Eastern Europe

Mags, a Birmingham-based activist with the left-wing Polish group Razem, spoke to Solidarity about the Polish women's strike against restrictions on abortion rights. In April this year a legal institute in Poland called Ordo Iuris put forward draft legislation for a ban on abortion. Currently, abortion on demand is not legal in Poland. It is permitted if a pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, if there is a danger to the mother's health or if the foetus is permanently damaged or terminally ill. But it is difficult to get an abortion, because there is something called a “conscience clause”...

Gemma Short is quite right in her comments on Steve Bloom’s review of The Two Trotskyisms ( Solidarity 402): the nationalisations in Eastern Europe had no socialist content. I lived in Hungary from 1991 to 2000 and in this time became acquainted with the giant Ózd steelworks complex near the border with Slovakia. I hasten to add that I never, unfortunately, visited the steelworks, but I knew a documentary filmmaker, Tamás Almási, who made a series of films on the workers there and their experience of going through privatisation and finally the closure of the works. In all Almási made eight...

Economic issues if Britain quits the EU? No problem, says the anti-EU Tory Michael Gove. We could be just like Albania. Bosnia, Albania, and Ukraine, as Gove said, have free trade with the EU without having to comply with EU rules. The Albanian trade unions, who in their May Day message ask the Albanian government for measures “in terms of rights and freedoms of association, labour relations and labour legislation, closer to that of the European Union”, have difficulty getting traction with the demand. Gove wants British unions to face the same prospect. The description that Albanian...

Here’s what the “Fortress EU” of ever increasing land, air and sea fences and more actual and conceptual borders says to us all, and not only to the refugees of Syria’s war: There is no place for you to live, because I want to grab your resources and check your routes. There is no other place for you to go to breathe. There is no way to walk. The only option to endure, to endure, to adapt, to live with the annihilation of any planning for a better future. And, to a large extent, those messages represent the broader social, economic, and cultural values of today’s capitalism. If Europe greeted...

In Poland a coalition government is being formed in which the Stalinist organisation, the so-called Communist Party, will, for the first time in over 40 years, have only a minority of ministers. The main other force in the government will be Solidarnosc, the political organisation based on the working class which has its origin in the great strike movement of August 1980 and the ten million strong free trade union which grew up between August 1980 and its suppression under martial law in December 1981. This is the most important development in Eastern Europe since the rise of Solidarnosc nine...

On 2 February EU president Donald Tusk published proposals to placate David Cameron. They will be ratified, or not, at an EU summit on 18-19 February. Cameron wants to hold an in-out referendum quickly, possibly in June. The chief plan is for the UK (or any other EU state) to be able to cut EU migrants’ rights to in-work benefits (tax credits, child benefit, etc.) for four years. East European states have objected to the proposal, since it discriminates mainly against their citizens travelling to the UK for work. They are right to do so. We have too many “two-tier” workforces already, with...

Refugee flows into Europe from the Middle East and Africa were expected to decline as autumn sets in and sea crossings become more dangerous, but the numbers of people fleeing poverty and war, particularly in Syria, remain very high and are even growing. UN figures show 218,000 crossed the Mediterranean in October; at least 700,000 have arrived in Europe this year. At least 3,000 have drowned trying to sail to Europe this year; the most recent victims were 11 people who drowned on 1 November when their boat overturned in heavy seas, just 20 metres from the Greek island of Samos. The dead...

Sometimes being worthy, decent and honest isn’t enough. Although at the time I moved in slightly more elevated circles than I do now, in the nine years I lived in Hungary I never met Árpád Göncz, Hungarian President for ten years in the nineties, who died on 6 October. Yet in those early days after the so-called “regime change” in 1989 his name, words and image were everywhere. For many Hungarians he epitomised the new start after the collapse of Hungary’s soft version of Stalinism, a voice of reason amongst what was often utter chaos. Like a number of other East European Presidents in this...

Germany is back-pedalling on its earlier stated open borders policy and has suspended freedom of movement, as EU governments fail to deal with the migrant crisis. Germany re-introduced border controls on Sunday 13 September, and stopped train traffic from Austria. This is the route by which as many as 450,000 refugees, most fleeing the war in Syria, have come into Germany via the Balkans this year. The German Interior minister Thomas de Maizière said the public resources of the southern German states were exhausted by the scale of the current migrant flows. Germany has been relatively generous...

Maciek Konopka, a dock worker in Gdansk, Poland, has been sacked for union organising, sparking an international campaign for his reinstatement. Maciek’s sacking is the latest union-busting action by dock management, including intimidation and threats of dismissal as workers organise for better pay, against the use of temporary contracts, and over negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement. Management employs workers on rolling temporary employment contracts, seemingly to maximise a culture of fear and job insecurity. LabourStart are working with international unions to run a campaign...