The Pankow Peace Group

Posted by John on Jan 28, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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0 comments It was one thing to establish an independent peace group in Poland or Hungary during the last decade of the Communist era. Freedom and Peace challenged military service in Poland, where there was a long tradition of independent organizing. In Hungary, perhaps the most liberal country in the region outside of Yugoslavia, Dialogus opposed nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Both...
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Recreating Central Europe

Posted by John on Nov 6, 2014 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured |
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0 comments In 1991, when they disbanded the Warsaw Pact, the countries of Central Europe officially declared their independence from the Soviet Union (though the breaking of the bond really took place two years earlier). This newfound independence did not, however, translate into a common voice or common position based on history and circumstance. The region almost immediately broke into several rival...
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The Misrule of Law

Posted by John on May 25, 2014 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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0 comments 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 assets at low prices and make a killing. Two decades after these...
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Germany’s Post-Reunification Foreign Policy

Posted by John on Nov 7, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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0 comments 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 “German problem,” and many of her French and Polish interlocutors...
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Following the Magic

Posted by John on Oct 28, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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0 comments 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 energy. Caleb Crain’s new novel Necessary Errors...
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