‘Out of concern for Germany’ read the headline of Blätter, the Journal for German and International Politics (Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik), that was first published on 25th November 1956. Today it might be: ‘Out of concern for democracy’ – in Europe and beyond. All across Europe the rise of right-wing populism is evident. The post-war development of the Western European model of democracy consisting of key principles such as political parties, free market economy, representative government, and civic participation seems to have failed. How can we save democracy? This is just one of the big questions that ‘Blätter’ intends to look at in the future.
Blätter is the most widely read political journal in the German-speaking area. The journal self-publishes a monthly issue, which is independent from companies, churches, interest groups, and political parties. In times of increasing corporate control of the media, it provides lively and critical media coverage. It considers itself a forum for current political discussion. Within the 128 pages, Blätter authors comment on and analyse the political events in Germany and abroad – retaining a critical perspective on the technocratic and neoliberal mainstream. The more than 13.000 subscribers guarantee its editorial and financial independence. The total print run is 13.500 copies.
Blätter aims to bring together academia and political intervention. On the one hand, it is focused on contributions with arguments backed up by academic standard citations, on the other hand, every text is held to journalistic standards of good readability and comprehensibility.
The editorial office consists of the six editors Anne Britt Arps, Thomas Greven, Daniel Leisegang, Albrecht von Lucke, Annett Mängel and Steffen Vogel. They are supported by a circle of publishers that share Blätter’s belief in editorial standards and emancipatory analysis of political debates. Among the 22 publishers are Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Saskia Sassen, Katajun Amirpur, Peter Bofinger, Micha Brumlik, Rudolf Hickel, Claus Leggewie, Jens Reich, Friedrich Schorlemmer and Hans-Jürgen Urban.
This stable publishing circle guarantees that Blätter remains what it has been for almost 65 years: ‘an island of reason within a sea of nonsense’ (Karl Barth).
The following articles were translated and published in cooperation with Eurozine, a network of European cultural journals.
Sometimes, a shift in the political landscape of an entire nation can be suddenly rendered visible by a fleeting moment, by a seemingly incidental comment. Moments such as the end of the address made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the House of Commons last month, beamed into the chamber via video link, where he thanked the PM personally for Britain’s early military aid to Ukraine.
There is no denying that the EU–Russia relationship is at its nadir. Early last year, Moscow threatened to sever all ties with the European bloc, while its foreign minister deemed it proper to underscore his country’s resolve by quoting the Latin adage Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you want peace, prepare for war. With the current escalation at the Ukrainian border, that threat now appears to have been more serious than many in Europe would have liked to believe.
The scenes currently coming out of Britain are extraordinary. The world is not used to seeing such things in Europe, and certainly not in the prosperous UK: angry motorists fighting over petrol, empty shelves in supermarkets, panic buying and hoarding. What’s more, there seems to be no end in sight.
Austria has had its fair share of scandals, but this was a first: on 9 October, chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced his resignation. But it was not and is not a proper resignation, rather a temporary withdrawal – from the chancellery to parliament. As the party put it, Kurz was merely ‘stepping to one side’.
Picture the following image: four young people sitting on a lawn, laughing as they share a pizza. Above, the words: ‘Together we want to make every person’s life a little more valuable every day’. This is not an ad for a convenience food start-up, but how West German Broadcasting (Westdeutsche Rundfunk, WDR) presents its ‘channel strategy’ for live and digital formats.
There have been a number of historic elections in post-war Germany, though few deserve the epithet better than the latest one. The results signal the resurrection of the SPD, something that until very recently seemed highly unlikely. But they also stand for a missed chance for the Greens to gain power and shape politics. More momentous still is the collapse of the CDU/CSU as the last intact People’s Party; in this respect the elections mark the end of the Merkel Republic, in which everything revolved around the Union as centre of power.
On 23 May, the Australian historian A. Dirk Moses published a provocative text entitled ‘The German Catechism’ on the Swiss web journal Geschichte der Gegenwart. According to Moses, the catechism consists of five articles of faith:
It is truly dizzying to live in the UK these days, if you have a good memory. Life under Boris Johnson’s government means that whatever they tell you today, it will all have changed by tomorrow. Whatever you remember, it never happened like that. What Johnson did was not as it seemed, or it was someone else’s fault. Johnson came to power thanks to lies, half-truths and sleights of hand. Back in 2019, his friends in the Conservative Party and his critics who cared about the future of the United Kingdom all hoped that he would not be able to continue in that vein as Prime Minister.
When the 16th European Football Championship takes place between 11 June and 11 July, the European football association UEFA will mawkishly celebrate its continent-spanning tournament as a symbol of international understanding. The competition will be hailed everywhere for its diversity and human rights. However, this is only an ostentatious, superficial part of the picture. Behind the glittering facade of the multicultural football industry, the most popular sport in the world also acts as a handy instrument of power. Football provides an almost perfect showcase for autocrats, nationalists and separatists.
