Eva Marlene Hausteiner (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) argues that far from serving as a historical safeguard against empire, U.S. federalism has been entangled with colonial and imperial practices since the nation’s founding—a finding that should give pause to those who assume federal structures, including a prospective European framework, are inherently immune to imperial drift.
The essays gathered here ask what the American experience — more particularly the debates between federalists and anti-federalists — can teach about the costs, limits, and possibilities of building a union, and whether those lessons travel to Europe at all.
In remembering his dear friend and colleague, Jeffrey Goldfarb highlights the importance of Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s writing on social conflict, collective memory, and social events.
As a writer, Slavenka Drakulić sought to evoke the life of the single individual in a way that made empathy possible, writes her friend Marci Shore.
Eyyup Yilmaz, (Loyola University) discusses the nature of debates surrounding Islam and democracy. Starting from a lecture by Ernst Renan, he shows how both Muslim and non-Muslim actors fall into a modernist trap of thought when discussing Islam and democracy.
Robert Austin (University of Toronto) argues that while for some the promise of a $4 billion dollar resort linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump is a sign Albania has finally made it, for others, it caps 35 years of shabby democracy and rampant development devoid of vision or rules.
András Bozóki (Central European University), Andrea Szabó and Zoltán Gábor Szűcs-Zágoni (Eötvös Loránd University) examine TISZA’s electoral strategy and its implications for challenging electoral autocracy without violence.
Irit Dekel reflects on how the book’s subtitle, Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, poses the potent tensions that are crucial for attempting to solve the problems at hand, suggesting that through his concept of the “radical center,” Goldfarb and the people who create this space create it consciously and arguing that it is radical to confront the retreat of democracy from a center that is plural and open.
Jeffrey C. Isaac suggests that this “paradoxical idea” (paradoxical, for: how can “radicalism” be “centrist?”) is best defended by Goldfarb himself, but that the answer goes something like this: however polarized the situation, and however righteous the cause, there is never a single way to act or to be. And so, there is always a need for there to be a space for thinking beyond oneself and one’s commitments, and for real dialogue—listening as well as speaking—as a constitutive feature of ethically justified action.
Siobhan Kattago notes that while “radical center” may sound like a contradiction in terms, the center that he envisions is radical because its roots can withstand the abyss of raging anger promoted by strongmen and clever algorithms, insofar as it is also an ethical space that grounds how we orient ourselves to one another and to the world. In this way, the radical center is similar to Krzysztof Czyzewski’s understanding of Sejny, as a small center of the world.
