On June 17th the Hungarian government decided to close its border with Serbia, securing it with metal fencing all along its 175 kilometres. Controversy is rampant. The Serbian government is outraged, with the press reporting on yet another wall in the European fortress. Associations active in the field of migrants’ human rights have, euphemistically speaking, expressed perplexity. According to the Hungarian government, closing the border will stop the flow of migrants that has affected the country in recent months. They almost all transit through Serbia, a fundamental part of the “Balkan route.” Migrants also travel to Europe by land. Frontex, the European agency responsible for monitoring and controlling borders, has reported that, in the first six months of 2015, the same number of people have arrived in Europe from the two Mediterranean routes (one leading to Sicily and the other to Greece) and from the Balkans, amounting to 50,000 migrants.
When reading the Russian press one can deduct that patriotism has become a fundamental key for understanding the Russian Federation’s foreign policy. It is interesting to study the different analyses of this phenomenon, from the most conservative to those most critical of the regime. What does Russian patriotism consist of? According to Andrej Il’nitskij – a political analyst and a member of Putin’s “United Russia” party – there is now a “democratic patriotism” in Russia. It is a peculiar ideology that starts with a negation of what the country is not – neither a fascist government like Kiev’s nor plutocratic liberalism following the Western model – and protects the state’s traditional values. Russian patriotism is “democratic” – since it is supported by the majority of the country, but also “creative” because it is free from the impediments typical of the liberal ideology. Its pillars are the educational system, the army, the media and the Russian intelligentsia.
The President’s Letter
This text, in the form of a letter, was sent to Reset by President Giorgio Napolitano whom we had asked to contribute to a special section marking the fiftieth anniversary of Luigi Einaudi’s death on October 29, 1961. The special section dedicated to this founder of the Republic appeared in Reset no. 127 and included articles by Enzo Di Nuoscio, Paolo Heritier, Paolo Silvestri, Corrado Ocone, Flavio Felice, and excerpts from Einaudi’s correspondence with Luigi Albertini. After I met with Napolitano early last September, the pressure of events forced him to postpone writing until recently. Although much has changed since last October, recalling what Einaudi can teach us remains important above and beyond an anniversary. Einaudi was president of the Bank of Italy from 1945 to 1948 and president of the Republic from 1948 to 1955, but his legacy also includes his writing, his work as economic columnist for Il Corriere della sera until 1925, and his teaching at the Bocconi University where Carlo Rosselli was his assistant.The heart of the matter that we wanted Napolitano to take on is the crisis of Italian politics and the reasons why the values espoused by a father of the Republic as important as Einaudi are no longer evident in the Italian ruling class except in a very few cases. This was also an occasion to reflect on Italian reformism (a tradition that our President represents in all respects) and on lost opportunities across the entire political spectrum.Napolitano’s letter takes full advantage of this occasion and offers many useful suggestions about work—both inquiry and action—that we must continue. We thank him for this.In a letter to the President sent after our conversation last September, I quoted the work of the recently deceased historian Tony Judt. The President refers to this quotation in his text, so I’ll repeat it here: “During the long century of constitutional liberalism…Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen. Whatever their political affinities, Leon Blum and Winston Churchill, Luigi Einaudi and Willy Brandt, David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities. It is an open question as to whether it was the circumstances that produced the politicians, or the culture of the age that led men of this caliber to enter politics. Today, neither incentive is at work. Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies” (Ill Fares the Land, Penguin Press, 2010, pp. 164-165). In the same letter, I mentioned that reading the Einaudi-Albertini correspondence (published by the Corriere della Sera Foundation and excerpted in Reset) reveals the magnitude of the work undertaken by earlier statesmen with such great scientific, political, and moral rigor on a daily basis. “This strengthens my conviction,” I wrote, “that the gap Judt speaks about is quite dramatic.” I asked the President to reflect on the issues raised by Tony Judt’s “open question.”
Giancarlo Bosetti, Editor of Reset-DoC
International constitutions and conventions must be respected without resorting to subterfuge. Every foreigner arriving in Italy must be permitted to present a request for asylum. This is a constitutional right. The commission appointed to examine the requests will then establish whether a person has the right or not to refugee status and protection. For as long as such a law exists, one has no choice but to apply it, if not applied the law should be changed or repealed.
Bologna, 27-28 January 2011Islam is today the second religion in Europe. Despite the complexity implied by this fact, a widespread dichotomy presents a homogeneous Europe versus a likewise consistent Muslim “Other”. This conference aims at deconstructing such a dichotomy and to scrutinize how gender lies at the heart of the frictions occurring as a result of contemporary transnational challenges. It presents frontline research on how European states govern Muslims´ migration movements and everyday life along with research focused on power relations within the Muslim minorities.
On November 17th 2010, ResetDoc and the Swiss University organisation UFSP Asia and Europe organised a conference on this subject in Zurich, on the theme “Islam in Europe”. Widely reported by the Swiss press, the event was held in the assembly hall at Zurich University, filled with students, professors and ordinary citizens, bearing witness to the fact that the need to address subjects such as pluralism, relations with Islam and European democracies, democratic dialectics between the majority and the minorities, tension between liberal principles and the traditional instruments of democratic deliberation, is a need that a rising number of people consider pressing.
Racism, the symbols of Islam, the relationship between Europe and the Muslim community were at the centre of the first day of the third edition of the Istanbul Seminars, the yearly conference organised by Resetdoc at the Bilgi University. Giancarlo Bosetti, Reset’s editor-in-chief, opened the sessions, reminding everyone how fear has become the main instrument of governments in applying pressure on society’s weaker and more easily influenced groups to incite hostile sentiments such as xenophobia and racism. Nilüfer Göle, chair of the Faculty of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, instead analysed the perverse perspective according to which, for many westerners, minarets symbolically represent missiles and veiled women are an omen of the imposition of Shari’ a in Europe.
An article by Marco Cesario.
The fragility of the agreements signed is there for everyone to see and contradicts President Al Bashir’s triumphant statements, when, speaking on State television and to the international press, he declared that the civil war in Darfur was “over.” Not all the players in the Sudanese political scenario wish for reconciliation. On the contrary, there have been violent clashes between government troops and the rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA/SLM), a group that has not signed the truce.
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