Dalibor Rohac is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in European politics and transatlantic policy. He contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard from 2011 to 2018, writing about European economic crises, the eurozone, and political developments across the continent and the Middle East. Originally from Slovakia, he has written widely on Central European politics, including tributes to figures like Václav Havel.
The upcoming parliamentary election in Hungary appears only marginally more exciting than the recent Russian presidential election. Although the number of undecided voters is substantial, it would require a minor miracle for the ruling Fidesz Party to be voted out of power this Sunday.
Everyone has heard the story. Early this month, former GRU officer and British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England. Twenty-one other people, including police officers who had intervened, received medical treatment and as…
“You’re my type of guy,” President Donald Trump is reported to have told the Czech President Miloš Zeman, a fervent critic of Muslim immigration into Europe and an avowed Trump admirer, in a phone conversation held before POTUS’ inauguration. To his chagrin, however, the Czech head of state was not…
Many are horrified by the ascent of protectionist, isolationist, and nativist ideas on the political right – and rightly so. Fewer have noticed, however, that developments on the political left also bode ill for those want to see the world’s liberal democracies united against their common enemies,…
Recently, French president Emmanuel Macron addressed the Polish government with perhaps the most scathing criticism of any European leader to date. Polish citizens, he said, “deserve better” than the current government, which “has decided to isolate itself in the workings of Europe.”
With everything he said on the campaign trail, it was inevitable that the relationship between President-elect Donald Trump and the European Union would start off on the wrong foot. But if Trump appreciates that the liberal democracies of Europe are still the best friends that America has in the…
If the U.S. election season looks too depressing, you might consider following the presidential primaries in France instead. A week ago, the French magazine Le Point—which lies on the French center-right but is very far from the intellectual conservatism in the British or American sense—dedicated a…
Just hours before President Xi Jinping's arrival in Prague on Monday for the first state visit by China's head of state to the Czech Republic, his host, President Miloš Zeman, gave a curious interview to Beijing's state broadcaster, CCTV. He called the impending visit "a restart" for Czech-Chinese…
Even if they disagree with his politics, Jeremy Corbyn’s parliamentary colleagues, such as Douglas Carswell from the UK Independence Party (UKIP), acknowledge that he is a nice, down-to-earth fellow; certainly not one of his party’s grandees. Unpretentious, rarely seen wearing a suit and a tie,…
Central European countries are currently commemorating the 70th anniversary of their liberation from Nazism at the end of World War Two. Budapest was captured by the Red Army in February 1945; Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava, was taken on April 4; Prague was liberated only after hostilities…
On his recent trip to Hungary, Vladimir Putin stirred controversy by visiting the monument erected to the memory of the Soviet soldiers who violently crushed the Hungarian ‘counterrevolution’ of 1956. While his Hungarian hosts remained silent, the symbolic dimension of this act of territorial…
Ron Paul’s aversion to monetary expansion in the middle of an economic crisis is a fringe libertarian idea—and also widely held in America’s political mainstream, including by some Fed officials. This wave of thinking seems to foreshadow a worrisome trend: the ongoing Japanization of the West.
A cynic would be tempted to compare the eurozone to Ryou-Un Mara, the rusty Japanese ghost ship that floated across the Pacific after last year’s earthquake. Some wrecks surprise us by staying afloat for a long time, but that does not make them less of a wreck.
In 1945, Friedrich Hayek famously predicted that economic interventionism in the West would lead to the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism. More than sixty-five years later, this prediction does not seem to have been validated.
By any standard, the transition toward democracy and market economy in Central Europe was almost miraculously successful. For that, Václav Havel deserves a significant share of the credit. Besides displaying enormous personal courage and determination in opposing the mortally rigid regime of Gustáv…
Mario Monti’s appointment as prime minister of Italy has given some hope to observers of the current crisis in the eurozone. Monti, a former student of Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin at Yale and president of the Bocconi University in Milan, has strong academic and policy credentials.…
As heartening as it is to see Muammar Qaddafi lose his grip on power, our expectations of Libya's future need to take into account this ethnically diverse country’s complicated reality. The biggest problem is Libya's enormous oil reserves.
Since the revolution in January, Egypt has been in a constant state of unrest. While the protests have been mostly peaceful, there are exceptions. The other week, dozens in one of Cairo’s slums—known as “Garbage City”—were throwing rocks at passing cars, demanding housing they had allegedly been…
With the debt ceiling debate behind us, now might be a good time to get back to the biggest problem currently facing the world economy: the eurozone. While the European debt crisis may have slipped off Americans' radar screens in the past weeks, its significance has not diminished.
Although Greek prime minister George Papandreou survived a vote of confidence last night, meeting the conditions required by the IMF for the disbursement of another tranche of aid to its ailing economy, parliament will have to pass another austerity package later this month.
The U.S. economy might be on the verge of a double-dip recession, while Europe is paralyzed by a massive debt crisis afflicting the governments on the periphery of the eurozone. Alarming as they are, both of these stories are just part of an even gloomier overall economic picture of the West.