Romania corruption scoop

This was largely the work of the excellent Economist stringer in Romania, Valentina Pop


Corruption in Romania

In denial

Jul 3rd 2008 | BRUSSELS AND BUCHAREST
From The Economist print edition

The European Union conceals Romania’s backsliding on corruption

HOW bad is corruption in Romania? Somebody well-placed to answer is Willem de Pauw, a Belgian prosecutor who is a veteran European Union adviser on the matter. Last November he wrote a report that concludes: “instead of progress in the fight against high-level corruption, Romania is regressing on all fronts…if the Romanian anti-corruption effort keeps evaporating at the present pace, in an estimated six months’ time Romania will be back where it was in 2003.”

This report has not been published (it is now available here). The European Commission’s report in February was a lot softer. “In its first year…Romania has continued to make efforts to remedy weaknesses that would otherwise prevent an effective application of EU laws, policies and programmes. However, in key areas such as the fight against high-level corruption, convincing results have not yet been demonstrated.”

That falls far short of admitting that Romania’s authorities are wilfully failing to co-operate. Some of Mr de Pauw’s most striking examples did not appear in the official report either, or were buried in footnotes. Mr de Pauw confirms his authorship but refers inquiries about it to the commission. Officials say he was consulted on the issue. Their February report, they add, was a “factual update”, not an assessment of Romania’s progress. That will come in a fuller report later this month.

It would be encouraging if this included some of Mr de Pauw’s points. One hot example is the cases that courts have sent back to prosecutors since Romania’s constitutional court struck down an anti-sleaze law. Mr de Pauw’s report said that “basically all” high-level corruption trials had been rebuffed by courts, which it was “statistically impossible to attribute [to] the coincidental occurrence of procedural mistakes in individual cases. Other factors than legal-procedural considerations have clearly played a major role.” He added that “the Romanian judiciary and/or legal system appears…unable to function properly when it comes to applying the rule of law against high-level corruption. Indeed, more than five years after the start of Romania’s anti-corruption drive, the public is still waiting for one single case of high-level corruption to reach a verdict.”

Events also support Mr de Pauw’s warning that Romania could soon regress to the level of 2003. Take the case of Adrian Nastase, a former prime minister charged with several counts of corruption and bribery. He has now been exonerated by the parliamentary committee on legal affairs. A lobby group, the Initiative for a Clean Justice, complains that “we are witnessing the transformation of parliamentarians into judges and of the judicial committee into an extraordinary court.” A full parliamentary vote on the committee’s recommendation has been postponed until after the EU’s July report. But Mr Nastase and his supporters are already considering a presidential bid in 2009.

In retrospect, the EU relied too much on individual politicians to back Romania’s anti-corruption drive, notably Monica Macovei, a much-admired justice minister. She was fired soon after Romania joined the EU in January 2007. Membership made the political elites feel they were off the hook. Mr de Pauw offers a bleak verdict. “Many of the measures that were presented, before accession, to be instrumental in the fight against corruption, have been deliberately blunted by parliament or the government immediately after accession…all major pending trials concerning high-level corruption, started just before accession and only after many years of hesitation, have now been aborted and are, most probably, definitely abandoned for all practical purposes.” He also cites the weakening of the role of the National Integrity Agency, meant to limit politicians’ conflicts of interests and verify their assets, and also amendments to the penal code before parliament that will “fatally affect” the investigation of corruption.

All this, he says, shows “the intense resistance of practically the whole political class of Romania against the anti-corruption effort”. Mid-level Eurocrats, as well as some foreign diplomats in Bucharest, agree. The problem is that countries such as France pushed to get Romania into the EU early for their own reasons, whether financial or geopolitical. And the political pressure may now be to cover up, not expose, the problem. If the EU’s July report on Romania is as anodyne as the previous one, suspicions will only grow.

Marshall Goldman book review: "Petrostate"

The Future Is in the Pipeline

Wall St Journal June 19, 2008; Page A13

Petrostate (Published in the UK as Oilopoly: Putin, Power, and the Rise of the New Russia)

By Marshall Goldman
(Oxford, 244 pages, $27.95)

Natural gas is a monopolistic business: Building even one pipeline is expensive; building another makes no commercial sense. Russia, with its huge natural-gas reserves, uses its monopoly on east-west pipelines to promote Russia's political interests -- and reacts toughly when challenged. Marshall Goldman sets out these disturbing truths in "Petrostate," a bleak and yet spirited account of Russia's energy politics. The West, Mr. Goldman makes clear, should be wincing at its own vulnerability.

The story, as Mr. Goldman tells it, starts with the first oil boom in the czarist era, when Russia and America together produced 97% of the world's oil. Foreign companies were booted out of the Soviet Union by Lenin and Stalin, only to be invited back in again (on different terms) when their technological expertise was missed. After the fall of communism there was a reverse involvement: Foreigners rushed into Russia to help set up a post-communist economy, only to retreat a few years later.

In between came the era of Soviet go-it-alone energy policy, when oil and gas revenues became the vital prop for Leonid Brezhnev's ailing planned economy. As in so many other parts of the Soviet system, ingenuity battled with incompetence, and incompetence won. The Central Intelligence Agency may have helped matters along by encouraging the Saudis to crash the oil price in the 1980s -- Mr. Goldman suggests as much -- but in the end, he argues, it was the Kremlin's mismanagement of its energy reserves that doomed the Soviet system.

Such incompetence lingers. The greedy and shortsighted engineering practices of the past all but ruined many Russian oil fields: It was routine to pump water in to get oil out, regardless of the consequences. The challenge for current Russian engineers is to coax Russia's shattered geology to cough up more oil -- for example, by drilling horizontally, not vertically. That's a tricky technical challenge. Arguing over the best approach to oil-extraction is at the root of the current row between BP and its Russian partners. The Russians want a dash for cash, while BP is seeking careful, long-term management of the oil fields.

Russia shows more savvy when it comes to selling natural gas abroad, where it has used its pipelines to skewer Europe, striking bilateral deals that might make short-term sense for individual countries but that undermine the leverage and bargaining power of the continent as a whole. Europe is three times bigger than Russia by population and about 10 times bigger in economic terms, yet the eagerness of individual countries for Russia's terms makes Europe politically vulnerable to Moscow's divide-and-prosper strategy. As Russia builds relationships with energy companies that might have been in a position to seek other sources of gas, Europe's ability to diversify its suppliers diminishes -- and becomes a prohibitively costly proposition.

