Tag: europe

THE AMBIGUITIES OF MILAN KUNDERA

July 19, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This tribute to Milan Kundera was published in the Observer on 16 July 2023, under the headline “It’s in Milan Kundera’s ambiguities and contradictions that we find his truths”. The novelist, Milan Kundera once observed to fellow-writer Philip Roth, “teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question”. He feared that in a world in which people “prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask… the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: central europe, europe, european, milan kundera, national identity

SOLIDARITY, IDENTITY AND “PEOPLE LIKE US”

March 9, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on what the responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine tells us about the ways in which we think about solidarity, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 March 2022, under the headline “The people of Ukraine need our solidarity. But not just because they’re ‘like us’”. In 1857, the English poet and Chartist leader Ernest Jones wrote a series of articles in The People’s Paper about the “Indian Mutiny” of that year. It was, he observed, no “mutiny” but […]

Categories: History, International, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-slav racism, ernest jones, europe, european union, fortress europe, freedom struggles, identity politics, racism, refugees, russia, russian invasion, slavs, solidarity, ukraine, ukraine war, vladimir putin

MORTALITY, INEQUALITY AND LESSONS FROM AMERICA

September 21, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on lessons from America about the relationship between inequality and mortality rates, was my Observer column this week. It was published in the Observer, 19 September 2021, under the headline “America’s mortality gap should sound a blaring alarm across the Atlantic”. Americans die younger than Europeans. That is true whether they are rich or poor, black or white, toddlers or OAPs. The latest confirmation of the mortality gap across the Atlantic comes from a newly published study that tracked death rates in the […]

Categories: Class, International, Politics • Tags: america, angus deaton, anne case, britain, covid 19, deaths of despair, europe, health policy, inequality, levelling up, mortality rates, poverty, race, race and class, usa

MIGRANT DETENTION AND MORAL DISGRACE

July 8, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on whether migrant detention centres should be described as ‘concentration camps’, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Tory policy and attitudes to the homeless.) It was published on 7 July 2019, under the headline ‘Whatever we call them, wherever they are, detention centres are a disgrace’. They are held in wire cages, with standing room only, sometimes for months. Adults have to wear the same clothes for weeks. Children have no washing […]

Categories: International, Race & Immigration • Tags: boer war, concentration camps, europe, european union, holocaust, migrant crisis, migrant detention, morality, nazi death camps, undocumented migrants, usa

IN DEFENCE OF UNIVERSALISM

May 3, 2019 by Kenan Malik

. . This is an interview with Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Ben Fogle for the podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, mainly on questions of immigration, identity, class and the left (though it opens with a discussion of the aftermath of the Notre Dame fire). . The image is Untitled by Hans Hartung.

Categories: Class, Kenan Malik, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: culture, europe, identity politics, immigration, left, notre dame, populism, white identity, white working class, working class

IMMIGRATION, INTEGRATION AND SOCIAL FRACTURE

April 29, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on whether the failure to integrate is responsible for social fracturing in European societies, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the Roger Scruton debate.) It was published on 28 April 2019, under the headline ‘Talk of integration is a sideshow in a society where many feel unheard’. Uncontrolled migrant flows have made many in Europe more hostile to immigration. The failure of migrants to integrate has helped create more fractured societies and exacerbated […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: bene sagvari, britishness, distrust, europe, european social survey, fear, immigration, integration, migration crisis, populism, social fragmentation, tony blair, trust, vera messing

ISLAMIC ART AND FLORENCE

August 13, 2018 by Kenan Malik

I am away for a couple of weeks, so will be posting little new material on Pandaemonium. I am taking the opportunity to publish some of those shorter pieces from my Observer column that I don’t normally post on Pandaemonium. This short piece was published in the Observer on 8 July 2018 under the headline ‘Look at art for the deep connection between Europe and Islam’. The Adoration of the Magi is an early 15th-century altarpiece painting by the Italian painter Gentile da […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: adoration of the magi, elif shafak, europe, florence, gentile da fabriano, islam, islamic art, renaissance

ON MORALITY AND ITS HISTORY

August 10, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions at the heart of The Quest for a Moral Compass. And these are the questions I want to explore tonight. For some, the questions themselves might seem absurd. It is striking that there are thousands of books about the […]

