A Hungarian academic reexamines the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe
I was born “behind the iron curtain” in the final days of the Soviet empire.
I grew up in Budapest during a predominantly liberal, seemingly post-ideological age when, as political scientist Ivan Krastev remarked in a recent interview, the future seemed to be “right next” to us. I currently teach contemporary history, with a focus on Eastern Europe, in European Studies and in liberal arts programs at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. My personal trajectory is thus inextricably linked to the transformations symbolized by the year 1989 and the European Union’s “big bang enlargement” some two decades ago—when twelve countries with more than a hundred million people, the vast majority of them East European, were added to the EU practically overnight.
In recent years, I have been trying to make sense of this enlargement, including the misconceptions, misunderstandings, and various tensions between East and West that have continued to shape Europe. Each year, I am confounded by how little my students, who typically arrive in my classroom after a decade-and-a-half of education in West European countries, seem to know about East European politics and cultures—and just how “normal” some of them consider their own ignorance. My own teaching position at Maastricht University, in the southern Dutch city where the EU was founded in the early 1990s, was created in the mid-2010s partly because the curriculum in European Studies was considered too Western-centric. Various forms of this imbalance in educational curricula persist across large swaths of Europe, and they are only a microcosm of a much larger problem: two decades after an apparently successful enlargement process, many East Europeans believe they have remained second-class citizens. With only one of the largest 500 companies in the EU headquartered in the East and none of the top hundred universities being based there, it would be hard to deny that their suspicion has some basis in fact.
It may therefore be high time to consider the place and roles of Eastern Europe and East Europeans in the history of European integration. I am convinced that a more robust understanding of this history could substantially improve relations between countries and peoples across Europe’s now much-less crucial, but quietly persistent, East-West divide. And it may be urgently needed to give transnational democracy a second chance amidst the current rise of illiberal forces.
The predominance of Western-centric assumptions in the mainstream historiography of European integration should perhaps be unsurprising, given that the predecessors of today’s EU originated exclusively within Western Europe and did so in the context of the Cold War. Yet, this context already points to a much more defining role that the continent’s Eastern parts have played. In fact, Eastern Europe has taken on numerous significant, and still largely underexplored, roles in connection with European integration since World War II.
During most of the Cold War, Eastern Europe acted as a rival against the currents of modernity in the West. In the late years of that conflict, it became an increasingly involved, if quietly desperate, partner. During the post-Communist transition, it acted much like a pupil trying to imitate its (Western) mentor as best as it could. And then, into the early twenty-first century, it turned into a neoliberal experimental ground and engine of renewed economic growth. In more recent years, East European member states of the EU—Hungary above all, but Poland as well—have been viewed by many in Western Europe as “internal others” once again after their governments took authoritarian turns.
Let me briefly elaborate on each of the roles listed above. If Eastern Europe—the part of the continent that came to belong to the Soviet sphere only after 1945 and which now largely overlaps with the EU’s “newer member states”—at first explicitly rejected the “capitalist West,” its vision of modernity nevertheless remained greatly inspired by images of Western development. The fierce competition between the two halves of the continent at the time was not only about growth rates and production levels. In the face of the challenge from the East, West Europeans understood that they needed to make mass politics safe for liberal democracy and the market economy by introducing elements of planning and extending welfare provisions. In the immediate aftermath of the launch of economic integration under Soviet primacy in the East, they developed new forms of economic integration with some transnational elements.
The late Cold War years mellowed several once-fierce rivals of the West into more accommodating partners one could “do business with.”
Ironically, even extreme authoritarianism did not preclude these arrangements: Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s tyranny was a pioneer in developing Western ties as it joined the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and even entered into trade agreements with the European Communities (the predecessors of the EU). The Ceauşescu regime’s harsh repression during the 1980s was in fact connected to his fanatical commitment to repaying Western loans; the latter required forcibly lowering local consumption levels, which predictably generated societal discontent and in turn led to further surveillance and crackdowns.
The increasingly pragmatic Hungarian party state, on the contrary, remained massively indebted by the late 1980s and became ever more heavily dependent on West German loans in particular. In their quiet desperation, Hungary’s reformist leaders even proved willing, months before the opening of the Berlin Wall, to negotiate the free exit of East German refugees from the country’s territory. This was a bold act that helped catalyze the swift collapse and unexpected disappearance of their former ally in East Berlin.
The peaceful end to the Cold War, the national independence and liberal democratic turn of the largest parts of Eastern Europe, the swift unification of the two Germanies in 1990, the establishment of the European Union via the Maastricht Treaty by 1992, and the preparation of detailed plans to enlarge the newly founded union eastward in 1993, were all part of the same historical moment.
The plan to enlarge the EU to include post-Communist Eastern Europe proved crucial for Europe as a whole. At that point the European Union was West European in all but name, and it had to confront the challenge of how to make post-Communist countries conform to its standards. It needed to determine specific entry requirements. This raised some fundamental questions: What qualified as a “consolidated democracy”? What constituted “the rule of law”? What did a functioning market economy look like? And, what qualified as a competent and reliable state apparatus? The revolutionary changes associated with 1989 soon made the “new East Europeans” into eager pupils hoping to be admitted into the highly distinguished club of their former rivals. This turned out to be the hour of the EU’s “transformative power” (Heather Grabbe) as it managed to impact domestic policies of East European countries via its conditionality for membership.