Standing in the nerve center of Gazprom's Moscow headquarters -- staring at a 100-foot wall that electronically displays the spiderweb of natural-gas pipelines spreading across Europe from Russia -- Mr. Goldman marvels: "What an empowering feeling! Should they choose to, those Gazprom functionaries could not only cut off natural gas from the furnaces and stoves of 40 percent of Germany's homes but also the natural gas that many German factories need for manufacturing."

In other words, Ronald Reagan's warnings in the 1980s, about the political dangers of Western Europe's dependence on Soviet gas, now seem prescient. Today Western Europe relies on Russia for half of its natural-gas imports.

It is sometimes argued that Russia's increasing energy consumption and its stagnant production -- its output of natural gas has been virtually flat for the past four years -- will lead to gas shortages in Europe. (They are already biting hard in Russia.) Mr. Goldman dismisses such fears, though much too briefly to be convincing. He also sees no danger of an international natural-gas cartel forming along the lines of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, one that would presumably include Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Trinidad.

Russia would never let its decision-making be affected by others, Mr. Goldman says. That may be true in the case of price-setting (where the economics are quite different from the oil market, because oil is traded on the spot market, whereas the international gas business is mainly based on long-term contracts). But a possible Organization of Gas Exporting Countries could still help bolster Russia's position by consolidating producer power in exploration, pipeline routes and the market for liquefied natural gas.

The biggest hole in "Petrostate" is its skimpy treatment of the European Union. An important question facing the EU now, for instance, is whether its energy liberalization policy -- unbundling the wholesale and retail businesses in gas and electricity -- will help or hinder the Kremlin. A fragmented market may be even easier to manipulate. Mr. Goldman's sharp mind would be well-suited to untangling such intricacies.

The unanswerable question is whether the Kremlin -- or more precisely, Vladimir Putin -- will use gas as a weapon to gain international political influence. The optimistic view is that business normalizes politics -- in this case, that Russia's need to be a dependable partner will require it to soften its political edge and conform to international standards of behavior. Pessimists fear that gas dependency will lead to the Finlandization of Europe. On the evidence so far, the pessimists have the better chance of being right.

Mr. Lucas is the author of "The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West" (Palgrave).

Europe

The European Union and Russia

Uneasy partnership
May 29th 2008 | BRUSSELS
From The Economist print edition
The European Union has agreed on what it wants from Russia. But not how fast

WHETHER it was brave or clumsy depends on your point of view. But Lithuania (population 3.5m) has nudged the European Union (population 500m) into a slightly tougher stance towards Russia. Talks on a (long overdue) partnership agreement were first postponed because of Russia's embargo on Polish meat. When that was lifted, the obstacle became Lithuanian demands for firmer terms concerning energy, judicial co-operation and Russia's treatment of countries such as Georgia.EU diplomats fumed about Lithuania's tactics, complaining of belated timing, poor preparation and unrealistic expectations. A few said this was just the sort of thing to strengthen the view in “old Europe” that letting neurotic and primitive ex-communist easterners into their club had been a mistake. Certainly some foreign ministers' meetings discussing the issue have been remarkably stormy by EU standards.But a meeting on May 27th agreed upon a new negotiating mandate, with small but significant changes on some points sought by Lithuania. “They have attracted attention to Russia's behaviour in Georgia, which is timely and good,” says an official from a neighbouring country. The talks on the partnership agreement will start at an EU-Russia summit in Siberia next month.The question is how fast they will go. Germany wants things sewn up, at least in principle, within a year. That seems too soon to countries that are hawkish on Russia, as well as to the European Commission. This camp wants a more detailed deal, in which Russia would have to make big changes on such contentious issues as its energy monopolies, investor protection and illegal migration. In return the EU would offer a laxer visa regime and let Russian energy companies expand westwards more easily. Other countries are moving to counter what they see as Germany's overly Russia-friendly policies. Poland and Sweden this week launched their own plan, called the “eastern partnership”, to offer generous trade and other co-operation to Ukraine and Georgia, as well as to other interested countries. The aim is to recreate the model of the “Visegrad” group of four central European countries in the early 1990s, which helped ex-communist states to prepare for what at the time seemed the highly uncertain prospect of EU membership.For the first time in any EU initiative, the plan explicitly includes Belarus (albeit only on a “technical” level for now). Russian regions such as Kaliningrad are also welcome to apply for some of the goodies that a partnership agreement can offer, such as better border crossings and environmental projects. Ex-communist Poland and rich, neutral Sweden may prove an effective combination. Their forceful foreign ministers, Radek Sikorski and Carl Bildt, get on well. Bravery is good. But brains are even better.

EU-Russia

The European Union and Russia

Divide, rule or waffle

May 1st 2008
From The Economist print edition

The European Union cannot agree over how to deal with Russia. That suits the Kremlin just fine

SEEN from outside, one might imagine that the European Union (population 495m, GDP of $16.8 trillion) was a rather intimidating neighbour for Russia (population 142m, GDP of $1.3 trillion). Yet the reality is the other way round. In recent years Russia has played a canny game of divide and rule against the EU, building cosy bilateral relations with Germany and Italy especially, but also with Austria, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Greece.

That makes other countries, and many Eurocrats, uneasy. They would like the EU to bargain more effectively with Russia, particularly over energy. But how? For now, the relationship is based on an outdated partnership and co-operation agreement (PCA), signed in 1997. Talks on renewing it are long overdue. But they show no sign of starting. Last year the obstacle was a Polish veto, prompted by a Russian embargo on Polish meat exports. But that was resolved after a charm offensive by Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, who was once a notable hawk on Russia.

Now talks on a new PCA are stymied again, this time because of a veto by Lithuania. The Lithuanians argue that the previously agreed negotiating position is too soft and too limited, given what they see as Russia's slide towards autocracy at home and aggression abroad. An EU foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg on April 29th ended in deadlock (though it did sign a deal that may clear the way for Serbia, a country wobbling into Russia's orbit, to become a candidate for membership).

Other EU countries are cross with the Lithuanians, accusing them of belated and clumsy diplomacy, and of posturing with an eye to a general election this autumn, in which the ruling coalition is lagging behind pro-Russian parties. The Poles, who agreed to drop their veto of a new PCA in return for a lifting of the meat ban, say they must honour their side of the deal they struck with Russia. Many west European countries also hope that the arrival of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president could be a chance to put their relationship on a friendlier footing. In any case, the previous negotiating mandate has already been adapted to reflect, at least partly, Lithuania's desire for stronger language on energy (Russia has blocked an oil pipeline to Lithuania's refinery since 1996, claiming that it needs “repairs”).

