Politics.co.uk: The break-up of the UK is coming - but will it be violent or peaceful?

 Contrary to the current talk of the British empire and the nostalgia around it, they are not Powellites. Their overriding concern instead is the restoration of the Westminster system. For them, our EU membership has been an historical parenthesis. Westminster is all. A century ago, ceding part of Ireland was a price worth paying for keeping the Westminster system intact. So was the loss of India, and the loss of the colonies in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, next year, whenever, Northern Ireland will follow.

The more troubling question is whether the Brexiters see Scotland in the same way, and whether their view of Scottish independence is the same as that of Unionists south and north of the border. Scotland is a nation of the United Kingdom, not a province that can be snapped off and tacked on to another state. It can only become separate by becoming independent and sovereign. [...]

That project's mode of governance is not the centralised one the less intellectual Brexiters constantly moan about, but actually about subsidiarity - decisions being made at the most local feasible level. By contrast, the heart and distinctiveness of the Westminster system is centralisation. Scottish nationalists believe Scotland would be freer to act autonomously within a federal, decentralised European Union than they are with devolution inside a unitary state.

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The Calvert Journal: Karol Palka

Edifice by Polish photographer Karol Palka is a visual journey through the interiors of communist-era buildings in Poland, Slovakia and East Germany. It includes shots of the Polana Hotel, an example of Socialist Realist architecture once owned by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and visited by Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, now a disused office building for the management of the Nowa Huta Steelworks. The series tells a story about power and its impermanence; an edifice which once provided shelter, security and a feeling of strength reveals itself to be illusory, its power transitory. The spectre of its downfall is always near, lurking just around the corner, behind the cold walls of grandiose ideas.

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The Calvert Journal: Living museums: discover central Europe’s grand communist interiors

In Edifice, photographer Karol Palka documents the faded grandeur of surviving communist-era buildings in his native Poland and neighbouring Eastern Bloc countries. Interested in the relationship between power and architecture, he visited places of grand ambitions — such as Poland's largest iron and steel industry complex, the Nowa Huta Steelworks in Kraków. Formerly known as the Vladimir Lenin Steelworks, this industrial colossus and the surrounding Nowa Huta district were intended to be Poland’s model communist city when built in the 1950s. Today, the Nowa Huta communist tour remains one of Kraków’s most popular attractions. The series also features lesser known buildings such as Hotel Polana, a retreat built for communist party leaders by the old Czechoslovak government in the Tatras mountain range. Other 1970s retreats built in Poland and the former Czechoslovakia now function as alpine spa hotels, offering peace, quiet and original communist decor. Despite the absence of people in Palka’s photos, the interiors that make up the series suggest a more symbolic presence: that of a regime that no longer exists.

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Political Critique: Visegrád: Turning the Back to the East

Initially, the three member states cooperated rather efficiently in the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Cooperation regarding the economic relations with each other and regarding negotiations with the EU developed to a much lesser extent. Indeed, the relationship with the EU was characterised by competition rather than cooperation. Besides the desire of the Czech and Slovak political leaderships to control the privatisation process in their respective territories, the Czech aspiration to move more rapidly towards the West without the poorer Slovak areas was one of the factors behind the splitting up of Czechoslovakia. The Czech governments led by the national-liberal Občanská demokratická strana (ODS) saw the country as the most advanced in the region and made it abundantly clear that the Czech Republic would negotiate its relationship with the EU structures on its own and without liaising with the neighbors. [...]

In positioning themselves towards the unfolding crisis of the EU integration model and the recomposing of the European power relations, the Visegrád states have shown significant differences. Slovakia with its particularly close links to the German export production sector is the only Visegrád country that joined the euro zone. The (left-)nationalist Smer government took a particularly hard line in the euro zone negotiations with Greece. By showing unflappable loyalty with the German position, it demonstrated its desire to remain within this institutional core of the EU. In the issue of the refugees, the Slovak government, however, took an extremely restrictive stance and offensively combatted any mechanism that would redistribute refugees among EU states. Thus, it challenged both the German position as the then majority inside the EU. [...]

Their joint extremely restrictive position on refugees is rather an exception. And it is informed by the desire to keep off a group of migrants that are forced out of their countries by war which might compete with their “own” labour migrants in the core economies.

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