In Europe, talking US politics

I spent much of this past week in Europe, engaged in a whirlwind cultural exchange speaking tour to help explain U.S. politics and 2016 election dynamics to (often perplexed, frequently worried) Europeans. The tour, sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, had me and co-presenter Sewell Chan of the New York Times speaking at five events in three countries over three days, plus a few equally engaging dinners.

Arriving in Brussels -- where the airport departure hall and parts of the metro system were still closed on account of the recent terrorist attacks -- we kicked things off at the European Parliament, at a well attended talk sponsored by EU40 -- an organization of young members of parliament -- and the U.S. Mission to the European Union. Victor Negrescu, MEP from Romania, acted as our formal host, but the audience was a mix of diplomats, parliamentary staff, businesspeople, American expatriates, and European officials. Here and elsewhere, I kicked things off with a five-minute lesson on the Balkanized nature of the U.S., a country comprised -- as per American Nations -- of rival regional cultures, most of which date back to the colonial period.

The most frequent questions here and throughout our tour were about Donald Trump, who most West Europeans find horrifying and who their American counterparts had previously (and incorrectly)
assured them would drop out of the Republican nomination contest early. Would Republicans try to stop him at the convention? (I suspect not, as their runner-up would likely also lose the general election, meaning they'd be damaging their coalition without a clear pay-off.) Are Americans ready for social democracy on account of Sanders? (The younger generation in three or four of our regions may be, but they will likely have to settle for something more akin to New Deal national liberalism on account of the libertarian-minded nations: Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Far West.)

Later that first afternoon we presented and took questions from another full house at the German Marshall Fund's Brussels office, and the following morning -- traveling to France by train -- at their Paris office in St. Germain. I had a couple of hours free to roam the Seine, including the neighborhood where my wife and I stayed last I was here, in those glorious-if-less-consequential days before the kids. Won't be too long before they're old enough to make the trip.

That second evening we flew on to Belgrade via Air Serbia, a three-year old successor to JAT which serves a pretty decent late night dinner. Although I spent most of the 1990s in neighboring Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, I'd never visited Belgrade, first on account of the war and, later, because as successor to David Rohde at the Christian Science Monitor -- a fellow Mainer who won a Pulitzer for finding (and being arrested on) the Srebrenica mass grave sites -- Serbia wouldn't issue me a visa. I was just there one full day, but it was personally meaningful to be there, especially in a context where I could talk about the challenges to sustaining a liberal democracy (the topic of my new book, American Character.) There are a lot of souvenir merchants
selling Putin paraphinalia -- and even a few with t-shirts celebrating the mass murderer Ratko Mladic -- but there are also clearly a lot of people fighting for change, for integration with Europe (and, thus, weaker ties with authoritarian Russia), and a refutation of the Milosevic era.

As far as speaking venues go, its hard to beat Belgrade's Aeroklub, in a mansion that once belonged to the Serbian monarchy, with art deco details and frescos on the ceilings. There, hosted by the GMF's Balkan Trust for Democracy and moderated by GMF's vice president, Ivan Vojvoda, we fielded questions from Serbian journalists and civil society representatives.  No surprise that they instantly got the American Nations paradigm -- it was my time in the Balkans that helped me see the fissures at home, so it felt poignant to be bringing it back, full circle. That evening we gave a talk at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Political Science, which has a Center for American Studies.

Thanks to all of our hosts -- and to my excellent co-presenter Sewell Chan -- for a delightful and informative trip. I look forward to seeing many of you in future.

Speaking on the US election at the European Parliament, Apr. 25

I'm pleased to be joining Sewell Chan, London-based International Editor of the New York Times, for a series of discussions on the U.S. election and political situation next week in Europe, where I gather our political contest is being watched closely and perhaps with a bit of trepidation.

Our events -- five in three days in Brussels, Paris, and Belgrade -- are primarily hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, as part of its longstanding mission of promoting Trans-Atlantic understanding. Most of these, as I understand it, are invitation only, but one exception, if you're willing to jump through some administrative and security hoops, is our discussion at the European Parliament in Brussels this coming Monday, April 25.

This particular event, convened by the U.S. Mission to the European Union and EU40, a group of young members of the European Parliament, takes place from 14:30 to 16:00. (RSVPs are mandatory.) It will be hosted by Victor Negrescu, MEP from Romania, and moderated by Michael DeTar of the U.S. Mission.

