A game of mirrors: Western/Eastern European crime series and the struggle for recognition

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caius Dobrescu ◽  
Roxana Eichel ◽  
Dorottya Molnár-Kovács ◽  
Sándor Kálai ◽  
Anna Keszeg

Our article focuses on a corpus of crime television series reflecting upon differences between western and eastern Europe – a phenomenon that we will address as the ‘West–East slope’. The series figure as instances of the struggle for recognition at the level of the social imaginary, between western and eastern Europe. Addressing the double logic of the western narrative on eastern Europe and the eastern narrative of western Europe, one of our main findings is that the recognition aesthetics of eastern Europe produced a multi-layered representation of the West varying from country to country. On the other hand in western productions, there is still a bias towards a more politically correct image of easternness, a state of affairs that is questioned by eastern European attempts to produce their original contents.

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-708
Author(s):  
George Vasilev

The Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) was supposed to herald a new era of multicultural coexistence in Macedonia following a short-lived civil war. However, antipathies between the Albanian minority and Macedonian majority run as deep as ever, frequently erupting into rioting which threatens the fragile peace on which coexistence is forged. This state of affairs appears to affirm at least one commonly voiced criticism against the OFA, namely, that the pluralisation of public life it set in place would further fragment, rather than unite, Macedonia’s diverse citizenry. This article sheds light on the persistence of volatile ethnic relations in Macedonia despite more than a decade of multiethnic democracy. It argues explanations blaming the OFA are misplaced, and that the source of Macedonia’s fraying ethnic relations lies with each community’s ongoing struggle for recognition. Under this account, conflicts are the outcome not simply of each community’s incompatible wants around access to sovereign power, prized employment, and other distributable resources but unredeemed idealisations of how they would like to be respected and esteemed by others. The article contends that such struggles for recognition are bringing Macedonians and Albanians to interact in a manner that stimulates a sense of profound wrong-doing at the hands of the other, which, in turn, serves to fuel interethnic antagonisms and widen the social distance between each group.


Author(s):  
Michel Kazanski

Introduction. Recent finds of Baldenheim-type helmets in the Dnieper (Klimovsk district of Bryansk region, Boldyzhsky Forest and Cherkasy region) indicate the proliferation of prestigious weapons in the territory of the Kolochin and Penkovka cultures, that is, in the zone of settlement of Slavs in the post-Hun time. Helmets of this type are well known in Europe, both in the West, primarily among the Merovingians, and in the Balkan-Danube region, and in the Mediterranean from the second half of the 5th to the second half of the 6th centuries, though most of the finds fall on the period from the late 5th to the mid 6th cc. These helmets, at least in part, were of Byzantine origin. In general, Baldenheim-type helmets are few in number and in Western and Central Europe come mainly from “chief” graves, and in the Byzantine zone from cultural deposits in fortresses and cities. Analysis and Results. Helmets found in Eastern Europe show similarities with both helmets from Western Europe and helmets found in the Balkan-Danube region and in the Mediterranean. Given the historical situation of the time, it seems more logical to assume that Eastern European helmets were of Balkan-Danube origin. Obviously, in Eastern Europe, these helmets belong to the ruling military elite. It is possible that Baldenheimtype helmets fell into the hands of the Slavs as a result of the Danube and Balkan wars of the 6th century against the Eastern Roman Empire.


Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta

The most important conclusions of this summarizing chapter are the following: The religious landscape of Eastern Europe is more diverse than that of Western Europe. The cases of Poland and the GDR confirm the hypothesis that there is a link between the diffusion of functions and the growth in the importance of religion. The strong processes of biographical individualization that occurred in the post-communist states did not necessarily intensify individual religiosity. The economic market model cannot be confirmed for Eastern Europe. There is in Eastern and Central Europe a demonstrable link between economic prosperity and the loosening of religious and church ties. What can act as a bulwark against the eroding effects of modernization is church activity on the one hand, and the everyday proximity, visibility, and concreteness of religious practices and rituals, symbols, images, and objects on the other.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 1045-1071
Author(s):  
Meili Steele

