Edward Lucas

PLEASE NOTE

2010-08-13T09:29:00.000Z

This site is no longer active. Please go to edwardlucas.com/blog instead Regards Edward

Redesign pending

2010-06-17T16:06:00.003Z

Sorry for the long gap in posting material on this blog. I have been busy launching an Economist blog called Eastern Approaches
This site has been redesigned and will be relaunched shortly at www.edwardlucas.com

the rise of English (book review_

2010-05-27T16:35:00.001Z

The rise and rise of English

Top dog
May 27th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language. By Robert McCrum. W.W. Norton; 310 pages; $26.95. Viking; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ENGLISH is what matters. It has displaced rivals to become the language of diplomacy, of business, of science, of the internet and of world culture. Many more people speak Chinese—but even they, in vast numbers, are trying to learn English. So how did it happen, and why? Robert McCrum’s entertaining book tells the story of the triumph of English—and the way in which the language is now liberated from its original owners.

The author’s knack for finding nuggets enriches what might otherwise seem a rather panoramic take on world history from Tacitus to Twitter. Take the beginnings of bilingualism in India, for example, which has stoked the growth of the biggest English-speaking middle class in the new Anglosphere. That stems from a proposal by an English historian, Thomas Macaulay, in 1835, to train a new class of English speakers: “A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.” At a stroke, notes Mr McCrum, English became the “language of government, education and advancement, at once a symbol of imperial rule as well as of self-improvement”. India’s English-speaking middle class is now one of the engines of that country’s development and a big asset in the race to catch up with China.

Bit by bit, English displaced French from diplomacy and German from science. The reason for this was America’s rise and the lasting bonds created by the British empire. But the elastic, forgiving nature of the language itself was another. English allows plenty of sub-variants, from Singlish in Singapore to Estglish in Estonia: the main words are familiar, but plenty of new ones dot the lexicon, along with idiosyncratic grammar and syntax.

Mr McCrum hovers over this point, but does not nail it. English as spoken by non-natives is different. The nuanced, idiomatic English of Britons, North Americans, Antipodeans (and Indians) can be hard to understand. Listen to a Korean businessman negotiating with a Pole in English and you will hear the difference: the language is curt, emphatic, stripped-down. Yet within “Globish”, as Mr McCrum neatly names it, hierarchies are developing. Those who can make jokes (or flirt) in Globish score over those who can’t. Expressiveness counts, in personal and professional life.

The big shift is towards a universally useful written Globish. Spellchecking and translation software mean that anyone can communicate in comprehensible written English. That skill once required mastery of orthographical codes and subtle syntax acquired over years. The English of e-mail, Twitter and text messaging is becoming far more mutually comprehensible than spoken English, which is fractured by differences in pronunciation, politeness and emphasis. Mr McCrum aptly names the new lingo “a thoroughfare for all thoughts”. Perhaps he should have written that chapter in Globish, to show its strengths—and limitations.

Iceland

2010-05-27T16:34:00.002Z

Life in Iceland

Nasty, brutish and short
May 27th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Wasteland With Words: A Social History of Iceland. By Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson. Reaktion Books; 288 pages; $39.95 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

FILTHY, damp, cold and exhausting, living in Iceland for most of the past millennium had one redeeming feature: that the long dark winter evenings gave people the chance to read a lot and tell stories. That combination of cultural depth and material backwardness is the central message of Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s social history of one of Europe’s smallest and remotest countries.

Given its 300,000 population (about the size of New Orleans), Iceland produces a lot of news. Its volcanoes and banks have blown up with dreadful consequences for locals and outsiders alike. Alone in Europe, it husbands its fish stocks properly. It used to be horribly expensive to visit. Now its hauntingly barren landscape is a bargain holiday destination. This book, drawing on Icelanders’ astonishingly detailed diaries and letters in past centuries, gives the outsider a rare glimpse into the past lives of an extraordinary people.

The story is not wholly pleasant. Even readers with strong stomachs will find them tested. The book opens with an account of a man who rips his own testicles off with a cord after a tantrum involving allegations of infidelity. The pressure-cooker of emotions induced by isolation (the road round the island was completed only in 1974) dispel any stereotypes of Nordic stolidity. The dank squalor of the turf-built hovels in which most Icelanders lived is described with disconcerting relish, along with the suppurating sores, stoically borne, that resulted. Clothes were boiled in urine occasionally, but were otherwise worn without washing.

Life lightened up in the 19th century when mechanisation allowed Icelanders to make some money from fish. In 1940 British and then American forces occupied the island to safeguard it from Nazi Germany. That broke the country’s isolation for ever. The author regards with distaste the pell-mell enthusiasm for globalisation, and casino capitalism that marked the last decade. He is particularly scathing about the bogus boom-year talk of the virtues of the Icelandic national character (innovative, resourceful, etc). Thrift and hard work, not showing off and speculation would have been more accurate, he says.

Books on Icelandic social history are rare. So it is a pity that this one has so many odd omissions. The author barely mentions the greatest tragedy in Icelandic history, the colossal volcanic eruption of 1783 which cut the island’s population by a fifth, to just 40,000 people. He writes a lot about childhood (and child labour) but rather little about sex (which helps while away those dark winter evenings). In particular, he says almost nothing about the country’s fascinating national cuisine. Iceland is a country where raw puffin hearts, pickled rams’ testicles and putrefying shark flesh are all regularly eaten. It may be that, as an Icelander himself, Mr Magnusson does not find such dishes particularly exotic. His readers, especially the unsqueamish ones, would be hungry to know more.

More jokes, please

2010-05-27T16:27:00.001Z

Explosive humour

May 27th 2010, 13:03 by E.L. | LONDON

JOKES helped make communism collapse. “Anekdoty” as they were termed, helped dispel the climate of fear and highlighted the backwardness and stagnation that were the hallmark of central planning and the police state. The best ones were about people like Brezhnev; few found Stalin a good subject for humour.

But since then life has become trickier for jokesters. Mocking other countries can easily seem patronising and crude. The fictional Borat was hilarious for people who couldn’t find Kazakhstan on a map, rather less so for Kazakhs (and for the Romanian villagers gulled into taking part as extras). Poland’s then deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski won kudos in 1999 by forcing CNN to apologise after Ted Turner told a silly joke implying that Polish sappers used their feet to detect mines.

Some old joke themes survive. The “hot Estonian guy”, famous for his dim wits and low libido is highly amusing for that country’s envious southern and eastern neighbours. Jews are still canny; pensioners, such as the stereotypical elderly Hungarians Kohn and Grün, are fearful of the future (and sometimes of the fast-changing past). Jokes about “new Russians” and their crudeness and extravagance are legion. But for the most part political correctness has taken its toll. Ethnic stereotypes, once a handy summary of the plusses and minusses of national character, are now seen as thinly disguised racism. Even the most side-splitting joke about, say, a scheming Romanian, a cowardly Czech and a gloomy Hungarian risks attracting a rebuke rather than a roar of approval.

This is not just an ex-communist phenomenon. A recent column which lightheartedly chopped Italy in half and suggested that the southern bits might be nicknamed “bordello” produced some anguished responses (as well as a much larger number of appreciative ones). So did an animated version published a couple of weeks later. the arrival of a TV crew from Rome, solemnly eager to interview the author of the “provocation”.

But a joke-less future would be a bleak one indeed. And good though the old jokes were, it is high time for some new ones. Promising themes might be the sleaze and cronyism of post-communist politics, the stitch-up of Europe between big countries at the expense of small ones, and the lamentably inadequate response of the continent’s political class to the economic crisis.

To avoid offence, every country should concentrate on developing self-deprecating jokes (just as rabbis tell the best Jewish jokes). Estonia has (as in so many things) paved the way here, with two sharply amusing videos, one lampooning that country’s tendency to ignorant self-centredness, a second one its timidity and negativism. Self-deprecating humour is the ultimate sign of emotional and political maturity, just as a rabid prickliness is typically a sign of unresolved complexes about superiority, inferiority, and lack of attention from the outside world.

The sanction for those countries that don’t produce enough self-critical jokes is a simple one: they will be ignored. That is an even worse punishment than being mocked. An Estonian businessman of your columnist’s acquaintance was recently posted to Vilnius to sort out his company's troubled subsidiary there. He forced through radical management changes involving minute-taking, attendance at meetings and punctuality. In return, he sat through a week of back-slapping anecdotes about Estonians's social, sexual and other short-comings. Eventually his hosts tired of the fun and asked him for some Estonian jokes about Lithuanians. “We don’t have any. Our jokes are about the Finns”, he responded coolly.

Readers are welcome to post jokes in the comments section below and to recommend the ones they like best. A future column will pick some winners. Political correctness will not be applied, so ethnic stereotypes, historical grudges and other forms of grotesque unfairness will (within reason) be tolerated.

Slovakia Hungary

2010-05-27T16:19:00.002Z

(a quick blog posting from today)

Pandora's passports

May 27th 2010, 13:50 by E.L. | LONDON

IN SOME parts of the world, having two or even three passports is nothing unusual. Plenty of people in Ireland (north and south) have both British and Irish passports; a sprinkling have American ones too. Even countries that frown on dual citizenship rarely make much of a fuss about it (not least because it is so hard to police). That lesson seems to be lost on Slovak and Hungarian politicians, who are cooking up an almighty row about the Hungarian new dual citizenship law which will give all ethnic Hungarians outside the country the near-automatic right to a Hungarian passport. The new law, passed by parliament on May 26th, removes the requirement for permanent residency in Hungary; in future, applications will simply need to show they speak Hungarian and have some Hungarian ethnic roots (such as a Hungarian grandparent).

For Hungarians, that salves a wound that has been open since 1920, when the Treaty of Trianon dismembered old Hungary, leaving more than three out of ten Hungarians stranded in other countries such as newly independent Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and a much bigger Romania. Giving passports to these Hungarians, who now number around 2m, appeases the radical right in Hungary and also signals to other countries that the Magyar minorities have a protector. That does not matter much in places such as Serbia, Slovenia or Austria, where Magyars live happily alongside their fellow-citizens. But it is potentially explosive in Slovakia, where some in the Slav majority are twitchy about what they see as the uppitiness of the ethnic Hungarian minority, who number about 10% of the population. Slovakia has annoyed Hungary, and alarmed some outsiders, with a poorly-drafted language law that in some cases penalises the use of the Hungarian language.

So Slovakia has protested, appealed to outsiders, and now says it will strip dual passport-holders of their Slovak citizenship. In theory, the fact that both countries belong to the European Union should mean that passports are largely irrelevant. Hungarian passport-holders have the right to work and live in Slovakia just like any other EU citizen. But these sort of ethnic-historical squabbles are just the sort of thing that EU enlargement was meant to settle. It is troubling to see them bubbling up. When Slovakia's new government takes office at the end of June, outsiders will be hoping to see some serious diplomacy between Bratislava and Budapest.

It is also odd to see ethnicity taking such precedence over more modern forms of political identity. The term "ethnic Hungarian" is convenient journalistic shorthand but a poor basis for legislation. There are people who speak excellent Hungarian but have no Hungarian ancestry, and others with pure Magyar blood (nasty term) who happen not to speak the language. It would take a new Nuremberg Law to determine exactly what level of Hungarian ancestry counts as sufficient.

Hungary would be on stronger ground if chose political-historical rather than an ethnic base for the law. For example, it could say that anyone whose ancestors were citizens of the old Hungarian Kingdom had the right to apply for a passport from the modern republic. (Estonia and Latvia took that approach when they regained independence in 1991, giving passports automatically to all citizens of the pre-war republics, regardless of ethnicity, while asking Soviet-era migrants to apply). If Hungary did the same, it is a fair bet that few non-Magyars would bother to take up the offer.

Europe view no 184

2010-05-21T20:14:00.000Z

Europe.view
An unfinished revolution
Public life in the ex-communist world is again run by a well-connected elite. But things may be starting to change

May 19th 2010 | From The Economist online

The Europe.view column will henceforth appear as a weekly posting at Eastern Approaches, The Economist's central and eastern Europe blog.

IN THE communist era, the countries of eastern and central Europe were run by tightly knit clans. Connections, particularly those of your parents, mattered more than ability. The same kind of people held the top jobs in the ruling party, in government, in media and in commerce and industry. One of the most potent fuels for the revolutions of 1989 was public discontent with this closed system and the unfairness and incompetence that went along with it.

It worked for a time. In the 1990s, social mobility, in both directions, was huge. Some of the former elite ended up washing dishes or selling insurance. People from the fringes of society (unemployed playwrights and electricians) rose to giddy heights. Capitalism opened huge possibilities for the flexible and ambitious. And if you didn’t like it, you could always leave: millions of people tasted the difference with work and study abroad.

They won that fight

But the new era proved brief. Instead of the old monopoly, a new cartel now holds sway. It is not so blatant. The communist parties' statutory grip on power is gone, as are the grim, grey men of the secret police. But from the Baltic to the Black sea, public life has again started looking like a game for insiders. The same people, with backgrounds in the same elite universities, with wealthy and well-connected parents, dominate politics, the media and top jobs in officialdom. Social mobility is slowing in many parts of the developed world, particularly Britain and America. But it is tantalising to see it fade in “new Europe”, which once seemed so open and dynamic.

The problem is most acute in politics. Generous subsidies for established parties rig the system against outsiders and newcomers. Electoral rules have the same effect—candidates for election face onerous registration requirements, for example. When voices are muffled, so are choices. Emigration, and in extreme cases even depopulation, is the unwelcome result.

But change does seem to be afoot. Running as an independent, Indrek Tarand, a popular former official, won a surprise victory in Estonia’s elections to the European parliament last year. In Hungary, the green-tinged anti-corruption movement Lehet Más a Politika (Politics can be different) won an unexpected 7.5% of the vote in the recent parliamentary elections. Less pleasingly, in the same election the far-right anti-establishment Jobbik party won nearly 17%, helped by protest votes as well as its traditional racist base.

The trend is visible elsewhere in central Europe. As the print edition reports this week, new parties and protest movements are making inroads into the clubby politics of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Some, such as the Slovak Sloboda a Solidarita (Freedom and Solidarity), make heavy use of the internet. In the Czech Republic, a movement called Change the Politicians uses smartly made video clips of cultural hotshots such as Aňa Geislerová, Aneta Langerová, Marta Kubišová and Jiří Stránský denouncing corruption and calling for change.

But complaining is easy, as is casting a protest vote. The newcomers will certainly put the old guard under greater scrutiny, dent cultures of impunity and give heart to others who want to change the system. But that is not enough. What the ex-communist countries need is a big new impetus, to complete the changes in officialdom and public services promised but not fully achieved after the collapse of communism. Accession to the European Union and NATO gave that process a boost, but it has proved only temporary. In some respects, the countries of the region are regressing. To restore momentum the new outsiders must show that they can win power and use it—and at the same time not fall into the mire that has engulfed their predecessors.

Important announcement

2010-05-20T13:56:00.002Z

I have also been made International Editor, starting in September. However I will continue to write on the east European region for the print edition of the Economist, as well as running a new blog called Eastern Approaches.

I am delighted to receive material from outsiders. It need be no more than a short email and a link to something interesting, such as a news item, a pamphlet, or another blog. My aim is to post something new every day. I am also interested in books which I can feature in the "Book of the Week" slot. My email is edwardlucas(at)economist.com

My column Europe View will now move to this blog as a regular weekly posting. It has had 183 outings in its current form, and (and another 100-odd in its humbler preincarnation as Wi(l)der Europe in European Voice).

I will continue to post my main articles from The Economist and other outlets on this blog, which is about to have a snazzy redesign.

Estonia after the Euro

2010-05-17T15:27:00.003Z

Just in case anyone is interested, here is a video of me and Toomas Hendrik Ilves discussing Estonia after the euro. Part two is here and part three here

Battle of Britain book review

2010-05-13T15:23:00.002Z

Britain and the second world war

Boys in blue
May 13th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940. By James Holland. Bantam Press; 677 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

EVERY country’s version of the second world war is selective. For Russians, it starts with Hitler’s unprovoked attack in 1941 and highlights the colossal battles in the east. For Americans, it starts with Pearl Harbour and features the Normandy beaches and Guadalcanal. Germans may privately start the story rather earlier, with the humiliation at Versailles which brought economic collapse and fuelled Hitler’s rise to power.

Each version is true up to a point. And each seems a bit odd to outsiders. James Holland’s comprehensive and readable history of the battle of Britain exemplifies the particular British blend of amnesia and nostalgia that the war arouses.

Yet in any terms, this is a tremendous story. In September 1939, Britain was fighting a phoney war alongside a seemingly powerful ally, France. Less than a year later, the country’s survival depended on whether a fragile array of a few hundred fighter planes, flown by exhausted young men, could prevent Hitler’s Luftwaffe from gaining the air superiority necessary for “Operation Sealion”: the first invasion of England since 1066.

The happy combination of youthful gallantry triumphing against overwhelming odds with brainy boffins giving the vital technological edge (through radar, and the brilliantly designed Spitfires and Hurricanes), as well as inspirational leaders using flawless tactics and matchless rhetoric, is irresistible. The author has an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, weaving together reminiscences from both sides, statistics and technical details into the broader picture.

He describes the collapse in France and the near-miraculous rescue in mid-1940 of nearly 340,000 British and French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. He also tells the story of the carnage of poorly protected merchant shipping in the early months of the war which threatened to strangle Britain’s supply lines. He ends with Hitler’s fateful decision to postpone Sealion in September of the same year. The Luftwaffe had lost too many planes and pilots to the RAF’s fighters, while Bomber Command had punctured Germany’s myth of invincibility. It was, as Winston Churchill said, not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning.

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the battle of Britain, this book should sell well. But it will leave many readers unsatisfied. One problem is its glibness. Hitler can rightly be criticised for his many disastrous mistakes. But to write of the Nazi leader’s “almost complete lack of military understanding” is wrong: his problem was too much (self-taught) military knowledge, not too little. Similarly, to call the German general Gerd von Rundstedt a “pigheaded fool” is lazy language that would be out of place in a schoolboy essay, let alone in something that purports to be the work of a professional historian. Throughout the book, the language is unsettlingly colloquial and anachronistic. Confusingly, Mr Holland calls the pilots by their first names, though they refer to each other in diaries and memoirs by their surnames.

A bigger problem is that the author’s enthusiasm for his subject is not matched by his grip of history. He peddles the Anglocentric myth that Britain was “alone” in the summer of 1940 (insultingly forgetting Greece, Poland and the entire British empire). Too many characters appear, with annoyingly similar potted biographies. Their tinnily-told stories swamp the rather skimpy treatment of the underlying war-winning narrative, such as the innovative tactics of a brilliant New Zealander, Keith Park, and the way that Max Aitken revolutionised aircraft production. Heroism is indeed captivating. But it was more than heroism that kept Britain out of Nazi captivity.

new rachman novel

2010-05-13T15:23:00.001Z

New fiction

Inky fingers
May 13th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The Imperfectionists. By Tom Rachman. Dial Press; 272 pages; $25. Quercus; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

FOR younger readers, stories about newspapers in their heyday may have a whiff of industrial archaeology, akin to tales about whaling or steam trains. Tom Rachman’s first novel is set in Rome, on a once-mighty American-owned international newspaper, surely quite unlike the (Paris-based) International Herald Tribune, where he used to work. The book links together 11 characters, each sharply drawn in a separate chapter. Read singly, each would be a good short story. Together they make an excellent novel.

The opening picture is of the paper’s elderly Paris correspondent, whose skills as a hack have deserted him after a lifetime of dissolution. The last is of the drippy scion of the once-formidable founding family, who fails even to announce the paper’s closure properly. In between comes an agonisingly incompetent new freelance correspondent in Cairo, a memorably ferocious pedant who guards the paper’s prose and accuracy, and the paper’s most loyal reader, an Italian nobildonna who, Miss Havisham-like, prefers ancient editions of the paper to the up-to-date issues.

Most of the characters have interestingly unhappy love lives, with neat twists to their betrayals and disappointments. Though bleakly portrayed, they still attract the reader’s sympathy, not least for their precarious, ill-paid jobs and filthy working conditions (the office carpets not cleaned since 1977, according to the paper’s lore). One longs for them to leave and get proper jobs.

Novels about journalism by journalists tend to be strong on score-settling and colour, but rarely survive the feuds they describe. Mr Rachman’s escapes that category. Though it lacks the transcendent absurdity of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” (1938), it could sit well on a bookshelf next to Michael Frayn’s “Towards the End of the Morning” (1967), which so vividly captured the feel of the old newspaper industry in the 1960s, on the brink of its television-led transformation into the power and prestige of the “media”.

This novel describes the final echoes of the newspaper story: dedication and ambition fighting a losing battle against backbiting and cheeseparing, and ending in a largely unlamented closure. Readers will look forward to Mr Rachman’s next novel. They may hope he picks a more cheerful theme.

Estonia and the Euro

2010-05-13T15:20:00.001Z

(from the Economist print edition)

The Baltic states

Euro not bust
May 13th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Estonia gets a green light to join the euro. Other Baltic states will benefit too

SURPRISES are Estonia’s stock in trade. Its return to the world map in 1991 after a 51-year absence startled outsiders. So did what came next: a fast-growing economy, based on flat taxes, free trade and a currency board. In 2004 it confounded pessimists’ expectations by joining the European Union and NATO. Now it is set to pull off another coup, gaining green lights from the European Commission and the European Central Bank in its bid to adopt the euro on January 1st 2011.

Many thought that highly unlikely. Only two years ago a property bubble in the country popped, rocking the banking system and sending GDP plunging by 14.1% in 2009. Doom-mongers said devaluation was inevitable. But they were wrong. Flexible wages and prices have helped the economy stabilise: unit labour costs fell by 7.5% in the final quarter of 2009. Exports were up by a sixth in the first quarter of 2010 and the central bank forecasts growth this year of 1% (although that depends on the pace of recovery in Sweden and other export markets).

Thanks to a fiscal tightening of a stonking 7.5% of GDP, Estonia easily meets the euro zone’s public-finance rules. Its gross debt in 2009 was only 7.2% of GDP (compared with 115% in Italy), and the government deficit is 1.7% (Greece’s is 13.6%). The concern is sustainability: will future governments be so thrifty? Inflation is low: in the past 12 months the average figure was negative, at -0.7% well below the euro zone’s 1% target. But the ECB report calls for “continued vigilance”, as well as efforts to raise productivity and competitiveness.

The real problem for Estonia is political, not economic. Some euro-zone members (France is often mentioned) think that allowing an obscure and volatile ex-communist economy to join a currency union that already has too many dodgy members should not be a priority. If Estonia is really so solid, why not wait a year to be sure?

Yet that would send a perverse message. Estonia is almost the only country in the whole EU that actually meets the common currency’s rules. All those that use the euro have gaily breached the deficit and debt limits. The grit shown by Estonian politicians and the public in shrinking spending, raising taxes and cutting wages has been exemplary. Punishing Estonia, which obeyed the rules, while bailing out Greece, which has breached them flagrantly, would do little for the euro’s credibility with governments and investors alike.

Estonia has two more hurdles to jump before it can scotch the scoffers: an EU committee meeting at the end of May, followed by a finance ministers’ summit in early June. Few think that France and other doubters will actually block Estonia’s bid; persuasion and horse-trading will probably bring agreement. Then the decision will be irrevocable. That will give heart to Latvia and Lithuania, which hope to join the euro later in the decade. Like Estonia, their currencies are pegged to the euro, so they bear the pain of a rigid monetary regime, but also miss out on the lower borrowing costs and higher investment that membership of the currency can bring.

The next task is to stoke growth and cut unemployment (now over 15%). After that, the aim should be to reach Nordic-quality public services and an economy based on brainpower by 2018, when Estonia celebrates its 100th birthday and also holds the presidency of the EU.

Europe view: Greece viewed from the region

2010-05-13T11:15:00.001Z

Europe.view

Default, and other dogmas
May 13th 2010
From Economist.com

The experience of ex-communist countries in the 1990s undermines many of the claims now made about Greece

FOR anyone from the ex-communist world with a medium-term memory, the frantic efforts under way to save Greece (and the other wobbly southern members of the euro zone) are rather puzzling.

For a start, what is so bad about default and restructuring? In the 1990s Russia restructured $32 billion worth of Soviet debt into PRINs and IANs (both are now stored in the Museum of Financial Archaeology and may be viewed on application to the curator). In 1998 it defaulted on those debt instruments. People said Russia’s financial credibility would never recover. One banker said he would rather eat nuclear waste than invest in Russia again. But within a couple of years, Russia was flavour of the month.

It was the same story with Poland, which restructured its debt after 1989. Thanks to heavy politicking from America, the freely elected authorities were allowed to swap sovereign debt incurred by the communist regime into less onerous “Brady bonds” (stored in the same museum, also viewable on application). Hungary, which did not have the same backing from America, has had to pay its debt in full. That depressed its growth rate in the 1990s and meant lower government spending and higher taxes. Hungary should have benefited from this sacrifice by gaining a better credit rating. It didn’t. Funny things, markets.

The moral is that investors’ memories are short. If Greece were to restructure its debt, it would not take long for greed to trump fear and for capital to start flowing again.

A second piece of dogma undermined by the experiences of the ex-communist countries is that leaving a common currency area is all but impossible. The Czech and Slovak korunas separated without even a ripple of disturbance. The Yugoslav dinar disappeared in a puff of hyperinflation, but the currencies that succeeded it did pretty well almost from the word go. The death-agonies of the Soviet rouble were painful, but now the Russian currency is one of the most solid in the region. Dig out the drachma from the museum and it may float better than anyone expects.

But perhaps trumping these feelings of confusion is a kind of envy. Greece is benefiting from the kind of support of which the ex-communist half of Europe could have only dreamed in the 1990s. Imagine for a moment that Greece was an EU candidate country, rather than a full member of both the union and of the euro zone. To judge by the way Turkey has been treated in recent years, Brussels would be demanding not only a leaner public sector but a different political system: for example, secularisation of church-state relations, greater minority rights or a climbdown on issues such as the names the country calls its neighbours.

The big difference, of course, is that in 1981, when it joined the then EEC, Greece was just one small country emerging from authoritarian rule (and from a military regime that had been partly supported by the West). In 1989, the sentiment was different. The west Europeans felt intimidated by the ill-dressed needy hordes in the east and preferred to slow things down rather than speed them up. That led to a long process of negotiations with phoney benchmarks for reform and adoption of EU standards. That was a great business for bureaucrats and consultants. But at the end the decisions on which countries to admit were almost entirely political. Funny thing, politics.

The lesson of Greece is that faced with a big, urgent issue, Europe can get its act together. What will it take for Ukraine or Turkey, both of which arguably deserve EU membership just as much as Greece does, to gain the same kind of attention?

Euro latest

2010-05-12T17:25:00.001Z

Estonia and the euro

Long euros
May 12th 2010
From Economist.com

Estonia gets a step closer to adopting the single currency

SURPRISES are Estonia’s stock in trade. Its return to the world map in 1991 after a 51-year absence startled outsiders. So did what came next: a fast-growing economy, based on flat taxes, free trade and a currency board. It confounded pessimists’ expectations by joining the European Union (in 2004) and NATO (in 2004). Now the country of 1.4m people is set to pull off another coup, gaining green lights from the European Commission and the European Central Bank for its bid to adopt the euro on January 1st 2011.

Many thought that highly unlikely. Only two years ago a property bubble collapsed, rocking the banking system and sending GDP plunging by 14.1% in 2009 (see story). Doom-mongers said devaluation was inevitable. But they were wrong. Flexible wages and prices have helped the economy stabilise: unit labour costs fell by 7.5% in the final quarter of 2009. Exports were up by a sixth in the first quarter of 2010 and the central bank forecasts growth this year of 1%. Estonia easily meets the euro zone’s rules on public finances. Its gross debt in 2009 was only 7.2% of GDP, and the government deficit is 1.7%. The only real concern is whether inflation will stay low: in the past 12 months the average was negative, at -0.7% comfortably below the 1% target. But the ECB report called for “continued vigilance” on that.

The real problem for Estonia is political, not economic. Some euro zone members (France is often mentioned) think that allowing an obscure and volatile ex-communist economy to join a currency union that has too many dodgy members already should not be a priority. If Estonia is really so solid, why not wait a year to be sure?

Yet that would send a perverse message. Estonia is one of two countries in the whole EU that actually meets the common currency’s rules (Sweden being the other). All the rest (even those that use the euro) have gaily breached the deficit and debt limits. The grit shown by Estonian politicians and the public in shrinking spending, raising taxes, and cutting wages has left outsiders awestruck (see leader). Punishing Estonia which obeyed the rules, while bailing out Greece which has breached them flagrantly, would do little for the euro’s credibility with governments and investors alike.

Estonia has two more hurdles to jump before it can humiliate the scoffers. An EU committee meets at the end of May, followed by a finance ministers’ summit in early June. Few think that France and other doubters will actually block its euro bid: a combination of persuasion and horse-trading will probably bring agreement. Then the decision will be irrevocable. That will give heart to Latvia and Lithuania too, who hope to join the euro later in the decade. Like Estonia, their currencies are pegged to the euro, so they have all the pain of a rigid monetary regime, but miss out on the lower borrowing costs and higher investment that the euro zone brings.

