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Towards a new world disorder?

The post–Second World War international order appears to be nearing its end. It is increasingly being replaced by a system that openly presents itself as non-liberal, if not outrightly anti-liberal. Should this emerging (dis)order remain nominally rules-based, its rules will differ fundamentally from those established after 1945. They may simply reflect the shifting whims of powerful leaders rather than stable and broadly accepted norms of conduct.

February 23, 2026 - Andreas Umland

The collapse of the European security order

The sense that Europe is adrift in the emerging world order reflects both external shocks and internal shortcomings. On the one hand, the United States is signalling that Europe is no longer the central theatre of American strategy. On the other, Europeans remain divided on how far they are willing to go in assuming real strategic responsibility, or the so-called European strategic autonomy.

February 23, 2026 - Wojciech Michnik

The last frontier. Europe’s psychological war

Europe now finds itself sandwiched between two autocrats, each working to weaken Europe for his own purposes. Those purposes may not be joint, but they intersect and are clear: they want to activate the Trojan horses of anti-EU, illiberal, political insurgency and thus undermine EU policies and democratic values from within. At stake now is the survival of Europe.

February 23, 2026 - Paul Bell

When war becomes a national idea: Russia’s strategy towards Europe

If Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, it will double down on efforts to destabilize Europe and may again turn to armed aggression. The safest and cheapest option for NATO is to give Ukraine the financial and military support it needs to block Moscow’s imperial ambitions. Meanwhile, the unpunished genocide unfolding in the heart of Europe painfully exposes the weakness and cynicism of Europe’s legal and value-based order.

February 23, 2026 - Maria Domańska

Never again meets a new war

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced Germany into a reckoning that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago. Warnings that Moscow could attack another European country before the end of the decade have pushed Berlin into its most ambitious rearmament effort since the Cold War. However, this shift has not come without resistance.

February 23, 2026 - Isabelle de Pommereau

Latin Europe

What a future European culture will look like remains an open question. What matters here is the insistence that such a culture must exist at all. Europe should be understood as an idea and a system of symbols, not as a race or a nation. For this to be possible, Europe requires a renewed sense of continuity.

February 23, 2026 - David Hallbeck

Goodbye communism

The pace of dealing with the communist past has been uneven across Central and Eastern Europe. While Poland intensely debated de-communization in the 1990s, in Ukraine the mass removals of Lenin monuments – the so-called Leninopad – began only during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. In the Baltic states, the memory of communism remains strongly negative.

December 8, 2025 - Kinga Gajda Michał Kuryłowicz

From revolution to souvenirs

The selling of communism across Central and Eastern Europe reveals more than the region’s ingenuity in repurposing its past – it exposes how memory itself has become a currency in the post-socialist era. This marketplace of memory is not merely a tourist trend – it is a mirror of broader cultural transformations.

December 8, 2025 - Jovana Janinovic

Sensory memory and creating a community of memory

The feeling of coarse toilet paper bought after hours in a queue, the scent of sweat on a train to a Bulgarian summer camp, the fizz of Soviet shampanskoye igristoye on New Year’s Eve – these are not just fragments of nostalgia. They are traces of a collective past, an embodied memory of life under communism that continues to shape how a generation remembers itself.

December 8, 2025 - Magdalena Banaszkiewicz

The memory of forgetting

After the end of communist rule, many societies sought recognition of their own wartime suffering as part of Europe’s shared memory. Although the Allies are often portrayed as a united front against Nazism, the newer member states of the European Union have pressed for acknowledgement of the oppression they experienced under both Nazism and Stalinism, arguing that these histories should be remembered on equal terms.

December 8, 2025 - Dymitr Romanowski

Rediscovering the People’s Poland

In Poland, after the initial rejection of the legacy of the Polish People’s Republic, a gradual re-evaluation of the communist period has begun. Certain elements of its social reality – those that gave it a distinct local colour and a sense of belonging – came to be reassessed and, in some cases, appreciated.

December 8, 2025 - Elżbieta Żak

The gradual “forgetting” of communism in Poland

Featured in communist times as a symbol of abductions, the black Volga has lost its aura now. Today few young Poles even recognize the car or recall the urban legends that once linked it to the KGB or security services. Stripped of these political connotations, it has survived mainly as a retro curiosity – an object of aesthetic nostalgia rather than historical unease.

December 8, 2025 - Aleksander Niepokój Michał Kuryłowicz

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