Yet the Lithuanians want more. They demand explicit mention of Russia's relations with such neighbours as Georgia, citing the Kremlin's increasingly strong support for the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This week the Russians claimed Georgia was planning to invade Abkhazia and said they would boost their peacekeeping forces, promising to respond forcefully to any Georgian attack. The Georgians have retaliated by threatening to block Russia's application to join the World Trade Organisation. The Lithuanians see all this as an ominous threat to their own security. “We are in the front line. If Georgia goes, we are next,” argues a Lithuanian official.

The Lithuanians also want the EU to be tougher over justice. In particular, they complain that the Kremlin is not helping track down those responsible for a Soviet-backed attempted putsch in Lithuania in early 1991 that killed 14 people and for the execution of eight border guards shortly afterwards. “We have had 22 Litvinenkos and no co-operation from Russia,” says the official. His irritation may be understandable (Britain is also furious with the Kremlin for refusing to co-operate over the murder of a Russian exile with British citizenship, Alexander Litvinenko, in London in 2006). But an unwillingness from Russia to investigate such crimes is nothing new, and is therefore harder to portray as a sinister new twist.

Diplomats still hope to launch negotiations on a new PCA before the next EU-Russia summit in Siberia in June. Reopening discussion on the negotiating mandate may not help Lithuania: some countries want it to be softer, not tougher, says one foreign minister. And none of this seems to bother the Russians much. Their ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizov, says his country would be delighted to deal with the EU if only it would decide what it actually wants. The impasse also makes it easier for national governments to justify doing bilateral deals with Russia. Italy made a barely veiled threat along these lines this week. Greece chose the same day formally to sign up to South Stream, a Kremlin-backed Black Sea pipeline that many see as a direct rival to the EU's own plans in the region. The outgoing Italian prime minister and former European Commission president, Romano Prodi, also said he had turned down (for now, at least) a Russian offer to head the South Stream consortium.

In practice a new PCA is unlikely to make much difference. Despite the obsolescence of the old one, trade between Russia and the EU has more than tripled since 2000. In negotiating a new one, Russia would, on past form, use its bilateral ties with big countries to get its way in what ought to be multilateral negotiations. And it is not clear that any new agreement will stick. Russia has explicitly said that it will not ratify the energy charter it signed in 1994, which would have required it to give third parties access to its gas pipelines. As Katinka Barysch, of the London-based Centre for European Reform, notes drily, “the Russians have a somewhat different approach to law, so whether you can aim to solve all problems with a legal document is open to doubt.”

Bulgaria

Bulgaria
Dirty politics
Apr 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition
One resignation is not enough to clean up Bulgaria

RUMEN PETKOV admits that as the then Bulgarian interior minister he met the country's top gangsters in 2006. He claims it was in a good cause: to ask them to stop shooting each other in the crucial weeks ahead of the country's accession to the European Union.

Bulgaria's woes with crime and corruption needed more than a temporary ceasefire. Gangland shootings, never resolved, have resumed: last week gunmen killed Bulgaria's best-known author of books on the mafia, Georgy Stoyev, and the manager of an energy firm with a controversial history.

Under pressure from the European Union, Mr Petkov resigned this week after a leaked intelligence report said a drug gang had received top-secret internal documents from officials in his ministry, while illegal booze producers gave money to a senior crime-fighter in return for information and the destruction of incriminating evidence. EU officials have long worried that anything they shared with Bulgarian counterparts would be leaked to gangsters. Eurocrats say they objected to Mr Petkov's bullying attitude; an EU source says he enjoyed “rubbing our nose into the fact that Bulgaria is now a member state”. That is not a unanimous view. The European Commission's vice-president, Franco Frattini, went skiing with Mr Petkov last year and has praised him. But the EU has already suspended some programmes because of corruption. In July, it will assess Bulgaria's overall progress and may suspend the validity of its court decisions elsewhere in the EU.

It was a parliamentary investigation that made Mr Petkov's position impossible. But the real story is Bulgaria's political weakness. The ruling ex-communists are split between a supposedly modernising faction lead by the prime minister, Sergey Stanishev, and the old guard around Mr Petkov. A coalition party that represents the Turkish ethnic minority controls the agriculture and environment ministries, the main conduits for EU money. It has been heavily criticised for land deals, arbitrary treatment of mining licences and vote-buying.

Mr Stanishev was recently forced to bring back into government a deputy environment minister from this party, fired last year for alleged corruption (and then cleared). While out of office he caused surprise by acquiring two newspapers (from his savings, he said). The economy minister, Rumen Ovcharov, another old guard ex-communist, resigned last year under a cloud, but protested his innocence. Criticism from Brussels and elsewhere about Bulgaria's murk has continued. One more resignation is unlikely to make a difference.

leader on European security

European security and Russia

Think pipes not rockets

Apr 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The European Union should worry about gas, not just missile defences

Illustration by David Simonds

BELIEVE the spin, and America and its European allies are doing a great job in bolstering the future security of a Europe whole and free. The NATO summit in Bucharest gave an (undated) promise of future membership to Ukraine and Georgia and endorsed America's plans for a limited missile-defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Reality is rather different. George Bush's efforts to burnish his presidential legacy led to a venomous row. Some NATO members in old Europe thought they were being railroaded by America into hasty expansion (see article). Some in eastern Europe worried that a Russia-friendly camp centred on Germany was taking shape inside the alliance. Meanwhile, the chirpy tone of a later meeting in Sochi between Mr Bush and Vladimir Putin belied a lack of substance.

Help for those who help themselves

But the real worry for Europe is a different one. It gets a quarter of its gas from Russia and the proportion is set to rise sharply. The Kremlin uses its monopoly of east-west gas pipelines, and offers of lucrative bilateral gas deals, to interfere in Europe's energy business. It relies on friends like Germany to block efforts to liberalise European markets and diversify supply.

Russia is also pushing ahead with South Stream, a $15 billion pipeline to bring gas across the Black Sea to central Europe via the Balkans. Three European Union members, Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy, have signed up, and Austria is interested. This weakens the chances of an EU-backed alternative, Nabucco, already stymied by lack of gas, partly because of Russia's Caspian arm-twisting and also because politics precludes using supplies from Iran.

