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Cross-border Talks
Cross-Border Talks is an independent medium ran by journalists from Poland, Bulgaria and Czechia.
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Milena Stateva, The Orion Grid:![]()
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"We're talking with a friend these days—he's not worried that funding for political work is shrinking. Realistically, he's right, that was the norm "only" after World War II and then because of the great hope for total democratization at the end of the Cold War. That is, at a time when humanity was deeply afraid of where things were going and mobilized with massive efforts—whether it was the Great Society in the US or the welfare state in Europe and the USSR. ![]()
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Now, of course, especially with the groundwork laid during the pandemic, that "we're all going to die" and "screw it, whatever happens," a great void appears as we move towards a much more brutal manufacturing of genocides, wars, exploitation, a slow and not at all glorious climate apocalypse, and general chaos and destruction.![]()
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This reality bothers me. I don't want to rob banks, corporations, and rich people to make a change—even though I'm hooked on the best series I've seen lately, "La casa de papel." Nor do I want to leave the task of building a better world in the hands of IT specialists and accountants who have the time and resources for "activism," unlike people who have studied and done this for decades. And you should be concerned too. ![]()
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On two fronts—first, not necessarily in this order—I think it should matter to you who is making the change, what they are basing it on, and whether it is a hobby for them. Second, you have no idea how important it is for you to radicalize yourselves. We've said it before—politics is not made by parties.![]()
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Everything is political: how you breathe, what you breathe, what you eat, how you eat, how you feed others, who you feed, how you sleep, where you sleep, who you sleep with, why you sleep and why you don't sleep, and it comes down to whether you are on the street when you need to be, whether you have ended up on the street without a voice (that's where things are going for all of us), whether you are self-organizing for survival and resistance, and whether you know what that is and how to do it. Honestly, most people in a neighborhood don't know how to organize a meeting. And they can't. ![]()
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Use The Orion Grid's Open Line, no matter how timid you are, no matter how much you think that nothing depends on you, that you don't understand these things, that there's no point, that it's not your job, or that you're afraid. ![]()
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Because there is hope. Violence and exploitation are only a reality in 3% of human history. Yes, it's true that those 3% are the last 10,000 years or so, but nothing is stopping us, on the contrary, we are required to plan for the next 10,000 years. Personally, I am for eternity.![]()
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Even if it seems to you that there is no hope, hope is a muscle, as Björk says (and Brecht similarly, but that's another topic). David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their book "The Dawn of Everything" (2021), debunk the myth of a "brutal" prehistoric past. They show that early human societies were diverse, often non-hierarchical, highly cooperative, and experimented with different forms of governance. They argue that violence and inequality are not inevitable, but are the product of specific historical changes.![]()
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Christopher Boehm, in turn, writes "Hierarchy in the Forest" (1999) about the evolution of egalitarian behavior. This anthropologist analyzes tribal societies and primates. It turns out that egalitarianism was maintained quite effectively through social mechanisms, including ridicule and group sanctions, rather than through domination. Early humans had "reverse dominance hierarchies," in which groups kept potential (and actual) tyrants and bullies in check.![]()
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Sarah Hardy writes in "Mothers and Others" (2009) that cooperative reproduction and empathy have shaped our evolutionary path to altruism and caring. Our survival depended on sharing, caring, and raising children together. Human babies are born expecting social care and cooperation, and this is our basic predisposition even in old age.![]()
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In fact, along these lines, it is no wonder that anarchy is so vilified and synonymous with chaos—to dissuade us from visions of solidarity, altruism, and a shared future. In essence, Peter Kropotkin, with his "Mutual Aid" (1902), provides a powerful classical counterpoint to social Darwinism. He observes that cooperation is more common than competition in nature, especially in harsh environments without external interference, and argues that mutual aid is "a biological law as old as life itself." How can you, as a ruler who hoards resources, say that such a thing does not exist and that all this leads to chaos?![]()
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And this does not apply only to humans. Frans de Waal, in "The Age of Empathy and Our Inner Monkey," presents his research on bonobos, chimpanzees, and other primates. He finds serious evidence of empathy, conflict resolution, and cooperation in animal behavior. He shows that violence is not a fundamental driving force, even among primates. In particular, bonobos turn out to be radically peaceful and matriarchal.![]()
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In general, there is clear evidence that most predators do not kill more than they need to—excessive killing is rare and usually occurs when humans disrupt ecosystems (e.g., chickens kept in pens and attacked by foxes). Many species are primarily engaged in play, coalition building, mourning, empathy, and even interspecies alliances. You can read more on the subject in "Wild Justice: The Moral Life of Animals" by Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce or "Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel" by Carl Safina.![]()
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Not that there aren't weirdos and psychopaths, but among humans they have come from nothing. However, deprivation and trauma are what provoke aggression - in both humans and animals. Cultures of domination create a loop of fear, competition, and violence. In the absence of such cultures, both humans and animals more often turn to cooperation and peace.![]()
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A favorite story that Stan Dodov told me the other day is about Robert Sapolsky's research. His "Baboon Monkeys and the Tyranny of Hierarchy" tells how male baboons often engage in aggressive behavior and overt physical violence to establish and maintain rank. The most normal thing for them, and how they spend their time, is to walk around and slap each other and do other nasty things to those lower down in the hierarchy.![]()
