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
Hungary has long been divided between its liberal and cosmopolitan capital and the more conservative countryside. During the Communist era, a small democratic opposition emerged that eventually, by the end of the 1980s, split into two political forces: the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) and the more nationalist Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). In the… Continue reading The Disappearance of the Political Middle
It wasn’t long after Francis Fukuyama published his “end of history” thesis that the war in Yugoslavia definitively wrecked his argument. How could the world be heading inexorably in the direction of market democracy when even the country long considered next in line for membership in the European Community was collapsing into war, nationalist extremism,… Continue reading Hungary’s U-Turn
Video games usually provide you with multiple lives. If you step on a landmine or get hit by an assassin, you get another chance. Even if such virtual reincarnation is not built into the rules of the game, you can always reboot and start over again. You can try again hundreds of times until you… Continue reading Earth: Game Over?
It wasn’t easy to find Kecerovce. I missed the turnoff on the road leading out of Kosice, the main city in eastern Slovakia. One of the clerks at the gas station where I stopped for directions had never heard of the place, and the other one didn’t know how to get there. I eventually retraced… Continue reading Roma Youth Get Organized
For the second year in a row, the world is spending a little less on the military. Asia, however, has failed to get the memo. The region is spending more at a time when many others are spending less. Last year, Asia saw a 3.6 percent increase in military spending, according to figures just released by… Continue reading World Cuts Back Military Spending, But Not Asia
International borders are manmade. They are arbitrary, although they often conform to some natural feature of the landscape. And they are very difficult to change. It is a cornerstone of the international system that borders should not be altered by force. Particularly since the end of World War II, the international system has resisted any… Continue reading What the Crisis in Ukraine Means for Northeast Asia
I just heard the news: the United States has changed its mind about Jens Stoltenberg, the new head of NATO. The U.S. Congress has passed a resolution blocking his appointment. Apparently, during his youth, Stoltenberg threw stones at the U.S. embassy in Oslo. As such, he constitutes a threat to American national security, and Congress is… Continue reading It’s Our Party
The environmental movement has long stressed the importance of personal responsibility. What we do as individuals might seem trivial when set against the huge complex systems that regulate the earth. But if enough individuals change their habits, it can make a difference. And so we do what we can: turn down our thermostats, install insulation,… Continue reading Participatory Environmentalism
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization just hit 65. That’s retirement age, especially for an alliance structure that was born, grew up, and prospered during a bygone era. The war in Afghanistan is winding down. European countries are, by and large, reducing their military spending. The United States is theoretically engaged in a pivot to the… Continue reading NATO on Viagra
Every few years in East-Central Europe, a new political movement emerges that challenges not only the status quo but the very substance of the political system. Sometimes the movement targets the party patronage system. Sometimes it focuses on the corruption that enriches those who participate in governance. Sometimes it elevates a set of issues that… Continue reading Can Politics Be Different?
When the book market opened up in East-Central Europe after the changes of 1989, readers naturally gravitated toward the books they’d been previously denied. Banned books became bestsellers. In Hungary, for instance, “everything that could not be published since 1948 was printed and sold in huge editions. Neither the ‘official’ publishing houses nor the ‘official’… Continue reading Becoming a Bestseller
In 1948, the village of Tantura fell within the borders of the newly created state of Israel. It was a small, seaside village of approximately 1,200 residents, most of them Arab farmers and fishermen. As the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors escalated, Tantura became an important transit point for smuggling supplies to a… Continue reading Asking the Hard Questions about Israel
It has been commonplace to use the term “transition” when referring to what took place in East-Central Europe in the years immediately following 1989. The term initially had a refreshing vagueness to it. So much was up in the air. So much was changing. The fixed certainties of the past had melted away. At the… Continue reading This Is Not a Transition
Between 1990 and 2010, according to the World Bank, the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide was cut in half. This dramatic achievement, which was actually a major Millennium Development Goal, happened several years ahead of schedule. The reduction in extreme poverty varied from region to region, with great gains made in Asia… Continue reading Funding Roma Autonomy
Anybody can claim the mantle of democracy. Russian neo-fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky runs a party called the Liberal Democratic Party. East Germany was called the German Democratic Republic. And even North Korea makes a nod in this direction when it calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The countries of East-Central Europe are, of course,… Continue reading Democracy without Democrats
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