The great Polish playwright and intellectual Slawomir Mrozek was best known for his absurdist plays, most of them written after he’d gone into exile in 1963. I saw his play The Emigrants performed by two enterprising Polish actors in a camper van parked on a Dublin street as part of the Fringe festival there a… Continue reading The Revolution Devours Its Children
When it came to the transition from Communism to capitalism, Poland led the way with its rapid, “shock therapy” approach. This “overnight” strategy was designed to reduce inflation, stabilize the economy, and eliminate opportunities for insiders to make money by taking advantage of large differences between state-subsidized and free-market prices. On the other end of… Continue reading Slovenia’s Gradualist Transition
With the death of South African leader Nelson Mandela, many have mourned the passing of a brave activist, a far-sighted statesman, and a compelling moral force in the fallen world of global politics. His passing has touched hundreds of millions of people around the world. They are grieving his death, of course. But they may also be… Continue reading The Twilight of Leadership
The Student Network in Hungary has been one of the most vocal and visible opponents of the current government. In Hungarian, the network has a memorable name: HaHa (Hallgatói Hálózat). Formed a year after Viktor Orban and Fidesz came to power, HaHa has focused on the government’s education reforms, opposing proposed cuts in state support… Continue reading Hungarian Students Resist
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wrapped up his finger-wagging tour of Asia on Friday, with a busy week of lecturing the Chinese, trying to get the South Koreans and Japanese to play nice with one another, and damning North Korea with faint praise for releasing an 85-year-old American after more than a month of detention.… Continue reading U.S. Still Playing Catch-up in Asia
If you look just at the statistics, Hungary seems to be doing pretty well, inequality-wise. The country experienced a significant spike in poverty and household inequality after the political changes of 1989-90. But since then, its rate of inequality has remained around the European average. It moved from Scandinavian levels of inequality (according to the… Continue reading Focusing on Inequality
In the novel The Year of the Frog, the narrator sinks into a funk over the claustrophobia that has closed over his life. It’s the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, and Communism stretches as far into the future as the eye can see. “I’m forty, and for the last decade I’ve wandered all over Bratislava without meeting… Continue reading The End of Claustrophobia
A generation of East-Central Europeans has grown up without any first-hand experience of Communism. They have been educated in schools that are connected Europe-wide through the Bologna process. They can get good jobs outside their countries. They increasingly think of themselves as European citizens (the younger they are, the more Euro-friendly they are, according to… Continue reading Rethinking Democracy in Europe
They’re the last three hunger strikers standing. Actually, they’re sitting—just outside the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The weather is turning cold, and they’re bundled up against the wind. The three men are legislators. Two of their number have already collapsed and ended up in hospital. In November, the government attempted to ban their… Continue reading Korea’s Domestic Cold War
I met Thomas Tschirner in 1990 when he was still in high school. He and his brother were enthusiastically involved in putting out an alternative newsletter in their hometown of Wittemberg, a city about 70 miles south of Berlin in what was then East Germany. “We felt the need for an alternative medium,” he told… Continue reading Growing Up During Die Wende
During the Communist period, the governments in East-Central Europe treated religious groups with varying degrees of tolerance. The Catholic Church in Poland was too large and influential to ignore, so remained powerful even under Communism. The Albanian government, on the other hand, tried to wipe out all religious identity to such a degree that Communist… Continue reading Being Quaker in East Germany
The story starts out simply enough: “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” What follows, in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, is absurd, a comedy of errors, except that it is not funny and the ending can’t be more tragic. Joseph K. is subjected to… Continue reading Trial Upon Trial
Romania has come a long way on LGBT issues. Homosexuality was illegal in the country up until 1996. Public manifestations of homosexuality were decriminalized only in 2000, and the last discriminatory law was repealed in 2002. The European Union applied considerable pressure during the accession process and so did the United States, which sent an… Continue reading Promoting Molecular Revolution in Romania
I was at a wedding not long ago of two dear female friends. The ceremony mixed together various religious traditions, including a Quaker meeting where people in the audience could stand up and speak spontaneously. After a number of people had already spoken, an old man made his way to the front of the space.… Continue reading Running Off to War
I thought it was a fad, and it would die out. Three years ago I read Daniel Drezner’s piece inForeign Policy about his search for an “international relations theory of zombies,” which he subsequently expanded into a full-length book. Really, this was on the order of devoting an entire university class to the lyrics of Madonna. If I just… Continue reading The Undead and Us
