can memories of the past function as copium? Russian researcher Nina Danilova has written an interesting study on the status of déjà-vu, a phenomenon driven by an ‘overabundance of memory and the disappearance of hopes for a better future’.N. Danilova, ‘Watching Oneself Live: Contemporary Art Negotiating the Temporality of Déjà-Vu’, PhD thesis submitted to Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, 2023. But what happens when memory can no longer be captured and is simply no longer there? What’s the déjà-vu effect in a culture of psycho-technic amnesia? Déjà-vu of the little that’s left? Sure, one can learn mnemonic techniques, but the lure of tech is always there to assist us when sudden waves of nostalgia resurface and we browse through our photo collections, social media collections and the occasional emails. We consist of technical devices, as prosthesis, as Stiegler calls it. Users feel mnemonically disabled and cannot live without their devices. With Paolo Virno, Danilova defines deja-vu as ‘a condition that determines apathy, fatalism, and indifference to the future, since history seems to be known in advance and unalterable’.

Danilova asks: ‘Why is thinking of the future so problematic within the temporality of déjà vu?’ Micro déjà-vu moments, whether narco-technically induced or not, are one of the many contemporary manifestations of ‘stuckness’, provoking a sense of stagnation of both society and its subjects. How have we already experienced the apocalypse before it has even happened? There can only be one ending but not in this story: we are stuck in the final phase that deliberately upholds its resolution. What happens when life gets trapped in a repetitive loop and we can only listen to the same old funeral songs? You want to move on, but, in the current sadist scenario, there is no way to elegantly exit from the scene.

In a digital cosmos, held together by copium, there are multiple readings. The Russian take on this is always an interesting one. As Danilova explains in an email exchange, ‘the Russian mentality is set to resist any hint of rose-tinted glasses. Our way is to hit the bottom so hard that you see stars.’ I ask about toska, the Russian form of despair beyond depression, sadness and melancholia, and how it relates to copium: ‘Toska indicates a realm where irony doesn’t work anymore. It is always a post-ironic state of disillusion. Irony is still a form of copium, as the meme world demonstrates. In the toska state of mind, one cannot hide behind it anymore. Copium can therefore be put aside as a frivolous Western affair, with still too much hope between the lines.’ Russians, we might say, subsist in the realm of post-copium: a continuum of culturally determined despair. As a dialectical antithesis, one could propose that it is precisely copium that prevents the cultivation of suffering and the ultimate establishment of death cults.

According to Italian theorist Franco Berardi, in analysing the West, we should consider the unsinkable Donald Trump as an addictive (social) media celebrity, a political copium of a peculiar kind:

Americans, in their majority, have so far used that repellent individual in a move to sabotage the globalist elite. But now there is something more crazy. The American mind needs to cope with the persistence of intolerable reality, so they open up the box of Pandora of total erasure of reality as Rational, unleashing a limitless sphere of memetic meaninglessness. The sphere of meaninglessness is not limited by plausibility, not to mention trustability or truth. The question for many is thus how to cope with the depression provoked by the limits of reality, by the predictability of rational choices.Email exchange, 19 August 2023.

While politics is often pushed aside as soap opera or a bureaucratic game, popular figures themselves are turned into copium.

Operation Find Lost Time

Once you’ve witnessed sudden mood shifts from anguish and mourning to outrage and anger as the core patterns that expresses discontent in society, ideological labels such as optimism and pessimism become interchangeable. The copium engine sits in the midst of all of this, right in the middle, making sure the pendulum never stops. In contemporary online culture, the happy emotions of ‘hopecore’Urban Dictionary defines ‘hopecore’ as ‘a genre of videos that invokes a feeling of hope, glee, wholeness, and most happy emotions. They can range to nostalgic clips, beautiful scenery, and usually have an audio of spliced together videos and songs.’ https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hopecore. and the infinite doom scrolling ‘corecore’ mode co-exist. Both are forms of collective psychic armours to protect the precarious multitudes from a growing flood of disasters. While gurus, therapists, influencers, friends and parents believe in the power of positive messages, users that yearn for better times have learned to leave open all options: while hope might be a mental painkiller, a visit to the dark side can be equally uplifting. As both morale boosting talk and dank memes can quickly lose their impact and become disgusting, don’t forget the power of singing the blues.

In the end, copium is a way to bridge empty time, flat, never-ending periods that are no longer intense nor circular but stretched and repetitive. When life is a series of pseudo-events from the lives of others, time flies and nothing stands out.‘Today was strange. I didn’t feel particularly good or bad – more of a numbing neutrality. Time flew by fast as I went through daily motions without anything standing out. Work, eat, watch the rain. An oddly uneventful day that left me feeling kind of hollow.’ https://medium.com/change-your-mind/i-feel-numb-time-to-recharge-600f9f4d7d2. It may be counterintuitive to reintroduce and impose a waiting time for no good reason, but the rebellion against friction-free smoothness feels right. The decolonization of time is at hand: Operation Find Lost Time, overcoming stagnation fused with a never-ending stream of disasters to create an inflationary spiral. Remember, the long durée of the malaise and the temporality of crises are no longer opposites and have become a toxic mix. Better relax and do nothing special. The ontological shock isn’t coming. Instead, distributed forms of waiting are on the rise. Chilling together provokes. Expect a planetary call for a ‘strike on time’ soon.

For Cade Diehm from the New Design Congress in Berlin, copium is distinctly different to nostalgia, the cozy web and escapism. ‘They all have similarities, but copium itself is a derogatory description of delusion as cope instead of defeat. … Copium is like coming last in a foot race and thinking you’re winning. It’s a form of post-Trump HODLing. BAYC ‘gm’ and WAGMI, QAnon loser moms “awaiting the storm” any moment now: General Flynn and Q are coming in to drain the swamp next year. Nostalgia for last month. That’s the promise. It’s the intensity for power or control, filtered through nostalgia but super immediate. It’s not a desire for current affect, and it’s not a longing for something long past. It’s a denial of the immediate.’Signal chat, 14 September 2023.

Upsetting Silicon Valley billionaires and their start-up clone armies worldwide would be an easy strategy to disrupt the ever-growing demand for copium. Their invisible tricks include employing behaviour psychologists and other techno-magic tricksters. It has taken time, but mass vigilance tactics at the frontline of subliminal wars are understood by the multitudes – even if they will eventually be rendered useless. The aim now is to reverse the digital extractivist strategy of disappearing into the background to making infrastructure that is visible. Challenging power to fight it out in the open isn’t likely to be questioned. And if their influence can no longer be diffused, there will be no return to ‘normal’.

Post-boredom

For Hannah Ahrendt, solitude meant solitary reading – while being with other authors. This is not how we perceive the current desolate situation. Copium is causing us to no-longer-be-there when the web of human relations unravels. Confronted with worldlessness, temporary lapses of absence may cause feelings of guilt, but the need to know has taken over. Indifference rulz, as David Kishik writes in Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition: ‘Although I want to express my emotions, all I can report back is a gradual loss of affect, plus a growing sense of isolation. Is this what medieval monks called taedium vitae, a weariness that arises not from life’s burdens but from its crawling emptiness?’ This is the inner struggle for (tele)presence. It’s time to articulate the dialectics of the absent presence.

Accelerationists see the unfolding of the forces of digitization as a guarantee for the apocalyptic transition from this late-capitalist bourgeois society to cool socialism. Against the passive certainty of the collapse, there’s nothing more exciting and erotic than the energy of new beginnings that overcome the death cult. This is Hannah Arendt’s Lebensphilosophie: the liberating feeling of not having been here before and escaping the prescribed apathy, cynicism, paralysis and depression to act, again, historically.

What comes after boredom? Discover the power of self-organization to overcome the depleted self. Reclaim the social – it’s now or never. Action is the a-priori; the coming community will not be presented on a silver platter. Tactical media are a radical interruption of the historical continuity of platform domination and don’t need a wolf at the door to thrive. There are multitudes of urgencies. Listing them would be a mistake and bound to make one depressed. Best to run into an urgency of collective design: your very own collapse trouvée.

‘By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place.’ (The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi)

‘Decolonisation’ has become the word of the year in our corner of the academic world. I will admit to some selfishly complicated feelings about this development. I had made decolonisation the central explanatory and structural feature of my 2014 book, Imperial Apocalypse, and no other aspect of that book was as criticised as my decision to use that term and that concept for a study of Russian imperial collapse. Indeed, Oxford University Press was wary of putting decolonisation in the title, preferring instead ‘destruction’. Ironically, the publisher of the Russian translation was fine with ‘decolonisation’.

I would give talks at universities in the run-up to publication and in the period afterward, and historians of Africa and Asia would promptly raise their hands to insist that the term ‘decolonisation’ belonged properly only to the period after World War II. Historians of Russia and Eastern Europe, including prominent specialists on Ukraine, complained that in the absence of self-conscious settler colonialism, decolonisation was the wrong term to use, at least in the European territories of the Russian Empire. Others observed that since the Soviet Union incorporated many of the Russian Empire’s borderlands over the course of the Russian Civil War, no real decolonisation could have occurred since it was so quickly reversed. Finally, the most common criticism was that I had not taken the opportunity to embark on a lengthy historiographical and theoretical engagement with histories of decolonisation and had failed to define the term.

Pyatigorsk, 1964. Image: Thomas Taylor Hammond / Source: University of Virginia Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies via Wikimedia Commons

Broadening the definition of decolonisation

Regarding the first criticism, my use of the term was intended to get us to think about the dynamics of decolonisation more broadly, not to limit it to very specific times and places. This is not to say that scholars like Prasenjit Duara have no point when they frame definitions of decolonisation to fit only processes in Africa and Asia. The post-World War II phase of decolonisation did have its own dynamic. Decolonisation often happens in multiple places at once with similar contemporary themes. Since race was such a key theme of the African and Asian cases, and was a lesser feature of earlier phases of decolonisation, those most interested in the racial aspects of decolonisation are naturally most interested in the period of the 1940s–1980s.

The second criticism made less sense to me. Historians of other empires freely use the term ‘decolonisation’, regardless of whether the territories becoming free had been settler colonies or governed through indirect rule. I didn’t see much sense in being more restrictive for the Russian case.

As for the criticism that the Bolsheviks had reconstituted an empire, it is of course true. But my point was not only that no one knew this would happen in the summer of 1918, but that it looked very unlikely to happen, with the Reds basically just controlling old Muscovy. This was why I ended the core chapters of the book there, and one can easily envision scenarios in which a reconstitution of empire did not happen.

Conceptualising decolonisation

So how should we describe and conceptualise decolonisation? In Imperial Apocalypse, my first intervention was to turn the focus of decolonisation away from the nation and toward the state. I argued that we better understand the process of decolonisation when we centre the examination not on the fulfillment of nationalist goals but on the concrete processes that lead to changes in territorial sovereignty and in the institutions that govern and structure actual lived experience.

This is not to say that ideology is unimportant. In fact it is critical throughout the processes I will describe, but decentring it in this way allows us to sidestep the teleology of decolonisation that it is about a nation fighting an empire and coming out on top. Both ideologically and politically, things are much messier and more uncertain, as I think contemporary events are showing us in real time. The events of 1991 and the achievement of full formal sovereignty plainly did not end the process of decolonisation in Ukraine or in Russia.

So I described a process of overlapping stages, starting with a phase of ‘imperial challenge’ in which both the legitimacy and practical control of empire is challenged in the periphery (and frequently in the metropole as well). The second phase is the state failure stage. I mean this in two ways. First, decolonisation necessarily means the loss of legitimacy of one set of governing individuals and institutions and their eventual departure. More commonly, and certainly in the case of the Russian Empire in World War I, state capacities decline, the economy suffers, control over legitimate and illegitimate violence dissipates, and the chaotic insecurity we associate with state failure ensues.

Thus, the third phase is often one of social disaster. Poverty, hunger, disease and rampant violence frequently attend the period when the imperial state has receded and its successor has not yet been firmly established. Violent political entrepreneurs vie for dominance, the former imperial power (and indeed other outside powers) involve themselves for reasons of political gain, humanitarianism or both.

Finally, the fourth stage is the post-colonial state-building phase. For reasons discussed above, I pay much less attention to this phase in my book, but it is of course an extremely important phase. It is also a lengthy one. Independence Day is the first day of this process, not the last, and we can see how long this process has taken in many countries around the world. How long exactly depends on how one defines the achievement of an internally stable state with international recognition.

Pushkin Park in Tashkent, 1964. Image: Thomas Taylor Hammond / Source: University of Virginia Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies via Wikimedia Commons

On Cultural decolonisation

Most of the discussion regarding decolonisation in the present moment has to do with cultural decolonisation. There are occasional think-pieces about Siberian or Dagestani independence along with a general breakup of the Russian Federation, but these are small in number and border on the fantastical in most instances. So the bulk of the conversation, certainly in academia, has had to do with cultural decolonisation.

In general terms, though, I think there is a great deal of under-examined tension between the culture of decolonisation and the realities of the process that is particularly acute in Europe and North America. For a variety of reasons, some connected with the Cold War and others not, progressives in both the Eastern and Western blocs latched on to the process of decolonisation and decolonisers with passion and no small amount of exoticism and romanticism.

Take, for example, the decision of Jean-Paul Sartre to literally annex himself to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth with a preface that served as a self-flagellating mea culpa on behalf of all European intellectuals who had previously ‘alone’ been the speakers and now found themselves as the objects of other (non-European) speakers. Or take, even more obviously, the popularity of Che Guevara, whose image adorned dormitory rooms across the world both before and after his death as a meme of virility, progressivism, high ideals and martyrdom.

The right was slower to engage with this process, in the first place because they were ideological compatriots of the imperialists and white settler regimes most targeted by decolonising movements. Soon, though, they too started developing heroes of decolonisation, of ‘freedom fighters’. Importantly, one of the key regions in which they sought decolonising figures was in Eastern Europe, both in the Soviet bloc and within the Soviet Union itself, most notably in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These representations tended to be romantic and heroic on both sides of the political aisle. This romanticism covered the term and process of decolonisation with a suitably shiny gloss.

As I have already described, I believe the realities of decolonisation are considerably less romantic. In sum, I think that we are predisposed, when talking about ‘decolonisation’ as a term, to think of it in this highly positive way conditioned by our cultural narratives of decolonisation and to displace the violence and other problems of the process onto other factors.

