The Belgian Curtain: Europe after Communism Part 4

These data are as bad as it gets. Senegal, Mali and Bangladesh are in the same league. The situation is better in Slovakia (63 percent). At 46 percent, the Czech Republic proved equal to the much richer United Kingdom and United States.

People everywhere do not blame their economic predicament on inapt administrations, or on specific leaders. Vladimir Putin is much more popular in Russia than his cabinet but the government get good marks.

The leadership in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, suffered precipitous drops in popularity since 1991. East Europeans - except the Russians - also rate the European Union higher than they do their own authorities. In Slovakia the ratio is a whopping three to one.

With the notable exceptions of Ukraine and the Czech Republic, east Europeans approve of their religious leaders. Ukrainians distrust their military - but all other nationalities are fond of the armed forces.

The media and journalists are universally highly rated as positive social influences.

Russians and Uzbeks are concerned about lack of housing. Health is a universal headache: two fifths of Russians, one third of Poles and Czechs and one quarter of Slovaks listed it as such. Central and east European education still yields superior results so only one fifth of Russians find it worrying. Respondents from other countries in the region did not.

Between two thirds and four fifths of the denizens of the crime-infested societies of the countries in transition registered delinquency as a major scourge, followed by corrupt political leaders, AIDS and disease, moral decline, poor drinking water, emigration, poor schooling, terrorism, immigration and ethnic conflict.

East Europeans are as xenophobic as their counterparts in the West.

Between half and three quarters of all respondents - fully 80 percent in the Czech Republic - thought that immigrants are a "bad influence on the country". Only Bulgaria welcomes immigration by a wide margin. But nine of ten Bulgarians decry emigration - Bulgarians fleeing abroad.

Three quarters do so in Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland and the former East Germany.

Ironically, the more xenophobic the society, the more concerned its members are with ethnic hatred. Almost three fifths of all Czechs identify it as the major problem facing the world today. Other east Europeans are equally worried by nuclear weapons, the gap between rich and poor, the environment and infectious diseases.

The survey reveals both the failure of transition and a decisive break between central and eastern Europe. The shared brief episode of communism failed to h.o.m.ogenize these parts of the continent. Central Europe - including Slovenia - with its history of industrial capitalism, modern bureaucratic governance and the rule of law - is reverting to its historical default. It is being reintegrated into the European mainstream.

The countries of east Europe - Poland included - are unable to catch up. Their transition is tortuous and unpopular among their subjects.

Their lot is, indeed, improving but glacially and imperceptibly. They are being left behind by a largely indifferent West. Their erstwhile central European co-inmates in the gulag of communism are now keen to distance themselves. They are considered a drag and an embarra.s.sment.

Their unquenched hopes for a better future are smothered by insurmountable economic and social problems.

European enlargement is likely to stall after the first intake of 10 new members in 2004. Those left out in the cold are excluded for a long stretch. Rather than relying on the double panacea of NATO and the EU, they would do well to start reforming themselves by bootstrapping.

Surveys like these are timely reminders of this unpleasant reality.

Left and Right in a Divided Europe

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

Even as West European countries seemed to have edged to the right of the political map - all three polities of central Europe lurched to the left. Socialists were elected to replace economically successful right wing governments in Poland, Hungary and, recently, in the Czech Republic.

This apparent schism is, indeed, merely an apparition. The differences between reformed left and new right in both parts of the continent have blurred to the point of indistinguishability. French socialists have privatized more than their conservative predecessors. The Tories still complain bitterly that Tony Blair, with his nondescript "Third Way", has stolen their thunder.

Nor are the "left" and "right" ideologically monolithic and socially h.o.m.ogeneous continental movements. The central European left is more preoccupied with a social - dare I say socialist - agenda than any of its Western coreligionists. Equally, the central European right is less individualistic, libertarian, religious, and conservative than any of its Western parallels - and much more nationalistic and xenophobic. It sometimes echoes the far right in Western Europe - rather than the center-right, mainstream, middle-cla.s.s orientated parties in power.

Moreover, the right's victories in Western Europe - in Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy - are not without a few important exceptions - notably Britain and, perhaps, come September, Germany. Nor is the left's clean sweep of the central European electoral slate either complete or irreversible. With the exception of the outgoing Czech government, not one party in this volatile region has ever remained in power for more than one term. Murmurs of discontent are already audible in Poland and Hungary.

Left and right are imported labels with little explanatory power or relevance to central Europe. To fathom the political dynamics of this region, one must realize that the core countries of central Europe (the Czech Republic, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland) experienced industrial capitalism in the inter-war period. Thus, a political taxonomy based on urbanization and industrialization may prove to be more powerful than the cla.s.sic left-right dichotomy.

THE RURAL versus THE URBAN

The enmity between the urban and the bucolic has deep historical roots.

When the teetering Roman Empire fell to the Barbarians (410-476 AD), five centuries of existential insecurity and mayhem ensued. Va.s.sals pledged allegiance and subservience to local lords in return for protection against nomads and marauders. Trading was confined to fortified medieval cities.

Even as it petered out in the west, feudalism remained entrenched in the prolix codices and patents of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian empire which encompa.s.sed central Europe and collapsed only in 1918.

Well into the twentieth century, the majority of the denizens of these moribund swathes of the continent worked the land. This feudal legacy of a brobdignagian agricultural sector in, for instance, Poland - now hampers the EU accession talks.

