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
Last month I visited Ningxia province, in China’s northwest. It is a relatively poor region, with a large Muslim population, a considerable stretch of desert, and a growing petrochemical industry. It is far from the unrest of Xinjiang province to the west and the maritime disputes of the South China Sea to the east. Ningxia… Continue reading Is China’s Rise Still Peaceful?
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
Back in the 1950s, the far right-wing John Birch Society worried that Communists were secretly behind the fluoridation of the American drinking water. This particular conspiracy theory probably would have vanished into collective amnesia if it hadn’t been so pointedly satirized—and thus immortalized—in the film Dr. Strangelove. I have to say, however, that I am tempted by such crackpot… Continue reading Guys with Guns
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
We were surrounded by sand. It stretched in undulating waves to the horizon in all directions. Wei Men, who works for the Baijitan Nature Reserve in Ningxia province, beckoned for us to step down from our desert overlook and take a close-up look at the desert floor. He wanted to show us what officials hope… Continue reading Deserts vs. Development in China, Global Post
Under Communism, the government cared a great deal about what you wrote. If you were part of the system, the government promoted your work. If you were against the system, the government censored you or possibly jailed you. In either case, though, the Communist governments took your words seriously — as useful propaganda or potential… Continue reading The Republic of Writers
Hungary has a rich tradition of environmental activism, from the anti-dam campaigns of the 1980s to the nature conservation efforts of the post-Communist period. It has also seen the rise and fall of a number of Green parties, including the most recent, Politics Can Be Different (LMP). In the run-up to the most recent parliamentary… Continue reading Rebuilding Hungary’s Green Politics
They were nationalists. They despised the huge supranational institution that ruled over Europe. They expressed little faith in the bureaucracies of power and preferred a more direct connection to the people. And they used the latest technologies to promote their messages. Take your pick: the Protestants of the 16th century or the populists of today. It… Continue reading Europe’s Populist Reformation
It wasn’t particularly easy to find vegetarian cooking in Hungary when I was there in 1990. This was the land of goulash and chicken paprikas, after all. And forget about organic produce. In those days, even in the United States, organic agriculture and organic products were a decidedly niche market. When the International Federation of… Continue reading Eating Healthy in Hungary
In his novel The Melancholy of Resistance, the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai describes a village sunk into its own timeless traditions. The farmers scrape at the fields. The men drink at the bar. Before the dreamer Valuska, a kind of holy fool and the moral center of the book, delivers the morning papers, he corrals… Continue reading The Mechanics of Change
It’s difficult to recapture the sheer ebullience that accompanied the official debut of Fidesz in Hungary. It was a movement of youth in a country that was starting over. It was quirky and full of memorable characters. People of widely ranging political sympathies – liberal, radical, alternative – were attracted to the new organization. Its… Continue reading Starting Out with Fidesz
According to the Chinese zodiac, the heavens circle around every 12 years. The Year of the Snake, the creature that sheds its skin to emerge anew, marks a time of great transformation. Indeed, for the last quarter century, the world has experienced three profound shifts at 12-year intervals, beginning with the Year of the Snake… Continue reading Participatory Totalitarianism
The wars in former Yugoslavia led to an enormous displacement of people. Even before the war broke in Bosnia, nearly 300,000 refugees from that multi-confessional region flooded into Croatia. As the wars spread and the refugee flow increased, the Bosniaks – Bosnians from a Muslim background – usually treated Croatia as a transit point to… Continue reading Starting Over Again in Croatia
When it comes to people expressing trust in others, Hungary ranks rather low. In 2011, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a ranking that put Hungary 24th out of 30 countries. Hungary’s ranking – 47 percent of the population expressed high trust in others – put it at nearly half the rate… Continue reading Cultivating Empathy in Hungary
On the surface, Hungary enjoys freedom of the press. There is a wide variety of newspapers that reflect different points of view from Nepszabadszag on the Left to Magyar Hirlap on the Right. There are some independent voices on the radio, including KlubRadio. The Internet is a veritable free-for-all displaying a full range of opinions.… Continue reading Protesting Media Control in Hungary
