The communicative that is inactive being written

In 2026, this magazine commemorates its 15th year of publishing. Our first issue, released in October 2011, which now seems like a life ago, announced that New east Europe was established to present readers with provocative texts, in-depth analyses, and stimulating reports from the countries that belong to what we then called east Europe. We were convinced that a fresh communicative about the region was being developed in front of our eyes and that required close reflection and commentary. We took on the challenge to supply them to you – our readers.

When we started discussing what our magazine should be like, what we should cover and whom to ask for texts, the overall temper in our region was that of cautious optimism. On the 1 hand, any countries, specified as Poland where we are located, offered a communicative of success. After having completed a successful transformation from communism to democracy and marketplace economy, Poland became a associate of western security, political and economical structures. Together with another post-communist countries it joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

However, as we were collecting the very first texts for the first issue, Europe was not free of challenges. While the EU was inactive recovering from the 2008 eurozone crisis, 1 could inactive sense divisions (also economic) between the West and the East. The authors of the first issue analysed these issues from different angles and perspectives. At that time, the memory of the 2004 Orange Revolution and its promise to turn Ukraine into a modern and democratic state, as well as the launch of the EU’s east Partnership programme, were inactive vivid and inspiring. It was not entirely naïve to believe that the EU integration of east Europe was the next step in Europe’s development. However, this imagination was not shared in the Kremlin where, despite Dmitry Medvedev’s time in office, the policy of the reintegration of the erstwhile russian republics was being formulated. The West, unfortunately, turned a blind eye to these developments, charmed by the thought of reset and rapprochement through trade.

Which way East?

When we published the first issue of New east Europe, we did not start it by claiming to know what east Europe was. Instead, we began by asking what east Europe meant – to the people and societies in the region, but besides to those who frequently looked at it through the lens of outdated stereotypes. Our first task was to examine what connected the very different countries and societies placed under this geographical label. It was besides crucial to think how much of “Eastern Europe” existed not on the map, but in the political imagination of those looking at the region from outside.

A comic anecdote from our early days active a gathering between our editors and the then elder editor and Central and east European correspondent for The Economist, Edward Lucas. During a gathering with Lucas in London, we proudly presented him with our first issue, knowing his affinity for the region and direct connections to our city, Kraków. His consequence after seeing our front cover was direct and provocative. “I hatred the name,” he said bluntly. Obviously, we were taken aback. Lucas then argued that the expression “Eastern Europe” was outdated, misleading, and a lazy shorthand for a complex region. The label, he contended, inaccurately reduces diverse nations to outdated Cold War stereotypes of backwardness and political instability. In many senses he was right then, and even more so today. Our retort can only be seen in subsequent issues. We understood that the region is diverse and resistant to easy categorization. However, at the same time, we see that it is connected by shared histories and experiences that proceed to influence its political and social development.

The impetus for launching New east Europe came from the emerging Polish position at that time. For the first time since its EU accession, Poland held the presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2011. It made a strategical decision to focus mostly on the fresh east Partnership programme, launched 2 years earlier under the joint leadership of Sweden and Poland.

Our publisher, the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of east Europe, had been publishing the Polish edition of Nowa Europa Wschodnia since 2008, a diary which aimed to influence Polish reasoning about its east neighbours. The thought for the English edition came out of a gathering of the then Chair of the College of east Europe, Jan Andrzej Dąbrowski, together with the then mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz (who was later assassinated in public in 2019), and Basil Kerski, then manager of the European Solidarity Centre. The first thought was to straight translate the Polish edition into English. However, erstwhile the editors gathered for their first editorial gathering they rapidly came to the conclusion that Polish reasoning about the region was much more nuanced and needed little explanations than what should be offered to the wider, global audience. It was besides clear that New east Europe was to not only cover what is understood as Poland’s east policy, which includes countries east of Poland. The discussion that we wanted to carry on through our magazine was meant to besides focus on the broader knowing of Central and east Europe. As a result, a decision was made to divided the Polish edition (Nowa Europa Wschodnia) and the English-language New east Europe.

