An old friend, Rick Zednik, just got a hefty headstart on the inevitable 20-years-after pieces that will start to gather steam as the year closes on the anniversary of 1993′s so-called Velvet Divorce of Czechoslovakia. In a thought-provoking op-ed published yesterday in The International Herald Tribune, Rick, who was one of the founders of the English-language Slovak Spectator, argues that “the divorce proved a boon to both countries that emerged from it”. As I read through the article, I found myself, an opponent of the split at the time, instinctively wanted to disagree with his conclusion. But, though I had some quibbles, I really can’t.

For those of us who had recently arrived in Prague (I landed here in January 1992), the impending divorce was hard to understand. I was researching the role of the media at the time, especially the nationalist press in Slovakia, and I could see the influence that various inflammatory reports had on the two populations. But the real nationalists were always fairly small contingents (as Rick points out, only around a third of each entity wanted to split). Perhaps some Czechs snobbishly viewed Slovaks as religious, country bumbkins, and some Slovaks felt discriminated against within the federation by the know-it-all, more cosmopolitan Czechs. But there was no visible ethnic animosity, at least nothing on par with what we were seeing in Yugoslavia in those days. It also seemed bizarre to many of us foreigners, and no doubt to most of the locals, that something so significant could be decided without a referendum, by two headstrong politicians that felt that they knew what was best for their respective nations. The Czechs that I knew had more of the attitude of “well, if they really want to go, then let them”.

That attitude was, yes, patronizing to some extent, but also represented the well-grounded skepticism that Rick writes about in his piece, skepticism that the Slovaks could really strike out on their own and survive in those heady but messy years after the collapse of communism (before anyone could say for sure that the region would successfully be integrated into the EU and NATO). As he notes:

My skepticism was based on Slovakia’s limited stature. Small were its population (5.4 million), its economy (a G.D.P. the size of Rhode Island’s), and its fame (birthplace of Andy Warhol’s parents). Without the 10 million Czechs, (whose beer, crystal and tennis players were world-renowned), I fretted that a Slovakia would never stand tall in the community of nations.

Yet Rick rightly concludes that we were all basically wrong. The Slovaks have managed to build a strong, robust country, with all the attendant structures, in just two decades. They turned Slovakia from being Central Europe’s black hole in the 1990s (under Meciar) into just another European country, a member of the EU and NATO. They passed ambitious economic reforms and attracted billions in foreign investment. Of course, there have been missteps along the way, and the ongoing Gorila scandal shows how ingrained political corruption has been in Slovakia. Yet I haven’t yet heard anyone explain any of the current challenges facing the country as some remnant of a hasty divorce – these are pretty much the same problems facing the rest of the region.

Though it must chagrin Rick to give any of the credit to Meciar (his paper bravely took on the autocrat and his cronies in the dark years), he apparently couldn’t help himself:

These victories, all accomplished under Meciar’s successors, were largely possible thanks to the divorce he orchestrated. Within the Czechoslovak federal context, political pressures would have inhibited Mikulas Dzurinda’s government from implementing the flat tax. Central authorities in Prague would have neutralized efforts by the Slovaks to attract foreign investors into their own territory. When Slovaks won a world hockey championship in 2002, and when they beat the Italians at soccer’s 2010 World Cup, they basked in the limelight alone … The split and subsequent autonomy has given both sides (especially the less populous, less famous Slovaks) the confidence to work as real partners.

We can argue if the central authorities in Prague (the federal authorities, made up of both Czechs and Slovaks) really would have prevented the Slovaks from courting foreign investors. Or whether the two sides – without arrogant, blustery types such as Klaus and Meciar – would have solved their problems and worked things out. However, given the perspective of the past 20 years, I’m extremely doubtful that would ever have happened, at least with the past and current Czech political elite. The reason: the low level of political culture and absolute inability to compromise with ideological opponents.

Though the country has needed to institute far-reaching reforms for years (and only now seems to be making some progress), there has hardly ever been any effort at all to seek consensus across the right-left divide. Party leaders really seem happy with ramming through their version of reforms without consulting the opposition. And, as a result, the opposition over the years has no qualms about mobilizing its electorate against changes in which their parties have not shared.

