The Post and the Pre

The Serbian prime minister told AmCham this last week, so it MUST be true. Maybe the post-crisis period started on that morning and I was just too sleepy to notice.

Up until recently, we had only been in the POST-TRANSITION. We would use the word post-transition because it would indicate that there is still a little clutter lying around in the corners from the transition period. In fact, until it is all clear up, we might say that we are actually still in the transition but we have been so many years in transit that post-transition feels better. Maybe this is the pre-post-transition. Likewise the crisis. Pre-post-pre-crisis.

By my calculation that means nothing at all.

So now it is the post-crisis post-transition. And welcome to it! We have transitioned or transited and we have suffered the crisis and now we are past the post. Among the many things which the post-transition has in store for us is getting Pre-Candidate Status to join the EU. Pre-Candidate comes before Pre-Accession. Which means beginning from the inception of the universe until the time in the future when the EU says ok, come on in.

 Obvious though it may sound, would it not be easier for us to live without labeling the epoch? After all, this kind of classification is usually done by dusty historians. When enough time has gone by, they create a word to describe the whole period - like post-war, post-romantic,  post-lapsarian, or post-office. In fact, giving the period a name automatically indicates that it is in the past. So if we are now post-crisis, we should be able to look back nostalgically on the Great Crisis and the Lingering Transition.

Given the way things seem and the way folks are talking, I would guess that post-crisis is a little optimistic. This is probably the pre-post-crisis. When we hit the post-post-crisis, we can have more of reason to celebrate. Maybe we can have an avant premier party to herald the arrival of the pre-post-post-crisis.

But we would have to be a little more specific about the time.