Refugee World

Posted by John on Jun 25, 2015 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Human Rights |
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0 comments To paraphrase William Gibson, the post-apocalypse is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed. Many of our post-apocalyptic stories — Mad Max, The Road, World War Z — feature desperate people on the move in a friendless and resource-poor environment. The world hasn’t ended quite yet, but these modern nomads have nearly lost hope. Something terrible has happened in the past, and...
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From Solidarity to Business

Posted by John on Apr 29, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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4 comments When I met with Mariusz Ambroziak in 1993, he was secretary for the Solidarity trade union in the Mazowsze area around Warsaw. He’d been a Solidarity activist for most of his life, starting out as a young worker involved in the famous Solidarity chapter at the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw. But by 1993, he was having difficulties getting up in the morning and going to work. It took two alarm...
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Returning Poland to Europe

Posted by John on Mar 11, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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4 comments Central Europe had been kidnapped, the Czech writer Milan Kundera once wrote in a celebrated essay from 1984. It had been dragged eastward by the Soviet Union after World War II. And like a displaced person yearning to return home, the region couldn’t wait until it could rejoin Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The economist Jeffrey Sachs first visited Poland in spring 1989, before the...
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Church and State in Poland

Posted by John on Feb 18, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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0 comments Poland has one of the stricter laws on abortion in Europe. Abortion is illegal except if the life of the mother is at risk, the fetus has a major defect, or the pregnancy is the result of a confirmed rape. Poland, Ireland, and Malta are the only countries in Europe that do not allow abortion on request. All three countries are also predominantly Catholic (95 percent for Malta, 91 percent for...
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The Market Before the Market

Posted by John on Feb 17, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized |
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0 comments When East-Central Europe made the transition to market economies after 1989, journalists sometimes referred to the process as “overnight capitalism.” This gave the impression that the countries in the region were Communist one day and capitalist the next. In fact, the market was present in most of the countries in the region in one form or another prior to 1989. Hungary, for instance,...
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