Note from the LeftEast editors: The July 8/9 NATO summit in Warsaw was not much more than the usual spectacular propaganda advertisement with which the Atlantic Alliance countries wanted to show the world their strength and their common commitment to “security and peace”. In fact, beyond the usual internal conflicts between members of the Alliance, the […]
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Turkey: the coup inside out
The Realness of the Coup “İçimiz dışımız darbe oldu.”[1] From toes to head the coup absorbed us. The coup has produced many pedestrian-experts, trying to gauge the coup’s hidden internal and external dynamics. This hermeneutics of the secret owes much of its power to a monumental failure… The failure of what could have turned out […]
Turkey in July: a Tale of Two Coups
Within days of the failed military coup attempt, president Erdogan announced his “good news” to the Turkish public: a state of emergency for three months. It’s been exceedingly difficult to identify with any of the protagonists of the last couple of weeks in Turkey. Essentially, what happened were two coups in quick succession: one—abortive military, […]
Brexit has been greeted as a darkly seminal event, likely to be enshrined as the first historical breakthrough of reaction in contemporary Europe. Everywhere it is being trumpeted as the triumph of xenophobia, populism and racism. In the eyes of the global media, “Vote Leave” irreversibly bears the signature of the Eurosceptic, nationalist right. And […]
The main result from this weekend’s NATO summit in Warsaw was the official proclamation of a “containment” strategy toward Russia. So far, the practical consequence of this declaration is modest in military terms—a total of 3,000 foreign troops will be deployed to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Far more important are the politics of this […]
During the Cold War, in the context of escalating tensions between Russia and China, a listener asks Radio Yerevan: “What do you advise: to drink Russian tea or Chinese tea?’ The answer comes in promptly: it’s wiser not to meddle with the business of great powers, better to drink coffee. It is the same now […]
The ideologeme of 99% and 1% have been present in the popular imagination since 2011. They are obviously theoretically speaking rather crude and simplified, but still paint a good enough picture of a society divided into a political-economic elite at the top and the rest of the people. This division is one of the main […]
Joachim Becker, professor of Economics and Business at Vienna University and deputy head of the Institute for International Economics and Development, was a guest of the conference Social Justice: New Perspectives, New Horizons in Belgrade. Becker’s research interests include development economics, theory of the state, regional integration and disintegration, Mercosur, Turkey, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. […]
When locating the key differences between the political left in the European West and the political Left[1] in the European East, an element of key importance appears to be something external to the Left itself. Namely, the politics and identities of the Western Left have long been shaped by a force external to it: Social […]
1. Polls predicted that Unidos Podemos would finish ahead of the social democrats of PSOE, and that these two parties would muster a majority against the parties of the right. This did not happen, and Unidos Podemos in fact lost votes compared to the December 2015 results of the two parties that make up UP […]