The longer-term question is what Estonia focusses on next. On May 10th it passed another benchmark, joining the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based rich-country thinktank—the first country from the former Soviet Union to do so. The hunt is on for a new national project. Estonia’s presidency of the EU in 2018 will coincide with the country’s 100th birthday. Finding something to surprise outsiders then is a pleasant challenge for the future.

My election take

2010-05-07T07:57:00.000Z

A welcome uncertainty, a shameful chaos. That is what Britain woke up to after the strangest election night in living memory. The chaos is as simple to describe as it is hard to justify. Thousands of people waited in vain to vote but couldn’t because pollings stations were under-staffed or ran out of ballot papers.

That would disgrace a country learning about free elections after decades of totalitarian rule. If it happened in Afghanistan or Ukraine, British election observers would tut-tut in disapproval. It is shameful in the country that likes to think of itself as the epitome of parliamentary democracy. Nothing better could epitomise the overpaid, underworked, out-of-touch public sector created by Labour than the useless electoral officer in Sheffield who said “I’m not blaming anybody”. What he failed to realise was this: we were blaming him.

Failure to run and to reform public services properly, despite showering them with money, is one reason that Labour has lost so many seats. But it has not lost office automatically. The Conservatives have won, but not by enough to gain power straightaway. And the Liberal Democrats have failed to make their hoped-for breakthrough, but won enough seats for their voters’ wishes to matter more than ever.

Sure that means uncertainty, of a kind that is unfamiliar in Britain and harder to explain to outsiders. We are used to simple results. We have two parties, Labour and the Conservatives. One wins, the other loses. Minor parties such as the Liberal Democrats may poll quite well, but their votes don’t count.

That system was perhaps defensible in the days when the two main parties won 90% of the vote between them. But it doesn’t fit a system in which the electorate is split three ways. In this election, the Liberal Democrats won nearly a quarter of the votes and gained less than a tenth of the seats.

The first big question is whether Labour will be able to hang on by offering the Lib Dems a shift to a fair voting system. That could even include Gordon Brown resigning as Labour leader, making way for another prime minister. If that fails, then it will be time for the Conservatives to try—perhaps with a formal arrangement with the Liberal Democrats, perhaps in a minority government. The Conservatives had a good night—they pushed up their overall share of the vote to more than 36%. But their claims to have a convincing mandate sounded hollow. They made tremendous gains in the easy seats—but failed to win the difficult ones that would have given them a majority in the 326-member lower house of parliament.

Anywhere else in Europe, this kind of uncertainty is normal. Election results alone do not determine the government: that comes only after negotiations between the parties. Mostly, whichever government forms has the backing of a majority of the voters. That is something that Britain has not enjoyed since 1955 (even Margaret Thatcher’s greatest Conservative victory in 1983 came with just 44% of the vote)

In Britain, we are not used to this. The result comes in the midst of a huge economic crisis. The markets are unhappy. They want a government that can repair Britain’s shattered public finances. Our deficit at 12% of GDP, is likely to be bigger than Greece’s this year. We have to borrow billions of pounds every week. Who will lend it to us? Given the scale of spending cuts and tax rises ahead, some politicians may wonder if now is a good time to be in opposition, not government. Whichever government takes office is unlikely to last its full five-year term.

Yet for all that the uncertainty is welcome, because it brings the chance of a change in Britain’s outdated electoral system. This no longer delivers the one thing it is supposed to deliver: a clear result. It was always a scandal that votes for the smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats piled up uselessly in third place in our first-past-the-post constituencies. Now the scandal is intolerable. For the first time in my lifetime, there is a real chance of that system changing.

Apple and Yalta

2010-05-06T15:44:00.002Z

Cupertino's cold warriors
May 6th 2010
From Economist.com

What has Apple got against eastern Europe?

WHAT have the following places got in common?

America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Vietnam.

Clearly the size of the market is not the determinant. China and Russia don’t appear, but Luxembourg does. It is not about prosperity: Iceland—which, believe it or not, is still one of the richer countries in the world—is out, whereas Vietnam is in. Political freedom or the rule of law are not the binding factors. The Philippines and Thailand are on the list, whereas impeccable democracies such as Slovenia are not.

Perhaps the list comprises the target markets of some tiresome company from “old Europe” that has not noticed that the Berlin Wall has come down and that the division of Europe at Yalta into consumer-citizens in a rich, free west and captive east is long out of date.

But no, the list comes from a company that prides itself on being an icon of über-cool internationalism, with a post-modern disdain for clunky convention and tiresome rules. It is from the Apple Store, where eager customers from all over the world end up in the hope of buying an iPad, or a humble $25 gift card.

First-time visitors are assumed to be from America. If you come from one of the countries listed above, you can switch. But if not, you are out of luck. No matter if your country is in the European Union, NATO and the OECD. For Apple, the eastern half of Europe is still both terra incognita and non desiderata.

Still, you can always buy your Apple hardware from an authorised reseller. The real irritation comes when you want to buy electrons, not atoms. Sign up for an iTunes account, and the opening windows offer a glimmer of hope. It offers not just two kinds of Portuguese, but Polish and Russian too, as well as the mysterious “Spanish (International Sort)”. It looks fine. So—at first sight—does the iTunes store, which offers a tempting array of countries.

But some are more equal than others. Visitors from Finland, for example, are presented with a full array of music. But register with an address in Estonia, just half an hour away by plane, and you get only a list, admittedly rich, of games, gimmicks and lectures. Films and music are out of bounds.

This approach annoys a lot of people. One organisation in Poland has been berating Apple for its approach to the biggest and most advanced market in eastern Europe. It is now celebrating a partial victory (Apple has agreed to open up its distribution market). But even in Poland, the company’s offering is nothing like what you get across the border in Germany. Other countries in the region have yet to see any improvement at all.

One of those most irked by the company's approach is the iPhone-toting president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a loyal customer since 1982, when he bought an Apple IIe. Estonia, he notes, is one of the most wired countries on earth. Tallinn is the centre of NATO’s cyber-warfare research, and Estonians invented another icon of internet cool: Skype. Skype’s director of new products, Sten Tamkivi, has an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac at home. He describes the Apple rule as “a weird relic of commercial east-west segregation inside what is otherwise known as the European Union".

Why doesn’t Apple, a company so irritatingly up to date in its products and marketing, update its worldview when it comes to sales? Apple’s global headquarters did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman in Britain promised to investigate. When we get an answer, we’ll post it here.

Greece and its neighbours

2010-05-06T15:42:00.001Z

Greece's woes and the neighbours

Greased up
May 6th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The region may share in some of Greece’s pain

AVERTING a meltdown in Greece, at least temporarily, is good news for that country’s fragile ex-communist neighbours. Their big worry is Greek-owned banks, which account for as much as a quarter of banking assets in Bulgaria, some 15% in Romania and a tenth in Serbia. These institutions have been facing potential runs by depositors, as worries have grown over Greece’s solvency and thus over the Greek banks.

The financial authorities in some nearby countries had already imposed emergency-notification rules to delay (and if necessary to prevent) local banks from being drained dry by cash-hungry headquarters in Athens. The bail-out from the IMF and the European Union includes €10 billion ($13 billion) in recapitalisation for Greece’s banks, and adds a condition about keeping their foreign subsidiaries alive and lending.

This echoes the efforts made last year to bolster foreign-owned banks’ confidence in central and eastern Europe and stop them from pulling out in panic. In that process, as it happens, Greece was particularly unhelpful. Outside advisers have been pressing the IMF and other lenders to make sure that the authorities in Athens behave differently this time.

Any further tightening of credit in Greece’s region is unlikely to be too severe. Other foreign banks may expand their market share as Greek-owned rivals contract. But Greece is not just a provider of capital, it is also a big export market (taking a tenth of Bulgaria’s exports last year). And Greece employs plenty of migrants, especially from Albania, where remittances make up about a sixth of GDP. A deep recession in Greece will surely dent both growth and confidence in its northern neighbours.

Yet some think that the troubles in Greece may also provide a welcome refutation of the notion that Europe’s big divide is between a feckless ex-communist east and a virtuous old capitalist west; it is, rather, between a prudent north and a profligate south. In July Estonia expects the go-ahead to adopt the euro in 2011. With no net public debt, a deficit of 1.7% of GDP and 1.7% inflation, Estonia meets the Maastricht criteria better than any existing member. But nerves may yet trump logic.

Enthusiasm for enlargement is cooling. Any country with Greek levels of debt and hubris (eg, Hungary under its cocksure new government) will meet a particularly chilly welcome. And the sight of Greece’s agonies may make others, especially larger countries such as Poland, think again about the single currency’s advantages. In a crisis being able to devalue and to control your own monetary policy can prove an advantage.

Long piece on power and history

2010-05-06T15:34:00.002Z

Report No. 30: Putin, Power and History: Does the Past Still Matter?
Posted Date: 3 May 2010

Following last month’s joint Polish-Russian memorials to commemorate the Katyń massacre, and the outpouring of Russian sympathy since the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others, CEPA Senior Fellow Edward Lucas offers a penetrating look at the politics of historical reconciliation in Central Europe.

Executive Summary
In the aftermath of communist rule, a fierce moral debate ensued in the east that raised profound questions about the intellectual framework which shaped history and politics under the old regime. Did Russia’s new leaders really accept the enormity of what the Soviet Union had done or did they still regard it as a success story brought down by bad luck and bad leadership? Under Vladimir Putin, it would be incorrect to say that historical revisionism wholly dominates Russia’s dealings with its neighbors. However it would be equally wrong to view recent signs of reconciliation as a sincere change of heart on the part of Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues. Nevertheless, Russia’s efforts to blunt long-standing historical disputes with Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland could lead to further attempts at reconciliation with Ukraine and the Baltic States. If successful, then the smoothing over of historical rows is potential game-changer for the region.

Accounting for History

Moral superiority and a sense of historical injustice have been the twin fuels of European politics since 1939. But what happens when truth intrudes, memories fade and differences blur? Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s presence at the joint Russian-Polish memorial service in Katyń on April 7, and the outpouring of sympathy in Russia for Poland since the plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, raises profound questions about an intellectual framework that has shaped local and outside understanding of the European continent’s history and politics.

The story used to be simple. Totalitarianism was the continent’s curse in the past century. But whereas Germany atoned for its evil deeds, Russia (the legal successor to the Soviet Union) did not. From that blindness and moral laziness, all manner of ills flow and until they change, Russia will neither reconcile with the former Soviet empire; nor, so the argument goes, will it be able to shed its own burden of authoritarian rule.

It is important to state at the outset that this approach was always open to serious criticism. To illustrate that, try unpicking the version of European history that many people in the English-speaking world would count as the bare-bones version, which would go something like this.

The story starts with Nazi aggression in the 1930s. That was wicked, and Western collusion was admittedly shameful—chiefly in the Munich agreement in which France and Britain arm-twisted Czechoslovakia into submission. But then things got better. Britain bravely fought alone until the mad and evil Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the mad and evil Japanese attacked America. Then the “allies” liberated Europe, with the landing on the Normandy beaches epitomizing the Anglo-American sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Yalta was a blot on the record (blame FDR’s illness, or Churchill’s weakness) but the Western allies soon regained the high ground, fighting the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Airlift (good) and the Soviet-built Berlin Wall (bad). The (good) Germans soon accepted how wicked they had been under Nazism and made amends. That contrasted sharply with the Soviet Union which was always tied up in knots about Stalinism. When the evil empire collapsed, we continued our stellar record, embracing the newly free countries in the east and bringing most of them (in some cases a bit too quickly) into the European Union and NATO.

Such versions of the past are not wholly false. But they are at best incomplete and at worst highly partial. They leave out huge chunks of what really happened, inflate the importance of sideshows and ignore causation and context.

When the entire picture emerges, the sunshine on the moral high ground dims. Take what many would regard as the central fact of the 1930s and 1940s: the transcendent wickedness of Nazi Germany. Nothing can take away from the bestial crimes committed by the Hitler regime. But the Nazis did not arrive on asteroids. Imagine that World War One had finished with a Marshall Plan, rather than the humiliation and punitive reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles agreement, and the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had hyperinflation not destroyed the middle classes, and without the multiple (and quite unnecessary) humiliations imposed on Weimar Germany by the victorious allies, Hitler would have remained a bar-room bigot and the Nazis a loathsome irrelevance.

Second, it is simply not the case that Britain and America went to war to stop the Holocaust. For most of the war they ignored the fate of the Jews or dismissed it as an irritant. Nor does the idea that the war was a crusade for democracy and freedom square easily with the decision to declare war on (democratic, free) Finland in 1940, and the enthusiastic alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union from 1941, let alone the determined refusal to see the horrors that regime inflicted on Russians and tens of millions of the empire’s other subjects. The reluctance of the British and American authorities to accept the truth about the Katyń massacre when the corpses were first exhumed in 1943 (and indeed for decades afterwards) is evidence of that.

That disgraceful episode in history undermines another myth: that the war was fought to save Poland and rescue Czechoslovakia. That was a fine point of principle at the start—but not one that Britain and the other allies adhered to as the war went on. Besides Katyń, other examples abound: foot-dragging in support of the Warsaw Uprising (imagine if the same thing had happened in Paris); Poland’s treatment at Yalta; derecognition of the London-based Government-in-Exile; and the decision to ban Polish forces from the victory parade in London in 1945.

The automatic response is to plead realpolitik or human error. What else could we have done? Voters in 1918 wanted revenge (“Hang the Kaiser”) on Germany and would not have accepted war any earlier than 1939 (in Britain’s case) or 1941 (for America). Munich bought valuable time for rearmament. By the time of Yalta, Poland was already doomed (“wrong place, wrong time, old boy, sorry”). Similar arguments are made on every other question where the moral foundations look soggy. So bombing of German cities was perhaps unnecessary or excessive or even mistaken in retrospect? War is full of mistakes; hindsight is 20/20. Handing the anti-communist Cossacks and Yugoslav royalist Chetniks back to be murdered in 1945 was terrible? Yes—but it was the price of getting back “allied” prisoners of war from communist clutches. Perhaps we should have done some things differently. But what matters is that we won and the Nazis lost.

Such arguments are wholly defensible. Nobody would argue that Britain should have simply surrendered because it could not stay on the moral high ground, or that America should have stayed out of the war in Europe because both sides were equally bad. Fighting to stop and defeat a potential invader requires no further justification. That you start late and finish badly is beside the point. But dodging so quickly and so often between principled and pragmatic arguments easily looks opportunistic and even propagandistic. It is a slippery basis for firing accusations against other countries in other ages, such as Russia now.

It is also odd when commentators criticize modern Russia for sentimental over-indulgence in wartime memories without mentioning their own countries’ predilection for exactly the same thing. Britain’s annual Poppy Day celebrations (when the guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month) have largely lost the original haunting, somber tinge of personal tragedy and bereavement. Instead, they are a media-led bath of insipid (or worse, fetid) nostalgia and self-congratulations. It is easy to see similarities: two declining countries looking back on their glory days and reliving their defining moments of heroism (the Battle of Britain on one side, the Siege of Leningrad on the other). Modern politicians yearn to stretch their shadows to match those of the giants of yesteryear. It would be quite unfair to equate Churchill with Stalin in terms of character or deeds. But the unreflective way in which they are remembered by Britons and Russians respectively can be strikingly similar.

The self-centeredness is a shared sin. American films (“Saving Private Ryan” and “U-571”) grossly distort the historical record. Britain likes to say that it “stood alone” in 1940, conveniently forgetting the Polish Home Army, as well as Greek, French, Dutch, Norwegian and Yugoslav resistance. That is not quite as bad as the Soviet historiography that forgets the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and starts the war with Barbarossa in 1941. But Western critics of the Soviet approach all too easily overlook the failings in their own accounts of the past.

Nor does the simplistic version of the next chapter of history, the Cold War, emerge intact from scrutiny. To take just one example: denazification in West Germany was partial and incomplete. It was more important to preserve a functioning legal system than to sack all the Nazi judges. Nor could the Third Reich’s intelligence assets or rocket scientists be discarded: they were needed to build weapons and spy on communism. Both decisions are defensible on pragmatic grounds. The result was that the Federal Republic became a staunchly and admirably free society. Its success, both economic and political, showcased the Western system and helped win the Cold War. But the idea of unquestionable moral superiority does not fit easily with hiring Germans who had enthusiastically served the Nazi war machine, while sending to the firing squad the Chetnik Yugoslavs, whose only crime was to have fought the communists.

These flaws and blunders do not create the moral inferiority pushed by Soviet propagandists in the past, nor the moral equivalence promoted by Kremlin spin-doctors now. Everybody is not as bad as each other. The West emerged at the end of the Cold War as the victor and justly so. Welfare capitalism, the rule of law, political freedom and human rights (loosely labeled “democracy”) was a model yearned for by more than 200 million people in the east, freed from a system marked by atrocious economic, political and social failure.

The combination of Soviet failure and Western success brought a victory that was rather more resounding than deserved; it was unexpected almost everywhere, and it was even unwished for in parts of the West that liked having illusions about socialism, or thought Western Europe was well rid of the barbarians in the east.

But come it did, and in its wake a fierce moral debate in the east about history. The legitimacy of communist rule in Eastern Europe rested on lies, chiefly about the origins and aftermath of the war. It was necessary to paint the pre-war (“bourgeois nationalist”) era blackly and to overlook the dirty tricks and violence that allowed the Communists to take power between the Baltic and the Black Sea.

Once communist rule ended, the demand for historical truth was burning not only inside the former captive nations, but between them. A century’s worth of grievances had been concealed behind the phony façade of socialist brotherhood. Lithuanians and Poles wanted to talk about Vilnius. Hungary wanted to talk about Trianon. Germans wanted to talk about the Beneš decrees. And, with ghastly results, Yugoslavs didn’t just talk about how they ended up in six artificial provinces of an artificial country: they fought.

But the biggest issue was with Russia. Did the country’s new leaders really accept the enormity of what the Soviet Union had done or did they still regard it as a success story brought down by bad luck and bad leadership? Would they pay compensation (or at least give back stolen property)? Would they withdraw their troops from the old empire or leave them to protect their interests (whatever they might be)? Would they open the archives? The agenda was impossibly crowded. Czechoslovaks wondered if the NKVD archives might reveal the truth about the murder (or suicide) of the much-loved Jan Masaryk in March 1948. Estonians wanted their presidential seal and regalia, confiscated in 1940. Romania wanted its gold. Poles wanted more details about Katyń. And so on.

Many Russians regarded these concerns as tiresome, irrelevant or ungrateful. They wanted due credit (i.e., a lot) for their own suffering under communism and their role in its downfall. They felt they had given up, almost entirely peacefully, an empire that included places where Russians had lived for centuries. In Ukraine’s case, they had given up (from a Russian viewpoint at least) an integral part of their spiritual and cultural patrimony. It is rather as if the Third Reich had collapsed 1991, leaving a democratic Germany to be confronted not only with furious Poles, Czechoslovaks and Danes wanting justice and reparations, but also an independent Bavaria.

The new historical debate was comfortable and familiar ground for old cold warriors. Instead of bemoaning the Soviet Union’s misdeeds in dusty meeting rooms in west London and New Jersey, it was possible to visit the scene of the crime and discuss it with the victims and their relatives. History became a white-hot subject and a vital ingredient in nation building. Where Soviet propagandists demonized “bourgeois nationalism” as a hellish mixture of injustice and exploitation, the temptation after 1989 was to see the pre-war era as an idyll and problems such as authoritarian rule, pig-headed diplomacy and economic failure were set aside. At least, people argued, these mistakes were our own mistakes, made by our own leaders, in our own country. What came next had been qualitatively worse.

The chance to speak honestly about the past, after 50 years of totalitarian propaganda and lies, was necessary, important and right. In another article I dubbed it “therapeutic historiography.”[1] But as time has gone on, the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities have faded. In 1991, the task of sorting out history was an urgent one. Now the present and the future look more compelling. Bilateral rows, unconnected with the communist era, have faded from being pressing political issues to the subject of academic debate (at one end of the spectrum) and name-calling in the blogosphere (at the other). Ten years ago, what really happened at the battlefield of Kosovo Polje in 1389 was a big issue between Serbs and their neighbors. Now it is becoming a (properly) remote one. The same goes for issues such as the Treaty of Trianon (which dismembered post-Hapsburg Hungary), or Żeligowski’s seizure of Vilnius (then Wilno) in 1920.

Some issues remain on the agenda: Lithuania’s squabbling with Poland about spelling remains a real nuisance. The Slovak language law really annoyed Hungary. The dispute between Greece and its northern neighbor about where the Macedonia label belongs and who can use it has paralyzed the expansion of the European Union and NATO, with dire results. But these arguments are increasingly seldom the central questions of real politics. And they are regarded with exasperation, not sympathy, by outsiders.

In the West too, public opinion began to rethink its view of Eastern Europe after 1989. Questions such as the fate of the Cossacks, the failed Anglo-American intelligence operations in the post-war Baltics, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Western silence over Katyń came onto the agenda. Western governments which had given Baltic gold reserves or embassy buildings to the Soviet Union paid compensation. Sweden, which had deported Latvians and Lithuanians to the Soviet Gulag in 1945, invited survivors back for an official apology and a meeting with the King. Countries that once regarded their policy of not recognizing the de jure Soviet annexation of the Baltic as an embarrassing historical relic started talking about it with pride. The idea that Stalin and Hitler were criminals of an equal hue sounded mainstream, not deranged. To some extent, even the heroic-sentimental self-image of the West changed. The British historian Norman Davies, and writers such as Timothy Garton Ash, deserve credit for their huge role in these changing perceptions. Another factor was daily life. Once, Eastern Europe was off the tourist trail. Now millions of outsiders have travelled to the ex-captive nations on business or on vacation, just as millions of east Europeans have gone to the west to relax, work or study. Their version of history has rubbed off on the Westerners, replacing or at least complementing the distorted and self-satisfied notions that used to be so widely accepted.

Behind that change is an even bigger conceptual difference. Western countries, on the whole, are not proud of their worst achievements. They are ashamed of them. And the discussion of history is not criminalized, or even politicized. The allied bombing of Germany has prompted agonized introspection from the middle of the war onwards. Britain contributed to the rebuilding of the beautiful Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Queen attended its reopening. That is in sharp contrast to Russian historiography, which is missing this mixture of atonement and sympathy towards the former adversary.

In the prevailing Russian version of history, as in the Soviet one that preceded it, the “fascist” enemy is demonized to the point of being inhuman. Even the most revolting war crimes, such as the mass rape of German and other women, are all but ignored. In Western Europe, taboos about the war have vanished. It is possible to discuss allied war crimes, the blunders of the generals, Churchill’s drinking habits. Roosevelt’s near-senility at Yalta, and even whether Britain should have gone to war at all without risking official displeasure or criminal prosecution.

Relevance and Relativism

But along with a wider perspective has come diminishing relevance. The generation with first-hand memories of the Second World War and its aftermath is dying out. The end of the Cold War has made history (especially European history) less relevant. The threat of nuclear annihilation made people want to know why we were in a military standoff with a totalitarian superpower. Now, the practical use of history is in understanding Islam and our relations with the Arab world. History is no longer a compulsory subject for British teenagers. Before they drop the subject, they learn little apart from a few anecdotes about the love lives of British monarchs, and a version of the Second World War that is even skimpier than the caricature with which this article begins. As fog descends on the public’s understanding of history, it is becoming similarly irrelevant for most policymakers.

In Russia too, interest in history has waxed and waned. In the 1990s, history was a national preoccupation. The crimes of Stalinism were one hot topic, the real history of the Russian revolution, and the missing history of the White (anti-Communist) Russians in exile was another. Much nostalgia for the Tsarist era remains—the popularity of Boris Akunin’s stories about the detective Erast Fandorin is a prime example.

But under Mr. Putin, the clock started to tick backwards in a more sinister way. His infamous remark that the Soviet Union’s collapse was the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the past century is well known. It came against a background of a new approach to the past that glorifies the Soviet Union, denigrates the West, and portrays the Yeltsin years as a period of disgraceful weakness and chaos from which Russia has now been rescued.

“Many school books are written by people who work to get foreign grants. They dance to a butterfly-polka that others have paid for. These books, regrettably, get into schools and universities,” Mr. Putin said in the summer of 2007.[2] He demanded new history textbooks that “make our citizens, especially the young, proud of their country” and insisted “no one must be allowed to impose guilty feelings on us.” Those textbooks portray Stalin as a tough leader who made some bad mistakes, not as a monster. These ideas were quickly appropriated by the mainstream Kremlin-controlled media. In September 2007 Rossiiskaya Gazeta, an official government newspaper, cast doubt on the idea that the NKVD was responsible for Katyń. That was as shocking for Poles as if a German government newspaper said that the evidence for gas chambers at Auschwitz was flimsy. Russia also denounced Estonia and Latvia for “fascism,” particularly after Estonia moved a Soviet-era war memorial from the center of town to a military cemetery in April 2007. The central ideological plank of the regime’s ideology is the idea that wartime heroism and sacrifice bestowed an unchallengeable moral legitimacy on both the Soviet Union and on Russia. This idea is both conceptually flawed and open to devastating empirical challenge. But its assiduous promotion has had an effect. According to a recent poll, only 20 percent of Russians believe that the Katyń massacre was the work of the NKVD.

A second plank is anti-westernism. Mr. Putin and his colleagues believe (or affect to believe) that Western moral superiority is nonsense based on hypocrisy. Western countries do not really believe in international law and human rights. They just pretend to — and use these notional moral frameworks as a way of constraining Russia. What really matters is power politics and the pursuit of market share. The same applies to history. Granted, Stalin was bad; but no worse, Mr. Putin has argued, than dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Western imperialism, the near-extermination of Native Americans, slavery and so on balance Russia’s presumed and alleged historical sins. Moreover, Russia has no direct responsibility for the Soviet Union.

That argument has some force. But it is not conclusive. The huge difference is that Britain, America and other Western countries do not celebrate the darkest parts of their history. They are ashamed of them. They certainly do not conceal them. Schoolchildren learn rather a lot about the bad side of European expansion into Asia, Africa and the Americas (some might think they learn too little about the good side). What is missing in Russia is an understanding that past imperialism had a dark side that was bleak indeed. To this day, many Russians believe that their mission in the Baltic States was a civilizing one: “We found this place in ruins, and we have built it up. Now how they thank us,” said my (Russian) fixer bitterly in Narva in 1990. The fact that Narva had been obliterated by allied bombing and the Red Army in 1944, in a war in which Estonia was guiltless, escaped her (she also thought that Britain had been neutral during the whole of World War Two).

The ignorance extends not only to the crimes of Stalinist expansionism, but also to the conquest of the Caucasus in the Tsarist era. Had a Britain or America massacred the Circassians in the way that the Tsarist General Suvorov managed in the 1860s, it would be a matter of national shame and sorrow.

It would be tempting but wrong to say that this revisionist approach to history wholly dominates Russia’s dealings with its neighbors. Seen from the Baltic States or (under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko) from Ukraine, the historical gap looks unbridgeable. Russia makes no secret of its detestation of figures such as the wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. When Ukraine made him a national hero, Russia expressed disgust and outrage: in Russian historiography, Bandera and his followers were nothing more than brutal Nazi henchmen. Russia explicitly refuses to recognize the Baltic States’ version of their own history, in which they were occupied from 1940-91 and subject to “illegal immigration” by Russian and other Soviet migrants. Russia, by contrast, sees them as newly independent ex-Soviet republics, just like Moldova or Georgia.

But elsewhere the picture is rather different. That can come as a shock to those who see Mr. Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues as repellently unrepentant apologists for the Soviet era, and even for Stalinism. It would be overly optimistic to describe the shift as a sincere change of heart: nothing on the scale of Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung has taken place. But for all that, Mr. Putin has effectively damped down many of the most burning historical issues.

In 2006, as president, he visited Budapest to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, where he told his Hungarian counterpart, “Certainly modern Russia is not the Soviet Union but I must tell you frankly that in our hearts we feel a certain moral responsibility for these events.”

On the same trip he went to the Czech Republic, endorsed (without repeating it) Boris Yeltsin’s apology in 1993 and said,

The only concern we have when talking about the tragic events of the past is that certain political forces use these events today to provoke anti-Russian feelings and try to give the impression that Russia is a somewhat incapacitated country. This makes us uneasy. But I must tell you absolutely frankly that while of course there is no legal responsibility here and indeed, there cannot be any, of course a moral responsibility exists. It could not be any other way.

In 2009, Mr. Putin went to Gdansk and uttered words on the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland that blunted the sharpest edges in Polish-Russian relations, “...one must admit that all the attempts to appease the Nazis undertaken between 1934 and 1939 by striking various agreements and pacts with them are inadmissible from the moral point of view and from the practical, political point of view are senseless, detrimental and dangerous.” He went on to say,

“Certainly, one must admit these mistakes. Our country has done it. We sincerely want Russian-Polish relations to be also cleared of this residue of the past, developing in the spirit of good-neighborliness and cooperation to be worthy of the two great European nations.”

At Katyń on April 7, Putin took a similar stance, saying:

We have been brought here today by common memory and grief, as well as common historical duty and faith in the future. Here lie Soviet citizens burnt in the fires of Stalin’s repressions in the 1930s, Polish officers shot by secret order and soldiers of the Red Army executed by the Nazis during World War Two.

Russia and Poland, and the Russian and Polish peoples, have suffered through practically all the tragedies of the 20th century like no other countries, like no other Europeans. They have paid a heavy price for the two world wars, the fratricidal, armed conflicts and the cruelty and inhumanity of totalitarianism.

