What's So Eastern About Eastern Europe?

Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Leon Marc

• Publisher: Oldcastle Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781842433409
• eBook ISBN: 9781842434307
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Leon Marc gives the reader the big picture of Eastern Europe—its political, economic, social and cultural history, the nature of changes there and of the issues at stake in the political and economic transition—while putting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EU enlargement into a broader perspective of general European history. Three key strands of Eastern Europe—Central Europe, Eastern Europe proper, and Southeast Europe—are identified and the Germanic, Byzantine, and Ottoman influences on the region are examined. What's So Eastern About Eastern Europe? is written in an accessible, non-academic way, addressing the stereotypes about the region and their roots and explaining why the notion of Eastern Europe is now obsolete and misleading. It gives an Eastern European's perspective, and is informed by the author's own personal experience of the changes that brought the Wall down.

The Growing Pains of Transition

The democratisation process in Eastern Europe in the 1990s also represented an opportunity for the restoration of national sovereignty. In the case of the Baltic states, and the states of former Yugoslavia and Slovakia, this actually accompanied the process of democratisation. In fact, regaining independence was sometimes more attractive and emotionally stimulating than the much more demanding task of building a democracy. As we saw earlier, the years between 1918 and 1939 witnessed the first attempts in the majority of Eastern European countries to establish a nation-state. This meant that they were already lagging behind countries in Western Europe, even though Italy and Germany had only emerged as nation-states themselves in the late nineteenth century. Given the consequences of World War I, the economic crisis of the 1930s and the rise of violent totalitarian systems, it is not surprising that the mere twenty years or so between the two world wars were not enough to allow these new nation-states and their democracies time to consolidate their positions. After World War II, there was another chance but this time national sovereignty was limited by the Soviet Union and/or Communism.

A new opportunity arose after 1990. But in the meantime, societies in the West had begun to talk about life beyond the nation-state, which finally led to the creation of the European Union. In such a context, the new patriotism in Eastern Europe after 1990 was difficult to comprehend. It appeared out of touch with the spirit of the time in the rest of Europe. The drive to establish new nation-states by those small nations that had not had the chance to do so earlier in their histories was often misunderstood in Western Europe as an expression of a will to fragment, a movement towards what has been portrayed as Balkanisation (one of those political terms wrongly associated with the Balkans64). The counter argument – that only sovereign nations can decide on joining transnational or intergovernmental organisations like the EU – did not sound strong enough, both because the world had moved beyond traditional concepts of sovereignty and because most of these nations had only very limited experience, if any, of being a sovereign nation.

Nevertheless, with some exceptions, most of the new states from Central and Eastern Europe, once they joined the EU, became some of its most devoted and enthusiastic members. There is a good reason for that: for the peoples and Governments of Central and Eastern Europe the enlargement of 2004 was not (only) an enlargement of an already existing union. For them, it was a re-creation of a more wholesome Europe, one which cannot exist without them, a return to the realities before Yalta and the Iron Curtain. It was also a confirmation of their essential European virtues and qualities. Before World War II, life in cities like Ljubljana, Prague, Budapest, Bratislava and Warsaw (as I have been trying to show throughout this book) was not substantially different from life in Vienna, Munich, Milan and Berlin. There were differences in the size and wealth of the cities, but the way of life and the mentality of the people were essentially the same. This is too often forgotten.

