Dear Readers, Since you will be holding the new issue of Aspen Review at a time greatly impacted by the world-wide Covid-19 pandemic, we have made it the central theme of the publication. We are living at a time when one can speak of a crisis of a double character, not only involving public health…

The Light that Failed. Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev New York: Pegasus Books 2019 If you are a person of critical, progressive persuasion, recent political developments give you more than enough reasons to feel frustrated. The liberal consensus is apparently over, yet it has not been…

Dissidents in Communist Central Europe: Human Rights and the Emergence of New Transnational Actors Kacper Szulecki Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 242 The history and meaning of dissidence have acquired new importance. The year 2019 has been dubbed ‘the year of the street protester’ as mass demonstrations erupted across the globe, including in Hong Kong, Georgia,…

Poetry from the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement is Our Civilization’s Last Chance Srećko Horvat Allen Lane, 192 pp, 2019 The American intellectual and journalist Walter Lippmann opened his 1922 book Public Opinion with a story about an island. It’s the year 1914 and Lippmann’s fictional island is populated by English, French and German settlers.…

If the ‘Anna Karenina principle’ could be applied to states, it would sound as follows: All the full democracies are alike, but every hybrid democracy is hybrid in its own way. After 2004’s Rose Revolution led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia won the admiration of the international community as it went from the brink of a…

The EU needs improvement in its competitiveness and innovation performance. This cannot be achieved, however, without addressing the problems of regional and country differences. The European Union is lagging behind its major competitors in terms of innovativeness and competitiveness in spite of the fact that in March 2000 the EU heads of state and governments…

Russia’s leadership is not interested in economic growth. Everybody only wants things not to turn to the worse. Back in 2013 and 2015, I wrote two pieces for the Aspen Review Central Europe arguing that President Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 marked the beginning of a ‘lost decade’ in Russia’s economic development1 and…

In September 2019 the theme of Ukraine returned to the ages of the world press. It concerned the publication of the transcript of a conversation between newly elected President Zelensky and US President Donald Trump. In this conversation, Trump allegedly asked Zelensky to assist his lawyers in resuming an investigation into the activities of Hunter…

The left-wing story has to be built on recognising what really unites us. We are the periphery and like every periphery we have the ambition to stop being periphery. This can only be done by deepening European solidarity—says Adrian Zandberg in an interview with Jakub Majmurek. JAKUB MAJMUREK: “Poland’s real security is Europe, it is cooperation…

I have good news for the left: the contemporary Zeitgeist finally favors it. If progressive politicians repeat the mistakes of their predecessors from previous decades, however, it may soon start favoring populists—who already know how to use it better. 1. It started, like many events on the Internet, from an event so insignificant that it…

Closing the borders between EU member states and locking people in their apartments has made us more cosmopolitan than ever. For perhaps the first time in history, people around the world are having the same conversations and sharing the same fears. ‘Man is the only known time machine.’ Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter In José Saramago’s…

The grand political criminal enterprise can only happen because of the intermediaries, like banks, lawyers and management consultants. This is something which we really need to understand—says Misha Glenny in an interview with Aleksander Kaczorowski. ALEKSANDER KACZOROWSKI: International crime has disappeared from the headlines. It is no longer as popular a media topic as climate…

Not really thinking it over, I agreed to write an article about environmental changes that affect our lives. Now, sitting on my couch in the middle of one of the most environmentally conscious and responsible countries in Europe, the thought comes to my mind, what a lucky life I have, to be able to breath…

For three countries of the Visegrad Group—the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary—the ‘Green Deal’ can be an opportunity to modernize the energy sector and the entire economy. The situation in Poland is different. The ‘Green Deal’ is not the European Union’s first long-term investment plan. There were several similar projects—the Lisbon Agenda (2000), the Europe…

The transformation will require the strong role of the public sector, in both regulation and investment. The Czech political representation is thus far hesitant to embrace this level of change. To confront and overcome the “greatest market failure that the world has seen” (in the words of the British economist Nicholas Stern), the global economy…

A shift towards green policies in many European countries is going to have a profound impact on their economies and may even influence the way key political decisions are made. Sooner or later this trend will reach the states of Central Europe, and change is just around the corner. Is there a revolution on the…

Achieving energy independence by the middle of the century is a key element in defining the EU’s strategic situation. All indications are that the most developed EU countries will implement this strategy without looking behind at possible laggards from Central Europe. Polish miners lost patience again. Nobody wants to buy their coal. Despite the assurances…

Greta Thunberg, Zuzana Čaputová, Olga Tokarczuk. It was because of them that last year had a woman’s face. Each of them in her own way became a symbol of hope for a better tomorrow—in the world, in Europe and in Poland. It is no accident that there is not a single man among these emblematic…