Central Europe reborn
Peter Unwin
Keywords: European Union, Effectiveness, Development
In 2000 I published a book about the Central European scene, now that the Iron Curtain has been swept into history (Unwin, 2000). In preparing it I repeatedly travelled along the line of the old continental divide, which ran from Lübeck on the Baltic through the heart of Europe to Trieste on the Adriatic. Once I took a bus-load of tourists with me, people who were interested in the history of the Iron Curtain and the politics and society of the Central European countries through which it ran.
They were an interesting and varied group of people. Some had personal reasons for the journey: a father born in the Sudetenland, a mother dead in Auschwitz, memories of a German childhood. Others, like me, had professional connections, and one of these was a Slovenian journalist who, I suspected,wanted to see the whole story, and particularly her country's story, through an outsider's eyes. Some were looking for an introduction to the history of Central Europe. Others again came only because they had lived through the Cold War as distant observers, and wanted to see some of the places along the Iron Curtain at which it was played out.
My fellow-travellers were a captive audience, and I talked at them all the way – in the bus, in the hotels before dinner, as we walked beside the Elbe at Lauenburg, among the ghosts at Buchenwald and through the tired splendours of Marianské Lazné. They were patient, interested listeners, and good talkers. Early on I warned them that on our last evening, in Trieste, I was going to ask them to turn the tables on me and make me listen, while they told us, each one of them, what they had made of the journey. I suggested a question we might ask ourselves, at the end of our journey along the old divide: what evidence had we seen that Europe had at last, in George Bush Senior's words,been made whole and become a continent united in freedom?
I knew what I thought; indeed, I had been preaching it, if indirectly, for a fortnight. We had seen seven countries: four "Eastern", two "Western",and a united Germany created out of a fusion of East and West. Each of these countries had its full sovereignty, trammelled only by membership, or the desire for membership, of an alphabetic soup of organisations. Within these seven countries, all their citizens had their democratic rights, and most of their inhabitants – gypsies, minorities, immigrants sometimes excepted –their full entitlement of human rights as well. By world standards, all seven countries were prosperous as well as free; and even the poorest of them,Slovakia, was prosperous by comparison with European countries further east. Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Italy were members of NATO; Slovakia and Slovenia looked forward to joining; and Austria's neutrality was guaranteed by international treaty. Germany and Italy were founder members of the European Union, Austria a latecomer whose position in the organisation was handicapped only by its own leanings towards far-right politics. All four "Easterners"– Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks and Slovenes – were eager candidates for membership and all four were likely to be admitted before the first decade of the twenty-first century was out.
On the other hand, we had seen very different standards of well-being. The change when we crossed the border from Germany into the Czech Republic had been striking. So were conditions in Slovakia outside the very centre of the capital. Hungary was a vastly poorer place than Austria or, for that matter, than Slovenia. And one could sense that politics and society in the old East were less self-consciously democratic, government less transparent, human rights less firmly established than in the West.
And yet, and yet … Italy's recent political history was as chequered as such things can be, its governmental record as corrupt. Already the story of Helmut Kohl's depredations in Germany was beginning to unfold. As for Austria,when we talked in Trieste Jörg Haider was only a potential threat, not the challenge to "European" values which he had become before 1999 was out;but already Austria was looking a less than impeccable member of the democratic world. In terms of economic and political righteousness and well-being there was, in short, no absolute distinction to be drawn between "east" and"west".
There was also the rebirth of Central Europe to celebrate. Before the Iron Curtain divided the continent, the people of most of the places we had visited would have thought of themselves not as Eastern or Western but as Central Europeans. The division of the continent into two camps had forced people to be"Easterners" or "Westerners"; and as long as it lasted perhaps only neutral Vienna among all the cities we had seen had been able to enjoy the luxury of thinking of itself as Central European. Yet even in the worst of times Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks and Slovenes privately cherished the idea that they were Central Europeans, temporarily corralled into the Eastern bloc. Occasionally even the Communist façade cracked, as a story I told my fellow-travellers illustrated.
Back in the mid-1980s, I was complaining about something or other in the impeccably Communist Hungarian Foreign Ministry. "You know", I said,"we British sometimes still find it difficult to get business done in Eastern Europe". "Ah yes, Mr Ambassador," the Deputy Foreign Minister across the table responded, with all the unction of a Habsburg counsellor of state, "How much easier you must find it here in Central Europe." And within a decade, by which time I had moved to diplomatic pastures new and the Deputy Foreign Minister had been kicked out of public service into more lucrative employment in the private sector, Hungary was avowedly Central European again, as Hungarians had only dreamed of being for the last half century.
So if Central Europe was itself again, and if Central Europe was open equally to East and West, it seemed to me that you could begin to talk about a Europe made whole. Of course, the countries we had visited, like those further west,were still distinguished from one another by a multitude of particulars. Language distinguished them, rivers and mountain ranges divided them. So did their very different histories and their places on the map. They had historical reasons for disliking one another. Their interests varied with their economics,their political systems, their size and their ambitions. But we lived today not in a Europe artificially divided by the Iron Curtain but as members of a European orchestra. Day-to-day differences within the orchestra produced discordant passages, even at times cacophonies of sound; but we were trying to play in harmony, in concert; and more often than not we were succeeding.