I will never forget the large billboards in Budapest promising, in a style unmistakably inherited from the former regime, that “Europe” was going to be “built here.” During that roughly decade-and-a-half, Europe tended to be depicted in “accession countries” as prosperous and peaceful, free and solidaristic. There appeared to be little difference between the self-presentation of the EU and its mainstream perception among us, model pupils. This was before reality came to bite East Europeans once again, as it so often had in the past. It is that naïve idealization of “Europe” in the 1990s—a rather mysterious entity possessing many desirable qualities that we East Europeans clearly lacked but to which we, confusingly enough, were also meant to belong—that defined this period in East European history.
But, almost as soon as they started to enthusiastically plunge themselves into their European future, East European states began to exhibit several ambiguities. They were visibly proud of their newly gained—or just regained—independence, yet eager to integrate into a European project that was intent on “pooling sovereignty.” They opened up economically yet often remained narrowly nationalistic in their political and cultural outlooks. They sought foreign capital and would uncritically accept Western advice on how to become more like the West. However, some would end up instead as experimental cases during what Philipp Ther aptly called the second, more radical wave of neoliberalism. A stark example of this neoliberal wave was when some Eastern European countries reintroduced flat taxation—the Baltic states (1994–5), Slovakia (2004) and Romania (2005)—a break with a whole century of consensus around progressive taxation in Europe.
By trying to copy what they understood as the Western model after 1989–91, East European countries thus came to exhibit in sharper form some of the basic tensions that characterized Western Europe at the time as well—tensions between deepening economic interconnectedness and the reproduction of key features of the nation state system, between the new realities of transnational integration and influential visions of national sovereignty. Since then, such tensions have only come to shape West European politics more. Ironically enough, the eager imitator ended up foreshadowing the future of the imitated.
When it comes to East-West dynamics in the two decades since the EU’s “big bang enlargement,” the 2008 financial crisis and the decline of democracy and rule of law standards within member states were especially important.
The crisis, which demonstrated that EU membership was no guarantee of increased prosperity, did much to dispel the naïve belief in the West’s superior wisdom. What made things even more disorienting for East Europeans was that the painful neoliberal restructuring they had gone through in the 1990s and early 2000s had finally started to pay off when the financial crisis and the harsh austerity measures imposed in its aftermath quickly reversed many of the gains.
If during the transition period the West appeared like a wise teacher with a long track record of tangible success, opportunistic East European politicians could now more credibly depict it as arrogant, self-serving, or even misguided. Such disenchantment often reignited old resentments. It soon made influential actors question whether trying to imitate the West remained prudent. The most notorious among them, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, went as far as to openly challenge whether playing by the liberal democratic script still benefited his country. A crisis of de-democratization and the rule of law soon followed.
The concentration of power has assumed a particularly acute form in Hungary for well over a decade. Poland, too, experienced democratic backsliding, and, in milder forms, so did Slovenia and Bulgaria. Currently, there are also growing concerns that Slovakia under Robert Fico’s premiership might soon follow in the footsteps of Orbán’s Hungary. This multinational political-legal crisis has in turn revealed just how little EU institutions can do to protect, let alone promote, liberal democracy in struggling member states. Tellingly, Hungarian scholars András Bozóki and Daniel Hegedüs even started to wonder whether the EU was enabling, rather than constraining, illiberal regimes in its midst.
Illiberal regimes in Eastern Europe may have repeatedly been depicted in recent years as constituting “internal others” intent on subverting common EU norms and values from within—whereby West Europeans have admittedly also revived some of their long-standing skepticism regarding the maturity of those “new Europeans.” East European illiberal actors may also be said to be holding up a mirror, or rather a mocking glass, to the supposedly buried but undead dark sides and prejudices of the West. After all, the heated debates surrounding the rise of illiberal regimes within the EU have brought to the fore a deeper polarization between two self-understandings of the West: as a liberal and progressive project, on the one hand, and as a rather exclusive cultural—or supposedly even racial—community, on the other.
Current interpretations of Europe’s East-West relations tend to focus on the achievements and shortcomings of the “Europeanization of Eastern Europe” since 1989. As I have aimed to show in this short essay, relevant East-West dynamics have been much more multifaceted than often assumed. A more nuanced perspective on these dynamics can help us reveal just how profoundly the relations to Eastern Europe have impacted the European project as a whole—through various hopes and fears, and through diverse strategies stretching from rejection all the way to incorporation.
It was the fierce rivalry with the Communist East after 1945 that motivated West Europeans to make extensive state interventions and develop generous welfare regimes. That rivalry was also among the factors motivating the launching of new, transnational forms of economic integration in the Eastern half of the continent. The remarkable mellowing of several East European rivals by the late 1980s decisively shaped the end of the Cold War, which soon led to the launch of an ambitious agenda to simultaneously deepen and broaden European integration and form the European Union. It must be viewed as ironic, then, that the basic tensions that resulted from Eastern Europe’s swift remodeling along Western lines in those years foreshadowed those of Western Europe in the early twenty-first century—a time when the emboldened illiberal challengers from the East further sharpened the already polarized self-understanding of the West.
Amidst the current rise of illiberal forces across large parts of the continent, a properly historical perspective on East-West relations—on the crucial, if often underestimated role of Eastern Europe in the history of European integration—may be urgently needed. Such a more nuanced perspective may even be necessary to give transnational democracy in Europe a second chance.◆
Ferenc Laczó was István Deák Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History (Spring 2024). He is Assistant Professor with tenure (universitair docent 1) in history at Maastricht University and a part-time affiliate of the Central European University’s Democracy Institute.
