Central & Eastern Europe Archive

According to Washington’s punditocracy, there are only two ways to interpret the Pentagon’s announcement Wednesday that it plans to move ahead with withdrawing nearly 12,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in Germany. One view is that President Donald Trump is capitulating yet again to pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin and handing Putin a gift in the form of a weakened NATO. The other take is that the White House decision to pull troops out of Germany, as Trump has long wanted, is a foolish escalation in his standoff with German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance. […]

If the European Union were a cartoon, it would resemble an episode of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. The EU would be Wile E. Coyote, furiously paving a road with the help of some mail-order Rube Goldberg machine, patch by patch, just ahead of the car he is driving. The Road Runner would be the course of history speeding up alongside him, then zooming off into the distance. This half-finished structure constantly driven forward by the urgent necessity of events is no accident. It was one of the implicit assumptions of the EU’s early architects and builders, who […]

Polish President Andrzej Duda narrowly won a second term in a hotly contested runoff election earlier this month, opening the door for the ruling right-wing populist Law and Justice party, known as PiS for its Polish initials, to continue cementing its power. But the vote, which was postponed from May due to the coronavirus pandemic, also illustrated the depth of the political divide in Polish society. On one side, a largely rural and older cohort of conservative voters handed Duda a narrow victory with 51 percent. His challenger, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, took the remaining 49 percent, mostly from metropolitan […]

During a recent online debate hosted by the Warsaw-based publication Visegrad Insight, a Polish opposition figure commented that in the country’s presidential election, “Poles will have a choice to make between two models of society”—“a European Poland and a Poland that looks at the United States.” This remark encapsulates an increasingly common understanding of the dynamics at play in the election, which goes to a second and final round this Sunday. The conservative incumbent, Andrzej Duda of the ruling Law and Justice party, or PiS, will face off against his liberal challenger, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, who came in second […]