In declining order:

1) In terms of education levels and worker productivity, 1990 Armenia resembled a Baltic state more than a Caucasus one.

2) The diaspora — capital infusions, commercial links, skills transfer, smuggling, more or less in that order.

3) Sense of national crisis engendered by the 1990s war led to national mobilization and (relative) political emasculation of oligarchs — Armenian oligarchs were allowed to get rich but not to interfere in matters of national policy.

4) One-time demographic hit from declining dependency ratios; after 1990, old people started dying a lot younger, while young people pretty much stopped having kids. So, for a single generation, Armenia had an anomalously high proportion of the population be working-age adults. The bill for that is about to come due.

5) Extremely high labor mobility. Armenians bounce in and out of Russia, and to a lesser extent the EU, with startling ease. Yerevan is full of thirtysomethings who got a graduate degree in Paris and then spent five years in Moscow.

6) Iran. To simplify, Iranians go to Azerbaijan for booze and whores, but they go to Armenia to hide their money. Armenia is Iran’s only neighbor that is friendly, politically stable, and discreet. So Yerevan is full of large buildings constructed by wealthy Iranians who are avoiding the attention of their government.

Doug M.

http://rt.com/Business/2010-02-12/estonia-braces-change-russian.html

Quite an expensive monument relocation.

What Scowspi said, mainly. I did an undergraduate paper this time last decade that suggested that the Ukrainians were concentrated in western Poland, curiously where there may have been family ties with Ukrainians displaced by Operation Wisla.

A “European perspective” for Ukraine is about as much as could reasonably be expected; expecting a Ukraine that’s still quite poor and illiberal by minimum EU standards to get fast-tracked into the EU’s unrealistic, especially given the precedents of the former Yugoslavia and Turkey.

Why suppose that Ukraine’s blocked off all chances of joining the European Union, though? I’m not sure why some of the commenters here think that Yanukovich is any more likely to take Ukraine (a Ukraine’s that’s quite internally divided) into an irrevocable bond with Russia than Lukashenko has been with Belarus.

I used to live in Prague (2001-02) and there were plenty of Ukrainians there. In fact, the word “Ukrainian” in Czech was starting to take on the subsidiary meaning of “Gastarbeiter” (“I’m planning to hire a couple of Ukrainians to fix up my kitchen”).

I agree with Anatoly that Ukraine is now unlikely to wind up a member of the EU. Maybe there was a chance in the early days of the Orange Revolution if the EU had got its act together. Maybe the EU could have offered Ukraine express membership of the EU backed up with generous subsidies. Maybe future historians will see this as a massive missed opportunity. Or maybe it was never realistic. I still think Ukraine would have been much easier to absorb into the EU than Turkey.

“Fears of a euro breakup have reached the point where the European Central Bank feels compelled to issue a legal analysis of what would happen if a country tried to leave monetary union.

“Recent developments have, perhaps, increased the risk of secession (however modestly), as well as the urgency of addressing it as a possible scenario,” said the document, entitled “Withdrawal and Expulsion from the EU and EMU: Some Reflections.”

The author makes a string of vaulting, Jesuitical, and mischievous claims, as EU lawyers often do. Half a century of ever-closer union has created a “new legal order” that transcends a “largely obsolete concept of sovereignty” and imposes a “permanent limitation” on the states’ rights.

Those who suspect that the European Court has the power pretensions of the medieval papacy will find plenty to validate their fears in this astonishing text.

Crucially, the author argues that eurozone exit entails expulsion from the European Union as well. All EU members must take part in EMU (except Britain and Denmark, with opt-outs).

This is a warning shot for Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. If they fail to marshal public support for draconian austerity, they risk being cast into Icelandic oblivion. Or for Greece, back into the clammy embrace of Asia Minor.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7G_5F2lxKo

http://www.gata.org/node/8246

With Belarus being “soft authoritarian” it might be because the so called “democratic” opposition is not very democratic heavily supported and financed by Soros, NED, British Foreign Office and EU which include UNA-UNSO a Ukrainian Neo-Nazi paramilitary group which I first became aware of when fighting in Chechnya when highlighted by the Jamestown Foundation.

http://belarus.110mb.com/analysis.html#mozTocId578645

http://belarus.110mb.com/analysis.html#mozTocId657052

http://belarus.110mb.com/analysis.html#mozTocId9643

I don’t know why Russia does not create an Asian alliance between China, Japan and South Korea to develop the natural resources of Siberia.