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".