U.S. evaluation of the events in Poland between August 1980 and December 1981 decisively determined the fear of Soviet intervention like the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the culmination of the election campaign presidential election. Therefore, the main slogan of American diplomacy, repeated like a mantra, it was nieinterweniowanie in internal Polish affairs, which were to be resolved by the Poles themselves. This dogma has been adopted by all democratic countries around the world, and the most consistently implemented by the members of NATO.
In the beginning was the charity. This feeling, understood as love of neighbor, different from eros and branches, more than other shaped the identity of the West. In the period from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, agape, at the unique process of enculturation and acculturation of Christianity, awoke feeling created models, directed policy, revived the law and institutions.
The paper gives an analytical description of the ideology of the Slavonic spirit as an essence of a culture. The principles of this ideology, from which a pretension on historical mission has been derived, was articulated by Russian Slavophils. In his writing 'Slavism and the world of future' Ludovit Stúr outlines this ideology to the Central-European Slavs as well as to justify the need of adopting pan-Russian Slavism. His vocabulary and style are marked by the political romanticism, while his conceptual map embodies dichotomies such as West/East, we/the others, religion/secularism. He finds the West to be in the state of the political and the moral decline, while the East (the Russian Slavism) is seen by him as the ground of a new civilization. The back-ground of this way of thinking is his conservative utopism.
The Iron Curtain was a symbol of a Europe divided between Soviet and Western influence for forty years. Powers on each side of the border invested huge efforts into creating ideologically motivated images of the Other. The article presents the outcomes of biographical research which offers an insight into how aged people in Eastern Slovakia remember their pre-1989 perceptions of the Western Block and how they think of life in the West today, focusing on the main element of their memories in this respect – emigration. It is the outcome of a broader oral history project being conducted in Slovakia since 2017, aiming to obtain and analyse current images of socialism, as communicated today by the generation of witnesses who were living their adult lives during the period spanning between the 1960s and the 1980s; and understanding the relations between the current attitudes and values of the respondents and their experience of life in state socialist regimes.
The article is based on the hypothesis that Europe has been historically and permanently “divided” into two parts. Four historical-geographical aspects of this duality are distinguished: cultural, economicsocial, political, and ethnic. To examine and džine duality, specific indicators are used. Duality is underwood as a complex and dynamic phenomenon that changes over the time. Conclusions summarize briefly the historical synthesis.
In the 19th century, the period of intensive contacts between the West and Japan was renewed. Two waves can be identified in the process of re-introduction of Japanese culture to the West until the continuous reciprocal cultural exchange as we know it after World War II. Fascination of Europe with the Japanese woodcraft (since 1862) that influenced Impressionism and later Art Nouveau can be identified as the first wave, the second wave is characterised by broader familiarity with Japanese culture and literature due to the fact that more and more Westerners mastered the secrets of the Japanese language and the first translations into the European languages appeared. Noh theatre emerged in the West as part of the second wave. It was during the U.S. and European tour of actor Kawakami Otojiro (1864 - 1911) who owned a private theatre Kawakami, and his wife, a former geisha Sadayakko (1871 - 1946), one of the first female actresses in modern Japan. Europe began to realize the authentic form of Noh. In London, the increase in popularity of Noh can be traced into the crucial moment, when a young American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972,) came here in 1908 longing to get to know the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). Western authors appreciated how the Japanese Noh combines drama, music and dance into the monolithic unit and they considered mask an excellent means of an 'alienation effect', leading the spectators to feel separated from the events on stage and giving them an opportunity to think about the deeper meaning of events. Analysing the history of Noh in the West, we note two milestones, two points in this development which brings in mind two ends of Monet's Pont Japonais (Japanese Bridge) in his garden in Giverny, stretching over the century of its naturalization in the West. One is the work of William Butler Yeats at the beginning of the 20th century and - a century later, Jannette Cheong's work, the latest piece of the Western Noh. Both were written in English and premiered in London.
The study compares identities of the Ukrainian and Slovak ethnicities; they both contribute with their respective uniqueness to Europe – in a certain sense – as a supranational community as well as to Europe consisting of differences and regional connotations. The existence of both ethnicities in a historical sense is primarily related to the European macro-regions of East and West. In this context, Christianity fulfilled important cultural and civilizational functions; it determined people’s educational levels, morals, customs, etc. In this sense, the Ukrainian ethnicity archetypically identified with the Orthodox Christianity. The principle of caesaropapism, the superiority of the political power compared to the ecclesiastical power, as well as the principle of Catholicity brought into the nation’s “mentality” the elements of collectivism, communalism, obedience, respect toward authority, and heteronomous religious morals, which were later transformed to secular morals, i.e. party and state orders / bans. The Slovakians living in the Roman-Catholic / Evangelical Christianity partially acquired the cultural and civilizational heritage of the West. By separating the secular and ecclesiastical powers, the West enabled the rise of individualism, liberty, nation states, and human and civil rights; however, one cannot overlook Slovakia’s geographic position within Middle Europe, and therefore the backwardness of its society. Both Slovakian and Ukrainian ethnicities, and more precisely, their elites led the national emancipatory processes in multi-ethnic empires (Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy) with a single state nation; they had been confronted with the issue of the linguistic nationalism.
In his study, the author searches for the causes of polarized tension in our perception of the paired terms - East and West. He seeks reasons behind this acute dichotomy and points out the sources and manifestations of the so-called Orientalism and its specific form - Balkanism. Methodological blunders prevent us from reaching more deeply into the processes that are under way in two great Himalayan powers. China, which is no longer merely a developing country, has experienced a fourth decade of steady real economic growth. India has recently undergone massive changes, too.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.