The energy-security outlook is bleak, but the EU could help itself in three ways. First, by pushing harder for new pipelines that weaken Russia's grip on gas from the east. Efforts to revive Nabucco should continue. But political support should also be garnered for White Stream, an ingenious smaller-bore pipeline that aims to bring Caspian gas across the Black Sea to Europe, bypassing awkward Turkey. Serious talks on that would concentrate minds on Russia's troubling monopoly. The West also already has access to twin oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian to Turkey.

Second, the EU needs to drive a harder bargain with Russia on the gas it does buy. Its population is more than three times Russia's; it is 13 times richer by GDP. And it is after all in Russia's interest too to make sure that Central Asia's gas is sold to Europe (ie, mostly via Russia) not directly to China. Europe is also the most plausible market for the big new gas field Russia plans to develop in the Arctic. Its ill-run, debt-soaked gas industry needs Western expertise and cash to modernise.

But Europe also needs to insist on more liberalisation and transparency in the gas industry. A deep and liquid market would make it harder for the Kremlin to manipulate supply. Gazprom—the trading name of the gas division of Kremlin, Inc—should be able to invest in Europe only if it obeys the rules. The EU should treat Gazprom with the same toughness that it has shown towards Microsoft, obliging it to publish details of its contracts and open the books of shadowy intermediary companies such as RosUkrEnergo. These often seem to exist solely to siphon off export revenues, for the benefit of hidden owners. And Gazprom needs to separate its transmission, distribution and storage assets to allow full third-party access—as the EU should have forced its own companies to do.

The intricate economics of the gas business may seem less exciting than the Star Wars technology of missile defence. But for Europe's unity and security, they matter more.

A gloomy upshot

Eastern Europe, America and Russia
Pipedreams
Jan 24th 2008
| VILNIUS
From The Economist print edition

America seems to care more than the European Union about eastern Europe
EUROPEANS may not always like it, but America still matters most for their security. As Kosovo edges towards independence, NATO ponders further expansion and Russia rips Europe's threadbare energy policy to rags, every debate involves America. And the mood is gloomy.
“Russia is getting stronger; we are getting weaker”, concludes one European political leader. That is alarmingly clear in Serbia, where a pro-Russian nationalist, Tomislav Nikolic, came out ahead in the first round of the presidential election on January 20th. Serbia has just signed an energy pact to distribute Russian gas exports to Europe; in return a Russian company (the oil arm of Gazprom, the state-run gas giant) is to get a controlling share in Serbia's national oil monopoly.

Europeans flinch at the idea of Kosovo, the mostly ethnic-Albanian province of Serbia, declaring independence immediately—something the Russians strongly oppose. The Americans fear that more delay risks violence by impatient Kosovars or by Serb provocateurs. Some Europeans plead for a few weeks longer, perhaps to allow yet more talks with Serbia after its presidential election, or simply to get more European waverers such as Spain and Romania to back European Union recognition of an independent Kosovo.
Serbia is one of what some analysts call “swing states”, places where Russia and the West are vying for influence. Others include Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova—and even a few EU members such as Latvia and Bulgaria. President Vladimir Putin of Russia, accompanied by his likely successor, Dmitry Medvedev, recently signed a deal with Bulgaria to build a new pipeline across the Black Sea. Called South Stream, this will pipe Russian gas direct to Europe, bypassing transit countries such as Ukraine and Poland. In this, it matches Nord Stream, a similar bypass under the Baltic (see map--on economist.com).

South Stream may stymie a rival EU effort, Nabucco, which was meant to bring gas from the Caspian and Central Asia to western Europe through the Balkans. Nabucco would be the only pipeline from the region not to cross Russian territory, giving Europe the hope of more diversified gas supplies. Nabucco's prospects already looked shaky: gas for it must come from either a trans-Caspian pipeline (which Russia has blocked) or Iran (which America dislikes). If South Stream were built, it would make Nabucco uneconomic.
Pipelines and dependence on Russian gas are not the only sources of controversy. American and European diplomats are also wrestling with the question of NATO expansion, which may feature at the alliance's summit in Bucharest in April. The leading candidate is Croatia. Albania and Macedonia are less prepared, but bringing them in might be seen as one way of countering instability caused by Serbia's hostility to Kosovo's independence.
That leaves Ukraine, whose new government says it wants eventually to join NATO, and Georgia, which tarnished its democratic credentials in a crackdown on opposition protests in November. Offering either country a membership action plan—a staging post to joining the alliance—would enrage Russia. But holding back might be seen as giving the Kremlin a veto over its neighbours' security arrangements. The hunt is on for something else to offer instead.
Largely silent is the EU, whose members appear more concerned over institutional reform and emissions targets (see article) than geopolitical issues. That worries the Americans. They seem to have settled a row with Poland over a planned missile-defence base. But not much else is going right. Ron Asmus, a former American diplomat now at the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, frets publicly about a “rollback” of the West's influence in eastern Europe. He is not the only one.

Europe.view column

Europe.view

All for none
Jan 24th 2008
From Economist.com


The perils of disparate interests


IT WOULD be nice to think that the harassment of the British Council by the Russian authorities would prompt a united, imaginative European response. Perhaps in a parallel universe it is. Imagine Germany’s Goethe Institute, the Spanish Instituto Cervantes, the Institut Français and other Western cultural-diplomacy offices announcing joint efforts to promote the English language and British culture and hire all the staff of the British Council offices.

That would force the Kremlin to decide whether it really wanted a full-scale confrontation with its most important neighbours. Such a stance would prove beyond doubt the need for a serious rethink. If Russia backed down, the row would end.

In this universe, though, the response has been feeble, and not for the first time. When European countries have tiffs with the Kremlin, they tend to find themselves standing alone, not shoulder to shoulder with their allies.

In Britain’s case, that is partly the fault of the prime minister, Gordon Brown, whose hermit-like approach to Europe has won him few friends. A man who won’t even come to the phone when the French and German leaders want to talk to him can hardly expect their instant help when things get tricky.

But it also reflects Russia’s remarkable ability to strike bilateral deals. Every European country has its own agenda—perhaps the prospect of cheap gas, perhaps the chance of a lucrative investment in Russia’s booming economy. Such considerations tend to override any other concerns.

