Estonia: A Move to the Euro, and Europe?

By Beatrice Walton — January 28, 2011 at 1:46 am

When I visited Estonia four weeks ago, I witnessed the bittersweet, albeit largely temperate, passing of the kroon, Estonia’s national currency since 1992.  As I, and indeed most of the country, rushed to dump my krooni before Jan. 1^st and the euro arrived, I nevertheless held on to a two-krooni note—a relic, no doubt, of a time that once was.

After fifty years of Soviet rule, Estonia was the first former Soviet republic to ditch the ruble and adopt its own national currency.  Now, eighteen and a half years later, Estonia is once again a forerunner in Eastern Europe—this time, as the first former Soviet republic to drop its own currency to join the euro zone.

Still, while this latest currency switch might deem Estonia more vigorous than its Eastern European counterparts, the subtle reality of the switch remains less encouraging.  Indeed history, it seems, is repeating itself this January.

While Estonia quickly dropped the ruble in 1992 to assist the emergence of a national identity that it quite obviously lacked, today Estonia may be joining the euro zone for many similar social (in addition to the obvious economic) reasons— to once and for all solidify its identity and break from its century-old problems with the east.

To get at the center of what’s socially at stake in Estonia’s currency switch, one must first recall the history of this small Baltic country of 1.3 million people.  And therein lies the problem: Estonia has only existed, in the formal sense of a state, between both World Wars and since 1991.  Moreover, for centuries upon centuries, the area now called Estonia was ruled by Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, or Poland—but always in a constant flux.

Really, Estonia has not always been Estonia.

And yet, even since 1991 Estonia has continually struggled to retain a constant citizenship.  With ethnic Russians comprising one quarter of its population and with 30% of the population speaking Russian as a first language, the country has had problems requiring even its own government employees to speak the national language.  As a result, Estonia has vamped up its National Language Inspectorate and has been testing government clerks, teachers, and even bus drivers in their Estonian language abilities.  The testing has caused hardship particularly in places like Tallinn, the capital, where roughly 50% of schools teach in Russian and, consequently, a new government law now requires 60% of class time to be taught in Estonian.

Nevertheless, the switch to the Euro will no doubt bring about greater economic prospects for Estonia.  The past few weeks have been marked by an absence of chaos (with McDonalds as the exceptional high profile price hike investigation)—a transition far better than was seen in Slovakia in 2009 or than most exports had expected.

Undeniably, the loudest of Estonia’s internal social controversies over issues like removing Soviet statues and other conflicts with ethnic Russians have also quieted lately.  Yet still, I can’t help but wonder about the conclusion of a NY Times piece late last month covering the Estonia currency change that concluded with a quote from an Estonian citizen that read, “Now we are back in Europe.”

Indeed, whether or not that’s the reality of the Estonia that currently exists, or even the sentiment of the majority of the Estonians who live there, it’s what the powers to be in Estonia had hoped to convey to the world, and more pointedly, themselves:

Estonia is now Estonia.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

http://hpronline.org/uncategorized/estonia-a-move-to-the-euro-and-europe/#more-7527

Midterms

http://hpronline.org/hprgument/no-we-can’t-searching-for-obama’s-audacity-in-the-post-midterm-world/

No We Can't? Searching for Obama's Audacity in the Post-midterm World

By Beatrice Walton

Immediately following the midterm elections, newspaper headlines from around the world told the tale of an American president embarrassingly “defeated” and “apologetic” of his presidency thus far.

From titles such as “No We Can’t” in the Kuwait Times to “Obama Admits He Needs ‘to Do a Better Job’ After Election Beating” in the London Guardian, to pouting faces of Obama on front pages from Brazil to China, the international media has cast Obama as a chastised president of remorseful policies.

Sadly, Obama sealed his own fate, particularly in the midterms, by allowing the media, Republicans, and even some Democrats, to spin his hard-fought achievements against him.

It’s a mystery to me how easily the country has rendered Obama, the most effective progressive since FDR who managed the largest economic disaster since the 1930s while passing healthcare reform, financial reform, winding down the war in Iraq, engaging with the Muslim World, significantly expanding Pell grants for low-income college students, appointing more openly gay officials than any other president, creating more private sector jobs than during entire Bush years, signing a new START Treaty with Russia, increasing fuel economy standards, and repealing restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, as a delinquent, incompetent president out of touch with America’s problems.

And yet, much of this portrayal I fault with Obama’s recent demeanor.  Instead of touting his impressive record, Obama took a defeatist line after the midterms and promised that in the future he would simply try to “do a better job.”

Now that’s an Obama we haven’t seen before.
And yet unfortunately, it’s an Obama of whom we will probably see more and more.  In his Op-Ed in the NY Times yesterday, Obama wrote about his upcoming trip to Asia that surprised me in one line.  He wrote: “If we can, we’ll be able to complete an agreement that supports jobs and prosperity in America.”

