1989

one of the best in the history of Europe.

1989-The Struggle to Create post-Cold War Europe

1989-2009 - 20 years after the start of the changes in Europe. A process still on the run, as long as even integrated as full EU and NATO members, the Central and Eastern European countries are still struggling to create functional market economies and political institutions. And, other countries - former parts of the Yougoslav Federation - are at various stages of the process of meeting the Western criteris.

1989-The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe is based on documents, television broadcasts, and interviews from many different locations including Moscow, Berlin, Bonn, Paris and Washington. The aim is to recontruct the starting process of the new Europe: the reunification of Germany, the NATO expansion and the redefinition of the role played by Russia on the world stage. A wide array of political players - from leaders as Mikhail Gorbatchev, Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush and James Baker, to organisations like NATO and the European Commission, as well to dissidents - all proposed courses of action and models for the future. The author explains how the aftermath of this fateful victory, and Russian resentment of it, continue to shape world politics today. The author is presenting diverse perspectives from the political elite as well as ordinary citizens.

Mary Elise Sarotte is associate professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. Her previous work includes the book, Dealing with the Devil and German Military Reform and European Security. She has served as a White House Fellow and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Read Central! Europe

Read Central! Europe is an informal association of four publishing houses from Central Europe: Magveto from Budapest, Hungary, Arhipelag from Belgrade, Serbia, Studentska zalozba from Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Fraktura from Zapresic, Croatia.

The common trait of all is the concern to publich literary works speaking to readers around the world and to offer a common basis of understanding in an area where disagreements were more often than the common perspectives.

Geography and conflict

The case of the Mountain Paekdu/Baekdu/Chengbai - the dispute between the two Koreas and China.

Iris Murdoch and Roma

Iris Murdoch's Philosopher's Pupil is not too complicate and metaphysical, with a certain story you could follow, at certain point, as a crime novel. John Robert Rozanov's death, for example - the character around whom all the main presences of the book are gravitating, with clear or unclear literary reasons - is something in between parody and real crime, as in the case when Rozanov's disciple George McCaffrey missed the only - psychoanalytical as well - chance of liberating himself of the power of his master : George wanted to kill his thinking master of whom he was existentially obsessed about, but in fact this one was already dead, after taking an overdose pills, soon before he thought he sunk him in the bathroom.

Shortly, it is a story loaded - and overloaded in some parts - with intellectual ideas, inserted and not always skilfully translated in a literary form through the characters. And many Freudian-interpreted couples.

What I found as well in the book, are the two characters of two Gypsies: Ruby and Pearl. Both of them are assigned the roles of servants/helpers of Alex - George's dominant mother -, respectively Hattie - Rozanov's daughter. They are portrayed as black, not very trustworthy, changing characters and with doubtful honor and morality, with bad habits acquired from the nomad camps they are frequenting from time to time. With prostitution family history. And obsessed with various superstitions, as Ruby's one related to the bad signs brought by the foxes.

October 9, 1989, Leipzig

The day of the wake-up call in Eastern Germany.
and
Preparing for the "20 years after" celebrations.

Herta Mueller, Nobel Prize in Literature

The profile of the Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in a family of ethnic Germans, she was both critical against the Ceausescu regime and other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, including the former East German writers who collaborated with the secret police. While she was not extensively published and discussed as an author in her home country- mostly through her positions against members of the cultural and political establishment - in Germany she is well known and appreciated and her works are translated in at least 20 languages. Probably now she will benefit of extensive laudatio and impressive articles.

Longer list of UNESCO intangible heritage

with traditions and customs from Latvia, Belarus, China, Mali, Viet Nam and Kenya.

Also, 76 new inscriptions were made in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, among which Aubusson tapestry and the tango.

