scholarly journals Perception of Polish Democracy in a Comparative Approach in Relation to the European Integration Processes

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Negative Phenomena

The aim of the article is to show the condition of Polish democracy on the example of two elections held in 2019 and 2020. The elections brought about a positive phenomenon for democ racy, which is an increase in voter turnout. On the other hand, negative phenomena appeared, in particular the violent political polarization within the political community. The example of the Polish elections was then confronted with the perception of democracy among Polish society in a comparative approach, i.e. against the perception of other European nations. Against this background, the assessment of Polish democracy by Poles is exceptionally positive. Later in the article, an attempt was made to consider to what extent the integration processes may be responsible for weakening democracy in the Member States, as well as for the decline in trust in democratic institutions in the west and southern part of the continent.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

"The Presence of the Other is a Presence that Teaches": Levinas, Pragmatism, and Pedagogy

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Elise Katz
Keyword(s):  
Educational Philosophy ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Positive Response ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Cultivation ◽  
Ethical Response ◽  
Ethical Project

AbstractAlthough Levinas talks about ethics as a response to the other, most scholars assume that this "response" is not something tangible—it is not an actual giving of food or providing of shelter and clothing. But there is evidence in Levinas's own writings that indicate he does intend for a positive response to the Other. In any event, while he acknowledges that the other is the sole person I wish to kill, killing the other, within an ethical framework would be a violation of that response. The failure to respond to the other ethically requires us to ask if Levinas's project needs an educational philosophy or a model of moral cultivation to supplement it. This essay explores this question by putting into conversation Levinas's ethical project and his interest in Jewish education with John Dewey's philosophy of education and its relationship to the political community. This exploration will help us see what this field of research might offer in promoting the cultivation of ethical response as Levinas envisions it and what its limits are.

Moving against Disappearance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Richard Giersdorf
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Pedestrian Movement ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Social ◽  
East German

Nearly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany was subsumed into the West German national structure. As a result, the distinct political systems, institutions, and cultures that characterized East Germany have nearly completely vanished. In some instances, this history was actively—and physically—eradicated by the unified Germany. This chapter works against the disappearance of East German culture by reconstructing the physicality of the walk across the border on the day of the opening of the Berlin Wall and two choreographic works depicting East German identities on stage. The initial re-creation of the choreography of a pedestrian movement provides a social, political, and methodological context that relates the two dance productions to the social movement of East German citizens. Both works take stances on the political situation in East Germany during and after the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, although one is by a West German artist, Sasha Waltz, and the other by East German choreographer Jo Fabian.

scholarly journals Why should we care? Two experiences in the politics of food and food research

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agata Bachórz ◽  
English English
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Food Research ◽  
Collaborative Paper ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Theoretical Dimension

The aim of this article is to analyse the political aspects of food and their significance as an object of study. The first author of the article has studied Polish society as an insider, while the other author had previously conducted research in other countries and three years ago started exploring Poland and Polish gastronomy, finding himself in the role of outsider. Both scholars have been recently working together. The power relations between the societies and the academic worlds from which they come from turned out to be crucial to the research dynamics and became one of the paper’s key interests. Three main topics provide the structure of the collaborative paper: 1) the question of the authors’ positionality; 2) food as a phenomenon that is intrinsically political, and the legitimacy issues related to its study within academia and to scholars’ engagement outside it; and 3) the power and inequality dimensions of food research. The authors agree that inextricable connection of food and politics has not only an academic or theoretical dimension, but impacts the realities of people’s lives.  

scholarly journals La persona humana: razón y fe al servicio del hombre (II): La comunidad humana. The Human Person: Reason and Faith in the Service of Human Being (II): The Human Community

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Caffarra
Keyword(s):  
Human Person ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Personal Dignity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Transcendence ◽  
Reason And Faith ◽  
Maximum Expression ◽  
The Trinity

La naturaleza humana es comunional. La semejanza del hombre con Dios, con la Trinidad, no solo estriba en su espiritualidad, sino también en su sociabilidad. La raíz de esta unidad interpersonal está en el nexo que el hombre tiene con Cristo; y sus supuestos son la sustancialidad espiritual de la persona y su capacidad de autotrascendencia. La persona no puede encontrar su propia plenitud sino en la comunicación con las demás personas, a la que tiende por naturaleza como causa final última de la historia de la humanidad. La causa formal de esta communicatio in humanitate, que tiene en la entrega su punto culminante, es la recíproca afirmación de la dignidad personal. La naturaleza comunional de la persona, por lo demás, se cumple en la unión varón-mujer —como primera forma—, en la comunidad política —con ciertas limitaciones— y, definitivamente, en la Jerusalén celestial.Human nature is “communional”. Man’s likeness to God, to the Trinity, lies not only in his spirituality, but in his sociability. The root of this interpersonal unity is the link of man with Christ; and its bases are the spiritual substance of the person and its capacity for self-transcendence. The person reaches its own fulfillment only in communication with the other persons, to which it naturally tends, it being the final and end cause of the history of humanity. The formal cause of this communicatio in humanitate, which reaches its maximum expression in self-giving, is the reciprocal affirmation of personal dignity. Also, the communional nature of the person is fulfilled in the union of man and woman —in the first instance—, in the political community —with certain limitations— and, finally, in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Conclusion to Part III

