Citizens of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries are not satisfied with the progress that has been made since 1989. Many feel that they have traded in the grey faceless bureaucratic oppression of the Communist Party for a new capitalist class who are offensively showy: every four-carat diamond and London flat pilfered through privatisation has become a personal insult to an unemployed Donbass miner or pension-dependent babushka in Yekaterinburg.

François Hollande’s five year term as president of France was more than underwhelming, which largely explains why the recent election has seen France’s Socialist Party wiped off the electoral map. During a period of high unemployment, Hollande’s government conducted an aggressive winding back of the country’s labour code, at the same time as slashing funding to hospitals and healthcare. To Australian audiences, this kind of neoliberal renovation probably sounds awfully familiar.

The refugee crisis has allowed a kind of ‘white internationalism’ to coalesce. The Far Right has not renounced nationalism, but it has foregrounded a whiteness defined in civilisational terms, and defined against the alleged threat posed by Muslim immigrants and refugees throughout the West, and by Latin-American migrants in North America.

On an overcast April evening, I wandered into the Place de la Republique to join disaffected youth, students, workers, and everyday Parisians involved in the Nuit Debout. The atmosphere was uplifting. The indignation of the gathered crowd was palpable, and the frustration with their political leadership unanimous. As an outsider, their self-expression was refreshing.

Since 1 January, there have been calls to close the borders, end all German intake of refugees and asylum seekers, and immediately deport any non-German found guilty of sexual harassment. These calls have been echoed across the political spectrum. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a politician who has not made some sort of public statement on ‘Cologne’, including the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose portfolio does not usually include sexual assault and petty theft on the streets of Cologne.

Terrorism operated on children as much as it did on adults. It formed us, growing up in this fear, and seeing fear on the faces of the grown-ups. It must have. However, I don’t recall ever being asked to draw those feelings.

The bullets had scarcely stopped flying in Paris before the pressure was on. There were the profile pictures filtered with le Tricolore or changed to show the user on holiday in Paris; the memes with cartoons by Charlie Hebdo illustrator Joann Sfar or words by Martin Luther King Jr; the condemnations of religious fundamentalism and pleas for tolerance on behalf of the peaceful majority of the world’s Muslims. The counter narrative went hand-in-hand: what about Beirut, we were asked with varying degrees of sanctimoniousness, where Islamic State militants had killed 41 people the day before the Paris attacks?

By now, most of us should be fully aware of the arrival of refugees on European shores, and by extension, Australia. The descriptors used for these movements of large masses of people across land and sea are often described in fluid terms: a surge, a flood, a wave, a flow; a rising tide that is about to break open the dams and threaten the biodiversity of our precious ecosystems. This language isn't just tremendously invalidating and dehumanising: when scores of migrants are either locked up in detention centres or dying at sea, it helps to gloss over the fact of their mere existence.

Some time ago, I made a mental note to write a piece about the election in Denmark – the one where the country had lurched to the left, repudiating the nativist Danish People’s Party, returning to the social democrats and socialists, and going beyond them to boost a new red-green alliance, and creating a four-party […]

Capital flows freely across the globe, picking the cheapest labour force it can; workers of different countries are pitted against each other in a race to the bottom on wages, working conditions and rates of tax on the operation of companies. It seems a quixotic venture to attempt to establish socialism — or even social democracy — in one country, when the benefits accruing to its citizens can be wiped out by currency devaluation, disinvestment and an exodus of industry to a country with lower (or to use the euphemism preferred by politicians, more ’competitive’) labour costs and tax.