by Peter Kolossa*

The EU’s commitment is to spend 0.7% of its total GNI on official development assistance by 2015, but only 0.33% in the case of its new member states. Nobody expects the poor Latvians or Hungarians to pay up and run the show in the common European development policy. Can they, then, offer something else of value?

by Ivan Kalburov*

 Don’t Speak! This is in short what the Slovak government told its all Hungarian-speaking citizens with the Slovak Language Act adopted at the end of June. The new legislation introduces restrictions on the use of minority languages in Slovakia. The act creates the category of “state language” which undermines the use of local and minority languages. Not only does the new law promote the use of Slovak in official documentation, but also it requires the use of the state language in all forms of public interaction.