The signs are there that something has gone awry: thirteen years after the so-called “big bang” enlargement, European officials from the “new” member countries continue to lead their lives completely separately, or as critics may say, to form their own cliques. There are exceptions, of course, in particular and paradoxically the most recent arrivals, the Bulgarians and Romanians, not forgetting the Cypriots who, having no Turkish speakers, have quite naturally joined the Greek family. In short, it appears as if a wall of incomprehension has been erected within the European institutions.
Where has this symbolic partition come from, this cultural apartheid imposed by the latest to join the institutions which, on the contrary, are supposed to embody the reunification of Europe and the union of citizens striving to be the architects of a common future? Some are tempted to see in it the aftermath of a period when Eastern Europeans enjoyed only limited freedom at the whim of Moscow and the Communist leaders of its satellite states, when the economic opulence of the Western world was, at one and the same time, a source of envy, resentment and daydreams. Perhaps, indeed, it is from this cocktail that have arisen the present day frustrations, the difficulty in finding, if not common ground, at least sufficient commonality to be able to overcome the lack of understanding.
From his series of reports from the new member states, journalist Frédéric Lemaître delivers two eloquent images. First of all, on the main square in Osijek, a plaque below the statue of Ante Starcevic, the champion of Croatian independence from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reads: “Only the laws of God and of Nature are above the sovereign will of the people of Croatia”. And not too far away, a sign in the window of an empty, closed shop in Ljubljana: “Born in Yugoslavia, educated in Slovenia, unemployed in the European Union” (Le Monde, 31 December 2016). All of this is illustration of the other cocktail that is now poisoning the enlarged European Union.
Even when concealed so as not to displease the masters in the Kremlin, national pride, belief in their country, was one of the ways to resist Soviet rule that was cultivated by the countries caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and even more so by the huge majority of their citizens. The problem is that national pride can, if one is not careful, very quickly lurch into nationalism. This can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in all the Visegrad countries today, their leaders having come to the point where “Brussels” is seen as being scarcely any better than Moscow was in the past. Hence their intolerable permanent state of rebellion.
If, as British historian Timothy Garton Ash recently wrote, “a young liberal hero of 1989, Viktor Orban, is now a nationalist populist leading Hungary toward authoritarianism and explicitly praising the ‘illiberal’ example of Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia” (The New York Review of Books, January 2017), it is also because the hopes that Hungarians, and many Eastern Europeans, had pinned on the economic model that had been presented to them as the only one possible have been largely dashed. Garton Ash does not agree with his German colleague Philipp Ther who, in his latest work¹ argues that the run-away neo-liberal train set in motion by Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan’s United States has, through liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, wreaked significant damage in the region in terms of social dislocation and growing inequality. However, “the one thing worse than having a neo-liberal transformation of your economy was not having a neo-liberal transformation”, acknowledges Ther to the great satisfaction of his British counterpart who willingly concedes in return that “post-dissident and reformist elites, including those who came from the democratic left, did go very far in their embrace of a radical (neo)liberal economic transformation”. Eastern European societies, far more than those in the West, have been pulled apart, divided into winners and losers with, for example, “millions of Poles in the small towns and poorer regions of ‘Polska B’, who felt themselves to be marginalised and left behind by the bulldozer of economic liberalism”.
As a result, many Eastern European citizens are now rebelling against broken promises and, Garton Ash observes, their “reaction against the consequences of economic and social liberalism now threatens the achievements of political liberalism”.
Can they be blamed for this when they only returned to democratic practices and began rebuilding democracies worthy of the name a quarter of a century ago? Have our ancient, time-honoured democracies, with their Wilders, Farages and Le Pens, any right to criticise them in any way at all? No. In this sad affair, it is, rather, up to each and every one to take responsibility and, as a matter of great urgency, look deeply into their own consciences if the approaching hell that threatens all Europeans, of the East and of the West, is to be avoided.
Ought we to be seeking salvation all twenty seven together at the same speed? That would, of course, be the ideal but it is illusory to think that this might be possible. At the present time, it is crucial to save the very essence, the original European project in which economic considerations were only secondary. The time has come to breathe fresh life into it so that hope can be re-ignited in the hearts of European citizens, of the East and of the West. At the summit commemorating the signing of the treaty, will there be someone who will stand up and challenge the people to join him/her on this way? (To be continued)
Michel Theys
¹ The New Order on the Old Continent: A History of Neoliberal Europe