When thinking about decolonisation, it is important not to separate the cultural and the political too rigidly. Cultural decolonisers all want their work to have political consequences, while political decolonisers pay significant attention to the cultural field. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on conjecture when considering how culture and politics might be conjoined in these moments, because the overwhelmingly dominant framework of decolonising moments is one of the most powerful synthesisers of culture and politics ever devised by human hands – the nation.

Here, I have to admit my age and formative experiences. As someone who attended college in the Gorbachev era and did my PhD in the 1990s, I have a take that is heavily conditioned by an intellectual generation shaped by observing the Balkan Wars, a parade of Zhirinovskys and Lebeds, shaped by university catalogues filled with courses on the nation, each one of them assigning Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and formed by my very first workshops and conferences that were devoted to producing books on the nation. I have, in sum, observed and studied nations and nationalism a great deal. And, I’m sorry to say, I don’t like them.

The two faces of nationalism

I won’t go into full detail about the whole 1990s discourse on nations and nationalism, but I will say that in the courses I took, we did a deep dive into the older, pre-Andersonian historical and political science literature on nations and nationalism, including a whole strand coloured by the prolific and influential Hans Kohn. Born to a Jewish family in Prague, and writing in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Kohn was of course fully aware that nationalism had a dark side. His solution was to propose not that nationalism tended to devolve into fascism or authoritarianism, but that there were ‘two types of nationalism’. One of them was ‘cultural nationalism’ or ‘ethnonationalism’. This was the dangerous type of nationalism, which just happened to be prevalent in the scary regions of the world – central and eastern Europe in the first place and the decolonising spaces of Africa and Asia in the second.

But there was also a good form of nationalism, ‘political nationalism’ or ‘civic nationalism’. This form of nationalism took root in western liberal democracies, and it centred on the rights and duties of citizens rather than one’s mother tongue or ethnic background. Nationalism could therefore appear in and politically strengthen multiethnic, multi-confessional states. Thus, in Kohn’s words, in a series of lectures at Northwestern University in 1956, the tie which united the United States ‘was not founded on the common attributes of nationhood – language, cultural tradition, historical territory or common descent, but on an idea’. That idea was ‘the English tradition of liberty’.

Kohn admits that American concepts of liberty ‘meant also the liberty to expand at the expense of the natives’. But he sees this not as a problem with his theory but as a salutary demonstration of ‘overflowing energy and initiative’. Empire-building and civic nationalism could – and did – go hand in hand. Because he decided to treat de Tocqueville, Kohn mentioned Black people, not because slavery and white supremacy undermined his glorious tale of liberty, but in order to observe ‘the ills which threaten the future of the Union [that] arise from the presence of a black population upon its territory’.

Kohn openly deplored the Civil War, which brought the end to legalised slavery in North America, as a moment when Americans rejected ‘compromise and the sobriety of common sense’ for ‘a rhetorical emotionalism and to most bitter controversy’. If you detect a whiff (or more than a whiff) of both Orientalism and Cold War politics in this theoretical formulation of West vs. East, rational vs. emotional, good vs. bad, I smell the same thing, and so have most scholars examining Kohn and the literature of nationalism over the past 30 years.

But still, is it possible that two types of nationalism do exist, and that we simply need to strip away the Cold War and racial dichotomies of Kohn and his followers? This might remove the Orientalist odour and recover the possibility for, say, a model African, Asian, or even Eastern European nation to chart a new political path.

Mtatzminda mountain in Tbilisi, 1958. Image: Thomas Taylor Hammond / Source: University of Virginia Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies via Wikimedia Commons

Nation-building in Ukraine

This is the possibility explored by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale in the book they published this year entitled The Zelensky Effect. They contend that Zelensky stumbled into being a living figure of a ‘civic nationalist Ukraine’ not only by virtue of being a Jewish Russian speaker from Eastern Ukraine, but also by the mode by which he gained popularity as an entertainer prior to his election as president. His show Servant of the People contrasted self-styled ethno-nationalists, who claim to be patriots but are actually corrupt and self-serving, with quiet heroes who ‘are patriots without ever saying so, simply trying to get things done out of a sense of civic duty and love for their country’. Onuch and Hale connect this explicitly with ‘key features and trends in Ukrainian society, most notably an emphasis on civic identity, meaning above all an attachment to civic duty and Ukrainian statehood rather than an identification with an ethnonational collective identity, which has been an increasingly important feature of Ukrainian politics since at least 2014’.

In sum, they conclude that ‘By regularly referencing history, Zelensky the president and Zelensky the performer before him are not only evoking, but actually building up and strengthening, Ukrainians’ contemporary sense of national civic identity.’ They admit that there is a ‘strong likelihood’ that Ukraine will eventually become divided over ethnonational issues like language, particularly in the wake of brutalities that have lead other societies to resort to ‘more exclusive definitions of the nation to wall off foreign influence’, but they do not see much evidence for this backsliding at present and hope that the prospect of EU accession can temper those emotions and political processes moving forward. They cite scholarship that finds that ‘if anything, the war seems to have strengthened Ukrainians’ commitment to liberalism and inclusive ideas of the nation’.

Onuch and Hale present us with an attractive possibility. Dispensing with Cold War binaries and Orientalist essentialism, they consider the possibility that all nationalisms are the result of political choices made in the present rather than destinies forged in the past. This anti-essentialist position was also, incidentally, one of Kohn’s signature contributions to the literature on nationalism, though as I have suggested, his blind spot regarding race complicates his historiographical position today.

But can there really be a good kind of nationalism, and is Ukraine following that path? I’m not so sure. To explain why, I’ll go back in time a bit, to the book I wrote under the influence of all that nation-studying in the 1990s, Drafting the Russian Nation. 

Deconstructing ‘civic’ nationalism

In that book, I argued that the actual Russian nation that emerged in the early 20th century was constituted by one of the most powerful generators of national identity and politics – the armed forces. As a result, it was a multi-ethnic and even a civic nation. This was true in the waning years of the empire, and it was a model self-consciously chosen by the Bolsheviks to quietly supplant the much more experimental proposition that armies and polities could be cemented together by ideas of class in a population that was, in their own view, not sufficiently class-conscious, especially in the countryside.

But wait! Aren’t civic nations also marked by a commitment to civic duties and other aspects of republicanism that were alien to both the Romanovs and Bolsheviks? How could civic nations emerge there? Well, what civic duty has been at the centre of political belonging in nations since the late 18th century? Military service. And it was indeed explicitly framed as a civic duty, as part of a social and political contract at odds with both monarchism and Marxism, under all regimes of the period, to the extent that soldiers frequently insisted upon the state’s fulfilment of obligations towards them as well. There are of course other civic responsibilities that can be added as desirable for belonging in the nation, but none are as central. This is particularly true when wars become the forges of national identity, as is clearly the case in Ukraine today.

I made one final, quite pessimistic, observation, which is that since the nation as a political form was centred on military service, it was centred around the performance of violence. As a result, the nation, whether civic or ethnic, was unstable as a political form and prone to produce periodic explosions of death and destruction.

I would make one further critique of ‘good’ civic nationalism, which is that the idea that there are happy instances of multi-ethnic polities in which the commitment is to the rule of law and community wellbeing rather than tribal identification is hard to sustain, historically speaking. As I suggested in my discussion of Kohn, the nations most often referred to as civic nations – the British, the French, the Americans – have been structured on ethnic dominance from their founding until the present day. One can write a history of ‘good’ civic nations only if one ignores white supremacy, which is a pretty massive thing to ignore.

Baku, 1964. Image: Thomas Taylor Hammond / Source: University of Virginia Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies via Wikimedia Commons

Post-colonialism in the USSR

Still, if civic nations haven’t been present in the past, could they still appear in the future? Could we imagine a situation in which an attempt to create a multi-ethnic civic nation is made? One in which a country was founded on anti-imperial lines, the histories of imperial and ethnic domination were consciously highlighted, and efforts were made not to repeat the past? One in which a new mode of solidarity could be created that recognised past discriminations and sought to build equality in the future?

As uncomfortable as it may be to recognise it, such an effort was made in the past, and it was made by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. This is not a good-Lenin, bad-Stalin argument. Much less is it a lack of recognition that the Bolsheviks built an empire in Eastern Europe and Eurasia that continues to affect politics and life now, more than 30 years after the demise of the Soviet Union. It is instead a recognition of the fact that the Soviet Union was a post-colonial state. The Bolsheviks came to power on an explicitly anti-imperial platform, indeed likely would not have come to power otherwise, and they genuinely did not want to recreate the empire they grew up in. Nor did many other people living in the wreckage of the Romanov Empire.

They wanted to create a different dynamic, and they invested significant political and monetary resources into doing so. In the first place, how shall we say this, Lenin was ‘woke’. He was eager to pose as a champion of the oppressed and to recognise the ways that he (and those like him) might consciously or unconsciously express ideas of ethnic superiority. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, in the midst of a debate over nationalities policy with the internationalist wing of the Party, he begged them to recognise the imperialist mindset in all of them. ‘Scratch any Communist and you find a Great Russian chauvinist … He sits in many of us and we must fight him’.

The Party followed Lenin’s insistence that they continue to promise national self-determination and a systematic critique of Great Russian chauvinism. Not only did they vote for his proposals, but they acted on them. The Political Administration of the Red Army, for instance, was an institution committed to addressing the very significant problem of antisemitism, even though that battle was initially a losing one.

Famously, they also implemented korenizatsiia and created an astonishing web of national territorial units across the Soviet Union. This would be the meaning of ‘national in form’ throughout the 1920s. The ‘socialist in content’ was of course even more important. Regardless of what language you spoke or the ethnicity of your local political leaders, the Soviet Union would be a one-party state headquartered in Moscow. This combination of central control, military dominance, and a radically new nationality policy led to Terry Martin’s well-known description of the early Soviet Union as an ‘affirmative action empire’. And, though both affirmative action and empire would remain in place in a variety of ways until 1991, the imperialism became more noticeable and pronounced.

Martin and others give a variety of reasons for this, but one prominent shift was from seeing borderland nationalities as potential beacons for revolutionary expansion to potential fifth columns. This change from revolutionary optimism to security-state paranoia associated with the onset of Stalinism had deadly and long-lasting effects. With the obvious imperialist expansion at the conclusion of World War II, whatever glimmer of a ‘woke’ approach to empire was dead well before Stalin was. The Great Russian chauvinist identified by Lenin survived the period of potential change, and reappeared when conditions were more congenial.

Lessons from the early 1900s

I have a couple more quick points to make about decolonisation in the early 20th century that have applicability today. First, there is a biopolitical dimension to nationalism and decolonisation that expresses itself in multiple ways. Two are persistent, in part because they date back to periods of imperialism and colonialism, but also because each connects to the dark shadow of race and ethnicity that lurks beneath both empire and nation.

The first is the discourse on atrocity. This was a prominent feature of the politics of the period of decolonisation before, during, and after the Great War. It served to further totalise the conflicts by encouraging citizens to think of hostile neighboring countries not only as enemies but as beasts. The discourse on atrocity was also critical in attracting public attention and media coverage from important foreign powers. This had been important since the episode of the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1870s British politics right through the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. It would be ubiquitous during the war itself. It also had a significant biopolitical aspect, as it rooted the conflict in the violated and martyred bodies of fellow co-nationals, the younger and the more female the better.

The second is an aggressively policed, conservative gender order. This not only entails the governance of male bodies through military service discussed earlier, but also a policing of female bodies and of non-heterosexual sexualities. It is truly no accident that gender essentialism and regressive gender politics underpins rightwing politics at the present moment both in ‘imperial’ and ‘national’ formations. Signals that a decolonising polity is moving beyond habitual nationalist repressions would include equivalent changes in social attitudes and legislation regarding gender and sexuality. The Bolsheviks actually did this in the first years of their rule, but they then retreated later.

Finally, imperial endings create, by necessity, regional vacuums of power that are usually filled by intense struggles for regional hegemony. These tend to be multi-actor struggles, often with competing political entrepreneurs from newly independent states, and nearly always with the interest and attention of global powers. These bids for hegemony, whether from a Greater Serbia or a Libya, or a Vietnam, can look like empire-building to those opposed to them, and maybe they are. The lines between nations and empires can be blurrier than we think at times.

So if we were to make some preliminary conclusions: 1) Be cautious, not triumphant, when considering decolonisation as a practice and as a term. The fields of decolonisation are littered with the bodies of those who sought liberation and justice and declared victory far too soon. 2) Civic nationalism is unlikely to be a solution. All nationalisms are centred around particular modes of violence and biopolitics that are baked into the concept and can’t be easily sifted out. 3) Trying to create a new way out is necessary but difficult, and backsliding will be a constant attraction and danger.

Pushkin Park in Tashkent, 1964. Image: Thomas Taylor Hammond / Source: University of Virginia Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies via Wikimedia Commons

Decolonising Russia: some conclusions

Let me take these warnings forward as we consider the topic of the calls for decolonising Russia today. I would say there are three different types of calls for ‘decolonising the field’ at present: nationalist, pluralist, and open-ended.

Let me start with the nationalist version, which finds wide traction not only in online media and social media, but also in popular journals such as Foreign Policy. As you would expect, I am sceptical of nationalist versions in principle. It turns out that they are not much better in practice. I’ll discuss two articles here by way of example. The first is by Artem Shaipov and Yuliia Shaipova in the Spring 2023 issue of Foreign Policy, entitled ‘Change the Way We Study Russia’. The Shaipovs begin with the statement that ‘as a fact of history and problem of contemporary geopolitics, Russia’s nature as an imperial power is incontrovertible’. OK, starting out with essentialism is unpromising, but let’s see where they go from there. 

 ‘Why’, they ask ‘has it taken a brutal war of conquest for most Russia experts in the West even to begin addressing Russia’s nature as a vast colonial enterprise?’ ‘It’s high time’, they say, ‘to decolonise Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian studies – and stop viewing the region through Moscow’s imperial lens’. They claim that universities and other knowledge-producing institutions in the West were born in the Cold War and have been unable to shed the ‘Moscow-centric’ framing of that period. Therefore they downplay the ‘rich histories, varied cultures, and unique national identities of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – not to mention the many conquered and colonised non-Russian peoples inhabiting wide swaths of the Russian Federation’.

