Reinventing Europe

Emerging from their isolation after decades of Communist rule, the newly independent nations of central Europe grope for ways to rejoin their neighbors on the continent.

This coming July the Western European Union--the political assembly of the sixteen nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--will decide on its first step in its eastward expansion," admitting to the alliance a select few of the formerly Communist nations of central Europe. This will be a decision of far greater significance than a rearrangement of Europe's defense arrangement. For the countries hoping for admission, either now or at a later date, admission is seen as a seal and guarantee of their permanent restoration to "Europe"--that cultural, democratic Europe from which they had been cut off for almost 50 and in some cases more than 70 years.

After the fall of Communism, "rejoining Europe" was envisaged as a two-fold strategy, marked first by the introduction of multi-party elections and then by the development of a market-oriented capitalist economy. At first it was tacitly accepted--both in the countries concerned and in the West--that any difficulties in this process would be merely technical, and could be solved by sending in Western "experts." So the experts flowed in--not always to the best effect.

"They come talking to us about Adam Smith." grumbled one Russian economist. "when what I want to know is how to draw up a Western-style balance sheet." Polish scientists, who for the past four decades had secretly monitored the pollution of their country's air, soil, and water by industrial waste (secretly, since under Poland's Communist censorship, such matter were not allowed to be publicly discussed), were furious when the Western experts refused even to look at the figures they had assembled at the risk to their own safety. Still, such misunderstandings were seen, for the most part, as only minor glitches in the grand cooperative deal of building democracy and capitalism on the ruins of Communism.

Gradually, however, it became clear that the transition would by no means be as easy as had been envisaged. Adjustment to a "Western" style economy--with the ending of government subsidies on housing, electricity, and basic foodstuffs--turned out in practice to mean galloping inflation. Particularly if, as in Poland, it was carried out in one fell swoop (the "shock therapy" approach) family savings and the pensions of the elderly were reduced to nothing overnight. The prevailing economic chaos of the post-Communist lands meant that giant industrial plants, which used outdated and highly polluting technology, and whose output was geared to plans laid down in Moscow, lost their traditional markets, while their outdated products were not wanted in the West. With a few exceptions--such as Hungary, where even under Communism, the "private plots" which collective farmers were allowed for their own use had supplied a significant part of the country's export trade--agricultural produce from the ex-Communist bloc failed to reach West European standards, and in any case, the agricultural policy of the European Community (now the European Union) blocked unrestricted imports from the East.

The advice of Western "experts," when it trickled down to the level of the ordinary citizen, was frequently misunderstood. In Poland, for example, where uniquely, agriculture had never been collectivized, the rural scene was dominated by family farms, which by tradition had to be divided, when a farmer died, equally among his male heirs. Communism had curbed this process somewhat by forbidding the sale of land, so that a son who did not want to be a farmer did not participate in the heritage. But many holdings consisted of only two or three acres, while with Poland's soil and climatic conditions, 15 to 20 acres is (according to the international experts) the minimum for economic viability. Hence a report prepared by Western "experts" in the early 1990s stated that some 1.5 million Polish family farms would disappear under capitalism. They had meant to indicate that the owners of small and/or unsuccessful farms, or the sons who did not wish to take over the family land, would be able to sell their plots and move on. But to the Polish farmers, and to at least one lawyer interested in their cause, this was seen as a threat that the owners of farms deemed inviable by the "experts" would simply be thrown off their land forthwith.

Even in the countries which (like Poland) had seemingly been strongest in their resistance to Communism, and where there was (barely) a living memory of a modern, non-Communist state, the bulk of the population had lost the habit of taking responsibility for themselves. And in the heartland of the former Soviet Union (which had been Communist for more than 70 years) and in areas of the Balkans which before Communism had never really come to grips with the modern world, the process proved far more painful. It is in these areas--in particular, in Russia and Albania--where the official Communist anti-wealth ethic suddenly disappeared, without being replaced by any alternative code of accepted morality, leading to extremely severe economic problems. The absence of any accepted standards of marketplace morality, coupled with a profound naivete on money matters, made if possible for fraudulent pyramid schemes to flourish, with disastrous effects. And when they crashed, the first cry of the defrauded investors was that the government must rescue them. (The second cry, in Albania, when the anti-government riots engendered by the crash got out of hand, was that "Europe" and specifically NATO, must come to the rescue.)

