scholarly journals Introduction: Thirty Years of Borders Since Berlin

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-300
Author(s):  
Melissa Tandiwe Myambo ◽  
Pier Paolo Frassinelli

AbstractNovember 9, 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the physical and geopolitical barrier that divided Berlin and the East from the West. This event symbolically inaugurated the period of post-Cold War globalization. The birth of the World Wide Web that same year spurred on globalization and led many observers to believe that (national) borders had become passé. The zeitgeist seemed to promise a borderless world in which capitalism and democracy would flourish. However, instead, the last three decades have paradoxically borne witness to the proliferation, rescaling, and reinforcement of territorial and other types of borders – linguistic, religious, ethnic, class, racial, urban, cultural, digital, temporal etc. The contemporary preoccupation with borders and walls is the result of the “deglobalization” that is also, ironically, a global phenomenon – Brexit, Trump’s border wall, Israel’s concrete wall in the West Bank, xenophobia from South Africa to India to “Fortress Europe,” and the growing power of right wing authoritarian leaders in several nations. The resurgence of (ethno)nationalism, racism, white supremacy, isolationism, populism, protectionism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and religious fundamentalism are all dialectical consequences of this global backlash. This is the subject of this special issue.

Sociologija ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jovan Byford

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the continuity in the ideology of the Eastern European far right has been apparent in the extent to which the restoration of right-wing ideas was accompanied with widespread rewriting of history and the rehabilitation of contentious historical figures, many of whom, 40 years earlier, had attained notoriety for their antisemitism and fascist and pro-Nazi leanings. This article examines a specific example of postcommunist revisionism in Serbian society. The principal aim of the article is to explore the rhetoric of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880 - 1956), a controversial Serbian Orthodox Christian philosopher whose writing includes overtly antisemitic passages, and elucidate the strategies that his supporters have been deploying to promote him and maintain his popularity while countering objections of antisemitism. The paper focuses on the way in which the controversy surrounding Velimirovic?s antisemitism was managed around the time of his formal canonisation in May 2003. The author argues that unlike the Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian denominations, eastern churches, including the Serbian Orthodox Church, have as yet not formally addressed from a doctrinal or ecclesiological perspective the problem of Christian antisemitism. Due to the unwavering traditionalism justifications and denials of antisemitism must be constructed in such a way that they present the bishop?s views as consistent with the prevailing secular norms of ethnic tolerance.


Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte

This book explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on the world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, the book describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Chapters cover changes in the Summer and Autumn of 1989, including the stepping back of Americans and rise in East German's confidence; the restoration of the rights of the Four Powers, including the night of November 9 and the Portugalov Push; heroic aspirations in 1990, including the emerging controversy over reparations and NATO; security, political and economic solutions; the securing of building permits, including money and NATO reform; and the legacy of 1989 and 1990. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk

The present article examines the place of the Jewish question in the ideology of the monarchist (right-wing, “black hundred”) parties. In spite of certain ideological differences in the right-wing camp (moderate Rights, Rights and extreme Right-Wing), anti-Semitism was characteristic of all monarchist parties to a certain extent, in any case before the First World War. That fact was reflected in the party documents, resolutions of the monarchist congresses, publications and speeches of the Right-Wing leaders. The suggestions of the monarchists in solving the Jewish questions added up to the preservation and strengthening of the existing restrictions with respect to the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. If in the beginning the restrictions were main in the economic, cultural and everyday life spheres, after the convocation of the State Duma the Rights strived after limiting also the political rights of the Jewish population of the Empire, seeing it as one of the primary guarantees for autocracy preservation in Russia, that was the main political goal of the conservatives.


2021 ◽  
pp. 187936652199975
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa

The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the beginning of the unification of Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev talked in terms of a “Common European Home,” an idea that continues in the guise of the project for a “Greater Europe.” However, right from the start, the transformative idea of Greater Europe was countered by the notion of “Europe whole and free,” whose fundamental dynamic was the enlargement of the existing West European order to encompass the rest of the continent. This was a program for the enlargement of the Atlantic system. After some prevarication, the enlargement agenda proved unacceptable to Moscow, and while it continues to argue in favor of transformation its main efforts are now devoted to creating some sort of “greater Eurasia.” There remains a fundamental tension between Atlanticist and pan-continental version of the post-–Cold War international order in the region. This tension gave rise to conflict and war: in 2008 (the Russo-Georgian War) and again from 2014 (Ukraine), and to what some call the Second Cold War. The continent is once again divided. However, pan-continentalism is far from dead, and although Greater Eurasian ideas have thrived, some sort of Greater European continentalism remains on the agenda. Is this, though, no more than a “sad delusion” or a genuine possibility?


