Talk politics.

Greetings, ma'fellow navel-gazing procrastinators! I'm sure most of you (the US part anyway) are watching, fixated, with unbliking eyes the ongoing circus of the US Democratic primaries, but may I distract you for a while with something more remote and abstract? Yep. I'm talking about Erap. That country (heh?) where you dream of going to spend a one-week vacation, eat some pizza, visit a museum or two, and go back home bragging how much more cultured and sophisticated you now are. ;-)

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of the accelerated divergence of the European West from the European East, including on the most important political issues of the day. The convergence between the two halves was among the main goals of the post-communist era, the emerging democracies of the former socialist bloc almost unanimously embracing it. The first years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall were packed with effort for that kind of social, political and economic transformation. The expansion of the European economy to the East, and the gradual expansion of the EU, NATO and European liberal-democratic culture as a whole in an eastward direction, were not just a series of symbolic gestures, but actually very real steps in the same direction.

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