Climate grief
This article is part of the 17/2019 Eurozine review. Click here to subscribe to our reviews, and you also can subscribe to our newsletter and get the bi-weekly updates about latest publications and news on partner journals.
Vikerkaar localizes planetary ecological crisis;
Blätter doubts the promises of digital capitalism;
New Eastern Europe focuses on the Black Sea region;
Culture et Démocratie talks about gender and the cultural sector;
and Merkur interprets the latest canon controversy.
Vikerkaar
9/2019
(Estonia)
Vikerkaar localizes planetary ecological crisis
As millions of people around the world strike to demand action on climate change, Vikerkaar asks scientists, activists and artists: how did we get here, and how do we move forwards? The issue takes an Estonian perspective on the planetary ecological crisis, discussing changes in climate, politics, culture, arts and economy — all precipitated by the Anthropocene.
Among the forty and more contributions are discussions of the contamination of waterways by agricultural runoff, oil shale mining and pharmaceutical waste; the return of diseases such as malaria, thought to be long banished from northern Europe; the emergence of urban heat islands, against which Estonians are unprepared; and the catastrophic decline in ecological diversity, which mirrors trends recorded in France, Germany and the US.
Not content with simply recording the damage, the issue also contains visions for the future: How might renovating Soviet housing projects offer a new model for resource-light urban development? Could eastern Estonia be rethought as a tourist hotspot to replace its destructive reliance on oil shale? Could cities be redesigned to support ecological diversity? What if we reformed taxation and supply chain management so that outsourcing carbon emissions to the global South would become impossible?
Climate change and democracy: On what grounds could citizens be forced to accept the kind of massive collective action required to meet the challenge of global heating? Ethical philosopher Francesco Orsi argues that the answer is neither unprecedented nor undemocratic: ‘What the Anthropocene presents is not an intractable problem for democracy, but the more limited (though obviously difficult) issue of how uncompensated transfers of resources (i.e. sacrifices) for the sake of future generations of foreign citizens can be made acceptable to citizens.’
Climate grief: Nothing can be done, we are too late, civilization is doomed. The question is not ‘if’, but ‘when’. Anthropologist Aet Annist notes how climate fatalism is tied to global inequality — fearing the loss of one’s comfortable life presupposes that one has a comfortable life to start with. Crisis and fear produce radically different collective responses: a hope for individual survival over the bodies of others — or a demand for equality and justice across generations, both globally and within specific societies. The first will inevitably leave climate change itself in the background. A bad strategy: ‘not even extreme forms of inequality can guarantee the über-wealthy that their personal good life can continue’.
More articles from Vikerkaar in Eurozine; Vikerkaar’s website
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
10/2019
(Germany)
Blätter doubts the promises of digital capitalism
In Blätter, political scientist Birgit Mahnkopf refutes claims that automation will bring growth, employment and social peace. Digital capitalism, she argues, not only threatens job security in the North, but will also wreak havoc on the economies of the global South.
In Germany, where the manufacturing sector accounts for 80 per cent of all exports, lower costs are expected to increase foreign demand, thereby increasing jobs. But this line — which is shared by IG Metall, Germany’s largest union — fails to acknowledge both that unemployment will be exported, and that the quality of jobs at home will decline. The disappearance of a low-skills sector will not translate into higher wages for better qualified workers. Instead, writes Mahnkopf, a two-tier system is likely to appear in technology companies, where more and more staff are employed by external contractors on significantly lower pay than the diminishing number of permanent employees.
In the developing and emerging economies, meanwhile, the World Bank expects that two thirds of all jobs can be automized. These countries will import robots and other technologies, rather than producing them, thus increasing the potential for massive disruption to their societies.
Museums: A controversy has erupted over the definition of the museum. Until now, the International Council of Museums — counting 20,000 members from 138 countries — has defined the museum as ‘a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.’ The committee within the Council responsible for defining the museum has declared this definition to be ethically ‘void’ and inadequate to the present situation, and has called instead for one that endorses human rights, social justice and protection of the environment.
