by Ferenc Laczó
Having been born ‘behind the Iron Curtain,’ and now teaching history with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe in European Studies and liberal arts programs in Maastricht, my personal trajectory cannot be properly comprehended and would not even be imaginable without the EU’s ‘big bang enlargement.’ I happen to have received my bachelor’s degree from University College Utrecht back in 2003 when the possibilities of studying at Western institutions remained rare for students from Central and Eastern Europe. This was a time when studying in the West still implied travelling across the continent by bus only to return to my hometown, Budapest, after being woken up in the dead of night by border controllers at Hegyeshalom – rude awakenings that must be entirely unfamiliar to my slightly younger compatriots.
The legacy of Europe’s previous division, which in the days of my youth appeared to be losing its relevance, has come to define my scholarly possibilities and ambitions quite directly.
The institutionalized division in academia between ‘Europe’ and ‘Eastern Europe’ has—despite numerous painful cuts and some forced mergers—been largely reproduced after the Cold War. Attempts to place Eastern Europe into an all-European context—i.e. exploring this large and heterogeneous region’s manifold roles and functions within and impacts on contemporary European history in a nuanced and critical fashion, not least through centering East-West relations and dynamics—continues to be way too rare an enterprise for my taste. My feeling of growing inadequacy for dealing ‘just with Eastern Europe’ when Eastern Europe’s role and place within Europe and the world at large appeared to have changed so radically in my youth, has largely determined my academic interests and career choices.
Recalling my formative years when I was ‘not yet properly European,’ my sense now is that the ‘big bang enlargement’ has changed the EU more than Western Europeans had expected but less than East Europeans had hoped.
I would argue that this crucial difference in how the two parties have experienced recent transformations has much to do with the divergent expectations with which they entered their unconventional marriage after the Cold War. These divergent expectations might even be seen as the root cause of the palpable mutual disappointments with how this marriage has functioned ever since.
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Notwithstanding all their internal diversity, Western Europeans—for whom the end of the Cold War meant no real rupture to their lives—tended to believe and trust, in a rather conservative fashion, that adding numerous, mostly smallish, and rather peripheral countries to the EU was unlikely to imply significant changes for Europe as a whole. They might have continued to fear ‘Europeans from the East,’ but generally believed they were in the position to control and manage the process of any future enlargement. I must admit, this belief made sense at the time. After all, the socioeconomic gap between ‘the two halves of the continent’ was never larger than at the time of the Copenhagen criteria’s formulation in 1993.
East Europeans, experiencing another historically unprecedented transformation after 1989—this time trying, as a contemporary witticism put it, to regain the egg once the omelette had already been made—cherished radical hopes during those years. They had illusions that their future Union membership would assure freedom, prosperity, and security all at once, and would soon result in their substantive equality (individual as well as collective-national) within an enlarged Western-style Europe. The power of such illusions in early post-communist Eastern Europe was clearly connected to, and may even have been trigged by, an acute loss of orientation that the end of vita sovietica induced.
A key buzzword accompanying Europeanization in the 1990s was Westernization. Shortly after their victory in the Cold War, the core Western countries exuded a newfound self-confidence and ended up recurrently overestimating their ability to transform others in their image. I only really started to hear about the possibility–and, more often, the threat–of Easternization around the mid-2010s.
By the early 21st century, due to the spectacular rise of non-Western and non-democratic powers—China most importantly, but also several Gulf states among others—, Western exposure to influences from various parts of the world should have emerged as an urgent matter of discussion within the West. Instead of initiating a more earnest discussion on the moral and political price of growing economic interdependence with such powers, what we often got instead was a polemic on how the multiplying symptoms of crisis on Europe’s new-old periphery—such as in Russia, Hungary, and even Poland—potentially endangered the Western core or foreshadowed its sorry future. In other words, if in the former case ‘Easternization’ was publicly downplayed due to vested economic interests, in the latter case the East’s influence came to be exaggerated for political reasons. This is obviously not to imply that political deterioration in the just mentioned countries was not substantial. However, instead of exaggerating their peculiarities, the grave trends that emerged in these countries ought to have been analysed through an all-European and a more global frame.
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Being primarily a market-enlarging project, with a complex and opaque system of rules attached to it, in socioeconomic terms EU enlargement after the Cold War was always likely to reproduce, if not downright reinforce or even strengthen, core-periphery relations. This was especially true considering the lack of advancement of common social policies across Europe.
The contrast between the core and the periphery within Europe today admittedly overlaps less directly with the distinction between Western and Eastern Europe than it did back in the 1990s. Some Eastern member states—think Poland or Slovenia—have clearly fared better in socioeconomic terms in recent years than Southern European countries such as Greece or Italy. That said, despite seemingly generous compensatory mechanisms, primarily in the shape of structural funds, the Eastern peripheries of the Union have most certainly not disappeared. As a matter of fact, the twenty least developed regions within the EU are still all right next to its Eastern border. All these regions are in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, with most regions of the former three being in this unenviable position.
What has emerged through the big bang enlargement is all in all a less balanced Union.
While nearly every second member state of the EU could be called ‘post-Eastern’ by 2013, in demographic terms the ‘newer’ ones contain only about one-fifth of the overall EU population (and migration patterns have only reduced the share of people residing and being employed in these countries). There being significant economic disparities between the western and the eastern ‘halves’ of Europe in the early twenty-first century, the economic share of the latter has in fact remained well below one-fifth of Europe’s economy. Courtesy this, a relatively underdeveloped part of the continent, containing numerous mostly smallish nation-states, has come to play a disproportionately large political role at the European level post-2004. Currently, it is responsible, among other things, for nearly every second Council vote and role of European Commissioner. At the same time, these ‘post-Eastern’ member states have come to possess so much clout within the EU without their citizens acquiring anywhere near a proportional share within European elites.