These are a set of claims that may seem reasonable on their face, but what evidence do the authors provide that they are true? Well, they point to the fact that the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington ‘lumps together all 15 former Soviet republics’ and that a couple of other programs do likewise. The content of these courses isn’t addressed or really considered. Instead, the authors claim that ‘today’s Russian studies in the West still replicate the worldview of an oppressor state and … presents Russia itself as a monolith with little or no attention paid to the country’s indigenous peoples’. The authors provide no evidence for these claims whatsoever.

So if the nationalist critique has problems, do we give up on decolonising the field? I hope not. Decolonisation, both political and cultural, is necessary, even if it has been frequently deformed by nationalism. What models might we have in this respect? There is a visible effort to create such models today, an effort I will call, for lack of a better word, a pluralist model of decolonisation. One example of this is the blog post by Susan Smith-Peter in H-Russia, the international scholarly network on Russian and Soviet studies, at the very end of last year. Smith-Peter argued that the famous Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky established a basic framework for understanding the Russian Empire that took root not only in the Russian Empire in the last decades of Romanov rule but also, eventually, in Anglophone historiography after World War II. Klyuchevsky, she argued, maintained that colonisation was a key feature of Imperial Russia but had a blind spot when it came to Ukraine, in part because he saw Ukrainians as part of a larger Russian people who needed to be rescued from foreign domination. Klyuchevsky described the Russian Empire as a colonising state across much of its territory, but insisted that in Ukraine and Belarus, their activities were not colonisation but a final gathering of the Russian narod.

This combination of colonialism and imperial nation-building is actually quite common historically, but historians like Klyuchevsky transformed it into a sort of Russian Sonderweg, because it was not a maritime empire. Klyuchevsky’s ideas came to America in the person of Michael Karpovich, who leveraged his position at Harvard to influence the next generation of US-based historians of Russia, including those who would write the major textbooks in the field like Nicholas Riasanovsky. As a result, Smith-Peter argues, the US historiography on Russia is still fundamentally shaped by the Russian émigré tradition, most notably by Klyuchevsky’s vision of Russian expansionist history and its Ukrainian blind spot.

Smith-Peter’s pluralist solution distinguishes her most significantly from the nationalists, even if it may be more common than she suggests. She argues that a productive direction would be to focus attention on the study of regions, since, whether in the multi-ethnic borderlands or in the Russian provinces, people were treated by this historiographical tradition as objects rather than subjects of history. A critical method of reversing cultural imperialism is to reconstitute them as subjects in their own right.

She concludes that contemporary regionalist political activity is ignored by the western media in part because it has been ignored by historians. As a result, both history and politics continue to be deformed because ‘of the tendency of the field to look at things from the centre’s point of view’. If this echoes the nationalist line, it is not quite the same, as it is anti-essentialist and open to varieties of political expression and organisation other than ethnicised empires and nations.

Finally, the third model is more unsure. Conferences and workshops are taking the question of ‘decolonising the field’ as an open question to be solved rather than as a pre-ordained set of solutions. I think this is a useful approach. There may be other models than the nationalist and the pluralist and a wide variety of directions in which we can go. The history of decolonisation is a troubled one, politically because state failures are traumatic, and culturally because nationalism recreates many of the problems it is purported to solve. I do hope that we are not locked in an empire-nation binary forever.

I.

When I visited China in the mid 2010s, it was as if I had found myself back in Czechoslovakia during the period of normalization. Rapid growth had led to industrial pollution and environmental devastation, with urbanization reaching unimaginable dimensions. I met people connected with the editor Xu Zhiyuan, the publisher of DanDu, an anthology of dissident texts commenting on the police state. It was as if a cycle were coming to an end and the world was spinning in a maelstrom of censorship and self-censorship. I was deeply ashamed that in Czechia, my country, even politicians perceive China as a stabilized, harmonious society.

Many indications can give us a glimpse into the future, whether in a family or state. And I asked myself what I was witnessing, what sort of manipulation and dictatorship was it this time. The fates of the Europeans I observed in China were those of Europe. 

European individualists are responding to China just as they once did to the Soviet Union; they don’t want to see the terror. André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre lavished giddy praise on Stalin’s criminal construct, claiming that Soviet cows produced more milk than French cows. Even the Czech journalist Julius Fučík saw the Soviet Union as a country where the future was already history. 

When Gide and Sartre visited the land of fear to see everything for themselves, they looked around through veiled eyes, delivering their reports to the world. Gide wrote of a great new joy that inevitably also involved small, unpleasant mistakes. In 1936 in Moscow he saw a city living a normal life even as the show trials and the years of genocide and terror had already begun. This minor demystification was held against him; the Czech poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann, a man who had never been to the Soviet Union, swiftly composed a pamphlet called Anti-Gide. In the 1950s Sartre was still describing Moscow as a city living a normal life.

People let themselves be blinded by the romance of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yves Montand was a fervent communist, but he drove a Ferrari and refused to acknowledge Stalin’s purges and show trials until 1968. It is always the same. Decades later Western European leftists continued to visit Soviet countries: in 1970s Czechoslovakia Václav Havel may have been in prison, but you could get beer for practically nothing; in the 1980s people went to small, independent theatres and said how nice it all was, so much cheap beer, so much fun.

A protest rally in Budapest for the release of Vaclav Havel on 2 March 1989. Image by Vimola Károly via Fortepan

And now people are traveling to Beijing. Much can be read from surface appearances but not enough. The twentieth century was an excellent lesson in top-down propaganda and deception. The twenty-first just needed to beef up its technical know-how; large groups of people can reliably be controlled by technology. 

Politicians in China consolidate their power by reaching for Stalin’s tried-and-tested tools from the Soviet thirties or those from the Eastern European fifties. They eliminate rivals in senior positions, ministers and civil servants, accusing them of corruption or moral degeneracy; anyone can disappear from one day to the next. In the provinces there are work and re-education camps. The tsarist policy that Stalin developed to such a state of perfection go by the name of ‘world domination’. Pragmatism joins hands with an ideology confident in its historical mission: emulating Stalinism is equivalent to state terrorism; communist elites anticipate high death tolls. It’s all about strength – that’s just how it is. Not everything enjoyable is swallowed up by the totality, but it engulfs the natural order of things. In China you have to be able to read not just between the lines but between lives. The mysterious regime of the secret services is as spotless as Stalinist snow. 

The economy has been militarized. Buying real estate or saving money are what Chinese people do abroad – the only place their private property is safe. At home they are at the mercy of the state, which might take their savings or confiscate their house. They send their children overseas in the hope of obtaining dual citizenship for them; officially, they can only have Chinese citizenship, but there are no checks. They dream of their country being a superpower. Economic success is not enough; China is arming itself, cosying up to the military. Just like Hitler’s Germany, China provokes conflicts and engages in skirmishes at its borders, so its politicians can later explain pleasantly that they had no choice but to arm themselves and go on the defensive.

What binds a nation most strongly is an external enemy. Whatever the circumstances, the Chinese Communist Party always gives the impression that it is defending and protecting its people against invaders. Li Zhisui, Mao’s personal doctor, recalls the words of his dear patient, so devoted to the Soviet Union, who on the one hand had the greatest respect for Comrade Stalin, and on the other competed fiercely with him, rejoicing maliciously over every tiny thing that weakened his rival. Mao thought that his comrade misunderstood the situation, expecting China to put to sea and take Taiwan. He disagreed: Taiwan’s ongoing anguish helped maintain internal unity. On an imaginary world map of tyrannies, China holds first place due to the harmonious perfection of its system.

All the talk I heard in China was communist with vocabulary resembling that of my childhood. It is a secret society. Hardly anyone can penetrate its heart. There is a virtual life and a real life, and it isn’t easy to distinguish between the two. Brainwashed, xenophobic societies all over the world react in the same way – they hate anything different. 

Many politicians now make compromises with China’s leaders just as quickly as the Czechoslovakians did with Soviet occupiers after 1968. Most tend to forget yesterday’s ideals in a flash, anyway. Eastern European countries that didn’t want to be satellites of the Soviet Union do want to be a Chinese subsidiary: they voluntarily accept today’s economic occupation. Back then, everybody knew who was on which team in the game of East versus West. These days, the teams have gotten mixed up. 

The atmosphere in Beijing resembles the mood in 1970s Prague; small islands of self-awareness and self-liberation are emerging, even though external ties have been brutally ripped apart. At that time in Prague, there was a new generation growing up that had not been traumatized by Nazi or Soviet occupation. 

II.

In 2017 a young woman who was studying medicine in Beijing wrote open letters to the National People’s Congress, the president and the premier. She called for democratization and uncensored books and journals – for a fairer China – but did not want to get involved in political debate. The young Chinese woman’s love for her country was otherwise unshakeable and uncritical. She died in prison. 

Those letters were her life’s manifesto, but, above all, they were an act of provocative hope. Achieving change means insisting on small, trivial things such as the publication of a certain book or journal, the salvation of an old house from dilapidation – not going along with the rules imposed from above and constantly defending yourself. Dissidents around the world pepper their courageous letters with quotes from Václav Havel, as did this young woman.

In 1978 Havel wrote a long open letter to the communist president, Dr. Gustáv Husák, who later sent Havel to prison. He spent eleven years there. His writing was intended as a form of self-realization. The aim was to demonstrate a new, healthy pattern of behaviour: to avoid gruelling polemics where concrete things fall by the wayside; to fight exclusively and without exception for those concrete things, without yielding, to the bitter end.   

The young woman quoted some lines from Havel that echo the arguments of the philosopher Jan Patočka. He shared Patočka’s view that we shouldn’t take a passive role in the history written by the victors, that we shouldn’t always wait for them to act. And Havel wanted to regain, at least in part, sovereignty over himself as an active subject. His criticism of Milan Kundera’s view on the fate of the nation is relevant here. Kundera – and he was not alone – claimed that the Soviet occupation and the subsequent period of adjustment in Czechoslovakia were simply the nation’s lot: as if the Soviets had come not to impose their idea of order on their rebellious territory but to fulfil the ancient destiny of the Czechs, as if our state representatives had to sign the Moscow Protocol for that reason alone. Havel didn’t think historical parallels and reflections on the meaning of our history were inherently wrong, but he disliked how they were a distraction from the living, human, moral and political problems of the time – in other words from the task of taking our history into our own hands and giving it meaning that way. 

Havel believed Kundera was a prisoner of his own scepticism and elitism, and, therefore, found it hard to admit that an act of bravery from time to time can be good for citizens – even if it means making a fool of themselves. Havel’s personal experience with communism meant he was well able to understand Kundera’s panicked fear of absurdity and pathos. But fear prevented Kundera from grasping the mysterious ambiguity of human behaviour under totalitarianism. That same fear now blinds Europeans to life under totalitarian conditions. 

The case of the young Chinese woman is connected to others. She thought she was prepared for arrest and imprisonment. Confucius said that the true mistake is to do something wrong and not correct it. She hoped to be able to make the most of prison; she would read, write, study. Havel also wrote while in prison – in his case, letters to his wife Olga. 

But Havel was world famous. The young woman had no supporters, nobody knew about her. Those who did, tried their hardest to conceal any connection to her. The truth of her suggestions was alarming. 

At the top of the pyramid is the state government. It gagged the young Chinese woman; the Party has no interest in virtue. The only reason the mysterious letter writer was taken seriously at all was because she wasn’t easily frightened. There was no collective or group behind her. She didn’t want to claim any personal merit. She just sent out the word. Havel’s words may have given her letters an additional moral dimension, but their naïve use allowed the authorities to respond with a comprehensive counterattack. The Chinese Communist Party learnt from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s misjudgement, banning the young literary magazine Tvář in the middle of the 1960s: the decision faced criticism from unexpected quarters at the writers’ congress in the spring of 1968 – from radicalized, progressive communists. 

The investigators of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection have unimaginable powers. They are as omnipotent as the Chekists in Stalin’s USSR, who drew up their own lists of enemies. They raid large firms and senior government offices under the guise of combating corruption or immorality. Violations committed by party factions at a national level provide an ideal pretext for witch hunts. The Chinese president grants the disciplinary commission unimaginable powers, including shuanggui, the twin-track justice system. Internationally acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei was accused of not paying his taxes and had to flee. Others are less fortunate. The Communist Party needs to keep its hands clean for the sake of foreign investors, so everything is done in the strictest secrecy: functionaries and common civil servants vanish, their bodies suspected of ending up in closed institutions. Nobody dares to ask questions.

The young woman was not looking for a global political confrontation. Her battle was a private attempt not to drown in compromise. Now, there’s no way back – not even to pointless, covert discussions about what must be sacrificed to preserve something. While in prison, awaiting her trial, she was expelled from university. Her parents’ house was ransacked: personal belongings, including the family piano, computers, mobile phones, textbooks and notes for her thesis on thyroid function, all seized; no evidence of unlawful behaviour was found. Her money was confiscated and bank accounts closed. Her parents were penitent. They distanced themselves from their daughter. Anyone who supported her financially or verbally would risk the same fate. 

The young Chinese woman stood alone, encumbered by freedom, burdened by her vision of a dignified, worthwhile life, a hopeless endeavour. Good things generally begin with hopeless endeavours. She wrote a letter like Havel. It freed her internally, catapulting her into mental autonomy. Then she experienced the paradoxical despair of being newly released into the absurdity of living as a free captive. What kind of freedom is it? She was excluded from everywhere, officially branded an enemy.  

Havel was allowed to watch television in prison. He read newspapers and a restricted number of books: multivolume editions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. On the evening news, he watched the furious smear campaign against Charter 77 in amazement. He understood that a trap was being laid for him; he was forced to apologize for one of his pleas for clemency. Parts of the apology, distorted and taken out of context, were later published. The words were intended to vilify him, to position him alone against the world – a coward and traitor to all. Strategies do not change. Terrorist states know that psychological means are the best way to demoralize opponents: defamation, newspaper articles, mass hysteria, propaganda. 

The young Chinese woman was just an anonymous cog in the machine; nobody demanded an apology from her. And yet Jan Patočka and Václav Havel spent their entire lives reiterating that if anything can influence our national destiny, it is above all how we fulfil our human duties. Even purely moral acts, with no hope of any immediate or visible political effect, can be gradually and indirectly politicized over time. It is worthwhile to act courageously as a citizen. 

Havel always remembered something Patočka once said: ‘the real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.’ Patočka’s cultural, political and civic engagement led to his dissidence. Spiritual renewal, which he called ‘existential revolution’, is an undertaking faced by everybody, at every moment. We all can and must do something, and do it here and now. We cannot wait for anybody to do it for us. 

