For Ciracassian, Sochi Olympics is not true to the spirit of Olympic Games. In contrast, it stands as a betrayal of the whole idea.

Years ago, when the well-known historian Norman Davies decided to have a look at Polish history, he gave it a significant title God’s Playground. It is a proper title for current situation in Hungary. Only that the small plot of ground there is tended not by the God himself, but by Viktor Orbán.

Slovakia’s presidential election will reveal the undercurrents in society

Ukraine is at the beginning of deep changes, which most probably will affect all the segments of its society. Ukrainians “shifted” westward with its values, dreams and the ideas about the future.

The present crisis in Ukraine has laid bare the very essence of Ukrainian politics, signs of which have been apparent since 1992: the country is politically divided, the political programme of Western Ukraine has not been accepted by the country‘s Eastern part and vice versa.

More than 500 million Europeans are sitting today on the EU “powder keg,” which could explode after the elections to the European Parliament in late spring

An interview with Boris Kagarlitsky by Filip MemchesBusiness elites in the East care only about the cash flow, control over the markets, and opportunities for enriching themselves at the expense of the state. In this sense, Russia and Ukraine form a peculiar vanguard of Europe— says Boris Kagarlitsky in conversation with Filip Memches.

Today, by any number of measures, the EU and the U.S. are drifting apart. Support for the transatlantic alliance is at a post-World War II low. There are many manifestations of what has been termed “continental drift”: inwards turns by both the U.S. and the EU after the economic crisis, an America increasingly focused on…

Democracy Equals Institutions Plus Culture

The solution of the European problems has been well known for some time. It requires the creation of a full federal union a least of the eurozone, with the establishment of an elected presidency, a joint parliament responsible for a common debt, and a single army.

An interview with Aleksander Smolar by Maciej NowickiLet us be clear: from the point of view of the Western EU countries the enlargement was a mistake. Creating a federation out of the original six countries would probably pose no serious difficulties—says Aleksander Smolar in conversation with Maciej Nowicki.

It seems that not only many large-scale social projects but history at large sometimes operates according to the law of unintended consequences. Whereas a quarter of century ago the stated goal of many leading figures of the opposition movements in Central and Eastern Europe and of their supporters in Western Europe and North America was…

Shortly after the historic enlargement of the EU to the East in 2004, published simultaneously in Poland and Germany, a book prophetically entitled “Vanishing Europe” came out. It was a joint work of fifteen European writers who had decided to tell the readers about places that most of us have never heard of and probably…

Anna Engelking, Kołchoźnicy. Antropologiczne studium tożsamości wsi białoruskiej przełomu XX i XXI wieku [Kolkhozniki. An Anthropological Study of the Identity of Rural Belarus at the Turn of the 21st century], Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń 2012

Галина Боднар, Львів. Щоденне життя міста очима переселенців із сіл (50–80-ті роки ХХ ст.), Львівський національний університет ім. Івана Франка, 2010; Анатомія міста: Київ. Урбаністичні студії, Смолоскип, 2012. Halyna Bodnar, Lviv. Everyday Life of the City in the Eyes of Rural Immigrants (1950s-1980s), Lviv 2010; An Anatomy of a City: Kyiv. Urban Studies, many authors,…

Laima Vince, “Journeys Through the Backwaters of the Heart”, Amazon 2012

Petr Drulák, Politika nezájmu: Česko a Západ v krizi. [The Politics of Indifference: the Czech Republic and the West in Crisis] SLON, Praha 2012.

JM Stim, Eva Weissenberger: Trotzdem. Oscar Bronner. Eine Biografie, [In spite of. Oscar Bronner. A Biography] rde — redelsteiner dahimene edition, Wien, 2013, 326 pages