Even the late Pope John Paul II, in his last book Memory and Identity, spoke about Central and Eastern Europe, and challenged the notion that these countries ‘returned’ to Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘An injustice has been done to Poland,’ writes the late Pope, ‘and to the Poles by the misleading thesis of a “return” to Europe’. Among the arguments in favour of the claim that the Poles (and, by analogy, other peoples in Central and Eastern Europe) have always been there as a part of Europe, the Pope lists the early adoption of Christianity, the Polish contribution in wars against the Mongols and later the Ottomans, various Polish philosophers and, more recently, the Polish contribution during World War II. Poland was more courageous than the Western Allies, the Pope argued: ‘While the Western democracies deluded themselves into thinking they could achieve something by negotiating with Hitler, Poland chose to accept war, despite the clear inferiority of her military and technological forces. At that moment the Polish authorities judged that this was the only way to defend the future of Europe and the European spirit.’ As we saw with the villagers of Vrhpolje, Eastern Europeans often resort to history in defending their position in Europe. This is not because they would like to live in the past, but because they want to draw attention to the fact that in the past both parts of Europe, East and West, used to live one shared history, not two separate ones.

In the eyes of Eastern Europeans, the last two generations of Western Europeans have become too easily accustomed to thinking of themselves as Europeans in an exclusive way, even though neither Western Europe nor even the European Union can simply be equated with Europe. On the other side of the divide, Eastern Europeans never stopped thinking of themselves as Europeans and did not start thinking of themselves as Eastern Europeans until the Western Europeans told them that that was what they were. But, in reality, Eastern Europeans are not Europeans because of their interactions with Western Europe, but because they too are the heirs to Europe’s Judaeo-Greco-Christian-Humanist culture. Obviously, the ways in which this culture was adopted were different in Eastern Europe as a whole and in the various nations within it. (There were also differences in the ways European culture expressed itself in Italy and in Britain, in Spain and in Sweden.) But that does not make Eastern Europe less European.

It is also true that in south-east Europe and ‘Eastern Europe proper’, the late arrival of Enlightenment ideas resulted in the slower development of the economy and liberal democracy, but even that does not make these countries less European, only less Western European. The Enlightenment is primarily a legacy of Western Europe but the European legacy as a whole cannot be reduced simply to the Enlightenment. This is what the draft European Constitution attempted to do (and failed).

Western Europe has not yet become accustomed to its newly-discovered sister and has not yet adopted her legacy in the joint and common heritage of Europe. In addition to the Latin and Greek scripts, the Cyrillic script is also a part of Europe’s inheritance; the whole Orthodox spiritual and artistic tradition belongs to Europe in the same way as Humanism and the Enlightenment do. Eastern Europe’s tragic experience of Communism should become a part of the continent’s collective memory, not just a grievance in conservative circles in Eastern Europe or an ongoing frustration for the disenfranchised. In culture, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Milosz, Kundera, Andrić, Ionesco, Bartok, Smetana, Dvořak, Plečnik and Jančar are some of the most widely recognised and valued Eastern European artists and yet they are still missing from many textbooks across Western Europe. We have the term ‘robot’ because of a Czech novel. We owe key astronomical discoveries to Copernicus, a Pole, and the very fundamentals of modern electricity were laid down by Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Bosnia-Herzegovina. One of the latest models of the Volkswagen Passat was designed by Robert Lešnik, a Slovenian. Lech Wałesa, Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II are some of the names that have become a part of the vocabulary of international politics and fundamentally changed Europe in the twentieth century. And there would have been no Renaissance, and therefore no Humanism, without the Greek artists and scholars who fled Greece after the Ottoman conquest and settled in Italy, carrying with them the intellectual legacy of the classical world.

It would, of course, be false to deny that the great men and women of Western Europe outnumber those from the Eastern half of the continent. There are many reasons for this. The first is demography: Eastern Europe has always been far less densely populated than Western Europe. Because of the difference in economic development which was a consequence of this, there were not enough large urban centres in Eastern Europe with the critical mass needed to encourage excellence in learning and science. If their talents were discovered at all, the most capable of Eastern Europeans simply had to leave for centres of learning elsewhere. These were mostly located in Western Europe where their origins were often forgotten or deliberately ignored. For many centuries, Slovenians, Czechs, Poles and others were simply labelled ‘Austrians’. Consider, for example, the fate of Dr Friderik Pregl who received a Nobel Prize in 1923 for his discoveries in chemistry. Born as a Slovenian in Ljubljana at a time when there were only around 1.25 million Slovenians, he is usually cited as an Austrian scientist. Certainly he left Slovenia for Austria ‘proper’ when he was a young student and there are conflicting accounts of whether he himself felt Slovenian or Austrian, but the issue of identity would probably not have arisen for him had there been a Slovenian national state during his lifetime.