Thanks in advance to GMF, EU40, and the U.S. Mission for having us.

Witnessing the Romanian miners' attack, 20 years ago today

I was looking at the calendar and realizing that my real, professional journalism career began with twenty years ago today, when the Communist retreads who'd seized power during the Romanian Revolution deployed an army of miners in Bucharest to beat the crap out of unarmed protesters, university students, and the opposition political parties.

Having gotten caught up in the 1989 events while an exchange student in Budapest, I'd returned to the region on a modest undergraduate summer research grant with a 21-year old's conceit that the truth about the Romanian Revolution could be uncovered with a couple month's field work.

When I reached Bucharest at the beginning of June, hundreds of ordinary Romanians were camped out in a tent city in the middle of University Square to protest the less than democratic behavior of Ion Iliescu's National Salvation Front, which seized power under mysterious circumstances after Nicolae Ceausescu fled the capital in an overloaded helicopter. (He and his wife were quickly betrayed, tried by a kangaroo court for their many (genuine) crimes against his people, and machine-gunned to death by their captors.) I rented a room from a working class couple in the city's outskirts -- among the kindest people I've ever known -- and through them and their friends and neighbors got to see Romanian life from the ground up on this and future reporting trips. During the day, I'd interviewed students, protesters, intellectuals, and opposition figures in the center, by night I'd hear stories of the trials and travails of day-to-day life under Ceausescu's Orwellian dictatorship, many of which were still very much present.

When the miners stormed the capital -- beating people half to death with clubs, crowbars, and other tools and trashing university and opposition offices -- I was in Brasov, the city I'd visited in the waning weeks of the Ceausescu regime. I saw the television footage of cars burning and detachments of helmeted miners clubbing their way through the capital, called my friends, and headed back on the next train, intending to stay away from the miners in the city center. Instead, I found myself face to face with them. When my train pulled into Gara de Nord, dozens of miners were waiting on the platform for us to disembark, smacking clubs in their hands and looking for likely victims. They were a grimy, wild-looking lot, behaving like caged animals who'd escaped from their subterranean prison and were looking for people to blame. Foreigners, perhaps, the sort with glasses, cameras, and notebooks. I felt lucky to have not been picked out as we walked the gauntlet to the subway entrance.

I returned to the center a day or two later, after watching Iliescu thank the miners at the national stadium on television. Opposition politicians showed me around the remains of their offices, where miners had spent the time to bash every typewriter to bits. At the University of Bucharest, students showed me through buildings where the miners had sacked everything, smashing even the porcelain toilets in every bathroom. Angry protesters returned to the streets, observed by lines of very frightened-looking army conscripts, guns at their side. Most of them had probably been caught up in the fighting the previous December and weren't looking forward to a sequel. I wound up covering it all for The Chronicle of Higher Education, kicking off my journalism career, which would have me based in Eastern Europe for much of the transition period.

Twenty years on, some of the mysteries surrounding the events of 1989-1990 have been solved, but many others have not.

Photographs (c) 1990-2010 Colin Woodard.

Has Eastern Europe's crisis peaked?

My old stomping ground in (what we children of the Cold War called) Eastern Europe has been hard hit by the Great Recession. So has the region's crisis peaked? That's the topic of my first piece from my recent trip to the region, which posted at Global Post today.

The story is for the Post's Passport section, which means they'd like you to subscribe, but it's well worth the bother. Remember all those newspapers that cut their foreign bureaus? A lot of their veteran writers file copy for Global Post these days.

More from Europe coming up....

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.

The Great Pyramids of Bosnia

My feature on the "pyramids" of Bosnia-Herzegovina is in the new issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic (aka Sam Osmanagich) became a celebrity in Bosnia after announcing he had discovered the world's largest and oldest pyramid complex, hiding in plain sight just outside Sarajevo. As you can read, many experts are more than a little skeptical of Osmanagic's claims, and alarmed at the degree of official support his "archaeological digs" have received.

The piece is also available online in its entirety.

(If you'd like to read some of Mr. Osmanagic's writings for yourself, he's conveniently posted the English translation of one of his books online. Another, the nine volume Alternativna Historija, is available in Bosnian.)