The overall result is dismal. Russia tends to put countries in one of three categories: those it flatters, those it squeezes, and those it ignores. Countries can be switched with remarkable rapidity. Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Romania are, for now, in the “ignore” category. Estonia and Lithuania, as well as, most of all, Britain, are in the “squeeze” category. France, Germany, Italy. Bulgaria and Poland are, for now, in the “flatter” box. Latvia was there too—but this week’s news of the expulsion of a Russian embassy official, supposedly caught red-handed trying to bribe local public servants, may change things.

The result is a kind of diplomatic ratchet, which goes in one direction only. That suits the Kremlin fine—it doesn’t need to be friendly with all European countries, just enough to prevent any united European policy emerging.

And when relations are good, Russia makes real gains—such as the recent energy deal with Bulgaria. Vladimir Putin, accompanied by his successor-designate Dmitri Medvedev, visited there last week and signed a deal on the South Stream pipeline.

This puts the kibosh on European hopes of building Nabucco, which could—if everything else went right—bring gas from Azerbaijan and elsewhere to European markets, without crossing territory under Russian control. With Russian deals done or looming in most of the countries that Nabucco is supposed to cross, the project looks moribund.

Perhaps in the parallel universe things are different: European countries could react to the South Stream deal by telling Russia that unless it signs the energy charter and demonopolises its pipelines, Europe is both going ahead with Nabucco and building a bunch of terminals to import liquefied natural gas.

They could also synchronise their counter-intelligence work. Instead of dealing with Russian spies piece-meal, they could organise a joint expulsion: say four from each country, announced at the same time on the same day. That would send a sharp signal to the Kremlin spymasters that their efforts were attracting seriously unwelcome attention, not just bouts of irritation.

Europe collectively is much bigger, richer and stronger than Russia. You wouldn’t know it from reading the news—in this universe at least.

A globe-trotters guide to Divorce

Divorce

For richer and poorer

Mar 1st 2007
From The Economist print edition

Rich people with wobbly marriages need to think hard about where they live

MARRIAGE may be about love, but divorce is a business. For global couples—born in different countries, married in a third, now working somewhere else and with children, pensions and other assets sprinkled over the world—a contested divorce is bliss for lawyers and a nightmare for others.

Divorce laws vary wildly, from countries (such as Malta) that still forbid it to Islamic states where—for the husband, at least—it may be obtained in minutes. Rules on the division of property and future financial obligations vary hugely too. France expects the poorer party, usually the wife, to start fending for herself almost immediately; England and some American states insist on lifelong support. Some systems look only at the “acquest” (assets built during the marriage); others count the lot. A few, like Austria, still link cash to blame (eg, for adultery). Japan offers a temptingly quick cheap break, but—for foreigners—little or no enforceable contact with the kids thereafter, notes Jeremy Morley, a New York-based “international divorce strategist”. Other places may be mum-friendly when it comes to money but dad-friendly on child custody.

The European Union (home to 875,000 divorces a year, of which a fifth are “international”) is trying to tidy up its divorce laws. A reform in 2001 called Brussels II tried to stop forum shopping, in which each party sought the most favourable jurisdiction, by ruling that the first court to be approached decides the divorce. That worked—but at the cost of encouraging trigger-happy spouses to kill troubled marriages quickly, rather than trying to patch them up. This, says David Hodson, a specialist in international divorce law, favours the “wealthier, more aggressive, more unscrupulous party”. It goes against the general trend towards counselling, mediation and out-of-court settlement.

An EU measure called Rome III, now under negotiation and pencilled in to come into force in 2008, tries to ensure that the marriage is ended by the law that has governed it most closely. It may be easy for a Dutch court to apply Belgian law when dealing with the uncontested divorce of a Belgian couple, but less so for a Spanish court to apply Polish rules, let alone Iranian or Indonesian, and especially not when the divorce is contested.

Such snags make Rome III “laughably idiotic—a recipe for increasing costs”, according to John Cornwell, a London lawyer. Britain and Ireland say they will opt out. That, says Mr Hodson, will give a further edge to London. Since a judgment in 2000 entrenched the principle of “equality” in division of marital assets, England, home to hundreds of thousands of expatriates, has become a “Mecca for wives”, says Louise Spitz of Manches, a London law firm. David Truex, who runs a specialist international divorce outfit, reckons that at least a fifth of divorce cases registered in London's higher courts now have an international element.

That trend is accelerating as more and more foreign professionals move to Britain: the latest bunch of customers, says Ms Spitz, are from the former Soviet Union: hugely wealthy and based in London for political reasons. That may protect their assets from being grabbed by the Kremlin; but it does not shield them from their wives. English courts are slowly edging towards the principle (already entrenched in some American states) that the wife's efforts during the marriage to boost her husband's earning power must be compensated, meaning that future income, as well as current assets, must be shared.

Compared with most other jurisdictions, English courts are not just wife-friendly but sharp-toothed and clear-sighted. A case to be heard next week by the Court of Appeal will determine the fate of the huge offshore fortune of John Charman, a financier. A lower court ruled that his wife was entitled to her share of the assets held in a Bermuda trust. Rich couples with troubled marriages and a London connection are watching with a mixture of glee and foreboding.

For the typical global couple, such high-profile, big-money cases matter less than the three basic (and deeply unromantic factors) in marriage planning. According to Mr Truex, a rich man should choose his bride from a country with a stingy divorce law, such as Sweden or France, and marry her there. Second, he should draw up a pre-nuptial agreement. These are binding in many countries and have begun to count even in England. Third, once divorce looms, a wife may want to move to England or America (but should avoid no-alimony states such as Florida); for husbands, staying in continental Europe is wise.

Outside Europe, the country—or American state—deemed the most “appropriate” in terms of the couple's family and business connections will normally get to hear the case. But here too unilateral action may be decisive. When Earl Spencer, brother of Princess Diana, divorced his first wife he surprised her by issuing proceedings in South Africa where they were then living. In England, where they had been domiciled, she might have got a better deal. She ended up suing her lawyers.

The lesson for couples? How you live may determine the length and happiness of your marriage. Where you live is likely to determine how it ends.

.

this week's europe.view

Europe.view

Two speeds, too scary

Feb 22nd 2007
From Economist.com

Beware a split between the EU's old and new democracies

DEPENDING on where you are standing, the phrase “two-speed Europe” can be tempting or terrifying. For the people who run many of the continent’s old democracies, it must be very tempting—a device for marginalising all the prickly Poles, hapless Hungarians, sleazy Slovaks, chattering Czechs and baffling Balts who have made the European Union so much more diverse a place in the past couple of years.

