The New Presence: The Prague Journal of Central European Affairs

Within our slightly confused planetary community, it would be impossible to find a more bizarre regime than the one in North Korea without the aid of candlelight. The regime, which is formally known as the Democratic People's Republic, is to most observers...

Two of the first calls to President Jacob Zuma's newly launched hotline were answered by the president himself. The Presidential Hotline, toll-free number 17737, was open for calls from 9am yesterday, and within the first hour 2,500 calls were registered--something...

At the end of the 1960s, the famous Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka began a newspaper opinion piece in the following manner: "It is good to know what something is all about. But is this even possible with a word such as socialism? Unlikely. Even...

On 29 September 2009, The New York Times ran a story headlined "Europe's Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn." The first line of the story read, "A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of Socialism's slow collapse." The purported reason for running...

A secret government program assigned to a privately run company to assassinate people around the world sounds like science fiction. It might even be funny if it weren't so tragically real. As reported by The New York Times and The Washington Post in...

People in the Czech Republic have become accustomed to the fact that even white-collar workers (for instance teachers) sometimes participate in demonstrations in their country; but this year they watched as researchers, in particular those from the...

The Treaty of Lisbon requires a new definition of national sovereignty. It is no longer enough for a state to just promote policies at home or speak to its individual national interests. They must also actively participate in the international community...

You have stated that the theoretical models economists employ are partially responsible for the current crisis. How so? What I meant is that people who applied models to finance did not take into account speculation and therefore unstoppable and...

Prominent scientists around the world have made non-partisan approaches to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, describes...

When Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia's capital of Tskhinvali in August of last year, a bitter reality dawned on Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili as he realized there would be no Western military intervention and there would be no stopping...

The Czech Constitutional Court recently annulled a law passed by parliament which proposed that the date of the parliamentary election be moved up to this October from the scheduled date in the spring of 2010. The aim of the initiative was that the...

Over the past twenty years, the Czech Republic has held little geopolitical significance. The same is not true, however, for Central and Eastern Europe (C&EE) in general, which has maintained its geopolitically significant role. Any study of modern...

Some European Union presidencies fade quickly from the memory. It is safe to say that the Czech Republic's presidency, ending on June 30, will not be forgotten for quite some time. One thinks of the art display erected in January at the EU's headquarters...

The Czech Republic's name contributes to creating distorted and confused perceptions of Czech people and their culture from abroad. Media Distortion of Identity Before we begin, the following discussion necessitates that we first differentiate between...

A little less than a century ago, the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, expressed that two generations or sixty years would pass before the newly-constitued democratic state of Czechoslovakia saw real democracy. Does the same...

Extreme right-wing parties have reemerged on the European political landscape. Since the nineties, their rhetoric has rang through parliamentary debates, presidential elections, and even during executive meetings of some European governments. Extremist...

Free speech has become a platitude. Like human rights and democracy, we're all in favor of it, but would rather not address the tough calls where core values collide. However, it's those tough cases, like media competition regulation, campaign finance...

As most of the former Soviet countries which broke free from the Kremlin's rule in the early nineties, Ukraine is still trying to identify and establish its new geopolitical role as well as bolster relations with its Eastern and Western neighbors....

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A defining feature of the twentieth century was the struggle between capitalism and socialism. The fight against capitalism was waged by three major types of socialist doctrine: fascism, national-socialism, and communism....

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since the Velvet Revolution, Czech dance has become unusually dynamic as an artistic discipline. While the communist regime supported ballet and folk dance, the official authorities did not encourage the development of modern...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SIXTEEN YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM, THE CZECH REPUBLIC JOINED THE EUROPEAN UNION; NOW, FIVE YEARS AFTER EU EXPANSION, THE FORMER SOVIET STATE HAS JUST COMPLETED ITS FIRST RUN AT THE HELM OF THE 27-MEMBER ORGANIZATION....

Human life is full of crisis whether individual or social. In simplistic terms, a crisis is a decisive or significant moment (e.g., an illness). In literature or in a dramatic work, a crisis represents a plot's climax, the peak in conflict which significantly...