Our people, who have lived through the horrors of civil war, forced collectivization and the massive purges of the 1930s, probably understand better than any other what Katyń, Mednoye, and Pyatikhatka mean to many Polish families, because the sites of massive executions of Soviet citizens are in the same mournful category.

(Stalinist) repression swept people away regardless of their ethnic origin, convictions or religious beliefs. Whole social classes became victims - Cossacks, clergymen, ordinary peasants, professors, officers…teachers and workers. The logic was simple - to sow fear, to awaken people’s basest instincts, to turn them against each other and to make them obey blindly and unthinkingly.

There is no justification for these crimes. In our country, we have passed a clear political, legal and moral verdict on the atrocities of that totalitarian regime. And this verdict cannot be revised.

It would be hypocritical to urge us all to forget, especially before these graves and the people who come here to honor the memory of their family members. It would be hypocritical to say that everything has sunk into oblivion.

No, we must preserve the memory of the past, and will do so, no matter how bitter it may be. We cannot change the past, but we can preserve and restore the truth and, hence, historical justice.

Russian and Polish historians, clergymen and representatives of the public have undertaken this laborious task. While studying the past they are working for the sake of the truth, and, hence, the future of our bilateral relations.

It is these concerted efforts to reflect on the past and heal historical wounds that can help us avoid misunderstanding, permanent stalemate and primitive interpretations dividing peoples as innocent or guilty, as irresponsible politicians sometimes try to do.

For decades, there were attempts to conceal the truth about the Katyń massacre with cynical lies. But to lay the blame for these crimes on the Russian people would be the same sort of lies and manipulation.

History written with malice and hatred is just as false and glossed over as history adopted to suit the interests of specific individuals or specific groups. I’m sure that this is increasingly understood both in Russia and Poland.

No matter how difficult it may be, we should meet each other halfway, realizing that it is impossible to live only in the past.

And so today we are here together. Here, in Katyń, at the commemorative ceremony devoted to the 70th anniversary of the Polish tragedy. And we were together in Gdansk as well, on the anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two. Our nations fought against a common enemy on the fronts.

I’m confident that we will also celebrate the anniversary of the Great Victory (in World War Two) together, which was primarily won by the soldiers of the Red Army, and which claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers of the Polish Army, the Armia Krajowa and the Anders Army, as well as lives of thousands of defenders of Moscow and Warsaw, Westerplatte and Smolensk.

The big breakthrough was that Putin accepted the Polish version of events: this was an NKVD crime, not (as the Russian government argues in a case in the European Court in Strasbourg) unclear; and certainly not the work of the Nazis. But he also relativized the crime, arguing that Soviet prisoners of war lay in the same soil (something that historians have not previously asserted). And he came out with an original argument that Stalin had ordered the killings to avenge the deaths of an even greater number (30,000) of captured Soviet prisoners of war in 1920. That is problematic for several reasons. First, the number of those prisoners’ deaths is disputed and almost certainly far fewer than Mr. Putin claims. Second, they died chiefly from typhus at a time when the Polish state was barely able to feed and care for its own people (not least because it had just been attacked in its infancy by the Soviet Union). To equate that with the deliberate massacre of captured Polish officers suggests an alarming degree of slipperiness and relativism.

What Mr. Putin did not do is condemn Stalin outright. Nor did he take the elementary steps that the Poles are asking for, in terms of opening the archives (noting that Britain has yet to open all the files concerning the death of Władysław Sikorski in 1943). He said that exposing the names of the perpetrators would be unfair to their surviving relatives.

Overtures

Yet for many Poles, particularly those in government, the trajectory is enough. More patient diplomacy with the Russians will steadily produce more results. But hoping for a “big bang” is unrealistic. The Polish parliament, for example (stung by “Katyń denial”) has categorized the massacre as “genocide.” That is disingenuous. The scale is so vastly different from the Nazis’ mass killings that it looks self-absorbed. It offends Jews (and Armenians) who think that the label is theirs by virtue of much greater suffering. Perhaps Russia would have accepted that at the height of the Yeltsin years (when the then Russian leader visited Warsaw in 1993 he knelt at the Katyń memorial, laid flowers, and whispered “prostite nas, jesli mozhete” [forgive us, if you can]. But that era is past. For politicians impatient to make their mark on history, it seems better to take what can be gained now, rather than waiting for a future Russian leadership that might, perhaps, adopt a more radical stance.

A similar quasi-reconciliation is in the cards for Ukraine. The departure of Viktor Yushchenko has ended, at least for the next four years, the period in which a radical Ukrainian-centered view of history clashed head on with the Kremlin’s neo-Soviet version. No more bashing on about the Holodmor. No more glorification of Stepan Bandera and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army). No more arguments about Kievan Rus and who brought Orthodox Christianity to the Eastern Slavs. No more rows — probably — about the future of the Black Sea Fleet at its base in Sevastopol. With Belarus, the argument has never started. Moldova is too small and poor to matter (not to the Moldovans, of course, but to the outside world).

It is increasingly likely that he will make a similar overture to one of the Baltic States — most likely Lithuania. It would be easy to imagine Mr. Putin (or perhaps Mr. Medvedev) on a trip to Vilnius, making a somber but not penitent speech about history. It could go something like this:

In 1939 the specter of fascist aggression cast a shadow across the whole continent of Europe. The Western countries had failed to form a convincing anti-fascist alliance. Worse, they collaborated with the Nazis in the Munich agreement. Some circles in Baltic States were planning their own alliance with Nazi Germany too. To forestall that, and to buy time, the then Soviet leadership came to a temporary tactical arrangement under which the Baltic States came under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. That temporarily sheltered them from fascist aggression. In Lithuania’s case, it enabled the country to regain its historic capital Vilnius and some other territories. The incorporation [слияние] into the Soviet Union that then took place remains controversial to this day. Though it can be argued that it was technically in accordance with international law at the time, it clearly did not represent the freely expressed will of the Lithuanian people. That is a matter for regret as much for us as it is for you.

In return, Lithuania would drop its demands for compensation and for Russia to explicitly use the o-word (“occupation”). To ease the deal, Russia could agree to restore the oil pipeline to the Mažeikiai oil refinery, in return for a stake in it going to a friendly company (it is currently owned, but unloved, by the Polish PKN Orlen; Russia has cut off its supplies, claiming that the pipeline needs maintenance).

Such a deal would, it should be noted, leave the other Baltic States in a difficult position. Soviet rule in the Baltics during the occupation era was not uniform. Lithuania gained territory that it lost to Poland 20 years previously. In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Soviet Lithuania also regained Klaipeda. Under its long-serving (August 1940 to January 22, 1974) Communist Party chief Antanas Sniečkus, Lithuania avoided the Russification inflicted on its northern neighbors. The Soviet-era migration to Estonia and Latvia, and the citizenship and language laws adopted in response since independence, have raised legal issues, often poorly understood by outsiders, that do not concern Lithuania. In short: when Estonia and Latvia condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its consequences, they do so in slightly different terms.

Clearly a unilateral Lithuanian-Russian deal would be troublesome for Estonia and Latvia. It would therefore be nice to think that Lithuania would not even consider such a step without close consultation with the other two Baltic States. On the evidence of the past, that does not seem likely. On May 9, the Baltic States seem set to repeat the fiasco of 2005, when two presidents (Arnold Rüütel of Estonia and Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania) stayed away from the Russian 60th anniversary celebrations of victory in World War Two, and one (Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga of Latvia) showed up. This year, Estonia’s Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Latvia’s Valdis Zatlers are going, and Dalia Grybauskaite is staying away (the result of a botched attempt to entice Dmitry Medvedev into coming to Vilnius for the 20th anniversary of Lithuania’s declaration of restored independence). If the Baltic States cannot coordinate their stance on something as predictable as an anniversary, what chance do they have when facing up to a serious Russian effort to play divide et impera.

Conclusion

This smoothing over of historical rows is potential game-changer. For 20 years, it has been an article of faith for people in the region and their friends that laying the ghosts of Soviet history was both a moral and political imperative. Those efforts have failed. Stalinist and neo-Soviet versions of the past have not died. They have revived, albeit in diluted form. The rest of the world —and many in the former communist world —seem increasingly ready to accept messy compromise, woolly words and half-truths in order to have normal relations with Russia. Resisting that tide is going to be tough.

It is worth it — not least because of solidarity with those Russians who do care about the past. Mr. Putin’s step is a profoundly important and welcome one. But it is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for a real change.

[1] The Economist. The End of History, Revisited: The ex-communist states of eastern Europe are leaving their pasts behind. February 25, 2010, available at http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15577511.
[2] “Butterfly-Polka” (Polka-Babochka) is, incidentally, an unusual choice of phrase straight from the Stalinist propaganda lexicon, when it was used to indicate something utterly alien. See this explanation by Pavel Felgenhauer, a hard-hitting journalistic critic of the Kremlin, available at http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2372256.

Norman Stone book review

2010-04-30T09:06:00.000Z

he cold war

Feel of history
Apr 29th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The Norman Stone story

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War. By Norman Stone. Basic Books; 668 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30.

IMAGINE that you are invited to lunch at Oxford University. Sherry, wine and port flow like the Isis, with facts, anecdotes, bons mots and sparkling insights swirling past in a bewildering but entertaining array. The conversation continues on a punt, then on a brisk walk around the university parks, then over tea, which slips into (more) sherry, and afterwards a splendiferous “high table” dinner. Late at night you wobble through the darkened streets, still talking, feeling pleasantly at one with the world. It is great fun, but no substitute for actually studying history.

That is how reading Norman Stone’s book about the cold war feels. He has a terrific eye for detail, bringing to life everything from the ruins of Germany to Ronald Reagan’s White House with a wonderfully waspish turn of phrase: Nikita Khrushchev, unlike his colleagues, “did indeed have a human face, though pachydermic”. Sometimes it runs away with him. Boris Yeltsin is dismissed in barely a page as a “sinister clown”. He captures well the West’s weakness, as well as the seemingly powerful challenge that eastern-style socialism posed to Western freedom.

At the end of this work you will know a lot about Europe, about the cold war and about Mr Stone himself. But the book has a careless air. The prose reads as if it had been dictated rather than written, and was then sent straight to the printers. The word “besides” appears with alarming frequency as a way of linking page-long paragraphs. Colloquialisms that would be charming once become grating and lazy when you meet them page after page. Episodes that normally count as rather important, such as the Polish shipyard strikes in 1980, pass in a blur, whereas hobby-horses such as the decline of British universities get an energetic ride.

Nor is there any sign of research. When Mr Stone does not know a fact, he shrugs his shoulders. The reason why Russian immigrants poured into occupied Estonia and Latvia in the Soviet era, but not into Lithuania, is an interesting historical question which affects the present. He recounts it, adds “for whatever reason” and moves on. Teresa Toranska, a Polish author, wrote a magnificent book called “Them”, based on interviews with dinosaur communists. Mr Stone refers to her book but cannot be bothered to name it or her. Instead of footnotes, there is a section called “further reading”. For a polyglot, he is remarkably careless in his spelling of names. Diacritical signs are distributed at random. Experts and lay readers alike will feel increasingly short-changed.

Most annoying of all is the lack of a conclusion: the book ends with a garbled account of the downfall of Margaret Thatcher and the limp observation that the 1980s were by far the most interesting part of the post-war era. Mr Stone’s colossal talents and his epic subject surely deserve better.

Rewriting the map of Europe

2010-04-30T08:58:00.005Z

This lighthearted piece has proved surprisingly popular--largely I think thanks to the brilliant Economist cartographer who made this map

Europe.view

Redrawing the map
Apr 29th 2010
From Economist.com

The European map is outdated and illogical. Here's how it should look

PEOPLE who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could. Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.

Britain, which after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores. (If the journey proves a bumpy one, it might be a good opportunity to make Wales and Scotland into separate islands).

In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.

Belgium’s incomprehensible Flemish-French language squabbles (which have just brought down a government) are redolent of central Europe at its worst, especially the nonsenses Slovakia thinks up for its Hungarian-speaking ethnic minority. So Belgium should swap places with the Czech Republic. The stolid, well-organised Czechs would get on splendidly with their new Dutch neighbours, and vice versa.

Belarus, currently landlocked and trying to wriggle out from under Russia’s thumb, would benefit greatly from exposure to the Nordic region, whose influence played a big role in helping the Baltics shed their Soviet legacy. So it should move northwards to the Baltic, taking the place of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These three countries should move to a new location somewhere near Ireland. Like the Emerald Isle, they have bitten the bullet of “internal devaluation”, regaining competitiveness by cutting wages and prices, rather than taking the easy option of depreciating the currency, or borrowing recklessly as Greece has. The Baltics would also be glad to be farther away from Russia and closer to America. Amid the other moves, Kaliningrad could shift up the coast towards Russia, ending its anomalous status as a legacy exclave of the second world war and removing any possibility of future Russian mischief-making about rail transit.

Into the slots vacated by Poland and Belarus should come the western and central parts of Ukraine. Germany, with the Ukrainian border now only 100km from Berlin, would start having to take the country’s European integration seriously. The Ukrainian shift would allow Russia to move west and south too, thus vacating Siberia for the Chinese, who will take it sooner or later anyway.

Next comes some reordering of the Balkans. Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo should rotate places, with Macedonia taking Kosovo’s place next to Serbia, Kosovo moving to Albania’s slot on the coast, and Albania shifting inland. Paranoid Greek fantasies about territorial claims from the deluded Slav irredentists from the north would evaporate. Bosnia is too fragile to move and will have to stay where it is.

Switzerland and Sweden are often confused. So it would make sense to move Switzerland north, where it would fit neatly into the Nordic countries. Its neutrality would go down well with the Finns and Swedes; Norway would be glad to have another non-EU country next door.

Germany can stay where it is, as can France. But Austria could shift westwards into Switzerland’s place, making room for Slovenia and Croatia to move north-west too.* They could join northern Italy in a new regional alliance (ideally it would run by a Doge, from Venice). The rest of Italy, from Rome downwards, would separate and join with Sicily to form a new country, officially called the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (but nicknamed Bordello). It could form a currency union with Greece, but nobody else.

* A welcome side-effect of these changes will be to make space for previously fictional creations such as Anthony Hope's Ruritania, Hergé's Syldavia and Borduria, and Vulgaria, the backdrop for “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.

Belarus Govt in Exile

2010-04-28T16:07:00.001Z

While I was away I missed the chance to interview Ivonka Survilla, president of the Belarusian Government in Exile (BNR). An audio interview is available here on the Economist website

Europe view on Poland. Politics as normal?

2010-04-22T11:41:00.000Z

Winners and losers
Apr 22nd 2010
From Economist.com

Normal politics, and hard questions, loom in Poland

IN THE churches of Warsaw and other Polish cities, the funerals continue but questions are looming. Why were so many of the country’s top brass on the plane that crashed on April 10th, killing President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 others, including some of the country’s brightest and best military officers? Some of the relatives are, privately, furious. They say that their menfolk were ordered to travel to the Katyn memorial service as a backdrop for the launch of Mr Kaczynski’s re-election campaign.

Bosses often waste busy people’s time for reasons of their own. But every decision that led to the crash now looks questionable. The decencies of mourning mean that media and political opponents are behaving gently. But that won’t last, especially when an even bigger question is in the air: what made the pilot decide to try to land at fog-bound Smolensk? He could have landed at Minsk, which would have been safer but would have ruined the commemoration ceremony by making the president late.

Was that just the pilot’s decision? Did he have doubts? Was there any pressure from Mr Kaczynski? (In 2008 the president publicly berated a pilot for “cowardice”.) The answer may never be known. The cockpit voice recorder includes only the crew’s preceding 30 minutes of conversation; the decision to ignore an air-traffic controller’s suggestion to land at Minsk was made nearly 45 minutes before the disaster.

A third question is whether Mr Kaczynski deserved burial at the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. That honour is normally reserved for Poland’s greatest heroes: the most recent to be buried there was Wladyslaw Sikorski, the country’s legendary wartime leader. Mr Kaczynski’s death was tragic. But he was a divisive figure, not an epitome of Polish greatness.

The answers to these questions may determine another: who wins the June presidential election. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president’s twin, could stand, perhaps buoyed by a sympathy vote. But his chances look fragile. If some of the blame for at least the scale of the disaster ends up falling on the late president, the Kaczynski legacy would look even flimsier.

Mr Kaczynski’s rival, Bronislaw Komorowski, is leading the opinion polls. In accordance with the constitution, Mr Komorowski, the speaker of the Sejm (the lower house of parliament) is already acting president. He should be a shoo-in. But his two public appearances since the crash have seemed wooden and unsympathetic. Some wonder if a cross-party candidate would be a good move, epitomising the new mood of national unity. But who? Despite the largely trivial political differences between the country's two main parties, Polish politics is sharply polarised.

Away from the backbiting world of domestic politics, the immediate question is whether Poland’s relations with Russia have been genuinely transformed or if the changes are just cosmetic. Some see realpolitik at work, assuming that Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, considers it worth making minor concessions over historical questions in order to fix relations with its large western neighbour, particularly given growing awareness of Poland's potential gas reserves. As for the Polish business lobby, profits in Russia loom larger than fiddly questions about history and justice.

The biggest question is about Russia. Openness about Katyn and Stalinist crimes against Poland inexorably leads to questions about the still greater crimes of the communists against Russians themselves. Pull on the thread of truth and all sorts of things will start to unravel. Why is the mass murderer Lenin, the author of the Red Terror, still venerated on Red Square? Answers on a postcard to Mr Putin.

A Lithuanian view on Katyn and Smolensk

2010-04-20T16:29:00.003Z

Ramunas Bogdanas, the former adviser to Lithuanian president Vytautas Landsbergis, has written this interesting commentary on Katyn, which I am glad to give a platform to.

KATYN: TRUTH VS LIE
Ramūnas Bogdanas

For 70 years the word Katyn is an open wound in the memory of the Polish nation. It can be healed only by the victory of truth against lie. This battle lasts since 1943, when Goebbels wrote in his diary on the day the Germans were retreating from Katyn: with no doubt the Russians shall blame the Germans for this crime. The Nazi ideologist guessed right because there was no difference in the essence of these enemies. During the trial in Nurnberg the Soviets tried to accuse Nazis of the Katyn massacre but the allies didn’t dare to confirm the fake, and it was nonsuited due to the “lack of evidence”.
The first Katyn annihilated the officers of the Second Republic, and the second – all the top commanders of the Third Republic.
For 70 years Katyn means the opposition of justice against iniquity. On one side – 21,680 killed, on the other – pragmatism, indifference, secrecy.
When the prime minister in exile Wladislaw Sikorski, residing in London, learned about Katyn in April, 1943, he asked Winston Churchill to approach Stalin for explanation. Churchill, knowing the truth, wouldn’t disturb his ally. Stalin suspended all the relations with that Polish government, and just after a month the plane with W.Sikorski crashed when taking off in Gibraltar. At that time the famous soviet spy Kim Philby was operating in Gibraltar as the British intelligence officer.
The President of the USA Franklin d Roosevelt got all the information about the massacre of the Polish from his special emissary in 1944 but he suppressed the report and officially rejected the conclusion.
The first to partially acknowledge the responsibility of NKVD for Katyn was Michail Gorbachev. Later Boris Jelcin handed to Poles a section of documents about Katyn which were always kept in the file No.1 of the First Secretary of the Communist party. The trial was started by the Russian military prosecutor in 1990 but it was closed with no results in 2004. The relatives of the victims approached the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Vladimir Putin invited the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk to visit Katyn on April, 6. On the eve the court in Strasburg received the answer from Russia to the request. It states: “It appeared impossible to get the information about the execution of the decision to shoot particular persons as all the notes are destroyed, and it is impossible to restore them”. So to whom Putin bowed his head next day? According to the official answer to Strasburg it is impossible to tell were almost 22,000 Poles have disappeared.
Another half-true of Russia was the explanation of Putin that the documents are kept secret because of the humanistic reasons as the guilty have offsprings and relatives. According to these logics, all the murders and rapists should be classified. Putin spoke only about the abstract victims of totalitarianism and claimed that Russia has already evaluated the crimes of Stalinism. O course! Moscow is under preparation to welcome the guests of the Victory parade on May, 9 spruced up with the portraits of Stalin. Somehow the Germans don’t display Hitler for eliminating unemployment in the pre-war Germany. When then German Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the ghetto of Warsaw he didn’t start explanations what is the difference between FRG and the Third Reich. Being the antifascist and social democrat from his young days, he performed penance bending his knees on the pavement of the ghetto.
The politics of half-step could be felt in all the setting of the prime ministers meeting. Russia never showed the movie of Andziej Wajda “Katyn” (2007) before. It appeared on TV on the eve of the visit to Katyn but it was on the channel “Kultura” which has a low popularity. V. Putin did invite D.Tusk to Katyn but came himself very late making the Polish prime minister wait for him almost an hour. In the language of diplomats this means: “You must know your proper place”.
The aircraft of the President of Poland plunged into the hardly transparent mist above Katyn both figuratively and directly. That was a private visit, and no high Kremlin officials were waiting for him. As one Russian pilot said on the radio “Echo of Moscow”, the special landing equipment which was brought to the airport to harbor the planes of Putin and Tusk has been removed. But in his not delivered speech Lech Kaczynski wanted to express his delight that the move towards the truth has started in Russia. As his last will the President left his unspoken wish “not to stop by any means” till the truth is revealed. As J.W. Goethe has said, the truth heals the evil. When a man can watch the truth directly into the eyes, he is free.
The meeting of two prime ministers paved the way to the relations based on the marginalizing the uncomfortable truth for the sake of the pragmatic interests of today. But such half-truth would leave Russians with a burden of guilty conscience which then raises the troublesome questions : why does nobody love us?; why don’t we enjoy confidence around? And the Poles would stay with a bleeding wound under a nice bandage. The crash of the Presidential plane didn’t leave a chance for lip–deep truth.
The sudden change in the behavior of Russia might be the reaction to the attempts taken by the American companies to explore the promising fields of shale gas in Poland. They declared the start this month. The success would mean the weakening of the main weapon of Putin’s politics which is Gazprom. If the shale gas is a success that will change the situation all over Europe. It is very pragmatic to get as close to Poland as possible, maybe becoming involved in the gas sector now, at the very start of the shale gas exploiting.
According to one of the US founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, the tree of freedom now and then must be watered with the blood of the patriots. Katyn-2 illuminated the wandering in the twilight like a lightning. “Katyn” of A.Wajda was replayed on the main Russian TV channel in the primetime. The hearts of Poles are full of gratitude for Russian compassion. The sharp Russian journalists declare to be proud of state authorities for the first time after many years.

Lech Kaczynski was mocked not only in Poland where he had almost no chances in the Presidential elections to be held this autumn. He was uncomfortable for EU for his firm principles, and the Western mass media used to sting him. Even after his death the biggest Antwerp newspaper published a contemptible cartoon “The eagle landed” with a picture of the eagle of the Polish coat of arms fallen on the Polish red and white flag.
After the crash there was a version spread that L.Kaczynski himself could press on the pilot to land in spite of the adverse air conditions. This was proven by the false story that he urged the pilot to land in Tbilisi during the military conflict in August, 2008, and after the pilot refused, later he put attempts to fire him. I specifically asked about this the former President of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus who was on that flight, and he was seated directly in front of L.Kaczynski so they could communicate during the flight – by the way, that was the same plane that crashed near Smolensk, and the first pilot in the flight to Smolensk kpt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk was a second pilot on the flight to Georgia. Mr. Adamkus witnessed that L.Kaczynski listened to the report of the pilot to land in Azerbaijan instead, and the only question he asked was if the cars to move to Tbilisi were arranged.
Death purified the essence of that man, and the Poles spend long hours queueing to pay homage for this small man with a big heart devoted to his motherland. I t happens often that a person is appreciated only after death. Only then appears the perception that the foundation of the state rests on the basic principles but not on the optimum of pork export.
According to the Constitution the early presidential elections shall be held in June. Thanks to the unknown will on the eve of the flight the twin brother of the President refused to fly together. The explanation about their mother in the hospital is not really sound: the trip would last just half a day.
Due to that decision there is a man in Poland now who is called the strategist of the tandem, the former prime minister in 2005-2007. It seems that the faith points him to continue standing for principles that his brother died for. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is an identical twin. Emotionally, he will seem to the electorate as the embodied president who is buried with the kings in the royal palace of Wawel in Cracow. The memoirs of the Sunday ceremony will still be alive, when only the nice words came from the lips of the visitants, the mighty of this world. Even the future rivals of the election campaign have to select the words of respect at the farewell ceremony. If Jaroslaw Kaczynski participates, the election campaign shall differ. The sceptical words against the gone President will be accepted as a scorn to Poland. The compliments to Lech Kaczynski the Poles accept now as the compliments to Poland. In Poland especially, no one can criticize what brings glory to the state. And the electorate even visually will see the copy of so honoured Lech Kaczynski in the face of Jaroslaw.
Bearing in mind that the accident near Smolensk paves the way to the truth in the story of Katyn, and not forgetting the Polish deep sense of honour I wouldn’t be astonished if J.Kaczynski is elected as the President. His destiny would be to start a new page of Polish – Russian relations which his twin brother opened with a sacrifice of his life.

Norman Davies

2010-04-17T21:53:00.000Z

We were lucky to be able to get Professor Norman Davies into the Economist audio studio. Here's my interview with him

leader on Poland

2010-04-15T21:14:00.000Z

Poland's loss

A president dies, a country lives
Apr 15th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The plane crash that killed Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, could bring good out of tragic loss

NO COUNTRY can endure the loss of dozens of its leading military, political and cultural figures without great pain. And in Poland, a place where history is punctuated by tragedy, it is all too tempting to link the plane crash that killed 96 people on April 10th, including President Lech Kaczynski (see obituary), with such other sorrows as the wartime Katyn massacre that they were flying to Smolensk to commemorate. But that linkage is both lazy and misleading.

The Katyn killings marked the deliberate decapitation of the pre-war state. The 22,000 prisoners-of-war murdered by Stalin’s secret police were not just the military leadership; they were also reservists—doctors, lawyers, teachers, officials—who formed the middle-class backbone of Poland. Stalin knew they were the biggest human obstruction to his plan, cooked up with Hitler, to wipe Poland from the map.

The plane crash was no decapitation. The empty posts are being filled calmly and correctly. Poland’s constitutional order has been scrupulously maintained (no Slavic Alexander Haig rushed in front of the cameras to proclaim “I’m in control”). The markets have been quite unmoved by the news.

A second difference is that Katyn was a crime compounded by a lie. Until 1990 the Soviet authorities blamed the murders on the Nazis. Under Vladimir Putin, the archives stayed sealed, judicial rehabilitation of the victims stalled and the excuses and deceits crept back. Those trying to raise the issue of Katyn felt that they were fighting a lonely battle. Not any more. The Katyn campaigners and relatives who perished this week have achieved in death a level of worldwide recognition for their cause that they never saw in life.

The crash has also brought unprecedented Russian openness and sympathy towards Poland. Mr Putin, not always this newspaper’s favourite ruler, deserves great credit. He had already denounced the Katyn massacre at a joint ceremony a few days earlier. Russian state television screened a gut-wrenching Polish film about the atrocity. After the crash it did so again. And far from covering things up, Russia’s co-operation with the Polish authorities in the aftermath of the crash has been exemplary. Even the most determined conspiracy theorists are finding no grist for their mills. Footage of Mr Putin embracing his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, at the crash site may come to exemplify a new relationship of trust and friendship, just as the smashed skulls and rotting bodies of Katyn victims of 70 years ago stood for the horrors of the past.

Mr Putin could do more to banish the spectre of Soviet nostalgia from Russia. But the main task is for Poland. Katyn came at the nadir of the country’s fortunes; the latest tragedy comes at a time when it has never been stronger, more prosperous or more secure (see article). Poland was the only European country whose economy grew last year. In 2011 it will hold the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, preceded by its close ally, Hungary. That will be a salutary shock for those who think the EU is run out of Brussels by France and Germany. Then comes another moment in the spotlight: the 2012 European football championships, shared with Ukraine.

The best legacy

Yet the old stereotypes of a poor, neurotic country still have some claim on reality. A million or more enterprising Poles, fed up with grotty public services and a poor quality of life, have voted with their feet to work abroad. The country needs a dose of energetic reform to give them a reason to return. And a worrying whiff of sleaze hangs over public life. Fighting corruption was one of the things that most animated Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw. To make Poland a shining success would be the best tribute to those who died in Katyn 70 years ago and at Smolensk airport on April 10th.

obituary (print edition)

2010-04-15T21:08:00.001Z

Lech Kaczynski
Apr 15th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Lech Kaczynski, president of Poland, died in an air crash on April 10th, aged 60

CHARMING in private, awkward in public, scrupulously honest and a bit out of touch, Lech Kaczynski exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of the political milieu from which he came. His formative years were the long bleak decades of Poland’s communist era, first in Warsaw and then in provincial Gdansk. He and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, idolised their father, a veteran of the Polish Home Army, which fought an underground war against the German occupiers, only to be persecuted by the Soviet “liberators”. Each night at bedtime, the two boys used to sing the country’s national anthem: “Poland is not yet lost, while we still live.”