Va.s.sals were little freer than slaves. In comparison, burghers, the inhabitants of the city, were liberated from the bondage of the feudal labour contract. As a result, they were able to acquire private possessions and the city acted as supreme guarantor of their property rights. Urban centers relied on trading and economic might to obtain and secure political autonomy.

John of Paris, arguably one of the first capitalist cities (at least according to Braudel), wrote: "(The individual) had a right to property which was not with impunity to be interfered with by superior authority - because it was acquired by (his) own efforts" (in Georges Duby, "The age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1981). Max Weber, in his opus, "The City" (New York, MacMillan, 1958) wrote optimistically about urbanization: "The medieval citizen was on the way towards becoming an economic man ... the ancient citizen was a political man".

But communism halted this process. It froze the early feudal frame of mind of disdain and derision towards "non-productive", "city-based"

vocations. Agricultural and industrial occupations were romantically extolled by communist parties everywhere. The cities were berated as hubs of moral turpitude, decadence and greed. Ironically, avowed anti-communist right wing populists, like Hungary's former prime minister, Orban, sought to propagate these sentiments, to their electoral detriment.

Communism was an urban phenomenon - but it abnegated its "bourgeoisie"

pedigree. Private property was replaced by communal ownership.

Servitude to the state replaced individualism. Personal mobility was severely curtailed. In communism, feudalism was restored.

Very like the Church in the Middle Ages, communism sought to monopolize and permeate all discourse, all thinking, and all intellectual pursuits. Communism was characterized by tensions between party, state and the economy - exactly as the medieval polity was plagued by conflicts between church, king and merchants-bankers.

In communism, political activism was a precondition for advancement and, too often, for personal survival. John of Salisbury might as well have been writing for a communist agitprop department when he penned this in "Policraticus" (1159 AD): "...if (rich people, people with private property) have been stuffed through excessive greed and if they hold in their contents too obstinately, (they) give rise to countless and incurable illnesses and, through their vices, can bring about the ruin of the body as a whole". The body in the text being the body politic.

Workers, both industrial and agricultural, were lionized and idolized in communist times. With the implosion of communism, these frustrated and angry rejects of a failed ideology sp.a.w.ned many gra.s.sroots political movements, lately in Poland, in the form of "Self Defence".

Their envied and despised enemies are the well-educated, the intellectuals, the self-proclaimed new elite, the foreigner, the minority, the rich, and the remote bureaucrat in Brussels.

Like in the West, the hinterland tends to support the right. Orban's Fidesz lost in Budapest in the recent elections - but scored big in villages and farms throughout Hungary. Agrarian and peasant parties abound in all three central European countries and often hold the balance of power in coalition governments.

THE YOUNG and THE NEW versus THE TIRED and THE TRIED

The cult of youth in central Europe was an inevitable outcome of the utter failure of older generations. The allure of the new and the untried often prevailed over the certainty of the tried and failed.

Many senior politicians, managers, entrepreneurs and journalists across this region are in their 20's or 30's.

Yet, the inexperienced temerity of the young has often led to voter disillusionment and disenchantment. Many among the young are too identified with the pratfalls of "reform". Age and experience rea.s.sert themselves through the ballot boxes - and with them the disingenuous habits of the past. Many of the "old, safe hands" are former communists disingenuously turned socialists turned democrats turned capitalists.

As even revolutionaries age, they become territorial and hidebound.

Turf wars are likely to intensify rather then recede.

THE TECHNOCRATS / EXPERTS versus THE LOBBYIST-MANAGERS

Communist managers - always the quintessential rent-seekers - were trained to wheedle politicians, lobby the state and cadge for subsidies and bailouts, rather than respond to market signals. As communism imploded, the involvement of the state in the economy - and the resources it commanded - contracted. Multilateral funds are tightly supervised. Communist-era "directors" - their skills made redundant by these developments - were shockingly and abruptly confronted with merciless market realities.

Predictably they flopped and were supplanted by expert managers and technocrats, more attuned to markets and to profits, and committed to compet.i.tion and other capitalistic tenets. The decrepit, "privatized"

a.s.sets of the dying system expropriated by the nomenclature were soon acquired by foreign investors, or shut down. The old guard has decisively lost its capital - both pecuniary and political.

Political parties which relied on these cronies for contributions and influence-peddling - are in decline. Those that had the foresight to detach themselves from the venality and dissipation of "the system" are on the ascendance. From Haiderism to Fortuynism and from Lepper to Medgyessy - being an outsider is a distinct political advantage in both west and east alike.

THE BUREAUCRATS versus THE POLITICIANS

The notion of an a-political civil service and its political - though transient - masters is alien to post communist societies. Every appointment in the public sector, down to the most insignificant sinecure, is still politicized. Yet, the economic decline precipitated by the transition to free markets, forced even the most backward political cla.s.ses to appoint a cadre of young, foreign educated, well-traveled, dynamic, and open minded bureaucrats.

These are no longer a negligible minority. Nor are they bereft of political a.s.sets. Their power and ubiquity increase with every jerky change of government. Their public stature, expertise, and contacts with their foreign counterparts threaten the lugubrious and supernumerary cla.s.s of professional politicians - many of whom are ashen remnants of the communist conflagration. Hence the recent politically-tainted attempts to curb the powers of central bankers in Poland and the Czech Republic.

THE NATIONALISTS versus THE EUROPEANS

The malignant fringe of far-right nationalism and far left populism in central Europe is more virulent and less sophisticated than its counterparts in Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, or the Netherlands.

With the exception of Poland, though, it is on the wane.