In other words, if I had a more positive view of the political elite, then I’d blame Meciar and Klaus for blasting apart a federation that had a chance of working and serving as a model for other multi-ethnic countries. But with so few people in high positions willing over the years to put their country’s needs above more narrowly defined party or financial interests, that dream would probably never have materialized – at least in a form that would have benefited both nations as much as independence.

Can you name the following country? (I know, it’s the second consecutive blog post I’ve started with a quiz, but sometimes these things happen.)

Between 1991 and 2011 the population decreased by nearly 12 percent.

High death rates due to smoking, accidents at work, and high incidence of suicides affect men in particular before they reach the age of 65. In 2011, life expectancy at birth was only 69.5, compared with 78.6 in the EU.

If you guessed Russia, you’re wrong. It’s Ukraine, which a new report by the Euromonitor research firm says will see the largest absolute decline in population in Europe through 2020.

That drop, from 45.5 million to 43.5 million, will come entirely among those under 65 (that age group will shrink by almost 3 million people, while the group over 65 will grow somewhat).

The shift will bring with it the usual problem of fewer people funding more pensions – the government raised the retirement age last year – but it will also lead to shortages on the labor market and higher wages.

To the many who are unemployed right now, that will be a welcome turnaround. That is, unless businesses start looking for less expensive places to operate. To deal with that challenge, the report says, Ukraine will have to move “toward higher value added activities” (in other words, toward jobs where the skills and contributions of the workers justify the higher costs).

Which brings us to education in Ukraine. Though it’s not a basket case, a 2009 report by the European Training Foundation said the country’s educational system has not adapted to the needs of the labor market “resulting in a substantial skills mismatch, weak involvement of the business community in education, outdated equipment and infrastructures, poor salaries for teachers, poor school management, and the absence of Ukrainian universities in international rankings.”

The report noted that the shift from the types of jobs that were prevalent before 1991 (in Ukraine, heavy manufacturing and agriculture) to positions brought in by a market economy (for instance in finance or small business) had been slower than in other transition economies.

I’m reluctant to quote statistics from the report, because they are pre-2008, and the world has changed much. But some of them illustrate trends that surely have not changed in only the four years since. For instance, “out of 888,000 graduates of vocational schools, colleges and universities in 2007,” the report notes, “53 percent and 15 percent received a university diploma and a college diploma, respectively, and only 32 percent received a vocational school diploma. Labor market needs are quite the opposite, however. Furthermore, many graduates tend to have professions that are not in demand or lack essential skills required by employers.”

If the Euromonitor research is right, the next decade could be an exciting one for young workers in Ukraine who are willing to train and re-train if necessary. Otherwise, we might witness the seemingly contradictory scenario of a smaller labor pool that ultimately results in fewer jobs.

Photo by Matt Shalvatis/Roads Less Traveled Photography/flickr.

It’s never been clear to me just what Europe’s “boycott” of Euro 2012 is for. What ill deed is it meant to flag up? Is it the conviction and imprisonment of Tymoshenko? Her medical treatment in prison? Or the “overall human rights situation”?

Nor is it clear to me why a football tournament is the best peg on which to hang Europe’s gripes about Ukraine. Sporting boycotts have not worked all that well in the past, with the partial exception of the ban on sporting visits to apartheid-era South Africa, and that was a matter of years, not weeks. Crucially, it was a matter of restricting the freedom of competitors to work, and earn money, in South Africa.

Because what Angela Merkel and others are suggesting is far less extreme than ordering athletes not to attend a sporting event. All they are threatening to do is stay home in a huff as the teams take part in what should be a glorious festival of football. In the absence of Merkel, Barroso, Klaus et al., we fans might even be spared those TV shots of stone-faced leaders fidgeting in their seats, waiting for the damn game to end so they can get back to the business of ruling the world. Euro 2012 without Van Rompuy? We’re heartbroken.

Some of the same bunch that is threatening to stay away from Ukraine skipped the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 to protest against the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. And so did Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk – who’s now calling the German-led stayaway from Ukraine “inappropriate,” precisely the word he used to explain why he decided to skip Beijing.