Protest  in Amsterdam by against the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1989. Image by Rob Bogaerts, via Anefo and Wikimedia commons.

III.

Collective falsehoods cannot be eliminated. In August 1968 it was more than Soviet tanks that moved into Prague without permission – it was an occupation. Russia still describes it as liberation in 2023; brainwashed soldiers thought they were protecting Prague against the aggression of West German revanchists. They believed, and still believe today, that they saved humanity from a Third World War. 

In January 1969 Jan Palach immolated himself in one of Prague’s public squares in protest against the Soviet occupation. The student set himself on fire, just as Tibetan monks had done in protest against Chinese genocide. Palach’s manner of death, difficult to explain under other circumstances, was immediately understood as a powerful, highly symbolic expression of the spirit of the time. Everyone recognized the desperate need for some spectacular act; when everything else had failed, only radical action remained. 

The Chinese know why the region’s communist regimes and their leaders fell in 1989. They understand that the majority didn’t dream of democracy or freedom but of materialism – life was better in the West. Chinese ‘communism’ includes private enterprise in a communist system – squaring the circle. 

Liberal premier Zhao Ziyang and his fate after 1989 recall that of the Czechoslovakian leader Alexander Dubček after 1968. When Ziyang spoke out against the use of force in Tiananmen Square, he was relieved of duties. He saved face by slamming his fist on the table. But Ziyang was held for years in his old family estate, remaining out of sight, in disgrace, while the Communist Party investigated his case. Dubček, acceptable to both reformers and conservative communists, delivering his reforms on democratization and the abolition of censorship with a shy smile, became a symbol of the Prague Spring. Yet, in April 1969, Gustáv Husák took Dubček’s place, demoting him to chairman of the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia. The apparatchik in him had waited until the autumn of 1969 before being shunted off to Turkey as ambassador. He was kept out of the public eye in the hope he would emigrate to Sweden at Prime Minister Olof Palme’s invitation; in that case, the familiar story of an agent in the West’s pay would have been wheeled out. After his return from Turkey, the functionary worked as a mechanic and fleet manager at the state forestry agency in Bratislava. He remained under surveillance at his old family residence, a villa in the city. He wrote letters to Husák and the Italian Communist Party, awaiting his fate in his living room. 

Dubček was not vocal enough after August 1968. He didn’t bang on the table or resign. He lost face. When surrounded by tanks, he just smiled unassumingly as if it was nothing. His friendly face later rubbed off on the period of normalization; people need so little, but that little is everything. 

The term ‘counterrevolution’ was already being used in Moscow in mid-March 1968, even though the Czechoslovakian politicians of the Prague Spring weren’t planning anything controversial. On the contrary, they wanted to strengthen socialism by giving it a ‘human face’. No communist leader had ever enjoyed as much support as Dubček; Eastern European and Soviet Union politicians were confused. People voluntarily paraded, waving banners, calling for democracy. 

Learning from the Czech experiment, China deduced that socialism cannot have a human face. It can only be strengthened by economic success. If people had not hankered after scarce goods and feared that customs officers would take their purchases away at the border, they wouldn’t have taken to the streets. The word ‘Ostalgie’ is often displayed on the walls of shops in the former German Democratic Republic; frustrated East Germans think fondly of the past, as if it wasn’t so bad after all. But ‘nostalgia’ is a sentimental distortion of reality, nothing more. The Nazis in East Germany wore the cloak of communism and said, like their counterparts in Austria, that under Hitler it wasn’t all bad. Countries that have experienced a temporary historical ‘defeat’ think along similar lines, and right-wing radicals can be found in their streets. 

Only the mindset appears to change. Every country carries its past under its skin. It’s not just politicians that want to avoid provoking the Chinese superpower. Everybody is seeking ‘détente’ with a ‘stabilized’ China, exactly as they sought ‘détente’ with the Soviet Union, that other ‘stabilized’ state in the last century. It’s a naïve and narrow-mindedly suicidal form of ‘détente’: the moral and political atmosphere is like the smog that Eastern European countries inhaled and that is still, along with slimy phlegm, being expelled from their lungs today. From 1945 to 1989, Czechoslovakia was saturated in Soviet agents. The General Secretary of the USSR found out about signs of agitation before the national president, and the military was organized as a satellite army for decades. Czechoslovakia’s entire society was a satellite society. 

And what of today? Is Czechia still a satellite society? It’s as if its citizens cannot live in freedom and independence, when actions such as that of former President Miloš Zeman continue, inviting Russian and Chinese advisors to Prague Castle. 

Image taken in the Qinghai province by xingtu via Flickr.

IV.

The trial involving the rock band Plastic People of the Universe in 1976 unexpectedly turned despondent people, including many banned scientists, artists and politicians, into a dissident movement. People gathered around Havel to demonstrate. Civic bravery prevailed against the representatives of communist authority and totalitarian despotism. Patočka said it was clear that terror had been unleashed; preparations for what became Charter 77 began on the day of the band’s trial, a symbol of state brutality. The philosopher said the problem was that a government was in power that nobody had elected and nobody liked, that the largest party was always a sort of conspiracy against the rest of the nation, and that this all-powerful government decided everything. But he also said that, in countries like ours, people make use of a weapon that may not be able to get rid of the government but can hurt it: the weapon of speech. Freely circulating words travel from person to person and awaken long-submerged capabilities and desires: the desire for the freedom and dignity of a human being whose fundamental rights are not just recognized but also guaranteed, for example. 

Authors, philosophers, politicians and scientists, banned from being published post-1968, were working as labourers, lorry drivers, window cleaners. Wherever culture is silenced, human community perishes. Patočka understood that there is no crueller tyranny than that exercised under the guise of law and with the appearance of justice, because it drowns its unfortunate victims on the very rafts on which they hope to save themselves. 

Things changed when the Czechoslovakian government added its signature to the international Helsinki Accords in 1975. By doing so, it committed, among other things, to ‘facilitate the freer and wider dissemination of information of all kinds’. It also agreed that children shouldn’t be disadvantaged by their parents’ political views, and that they should have the opportunity to attend lower and upper secondary schools when suitable. 

After several years of increasing depression, 1977 brought new momentum. Only in an environment without prohibitions and restrictions can people’s hidden creative qualities be released. Such an environment was generally not available. The young people from the rock band were in prison because they had played their music. Patočka did not like the ‘kids’ music’, with its electronic effects and added visuals, but, after the trial, he got involved. He couldn’t have done otherwise, and he helped them. It was a matter of principle, of freedom. It was about making sure young Czech musicians could play; it is about making sure a young Chinese woman can express her opinion. 

Charter 77 was founded as a political movement of dissidents. Patočka decided to not always wait for others to act but to do something himself, and, for a change, to encourage other people to deal with something other than that which was originally planned. The rule of law is like daily bread, like water to drink and air to breathe. The best thing about democracy is that only it can ensure the rule of law. Freedom is for society what health is for the individual. The slogan ‘Today Plastic People of the Universe, tomorrow us!’ summed up the mood of the people. 

V.

In the 1960s it was the old communist dogmatists that were confronted by the communist anti-dogmatists of the Prague Spring. In China all communists are anti-dogmatists. Restaurants only come to life in the evenings: the lights go on, the staff wake up and yawn, young people clutching mobile phones wolf down their food, drunkards knock back more shots, in the corner a woman practices K-Pop dance moves; everyone is doing their own thing, nobody is interested in anyone else, their bodies possessed by technology. 

Our world is different, based on the textbook example of Central Europe’s explosion of bravery following the Plastic People of the Universe. But it had nothing to do with bravery in actual fact. The band stumbled into the dissident ghetto by chance thanks to the drafters and first signatories of what became Charter 77: Václav Havel, Jan Patočka and Jiři Hájek. The band was never interested in politics. People grew out of their stupefied admiration. The group was later invited to Beijing by the Czech Embassy. They were asked to play in a communist punk club. When the organizers mentioned China, they declined. But when they mentioned the fee, an eager answer came back: ‘When?’ All around the world, people are being taken in by the new totalitarianism without batting an eye. The only thing that matters is the size of the offer. Stalin’s message to the Soviet satellite states was that there should be no mention of Western Allies. Stalin created Homo Sovieticus, a Soviet conformist who is still alive and well in Eastern Europe. 

Many people nowadays are impressed by the Chinese model: an economically successful, capitalist-communist police state that promises affluence. But Chinese prosperity has its own purpose: to avoid democracy rather than support it. Reforms are implemented to keep communism alive. They are targeted at democracy. The system in China now is the lovechild of the worst of capitalism and the worst of communism. 

Nobody will sign a petition. Sure, in the last century, petitions might have been useful, so the mantra goes, but these days nobody reads them – they just irritate the powerful unnecessarily, provoke authorities; a truly unnecessary display, protests by nonconformists change nothing. Milan Kundera was right. Dissidents are always outside of reality: officially, there is no Tibet, no Uyghur minority, no Falun Gong, a religious-political movement with more members than the Communist Party, all blind in both eyes. 

Books by Havel can be found in Beijing these days but not always – it varies. When the Party decides to take a harder line, Havel lands back on the blacklist of strictly forbidden authors. He is idolized by young Chinese dissidents. They worship him just like the East German and Polish intellectuals whose manifestos he inspired back in the day. His concepts of living in truth and the power of the powerless, of the need for national revival and existential revolution, are known around the world. Hope is concentrated in his person, because he not only kept control of the story of his books until the end but also of the story of his life. In the last absurd chapter and final twist, he became president of the country that had gagged him, banned him from working and repeatedly imprisoned him.

The masses in China don’t understand what dissidents are good for. What chance does an egg have against a millstone? They do not know the word dissent and, just like the illiterates carted off to Tibet, they are unaware of its context and simply chase after their lucky rice bowl. Anyone who thinks communism means equality should go to China. The cities of Beijing and Shanghai give a false impression: the majority of the country is poor; people flock to the cities. Urbanites do not see villagers as real people; simply being poor makes you one-third bad already, while wealth hides a multitude of sins.  

China’s contemporary communists think Confucianism has lost its religious power. For that reason, Confucian values are held in high esteem: to maintain calm among subjects who are afraid of the rapid pace of change, the new materialism, the generation abyss, as if entire life stages had been skipped. Nothing can be skipped. China’s politicians put Confucian morals to use: obedience to authority and family ties are the foundation of moral values; both serve to explain the economic upturn. Obedience is paid to the ruler, whether Emperors of the past or the Communist Party. Obedience is in the country’s bones. China has been shaped by religion and Confucian ethics for more than two thousand years. For precisely that reason, both can easily be misused, because there are no limits on textual interpretation. The Communist Party clings adamantly to its prestige. 

The Chinese Charter 08 was inspired by Charter 77, the first significant act of solidarity in the communist period of Central Europe. It created an atmosphere of equality, solidarity and community. The original drafters of the charter did not share Kundera’s default scepticism regarding all civic action with no hope of immediate effect. They recognized that one must act as a matter of principle, for instance on behalf of those unjustly detained. When prisoners were released from their isolation, they unanimously said that the petitions were of great support, making them feel that their imprisonment meant something. They knew better than the people ‘outside’ that the meaning of such interventions goes far beyond the question of whether and when someone will be released. The knowledge that someone was on their side and did not hesitate to publicly take up their cause in the face of general apathy and resignation was priceless, just as it has been more recently for the Turkish author Aslı Erdoğan, the Kurdish author and politician Hevrin Khalaf, and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo. None of the politicians or diplomats who have travelled to Beijing mentioned the work camps, the laogai. If they had, all the Chinese would have left the room without a word – and with them the hope for investments running into millions. No European diplomat is going to bend over backwards on behalf of a prisoner. It’s the same in Czechia now, even though Western media once reported urgently on every prisoner of Czechoslovakian communism, while West German writers like Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass organized concrete efforts to help and travelled to the country when Soviet. 

Today’s diplomats think it has nothing to do with them. They think it would be impolite to insult their hosts. Politicians didn’t even leave their delegations to protest the death of Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo; business is business. They poke fun and cite Kafka, who they haven’t read: ‘Evil knows of the Good, but Good doesn’t know of Evil’; they went to China to learn about Evil and think they are the Good.     

Charter 08 was signed in December 2008 in China by over three hundred intellectuals, including at least one member of government. Intellectuals are never in the majority: even among Confucius’s three thousand disciples there were only seventy-two scholars and twelve wise men. The twentieth century was a century that slaughtered people of character: genetic genocide, murdering those with noble intent. The best minds were annihilated in war or in death camps, banished, executed under Stalin. In China friendly conversations take place in a convivial Druzhba atmosphere of friendship and dissidents are outside of reality. Yes, Václav Havel has seeped into Chinese society: Chinese dissidents hold his name up like a flag, hiding away underground with their Czech counterpart. The reduction of democracy to business is not a good way forward. A moral person cannot retreat into the role of spectator. That is the legacy of the philosopher Jan Patočka.    

Ferenc Laczó: You state in your new book Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation that the Ukrainian question, now and in the past, has repeatedly become acute at the most critical turns in global history. You also highlight that Ukraine has quite a unique status in global history as a geopolitically crucial borderland. Could I ask you to highlight some such key turns in global history and discuss their connections to Ukraine? Could you also tell us a bit about how being such a geopolitically crucial borderland has shaped Ukrainian history?

Yaroslav Hrytsak: I would start with the moment that might be the most crucial one in history: 1492, ‘the discovery of America,’ which marked the beginning of globalization – Felipe Fernández-Armesto has written an excellent book about it with the subtitle The Year Our World Began. For the first time, people living on two sides of the Atlantic Ocean became interconnected in a variety of ways and with many different results, one of which was the rise of the West. That period ended when the West became global through exercising imperial rule over other parts of the world and, by the end of 20th century, via the collapse of Soviet communism. This is a large process which lasted approximately 500 years.

My basic argument is that Ukraine emerged because of this process. I would go so far as to say that without the discovery of America you could hardly have had a Ukrainian nation – Columbus may be considered an important protagonist in its history. This may sound provocative. However, when I started reading to prepare this book, I found out that my thesis was not new at all: it was formulated by Omelian Pritsak, a famous scholar of Turcology who taught at Harvard University. He made this point at the beginning of the 1970s. Later on, I discovered that it was not even him who first made this observation: Eric Hobsbawm articulated towards the end of the 1950s in his famous discussion on the crisis of the 17th century.

