Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: The following piece was first published on the Global Social Change Blog. We reprint it with permission. Below please find an incriminated paragraph from Orbán’s rambling, recent speech, given before a couple hundred, predominantly middle-“class”, middle-aged fans at an open-air right-wing political festival in northern Romania. The speech has been widely […]
Based on all this, the ongoing conflict is between
– a richer (and of course very considerably larger) Russia that turns its economic performance into life spans of its population with relatively low efficiency (sort of like a state afflicted with what I would call a quasi-resource-curse), and
– a poorer (and, obviously, less gigantic–although by no means “small”–) Ukraine whose Life Expectancy figures are considerably higher than those of Russia, reflecting a less terrible linkage structure turning the country’s moderate per capita GDP into life spans for its population.
Interview excerpt: “For us, in our part of the world, one of the most breathtaking aspects of the history of the Haitian Revolution is that the Polish battalion sent there by the French switched sides and supported the uprising. Mind you, some of the Polish survivors ended up settling there, and there are even today proud Haitians who claim, partly, Polish family heritage.
There are many intricacies to this story. My point is that, in the late-18th, early-19th century, it was still possible for east European subjects to experience a political, moral and emotional identification with Black people and the objectives of the latters’ armed struggles against colonial rule and slavery. This, by the way, was not unique to Poles—there is ample evidence of similar positions in Hungarian history as well.
By today, this political, moral and emotional identification has become almost impossible.”
Note from LeftEast editors: This talk was recorded at the workshop on After US Hegemony: Geopolitical Economy in the 21st Century, held at the Karl Polányi Center for Global Social Analysis at Corvinus University, Budapest, on February 11, 2020.
The rule of European difference Self-reflexive European conversations have produced a great variety of genres. They proceed on diverse levels of abstraction, attend to a wide range of topics and recur in numerous narrative situations, showing slight modifications depending on who is speaking to whom about whom. There is one common feature in all that […]
This is Éva Gönczi’s translation of an article that first appeared in Hungarian in the journal Népszava on April 21, 2019. Here György Heimer interviews well-known sociologist József Böröcz on the luster and pitfalls of the European Union, at a time when that institution has become the object of great polarization in Hungary and across […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: This interview of Àngel Ferrero with sociologist József Böröcz (Rutgers University) was carried out for the newspaper El Salto and first appeared there in Spanish on the 7th of April 2018. LeftEast reprints the English original with the kind permission of the author. 1/ According to the polls, Viktor […]
source: J.Borocz’s blog GlobalSocialChange Here are the conversations that are NOT happening: The European Union is not giving any clear signals just what it actually wants the Schengen states most exposed to the refugee inflows–not only Hungary, but also Greece, Bulgaria and Italy–to do. It is completely obvious that, if anybody actually cares about alleviating […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: This text was originally published on the authors’s blog Global Social Change, dedicated to his book The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis, Routledge 2009 , and is reprinted on Lefteast with the kind permission of the author. Hungary’s National Bank, in its capacity as financial […]