During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos, which was, per capita, the most bombed country in history. Nearly one-third of those bombs didn’t explode on contact. It’s been 40 years since the bombing campaign stopped and yet more than 100 people have died over the last couple… Continue reading The Stasi’s Long Shadow
There’s something about white horses and strong leaders. A nation is in crisis, and no one knows what to do. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a man appears astride a white horse. He takes the reins of the nation, just as he controls his horse, and leads the country to the promised land. The myth… Continue reading Regime Change in Hungary
In the bestselling Croatian novel Our Man in Iraq, the main character, a journalist named Toni, is struggling with his job, his girlfriend, and his very identity in post-war Zagreb. One day during this existential crisis, Toni comes across a biography of Jimi Hendrix. He’s fascinated to read that, in the early days, the rocker… Continue reading Life in Fast Forward
There is a great unease among young people in Europe today. You can measure the dissatisfaction in a variety of ways. The protests that swept the continent over the last couple years – the indignados in Spain, the anti-austerity demonstrations in Greece, some scattered Occupy demonstrations – brought young people into the streets to voice… Continue reading Training the Next Generation
Catharsis is an important element in both theater and politics. On stage, the actors enact a drama that generates a great change of emotion in the audience. Through this outpouring of emotion – of pity, of fear — the audience can experience some kind of spiritual renewal. In politics, too, catharsis is an important stage… Continue reading Catharsis!
The end of the Cold War promised a remapping of European security. The Warsaw Pact disbanded officially in 1991, though it had functionally ceased to exist at the end of 1989. NATO, without its longstanding opponent, no longer had a raison d’etre. The logical structure to replace the two-bloc system was the Conference on Security… Continue reading Detente from Below
When, one after another, Communist parties took over in Eastern Europe in the years after World War II, their chief competition were social democrats. The various social democratic parties supported political and economic pluralism and, with few exceptions, refused to accept the putative vanguard position the Communist parties claimed for themselves. As payment for their… Continue reading The Decline of Social Democracy
In the early 1980s, the citizens of Yugoslavia enjoyed a distinct comparative advantage over their counterparts in East-Central Europe. Yugoslavia’s per capita GDP was the best in the region. True, $3,230 might not sound like a lot of money, but the closest competition in 1982 was Czechoslovakia at $2,980. By comparison, Poland’s was only $1,540… Continue reading Yugoslavia Could Have Been a Leader
When the Berlin Wall fell, a tremendous number of people headed for the West, permanently. Between 1989 and 1990, nearly 4 percent of the population of East Germany moved to West Germany. The outmigration rate dropped considerably once the new common German currency was introduced and reunification became an irrevocable fact. But it rose again… Continue reading Heading East
In 1990, when I was in Romania, inter-ethnic conflicts broke out in Transylvania. Although the cause of the conflict in March 1990 in Targu Mures is disputed, the most likely story concerns a bilingual sign — in Hungarian as well as in Romanian – that a pharmacist put up on a shop in the… Continue reading We Were So Close to Preventing Genocide