If the EU were to fracture, the natural fault-line would be the edge of the euro zone, as Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s thoughtful president, has observed (see map, below).

The common currency includes most of old Europe, but excludes most of the new democracies (including his). What would happen to the outsiders?

It would be nice to think, as a worst-case scenario, that the single market would hang together, and that the baker's dozen of countries outside the euro zone would at least remain part of this thriving free-trade area.

They would find themselves in much the same position as Norway and Switzerland do today―bound by the EU's rules and standards for trade and industry, in exchange for free-trade arrangements, but with few of the other main burdens and privileges of EU membership.

Probably, however, the unravelling would go further. The EU already finds it a huge effort to make the Poles, for example, abide by European competition law. Without a seat at the top table in Brussels, no Polish government would allow foreigners to claim full national treatment, especially when it came to buying the country’s big companies. With that, the single market would unravel too.

The already withered carrot of enlargement would look much less appealing. Today the EU can hope to make the politicians of the western Balkans raise their game by talking up the distant prospect of full membership. But who is going to lift a finger to join a two-speed Europe in the slow lane to nowhere?

Another big casualty of a two-speed Europe would be any hope of a tough and coherent policy towards Russia.

A resurgent old Europe would probably be dominated by France, Germany and Italy (assuming Britain, as usual, dithered). These countries tend to see rows with the Kremlin as costly distractions. They view the warnings and grumblings of the Poles and the Balts as mere revanchism.

Given the chance, they would happily strike bargains with Russia on energy and anything else, over the heads of the countries in between. A Russian-German gas pipeline being built on the Baltic seabed is a foretaste of what Poland and the Baltics can expect if a two-speed Europe takes shape.

The ex-communist states’ wobbly finances are propped up in part by the financial markets’ confidence that they will join the euro eventually. If that belief erodes, the halo effect of proximity to rich stable Europe evaporates

This should be a terrifying scenario for the new democracies. You might expect them to react furiously by hastening to adopt the euro, by restoring their reputation as reformers, and by pushing for adoption of the EU's constitutional treaty.

But they aren’t, mostly. And the euro is slipping away from them as the EU’s monetary bosses cook up ever more slippery criteria to limit membership. Slovakia, the new EU member with the best claim to join soon, is likely to be told that its low inflation is “unsustainable”, because it relies on a currency appreciation which will end when Slovakia joins the common currency.

The dangers here can scarcely be exaggerated. The ex-communist states’ wobbly finances are propped up in part by the financial markets’ confidence that they will join the euro eventually. If that belief erodes, the halo effect of proximity to rich stable Europe evaporates. Slow-lane Europe’s bad government, backwardness and weakness will stand starkly revealed. And who will pay then?

second article about Poland, from print edition

Poland's government

Turning the loose screw

Feb 15th 2007 | WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

The Polish government flails, creaks and sheds ministers

POLAND'S fractious, pig-headed government has survived for nearly 18 months, against the expectations of most commentators. Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the identical twins who are respectively president and prime minister, may be disastrous in foreign affairs, but at home life rumbles on fine. Poland took in a record $14.7 billion in foreign investment last year, and the economy is growing at almost 6% a year.

Money is flowing in from Brussels, thanks to Grazyna Gesicka, the diligent regional-affairs minister. The justice system, under a zealot named Zbigniew Ziobro, at least sounds serious about catching the biggest crooks. Communist-era secret-police files—long a source of suspicion and scandal in Poland—are to be opened. The old military intelligence service, the WSI, has been closed down, and a dossier will be published soon showing the reach of its sinister tentacles in business, media and officialdom. The upper reaches of the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice party exude a puritanical rectitude. Its two small coalition partners, once known for their outlandish populism, have been tamed by power.

In the past two weeks, however, the government has shown signs of self-destruction. First to go was Radek Sikorski, the defence minister. He resigned because his military counter-intelligence service was snooping on him, at the behest of its chief, Antoni Macierewicz, a Kaczynski ally. Mr Macierewicz was in charge of liquidating the WSI, but has created a private spy service for the Kaczynskis in its place. The loss of Mr Sikorski, the only minister able to talk sense in English, will merely highlight his ex-colleagues' failings.

Next came the departure of Ludwik Dorn, a deputy prime minister and head of the interior ministry. Known as the “third twin” for his closeness to the Kaczynskis, the brainy and hard-working Mr Dorn wrote a furious open letter to the prime minister, demanding indefinite leave (which was granted). The ostensible reason was a clash with Mr Ziobro.

Two senior foreign-policy advisers have also left. The chaos suggests that the Kaczynskis' grip may be failing. Anybody wanting to survive in the government must be passive, mediocre and loyal, say Poles. One Polish weekly has even compared Jaroslaw Kaczynski to Vladimir Putin, an insult that is both shocking and a shade absurd. Yet Mr Kaczynski's statist, top-down approach and his disregard for the separation of powers do ring some faintly alarming bells.

Even as their enemies become more hysterical, however, the Kaczynskis' supporters are untroubled. Law and Justice is polling a steady 28%, more than it scored in the election of September 2005. It would be rash to write the government off; Jaroslaw Kaczynski has often proved a masterly tactician. Some loyalists even suspect that Mr Dorn's half-resignation is part of a master-plan. Others think the government's troubles are a last-ditch diversion put up by the WSI in its death-throes.

The bigger problem is that, aside from the justice ministry, reform has stalled in Poland. Its public administration remains unwieldy, incompetent and backward. Having booted the old government's cronies out of top jobs in public institutions and state-owned companies, the Kaczynskis have installed their own chums, rather than liberalising and depoliticising. Privatisation has almost stopped. Public purchasing is still deeply corrupt. The Kaczynskis' obsession with the wrongs of the past seems to blind them to what is happening under their noses.

In foreign policy, farce is mixed with tragedy. The Kaczynskis have missed no opportunity to insult Germany—which under Angela Merkel has been trying to be friends. Their conduct of diplomacy is comically incompetent. Any advisers who know anything about abroad attract mistrust, and often dismissal. Hardly any officials are left who understand the European Union, for example, a grave matter with tricky negotiations over the EU constitution about to start again.

Economics attracts similar disdain. The sole goal of economic policy was to remove Leszek Balcerowicz, author of Polish free-market reforms in the 1990s, from the central bank. Poland's most urgent task is to use the boom to cut the budget deficit. Taxes on labour are too high, squeezing wages and increasing the incentive to emigrate. A million-plus Poles have done just that since Poland joined the EU, creating widespread labour shortages.

