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
The last century has witnessed an enormous tug-of-war between the state and the market. One hundred years ago, coming out of World War I, three successive Republican administrations in the United States embraced the laissez-faire principle of limited government involvement in the market, a view that found considerable resonance among classical liberal economists and politicians… Continue reading State v. Market
In horror movies, just when you think the villains have been dispatched, they often make one last reappearance at the end to threaten the hero and shock the audience. It is a reminder to avoid complacency. Even as you file out of the theater, you have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a sequel,… Continue reading Reviving Slovak Civil Society
When I lived in Poland in the first half of 1989, the topic of constant discussion was the Round Table negotiations. Some people liked it. Some people hated it. And many people saw it as a necessary but tedious stage that the country would have to endure in order to exit Communism. Later, this multi-tiered… Continue reading The Remarkable Round Table
It was an exhilarating time to be young in November 1989 and living in East Berlin. It was not only the physical Wall that fell on November 9. It was also the many invisible walls that closed off anyone who didn’t conform. All those who had been largely hidden from sight – punk rockers, dissidents,… Continue reading Squat Paradise
Certainly 1989 was a watershed year for politicians, political scientists, and human rights activists in East-Central Europe. But the people that really must have felt the ground shake beneath their feet were: real estate developers. Just imagine all the amazing housing stock that suddenly became available in the heart of beautiful historic cities: medieval buildings,… Continue reading Challenging Gentrification
There’s no goose-stepping in the streets. There are no curfews or explicit censorship or martial law. The cafes, in fact, are full of happy, laughing people. Tourists continue to flood the country. If you don’t speak Hungarian and if you don’t speak to Hungarians, you could visit Budapest and believe that you’re in just another… Continue reading The Cancer in the Middle of Europe
Between 1990 and today an entire class of Roma politicians has emerged. I recently stopped in on a training of local Roma elected officials in Romania, part of a group of several hundred scattered around the country. Roma parliamentarians from around the region recently met in Belgrade and signed an agreement to cooperate on enforcing… Continue reading Roma Politics
Militant nationalism is not an exclusively male enterprise. But a principal fuel that keeps the enterprise going is high-octane testosterone. You can find this renewable resource in many male-heavy places: the battlefield, the football stadium, the pulpits of politics. And when men gather in pubs to sing hymns to the gods of blood and soil,… Continue reading Women against Nationalism
The first ghetto was a Jewish neighborhood in Venice located on an island that had been set aside for a foundry (getto in Italian). The 1,000 Jews who lived there in the early 16th century had free rein during the day but were locked in at night. There was very little space on the island.… Continue reading The Ghettos of Eastern Europe
Kosice is not simply one city. Like any Central European metropolis worthy of the name, many urban incarnations coexist cheek and jowl in this charming capital of eastern Slovakia. In the Old Town, a medieval church overlooks a beautifully preserved Renaissance palace that abuts an Art Deco hotel from the Czechoslovak era. The more than… Continue reading The City and the City
Many people I’ve interviewed in East-Central Europe have talked about their initial expectations in 1989-90 that their countries would soon leap the development gap and join Europe proper. Within a few years, they thought they’d be living in the equivalent of Austria or Italy. When several years went by, and then several more, and they… Continue reading Playing Catch Up
On May 12, Bulgarians went to the polls and gave the nod to the party — Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) — they’d just ousted from government in demonstrations a few months before. The party that came in second, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) was the successor of the Communist Party that had… Continue reading Bulgaria’s Political Future
There is an art to curation. Curators must not only choose the works for an exhibition, which involves making aesthetic judgments about “good” and “bad” as well as what fits together according to the exhibition’s theme. Curators must also provide a context for understanding the art. They put texts on the wall that identify histories,… Continue reading Curating the Curators
We quickly become inured to stimuli. We put on a shirt and immediately feel it against our skin. But then, unless we have a neurological disorder or something in the shirt causes a chemical reaction with our skin, we no longer feel the shirt. The same holds with other senses. We become accustomed to the… Continue reading The Artist as Bullhorn
America is the land of “move on.” That’s the name of the organization whose original mission was to persuade the U.S. electorate to move on from the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. But it could also be the name of President Barack Obama’s approach to the crimes and misdemeanors of the preceding Bush administration:… Continue reading The Politics of Memory
The media in East-Central Europe used to be idea-centric. The unofficial samizdat publications focused on the cruelties and inanities of the regimes, unearthed nearly forgotten history, and often featured philosophic meditations on politics and morality. Even the government-run media tended to be rather high-minded in its emphasis on economic statistics, proletarian values, the activities of… Continue reading Voice to the Voiceless
The Bulgarian election season is underway with voters set to go to the polls on May 12. Public opinion polls show that the two top vote-getters are likely to be the former ruling party, Citizens for a European Bulgaria (GERB), followed by the former Communists, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). GERB resigned in February during… Continue reading Representing the Movement
Last fall, I spent the night in the Bulgarian city of Yambol on my way from the Black Sea coast back to Plovdiv and Sofia. Although I drove around the city looking for my hotel and poked around a bit the following morning, I failed to see what is considered the most remarkable bedesten –… Continue reading Challenging the Movement
Some of the first oppositionists to Communism came from the left, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. Later, in Eastern Europe, the first stirrings of dissent from below also came from the left – workers in East Germany, dissident Communists in Hungary, reform socialists… Continue reading Regretting the Region’s Right Turn
Politicians have lied since the very beginning of politics. Ramses II fought to a stalemate against the Hittites then came back and announced to his fellow Egyptians that he’d thoroughly conquered the adversary in battle. PBS, oddly, dates the beginning of political falsehood more than a thousand years later to the Roman emperor Augustus, who… Continue reading Serbia’s Truth-O-Meter
When I met Miroslav Durmov in 1990, he was a spokesperson for the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), a political formation that focused on minority rights in Bulgaria, particularly those of ethnic Turks. We conversed in Russian, since he didn’t speak English. He wasn’t himself ethnic Turkish. But he had been concerned for some… Continue reading Inside the Movement