Tag Archives: Eastern Europe

Just finished reading “Bloodlands,” a book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It was published in 2010, but now has a lengthy afterword that discusses the book’s reception and ties the theme to current events. I was inspired to read this book because of events in Ukraine and I believe that I have a much better understanding of the current conflict from having read it.The bloodlands refers to the territory lying between central Poland and, roughly, the...

  "The EU's greatest achievement is the Euro", said Michael Portillo on the BBC's This Week programme last Thursday.No, Michael, it isn't. It is the EU's worst mistake.As Yanis Varoufakis entertainingly explains in an interesting lecture published in the Australian Journal of Political Economy, the creation of the Euro led inexorably to the buildup of unsustainable debt - both private and public - in the Eurozone periphery countries: The problem is that creating a monetary union is a...

My Forbes post on the threat to democracy in the EU touched a nerve. Well, several nerves, actually. Some people regarded my invocation of the Prague Spring as insulting to the people who suffered under Soviet oppression: others objected to my comparison of the benevolent EU with the evil USSR: and a few complained that I had presented the Syriza government as "martyrs", when they are nothing of the kind. And lots of Portuguese called me out for misrepresenting how their parliamentary...

At the end of my previous post, I posed the question: why did Latvia experience the deepest recession in the world in 2008-9?The first puzzle is that Latvia's banks were in no worse shape than anyone else's and better than some. Among small countries, Iceland, Ireland and (in 2013) Cyprus all experienced bigger banking collapses relative to the size of their economies than Latvia. Larger countries did too, notably Germany and the UK, both of which suffered widespread damage across their large...

This is not what you think it is. And it is not what I intended to write about, either. I was going to write about Latvia as it is now, after the deepest recession in the world in 2008-9 and an excruciatingly painful front-loaded fiscal consolidation. Has it really recovered, or is it just marking time?But in looking at Latvia now, I find myself drawn to its history. Latvia's unusual response to the kicking it got in 2008 was because of its history. It had a deep recession 1991-3 and a severe...