As 12-year-olds the twins starred in a popular Polish fantasy film, “The Two Who Stole the Moon”, though in real life the swotty duo had little in common with the scamps they portrayed. Both became academic lawyers, Lech specialising in labour law. That proved useful during the Solidarity era, when he advised the opposition trade union’s leaders in their talks with the communist boss-class. After the imposition of martial law in December 1981, he was interned for ten months.

He helped negotiate the communist regime’s surrender in 1989 and was one of the victors in the electoral triumph that followed. Soon after, he became security minister, developing a lasting distaste for the continuing influence of old communist spooks in public life. He resigned after falling out with his former friend, the Solidarity leader-turned-president, Lech Walesa, whom he later accused of having collaborated with the communist secret police. He was a crime-busting justice minister and then mayor of Warsaw. His legacy there is the capital’s haunting museum of the 1944 uprising, crushed by occupying German forces while a nearby Soviet army kept aloof. Both his parents fought in it.

But few saw him as a likely head of state. He was the less prominent of the twins: their all-but-identical appearance (Lech had a mole on his cheek; Jaroslaw did not) belied big differences. Lech was the younger and shyer, Jaroslaw the brainier, the bossier and the mastermind of the Law and Justice party (PiS in its Polish acronym) which they founded in 2001.

A surprise victor in 2005, Lech Kaczynski proved an uneasy president. He looked nervous at public occasions. Foreign ambassadors in Warsaw traded horror stories about protocol snafus in his chaotic chancery. His public relations were awful, consumed by suspicion of media plots against him. But content as well as form was adrift.

His grasp of economics was hazy, but that of foreign affairs was weaker still. Before his election Lech (like his brother) displayed scant interest in them. He spoke no foreign languages and had travelled little. His worldview was fixed: America, good, Russia and Germany, bad. Fellow-victims of communist imperialism, such as Lithuania, Ukraine and Georgia, needed help against the ex-KGB regime in Russia. Poland should always support Israel. The EU was overmighty and too secular. Most other countries did not matter at all.

Those views were popular among many Poles. But Mr Kaczynski pursued them clumsily, sometimes disastrously so. His performances at European summits were petulant and destructive. Repeated attempts by Angela Merkel, the polonophile German chancellor, to build a strong relationship with Poland were rebuffed. He told Germany to give Poland voting rights to reflect her wartime population losses. He cancelled his attendance at a trilateral French-German-Polish summit in 2006 in protest at an insulting German newspaper article. Bemusingly, he demanded a government apology.

Such gaffes and inexperience made Mr Kaczynski easy to lampoon. So did his socially conservative views. As mayor he banned gay parades in Warsaw. His stance was mainstream in Catholic Poland but shocked secular European opinion. Hostile journalists at home and abroad enjoyed ridiculing him.

But his critics often missed his virtues and overstated his faults. He was a patriot, but not a nationalist. He was no bigot: his daughter divorced, and then married someone active in Poland’s left-wing party, the SLD, which has its roots in the former communist party. Mr Kaczynski treated his new son-in-law with impeccable kindness.

Nor was he simply right-wing in the traditional sense. If anything, his views were those of Poland’s pre-war Socialist party. He was rather sceptical of big business (not least because of his concern for workers’ rights). Free-marketeers found him frustratingly unsympathetic to demands for more liberalisation and less bureaucracy.

Honest to a fault

His great concern, and that of many founding members of PiS, was corruption. Scrupulously honest themselves (his brother Jaroslaw does not even have a bank account) the twins could hardly have been more different from the sleek cronies who populate large parts of the Polish political spectrum. The Kaczynskis’ real failure was overzealousness: their anti-corruption crusade too often trampled over the rule of law that they wanted to uphold.

Mr Kaczynski was trailing badly in the re-election race due in October. Poles like honesty. But they like competence, effectiveness and modernity, too.

three-pager on Poland from this week's print edition

2010-04-15T21:06:00.001Z

Out of tragedy, normality
Apr 15th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Poland’s prospects look bright, despite the aeroplane crash that killed its president on April 10th. But Poles still have a lot to do to make the most of their chances

COMMUNAL mourning after a national tragedy is deep but transient. People thought that the death in 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales, would change Britain for ever. After a few weeks, things got back to normal. The same was true in Poland after the death in 2005 of the country’s most famous son, Pope John Paul II. The sense of national solidarity and the kindness between strangers were overwhelming. But they didn’t last.

And so, almost certainly, it will be with the great convulsion of grief that has swept Poland since the death of President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others in an aeroplane crash in Russia. After the funerals on April 17th, the media will doubtless resume its backbiting and excitability; politics will once again be bad-tempered, and people will ask hard questions about the crash.

Some of these will deserve answers more than others. It is not inherently scandalous, for example, that the Polish president was flying in a Soviet-made plane, recently serviced in Russia. The Tupolev 154 is thirsty and noisy, but robust and reliable. Nor do the conspiracy theories deserve a nanosecond’s attention. It is true that Poland’s wartime leader, Wladyslaw Sikorski, died in a mysterious aeroplane crash in Gibraltar in 1943, just as he was demanding the truth about the newly discovered massacre at Katyn. But the terrible coincidence is just that: a coincidence. Russia’s co-operation with the investigation cannot be faulted. It may even be the start of a deeper reconciliation between the two countries.

What does look questionable is the concentration of talent on the passenger list. The crash cost Poland’s armed forces six of their top seven commanders, and killed dozens of other notables. Countries and big companies usually have strict rules about how many of their most vital people can fly in the same plane. The crash shows the wisdom of such practices.

The investigation may reveal other misjudgments, too. Mr Kaczynski publicly berated for cowardice a pilot who refused to fly him and four other heads of state to Tbilisi during a mission to support the Georgian leadership during the war in August 2008. (The pilot later got a medal for refusing to obey the president’s reckless order.) The theory that on April 10th the pilot felt unduly pressured to get the president to the commemoration of the Katyn massacre, despite severe fog at Smolensk airport, deserves scrutiny. Some also wonder if it is overdoing things to give the late president, a divisive figure, the honour of burial in the crypt of the Wawel cathedral in Cracow, alongside Poland’s greatest leaders.

But whatever combination of incompetence, recklessness and sheer bad luck turns out to have caused the disaster, the bigger picture of Poland is a bright one. Foreigners used to stereotypes about Polish disorganisation, backwardness and prejudice find plenty to surprise them.

The clearest success is the economy. Poland is not only doing well in the “ex-communist” region (already a dated category). It is doing well by any standard. Its economy was the only one in Europe to boast growth last year, of 1.7%. Though the budget deficit is a whopping 7% of GDP, outsiders are unbothered. Poland’s banking system is solid, being largely unburdened by the rotten foreign-currency loans made in places such as Hungary and Latvia. Outside investors like Poland. It attracted more than $10 billion in foreign direct investment last year. Debt, at 53% of GDP, is manageable. Countries such as Britain might drool at that.

Poland’s success is partly a matter of luck. Its size (the biggest economy by far of the European Union’s newer members) means that domestic demand cushioned a fall in exports. EU taxpayers’ money for new roads, railways and other modernisation provided a fiscal stimulus at the right time. Growing interest by outside investors in Poland’s big gas reserves has raised the prospect of both a bonanza and greater energy independence—a big deal in a country fearful of over-dependence on Russian gas.

There was also good judgment. Poland has used monetary and fiscal policy well during the crisis. It has made a stab at reforming the pension system—a weak point in all ex-communist countries. It is using EU money more effectively than in the past. One of the biggest successes of Donald Tusk, the prime minister, has been to push squabbling local politicians to agree quickly on road-building programmes. Transport bottlenecks were an infuriating and growth-stifling feature of Polish life.

The government now exudes confidence. Mr Tusk heads a stable coalition with a solid parliamentary majority (unknown in modern Polish history). Business likes that. Among its prominent members are the finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, an economics professor from Britain; and Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister. A teenage refugee from communism, Mr Sikorski boasts a degree from Oxford and a high-profile American wife (who was a former Economist journalist). Both men have the connections and language skills to get Poland’s message across in a way that stirs envy among other politicians, working in laboured English or through interpreters.

Under the previous government, led by the late president’s twin brother Jaroslaw, Poland was turning into a laughing-stock. The Kaczynskis’ policy seemed to be to pick noisy fights with Germany, Russia and the rest of the EU, over, for example, support of the beleaguered Georgians. Some of the criticism was no doubt grossly unfair but the twins’ woeful tactics left Poland marginalised.

Since Mr Tusk’s government took office in 2007, however, that has begun to change. The country has offered loans to stricken economies such as Iceland, Latvia and Moldova. Some wonder if it might help Greece, undermining the notion that Europe has a rich, well-run western half, and a poor, backward east.

Polish leaders have also made friends with Germany, seeing in Angela Merkel’s leadership an opportunity for a powerful friendship. Many noticed when Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, paid his first visit not (like his predecessors) to Paris, but to Warsaw.

Poland has always been a military heavyweight by European standards, able to deploy its 100,000-strong armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. America likes that, seeing a sharp contrast with the feeble efforts of some other NATO allies. In return, Poland has gained the main role in America’s anti-missile plans. The Obama administration clumsily ditched a scheme promised by the Bush administration but says the new programme will be bigger and better. American energy companies’ interest in Polish gas reserves may make the connection even stronger. Poland has also earned NATO attention on what was once the neglected home front. The alliance developed contingency plans to defend Poland, and is extending them (using mainly Polish troops) to protect the vulnerable Baltic states.

But Mr Tusk’s biggest diplomatic achievement since taking office has been to steer Poland towards a rapprochement with Russia. The biggest sign of that was the participation of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, at a ceremony on April 7th to mark the anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The Russian government’s reaction to the deaths of Mr Kaczynski and his entourage seems designed to take the process further (see article).

This is a big change. Poland used to be the most forthright critic of Mr Putin’s regime. The Russian leader said that Poland would be a nuclear target in wartime.

The countries’ reconciliation still has a long way to go. Mr Putin has expressed sympathy for the victims of Katyn. But he has not publicly condemned their executioners. And in a response to a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights brought by relatives of Katyn victims, Russia still claims that it is not clear who perpetrated the massacre. Many Poles find that outrageous: it is as if, they say, modern Germany were to admit the Holocaust was not a myth yet still hesitated to condemn Hitler outright.

Such feelings brought Mr Kaczynski, along with almost the entire foreign-policy leadership of his party, the commanders of the armed forces, senior intelligence veterans and top historians, to board the plane that crashed on April 10th. They were paying their own unofficial visit, an alternative to the (in their eyes, phoney) reconciliation of the earlier event attended by Messrs Tusk and Putin.

In many countries, the destruction of so great a part of the top echelon would have precipitated a crisis, domestically and on foreign-exchange markets. It is hugely to Poland’s credit that this has not happened: the country’s institutions and constitution have passed the test almost serenely.

But it has taken a great tragedy to remind Poles of this achievement because, for many of them, too little has changed in daily life. A million or more have gone to work in other EU countries, chiefly Britain and Ireland. Despite the downturn there and Poland’s economic success, they are so far mostly not coming back.

The reasons are complex. Poland has little tradition of internal labour mobility, so shortages in Warsaw and the country’s booming western crescent can coexist with deep joblessness in the east. It can be easier, with a budget airline, to commute weekly to Britain than to drive to a job 100km away. Petty corruption in health care and education is endemic. Perhaps most worrying, social mobility is stagnating. After the collapse of communism, a bright young person could aim high. Now many feel that without good connections, it is best to head abroad.

The suspicion lingers that the country’s old communist elite and their children have morphed into a new nomenklatura. Poles call this idea the Uklad, an all-but-untranslatable word meaning “deal”, “arrangement” or “system”. The price of the communist surrender in 1989 was that the old elite was able to turn its power into wealth, using connections, slush funds and privileges to gain a head start in the country’s shift to capitalism.

The Kaczynskis found that idea repellent. They wanted a fresh start and called it a “Fourth Republic”. But during their ill-starred government of 2005-07, the atmosphere was more reminiscent of Robespierre than Benjamin Franklin. Prosecutors conducted trial by press conference, denouncing victims live on television on what often seemed the flimsiest of grounds. Overzealous sleaze-busting was matched by an apparently obsessive focus on reforming the over-mighty military-intelligence service.

Disquiet about the brothers’ vengeful, chaotic and weird reputation led to their downfall in 2007 and the election of Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform party. The big criticism of his government is that presentation outweighs substance. Poland’s prosperity rests on a surprisingly narrow base. It needs structural reforms to deal with, for example, a rapidly ageing workforce, only just over half of whom are economically active.

The deaths of Mr Kaczynski and many of his closest allies leave a big political hole but also create an opportunity. The late president was already facing a tough challenge from Mr Tusk’s party in the presidential race that was due in October. That election will now be in June. Bronislaw Komorowski, who is acting president by virtue of his position as speaker of the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, is also the Civic Platform candidate. A victory for him would make Mr Tusk’s efforts to consolidate the centre-right of the Polish political spectrum start to look unstoppable.

The most powerful candidate for Law and Justice would be Mr Kaczynski’s twin, Jaroslaw. His intentions are unclear. If he stands, he could gain a big sympathy vote. But he might also remind Poles why they voted him out of office as prime minister. Some Poles believe that a cross-party candidate would be the right step.

One of Mr Tusk’s biggest excuses for his government’s cautious approach to reform is that anything radical might be met with a presidential veto. That was not a complete excuse. But if Mr Komorowski or a non-partisan figure is elected, it will be no excuse at all. Poland has done a tremendous amount to make up for five decades of sometimes bestial misrule after 1939. But it has more to do if it is to establish a position as one of the powers of Europe.

Behind the grieving faces is a thriving nation | Edward Lucas - Times Online

2010-04-12T09:28:00.000Z

Behind the grieving faces is a thriving nation | Edward Lucas - Times Online

Here is my take on the Kaczynski plane crash from this morning's London Times

The Times
April 12, 2010
Behind the grieving faces is a thriving nation
The spotlight on Poland today will burn increasingly brightly in the coming years
Edward Lucas

Tragedy and chaos, both imposed from outside and self-inflicted, feature all too often in Poland’s history. They are exemplified by Saturday’s plane crash. President Lech Kaczynski’s apparently reckless insistence on landing on an unsuitable foggy airport cost the lives of some of Poland’s most distinguished military and academic figures. The echo of the original Katyn massacre, in which the Polish prewar elite — lawyers, doctors, teachers, public servants, all serving as reserve officers — perished at Russian hands is unbearably poignant.

Yet the Poland that is now so convulsed in grief has another side to it. Never in its history has Poland been so prosperous or so secure. Last year its economy was the only one in all of Europe to show GDP growth, of 1.7 per cent. The country’s banking system is solid, its public finances sound. The currency, the zloty, is inconveniently strong. Clapped-out communist-era infrastructure is giving way to excellent modern roads, railways and public buildings. Its state education system puts Britain’s to shame.

Poland matters. Its 38 million population is bigger than the combined total of the other former communist countries (Hungary, Slovakia etc) that joined the European Union in 2004. In America’s eyes, Poland’s military matters more than that of any other country in continental Europe. Unlike the toy soldiers employed by many other so-called Nato allies, Poland’s soldiers turn up, fight and die in missions overseas. In return, America insists that Nato makes real plans to defend Poland if necessary.

The country has lately gained a new role as a diplomatic heavyweight in Europe. The late President had many virtues, including an acute sense of history and scrupulous integrity.

But they were all too often overshadowed by his failings: obstinacy, pettiness and a sometimes startling lack of perspective. In the 2005-2007 period when Law and Justice, the main opposition party led by the President’s twin brother Jaroslaw, was in office, ill-chosen tactics, amateurishness and startlingly bad public relations risked making Poland a laughing stock.

Since then, Poland’s wily, soft-spoken Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and his heavyweight Oxford-educated Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski have brought about a diplomatic renaissance. Poland has defused tension with Germany, revived the Visegrad grouping of Central European former communist states, built a strong friendship with Sweden and managed a remarkable breakthrough with Russia, epitomised by Vladimir Putin’s attendance at a ceremony in Katyn on April 7, just three days before Mr Kaczynski’s own ill-starred visit there. Politics at home looks good too: whereas many other former communist countries flounder under weak minority governments, Mr Tusk’s coalition administration is smooth, effective — and popular.

The socially conservative, prickly, ethics-conscious and patriotic constituency that voted for Mr Kaczynski will not go away. But the politicians that represent it look increasingly outmanoeuvred. Mr Kaczynski was already facing an all but insuperable challenge from Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform party in the presidential elections in October. Now Law and Justice will struggle to find a strong candidate to run in his place. That will further streamline Polish politics by removing the embarrassing clashes with the presidency caused by constitutional confusion over who runs what in foreign policy.

The spotlight on Poland will burn increasingly brightly in the coming years. In 2011 Poland will hold the rotating six-month presidency of the EU, preceded by Hungary. The two countries are already planning hard to make that a success, and shift the centre of gravity in EU decision making away from the cosy West European cartel dominated by France and Germany. In 2012 Poland will host the European football championships jointly with Ukraine. Those old stereotypes about Polish backwardness, weakness, misery and failure have never looked more outdated.

Edward Lucas is central and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist

cee election roundup

2010-04-08T19:36:00.002Z

Election season in central Europe

Crossed words
Apr 8th 2010 | BUDAPEST AND WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

This year sees elections in many countries in central Europe. The results may not change all that much

IN A scruffy Budapest district, a postgraduate student from Cambridge is getting a bruising reception. Gabor Scheiring knocks on voters’ doors to say he is fed up with Hungarian politics and wants change. His party, a greenish outfit called Lehet Más a Politika (Politics Can be Better), is campaigning for cleaner, less partisan politics. His donnish manner and shabby car mark him out from the slippery, bombastic figures who dominate Hungarian politics. But Mr Scheiring is more likely to resume his studies in Britain than to win a parliamentary seat. “They say they hate all politicians,” he says glumly.

The two rounds of Hungary’s general election are likely to deliver a big victory for the centre-right, with a strong showing also for the far-right (see article). But a deeper trend across all central European countries facing elections this year is that voters may back politicians they know even if they dislike them, rather than risk new faces from outside. Crossness about misgovernment, economic hardship, corruption and poor public services is palpable. But the politicians who have run the region for most of the past 20 years remain firmly in charge.

In the Czech Republic the likely winner in the general election on May 28th is a former Social Democratic prime minister, Jiri Paroubek. He may end up in coalition with the country’s unrepentant Communist Party. In Slovakia the centre-left prime minister, Robert Fico, is likely to be re-elected. In Poland the presidential election in October will probably be won by the candidate from Civic Platform, the party that heads the centre-right government.

At the height of the financial crisis 18 months ago, the political fallout looked ominous. Higher unemployment, tax rises and lower living standards suggested that a social and political crisis might follow the economic one. Outsiders noted the shallow roots of democracy in much of central Europe and fretted about violent public protests, nakedly populist politicians and spreading political chaos.

Reality has proved reassuringly boring. One reason for this is the success of Poland. It is by far the biggest country in the region and also has the most stable politics, the strongest economy and the most active diplomacy. The prime minister and leader of Civic Platform, Donald Tusk, can boast of economic growth in 2009 of 1.7% and a government with strong approval ratings. He has just calmed a long row with Russia about the Soviet wartime massacre of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn by persuading his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to attend a joint ceremony.

Mr Tusk’s approach contrasts sharply with the more abrasive style of Civic Platform’s big political rival, Law and Justice. The incumbent Law and Justice president, Lech Kaczynski, faces re-election in October. But he and his twin brother Jaroslaw (who leads the party) have been outmanoeuvred by Mr Tusk. Civic Platform’s candidate, Bronislaw Komorowski, seems set to win the presidential election. An aristocratic figure with a distinguished record in the communist-era underground, Mr Komorowski easily defeated the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, in a primary election among Civic Platform members.

The main effect of the crisis has been on unemployment. In the European Union’s ten central European members it has risen from 6.5% at the height of the boom in 2008 to 9.5% this year. But by the standards of some southern European countries—Spain, for example (see article)—that is hardly apocalyptic. The central European economies shrank by an average of 3.6% in 2009, and the World Bank expects them to grow by a measly 1.6% this year. That is unpleasant but it is not disastrous—and the recovery in 2011 is likely to be stronger than in western Europe.

Economic policy is unlikely to change much anywhere after the election season is over, though Poland may find it easier to speed reforms if the president and prime minister can work in tandem. Scarred by memories of communism and distrust of government, central European voters (unlike some west Europeans) show little appetite for more statist policies. Middle-class voters are the most disillusioned by the failure of their elites to bring Western-style stability, prosperity and good government, says Ivan Krastev, a political scientist. But that discontent has yet to find an outlet. “Nowhere do you find a really interesting policy debate,” he says.

The biggest shifts are likely to be felt in more peripheral matters. A fraying sense of social solidarity may harden attitudes to minorities such as Roma (gypsies), notes Mr Krastev. The treatment of Roma is central Europe’s worst social problem, and it could easily turn a lot nastier. Foreign policy too offers some scope for change, potentially of a harmful kind. Many worry that Hungary’s Viktor Orban will squabble with such neighbours as Slovakia, where a large Hungarian ethnic minority feels increasingly alienated by Mr Fico’s own ethnocentric approach.

A growing rapprochement with Russia is also under way in most places. For all his firebrand rhetoric, Mr Orban seems to get on well with Mr Putin. Mr Fico is particularly chummy with Russia, as is the would-be Czech leader, Mr Paroubek. Mr Tusk has made a remarkable breakthrough over Katyn. In short: in diplomacy as well as politics, central Europe is looking increasingly like western Europe. If only living standards and the quality of life would catch up as well.

Defining what makes a country

2010-04-08T19:36:00.001Z

In quite a state
Apr 8th 2010
From The Economist print edition

How many countries in the world? The answer to that question is surprisingly difficult

APPLY online for visa-free entry to the United States and the Department for Homeland Security offers 251 choices for “country where you live”. The wide but rum selection includes Bouvet Island, an uninhabitable icy knoll belonging to Norway in the South Atlantic; South Yemen (which stopped being a state in 1990); and the “Neutral Zone”—a diamond-shaped bit of desert between Saudi Arabia and Iraq that vanished after the 1991 Gulf war.

That is the trouble with such lists. Places that are not real states at all end up on them. And places that approximate a bit more closely to countries (at least in their own eyes) may be absent. America’s list, for example, excludes Abkhazia and South Ossetia, self-proclaimed states that broke away from Georgia with Russian backing. Just three other countries—Nicaragua, Venezuela and the islet of Nauru—recognise those breakaway statelets as independent. Meanwhile nobody at all in the outside world seems ready—yet—to give southern Sudan a label of its own, though that day may not be far off.

Private-sector lists are just as odd as those compiled by governments. Hotmail offers 242 “countries/territories” from which you can register an e-mail account. Web-savvy penguins may be pleased that Bouvet Island is on the list. But human beings in Kosovo (recognised by 65 states) and Western Sahara (more than 80) will search in vain for their homeland.

Any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies. Diplomatic recognition is clearly not much guide to real life. In the early years of the cold war most countries recognised the Chinese regime in Taiwan (“Free China”) while the mainland communists (“Red China”) were isolated. Now the absurdity is the other way round. The number of countries with formal diplomatic ties to Taiwan has shrivelled to just 23—mostly small, cash-strapped islands. Yet Taiwan is not just a country, but a rather important one. Under mainland-pleasing names such as “Chinese Taipei” it is a member of the Asian Development Bank and the World Trade Organisation, and an observer at some OECD panels. It has nearly 100 “trade offices” around the world.

If diplomatic recognition is not the main thing that marks out a country, what does? Is it the ability to issue passports that are of some use to the holder, or simply actual control of a stretch of land? Again, the picture is cloudy. Legitimacy, physical control and the capacity to issue documents that other people accept don’t always coincide. For example, lots of countries that do not recognise Kosovo accept travellers bearing its passports. For decades, Lithuania’s exiled diplomats issued usable passports even though their country was under Soviet rule. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a do-gooding outfit with crusader roots, issues not only passports but postage stamps (and has diplomatic relations with over 100 countries). Its territory is just two nice buildings in Rome. Vatican City, an enclave of just 44 hectares in the middle of Italy’s capital, is only a little bigger—but it very much sees itself as a sovereign state (see article). Yet the Vatican’s diplomats serve the papacy—the Holy See—rather than the state where it is based. And the See, not the statelet, is an observer at the United Nations.

Not that presence or absence from the UN is much help to anyone seeking clarity. Israel joined the world body in 1949, but 19 of its 192 members do not accept the Jewish state’s existence, and many avoid uttering its name, preferring formulas like “Zionist entity”. A third of UN members do recognise Kosovo, but the UN itself does not.

Living in limbo

In reality, UN membership is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for functioning statehood. Being outside the UN means that Kosovo is still waiting for its own internet domain name, phone prefix and chance to play international football. But Taiwan, recognised by even fewer countries, manages to have all three.

The Turkish-backed administration in northern Cyprus proclaimed independence in 1983 but it has been recognised only by Turkey and remains in a state of partial economic isolation. Attempts have been made to start direct air links with Britain, but in 2009 a court ruled that this would contravene international law which gives the island’s internationally recognised government (which controls the Greek-speaking part of the island) sovereignty over its airspace.

A German thinker, Max Weber, defined statehood as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence”. That may be a practical approach but it doesn’t end the confusion. Chaotic Somalia spectacularly fails to meet this criterion, yet still counts as a sovereign state. Yet its northern bit, Somaliland, has met this standard with increasing impressiveness since it declared independence in 1991. It has a currency, car registrations and even biometric passports. But only private firms such as DHL, a courier company, link it to the outside world. International postal service requires membership of the Universal Postal Union, which for non-members of the UN need approval by at least two-thirds of that body’s members. The African Union refuses to recognise Somaliland’s independence because it dislikes changing any African borders. Outsiders hold back until African countries change their minds.

One reason for confusion is simple laziness. Deleting countries that have disappeared or places that have always been uninhabited should be easy (the Department of Homeland Security blames out-of-date historical data for its list and says it will change it soon). But sheer inertia, and a feeling among many sovereign states that changes of boundary and status set a bad precedent, makes changes less likely.

How far a populated patch of land qualifies as a country is ultimately a subjective question for politicians; it will never be settled by lawyers in a way that everybody accepts. And the fact that there are degrees of recognition—ranging from full diplomatic ties to virtually denying a state’s existence—gives governments a calibrated set of tools which can be used to reward good behaviour and penalise bad.

And whatever diplomatic theory says, life goes on. Taiwan is celebrating a friendly resolution from the European Parliament, and dishing out aid to Haiti. Kosovo rents dialling codes from Monaco and Slovenia. A football championship for teams from unrecognised countries is due to start next month in Malta. And a delegation of senior politicians from Somaliland had a friendly meeting at the White House on April 3rd. Presumably they had squared things with immigration control.

quick piece on Prague dinner

2010-04-08T19:34:00.001Z

America and eastern Europe
Guess who's coming to dinner?
Apr 8th 2010
From Economist.com

Barack Obama tries to fix damaged relations with eastern European allies

THE Obama administration’s closest European allies are oddly tricky to please. An invitation to the leaders of the 11 ex-communist members of NATO to dine with the president in Prague on April 8th was meant to repair a relationship both cherished and moaned about. Instead, indigestion was looming even before the meal was cooked.

It should have gone smoothly. The president is in Prague to sign a new nuclear disarmament agreement with Russia. Even the twitchiest ex-communist countries don’t mind that. The choice of Prague, the capital of a key American ally in the region, over a neutral location such as Geneva, was meant to signal America’s continued commitment to the region’s security. Mr Obama could have simply headed home after the ceremony, or travelled on to a meeting with one big ally. Instead, he chose to invite, admittedly at short notice, all of his ex-communist allies to talk.

The first sign of trouble was that the guest list looked odd. From the three Baltic states, the administration invited the presidents (Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, Valdis Zatlers of Latvia and Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania). But from most of the other eight countries, it was the prime ministers. Admittedly, lines of responsibility between heads of state and government can be blurred. But the rationale for including the mainly ceremonial Baltic presidents but snubbing the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, who has rather more clout, was mystifying.

While heads were being scratched, Ms Grybauskaite dropped a small bomb. She would not be going to Prague, she said. Her prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, would stand in for her. Explaining her decision, Ms Grybauskaite complained that the dinner would involve “no decision-making”, that it was organised by junior officials, that its outcome was unclear and that she would have only two minutes to talk one-on-one with Mr Obama. Coming from a country roughly one-hundredth America’s size, that showed a startling self-confidence, even by Lithuanian standards.

Next came a remark by a “senior US official” in the New York Times, that the president “will seek to impress upon regional leaders a new attitude toward Russia in which the outmoded fears of Russians hiding under the bed are a thing of the past”. That appeared to confirm the east Europeans’ darkest fears about America’s new cosiness with Russia. Senior officials dealing with the region in the White House and the State Department categorically denied that any such thinking lay behind the dinner.

Clumsiness in American presentation of policy in the region is nothing new. Some Poles are still fuming about the botched announcement of a change in American missile defence plans on September 17th last year. That date, the anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, matters there roughly as much as Pearl Harbour day does in America. The blunder followed a fretful public protest from leading figures in the region, such as Vaclav Havel, about weakening transatlantic ties.

But since then the administration has worked hard to improve things. It has pushed through NATO contingency plans for the Baltic states, the alliance’s most vulnerable members, bringing a spectacular German flip-flop on this previously taboo issue. The new missile defence scheme is bigger and better than the one it ditched. And now the president, on yet another visit to Europe, has invited everyone to dinner.

