Events
Russian Challenge Widens Transatlantic Divide
October 15, 2008 - At the very time when U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was pressing NATO defense ministers last week in Budapest to take early action to include Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance, the conflict between Russia and Georgia has persuaded many European leaders to oppose this action.
Energy Security and Diversity of Supplywithin the European Union, 1973-2008
This paper focuses on the interrelationship between the attempts to create a common European energy policy, on the one hand, and the institutional development of EU (and its predecessors), on the other hand.
Anxieties Without Borders:The United States, Europe And Their Southern Neighbors
May 2005-
If the last half of the 20th century was shaped largely by east-west relations, will the first decades of the 21st century be defined along north-south lines? Europe and the United States are increasingly affected, as societies, by developments on their southern peripheries – the southern Mediterranean states of North Africa and the Middle East in the case of Europe, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean in the case of the U.S. Journalists, analysts and policymakers point to analogies between the Mediterranean and the Rio Grande, and the list of policy challenges – migration, trade and investment, transnational security issues, and questions of culture and identity – is outwardly similar.
72. Privatization in Brcko District: Why It Is Different and Why It Works
April 2004 - The Brcko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina is small, with less than 100,000 people. In 2001, about 30 public companies were selected for privatization. At the outset, there were good reasons to ask whether the District would have any success in privatizing them. Many of the public companies had been shut down for up to ten years, while the rest were operating at a small fraction of their pre-1991 output.
210. Twenty Years After Solidarity: The State of Democracy in the Post- Communist World
September 2000 - In his opening remarks, Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined three categories of democracy: functioning, malfunctioning, and fictitious. Functioning democracies are characterized by political and economic pluralism. Poland represents one of the most successful "functioning democracies" in the post-communist world. Malfunctioning democracies, such as many former Soviet states today, may aspire to democracy, but are crippled by legacies of the communist past. In fictitious democracies, the organs of the Communist Party remain but the regime pursues limited, reformist economic and social policies, such as in China. Brzezinski also pointed out that wide-scale, growing poverty impedes the movement toward democracy in many post-communist countries.
290. Ethnic Cleansing, Communism and Environmental Devastation in Post-War Czechoslovakia
January 2004 - In the aftermath of World War II, Czechoslovakia expelled close to three million ethnic Germans into occupied Austria and Germany. These so-called Sudeten Germans had long lived in borderland regions ringing the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, with the heaviest concentration inhabiting the industrially advanced north and west of Bohemia. During and after the expulsions, over two million Czechs settled in the formerly German areas, taking over houses, businesses and factories. The popular Communist Party controlled the resettlement process from the beginning in 1945, using its influence to create a web of patronage in the borderlands. This helped the Party win over 50 percent of the vote in north Bohemia in free elections in May of 1946. Even before Stalinism took hold in Czechoslovakia in 1948, north Bohemia's coal mining, power production and chemical industry were renowned. With the onset of a Communist policy of heavy industrialization, north Bohemia's industry became a model for the entire country. By the 1960s, north Bohemia also became known for its almost unrivaled pollution, with air and water so foul that trees died in waves and children decamped to the mountains for doses of clean air.