He went on, “I can understand the politicians who sympathize with Yulia Tymoshenko, but nothing stands in their way to express this sympathy in a clear way during the championships.”

Right on, Don. In fact, if European statesmen and -women really want to make Yanukovych dance to their tune, a much more effective instrument is at hand. If you want all the financial goodies attached to the Eastern Neighborhood program, they could say, show us the legislation that will bar any future politically motivated prosecutions like those aimed at Tymoshenko and Yuri Lutsenko. If you want a free trade agreement, show us that you are cracking down on cops who torture suspects and prove you are serious about solving the Gongadze killing.

Rather than staying way from Ukraine to no point (except to mollify their own domestic critics), Merkel, Barroso and the rest should use the very real powers they have to hit Kyiv where it really hurts.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TWEETIN’ DMITRY?

The fairly patronizing attitude in the Western press toward Dmitry Medvedev’s technology hobbies when he first took office seemed to tie in with a naïve hope that Russia must be on the way to being a “normal” country, now that its president was video chatting and tweeting.

As it turned out, Medvedev’s tweets have been about as dull as anyone else’s, although his efforts to look like just a normal guy have a certain appeal:

“Toured an agro company and dairy factory, and met vacationers near Orenburg who grow watermelons in their gardens.”

The only interesting thing about Medvedev’s tweets is that he, or whoever on his staff tweets for him, does it much less often these days. He emitted six just on his first day on Twitter, 23 June 2010, inspired I suppose by his visit to Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. By the end of 2010 he’d tweeted about 300 times, so nearly twice a day, but the frequency dropped sharply. In 2011 he sent only about 100, and only 18 so far this year.

One of the most interesting observations this week on Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency – he was inaugurated for a third term 7 May – comes from Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations. After the wave of anti-government protests that followed the contested parliamentary polls in December, Sestanovich says, Putin survived in large part by courting a new base.

Putin made his comeback, such as it was, in the presidential election by showing that he had a strong base in rural areas, among the working class. Putin found that he could appeal to these constituencies with a kind of anti-Western rhetoric, with an appeal to the strength of the state …

The irony, Sestanovich notes, is that Putin “has managed to solidify his support among people who have done the least well during” the economic boom years of his first two presidential terms, from 2000 to 2008, and his premiership. While the beneficiaries of his tenure – the middle class, which enjoyed soaring living standards amid 7 percent annual GDP growth before the global financial crisis – are protesting.

The opposition protesters, who have returned to the streets after a lull, fall within what Maria Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank calls the “modernized minority,” the more independent-minded of Russia’s two dominant constituencies. The other, the “conservative majority,” prizes a strong state and the status quo. Putin’s new base comes from this group.

In a recent op-ed, Lipman says Putin has for years appealed to both groups through “two tacit pacts.” He promised the conservatives cushy state benefits in exchange for loyalty; the modernized minority got enhanced autonomy – the freedom to pursue their individual dreams or criticize the Kremlin, for instance – as long as it stayed out of politics.

But while the first pact has held, Lipman notes, the second has not. The minority is rising up against Putin’s authoritarianism, and there’s no going back. “Now that their tacit pact with Putin has been ruptured, it can’t be restored,” she writes, adding that the fragmented opposition will eventually coalesce.

Taken together, Sestanovich and Lipman’s analyses raise some salient conclusions/questions. First, Putin is running out of places to turn to for support. Second, if he can alienate the people who’ve thrived most under his rule, how long is it before that discontent metastasizes?

Perhaps, as Lipman suggests, the conservatives’ commitment to a strong state – and thus to Putin – is absolute. But with the Russian economy sluggish and state coffers well in the red, Putin might have trouble holding onto his new base.

Picture of Putin taking the presidential oath of office 7 May from www.kremlin.ru

In the wake of the success of Greek extremists in last week’s parliamentary elections (including the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party with almost 7 percent of the vote), I received an email roundup of other right-wing extremist parties represented in European parliaments (care of our friends over at Romea.cz, who had, in turn, translated an article from the Czech news agency).

