Despite its current exclusionary character, citizenship is not a concept corrupt to the core. The ideals of equality before the law, cooperation and civic participation that citizenship represents to some are not bad in themselves. Clearly, the problem with citizenship is that it is an arbitrary and exclusionary institution, the benefits and disadvantages of which are distributed unevenly across the globe – Jyry Pasanen
Category: May 2019
When past comes a knockin’. The unceasing grip of history in Lithuania.
In the case of the Baltic states, grievances of the national ethnic groups who suffered under the Soviets have completely overshadowed the remembrance and education on the Holocaust, which only recently has entered the public consciousness. As stories concerning war time collaboration and the details of Holocaust become more openly disclosed, the significance of preserving the mythical martyrdom of the national populations becomes ever more important – Jorens Jakovlevs
Do As I Say Not As I Do – On European Political Actorness
The opening of the Iron Curtain was felt as a phenomenon that enabled the possibility for the suffering East to be embraced by a new notion of European union. The only place that kept fighting this enlightenment appeared to be the Balkans. Turning the lessons drawn from European history on its head, our embracing notion of European Union became an impossibility once the long lost nightmare became reality again: Seemingly unsolvable and graphically brutal conflict based on the perception of diversity – Nikolai Markov
Now You See It, Now You Don’t – Addressing the Invisibility of Europe’s Colonial Past in Museum Collections
Museums in Europe are amongst the most problematic culprits when it comes to masking the colonial past. Looking around museum exhibitions displaying objects from different cultures, descriptions of pieces often state that they were “donated” or “acquired”, this kind of elusive language often means that the objects came into the museum’s possession through the means of colonisation and plundering – Anna Boyce