A lengthy article which offers an approach to the conservative and nationalistic agendas of some European countries. Explaining Eastern Europe (2019) Stephen Holmes & Ivan Krastev. Interestingly a the amount of immigration from Romania to the west (from 2007 onwards) is larger in volume then the amount of refugees arriving to Europe from Syria (from 2015 onwards).
For two decades after 1989, the political philosophy of post-communist central and eastern Europe could be summarized in a single imperative: imitate the West! The process was called by different names – democratization, liberalization, enlargement, convergence, integration, Europeanization – but the goal pursued by post-communist reformers was simple. They wished their countries to become ‘normal’, which meant like the West.
In 1989, central and eastern Europeans were not dreaming of some perfect world that had never existed. They were longing for a ‘normal life’ in a ‘normal country.’ […] What they meant by ‘normality’ was the West.
The ultimate revenge of the central and eastern European populists against western liberalism is not merely to reject the ‘imitation imperative’, but to invert it. We are the real Europeans, Orbán and Kaczyński claim, and if the West wants to save itself, it will have to imitate the East.
A very spesific collection of articles on toxins and sex. Queering chemicals (EDCs): A bibliography (2019) Alex Zahara. The collection has texts by familiar names such as Heather Davis and links to interesting concepts such as eco-normativity. Serpil Oppermanns Toxic Bodies and Alien Agencies – Ecocritical perspectives on ecological others (2017) seems interesting.