Micha Brumlik: There have been considerable developments in the situation in the Middle East. Israel has moved closer to its former adversaries in the region, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This would have been all but inconceivable only a few years ago, and it has brought with it a shift in the balance of power in the region. And on taking office Joe Biden reaffirmed his commitment to the two-state solution, in contrast to his predecessor Donald Trump.
After last year’s Islamist terror acts in France and Austria, the same old script could be observed being played out yet again. On the one side, there were those who accused Islam of being an intrinsically violent religion; on the other, those who argued that Islamist violence has nothing to do with the Muslim faith. This is a bit like responding to paedophilia in the Catholic Church either by shouting ‘Catholic bastards’ or by insisting that the teachings of Christ have nothing to do with child abuse. Neither leads anywhere.
In October this year, Instagram celebrated its tenth birthday – a proud old age in the digital era. The social network’s user numbers are even more impressive: more than a billion people around the world share their photos and videos on the platform. But Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012, was in no mood to party. For some time, the digital zeitgeist has been captured not by Instagram but by its Chinese competitor TikTok.
"Crime Minister" is one of the slogans with which thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating several times a week since mid-July in many Israeli towns and cities, but above all in front of the Prime Minister's official residence in Jerusalem's Balfour Street. They are demanding nothing less than the resignation of the Prime Minister, who is on trial for corruption.
Thirty years after the seismic shift in world history of 1989-90 with the collapse of communism, the sudden eruption of life-changing events could be another watershed. This will be decided in the next few months – in Brussels and in Berlin too.
Around the year 1320, the Plague broke out in Hubei, the same central Chinese province, with its capital Wuhan, where COVID-19 originated. Despite all the historical differences, there are striking parallels between the course and consequences of both epidemics. It took 25 or 30 years for the Plague to reach the Chinese coast and take hold in the trade ports and the termini of the Central Asian caravan routes that connected China to Europe.
In mid-January, The New York Times revealed that hundreds of law enforcement agencies and private companies across the world use a software called Clearview. It allows images of people to be identified within seconds, together with their name, address, occupation and contacts. The revelations are controversial for two reasons. First, Clearview identifies people using its own database of more than 3 billion private photos. By comparison, the FBI photo database has ‘only’ 640 million photos.
First, the bad news. When it comes to Big Tech, we have lost the plot. By we, I refer to those of us who, in one way or another, feel a relationship with social democracy or socialism. And by the plot, I don’t mean just our understanding of the dynamics of the digital economy and digital capitalism, but also of capitalism as such and the role that social democracy and socialism should be playing in either countering or counterbalancing it.
Here’s the problem with Big Tech, in a nutshell. A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said the following: ‘In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.’ Zuckerberg is seeking to establish a supreme court for content moderation, to structure the media environment with a quasi-cartel of publishers, and even to create his own currency. Such concentrations of private power are simply not compatible with democracy.
For almost five years Margrethe Vestager has been the EU Commissioner for Competition and officially responsible for dealing with cartel brotherhoods and monopolists from all over the world. The Danish politician really does a good job. Since taking office, she has imposed more than 15 billion euros in antitrust fines, almost twice as much as her predecessor, thereby doing Europe’s consumers a service that is worth all the more because it depresses prices. Vestager imposed 4.4 billion euros in fines on Google alone last year.
The question of ‘the city’ has preoccupied me for a long time. My latest book, The Open City, is the last of a trilogy on Homo Faber, human beings, man and woman, as makers. The first book was on craftsmanship, the second was a book on cooperation, and this is a book about making the physical environment.
With China’s geopolitical ambitions currently at the centre of attention, the domestic policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are going largely unnoticed.[1] Yet it is becoming clear that internally, China is also undergoing wholesale transformation: by the year 2020, the CPC aims to introduce digital systems for social control nationwide.
The negotiations over Britain’s decision to leave the European Union are now entering a decisive stage. European colleagues have asked me to set out what is going on. Will there be a deal? If there is, will the government hold together? Will the UK’s parliament vote it down? Might the UK crash out of the EU without a deal? Will Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister?
At the memorial service for the late John McCain, our divided political elite came together to voice their apprehensions about our democracy. Better late than never; having indulged in an increasingly preposterous American moral imperialism for decades, it is indeed time for them to reconsider.
The motto of the new government in Vienna is ‘Austria first!’ Although the country’s export economy means that Trump-style trade wars are not an option, rose-tinted nationalism is another matter.
The result of the 2017 German federal elections is historic – in a historic year. The fiftieth anniversary of the death of Konrad Adenauer on 19 April, the death of Helmut Kohl on 16 June, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Willy Brandt on 8 October: 2017 is a year when post-war West German history is again being remembered.