The two most notable exceptions to the shared legacy and collective memory of the two halves of Europe were probably the Ottoman conquest of south-east Europe and the fifty years of Communist (Soviet) domination in Eastern Europe. Since its fall, Communism has often been too easily dismissed and parallels have even been drawn between it and the benign American influence over Western Europe in the same period. One must not forget the differences between democratic and totalitarian political and social systems but there was also the economic factor which made the two influences (American and Soviet) very different. Because the Communist/Soviet domination came about in a period that was characterised in Western Europe by a historically unprecedented growth (also heavily stimulated by the United States), the whole of Eastern Europe missed out on a unique opportunity to boost its economy. This can be very well illustrated by the case of the Czechoslovakia. Before World War II it was the most developed of all Eastern European countries and its cars, made by the firm of Škoda, were among the best-built cars in the world. In 1950 its GDP per capita was still 3,501 dollars65 (for Czechoslovakia combined); almost the same as Austria (3,706). Forty years later the Austrian GDP per capita was 16,905 dollars, while the Czech GDP was 8,815.

Since Eastern Europe was finally liberated, dignitaries and policymakers, scholars and journalists, property developers and tourists from the EU-15 countries have often praised the progress that the new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe have made since the re-emergence of their independence and democracy, and have even congratulated them on how much they have done since their accession to the EU in 2004. They are right in a way, but the realities are much more complex: these countries did not come out of the blue on 1 May 2004, nor was their relative progress merely a result of their newly-acquired independence, democracy, market economy and EU membership. Let’s turn back to the example of the Czech Republic. As it emerged out of Communism in 1990, its GDP (8,815 dollars) was only about a third lower than the Irish or Spanish or Portuguese GDP of the time, which ranged from 10,826 for Portugal to 11,800 dollars for Spain. Slovenia, which during the inter-war years caught up with the Czech Republic economically, came even closer with 11,404 dollars per capita. The Estonian GDP then was 10,794, the Latvian 9,886 and the Lithuanian 8,446. (Unfortunately, the three Baltic countries experienced a particularly dramatic fall in their GDP in the early 1990s, due to loss of markets, the complex relationship with Russia and the painful restructuring of their economies.) The stretch of countries from Estonia to Slovenia, i.e. the Central European tier of Eastern Europe, was clearly doing better than the rest of Eastern Europe, and these countries – despite Communism – were not dramatically poorer than the countries at other margins of Europe. In other words, the historic and geographic advantage of Central European countries could not have been wiped out completely by Communism. This explains the difference in performance between Central Europe and ‘Eastern Europe proper’, but also – at least in part – their ability to catch up after 1990 and, in particular, after their integration into the EU.

Further afield, the figures for 1990 differed. Bulgarian GDP was 5,597, Romanian 3,511, Yugoslav (as an average within pre-1990 frontiers) 5,279, Albanian 2,194. In ‘Eastern Europe proper’, Belarus GDP was 7,184 and Ukrainian 6,027. Both Ukraine and Belarus experienced a sharp decline in GDP in the following years. But the 1990 figures alone show that historic differences in economic development within Eastern Europe as a whole have persisted or – because of the accelerated growth in the west of the Continent throughout the twentieth century – even increased.

