The Serbian elections in May 2012 shocked many liberals in the country. They assumed that the electoral coalition that coalesced around former President Boris Tadic – the Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, the Green Party, the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina – would handily win the election. Instead, Tomislav… Continue reading The Future of Serbian Civil Society
Bulgarians are proud to be pessimistic. Many of the people that I recently interviewed in the country spoke with pride of the various polls that bore out this depressing conclusion. So, for instance, in a 2009 Gallup poll, Bulgaria ranked at the very bottom of the world in their view of what life would be… Continue reading The Pinnacle of Pessimism
Much has changed in Eastern Europe over 22 years. But one group that has seen relatively little improvement in its fortunes over this period has been the Roma. Unemployment levels among Roma remain high. Access to decent education, health care, and other social services is limited. Representation in politics and business is minimal. And discrimination… Continue reading The Persistence of Discrimination
Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 in part because of his pledge to end the war in Iraq and shift the Pentagon’s attention to Afghanistan. He has won a second term in part by promising to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan – as quickly and as securely as possible. There have been no “mission… Continue reading Afghanistan: Avoiding Default
The most important rule in the world of theater is to keep the attention of your audience. If they become distracted or bored, if they start to fidget in their seats, the illusion of the spectacle is at risk. Once word gets out that you can’t deliver as a playwright or a director, the audiences… Continue reading North Korea’s Nuclear Theater
When I sat down with Sonja Licht in Belgrade in 1990, it was like visiting the Oracle at Delphi. And her predictions of the future were not bright at all. I’d met Sonja earlier that year through the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (HCA), which she would eventually co-chair with British activist and academic Mary Kaldor. HCA was… Continue reading The Oracle of Belgrade
When I was traveling in East-Central Europe in 1990, I had only a handful of contacts outside of Poland, where I had lived the year before. I usually arrived in some capital city and started calling the few numbers I had. Then I relied on those people to connect me to their friends, their colleagues,… Continue reading Reconnecting the Balkans
Barack Obama has won a second term as U.S. president. Voters have decisively rejected the Republican version of economic reform, and Obama has already used this mandate to address the debt crisis through higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans. The implications of the elections for foreign policy, however, are not so clear. To the extent… Continue reading Obama: The Legacy Term?
The war in Yugoslavia began as a conflict over state structure. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nationalist movements in the republics championed greater autonomy only to be suppressed in turn by Tito, who then went on to incorporate many of their demands in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic signaled… Continue reading Serbia’s Future: Back to the Past?
A major change that has taken place in East-Central Europe in the last few years is the emergence of a new left. In the same way that the New Left in the United States distanced itself in the 1960s from the old-style Communist Party and its fellow travelers, this new left in Eastern Europe has… Continue reading Bulgaria’s New Left