The drawing of the border between the West and the East, as pointed at throughout last week’s short reflection, is a contextual and temporal matter: ideological forces, historical tendencies and political actors all participate in these processes that are never fixed. The highly flexible and fluid concept of Central Europe as an acting “controversial territory” …
Continue reading “Impossible Borderlands: The Case of the Yugoslav Utopias”
Yugoslavia, a state that grew out of the ruins of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and collapsed twice – once at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the second time after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, each of those times accompanied by a class, religious and ethnic war – …
Continue reading “Central/Eastern European Impossibilities: The Yugoslav Case”
When we think about democracy, it is natural that Athens in the antiquity comes to our mind. Not only the origin of the word, but also the first application of the concept links it to ancient Greece. Yet, as Bernard Crick reminds us, Pericles’s concept of democracy differs significantly from the modern concept, particularly because …
Continue reading “Democracy in Ancient Greece and contemporary consumer societies”
I have been asked a number of times what I think about the relationship of democracy and utopia, since these two concepts are in the centre of my current research. My experience is that most people today (at least in Western Europe) believe that the ideal society is necessarily democratic (this is a clear assumption …
This is the website of the ‘Democracy in East Central European utopianism’ research group. This is the place for you if you are interested in how literary works, particularly utopias and dystopias reflect on the workings of society. We are literary scholars and social scientists who primarily study utopian and dystopian texts, focusing on how …
Utopia and democracy 