In 1989, the post-communist elites in the four Central European states of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia had a supposedly innocent ambition. They wanted to escape from the captivity of the Russian ‘East’ back to the civilized ‘West’, where they sought political and economic equality. Milan Kundera put it best in his 1983 essay on Central Europe, ‘The Kidnapped West’. But this supposedly innocent ‘return to Europe’ was also about skepticism and power ambitions. Like Kundera, Central Europeans doubted that Western Europe retained the Western values and the desire for freedom that post-communist societies had supposedly preserved out of a civilizational instinct for self-preservation. Their ambition was to return to the Western bloc and the European project, which claimed to remake the rest of the world in its image at the famous end of history.
In 2004, the Eastern enlargement of the European Union was seen as part of this liberal end of history. Twenty years later, we know that the end of history has not come either for Central (and Eastern) Europe or for the Union itself. The two decades of the Central European states’ EU membership can be judged precisely in the light of such earlier ambitions as well as today’s European turn towards the center-to-far-right reconstitution of the EU.
Two strategies
Neither of these ambitions has been achieved by 2024. First, even the Central European societies that demanded a privileged position among the other post-communist countries of the Union’s new East have not achieved political and economic equality. According to European Democracy Consulting, Central and Eastern Europeans remain severely underrepresented in the EU institutions. None of the member states on the EU’s eastern periphery have achieved full economic convergence. The stumbling Czechia, with 91 per cent of the EU average GDP per capita, and the growth champion Poland, with 80 per cent, may have been overtaking Greece, Portugal or Spain in the EU’s southern periphery. But they cower behind the above-average 115 per cent of the stagnating Germany and the 130 per cent of the Netherlands in the EU’s north-western core. The East has long since realized that the EU tends to reproduce inequalities between European societies rather than overcome them.
Second, doubts about the EU’s prestige and economic weight have grown. The global polycrisis, a series of mutually reinforcing crises from the 2008 financial crisis to the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine, has made Europe particularly uneasy. While the Eastern enlargement has reinforced the EU’s self-image as a global power whose civilizational values and socio-economic model are unconditionally accepted, the so-called ‘geopolitical Europe’ must supposedly defend these values and model against the rest of the world. According to the pro-European think-tank ECFR, this identitarian defense is linked to Europe’s identity crisis, doubts about the EU’s viability in the rest of the world, and the continent’s ‘vassalisation’ in relation to the United States.
Central Europeans have developed two coping strategies in response to their current situation: a half-hearted political emancipation and a halfway socio-economic equality in the EU, which, as a continental project, is haunted by a crisis of identity and power of its own. This is a sovereignist and a pro-European strategy.
Although sovereignists like Viktor Orbán or Robert Fico (as opponents of the European mainstream) and pro-Europeans like Donald Tusk and Petr Fiala (who see themselves as part of this mainstream) confront each other both at home and in (Central) Europe, both strategies share two common features in the 2020s. One is the drive to further emancipate the EU’s East from the Western European political and economic leadership in the Union. The second is that these strategies are not some exotic exceptions to the Eastern struggle between local authoritarians and naive returnees to the Western European embrace, but rather, they are part and parcel of a trans-European shift towards a center-to-far-right reconstitution of the EU. Both strategies can still be seen as a result of the Central European submission to the pro-European aspirations of the 1990s and 2000s, which soon gave way to the skeptical disillusionment and sovereigntist defiance of the 2010s.
Submission
Central European elites submitted rather willingly to the EU´s Eastern enlargement and its symbolic, material, and formal inequalities. These inequalities were expressed in the accession conditions themselves. They framed the overall transformation of the East in the EU´s (neo)liberal image while simultaneously normalizing the enlargement as a mutual competition to achieve the minimum civilizational criteria of (West-)Europeanness. Since the Copenhagen criteria of 1993, this Europeanness took on a technocratic disguise in the form of tougher entry conditions than those in previous enlargement rounds and gradually required the Eastern outsiders to implement standards and rules that the existing member states could bend or avoid from inside. Their accession in 2004 alone did not level this East-West divide. On the contrary, the new East of the EU remained in the role of more backward societies that had to politically and economically catch up with the more advanced rest of the bloc.
