by Edward Steen, Vienna, September 18, 2023
This, belatedly but with great pleasure, is to introduce the 
AEJ’s recently-appointed Brussels Representative, Gian-Paolo Accardo, distinguished Italian-Dutch journalist and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the multilingual website voxeurop.eu.
If anyone thought serious journalism was dead, not just having a little rest, Gian-Paolo’s extraordinary career is proof of the opposite. Here is the latest of his Vox newsletters, and it takes in all of our current concerns, from Europe’s future to the Ukraine war, to the environment. The charge for a subscription is better than good value, as the latest newsletter shows – with unusual and dramatic cartoons. A leading member of our French AEJ Sectiin, he’ll also be speaking at our first-ever AEJ Congress in Albania from October 26 – 30.
Gian-Paolo writes: “Europe is currently in the grip of a crisis whose outcome will define the rest of the 21st century. It is therefore the ideal time for Europe to rethink and revise its founding myths – those grand narratives that Europeans have been expounding for decades, deceiving others and deceiving themselves.”
“Thus Vasyl Cherepanyn in his contribution to our series with Eurozine entitled The Lessons of the War, whose two most recent essays we are publishing this week. The Ukrainian historian and curator methodically dismantles those myths, which include genocide denial, decolonisation and antifascism. His logic is all the more compelling given how neatly the current conflict threads the myths together.
“For his part, Swedish writer Göran Rosenberg argues that what Europe lacks to deal with this crisis – not for the first time and surely not for the last – is a capacity to mobilise quickly and decisively.”