The lingering difficulties reflect the real problem in the US relationship with central Europe, which is in the ingredients, not the cooking. The days of instinctive Atlanticism in the region are over, as Ms Grybauskaite’s haughty stance, which would once have been inconceivable, demonstrates. The ex-communist allies’ contribution to solving most of America’s problems is marginal, at best. Europe itself is divided and lacks credibility in the eyes of busy Americans. Sorting that out needs hard thinking and a long slog, not just a nice dinner.

Katyn and Putin

2010-04-08T13:45:00.001Z

Europe.view nr 178

We regret the inconvenience
Apr 8th 2010
From Economist.com

Russia attempts to resolve disputes with its neighbours over Soviet-era crimes

AS THIS column noted recently, the era of “therapeutic historiography” is drawing to a close in central and eastern Europe (with the odd exception). The Russian authorities are also trying to clean up, at least in part, their country’s most toxic historical debris.

One remarkable sign is that state-run Russian television has just screened Andrzej Wajda’s extraordinary film “Katyn”, which epitomises both Soviet atrocity and the lies that followed. Accompanying Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, at a commemoration ceremony to mark the 1940 killings (see below), Vladimir Putin even publicly expressed qualified regret, if not quite an apology, for the massacre—a huge shift given the disgusting falsehoods pushed in official and semi-official media in recent years.

That is part of a pattern. In Budapest in 2006, at the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, Mr Putin said: “Certainly modern Russia is not the Soviet Union, but I must tell you frankly that in our hearts we feel a certain moral responsibility for these events.” On the same trip he went to the Czech Republic and said, of the 1968 Soviet invasion, “While of course there is no legal responsibility here…a moral responsibility exists. It could not be any other way.” In 2009 he told Poles that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was “inadmissible from the moral point of view and from the practical, political point of view…senseless, detrimental and dangerous.”

This is still a long way short of German-style Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). Russia has paid no compensation to the foreign victims of Stalinism (and little to its own citizens). Rows over looted property remain unresolved. (Estonia’s presidential seal is one of many such “souvenirs” illegally in Russian hands). Shamefully, many historical archives remain sealed.

But mild regret and an appeal to pragmatism are a step forward. Czechs, Hungarians and Poles have accepted compromises over history in order to have normal relations with Russia. Ukraine, under its new president, Viktor Yanukovich, may strike a similar deal; Mr Yanukovich will find it much

easier to find a common language with Mr Putin than did his predecessor, the divisive and discredited Viktor Yushchenko. On the other hand, Mr Yanukovych, often seen as “pro-Russian”, needs to be careful not to appear a soft touch.

That leaves the Baltic states, where the demand for justice about the past is still burning. Their forcible annexation into the Soviet Union in 1940 was one of the clearest and most outrageous consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

But the ground is shifting. Russia is flirting with Lithuania, where President Dalia Grybauskaitė is convinced that her personal touch can bring a breakthrough in relations. A deal looks possible: Russia could express “regret” (not “apology”) for the “incorporation” (not “occupation”) in 1940, and offer a favourable trade deal. In return Lithuania could drop demands for compensation. If Latvia followed suit, Estonia would be impossibly isolated. If Ukraine goes for “normalisation” too, that would be game, set and match to the Kremlin.

Smugness and evasion over history are widespread in Europe. Britain, to take one example, habitually wallows in a nostalgic and misleading version of its own past. But it is hard not to feel that an opportunity is being missed. The horrors of Soviet rule, and the memory of its victims, deserve more than a convenient political fix. The greatest victims of Stalinism were arguably Russians—in more ways than one. Brave Russians who still demand that their rulers face up to the awful past may feel let down if others settle for half-truths.

Oliver Bullough book review

2010-04-01T14:42:00.000Z

The Caucasus

Haunting history

Mar 31st 2010
From The Economist print edition

Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus. By Oliver Bullough. Allen Lane; 496 pages; £25. To be published in America by Basic Books in August.Buy from Amazon.co.uk

WESTERN colonialists have often behaved abominably but they usually repent of it later. Move east, though, and the picture becomes cloudier. Few now remember what happened to Circassia. As the Ottoman empire crumbled in the mid-19th century, Russia conquered the loosely held Turkish domains on the north-east coast of the Black Sea—and huge numbers of the anarchic, steely Circassian tribespeople died in what would today be termed a genocidal colonial war. Many more fled the killing grounds, crossing the Black Sea in leaky and overcrowded ships, many of them to die miserably in now-forgotten refugee camps on the Turkish coast. Around half the Circassian population of 2m perished.

Oliver Bullough’s first book marks him out as a distinguished researcher, observer and narrator. The opening chapters deal with a part of history wholly neglected in Russia. It is as if Americans had never heard of the Sioux, and Wounded Knee had become a tourist resort where the events of 1890 had faded from memory.

That is pretty much how surviving Circassians now see the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which 150 years ago was the site of their final and greatest defeat and massacre. Mr Bullough tracks down their remnants, determined and despairing by turns, in Russia and in exile. His quest takes him from dirt-poor villages in Kosovo to influential bits of Jordanian officialdom. He paints a haunting portrait of a people blown to the winds by a forgotten storm.

His research is formidable. He unearths long-buried contemporary accounts of the killings, and desperate pleas for help buried in old files in the British Foreign Office. He matches this with accounts of the contemporary diasporas, often both nostalgic for what they have lost and disgusted by what they find when they return.

The Caucasus will be blamed

If the tsarist conquest of the northern Caucasus was savage, what followed under communism was worse, including the Stalin-era deportations of whole nations to the steppes of Central Asia. A particularly harrowing account is of a wartime massacre in the Cherek valley in Balkaria (a Turkic-speaking district next door to the former Circassia). Like the murder of Polish officers at Katyn, this was carried out by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD—but then cynically blamed on the Germans. But whereas Poles have doggedly defended their history against falsifiers, the Circassians have been all but voiceless. One of Mr Bullough’s most powerful points is how little about the Circassians can be found even in works by specialist historians of the region.

The heirs to this history visit cruel, random destruction in terrorist attacks, bringing botched responses by the authorities. Mr Bullough unpicks the seizure, by terrorists claiming to be Chechen fighters, of the Beslan school in North Ossetia, a neighbouring republic in Russia’s Caucasus, in 2004. And he investigates the background of the women who have become suicide-bombers to avenge their husbands, sons and brothers—a tactic which, early indications suggest, was repeated in two attacks on the Moscow metro this week.

Russian and then Soviet rule brought literacy, electricity and roads to the region, and uprooted feudalism. But by Mr Bullough’s account, it would be a travesty to call that a civilising mission. It has come with a shocking mixture of brutality, incompetence and corruption, entrenching criminality on all sides.

Moldova

2010-04-01T14:41:00.000Z

Poor Moldova

Chisinau's charm offensive

Mar 31st 2010
From The Economist print edition

Europe’s poorest country looks for friends in the West

FEW people have heard of Moldova—and when they have, it is usually for the wrong reasons. A frozen conflict with Russian-backed separatists in Transdniestria has hamstrung the country since 1992. A year ago a rigged election brought riots, followed by hundreds of arrests, scores of alleged beatings and rapes, and three deaths. The outrage led to a new election and the formation of a shaky pro-Western coalition government. Its youthful ministers are in sharp contrast to the greyness of the previous regime, nominally a Communist one but in fact crony-capitalist.

The new lot have thawed relations with Romania and launched a charm offensive in the West. A donor conference recently pledged €1.9 billion ($2.6 billion), half in grants and the rest in soft loans. China has dangled a $1 billion loan for infrastructure. The IMF has approved the government’s economic policies: after an 8.5% drop in 2009, GDP is likely to grow by 1.5% this year. Yet Moldova will still be Europe’s poorest country. Hundreds of thousands of Moldovans work abroad, mostly illegally. Their remittances keep Moldova afloat.

Outsiders see more changes at the top than Moldovans themselves feel in practice. Reining in the budget deficit, over 8% of GDP in 2009, will mean rises in heating costs and cuts in a bloated public sector. Wrangles in the deadlocked parliament over the election of a new president waste time. Failure, says the constitution, would mean another general election that few want.

More important to voters is travel to the rest of Europe. This has got harder since Romania joined the European Union in 2007. The Romanians promise a special regime for Moldovans living within 30km (about 19 miles) of the border. But they also want to join the Schengen passport-free zone next year, which would create still more expense and hassle for Moldovans. The goal of visa-free travel to the EU is a long way off.

Changing Western minds means enacting reforms, not just talking about them. Officials speak excitedly of Estonia and Georgia as models. One sign of intent might be to liberalise aviation rules, allowing budget airlines to fly to Chisinau. That would be popular with passengers but bad news for the protected national airline, Air Moldova.

The biggest change has been in media freedom, tightly restricted under the previous government. Two new television stations have started broadcasting. Romanian television will return soon. But big reforms in the corrupt, Soviet-style bureaucracy must wait, as it seems must the rule of law. Investigations into official misbehaviour during last year’s riots have brought some sackings and suspensions, but no deep-seated changes—or even a truthful account of what really happened.

Europe View 188

2010-04-01T14:40:00.000Z

Europe.view

You say Lwów, I say Lviv

Apr 1st 2010
From Economist.com

A guide to Eastern Europe's most tedious arguments

LAST week’s column dealt with the arcane name squabble between Macedonia (aka FYROM) and Greece. This piece was soon the most-commented on the Economist’s website. That was no thanks to the brilliance of the prose and the lucidity of argument. The subject was one of those issues that attracts bigots, scaremongers and polemicists, with a vanishingly tangential relationship to truth, logic and courtesy.

The article described the row as “the most tedious dispute in the Balkans”. The ex-communist region sets a high standard in such matters, so the epithet is not to be bestowed lightly. Here is an outsider’s guide to a few of the other rows. All the arguments below are a) historically plausible and b) strike most outsiders as quite mad.

Are you calling me a Tatar?

Moldova/Romania A sizeable number of Romanians believe that what is today called the Republic of Moldova is nothing more than a lost province of real Romania, snatched by Stalin out of spite (along with northern Bukovina, which went to Ukraine). The sooner this “pretend Moldova” rejoins Romania the better. Handing out passports to as many Moldovans as possible brings this nearer.

Bulgaria/Macedonia From a certain Bulgarian-nationalist viewpoint, the idea of a discrete Macedonian ethnicity or language is a nonsense—rather like defining “Texan” as an ethnicity in America. Yugoslav Macedonia was a historical accident, and the sooner the detritus joins Bulgaria the better. After that, it will be time to liberate the brother-Slavs of northern Greece.

Slovakia/Hungary According to hardline Slovak nationalists, the whole idea of a Hungarian ethnic minority in the country is absurd. These people (many of whom are Gypsies anyway) should shut up and get on with being Slovaks: ie, speaking Slovak and thinking like Slovaks. Any other behaviour is a sign that they are still imprisoned by their imperial mindset. If they don’t like living in Slovakia, they should go back to Hungary (where, incidentally, the Slovak-speaking minority has dwindled to nothing—proving that it is the Magyars who are the real ethno-nationalists).

Lithuania/Poland Not many people realise this, but most of the people speaking Polish and Belarussian in the area in and around Vilnius are not really Slavs but polonised Lithuanians, the legacy of centuries of forced assimilation. That is a terrible fate, so the right (and kindest) thing to do is to depolonise these people and relithuanianise them. A good way to start is to make sure that they do not get trapped into using foreign Polish letters and silly spellings when writing their names. It is Adomas Mickevicius, not Adam Mickiewicz. Let nobody forget it.

Ukraine/Poland Anyone who spells the capital of Galicia as Lwów is a Polish nationalist who bayonets Ukranian babies for fun. Anyone who says it is spelled Lviv is a Ukrainian fascist who bayonets Polish babies for fun. Anyone who spells it Lvov is a Soviet mass murderer. And anyone who calls it Lemberg is a Nazi. See you in Leopolis for further discussion.

Among the runners-up: “Tatar” is a derogatory and invented name for the inhabitants of modern Tatarstan, who are in fact the descendants of Volga Bulgars. Kievan Rus was not Russian. Any talk of a Ruthenian nation is ill-informed, stupid, possibly mad and the product of Muscovite attempts to split and destroy Ukraine.

Outside pressure has mostly calmed these arguments within formal politics. But on the internet the rows still rage, with tortured facts, arguments and syntax, all mixed with vituperative insults, phoney politeness and seemingly RANDOM Use Of Capital letters. There is a whiff of pyjamas-at-noon, and of people who check their emails in the small hours. Time to get a life?

Europe view 177

2010-04-01T14:38:00.001Z

Europe.view

You say Lwów, I say Lviv

Apr 1st 2010
From Economist.com

A guide to Eastern Europe's most tedious arguments

Are you calling me a Tatar?

Lithuania and the CIA

2010-04-01T14:11:00.003Z

I have written another piece on the scandal, this time with my CEPA think-tank hat on.

It is called Lithuania: Hung Out to Dry?

Another fun map

2010-04-01T14:10:00.001Z

Europe according to Hungarians (does anyone have these for other countries? Lithuania? Russia? Ukraine? Romania? It would be fun to collect as many of these as possible)

Europe according to the Poles

2010-03-29T09:45:00.003Z

Type your summary here

Type rest of the post here

Amazingly funny Swedish (!) viral video

2010-03-28T22:03:00.001Z

You can go to http://en.tackfilm.se/ and make a film featuring anyone you like as a "hero". Just for the sake of example I've done it here for Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the Estonian president (who is Swedish born). It is amusing and addictive and I strongly recommend it.

prenups

2010-03-25T21:45:00.001Z

Another piece from my legal-affairs beat
Prenuptial agreements

For poorer
Mar 25th 2010
From The Economist print edition

English courts used to ignore prenuptial agreements. Not any more

LONDON is the divorce capital of the world, for two reasons. It is home to many foreigners, often themselves in cross-border marriages. And it has a divorce law that—at least until now—sharply favours the poorer partner in a marriage (usually the woman). That can mean nasty surprises, particularly for rich foreign men whose wives issue divorce proceedings in London. English courts often choose to overrule clauses in prenuptial agreements, especially foreign ones, if they look unfair.

But a case now being heard by the Supreme Court in London is likely to give such agreements more clout. It concerns a German heiress, Katrin Radmacher. She used to be married to Nicolas Granatino, a Frenchman who dumped a lucrative career as a banker to become a humble Oxford don. When they married, he signed a prenuptial agreement (common in wealthy German families) agreeing that in the event of a divorce, he would get nothing from her.

But after the couple divorced in 2007, an English court awarded him a settlement of £5.9m ($8.9m). Citing the agreement, Ms Radmacher challenged that, and the Court of Appeal reduced it to £1m. In what will be a landmark ruling on English family law, Mr Granatino is now challenging this in the country’s highest court. He argues that he did not know how rich Ms Radmacher really was (her fortune is over £54m and she stands to inherit a lot more) and that he did not have proper legal advice before signing the agreement.

Lawyers around the world are watching with interest—especially, notes James Stewart of Manches, a law firm, if they are involved in helping rich people manage their money. Such clients pay great attention to their tax and investment affairs, he points out, but they often neglect the “matrimonial” issues raised by residency in London. Rich Russians are particularly vulnerable to this: the usual “marital agreements” (in effect, prenuptials) that they conclude at home may carry little or no weight in London.

The Supreme Court’s judgment is expected in a few months, probably around the time that the Law Commission, a body that tidies up the statute book, comes out with its own proposals for change. Both Labour and the Conservative Party have said they want to reform divorce law too.

Few doubt that prenuptial agreements are going to gain in importance. The question is how much. One issue is the level of independent legal advice. Kerstin Beyer, a dual-qualified German divorce lawyer practising in London, says that in Germany it is enough

for a notary to draft the agreement on behalf of both parties. An English court (and most American ones) would expect each side to have its own lawyer. Another question is disclosure: did each side truly know the other’s financial position?

A third—and probably the biggest—question is fairness. Courts in England and Wales see marriage as an institution, not a contract. They tend to look at needs first, and then equity. So a rich man may have to cough up lots of money (including from assets acquired before the marriage, or inherited) to house and support a wife, especially if she is looking after the children. English courts may also reckon that wifely efforts in childcare or home-making have stoked a husband’s earning power, and give her a lifetime slice of it. A prenuptial agreement that disregards any of these three considerations is likely to count for less, or even nothing.

Most other European jurisdictions (and Scotland) take a flintier view: maintenance payments are scanty; only assets accumulated during the marriage are up for grabs. And prenuptial agreements are rigorously enforced. Most American states offer more generous terms for wives, but also enforce prenuptial agreements. A contract is a contract, says Marjory Fields, a former New York judge now practising as an international divorce lawyer. But American courts also have a high standard of fairness: she judged a case in which the groom made his bride sign the prenuptial on the way to the marriage ceremony; that invalidated it.

Though the European Commission launched an effort on March 24th to harmonise divorce law among ten like-minded countries (and it hopes other EU states will come on board), many international initiatives have become bogged down amid cultural and legal differences. Many lawyers doubt, for example, whether it is possible to produce a prenuptial agreement that would be globally recognised, let alone enforceable. And in many countries the whole idea of planning in advance for the failure of a marriage seems unromantic—or repellent. Yet in rich countries, the incidence is growing—not least because of grandparents, now often a family’s richest members, who wish to ring-fence property in favour of grandchildren, keeping it away from grasping in-laws.

Increased use of prenuptial agreements sounds as though it means yet more lucrative work for lawyers. Yet just as divorce law in most countries now strongly encourages mediation rather than courtroom battles, new forms of collaborative drafting aim to take the sting out of premarital negotiations. It will still cost something—but, as Ms Fields notes: “If you need one, you can afford one.”

Libel

2010-03-25T21:43:00.001Z

(my other job is legal-affairs correspondent)

Libel-law reform
Fairer but still costly
Reform of England’s tough libel law is moving up the agenda

Mar 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHETHER or not lie detectors work sounds like a good subject for open and honest discussion. Unless English libel courts get in the way, that is. Francisco Lacerda, a Swedish professor of phonetics, believes that the science of analysing voices for signs of stress—and therefore deceit—is flawed. He published an article called “Charlatanry in Forensic Speech Science” in an academic journal. The publisher was then threatened with a libel action by an Israeli company that made devices that Mr Lacerda criticised.

The case (which has not come to court) is the latest to be cited by a coalition demanding changes in English libel law. Others include

that of a British cardiologist, Peter Wilmshurst, who criticised the safety of an American-made medical device at an American conference—but is being sued, personally, in England. The law, critics say, unfairly protects reputation at the cost of the public interest. That hurts journalists, and scientists and anti-corruption campaigners. They also worry about “libel tourism”: foreigners fighting cases in English courts that would be unsuccessful elsewhere.

On March 24th the justice secretary, Jack Straw, said Labour would introduce a bill reforming libel law after the election. It would create a statutory “public interest” defence and restrict libel tourism. Campaigners welcomed the promise, which is a defeat for some senior judges who have argued that nothing much is amiss. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats also support reform.

A report issued on March 23rd, by a working group at the justice ministry, calls for changes too. But it also explains how hard it will be make them work. It is not true that the law in England currently allows no defence based on responsible journalism in the public interest. Thanks to some landmark judgments in recent years, that already (to some extent) exists. And courts have shown themselves willing to rule against claims by foreigners when no significant publication took place in England.

But winning such victories may be prohibitively costly. England’s adversarial system of justice expects both sides to be represented; it does not encourage judges to be inquisitorial, as in continental Europe. Cutting costs would reduce the problem for small, poor news organisations that are being sued by tycoons (a notable example involves a Ukrainian website). But for scientists who are just trying to do their job a robust public-interest defence matters even more.

Lebedev

2010-03-25T21:38:00.002Z

The sale of the Independent

Bought for a song
Mar 25th 2010
From The Economist print edition

A Russian tycoon buys an ailing British newspaper

ALEXANDER LEBEDEV was a rising star in the KGB in the dying days of the cold war. All he will say now about his time in the Soviet spy service’s London station is that he used to “read the newspapers”. Now, as a successful Russian tycoon, he owns several. Last year he bought the London Evening Standard, for a pound (twice its then cover price). On March 25th he bought the Independent, a national daily, and its Sunday stablemate from a company owned by Tony O’Reilly, an Irish businessman. Mr Lebedev paid a mere £1 ($1.49) for the titles.

The papers’ fortunes have fallen since he first read them. Launched in 1986, the Independent gained hugely from the collapse in newspaper costs that followed Rupert Murdoch’s defeat of the print unions. It pioneered the used of big photographs, and prided itself on extensive foreign coverage and on its independent political stance: its advertising slogan was “It is. Are you?”

But the recession, plus what looks like a structural shift in newspaper economics, has hit all British newpapers badly, the upmarket ones worst, and the Independent titles the hardest of all. People are buying and reading fewer copies. Advertisers are looking elsewhere. Internet revenues are not filling the gap. As losses mount, editorial budgets are shrivelling. That matters most for papers dependent on costly real news rather than cheap gossip. Without Mr Lebedev, the future of the

daily and Sunday Independent seemed bleak indeed.

Now it looks a bit brighter. Mr Lebedev appears willing to meet the Evening Standard’s losses from his own deep pockets (his fortune is estimated at around $3 billion). His decision to distribute it free of charge has raised circulation—though probably not enough to make up for the lost sales. He has not interfered in its journalism. The paper made an unusual public apology for what it termed an excessively negative editorial stance. The new approach is breezier.

Mr Lebedev’s motivation is hotly discussed. The authorities seem sanguine about his move into national media, though in the shadowier corners of Whitehall, some old hawks see at least a risk of mischief from any ex-KGB man with influence. But Mr Lebedev’s relationship with Russia is unclear: he has big investments there, but also part-owns Novaya Gazeta, a paper that is highly critical of the authorities. The British papers may be partly a status symbol, partly an insurance policy and partly simply an enjoyable toy. Compared to the costs of a football club, even their losses don’t look very expensive.

The most boring issue in the world

2010-03-25T21:37:00.000Z

Europe.view

What's in a name?
Mar 25th 2010
From Economist.com

It is time for the most tedious dispute in the Balkans to be settled
IN THE headlines about Europe’s economic woes, one country stands out. Its public finances are a disaster. It has systematically fiddled its statistics. Its overpaid, underworked public-sector employees are a laughing stock across Europe. Rigid labour and product markets, and membership of the euro, have imprisoned it in an economic-policy straitjacket. It urgently needs a big bail-out. Call it the “Country That Needs Help” (CTNH).

Its next-door neighbour in south-eastern Europe is the “Country That Can’t Be Named” (CTCBN). The name it would like to have annoys CTNH, which regards it as an implicit territorial claim on its northern province with the same name. So the country is often called by a cumbersome five-letter acronym.

What a FYROre

The dispute has consumed an enormous amount of diplomatic time and energy over the past 15 years. It has prevented CTCBN, a small, poor country, from joining NATO, and has blocked the start of talks over its membership of the European Union. The details of the dispute are so mind-bogglingly silly that they make the Polish-Lithuanian row over spelling seem serious. it is difficult to know what sort of adjective or other qualifier, in what language or languages, with or without a hyphen, in what documents and in what contexts, would be enough to satisfy CTCBN's feeling of identity without prompting paranoia in CTNH.

Neither side is blameless. Politicians in CTCBN have provoked their southern neighbour. The controversial renaming of an airport and the erection of a prominent statue of a historical figure claimed by both sides are the main charges (no kidding: this is Europe in 2010 and people are getting seriously cross about statues). For its part, CTNH has been ridiculously obdurate: having said it would not let the name issue stop CTCBN’s integration into Euroatlantic organisations, it has

done exactly that.

Delay means playing with fire: CTCBN is divided ethnically and has weak national institutions. One of the things that keeps the country together is the prospect of integration into international organisations, chiefly the EU and NATO. CTCBN’s minority Albanian population has no dog in the fight. But if the name dispute goes on long enough, they may lose faith in CTCBN’s future as a country. Violence is not likely, but is certainly possible. If it does break out, CTNH’s foot-dragging will be largely to blame.

So a lot rests on the meeting of the two countries’ prime ministers at an EU summit on March 25th. Matthew Nimetz, the American diplomat charged by the United Nations with mediating the issue, sees some signs of hope. (He deserves a Nobel prize for patience, if nothing else).

What is missing is more muscular outside intervention. America thought of getting serious before the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit, but failed to push CTNH hard enough. Being realistic, even with health-care reform successfully passed, it is unlikely that the White House is now buzzing with excited talk about this arcane dispute as its next big priority.

The EU is a more hopeful source of help. It is good at solving problems by being boring. Faced with the prospect of a near-death experience in a meeting room in Brussels, people often discover new possibilities for compromise. But the EU doesn’t want to get involved.

That’s a pity. Without getting into crude arm-twisting, it should be possible to suggest to CTNH that talks about the bailout might go faster if the government showed a bit more flexibility. Sighs of relief would echo round the world. And the indefatigable internet propagandists insisting on either unadorned Macedonia or Greece-sanctioned FYROM would have to find something else to do.

Marvellous if true

2010-03-24T17:09:00.000Z

According to Vedomosti, last year Russians bought 500,000 baseball bats and TWO balls.
http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/2010/03/24/228992

(Hat-tip Mikhail Korchemkin for pointing this out)

Hilarious anti-Estonian propaganda

2010-03-20T23:46:00.001Z

Estonia is (Pravda reports so it must be true) launching a new campaign for the assimilation of the Russian-speaking population. The Russians residing in Estonia will be pushed towards changing their Russian surnames to Estonian surnames. The administration of the Baltic nation decided to use such a measure to conceal its absolute inability to struggle against the financial crisis, which had put the three Baltic states on the edge of the economic collapse.

Utterly Alone

2010-03-20T23:45:00.001Z

Just watched this interesting film "Vienui Vieni" in Lithuanian. Shot in black-and-white in 2003, it has (perhaps unconscious) echoes of Soviet propaganda films but with the plot the other way round. Very moving. Amazing that the widow of Lithuania's most famous partisan, Juozas Lukša-Daumantas, is still alive.

20 years ago..

2010-03-19T10:02:00.001Z

The Economist carried a marvellous cover story called "The Bullies of Vilnius"

(not by me)

You can read it here

Catholic Church and sex abuse (leader article)

2010-03-18T17:32:00.001Z

The Catholic church and paedophilia

Crimes and sins
Mar 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition

The pope should say plainly and loudly that sexual abuse of children is not just sinful. It is criminal

IT COULD hardly get worse. Sex scandals are breaking over the Catholic church with such fury (see article) that the Vatican has felt bound to defend Pope Benedict XVI himself. Children at some Catholic schools in Germany have been systematically abused; paedophiles were transferred to other jobs, rather than dismissed or prosecuted. Abuse has surfaced in Austria and the Netherlands. In Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady, the primate, has admitted that he was present in 1975 when two teenage boys were persuaded to sign oaths of silence about their abuse by Father Brendan Smyth. The church defrocked Smyth, but nobody, including Cardinal Brady, told the police about his crimes and he remained free to abuse boys for two decades.

Yet denial still reigns. Bishop Christopher Jones, head of the Irish episcopate’s committee on family affairs, has complained that the church is being singled out, when most abuse happens inside families and other organisations. “Why this huge isolation of the church and this huge focus on cover-up in the church when it has been going on for centuries?” he asked.

He is right that other secretive outfits (orphanages in authoritarian countries, say) are home to shameful abuse, but that misses the point. No church can expect to be judged merely against the most depraved parts of the secular world. If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards. Hence, for Catholics and outsiders alike, the church hierarchy’s inability to deal with the issue is baffling. The church now has exemplary child-protection rules—so strict, in fact, that they sometimes stifle healthily affectionate behaviour. It is the scandals from the past that are so toxic.

Applying modern standards to conduct long ago is tricky. The hierarchy in the past often saw paedophilia not as a crime with victims but as a sin that endangered the perpetrator’s soul: along the lines of alcoholism, or pilfering church funds. A priest who “erred” deserved a rebuke, pastoral attention (perhaps) and a fresh start. The dreadful damage done to the victims of the abuse was not appreciated, or was ignored.

A second delusion—still lingering in some church circles—was the conflation of paedophilia and homosexuality. A sexual relationship between a priest and a teenage boy was regarded as wrong, just as a liaison between two priests would be. But it did not count as a revolting abuse of trust.

Some add celibacy to the charge list. Those cut off from family life may not appreciate the horror parents feel about abuse. In a sex-obsessed age abstinence sounds unnatural and thus a cause of sexual deviancy. Yet a moment’s reflection shows how unfair that is. The childless care about children too. Parents are some of the worst child-abusers. And nobody has shown a statistical link between celibacy and paedophilia.

As in so many scandals, the cover-up compounds the original sin. The guilty secrets of the past must be flushed out. And bishops must admit their part in them. It is odd that an institution founded on honesty and penitence should struggle so. Today’s Catholic leaders might also recall that clerical abuses of power, defended by legalistic quibbling, greatly angered an itinerant preacher in Palestine two millennia ago.