One answer to why Central Europeans accepted this subordinate position is that they themselves believed in such European hierarchies. The pro-European president Václav Havel and the sovereigntist prime minister Václav Klaus disagreed on virtually everything except perhaps that the Czechs, as the most historically advanced nation in Europe´s East, deserved to be the first to join NATO and the EU. In a rush to join Western structures, Central Europeans emphasized their civilizational superiority over the rest of the post-communist space. As one of the intellectual fathers of the concept of Central Europe and the founder of its political embodiment in the so-called Visegrád Four, Havel made these privileges openly clear in the 1990s. Klaus went even further, rejecting any institutionalization of similar formats, such as the Visegrad Four or the Central European Free Trade Agreement, on the grounds that they would draw Czechia back to the East and delay its reintegration with the West.
The second answer is that EU accession made this promise of socio-economic and symbolic convergence with Western Europeans a real prospect. The Union’s single market magnified the inflows and impact of foreign direct investment, while the development assistance from EU funds created the hope of ubiquitous modernization. This modernization was imagined as spilling over from the West to the East of the EU, and, within the East, from its centers Prague and Warsaw to its peripheries, such as the Carlsbad and Podlachia regions. In the process, the region became dependent on these funds and investments while being subordinated to the new European division of labor. The former competition for EU accession was replaced by a competition for socio-economic catching-up and deeper integration. Slovakia initially excelled in both, moving from 52 per cent of the EU average GDP per capita in 2004 to 74 per cent in 2010, in just six years. It was also one of the first new member states to adopt the euro and the only one in Central Europe to date.
As these innocent ambitions seemed to be becoming fulfilled, power ambitions and open skepticism gradually emerged. Their mixture soon found expression in the continent’s division into a pro-American ‘New Europe’ in the East and a sclerotic ‘Old Europe’ in the West. The New Europe was far more willing to engage alongside the United States in the Westernization and democratization of the global South, even by force, as in Iraq in 2003. At the same time, it cultivated a growing skepticism about the Western European approach to Russia. When Poland’s sovereigntist president Lech Kaczyński, on a solidarity visit to Tbilisi at the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, warned of Russian imperialism and criticized the Western allies for their passivity, the Western Europeans responded by dismissing his Eastern irrationality and hysteria.
Just four years after accession, the skepticism was exacerbated by the dashed hopes of convergence in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Not only did this crisis initially hit some Eastern economies, but its spillover into the so-called Eurozone debt crisis ruined the image of the EU as an economically powerful and stable bloc. In addition to Romania and the Baltic states, Hungary also came close to bankruptcy. The international aid to these countries was bought with harsh neo-liberal reforms, which the European Commission pushed through most vigorously. At this time, Central Europeans, for a change, have shown no solidarity with the Eurozone’s southern periphery. Among others, Czech and Slovak elites supported the tough German approach to the over-indebted Greece while reinforcing their own belief that the EU is a bloc of debt and regulation, not of stability and prosperity. The willingness to submit to the EU’s unequal East-West relationship was gone.
Defiance
If the 2000s as a period of submission structurally favored the pro-European forces, the 2010s as a period of defiance favored the sovereigntists. The eurozone crisis opened a Pandora’s box of crises that amounted to a global and especially an EU polycrisis: right-wing populism, the so-called migration crisis, the climate crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s attack on the transatlantic partnership, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian aggression and inflation. Viktor Orbán, as the chief architect of the sovereignty strategy, has managed to exploit virtually every one of these crises. The sovereignists have seized on the persistent symbolic asymmetries and economic inequalities as an opportunity. The East-West divide allowed them to become an authentic mirror that sharpened both the demand for equality with Western Europeans and the growing skepticism towards the collapsing image of the European (neo)liberal mainstream and the Western European social model as a civilizational norm.