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Lacey
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sharp Distinction

Chapters 5 and 6 point towards the general conclusion that the logic undergirding the LFT cannot be ultimately defeated, but merely contained indefinitely. In this conclusion to Part III, I attempt to draw out explicitly the main comparative lessons from my analysis of Belgium and Switzerland, highlighting the primary factors that explain why the LFT took hold in one case but not the other. We can distinguish between factors related to the political community and those more closely linked to the regime. Of course, to the extent that a regime and political community are co-dependent and continue to impact one another in their mutual evolution, it is impossible to make a razor-sharp distinction between factors related to one rather than the other. Bearing this in mind, however, we may group things together in this way for analytic purposes....

scholarly journals Individualism, Polarization and Recovery from the COVID-19 Crisis

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (6) ◽  
pp. 371-374
Author(s):  
Barry Eichengreen
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Us

AbstractPolitical polarization, meaning sharp differences in the political ideologies and preferences of the partisans of different parties, implies that members of one party are more likely to dismiss the policies and recommendations of spokesmen and appointees of the other party on the grounds that those policies and recommendations are informed by value systems inimical to their own. In the US, this means that when spokesmen for one party endorse masks, members of the other party reject them instinctively and automatically.

Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Olaloku-Teriba
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Subtle Racism ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

AbstractIn the coming months and years, the left faces a historic juncture. On the one hand, racist violence is on the rise across the West, and the political class seems intent on mobilising both overt and subtle racism. On the other hand, strategies of anti-racist organising, which have developed on both sides of the Atlantic, have reached a theoretical impasse. I argue that now, more than ever, a serious project of historical and intellectual retrieval is necessary. This article interrogates the theoretical limitations of ‘anti-blackness’ as an analysis of racialised oppression. Through the thought of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, among others, I argue that theories of ‘anti-blackness’, specifically those rooted in Afro-pessimism, are predicated on a theoretical shift away from relational social theory to identitarian essentialism which obscures, rather than illuminates, the processes of racialisation which undergird racial oppression.

scholarly journals Growing up South Asian: A Brief Trajectory Drawn from South Asian Novels Targeted for Youths

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Hari R. Adhikari
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Interest ◽  
The Political ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Significant Change

This paper primarily presents the trajectory of growing up in South Asia drawing insights from the selected novels about South Asian youths (SA youths). In this process, the paper explores the political interest of the West in non-Western children and youths. The focus is on the exploration of whether contemporary youth literatures have still been reinforcing the image of SA youths as the Other of the European youths, or if there has been any significant change augmented by the recent phenomenon of global connectedness. By laying a framework of these forces for analyzing how they are reflected in the literatures for the South Asian youths by foreign, diaspora and home authors, this paper prepares a ground for further exploration.

De Europese programma's van Fianna Fail, FDF-RW en Volksunie : Een gemene noemer voor Ierse nationalisten en Belgische federalisten ?

Res Publica ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Joan Hart ◽  
Bruno De Witte
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
European Integration ◽  
National Level ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Economic Importance ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
The One

The article compares the attitude of the Irish Fianna Fait, the Flemish Volksunie, and the coalition of the Rassemblement Wallon and the Francophone Brussels' PDF, towards Europe and their programmes for the European elections.These parties do not define themselves on a socio-economic or religious basis, as most of the other European political parties do, but give ideological priority to the ethnic or national factor. Does this imply a common and distinctive attitude to European integration ?The answer must be no; they disagree not only on sectoral policies, but their fundamental outlook is different.  FDF-RW and VU, on the one hand, though bitter opponents on the national level, both favour a federal Europe, in order to promote autonomy for their respective regions.Fianna Fait on the other hand, white recognizing the political and economic importance of Europe, is sceptical on the institutional level.  Fianna Faits approach is essentially pragmatic, being a government party identifying its interests with the national interest, whereas the Belgian federalists cannot identify themselves with the existing Belgian state.  Therefore it is unlikely at present that Fianna Fait wilt leave its European allies - the Gaullists - to join a hypothetic regionalist grouping in European Parliament.

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