If we can?

What happened to yes we can?

Obama needs to pull together in the wake of his party’s bloody midterm results to regain the confidence in his policies and penchant to radiate hope that propelled him to office in the first place.

Otherwise, Republicans and Democrats alike will simply be battling it out in Congress, conducting phony investigations, and bickering about power, while attempting to fix American problems, “if they can.”

Photo Credits: Newseum.org

Losing Poland, One Year later

http://hpronline.org/hprgument/poland-disillusion-trumps-obamas-popularity/

Poland: Disillusion Trumps Obama’s Popularity

By Beatrice Walton

On my first night living in Poland last summer, I asked my host mother, a 44-year-old Polish elementary schoolteacher and mother of two, her opinions of President Barack Obaa as we sat in her rural farmhouse eating slabs of unidentifiable meat on rye bread.  She gave me two responses, meaning, she pointed to the two words in my Larousse Polsko-Angielski dictionary that first came to mind:

1. Historia
2. Hipokryta

As I wrote at the time, I was certainly caught off guard.

Though first surprised that any European country might possibly have the gall to like Bush more than Obama, from then on, I took note of what I have since come to acknowledge as Poland’s widespread anti-Obama sentiment.

This September, the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends report finally confirmed what I had come to believe over the past year: Poles, and indeed many other Eastern Europeans, are increasingly disillusioned with America.

In section six of the report entitled “Poland—An Outlier in the European Union,” the survey found that although Poland carried the highest popularity rating for Bush of any European country, in contrast, only 53% of Poles surveyed in 2010 approved of Obama’s handling of their country, the lowest of any European country surveyed.  Similarly, 31% of Slovakians had an unfavorable view of the U.S., the highest in Europe.

While at first it is tempting to jump to say, “Well, clearly Poles are just missing the boat,” and cite Bush’s overwrought, hard-ball style stance on their issues as reason for their current sour feelings, it would be premature to do so.  Instead, anti-Obama sentiments stem from a series of minor, yet significant, Polish grievances with the President.

In an open letter to the President in the summer of 2009, 22 intellects and former leaders from Eastern Europe presented their anxieties about being hung-out to dry by the U.S. at the hands of a revisionist Russia.  Yet true to Eastern European fears, Obama scratched the Bush-designed missile shield slated for Poland in a bid to curry favor with the Kremlin, perhaps to gain Russia as an ally against the Iranian nuclear threat.  Though a much smaller, modified military base has since been placed in northern Poland, Poles still envision America with its back turned on Eastern Europe.  Against the will of the E.U., former Polish President Lech Kaczynski had gone out on a limb in favor of U.S. policies, such as the missile shield, and Obama had cut him down.

Similarly, many Poles express deep grievances over America’s visa requirements for them to travel to the U.S., with Poland as the only country in the Schengen Zone required to do so.  Though over 2,500 Polish soldiers currently serve in Afghanistan, they and their families are not openly welcomed into the U.S.

In the wake of the tragic plane crash killing President Kaczynski and 10% of the Polish government, minor missteps have again hurt U.S. credibility in Poland.  Canceling his agreement to attend the state funeral of the Polish President in Krakow due to Iceland’s volcanic eruption, President Obama proceeded to golf for the day instead—a story which has since become legendary throughout Poland.  Again, hype ran rampant over Brazil’s announcement of three days of mourning for Poland’s tragedy, while the U.S., which contains 10 million Poles and whose president’s home city, Chicago, contains more Polish people than any city other than Warsaw, observed not one.

While it is fair to question whether the U.S. should bother to care about a small, largely homogenous, Eastern European country of 39 million people, truly the answer requires a broader knowledge of the region.  Positioned in a complex area where countries sway to countervailing force—not the least of which is Moscow—Poland is that little country that wants so badly to be friends with the U.S., yet keeps getting shunned.  By easily amending minor grievances, the U.S. can assure a valuable ally in a tense region, or through indifference, turn away an old friend (and its acquaintances) to the other side.

11 Months Later

http://hpronline.org/hprgument/ukraines-soul-search/

Ukraine’s Soul Search

By Beatrice Walton

Exactly eleven months ago yesterday I sat on a bus rattling its way through countryside on my way to L’viv, an artistic, cobblestone city in the western half of the Ukraine. As I gazed out the window, I watched as petite houses dotted the rural landscape where old babcias tended their gardens and teenagers waited for the bus under graffitied cement overhangs.

At the border my lone American passport held up the bus for an additional three hours, bringing our total wait to six hours. We spent the night at the checkpoint, a place which I recall as dark, modestly sketchy, and where drug-sniffing dogs barked constantly. Later, we stopped again, first for wandering cows and a team of horse-drawn wagons in the road and, second, for police, who according to my fellow passengers, are usually just looking for bribes.

