With Marine Le Pen comfortably out-polling her competitors, the prospect of a far-right president in France no longer seems far-fetched. Crucial to Le Pen’s chances in 2027 will be whether she can sat...

In search of traces of the Belarusian diaspora in the West after 1945, the poet Volha Hapeyeva considers how language and literature provide a sense of belonging away from home, helping to conserve an...

The controversial reopening of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, justified under the pretext of dialogue, legitimised the Russian state's weaponisation of culture – a practice rooted in Tsa...

Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996) was a pioneer of the ecology movement and a fierce critic of the tourism industry, which he argued came from an authentic desire to escape the city, but which brought w...

Even in the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, a deep-rooted moral paralysis prevents the Russian opposition from demanding justice for the crimes committed by the state both during Sov...

Against the backdrop of the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine and a historically low birth rate, the authorities in Russia are waging an unprecedented campaign against the right to choose to be a mother.

How do you write the history of a displaced society when sites of memory have been destroyed, libraries looted, and archives made inaccessible? Tracing the evolution of Palestinian historiography is t...

Though the development is uneven, the direction of travel is clear, as coalitions between conservative and far-right parties become the more viable option at both the national and European levels.

As a writer, Slavenka Drakulić sought to evoke the life of the single individual in a way that made empathy possible, writes her friend Marci Shore.

From late-90s punk to ‘Happyism’, the trajectory of former The Flowers front-man Wowkie Zhang exposes a dialectic typical of China’s mainstream: alternative impulses constantly surface, are monetised,...

After being forced to leave Croatia in 1992 following her criticism of the nationalist regime, the writer and feminist Slavenka Drakulić set out to explain her homeland to a western public. She will b...

After Orbán’s defeat, Andrej Babiš remains the only member of the Patriots for Europe group with real power. But the Czech leader appears unwilling to succeed Orbán as figurehead of European illiberal...

From Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin to Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin and André Gorz: the anarchist tradition understands ecology not as top-down conservation, but as practice of cohabitation.

For the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the essence of bullshit was not the intention to deceive but ‘indifference to how things really are’. But does that make bullshit worse than lies? Are we not all, ...

Beyond Beck’s risk society; manufacturing uncertainty; leftist survivalism; Dufourmantelle vs. Anders; love, risk and polyamory.

Since 2020’s ‘revolution with a female face’, Lukashenka has ramped up his neo-Soviet family policy while continuing to persecute women disobedient to his regime.

Despite a transatlantic exchange of far-right ideology, material interests are what bind the international of nationalists. And despite transatlantic patterns in far-right strategy, talk of a rightwin...

Why the rules-based order was never pure fiction; what Europe must do to remain non-aligned; lessons from Greenland; Jan-Werner Müller on Trump.

The vilification of Orbán in Europe became politically counter-productive in Hungary itself. Péter Magyar’s success is founded on a realistic appraisal of the concerns of Hungarian society instead of ...

Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz was defeated by a grassroots movement that faced down systematic intimidation in an extraordinary act of popular mobilization. The attempt to restart democracy in Hungary stands ...

Habermas’s insistence on negotiation with the Putin regime stemmed from a failure to comprehend the eastern European experience of totalitarianism. The argument that regime change is not a legitimate ...

Habermas understood that the possibility for German–Jewish dialogue after the Holocaust depends on commitment to universal law. But when the past demands silence about the present, that possibility is denied. On the contradictions in Habermas’s exemplary cosmopolitan project.

Hungary’s elections will be decisive for the future of the anti-EU pressure group MCC Brussels, the international arm of the Fidesz-associated Matthias Corvinus Collegium. How would an Orbán defeat im...

Stigmatized during socialism, LGTBQI+ people in Slovakia continued to face political and social adversity in the following decades. Two veteran activists reflect on the campaign for equal rights after...

Lesen Sie Artikel von Alexander Kluge in der Kulturzeitschrift MERKUR – Gegründet 1947 als Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken.

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Iran’s regional influence, already much weakened before the current war, has been dealt a fatal blow. While the country’s political future is uncertain, Israel has moved closer to becoming the centre ...

Change the directors, cut the funding, rewrite the narrative: from Washington to Warsaw, mnemonic warriors are deploying the same techniques to weaponize history. How museums have become key arenas in...

Quackery with a university logo: the failed attempt to introduce pseudoscience onto the curriculum of Georgia’s flagship technical university was a bizarre episode in a wider cultural war being waged ...

Recent statements by the presidents of FIFA, UEFA and the IOC indicate that the resolve to exclude Russia from international sport is crumbling. The justifications for this change of heart are disinge...

Lev Gudkov on the roots of fear in Russian society; translation as survival strategy in Soviet Kyiv; why the EU needs to get real on Belarus; what the Armenia–Iran relationship means for the South Cau...

Police urge the former prince’s protection officers to come forward with what they ‘saw or heard’

The anti-EU sentiment emerging from Central Europe today suggests that little remains of the ‘arch-Europeanism’ Milan Kundera once ascribed to the region. But was there something inherent to Kundera’s...

Looking at what we have learned not to see: on the secrets of communist infrastructure; museums and mnemonic warriors; folklore and the spirit of community.

A discussion with the historian Nancy L. Green on the historiography of migration from structuralism to intersectionality; the relevance of trajectories in an age of global movement; and walls, episte...