After two and a half months of NATO bombing, fighting between the Yugoslav Army and the KLA, and the exodus of half of the Kosovo Albanian population, the war has ended. Though both sides were claiming victory there was little to celebrate except that the killing and destruction were stopped. The agreement reached amounts to a truce, while no political settlement is in sight. Did diplomacy fail in Paris as well as the formidable military power of NATO in the field or is this a crisis which cannot be resolved by any means? more

In the period between the two world wars, Hungary's professions were transformed from a politically liberal and professionally oriented elite into an illiberal pressure group attracted to radical politics. This metamorphosis of the professions contradicted the expectations of many analysts of modernization who viewed the professions as the most secure element of Western liberal culture. The professional elites of Eastern and Central Europe defied this kind of sociological optimism. They increasingly turned from being allies of the liberal state into the partners of illiberal movements and governments. Already in the 1930s, this transformation gave birth to a new, more pessimistic school of thought on the professions. more

September 1998 - Grand narratives of Southeast European history can be objects of suspicion, especially when today's confrontations are traced into the past and dubbed as "ancient hatreds." The careful scholar who deconstructs such presentist approaches, however, faces another problem. Past national distinctiveness, when asserted by collective struggle, is a key asset in current political claims. By maintaining a neutral stance on a nation's history, a scholar may be branded as hostile to that nation. more

October 2003 - The shortest answer to the question posed by the title is, yes, it does. But this answer is only partially true. A truer answer, but still only partially true, is that it does and does not. And the real answer is, I think, that it does exist but is only one among the many dividing lines that criss-cross Europe and it may not be the most important one—or at least its importance is rapidly decreasing. I emphasize this point because the reality or myth of the East-West divide has become part of the political game in Europe. It has become an argument against integration on both sides of the continent. Conservatives in the West repeat: "they are so different," while conservatives in the East echo: "we are so different more