I conceded that further east the picture was different and that a new divide was being driven through Europe. What had been Yugoslavia was bitterly fragmented, with only Slovenia safely a member of the European orchestra. When we talked in Trieste the war with Yugoslavia was not long over, the refugees were still making their way home in Kosovo, the Serbs still fulminating against the fate that they had brought upon themselves. All south-eastern Europe was still affected, still divided by unsettled business with Milosevic. Further east again, where the former Soviet Union met the former Soviet Empire, there were more and deeper divisions.
The gradual absorption of the countries of Central Europe into NATO and the European Union would codify those differences, make them more absolute; and there was little that I could see that we could do to ease the pain. The West could look after the Baltic States, give them European Union membership. But I could not see it doing the same for Ukraine or Belarus. And only the Russians themselves could find an answer to their existential dilemma, their age-old doubts about their country's relationship to Europe: part of or distinct from,friendly or constitutionally hostile, a European nation or a uniquely Russian identity, European or Russian values? Over there in the East, I had to admit,Europe had not been made whole or free. But in Central Europe, along the line which we had travelled, I believed that wholeness and freedom were in the making, indeed already apparent, if not yet fully accomplished.
My fellow-travellers were having none of this. There was no consensus, but the weight of opinion was far more sceptical than mine. Perhaps I had provoked them by looking too hopefully to the European Union as the instrument which would complete the process of making Europe whole. Faced with that belief, some were sceptical, some downright hostile; and they came back time after time not to what we had seen in central Europe but to Brussels and the sins of the Commission, to Paris and the age-old differences between Frenchmen and Englishmen, to Bonn and Berlin and the suspect ambitions of the Germans.
To almost all my friends at that meeting in Trieste, what still mattered most were national character, identity and interest. They had seen the differences between the countries we had visited. The familiar stories I had told them about frictions between Germans and Czechs, Hungarians and Austrians showed how hostile these peoples had been to one another in history. What reason was there now to imagine that their attitudes to one another had changed?
My friends were doubtful even about the desirability of wholeness. They had seen the peasant-girls-turned-tarts along the roadsides in western Bohemia,waiting for German sex-tourists to bring them Deutschmarks; if that was what being made whole meant they saw nothing to commend it. I had talked about the hundreds who had died along the Wall and the Iron Curtain, but what about the"Ossi" children killed at a traffic black spot just east of Lübeck by speeding "Wessis"? They saw not a European orchestra but evidence of national selfishness acted out day-in-day-out in Brussels, with every example of cross-purposes there reported in their morning newspapers. The things I had shown them and the stories I had told them illustrated those differences, not the wholeness that George Bush had talked about and that I claimed to detect.
I had promised my friends that in Trieste I would listen while they talked;but I found myself answering back. "What about multiple identities, layered identities?" I asked. I thought of myself as an Englishman, a Yorkshireman,someone who could talk more easily with Americans and Canadians than with Germans, yet a European also, all at the same time. Throughout their history,Germans and Frenchmen, Italians and Hungarians had thought of themselves also as Europeans; and I quoted Voltaire to illustrate the point: "I have always considered the Christian powers of Europe as one great republic, whose parts all correspond with each other, even when they endeavour at their mutual destruction." If Voltaire could write of the war of 1741 in such terms could not we, after the twentieth century's two vicious European civil wars, recognise the reality of Voltaire's great republic, of my European orchestra?
They were unpersuaded, and when I went to bed I found myself thinking about mankind's two legs. Each of us has his own views about the balance between his private world and the public one. We decide for ourselves where we place most of our weight, on the private leg or the public. It is the same when we think about domestic politics: more freedom or more equality, high taxes or low, more public welfare or more money in your private pocket? Views of international affairs divide in the same way. Are you interventionist or isolationist, a do-gooder or a national interest man, a believer in international groupings or a nationalist?None of us is solely one thing or the other; when we judge individual issues as much as in our general approach, all of us choose how we will place our weight:60/40, 70/30, 50/50?
Almost to a man and woman, my friends seemed to place most of their weight on the national leg, far less on the European. And these, I had to remind myself,were natural Europhiles, people who had invested time, money and energy in our voyage of exploration, our journey through the heart of Europe. If internationalists such as these still viewed developments in Europe with such wary suspicion, what about the little Englanders, the Germany-firsters, the French nationalists and the hard, suspicious men of the once-Communist world?Perhaps my enthusiasms had got out of hand and cried out for a cold shower of scepticism about the old continent.
Perhaps they have, but I still think I am nearer the truth about all this than my friends in the conference room of our Trieste hotel. I concede that the countries of the region have far to go before we can talk of a Central Europe made whole. I accept that further east Europe is split by a new division. Events in Austria show us that old Adams are not dead but merely slumbering. But at the end of my travels I am still more hopeful than not. Europe today is manifestly freer than it was, and to my eye it is on its way to being made whole.
ReferenceUnwin, P. (2000), Where East Met West: A Central European Journey, Michael Russell (Publishing).
