I played for Green when I was growing up. That was my soccer team. We were divided up by color: Green vs. Red, Gold vs. Blue. The teams were chosen at random, but we became fiercely attached to our color. Friendships across color lines became strained. We talked of “Purple power” and the “Gold tradition.”… Continue reading The Color Wars
In broad strokes, religion became more important for people in East-Central Europe over the last 20 years and less important for people in Western Europe. According to the European Values Survey, church attendance jumped in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia whereas it declined throughout the West. Even in places where church attendance in the east remained… Continue reading Televising Religion
As part of their industrialization policies, the Communist governments of East-Central Europe built nuclear reactors to boost their energy production. Only Poland, at the time of the changes in 1989, didn’t have any nuclear reactors on line. Of the 26 reactors in the region, 24 were Soviet-designed. Although they generally weren’t the same models as… Continue reading Addressing Nuclear Power
We think of human rights movements in terms of voice: the voices of protest, the voices of the marginalized, the voices of the silenced. In East-Central Europe prior to 1989, the faces of the human rights movement were the signatories of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, the dissident writers in Hungary, the Solidarity trade union leaders… Continue reading The Largest Human Rights Movement in the East
Some years ago when I was fielding complaints from authors through the National Writers Union — about not getting paid, about their work being spiked — I received a phone call from an irate woman. She told me that her best ideas were being stolen. She’d be watching television and a favorite drama would suddenly… Continue reading The Surveillance Blitz
On the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Europe is at peace. There are no major border disputes. The countries form a unified economic bloc instead of a patchwork of jostling alliances. In the last 70 years, the only large-scale violence took place during the unraveling of Yugoslavia, which ended 15 years… Continue reading Asia: The Ghosts of 1914
For decades, the Communist governments of East-Central Europe held elections. And for decades, these elections produced more-or-less the same results. The Communist Party candidates – or the candidates of the parties aligned with the Party – won the elections by absurd margins. The Party in Hungary was the poorest performer in this regard. In the… Continue reading Ensuring Free and Fair Elections
In a future update of The Devil’s Dictionary, the famed Ambrose Bierce dissection of the linguistic hypocrisies of modern life, a single word will accompany the entry for “Pacific pivot”: retreat. It might seem a strange way to characterize the Obama administration’s energetic attempt to reorient its foreign and military policy toward Asia. After all, the president’s… Continue reading The Empire’s New Asian Clothes
Once, at the request of my employer at the time, I filed a Freedom of Information Request to get his FBI file. It took a while, but eventually an envelope arrived from the U.S. government. My boss eagerly opened it up. A great deal of the materials had been blacked out. On some pages only… Continue reading The File
In 2006, a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England accidentally became an artwork. Let’s call him Dude Descending a Staircase in honor of that merry prankster Marcel Duchamp. This particular visitor tripped over his feet as he was going down the museum stairs. As he fell, he knocked into three large Qing Dynasty vases that… Continue reading Iraq: Revisiting the Pottery Barn Rule
Romania is near the bottom of all social indicators in Europe. If you live in Denmark, you have approximately a one in seven chance of growing up in poverty – or what Brussels calls AROPE (at risk of poverty or social exclusion). But if you live in Romania, at the other end of the EU… Continue reading Romania’s Fraying Social Safety Net
Much of East-Central Europe was once ruled by monarchs. From the 16th century until the end of World War I, the Habsburgs presided over a territory that extended from parts of present-day Poland in the north to the Croatian coastline in the south. At the time, the subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire viewed it as… Continue reading Monarchy as Metaphor
The various Communist parties in East-Central Europe experienced several waves of transformation – or attempted transformation – between 1945 and 1989. A “thaw” would come, and reformers took over, followed by a crackdown and the return of the hardliners. Often the Soviet Union was a prime mover behind the crackdown, either directly in the case… Continue reading Reforming the Party
The Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel popularized the notion of “living in truth.” He was dismayed at the degree to which lies had permeated Czechoslovak society under Communism. It wasn’t only government and Party officials who lied about history, the economy, the state of human rights, the opposition Charter 77 movement, and so on.… Continue reading The Czech Culture of Corruption
I passed through an enormous tori, the traditional gate in front of Shinto shrines. In the courtyard, white-clad Shinto priests walked quietly back and forth. A flock of white doves, specially bred on the site, pecked at the ground and then took wing at the prodding of a photographer. I visited the strolling garden and… Continue reading The Sun Also Rises