Eastern Europe: remembering the bad old days

I've been a longtime foreign correspondent of The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which I covered Eastern Europe for much of the 1990s. On the occasion of this, the 20th anniversary of the collapse of Communism there, I put together this feature on how some prominent university professors see their professional lives then (underground classes, listening devices in the walls, etc.) as compared to now (as European Union citizens with academic freedom, university autonomy, and more conventional challenges.)

At this writing, at least, the piece is freely available online. If that changes, it's also in the Chronicle Review section of the print edition.

I was actually an exchange student in Eastern Europe in 1989 and saw many of the historic events of that fall firsthand; I've been posting about that here at World Wide Woodard.

My last piece for The Chronicle was on the role of Iceland's universities in addressing that country's economic meltdown.

1989-2009: Visiting Ceausescu's Romania, Part II

Continued from this post.

Morning broke, revealing a gray landscape where two time periods existed side-by-side. Farmers tilled over the ground with horse-drawn plows on the outskirts of dilapidated villages that looked to have changed very little since the late 18th century. The train regularly passed the ruins of medieval keeps and, at road crossings, peasants in horse-drawn carts. But every dozen miles or so -- usually in towns or large villages -- Ceausescu had deployed an early 1950s-style complex of prefabricated concrete housing blocks and smokestack-studded industrial facilities. While these appeared in as poor shape as the surrounding peasant cottages, they were actually quite new, part of Ceausescu's plan to create a rural industrial proletariat. (Peasants themselves, the dictator and his wife distrusted cities.) I would later write in my journal that while living in Budapest felt like stepping back to the 1970s (in terms of technology, clothing, the design of everyday objects), nothing in Romania looked like it post-dated the 1950s.

I was 20 years old and, until six weeks prior, had never been outside North America. Stepping off the train in Brasov that morning made a powerful impression. I described the scene as "the most disturbing place on Earth." The central railway station of Romania's fifth largest city had no power or heat and downtrodden people shuffled through the cavernous gloom under the watchful states of submachine-gun toting guards in great coats. The station and surrounding apartment blocks were crowned with billboards praising the dictator and his "Epoch of Light." In Czechoslovakia or East Germany people might take a second glance at a foreigner; here people stopped in their tracks and stared, unblinking, as if we had dropped from the moon.

At the bus stop in front of the station, commuters formed a silent semi-circle around us, everyone staring in silence. Nobody would return greetings. Five minutes passed. Still staring. Ten minutes. Staring. Then, as if responding to a starting gun, everyone rushed inwards towards us, faces desperate, wads of decomposing currency in their hands, pleading urgently to buy most anything: food, cigarettes, candy. We gave what we had of the latter, handing chocolate bars in grasping hands, refusing pay until -- as suddenly as it began -- everyone swooped away, back into their silent semi-circle. A man walked by. People stared. The bus arrived: an electric trolley bus dragging itself painfully up the street, three of its four tires completely flat.

In Brasov's medieval center -- a gorgeous place under other circumstances -- more guards were posted in pairs on many street corners. Peasants in traditional dress wandered the streets -- for real, not for tourists -- alongside at least one middle-aged woman with a full-on beehive hairdo. Most shops looked to be closed and empty, until you ventured to peer into their gloomy interiors where, under the light of a single 40-watt bulb, people were lined up between the empty shelves and display cases to buy the only items available from the workers behind the counter: pig's feet in the case of the butcher's shop). One exception: a bookstore with window displays full of the works of one man, Nicolae Ceausescu, including his 32-volume magnum opus, Romania on the way of building up the multilaterally developed socialist society. (It's available in English and is about as gripping as it sounds.)

As the sun set, the city became shrouded in darkness on account of electricity rationing. Even my "first class" hotel had just one low-wattage bulb in each room and in each eight-bulb chandelier. The Carpathian Mountains are cold in October, but the heat came on only briefly that night. At 7 pm, power to the city was cut off altogether, plunging the hotel corridors and stairways into pitch black darkness. My traveling companions and I joined other guests creeping along behind a man with a cigarette lighter, feeling our way along the walls until reaching the moonlit streets. Everything was blacked out -- shops, homes, streetlights -- except the police checkpoints and the billboards celebrating Ceauescu's greatness.

The next day I caught a train and country bus to Bran, home of a very atmospheric castle falsely touted as having belonged to Dracula. Once in the countryside, people seemed more relaxed, acknowledging our presence with friendly nods. Apart from being confronted and stared down by a menacing six-year old in a Young Pioneer's uniform, the excursion was a pleasant intermission from what was an otherwise sinister environment. In retrospect I wonder if the security situation in Brasov was particularly extreme on account of there having been an uprising there against Ceausescu just two years earlier.