CEE economics--"leader" article

2010-03-18T17:28:00.001Z

Eastern Europe's economies

What went right
Mar 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition

If Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece want a lesson in how to take hard decisions, they should look eastward

IN THE depths of the financial crisis a year ago, it was easy to see how the woes of the ex-communist economies could cause huge problems for the rest of Europe. Western banks had lent recklessly in foreign currency to firms and households stricken by the downturn. If they all fled for the exit at once, dumping assets and stopping lending, the result would be carnage both at home and abroad. Also scary was the prospect of a currency crisis. If Latvia were forced off its peg with the euro, its Baltic neighbours might topple too. A combination of weak governments and angry voters looked ominous enough for some commentators, including this newspaper, to fret that the bill for bailing out new members from the east could be big enough to threaten the European Union.

In the event, the ex-communist economies have so far ridden out the storm (see article). Ex-communist Europe still has to grapple with its share of problems: an ageing workforce, bossy officials and poor infrastructure. But nobody has defaulted and nobody has rioted. Something went right—and it holds lessons for troubled countries in western Europe.

As easy as jeden, dwa, trzy

One reason for the ex-communist countries’ relative fortune is that they are not a homogenous block all of which is suffering in the same way. Few other countries had the huge debts that made Hungary so wobbly, or the gaping current-account deficit that made Latvia so vulnerable. Slovenia and Slovakia were shielded from currency speculators by being in the euro area. Poland, by far the biggest of the new EU countries, is in a category of its own: thanks to good government and good luck, it was the only European economy to boast economic growth in 2009. In short, Poland, Estonia and Bulgaria are as different in their way as are France, Finland and Greece.

International organisations also deserve some praise. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development helped stabilise the region’s banks, bringing foreign lenders together to ensure an orderly deleveraging instead of a rout. Both the European Commission and the European Central Bank realised that problems beyond the euro area could create headaches inside it. Their cheap loans helped foreign creditors and countries alike. And the IMF showed itself to be a collegial and flexible organisation, not the aloof, rigid outfit that EU leaders have foolishly rejected as a source of help for Greece and other troubled members of the euro.

Yet the greatest credit should go to the resilience and level-headedness of the region’s own politicians and citizens. Seemingly weak minority governments in places like Hungary and Latvia proved capable of making enormous fiscal adjustments. The east European economies, for all their faults, have shown more flexibility in both labour markets and in what they produce than have many older EU members. Moreover, the cuts in spending and increases in taxes and the retirement age that some ex-communist countries have imposed over the past year were much more savage than anything that Greece or Spain have so far contemplated.

That is salutary for the many countries that have yet to change public expectations enough to make big, painful structural changes more acceptable. Greece and the other Mediterranean countries in the euro area—Spain, Portugal and even Italy—nowadays seem to be sicker than ex-communist Europe. They should look east for a cure.

CEE economics

2010-03-18T17:26:00.002Z

East European economies

Fingered by fate
Mar 18th 2010 | BUDAPEST AND RIGA
From The Economist print edition

A region that a year ago looked as bad as Greece does now has averted catastrophe—but is not yet completely safe

see chart here

BELIEVE the headlines and Europe’s worst economic headache by far is Greece, financially feckless and socially volatile. Uncontained, its problems could infect other Mediterranean countries like Spain, Portugal and even Italy. The euro’s future and the European Union’s credibility are at risk. And so on.

This week EU finance ministers talked of the possibility of bilateral loans to rescue Greece, as a reward for the government’s new fiscal austerity—though details were conspicuously lacking. But history shows how fast the tide of worries can ebb. Twelve months ago, it was ex-communist countries—Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine and others—that were seen as the biggest problems. Banking and currency collapses loomed, stoking dreadful risks for the region and beyond. A year on, their problems seem humdrum, not horrific.

The fears were partly overblown. The idea of a single “ex-communist region” called eastern Europe does not bear scrutiny. What does prosperous Slovenia, which is richer than Portugal, have in common with Moldova, Europe’s poorest country? Countries like Hungary had big, over-leveraged financial systems, plagued by reckless lending and spendthrift consumers. But in the Czech Republic, the banks were solid and habits thrifty. Poland’s economy, the largest in the region, was so untroubled by the catastrophe that its GDP grew in 2009, helping all its trade partners.

A good example of outsiders’ wrong views was the market in credit-default swaps on Estonian debt. This was a chance to trade bets on, in effect, the death of a non-existent horse, as Estonia has no publicly traded government debt. Wrong numbers deepened the gloom. In particular, a misreading of some data from the Bank for International Settlements overstated the level of foreign banks’ exposure.

But ignorance only partly explains the jumpiness. Another element may have been self-interest. Officials mutter darkly that some bankers first shorted currencies and bank shares, and then published research notes forecasting default or devaluation. Others believe that west Europeans were eager to shift the blame for the recession, first to Wall Street and then to their wild and woolly east. Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s finance minister, says he was “surprised” by the “hysteria”. He blames “a deep psychological need to identify the source of crisis as ‘them’ not ‘us’.”

There is a striking contrast between riots in Greece and the grim patience of ex-communist voters, whose living standards have plunged amid soaring unemployment. The “institutional fragility” that some west European politicians worried about may be a genuine problem—but in the euro area, not in eastern Europe.

Over the past year politicians in the east facing the worst outlook mostly took commendably tough decisions (Ukraine, paralysed by political in-fighting, was the exception: it has stayed afloat thanks only to the generosity of outsiders). The spectre of populism proved a mirage. Seemingly weak coalition governments were actually rather good at pushing through reforms. In the worst-hit countries, Latvia and Hungary, the governments’ popularity even rose when the pain bit (though on March 17th Latvia’s coalition government lost its majority when a big party pulled out).

For their part, outsiders showed patience and ingenuity. A big but little-known effort was the “Vienna initiative”, brokered by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In late 2008 its chief economist, Erik Berglof, spotted the danger of policy based solely on national interest. The Austrian government had just said it would support the troubled Erste Bank, but only if the money went to loans inside Austria. That approach risked a rampage out of eastern Europe by overexposed foreign banks that had lent unwisely (and often in foreign currency) during the bubble years.

This was a classic collective-action problem: each bank’s individual interest was to reduce exposure by calling in loans and dumping assets, but if all acted similarly, everybody would suffer. The international response has worked well. The European Central Bank’s provision of liquidity to foreign banks encouraged them to keep financing subsidiaries outside the euro area. The IMF and other lenders helped host countries to stay afloat—and to provide liquidity to banks, regardless of ownership. Regulators helped the banks by relaxing capital requirements.

No foreign-owned bank has pulled out of the region. In total 17 systemically important local banks went bust (mostly in Russia, Ukraine and the like). But inside the EU, just one, Parex in Latvia, had to be rescued by the government and the EBRD. That is a lot fewer than many were expecting—and it is a far better result than in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.

Other efforts by outsiders helped too. “Cash for clunkers” car-scrappage schemes boosted countries, such as Slovakia, with big car industries. The inflow of EU money for modernisation of infrastructure softened the effects of the fiscal squeeze in countries that had to sort out their public finances in a hurry. Those countries that could depreciate their currencies did so, keeping monetary policy loose. Those with currency pegs—the Baltic three and Bulgaria—have started on an “internal devaluation”, thanks to their flexible labour and product markets.

Sustainability remains a big problem. The overhang of private-sector debt in the region risks damping growth for years to come. Sharing out the burden of adjustment among lenders, borrowers and taxpayers in an orderly restructuring is a job that has barely started. As Capital Economics, a consultancy, notes, the banks remain fragile, a new fiscal squeeze looms and export growth is likely to stay sluggish. Through luck, judgment and friendly help, eastern Europe has staved off disaster. But to catch up on what the region missed when it was behind the Iron Curtain remains a mighty task.

Lithuanian diary

2010-03-18T17:19:00.002Z

Here is a short (three-day) diary from last week's trip to Lithuania

Lithuania

Back on the map
Mar 16th 2010
From Economist.com

How an invisible country rocked the world

Day one

EARTHQUAKES are a horrible way of changing the physical landscape—but geopolitical ones can have marvellous results. Lithuania has just celebrated the 20th anniversary of its declaration of renewed independence, when late in the evening of March 11th 1990, deputies of the “Supreme Soviet” of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic voted unanimously to dump the symbols of Soviet rule and to restore their country’s independence.

It seemed a hopeless gesture at the time. But the seismic shocks shattered the Soviet Union, bringing freedom, or at least the chance of it, to 15 new countries. It put Lithuania—literally—back on the world map, from which it had been wiped by its forcible annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.

A poignant exhibition in the parliament building shows the mass murder, deportations, collectivisation, forced atheism and unrelenting propaganda inflicted on Lithuania under Soviet rule. It also shows the determination to resist. Particular moving are the souvenirs created by Lithuanians in the Gulag, bearing national symbols and the red-green-yellow colours of the national flag. Possession of that flag, or let alone humming the old national anthem, was a criminal offence.

Yet that flag, along with those of Latvia and Estonia, was visible in in the lobby of the American State Department throughout the period of Soviet occupation. (America, like almost all western countries, never formally recognised the Baltic states’ incorporation in the Soviet Union). Thanks to that non-recognition policy, a dwindling handful of elderly diplomats in moribund embassies, chiefly in Washington, DC, the Vatican and Britain, retained their diplomatic status, living and working in a kind of limbo which all too easily seemed futile. One of their few real jobs was issuing passports, carried with pride by Lithuanian emigres, though seldom used in practice.

As the Soviet Union crumbled, old Lithuania stirred: neither gone, nor forgotten, just buried. Huge demonstrations began to challenge the Soviet occupiers. Political prisoners returned from Siberia. Independent media emerged, and began overturning the systematic lies and propaganda of the past. In late 1989 the Communist Party turned against its masters in Moscow and then split. In elections to the Supreme Soviet, the candidates endorsed by the pro-independence “Sajudis” movement (pictured in 1990, above) swept the board. On March 11th, barely 24 hours after they first convened, the new members restored the pre-war coat of arms, ripping down the hammer and sickle from the building’s entrance. Then—to the amazement of the outside world—they declared the pre-war republic re-established with immediate effect.

Had it all gone wrong, those men and women would have been the first to suffer. Some of them had been born in Siberia, the children of parents deported there for no other reason than that they had been officials in the prewar republic. But bravery aside, what the gesture meant in practice was unclear. Lithuania had no money, no state institutions, no experience, no means of defending itself. The KGB was still a threatening presence, housed, appropriately, in the building that had once been the Gestapo headquarters. The Lithuanian authorities’ power was dependent on the Soviet military staying in their barracks. Initially, only a few hunting rifles and sandbags defended the parliament. Lithuania’s borders were still under Soviet command. Anyone wanting to cross them needed a Soviet visa. There was one exception. On March 28th, your correspondent managed to enter the country, gaining Lithuanian visa 0001. Using visa 0002 had to wait for more than a year, until the Soviet Union collapsed in August 1991.

The effusive congratulations for the 20th anniversary belie the fact that at the time most outsiders reacted not with cheers but a mixture of caution and outright horror. The top priority for most countries was not supporting a forgotten country’s quixotic quest for freedom. It was to keep the embattled Mikhail Gorbachev in power in the Kremlin, and his hardline opponents out of it. Following the fall of the Berlin wall, Germany was gingerly negotiating the terms of reunification. That depended on Soviet consent.

Foreigners counselled the Baltic states to play it slow and soft. Better to be autonomous in a Soviet Union where glasnost and perestroika (openness and reform) were ascendant than to aim for the seemingly impossible goal of restoring full statehood. Lithuanians disagreed. As Vytautas Landsbergis, the first head of state of the reborn republic, put it during the celebrations, “they offered a reform of the prison regime. We didn’t want to be in the prison at all”.

Yet the gamble paid off. Barely 14 months later, a failed putsch in Moscow left the Soviet Union in ruins. The Russian leader Boris Yeltsin displaced Mr Gorbachev in the Kremlin. He wanted independence for his country from the Soviet Union too. Almost overnight, the Baltic states were back on the map. It was as if Atlantis had reemerged from the depths of the sea and applied to join the United Nations. A lot to celebrate indeed.

Day two

THE centre of the celebrations was the parliament. Most senior positions there and in the government are still held by people who featured prominently in the independence struggle. They look a lot less tired and worried now. They are also a lot better dressed. Sleek designer glasses have replaced clunky Soviet-era spectacles. Dreadful dentistry has given way to shiny white teeth. Grey shoes and white socks—once a common combination—have vanished. Shabby polyster suits are in the same dustbin of history as the Soviet Union.

In those days the “Supreme Council” building (pictured, right) was rank with cigarette smoke, sweat, cheap Soviet perfume (seemingly applied by the litre) and the lingering smells of boiled cabbage and stewed tea from the cafeteria. All that has gone, along with the improvised defences that used to ring the building. These were built, Lego-style, out of huge prefabricated concrete structures from a nearby building site, under the direction of a mysterious and energetic American who was rumoured to have a military engineering background. They were backed up by what purported to be a minefield. The sign “Stop-Mines!” was in Lithuanian only—a language that attacking Russian soldiers would be unlikely to understand.

The parliamentary guards of those days—twitchy, unkempt and armed with only rudimentary weapons—were the nucleus of what later became Lithuania’s armed forces and security service. Both outfits are in a mess. Swingeing defence cuts have left Lithuania’s military able to do its NATO duty in Afghanistan, but not to defend the country—something that infuriates the Estonians, who still spend the NATO-mandated 2% of GDP on defence. Lithuania, like the other Baltic states, is now gaining formal contingency plans from NATO and big American land exercises are planned for later this year. But outsiders’ willingness to risk blood and treasure in the Baltic may fade if the locals show so little desire to provide their share.

In the security service, the VSD, a huge political row is raging over the so-called “Valstybininkai”—a tightknit group of hawkish senior security officials and advisors. Their nickname is all but untranslatable into English, but could be rendered as “Men of State”. They played a key role in deposing an elected president, Rolandas Paksas, in 2004, supposedly because of ties (which he denies) with Russian intelligence and organised crime. Now they are enmeshed in a scandal over a CIA compound in a suburb of Vilnius, which may have been a secret prison. News of its existence was leaked in America, to the despair of Lithuanian officials. Not that it was very secret: the Americans had acquired the building through a shell company in Panama, engaged in highly conspicuous and unusual construction work, and asked the electricity utility to wire the building up with an American-style 110-volt power supply. Short of putting a neon light on the roof saying, “CIA—your security in safe hands”, it could hardly have been more conspicuous.

Some of the Valstybininkai may face criminal charges relating to abuse of power; others have been exiled to postings in faraway countries. Lithuania is a hugely pro-American country, and many might think that turning the odd dirty trick for the country’s most important ally was nothing to get too excited about. Though the group may have got overly self-important, they still enjoy great respect in many quarters (not least abroad) for their brains and patriotism. Some scent a vendetta by Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaite. Since her election last year she has seized on the issue. She also wants to improve her country’s ties with big European states such as France and Germany—and with Russia. Nobbling the VSD could be part of that, say her critics.

But what worries even the most solidly Atlanticist Lithuanians is the mystery around the presumed murder of a senior VSD officer, Vytautas Pociunas, in Belarus on August 23rd 2006. His family and friends believe that his death (falling from a hotel window) was covered up in order to forestall an investigation into a scandal in the VSD. Conspiracy theories abound, involving secret cabals of homosexuals, Russian penetration and high-level corruption. Others think that he was murdered by the Russians, or the Belarussians, in order to sow confusion in Lithuania. If so, that certainly succeeded. More than three years after his death, the issue continues to sow mistrust, and a certain amount of fear.

Day three

CENTRING celebrations around Lithuania’s parliament leaves Ms Grybauskaite in an unusual position: off stage. A former European commissioner, she trades on her image as a political outsider, running against the old-boys club that dominates public life. Without a political machine behind her, she needs to keep her popularity high. Many Lithuanians appreciate her boldness and bluntness, as well as her squeaky-clean image. Unmarried and childless, she has no relatives to embarrass her with dodgy business dealings. Her success in a big job overseas gives her credibility. In a country where politicians are prone to self-enrichment, she does not even draw her full salary. Her tactical skills are formidable—she fought and won a sharp battle to get rid of the country’s high-profile foreign minister, Vygaudas Usackas (who is now the European Union’s envoy to Afghanistan).

That leaves her (at least in her own eyes) as the unquestioned leader of Lithuania’s foreign policy. But to what end? By Lithuanian standards, she is not a great Atlanticist. Her priority is to develop the country’s ties with the EU, especially France and Germany. She shows little interest in causes that have been at the centre of Lithuanian concerns in previous years, such as promoting Georgia. To the displeasure of Georgia’s friends in the region, she did not invite President Mikheil Saakashvili to the celebrations (though the parliament invited heavyweight Georgian lawmakers). Instead she invited Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the autocratic president of neighbouring Belarus—and Dmitri Medvedev of Russia.

The reasoning behind this is interesting. Ms Grybauskaite said she would go to Moscow on May 9th for the 65th anniversary celebrations of the end of the war if Mr Medvedev would come to Lithuania to celebrate the events of March 11th. He said no, quite politely, and in turn invited her to come to Russia at a time of her choosing. That could be quite a victory: May 9th is not a great day of celebration for the Baltic states, where many see it as irredeemably tainted with the Soviet (and Stalinist) view of the war, in which the three little countries bounced like shuttlecocks between two totalitarian empires. So Ms Grybauskaite avoids the embarrassment of being pictured against the pictures of Stalin which are likely to adorn the Moscow streets. And she gets a chance to talk properly to Mr Medvedev in more congenial surroundings.

But if the price of good relations with Russia is snubbing Georgia, many Lithuanians will balk. Georgia’s plight—divided and part-occupied—could easily have been the Baltic states’. Even those who bemoan Mr Saakashvili’s flaws still care about the country he leads. The speaker of the Georgian parliament, David Bakradze, gained a rapturous reception from a big crowd at an outdoor concert in Vilnius on March 11th. Mr Saakashvili would have had an even bigger one.

Ms Grybauskaite’s invitation to Mr Lukashenka, oddly, was less controversial. Lithuania has rather good relations with Belarus, despite being a base for efforts to aid the opposition there. (Another scandal around the VSD concerns the alleged misappropriation of American money paid to that cause). Lithuania was the only NATO country to be invited to observe the big and threatening military manoeuvres mounted last autumn by Russia and Belarus. Showing the Belarussian authorities that close ties with Russia are not the only option is a good idea: it is strongly supported by neighbouring Poland.

That is another priority for Ms Grybauskaite. Poland and Lithuania should be great friends. They share a long history. From a cultural point of view, they are in some ways indistinguishable (Poland’s best known poem starts, “Lithuania, O my fatherland”). But ties are oddly tense. Lithuanians, with unhappy memories of past Polonisation, have never delivered on repeated promises to sort out an arcane dispute about spelling. That infuriates Polish officials. The Conservative Party, which leads the governing coalition, is deeply divided on the issue. But it may have to swallow its pride: the votes of two Polish deputies are essential if it is to have a working majority.

Lost in cyberspace

2010-03-18T11:25:00.001Z

As I gradually get back into the swing of things after the distractions of the past year, I notice how the cyberscape has changed. Where is the Tiraspol Times? That website is no longer active. I hope somebody has saved some screenshots of their groundbreaking journalism. Luckily Transdniestria news is still available at transnistria.info though the site appears to be running on an automated basis (the last "views" entry was posted in May 2007). Another "separatist" site, visitpnr, is still running but similarly free of new content. The semi-official pridnestrovie.net is still running, and claims support from the mythical ICDSS (subject of an Economist investigation a couple of years back). But of the ICDISS itself--no sign.

Back in the real world, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (which at least has some real people associated with it) has relaunched its website. But the material is so old it is growing whiskers (unless I am missing something). The menu of recent offerings highlights material from the US mid-term elections in 2002. Maybe some fresher fare is lurking behind the subscribers' wall.

Ukraine--Andrew Wilson latest

2010-03-18T11:20:00.001Z

Andrew Wilson is the best Ukraine-watcher I know. Here is his new paper, which argues that Yanukovych could be Ukraine's Nixon.

This is the most amusing thing I've seen for a long time

2010-03-17T21:13:00.003Z

Have you ever wondered how the history of the 20th century would look if represented on Facebook? Well, look at this

A Moscow-based friend has just received this letter from his hr department

2010-03-15T12:18:00.001Z

Dear XXXX

I need to ask you to bring me medical certificates about absence of the following diseases for Work permit:

lepromatous leprosy chancroid
tuberculosis
syphilis
Chlamydia
limphogrannulema
HIV test (HIV certificate is needed)
test on the absence of narcomania

All the tests could be taken at the International Medical center SOS (Orlovskiy pereulok, 7).

Warm regards

XXXXXX

secret plan to expel Baltic states from Europe

2010-03-15T10:23:00.001Z

The Kremlin is trying secretly to discredit the Baltic states by organising their public humiliation on television. This I suspect one of the opening efforts.

Latvia and history: Europe View 175

2010-03-11T13:10:00.000Z

Europe.view

Harmony in Riga

For once, the anniversary of a wartime battle in Latvia should pass off peacefully

Mar 11th 2010 | From The Economist online

THAT March follows February is not a state secret, but it sometimes seems to come as a surprise to Latvian officials. Sometime in February, they notice that March 16th is approaching and start worrying, belatedly, about what outsiders will think.

That date is the anniversary of a battle in 1944, when two Latvian units raised by the Nazis fought against the Soviets side by side, under Latvian command, for the only time during the war. The commemoration highlights a sharp historical controversy in the ex-communist region. On one side are those who regard those Estonians, Latvians and others who fought on the Nazi side and wilful collaborators with the genocidal regime of Adolf Hitler. That they bore the uniforms of the SS—the epitome of Nazi brutality—is a key incriminating fact. Given the slaughter of Jews in the Baltic states during the war, the only defensible position is to accept that the Soviet forces were liberators. Any form of commemoration of their opponents, such as the Latvian SS, is tantamount to nostalgia for the Nazis.

In the middle are those that see mitigating circumstances. By this late stage in the war the “SS” label was used for all conscripted non-Germans, who were not allowed to join the Wehrmacht. The label “volunteer” was a Nazi propaganda trick: the vast majority of soldiers in these units were conscripts. Though many war criminals did join the new units, fighting in the Third Reich’s military forces was not in itself a war crime. The Soviet claim that the Estonian and Latvian SS were “traitors” is based on the idea that the 1940 annexation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union was legal. That is not an approach that any civilised country accepted then, or believes today.

On the other side are those who think that Latvians and others who fought against the Red Army were fighting in a just cause: to defend their countries against a return to the horrors of Soviet rule they had experienced in 1940-41. Their military prowess and bravery in a doomed fight deserves recognition, particularly given the huge casualties and persecution they experienced after the end of the war. It is this last group that most wants to mark March 16th.

The anniversary is marked not by a march or parade. Instead, veterans of the Latvian units, in civilian attire, lay flowers at the Freedom Monument in Riga, in memory of their fallen comrades. The event attracts unpleasant attention from neo-Nazi and skinhead groups on one side, and self-proclaimed anti-fascists on the other.

Russia usually makes a big deal of this. Tarring Latvia (and Estonia) as “fascist” is a big theme of Kremlin propaganda. Claiming that the authorities honour “SS veterans” (or at least permit them to meet in public) adds an extra twist. By skilful manoeuvring and news management, Estonia has managed to defuse the issue. But in Latvia, the authorities have found it a perennial and perplexing headache.

This year, the pot is, for once, off the boil. Regnum, a normally polemical Russian news website, published a remarkably balanced commentary here (in Russian) http://bit.ly/b2FdM4. Riga city council has banned the veterans’ wreath-laying.

This reflects Latvia’s changing politics. Riga is run by a coalition led by the Harmony Centre party, which has good chances in the October parliamentary elections. The party is mainly Russian-led, but its pro-welfare policies attract Latvian voters too. A big row over March 16th would polarise opinion, driving Latvian voters to support the mainstream parties that thrive on fears of Kremlin mischief-making. The leaders of Harmony Centre don’t want that. Neither do their friends in Russia.

what's happened to axisglobe?

2010-03-09T11:01:00.004Z

For several years I have been reading with enjoyment and some puzzlement a site called www.axisglobe.com/ It is a rum mixture of assiduously collected press cuttings and spin, mainly to do with the activities of security and intelligence services in the ex-communist world. The authors are all pseudonymous (at least as far as I have been able to determine).

Michel Elbaz – general coordinator. Specialization – regional security in Eurasia, in particular in what concerns regional activity of local and international terrorist organizations.
Allister Maunk – administrator and editor of the Eurasian secret services daily reviews. Specialization – Eurasian states' relations with the states of South Asian region.
Can Karpat – Turkish and Balkan section coordinator. Specialization – interior and foreign policy in the states of Balkan region.
Simon Araloff – European section coordinator. Specialization – East European states' regional policy, and the East European policy of the West European states (particularly, Germany) and Russia.
Anders Asmus – European section writer. Specialization – regional and international politics of Baltic States.
Pavel Simonov – Russian section coordinator. Specialization – Russia's foreign policy and secret services.
Ulugbek Djuraev – Central-Asian section coordinator. Specialization – geopolitics of Central-Asian region.
Asim Oku – Turkish section writer. Specialization – Turkey's policy towards Eurasian states; the Southern Caucasus' regional policy.
Sami Rosen – Israeli section coordinator. Specialization – Eurasia – Middle East relations (with emphasis on Israel).
Alexander Petrov – webmaster.

I had the strong feeling that the site was part of some "information warfare" effort but I could not quite see from which quarter.

But since late December, nothing new has been added (as far as I can see) to the axisglobe site. The Russian version of the site has completely expired. I have tried a whois search and found only that the axisglobe registration runs out shortly.

Does anyone have any idea who is (or was) behind it, and why it has suddenly stopped? Those wanting to be discreet can email me at edwardlucas(at)economist.com or skype me at edwardlucas

Latvian SS commemoration

2010-03-09T10:58:00.001Z

Has anyone else noticed how quiet the Kremlin propaganda machine has become as the March 16th anniversary approaches. I am writing on this for my online column this week but I have just come across this remarkable (to me) commentary on the normally vitriolic regnum.ru site, by Vlad Bogov, which gives a more-or-less balanced account of the issue. Has anyone else noticed this shift in Russian approach?

Why not extend and reverse Nabucco?

2010-03-08T14:18:00.002Z

This just in from London-based Polish gas expert Greg Pytel

Greg Pytel

Extended and reversible Nabucco – competitive and secure natural gas market for Europe

There has been an ongoing debate about constructing Nabucco pipeline: a pipeline designed to transport natural gas from Central Asia, Middle East, Caspian and even North Africa via Turkey and then Balkan countries to Hungary and Austria. Nabucco would bring a degree of diversification of gas supply routes to Europe from southern and eastern directions. At present there is a renewed initiative to make Nabucco happen.

In the background a new significant region of exploration and production of natural gas is emerging: Central and Eastern Europe, in particular Poland, Austria and Hungary. Whilst there was a lot of exploration work done in a number of past decades there was relatively very little, if any, of competitive, high-tech, modern nature. With degree of caution considering this and unconventional gas prospects, the region
looks very attractive.

The prospective natural gas conventional reserves in Poland, Austria and Hungary contain at least 4 tcm and with inclusion of unconventional gas they can be as high as 15 tcm or even more. Considering the real costs of Russian gas (from difficult and inaccessible regions transported for many thousand of kilometres), CEE gas, even from unconventional reserves, should be very competitive.

This makes a case for building Nabucco as reversible gas pipeline from Turkey, through the Balkans, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Baltic states up to Finland.

The highlights of the reversible and extended Nabucco:

- trunk line allowing distribution of the locally produced gas, balancing supply and demand along north – south axis and interconnecting with the western European gas network in east – west direction: it resolves a great number of issues related to interconnections in north – south direction and it also eases the pressure on the issue of “feeding” the pipeline in Turkey (as it is a interconnector and transport route for local CEE gas production)

- new route of gas supply to Finland and the Baltic states opening a competitive market

- integration of 50 bcm Latvian storage facility into pan-European network

- Poland, Austria, Hungary are new significant producers with interconnectors north-south and east-west to unify the market

- connecting Italy, Balkans and down to Turkey with Turkey playing a special role of a hub for gas supply from North Africa, Middle East (Iraq, etc) and Central Asia, Caspian.

This results in 7 supply hubs for Europe:

1) Russia directly,

2) Germany/Austria (Russian gas when Nord and South Streams are built)

3) CEE own production

4) Norway

5) existing supply from North Africa

6) LNG

7) Turkey: gas from Central Asia, Middle East, alternative route for Russian gas and possibly North Africa. Furthermore it will be a significant step in development of ever closer relationships between the EU and Turkey.

Nabucco will be a trunk line allowing distribution of the locally produced gas, balancing supply and demand along north – south axis and interconnecting with the western European gas network. Furthermore it would enable the use of Latvian gas storage (around 50 bcm) for the benefit of the entire Europe, Baltic states, including Finland, and would provide alternative source of supply gas to Russian gas.

Reversible Nabucco, from Turkey to Finland, will be a significant step towards competitive and secure natural gas market in Europe integrating diverse routes of supply.

Germany's Lostpolitik

2010-03-08T11:05:00.000Z

Constanze Stelzenmueller writes an interesting and thoughtful piece about German security and foreign policy
here. She wants Germany to be less neurotic, less stingy and more decisive--with a new national security commission (ie council) to run things. Great idea--but what happens if we then get Europe's most powerful country run by another Schroeder?

New anti-Putin site

2010-03-08T10:35:00.002Z

As attention on the Sochi Olympics grows, so do the critics' efforts,
like this.

