The new spring season is just around the corner, and it looks as though the new “in” color is brown. That’s brown as in “brown shirts.” Perhaps you thought that fascism went out of fashion in the 20th century. But there’s nothing like a lingering economic crisis to bring out the vintage ideologies. The far right… Continue reading Brown Is the New Black
In Bulgaria, the political system has been roughly balanced between the Left and the Right for the last two decades. As a result, the party that represents ethnic Turkish interests – the Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF) – can provide its constituency base, which is only about 10 percent of the population, with the… Continue reading Roma as Game Changers
Many people are drawn to journalism because of their passion for social justice. They want to investigate wrongdoing. They want to expose corruption. They want to give voice to those who don’t have any other way to bring their stories to the public. Journalism can be powerful. It can bring down the mighty and elevate… Continue reading From Journalism to Activism
Last August 8, the great Romanian sociologist Nicolae Gheorghe passed away. He was only 66. I first met him in 1990, when he was just embarking on his project of elevating Roma issues to the highest level of European politics. Because he spoke English and had an academic background, he was often the lone Roma… Continue reading Toward a Roma Cosmopolitanism
The feminist movement, which gathered strength in the 1960s and 1970s in the West, arrived in East-Central Europe much later. Women’s equality was a stated principle of the Communist governments, and official women’s organizations operated in all of the countries. But the official representation of women remained rather conservative. Alexandra Kollantai’s Marxist challenge of patriarchal… Continue reading The Flowering of Feminism in Hungary
For the long eight years of the George W. Bush administration, progressives decried the over-militarization of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s budget doubled, and U.S. military exports surged. Instead of deploying international law against Osama bin Laden, the United States deployed troops in Afghanistan. It went on to invade Iraq and threaten Iran. The Bush… Continue reading If I Didn’t Have a Hammer
In the 1970s and 1980s, the West European peace and environmental movement reached out, tentatively at first and then more vigorously, to the dissident groups in Eastern Europe. Nowhere was this more evident than in West Germany. The Green Party, established in 1979, integrated the peace and environmental agendas and cultivated links with the emerging… Continue reading Bridging the East-West Divide
For most countries in East-Central Europe, capitalism didn’t arrive overnight in 1989 or 1990. Even in the more controlled environments like Romania, people could get a taste of capitalism by buying or trading on the black market. Hungary, on the other hand, was far ahead of its neighbors in this respect. It had been experimenting… Continue reading Managing the Economic Transition
It’s not easy for North Korea to grab headlines these days. Over the last couple weeks, Pyongyang launched several short-range missiles and rockets. They barely caused a ripple. The world has been focused on the showdown in Ukraine, the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and the Oscars. North Korea also barely registers on the U.S. policymaking… Continue reading My Strategic Impatience
The break-up of Czechoslovakia was generally amicable. There were grumbles from people in both parts of the country about the lack of a referendum. Some families found themselves split between two separate states. The Czechs had to travel abroad to ski the Tatra Mountains, and Slovaks had to study abroad if they were accepted at… Continue reading The Sound of Music