Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
There is an infamous story in Poland about a sign at the shipyard in Gdansk where the trade union movement Solidarity got started in 1980. Although nobody actually saw the sign, many people firmly believe that it existed. The sign read: “Women, do not disturb us. We are fighting for Poland.” “The sign is very… Continue reading Poland’s Feminist Genealogy
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Poland was both the most likely and the most unlikely place to expect the rebirth of the Left. The country has a rich Left tradition that predates the Communist period, and many figures of the anti-Communist opposition, like Jacek Kuron, considered themselves on the Left. At the same time, however, the Polish Left has already… Continue reading Reinventing the Left in Poland
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Romania has 275 kilometers of Black Sea coastline. The country tries to attract tourists by touting its sandy beaches, temperate climate, spas, and resort hotels. It’s tough competition. I met a couple of Romanians who said straight out that they prefer to vacation along Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. And Turkey is a more popular destination… Continue reading Romania’s Resort Tourism
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Political parties in East-Central Europe are like amoebas. They are constantly splitting apart (mitosis) and then banding together in coalitions (aggregation). For someone coming from a U.S. context of two relatively stable parties, the political scene in East-Central Europe seems hopelessly complex. That goes double for Romania. During the 1989 revolution in Romania, a popular… Continue reading Playing Party Politics
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
In 1990, the issue that catapulted Romania into the headlines in the West, after the rise and fall of Ceausescu, was the country’s orphanages. Journalists and foreign health care workers were appalled to discover the condition of babies and children in the many state-run institutions in the country. During the Ceausescu era, abortions were difficult… Continue reading What Happened to Romania’s Irrecuperables?
Blog, Eastern Europe
Revolutions elevate a new and unexpected group of people to power. In East-Central Europe in 1990, an electrician became the president of Poland, a playwright the president of Czechoslovakia, and a philosopher the president of Bulgaria. After this brief period of the world turned upside down, the professional politicians took over again (or in the… Continue reading Fighting for Equal Opportunity
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Homogeneous countries can be nationalist. Think of Korea, either North or South. Their nationalism is generally expressed toward other countries that threaten their presumed purity in some way. Heterogeneous countries engage in that strategy as well. But nationalism in these ethnically mixed countries also functions domestically – as a card to be played in the… Continue reading Game of (Nationalist) Cards
Blog, Eastern Europe
“All politics is local,” said legendary politician Tip O’Neill. But if O’Neill hadn’t risen to the nationally prominent position of speaker of the House of Representatives, no one would remember this quotation, which comes from the time when he lost his only election – to the Cambridge City Council in the 1930s. All politics might… Continue reading Roma and Local Politics
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
It took a while before the new democracies of East-Central Europe acquired the trappings of a modern political system. One of the new features borrowed from the West was lobbying. To engage in lobbying, however, the new NGOs first had to overcome the perception of politics as “dirty,” since engaging with official political structures still… Continue reading Lobbying for Women
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
In many discussions on the Roma issue in East-Central Europe, someone will inevitably say, with a mixture of wistfulness and bewilderment, “Where is the Martin Luther King of the Roma?” There are indeed some parallels between the experience of Roma and African-Americans. But a galvanizing civil rights leader with broad appeal like Martin Luther King… Continue reading More Malcolm X
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
An ethnic map of Romania explains a great deal about the relations between the majority and the minorities in the country. Ethnic Hungarians have an absolute majority in two counties – Harghita and Covasna – in the very heart of the country. Together with parts of Mures county, this region is known as Szekely Land. This… Continue reading Resolving Conflicts in Romania
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One of the economic advantages that Poland has over its East-Central European neighbors is its relative decentralization. Hungary is completely dependent on Budapest just as Bulgaria leans heavily on Sofia and the Czech Republic on Prague. Poland has a number of major cities, including Krakow and Gdansk. Moreover, decentralization was a chief aim during the… Continue reading Making It in Lowicz
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Here’s a condensed version of what happened in Germany in 1989-90. The Germans in the East rose up against their authoritarian regime because they wanted freedom. Eventually they also got the German deutschmark and reunification. The cost of that economic and political reunification was shouldered almost entirely by West Germans while the benefits flowed mostly… Continue reading The Costs of Reunification
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
It is commonly said (on the Internet) that the second most widely spoken language at Microsoft, after English, is Romanian. Even if this is just a fanciful e-myth, it’s certainly true that the corporation does a great deal of recruiting in Romania and, in 2007, established its Global Business Support Center in Timisoara and Bucharest.… Continue reading The No-Complex Generation
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
