Citizenship and alienage, the two foundational institutions for membership in the modern state, are being partly destabilized through major current transformations. As citizens lose rights due to the new types of policies that reduce social rights and immigrants gain rights through the human rights regime, we see a blurring of the distinctions. more»
Economic globalization simultaneously leads to a reshaping of cross-national economic integration at different scales, such as transnational economic development areas or new forms of regionalisation that challenge the classical divisions of the Mediterranean. Here I concentrate on the borderland sites of Southern European migration.
During the last few decades of the neoliberal-imperial globalisation process, social relations have been fundamentally transformed. Neoliberalism was never a purely market-driven process but also a shaping of other social relations and institutions, especially of the state. The state, private corporations, public discourses but also many aspects of everyday life were reoriented towards economic efficiency and international competitiveness. Aspects such as (re-) distribution or social and/or international solidarity played scarcely any role.
It is surely no coincidence that the word Atlantis first appears in the context of a dialogue namely that of Plato's Timeaus and Critias – and nearly two and half thousand years later we are still talking in and of the same literary form of dialogue. Perhaps, the only but greatest mystery then is that the notion of why Atlantis "continues to float across the human imagination and the far horizon of the modern world". For what is a dialogue?
Europe has seen better days (so far) – By Robert Misik Concerning the development of Europe, even hard-line optimists, as well as any other civilian, were highly distracted a few times in the past 20 years. The present Europe achieved some noteworthy goals: the Euro, the institutional organisations, the dozens of new members; however, there’s a hangover ruling the continent for some time now. more»
What happened in 1989? This year almost every day and everywhere there are memorials for the historical events 20 years ago. Communist polit bureaus and central committees collapsed back upon themselves like card houses, governments where dispossessed, political systems vanished and lastly whole states disappeared. “A centenary is to be deselected” as British historian Timothy Garton Ash titled his report out of the centres of Europe.
Statements on Democracy – by Kostis Stafylakis (artist, art theoretician, Athens) by Luchezar Boyadjiev (artist, Sofia) by Nikos Xydakis (chief editor of newspaper “Kathimerini”, Athens) by Dr. Natalia Ribas-Mateos (Universidad de A Coruña ESOMI, Equipo de Sociología de las migracionesinternacionales), visiting Professor at the University of Meknes in Morocco)
Coming soon: Publication of art and culture presented and elaborated during “ATLANTIS. Hidden Histories – New Identies – European Art 20 years after the Iron Curtain” (2010).
