In Crisis, Europeans Support Radical Positions Climate Change and Social Welfare issues most salient. BertelsmannStiftung eupinions brief | May 2020

Europe finds itself in an unprecedented crisis which is pushing many of its citizens into existential uncertainty. Our EU-wide poll, conducted in March 2020, as the corona virus was spreading across the continent, shows Europeans embracing some radical positions

Five minutes with Timothy Garton Ash: “We’re far more European in the UK than we think we are”

Is it possible to create a truly European public sphere? In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Timothy Garton Ash discusses the failure of efforts to reignite the enthusiasm of citizens for European integration, the importance of European identity, and why the UK is far more European than most people believe

L’omaggio di due amici

Il primo maggio del 2009 è stato celebrato presso il St Anthony’s College di Oxford l’ottantesimo compleanno di Ralf Dahrendorf. Nell’occasione si è tenuto, in sua presenza, un seminario internazionale nel quale si è affrontato, nelle diverse prospettive tipiche delle scienze sociali, il topos della libertà, un tema che è stato la stella polare della sua vita di pensatore a cavallo tra mondo accademico ed impegno politico. L’evento è stato coordinato dal professor Timothy Garton Ash che SMP ringrazia caldamente per aver autorizzato la pubblicazione, qui di seguito, di due importanti interventi ora raccolti nel libro da lui stesso curato On Liberty.The Dahrendorf Questions (University of Oxford, 2009)

Data gathering, surveillance and human rights: recasting the debate

The nature and depth of internet surveillance has been revealed to be very different from what had previously been publically acknowledged or politically debated. There are critical ways in which the current debate is miscast, misleading and confused. Privacy is portrayed as an individual right, in opposition to a collective need for security. Data gathering and surveillance are portrayed as having an impact only on this individual right to privacy, rather than on a broad spectrum of rights, including freedom of expression, of assembly and association, the prohibition of discrimination and more. The gathering and surveillance of ‘content’ is intrinsically more intrusive than that of ‘communications’ data or ‘metadata’. The impact of data gathering and surveillance is often portrayed as happening only at when data are examined by humans rather than when gathered, or when examined algorithmically. Commercial and governmental data gathering and surveillance are treated as separate and different, rather than intrinsically and inextricably linked. This miscasting has critical implications. When the debate is recast taking into account these misunderstandings, the bar for the justification of surveillance is raised and a new balance needs to be found, in political debate, in law, and in decision-making on the ground

Reversing the wave: the perverse effects of economic liberalism on human rights

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Interpreting the Outsider Tradition in British European Policy Speeches from Thatcher to Cameron

The article investigates how British European policy thinking has been informed by what it identifies as an ‘outsider’ tradition of thinking about ‘Europe’ in British foreign policy dating from imperial times to the presen. The article begins by delineating five phases in the evolution of the outsider tradition through a survey of the relevant historiography back to 1815. The article then examines how prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron have looked to various inflections of the outsider tradition to inform their European discourses. The focus in the speech data sections is on British identity, history and the realist appreciation of international politics that informed the leaders’ suggestions for EEC/EU reform. The central argument is that historically informed narratives such as those making up the outsider tradition do not determine opinion-formers’ outlooks, but that they can be deeply impervious to rapid change

Revolution and the end of history: Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest

Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, written and performed very soon after the Romanian revolution in 1990 and performed both in London and Bucharest, is a dynamic, inter-cultural play that represents a variety of perspectives on the revolutionary events, as well as oscillating between English and Romanian cultural and language coordinates. It has a peculiar topicality in its detailed and specific usages of different aspects of the revolutionary narrative, its sketches of family life before and after the revolution, and the inclusion of the revolution as reported in quasi-documentary-style testimony. The perspective in this article is one that places the play within a framework that thinks through Mad Forest’s relationship to the triumphant, neoliberalist heralding of “the end of history,” most famously argued by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 article of that name. This discourse gained further confidence from the collapse of Eastern Europe, a collapse that was viewed by proponents of the end-of-history argument as signalling the permanent disintegration of communism and a victory for capitalism. However, Mad Forest is considered here as a play that reflects multiple perspectives on the revolutionary period and, while declining to provide political solutions as such, simultaneously refuses to accede to the implications of the end-of-history argument

The Emerging Aversion to Inequality: Evidence from Poland 1992-2005

This paper provides an illustration of the changing tolerance for inequality in a context of radical political and economic transformation and rapid economic growth. We focus on the Polish experience of transition and explore self-declared attitudes of the citizens. Using monthly representative surveys of the population, realized by the Polish poll institute (CBOS) from 1992 to 2005, we identify a structural break in the relation between income inequality and subjective evaluation of well-being. The downturn in the tolerance for inequality (1997) coincides with the increasing distrust of political elites.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64387/1/wp919.pd

Educating Britain? Political Literacy and the Construction of National History

Despite the reflexive nature of historical enquiry and the degree of national interconnectness now theorized by historians in the United Kingdom, education debates over history teaching in Britain often yield a comforting defence of Britain's 'island story'. The singular 'island story' is an economical narrative device favoured by politicians and further mediated through newspapers which profit from such national cryogenics. Maintenance of a currency, or crisis, of Britishness can also be contrasted with the relative absence of longitudinal or comparative enquiry into identity and school curricula. In addition, the teaching of states, connections and post-sovereign communities is largely under-theorized, potentially contributing to the sterility of future debates about citizenship, agency and Britain’s wider political reach. It is argued here that the public framing of history as nationhood and the underdevelopment of children’s political literacy are mutually reinforcing conditions by which the state has constructed a stabilizing, yet shifting presence of the ‘national’