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have enabled us to think about normatively charged collective imaginaries as logically prior to the construction of normative principles. What theorists of the imaginary have not done is make specific connections between the ontological background of social imaginaries and the normative utterance. This lacuna has left them vulnerable to the charges of ‘normative deficit’ and vagueness that Habermas and others famously make against philosophies of ‘world disclosure’. This article develops a conception of the normative utterance that enables us to reason through social imaginaries. In such reasoning, claims are not expressed in the propositional form of the Rawlsian or Habermasian justification, but through a complex engagement with the worldhood that informs normative judgements.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Zabłocki

Abstract This article is an analysis of differences and similarities between four Englishlanguage journals on rural sociology. The comparison covered topics discussed in about 600 articles published in the journals in the years 1995-2010 and the regional affiliation of their authors. In the comparison, all articles and texts on empirical research published in this period in Eastern European Countryside were considered. In total, 141 texts were published in this annual journal. Out of the three other journals (Rural Sociology, Sociologia Ruralis, Journal of Rural Studies) 50 articles for each of three periods: 1995-1996, 2002-2003, 2008-2009, were selected. Results of the comparison show that the journals have strictly regional profiles, and that present rural sociology does not seem to be the science on social phenomena in world-wide rural areas. Rural sociology used in the four studied journals does not develop the knowledge that would be useful in solving problems of the rural population. In the three journals under study (Rural Sociology, Sociologia Ruralis, Journal of Rural Studies) almost exclusively sociology of rural areas in Western Europe and Northern America was developed, and their contributors were almost always authors from the two regions. The fourth journal - Eastern European Countryside - was concerned, adequately to its title, with rural phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Joanna Krasodomska ◽  
Paweł Zieniuk

Objective: The paper presents the issue of non-financial information assurance and identifies the practices of companies operating in Europe in this regard. Methodology/research approach: The research is based on a literature review and analysis of a sample of 935 companies whose non-financial reports, prepared according to the GRI guidelines, are available from the GRI Sustainability Disclosure Database. In particular, we analyze how many companies had their non-financial information verified in 2017 and their previous practice in this regard (since 2005), as well as their structure according to the assuror type, the assurance standard used, the engagement type, and the assurance scope. Findings: Nearly half of the companies had their non-financial information independently and externally verified, including 34 Eastern European companies (30%) and 426 from Western Europe (52%). Most of the entities which provide assurance are so-called Big Four audit companies, mainly Deloitte and E&Y, which use the ISAE 3000 standard for this purpose. The most common engagement type is limited engagement. Limitations: The study is descriptive, which results from the nature of the data collected and the large disparity between companies using assurance in Western and Eastern Europe. Originality/value: The Article broadens accounting knowledge, in particular, on non-financial reporting. It indicates the need to take steps towards the wider use of non-financial information assurance in Eastern Europe.


Author(s):  
Daniil A. Anikin ◽  
◽  
Andrey A. Linchenko ◽  

Within the framework of this article, the theoretical and methodological framework of the philosophical interpretation of the concept “memory wars” was analyzed. In the context of criticism of allochronism and the project of the politics of time by B. Bevernage, as well as the concept of the frontier by F. Turner, the space-time aspects of the content of memory wars were comprehended. The use of Bevernage's ideas made it possible to explain the nature of modern memory wars in Europe. The origins of these wars are associated with an attempt to transfer the Western European project of “cosmopolitan” memory, in which Western Europe turns out to be a kind of a “referential” framework of historical modernity, to the countries of Eastern Europe after 1989. The uncritical use of Western European historical experience as a “reference” leads to a superficial copying of the politics of memory, which runs counter to the politics of the time in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, the idea of two totalitarianisms is presented as a single and internally indistinguishable era, and the politics of modern post-socialist states are based on the idea of a radical spatio-temporal distancing from their recent past. The article analyzes the issue of the specifics of the Eastern European frontier, the conditions for its emergence and the impact on modern forms of implementation of the politics of memory. The frontier arises as a result of the collapse of the colonial empires and becomes a space of symbolic struggle, first between the USSR and Germany, and then between the socialist and capitalist blocs. The crisis of the globalist project of the politics of memory and the transfer of the German model of victimization to the territory of the Eastern European frontier leads to the competition of sacrificial narratives and the escalation of memorial conflicts, turning into full-fledged memory wars. The hybrid nature of the antagonistic politics of memory in the conditions of the frontier leads to the fact that not only the socialist past, but also the national trauma of individual states becomes the subject of memory wars. The increasing complexity of the mnemonic structure of the frontier is associated with the emergence of a number of unrecognized states, whose memory politics, in contrast to the national discourses of Eastern European states, is based on a synthesis of the Soviet legacy and individual elements of the imperial past.


