Last month Baltic Worlds' reporter visited two conferences being held in Poland with the aim of discussing the one and half year of EU’s Eastern Partnership Policy (EaP) and trying to generate new proposals for the future work of the EU towards Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus. The main aim of the EaP is to promote democracy and economic integration with the Union of the six countries involved in the program, which is not an easy task.
By
Peter Johnsson
December 17, 2010
Andrey Sannikov is a wellknown Belarusian diplomat. In the 1980s, he served as representative of the Belarusian Soviet Republic at the United Nations. In the beginning of the 1990s, when Belarus declared its independence, he was an active member of the the newly formed independent adminstration and held the post of deputy foreign minister.
Here in an interview about dicatorship, the importance of voting and the role of international observers.
By
Peter Johnsson
December 15, 2010
Visiting Warsaw in November 2010, during a tour to the neighboring countries, Uladzimir Nyaklyaeu, gave the following interview for Baltic Worlds’ correspondent Peter Johnsson.
November 2011 the poet and former opposition candidate to Lukasjenka is not allowed to leave his house and to be in Stockholm to receive the Tucholsky Award. The Tucholsky Award is presented each year by Swedish PEN to a persecuted, exiled, threatened author or journalist. The Award is named after the author Kurt Tucholsky, who in the early 1930s fled to Sweden from the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany.
By
Peter Johnsson
November 30, 2010
Lithuanian politician and ex-President Algirdas Brazauskas was a Communist leader, who became a reformer of considerable prominence, a Western-style social democrat, and finally a statesman, European-style. Here is an interview with this pragmatic leader, only shortly before he died in cancer in June 2010.
By
Peter Johnsson
September 21, 2010
Over the past two decades Poland has begun to catch up to the wealthier parts of Europe. Between 1996 and 2008, average growth in Poland was 4.6 percent, compared with 2.2 percent in the EU-15. During the crisis year of 2009, Poland was the only EU country to post positive GDP growth. Prosperity has increased, infant mortality has fallen and life expectancy is longer. But income growth has been unequally distributed. There are winners and losers. Today Poland is among the group of European countries in which income inequality is greatest.
By
Peter Johnsson
September 21, 2010
The Polish domestic political scene since the presidential election has been characterized by much sharper political divisions than before the disaster in Smolensk on April 10. At no time since 1989, have the tone of debate and the accusations been as hostile as now.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski may have lost the presidential election, but because of the disaster in Smolensk and the good election results, he emerged politically stronger from the campaign. He has now set his sights on the next election campaigns in Poland. In November, municipal elections will be held, including politically important direct elections to mayoral positions in the cities of Poland. Next year it will be time for election to the Polish Sejm. All indications suggest that the strong differences of opinion and the angry tone of Polish politics will continue until the parliamentary election, although some hold hopes that somewhat cooler political winds may blow across the country after the municipal election this fall.
By
Peter Johnsson
September 8, 2010
Issue 2024, 1-2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.