Paks. A small town located in a bend of the Danube about 100 kilometers south of Budapest. The entire area is dominated by a nuclear power plant built in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is clearly visible from the nearby hills with the vineyards of Szekszárd, famous for its excellent wine. You can…

Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America Cass R. Sunstein ed., New York: Dey Street 2018. The year 2016 has led to the renewed political popularity of the verb “to happen,” especially in the indefinite passive voice. Politicians, commentators, and social scientists have reacted as if a meteor had stricken the global body politic. Nobody…

Střední Evropa je jako pták s očima vzadu: O české minulosti a přítomnosti Jacques Rupnik Novela Bohemica, Praha 2018, 428 stran (Jacques Rupnik, Central Europe Is Like a Bird With Its Eyes at the Back of Its Head, Novela Bohemica 2018, 428 pp) Czech history does not appear overly dramatic to an outsider. More or…

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World Adam Tooze Allen Lane, 706 pp, 2018 Investment bankers have always made bad big picture predictions. “The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson famously said back in the 1960s. Bankers haven’t done very well recently…

The assassination of Paweł Adamowicz, the Christian-Democratic Mayor of Gdańsk, is another act of political terror in contemporary Europe. Three years ago, in similar circumstances, a British politician Jo Cox was killed by a supporter of the extreme right just before the referendum on Brexit. She had also been a victim of hateful attacks by…

Dear Readers, Over the last three decades, free trade has advanced due to a favorable international order and the availability of relatively cheap means of transport enabling fast delivery of products to customers. These have been the main boosters of globalization, together with the technological revolution. With the advancement of 3-D printing, for example, new ways…

The narrative of eco-activists, attacking modern agricultural biotechnology based on genetic engineering, is as unreliable as the campaigns of the opponents of global warming. It is based on demagoguery, ignoring data and a selective treatment of what science actually says. Mark Lynas is a well-known and respected British journalist. In the 1990s, as a member…

Poor but Sexy Agata Pyzik Zero Books 2014 It has been almost thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. Today’s German capital was not only divided by the wall built in 1961. Most of the former Eastern Bloc countries are today part of the Transatlantic structure and are participating…

Ota Pavel. Pod powierzchnią Aleksander Kaczorowski Czarne 2018, p. 328 A Chinese proverb says that to be happy for an hour you should get drunk, to be happy for three days you should get married, and to be happy all your life you should become a fisherman. Ota Pavel, although not Chinese, but a Czech…

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian Harvard University Press, 381 pp, 2018 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are alternately credited or condemned for instigating a global economic and political shift that began in the late twentieth century. For them, the state equated a force of repression from which businesses…

The V4 countries currently have a broad range of industries from sophisticated production to basic assembly shops. The current trends inspire modest optimism. The Czech Republic saw a significant growth in imports from Bulgaria and Serbia in the first half of 2018. An examination of detailed data, provided by the Czech Statistical Office, indicates that…

Export-oriented new member countries of the European Union and the spread of trade protectionism. A ghost is on the loose in the world. The ghost of protectionism. The bottle was opened by the Trump administration but can rapidly attain global dimensions with irreparable harm not only to world trade but also to the global economic…

The governments of Poland and Hungary have attempted to build an alliance with Israel for several years now, based on their ideological affinity to Likud, the ruling party in the country. The general condemnation of anti-Semitism by Orbán and Kaczyński is accompanied, however, by a historical policy based on the affirmation of political traditions of…

Paris has seen that it can advantageously use tensions within the Visegrad Group to firmly anchor its political aims in the region. More than a year after the election of Emmanuel Macron as French President, and after his Sorbonne speech, other EU member states still seem to have been caught at-footed about the activism of…

When it comes to the rhythm of European integration, Paris and Berlin evidently do not share the same starting points. Since the formation of a new German government in spring 2018, the Franco-German machine has been running at top speed. High level meetings have followed one other and all resources are being mobilized to achieve…

As has been rightly pointed out by Jacques Rupnik, the European Union as a liberal, elitist, supranational project is a perfect target for populist nationalists since it represents a combination of important grievances. This has been mirrored accurately in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán depicts himself as the only defender of national identity and…

The next European elections are going to be a litmus test for the state of democracy worldwide—says Lorenzo Marsili in an interview with Jakub Majmurek. JAKUB MAJMUREK: Italy has elected a government supported by the Five Star Movement (M5S) and Lega Nord—two political parties generally regarded as dangerously populist and more or less anti-European. How…

If Generation Z stays on the barricades, how #MeToo failed us and finally how Gen Z will save us. Emily Ratajkowski was your usual swimsuit supermodel until she wasn‘t. On October 4, she posted a picture on her Instagram scoring almost two million likes. Nothing unusual for her profile, but this time she was fully…