Category: Essay

Two Books on Europe since 1989* Living in a time warp at the periphery simply means you are a second class citizen of Europe. One sees that […] in the fish fingers in the supermarket: they look the same and have the same branding; but for the customers in Austria

I. INTRODUCTION The collapse of Communist regimes left the legislatures of the affected states with the duty to satisfy two fundamental economic and social demands. The first consisted of enacting laws to enshrine the democratic transformation of the structure of executive power, specifically in terms of reshuffling the relationship (the

The goose that lays the golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else’s goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people’s own money.

Budapest Talk, 27–28 September 2017 The gist of my talk is this: We have a problem in the democratic world with robed, ex-lawyer mandarins who remove issues from the political sphere by declaring them to be constitutional in nature and thereby put them beyond discussion and resolution by mere citizens

There is no doubt that George Gömöri is held in high esteem in Poland, in literary circles no less than in the upper echelons of scholarship. He has a place in the Pantheon of those foreigners who have made particularly vital contributions to Polish culture, especially literature. Moreover, he occupies

EUROPEAN ETHNIC MINORITIES As once unerringly pointed out by Christoph Pan, an expert on the South Tyrolean minority, an “old question within the new Europe” has not gone away, i.e. the question of autochthonous national or ethnic minorities. This is an “old question”, because it implies the formation of a

The Problem of Ambiguity in the Language of Politics The first decades of the twenty-first century witnessed a notable rise in war and political violence. After the End of History we entered, at the millennium, a new Age of Anger.1 The United States was at war a startling two out

This article is largely based on a lecture given to CARA (the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics) on 20 November 2014 in the series of Science and Civilisation. It examines the role of refugee academics in the scientific enterprise. It challenges the established dogma of basic versus applied research and