The first war of nationalist extremism in East-Central Europe in the post-1989 era could easily have been in Romania, not Yugoslavia. Before conflicts between Serbs and Croats escalated into violence, ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians squared off against each other in Targu Mures, a Transylvanian city that had a rough ethnic balance in the early… Continue reading Avoiding the Yugoslav Scenario
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
It’s been nearly a quarter century since the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania, and still many aspects of what happened in December 1989 and immediately afterwards remain a mystery. Many people in the country hesitate to call what happened around Christmas of that year a “revolution.” They suspect that the collapse of the… Continue reading The Puppet Masters of Targu Mures
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Constanta, the Romanian city on the Black Sea coast, is perhaps best known for being the place of Ovid’s exile in the first century AD when it was known as the Roman port of Tomis. The poet, having fallen afoul of Emperor Augustus for some mysterious offense, found himself at age 50 on the edge… Continue reading A Sad Country Full of Humor
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
For many dissidents, the revolutions of 1989 did not come soon enough. The great Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, one of the original signatories of Charter 77, died in 1977. Other dissidents were already quite old when the changes finally came. The Slovak writer Milan Simecka was able to enjoy life in a free country for… Continue reading The Revolution Came Too Early
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
The Women’s Association of Romania (AFR) began as a mass movement constructed out of the ruins of the previous Communist-era women’s organization. When I visited the offices in 1993, AFR was possibly the largest NGO in the country, with 240,000 members. Its activities were all over the map, from providing services to singles through a… Continue reading Empowering Women in Romania
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
One of the great stories of the 1980s to be obscured by the success of civil society organizations like Solidarity in Poland and Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia was the rise of an independent peace movement in a region dominated by official peace councils. Freedom and Peace (WiP), for instance, had a tremendous influence on what… Continue reading Hungary’s Independent Peace Movement
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Nicolae Ceausescu was not exactly a team player. He adopted the title conducator – literally, the leader – and constructed his own personality cult. He defied the Warsaw Pact by refusing to allow Romania to participate in the Soviet-led 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He preferred to pick up leadership tips from Beijing and Pyongyang –… Continue reading An Architect of Change
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Agnes Gagyi grew up in the city of Miercurea Ciuc in the Transylvanian region of Romania. More than 80 percent of the population of this city of 50,000 people is of Hungarian ethnicity. Most everyday interactions are conducted in Hungarian. In fact, Gagyi didn’t learn Romanian at home or on the streets, but rather through… Continue reading Growing Up in Transylvania
Blog, Eastern Europe
Last May, a terrible set of storms swept through Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Croatia. More than 70 people died during the ensuing flooding, and nearly a million people had to be evacuated. Tens of thousands are still living in temporary shelters. There’s a new fundraising effort to link up people who experienced Hurricane Katrina in… Continue reading Blues for the Balkans
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
The classic novel about government structures in East-Central Europe is Franz Kafka’s The Castle. A land surveyor, K., arrives in a provincial town after being summoned for a meeting at the local Castle. But the summons apparently has been sent in error. The land surveyor tries to visit the Castle to get to the bottom… Continue reading Making the Castle Transparent
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Liberalism took a beating in Poland in the 20th century. It was overwhelmed by nationalism in the 1930s, by Nazi occupation in the 1940s, and by a succession of Communist governments during the Cold War period. Finally, when the full political spectrum was restored to the country after 1989, liberalism became almost exclusively associated with its… Continue reading Rescuing Polish Liberalism
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
The great riddle of German reunification involves the two dogs that didn’t bark. The first dog was the Stasi, the East German secret service, which did so little to prevent the demonstrations of 1989 from bringing down Party chief Erich Honecker, the Berlin Wall, and then the entire Communist regime. The second dog was the… Continue reading Dealing with the Stasi
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
I was sitting in a café in Bratislava, having a final cup of coffee and picking up my email before boarding a train for Budapest. I was dimly aware of a couple of guys in another part of the café dismantling film equipment as if after a shoot. I was in a hurry, so I… Continue reading Sixty Seconds of Art
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Fyodor Gladkov published his novel Cement in 1925. One of the first examples of socialist realism, it depicted the post-revolutionary construction of the Soviet Union from the point of view of a cement factory. Gleb, a Soviet soldier who returns to his hometown, discovers that in a few short years everyone has forgotten about the… Continue reading Cement
Blog, Eastern Europe, Uncategorized
Nearly one-third of Hungarians live in rural parts of the country. Surprisingly the rural population in Hungary, as a percentage of the population, is larger than in Bulgaria. But agriculture has declined steadily as a value-added portion of GDP – from over 15 percent in 1989 to 3.5 in 2010. There are a number of… Continue reading The Countryside Strikes Back