The 19th anniversary of the Prague Writers' Festival will be held on the 7th-11th of June at the famous Laterna Magika Theatre, Prague, Czech Republic. This year's theme is "2001 Nights: The Art of Story-telling." The festival will explore the parallels...

Forget Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--Bush's "Axis of Evil." As economic calamity meets political and social turmoil, the world's worst problems may come from countries like Somalia, Russia, and Mexico. And they're just the beginning. Seven years...

Despite prior attempts at school reform, racial discrimination remains rampant in Czech classrooms. Roma children are forced into substandard separate schools and if kept in regular classrooms, are often treated as inferior to their Czech peers. Persistent...

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, nationalist mythology has created the notion that immigrants are marginal or even disruptive components of a homogenous society. Among some individuals, this primitive argument still prevails today....

Some time ago, the Czech press published a report which estimated that the number of people staying in the Czech Republic without a permission is approximately the same as those who are here legally. Do you agree? I cannot very well agree or disagree;...

Since the Second World War, no other conflict has attracted as much constant attention as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with approximately ten thousand fatalities, the conflict's victim count ranks 50th in post-WWII conflicts. The conflict...

Nowadays when one mentions anticipatory, often referred to as preemptive, or as many in the Bush administration [unknowingly, but correctly] preferred to label it "preventive" self-defense, the first example which comes to mind is the US invasion of...

Humans--the big brained species; so clever, yet so destructive. We can split an atom. And we can blow ourselves into oblivion. Albert Einstein observed, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and hence we drift...

More than 25 years ago you wrote the successful book "Beyond Positivism," in which you claimed that positivism (a philosophy which holds that authentic knowledge is acquired solely through observation and experience) may see a revival if it's antithesis,...

GLOBAL PHENOMENON Mogadishu, "the capital of the capitalist world," is where the dreams of anarcho-capitalists and libertarians became nightmares for local citizens and the international community. From the outside, it seems like the city is pulsating...

According to some, parts of Antarctica are sinking into the sea, ocean water levels are rising dramatically, devastating hurricanes will bear down on us, the Gulf Stream will stop flowing, and Europe will freeze over. Will such end-of-the-world scenarios...

It is unbelievable that as of next year, twenty years will have passed since the fall of the communist regime. It is really unbelievable. Personally, it feels like just yesterday. Nevertheless, I belong to the generation that has lived most of their...

* 1. 1. The Czech Republic and Slovakia The Czech Republic becomes the second post-communist state (after Slovenia) to become the EU President. The Czech presidency begins dramatically when a government spokesperson, Jiri Frantisek Potuznik, describes...

The battle lines have been drawn again in the Lisbon debate and we can now see them with a clarity denied to us before the June fiasco, when the "No" campaigners befuddled so many voters with their garbage about sovereignty, abortion and the detention...

For five years we have been a full-fledged member in this twenty-seven member club. We have been to all the meetings with the highest representatives, we have led debates with heads of state who have been friendly and not so friendly, and we just recently...

With the slogan "Europe without barriers," the Czech European Union presidency commenced on the first of January and will continue through the end of June 2009. This slogan and the agenda it carries were, however, born before the world economic crisis....

When the iron curtain fell twenty years ago, hope bubbled to the surface in Central and Eastern Europe. And five years ago, the Czechs and their kin joined the EU with great expectations. Now, given the current woes of global capitalism, the promise...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In November 2006, Eurozine published an article by Thomas von Ahn analyzing the causes of the demonstrations in Hungary the previous month. Among other things, von Ahn argued that Hungarian opposition [Fidesz] leader Viktor...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2004, the Baltic States--Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia--entered the modern structures of the Euro-Atlantic civilization: NATO and the EU. There are, perhaps, no other member countries within these organizations that has...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On the 19th of October 2008, one of the biggest events on the Czech art scene happened since 1989. The massive street advertising campaign that preceded this day was, however, met with a lukewarm reaction from the Czech media...

The Czech voting system is rightly criticized for its inability to deliver a stable majority government that is capable of making decisions. One of the more radical options for electoral system reform is the transition to a majoritarian system. As...

The "Communication from the European Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: A Roadmap for Equality between Women and Men 2006-2010" might bring a smile to one's...