Central & Eastern Europe Archive

Greece’s parliament held a historic vote last Friday that not only ended a three-decade-old dispute with its neighbor, but handed Russia a bruising defeat. The decision, formally recognizing the newly renamed nation of North Macedonia, sealed a deal reached between Greek and Macedonian leaders last year and removed the main obstacle that has prevented the former Yugoslav republic from joining the European Union and NATO. The resolution of the naming quarrel is a setback to Russia, which had deployed its now-familiar geopolitical tools to try and block it. Yet the dispute is just one of many sources of tension in […]

Protests sparked by a new law that allows employers to demand 400 hours of overtime from workers each year, which critics have dubbed the “slave law,” have put Hungary’s disparate opposition parties side by side on the streets and in parliament. They need to expand this cooperation if they’re going to mount a serious challenge to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s corrupt, authoritarian government. Passed in December, the “slave law” would essentially move Hungarian workers to a six-day work week, with pay postponed. The measure is Orban’s way of softening the effects of a severe labor shortage for multinational corporations, with […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about education policy in various countries around the world. Beginning in early December, student demonstrators have brought Albania’s public universities to a standstill with protests against the implementation of a law on higher education reforms. Although the government quickly rescinded the extra fees that initially triggered the protests, the students refused to back down, and their demands have since broadened. In an email interview with WPR, Esmeralda Shehaj, associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Tirana, and Armando Memushi, lecturer in the Department of Economics at […]

Fifteen years ago this past weekend, I lost a friend and mentor in a car crash in Croatia. Steve Degeneve was one of the first people to teach me about how conflicts, and conflict management, play out in real life. He was an idealist and a passionate, sometimes almost obsessive, believer in promoting human rights and the rule of law. He died at the age of 37 on Jan. 12, 2004. I often wonder what he would say about a world in which his ideals are increasingly under threat. I met Steve roughly a year before his death in Vukovar, […]

On Dec. 14, Kosovo’s parliament took a step that the Serbian government had warned could lead to military intervention: It voted to form an army. Months after Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and his counterpart in Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, shared a stage and discussed ongoing negotiations to bring lasting peace to the Balkans, the region seems to be tipping back to the bad old days. An outbreak of war is very unlikely in the near future, but it is increasingly apparent that Western policy toward the region is losing traction, compounding past missteps and leading to the weakening of the Euro-Atlantic […]