That night, we spent a couple of hours in the darkened interior of Brasov station, waiting for the train back to Budapest. It soon became clear that there was a large band of orphaned children -- five to nine years old -- wandering around the station. Some of them apparently lived there, begging a precarious subsistence from Brasov's undernourished commuters. One seven-year old boy took notice of our foreignness and struck up a conversation in Romanian, unperturbed and apparently uninterested in the fact we couldn't understand him. He had a small flashlight which he kept pointed in his own face, flicking it on and off He laughed in a sort of maniacal way from time to time for no apparent reason. Everyone else in the station was afraid to speak to us -- the invisible presence of informants was reflected in their body language -- but eventually a young man sitting beside us asked the boy a few questions and whispered a translation, while pretending to look the other way. "He is going to a school for hopeless children in Moldavia, alone. He is sick. He is actually 11 years old. Yes, he is small, because of his sickness." The man added that he could be arrested just for talking to us. "I want to leave Romania," he said, before stating the obvious. "There is no freedom here."

Seat reservations were mandatory on the train we were taking, but the station agents refused to sell us any. This meant we had to stand, sardine-like, among the hundreds of people in the corridor for the eight hours it would take to get to the Hungarian border (which was fine) and that we would have to bribe the conductor with a package of Kent cigarettes to not be kicked off the train (which was a bit more harrowing, and involved a cloak-and-dagger hand-off in the space between the wagons.) I spent much of the next seven hours conversing with a relaxed man who had to have been a securitate agent; he was the only adult in Romania who spoke with me freely and without worry. We drank a bottle of his grandfather's homegrown wine and, after an hour or so, the man -- "call me Johnny, Johnny Doe" -- lowered his voice a bit and confessed he intended to leave Romania. "I want the freedom to live," Agent Doe declared. "I love Romania: the people, the mountains -- it is the most beautiful country in Europe. But you have only one life and here is not life, only survival."

He later pointed out securitate agents on the train for me. I, already knowing the answer, asked him why he wasn't afraid to be observed speaking with me. "Because I'm half one of them," he explained, even showing me his secret police i.d. "If they come over and yell at me I can tell them: brother, you are talking too loudly." Now, however, he said was only "one of them" on paper. "When I was younger, I didn't think. Then I traveled, I saw what it was like outside, all over the Mediterranean and in the Soviet Union. Now I know better. But at least I don't have to be afraid of Them."

Doe took his leave and got off the train before we reached Hungary, giving me his postal address and an invitation to visit if things ever changed. As the train headed for the Hungarian border, I felt certain there would be no change in Romania for a very long time. I had come to entirely the wrong conclusion, of course. Ceausescu had lost the loyalty of many in his own security apparatus, and would be executed in a bloody coup staged amidst a popular uprising. I would return to Romania nine months later -- and more than a dozen of times thereafter -- but I never did look up Agent Doe. Part of me always wondered where he was and what he was doing when Romania's December Revolution broke out. Another part of me didn't want to find out.

[For more on my experiences in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions, here is the complete series to date.]

20 Years Ago: Visiting Ceausescu's Romania

Twenty years ago this evening two friends and I boarded an overnight train to the Transylvanian city of Brasov. It was to be a dark, cold, and scary trip.

Just about everyone in Budapest had warned us not to go, many of them with wearing the grave expression of the villagers in those old Dracula movies when the main character asks for directions to the Count's castle. Be careful, we were told. Bring food. Don't take anything of value. Dress warmly.

It wasn't vampires they were worried about, it was Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, whose dictatorial rule had degenerated into madness. Ceausescu had built a cult of personality modeled on that of North Korea's Kim Il Sung backed by the securitate, a secret police force believed to have Orwellian omnipresence. Some securitate officers were said to have been recruited as children from Romania's massive population of abandoned children, itself a direct product of Ceausescu's rule. Possessed with the notion that Romania's national greatness would grow in direct proportion with its population size, he had banned abortion, banned the import or sale of birth control, slapped taxes on couples with few children, and instituted surprise examinations to detect illegal terminations of pregnancy. the result was a flood of unwanted babies, many of whom wound up in horrifying conditions in overtaxed, under-supplied state orphanages.