However, the new definition it proposes — which states that ‘museums are democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures’ — has been rejected by many museums as overtly prescriptive and potentially damaging to the interests of members, particularly where the independence of museums is threatened. Museologist Thomas Thiemeyer welcomes this debate but warns of defining the museum as an institution that ‘not only reflects but also defines what is right and wrong in society. The new text is provocative because it demands that museums hold the public to account and therefore expose themselves to attack.’
Brexit: To dismiss the British parliament as incompetent is not only a reflex of Germany’s ‘extreme centre’ but also fails to understand how the British parliamentary system actually works, writes constitutional lawyer Florian Meinel. Brexit, he explains, has placed the majoritarian principle under such strain that the current government may be encouraged to dispense with parliament altogether. Britain’s constitutional crisis might be only just beginning.
More articles from Blätter in Eurozine; Blätter’s website
New Eastern Europe
5/2019
(Poland)
New Eastern Europe focuses on the Black Sea region
Since the end of the Cold War, the Black Sea region has become a centre of geopolitical competition. Contributions to the latest issue of New Eastern Europe explore the growing interdependencies in the region and the role of wider international factors in its development.
Geopolitics: Political scientist Tomasz Stępniewski identifies three types of geopolitical actor in the Black Sea. First, there are the ‘littoral states’, including Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, as well as the ‘regional and external players’ Russia and Turkey. Second are the ‘affiliate states’, including Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, which provide an East-West ‘buffer zone’, and Greece, which controls access to the Black Sea straits. Finally, there are third parties attempting to shape the balance of power: these include the EU, for whom the Black Sea now acts as an ‘internal basin’, the US and NATO. The region’s stability depends, Stępniewski argues, on states’ cooperation with NATO and on the EU’s ‘architecture of security’, as well as on democratic reforms and relations between Russia and Turkey.
Germany and Ukraine: Historian Adam Balcer traces the ‘long and complicated history’ of Ukrainian-German relations. In the twelfth century, Germany and Ukraine were linked by the Silk Road, where trade was conducted by Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews migrating eastwards from the Holy Roman Empire. This pattern continued all the way up to the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when German settlers made up more than two per cent of Ukraine’s population, with German culture merging into Ukrainian society. Though Germany assumed Ukraine would become a client-state after World War One, it instead became a colony of the Third Reich, ‘a gem in the crown of the German global empire’. However, by equating the Soviet Union with Russia, post-war Germany tended to forget the ‘Ukrainianness’ of the victims of Nazism.
Politics and music: Social scientist Wojciech Siegień listens in on Russia’s independent music scene. This might appear polarized, with ‘government-sanctioned’ artists on one side, feeding audiences kitsch presented as sophisticated art; and independent, but largely apolitical artists on the other, combining hip-hop with electronic music. But in fact, the Kremlin controls both: the success of the ‘protest sphere’ depends on its ‘monopolization by authorities’. The result is ‘like a magical fairytale where white becomes black and the enemy turns into an ally’. The Kremlin, ‘wiser’ after post-Soviet ‘colour revolutions’, can turn propagandists into victims (and vice versa).
More articles from New Eastern Europe in Eurozine; New Eastern Europe’s website
Culture et Démocratie
6/2019
(Belgium)
Culture et Démocratie talks about gender and the cultural sector
Belgian journal Culture et Démocratie — a new Eurozine partner — examines gender disparity in the cultural sector and beyond. ‘Quick to present itself as virtuous,’ writes Sabine de Ville in her editorial, ‘the sector must recognize its shortcomings in this matter and others, and emphasize a move towards greater openness which, though certainly perceptible, is ill-defined and too slow.’ Contributions address feminism and the politics of gender representation within the cultural industries (film, art and publishing), as well as the broader impact of transnational protest movements involved in the fight for social justice.