Applebaum-Sikorski

2010-03-08T10:25:00.001Z

Long profile of Poland's power couple here in Polish Newsweek

Russia latest--from ex-ambassador Sir Andrew Wood

2010-03-07T14:27:00.001Z

Sir Andrew Wood was one of the most able ambassadors Britain has sent to Moscow. Here are ten punchy points about the current political outlook. Well worth a look

Political writing at its best

2010-03-05T16:36:00.003Z

Most politicians today talk like robots (I've just been watching Gordon Brown at the Chilcott inquiry) and when they write it's even worse. Even Barack Obama's "rhetoric" is more about delivery than real literary style. So (thanks Guistino) here is an example of a political document that is inspirational, elegant and brief.

Katyn update

2010-03-05T15:46:00.006Z

The Kremlin is gradually sorting out (or at least defusing) its historical rows with the ex-captive nations. First it was Putin's visit to Hungary on the anniversary of '56 (see this report). Then it was Prague for 40 years after the 1968 invasion see this one, in Russian. Now comes Katyn, with official confirmation that Putin and Donald Tusk (the Polish prime minister) will be visiting jointly on April 7th. That follows a path-breaking visit to Gdansk in September to mark the outbreak of WW2.

What to make of that? First, it is clear that Putin is trying to wrongfoot the Polish president Lech Kaczynski. He will visit Katyn later, on April 10th. So Tusk will reap the benefits of his softly-softly approach to Russia. Kaczynski, who comes from the other bit of Poland's divided conservative politics, is more abrasive.

Second, it is highly commendable that Russian television viewers will hear their prime minister publicly accepting that Katyn was an NKVD/Stalin/Soviet crime, not a Nazi one. The revival of "Katyn denial" has been one of the most atrocious features of the revisionist approach to Soviet history which has gained so much ground under the Chekist revival. Publicly accepting the truth about Katyn does not stop that process, but it certainly impedes it.

Thirdly, the Balts are next. It may be either Latvia or Lithuania which is first, but I suspect that the Kremlin will offer a deal in which it accepts that the "annexation" (not "occupation" happened against the will of the citizenry, without outright condemning it as illegal. In return, the Baltic side will have to drop claims for compensation. If that happens, it will put the remaining Baltic states (and especially Estonia) in a tricky position, with appeasement-minded western countries saying "oh please hurry up and bury your tiresome historical differences so that we can all get on with worrying about important things like gas supplies and warship sales).

My worry about this is that the regime is getting off lightly. In his speeches at these events Mr Putin accepts (in rather qualified terms) "moral responsibility". IE bad things happened and some of them were done by Russians, and although the Russian Federation now is not the same as the USSR, we are still sorry about it.

But he also relativises it. So Molotov-Ribbentrop was bad, not least because it was mistaken. But other countries (including Poland) did bad things to. In that way, the deplorable but essentially trivial Polish annexation of Teschen/Czieszyn/Těšín
somehow ranks along with the dismemberment of Poland, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is just the eastern version of Britain's shameful Munich agreement.

That seems to me to dodge two fundamental questions. One is the evil of the Stalinist regime, which is qualitatively different to anything else (except Hitler or Mao) in modern times. I am reminded of the late Jorg Haider, who used to denounce Nazism because it had brought bad results. That was true, but not the main reason for denouncing it. Putin denounces the Soviet Union mainly because it failed, rather than because it was based on lies and mass murder.

The second question that gets dodged is the way in which modern Russia still has not really dealt with the Stalin/Soviet legacy.

In an ahistorical age, where everyone cares a lot more about live deals than dead bodies, I fear that Putin is getting away with it. Scrutinise what he says at Katyn closely.
(Update). As Paul Goble highlights on his excellent "Window on Eurasia", the Russian human-rights organisation Memorial has urged Medvedev to condemn Katyn as a crime against humanity. And here , Memorial calls on the Russian president to declassify the Katyn documents, to renew the investigation of the Katyn case, and to rehabilitate by name “in correspondence with Russian law” all those who were shot by the decision of the Soviet leadership on March 5, 1940.

2010-03-04T17:00:00.000Z

Energy security in Europe

Central questions
Mar 4th 2010 | BUDAPEST AND WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

United in the cause of undermining Russian pipeline monopolies

DOES “Central Europe” exist? It depends on the political climate. Amid worries that France and Germany are stitching up the European Union’s decision-making, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia are reviving their ties and pushing shared ideas on energy security and relations with the east.

The alliance began in Visegrad, a Hungarian town, in 1991, when even the EU’s waiting-room seemed distant. Once dreams of joining Western clubs became reality, co-operation all but dissolved. New members shunned anything that made them seem different from the rest. Squabbles, most recently over the treatment of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, dominated Visegrad meetings. Some even suggested winding the club up.

Not any more. At a summit in Budapest on February 24th Visegrad showed signs of renewed life. The big shift is in Poland, where go-it-alone policies have given way to enthusiasm for working with the neighbours. Under the voting rules of the Nice treaty, in force until 2014, Visegrad countries have as many votes in the EU as France and Germany combined.

Next year Hungary and Poland will each have six months in the EU’s rotating presidency. Eurocrats in Brussels like to portray the rotating presidency as largely redundant now there is a permanent European Council president. The Poles and Hungarians are working closely together to disprove this. Hungary wants a “Danube strategy” to divert EU money and attention to the river basin. Poland supports this, in return for Hungarian backing for more EU aid to countries such as Georgia, Moldova and Belarus.

The group is gaining allies. “Visegrad-Plus” adds some neighbours, largely from the former Austro-Hungarian empire. Most of these (especially the core four) depend heavily on Russian gas and oil. These are typically costly and come from clapped-out fields along ageing pipelines through unreliable transit countries, with unwelcome political conditions attached.

One way to change this would be to turn the east-west gas pipelines into a grid, with interconnectors running north to south. New Hungarian pipelines to Romania and Croatia will be finished this year. A Czech-Polish connector will open in the summer of 2011. An EU-financed Bosnian-Serbian link will be announced on March 5th. A second idea is coastal terminals in Poland and Croatia to import liquefied natural gas by tanker from countries such as Qatar. The third plan is Nabucco, an ambitious pipeline to connect Caspian and Iraqi gasfields to Europe via Turkey.

Visegrad is also pushing for EU rules on mutual help in

energy crises. These could offer the region greater security. But big obstacles remain. One is Russia, which is intensifying its co-operation with friendly energy companies in France, Germany and Italy. On a trip to France, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, started formal talks on the sale of up to four Mistral-class warships, while France’s GDF Suez gained a 9% stake in the Nord Stream pipeline.

Russia also continues to push South Stream, a Russian-backed Black Sea pipeline. But it now has less backing than Nabucco. The new Croatian prime minister, Jadranka Kosor, visited Moscow this week and signed up to receive gas from South Stream. But Hungary and other countries have stiffened Croatian resistance to other Russian plans, such as the attempt to gain control of an oil pipeline from the Croatian coast to Hungary. That is a lifeline for Hungary’s energy company, MOL, which otherwise depends solely on oil from the east and is fighting attempts by a Russian company, Surgutneftegaz, to gain control.

The biggest problem is that energy security costs money. Gas interconnectors, for example, sound fine. But the extra competition they bring hits market share for companies used to cosy national monopolies. The Visegrad governments may gripe about west Europeans. But they have plenty to do on the home front.

Molotov/Polonsky

2010-03-04T16:58:00.004Z

The bloody age of Vyacheslav Molotov

Bullying bibliophile
Mar 4th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Stalin’s violent henchman and his library may have inspired a modern classic

Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. By Rachel Polonsky. Faber and Faber; 388 pages; £20.

EXPATRIATE spouses living pampered lives in Moscow often think it would be nice to write a book about their time there. The material is irresistible: vastness, extremes, depths and delights. But the trite, coy and overly personal jottings that result often prove quite resistible. Rachel Polonsky moved to Moscow with her lawyer husband and stayed for a decade. Her perceptive and erudite book is the exception and sets a standard to freeze the ink in others’ pens.

Ms Polonsky was a fellow at Cambridge University who initially planned to spend her time in Moscow working on a follow-up to her previous book, a heavyweight study of Russian orientalism. Instead she has produced a spectacular and enjoyable display of intellectual fireworks for the general reader.

The book’s core is other books: the fragments of a library that Ms Polonsky discovers in her neighbour’s flat, which once belonged to one of Russia’s greatest monsters, Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin’s most devoted henchman in the blood-drenched years of the Great Terror, Molotov signed a record 373 death warrants for senior officials, including his close colleagues. He also co-signed, with Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, another death warrant—the deal that dismembered the countries of central Europe and the Baltic states. Toasted by Molotov and Hitler at a banquet in Berlin, the Nazi-Soviet pact consigned millions to death, slavery and destitution.

The butcher was a bibliophile. His books, sometimes annotated, or even with his moustache hairs left, repellently, as page markers, are much in Ms Polonsky’s thoughts during her journeys to Russia’s bleak north, lush south and distant east. Her finely drawn literary travelogues on Taganrog, Murmansk, Vologda, Irkutsk and other places depict squalor, pomp, misery, exhilaration, heroism and brutishness, each cameo framed in its historical, cultural and physical context.

Some of the material comes from Molotov’s books, others from Ms Polonsky’s well-stocked mind. Few readers will have her encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Herzen, Varlam Shamalov and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name but a few. But while reading the book they will feel that they do. Ms Polonsky wears her considerable learning lightly.

She has a knack for putting herself into other people’s shoes with empathy and skill. During a visit to Moscow’s luxurious Sadunovsky bathhouse she spots a fellow-bather reading Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West”; another is applying a home-made unguent consisting of cream and coffee grounds. Spengler, a German historian, thought that cities were ulcers on the body of Russia. What, she asks, would he have made of this scene? That prompts a captivating excursion into the mystical significance of the steam bath, from its rural pagan roots to modern urban body worship.

Ms Polonsky’s interest in the spiritual comes across strongly. She highlights the significance of Aleksandr Men, an inspirational Orthodox priest murdered as the Soviet Union died. Her description of the Bolsheviks’ desecration of the Savvino-Storozhevsky monastery in the midst of the last monks’ final liturgy is memorable. So is her icy account of the creepy religiosity, bordering on paganism, that is to be found in the upper reaches of the current Russian regime.

The contempt she feels for the greed, filth and viciousness that she encounters is all the more compelling for being understated. Her sympathy and affection for the finest bits of Russia’s past and present shine through—whether for the civic traditions of ancient Novgorod, for the aristocratic rebels of the Decembrists or for more modern martyrs such as the Mandelstams or Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist murdered in 2006. The reader catches only fleeting glimpses of Ms Polonsky herself. That contrasts pleasingly with the self-centredness that is present in so much other Western writing about Russia. As her book shows, the author has grit, charm and style—and a gift for traveller’s tales.

Estonia and defence spending

2010-03-04T09:24:00.003Z

Why does Estonia spend so much more on defence than Latvia and Lithuania? And is it a good idea? Cynics say that Estonia can't be credible in defence if the other Baltic two have in effect given up. Estonia should stop bothering with even vestigial territorial defence and concentrate solely on international obligations. I think that would be a big mistake. Defence spending is about credibility, both in military and political terms. Trying to meet the 2% of GDP target shows the Estonian people that the state is serious about defence (and therefore serious about other things. It also signals that to the outside world. Here Kurt Volker, the former US Ambassador to NATO, praises Estonian defence thinking. And in this speech
he gives some general thoughts about the Atlantic alliance.

New Ukrainian column

2010-03-03T16:37:00.002Z

I have started a regular column for the excellent Ukrainian weekly Tyzhden. Here is the first one (with a link here to the Ukrainian version)

“Dokumenty pazhaluista”

(What can Europe do to help Ukraine? And what can Ukraine do to help itself?)

Given the amount of time and money European Union countries have spent advising Ukraine on the reform of public administration, it is shocking and shameful that their own consulates in Kyiv and elsewhere epitomise the problem, rather than advertising the solution. It may not be possible to convince voters in the EU that Ukrainians should have visa-free access immediately. But it should certainly be possible to provide the visas in an efficient, polite, honest and open way. The current system offers no real obstacle to people-smugglers and crooks, while imposing huge and humiliating burdens on the ordinary decent people wanting to visit for work, pleasure or study. It is a scandal that it is far easier for a citizen of Turkey to get a visa for the Schengen zone than it is for a citizen of Ukraine.

I would like to see the Ukrainian media and NGOs attack this problem head-on, providing a detailed ranking of the consulates in terms of convenience of opening hours, politeness of staff, speed of service and use of modern technology. Those that make people queue on the streets in sub-zero temperatures will come bottom. Those that use the internet intelligently, and treat applicants as honoured guests, rather than lying nuisances, will come top. Imagine the shock if it turns out that the best service comes from China, say, or Egypt, rather than the arbiters of good government in the EU and North America.

The next stage should be to present the findings to those in charge of the consular services with the question (asked politely of course) what they intend to do to improve their ranking and when. Then follow-up the exercise at six-monthly intervals and see which promises are matched with action and which prove to be just empty words. Transparency and accountability are fine things and the EU and America are right to preach them. But they are even more effective when those who preach them also practise them.

An important feature of this exercise is that Ukrainians would no longer be the supplicants, patiently waiting for outsiders to give them things. Instead, Ukrainians would be saying: “we are the people of one of the largest countries in Europe. We may be poor and badly led, but we also choices about how we spend our time and money, about where we work and study, or buy and sell. If you want our attention, show us some respect”. That is not a message that the rest of Europe has heard before. It would be good to deliver it.

At the same time, of course, Ukraine needs to improve its own image.

I am rather sceptical of the portentous discussion about “foreign policy orientation”. In the end, image follows reality, and so long as the reality of Ukraine is of a country run by the provincial Soviet nomenklatura and their business chums, the bad image will be hard to shift. The more Ukraine imitates the corruption and incompetence of the Russian system, the closer it will become to Russia. And the more it adopts western-style public administration, the closer it will come to the world’s richest and happiest countries.

The election result may mean that big changes are off the agenda. But small steps can be effective too. Too take one example, familiar to foreigners but probably not to Ukrainians themselves, examine the “landing card” issued to foreigners on inbound flights. This is, in effect, Ukraine’s visiting card: it may be the first official document that outsiders encounter.

It is a strikingly shoddy affair. I could almost believe that it was designed by Modest Kolerov, or some other sinister Kremlin spin-doctor, aiming to damage Ukraine in the eyes of the world. For a start, it is not a card. It is printed on the cheapest possible paper—so grey, rough, flimsy and absorbent that it almost has curiosity value. The instructions are incomprehensible. The print is tiny. The applicant must fill in details, letter by letter, in tiny boxes seemingly designed to produce illegibility. If you get it wrong, you are shouted at by a man in uniform.

What is so odd is that this ghastly effort is not some bureaucratic fossil from the Soviet days, but something fairly new. A committee of officials must have debated its design, wording and production, and solemnly decided that this was the best possible option. Given the way that Ukraine works, their decision was probably signed off at quite a high level. I don’t exclude the possibility of corruption—perhaps the contract was given to a design bureau and printing house that skimmed off the contract, and then did the cheapest possible job. But it would be nice to know. I would suggest a public competition for Ukraine’s best designers to produce a rival version, which would have typography, clarity and quality to lift spirits rather than sink them.

The existing dismal document is worth contrasting with the similar form used by foreigners entering the United States. This is printed on high-quality white card. The instructions are exemplary. And a small line of print at the bottom, citing the “Paperwork reduction act” passed by Congress, even tells you how many minutes it should take to fill the form in. That sends a powerful message about America: it is a country where lawmakers bestir themselves to save their constituents time, and where public agencies pride themselves (at least sometimes) on doing a good professional job.

These two ideas won’t change Ukraine overnight. But they will foster two important kinds of confidence. One is the confidence to complain when badly treated. The other is confidence innovate when something is not working well. Both are the hallmarks of a society where the state is a partner, not a parasite. That change is long overdue in Ukraine.

Budapest energy summit

2010-03-03T16:03:00.002Z

I spent a happy few days in Budapest last week, watching the central European countries (belatedly) getting their act together on energy. Today they followed up with a new push on the eastern Partnership. I will be writing about that in the Economist tomorrow. Vlad Socor from the Jamestown Foundation highlights some of the key points.

Russian military

2010-03-03T15:20:00.004Z

Amid all the worries about the Mistral sale (now four, and with a gas deal thrown in) it is worth bearing in mind how weak the Russian military actually is. This presentation of the impending collapse of the "wpk" (military-industrial complex) by Julian Cooper is well worth reading. So is this NATO war college analysis by Keir Giles of Russia's new military doctrine.

Therapeutic historiography, (Europe view 173)

2010-02-26T12:36:00.001Z

The end of history, revisited
Feb 25th 2010
From Economist.com

The ex-communist states of eastern Europe are leaving their pasts behind
WHERE would they be without their past, the ex-captive nations? (Or "ex-communist countries", "former Soviet satellite states", "the old Eastern block": so much history even in the category). The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea is so shaped by history that at first sight the question seems absurd. Trianon, Yalta, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Munich—the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities are inescapable.

For the past 20 years, the countries of this region have been involved in what might be called "therapeutic historiography": tearing up old communist propaganda versions of history, and writing new ones. That has been an exhilarating, messy and sometimes disconcerting process. For Estonians and Latvians, for example, it meant the chance to honour those (heroes or victims, but not villains) who fought against the impending Soviet occupation in 1944-45. Yet many outsiders see these men as no more than Nazi collaborators: they wore uniforms of the SS, the epitome of wartime evil, and served alongside some war criminals. Context and comparison (far more Russians than Balts fought on Hitler's side) become irrelevant.

Slovaks and Croats want to de-demonise their wartime republics (Nazi puppet states from one viewpoint, a snatched breath of national regeneration from another). Germans and Jews, once seemingly vanished from the region, have emerged from the shadows (and from abroad), with their own unhappy memories that undermine the self-righteousness of both Communist and ethno-nationalist versions of history.

Yet re-examining taboos is a self-limiting process: you run out of them after a bit. And historical inquiry inevitably bogs down in complexity. The communist version of history may have been mostly lies, but the western version has holes in it too. If you like closely reasoned historical monographs, you may spend your evenings examining the interplay between the Munich agreement (when Britain and France betrayed Czechoslovakia) and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (when Hitler and Stalin carved up Europe). For most people, it is enough that the latter deal is no longer secret or glorified.

In the luckier half of the continent, history has a much shorter half-life. Who worries about the Schleswig-Holstein question when looking at Danish-German relations? Who cares that Norway was once part of Sweden, or that Finland used to be a Grand Duchy of tsarist Russia?

Now central and eastern Europe may be joining the club of the ahistorical and apathetic. Historical rows are already the exception, not the rule. Poland is the signal example. In recent years it has successfully pursued reconciliation with Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Germany and even (albeit in limited terms) with Russia. The picture is marred only by a recent flare-up with Belarus, and a tiresome squabble with Lithuania about spelling. The recent ripple of protest in Poland when Ukraine's outgoing president, Viktor Yushchenko, made the wartime nationalist leader Stepan Bandera a "Hero of Ukraine" was interesting not because it exemplified the two countries' rows over history, but because it came after years in which they had sorted out so much.

Hungary's neighbourhood is transformed too. Relations with Slovakia are tense, thanks to a badly drafted language law there and some silly politicking. But Hungarians' real animosity is directed towards the Austrians, who have (they feel) betrayed them by selling shares in MOL, the Hungarian energy company, to Russians against their will. The historically difficult relationships with Serbia, Romania and Ukraine, all home to Magyar minorities, look chummy in comparison.

That reflects a big shift. As western Europe flounders, the old patronising and unfair treatment of the "east Europeans" is no longer sustainable. Change is in the wind. Power is up for grabs. And it is more fun than history.

Latvia and Greece

2010-02-26T12:35:00.001Z

Latvia and Greece

Baltic thaw, Aegean freeze

Feb 25th 2010 | RIGA
From The Economist print edition

Latvia’s economic free fall has halted, and it may now do better than Greece

DOOM-MONGERS are licking their wounds. For two years bankers have said that a Latvian devaluation was inevitable. The struggle to save the lat’s peg to the euro was bound to end in tears. And a panic in Latvia could topple the wobbly economies of Estonia and Lithuania, which have similar exchange-rate regimes, with repercussions extending across eastern Europe and to Scandinavian banks that lent recklessly in the Baltics.

Yet despite a fall in GDP last year of 17.5%, Latvia seems to have achieved something many thought impossible: an internal devaluation. This meant regaining competitiveness not by currency depreciation but by deep cuts in wages and public spending. In a recent discussion of Greece, Jörg Asmussen, a German minister, praised Latvia for its self-discipline.

Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency, has raised its outlook on Latvia’s debt from negative to stable (ie, it no longer expects further downgrades). The current account, in deficit to the tune of 27% of GDP in late 2006, is in surplus. Exports are recovering. Interest rates have plunged and debt spreads over German bonds have narrowed (see chart). Fraught negotiations with the IMF and the European Union have kept a €7.5 billion ($10 billion) bail-out on track, in return for spending cuts and tax rises worth a tenth of GDP.

At the centre of Latvia’s crisis was its biggest locally owned bank, Parex. Until it went bust, Parex was a byword for high living and murky dealings. Its new American-born boss, Nils Melngailis, has refinanced its debts, divided its assets into good and bad, and aims soon to unfreeze depositors’ cash. He found plenty of savings. Selling a fleet of sports cars and ending the use of private jets cut travel costs by 90%. Overall, he cut the bank’s costs by 40% in 2009, with 30% more to come.

Even if a catastrophe has been averted for the moment, Latvia’s economy remains troubled. Unemployment, at 22.8%, is the highest in the EU. Growth is unlikely to resume until late 2011. After a decade of prosperity based on a construction boom, cheap manufacturing and transit from Russia, Latvia needs new sources of income. The biggest task is to harness local brainpower. Emigration has been a safety valve for jobless Latvians, but the country loses if fraying public services, high taxes and low pay drive its more productive workers abroad. And nobody seems to be trying to stop them. Even his fans would hesitate to call the prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, charismatic or visionary.

Confidence in institutions is feeble—support for the EU is lower than in any other member state. Politicians are uninspiring, with most parties run by tycoons who escaped blame for economic mismanagement. A sense that the rich and powerful evade justice is pervasive. At Vincents, a Riga restaurant where dinner for two can cost $400, the owner, Martins Ritins, says business is booming. On Valentine’s Day he opened on a Sunday for the first time in years and almost every table was taken.

As politicians’ credibility dwindles, Russian influence grows. A pro-Russian party won control of Riga last year. Latvia’s president, Valdis Zatlers, will go to the Soviet-tinged celebrations in Moscow on May 9th to mark the 65th anniversary of Victory Day. Hawks see this as a sell-out. A visit to Riga by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in April may be a step towards normal relations—or a sign that Russia sees Latvia as a swing state in the Baltic.

Even so, Latvia looks good when compared with Greece. It did not lie about its public finances or use accounting tricks. Strikes have been scanty. Protests are fought in the courts, not the streets. Both Greece and Latvia have had hard knocks, but Greeks became used to a good life that they are loth to give up. Latvians remain glad just to be on the map.

Libel latest

2010-02-26T12:33:00.000Z

Media and the law

Publish, perish, protest

Feb 25th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Bad news for dodgy journalism—and for libel tourists

LIBEL law in England is too expensive and restricts free speech. But journalistic dirty tricks are a disgrace and self-regulation of the media isn’t working properly. So the rules need lots of tweaks and a couple of big changes. Those are the conclusions of a much-awaited parliamentary committee report on the British press.

It makes uncomfortable reading for many. But the sharpest criticism was reserved for the News of the World, a tabloid that is Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper; its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News International; and its practice of stealing messages from the voice mailboxes of prominent people, including members of the royal family. A reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed for four months for the offence, later receiving a generous pay-off from his erstwhile employer for “unfair dismissal”.

The report says the number of phones hacked must have been far bigger than the handful admitted by the company, and calls it “inconceivable” that nobody else knew what was going on. It criticises the “collective amnesia” of the company’s witnesses and their “deliberate obfuscation” (some refused to give evidence; others said things that the MPs implied were untrue). But the report makes only indirect criticism of Andy Coulson, then the paper’s editor and now a close adviser to the Conservative leader, David Cameron. In response, News International rejected the allegations, accused the MPs of bias and said they had produced nothing new. Calls for a further inquiry are growing.

The report gives other journalistic misconduct a savaging too, especially the “abysmal” standards of reporting in the frenzy surrounding Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of a British child who went missing in Portugal in 2007. (The McCanns later won hefty libel damages from newspapers that wrongly blamed them for abducting their own daughter.) The MPs also note that the McCanns were failed by the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body which is meant to deal with such conduct.

The committee’s original aim was to focus on media misbehaviour. But its investigation has ranged more widely. The report has plenty of comfort for more serious-minded journalists, as well as for the campaigning groups, scientists and others who worry about the chilling effect of libel law on press freedom. In English libel law (Scotland’s is different), the fact that the public has an interest in knowing about something offers only a limited defence against a charge of libel. (This is not unlike the rest of Europe, but it is shockingly different for Americans used to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.) When sued, journalists usually have to prove that what they wrote was right, fair or at least conscientiously reported. That can be costly (even a preliminary defence can easily exceed £100,000). Foreigners may sue other foreigners, as long as they can show that their reputation was damaged in England.

Many lawyers and judges have dismissed media campaigns for changes in the law as self-interested. The committee rejects sweeping proposals for reform, such as statutory caps on the size of libel damages. But it does suggest that the Ministry of Justice, which is examining the libel law, make some important changes.

One is reversing the burden of proof for corporate claimants: if they want to sue for libel, they would have to show that the published material actually damaged their business. That could help people such as Simon Singh, a science writer facing a lawsuit from the chiropractors’ trade body for calling their treatments “bogus”. The MPs also want to discourage “libel tourism” by requiring a claimant who is not based in Britain to produce a very solid argument as to why the case needs to be brought there.

As for the cost of libel actions, which can be ruinous to all but the biggest defendants, the MPs have few specific ideas, though they appeal to lawyers’ sense of responsibility. That is about as realistic as urging tabloid journalists to act ethically.

Poland's big chance

2010-02-20T22:15:00.002Z

This is the English version of my most recent column for Wprost
Poland leads. Who will follow?

Europe’s new foreign policy is somewhere between tragedy and farce. Lady Ashton, who is meant to be in charge of it, is arousing a mixture of ridicule and astonishment. She is still commuting from London to Brussels, fails to turn up to important meetings, has yet to gain the necessary security clearance and turns her mobile phone off at eight o’clock in the evening. Meanwhile the Spanish government is pretending that the Lisbon treaty has never happened and that national governments still run the European Union on the basis of a rotating presidency. Nobody is in charge. Nothing is happening. It is not surprising that Barack Obama has found something else to do instead of turning up to the planned EU-US summit in May.

The vacuum in Brussels is a big chance for Poland. Next year, the EU presidency will be held first by Hungary and then Poland (with Denmark taking over for the first half of 2012). Given that the Spanish presidency is proving a disaster, and that low-key Belgium is in charge for the second half of this year, that means that Poland is the only big country running the EU until Italy takes over in 2014.

The first priority for Poland is to coordinate its efforts with Hungary. That is well under way. Poland is supporting the “Danube strategy” and Hungary’s plans for greater energy security. In return, Hungary will support Polish efforts to boost the EU’s defence capability. For 24 months, either Hungary or Poland or both will be in the “Troika” of countries in charge of the Union.

Poland is already becoming a diplomatic heavyweight in Europe. The Kaczynski era of grotesque stunts and blunders is receding into the past. Poland’s economic growth makes the country stand out and gives people like Donald Tusk, Jacek Rostowski and Radek Sikorski added weight in international meetings.

The best example right now comes from Moldova, the poorest country in Europe and one where we are in danger of missing a huge chance to improve things. After a messy and contested election, accompanied by plenty of official brutality, Moldovans booted out their corrupt authoritarian communist rulers and elected a pro-Western, pro-reform government under the leadership of the professorial Vlad Filat. America has leapt in, giving him a warm reception in Washington DC and unblocking hundreds of millions of dollars in development aid.

America understands that Moldova matters: the unrecognised statelet of Transdniestria creates a sump of smuggling-based corruption for crooked politicians in Ukraine and elsewhere. Romania—which shares a language and history with Moldova—is now also playing a constructive role. But the absence of interest from the rest of Europe has been shameful.

Poland is the honourable exception. It is offering a $15m immediate bridging loan to help the cash-strapped government meet its commitments. Despite the impressive bureaucracy-busting reforms of the past 100 days, the economy remains stricken. Seasoned foreign officials who visit Moldova say it reminds them of Poland on the brink of the Balcerowicz reforms, or the Baltic states in the early 1990s. The problems are huge. But so are the possibilities.

Poland has plenty more to offer too: it understands the need to engage with the nomenklatura in Belarus, with seductive offers on the lines of “do you want your children to work in Brussels as equals or Moscow as slaves?”. It understands the need for deep strategic patience in dealing with Ukraine, and the need to provide a resolute, American-backed security guarantee to the Baltic states. The recent joint initiative on tactical nuclear weapons by Radek Sikorski and Carl Bildt struck just the right note: reasonable to western ears, but deeply tricky for the nuke-loving Russian leadership.