Welcome to Ukraine, a place not quite like Europe and yet not really like Russia either. A place which, one might say, is currently on a soul search.

As we drove along I conversed with a Polish banker who had worked in Ukraine. He told me how he felt that support for democracy there was waning. To the poor, rural Ukrainians who had experienced communism and were now struggling under capitalism and the recession, the old days of relative economic security under strong leadership seem tempting. For them, things weren’t ever good in the old days, but then again, things weren’t ever so bad.

Flash-forward to this week’s news of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court’s reversal of an amendment passed in 2004 which markedly decreased the power of the executive. Passed following the Orange Revolution, the 2004 amendment was a check on the original 1996 constitution, which gave the president power to appoint the prime minister and cabinet officials and to fire ministers without parliamentary approval. Under the reversal, parliamentary terms will be decreased from five to four years, and pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych will now be able to cancel any government resolution.

According to the former Prime Minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, in a September 30th Kyiv Post article, “October 1st [will] go down in Ukrainian history as the day democracy was murdered and a dictatorship installed.”

Since elected in a cloud of fraud in February, President Yanukovych has continually courted the Kremlin. With his increased powers, Yanukoyvch can be expected to further strengthen his ties with Russia as he continues on his agenda of ending Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, increasing Russia’s control over an important southeastern gas line, and possibly even installing Russian as the official language.

Perhaps the man on the bus was right, democracy for sure is waning in Ukraine. However, I for one tend to disagree—because, this is Ukraine’s great chance. If Ukrainians take a stance and rise up in protest behind Tymoshenko, they will decide their allegiance and their commitment to democracy, once and for all, on their own terms. In doing so they will build a stronger Ukraine, independent in its views and collaborative in its means, to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Otherwise if they don’t, there are few reasons to believe why Ukrainians, half of whom already speak Russian, won’t simply sway to Russian influence under a President who already has.

Photo Credit: Ria Novosti

Memories

Time Slipping Away

Last Wishes in Krakow

On my last day in Poland I frantically scrambled through the cobblestone, congested streets of the city center in Krakow in search of last minute souvenirs.  A Polish shot glass and a couple of t-shirts later my work in Krakow was finished.  Or was it?

It wasn’t so easy saying goodbye to a city I’d come to call home for so many months.  And knowing that I would be leaving later that evening to begin my long journey back to the U.S. only made life more difficult.  

I didn’t want to leave.  Standing, watching the crowds of people pass by, the street vendors, and the performers, I took note of the immense beauty of the place I had been fortunate enough to live in over the past 10.5 months.  I had always known I had been living in a gorgeous city, only now, when I had only a few more moments to appreciate it, every detail took on a whole new light.

Since when had the scaffolding been taken down from around the Sukiennice?  Since when had I missed that fountain next to Kosciol Mariacki?  All of the sudden my mind was flooded with hundreds of ideas of things I had forgotten to do, to see, or to experience.  There was still so much I had hoped to accomplish.  And then all of the sudden it hit me: I was finally out of time.

With all 60 kilograms of my packing still awaiting me at home I made some irrational, yet in my mind very reasonable decisions: I would see some last minute sights which I had somehow forgotten to visit in the 320 days prior. 

In Poland, tradition holds that whenever one enters a church for the first time, he or she is entitled to one wish.  Luckily, Krakow has so many hundreds of churches that it is next to impossible for even locals to find and visit them all.  So with that in mind I decided to visit one last church. 

For sure while living in Poland some of the uber-Catholicness of my Polish compatriots had rubbed off on me.  I mean honestly, it doesn’t take many days in Catholic-school mandated recollection before one will begin to adopt a bit of piety.  So I knelt down on the hardwood pew of a gothic-style church, uniquely designed with one huge center column situated in the main aisle, and thought.

I thought about all the good that had happened to me over the course of the past year.  I thought of all amazing sights I had seen, the countries I’d visited, the people I’d met, and the changes that had occurred in me.  I tried to remember when I first arrived in Poland and how strange and different everything seemed.  I thought too about how my host mother had cried the day before as she told me I had been like a second daughter to her.  I thought about how one year ago I didn’t want to go to Poland and about how now, one year later, I didn’t want to leave. 

And of course I thought about how I had fallen in love and how difficult it would be to say goodbye.

And then, just before leaving, I made one very last wish.

The Fourth of July

An Election Birthday

      An actual ballot box, loose security, a paper ballot with two boxes to personally “X” and fold in half… certainly a new voting experience for me.

      A bittersweet birthday with only two days left in Poland.  Cheap Russian champagne, a cake with all the candles, and American-style strawberry shortcake helped to make the occasion.  Ironically, a neighborhood festival happened to set off a full fireworks display directly across from my house. So it ended up being a full 4th of July style birthday after all.