Yugoslavia fell apart in stages, and violence accompanied each of these stages. The first war was brief, a ten-day standoff between the Yugoslav Army and Slovenian forces in the summer of 1991, and there were few casualties. The Milosevic government in Serbia was not happy with Slovenia’s secession, but the Serbian population there was miniscule… Continue reading Addressing War Crimes
The Communist governments and the oppositions shared at least one feature in common: they were overwhelmingly male. The leaders of the countries and the members of the Politburos were mostly men. And the dissidents that received all the coverage in the West – Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Victor Orban – were also men. There were… Continue reading Engendering Change
The fall of Communism in East-Central Europe was as much a series of miscalculations on the part of the authorities as it was a burst of revolutionary organizing from below. In Poland, the Communist Party calculated that it would win in the first semi-free elections on June 4, 1989 and instead it lost nearly every… Continue reading Behind the Velvet Revolution
The beginning of a new year is when optimism courses through the blood. Even in the foreign policy realm of dreary realism and apocalyptic musings, January is when pundits and policymakers entertain temporarily vaulted hopes that wars can be stopped, deals negotiated, reputations salvaged, and the planet saved. This year, though it marks the 100th anniversary… Continue reading Reasons to be Cheerful
When Poland went through its “shock therapy” years of the early 1990s, many people lost out as a result of the economic reforms. The unemployment rate went up rapidly from under one percent in January 1990 to over 16% in 1994. And even though the reformers had promised that the pain would be relatively brief,… Continue reading Organizing the Disappointed
At the beginning of the changes in 1989 in East-Central Europe, civil society activists were very interested in alternative approaches to economic development. They’d seen the failures of Soviet-style Communism up close, and they didn’t want to import the worst kind of McDonalds-style capitalism. In 1990, when I visited East German pastor and dissident Wolfgang… Continue reading Building a New Economy
When I travelled in the Transylvania region of Romania in 1993, relations between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians were still tense. There had been outright confrontation and violence in 1990, particularly in Targu Mures. By 1993, the conflict had largely migrated to the political realm. In Cluj – the old Hungarian town of Kolosvar –… Continue reading Speaking One’s Tongue
The social distance between Roma and non-Roma communities in Europe is quite large. In other words, there is not a great deal of mixing between the two communities. Applying the scale developed by Emory Bogardus in 1925 – which asks people questions about willingness to intermarry at one end to eagerness to deport at the… Continue reading Bridging Social Distance in Slovakia
When Communism collapsed in East-Central Europe, it should have been a golden opportunity for the Greens. Newly enfranchised voters were looking for something new. They were skeptical of old-style parties. For decades they’d been breathing polluted air, drinking polluted water, and suffering other consequences of unrestrained growth. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, “post-industrial” politics were becoming… Continue reading From Greens to Guns
Vaclav Havel wrote for the theater. When change came to Czechoslovakia in November 1989, the velvet revolutionaries of Prague met and planned in the Magic Lantern theater. The events of those ten days that shook the country unfolded like a massive, open-air performance, with dramatic speeches, a soundtrack provided by local bands, and a huge… Continue reading Creating a Spectacle
Solidarity was not just an opposition movement. With 10 million members – more than one quarter of the population of Poland in 1980 – it was an unprecedented phenomenon. The Communist governments had faced protests from individual dissidents and even from small groups like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. There had also been reform efforts launched… Continue reading Solidarity After Solidarity
The Hungarian Guard, a far-right paramilitary organization founded in 2007, followed a pattern. It would solicit an invitation from someone in a village. Then it would show up to hold a rally or a paramilitary exercise. The Guard would specifically target villages with large Roma populations and justify its presence as an effort to protect… Continue reading Becoming a Leader
Several years before William Shakespeare wrote his first play, England was rocked by a bloody political scandal. Queen Elizabeth, the virgin monarch who had been on the throne for nearly three decades, was in a battle of wills with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. England’s religious future was at stake. Would it stay Protestant,… Continue reading Kim the Third
The long-serving U.S. politico Tip O’Neill is credited with the observation that “all politics is local.” If a politician hopes to stay in power, he or she must connect with people at a local level and respond to the concerns of constituents. Trips to far-off places might be glamorous, but you win votes by fixing… Continue reading All Politics is Local
I’ve had arguments with some Korean friends about the National Security Law (NSL). They tell me that the law may not be perfect, but I should remember that North Korea still harbors a desire to reunify the peninsula by force. It continues to send its agents to the South, sometimes in the guise of defectors.… Continue reading McCarthyism in Korea?