The economic crisis of 2008 was a watershed event despite its varied impact on individual countries and their regions. It undermined the pro-European promise that Eastern workers would receive further socio-economic convergence in the EU single market in return for working lower-paid jobs for Western European investors or consumer markets. The crisis has either reversed, halted or slowed down this convergence. Orbán himself returned to power in 2010 on the back of tough debt management and the sovereignist slogan ‘We will not be a colony’. As successful as Poland was in weathering the crisis, following the 2015 election victory of the radical conservative party Law and Justice, Mateusz Morawiecki, the future prime minister, announced his goal of freeing the country from being ‘dependent’ on the excessive economic and decision-making power of foreign, and especially German, capital. Poland has continued to converge, as its GDP per capita went from 69 per cent of the EU average GDP per capita in 2015 to today’s figure of 80 per cent, but without breaking the glass ceiling of economic dependence.
The demand for socio-economic equalization was accompanied by skepticism about what kind of economic model is being caught up with. After the economic crisis, Europe began to fall behind the United States and China both economically and technologically due to austerity policies and lack of investment. While the EU’s GDP was slightly larger than that of the US in 2008, it is now more than a third smaller. Neoliberalism was something the Central European economists coproduced transnationally, and it was thus an inherent part of their 1980s skepticism about the Western European social model. If Václav Klaus and other Central European neoliberals, along with their Thatcherite idols, had been railing against the alleged social and environmental overregulation coming out of Brussels and Western Europe since the 1990s, they were now vindicated. Both the moribund Western European welfare state and the underfunded European Green Deal agenda were symbolic opportunities for mixing neoliberalism and sovereigntism to level this skepticism against the new ‘communism’ from Brussels again.
Since 2015, the so-called migration crisis has become an even greater opportunity to deepen the belief that Western Europe has lost its instinct for civilizational self-preservation. Then for perhaps the first and last time since their countries joined the EU, Central European leaders revived the Visegrád Four as a homogeneous bloc with a clear purpose. The Kunderian notion that Western European societies, unlike their post-communist counterparts, were no longer capable of defending Western values was given its full racial dimension. The Central European reaction to the crisis and the EU’s refugee relocation plan was clear. Petr Fiala, then still in his role as the Czech opposition leader against an allegedly populist government made up of the Social Democrats and Andrej Babiš’s ANO, proposed cutting ‘social benefits’ and ‘defending the border’ with barbed wire as the only solution to migration. The Czech sovereignist President Miloš Zeman rejected the principles of the relocation and the balanced distribution of refugees between the most and the least affected EU states because it was ‘practically impossible’ to integrate Muslims or people from the global South in general. This defiance of the so-called Brussels diktat and the idea of a more culturally and racially diverse society was also a further betrayal of the solidarity with Europe’s South.
By the end of the 2010s, the socio-economic divide between the EU’s West and East was a little shallower but symbolically much deeper. Its symbolic deepening was due equally to Western European elites and the pro-European mainstream. The defiant demands for equalization or being heard resonated with Western European stereotypes of the supposedly irrational, autocratic, and corrupt societies in the Eastern periphery. A caricature of this approach was provided by the famous Belgian liberal politician Guy Verhofstadt, for whom the Central European ‘mini-Trumps’ were indiscriminately ‘a greater existential threat than Brexit’ to the EU and the ‘European soul’. Like Verhofstadt, many Western European politicians, pundits, and journalists rushed to suggest how to ‘protect EU values’ in the East or discipline the local societies by withdrawing EU funds. The Western Europeans themselves did not abandon their crippling stereotypes of Central and Eastern Europeans, which ultimately strengthened the domestic position of local sovereigntists as national protectors against the contempt of Western European elites.
Emancipation
In 2022, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine surprisingly catapulted the EU’s East into the European leadership. While the coronavirus pandemic reinforced the region’s political peripherality, the Central European and Baltic states were praised for their swift and unconditional support for Ukraine. In an almost ironic development in terms of Kundera’s 1980s essay, Russians helped some of Central Europe’s outcasts to symbolically ‘return to the West’ (yet again). The new half-sovereigntist and half-pro-European government of Petr Fiala and its Presidency of the EU Council, and the sovereigntist Poland were given a new European mission. As some in the transatlantic think-tank and media bubble suddenly discussed this resolute reaction as an eastward shift of ‘the center of gravity’, the atmosphere of the New Europe of the 2000s was back. With the election victory of Donald Tusk in Warsaw, the pro-European strategy could be revived as an alternative to the defiant Orbánist strategy. Neither strategy is submissive anymore; both seek an assertive emancipation.
