What keeps European states committed to the EU project has not changed: it is economically much better to be inside the bloc than outside.

“The region has seen a radical shift from widespread unemployment to labor shortages, a historic expansion in higher-education opportunities, and unprecedented mass migration to the West.” Seventh in a series on social mobility around the world .

Nations that endured communist dictatorships must come to terms with the traumas of the past before durable democracies can take hold—a lesson the author learned firsthand in Romania.

The one bright light in this darkening landscape is that Poles remain committed to democracy.

After the fall of communism, the restructuring of labor became an integral part of the larger project of building democracy and markets.

In Hungary and Poland, populist leaders with authoritarian tendencies have drawn on the cynical power-holding playbooks of the old communist regimes whose traces they vowed to erase.

Nearly every senior official in Poland and the Baltic countries expressed great unease. Political leaders and military commanders in the region increasingly warned that Putin was intent on undermining NATO's resolve to protect their countries.

Achieving relatively easy terms under the Kyoto Protocol did not necessarily inspire post-socialist states to engage enthusiastically in international climate talks….

A new book by Anne Applebaum offers a heavily detailed, ground-level history of the arrival of communist rule in postwar Eastern Europe. The author aims, she says, to understand “totalitarianism in practice.”

Warsaw's aspirations to become a major EU player and to develop closer ties with Moscow could create the appearance of detachment from and even arrogance toward smaller neighbors.

Predictions of massive social unrest, political breakdown, or reformist reversals have, to date anyway, proved misplaced.

Although the publics in Poland and Romania believe there are more similarities than differences in the quality of their lives after communism, external observers argue that Poland's democracy is qualitatively better than Romania's. The challenge is to explain why there is this difference when both countries are consolidated democracies inhabited by unsatisfied…democrats.

Adopting the euro will have costs for the so-called accession economies, but so would shunning the euro. In fact, there are compelling reasons to think that adopting the euro will be less costly than the other monetary options available to the countries of ‘new’ Europe.

What today stands as a shining moment for Poland in nato and Iraq may ultimately harm its far more vital role as a bridge between an increasingly independent Germany and an uncertain Russia. America's global-led war on terrorism might, paradoxically, unravel the key stabilizing country between west and east….

As considerable as the challenges of enlargement for the EU are, they pale in comparison to the challenges of accession facing the new members. … Taken together, they will make it exceptionally difficult for most if not all of the governments of the new member states to govern effectively and maintain public support.

Has the Chinese body politic finally been infected by what Beijing officials have sometimes dubbed the ‘Polish disease’…? Could China's 2002 turn out to be like Poland's 1981, a turning-point year when cleansing fevers (to invert the medical metaphor) began to take effect?