Thanks to benign neglect on the part of government, private and commercial endeavors in the United States have revolutionized the global energy sector. As luck would have it, North America is as close to energy self-sufficiency as it is possible to be in the modern, interdependent world. Now, if only Trump can be stopped from…

Energy diversification in Ukraine is an opportunity for the V4 countries. Slovakia and the Czech Republic have already benefited from it. The direction of the gas transmission has changed, it now flows not only from east to west, but also from west to east—says Agata Łoskot-Strachota interviewed by Zbigniew Rokita. ZBIGNIEW ROKITA: Has the energy…

The most important thing is having clarity about what kind of country we want to be and the direction in which the country’s economy should develop. Our energy policy will then adapt accordingly, says Václav Bartuška, Ambassador-at-Large for Energy Security in the Czech Republic, in an interview with Robert Schuster. ROBERT SCHUSTER: The world powers…

Discussions on the future of energy, and more precisely on the ways of producing and using it by humans, are not all that much different from fantasizing about artificial intelligence. That which is potentially possible is confused with what is actually needed, while reality develops anyway in accordance with its own unpredictable dynamics. Thinking about…

At the beginning of October, the Czech parliament passed a resolution condemning the launch of the Article 7 procedure against the government of Viktor Orbán. The authorities of Poland and Bulgaria announced earlier that they would not support any measures against the Hungarian government. The German Christian Democrats are also reluctant to do so. Although…

Dear Readers, The quest for new and available sources of energy has come to the forefront of public debate periodically since the time of the “steam revolution”. The peak of attention was reached globally during the oil crisis in the 1970s. Energy was at the center of structural transformation in this region in the 1990s.…

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad Fareed Zakaria It is quite paradoxical that Fareed Zakaria’s Future of Freedom got published in Poland only when, its praise for the country’s democracy turned out to be an overstatement. To be sure, Central Europe is not the main topic of the book. Nevertheless, it…

Flucht—wie der Staat die Kontrolle verlor. Christian Ultsch, Thomas Prior, Rainer Nowak Molden, Wien 2017, 205 pp. ISBN 978-3-222-15005-0 The one political theme that has been dominating Europe for the last several years, the migration crisis, is usually being linked with Germany, as it has admitted in the biggest number of migrants. Its government has…

The Beginning of the End, Ivan Krastev, After Europe, University of Pennsylvania Press, 120 pp, 2017 Not so long ago, the European Union was touted as a model of aspiration. Member states were consolidating cooperation and integration via the Treaty of Lisbon and Turkey still wanted to join. The EU was so cool that rapper Jay…

The declared goal of the government is to consolidate institutional resources in order to move Poland from the periphery of capitalism to a level of development characteristic for the center. Costly social programs have become, however, a priority. Investments Investment is not growing and is lower than in other countries in Central Europe. The global…

Even if it is still a one-digit figure, the impact of startups weight in the Hungarian GDP can now be measured in full percentage points. Despite certain success stories, Hungary has not found a way to utilize the brainpower of startups in a traditional economy. Hungary’s best-known startup Prezi has signed up its 100 millionth…

Basic building blocks of future solutions must lie in the strengthening of the federal features of the European budget. The future financial perspective of the EU can be probed from many points of view. One of them is to take into consideration the European Union’s budget from an overall historical perspective. It is obvious that…

Poland is ethnically, religiously, and linguistically homogeneous, without minorities to scapegoat. It may be necessary then to resort to scape-ghosting, blaming ghosts to maintain social cohesion. There was only one past. History was not made of multiple parallel universes. History, past events, cannot change. Historiography, the representation of past events, changes and historians can and…

Russia is like a registration employee in a hospital. This person has the medical documentation of all the patients and knows their weaknesses. So the registration employee knocks the patients’ heads together and unleashes them on each other—says Yevhen Mahda, a Ukrainian political scientist, interviewed by Zbigniew Rokita. ZBIGNIEW ROKITA: Four years have passed since…

A global cyberwar is under way. Such a cold war—or cold peace—has never happened in history. A great war is always preceded by a long process of increasing international tension, an arms race, limited wars or proxy wars. Such warning signals do not mean that the probability of an outbreak of a world war or…

Czechia needs Europe to be a continent of free and responsible citizens, who are not only aware of their rights but duties as well. Citizens, who live in sovereign nation states, governed by democratically elected politicians, who in turn are governed by common sense. In all these aspects the current development, led by West European…

Liberalism was able to define the notion of normality: what was rational and what was crazy. The new forces will attempt to do the same. They are by no means paper tigers. Not any longer—says Jan Zielonka in an interview with Jakub Dymek. With the electoral win of populist coalition-to-be in Italy, Poland’s right-wing surge,…

I feel an energy that will bring change. These local government elections will be a test, and in two years, with the parliamentary elections, we will learn the truth about Slovakia—says Matúš Vallo, architect, urban activist, and candidate for the office of mayor of Bratislava. ŁUKASZ GRZESICZAK: It’s raining cats and dogs. How did you…