In Salzburg

I'm in the midst of a trip in Central Europe, the first in several years. I lived in this part of the world for the better part of the 1990s and it's good to be back.

A few observations after five years' absence.

1. The region has discovered "take out coffee." This is a good thing. I wonder if Starbucks, a relatively new arrival, is responsible for this long-delayed innovation.

2. The Austrians still hold the Post-Imperial Area title for motorway engineering. If we Americans spent as much as they must have to build sound barriers in even the most rural of areas, I suspect it would have paid itself back in improved property values alone. It's still jarring to go from limping across southern Moravia or south Slovakia to the meticulously engineered, tunnel-intensive autobahnen, where the original 1967 Mission Impossible television soundtrack is required driving music.

3. In Budapest, the trend has continued, and it is now nearly impossible to find good Hungarian food in restaurants. The best gulyas I've had so far in the region was in Štúrovo, an ethnic Hungarian community in South Slovakia. Somebody needs to give Budapest's chefs some remedial education in the old ways.

4. If you want to see a town defy Rust Belt-ism, go to Zlin in the Czech Republic, the former Bata shoe factory town-cum-Capitalist worker's utopia. I wrote about the city five years ago in the Christian Science Monitor and the trend has only continued. The old factory complex -- largely empty last I visited -- is now a thriving neighborhood of hipster lofts, university expansion buildings, and business start-ups. And if this rural corner of the Czech Republic can build a rapidly expanding public university -- with new buildings popping up every year -- why can't Maine manage to keep the University of Southern Maine from imploding? I suspect this has to do with leadership, municipal, academic, and state.

5. Hungarian politics are as bad as they say. One could ask, "Who votes for this guy?" But I'm from Maine, so I don't need to.

Has European "Socialism" helped in a crisis?

The last of my stories from my recent trip to Europe just posted over at Global Post. This explores whether the European model -- a social democratic system with universal health care, a more rigid labor market, and higher taxes -- proved more resilient in coping with the shock of the Great Recession than the American "free market" alternative.

The answer, as one might expect, is nuanced. The piece, filed from Austria with input from across western Europe, can be read by subscribers to the Post's Passport service. If you don't get Passport but care about foreign news, consider trying it. Where else are you going to find a prominent Czech economist describing the situation by use of metaphors from Lord of the Rings?

Austria's banking worries

I was in Austria recently in connection with a series of stories on how the Great Recession is playing out in East-Central Europe. There many countries had only just emerged from their post-Communist recession when they got whacked hard by an uber-Capitalist one.

One of the casualties has been Austria, whose banks loaned heavily to the region during the go-go years, so much in fact that many experts say the country is vulnerable to a Greek-style meltdown. Read my piece on this topic in the Christian Science Monitor to find out more.

One thing to be aware of: reporters generally don't write the headlines and subheads that go with their story, and the ones the Monitor wrote for this piece don't accurately reflect the article. A better headline would have been "Austria fears wave of bad banks loans tied to Eastern Europe" and the subhead should have focused on the Hypo bank failure (in December) rather than the Austrian state's massive bank rescue (more than a year ago.)

Memo to journalists: always ask to see headlines and captions beforehand.

In Austria

I'm currently in Austria, where the banking sector has been under stress from having lent perhaps too heavily to the former Warsaw Pact countries during the recent financial and real estate bubble. It being western Europe, there are few signs of stress on the streets. Homeless people are extremely rare, crime is extremely low, and fur coats remain as popular as ever for the older generations. The trains, of course, run on time. I think I once had to wait a full three minutes for a subway train in Vienna; generally its been about 5 to 15 seconds.

1989-2009: Romania's Revolution lifts off (as do I)

Twenty years ago this morning, I was being interrogated by Vienna airport security, along with just about everyone else intending to fly to New York with TWA.

I was grilled by a hawk eyed Austrian agent with a cold demeanor and a Mitteleuropean's clipboard. My answers seemed to annoy him. Where are you traveling from? (Hungary.) How long were you there? (Four months.) Where else did you go? (the Romanian Socialist Republic, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, twice to the Polish People's Republic, Yugoslavia three times.) What were you doing there? (Exchange student, Karl Marx University of Economics.) You entered Austria yesterday, where did you spend the night? (Sleeping on an airport ticket counter.) Why? (I can't afford your hotels.) Are you carrying any weapons? (No.) Are you sure? (Yes.) And so on. Vienna had been the site of a horrific terrorist attack four years earlier engineered by Abu Nidal, that decade's stand in for Osmama bin Laden. They weren't taking any chances.

While riding out to my aircraft in one of those giant people movers, I saw my first glimpses of the Romanian Revolution on a wall-mounted television. There was footage of protesters seizing control of Timisoara and talk of security forces mowing down thousands in mass graves. It had apparently been going on for two days, but I'd again been traveling on long-distance trains and this was the first I'd heard of it. I was shocked. I'd been in Ceausescu's Romania two months earlier and had come away with the sense that there was no chance of a popular uprising: the people were terrified, cold, and hungry, the security forces aggressive, heavily armed, and omnipresent. I'd expected Romania to hold out, North Korea-style, until their mad dictator succumbed to age or disease.

At home in Maine, I watched the revolution unfold on television. The events raised some provocative questions, particularly after a group of once-powerful Ceausescu regime apparatchiks seized control of the government. I would return to Romania that summer in search of answers, stumbling into a journalism career along the way. As in a bad mystery novel (or an X-Files episode), I only turned up more questions (along with a close call with a pack of government-guided miners brought into Bucharest to put down a new wave of protesters.)

Twenty years later, scholars remain divided on whether we yet know all the answers about what happened in Romania in December 1989, the subject of my feature that posted this morning over at Global Post.


