‘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.
Many people have lost the belief that the world can be put on a better track. Since the Enlightenment, people or groups of people – political parties, revolutionaries, subversives, utopians or reformers – have tried again and again, but often not much good has come of it. In this respect, we are once bitten, twice shy.
Two-hundred-and-fifty km/h from Stuttgart main station across the Schwäbische Alb – that's what Baden-Württemburg's political establishment have been dreaming about since 1994. Yet it's not certain that Stuttgart's railway terminus really will have been converted into an underground through-station by 2019.
At the end of 2009, German students once again took to the streets and occupied their universities in protest at current study conditions. At core, the protests were aimed at the massive changes in the organization of higher education introduced by the Bologna Process. And rightly so.
A football World Cup on the African continent might be a novelty but it is no accident.
Africa's blogger community is still in its infancy, but it has already demonstrated its importance in mobilising opinion in Kenya and Nigeria and promises to be a significant player in the fight for democracy and free expression across the continent.
There was jubilation among data privacy campaigners on 2 March after the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe overturned the EU Data Retention Directive of 2006 (obliging member states to store citizens' telecommunications data for six months to two years).[1] However
German chancellor Angela Merkel's neologism Flüchtlingsbekämpfung, coined in the German parliament in 2009 and translatable as "refugee combating", might have seemed like a misanthropic lapse; it could, after all, easily belong to the jargon of the extreme Right.
Two years have passed since the outbreak of the property and financial crisis, yet there has been no progress in the regulation of the banking and financial sectors. Worse still, a serious start has not even been made. This diagnosis doesn't only go for Germany. It applies equally to the US, the European Union, and at the level of international regulation.
On 29 November 2009 the Swiss electorate was called upon to vote on an initiative that wanted to ban, with immediate effect, the construction of minarets. Moreover, it was proposed that the ban – a mere detail of building law – be written into the constitution (!).
Yes, newspapers are relevant – and I can prove it. They are more relevant than Hypo Real Estate, more relevant than Deutsche Bank or Dresdner Bank. They are far more relevant than Opel or Arcandor.
It has long been a cliché that Europe is in crisis. First it was a crisis of "widening", then it was a crisis of "deepening", now it is a constitutional crisis.
Gert Weisskirchen: When we – especially those of us in the "West" – speak of '68, we usually think of Paris or the Prague Spring, which was suppressed with such brutality when the Warsaw Pact states invaded on 21 August. It is less well known that as early as March 1968 demonstrations were held in Poland – when performances of a play by the great Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz were banned. So 1968 evidently had a lot to do with culture. One of the students who protested, and was later imprisoned for doing so, was Adam Michnik.