As I scanned the list, which included many of the usual suspects, I came across Ataka, a nationalist coalition in Bulgaria that burst on the scene back in 2005. Given the anxiety across Europe that the anti-Roma, anti-Turk party caused back then, I wondered whatever happened to them.

Back in July 2005, TOL, like other media, ran a rather alarmed feature describing the sudden success of Ataka. Though the coalition had formed only in May of that year, it had won more than 8 percent of the vote in the June parliamentary election. According to the author of the article – Yana Buhrer Tavanier, an editor at the weekly Kapital:

Such a party is a novelty for Bulgaria, where since the fall of communism, ethnic Bulgarians, Turks, and Roma have avoided the kind of ethnic tension that caused bloody wars in other Balkan countries. Almost everyone – political analysts, journalists, sociologists – declared Ataka the biggest surprise of these elections.

Led by journalist Volen Siderov, Ataka managed to attract both hard-core nationalists, as well as many left behind by the transformation: the beneficiary of a clear protest vote. More recently, Siderov came in second in the 2006 presidential elections at the end of 2006.

In 2009, Ataka won 9.4 percent in parliamentary elections and a whopping 12 percent of the vote in elections to the European Parliament.

Bulgarians have probably followed those results, but the rest of us could be forgiven for some curiosity over Ataka’s real influence and potential threat, especially taking into account how the economic crisis has radicalized the political scene next door in Greece.

Today, it turns out, the party is pretty much a joke. Ataka is in the midst of crumbling, in part because of sensational charges that Siderov had an affair with an Ataka parliamentary deputy, the former high school girlfriend of his son. In response to the scandal, the son and his mother have formed a splinter party, the National Democratic Party, and have tried to attract Ataka parliamentary members, with mixed results. The latest polls give Ataka a mere 2 percent or even less, far too little to enter into parliament in next year’s elections.

One of TOL’s correspondents in Bulgaria, Boryana Dzhambazova, had this to say:

To the disappointment of party supporters Ataka didn’t prove to be the real threat everybody feared it would be. Through the years Siderov seemed to be the barking dog that never bites. Despite his anti-Roma and anti-Turkish rhetoric his party never translated the words into some real actions.

Except the bloody clashes between Ataka supporters and Muslims during a Friday prayer last year, recently Ataka is under the media spotlight mostly because of the soap-opera-like family scandals between Siderov and his wife rather than some outrageous far-right political incentives.

Moreover, after the ruling centre-right GERB took over in 2009 Siderov became its most loyal ally in the Parliament and much of Siderov nationalistic talk slowly softened.

Boryana also got hold of Evgenii Dainov, a leading political analyst, to see what he had to say. In Dainov’s view Bulgarians got lucky that Volen Siderov turned out to be “harmless”.  

“Ataka turned out to be a vaccine, not a disease for the political body in Bulgaria,” Dainov added. Like many others he predicted that Ataka was on its way out, and he expected that another far-right party would be able to accumulate the nationalistic vote – though it’s too early to determine which one.

Another long-time observer of the Bulgarian political scene that I spoke to saw things a bit differently (he didn’t want to be quoted because of past problems with Ataka). In the current climate, he felt that a single nationalistic party had no chance of doing well.

First of all, the vote is now fractured and there are four or five potential Ataka successor parties, with the most serious one clustered around a nationalist-bent regional TV station called TV Skat (which played a pivotal role in Ataka’s origin, as well, by hosting a Siderov talk show). Second, said the analyst, Ataka had disillusioned many that this type of party had real potential. “Bulgaria did not have a nationalistic party for a long time, then Ataka came and failed,” he said.

The analyst also cited the “traditional rationality and openmindness” of Bulgarians, perhaps a gracious explanation for the lack of similar parties in the recent past , perhaps not. Lastly, he pointed to Prime Minister Boyko Borisov as an attractive figure for nationalist voters: “No nationalistic leader looks more as a leader than he does. He embodies hard talk and leadership. So many nationalists simply vote for him.”

As for Ataka’s demise, the analyst had a straightforward explanation:

“The simple truth: Siderov got more money (staying close to GERB), less voters, and a new girlfriend. This killed the party. Now the voters are gone, the money as well, even the girlfriend.”

Sidorov photo courtesty of HomoByzantinus.