The Communist-ruled lands had been held together politically by the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism, economically by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), and militarily by the Warsaw Pact alliance. These had been presented by the propagandists as the Communist world's answers, respectively, to capitalism, the West European Common Market, and NATO. Now the Communist bloc, and the three ties which held it together, were gone. "Capitalism" had arrived--or was at any rate in the process of being installed. To post-Communist governments wishing to reintegrate their countries into Europe, the other two Western alternatives to the Communist system, the Common Market and NATO, seemed increasingly desirable.

This was especially true because post-Communist Russia, in spite of its commitment to democracy at home, was clearly not reconciled to the loss of its empire. Even moderates who were prepared to let Central Europe go its own way openly mourned the dismantling of the Soviet Union, and advocated its reestablishment in some new, improved form. Extreme nationalists such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky called for the re-establishment of Russian rule over all lands which had at any time been part of the Russian Empire, including Finland, large parts of Poland--and even Alaska and northern California. (And Zhirinovsky, it must be remembered, was strongly favored by the "experts" to defeat Yeltsin in the 1994 Russian presidential elections.) Not surprisingly then, the smaller countries near Russia increasingly came to see integration into the economic and defense structures of Western Europe as a means of preserving their sovereignty from the claws of the Russian Bear. In particular, the Poles and the three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia--who felt, with some justice, that they had been betrayed by the Allies at the end of World War II and callously handed over to Stalin--saw such integration as the only guarantee that such a betrayal would not occur again.

But neither the European Community (as it then was) nor NATO was overly anxious to welcome the central Europeans--let alone the former Soviet states. Entry into the Community requires certain standards both of economic performance and of human and civil rights. None of the post-Communist states were initially, up to economic standard, though most are now making progress toward it. As far as human and civil rights were concerned, their track record had not yet been established.

As for NATO, from the beginning, Russia made it clear that it did not wish to see its ex-satellites entering into any alliance which it, itself, could not join. And Russian membership of NATO was excluded (unless, as a few futurologists have predicted, Siberia and the Russian East eventually break free from Moscow), since it did not seem a viable option to extend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization far eastward to the Pacific . Instead, NATO proposed signing a series of "Partnership for Peace" agreements with the former Communist states, including the Russian Federation. Significantly, the first state to sign such a deal was the country which has the most to fear form a new wave of Russian expansionism: a country which most Russians, consciously or subconsciously, still cannot accept as an independent entity: Ukraine.

In the meantime other, pan-European organizations were opened to the post-Communist world. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (established in 1975 as the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe to oversee implementation of the Helsinki Final Act) already included among its members the ex-Communist states of Central Europe and the Balkans.

Russia itself, as successor to the USSR, was a member of many international bodies. And Belarus and Ukraine, even in Soviet times had had separate membership in a number of international organizations. (From the UN downwards, this had been one of Stalin's more diplomatic coups, gaining him two extra votes in such bodies.) The other newly independent states, hastened to join. The Russians have pressed, unsuccessfully, for the OSCE to become the principal defense and security body in the new Europe--with Russia itself responsible for "peacekeeping" within the former Soviet bloc. This idea found no favor abroad--particularly after the disastrous example of the war in Chechnya.

Hence Russian anti-NATO propaganda took the line that NATO expansion eastwards would simply split Europe into two mutually hostile blocs, once again, with the new "iron curtain" on the Russian frontier. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the curtain would come down on the Belarusian-Polish frontier, since by now the Russians had found one ally in their campaign against NATO: President Alexander Lukashenka of Belarus, who, contrary to the prevailing trend, sees his country's future in integration not into "Europe" but into a new Russian-aligned "commonwealth," into which Belarus will be incorporated, without (he maintains) losing its sovereignty. Lukashenka's pronouncements tend to be mutually contradictory, but his anti-NATO stance is one of their few constants, and he has even, on occasion, threatened that if Poland joins NATO, the nuclear warheads withdrawn from Belarus with so much publicity last year may be re-deployed.

