This 12 months marks the journal’s twenty fifth anniversary and our community of cultural journals celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the primary European Assembly of Cultural Journals, which came about in Switzerland in 1983.
Connecting editors and writers on the opposite aspect of the Iron Curtain was an not possible activity on the time. The founders succeeded on this, and immediately our community contains greater than 100 journals, magazines and associates. However now we’re confronted with new divisions in and round Europe. But we preserve that cultural publications are essential to understanding and interesting responsibly with every period – particularly in an period of chaos and fast change.
Eurozine has bounced again from the brink quite a few instances – our monetary state of affairs in 2022 was the bottom level but. After the hardships of final 12 months, we have constructed again up with a vengeance this 12 months and even launched new ventures: Eurozine is likely one of the co-founders of the model new Show Europe platform and we have simply launched our new weekly speak present. Extra about this may be discovered beneath.
To be truthful, Eurozine’s operations are nonetheless removed from steady: the crew has been thinned out with an enormous bundle of labor, and our funding shouldn’t be secured past mid-2024. Nevertheless, our readers are rising in quantity, which is at all times an issue. a terrific reassurance that our work is related and appreciated. When you can, please think about supporting Eurozine so we are able to maintain the community going and the journal unbiased and free.
And now let’s check out the preferred articles of 2023!
#10
Numerous alarming warmth data have been damaged this 12 months, throughout all seasons and between hemispheres. World warming is simple, even when common discourse nonetheless takes time to totally perceive it. Celia Fernández’s article got here to Eurozine from our contributor, the Inexperienced European Journal, and it’s related to each reader, no matter season she or he is at the moment having fun with.
#9
Jan Sowa seems to be at modernity nearing the top of its path, and considers what comes subsequent:
As capitalism teeters getting ready to destroying our whole ecosystem and splintering liberal modernity, we should look past capitalism to another trendy imaginative and prescient.
It is not a very good time for nostalgia and melancholy, whether or not it is liberal or no matter. If we fail to establish this new course, the top of historical past we ushered in thirty years in the past might be an ominous foreshadowing of the top of the world, at the least of the world as we all know it.
#8
Farmers are the keepers of custom, stewards of the land and the representatives of small companies – in our political creativeness. In actuality, it is a new career, more and more dominated by massive landowners, and the politicians who need their vote are prepared to use stereotypes to serve the pursuits of huge enterprise in opposition to ecology and labor:
European agriculture is in a tough state of affairs. Regardless of agriculture being the EU’s largest price range merchandise, spending tens of billions in public cash every year, the bloc has misplaced three million farmers previously decade. That is a proportion of 800 farmers leaving the career day-after-day. What’s much more worrying is that they aren’t being changed: the common age of a European farmer is now 57 years previous. These statistics date from the last decade from 2010 to 2020, earlier than the warfare between two agricultural superpowers on the sting of Europe put additional strain on meals producers. , which have since needed to take care of quickly rising costs of uncooked supplies equivalent to feed, fertilizers and pesticides.
Your favourite sequence in 2023
What is going to Europe appear to be after ‘the warfare’? Nicely, that is an not possible query. By the top of 2023, seven main armed conflicts are underway, together with in Gaza, Sudan and Ethiopia. Of all these, Russia’s aggression in opposition to Ukraine is the one that almost all straight shapes the European Union. The sequence was a global hit, with dozens of translations and republications, and the person articles are among the many most learn essays in Eurozine this 12 months. Nevertheless not possible it’s to foretell the ‘finish of the warfare’, you will need to sketch views. And that is precisely what our Classes from warfare sequence did.
This debate sequence was put collectively by two of Eurozine’s co-founders, Klaus Nellen and Carl Henrik Fredriksson, who needed to distinction Europe’s response with the opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Vasyl Cherepayn refuses to normalize the warfare, nor does he need to give in to daydreams about reconstruction after the warfare.
…panic would in actual fact be the suitable response to Russia’s warfare crimes…The worldwide neighborhood appears to be step by step accepting the atrocities as inevitable, a response that may beforehand have been completely unthinkable. Panic may additionally be a simpler political response, doubtlessly resulting in much-needed worldwide motion…
However Europe nonetheless prefers to speak about genocide when it comes to historic politics, reminiscence tradition and ‘coming to phrases with the previous’, typically avoiding making use of the time period to the current for worry of the ‘relativization ‘ of it.