Vengeful, paranoid, addicted to crises, divided and mostly incompetent, the government survives mainly because the economy is strong and the opposition is feeble. Neither will last for ever.

correspondent's diary (new feature on Economist.com website)

Europe

From Estonia to Atlantis

Jan 12th 2007
From Economist.com

Travels with our central Europe correspondent

Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday

Friday

LONDON (or at least the bit of it that is interested in eastern European politics) was abuzz with unkind gossip after the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, came visiting in November. Of several awkward moments, the most talked-about was when he looked around the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street, and muttered something which his interpreter rendered as “Not very impressive”.

There are three baffling aspects to this. One is why Poland, the weightiest country in eastern Europe, managed to choose as head of state a man whose personal merits (honesty and kindness) are disguised by an ignorant, clumsy and nervous manner.

Reuters

Not very impressive

Another is why his staff are so utterly incompetent that they don’t provide him with some bland talking points.

The third is why the Polish government seems consistently to hire such lousy interpreters. Mr Kaczynski actually wanted to make a pleasant observation that it was a surprisingly small room for somewhere so important.

Poles who understand the damage done by such mistakes are gloomy. The government is not too bad—indeed it is probably one of the least bad that the country has ever had. But it is abominably bad at foreign policy.

To console them, your correspondent tells some horror stories from other countries. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia turned up nearly an hour late at Downing Street—a place where the prime minister’s day is timed to the minute.

But it is odd that Poland gets so much mockery. There is a kind of snobbish disdain for Europe’s east rooted very deeply in the British psyche. Before writing this diary, your correspondent was trying to do his expenses—a task that represents a weekly high-water mark for a journalist’s numeracy (and, it is rumoured, creativity).

The Economist’s internal expenses form allows claims in Zambian Kwacha—but not Estonian kroons, or lats (Latvia) or litas (Lithuania). These countries may be members of the EU and NATO, but for all that they are just not important enough. To say nothing of pipsqueak countries such as Ukraine.

There is some pressing business to end the week with. Literature from small countries, especially those that were wiped from the map for a few decades, tends to fare badly on the international publishing circuit.

Despite that, Estonia’s writers have a lot of clout for a country of 1.3m people. Jaan Kross (as in “The Czar’s Madman”) is internationally known. Tõnu Õnnepalu is a rising star. But the national classic, “Truth and Justice” by Anton Tammsaare, has never been published in English. That is a huge gap: rather as if Thomas Mann, Cervantes or Stendhal were not available in English.

“Truth and Justice” is a terrific tale, in five volumes, spanning rural farm life in Czarist-era Estonia, the Russian revolution and the creation of an independent Estonia.

The world it portrays seems as distant from ours as Atlantis. But the Estonians, taciturn, thoughtful, and dependable, are instantly recognisable.

There are translations in both German and Finnish. Rumour has it that there was once a translation into English, but it perished during a wartime shipwreck.

Now two Estonian-Americans, Inna Feldbach and Alan Trei, have translated the first volume and have sent some sample chapters of what they call the “sprawling, rambunctious” epic. A literary journal is publishing one of them, and the others are now with Random House in New York, and Arcadia Press in London.

It is addictive stuff, and a valuable Friday afternoon that should have been spent fixing interviews for next week’s paper slips by in a happy, melancholic haze. With luck the hard-nosed publishers will feel the same way. It would be a worthy addition to the Great Books list so animatedly discussed in Bratislava.

Back to top >>

Thursday

HOME again to London―the financial, cultural and diplomatic capital of eastern Europe. The city is a magnet for the ambitious, the desperate and the nervous, and for those just itching to have fun. By some counts it acommodates 500,000 expatriates from what your correspondent still likes to call the “former captive nations”. There could well be more.

It’s a new wave, but not the first. When your correspondent was first learning Polish in the mid-1980s, he frequented a café in South Kensington called Daquise, where he laboriously construed the label on a shabby collecting tin that sat next to the cash till. It was a quote from one of Poland’s great wartime leaders, General Wladyslaw Anders: “Legitymacja skarbu narodowego jest paszportem wolnego Polaku” (”The National Treasury ID card is the passport of a free Pole”).

Holders of those particular ID cards faced a death sentence if they returned to communist Poland, which regarded the government-in-exile that issued them as treasonous.

Now the members of that government, for which the tin raised a tiny, voluntary tax, have wound up triumphant. They, not their communist usurpers, are honoured by Poland's current rulers, as the legitimate government of that day.

It was a time when east European languages were deeply exotic, and finding people to practise them with was quite hard. The smart way to get a cheap conversation lesson was by buying drinks for the mustachioed gents who used to hang around Daquise, or the Polish Hearth Club up the road.

Now, by contrast, east European languages are so common on the London street that they barely register. But few of their speakers imagine that any local (and in his tweed jacket, corduroys, brogues and Barbour jacket, your correspondent could hardly look more English) will understand what they are saying.

At a bus stop, a Russian chats animatedly into a mobile phone about a scam involving over-invoicing. On the bus, two Polish girls are comparing notes on their sex life with laudable frankness.

A bit later, on the tube, three Lithuanians are discussing a complicated and dodgy-sounding business to do with a container, some forged documents, and a British “colleague”. They create the dismal impression that they have corrupted a customs officer.

After a bit the eavesdropping gets rather conspicuous, and they look at the unwanted observer with undisguised dislike. They switch to Russian, which this eavesdropper understands rather better. Sadly, they get off at the next stop.

Merely speaking Russian doesn’t mean that you understand Russians. For that, start with one of the best books ever written about the Communist mindset, “Negotiating with the Soviets”, by Raymond Smith, first published in 1989.

The author, a retired American diplomat who spent his working life in dull, intricate, pointless talks with Soviet bureaucrats, explains beautifully the difference between two kinds of Russian truth―istina which is what is factually true, and pravda, which is the “right truth”.

He explains the use of vranyo—an untranslatable word meaning, roughly, “useful bullshit”. And, perhaps most usefully, he outlines the three ways of dealing with strangers: befriend, bully or grovel.

The normal Western conversational register, of friendly, respectful professional interaction is much rarer, particularly among Soviet-born people of a certain age.

AFP

Mourning Mr Litvinenko

An example: your correspondent leaves a message with a famous Soviet-era defector, now living in the UK, asking whether he and other cold war fence-jumpers are nervous in the wake of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asks brusquely. He interrupts the explanation. “I don’t talk to the KGB”, he erupts. “Your paper is full of communist propaganda. Your correspondents are KGB officers. Sack them.”

