If an important decision is to be made [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk and the following day the master of the house…submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.
- Herodotus (450 B.C.): The Histories
A quick public service announcement:
We are going to Hay Festival / How the light gets in which will take place in the beautiful village of Y Gelli Gandryll (also known as Hay-on-Wye)! No – we are not going speak at one of the events as we are not famous enough and, to be honest, we do not have enough interesting things to say. But we will certainly enjoy the festival and the Welsh countryside. Plus a healthy dose of listening, learning, reading, partying… (And don’t expect any live blogging or tweeting!)
Well, if you are around say hay (sorry about this!) We are always happy to meet readers and have a pint. Contact us here!
Shameless plug for a recent blog post over at ‘Ideas on Europe‘ about European Studies and wikileaks. Basically I am wondering if the idea of wikileaks could constitute a research topic in European Studies and whether ‘cablegate’ in particular could be the basis for a panel at an academic conference.
I am still thinking of putting together this panel so if you are an academic and want to get involved please contact me!
Ideas on Europe is the blogging platform of UACES, a traditional academic association in the field of European Studies with a membership of around 1000 academics. As some of you already know I started working with them on issues regarding online/media strategy which also includes Ideas on Europe.
We just launched some sort of editorial blog called “The Ideas on Europe Blog” (yes that is a very creative name 
. The main aim of this blog is to discuss how blogs and social media can be used by academics and researchers that work in European studies. The first blog post deals with ‘blogs as a teaching tool‘, however, more will follow soon. We also ‘relaunched’ the ideasoneurope twitter feed – so make sure you follow us @ideasoneurope.
Ideas on Europe is a collaborative website – and so is the editorial blog. If you have any suggestions or requests what kind of topics you would like us to write about – just get in touch with us. Moreover, we are always happy to discuss guest blog posts – for example if you are a blogging researcher/PhD student and you want to share your experiences regarding academic blogging, let us know.
Just a reminder that Ideas on Europe is a group blog for researchers dealing with Europe and/or the European Union. So if you would like to create a blog at ideasoneurope.eu just sign up here!
Sehenswertes Interview mit dem Titel: “Freiheit, Freiheit über alles?” (video in German only)
Peter Voß fragt die Schriftstellerin Juli Zeh from Netwatcher24 on Vimeo.
A short op-ed called “Scholars on the sideline” by Joseph Nye in the Washington Post kicked off an interesting (online) debate (read a reaction by Daniel Drezner here) on the relevance of political science/international relations for actual policy making.
Nye writes in his article that “not too many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory. (…) The fault for this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics.”
If you are interested in that topic, here is a nice video featuring Daniel Drezner in a online debate with Joseph Nye on Blogginheads.tv. The debate and the issue are rather typical for the US and its academic tradition in political science- so it would be intersting to see whether this debate has any significance for European political scientists…
Some food for thought (and some more lazy blogging). Via Ariel Zellman’s blog I came across this little gem which can be found in Stuart Kaufman’s Modern Hatred: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War
A Beginner’s Guide to Ethnic Politics
1. If an area was ours for 500 years and yours for 50 years, it should belong to us – your are merely occupiers.
2. If an area was yours for 500 years and ours for 50 years, it should belong to us – borders must not be changed.
3. If an area belonged to us 500 years ago but never since then, it should belong to us – it is the Cradle of our Nation.
4. If a majority of our people live there, it must belong to us – they must enjoy the right of self-determination.
5. If a minority of our people live there, it must belong to us – they must be protected against your oppression.
6. All of the above rules apply to us but not to you.
7. Our dream of greatness is Historical Necessity, yours if Fascism.
Interesting piece of research on “how online experiences feed back into offline perceptions” in the case of the official europa.eu website which indeed has some potential for improvement regarding content, accessibility, participation and navigation. Some points are obvious, others quite surprising though:
Read more about the findings here. Would be interesting to get hold of the recommendations…
“Every state needs its own Balkan”
With this words philosopher Slavoj Žižek started his lecture on ideology and the fall of state borders. The lecture was given in Italian Gorizia which was until 2007 a border town with Slovenia and is a well known habitat of Italians and Slovenes. From this point of view, the place for discussing such a topic could not be better. Žižek, “the superstar” appeared in front of the fully packed theatre in his typical, a bit nervous manner and made us think about today’s presence of borders. Having in mind a Europe without boundaries, he pointed towards the difference between the physical and mental presence of borders. The latter is more difficult to remove and is usually transferred from one generation to another in a process known as mental mapping . ‘Balkan’ in the European mental perception presents ‘the other’. However, ‘Balkan’ is nowhere, if we approach it from the position that no one wants to belong to it. But at the same time every state needs its own ‘Balkan’ for dividing itself from the others.
The geographical category has been even more intensively labeled as a scapegoat after the last conflicts, often wrongly presented as perpetual, unforgettable clashes between different ethnic groups. The situation was in a false way presented in Kusturica’s Underground, where the former state is shown as a place of passions, alcohol and sexual desires. The place where memories rule and ancient hatreds exist. Žižek negates this with the idea that people that were involved in a conflict were also able to forget about past events and continue to trade and exchange goods regardless of the crimes committed. He claims that the reasons for the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia should be sought in a crisis of legitimacy of leading party nomenclature after the death of Tito and not in a hypocritical apolitical plot of the Underground and its picturesque simplifications of the carnival state. However, the time for the carnival arose latter, with the rule of Milošević which, under a totalitarian surface established a situation in which everything was allowed.
Slavoj Žižek
Žižek claims: “What we need today is not more understanding, but more distance.” Physical borders fell too fast and societies have not been culturally prepared for such a proximity which can result in clashes and reactions. In this sense, he negates a liberal idea of multiculturalism and he rather advocated his position with the image of “the house with many floors in which people live together but not necessarily interact”.
The lecture was concluded in a rather worrying tone. Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing. State of emergencies keep appearing in political discourses (e.g. Italy in July 2008) and this should be taken into consideration very carefully. The globe is more dangerous than ever before. Not in a typical old way, but with the presence of biotechnology, ecological catastrophies and similar issues, more sensibility is needed if we don’t want to live in a total misery in the next 30 or 50 years.