We used to think about modernization and globalization in very positive terms, connecting it with all kinds of transformations, such as an increase in communication, etc. Since the Second World War, and especially nowadays, we have come to see modernization and globalization much more critically. Now we see clearly that violence is a very important side of it, which the story of the indigenous people of America after the arrival of Columbus demonstrated very, very clearly.

Measures to protect the monument to Volodymyr the Great, Kyiv, against Russian missiles (25 March 2022). Source: Kyiv City State Administration, Oleksiі Samsonov / Wikimedia Commons

What I am trying to show in my book is that this kind of globalization, the rise of the West in the 16th and 17th century, had an impact on Ukraine at a moment of utmost political crisis and extreme violence. As one of the chronicles from the time says: blood was flowing like a river and rare was the person who had not deepened his hands in that blood. So I am trying to depict both sides of globalization.

I believe the two world wars reveal the extreme of this other, darker side. As a matter of fact, the Ukrainian issue emerged during the First World War. It has been on the agenda of global politics since then. Before that, it used to be a rather minor issue in international politics. Since WWI it has been very important for a variety of reasons but, most importantly, because it was a total war.

Total war requires the total mobilization of resources and Ukraine has huge resources, both human and especially natural resources, including grain, which is became increasingly important during the 20th century, not least because it is used as a strategic weapon.

Probably an even more important reason was that Eastern Europe – by which I mean the territory between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea – acquired a kind of extreme geopolitical importance: whoever controls this territory has a better chance of controlling the whole of Europe and dominating globally. Since the Ukrainian issue was closely interrelated with the Russian issue in the Russian Empire and then also in the Soviet Empire, and Ukraine greatly helped to raise this empire to global status, you had to deal with Ukraine. There’s a rule of thumb, I would say, that has been formulated by people who study peasants: you can hardly find a peasant identity in peaceful times, but it becomes very visible in times of crisis. The same goes with Ukraine. In this sense, Ukrainian history is very much like the game ‘now you see me, now you don’t’.

The deeper the crisis, the more the Ukrainian issue gets accentuated, and the stronger Ukrainian identity gets. This was the case during the two World Wars, and during the current war as well. Again, I see this as part and parcel of a global process which has two sides, and the case of Ukraine fits both of those sides well.

Marta Haiduchok: You state that the creation of Ukraine was threefold: from a people to a nation, from a traditional to a modern society, from Rus to Ukraine. You also argue that, more recently, Ukraine has undergone a complex transformation from an ethnic to a civic nation. Could you elaborate on this threefold creation and that more recent transformation? What caused these transformations and how did these processes unfold?

YH: I believe that what we are discussing as a threefold creation is, in fact, three dimensions of one and the same large process. For lack of a better word, one may call it modernization. Ernest Gellner was right in the sense that pre-modern society could exist without nations, but modern society depends on their existence. They become a kind of norm – you can hardly imagine the modern world without nations.

In a sense, nations are created by modernization. When we are talking about the origins of Ukrainians, as well as Belarusians and Russians, I do not believe that there is a place for a nation in traditional communities and in Rus broadly speaking – in Kyivan Rus but also in ‘Rus after Rus’, which is the story until the 19th century, if we are talking about Rus society as Orthodox society.

I try to substantiate this argument by providing statistics on book reading and book printing because, as Yuri Slezkine nicely put it, ‘nations are book-reading tribes’. And to read books, you have to have them. Many medievalists who focus on Byzantium and Rus state that the intellectual tradition of Rus was poor, especially in terms of producing books. Most of the books on the territory of Rus until the 18th century were books translated back in the 10th and 11th centuries. If you collect all those books, what you get is the library of a medium-sized Byzantine monastery. There were hardly any original books, which means that an Orthodox reader in the 19th century would still be reading the same books as his or her counterpart seven centuries earlier. There is thus no intellectual communication. Printing has changed some things, but not that much.

What I am driving at is that to make a nation you have to destroy Rus as a traditional community. In a sense, the making of Ukraine was the unmaking of Rus. Having said that, I do not believe in simple dichotomies. We may use concepts like traditional society and modern society as working concepts, but they should not be more than that. The two world wars were the intrusions of modernity into the traditional worlds of the Ukrainian peasants and of the Jewish shtetl, and they destroyed them. Still, Rus and Rus values are very much persistent. I believe what Putin is trying to do is to build on the concept of a Russkiy mir as a world of traditional values as opposed to the West.

The current Russian war is largely a war on history. ‘Let’s make Russia a superpower again’ is a strategy to return to the past. Traditional societies see the golden past as their best scenario. Ukrainians have a very different strategy. This is why my book in Ukrainian has the subtitle Overcoming the Past. Ukraine, luckily enough, has no past golden age to cherish and the only strategy left for Ukrainians is to try and overcome the past.

While I do not really believe in sharp dichotomies, this dichotomy makes sense to me and it is a dichotomy that means war today – it is about much more than just history.

FL: Your book discusses the manifold and heterogenous influences that have come to shape Ukraine over time. As part of that discussion, you emphasize the European and western aspects of Ukrainian identity . At one point, you even state that the ‘transformation of the Orthodox Rus into a Ukrainian nation was a consequence of the spread of western Christian ideas to the East, through the mediation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.’ Could I ask you to elaborate on Ukrainian history’s European and western connections and why you attach such importance to them in the book?

YH: I am afraid that many of my colleagues will strongly dislike this book because it is unashamedly Eurocentric, which is certainly not considered fashionable or modern nowadays. But this is not about my personal or political preference but rather about the fact that I follow the argument that the nation per se is a western concept. Andrian Hastings’ book Construction of Nationhood had a very strong impact on me. In rough terms, he argues that nationhood emerged in a cultural milieu which may be called Catholic Europe. I accept his point that the nation is a western concept which became global with the globalization of the West.

In Ukraine, the West meant the Polish factor. The famous historian and Byzantinist Ihor Ševčenko put it very nicely: the West came to Ukraine in Polish dress. After all, Poland was part of the space where the nation was very important. To give just one example: until the 17th century, the Orthodox space had no university and the furthest one to the east within the Catholic realm was in Cracow. Nobody had ever forbidden creating universities in the Orthodox realm but they were still very late to emerge and only came with the extension of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth towards Rus.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a special creature. This was the only large state where Orthodox and Catholic people lived together in comparable numbers. That led to intense encounters that were problematic, and very violent as well, but there was much cultural interaction too.

The Cossack rebellions which led to the Cossack state was a rebellion against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The irony is that the Cossacks deliberately emulated the status of the Polish nobility, not least with their concept of a nation.

This trend becomes even more visible in the 19th century. Modern Polish nationalism emerged after the partition of Poland. In my opinion, it was the only real nationalism in the Russian Empire until the middle of the 19th century.

They both taught the local population the logic and rhetoric of nationalism. One of the most telling pieces of evidence is that three national anthems have nearly identical opening lines: the Polish, the Ukrainian, and the Israeli. All the three lyricists were born in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, and they all had this idea.

We used to consider the Ukrainian past in the shadow of Russian history. That has a certain logic, but I would also say that the Russian factor is a relatively modern one. It came to this space largely by the end of the 18th century. However, Ukrainian territories were under the strong impact of the so-called Polish factor and prior western influences until even later. In the 19th century, the largest noble group on Ukrainian territory was the Polish nobility. The Polish language was loudly spoken in Kyiv until the middle of the 19th century. You have a lot of Polish professors and students in Kharkiv, including Józef Piłsudski. In the case of the western part of Ukraine, this lasts until the Second World War.

When you draw a map that shows the longevity and intensity of the Polish factor and explore the map of today, you find that its various zones roughly coincide with the intensity of Ukrainian identity, with the use of the Ukrainian language and, even more importantly, with political divisions in Ukraine.

MH: Your book  recurrently addresses the differences in the development of western Ukraine compared to other regions. You mention that in the case of western Ukraine a form of Ukrainization took place instead of Sovietization. Lviv became a sort of hidden capital of Ukraine as a result. However, in the context of the ongoing war, it might not be the best time to emphasize the differences between the regions of Ukraine. What is your current understanding of the relevance of western Ukraine’s ‘exceptional’ trajectory? More generally, how do you relate to the question of the diversity of Ukraine’s regions nowadays?

YH: That is a very complicated matter. Let me start with a simple statement that I can make with certainty: Putin is interested in Ukraine, but not in western Ukraine. He considers this part of Ukraine one of the most toxic territories for his Russian world. He believes that the accession of this territory to the Soviet Union was among the greatest mistakes of Stalin. Were it not for the Baltic States and western Ukraine, the USSR might still exist today, he seems to think. There was even a rumour that Putin wants western Ukraine to be taken by somebody else, like Poland – a strange and crazy idea.

To zoom out: regionalism is probably the most important factor in Ukraine’s past and present. There is hardly another country where regionalism plays such an important role as it does in Ukraine. Ukraine is an extremely divided country – it is divided by language, religion, culture, tradition, you name it. Many people say that, in this sense, Ukraine is unlike most European counties. The closest comparison might be the United States. We have extreme heterogeneity in Ukraine, but the country still holds together. There is a paradox here which we have explored in our project on regionalism which we have conducted together with Swiss scholars.

What we have found is that there is a lot of regionalism, but there are no stable regions in Ukraine. The divisions between them are unstable. However, there is one exception, which is easy to guess: Western Ukraine – Galicia. This is the only real region. The Donbas has increasingly become a region, but only since the rule of Yanukovych and the spread of his narrative.

We have been working on a comparison between Donetsk and Lviv and between the Donbas and Galicia, more generally. We have been conducting social surveys for many years. It was a revelation for us that it does not really make sense to repeat surveys in Lviv because the results will not differ much. We are dealing with a region that has a very strong Ukrainian nation identity in which the Ukrainian language is a crucial factor.

Next to that, there is a very strong regional identity: the idea of Galicia and that of Ukraine are twin brothers or twin sisters who cannot be separated. In contrast to that, Donetsk is unnational. When you ask people to define themselves, the majority of people do not choose national identity as their main identity – they would rather talk about their gender identity, social identity, or professional identity. We have a Russian-speaking city with a very weak Russian identity. Ukrainian identity is faring somewhat better than Russian identity, but no single form of identity ever gets more than 50%. It’s a very fragmented society which is in a constant flux. You can achieve many things here if you make a serious effort, which Yanukovych and his team did.

Shmuel Eisenstadt developed the theory of multiple modernities. My point would be that Ukraine has experienced one kind of modernity coming from the West and the other coming from the Russian and then the Soviet Empire. Stalin was a very ambitious modernizer and he largely succeeded, but it was modernization without the concept of the nation. As a matter of fact, neither the late Russian Empire nor the Soviet Union particularly liked this idea because their ideal was basically a homogeneous society imposed from above – Donetsk may illustrate the results.

There is a variety of reasons for this. I would just like to highlight one geographic reason because it is a global factor and is quite often omitted: the steppe, which is one of the largest axes of the Eurasian continent economically, politically and militarily. The steppe starts in Manchuria and Mongolia, and goes through Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to end around Pannonia. This is a huge zone for nomadic migration and a source of threat for settled territories. What the historical process produces are zones or borderlands which are extremely rich in resources, but also very dangerous.

There is a parallel here with the colonization of America. I mean this quite literally: the Polish nobility treated this zone, which was part of the Polish state, as their America and saw themselves as conquistadors. The similarities between North American and the steppe are remarkable; the two models are practically the same.

I believe there is a radical difference between western and eastern Europe. Even as the meaning of these terms needs to be revised, there is one factual, very tangible difference between them: in western Europe, you did not have large migration processes since the end of the Viking era and ethnic borders have remained relatively stable. In the case of the steppe, large-scale migrations last until the Second World War, not least through forced migrations, and so-called special actions, etc.

The colonization within the Russian Empire was much like the colonization of America and the problems with establishing borders may have been larger in the former. The Donbas is an extreme here case: it has been a problematic territory for every state, including for contemporary Ukraine, and has been very difficult to bring under control. Hiroaki Kuromiya has written an excellent book on this subject. The debate about the Donbas is obviously not only historical but also political: after all, the question is whose territory it is.

Having said that, regional differences have generally been a blessing for Ukraine. These divergences create a situation where no elite can rule the country single-handedly. To be able to rule in Kyiv, you need to strike a compromise with regional elites. That is the only way to preserve the unity of Ukraine and compromise is also the daily bread of democracy. Therefore, Ukraine has democracy by default – not by institutional design, but by default. I believe that one of the main challenges for Ukraine since the Euromaidan is how to transform this democracy by default into a strong, socially embedded democracy.

In short, the diversity of Ukraine can be very problematic, but I also see it as a kind of blessing: it helps Ukraine survive as a relatively stable and democratic political community.

MH: In recent years, and especially since February 2022, more and more attention has been paid to the colonial politics of the Russian Empire, followed by what has sometimes been called the neocolonial politics of the Russian Federation. How would you locate your approach within the broader field of colonial and post-colonial studies? Has the full-scale invasion of Ukraine altered your understanding of the history of Ukrainian–Russian relations?

YH: I hate to say it, but I don’t particularly like postcolonialism. I would like to quote Ernest Renan here: ‘to have good reasons you have to be unfashionable sometimes.’ I believe that postcolonialism proved to be very important for literary and cultural studies and tremendously good scholarship has been done in those fields. But when it comes to the hard facts of Ukrainian history, I am sceptical about its import. I find it hard to characterize Ukraine as a colony.

The right question is not whether Ukraine was a colony, but rather when and to what extent it was one, if at all?

I would say that for most of its history Ukraine was not a colony. There are some periods of colonization. Probably the most intensive one occurred under Stalin and the Holodomor was a part of that. There were instances of Habsburg colonization in western Ukraine, which to me implies that colonization is not by definition a negative thing – it can in fact contain positive aspects too.

When it comes to other parts of Ukraine, they constituted the core of the Russian Empire. If you look at the history of 18th-century Russia or that of the late Soviet Union, you see that to a large extent it was Ukrainian elites who were running those empires. There was even a chance, as Andreas Kappeler has argued, that 18th-century Russian Empire would have become a Ukrainian Empire. Ukrainian elites had the advantage of coming from the western borderlands and used that to their utmost advantage. Russia was a large but backward empire and to run it educated elites were badly needed. Those elites often came from the Baltic region, Ukraine, Poland, Georgia and Armenia. Ukraine thus resembles Scotland which was built the British Empire as its empire too.

