WARSAW / WASHINGTON – For hundreds of years, Poland suffered from an overbearing Germany that trampled on the rights of the Polish nation, occupied the country, and, at times, worked to extinguish the Polish nation-state entirely. No wonder that there is a residue of skepticism and caution in Poland when it comes to relations with [...]

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WASHINGTON– Strange as it may seem to some, there are those who wish to join the European Union, in spite of all its current flaws. Croatian voters gave a resounding yes to becoming the 28th member state of the European Union in a referendum held last Sunday. The country is slated to join as a full [...]

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BRATISLAVA—“Freedom House got it wrong!” We can expect to hear this message from an angry official in Budapest after the release on Thursday of the Freedom in the World Report 2012. Hungary has the unfortunate distinction of being the only Western democracy in which governance and civic liberties declined over the last year. Just earlier [...]

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BUCHAREST—The landslide victory of former speaker of the Parliament Yevgeny Shevchuk in the December 25 Transnistrian presidential elections came as a surprise to observers in Moldova, Russia, and the West. Shevchuk, who won 74 percent of the vote in the run-off, overcame the challenges of the Moscow-backed candidate Anatoly Kaminski and the incumbent of 20 [...]

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MINSK– On 19 December 2010, Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in a re-election (his fourth) marred by irregularities and falsifications. The mass protests that ensued were brutally repressed. All nine opposition candidates and 700 protesters were arrested; the opposition leaders Andrei Sannikov and Nikolai Statkevich remain in prison, as well as 13 other political [...]

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BERLIN – In politics, this has been a year of extreme weather. The Arab Spring dismantled decades-old autocracies through peaceful protest. The heat of summer scorched some even more brutal and determined rulers, from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (whose regime went up in fire) to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (the flames are still licking at the foundations [...]

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KIEV– After reaching an agreement on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization on Thursday, European Union leaders are set to meet Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in Kiev today. Although the EU-Ukraine summit should endorse an ambitious new political association and free trade agreement that has been five years in the making, the agreement’s fate is still [...]

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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – The entry of the four Central European countries — Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia (known also as the Visegrad 4 group, or V-4) — into the European Union on May 1,  2004, was the triumphant end to a long journey.  It was a time for celebration among the quartet of post-communist [...]

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BRUSSELS – At five in the morning on Friday, a senior EU official commented that the summit outcome could be the first step toward Britain’s leaving the EU. After Prime Minister David Cameron’s veto of a new treaty embracing all 27 member states, aiming to achieve what German Chancellor Angela Merkel calls a “stability union,” [...]

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Croatia On December 4, Croatians went to the polls to choose the government that will lead them into the European Union in 2013. Tired of numerous political corruption scandals, the most high profile of which was the arrest of a former prime minister, Ivo Sanader (from the conservative HDZ party), and despite the recent anti-corruption [...]

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