Eating History

Posted by on Feb 18, 2013 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Food, Russia and Eastern Europe, Uncategorized | 2 comments The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another. That might not have been the intention of the museum founders. But this tension actually captures the ambiguities of East Germany and the ambivalence that many Germans feel today about the erstwhile communist state. The...
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When Soft Power Fails

Posted by on Jan 20, 2013 in Articles, China, Featured | 0 comments The oldest Chinatown in the world is not in New York or San Francisco or even Yokohama. It is in Manila, a fact that comes up often when Beijing talks about its longstanding connection to the islands that lie about 600 miles to the southeast.  Similarly, China boasts of its three Confucius Institutes in the Philippines where Filipinos can learn Mandarin and appreciate the many facets of Chinese...
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Escape from Ignorance and Chalga

Posted by on Jan 17, 2013 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Russia and Eastern Europe, Uncategorized | 4 comments There is a joke in Bulgaria. What are the two ways out of the current crisis? Terminal One and Terminal Two. Those would be, of course, the terminals at the Sofia airport. An enormous number of people have left Bulgaria since 1989. Over the last quarter century or so, the population dropped from approximately 9 million to approximately 7.3 million people. Some of the population reduction is the...
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Serbia’s Strategic Ambiguity and the EU

Posted by on Jan 14, 2013 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Russia and Eastern Europe, Uncategorized | 2 comments Serbia this week adopted new guidelines for its talks with Kosovo. As usual, the Serbian parliament declared that it would never recognize the independence of the breakaway region. This was not a surprise. But the parliament also called for more autonomy for ethnic Serbians living in Kosovo. On the face of it, this latter statement seems of a piece with the refusal to recognize Kosovo’s...
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The Failure of Funding Roma Inclusion

Posted by on Jan 10, 2013 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Russia and Eastern Europe, Uncategorized | 0 comments Shortly before the last national elections in Bulgaria in 2011, an incident took place in the village of Katunitsa, which is not far from the second-largest city of Plovdiv. On the night of September 23, a 19-year-old ethnic Bulgarian Angel Petrov was hit by a car and died. It was an accident, but it wasn’t accidental. His accused murderer, a mini-bus driver Simeon Yosifov, was a relative of a...
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Where Bulgaria Went Wrong

Posted by on Jan 8, 2013 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Russia and Eastern Europe, Uncategorized | 0 comments Bulgarians can talk at great length about what went wrong in 1989-90 and why the country didn’t immediately become economically successful and politically liberal after the end of the Cold War. Some will tell you that the politicians didn’t embrace the Western model quickly or thoroughly enough. Others will wax conspiratorial about secret Communist Party machinations. Ognyan Minchev, a...
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