There is a paradox however which was especially visible under the Soviet regime. Ukrainians were overrepresented among members of the Russian imperial elite and then the Soviet elite, but they were also overrepresented among the dissidents and nonconformists. To make a career in the centre, Ukrainians had to deny large parts of their identity. They were Ukrainian by origin and servants of the Russian Empire by conviction. Many other Ukrainian intellectuals and members of the middle classes tried to resist this. There is an estimate that perhaps as many as 50% of all Soviet dissidents were Ukrainian under Brezhnev. You could make the same argument about Jews, who were overrepresented both in power and in opposition. In this respect, Ukrainian history may be reduced to a simple sentence: Ukrainians started as the Scots and ended up like the Irish.

Western academia has recently been greatly influenced by postcolonial theories. I think rightly so. When it comes to eastern Europe, western academia has focused on Russian history to the extent that chairs have been named ‘Russian and East European Studies.’ I do think that it is time for decolonization there, to give voice to other people, and maybe to drop the label Russian. The journal Ab Imperio has done tremendously important work in this respect.

Having said all that, when it comes to the hard facts of Ukrainian history, which I prefer to study for a variety of reasons, I do not believe that postcolonial studies can offer us much help.

MH: When you discuss the dilemmas of the Russian language in Ukraine, you mention that even though Ukraine was never a monolingual country, Russian used to have a very strong position because of its status as a ‘world language’. How do you view the status and role of the Russian language and culture in Ukraine in the postwar period? Would you say Russian is likely to lose its prestige as a ‘world language’?

YH: I don’t have too many original ideas to offer here. On these issues, I am basically referring to other academics, mostly social linguists, whose research I trust very much. They use statistics to say that the number of Russian-speakers is decreasing globally. There is a chance that in the few next decades Russian will cease to be one of the 10 global languages.

That process has intensified after the start of the current war. Nobody has done as much for the de-Russificiation of Ukraine as Putin with his bombing of Russian-speaking cities. But there is a larger process at work here which the war has only accelerated.

Russian was not just a language of domination. In every new country that emerged out of a now old empire, the language of the empire was maintained – this was the norm. When we talk about global dimensions, for Ukrainians, Georgians, Belarusian, Chechens and others, the Russian language was their only access to a global world. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian has increasingly been replaced by the English language.

This, you can clearly see in Ukraine, especially among the younger generations. This has much to do with the internet of course. I believe that the Russian language will lose its special status and will become the language of a minority in Ukraine – like how German is in Poland or Hungarian is in Slovakia nowadays. As predicted by social linguist Tomasz Kamusella, this probably will take two or maybe three generations to materialize.

Kamusella made a simple observation which may not be too evident: you cannot find a single country in the world which accepts Russian as an official language and is at the same time democratic. You cannot say the same about the German language or the English language, nor even Arabic for that matter. In the case of Russian, we shouldn’t blame the language, of course. It is rather a matter of political culture that comes together with the language. Maybe someday Russian will also become a language of democracy. I very much hope for that for the sake of Ukraine too.

FL: You place a clear emphasis on the role of violence in the making of the modern nation – the birth trauma of modern and contemporary Ukraine, if you wish. You indeed depict the history of Ukraine as a history of progress and catastrophes, a history that provides grounds for ‘limited but defensible optimism’. Could I ask you to discuss the role of violence in shaping Ukraine and what grounds for limited but defensible optimism you see?

YH: As I mentioned earlier, I think Ukraine largely emerged as a modern nation due to the two world wars. To use a metaphor: if nations had passports, Ukraine’s would say 1914. Military historian Mark von Hagen was the first to make this point and he has shown very persuasively to what extent war, and especially the First World War, accelerated the nation-building process in Ukraine. You have a period of thirty years of violence and Ukraine emerges out of that. As a matter of fact, the territory of today’s Ukraine became integrated within one state in this period – the Soviet Union.

Until 1945, or even the death of Stalin in 1953, Ukraine was a territory of extreme violence. There were several waves, like the repression of the thirties, the destruction of the Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis, then the ethnic cleansing of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, the deportation of Crimean Tatars, the deportation of Ukrainians and Poles – wave after wave. The violence was so extreme that it is difficult to understand how certain people managed to survive it at all.

These are birthmarks and I try to show their lingering effects in my book. I believe that one of those effects is corruption. This may sound strange at first hearing, but several analysts have pointed to the correlation between the levels of violence and corruption. Societies that experience extreme violence tend to be more corrupt because corruption serves as a kind of survival strategy. This connection needs to be explored further. Another effect is ambivalence. Societies that went through extreme violence will not have clear notions.

This was very visible in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. If I may draw on my personal experiences in Ukraine during the nineties – it was very difficult to come up with any kind of radical reform because the population remained very ambivalent. They were in favour of Ukrainian independence, but they were also nostalgic about the Soviet Union.

Having said that, I would say that Ukraine now has a chance to transform itself, or at least had a chance to do so before the war broke out. We had the first generation raised without the trauma of violence and they behaved very differently from previous generations.

They wanted to express themselves and expand their vision. Once you have such a generation, radical and positive changes come within reach. This is the positive side. The negative side is that now they also have a trauma – the current war – and so we cannot tell what the results will be like. Evidently, a lot depends on the longevity of the war and its result, which are very hard to predict. Now we have both positive and negative tendencies, like so often in history, and it is very hard to strike a precise balance between them.

Why do I see reasons for limited optimism? Because such a generation emerged and, more importantly, they managed to take up positions of power in the country. If you look at almost any field in Ukraine, people in power these days are generally quite young. If you look at Zelensky and his milieu, you see people who are around 40. Just compare that with the Biden’s or Putin’s milieu who are in their 70s or even 80s. This new generation is now running the country and organizing the resistance.

What I am trying to suggest here is similar to what Anne Applebaum has written in The Red Famine, her book on the Holodomor: what gives us a sense of optimism even after one of the most tragic parts of Ukrainian history is that Ukraine managed to survive and even have a new generation. This resilience should give us hope.

War is a tragedy without any doubt. It is the biggest tragedy that can ever happen to anybody. Paradoxically, it also opens a window of opportunity to make radical reforms because the past is now definitely over.

MH: When discussing significant social events of the 20th century, you assign a lot of importance to the activities of young people, especially when it comes to large social changes. How do you view the current situation and future development of Ukraine in the light of this? How important do you think the current experiences of young people will prove to be and what impact might they have?

YH: When we talk specifically about studies of central and eastern Europe, we mostly use concepts such as ethnic and religious groups, nations, and classes. The concept of generation has been largely neglected, despite the famous slogan which becomes especially popular in the West after 1968 that history makes generations and generations made history. There are some exceptions. In Russia, for example, generations have been studied as agents of change. We also have several recent books on the sixties generation in Ukraine who became dissidents. I also emphasize the concept of generation in my book on Ivan Franko and his community.  

We have a new generation in Ukraine nowadays which Zelensky epitomizes. Tymoshenko or Poroshenko look like dinosaurs compared to them, even though they are quite young compared to Biden or Putin. The new generation consists of people who were born shortly before or just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have not been Sovietized much and have only a weak memory of the Soviet Union. They may be speakers of Russian, but they do not have a special empathy for Russia, because they want to have a standard of living like that of the West.

I would claim that the Euromaidan was largely their revolution: it was the revolution of a new urban middle class – the revolution of a class-generation. A very important feature of this class is that they are very educated. Nowadays, Ukraine and Moldova have the highest percentages of university graduates. Unfortunately, the standards of university education in Ukraine are not the highest, to put it mildly. But studies reveal that five years spent in any university will change your values.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, most members of this generation do not work in state institutions or industry. Ukraine has undergone a transformation from being an industrial society to a service sector-based one. Look at Zelensky’s team: they practically all come from the service sector. Of course, this social transformation is also a global one. Just compare it with the recent Belarusian protests or the protests against Putin’s return to power a little more than a decade ago: the main actors in them belonged to the same class-generation.

Those born around the 2000s are now trying to find their political voice. They are part of a global revolutionary wave which started in the last decade with Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab revolutions, and the revolutions just before COVID. We may have already forgotten, but 2019 was a year of revolutions which COVID and, in the case of Ukraine, the war, abruptly put an end to. But the seeds are still very much there.

There is one important Ukrainian particularity here: most of the recent revolutionary attempts have failed whereas the Ukrainian one has succeeded. So why is the Ukrainian middle class different from the Belarusian or the Russian, whose members I sympathize with very much? They have all been raised under conditions of security and relative prosperity, but you also need to have a modicum of democracy to make revolutionary change happen. This combination was only the case in Ukraine.

In my final chapter I point to a very interesting parallel which may be coincidental to an extent. In Chile, you had something almost identical to Euromaidan in 2019, with the same sequence of events and the same kind of logic used by powerholders. You may be surprised to hear that the Russian community in Chile asked the president to take harsh measures against the protesters. The phenomenon is very much global.

I am afraid though that the revolutions of the 2010s are being replaced by the wars of the 2020s, with war in Ukraine and now also in Palestine. And nobody knows what will follow…

FL: You also state in the book that democracy wins when there is a strong sense of belonging to language, literature and history. In conclusion, could we ask you to elaborate on that remarkable statement?

YH: This observation was originally made by Anne Applebaum during the Euromaidan revolution, and I have borrowed the idea from her. She said that we have a very negative notion about nationalism and especially about Ukrainian nationalists, who are presumed to be antisemitic and violent. She says that is not true if you look at the Maidan. If you want to find a territory without nationalism, you have the Donbas: a very corrupt and violent territory with a very weak sense of belonging.

I would say there has to be some modicum of belonging because people need to have a narrative of what they are fighting for and why. I also believe that the Euromaidan revolution was successful because, unlike other revolutions, it had a national dimension – the protestors on the street were fighting not only against Yanukovich but against Putin as well. We know from our history that revolutions that make national demands have a better chance of succeeding than other revolutions.

At the same time, I try to problematize every concept including that of nationalism. What my book is calling for is a revision of the basic notions that were normalized in the 19th and 20th centuries. The society they were meant to describe does not exist anymore; we now have something quite new. This calls for critical revision and rethinking. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, the one duty we owe history is to rewrite it.

Now, you could write a global history of anything. So why is the global history of Ukraine so important? In my understanding, Ukraine is a kind of mirror in which the global can see itself with all its different problems and possible solutions. For that reason, global history is not just very useful, but it also makes a lot of sense.

Austrias ei ole ükski monument kirgi nii lõkkele puhunud kui Viini antisemiitliku linnapea Karl Luegeri mälestusmärk, mis paikneb temanimelisel väljakul linnas, mida ta kunagi valitses. Ehkki üleskutsed kuju eemaldada ja väljak ümber nimetada on siiani jäänud viljatuks, on vaidluste käigus sündinud terve küllusesarvetäis kunstilisi ideid selle kohta, kuidas probleemse poliitiku monumenti võõrandada ja kontekstualiseerida. Praegu on väljakul eksponeeritud ajutine installatsioon ja välja on kuulutatud konkurss kunstiteoste leidmiseks, mis monumendi püsivalt teise tähendusraami asetaksid.

Säärastest aruteludest hoolimata on Lääne-Euroopa ja Põhja-Ameerika monumendimaastik võrdlemisi sirgjooneline. Vaidlused koonduvad tüüpjuhul üksikute kujude ümber, mis asuvad silmapaistvana tähtsates avalikes ruumides. Enamik tänapäeva külastajaid tunneb nendega parimal juhul vaid nõrka sidet, ja kujutatud tegelaste saavutused näivad tagasivaates tihti tagasihoidlikena, eriti kui arvestada, et nad olid vaieldamatult kaasosalised kuritegudes.

Occupied Kherson: memorial from 2013 to Soviet soldiers who died in Afghanistan. The polymer sculpture has been repainted in different colours. Photo: Mykola Homanyuk, summer 2022

Siis on veel mälestusmärgid möödaniku sõdades langenud sõdureile, mis – mõne esileküündiva erandiga – paiknevad sõjaväekalmistutel ja meelitavad harva ligi juhuslikke külastajaid. Või siis on neile antud mälestatavate isikute nimeloendi kuju: paljudel maadel ei tähenda enamikus külades mälestusmärgile või kirikuseinale kantud nimed väljaspool erilisi mälestussündmusi isegi kohalikele elanikele palju enamat kui lihtsalt jälgi minevikust. Nende inimeste jaoks, kes kohapeal ei ela, ei ole neil tavaliselt mingit erilist tähtsust – ega ärata need täpselt samal põhjusel ka erilist pahameelt.

Sõjamälestusmärgid Venemaa okupeeritud Ukrainas

Kõikjal endises Nõukogude Liidus on lood hoopis teisiti. Palju aastakümneid nägi Nõukogude juhtkond mälestusmärkide püstitamises üht viisi elanikkonna kasvatamiseks. Postsovetlikes maades võib peaaegu igal sammul kohata mitte ainult suurejoonelisi memoriaale, vaid ka riigi- ja parteijuhtide, kirjanike ja kunstnike seeriaviisiliselt toodetud kujusid ja büste. Need monumendimaastikud on aga enamat kui lihtsalt propagandavõtted. Mitmel pool endises NSV Liidus on igal linnal ja külal oma mälestusmärk mõnele Teises maailmasõjas hukkunud miljoneist sõdureist ja mõnikord ka tsiviilohvritele. Märkimisväärne hulk neist rajati kõrgemalt tulnud käsu peale, kuid paljude püstitamise algatasid ellujäänud veteranid või langenute perekonnaliikmed. 20. sajandi teisel poolel kujunesid kõik need mälestusmärgid järk-järgult kogukonnaelu keskseteks paikadeks. Tihti neid laiendati, et hõlmata lisanduvaid monumente hilisematele sõdadele ja katastroofidele – Afganistani sõda, Tšornobõl, Tšetšeenia sõjad – ja need võimaldasid inimestel romantiseeritud, ent intensiivsel viisil samastuda oma kodulinna ja perekonna ajaloost pärit lugudega kannatustest ja vastupidamisest.