Meanwhile, having spent millions razing much of historic Bucharest to build his Stalinist palace, Ceausescu had become fixated on the need to immediately pay off appreciable his foreign debt. His solution: import nothing and export everything without regard to domestic needs. By 1989 the situation had become dire, with severe rationing of even the most basic foodstuffs. Buildings were heated for only a few hours each day, elevators and many electric appliances were banned, and inspectors arrived at homes unannounced to ensure that no more than one room was lit at a time, using a bulb of 40 watts or less.

As we prepared to visit, Ceausescu was making bellicose noises about the reformist government in Hungary and cutting back on the issuance of foreign visas. We got our visas by chance: one of the coordinators of our exchange program at Karl Marx University was related to Budapest's Romanian Orthodox bishop and had friendly contacts at the embassy. We packed our bags with food for ourselves, chocolates to give as gifts, and cartons of Kent cigarettes, which had become Romania's unofficial currency-of-graft. Then we boarded the old Orient Express bound to the East.

At midnight the train screeched to a halt at the border. The heaters in the compartment shut off. Romanian border guards marched through the wagon, throwing open doors, yelling at passengers, tearing into bags and dismantling the seat cushions. Outside someone was cackling into the public address system, his mad laughter echoing through Curtici's railyard. The other passengers just stared down at the floor in silence, as if awaiting their fate. A guard screamed threats at one couple - the wife was apparently ethnic Hungarian -- but eventually lost interest and stormed off to terrorize the next compartment.

Then two customs officers stepped into the compartment: a slim, pale-faced, raven-haired women with Natasha Fatale's demeanor, and her male colleague, who was portly, drunk, and loud. She confirmed we had no subversive materials (Hungarian newspapers, bibles) and collected $30 for each day we would spend in the country. In exchange I was given a wad of greasy rags: greasy and smelling of dirty socks. On closer examination this proved to be Romanian currency -- $30 worth at the absurdly optimistic official exchange rate -- although the notes were in such terrible condition their denominations could only be identified with considerable effort. The national mint had apparently stopped functioning in the late 1960s. The aging notes, like most things in the country, were falling apart. "Have a nice time in Romania," Agent Natasha said ominously before sliding the compartment door closed.

An hour later the train jolted into motion, pulling us further into Ceausescu's nightmare.

Continued here.

20 years ago: Yugoslav hyperinflation

Twenty years ago today, Yugoslavia was still a single country and its currency was in crisis. I'd just arrived from Budapest and, at the train station, lined up to change $20. I was handed a stack of large denomination dinar notes three-inches thick. Unable to fit them in my pocket, I carried them around in a plastic sack.

In Split, merchants had already taken to writing all prices on chalkboards and changing them throughout the day as the currency collapsed. Residents said the first thing they did upon receiving their pay is to spend it all -- preferably within hours -- before the 2500% annual inflation ate up its value. The presses at the central bank couldn't keep up, with 5000 dinar notes the largest in general circulation that day. At lunch, hamburgers for six cost over a million dinar, and it took ten minutes to simply count the bills (pictured above.) Credit cards not being in widespread use back then, we had to change money a couple times a day.

The next time I visited -- just five weeks later -- the streets and railroad underpasses were awash in discarded banknotes; they blew around in the wind at train stations and gathered in ditches. I filled a bag with 100 dinar notes with Antun Augustincic's Monument of Peace (which sits in front of UN headquarters in New York) on the front; the entire bagful was worth, at most, a few pennies. So was any cash anybody had stashed under their mattress or otherwise forgotten to spend.

The corrosive effect of all this on a society is hard to underestimate. and it only got worse during the war. By January 1994, Yugoslav dinar inflation peaked at a mind boggling 313 million percent per month, the second highest rate in human history. The highest? Hungary at the end of World War II, which saw prices increase by 3.8 octrillion fold in a single year. That's 3.8 with twenty-seven zeros after it.

The Dalmatian Coast was the first place I'd seen whose physical beauty rivaled that of my native Maine: limestone mountains falling straight into the azure sea, only to rise up again as islands a few miles offshore. The towns and villages had a Venetian flavor: white stone buildings with red tile roofs climbing steep hillsides. For the visiting tourist there was little indication that the country would soon descend into civil war.

Top Image (c) 2009 Colin Woodard.