Mgr. Peter MARKOVIČ

Když lidé začnou pochybovat a hledat ospravedlnění, může je přepadnout nejistota. Ta nebývá právě příjemná, a tak se jí zpravidla snaží uniknout. Nátlak na přizpůsobení se normám šířeným kulturní výchovou bývá proto obvykle doprovázen snahou o diskreditaci a očernění norem kultur jiných. Na jednom konci spektra se pomocí rétorických projevů o „čistotě” a „nákaze” obhajuje […]

Over the past decade, Turkey and Brazil have been widely celebrated as star economic performers—emerging markets with increasing influence on the international stage. Yet, over the past three months, both countries have been paralyzed by massive demonstrations expressing deep discontent with their governments’ performance. What is going on here, and will more countries experience similar […]

Frank Furedi is a sociologist and commentator. He is the author of many books, including: Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (2003); and, most recently, Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter (2015). The aim of this slim volume of essays, The Clash of Civilisations? The Debate: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, is to commemorate […]

Analysis In his latest novel, French writer Michel Houellebecq presents a controversial situation: The year is 2022, and France has become an Islamicized country where universities have to teach the Koran, women have to wear the veil and polygamy is legal. The book, which created a stir in France, went on sale Jan. 7. That […]

Last week, I wrote about the crisis of Islamic radicalism and the problem of European nationalism. This week’s events give me the opportunity to address the question of European nationalism again, this time from the standpoint of the European Union and the European Central Bank, using a term that only an economist could invent: “quantitative […]

COMMENTING on the flow of migrants making their way through Hungary to Austria and Germany, a Hungarian journalist told me recently: “We don’t have cities anymore. Only an extended railway station.” Twenty years ago, Hungary and its Eastern European neighbors were transitional, post-Communist societies, and several — Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia — still are. Now, overnight, […]

Europe is facing the biggest wave of migration since that from the East at the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. And it is indeed Central Europe, whose peoples regard freedom of movement as the greatest benefit arising from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, where today […]

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two […]

THOSE of us outside Europe are watching the unbelievable images of the Keleti train station in Budapest, the corpse of a toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, the desperate Syrian families chancing their lives on the night trip to the Greek islands — and we keep being told this is a European problem. The […]

Sometimes it is easy to forget why we study history. Of course, we use the past to understand the present; but also, ideally, we learn from it too. What a shame, then, that there is no space in the new national curriculum for the history of Byzantium. The eastern half of the Roman empire that […]