Even the Clinton-Yeltsin Helsinki Summit in March, in which the Russian President grudgingly withdrew his objections to some Central European states jointing NATO, reflected no real change in Russian attitudes. It simply provided more fuel for the growing criticism of Yeltsin within Russia. At worst, the critics accuses Yeltsin of deliberately betraying Russian interests; at best they suggest he is now too sick to do his job.

Other European organizations open to the ex-Communist states, and to which they virtually all hastened to apply, are the European Parliamentary Union and the Council of Europe. Once again, the requirement is a commitment to freedom, democracy, and economic progress. The Council of Europe admitted the ex-Communist states on a probationary basis subject to periodic monitoring. It was a cause of much rejoicing last winter when Estonia became the first post-Communist state to be declared exempt from this monitoring process.

Conversely, countries which fail to adhere to democratic norms are liable to censure by these bodies--as Slovakia has been in recent months, for the increasing crackdown on freedom of speech and artistic expression; and artistic expression; and Belarus, whose membership of the European Parliamentary Union was suspended after President Lukashenka dissolved the duly elected parliament last November. Rulers and governments who earn such censure tend to bluster that this is a case of "the West" interfering in the internal affairs of their countries. The "West's" reply is, in effect, "If you want to join our club, stick to the rules."

Most governments--even those left-wing ones made up largely of ex-Communists and born-again social democrats--do want to stick to the rules, if only to gain the perceived economic benefits of "joining Europe." This has undoubtedly hastened some features of the process of cleaning up after Communism--the restoration of confiscated Church property, for example, which otherwise might have been shelved until the economic situation was more favorable (that is, indefinitely). Likewise, in the Czech Republic, the desire for a good image in Western eyes undoubtedly influenced the government (which had initially said it could not deal with claims going back before the Communist take-over in 1948) to tackle the sensitive issues of Jewish property confiscated under the Nazi occupation and the cases of the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland, expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II.

The "West" (which in this context must include North America as well as Western Europe) might then claim to be doing a good job in the encouragement of democracy in the former Communist lands--both through the lure of economic ties at the governmental level, and also through private initiatives such as the Soros Foundation, established by the Hungarian-born American millionaire George Soros, which has funded a whole range of pro-democracy projects in the area, from the translation of Western university textbooks to support for the emerging independent mass media. Unfortunately, there is another side to the story.

Just as in the past, European missionaries in Africa were followed (or in some cases, preceded) by arms-dealers and rum-runners, so now the West is exporting to the former Communist world its last pleasant cultural phenomena. The beginnings of this process preceded the collapse of Communism. The disaffected young, including the children of the Communist elite, took early on to wearing blue jeans, drinking Coca-Cola, and--when fast-food restaurants arrived in the late 1980s--eating hamburgers, as symbols of their disenchantment with the status quo. Back in the 1960s the music of the Beatles (from smuggled records, or taped illicitly from Western radio stations) was the rage among young Czechs and Slovaks--and was resolutely stamped out after the 1968 Soviet invasion.

The symbols of the forbidden West before 1989 have now become, all too often, the mass-symbols of joining the West. During the death throes of Communism--after the Berlin Wall had come down, but before the Soviet Union finally fell apart--a major article in the Russian weekly Literary Gazette suggested that these symbols were becoming the "sacraments" of the new "religion of Westernism." The taste for old TV soap operas, now carried by TV stations across most of the former bloc--and sold in transcribed form as cheap paperback books in the remote areas of Siberia and Central Asia where they are not yet transmitted--seems universal, and is often rationalized by devotees as "learning the Western way of life."

But once again, this trend antedates the fall of Communism. In Soviet times, the residents of Leningrad (as it then was) and Estonia were envied by the whole Soviet Union for the fact that they could pick up Finnish TV, which often carried British and American films and serials. In the mid-1980s, the hard-line Communist regime of East Germany even had to arrange for West German TV to be brought by cable into those districts which could not pick it up on their antennas--since factories were losing their work-force to those areas which could receive Western TV.

