REPCO

Perceiving war as a series of strategic manoeuvres delineated on a map renders a horizontal view of conflict. And projecting an end to fighting is fundamentally restorative. But deep pollution, as is occurring in Ukraine from Russia’s radioactive colonialism, warns of a more persistent dimension with long-term environmental impact.

Even after the disgracing of Gerhard Schröder and Scholz’s trumpeted Zeitenwende, German Social Democracy has been unable to dispel suspicions that it continues to sympathise with Russia. The authors of a recent book discuss this ignominious history, in which Schröder was the main but by no means only actor.

From free school meals to the privatization of family policy, early childhood education can be heaven on earth when it works well, or a hellscape when it is dysfunctional. Kindergartens are on this week’s episode of Standard Time, premiering today at 7 PM CET.

Pilot schemes show that the four-day week can increase productivity while significantly improving personal wellbeing. So what is holding back this long mooted reform? Comparison shows that some models are more popular than others among employers and employees alike.

Vladimir Putin insists that Russia is a unique civilisation state. But behind this assertion of ‘Sonderweg’ or a ‘special path’ lies a complex series of social constructs. Questioning the geopolitical metaphor dividing ‘West’ and ‘East’, ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’, points to a recurring battle with transformation.

Western Europe’s historical denial of Ukraine’s Europeanness stemmed from the same imperialist root as Russia’s denial of Ukraine’s national existence. Against this background, the EU’s recent change of heart is momentous.

Analyses of the decline of Scandinavian social democracy: how marketization has destroyed the Swedish model; on the rise of anti-elitist conservatism in Denmark; and dusting down the concept of the professional managerial class.

Safeguarding the dubious concept of a ‘European way of life’ has serious implications for migrants. Though indispensable for economic growth, new arrivals, who endure militarized border systems, face a future of privatized detention centres and offshore processing facilities. Could a new focus on common goals provide the necessary end to dehumanizing practices?

Private enterprises founded by diaspora Poles with seed capital from the West produced a range of consumer goods for the domestic market in the late Polish People’s Republic, blowing a ‘wind of change’ into the planned economy over a decade before the transformation.

At one point in his 1984 essay ‘Permission to narrate’, Edward Said described urging family and friends in Beirut to record what was happening during the Israeli siege, in order to tell the world ‘what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “anti-terrorism”’.