This line of attack is rather disconcerting, given that our general line on Russia is quite hawkish, and your correspondent's, if anything, more so. But still he thinks the paper’s coverage of Mr Litvinenko’s death was insufficiently reverential.

He rants on. One option is to counter-attack, berating him for his foolish and ignorant views. But that is risky. He is a lot older, and considers himself a lot grander. Another is to whine and apologise, let him enjoy some trampling, and then appeal for mercy. The third is try to befriend him.

But a fourth option looks more attractive still. As he reaches a fulminating crescendo of insults, explaining for the third time why he will not talk to Moscow’s flunkeys, it is time to apologise crisply for bothering him and then, as he pauses, slightly startled, add a swift goodbye and hang up. It wasn’t that interesting a story anyway.

Back to top >>

Wednesday

TO BUDAPEST, and the Gellert hotel. A favourite of your correspondent. Note the eccentric plumbing, the peeling paint and the worn carpets. The service ranges from sombre to sullen. Here you can see all the tide-marks left in the course of Hungary’s transition from goulash communism to debt-laden crony capitalism.

But the history, architecture and atmosphere outweigh such cavils. The visitor is not quite standing on the shoulders of giants, but at least standing in rooms they frequented. The Gellert is where Oskar Schindler stayed when saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

The hotel manages, just, to feel like an oddly-run bit of a market economy. But a trip down the corridors to the Gellert's thermal baths, still municipally owned, brings with it an unmistakable whiff of the bossy, dour regime that collapsed in 1989.

In, say, Estonia, this gorgeous Art Deco swimming pool would have been privatised long ago, renovated, and turned into a world-class health resort for the super-rich.

In a city with a more dynamic municipal government, it might at least be run by friendly English-speaking staff.

But it isn’t. And for the foreign visitor, one of the great experiences of Budapest can seem a bit daunting. So here’s what to do.

Pack a bathing costume and flipflops (or buy overpriced ones in the hotel business centre). Change in your hotel room, donning the thin and scratchy white bathrobe provided. Bring soap, some small-denomination Hungarian banknotes, reading material, and a towel.

Pad down the corridor and summon the antique lift, all ironwork and glass. The female attendant will give you a faded plastic swipe card to get you through the turnstiles thronged by glum-looking Budapesters intent on sweating away their troubles.

Here you will catch a tempting glimpse of the swimming pool to your right, though you get there via a roundabout tunnel worthy of a car park.

Danubius Hotels

The way of Buda

Swimming is strictly anti-clockwise. Backstroke is recommended so that you can see the ceiling. Grecian urns and lions’ heads spouting water evoke a more elegant age―which is more than you can say for the podgier of the clientele.

Now for the real treats. Head right (men) or left (women) and you reach a warren of cubicles and passages. Collect a “modesty cloth” from the freshly laundered pile on the table, and find a vacant cabin to change. An attendant (monoglot and cross) will lock away your possessions for safe keeping and give you a tiny metal tag to wear round your ankle.

Proceed to the dry sauna with its three circles of hell. The hottest is 80ºC. Hungarians sit stolidly reading newspapers, or conversing in their (to outsiders) impenetrable tongue. Some are in their underwear, others in modesty cloths. The etiquette is to switch this round when you sit, so that your bare bottom does not rest directly on a wooden chair.

After a bit of that, head for the two plunge pools, heated to 36ºC and 38ºC, or go for a bracing wallow in the cold pool. Disappointingly for aficionados of the Russian banya, which follows a long bake with a serious freeze, the cold pool here is cooled to a mere 8ºC.

Once your extremities are losing all feeling, warm up again in the “wet” (steam) sauna next door. Nobody reads or talks here. Breathing is painful, and you can’t see across the room.

The tantalising “mud treatment”, whatever the hotel may say, is not available at weekends. To get it at all you need a doctor’s letter certifying to your general good health, and to your particular need of spa treatments for fatigue and digestive problems.

But there are beauty treatments requiring nothing more than cash—around €50 for an hour of facial patting and prodding with anti-wrinkle potions, an extraction of blackheads (by hand) and other pleasurable if scientifically unproven remedies. Your correspondent's wife, who believes her husband to spend most of his time overseas in a muddy wasteland where starving dogs gnaw at frozen corpses, was delighted, pronouncing it “blissful”. Wait until we get to a Moscow banya.

The baths will shoo you out in good time for dinner. Take the hint. Hungarian cuisine is the best anywhere in the ex-communist world, with sophisticated combinations of duck, goose, sour cherries and chestnuts, instead of the cabbage, sausage and potato of most other countries.

But some local delicacies are better than others. Lung casserole is rather like eating rubber bands. Catfish, especially when stewed, taste like the lake-bottom on which they live.

Back to top >>

Tuesday

THE conference on post-communist Europe is a rare gem, with short papers, lively discussions, and lots of time for socialising. The wildly varying levels of informality are striking. Some people have been friends for 20 years: they use “ty”, and diminutive forms of address―“Honza” for Jan, “Edicko” for Edward.

Others are meeting for the first time, and want to be friendly without rushing it. Luckily, it is much easier to be informal in English, where speedy use of a Christian name doesn’t signify forced intimacy.

A Serbian diplomat will have none of this. Steely in manner, appearance and views, she insists on addressing her interlocutors at every point as “Esteemed” followed by their job title. The crosser she gets with our more cavalier approach, the more formal she becomes.

A spare hour presents a chance to call an actress, Ingrid T. She comes highly recommended by a journalist colleague, now in New York, who spent many years in post-communist Czechslovakia. He is something of a Casanova, but gives no hint of any romantic entanglement.

The conversation goes like this. “Hello, this is X from The Economist. I am in Bratislava and wanted to discuss the interaction between Slovak cultural identity and global influences. I got your number from Peter in New York”. At this point the call is interrupted by a peal of derisive, incredulous laughter, followed by a click. It is tempting to phone New York for an explanation. But perhaps better not to.

Over dinner, four of us, all from outside the region, discuss what first sparked our lifelong interest in the now ex-communist world, back when it seemed as inaccessible as Pyongyang seems today. The common answer: books.

The captivating Milosz

This prompts an attempt to construct a reading list, on the lines of an American-style Great Books course.

You have to start with Kundera, says one colleague. “Grossly overrated,” says