Interlude period

Looking back at our first full years of publishing in 2012 and 2013, it now appears as something of an interlude – a period between the optimism associated with the post-1989 transformation and the upheavals that would shortly fundamentally reshape the region. At the time, of course, we did not know what was coming. Yet many of the informing signs were already there, and they were increasingly reflected in the pages of New east Europe. We noted declining freedom and democracy rankings across the region and looked ahead to elections in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Russia inevitably occupied a central place in this discussion. Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 coincided with the largest demonstrations the country had witnessed since the collapse of the russian Union. At first, there were voices stating that the increasing urban mediate class and the emergence of a fresh generation of politically engaged Russians might begin to challenge the strategy built during Putin’s first 2 presidential terms. Provoked by these opinions, by early 2013 we asked the question straight on our cover: “Can Russia truly change?” Yet what curious us was not Putin himself, but the durability of the political strategy around him and whether the civic awakening of 2011-12 represented the beginning of something larger. In retrospect, we can clearly see that this was a decisive moment. The government survived the challenge it faced from the democratically-minded members of Russian society. In the following years, it would increasingly respond to any home uncertainty through repression, ideological mobilization, and confrontation with the West.

While observing these, and another political developments, we were becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the political transformations that had begun 2 decades prior did not necessarily decision in 1 direction. The russian legacy, personalized systems of power, political patronage, and even Cold War-style espionage had survived into what was expected to be a fresh European reality. In Ukraine, we examined how Viktor Yanukovych had concentrated power, while in Belarus we monitored different stages of Lukashenka’s way to dictatorship. Even Hungary, long considered 1 of the success stories of the post-communist transition, appeared in our pages as evidence that democratic consolidation could not simply be taken for granted. The lines dividing Europe, as Timothy Garton Ash told us at the time, were becoming “more fluid and more complex”. In this way, they did not match anything that was known from the period of the Cold War erstwhile the Iron Curtain marked a clear divided between 2 opposing systems.

Our knowing of the region has never been limited to the geopolitical space between Russia and the EU. In early 2013 we thus turned towards the Western Balkans. We published an issue titled “Painful Past, Fragile Future” in which we focused on questions of memory, identity and belonging in this part of Europe. The experiences of the societies in the Balkans reminded us that the past can proceed to form the political choices of the present.

By the mediate of 2013, however, many of the questions appearing in our pages about Russia’s trajectory, Ukraine’s geopolitical position, democratic backsliding, unresolved histories, and the limits of Europe’s transformative power were beginning to converge. Within months, they would do so dramatically. Our final issue of that year focused on the east Partnership ahead of the Vilnius Summit and reflected a minute erstwhile further European integration inactive appeared possible. Carl Bildt, 1 of the 2 architects of the east Partnership Programme, envisioned a Europe without dividing lines, while Radosław Sikorski, its second architect, argued that the countries covered by the programme were not simply Europe’s neighbours, but its “European neighbours”. erstwhile that issue went to print, we could not foresee the developments that would be triggered as a consequence of the then approaching east Partnership summit in Vilnius.

More than a revolution of dignity

The uncertainty with which we ended 2013 did not last long. Yanukovych’s decision to abandon the Association Agreement in Ukraine triggered the protests that grew into the Euromaidan and later the Revolution of Dignity. Suddenly, many of the questions we had been following since the magazine’s launch came together in this extraordinary moment. During the most intense weeks of the revolution in January and February 2014, we followed events through a live blog online, while our subsequent print issues tried to realize the Maidan from political, historical, cultural and social perspectives and, importantly, through voices from Ukraine itself.

