Countries in the old communist bloc are desperate to enter the EU. But, as crime and corruption thrive, their hopes are, if anything, dwindling. John Lloyd reports
Ten years after the revolutions that were to set them free, the countries from the centre to the far east of Europe are trapped between the world they thought they had left and the one they thought they were joining.
The world they thought they had left was the Soviet bloc. The past ten years have seen its dissolution and the painful rediscovery by most of its constituent members that they were woefully ill-equipped to make a transition anywhere, except backwards. Russia, the core state of the Soviet Union and its successor as a nuclear (but no other kind of) superpower, has been the most obvious, if not the worst, example. At the end of a decade of failed economic reform and a political process that has seen the corruption of the elite, the criminalisation of society and the preservation of only the most fragile democratic institutions, it is now moving to active hostility towards the west.
The war in Chechnya is excoriated in the west but is popular in Russia and has so far gone well for the Russian forces. It has turned the ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, and in charge of the war, into the leading contender for the presidency.
The war has united Russian political society: the architect of privatisation, Anatoly Chubais, now head of the main energy company, has said it marks "the rebirth of the Russian army"; while Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 80-year old Slavophile and Nobel prize winner, said in a Russian TV interview recently that "we have been retreating for 15 years [ie, since Gorbachev]; we need to stop somewhere. We have capitulated everywhere. We capitulated in 1996 [in Chechnya]. Our country cannot abandon the right to defend itself and defence means completing the operation in some way."
According to Richard Pipes, the historian of the Russian revolution, Russia has returned to "rabid anti-western rhetoric" and he fears it is in the "same mood as at the height of the cold war".
The polls prove him right: some 65 per cent of Russians regret the dissolution of the Soviet Union and 69 per cent feel that Russia still has enemies - and for almost all, the main enemy is Nato.
Meanwhile in Central Europe, three countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland - are already in Nato and are considered to be in the first rank of prospective European Union members. They are the most economically advanced, the most secure and the most successful in attracting foreign investment. Because of that, they are routinely assumed to be home and dry in the common European house. They are not.
In all of these states, crime and corruption have increased dramatically; society has rapidly become polarised and fragmented; the political sphere is bitter; and a significant section of the new business class is proving a cross between corrupt and sluggish, with a rising stake in keeping things as they are. The Czech political scientist Jacques Rupnik told me in Prague that "people in Central Europe had huge enthusiasm at first, in part stimulated by the west; but now they are taking once again an ironic distance from politics and public affairs, a mentality you could say that was of the Good Soldier Schweik".
These states have seen a century of violent change to their borders (all of which are 20th century, usually postwar, creations), to their politics and to their international orientation. They have a vast deal of economic, political and historical stock-taking to do, which they are doing with differing degrees of efficiency - relatively well in Poland, more slowly in Hungary and so far surprisingly badly in the Czech Republic.
In all, the privatisation process - the transfer of assets from state to private hands - has been a hugely contested area of corruption, organised crime, insider capture of the profits and government timidity over the consequences for employment. Jacques de Larosiere, the former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said in Prague that privatisation in itself tended to have been fetishised, whereas "privatisation without corporate governance is useless".
Government can do little in this: indeed, foreign investors sometimes see it as a collaborator with the worst practices of the new economic nomenklatura. Early in November, the US entrepreneur Ronald Lauder took full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Washington Post to allege that the local partner in his Central European Media Enterprise's development of TV Nova in Prague had "exploited his political influence" to "cut out the foreign investors". Lauder claimed that "the Czech government has failed to act" to redress the wrong - and thus "the international financial community [should] think twice before investing in the Czech Republic". The prime minister, Milos Zeman, has said that the advertisements contained "false and misleading information" - but the damage has been done.
It is much worse in the east. Bulgaria, Romania and above all Albania are areas that have witnessed little reform and where the political and economic systems languish. The coming together of a new political class - part political, part business, part criminal, part state enterprise managers who effectively "own" their companies - has seen the consolidation of a group with an interest in stasis. There is very little political will to undertake the reforms necessary for entry into the EU.
"In Romania," a senior official who did not wish to be named told me, "we have brought in a whole series of laws. Laws are not the problem. The point is their observance. People do not consider themselves to be under the law or above the law - they are beyond the law."
The dramatic disaster areas - they will be more so as winter bites - are the war-damaged states of the former Yugoslavia - Serbia, Bosnia and the province of Kosovo. On the war's successful conclusion in summer, Europeans promised a great deal - a stability pact, a Marshall Plan for the Balkans and accelerated entry into the EU for the countries of the region. But since then, all has been delay and bureaucratic wrangling. A senior EU bureaucrat, who also asked to remain anonymous, told me: "I'm horrified by the lack of progress on the stability pact. I think we in Europe are presently extremely ill-equipped to help south-eastern Europe."
Jiri Musil, the Czech political philosopher, says that "history is very important for small states; and that is a region of very small states". Yet if they cannot shake themselves free from the tyrannies of their histories - or their interpretations of history - then they remain victims to it, and to the threat of being shunned by the "international financial community", as Lauder calls it. Not one investor has gone near Bosnia since peace was declared - in spite of a vast range of temptations.
Russia's immediate neighbours are growing more and more alarmed. The relatively advanced Baltic states, which have all (especially Estonia) seized their chance to move into the Central European camp and are now urgent applicants to Nato and the EU, are wary - but believe they have done enough to ensure that the western states will defend their independence.
Not so the rest. Relations between Russia and the former Soviet states most important to it have been relatively restrained since the USSR collapsed, but are based much more on personalities than on law. President Boris Yeltsin has cultivated a range of relations with his Belorussian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian and Kazakh opposite numbers through which deals have been done and tensions defused. But he leaves office in a few months; and if Vladimir Putin succeeds him, the new president will come to office not with the halo of democrat-liberator, but with the laurels of a dirty colonial war on his brow.
No wonder then that Leonid Kuchma, just re-elected president of Ukraine, has renewed an urgent request for a timetable for EU entry; or that Nursultan Nazarbaev, president of Kazakhstan, should have arrested a group of Russians accused of plotting to cause the separation of Russian-dominated Northern Kazakhstan from its Kazakh-occupied south.
The spectre of a Russia able to pursue its interests everywhere in the former Soviet space is a hideous one. All over that space - in eastern Estonia, in the suburbs of the Latvian capital Riga, in the southern Ukrainian province of Crimea and in its eastern Donbass coalfields, in northern Kazakhstan and all over Belarus - Russians or pro-Soviet non-Russians wait for a chance to reassert ownership of what was snatched from them unjustly. It doesn't matter if we think it is manifestly self-defeating: what we in the west think counts against a course of action in Russia now.
This is, as the Americans say, a challenge. They are right, for if it is simply left as a disaster nothing will be done. The challenge, however, is not so much to the US but to a Europe which has, for the past decade, been content to hand over the policy towards its own backyard substantially to the US State Department and US Treasury and must now come into its responsibilities as the dominant European power, albeit one without coherent leadership.
What is needed is a long-term strategic view of the region: how EU membership can best be used to promote its stability; what happens if membership is impossible in the short or even medium term; how far an EU "political space" is possible without the exigencies (and advantages) of economic membership. Policy in the region has failed not just, or even not largely, because the US acted wickedly or stupidly; it failed because no one knew what kind of societies would emerge after communism.
Now we know: these societies are deeply damaged. A slower process than that envisaged by neo-liberal optimism is probably needed - but it is a process that must be more engaged, and which draws all of the eastern countries into different fora of debate, questioning and mutual understanding.
Ten years on, we should have learnt that a one-way stream of enlightenment, from west to east, is not the answer.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