Three of the world’s eight worst media environments are in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. That’s just one of the alarming findings on TOL’s coverage area in Freedom of the Press 2012, the annual survey by the Freedom House human rights watchdog.

Released Tuesday, the survey evaluates press freedom in 197 countries and territories in three categories – legal, political and economic – that consider everything from media-related legislation to attacks on reporters. It scores them 0 to 100 – 30 or under is Free, 31 to 60 Partly Free, 61 to 100 Not Free – and assigns each country a rank. The 2012 survey notes that the overall media landscape in TOL’s coverage area is backsliding just as the global average score for press freedom is up for the first time in eight years.

A few key findings:

• Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are among the eight worst of the worst – countries where independent media do not exist or are effectively crippled by state pressure, and the press is a government puppet. Last year Tashkent closed one of the last independent newspapers in Uzbekistan.

• The average score for Central and Eastern Europe/Eurasia fell significantly, and a majority of the regional population lives in Not Free media environments. The score decline is due to major regression in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary and Macedonia.

• Hungary followed an abysmal 2010 with a downgrade from Free to Partly Free in 2011. Freedom House, like many human rights groups, says press freedom is receding under Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Budapest has been faulted for a controversial package of media regulations that took effect last year. The laws regulate not just public broadcasting, as was the case before, but all media formats.

• Macedonia’s (Partly Free) score worsened six points. Journalists say the government, among the country’s largest advertisers, is pressuring independent media by shifting ad dollars to friendly outlets. Moreover, in 2011 an opposition-oriented television station and three of its newspapers closed after the arrest of its owner on tax evasion charges. Rights groups have called the arrest politically motivated.

Though Freedom House offers less analysis on Azerbaijan, it’s another troubling case. The country ranks 162nd out of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index 2011/2012, right ahead of Sri Lanka and Somalia. Baku stepped up media repression last year to undermine any nascent opposition inspired by the Arab Spring.

“There was a dramatic rise in the number of arrests in Azerbaijan,” Reporters writes, “where [President] Ilham Ailyev’s autocratic government did not hesitate to jail netizens, abduct opposition journalists and bar foreign reporters in order to impose a news blackout on the unrest.”

Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani investigative reporter and Radio Free Europe correspondent, has also been targeted in a smear campaign. She says a video released online in March showing her engaged in sexual acts aims to blackmail her into dropping investigations into government misconduct.

Ismayilova has uncovered several cases of elite corruption, including against the family of President Aliyev. When the video was released, she was scrutinizing links between Aliyev and lucrative construction projects in Baku ahead of the Eurovision Song Contest, which Azerbaijan hosts later this month. For more on her case and the media environment in Azerbaijan, TOL has this report.

Picture of the Macedonian press corps covering a 2011 protest march by local journalists in Skopje from flickr

As TOL readers might have seen, the international pressure over Yulia Tymoshenko’s incarceration is starting to snowball. The outrage over the former prime minister might even touch one of Europe’s most sensitive areas – soccer – as EU bigwigs have been hinting that they are considering boycotting the main event of the spring: the Euro 2012 tournament set to take place in Ukraine and Poland.

That got me wondering if ordinary Ukrainians are registering all the international backlash or even following the Tymoshenko case anymore, what with all the hullabaloo over various accusations of mistreatment, her hunger strike, her disputed beating, and even her lawyer actually breaking into prison to visit his client.

According to a TOL contributor from Ukraine, Ivan Lozowy, people are still paying attention to Tymoshenko.
“Most believe that she did not get a fair trial,” he says. “This has all been very big news for some time now and even in the current restrictive environment Tymoshenko and her representatives have gotten lots of media attention and coverage.”

Tymoshenko also did a good job, Ivan said, in accentuating the flaws of her trial and creating the impression of political persecution.

In addition, a significant factor has been that she is a woman who, despite her steely character, looks somewhat fragile and this has given her lots of sympathy among the general public. Views of women are somewhat different here in Ukraine than in, say, the US or Western Europe and these “bully boys” of Yanukovych (just the visage of his primary prosecutor, Renat Kuzmin, speaks volumes) mistreating a woman, Tymoshenko, has provided her with much sympathy, which I’ve heard often from regular people on the street.