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As a result, both males and females experience chronic stress associated with higher levels of cortisol, a weakened immune system, reproductive problems, and a shorter lifespan. Violence is often gratuitous—not for food or survival, but to reinforce social status. Sapolsky often calls this social system "hellish" and notes that baboons seem to have "invented psychological stress."![]()
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But – and this is key – he also observes how change happens. In one of his most cited examples, a group of aggressive high-ranking males dies (due to contaminated meat), and the surviving tribe (now dominated by more peaceful males and females) develops a radically different culture: less aggression, more caring and affiliative behavior, and hence lower levels of stress among all members of the group.![]()
This culture persists even after the arrival of new males, which shows that baboon culture, like human culture, can change and that this change can be passed on to subsequent generations.![]()
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So, yes, some species in nature are violent and hierarchical, but violence is not necessarily an essential factor or evolutionarily predetermined—it is cultural and more often learned. There are many cooperative species (e.g., bonobos, elephants, wolves in some conditions, dolphins, even ants) whose basic way of life is based on care, sharing, and mutual aid. Even among baboons, social change is possible, which supports my argument that cooperation is a deeper, older thread in nature, and violence is often a distortion caused by stress, deprivation, or specific cultural patterns.![]()
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I don't know if you've gotten this far, but I'd like to introduce alternative paradigms here, especially the feminist one. You know, I'm not a feminist, but that's simply because these things are woven into my entire self and existence. Just as many of you are not neoliberals, but you still take offense when called like that. And this on a day when you are bursting with pride that you are diversifying your summer by not going to the beach, instead of living in a new world all year round, 24/7.![]()
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But let's not digress. Let's weave in Luce Irigaray's feminist philosophy—especially her concepts of desire, subjectivity, and symbolic order, and how capitalism and patriarchy are actually cultures of fear that have brought us to this point. And, of course, what it means to imagine a culture that stems from desire (not as Bauman shows us, as fleeting and passing whims of our liquid modernity, masked as desire and creativity). ![]()
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Here, I must not forget to boast to those who have forgotten that when we were setting up the Women's Community Center, Irigaray wrote me a letter by hand, sent by regular mail (yes, the kind with a wooden mailbox at the entrance to the building), telling me how great what we were doing was.![]()
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Luce Irigaray criticizes Western culture—especially its male symbolic order, i.e., the last 3% of human history, which I am reflecting on today—as being based on control, accumulation, and the logic of these things. In her analysis, patriarchy constructs subjectivity through opposition, specifically male/female, subject/object, mind/body. This binary logic excludes female subjectivity and instead reduces women to a mirror or a vessel, to something against which the male subject can define himself.![]()
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This symbolic order is rooted in the anxiety of survival: in order to secure identity, power, and control, one must dominate, accumulate, and preserve. She links this to the logic of ownership, exchange, and accumulation—which reflects capitalist impulses: to hoard, to measure, to determine value, to possess. In other words, both capitalism and patriarchy arise from the same psychological structure: fear of loss, of dependence, of change and, ultimately, of death and decay. And so, in fact, it forms a framework in which this is exactly what happens in the end.![]()
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For Irigaray, an alternative world is possible—a world based not on fear, but on desire. Here, desire is not absence (as in Lacan), but presence, connection, and movement. She proposes a concept of sexual difference—not simply "men versus women," but a multiplicity of embodied subjectivities, where differences are named, recognized, respected, and honored without hierarchy. She sees the alternative in a culture that speaks with many voices, rooted in a mobile, open, and living body, rather than in fixed categories. For her, desire is an ethical and relational force: it moves toward the other without trying to consume or fix it.![]()
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In this culture, exchange would not be transactional, but transformative. Relationships would not be based on survival, but on encounter and coexistence. She often uses female imagery—the sea, breath, lips, fluids, touch—to remind us of this ontology of happening, in which the self is porous and permeable, the other is not a threat, and the world is not a battlefield of scarcity, but a space of shared emergence and happening for each of us and our common world and future.![]()
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So, I say again - there is hope, and you, and me, and Roncheto, and Blackie (Milena Stateva's dogs - translator's note), and Orion Grid, and Vila Eita (the Orion Grid's social centre - translator's note), are its bearers. If patriarchy and capitalism are rooted in the fear of destruction, Irigaray suggests that a world oriented towards care, connection and desire offers another path: one that is not utopian in the naive sense of the word (also connoted in such a way as to make you not want to associate yourself with utopias that are far from impossible and naive—they are simply threads that we do not pull because they have been "braked" by our habitus), but deeply political.![]()
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Imagine economies of mutual prosperity, not extractivism. Imagine subjectivities that are formed not through domination, but through adaptation. Imagine a politics not of identity, but of recognition and respect without assimilation, subjugation, and enslavement.![]()
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Desire is not a lack that must be filled—it is the power of happening, of movement toward—not out of fear, but out of joy, pleasure, curiosity, and love. Irigaray's vision is a call for a symbolic reconstruction of the world—for the creation of a symbolic order that can accommodate the multiplicity, fluidity, and sacredness of difference and diversity.![]()
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In this sense, on this beautiful summer day, you can, without making any effort, begin to build your spiritual defense of the shared nature of life—of animals that do not accumulate, of communities that share. And as you doze off in the afternoon, dream again of our culture, and with it the new world order in which we are intertwined subjectivities, inextricably linked to the flora, fauna, climate, waters, and planet with which we are, in fact, one."