Germany has played an outsized role in Europe after reunification in 1990. But that role has largely been economic. There were many fears at the end of the Cold War that a reunified Germany would destabilize Europe. Margaret Thatcher kept a map of Germany’s 1937 borders in her purse to illustrate her anxieties about the… Continue reading Germany’s Post-Reunification Foreign Policy
In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Poland. It was an official visit, the invitation extended by the Communist government. The pope—once known as Karol Wojtyla, an actor-turned-priest from a small village outside Krakow—managed to pull off the impossible. He gave speeches about economic justice that one of my Polish friends told me were more… Continue reading The Audacity of Pope
All the countries of East-Central Europe have experienced collective mood swings since 1989. Political parties have rotated in and out of power. The economic fortunes have oscillated considerably. And the level of social enthusiasm – on a spectrum from malaise to engagement – has also fluctuated a great deal. Slovakia has been perhaps the most… Continue reading Slovakia’s Pendulum Swing
One of the key contributions of the Polish opposition movement was its concept of living “as if.” At a certain point in the 1970s, dissidents like Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron proposed to create a parallel society in which people acted as if they were already living in a democratic society. They would act openly,… Continue reading Creating a Parallel Society
To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, undisclosed location Re: Memo XP1476 Greetings from the tropics! I apologize for not writing to you earlier. As you probably know, if you have my file in front of you, I wrote to your predecessors with various modest proposals:outsourcing targeted killings to the Chinese, turning our drone program… Continue reading NSA and TMI
In the early 1990s, Eastern Europe entered the list of expatriate wonderlands, like the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s or Tokyo of the 1980s. Prague was the most powerful magnet: Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution was relatively cheap, jobs teaching English were plentiful, and the city was full of beautiful buildings and creative… Continue reading Following the Magic
The intellectual revolutionaries of the Age of Enlightenment created a community through the exchange of letters. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, this “republic of letters” created a common intellectual language across countries and, indeed, across the Atlantic between Europe and the United States. This non-territorial republic played a role in various scientific… Continue reading YU-Rock!
In his 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to roam. It’s an optimistic vision of the future—if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or… Continue reading The World Without U.S.
When Communism collapsed in 1989 in East-Central Europe, many industries collapsed with it. Factories closed, workers were out of jobs, and economies shrank. But one sector of the economy grew: the media. Where there had once been a state monopoly, now there was pluralism. There was suddenly an explosion of reporting, commentary, TV debates. All… Continue reading Expanding the Fourth Estate
He started out his career by painting a tank pink. In 1991, David Cerny was an art student in Prague. For years he had walked by the Soviet tank mounted on a pedestal in Kinsky Square and fumed. The tank commemorated the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, and indeed the square was once known… Continue reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Provocateur
When small children want something to go away, they close their eyes. Poof! The monster disappears. The spoonful of spinach vanishes. The spilled milk evaporates. Except that they don’t. U.S policymakers indulge in a similar variety of child’s play called collapsism. They close their eyes when they want a particularly despised adversary to go away.… Continue reading Collapsism
There is often more support for radical change in the city than in the countryside. The Green movement in Iran in 2009 had tremendous support in Tehran but considerably less in the countryside. The Bulgarian opposition was convinced that it would win in the first democratic elections in 1990 elections but failed to take into… Continue reading To the People
The changes that took place in East-Central Europe in 1989 were not just an inflection point for people in the region. The lives of many outsiders were profoundly altered by what happened year. I was 25 years old in January 1989 and living in Warsaw. I had no clear idea of what to do with… Continue reading A Child of 1989
Of the three multiethnic countries that dissolved in the aftermath of the Cold War, Czechoslovakia fared the best. The two successor states suffered none of the violence, economic catastrophe, or political discord that Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union experienced. Indeed, the relations between Prague and Bratislava are probably better now than they’ve ever been. The… Continue reading The Slovak Example
The world will not end with bang or a whimper. It will end with the silent slither of jellyfish. Literally. And figuratively. On the literal level, jellyfish are indeed taking over. As a result of global warming, overfishing, and fertilizer runoff, these surprisingly hardy creatures are spreading into new territory. Certain jellyfish can kill you. If… Continue reading The Jellification of Politics