Indeed, when the Liga newssite recently published pictures of Tymoshenko’s bruises, most of the readers supported her in an online poll. Even though the poll isn’t, of course, a true sociological survey, the results are enlightening: 716 people believed that her beating was ordered by the country’s officials, a lot more than the 414 people who doubted that the beating actually happened. A total of 283 people thought the beating was the initiative of prison authorities, and 105 felt the opposition had a hand in the attack. Ninety-seven people thought the beating wasn’t really a beating, just an accident, and 78 people said they didn’t care.

Unfortunately for Tymoshenko, that sympathy has not, however, translated into broader support, as Ivan explained:

…When it became evident she would be sentenced to prison for an extended period of time, her political force called for a “total” mobilization of the population, but few responded. Demonstrations in her support have gathered, at most, several hundred people, a pittance. The reason is that Tymoshenko has been in power twice, serving twice as prime minister and the average citizen has not felt any improvement. She really doesn’t know what to do once in power, has a weak grasp — to put it mildly — of free market economics, in her own words enjoys running the country “by hand,” i.e. personally intervening to “fix” what is wrong, an unworkable approach in a country the size of Ukraine. The bottom line is that she is not a “solution” that people are looking for. The fact that she conducted secret talks with the Party of Regions at one point about joining forces does not help her cause. She has been reduced to a core of ardent supporters, which does not include any very prominent or charismatic figures. The average citizen does not see any hope for positive change coming from Tymoshenko and thus, although the prevailing attitude is clearly sympathetic and on her side this does not translate into specific support, even though the Party of Regions have themselves become deeply unpopular since Yanukovych’s election.

Incidentally, the PR war between the two sides, Tymoshenko and the PoR, received an interesting twist over the past week with the release of a video of her in her cell, walking around quite freely in her cell, then faking having trouble getting around when visitors show up, her daughter, then her lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko. Some real “spice” was added when the video shows her entering into a prolonged kiss with Vlasenko. Most people, myself included, believe the video is probably real. It may well be that the Party of Regions was holding the video back so as to release it given an opportune moment and to draw attention away from her allegations of being beaten up.

Here’s the video, which appeared first on the website of a former aide to Hanna Herman, a media advisor close to Yanukovych:

Even with all the mixed feelings about Tymoshenko across the population, a mock presidential poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology gave her 10.8 percent of the vote. But that’s still only a little more than half of what the current president, Viktor Yanukovich, received (19.3 percent) – despite all his scandals.

But perhaps that’s not really that bad for someone currently in jail.

Image courtesy of Neeka’s photostream at Flickr.com.

Thanks to TOL intern Anna Shamanska for research for this post.

I was going to write that a Kosovo new media organization’s decision to pull out of this weekend’s culture/tech event in Belgrade illustrates the clash of two value systems. On reflection it seems more like the clash of two facets of one system.

Kosovo 2.0 had planned to participate in the Share Conference, an array of “cutting edge” events and performances today, tomorrow and Sunday featuring, among many others, Russia’s Voina art collective, former Wikileaker Daniel Domscheit Berg, and SF writer Bruce Stirling.

It’s certainly a good thing, all in all, that such an ultra-hip event is being staged in Belgrade. It’s the second year for Share, and actually Belgrade is the natural place for such an event. Belgrade is the most fertile ground for cultural experiment anywhere in the western Balkans. Belgrade seems to me the only true, if still only potential, metropolis among the Yugoslav successor states. And one flavor of the city is the persistence of solid, nationalist/conservative opposition to the policy of European integration, EU and/or NATO membership especially.

That aspect of Belgrade life reared its head when the Serbian National Movement Nasi organization threatened to mount a protest at if Kosovo 2.0 participated in Share. Nasi, “Ours,” incorporates parts of the 1389 group of hard-core nationalists, notable for using social media as platforms to mount attacks on a gay-pride parade and other manifestations of un-Serbian behavior.