East Europeans have thus acquired disproportionate power within the Union via the nation-state principle but continue to exert negligible influence through the transnational logic.
This was of course quite predictable.
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What has surprised and disappointed me more in recent years, not least as a citizen of Hungary, is just how meek and indulgent the EU’s response has been to the evident concentration of power and the worsening threats of de-democratization within its borders. Much ink has been spilled on why exactly the two pioneers of the revolutionary changes of 1989, Poland and Hungary, ended up in the role of ‘the most problematic cases’ in recent years. Questions have been asked regarding what extent their assumption of this unenviable role has had to do with unexpected and sudden historical reversals, with the misfortunate logic of their Europeanization, with problematic local traditions, or rather with Western stereotypes about them, etc. This is not the place to enter into such polemics.
What matters more for my purposes is how in retrospect it appears as though the enlargement process of the post-Cold War years created an optical illusion. The unusual form of Western tutelage exercised at the time led many East Europeans, including the author of these lines, to perceive the EU as an eager promoter and effective guarantor of liberal democratic standards. The indulgent treatment towards Italy under Silvio Berlusconi’s rule and the EU’s incompetent approach towards the far-right in power in Austria around the 2000s should have sent serious warning signs, however, their gravity was widely underestimated at the time.
The years since the big bang enlargement have thus meant a process of unlearning for me, a painful realization that liberal democratic norms and values are much less firmly secured in the EU than previously assumed. Critical EU experts had of course been largely aware of this design defect in the EU and the massive gap between ambitious rhetoric and institutional realities. Still, the often-complacent attitudes of this gentlemen’s club started to seriously hurt millions of EU citizens (including myself) only more recently.
What recent years have taught us is that the contemporary EU not only lacks appropriate instruments but also the political will to try and defend liberal democratic standards, let alone promote in urgent and creative ways a liberal democratic culture and practices within struggling member states.
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More generally, what has struck me during the crisis waves since 2004 is that even though the EU may be viewed as a moderately successful project, especially when placed in a global comparison, it has set several problematic precedents for itself.
Let me draw on the EU’s self-representation from some two decades ago to illustrate what I mean. The EU defines itself ideal-typically as ‘a union of liberal democratic states based on the rule of law that are developing new forms of multilayered governance to develop workable solutions and reach mutually beneficial compromises and which are pooling elements of their sovereignty consensually and in a unidirectional process, a union that is at the same time open to the world, respects universal human rights, and practises solidarity.’
To my mind, the five major crises that the EU has faced in the early 21st century include a) the crisis of democracy and the rule of law; b) the Eurozone crisis, itself triggered by the global financial and economic crisis; c) the crisis related to migration and refugees; d) the exercise of democratic vetoes by member states and attempts from above to overcome them; and e) the shambles surrounding Brexit.
I would insist that the EU’s moderately successful responses to these crises nonetheless contradicts its admittedly flattering definition on practically each point. From these crises we can conclude that compromises may not always be mutually beneficial between EU member states (just think of developments in Greece during crisis b), the process of integration may not be unidirectional at all (which Brexit’s short-sighted pursuit has confirmed during crisis e), pooling sovereignty may not always be done consensually (think of how French and Dutch vetoes have been largely ignored during crisis d), Europe may not be nearly as open to the world as it claims to be, its actual respect for universal human rights may be overstated, and solidarity among its states is far from given (just think of the humanitarian tragedies around the EU’s external borders during crisis c). In fact, one can conclude that the EU may not even be a union of liberal democratic states any longer (think, most obviously, of the political state of Hungary today i.e. crisis a).
This cascading self-contradiction has in turn resulted in a new, heavily politicized debate around the legitimacy of EU-style integration, with the main cleavage now pitting right-wing populists against technocratic liberals. The former actors have made relatively minor yet steady gains in recent years.
To my mind, what is even more problematic than their worrisome gains is that while they prefer to scale back supranational forms of integration and promise protection to ‘ethnonationals,’ their rivals have shown no intention of creating a socially embedded form of capitalism on the European level either.
To be sure, plans to foster more positive forms of integration have recurrently been floated on various fora in recent years. However, their political feasibility seems more than doubtful in the foreseeable future.
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From today’s point of view, the 1990s appears as the highpoint of Europeanist expectations and hopes. By contrast, few currently believe that widening and deepening the EU can succeed simultaneously. That said, crises also open up new political opportunities. By focusing on the worsening crisis that simultaneous efforts to widen and deepen the EU after the Cold War have brought might indeed prove to be a most fruitful way of grasping where we have arrived today.
Two decades after the EU’s big bang enlargement, we appear to be living in a moment when widening and deepening the EU are both on the table once again. However, this time these twin processes are planned rather separately – the EU would be widened, so that others can deepen their integration without some of their current and increasingly awkward partners.
The ambition to widen and deepen in this manner may well reshape the EU in the coming years. If so, that would ultimately be another legacy of Europe’s East-West divide – a divide that may have lost much of its relevance in my lifetime but apparently continues to haunt our continent.
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A shorter version of this text previously appeared on the website of New Eastern Europe under the title “An unconventional marriage: twenty years since the EU’s ‘Big Bang enlargement’,” see it here.