Ukraina monumendimaastik on eriti rikkalik ja keerukas. Teise maailmasõja ajal täielikult okupeeritud ning mõningate sõja kõige jõledamate hävitusoperatsioonide ohvriks langenud Ukrainast sai sõja järel see Nõukogude vabariik, kuhu rajati kõige rohkem mälestusmärke surnutele – protsess, mis ei lakanud hetkekski, vaid jätkus ka pärast Nõukogude impeeriumi lagunemist. Lisaks mälestusmärkidele mineviku sõdades langenutele on lugematuid monumente rajatud neile, kes langesid 2014. aastal alanud terrorivastases operatsioonis – nagu ukrainlased nimetavad sõjalist vastupanu Venemaa invasioonile.

Sellest ajast edasi, eriti pärast sõja eskaleerumist 2022. aasta veebruaris, on sõjamälestusmärke Ukrainas ikka ja jälle tuliselt vaidlustatud. Need on jäänud risttule alla, kuna mälestusmärgid rajati tihti strateegiliselt tähtsatesse kohtadesse, kus oli toimunud ränki lahinguid Saksa invasiooni ajal ning mis on praegu jälle strateegiliselt olulised. Mis aga veelgi tähtsam – mõlemad pooled näevad parajasti toimuvas konfliktis Teise maailmasõja taasesitust: Venemaa jaoks on see kordussõda väidetavate natside vastuM. Gabowitsch, Von „Faschisten“ und „Nazis“. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 2022, kd 67, nr 5., samas kui Ukrainale on see isamaasõda võõrvõimu agressiooni, okupatsiooni ning massimõrvade vastu – mis annab monumentidele määratu suure sümboolse tähenduse.

Otsekohe pärast täiemõõdulise invasiooni algust võtsin ühendust oma ukraina kolleegi Mõkola Homanjukiga Hersoni Riiklikust Ülikoolist. Kui organiseerisime okupeeritud linnas asuva ülikooli tudengitele ja töötajatele Zoomi loengutega akadeemilist õhusilda, Академічний міст ХДУ – 2022. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuL1dq6vVjh2ElpsxEE1jV2dXr3ZXdJoS hakkasime vahetama tähelepanekuid selle üle, mis juhtub äsja Venemaa okupatsiooni alla langenud Ukraina piirkondades Vt T. Zhurzhenko, Terror, Collaboration and Resistance Russian Rule in the Newly Occupied Territories of Ukraine. Eurozine, 17.01.2023. Eesti k-s: T. Žurženko, Terror, kollaboratsioon ja vastupanu. Tlk. M. V. Vikerkaar, 2023, nr 4/5. sõjamälestusmärkidega. Meid jahmatas, kui tähtsad olid okupantide jaoks mälestusmärgid, eriti sõjamälestusmärgid. Ühelt poolt kasutasid nad neid taustana võidupiltide tegemiseks. Teiselt poolt lavastasid nad oma propagandavideotes monumentide hooldamist, tõestamaks, et aastatepikku väidetavalt hooletusse jäetud mälestust hiilgavast minevikust osatakse nüüd jälle austada.

Me otsustasime kammida süstemaatiliselt läbi online-propagandakanalid ja muu meedia, et leida allikaid monumentide niisuguse ja muu kohtlemise kohta igas Ukraina värskelt okupeeritud piirkonnas. Me ei piirdunud online-allikatega: Mõkola jäi oma kodulinna ja dokumenteeris kangelaslikult nii vanade kui ka uute monumentide käekäiku isegi ajal, kui mõned Hersoni elanikud olid juba kinni võetud või „kadunud“ lihtsalt sellepärast, et pistelise kontrolli käigus oli nende nutitelefonidest leitud kahtlasi andmeid.

Sel teel kogusime rikkalikult allikaid, mis heidavad valgust mitmesugustele viisidele, kuidas sõda ja okupatsioon võivad monumente mõjutada. Raamatus, mida me parajasti kirjutame, analüüsime lugematuid juhtumeid, mis osutavad ülimalt mitmekesiste monumentide ja memoriaalide kahanematule tähtsusele nii okupantide kui ka vastupanuvõitlejate jaoks.

Kui mõned monumendid – sealhulgas holokaustimemoriaalid Kiievis ja Harkivis – langesid juhusliku kahjustuse ohvriks, siis teised hävitas Vene agressor meelega. Erilise hoolega otsisid nad välja mälestusmärke ja -tahvleid, millega austati oma maa kaitsel pärast 2014. aastat langenud ukrainlasi, aga ka noid, millel oli kujutatud kolmhargi-taolisi rahvuslikke sümboleid kui meenutust minevikus Venemaa vastu peetud sõdadest. Avalike asutuste, sealhulgas koolide direktorid on tihti lasknud ettevaatuse mõttes katta mälestustahvlid musta fooliumiga, et need kuni vabastamiseni avalikkuse silma alt eemal oleksid.

Kui need memoriaalid, mis mälestavad ukrainlaste vastupanu Venemaale, on okupante selgesti raevu ajanud, siis teised on täielikust hävitamisest pääsenud. Näiteks mälestusmärgid ametikohustuste täitmisel surma saanud Ukraina politseinikele jäeti suures osas puutumata, ehkki mõned mälestatavad politseinikud olid hukkunud vabatahtlikena võitluses Venemaa vastu. Improviseeritud mälestusm

ärgid Venemaa täiemõõdulise sissetungi esimestel päevadel hukkunud Ukraina Territoriaalkaitseväe – riigi reservsõjaväe – liikmetele pidasid Hersonis vastu mitu okupatsioonikuud. Kui enamik Ukraina armee sümboleid mõjub okupantidele nagu punane rätik härjale, siis mõningail juhtudel paistsid nad olevat valmis võtma „tsiviilsemate“ üksuste liikmeid kui süütuid sõjaohvreid. Ukraina politsei, mille ridades langenute nimekiri ulatub tagasi Nõukogude perioodi, võib isegi äratada midagi korporatiivse solidaarsustunde taolist Vene rahvuskaardi seas, mille üksusi rakendatakse rindejoone taha jäänud okupeeritud aladel korrapidamiseks.

Siiski oleks ekslik kujutleda, nagu oleksid okupandid järginud mingit ikonoklasmi- või monumentide (re)konstrueerimise sidusat programmi. Otse vastupidi, nad on monumentidele lähenenud olenevalt olukorrast ning eri paikades erinevalt. Teatavaid peateedest kaugel asuvaid ja seetõttu strateegiliselt tähtsusetuid külasid on sissetungijad suuresti ignoreerinud. Mõningates külades on Ukraina sümbolid endiselt avalikus ruumis nähtaval, ehkki rangelt võttes asuvad need külad Venema okupeeritud territooriumil. Samas, ehkki Teise maailmasõja memoriaale koheldakse tavaliselt aupaklikult ja säästetakse hävitamisest, on Vene sõjaväelased mõnel puhul nähtavasti meelega kahjustanud sääraste memoriaalide mõningaid osi lihtsalt sellepärast, et neil on ukrainakeelsed kirjad.

Üldiselt siiski on okupandid kaldunud kasutama „Suurt Isamaasõda“ mälestavaid monumente oma sissetungi õigustamiseks. Vene propagandatekstides ja -videotes korratakse pidevalt väidet, et need monumendid olla Euromaidanile järgnenud kaheksa või isegi kõigi Ukraina iseseisvumisest möödunud kolme-kümne aasta jooksul olnud lagunema jäetud. Nüüd olevat Venemaa „naasnud“, kuulutavad nad, et ajalooline õiglus taas jalule seada ja nagu kord ja kohus austada kangelaslike esivanemate mälestust, kes alistasid Saksamaa. Ometi ei ole nõukogudeaegseid sõjamälestusmärke Ukrainas sugugi kehvemini hooldatud kui Venemaal, kusjuures isegi uusi on lisatud, näiteks paikadesse, kuhu on ümber maetud Teise maailmasõja sõdurite hiljuti leitud säilmeid.

Seetõttu otsib Vene propaganda abi tavatutest vahenditest, et müüt sõjalisest erioperatsioonist monumendipäästmise eesmärgil usutavam paistaks. Näiteks on selleks volitatud organid süüdanud paljudes sõjamemoriaalides igavese tule – sealhulgas isegi niisugustes, kus tuli algse kavandi osa ei olnudki. Värviga sekkumine on samuti saanud osaks sõjamälestusmärkide tagasivõtmisest. Maakohtade lihtsate betoonist või kipsist kujude puhul on monokroomse (tihti hõbedast tooni) värviga katmine olnud ammust ajast viis kaitsta monumente ilmastiku eest, mida tavaliselt tehakse ettevalmistusena võidupühaks või mõneks muuks mälestustseremooniaks. Et Ukrainas kipuvad sõjamälestusmärgid olema heas seisukorras, valivad okupandid tihti iseäranis karjuvaid ja kirevaid värvilahendusi, et keegi ei saaks kahelda, kui kangesti nad on pühendunud memoriaalide renoveerimisele. Individuaalsete elementide esiletõstmiseks kasutatakse eri värve: musta sõdurisaabaste, kuldset ordenite, punast viisnurkade jaoks. Sellest kriiskavast dekoreerimiskirest ei pääse isegi pronkskujud.

Selline värvikasutus ei ole sugugi venelaste uuendus. Lõuna-Ukraina maakohtades on kohalikud elanikud „oma“ sõjamälestusmärke aastaid kaunistanud viisil, mis tuletab meelde Kreeka ja Rooma skulptuuride polükroomsust. Н. Гоманюк, Памятник неизвестному богу. Шоиздат, 31.05.2020. https://shoizdat.com/pamyatnik-neizvestnomu-bogu/#desctop_menu Nõukogude ajal allus inimeste interaktsioon oma monumentidega karmimatele reeglitele, ent autoritaarse süsteemi langemine päästis valla kohaliku loomepalangu. Seda tava üle lüües ja esitades seda aupakliku mälestamise juurde naasmisena pärast aastaid kestnud hooletussejätmist, järgivad Vene okupandid ajaproovi läbi teinud nõukogude traditsiooni. Teise maailmasõja lõpust alates on võimud alati hoidnud silmad lahti, leidmaks kohapeal väljakujunenud mälestamisvorme. Need vormid, mis elanikkonnale meeldisid, võeti korrapäraselt üle ja neid levitati laiemalt riigiaparaadi abiga, surudes samal ajal hoolega maha igasugust õõnestuslikku potentsiaali, mida need tavad võisid kanda.

Okupandid on kasutanud monumente selleks, et rakendada deukrainiseerimise ja venestamise poliitikat. Nad on mitmel moel sundinud kohalikke osalema Ukraina monumentide hävitamises ja nõukogude memoriaalide eest hoolitsemises. Sõjavangide osalemist niisugustes aktsioonides esitab Vene propaganda karistuse või ümberkasvatamise ühe vormina.

Keset jätkuvat sõda on Vene okupatsioonivalitsused võtnud aega suure hulga uute monumentide kavandamiseks, ehitamiseks ja püstitamiseks, millest mõned peavad asendama hävitatud monumente Ukraina sõduritele. Need värsked Vene võimu sümbolid võivad olla väga erinevad, väikestest büstidest kuni luksuslike pronkskujudeni. Peaaegu täielikult maatasa tehtud Mariupoli linna on püstitatud plastikkuju vanaldasest naisest, kes oli Harkivi lähedal tervitanud Vene sõdureid Nõukogude lipuga, aga ka keskaegse vürsti Aleksander Nevski toretsev ratsamonument. Mitmel puhul on uuesti püstitatud Lenini kujusid, mis varem Ukraina „Lenini-langetuse“ käigus avalikust ruumist ära koristati – üks mälupoliitika iroonilisemaid hetki, sest oma invasiooni-eelses kõnes oli Vladimir Putin pannud just Leninile süüks Venemaast sõltumatu Ukraina riigi olemasolu.

Lõpuks on Venemaa omandinõue Ukraina okupeeritud osades asuvatele monumentidele toonud kaasa ka otseseid vargusi, kui venelased mõnelt territooriumilt pidid taganema. Kõigest neli nädalat pärast seda, kui Herson oli 2022. aasta lõpus Venemaa osaks kuulutatud, võtsid taganevad okupandid endaga kaasa 18. sajandi Vene väejuhtide Aleksandr Suvorovi ja Fjodor Ušakovi monumendid ning kaevasid hauast välja vürst Grigori Potjomkini säilmed. Nende kõvera kiskjaloogika järgi olid nood objektid nüüd osa Venemaa kultuuripärandist, mida tuli Ukraina eest kaitsta.

Ukraina uus ikonoklasm

See jõhker monumendipoliitika, nagu mõistagi kogu invasioon ise, on omakorda vallandanud Ukraina okupeerimata osades uue ikonoklasmilaine. Nõukogudeaegsete riigi- ja parteijuhtide monumendid olid avalikust ruumist eemaldatud juba pärast 2014. aasta Väärikuse revolutsiooni. Pärast 2022. aasta 24. veebruari on eemaldamiseks valitud veel teisigi nii Tsaari-Venemaa kui ka Nõukogude perioodist pärit monumente, mis olid omal ajal püstitatud Venemaa võimu ja tema kultuuri kinnistamiseks: monumente Ukraina „taasühendamisele“ Venemaaga 17. sajandil, mälestusmärke Aleksandr Puškinile, Maksim Gorkile ja teistele kirjanikele, kelle laialdast kohalolekut tõlgendatakse nüüd Venemaa kuulutatud kultuurilise üleoleku sümbolitena. Ka sõjamälestusmärgid pole enam pildirüüste eest kaitstud: harilikult on sihtmärkideks need monumendid, mis ei ülista mitte tavalisi Punaarmee sõdureid, vaid Nõukogude sõjaväevõimu, ent mitmel pool on eemaldatud ka „vabastajatele-sõduritele“ pühendatud mälestusmärgid. Enamikul juhtudest on vastavad otsused vastu võtnud demokraatlikult valitud linnavolikogud, ent on olnud ka juhtumeid, kus aktivistid on monumendid maha võtnud omal algatusel, täpselt nagu see toimus „Lenini-langetuse“ hakul – sealhulgas eemaldades ka sõltumatus Ukrainas püstitatud, ent nõukogudeaegseid tegelasi mälestavaid monumente, nagu Teise maailmasõja kuulsa väejuhi Georgi Žukovi rinnakuju. 2022. aasta oktoobris sai Mõkolajivi linn tunnistajaks ametikohustuste täitmisel langenud militsionääride mälestusmärgi ründajate ja kaitsjate kokkupõrkele. Need, kes soovisid seda monumenti eemaldada, nägid selles rõhuva ja ebaõiglase Nõukogude süsteemi sümbolit. Nood, kes taotlesid selle säilitamist, tõid esile, et ehkki püstitatud Nõukogude ajal, oli see rajatud rohujuuretasandi rahakogumiskampaania toel. Lõpuks purustasid monumendivastased selle öö katte all, jäämata ootama ametlikku otsust.