Europe underwent a profound transformation in the 16th century with the Protestant reformation. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and their co-religionists attacked the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church and its corrupt practices. They also advocated a different, more direct relationship between the individual and God. They were aided by the new technology of the printing press,… Continue reading The Populist Reformation
It’s chaos these days in Libya. Rival militias have carved up the country and the major cities. The security situation has deteriorated to such an extent that legislators in Tripoli recently had to abandon their parliament building for a former royal palace. There they managed to elect a new prime minister—a 42-year-old businessman, the fifth… Continue reading Coup Fever
It was one of the worst environmental disasters in Europe. In October 2010, near the town of Ajka in northern Hungary, a reservoir wall containing the industrial sludge pond of an alumina plant collapsed and more than a million cubic meters of toxic red mud swept across the countryside, through several villages, and into the… Continue reading On Red Mud and Other Messes
The success of the free market reforms that took place in East-Central Europe after 1989 was predicated to a large degree on the rule of law. The privatization of state assets, for instance, required a high degree of transparency and a strong set of regulations. Otherwise corrupt individuals and groups could easily vacuum up the… Continue reading The Misrule of Law
In the late 1980s, Hungary was widely considered to be the economic trendsetter in Eastern Europe. The “goulash Communism” of Janos Kadar, introduced at the end of the 1960s, had gradually morphed into a hybrid form of market socialism. I spent a month in Budapest in 1985 and was startled by the profusion of goods… Continue reading Hungary’s Economic Leap
At the beginning of last summer’s blockbuster film Elysium, three rogue shuttles from Earth approach a space station that houses a super-rich enclave. It’s the ultimate offshore gated community, where the inhabitants possess magical machines that rid them of disease so that they can practically live forever. The shuttles, meanwhile, contain the poor, the sick, “the… Continue reading Piketty in Elysium
U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a “doctrine” that emphasizes incremental diplomacy… Continue reading The Three-War Doctrine
In the United States, women of color frequently experience the double burden of discrimination. They are discriminated against by race and also by gender. The same applies to Roma women in East-Central Europe. And sexism imposes its own double burden, for Roma women must confront not only the prejudices of society as a whole but… Continue reading The First Roma Feminist
Small underdeveloped countries, unless they suddenly discover oil or gold, are at a distinct disadvantage in the global arena. If they play by the rules, they will remain underdeveloped. Over the last half-century, very few countries have managed to jump from the Third World to the club of richest nations. South Korea is one of… Continue reading Breaking the Rules
For the last 20 years, the small village of Kapolcs has held an arts festival in the summer time. The town has fewer than 500 people, but thousands flock there during the festival to hear music, buy crafts, and eat traditional Hungarian countryside food. Kapolcs is also on the edge of a national park that… Continue reading Toward Local Resilience
It says a lot about Hungary in the 1980s that the movement that represented the biggest challenge to the Communist authorities was an environmental one. In Romania, dissidents focused on a tyrant. In Poland, striking Solidarity activists protested against working conditions and in support of labor rights. And in Hungary, the rallying point of the… Continue reading The Dam
President Barack Obama’s recent tour of Asia was an opportunity to reenergise his foreign policy after a series of setbacks in the global arena. The four countries on the week-long tour — Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines – have all been eager to upgrade their relationships with the United States in light of… Continue reading Obama’s Half-Pivot to Asia
When Barack Obama enters the geopolitical funhouse these days, the distorting mirrors reflect back very different images of the U.S. president. The mirror held up by the Republican Party shows a presidential beanpole, a 98-pound weakling who is continually getting sand kicked into his face—by Syria’s Assad, North Korea’s Kim, Cuba’s Castro, and assorted other… Continue reading Obama in the Funhouse
In the recent Hungarian elections in early April, the one party that increased its popularity with voters was Jobbik, the radical party that stands to the right of the Fidesz government. It increased its vote count from roughly 16 percent to over 20 percent. Jobbik is now the largest radical right party in Europe in… Continue reading Jobbik: Looking East