The far right’s clout in Belgrade is such that city officials canceled the pride parade in 2009. No surprise then when Kosovo 2.0 decided to pull out of Share:

“The Share Conference aims to share progressive ideas in the fields of society, technology, music and new media. However, after the Nasi movement invited ‘patriotic’ Serbian individuals and organizations to participate in a protest to prevent Kosovo 2.0 from presenting, our staff felt like its personal safety was in jeopardy. For this reason we were forced to cancel our participation.”

One visitor commented on the announcement, “I think this [decision to pull out of Share] was needed to bring some of those who work for and/or read this website back down to reality. Nothing personal against anyone or against this organization, but many internationals take an extremely naive approach to this problem (ie. they treat the tension between Serbs and Kosovars like a segregated kindergarten class).”

Another argued that Kosovo 2.0 should not have given in to the hate mongers:

“I am very sad that you decided not to participate. In my opinion you should have gone forward with the presentation and fought for your freedom of speech and against this triumph of fascism. Our whole life in the Balkans is one big ‘security risk,’ and if you agree to a life like that, things are never going to change.”

I can partly understand the first commenter’s point. There is an element of well-meaning internationalism to Kosovo 2.0, which seems aimed chiefly at young people – the site is sponsored by a handful of Western donors and clearly some money has gone into it. The paradox is that both Kosovo 2.0 and Nasi are using the tools of new media to communicate. Of course, Nasi and like-minded groups are also prepared to use physical means, like marches and protests. Belgrade looks likely to continue as a place where high-tech tools are utilized in the service of a range of causes, with a definite Balkan tang.

Can you guess which country in a recent global survey by the World Bank registered 0 percent of adults with accounts in formal financial institutions?

It wasn’t Yemen or Sudan. It was Turkmenistan.

Can you guess which country had the second-lowest rate of account ownership? OK, that was Niger, with 2 percent.

But countries in Central Asia scrape the bottom of the table. In Tajikistan the percentage was 3; in Kyrgyzstan, it was 4.

The survey, called Measuring Financial Inclusion: The Global Findex Database (available from the World Bank’s online press center to users who register), examines why it’s better to have an account than not to have one, and why many would opt to forgo one.

The benefits of an account are pretty obvious: it’s a safe place to save money and to send or receive payments. In addition, the authors note that just having an account might act as an incentive to save, and it certainly helps budding entrepreneurs get credit.

Most people who don’t have an account say it costs too much, whether in fees or travel time (most customers in developing countries still do their banking face to face). Others say they don’t have enough money to open an account or they don’t have the required paperwork. Still others just use a family member’s account. The remaining, smaller groups either don’t trust banks or opt out for religious reasons.

Unfortunately, the survey lumps Central Asia in with Europe, so coming up with relevant conclusions about the “-stans” is tricky. But it reports that in Europe and Central Asia “31 percent of non-account-holders cite lack of trust in banks as a reason for not having an account – a share almost three times that in other regions on average.”

You might guess that Russia, with its recent memory of devaluation and lost savings, would explain much of that, but it doesn’t seem to: a relatively healthy 48 percent of adults there hold a bank account.

I would bet that it’s Central Asians, with their well-earned mistrust of their leaders and their largely state-led financial sectors pushing up that number. In Kyrgyzstan, past governments have seized shares in banks, which were thrown into limbo again when those governments were overthrown. One correspondent in Kyrgyzstan reminds me that the interim government that took over after the 2010 ouster of Kurmanbek Bakiev seized safe deposit boxes in some banks.

So what do Central Asian savers do instead? That seems to be a mystery.

Although the survey notes that popular alternatives to a financial institution can include banking via mobile phones or community-based savings clubs, those methods of saving are not widely used in Central Asia.

In Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the authors write, “more than 85 percent of adults who report having saved in the past year did so using neither a formal financial institution nor a community-based savings scheme. Interestingly, more than 85 percent of all savers in these three economies report saving for a wedding, an education, or another future expense, a larger share than report saving for a future emergency.”

(If you’ve read our coverage of the back-breaking expense of Kyrgyz weddings that last bit should come as no surprise.)

And it’s not an insignificant number of people there who have saved, somehow: The study says that about 35 percent of adults in those three counties reported having saved money in the past 12 months.

