So Romania’s economy grew by about 8% in the first quarter of this year.
To put this in context: Romania has been growing at a rate of around 6% per year nonstop since 1999. So — on paper at least — its economy has nearly doubled in size since then.
And you can see it. Bucharest [...]

It would take a stand-alone blog to track the daily utterances of George Bush but here he is in St Louis today talking about his visits to Romania –
And they had just been accepted into NATO, and the President asked me and Laura to go, and there was 225,000 people, more or less, in the town [...]

I was going to do a rather obnoxious post about the Macedonian name issue, but decided not to. You can see a draft of it in the comments section over here.
Meanwhile, here’s an idea I’ve sometimes toyed with: a series of posts on the leaders of small European countries during the Second World War. [...]

We can all probably agree that Italy’s fit of xenophobia towards Romanians is pretty bad, but it has had one positive consequence; ITS, the extreme-right/nationalist grouping in the European Parliament whose membership can be summed up as “if you want to make some minority unwelcome and you’re in the minority yourself, you’re welcome here”, has [...]

Various things about Transnistria that didn’t fit in the previous post. If you don’t find this sort of thing interesting, don’t hit that link.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

1) Transnistria is [...]

Spent a weekend in Nagorno-Karabakh last month.
If you don’t know what or where Nagorno-Karabakh is… well, that’s healthy and normal. Most people don’t. But it’s pretty interesting, in a depressing sort of way.
When the Soviet Union broke up, it left a number of unresolved ethnic and territorial conflicts around its old frontiers. [...]

So the new Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index came out last week. If you are a development geek — cough, cough — this is like Beaujolais Nouveau Day.
Not that there are any /huge/ surprises. The top ten slots are dominated by the same countries, year after year — Finland, the Netherlands, Singapore. [...]

I don’t usually cite whole articles, but this recent piece over at birn.eu is too good to miss.
After years of vigorously opposing the eastwards expansion of the European Union, extreme-right-wing parties in the European Parliament, EP, ironically stand to benefit hugely from the Romanian and Bulgarian accession…
[A]agreement with nationalist parties from the two newcomers has [...]

Since I doubt anyone of the afoe crew will be anywhere close to a computer when it will happen later tonight, this little announcement about the latest and probably last EU-enlargement in a while will have to do for the time being.
At midnight, Bulgaria and Romania will become members of the European Union, increasing the [...]

Romania’s government lost its majority over the weekend. I know, it took us a little while to notice, too. In fact, our attention was called to it by the German newspaper whose web site could be better organized (page 6 of today’s edition, not on the web site apparently).
The Conservatives departed the four-party coalition, a [...]