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110059
Author(s):  
Tamir Bar-On

In this paper, I argue that the Alt-Right needs to be taken seriously by the liberal establishment, the general public, and leftist cultural elites for five main reasons: 1) its ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ borrows from the French New Right ( Nouvelle Droite – ND) and the French and pan-European Identitarian movement. This means that it is engaged in the continuation of a larger Euro-American metapolitical struggle to change hearts and minds on issues related to white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racialism; 2) it is indebted to the metapolitical evolution of sectors of the violent neo-Nazi and earlier white nationalist movements in the USA; 3) this metapolitical orientation uses the mass media, the internet, and social media in general to reach and influence the masses of Americans; 4) the ‘cultural war’ means that the Alt-Right’s spokesman Richard Spencer, French ND leader Alain de Benoist, and other intellectuals see themselves as a type of Leninist vanguard on the radical right, which borrows from left-wing authors such as Antonio Gramsci and their positions in order to win the metapolitical struggle against ‘dominant’ liberal and left-wing political and cultural elites; and 5) this ‘cultural war’ is intellectually and philosophically sophisticated because it understands the crucial role of culture in destabilizing liberal society and makes use of important philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola and others in order to give credence to its revolutionary, racialist, and anti-liberal ideals.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 480
Author(s):  
Frank G. Bosman

The story collection known in the West as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, is famous, among other things, for its erotic playfulness. This eroticism was (and is) one of the key reasons for its continuous popularity after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. The Arabian Nights includes, besides traditional, heterosexual acts, play, and desires, examples of homoerotic playfulness—even though we must tread lightly when using such Western concepts with an oriental text body such as this one. The homoerotic playfulness of The Arabian Nights is the subject of this article. By making use of a text-immanent analysis of two of the Nights’ stories—of Qamar and Budûr and of Alî Shâr and Zumurrud—the author of this article focuses on the reversal of common gender roles, acts of cross-dressing, and, of course, homoerotic play. He will argue that these stories provide a narrative safe environment in which the reader is encouraged to “experiment” with non-normative sexual and gender orientations, leaving the dominant status quo effectively and ultimately unchallenged, thus preventing the (self-proclaimed) defenders of that status quo from feeling threatened enough to actively counter-act the experiment.


Author(s):  
Marie V. Lebour
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
Open Sea ◽  

Several Gobius species and also Aphya and Crystallogobius are common near Plymouth, from up the estuaries in the neighbourhood of Saltash to the west and Chelson Meadow to the east, as far as the open sea, well beyond Rame Head and the Eddystone Lighthouse. It has, however, always been difficult to determine the young of the various species as they usually differ very little from one another and it is hoped that the following notes may be a help in the elucidation of the subject.


Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Zanoni ◽  
Annelies Thoelen ◽  
Sierk Ybema

Much literature on the cultural industries celebrates ethnicity as a source of creativity. Despite its positive connotation, this discourse reduces ethnic minority creatives to manifestations of a collective ethnic identity automatically leading to creativity, creating a paradox of creativity without a creative subject. Approaching creatives with an ethnic minority background as agents, this article investigates how they self-reflectively and purposely discursively construct ethnicity as a source of creativity in their identity work. Empirically, we analyze interviews with well-established creatives with an ethnic minority background active in Belgium. Most respondents construct their ethnic background as ‘hybrid’, ‘exotic’, or ‘liminal’ to craft an identity as creatives and claim creativity for their work. Only few refuse to discursively deploy ethnicity as a source of creativity, crafting more individualized identities as creatives. Our study contributes to the literature on power and ethnicity in the creative industries by documenting ethnic minority creatives’ discursive micro-struggle over what is creative work and who qualifies as a creative. Specifically, we show their counterpolitics of representation of ethnicity in the creative industries through the re-signification of the relation between the ‘west’ and the ‘other’ in less disadvantageous terms. Despite such re-signification, the continued relevance of the discourse of ethnicity as a key marker of difference suggests that ethnicity remains a principle of unequal organization of the creative industries.


1941 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. I. Bell
Keyword(s):  

The subject of this paper is the relations between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, that long-protracted racial animosity which forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of what is commonly, if loosely, known as anti-semitism; but before coming to my subject proper it will be necessary to say something about the position of the Alexandrian Jews.


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