Today the EU Council meets as “the EU has called the Belarusian political leadership to participate in a genuine and inclusive dialogue with broader society to avoid further violence. The EU supports the Belarusian population in their desire for democratic change.” You can follow the video conference via this link.
We hope the outcomes will support the changes in Belarusian society now that the society experienced “a revolution in its mentality, a complete reboot of its thinking process,” as visual artist and writer Artur Klinaŭ had hoped for in his 2015 contribution to our Another Europe book.
Featured People: Rana Yazaji
In this conversation, we talk to Rana Yazaji (Syria), Managing Director of Culture Resource (Al Mawred Al Thaqafy) – a key cultural player in the MENA region that facilitates the development of national cultural policy groups in more than ten Arab countries. We talk about her work and about the challenges she and her team face in these turbulent times for the region. Throughout the autumn, we highlight cultural policy research and activism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Through a series of insightful interviews, we introduce cultural policy researchers and activists who have contributed to the World CP –International Cultural Policy Database.
Read MoreIvan Krastev in conversation with Philipp Dietachmair - Part 5
In this final instalment of a five-part interview with Ivan Krastev, we look closely at civil society initiatives across the continent, the danger some cultural actors face in their local environments, and we conclude by evaluating the role of cultural institutions in realising the critical role attributed to culture in the current political context of Europe and its neighbourhood.
Read MoreIvan Krastev in conversation with Philipp Dietachmair - Part 4
We continue our conversation with Ivan Krastev in this fourth instalment of a five-part interview. After we looked back at what the past 15 years have meant for the building of democratic European communities in part 1, we dove into the issues around the real division between people within our societies across the continent in part 2 and looked at concrete examples of this division across different countries in Europe in part 3. We now explore the possibilities of finding a new language.
Read MoreIvan Krastev in conversation with Philipp Dietachmair - Part 3
We continue our conversation with Ivan Krastev in this third instalment of a five-part interview. After we looked back at what the past 15 years have meant for the building of democratic European communities in part 1, and dove into the issues around the real division between people within our societies across the continent in part 2, we look at the similarities of the many issues across our geographies, through concrete examples from Hungary and Ukraine, and we examine empathy and its possible role in solving many issues.
Read MoreIvan Krastev in conversation with Philipp Dietachmair - Part 2
We continue our conversation with Ivan Krastev in this second instalment of a five-part interview. After having looked back at what the past 15 years have meant for the building of democratic European communities in part 1, we dive into the issues around the real division between people within our societies across the continent.
Read MoreIvan Krastev in conversation with Philipp Dietachmair - Part 1
In part I of our conversation , Ivan Krastev discusses the powerful drive behind the expansion of the European Union and various institutional blind spots he observes when it comes to acknowledging historical and cultural divides. He then focuses on the particular cultural and political conditions of Eastern Europe and Russia where the dissolution of the Soviet Union has led to an identity crisis that was instrumental in growing nationalistic sentiments.
Read More15 Years in the Neighbourhood - Ivan Krastev in conversation with Philipp Dietachmair
We take the book, Another Europe, as our starting point in a conversation with Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, together with ECF Programme Manager Philipp Dietachmair, who has been running our neighborhood programmes for more than 10 years.
Another Europe: the Book
Since our beginnings in the 1950s, ECF has been pursuing the idea of a Europe that goes beyond historical, cultural and political borders and proposes new ways of doing things. The Europe ECF imagines extends well beyond the EU, embracing the countries that touch our borders to the east and to the south. These guiding principles run through the pages of our new publication Another Europe, which brings together a treasure trove of insights and experiences from partners and participants working with us in the European Neighbourhood over the past 15 years.
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