Index on Censorship

Fierce critic of the dark side of US society, or vicious, foul-mouthed wizard of hate? White rapper Eminem, the music industry's hottest property and sworn enemy of 'concerned parents' everywhere, is in trouble - but not with his teenage fans and followers

Neither Prague nor, remarkably, Brussels seems in a hurry to guarantee media independence in the Czech Republic, one of the darlings of EU expansion

The next few months may be decisive for the future direction of Iran and for the fate of the revolutionary regime. They could also seal the fate of the many journalists and writers languishing in Tehran's jails

Europe is changing from a collection of citizens with individual rights to a mosaic of language groups with collective rights

National identity goes far deeper than a European one and, if we want to avoid a nationalist backlash as in Austria, it would be better for us to live with that reality

The best as well as the worst of twentieth-century experiences have been generated in Europe

The launch of the new Euro-army raises critical questions about its value on a continent which, since Kosovo, lacks any comparable doorstep cases

Balkan media, particularly the Serbian press, were actively engaged in forging war in the region. Now they have to learn a new role

Even greater concentration of media ownership could be Europe's salvation from homogenised cultural globalisation

Could the despised euro actually provide the sense of identity so long sought by the European Union?

A sustained campaign of violence against journalists and academics has led critics of the Basque separatist army, ETA, to talk of fascism

Along with Poland and the Czech Republic, Hungary is in the first wave of central European countries to be admitted into the EU. It hopes to fulfil the 'Copenhagen Criteria' (democratic rights and a functioning market economy) in the next two or three years. But concerns about its treatment of its Roma minority may upset these plans

A time-lapse film of modern Greece would show a country shedding its particularity as it comes to terms with the modern world

What made the Greeks - and what is unmaking them

Many who fought in the resistance against the German occupation of Greece and in the civil war that followed were persecuted for decades after, regardless of their politics. It is only recently that they have felt free to tell their stories

The struggle between traditionalists and modernisers has found a focus in the unfinished row about what should be written on Greek citizens' ID cards

The battle over minority languages hots up

The furore caused by the use of depleted uranium in former Yugoslavia also exposed dangerously depleted levels of impartiality in the media

Before 1991 there was a very short joke making the rounds in Greece: 'Albanian tourist'

I never think of myself as someone who is going to be - or who is likely to be - censored. Recent experiences have tended to prove me wrong. The sting in these experiences has not been the act of censorship itself, but the identity of the censors. Essentially, they are people who ought to have been on my side of the fence

The long arm of intimidation reached deep into Rotterdam last year to silence the tale of one of Islam's most astonishing women

Republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War are still waiting for the return of their citizenship 60 years after their defeat by General Franco's fascist troops

First it was the Holocaust; then Jesus and the Quran. A stand-up comedian discovers the limits of laughter in South Africa