As we acknowledged in our second issue of 2014, the events were moving so rapidly that any articles risked becoming outdated even at the time erstwhile the paper was released from the printers. Our task was so not to study on what was happening, but to supply the context essential to realize why it was happening. Thus, the Revolution of Dignity besides marked a turning point for New east Europe itself. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the subsequent outbreak of the war in Donbas transformed what had begun as a conflict over Ukraine’s political future into a crisis of the European safety order. The request for deeper analysis of the region increased accordingly. Despite receiving no corresponding increase in funding, we made the decision to transform our diary from a quarterly into a bimonthly magazine. It was an ambitious step for our tiny team, but besides a consequence to our readers, who were looking for ways to realize a region that in the second decade of the 21st century had moved from Europe’s political margins to the centre of global attention.

The rupture of 2014 did not end with the Maidan or the annexation of Crimea. It established a fresh reality with which the region would gotta live. In 2015, we were already asking whether the Baltic states might one more time find themselves on the geopolitical frontier between East and West, while informing that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine could no longer be treated as a regional conflict but as a challenge to the wider European order. The war in Donbas, Russian disinformation campaigns, as well as the hard question of whether reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine could always be possible, were then addressed in our pages.

As the immediate shock of 2014 receded, our focus widened. The migration crisis in Europe, democratic backsliding in respective countries including those in our region, and the emergence of illiberal and populist forces demonstrated that instability was not confined to Europe’s East. By 2017, erstwhile we asked whether “the planet is turning upside down”, it was becoming increasingly hard to presume that the liberal democratic model towards which the post-1989 transformations had been heading was either inevitable or irreversible. This led us back to 1 of the questions with which NEE had started: what was the meaning of the post-communist transformation in the erstwhile russian republics, which were now independent states?

By 2018 and 2019, another subject had become visible in the form of a generational change that was seen across different states. The question we asked was could this shift lead to fresh developments in the realm of politics? We looked at young Russians taking part in anti-corruption protests led by Alexei Navalny, but besides analysed the factors pointing to the durability of Putin’s increasingly authoritarian strategy and the Kremlin’s instrumentalization of historical memory. The tenth anniversary of the east Partnership offered an chance to revisit any of the hopes that had been seen in our coverage prior and to ask how much the EU had actually succeeded in transforming its east neighbourhood. In 2019, we noticed any “new faces” appearing across the region. Among them was Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current president of Ukraine who was elected besides in this year.

Bound to explode

The year 2020 brought us a deliberately provocative question: was the region “bound to explode”? – a question we placed straight on the cover of the first issue of that year. Political polarization, populism, competing narratives and increasing tensions between Russia and the West all suggested that the fresh decade would bring greater instability. Within months, COVID-19 closed borders and disrupted societies, economies and even the distribution networks on which a tiny global magazine like ours depended. As a result, our 3rd issue of 2020, devoted to the inactive ongoing war in Donbas, could not scope newsstands and bookshops. To meet this challenge, we appealed to our readers to order the magazine straight from us. Their response, as well as that of any of our partners, allowed us to meet our sales mark for the issue – a tiny but crucial demonstration of the community that had grown around NEE.

By the autumn, the pandemic itself had become the subject of our analysis. Our authors looked at the different responses to COVID-19 across east Europe, as well as what the crisis was exposing below the surface: economical vulnerabilities, migrant labour, expanding state surveillance and political systems already under strain. In spring 2020, we saw how the negligence of public wellness issues brought on political mobilization in Belarus, which a fewer months later, after the blatantly fraudulent re-election of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, led to an unprecedented wave of democratic protests. These acts of dissent were brutally suppressed, followed by a wave of repression on a scale unseen in the region for a long time.

If 2014 had shattered many assumptions about the post-Cold War order, February 24th 2022 destroyed any remaining illusions. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was, as we wrote later that year, “the single most crucial event in our region this century”. At New east Europe, the war became the central focus of our work, but it besides brought us back to questions we had been asking since the magazine’s first issues.