As an alliance created by crises and devastation, the European Union has the chance to show itself within the face of a disillusioned polity. However a fast answer will not get you there, argues Natalie Tocci.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie argue that if Europe desires to keep up political momentum, its relationship with the World South should basically change.
The TOP 3
Belief is the widespread thread that connects our three most learn articles from 2023.
#3
Katarzyna Boni’s article was shortlisted for the European Press Prize, and for good purpose: it begins by introducing a private relationship with wildlife, and from there unfolds a journey to embrace our particular person and cultural tasks to ecology to acknowledge and rethink.
Now we have change into spectators. The extra we all know, the additional we change into from animals and animality. We do not have to make eye contact with them anymore. Berger argues that the beast’s gaze has change into a trigger for concern and even disgust in Western civilization. Lastly, A smart man has been bred, not simply any sort of fauna. Wanting a wild animal within the eye prompts a type of species-related narcissism, proving how far we have come.
#2
James Dodd writes about why warfare appears more and more inevitable, in a spiral of self-deception. De-escalation is at all times potential, he argues.
Escalation is a elementary function of any warfare, but it surely shouldn’t be interpreted as a figuring out issue that rigidly establishes a causal chain of occasions. Violence has no intrinsic logic, it dictates no necessity; which means that any escalation of violence, as Carl von Clausewitz argued, is basically a political difficulty. We combat wars for political causes, and we remedy them solely by way of political means.
Wars change into extra protracted and damaging, mindless and debilitating, because the political state of affairs turns into extra disturbed – stifling potential alternate options to easily prolonging the violence, and thus giving warfare the misleading air of necessity.
#1
Our newest enterprise, the brand new speak present Normal Time, featured this dialog with two implausible journalists and a returning reader favourite of our authors. On this dialog we focus on how journalism is altering form; how readers immediately have a tendency to connect themselves to particular person authors moderately than the media; and whether or not any of the audio system need their kids to pursue media as a profession. (No moderately not.)
Mercy Abang is a Nigerian journalist, one of the vital internationally appointed journalists from Africa. She is the editor-in-chief of Unbiased the Information, based mostly in Berlin, and curator of a platform that goals to appropriate the imbalance of standard media reporting. Lina Chawaf runs Radio Rozana from Gaziantep, Turkey, broadcasting in Arabic to a Syrian viewers, each in Syriac and within the diaspora.
Social psychologist Péter Krekó is a returning champion of Eurozine’s prime lists – he was considered one of our most learn contributors in 2022 and once more in 2021. This time he shares the successful streak with main colleagues – and with our deeply enchanted editor-in-chief, who beams with pleasure as a result of she meets authors.
A brand new enterprise
Eurozine is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this 12 months and some weeks in the past we launched this weekly TV program, as a part of a brand new platform that we’re constructing along with greater than 15 worldwide companions: Show Europe. That is an try to scale up Eurozine’s work spanning three a long time, by way of a brand new platform providing articles, movies and audio content material from dozens of media companions and in additional than 15 languages. Try the platform and observe the speak present, the place we’ll current authors and editors from Eurozine, in addition to media personalities from the Show Europe platform and from throughout the continent.
Our New 12 months’s episode is already out: an unusually light-hearted episode about offensive jokes and who can inform them.
By way of thick and skinny
Admittedly, Eurozine has been fighting monetary issues since 2021. Regardless of all of the improvements, we’re nonetheless removed from steady, as a result of cultural funding is reducing and our price range won’t be secured after mid-2024. For the reason that pandemic lockdowns, we have now gritted our tooth and continued a pressured march to safe and additional develop Eurozine. The publishing trade is in growing turmoil and high quality is likely one of the much less essential concerns for main financiers. That is all of the extra purpose for us to worth our audiences – thanks for sticking with us in 2023 and we hope to have you ever within the new 12 months.
When you can afford it, please help us on Patreon, from as little as €3 a month, or no matter you possibly can spare to maintain Eurozine free and unbiased.
A pleasant new calendar for all of you!