Big western countries like France and Germany may find it tiresome that the big ideas and bold leadership is coming from the east now. But they had better get used to it. They had their chance and we ended up with Lady Ashton. Now it’s Poland’s turn.

Ambassador Habsburgshvili

2010-02-20T22:10:00.000Z

The Habsburgs' new empire

The princess and the bear
Feb 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Europe’s aristocracy, alive and kicking

GEORGIA struggles to make its case in Germany, which sees trade ties with Russia as vital and the ex-Soviet Caucasian republic as troublesome. So who better to burnish Georgia’s image there than a German-educated Habsburg? Georgia’s new ambassador to Berlin, once she presents her credentials to the president next month, will be Gabriela Maria Charlotte Felicitas Elisabeth Antonia von Habsburg-Lothringen, princess Imperial and Archduchess of Austria, Princess Royal of Hungary and Bohemia. A name like that, says Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili, should open doors.

The towering figure on the Berlin diplomatic scene is the Russian ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Kotenev, an indefatigable socialite who runs what is probably the biggest embassy in Europe. Ms von Habsburg (the name she prefers) will not, despite her titles, have the cash to match his efforts. But she may still help Germans think again about Georgia’s European roots and future. Born in Luxembourg, brought up in Germany and Austria, the polyglot Ms von Habsburg is an avant-garde sculptor, specialising in large steel outdoor works. She has lived in Georgia since 2001, has become a Georgian citizen and gained a command of the language (it is “improving every day”, says Mr Saakashvili).

By the standards of her family, a spot of diplomacy in Berlin is not particularly exotic. The heirs to the Habsburg emperors helped speed the downfall of the Soviet empire, particularly by arranging the cross-border exodus from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989 that punched the first big hole in the iron curtain. Among Ms von Habsburg’s six siblings, her younger sister Walpurga is a leading conservative politician in Sweden; her brother Georg is an ambassador-at-large for Hungary. Another used to be in the European Parliament.

Her father, Otto von Habsburg, now aged 97, is one of very few who can remember the Austro-Hungarian empire (his father, Karl, was its last emperor and it collapsed when Otto was six). He does not mourn the demise of that world: liberated from court etiquette, he says, he can call someone an “idiot” if he wants, instead of “your excellency”. His daughter may find German diplomatic protocol rather more constraining.

Missile defence: Kremlin protests backfire

2010-02-20T22:09:00.000Z

Missile defence in Europe

The next salvo
Feb 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition

America’s reconfigured anti-missile shield still irks Russia

READ the small print. That would have been good advice for foes and allies alike when America announced in September last year that it would abandon its plans for anti-missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic, in favour of a new system initially based on ships.

Some saw that as a sell-out. Russia was being appeased as part of President Barack Obama’s “reset” of relations with the Kremlin, and the ex-communist countries were being punished for supporting the Bush administration. Five months later, that reading of events looks mistaken.

The new system, the Obama administration officials said at the time, will be more flexible and will have a land component from 2015. Poland will eventually host one base. And earlier this month Romania—after the briefest of talks—announced that it would be the site for interceptors. American officials are trying to find a consolation prize for Bulgaria, the runner-up, which says it would like a base too.

This has annoyed Russia. Its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the Kremlin had complained to America about the Romanian “surprise” followed by a Bulgarian one. In fact, America itself seems to have been caught unprepared by the enthusiasm of its allies. It had expected protracted negotiations, of the kind it had pursued with Poland. This would have provided a chance to soothe Russian feelings at a time when America is seeking its help to impose sanctions against Iran.

Echoing earlier Russian threats (now rescinded) to deploy nuclear missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave, a Russian-backed separatist enclave in Moldova has offered to host Russian Iskander short-range rockets in response to the planned base in Romania. That may have more to do with wrong-footing the new pro-western, pro-Romanian government in Moldova than pleasing Russia, which declined the offer.

If American technology develops as expected, by 2018 the new shield would cover almost all of NATO’s European members against an Iranian attack—only a small part of Turkey would be exposed. That is a big change from the previous scheme, which was intended mainly to protect America from an intercontinental threat, leaving chunks of Europe unprotected. The new system poses even less of a threat to Russia’s nuclear arsenal (the Americans say neither ever did). The SM-3 interceptors now planned have a shorter range and fly less quickly than the rockets proposed by the Bush administration. Moreover, much of the system—the tracking radars and the Romania-based interceptors—will be deployed further south, unable to interfere with Russian missiles heading for America over the Arctic.

The main basis for the Kremlin’s complaint is political. Though Russia grudgingly accepted that ex-communist countries could join NATO, it sees the creation of American bases there as a breach of a promise made when the Soviet Union consented to German reunification. (American officials insist no such promise was ever given.)

Regardless, America is making other security arrangements. It is placing Patriot anti-aircraft missiles in Poland. More significantly, it has pushed NATO into agreeing to draw up military contingency plans to defend the Baltic states. It will hold drills there later this year. Russia’s growling may have brought results—but probably not the ones that Moscow wanted.

Europe view nr 172

2010-02-20T22:08:00.000Z

Europe.view

Stay off the potash
Feb 18th 2010
From Economist.com

Eastern Europe-friendly boycotts are difficult to pull off

VOTING with your wallet is a tempting substitute for real politics. Time was when the British left demonstratively boycotted South African oranges. The same people usually regarded Israel as no better than the apartheid regime. They also ruled out “fascist” Spain and Portugal, and Greece under military dictatorship. Barring the odd shipment from Costa Rica or Cuba, progressive politics was bad for the fruit bowl.

Much the same dilemma now faces those who care about the security of the ex-communist region. In Tallinn last week, your columnist, wining and dining one of the country’s top foreign-policy thinkers, learned a new Estonian phrase: “Palun tooge eesti kraanivett jääga” [Estonian tap water with ice, please]. The only bottled water available at the otherwise admirable Ö restaurant was Vittel or Perrier, both French brands. Paris has just agreed to sell some formidable amphibious-warfare ships to the Russian navy, with potentially dire consequences for the security of the Baltic states. French foodstuffs are encountering a certain froideur across the region as a result.

Finding alternative brands of drinking water is easy (and tap water is better on ecological grounds anyway). Dealing with the wine list is more difficult. Most European wine-producing countries are unsound on security questions: as well as France, the list includes Italy (Berlusconi, Russia's biggest chum in the EU), Germany (the Russia-sponsored Nordstream pipeline) and Austria (almost everything). Georgian, Moldovan, Croatian or Macedonian wines would be ideal but are hard to come by, so new world vineyards have to fill the gap. Champagne creates an even bigger problem. The Crimean labels are rare and usually too sweet. Your columnist likes an English sparkling wine called “Nutty”; his friends and family are unconvinced.

The choice is hardest when it comes to cheese. It is difficult to find anywhere that produces tasty soft cheese and is not subject to unhealthy Russian influence. Even the kind of conspiracy theorist who wears a tinfoil hat to protect his brain from being zapped by Kremlin mind-rays would have to accept that this is a coincidence. But it is certainly an annoying one for Atlanticist cheese lovers.

Penalising weak-kneed European countries is hard enough. It is even more difficult when trying to put pressure on the source of the problem. If you want to boycott Belarussian goods, say, because of that government’s persecution of its Polish minority, you are unlikely to change your lifestyle much, unless you use industrial quantities of potash or need a lot of cheap tractors. Similarly, unless your consumption pattern includes weapons and vodka, giving up Russian goods is easy but pointless.

But the real problem with personalised sanctions regimes is conceptual. For a start, they risk seeming silly. Why punish a hapless French cheese-maker or Italian vineyard for the sins of their governments? The thinking is that plunging export sales might create pressure for a change in foreign policy. But this seldom happens in practice.

For countries like Belarus, a trade boycott is outright counterproductive. The more Belarus trades with the rich industrialised world, the weaker will become the ties binding it to Russia. It may be reasonable to try to take custom away from companies that owe their existence to commercial ties with sleazy politicians. But such bodies tend not to sell anything that a normal consumer in the outside world is likely to buy directly. You may not like the fact that some pennies from your fuel bills eventually trickle into the coffers of Kremlin cronies, but there is not much you can do about it.

The occasional flourish, especially with the wine list, is fine. But systematic sanctions are self-defeating. Trade opens borders and minds; protectionism closes them. That principle is worth fighting for too.

Murder and spies

2010-02-20T22:03:00.001Z

Assassinations and technology

Hitmen old and new
Feb 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Modern technology makes killing easier—but harder to get away with

ONLY a decade ago the assassins who killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh would have disappeared into oblivion. Now that is much harder, and not merely for the obvious reason that lenses are ubiquitous. Modern cameras capture more than blurred images: they record the precise bone structure of people’s faces. Digitised and interpreted by an algorithm, this information is fed to police computers all over the world.

The net is closing around old-fashioned secret-service methods. Biometric passports are already the norm in most European countries. Their chips hold easily checkable data such as retina scans, which are both unique and unfakeable. The thought of an easily disproved false identity fills spymasters with horror. They remember the fate of western agents, in the Soviet Union after the second world war, whose painstakingly forged identity documents had a fatal flaw: they used stainless steel staples, rather than the soft iron fastenings found in authentic Soviet documents. The tell-tale absence of rust allowed Stalin’s secret police to spot them.

The age of Facebook creates another problem. Creating a false identity used to be simply a matter of forging a few documents and finding a plausible life story. Nowadays, leaving an internet trail of convincing evidence for a fake identity is increasingly difficult—and a phoney detail is worse than none at all.

Even poisoning, for a long time the best way to hide a killing, may have become more difficult. The Soviet Union developed formidable expertise in the art of assassination, and (as a by-product of its germ-war and poison-gas efforts) in making toxins. A book published in Britain last year and written by Boris Volodarsky, described as a former Russian military-intelligence officer, provided a glimpse into “The KGB’s Poison Factory” from 1917 until the present day. Its “successes” included the killing of a Soviet defector in Frankfurt with thallium in 1957, and that of a Bulgarian dissident, Georgy Markov, in 1978, in London with a ricin-tipped umbrella.

Toxin analysis has improved but sometimes it is only luck that reveals ingeniously administered substances. Alexander Litvinenko, a renegade Russian security officer living in London, was killed by poisoning with polonium, a rare radioactive substance, in 2006. His assassins—said by British officials to have had help from Russia’s security service—nearly got away with it. Had their victim died sooner, nobody would have tried the highly unusual test for that kind of radiation poisoning.

As another sign that sending hit squads to distant lands can go wrong, consider the tale of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen ex-president killed in 2004 by a car-bomb in Qatar. The Qatari authorities, using well-honed surveillance, arrested three Russian officials; one had diplomatic immunity, but the other two were sentenced to jail. Only after a messy row between Russia and Qatar, and much damage to Russia’s ties with Islam, did the pair return to Moscow—and a hero’s welcome.

Europe View nr 171: Ashton to Ukraine

2010-02-11T14:53:00.001Z

Europe.view

Turn east, Lady Ashton
Feb 11th 2010
From Economist.com

The EU could make a real difference in Ukraine

PIGEONHOLING and false analogies are not part of formal international relations studies. But from the way that diplomats, policymakers and analysts talk about Ukraine, you would think they were compulsory courses.

Take the optimistic point that Ukraine’s elections are now unlike Russia’s. True, Ukrainian voters had a real choice in that country’s recent presidential poll. The incumbent, Viktor Yushchenko, gave up power peacefully. (In Russia, he might have handed power over to an ex-spook, amid bogus terrorist attacks to panic the public into accepting authoritarian rule). The vote count was fair. Ukraine’s media is far more pluralist than Russia’s. And so on. All this is fine. But Ukraine’s election was also unlike Kazakhstan’s. It is easy to make something look good by choosing a dismal comparator.

It is also tempting but wrong to compare Ukraine now with Russia in the 1990s. True, oligarchs rule the roost in both countries, with politicians as their puppets. True, Western money keeps Ukraine afloat, as it did in 1990s Russia. There, the West hoped to avert nuclear anarchy or a Communist revanche. In Ukraine the money is intended to stave off take-over by Russia.

But there is no sign of, or appetite for, a Ukrainian version of Vladimir Putin, not least because the West has not (yet) incinerated its credibility in Ukraine the way it did in Russia in the 1990s. Ukrainian politicians of all stripes, and the public, continue to want European values and European integration.

Brussels has yet to respond to that desire. European leaders missed the chance presented by the orange revolution (though to be fair, Mr Yushchenko and other Ukrainian politicians botched their opportunities even more badly). The European Union’s leaders also failed to make much of the recent election. Ukraine is a long way from Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s nominal foreign-policy chief, seems distracted, to put it mildly. The EU is treating Ukraine like Turkey—too big, too poor, and destined to wait indefinitely for membership. (That’s a false comparison too, but never mind).

Yet Ukraine is perhaps the one place where Lady Ashton and her new External Action Service could make a real difference. Ukraine badly needs attention, and unlike America or China it is not a place over which other EU leaders will be jostling for influence. Done properly, the gains from renewed EU involvement could be huge.

The European policy so far has been engagement with Ukraine’s political class. This has proved expensive, and mostly fruitless. Attention should now move to the citizenry. Imagine the effect if the EU opened 50 “Europe Houses” in the main towns and cities of Ukraine. The excellent new House of Europe in Tbilisi should be the model. That project aims to be the Georgian centre for all sorts of Europe-related cultural events, as well as debates and lectures, with a library and internet café as added attractions (readers with spare cash please note: it needs donors). It will have far more impact than the piecemeal efforts of individual European countries’ cultural institutes.

In the tense Ukrainian region of Crimea, a big EU presence would make it harder for Russia to hide its mischief-making (that should be a lesson from Georgia, where the EU’s absence was a lethal element in the run up to the 2008 war). More generally, the new policy will focus the EU’s biggest asset: its soft power. The EU’s military capability is meagre; its ability to stand up to Russian divide-and-rule tactics in energy security is feeble. But the EU does have something that the Kremlin doesn’t: attractiveness. Projecting that into Ukraine will give Lady Ashton and her staff something worthwhile to do. It could even work.

Asmus book review

2010-02-11T14:52:00.001Z

Georgia and Russia

Ungodly suffering
Jan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition

An American take on a war that fed conspiracies throughout Europe

A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West. By Ronald Asmus. Palgrave Macmillan; 250 pages; $27 and £20.

TWO points about the war in Georgia in 2008 have stuck in outsiders’ memories. One is that it was quite unexpected. The other is that Georgia started it. Both, in Ronald Asmus’s view, are wrong.

The real cause of the war, he argues, was Russia’s determination to block Georgia’s American-educated and America-loving president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He had embarked on “a crash course to turn Georgia from a semi-failed state into a reform tiger that could become the catalyst for creating a democratic pro-Western corridor in the southern Caucasus…it was a breathtaking vision.”

Mr Asmus’s metaphors may be breathtakingly mixed, but his big point is right. Situated on the most promising east-west route for oil and gas, Georgia was becoming an economic and political success story under Mr Saakashvili, who took power in the “Rose revolution” of 2003. Its pluralism was a profound challenge to the authoritarian crony capitalism taking root in Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Mr Saakashvili’s growing sway in two Russian-backed breakaway regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was also an increasing nuisance for the Kremlin. He had restored Georgian control over a corner of Abkhazia and set up a loyalist administration inside South Ossetia—an untidy place with villages of varying ethnic and political make-up.

For Russia, that was intolerable, Mr Asmus argues. The Kremlin, therefore, deliberately provoked the Georgian leader into starting a war that he was bound to lose. Humiliating Georgia was also a way of paying back NATO for the recognition of Kosovo, a breakaway province of Serbia. And it signalled the limits of America’s role in Russia’s back yard.

Mr Asmus writes with authority. He is a former American official who masterminded the first enlargement of NATO to the ex-communist east. In his office, now at a Brussels think-tank, souvenirs include a commemorative sword given by the “grateful nation of Poland”. He has lobbied hard for new candidates, including the Baltic states, which joined NATO in 2004, and most recently for Georgia.

His book lays bare the dilemma facing Mr Saakashvili in the summer of 2008. Russian provocations against Georgia had been escalating for months, with a mixture of economic pressure, subversion and military attacks, chiefly by air. The West’s response was feeble. It made anodyne pleas to both sides to refrain from using force. It was not prepared to say unequivocally to Russia that destabilising Georgia would have serious inevitable consequences.

On July 29th 2008, Russia’s proxies in South Ossetia started shelling pro-Georgian villages there. What was Mr Saakashvili supposed to do? If he ignored the shelling, leaving his supporters to flee or be killed, the loss of prestige would be catastrophic. His pleas to the outside world to intervene were ignored. Moreover, Mr Saakashvili received intelligence (probably exaggerated) that large numbers of Russian troops were crossing into South Ossetia, perhaps as reinforcements, perhaps as a prelude to a full-scale invasion.

Mr Saakashvili decided to act at once, ordering troops into South Ossetia to stop the shelling but not to fight the Russian troops there. As Mr Asmus recounts with painful clarity, that decision was a disaster. The Georgian army lacked plans, troops, equipment, training and communications. All it had was hopes of a quick victory, of Russian hesitancy and of Western support. In fact, huge Russian reinforcements poured in, and within a few days were poised to take Tbilisi.

America stood back, though Mr Asmus gives an intriguing hint that at least some officials were arguing, albeit tentatively and unsuccessfully, for a military response to defend Georgia. That could have ended the war quickly—or led to a terrifying escalation. In the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, on behalf of the European Union, brokered a messy ceasefire.

The book’s detailed inside accounts of Georgian and Western manoeuvring before, during and after the war are gripping. Mr Asmus is caustic about the outside world’s failure to forestall the conflict. Hundreds of people died and many thousands of people lost their homes because of that. In particular he highlights the weakness of NATO (crippled by feuding over the Iraq war) and of the self-centred and complacent EU.

He is rather kinder—too kind, many might feel—to the Georgians. Many decisions and actions may have been mistaken and deserve scrutiny, he concedes. But the author flinches from condemning even the most lamentable mistakes outright. In particular, the heavy-handed crackdown on opposition demonstrators and media in November 2007 played a big role in tarnishing Georgia’s image abroad. This deserves more than the couple of sentences Mr Asmus devotes to it here. Mr Saakashvili’s exasperating habits were similarly damaging: disorganisation, self-indulgence, verbosity, favouritism and vindictiveness are just a few. Mr Asmus also ignores how far the Georgian leadership’s American cheerleaders, especially in some corners of the Republican Party, may have made it overconfident.

Insights from the Russian side are also missing (because officials in Moscow declined to talk to him, says Mr Asmus). What were the Kremlin’s real war aims? How badly did Russia’s military forces do? What conclusions did Russian leaders draw? The definitive book on that is still to come, but Mr Asmus’s work sets a high standard.

Europe View 170--Prickly Poles

2010-02-11T14:45:00.003Z

The furious reaction to the earlier piece on the Polish blogosphere provoked this exasperated response

Europe.view

Better say nothing
Feb 4th 2010
From Economist.com

The minefield of writing about Poland

POLAND is the largest and most successful of the eastern European countries. A safe enough statement? Probably not. Someone will immediately start quibbling that “eastern” Europe doesn’t exist. That will start a long argument about whether “east central Europe” or “central Europe” is the best way of describing the ex-communist region (at which point someone else will chip in and say that the term “ex-communist” is anachronistic). “Largest” is dodgy too—not least because it may prompt a discussion about the fragile and tragic foundations of Poland’s eastern and western frontiers. Ukrainians and Russians will be quick to ask, justifiably, why they have been excluded from this notional category.

Most dangerous of all is to praise the achievements of Poland’s current government, as this newspaper did recently (see article). Clearly, some readers said, the author of such an article has never been to Poland. Otherwise he would know that a small and coincidental spurt of economic growth does not make up for pervasive corruption, ineffective administration of justice, two-tier public services and a cartel-like political system in which insiders feast (literally) and outsiders starve (metaphorically). Any possibly praiseworthy reforms are either superficial and belated, or else were introduced by the previous government.Alamy

The same applies to foreign policy. If Poland is friends with its neighbours, has sorted out its relations with America and is seen as a constructive heavyweight inside the European Union, that does not mean success. It means that the sneaky traitors running the country have sacrificed national interest in order to feather their own nests. In truth, runs this argument, poor Poland is yet again being misruled, betrayed and looted. Any claim to the contrary is either the result of pitiful ignorance, or has been ordered into print by the powerful hidden interests that control the world media.

The outsider who dares to voice such criticisms himself, however, will be met with an opposing but equally incensed strain of argument. Clearly, the author of such an article has never been to Poland. Otherwise he would know that Poland is still struggling with the consequences of centuries of tragic history. Any discussion of Poland’s poor public administration, for example, must acknowledge the role of the missing middle class, eviscerated by foreign occupation, mass murder and emigration. And who are these outsiders to criticise, anyway? The author should write about Greece or Italy if he wants to highlight problems in European countries. Why pick on Poland? Ill-will rather than ignorance surely lies behind the writing of such an article. It must have been ordered into print by the powerful hidden interests that control the world media.

Both those allergic to praise and the foes of criticism agree on one thing. The article’s greatest failing is that it does not include every salient point from Polish history, and a book-length analysis of all features of the country’s contemporary political, economic and social development. If the author pleads lack of space, he should demand more from his editors. Writing about a country as important as Poland in an article the size of a postage stamp is an insult in itself.

And so on and so forth. For the record, your columnist was a student in Poland in the mid-1980s, speaks Polish, has relatives in the country and visits regularly. He normally counts as a Polonophile, especially when arguing with other journalists who use phrases such as “Polish death camps” and a “vicious history of anti-Semitism”. He notes that writing about the other 20-odd countries on his beat does not arouse quite the same neurotic reaction. Why is that? Better, perhaps, to leave that question to the Poles.

Sikorski for President?

2010-02-11T14:40:00.001Z

(when I wrote this, it seemed a bit outlandish. Now the WSJ describes Radek as the "Polish Obama")

Poland's strong economy

Horse power to horsepower
Jan 28th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Economic growth and a strong, stable government to boot: time to rethink old notions about Poland

OUTSIDERS often have fixed ideas of Poland: a big, poor country with shambolic governments, dreadful roads and eccentric habits. Old stereotypes die hard, but the facts paint an increasingly different picture. By the grim standards of recent centuries, Poland has never been more secure, richer or better-run.

It was the only country in the European Union to register economic growth last year, at 1.2%. As Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s finance minister, likes to point out, GDP per head rose from 50% to 56% of the EU average in 2009—a record jump. By the same (somewhat flattering) measure, which adjusts for the greater purchasing power arising from lower prices, Poland now has Europe’s sixth-biggest economy.

Foreign investors like what they see. Whereas supposedly “west” European countries such as Greece flounder, ex-communist Poland is borrowing cheaply, for example with a $4.3 billion (€3 billion) Eurobond issue this month. Lenders’ generosity allowed the government to run a budget deficit of 7% of GDP in 2009 (though officials promise that a new public-finance law will cut spending growth sharply in the years ahead).

These good results owe much to luck. Poland’s stodgy banks came late to the wild foreign-currency lending that proved so disastrous in such countries as Latvia and Hungary. Poland’s big internal market has cushioned demand. Stimulus measures in Germany have spilled across the border. But the country has also benefited from some canny political leadership. Poland has something rare in the EU and all but unique in its ex-communist east: a sensible centre-right government with a majority in parliament.

Many criticise the government for its caution, and more recently for sleaze (a scandal about lobbying by the gambling industry is outraging Poland’s puritanical media). Some long-term problems are unsolved, such as a low rate of participation in the workforce and patchy public services. As many as 2m Poles have voted with their feet by working abroad.

Even so, by the standards of Poland’s governments in the past, and of the rest of Europe now, the present lot look pretty good. The government has made inroads into some of Poland’s worst problems, notably with a tough, if partial, pension reform. It has belatedly started a programme to modernise roads and railways (2,000km of new fast roads will be built by 2012, when Poland and Ukraine co-host the European football championships).

It has also made some badly needed changes in the country’s stifling bureaucracy. Poland ranks low on most indices for friendliness towards business. A recent study by the World Bank put the Polish tax system at 151st out of the 183 countries it surveyed. But some improvements are under way, including online tax filing and faster customs clearance. A new law has liberalised the housing market, allowing short-hold tenancies. That should encourage Poland’s workers to move within the country in search of work, rather than emigrating. It can be easier to make a weekly commute to Britain by air than between Polish cities by road.

A big symbolic and practical change is that citizens can increasingly use a simple signed declaration (an oswiadczenia) instead of a costly, time-consuming notarised one (a zaswiadczenia) in their dealings with the state. “We assume that citizens are telling the truth unless there is evidence to the contrary. In the past, the reverse applied,” says Mr Rostowski. Sceptical Poles, scarred by their dealings with suspicious, nit-picking bureaucrats, may take some convincing of this.

A new Polish foreign policy has been a success, after a spell when the aim seemed to be to lose friends and alienate people. Under Radek Sikorski as foreign minister, Poland has managed to improve relations with all its neighbours and, despite some hiccups, won a favourable security deal from America under Barack Obama. After much haggling, a battery of American Patriot missiles will arrive in Poland in March.

Germany now claims that it wants its relations with Poland to be as close as they are with France. Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s new foreign minister, chose Warsaw for his first foreign visit. Poland’s relations with Russia, once equally neurotic, have calmed down. Even the unearthing of a Russian spy, who had been living for many years under a false identity in Poland, has caused only a ripple.

Some talk of Mr Sikorski as a future president. If he ran this autumn, it would solve a problem for the prime minister, Donald Tusk. Until he ruled himself out on January 28th, Mr Tusk had been dithering about whether to run himself against the incumbent, Lech Kaczynski.

Mr Kaczynski’s record is dire (his popularity rises only when he makes no public statements). His main role has been destructive, vetoing laws and blocking appointments. He is widely believed not to want a second term, but to have been pushed into it by his bossy twin brother, Jaroslaw, who leads the main opposition party, Law and Justice.

Mr Tusk wants to unseat Mr Kaczynski as part of a long-term plan to break up Law and Justice and absorb bits of it into his own Civic Platform party. But he was uneasy about relinquishing the prime minister’s job, especially as he hopes to trim the president’s power in future. Mr Sikorski is electable. He is Poland’s most popular politician and also something of an outsider (he was educated at Oxford; his wife is American; he has worked at a Washington think-tank). So he is no threat to Mr Tusk. As president, he might even help to dispel more of those tiresome stereotypes.

Europe View 169-- RIP Roman Kupchinsky

2010-02-11T14:38:00.000Z

Say not the struggle naught availeth
Jan 28th 2010
From Economist.com

Roman Kupchinsky, a scourge of communists and post-communist kleptocrats alike

IN THEIR freedom they had no homeland. And in their homeland they had no freedom. Roman Kupchinsky, a warrior in and out of uniform, who died on January 19th aged 65, was one of the most remarkable of those who fought a seemingly hopeless but ultimately triumphant struggle against the Soviet seizure of power in the eastern half of Europe.

Much of what he did in the cold war is still secret. The son of Ukrainian émigrés to the United States, he served with the American army in Vietnam*. Then he worked “for the government”. He campaigned for political prisoners and fought hard in the information war against Soviet rule in Ukraine. RFE/RL

But unlike many of his fellow cold-warriors, he did not declare victory and retire in 1991. He turned his fire on a new, more insidious enemy: the overlap between organised crime and ex-Soviet intelligence services, and in particular the staggering corruption of the oil and gas industry. He edited a gripping fortnightly digest on crime and corruption in the ex-Soviet region for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (For readers who know that outfit only in its pale modern incarnation, a trip into the archives is recommended.)

Those who read his reports there, and later for the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank, found them eye-poppingly well-informed and insightful. Yet they were only dilute versions of what he really knew. Western energy companies and governments took him into their confidence, using him as a consultant to explain the monstrous menagerie of cronyism, spookery and greed that they encountered in the wild east. He kept their secrets.

Many people enjoy the title of a “walking encyclopedia”. Mr Kupchinsky deserved it. But that was only part of it. His companionship was uproarious; his determination to outwit the bad guys inspirational. Your columnist once needed urgent help against a seemingly unbeatable enemy from that world. “Romko’s” salty humour calmed my nerves; his deep knowledge helped win the battle.

Mr Kupchinsky was emblematic of a generation that had escaped totalitarianism and found new homes in the west. Others of the same ilk can be found all over the region: Valdas Adamkus and Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former presidents of Lithuania and Latvia respectively, or Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s serving head of state. From the past 20 years you could find plenty more, of all ages, in and around public life in the ex-captive nations.

Their great asset was binocular vision. Having lived in the west, they understood far better than most of their compatriots at home how life in the rich, free world, for good or for ill, really works. But they also enjoyed a deep knowledge of their own countries’ history and traditions—more so, in some cases, than those who lived under Soviet rule. It didn’t always work: after 1991 some returning émigrés proved to be patronising, bombastic and outright flaky. Some of them died too early: Stasys Lozoraitis, Lithuania’s top diplomat in the West, was struck down by liver cancer in 1994, aged 70, robbing his country of his integrity, charm and vision. But the best and luckiest of them have played a huge role in securing their countries’ future after the collapse of communism.

Mr Kupchinsky was one of the most formidable: equally at home in dealing with troubled bureaucracies such as the FBI and CIA or with Ukraine’s also ill-run intelligence bureaucracies, as well as the private sector, the media and think-tanks. He continued reading, writing and talking—fuelled by a prodigious intake of nicotine and alcohol—right up to his death.

What will we do without him?