Occupied Kherson: the Ukrainian trident and portraits of those who lost their lives in Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation against the Russian invasion have been removed from a memorial and replaced with portraits of Second World War heroes. On the flagpole next to it, the Soviet Victory Banner has been raised instead of the Ukrainian flag. Photo: Mykola Homanyuk, summer 2022

Kui aktivistid teostavad muutusi ilma eelneva aruteluta, tõuseb küsimus, kas nende pildirüüstel on ikka rahva toetus – või kas see üldse vajab niisugust tuge, et legitiimne olla. 2022. aasta novembris viis Mõkola Homanjuk koos kolleegidega Harkivisse jäänud ja linnast lahkunud elanike seas läbi esindusliku küsitluse, М. Гоманюк, І. Даниленко, Символічний простір міста: візія харків’ян. Результати соціологічного дослідження. Харкiвська соцiологiчна мережа. http://soc.kh.ua/doslidzhennya/strong-symvolichnyj-prostir-mista-viziya-harkiv-yan-strongmis puudutas nende suhtumist tänavate ümbernimetamisse ja monumentide eemaldamisse. Uurimuse tulemused on huvitavad oma komplekssuses.

Enamik küsitletuid pooldab seda, et protsessi kaasataks võimalikult palju elanikke, ent vaid vähesed on valmis ise tegema enamat kui online-küsitlustes hääletama. Tugev toetus on sellele, et eemaldataks kaardilt vene ja valgevene toponüümid, osutused nõukogude ideoloogiale ja Vene/Nõukogude sõjaväejuhtidele. Kummatigi pooldavad enam kui pooled küsitletutest Vene/Nõukogude kultuuritegelaste või teadlaste järgi nimetatud tänavate muutmata jätmist, eriti kui küsiti konkreetsete nimede kohta (nt 79% tahtis jätta muutmata kosmonaut Juri Gagarini järgi nimetatud tänava nime). Samamoodi kiitis enamik heaks marssal Žukovi monumendi eemaldamise, kuid suur hulk eelistas alles jätta Puškini monumendi.

Detsentreerivad vaated monumentidele

Venemaa jõhker invasioon on otsene rünnak mitte ainult ukraina rahva, vaid ka tema kultuuri vastu – kultuurilise diversiteedi, paljuse ja hübriidsuse vastu, mis teeb selle maa nii ainulaadseks. Agressorriik kasutab nii terrorit kui ka inimeste, raamatute ja monumentide hävitamist, et asendada argise ja mälestamiskultuuri keerukust ja paindlikkust okupeeritud aladel mingisuguse postmodernse versiooniga Vene/Nõukogude ühetaolisusest ning ärgitades Ukrainat seeläbi rookima omakorda enda maastikult välja neid sümboleid, mida võidaks tajuda venelike või nõukogulikena.

Kuidas me niisugustes tingimustes saame üldse monumentide üle arutleda, eriti nonde üle, mis ühel või teisel viisil tekitavad seoseid agressorriigiga, isegi kui enamiku neist ehitasid tegelikult ukrainlased?

Ma tahaksin kinni haarata mõttest, mille ühel hiljutisel diskussioonilDecoloniality in Ukraine: Is There Still a Place for a „Soviet Soldier“ in Historic Memory? Online Panel Discussion, 01.12.2022. Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden. https://www.skd.museum/programm/decoloniality-in-ukraine/ nõukogude monumentidest Ukrainas käis välja ukraina kunstnik, fotograaf ja kirjanik Jevhenija Bjelorussets. Sestpeale kui sõda 2014. aastal algas, on Bjelorussets väsimatult kaitsnud iga hinna eest oma koju jääda soovivaid Donbassi inimesi selle eest, et neid vahet tegemata ei demoniseeritaks kollaborantidena. Paljud neist inimestest tunnevad juba Nõukogude ajast saadik sidet oma piirkonna tööstusliku pärandiga, sealhulgas oma monumentidest kubisevate linnamaastikega. Nende silmis ei ole see pärand ja need monumendid mitte pelgad nõukogude ebaõigluse sümbolid, vaid väljendavad nende enda elutöö saavutusi. Et niisugustes kohtades asuvate monumentide mitmetähenduslikkust õiglaselt hinnata – mõnedele on need rõhumise märgid, teistele koduse keskkonna elemendid –, on Bjelorussets pakkunud välja termini „detsentreerimine“. See kognitiivpsühholoog Jean Piaget’ arendatud mõiste tähistab tüüpjuhul hilises lapsepõlves välja kujunevat võimet vaagida mingi objekti mitut eri mõõdet või olukorra mitut eri tahku ühekorraga.

Nii lihtsalt kui see ka kõlaks, võib selline perspektiivinihe osutuda monumentide üle arutlemisel viljakaks – eriti, aga mitte eksklusiivselt, postsovetlikus regioonis. Tänapäeval ässitavad niisugused arutlused tavaliselt kaks vastasleeri teineteise vastu üles (jättes kõrvale passiivse ehk ükskõikse enamuse). Üks pool näeb kõigest monumendi tumedat külge, teine ainult selle ülevat või tuttavlikku tahku. Ühe poole silmis on igasugune katse hoida alles mõni nõukogude panteoni heroiline figuur koloniaalse vaimse sättumuse ja venemeelse hoiaku väljendus. Teine pool tajub igasuguseid üleskutseid mõni monument maha tõmmata või eemaldada esivanemate saavutuste ja oma kodutunde tühistamisena.

Ilmset fakti, et üks ja sama monument võib tähendada rohkem kui vaid üht asja, mainitakse niisugustes diskussioonides üllatavalt harva. See on eriti ilmne nende monumentide puhul, millega mälestatakse Teist maailmasõda – olgu nendeks siis sõdurite kujud või pjedestaalile tõstetud tankid. Monument, mis võib äratada ühes inimeses tänutunnet natsionaalsotsialistliku võimu alt vabastamise eest, võib mõjuda ähvardavalt teisele. Asi ei pruugi isegi olla selles, mida see monument väidetavalt mälestab. Praeguses Ukrainas pole kuigi tõenäoline, et keegi tahaks püstitada mälestusmärgi bolševik Fjodor Sergejevile (paremini tuntud Artjomi nime all), kes suri aastal 1921 – Stalini lähedasele sõbrale, kes kasutas kodusõja ajal jõhkrat jõudu talupojamässude ja rahvuslike liikumiste mahasurumiseks. Sellegipoolest on võimalik hinnata ukraina loomingulisuse väljendusena märkimisväärset hiiglasuurt konstruktivistlikku Artjomi kuju, mille kavandas multitalentne kunstnik Ivan Kavaleridze ja mis püstitati Svjatohirskisse 1927. aastal.

Memorial to Red Army soldiers near Irpin’. The statue has been left untouched, but the plaques with Soviet-era inscriptions have been smashed. Photo: Mykola Homanyuk, February 2023

Kunstilistest aspektidest on siiski palju suurem kaal monumentide igapäevasel tuttavlikkusel. Kui mõni kuju kaob – kuju, mida elanikud on kasutanud suveöiste kohtumiste paigana, oma esimese suudluse taustana, vaid pooleldi märgatud linliku maamärgina –, siis oleksid kohalikud elanikud nagu kaotanud osa oma eluloost. See mängib eriti tähtsat rolli endistes sotsialismimaades, kus parke ja linna- või isegi külaväljakuid rajati mõne keskse monumendi ümber veelgi sagedamini kui enamikus Lääne-Euroopa riikides. See on üks põhjusi, miks monumentide eemaldamise oponentide hulka kuulub lisaks pensionäridele, arhitektuuriajaloolastele või mäluaktivistidele tihti ka noorte subkultuuride esindajaid: rulluisutajaid, tänavakunstnikke või -muusikuid, kes on hakanud hindama vastavat monumenti ja selle ümbrust kui omaenda väikest saart avaliku ruumi suures meres. Sõja ajal, nagu ütleb Jevhenija Bjelorussets, võib hästi tuntud objektide mahavõtmisel olla eriti traumaatiline mõju: keset igapäevast laastamistööd võib veel ühe materiaalse objekti tahtlik hävitamine mõjuda lausa kallalekippumisena osale inimese enda elust. Just see on põhjus, miks ülekaalukas enamik mainitud küsitluses osalenuid pooldas seda, et ikonoklasm ja muud selletaolised sümbolipoliitikad lükataks edasi sõjajärgsesse aega.

Teised – kelle tunded pole sugugi vähem mõistetavad – suunavad oma raevu talutud ülekohtu pärast freudistliku afektiivse kohavahetuse moel kujude pihta. Või siis väidavad nad, et paljalt Vene või Nõukogude monumentide kohalolek Ukraina avalikus ruumis pakub naabermaale jätkuvaid ettekäändeid agressiooniks, mida vaid kergelt maskeeritakse soovina kaitsta kahe maa ühist pärandit. Selles on oma tõetera. Ent Vene režiim on näidanud, et kujude eemaldamine võib vallutamist ja hävitamist õigustada sama hästi kui need monumendid, mis veel alles on. Tegelikult teeb just tuhandete nõukogudeaegsete monumentide jätkuv olemasolu Ukrainas Vene režiimile seletuste leidmise pea võimatuks ning sunnib talle peale propagandistlikud kondiväänamised.

Mõningate vanade monumentide eemaldamine ja uute rajamine on sõja ja poliitiliste vapustuste ajal arvatavasti paratamatu – vähemalt seni, kuni me usume, et avalikel monumentidel üldse mingi tähendus on. Selles protsessis on viha ja kibedustunne sama õigustatud kui lein ja igatsus uue alguse järele. Siiski oleks ekslik suunata viha ja kättemaksujanu oma kaaskodanike vastu või, mis veel hullem, häbimärgistada neid kui reetureid, kuna nad on kiindunud monumentidesse ja sellesse, mida need esindavad. Lõppude lõpuks ei ole asi mitte monumentides endis, vaid selles, mis laadi kogukond end nende kaudu väljendab. 

Austrijoje joks paminklas nesukėlė tiek aistrų, kiek Vienos mero Karlo Luegerio statula, nuo seno stovinti sostinėje, kurią jis kadaise valdė, jo vardu pavadintoje aikštėje. Nors raginimai demontuoti monumentą šiam antisemitui ir pervadinti aikštę iki šiol nebuvo išgirsti, diskusijos sužadino gausybę meninių idėjų, kaip kontekstualizuoti šį paminklą, atsiribojant nuo politiko pažiūrų. Aikštėje eksponuojama laikina instaliacija ir skelbiamas jau nebe pirmas konkursas šiam paminklui pertvarkyti. 

Nepaisant įvairių svarstymų, Vakarų Europos ir Šiaurės Amerikos paminklų peizažas yra palyginti ramus. Ginčai paprastai įsiplieskia dėl konkrečių statulų, matomų svarbiose viešosiose erdvėse. Dauguma dabartinių lankytojų geriausiu atveju jaučia tik silpną ryšį su paminklais, o žvelgiant atgal, pagrindinių veikėjų nuopelnai dažnai atrodo kuklūs, ypač kai įrodomas jų dalyvavimas nusikaltimuose.

Atskira grupė yra paminklai kariams, žuvusiems karuose. Išskyrus keletą ryškių išimčių, tie monumentai stovi karių kapinėse, į kurias retai užsuka atsitiktiniai lankytojai. Arba pateikiami tik atminimo sąrašai – daugelyje šalių ant paminklų ar bažnyčių sienų iškaltos pavardės yra praeities relikvijos, ten vietos gyventojai susirenka ypatingomis progomis, kad pagerbtų karių atminimą. Turistams ir šiaip atvykėliams jie paprastai nekelia nei didelio susidomėjimo, nei kokių nors nuoskaudų.

Paminklai Rusijos okupuotuose Ukrainos regionuose

Buvusioje Sovietų Sąjungoje viskas klostėsi visiškai kitaip. Ištisus dešimtmečius sovietų vadovybė paminklų statymą vertino kaip gyventojų politinio švietimo būdą. Posovietinėse šalyse kone kiekviename žingsnyje stūkso didingi memorialai, serijiniu būdu pagaminti partijos, vyriausybės lyderių biustai ar statulos, paminklai rašytojams, kitiems menininkams. Tačiau toks paminklinis peizažas nėra vien propagandos rekvizitas. Daugelyje buvusios SSRS vietų, miestuose ir kaimuose yra paminklai Antrojo pasaulinio karo kariams, o kartais ir civilių aukoms atminti. Nemažai jų buvo pastatyta, nurodžius iš viršaus, tačiau dalį inicijavo veteranai ar žuvusiųjų šeimos nariai. XX a. antrojoje pusėje šie paminklai pamažu virto svarbia bendruomenės atminties vieta. Jie dažnai plečiami, įtraukiant paminklus vėlesniems karams (Afganistane, Čečėnijoje), Černobylio katastrofai, leidžia susitapatinti su kančios ir atsparumo istorijomis.

Occupied Kherson: memorial from 2013 to Soviet soldiers who died in Afghanistan. The polymer sculpture has been repainted in different colours. Photo: Mykola Homanyuk, summer 2022

Ukrainos paminklų kraštovaizdis ypač turtingas ir sudėtingas. Antrojo pasaulinio karo metais šalis buvo visiškai okupuota ir paversta baisiausių žudynių vieta. Po karo sovietinėje Ukrainoje pridygo paminklų žuvusiesiems atminti, procesas nenutrūko net Sovietų imperijai iširus. Neseniai pastatyta nemažai atminimo ženklų žuvusiesiems per antiteroristinę operaciją – taip ukrainiečiai vadina karinį pasipriešinimą žaliesiems žmogėnams, kai Rusija pradėjo invaziją 2014 m.

Nuo tada, ypač karui įgavus platų mastą 2022 m. vasarį, dėl memorialų Ukrainoje vyksta įnirtingi ginčai. Paminklai patenka į kryžminę ugnį, nes dažnai buvo statomi strategiškai svarbiose vietose, kur vyko intensyvios kovos su vokiečiais per Antrąjį pasau