In a kind of throwing-up of hands, the report speculates they might have bought assets, like gold or livestock, or in the report’s own quotation marks, put it “under the mattress.”

That jibes with my correspondent’s assessment that many people invest in real estate or cattle, or stash the money in safes.

Photo by Ken Teegardin/flickr.

Towns on the Czech-German border are divided by what must be one of Europe’s strangest frontiers. Strange, because there ought not to be any frontier at all there anymore, really: in the Schengen space, people can freely cross the border wherever and whenever they like, and in some towns the only reminder of a border is a small “welcome to (Germany/Czech Republic)” sign. But more than that, the people should be almost the same on both sides: hard-working, mostly Catholic and German-speaking. But 98 percent or so of the Czech Germans disappeared between 1945 and 1947, expelled to Germany and Austria in a gargantuan ethnic cleansing operation.

The houses once looked the same on both sides too, but while many remain, the visual gap stuns you: on one side clean, bright, well-kept houses, shops selling locally made products, local small businesses providing services to local people. On the other, neglected buildings, Vietnamese-owned shops selling junk food and cheap imported goods, far fewer service providers. Things are changing on the Czech side, mostly for the better, but that bizarre invisible frontier remains. To borrow the terminology of a perceptive essay published recently, the Czech side illustrates the workings of three frames of mind: small-country, post-communist, and Central European.

Enter, from behind the rusted iron curtain, a man wearing the rear end of a car. Filmmaker Martin Dušek sports this bizarre getup in a mockumentary showing this week on Czech public television, Mein kroj (Mein Folk Costume). Dušek hails from Česká Lípa in northern Bohemia. As he told a Radio Prague interviewer, when he found out that the “folk costume” of Česká Lípa exhibited in the town museum was an artifice invented after World War II by the new, Czech inhabitants of the town, he thought, “I cannot identity with this fake costume, so I thought that I should make my own folk costume, to have something I can identify with, which I did really. I took an old blazer from my grandfather, even the rear lights from the old Skoda Octavia I had inherited from him.”

And, clad in lederhosen, the red bandanna of the old Czechoslovak Pioneer scouts, and those Skoda tail lights as epaulets, he and a camera crew set off to visit a Sudeten German convention in Augsburg. The Sudeten Germans take their old customs very seriously (on this, go here and search for “tracht”). The humor and the conflict arises from Dušek’s efforts to crash their party in his outlandish costume, claiming Sudetenness through his German-speaking grandfather. The first day, he inveigles himself inside and even takes to the dance floor with a Tracht-clad woman named Ulrike …

… but when he returns the next day and tries to join a procession of elderly ex-Sudeten Germans from various parts of the Czech lands, tempers flare and he ends up being escorted off the exhibition grounds by police.

[“You’re trying to expel me!”]

One man calls Dušek crazy and accuses him of setting up the subjects of his film as buffoons. Indeed, Dušek throughout maintains a Borat-like, or rather Michael Moore-like sincerity, but there is a difference: unlike Sacha Baron Cohen in Kazakhstan, he really can claim some cultural affinity with his subjects, through his ancestry and through living where they once lived.

If “Central Europe” exists as something more than a temporary feature of late 20th and early 21st century political affairs, I would argue that the German-speaking lands belong in it, for one thing because German institutions were the single most powerful civilizational force in large parts of the region. The essay mentioned above (it’s by a Prague think-tank head, Petr Drulák), concisely lays out a scheme for understanding where Czech political culture is at these days. Drulák writes that in the 1990s the “Central Europe” label “was warmly welcomed by Czechs keen to distinguish themselves from (allegedly less developed) Eastern Europeans. However it also distinguished them from being from Western Europe, which represented what they aspired to. EU accession ameliorated most of these fears, and the current Central European condition suggests a geopolitics whose principal components are the Russia, Germany and the US.”

He goes on: “The perceived friendship between Germany and Russia is seen as particularly concerning, although Germany also plays its own important role in Czech mental geopolitics.”

Mentally, and physically, this part of Central Europe is still divided. Thanks to Martin Dušek for trying to bridge the gap through straight-faced wackiness – a classic Czech shtick.

Screen grabs from Czech Television