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The zbor (zborovi in the plural) is a grassroots democratic council that is currently experiencing a renaissance as a model of political participation in countries that were formerly part of Yugoslavia. This resurgence is evident in the adoption of the zborovi by the student movement in Serbia, which has now spread to other areas of society. While authoritarian President Aleksandar Vučić warns that such councils will bring Bolshevism to the country, pro-government television talk shows are discussing whether the revived zborovi could lead Serbia into anarchy. In this interview, Stefan Gužvica and Gal Kirn explore the history and political potential of the zborovi.![]()
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The Politics of Zborovi: Councils, Direct Democracy, and the Specters of Revolution in the Balkans
berlinergazette.de
The zbor (zborovi in the plural) is a grassroots, democratic assembly model experiencing a renaissance in the Balkans. It nearly disappeared with the spread of neoliberal nationalism in former Yugosla...
On 6 June 2025, the Slovenian intellectual Miha Kosovel gave a lecture at the Ambar Hotel in Giurgiu on the cross-border city of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) – Gorizia (Italy), its status as the European Capital of Culture in 2025, and the insights that can be gained from the cross-border experience. The lecture was part of the Play Giurgiu festival, which will take place in Giurgiu and Ruse at the end of June 2025, showing films for young audiences.![]()
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Mihai Mitrică from Animest, the organiser of the Play Giurgiu festival, introduced the guest, after which Miha Kosovel gave his presentation. The experience of Nova Gorica and Gorizia is important for Ruse and Giurgiu, as they are twin cities divided by an EU border. During the discussion following his lecture, Miha Kosovel spoke about the cultural practices of the two towns of Nova Gorica-Gorizia as European Capitals of Culture and the transformational effects of having a cross-border identity.![]()
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www.crossbordertalks.eu
A transcript of the Slovenian intellectual’s speech in Giurgiu on the cross-border experience of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) - Gorizia (Italy) - European capitals of culture in 2025 and an example of cul...
The 6th of June 2025 marked the 150th birthday of novelist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann. In 1933, at the age of almost 60, Thomas Mann had spent his summer on exile in France’s Sanary-sur-Mer. ![]()
Escaping from Hitler-dominated Nazi Germany, he travelled on to Switzerland and later emigrating to the USA.![]()
Back in Germany, Hitler’s regime started to burn books and later, people. The books of Thomas Mann were among the books burned. ![]()
Without much doubt, were Thomas Mann to remain in Germany, he would have suffered a similar torturous mistreatment as his Nobel Prize winning colleague Carl von Ossientzky – death in a German concentration camp.![]()
Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday is also a moment at which to celebrate Thomas Mann as an anti-fascist. On this occasion, his famous radio lectures – called “German Listeners” – have been newly published. ![]()
Thomas Mann’s words signify a voice that speaks deep into the conscience of the Germans. During the early 1940s, Mann’s inspirational lectures were about Hitler’s Nazism. In 2025, Mann’s words seamlessly apply to the AfD’s Neo-Nazism.![]()
With the rise of the neo-fascist AfD, a voice like Thomas Mann is, once again, bitterly needed in Germany and beyond. Today, Germany remains a country in which a sizable part of the population seemingly have learned next to nothing from Nazism.![]()
Back then and in his own voice, he read his text out loud – that was important to him. At the time, Thomas Mann was in all likelihood one of the most famous living writers in the world.![]()
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