Texts
Intercultural dialogue: Laboratories of cross-cultural practices.
This particular project began in 2008 as part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. It is being realised by the Borderland Foundation (Sejny, Poland), the Artists’ Association Laundry (Birmingham, Great Britain) and the New Culture Foundation (Bela Rečhka, Bulgaria), though the first ideas emerged from a symposium in Sarajevo and Mostar the previous year. Additional participants were Etz Hayyim Synagogue (Crete) and the Center for National and International Studies (Azerbaijan).
Isabella Thomas - Religion vs. Civil Society: The Right Question?
The Borderland Foundation espouses a noble aim: to try to build connectedness between different groups of people in different countries, across frontiers. This sort of aim, however, is not only necessary in places which are on borders, or which run along frontiers. In the heart of the old metropolitan cities of Europe, bridge building and projects for community cohesion have begun to become urgently necessary. This is especially true of London. For just as the British have begun to give up class divisions, or class awkwardnesses, new walls...
Nicholas Stavroulakis: Crete - A Borderland in a State of Denial
The term borderland as applied to territories, describes in the most general terms the overlapping of ethnicities, religions and cultures usually on peripheries somewhat far removed and less affected by the centrifugal energy created of a nation state. By definition borderlands are not comfortable phenomena as their very existence bear witness to changes in demography, religions and even state allegiances; each questions the very definition of the modern Nation state as it has evolved out of its nineteenth century...
Elżbieta Matynia - Between the Local and the Global: or, What Wroclaw Has Given Us
It was late summer, and I was sitting in an air-conditioned movie theatre in Manhattan, one of those places where New Yorkers who have to stay in town in steamy August love to go. The movie was seemingly simple: two middle-aged men – a chubby playwright who, as I later learned, actually lives in a roach-infested studio on the Lower East Side, and a theatre director, a slender resident of an Upper East Side building with doormen – meet in an elegant restaurant, and have a conversation over dinner. They talk for almost two hours....
Basil Kerski - "What happened to us?" The Growth of Nationalism and Xenophobia in New Member States of the European Union of Central and Eastern Europe
I would like to begin my speech with one basic remark: I find the present movements, reactions, and nationalist thought in Central and Eastern Europe and xenophobia a surprising phenomenon. Why? Because nationalism and xenophobia, which used to be integral elements of the policy of communist authorities in Central and Eastern Europe, are an enduring heritage not only of the wartime or the 30s but also the post-war decades.
Aleksander Kaczorowski - The Price of Our Success
There is a joke from an essay Grey is Beautiful, which was written by Adam Michnik ten years ago. The prince found a frog and it started to speak to him: “If you will give me a kiss, I will come back to my true nature, I will become a pretty princess and you will marry me”. But do you know, what the prince’s answer was? “I do not care – it is better to have a speaking frog!”. Of course, the prince was the West, or the European Union, and the frog was Central Europe, or Poland.
Eva Hoffman - Some Reflections on the Multicultural Cosmopolis Today
Let me start rather personally, by saying that I was particularly delighted to be invited to a conference in Wroclaw – as this is a city which holds vivid early associations for me. I grew up in Cracow after the war, but an adopted auntie – Ciocia Bronia – moved to Wroclaw in the 1950, and I remember visiting her here, and the indelible sight of ruined buildings and post-war shabbiness that were still evident in much of the city. Such sights were sad and forbidding, but they also had, to a child – innocent of the...
Konstanty Gebert - Lecture
Chris Keulemans:
What do you think about this statement by Professor Bauman, that humiliation still is the motor for revival of religion as we see it today?
Edwin Bendyk - Desire Called Utopia
Let's imagine that somebody from the other planet has arrived to the Earth and tries to understand what is going on. The Alien begins with reading basic statistics and what can he find? That it has never been so good on the Earth as it is now. The state of the world is improving. Yes, two billion of people are living in misery, but generally the poverty is decreasing, the standard of living is improving. There are two examples without precedence: China and India, where GDP is doubling every 9 years and not only the boats of the richest go...
Zygmunt Bauman - Terrorism and Religion
Mark Juergensmeyer has analysed the intricate blend of religion, nationalism and violence in the perpetually simmering and occasionally erupting inter-tribal hostilities in Punjab. Focusing particularly on Sikh terrorism responsible for the death of thousands victims, and among other crimes for the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, he found what he and most other researchers would have expected to find before they embarked on their field work: “Young rural Sikhs had perfectly good reasons for being...
Gabriela Adameşteanu - “What has happened to us?” The Rise of Nationalist Sentiments and Xenophobia in the New EU States of Central and Eastern Europe
Not Back to 1944; Forward in 2007
On the third of March, 1990, I and my colleagues from the Group for Social Dialogue found ourselves near Budapest at a first international meeting on a theme very like today’s – with the difference that that conference focused exclusively on the relationship between Romanians and Hungarians.
The dissident poet Mircea Dinescu was the most widely known member of the Romanian team. Certain foreign journalists had taken to calling Dinescu the prince of the Romanian...
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