Unfortunately, many history and politics books on the subject treat Eastern Europe in a uniform way. This is particularly true for history before the nineteenth century and in the post-war period. Because of this they find it very difficult to explain the differences in the economic development that exist among the Eastern European countries, as outlined above. Even developments after 1990 are difficult to explain without knowing the past. Why are Estonians the boldest of all and Slovenians the richest, yet perhaps the most cautious as well? Why is Poland the most enthusiastic Atlanticist and why are conservatives there so strong? Why are the Czechs the most Eurosceptical and also probably the most liberal in the region? Why did some of the countries get rid of their former ruling elites, while, in others, faces from the past continue to dominate? Why have some Eastern European countries seen large proportions of their workforce migrating to Western Europe and others have not? Such questions cannot be convincingly explained without looking, not only at the past fifty years of Communism, but also at a slightly more distant past.

In the lead-up to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some of the new EU member states were found not to be terribly enthusiastic about the uniform plans for the celebration. They did not want to be seen primarily as victims of the Soviet Union, mercifully rescued by the West. True, their experience of Communism was common to all the countries of Eastern Europe, but they did not want their individual identities to be reduced just to that. And even in their experience of totalitarianism they were not alone: after World War II, Spain, Portugal and Greece endured right-wing dictatorships. Indeed, some of the developments in Eastern Europe have had surprising similarities with developments in these countries. Confrontation of a dark past, issues of reconciliation, social backwardness caused by totalitarian isolation, the lack of economic freedom, similar stages of economic development (think of the similarities in GDP figures presented earlier) – all of these are familiar problems in states that have suffered totalitarian government whether of the left or of the right.

Various explanations have been given for fact that, economically and socially, both ‘Eastern Europe proper’ and south-east Europe, have lagged behind the rest of the continent. Some even think that Orthodox Christianity, in much the same way that it was once able to reach an accommodation with the Ottoman occupation, was also less likely to have irreconcilable differences with Communism. In truth, it does seem that there is some difference between how Western Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) on the one hand and Orthodox Christianity on the other see the person as a part of society. Even contemporary Orthodox theology renounces the idea of giving priority to social problems; it underlines that the human person is the prime existential issue. Only within the framework of the individual human soul can one also solve social problems. ‘Man is making our society and all the institutions ill…’66 The two struggles, for men’s souls and for the improvement of society, should run in parallel, ‘with priority given to the cure of man… Those who give priority to the social problems are unaware of the reality and are also possessed by a Western notion of how these problems are solved.’67 In contrast to this, Catholic teaching went further and, relatively early, developed the concept of ‘structures of sin’, whereby an individual is not solely responsible for his or her actions, when these actions are the result of circumstances of social injustice which are inbuilt in the society. In such a situation, the individual is unable to act morally, i.e. against the sinful structures, which are forcing him to act in an immoral way. So the task of the faithful is not just to change one’s own moral conduct. Everyone is asked to help change society too. Similarly, the more conventional Protestant traditions are, according to Max Weber’s famous theory, responsible for the development of the enterprising spirit of capitalism and the wealth the latter created in the West68.

Therefore, while there may be a grain of truth in assertions about cultural and religious differences between East and West, they do not take us very far or at least do not explain the whole story. By the same kind of argument, one could consider the Mediterranean character and the omnipresent, sometimes militant, Catholicism in Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as the emergence of Fascist/authoritarian systems there in the past, as underlying reasons why this part of Europe has lagged behind other regions. (But then, Nazism took roots in a largely Protestant country and German Catholics showed stronger opposition to it than Protestants did.) Talk of ‘the Mediterranean character’ has a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• Preface: The End of a Divided Europe
• Prologue: The Three Classmates
• Introduction: Eastern Europeans Descend on the Isles
• St Ferghal and the Globalisation of the Middle Ages
• The Slavs and the Rest of the Eastern Europeans
• The Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Eastern Europe ‘Proper’
• Islam Creates the Balkans
• The Germans and Central Europe
• Rebellion, Emancipation and Totalitarianisms
• The Communist Effect: The Creation of Eastern Europe
• The Growing Pains of Transition
• Epilogue: The Future of Eastern Europe
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright