Honderd jaar nadat Transsylvanië aan Roemeens grondgebied werd toegevoegd, is de herinnering aan “Trianon” nog altijd levend in Roemenië. Het land heeft sinds vorige maand maar liefst twee nationale feestdagen om dit voor Roemenen heugelijke feit te vieren. Op 1 december staan ze op de Nationale Dag (Ziua Națională) – ook wel Grote Unie Dag (Ziua Marii Uniri) – stil bij de unificatie van de Roemeense provincies Wallachije, Moldavië en Transsylvanië. Op 13 mei jongstleden nam het parlement een wet aan die van 4 juni de Dag van het Verdrag van Trianon maakt.
After twenty years of growth, labor shortages threaten to derail the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Since the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, their economies have been boosted through a combination of capital from multinationals and cheap and well-educated local workers.
‘Sex at last!’ was the headline of an article in the German weekly Die Zeit about the opening of the first sex shop in Leipzig, East Germany in June 1990. These were the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a country whose citizens “were not allowed to show themselves naked or see the naked bodies of others, except at the nudist beach.” “The workers and peasants,” the article went on, “could only practice voyeurism under the covers of the marriage bed.” The collapse of the Berlin Wall, Communism and the impending unification were giving them, at last, the opportunity to make up for lost time, according to the article’s author.
A new report on how EU member states address the legacy of the Holocaust claims that several Central and East European countries are seeing widespread historical revisionism and are downplaying of World War II crimes. The report was published two days before January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered.
2018 was yet another year with ups and downs for Eastern Europe & Central Asia, a region that continues to throw off the yoke of authoritarianism, which dominated the region from the 1920s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although on the surface autocrats and kleptocrats seemed to take even more control of democratic institutions this year, the first cracks in these “illiberal democracies” also started appearing – from Moscow to Budapest, Warsaw to Bucharest. The main highlights of 2018, month by month.
According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2018, published yesterday by the World Economic Forum, the world has collectively closed 68% of the overall gender gap, as measured across four key pillars: economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment, and health and survival. Stagnation in the proportion of women in the workplace and women’s declining representation in politics, coupled with greater inequality in accessing health and education, offset improvements in wage equality and the number of women in professional positions, leaving the global gender gap only slightly reduced in 2018 compared to 2017.
The Czech nouvelle vague cinema is back in vogue. Fifty years after Warsaw Pact tanks quelled the political and cultural reform movement in Czechoslovakia, Europe has rediscovered the genius of Czech filmmaking from the 1960s. Movies like Loves of a Blonde, The Joke, and The Cremator have withstood the test of time and still capture the imagination of viewers and art critics alike. In the past year, Czech New Wave film festivals have been organized on all continents. This year, Czech cultural centers from Brussels and London to New York and Bucharest featured many movies directed by the nouvelle vague generation, drawing large crowds.
In socially conservative Poland, a new museum opened this summer: the Polish LGBTQIA Museum. The museum aims to preserve the history of non-heteronormative people in Poland by documenting their stories. Its collection includes a variety of archival materials — from posters, photographs, flyers, leaflets, and magazines to DIY zines and film clips. The museum is virtual and therefore accessible from anywhere in the world.
Last week, political leaders descended on Bucharest, Romania for the third Three Seas Initiative Summit. Launched in 2015, the Three Seas Initiative is an economic alliance of twelve EU member states between the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black seas. These countries – Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia – are strategically located, especially when it comes to energy and security.
One of the most ambitious building experiments in history is nearing its end in many former Soviet states. Faced with severe housing shortages in the 1950s due to rapid population growth and urbanization, Soviet planners rolled out their first pre-fabricated, concrete panelled apartment buildings. By industrializing the building process, instead of using time-intensive masonry, housing stock throughout the Soviet block was rapidly expanded in the 1960s with these so-called Krushchyovkas, named after Soviet leader (1953-1964) Nikita Khrushchev.