For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, and visits to Ceausescu's Romania, late Communist Poland and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.

Austria: fearing a borderless Europe

My piece on the (fearful) Austrian reaction to their vanished Eastern frontier has finally posted at The Christian Science Monitor. The original piece ran in the September 13th edition of the Monitor's weekly print magazine as a companion to this piece on the (more celebratory) reaction in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The old Habsburg empire is now borderless again, after all.

I'm also following the aftermath of the arrest of four suspects in the spate of death squad style gypsy murders in Hungary. There's been a curious lack of information coming from Hungarian authorities, which is being capitalized by the far-right Jobbik party.

For more on Eastern Europe (including Jobbik and the 20th anniversary of 1989) click here.

1989-2009: Habsburg lands borderless again; does anybody care?

Twenty years ago, when I was an exchange student in Budapest, our teachers would tell us how in the early 20th century it had been possible to take a streetcar from Vienna to Bratislava. It had all been one country then -- the Habsburg's Austro-Hungarian Empire -- and people moved freely from Krakow to Ljubljana. I remember how, at the time, this seemed so preposterous, given the Iron Curtain -- guards, fences, tank traps, visas -- then dividing Austria from Slovakia.

How times change. For nearly two years now, most of the Habsburg Empire (save Transylvania, Trans-Carpathia, and parts of old Yugoslavia) has been borderless again, recreating the mythic cultural space called Middle Europe. Bratislava's city transportation system doesn't quite make it to Vienna, but you can get as far as Hainburg, and there are plenty of trains of course.

I have two pieces in last week's weekly print edition of the Christian Science Monitor that ask how this is all playing out. Is Middle Europe being reborn? If so, why are Austrian borderlanders so queasy about it? The main piece -- from Sopron, Hungary -- is now online at the Monitor's website but, last I checked, the companion piece on Austria wasn't up yet. [Update: 9/25/09: the companion piece is now online.]

1989-2009: Arriving in the East, as Zonies flee West

Twenty years ago today I arrived in Eastern Europe for the first time, crossing the border from Austria at just about exactly the moment Hungary's reform communist government announced it was letting the 60,000 East German refugees on its territory escape to Austria and on to West Germany.

I was back in Hungary recently and have a piece in today's Christian Science Monitor on the 20th anniversary of Budapest's decision to facilitate the East German exodus, an event which led to the opening of the Berlin wall two months later. Recent research suggests the decision was made with the tacit approval of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, but that nobody felt certain that there might not be a coup in Moscow or that Soviet troops in Hungary might react on their own to a provocation.

On my train from Vienna to Budapest on Sept. 10, 1989, that sense of uncertainty was palpable. At Vienna-Westbahnhof I had sat down in a compartment with an elderly man and his wife, but the man got off the train just before departure. He'd see his wife in when she next visited Austria. I recorded his explanation in my journal: "I left Hungary for good six months ago and I won't go back. There's no warranty that things won't return to the way they were. I just don't believe fundamental change an happen -- we don't have a Gorbachev."

I'd expected some sort of drama at the border -- it was supposed to be the Iron Curtain after all -- but the guards took little interest in a young American and his ample supply of luggage (I was 20 and on a university exchange program.) They were far more interested in questioning the Hungarian passengers, but even that seemed no more intimidating than at U.S. Customs. The Evil Empire's minions seemed to have lost their edge.

Arriving at night at Budapest-Keleti, the first person I met was a black market moneychanger, eager to change Hungarian forints for dollars at a rate several times higher than the official one. He threw in a taxi ride to my dormitory at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences for free, and was as honest and efficient as could be. As I'd soon learn, many people were eager to buy hard currency, not least the tens of thousands of East Germans in the country who suddenly had a chance to flee the Eastern Bloc for good.

The Picnic that helped topple the Berlin Wall

My piece on the Pan-European picnic -- an event on the Austro-Hungarian border in 1989 that (accidentally) helped bring down the Berlin Wall -- is the lead story this morning at Global Post.

Along with the picnic's organizers (including Otto von Habsburg's daughter), I was able to interview Aprad Bella, the border guard who had to make a split decision whether to use force to try to stop a crowd of hundreds of desperate East Germans who rushed his border post during the event. As you'll read, his decision helped turn the tide of history.

Celebrations commemorating the 20th anniversary of the event are underway today in Sopron, Hungary, with German chancellor Angela Merkel (an East German herself) and Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom in attendance.

Photo courtesy of the Pan European Picnic Foundation archives.

Austria-Hungary Revisited

I've been in western Hungary and Austria's Burgenland, preparing stories connected with the 20th anniversary of the events of 1989 and on life along the (now-borderless) frontiers that once separated the Warsaw Pact nations and western Europe.

When I first visited the region almost exactly 20 years ago, crossing Austria's frontiers with Hungary and Czechoslovakia was still a big deal. Guards with automatic weapons surrounded the train. Border guards stomped about, stamping visas and asking questions. (My favorite broken English demand -- from a very stern and humorless Czechoslovak border guard -- was "Passport, baby!")

Now you just drive on through at 40 miles an hour, whizzing by the abandoned highway border stations or on your choice of newly-reconnected backroads. Travelling from, say, the Czech Republic to Hungary via Vienna is now as easy as going from Maine to Vermont via New Hampshire, only with better public transportation options.

Two years ago, Europe's borderless "Schengen zone" expanded to include much of East-Central Europe and the region around Sopron, Hungary and Eisenstadt, Austria -- a single economic and cultural entity under the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- is healing back together. But it's not a universally welcomed process -- particularly in Austria -- as I'll be reporting on in "the mainstream media" shortly.