The end of Communism, it seems, has simply given the people of these countries unrestricted access to the Western media "goodies" they already craved. Regular visitors to these lands agree that, except in certain obvious exceptions such as war-ravaged Bosnia, the economic situation is generally improving, albeit not as quickly as most citizens wish. But even if the people of central Europe cannot yet afford all the material goods offered by the West, they can at least enjoy a diet of Western TV. This is the intellectual equivalent of fast food, comparable to the hamburger, pizza, and fried-chicken concessions which now dot the streets of central and eastern European cities. That trend may be deplorable, but it seems that very little that can be done to stop it, given the Western commitment to freedom of speech.

Some voices are, of course, raised against the tendency to import the tawdrier aspects of Western culture. Poland's Primate, Cardinal Glemp, has on several occasions warned his people about how Western materialism is undermining Poland's traditional moral principles. A Lithuanian gynecologist (who for professional reasons must remain anonymous) speaks regretfully among the high rate of teenage pregnancies and sex-related disease "among just the same sort of young people whose older brothers and sisters, ten years ago, used to go to Mass and on pilgrimages just to defy the regime!" It is not, she stresses, a case in which a "negative social phenomenon," which the Soviets refused to recognize, has now come into the open. There has been a real increase. "Young people are being taught freedom," she says, "but who will teach them responsibility?"

Together with the hamburgers and the soap operas have come the sex-shops and the pornographic videos. A free press has meant, in all too many cases, irresponsibility. For the law-breakers, great and small, the opening of contracts to the West means not only increased opportunities for smuggling in contraband, but also a chance to stash away one's loot in an inflation-proof, Western bank account.

Even the development of a free press, unfettered by government controls, has been uncertain at best. The media exposure of the evil deeds of the former regime has been followed by campaigns against the corruption that still remains in government circles. The results might be excellent if the journalists were sure of their facts, but often they fail to check their stories out. So reporters and editors are hauled into court, and the trial typically ends with massive fines on the journalists and newspapers concerned. This naturally undermines the credibility of other, sounder investigative reporting of real corruption and scandals, and thus ultimately sets back the process of exposing corruption in government.

Furthermore, in countries where for decades (or, as in Russia and its former empire, for centuries) "law" has meant simply the latest decree of the ruler, the only inner imperative impelling people to abide by the law is still, for the majority, "Thou shalt not be found out." In some countries, such as Bulgaria, the authorities are turning to the Orthodox Church as the traditional custodian of national tradition, and imposing restrictions on the activities of missionaries from non-traditional "Western" denominations. The role of the non-Orthodox churches in instilling a moral sense is far less often mentioned--perhaps because the governments concerned are unsure of how far they can cooperate with these denominations without transgressing the "separation of church and state." which they have all written into their constitutions.

Yet in spite of the occasional jeremiads against the influx of the cheapest and worst of Western culture, and despite the problems that seem inevitably to mar the transition to democracy and free markets, the former Communist lands are, virtually unanimously, set on joining the European community. Unlike critics of the EU in those states which are already members (Britain and Germany in particular), they do not see membership as a threat to their sovereignty. Nor do they have any qualms about eventually replacing their own national currencies-- the zloty, koruna, dinar, or foriut--with a common European currency, the ecu.

NATO too is seen as a guarantee of security and independence by those most eager to join. Indeed the Baltic peoples, who according to current predictions will not be among the first successful applicants for NATO entry, worry that if they are left behind, the West might be willing once again to abandon them to Russian expansionism. Even Ukraine, which clearly does not want to antagonize Russia further (since it already has serious problems over the status of Crimea and the division of the Black Sea Fleet) will not rule out the possibility of applying to join NATO sometime in the next fifteen years.

Since the Romans "split the eagle," in the late 4th century, with twin emperors in Rome and Constantinople, Europe has been divided by culture, by schism, and in this century by ideology. The line of demarcation has shifted, but has always been there. "The East" has been said at various time to begin in Vienna or on Vaci Street in Budapest. Only seven years ago, it began (politically) in mid-Germany. Attempts to "reunite" Europe have usually been undertaken in response to a perceived threat--such as the advance of the Ottoman empire. Now, in one of the nice ironies of 20th-century history, the lands of what was until recently the Communist "East" see their efforts to rejoin Europe as bound up with membership in NATO--an organization which was created to oppose a threat which no longer exists, but of which they, until very recently, were a part.

Vera Rich, a veteran reporter on the affairs of the former Soviet bloc, writes from London.