Eurozine

About Eurozine

Europe's leading cultural magazines at your fingertips

Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up 70 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages.

The most important articles on European culture and politics

By providing a Europe-wide overview of current themes and discussions, Eurozine offers a rich source of information for an international readership and facilitates communication and exchange between the journals themselves. By presenting the best articles from its partners and their countries, as well as original texts on the most pressing issues of our times, Eurozine opens up a new space for transnational debate.

Eurozine is a non-profit institution, with an editorial office based in Vienna. The Editorial Board, composed of the editors of four European cultural journals, and the Advisory Board play an important role in guiding and advising the Eurozine editors.

The history: the European meetings of cultural journals

Eurozine emerged from an informal network dating back to 1983. Since that time, a variety of European cultural magazines have met once a year in European cities to exchange ideas and experiences. In the meantime, approximately 100 periodicals from almost every European country have become involved in these meetings.

In 1995, the meeting took place in Vienna. The success of this meeting, in which numerous eastern European magazines participated for the first time, and the rapid development of the Internet encouraged the editors to reinforce the existing loose network with a virtual but more systematic one. Eurozine was established in 1998.

Today, Eurozine hosts the European Meeting of Cultural Journals each year together with one or more of its partners.

The journals Mittelweg 36 (Hamburg), Kritika & Kontext (Bratislava), Ord&Bild (Göteborg), Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais (Coimbra), Transit -- Europäische Revue (Vienna), and Wespennest (Vienna) are Eurozine's founding members.

Chronology

The strategy: an alliance between old and new media

Eurozine is a showcase for the many possibilities that cooperation between print and electronic media creates. In presenting its partners online, Eurozine gives these printed journals the chance to widen their sphere of influence without compromising their independence. At the same time, Eurozine's base in printed journals with a longstanding intellectual tradition distinguishes it from most other web-based projects.

Designed as an independent cultural platform, Eurozine uses the world wide web

* to promote the leading European cultural journals;

* to intensify communication and exchange between them; and

* to offer, as a journal of its own, a public space of a new type for open and critical debate on a transnational level.

The philosophy: translation of cultures

Whenever European culture is discussed today, its diversity is evoked with near euphoria. The true challenge is to take diversity seriously and make room for new perspectives -- whether in word or thought. Only a rich and freewheeling dialogue has the potential to forge a common identity and put it to the proof.

Cultural journals are the sector of the media that most closely approximates a definition of the European public space. These journals are part of a genuinely international debate, spreading political, philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural thought between languages. In bringing the panorama of European cultural journals to an international public, Eurozine stimulates a common cultural discourse among an international readership.

Translation is the key to creating a European public space that respects diversity. By translating texts into one of the widely-spoken European languages, Eurozine creates the possibility for texts to be understood and valued outside of their original context.