Historical feminism: Veteran activist Nadine Plateau situates feminism in the cultural sector in the context of attempts since the 1970s to ‘combat processes of effacement inflicted upon minority groups’. Increasing the visibility of the cultural creations of women and minorities, and making the sector as a whole more transparent, provides an ‘opportunity to develop a way of thinking and practising dissonance within culture, of subverting the symbolic’.
Discrimination: The absence of official figures on gender discrimination in the cultural industries are another sign of processes of effacement, writes policy-maker Alexandra Adriaenssens. What little data there are show that ‘while the cultural sector has a strong female presence, women only occupy 30 per cent of decision-making roles on executive boards.’
Education: Semiotician Petra Van Brabant and comedian and author Bwanga Pilipili discuss the role of education in combatting gender discrimination and raising awareness of social justice issues, observing that the current system in Belgium ‘promotes competition, rivalry and jealousy’ and makes little effort to develop any deeper understanding of gender, race and class.
Resistance: Political theorist Nikita Dhawan criticizes global justice movements that extol the virtues of cosmopolitanism but fail to ‘seriously address the historical processes through which certain individuals are placed in a situation from which they can aspire to global solidarity and universal benevolence’. Instead of the ‘state-phobic rhetoric’ of western street politics and anti-capitalist protest movements, Dhawan calls for a ‘critical reworking of our understanding of resistance that counteracts tendencies to stabilize ‘the hierarchical relation between hegemonic and subaltern groups’.
More articles from Culture et Démocratie in Eurozine; Culture et Démocratie’s website
Merkur
9/2019
(Germany)
Merkur interprets the latest canon controversy
Controversy sparked by the recent publication in Die Zeit of a supposedly modern and international canon of art, literature and learning — too white, too male — prompts Hanna Engelmeier to reflect on what recurrent debates about ‘the canon’ are really about. The choice between subordinating aesthetic criteria to ‘engagement for (historical) justice for marginalized groups’ and ‘accepting an aesthetics that ignores such questions’ is ‘unattractive’. Not only that, the debate is tired. Like others before it, the latest controversy is a conflict between academic fields over claims to knowledge and institutional presence. And more prosaically: ‘the expression of generational change and probably of simple forgetfulness’.
Drawing on John Guillory’s 1993 work Cultural Capital, which made the case for ‘critique of canon-formation as critique of educational institutions’, Engelmeier argues that, instead of quarelling over the content of reading lists, we need to turn our attention to artistic and literary institutions. Here, women, non-whites and members of the lower classes are still underrepresented. The canon debate, Engelmeier writes, contributes less to our understanding of who ought to dictate what to read to whom, but to our understanding of current attitudes to racism, sexism and classism. ‘The “canon” is more the name of a debate over the status of these topics than a practical orientation in literary history.’
Literature: What does GDR literature have to say to today’s reader? Quite a lot, observes Matthias Rothe — though predominantly about failure. The novels of the 1950s and 1960s celebrated the humanity of industrial existence in the absence of the ‘new human being, freed from capitalist wage labour’. During the Honecker years, literature replaced the dichotomy between socialist progress versus those who would hinder it with a conflict between individual and society. Independence from socialist production could now be articulated, but only negatively — hence the frequency of symbolic deaths in the early work of Christa Wolf, Ulrich Plenzdorf and Volker Braun. Here, utopia remained tangible; critique immanent. Art was not ‘against the state or system, but for the whole’. Finally, in the 1980s, came the literature of disappointment. Writers like Wolfgang Hilbig and Gert Neumann, argues Rothe, expressed the scandal that nothing remained of socialist labour but the limited individual and an impoverished literary language.
Populism: Liberal critiques of populism omit a crucial element, writes Georg Simmerl: the liberal affinity with the resurgent far-right. This may be a peculiarity of Germany, where the nationalism and anti-socialism of the AfD has its immediate roots in the country’s ‘ordoliberal’ reaction to the eurocrisis — and more distantly in the ‘liberal anti-liberalism’ of post-war conservative economists, which was itself a reaction to Germany’s economic crisis during the Weimar Republic.