Let’s start with the revived pro-European strategy. The immediate and sustained support for Ukraine from Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, and the Baltic and Nordic countries is to be admired. The Eastern criticism of the initial indifference and passivity of Western European partners is understandable.
However, the Central European and Baltic support for Ukraine against Russia has its own power ambitions in the center of gravity shift to the East. Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction is often seen as an ‘opportunity’ for further convergence of the EU’s East in a way reminiscent of the ‘colonization’ of Central Europe by Western European investors. The very legitimate criticism of Russian imperialism then exposes a Central European egocentrism when it comes to the global South. According to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, Russia’s war is the ‘last colonial war’ in Europe because the ‘time of European empires is in the past’. The pro-European Central Europeans thus subscribe to the portrayal of the EU as the ultimate peace project in a world dominated by almost exclusively non-Western imperialisms. The skepticism about Western Europe’s reluctance to get more involved then welcomes the EU’s vassalization in relation to the United States. Only this time, instead of spreading Western values in the global South, they must be defended in Europe.
Alongside this pro-European strategy, the sovereigntist strategy reproduces the earlier defiance within broader global and non-Western trends. The Russian aggression has destroyed Orbán’s ambitions to unite Central Europe as an ultra-conservative counterweight to the supposedly ultra-progressive Western Europe. However, the authoritarian transition and return to power of Robert Fico as the Slovak Prime Minister and the more than pragmatic embrace of this sovereignism by Andrej Babiš in Czechia suggest its vitality. Orbán hardly exempts the EU from vassalage to the US as he patiently awaits Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In doing so, the Hungarian government has mixed the rhetoric of Western European colonization with continued cooperation with the German car industry and a new collaboration with Chinese battery and electric car manufacturers in the EU single market. Orbán and Fico’s appeals for a ‘peaceful solution’ and their indifference to Russian imperialism are ultimately just a much more heinous continuation of the earlier Western European policy towards Ukraine, but also a balancing maneuver towards the growing weight of China and the global South, as well as Trump’s possible return.
The European mainstream
The two strategies may compete with each other both domestically and at the (Central) European level. However, Ukraine aside, there are clear overlaps between them in terms of the Union’s reconstruction in the 2020s. Today, they are two different responses to the original Central European ambitions and skepticism in a new context. That context is half-hearted political emancipation and halfway socio-economic equality in a Union that lost its self-confidence in claiming its socioeconomic and civilizational superiority. These two strategies are, therefore, no Eastern exoticism but are fully in line with the center-to-far-right transformation of the EU into a defensive Fortress Europe.
Central European political elites agree on several issues, including the fight against migration and the delaying of the Green Deal. It is therefore not surprising that the pro-European Tusk, like the sovereignists Orbán and Fico, publicly opposed the Union’s new migration strategy by pledging that ‘the EU will not impose any migrant quotas on us’. Almost a decade after the so-called migration crisis, the pact is supposed to resolve the dispute over the principles of relocation and fair redistribution of migrants among all member states. The common goals of preventing illegal migration from non-European countries and not sharing too much of the responsibility for dealing with it unite Central Europeans once again. The skepticism about the goals of the Green Deal and the desire to reduce or slow down the efforts to reach them in favor of the EU competitiveness also unites many Central European politicians, from the anti-Russian Fiala to the pro-Russian Orbán.
These overlaps are part of the gradual far-right transformation of the European mainstream following the European Parliament elections. This transformation is being driven across Europe by the growth of the far right and the mainstreaming of its rhetoric and political programs in public debates, often with the help of the center-right parties, whether it is the acceptance of the post-fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni into this European mainstream, the participation of the far right in the Swedish, Finnish and Dutch governments, or the spectacular rise of the AfD in Germany. These national successes were mirrored in the European elections. The right-wing shift in the European Parliament symbolically coincides with the Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council in the second half of 2024. With irony, one might ask whether the EU’s East will finally achieve its political and economic equality by participating in this center-to-far-right reconstruction of Europe.
Daniel Šitera is a researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and a lecturer at the Prague University of Economics and Business. His research interests include comparative and international political economy, Central and Eastern Europe, and the economic dimension of European integration.
The Czech original of this text was published in the cultural journal A2 with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.