America is the land of "move on." That's the name of the organization whose original mission was to persuade the U.S. electorate to move on from the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. But it could also be the name of President Barack Obama's approach to the crimes and misdemeanors...

The media in East-Central Europe used to be idea-centric. The unofficial samizdat publications focused on the cruelties and inanities of the regimes, unearthed nearly forgotten history, and often featured philosophic meditations on politics and morality. Even the government-run media tended to be rather high-minded in its emphasis on economic statistics,...

Political cartoonists love to portray North Korea as an irrational and infantile force. It's either a baby with a nuclear rattle or a little truant in need of a timeout. The relative youth of the country's leader Kim Jong Un, encourages such representations, but the practice predates...

Bulgarian voters went to the polls on May 12. The two top vote-getters were the former ruling party, Citizens for a European Bulgaria (GERB), followed by the former Communists, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). GERB resigned in February during a surge in protests over the economic situation in the country.

Last fall, I spent the night in the Bulgarian city of Yambol on my way from the Black Sea coast back to Plovdiv and Sofia. Although I drove around the city looking for my hotel and poked around a bit the following morning, I failed to see what is considered...

Some of the first oppositionists to Communism came from the left, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. Later, in Eastern Europe, the first stirrings of dissent from below also came from the left -- workers in East Germany, dissident Communists...

Politicians have lied since the very beginning of politics. Ramses II fought to a stalemate against the Hittites then came back and announced to his fellow Egyptians that he'd thoroughly conquered the adversary in battle. PBS, oddly, dates the beginning of political falsehood more than a...

When I met Miroslav Durmov in 1990, he was a spokesperson for the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), a political formation that focused on minority rights in Bulgaria, particularly those of ethnic Turks. We conversed in Russian, since he didn't speak English. He wasn't himself ethnically Turkish. But he...

The colonial relationship was reasonably straightforward. The empire dictated terms to the colony, and the colonial administration carried out the orders. Sometimes colonial subjects revolted. Sometimes the imperial agents went "native" and adopted the culture and perspectives of the people they were supposed to be pushing around. But the power...

In the middle of Sofia is a big space where the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov once stood. In 1990, the removal of Dimitrov's preserved body, followed by its cremation and burial, was a symbolic rejection of the old regime. The mausoleum itself was taken down in 1999, though

Even at an intuitive level, sanctions never made much sense to me. If North Korea is such an isolated country, and isolation only reinforces the leadership's paranoia, then adopting a policy of further isolating the country through sanctions seems counterproductive. If you want the people of Iran to rise up...

Anyone engaged in social change has grappled with the essential question. Should I work within the system or outside the system?

In the United States, the question is often expressed geographically: to operate "inside the Beltway" or "outside the Beltway." The Beltway is, of course, the ring road that encircles...

It looked and sounded like something out of the Deep South during the civil rights era in the United States. Angry protesters, men and women, were shouting racist slogans and trying to prevent a group of 50 young schoolchildren from entering an integrated preschool.

Except that this wasn't...

The home movies show a bunch of young kids doing skateboard stunts all around their neighborhood. Without the sound, the action could be taking place almost anywhere. The kids have clothes and haircuts that look like the late 1970s, the town they live in has a prefab drabness. But their...

The "Pacific pivot" of the United States is nothing new. At the same time, it doesn't really exist. And yet, even though it doesn't exist, this pivot is partly responsible for the escalation of tensions in and around the Korean peninsula.

How can all three of these statements be simultaneously...

In the 6th century, in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, the historian Procopius penned an account of the misdeeds of the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora. The Secret History is a compelling account of the court intrigues of a treacherous emperor in a crumbling empire. That Justinian enjoyed a...

I was struck by the banners in the airport in Belgrade. They hung in a series from the ceiling and highlighted different Serbian cities. Pirot was represented by a tire and the tagline "on the right track." Loznica featured a pear surrounded by cherries and berries and the tagline "fruitful...

The state and the market have long been in a tug of war in East-Central Europe. The Communists were not the first political force to recommend that the state play a much larger role in the economy. During the inter-war years, for instance, democratic visionary Tomas Masaryk acted much like...

After 1989, some of the dissidents of East-Central Europe went back to their original jobs as journalists or engineers or teachers. Others threw themselves into politics, as Vaclav Havel somewhat reluctantly did. And then there was the smallest category of them all: the dissidents who turned professional.

There were, after...

It has not been easy for the countries of East-Central Europe to establish stable, functioning democracies. Strong-arm leaders -- like Victor Orban in Hungary or, until recently, Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic -- have persistent appeal. Corruption has claimed any number of political victims, from Adrian Nastase in Romania...