20 years after

I've read and watched and heard many discussions and points of view, related to the fall of communism. I will not outline here the aspects related to the mechanisms of the system or other recent history backgrounds. What I would like to explain, in a couple of words, is why I consider all the discussions about "nostalgia" and thoughts of a possible reconsideration of those period, misleading. For sure, the liberal or social-democratic systems in the West are not always meeting the expectations and needs of a big share of the population, as the new political parties in the Central and Eastern European countries, are still clumsy and are hardly resisting the temptation of corruption - material and financial altogether. But, in the same time, the solution is not to look back for inspiration, in a past remembered in an extremely mistorted way, but to try to evaluate the situation starting up to what do you have on the ground.
- Even from the very beginning, we were having on the walls and in our textbooks various quotations from the writings of Lenin and Marx and Engels, what matters in fact was the wonderful and unique way of thinking of the representatives of the ruling party. The whole system was created around an outrageous personality cult. It is nothing to be nostalgic about.
- This personality cult was based on a personal relations system, corrupt, centered on the self-assumed humility of accepting to discuss with idiots because your own and family survival was at stake. Accepting to write an ideological standpoint only because at the end an addition kilo of bread or eggs or cheese was at stake. Never, the system was in itself egalitarian. Always, from the very beginning of the regimes, it was an elite - understood as the top of the social system - replaced another one and tried to steal - no abuse here, some of the old regime representatives were put out of their houses and their goods transferred in the houses of the new communist leaders - the goods and privileges. If somebody is ever dreaming about equality, I must warn it is dreaming about an utopia. Communist produced one of the most selfish and lacking common responsibility political subject. If it is living together in the old, almost destroyed block houses it is more likely that - two of the most common examples:
- It will not care about the other neighbors and will always listen its music at the highest volume possible
- It will threw the garbage directly out of his/her window, preferably in the front of the main entrance in the common building
The so-called common feeling of belonging to "something" as I found expressed in some nostalgic writing, with the example of the youth gatherings was faked: the people gathered there found a reason and a way to spend time together, but it was not the aim they were brought to. The aim was, of course, propaganda and indoctrination. The rest is thinking by substitution.
Cheep and affordable products? Subnutrition and products of low quality, not for everybody, not anytime.
Holidays for everybody at low costs? In bad quality conditions and with the required company and the desired destination. Yes, indeed, it was possible to have at least three weeks out of the town, but in the same places, and with the same people and in precarious conditions.
Cultural opportunities, books at low prices? Another bad joke, because in fact the whole cultural production, in all the Central and Eastern European countries was under the strict control of the party and security system. It was not freedom of thought. Nowhere.
It is anything to be nostalgic about?

The Alternative Textbooks in Romania: Live from the Prison

Why living - from time to time - in a former communist country could be an astonishing experience.

I will shortly give an example - in a very condensed way, because, of course, in Eastern Europe, the stories are long and a long explanatory background is more than necessary - from the long process of reform of the education in Romania. It is not selected purposely to be ridiculous or ironic. It is simply how some of the fact took place chronologically.

In 1999 - 10 years after the end of the dictatorship -, following an agreement with the World Bank, it was decided to start a reform of the school textbook, including by the creation of an alternative system of textbooks. By then, there were a list of handbook, one version for each domain, compulsory at every level of education. The alternative system was making possible to choose among a list of textbooks, agreed by a special Commission set by the Ministry of Education. One of them, designed for teaching history of Romania for high-schools, was the subject of an intense political and media campaign.
Shortly: the authors - mostly young historians from Cluj - tried to present in a very systematic and synthetic way the historical moment, focusing more on the history of the present time. One important detail, when we are talking about textbooks in Romania: due to the communist legacy of propaganda, many of the texts for the school use were/and in some cases still are extremely rich in information, data, details, chronology. You don't have the opportunity to think too much by yourself, because you might learn thousand of data about reigns and historical periods. This new texbook was relatively free in this respect and, as the authors themselves explained, it was tailored to answer the preoccupation and the cultural sources of the nowadays Romanian teens.
The scandal started after, one day, the Romanian MP Sergiu Nicolaescu, film director, well known for his movies with heavy historical bias, extremely successful during communism. He took the floor and protested against the way in which the history of Romania is presented in those handbooks, the short space alloted for the moments considered, in his opinion, very important for the historical evolution, as the unification moments, the successful wars etc. At the end of his intervention, he recommended that such a textbook deserves to be publicly burned. Sounds familiar? Not too, for the Romanian MPs who listened indifferently.
From this moment on, the scandal was getting bigger and bigger. The nationalist parties united against the Ministry of Education, the government, the Hungarians, the historians - one of the historians, Sorin Mitu, whose workings haven't been discussed before this public undeserved exposure, is married with an ethnic Hungarian - the World Bank, the European Union and everything was different of speakers. Some of the young historians supported the idea of an alternative presentation of history and a couple of discussions were held, but the "anti" noise was so big, than hardly a professional point of view was heared. The Romanian Academy and a couple of historians from the History Chair of the University expressed their disagreement with creating alternative narratives of the national history and considered the textbook not meeting high standards - nobody pretended it is perfect, it was, we might remember, the first such an alternative textbook after more than 60 years - asking equaly moderation in addressing the issue in the media.
But, the media was continuing the accusations against - hardly to specifically mention who was the target, as nobody was considered clean in this "scandal". The highest point of this tensions was an inquiry made in a Romanian prison: the inmates were asked what do they think about the way in which the national history is presented in those alternative textbooks. Do they consider fair and normal such an approach? Of course, they disagreed.

The European Project - A Myth or a Reality?

An Interview with Tony Judt, for RFE/RL.

The Greeks and their myths

an essay on deconstruction the myths.