1984 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gebru Tareke

Weyane was a spontaneous, localized peasant uprising with limited objectives. It occurred in 1943 because several disaffected social groups in the eastern part of Tigrai believed that they could defeat or at least extract substantial concessions from a weak transitional government. The multiplicity of objectives roughly correspond to the divergent interests of the participants: the sectarian nobility wanted a greater share in the regional reallocation of power, the semi-pastoral communities of the lowlands were interested in pre-empting feudal incorporation, and the highland cultivators wanted to terminate the excessive demands of officialdom and militia. The convergence of these forces made Weyane possible; the disorganization of the ruling strata and the subsequent defection of a segment of the territorial nobility enormously enhanced the peasants' capacity for collective action. But this very heterogeneity comprised the peasants' objectives. The revolt lacked a coherent set of goals, nor did it have a specific program for social action. The rebels attacked neither the legitimacy of the monarchy nor the ideological basis of the Ethiopian aristocracy. In the end, Weyane buttressed the feudal order, and was probably instrumental in strengthening Ethiopia's neo-colonial link with the West. In the aftermath of rebellion, the Tigrai nobility did get its rights and prerogatives recognized, to the same extent that the nobility in the other northern provinces did. The government undercut the nobility's political autonomy, but paid the price of reinforcing their social position. On the other hand, in reaction to Weyane, the state destroyed the social basis of clan authority and autonomy, and reduced the Raya and Azebo to landless peasants. Weyane marked the end of conflict between centrifugal and centralizing forces, but did not eliminate the social roots of popular protest.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeriy Heyets

Nearly 30 years of transformation of the sociopolitical and legal, socioeconomical and financial, sociocultural and welfare, and socioenvironmental dimensions in both Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, has led to a change of the social quality of daily circumstances. On the one hand, the interconnection and reciprocity of these four relevant dimensions of societal life is the underlying cause of such changes, and on the other, the state as main actor of the sociopolitical and legal dimension is the initiator of those changes. Applying the social quality approach, I will reflect in this article on the consequences of these changes, especially in Ukraine. In comparison, the dominant Western interpretation of the “welfare state” will also be discussed.


Tempo ◽  
1995 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Alastair Williams

The current reappraisal of tradition, along with an interest in a music that deals with concrete emotions and which has a direct appeal to audiences, sounds a certain resonance with the aesthetic doctrines that prevailed in the former communist bloc. A sense of history is vital to socialist politics, but the availability of a symphonic tradition to Soviet composers after a break with that heritage suggests a state of posthistoire; a condition normally associated with postmodernism. The postmodernist reappraisal of the past is anticipated by, for example, Shostakovich's complex and sometimes ironic relationship to the symphonic tradition. Conservative traditionalism in the East maintained to be a critique of high modernist principles; in the West, ironically, a turn to tradition is now put forward as an alternative to the same rationalist modernism. At the moment when the achievements of the historical avant-garde and of high modernism have become fully available to the former Eastern Europe, the former Western Europe is engaged with the reappraisal of tradition. Even where a modernist music did develop in Eastern Europe – as, for example, it did in Poland – it was followed by a move back to more traditional techniques. The consequence of this inclination is that composers such as Górecki and Pärt, who employ traditionally-based expressive languages, have shot onto centre stage. The point is that composers from the former communist bloc have already encountered many of the issues that now preoccupy some contemporary composers in the capitalist West.


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