Ukraine’s extraordinary opposition provided its own answer to any of those questions. It demonstrated that Ukrainian statehood and identity were not abstract slogans but realities that millions of people were prepared to defend. At the same time, the invasion forced a much broader reckoning with Russia. By the end of 2022, we argued that relations between the democratic planet and the Kremlin had passed a “point of no return”. The debate no longer included questions of how to talk with Russia but focused on specified issues as Russian imperialism or the accountability of the Russian state for the crimes committed in Ukraine. We besides analysed the mistakes that had been made in abroad policy reasoning across Europe, pointing to how any countries, especially Germany, needed to rethink assumptions that had shaped their Russia policies.

Belarus besides offered a warning. The defeat of the democratic protests of 2020 had been followed by the Lukashenka regime’s greater dependence on Moscow. That besides partially explains Minsk’s complicity in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Eleven years after NEE had begun by asking what east Europe was and where it belonged, the war had made clear that these were never simply questions of geography or identity. They were questions of sovereignty, freedom and, ultimately, the kind of European order that would appear from the conflict taking place in Ukraine.

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

Changing with the times

In the years since 2022 our attention has increasingly turned towards a much larger transformation of the global order. For example, Russia’s deepening relation with China prompted us in 2023 to examine Beijing’s increasing presence in Central and east Europe and the wider implications of the Sino-Russian partnership. In the same way, the developments in the South Caucasus that same year, erstwhile Azerbaijan regained control over Nagorno-Karabakh and more than 100,000 cultural Armenians fled the region, would have been almost unthinkable in our early years of publishing.

A year later, a historical series of elections around the planet led us to ask whether democracy itself could withstand the pressures it was facing, while the 20th anniversary of the EU’s “Big Bang” enlargement provided an chance to revisit another of the assumptions that accompanied NEE’s early years: that the divisions between Europe’s East and West would gradually lose their significance. By the end of 2024, we were alternatively writing about an “age of uncertainty”.

In 2025, as questions grew over the future of transatlantic relations and continued western support for Ukraine, we suggested that “something is coming to an end.” And by the beginning of 2026, our cover described Europe as existing in a “new disorder”: a planet in which global law, alliances and established spheres of cooperation are increasingly challenged by the return of large power competition and the politics of might. The question facing us present is so no longer simply where east Europe fits within Europe, but whether our full region, and Europe itself, will fit within the fresh global order now taking shape.

As the planet we cover has changed, so have the ways in which we effort to realize and explain it. The printed magazine remains at the heart of New east Europe thanks in large part to our readers and partners. It is enriched by the content offered on our website: www.neweasterneurope.eu, which offers more updated analysis and reports from the region. However, these 2 are only 1 part of a much broader conversation we have with our audience. Since 2019, our podcast Talk east Europe has grown into an crucial part of our work and, in 2026, it expanded further as a YouTube channel. In 2024 we besides launched Brief east Europe, which has developed into a weekly newsletter helping readers follow the most crucial developments across the region, and our website continues to supply analysis and commentary between the publication of our print issues.

As we enter, hopefully, our next 15 years of publishing, we proceed to look for reasons for optimism, despite the tremendous challenges facing our region. We frequently find them in the stories of individuals, communities and societies where real change begins and where hope persists, even under the most hard circumstances.

The communicative of this region has entered another chapter, 1 that is increasingly inseparable from the wider communicative of Europe and the changing planet around it. We cannot know where past will take us next. But we can proceed to observe it, question it and effort to realize it. And possibly we can let ourselves 1 hope of our own: that 1 day the words “Eastern Europe” will evoke not division, conflict or a troubled past, but freedom, prosperity, solidarity and renewal.

In the end, we would like to take a minute here to thank all of the staff and colleagues at the College of east Europe who have worked with us over this decade and a half; as well as extend our sincerest gratitude to the City of Gdańsk and the European Solidarity Centre for their continued support and incredible partnership.

Adam Reichardt is the editor in chief of New east Europe and co-host of the Talk east Europe podcast.

Iwona Reichardt is the deputy editor in chief of New east Europe. She is simply a associate of the board of the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of east Europe and a co-founder of FemGlobal, Women in abroad Policy – a Polish-based association of women working in the field of global relations.