Categories: History, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, christianity, enlightenment, europe, french revolution, greek philosophy, haitian revolution, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, imperialism, modernity, monotheism, morality, nietzsche, plato, radical enlightenment, thrasymachus, viktor frankl

THE MAKING OF THE MUSLIM WORLD

June 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a review of Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason (Bodley Head), Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press) and Tariq Ramadan’s Islam: The Essentials (Pelican). It was published in the New Statesman, 9 June 2017. ‘The Turkish nation,’ Mehmed Ziya Gokalp wrote, ‘belongs to the Ural-Altai [language] group of peoples, to the Islamic umma, and to Western internationalism.’ Gokalp was an early-20th-century sociologist, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books • Tags: enlightenment, europe, imperialism, islam, islamic enlightenment, islamism, modernity, tariq ramadan, west

GRASPING DIVERSITY, EMBRACING DEMOCRACY

March 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

© Art Projects International; Courtesy of artist and Art Projects International, New York . This is the keynote talk I gave at the 2017 Karlsruhe Dialogues on ‘The Pluralistic Society and its Enemies’ on 4 March 2017. It was entitled entitled ‘Can Diversity Embrace Democracy? Can Democracy Acknowledge Diversity?’ If there are two issues that define contemporary political debate, they are those of diversity and democracy. From the migration crisis to radical Islam to multiculturalism, fears about the consequences of […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Politics • Tags: Class, cultural diversity, democracy, diversity, edmund burke, europe, identity politics, left, working class

TALKING MIGRATION, BREXIT AND HOSTILITY

July 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a ‘Talking Migration’ podcast with Rob Ford, Professor in Political Science at the University of Manchester, about the Brexit vote and the role within it of migration, and of hostility to migration. ‘Talking Migration’ is a podcast series produced by Clara Sandelind of the University of Huddersfield. (I sound in the podcast as if I’m standing in the middle of a cave and shouting – my apologies, I was obviously sitting in a highly resonant […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: brexit, british politics, europe, european union, immigration, racism, working class

BRITAIN, EUROPE AND THE REAL CRISIS

June 29, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The decision by British voters last week to leave the European Union has brutally exposed two features of contemporary British politics. The first is the depth of popular disaffection with mainstream political institutions. The second is the paralysis of the political class in the face of this disaffection. The Brexit victory was buttressed by a coalition of disparate social groups. Traditional Conservative supporters in the shires and the suburbs have long been suspicious of the European project. Few were surprised […]

Categories: Britain, International, Politics • Tags: brexit, british politics, europe, european union, far right, front national, left, populism, ukip, working class

HOW SHOULD WE LIVE IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY?

May 2, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my talk at the Castrum Peregrini in Amsterdam on 2 May. (Apologies for the lack of links and references; I will sort them out in due course when I have more time.) ‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ So asked the American writer Christopher Caldwell in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, published a few years ago. It is a question that has been asked with increasing urgency in […]

Categories: Free Speech, Multiculturalism • Tags: anti-semitism, christianity, clash of civilizations, diversity, europe, identity politics, immigration, integration, islam, judeo-christian tradition, karim miske, migration crisis, racism, trevor phillips

THE FOURTH WAVE OF EUROPEAN JIHADIS

April 3, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Rik Coolsaet, Professor of International Relations at Ghent University and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Egmont-Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels, has just published an important and insightful paper on Belgian jihadis. It provides a comprehensive overview of jihadi scene in Belgium and, in doing so, challenges many of the myths about radicalization that I mentioned in my recent New York Times article. It is worth looking at Coolsaet’s argument in detail. Today’s European jihadis comprise, Coolsaet argues, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, International, War on terror • Tags: europe, islamic state, islamism, jihadism, marc sageman, olivier roy, radicalization, rik coolsaet, terrorism

DEMOCRACY, MORALITY AND THE MIGRANT CRISIS

February 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer (in a slightly shorter version) under the headline ‘Europe’s immigration bind: how to act morally while heeding the will of its people’. Europe faces a migrant crisis, but not the one we imagine. The dilemma it faces is this: on the one hand, any moral and workable immigration policy will not, at least for the moment, possess a democratic mandate; on the other, any policy that has popular support is likely to be […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration • Tags: angela merkel, europe, european union, fortress europe, germany, immigration, migration, morality, refugees, schengen, spain