Latest posts
Can This Union Be Saved?
Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago, observed this today in the New York Times: Ireland was poor and helpless until the European Union came along like a fairy godmother. The E.U., really Germany, took compassion. It gave Ireland a home in th...
A Chorus of Protest
I like the approach of a group of young people in Macedonia who have taken to protesting their country’s foibles in song. You can see a story about them here in Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso and videos of their performances here. But I want to...
Yulia Peron and other presidential follies
The Ukrainian presidential campaign, for all its serious regional implications, sometimes seems designed to offer laughs to those not actually living in Ukraine (in which case you might well feel more like crying). In my new task of putting together...
A Belarusan dissident drama in D.C.
The Washington Post has a nice profile today of the Belarus Free Theatre, an underground and highly political Minsk company that performs at Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center tonight and tomorrow night. I write “Minsk c...
Ukraine sets election date; Times details Kiev chaos
Ukraine’s parliament has set 17 January 2010 as the country’s presidential election date, setting the stage for six more months of the kind of backbiting and paralysis that, per a recent New York Times headline, has given Orange Revolutio...
Goodbye to enlargement?
As the results from the European parliament (EP) elections started coming in a week ago pundits faced two worrying phenomena: the low turnout, and the comparatively big vote for the extreme right. Holland was the first to announce its results, premat...
Does the EU Accept nation-states still in the building?
On December 14 1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina became a nation-state on paper. It took a bloody three-year long war, a NATO bombing campaign, and the signatures of all the great powers apart form Japan, assembled in Paris, to end the war and create a l...
EU declares Albanian mafia to be buckling down?
What happened to the Albanian gangsters? Those same whose notoriety won them a mention in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale in the character of the chief villain Le Chiffre? Throughout the 1990s they stood out even in the eyes of Italian prosecutors a...
Hostages of Realpolitik: EU Wouldn’t Notice New Belarusian Prisoners of Conscience
Mikalaj Autuchovic is dying in a Belarusian prison. It is the EU’s approach to the Belarusian regime that that may silence him to death. Mikalaj Autuchovic, Jury Lavonau and Uladzimier Asipienka have been in custody since February 8, 2009. They...
About this blog
Welcome to Transitions Online’s Next In Line Blog, a resource devoted to spotlighting issues concerning prospective EU members in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. With support from the Czech Foreign Ministry, the Swedish International Development Co...
Coming soon: EU Next in Line
Thanks for checking out EU Next in Line, TOL’s blog on the accession candidates and partnership states along the European Union’s southern and eastern borders, from the Balkans to Belarus. This blog is still in development, but we’l...
