Global crises, world views and crossroads
Europe must send global cooperation signals – Four proposals
Europe must send global cooperation signals – Four proposals
Who are the real “Europeans” today? The bureaucrats, officials and parliamentarians of the European institutions, in their somewhat isolated “Brussels bubble”? A few distinguished philosophers and other intellectuals who firmly reject nationalism?
It’s easy to dismiss the increasing drumroll of war in London and Berlin as the panic-fueled reaction of madmen who happen to be in power. Yet, the truth might be even more disturbing.
The hideous and deplorable attacks in Paris on November 13th have unleashed a wave of fear throughout Europe triggering the lockdown of the Belgian capital Brussels. The clocks were pointing at 1am on Friday 20th, when the Belgian government decided to raise the terror alert to its maximum, 4 out of 4, due to a “serious and imminent” threat similar to the tragic events in Paris claimed by the Islamic State, “with multiples attacks in different places,” said the Belgian prime minister Charles Michel.
On 22 November the right-wing presidential candidate, Mauricio Macri, won the presidential elections in Argentina, at little distance from the government candidate from that always somewhat incomprehensible Peronist movement, located somewhere between popular and populist, left and right, democracy and authoritarianism, and tradition and progress.
This week’s downing of a Russian jet by Turkey near the Syrian border will complicate even more the mess surrounding Syria. Putin has called Turkey an “accomplice of terrorists”, and has denounced that the oil extracted by the Islamic State (ISIS), which is vital for its finances, is sold through Turkey.
By Samira
Alors que le terrorisme fondamentaliste frappe à nouveau plusieurs continents en même temps, Paris, Bamako en l’espace de quelques jours ; il donne l’impression que c’est une guerre aux multiples fronts qui se développe et qui tourne en dérision les principes les plus fondamentaux du droit de la guerre comme le respect de la vie des civils.
By Francisco de Borja Lasheras
When, like every Monday in the 1990s, the children at her school in Sambir, western Ukraine, sang the national anthem, Anna felt nothing. It was a cold ritual, directed towards an impersonal entity: the state, which did not evoke many positive emotions. Suspicion more like.
At the entrance to European Union (EU) territory, asylum seekers are bound for different countries. Most of them want to continue their journey to Germany and Sweden, although they are technically allowed to ask for asylum in the first EU country they enter. So far, less than 50 persons have asked for asylum in Slovenia.
Those who blame refugees and Muslims hide the role of the alliance between the West and the petrol-monarchies.
By Lorenzo Feltrin (Translation from Italian by Carlo Geromel)
As it is well known, terrorist attacks are a manna from heaven for fascists and other xenophobic forces who point to the massacres as a confirmation of their theses: migrants and Muslims are a threat that must be erased in one way or another…