The Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Warsaw office was established in April 2002, during the final phase of accession negotiations between the European Union and candidate countries. The opening was a logical step, building on the Heinrich Böll Foundation´s activities in Poland and Central Europe that had been established since the early 1990. The Office’s first key task involved the coordination of activities focusing on the accession process from a gender perspective.

Since then, the Warsaw office’s activities have expanded rapidly. Although gender issues are still an important part of the Warsaw Office’s activities, a large focus has been put on initiating and supporting debates between the old and the new EU member states on European integration and deepening, but also on sociopolitical debates within Central and Eastern Europe on other “green” issues. This includes developing civil society, fostering sustainable development, promoting human rights, and introducing and discussing an expanded concept of international security.

Starting in 2004, the Warsaw office has further expanded its activities in order to include a new focus on “Integrated Rural Development”. Also in 2004, the coordination of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s activities in the Ukraine fell in the responsibility of the Warsaw office (“Our Neighbours in Europe” Program).

With this growing set of tasks and its location within central- and towards Eastern Europe, the Warsaw office functions as a dialogue office, setting up (green) networks and fostering debates through own events (usually organized in close cooperation with partners from think tanks, academia and NGOs) in addition to its direct support to various partners and projects.

www.eurozine.com

eurozine is a virtual cultural magazine, that wants to make use of the new possibilities provided by the world-wide-web, in order to link up the actually existing European cultural magazines more effectively and to amplify their international public presence. Beyond these functions eurozine has the ambition of being an original magazine which offers high quality texts and an effective platform for communication and exchange.

An informal network which has been existing since 1983 can serve as the basis for the realisation of this idea: Since that date the best European cultural magazines have met once a year in a European capital to exchange ideas and experience. In the meantime approximately 50 periodicals from almost every European country have become involved.

Whenever European culture is discussed today, its diversity is praised with near-euphoria. Unfortunately this is usually no more than cheap rhetoric. What is left unmentioned, is that diversity also means many small markets and many barriers, linguistic as well as economic. To really defend European diversity and avoid sacrificing it for a uniform global culture, special efforts are neccessary in order to facilitate and intensify the work of translation between cultures as is being done by cultural periodicals.

This is where the Internet can make a decisive contribution. Cultural pessimists regard it as the spearhead of cultural globalisation, leading to a loss of diversity. What they overlook is that it is at the same time also a medium which allows minority groups - including the cultural diaspora of the periodicals addressed here - to concentrate their strengths to oppose this trend.

eurozine thus fulfils a double purpose: On the one hand it facilitates communication and exchange between the periodicals. It offers a Europe-wide overview of current themes and discussions in the periodicals involved in the project. On the other hand, eurozine provides information for readers (and potential subscribers), which is not normally easily accessible.

The participating periodicals are providing eurozine with access to a pool of high quality texts, as well as intellectual debates in the represented countries. Above all eurozine draws on these resources to create a new type of cultural magazine. Accordingly, the partner periodicals are invited to identify the best articles published in their country (not restricted to their own periodical!) and propose them for publication in eurozine. Furthermore eurozine itself plans to commission or acquire articles and make them available to the participating magazines. The eurozine editors are responsible for the quality and the character of eurozine. eurozine is not published at fixed intervals, since the new medium of the internet allows articles to be replaced continuously, and debates to be conducted in real time. eurozine is a multilingual publication, initially in English, French, Spanish and German. Contributions in so called "minor languages", however, are made available, wherever possible, in a translation into a "major language".