Submission, Resistance, and Emancipation? Two decades of the EU’s eastern periphery.

The primary ambition of post-communist elites in Central Europe was an “innocent” escape from the thrall of the Russian-dominated “East” back to the civilized “West,” where they aimed to achieve political and economic equality. As early as the 1980s, Milan Kundera articulated this aspiration in his book on Central Europe, A Kidnapped West. Though supposedly innocent, this return to Europe involved uncertainties as well as ambitions of power. It was especially the Central European nations who wondered whether Western Europe had perhaps lost their traditional European values and the desire for freedom, something that post-communist societies had supposedly retained through their survival instinct. Their aspirations for power involved rejoining the Western Bloc and participating in the European project, which, at the alleged “end of history,” sought to reshape the rest of the globalized world in its own image.

The two eastern strategies

By 2024, neither ambition had been fulfilled completely. First, not even the Visegrád countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), which claimed a privileged position among the new eastern EU Member States, have achieved full political and economic equality with the older Member States. According to European Democracy Consulting, eastern Member States have long been deeply underrepresented in EU institutions. No country on the EU’s eastern periphery has achieved full economic convergence either. Granted, the stumbling Czechia, at 91%, and the constantly-growing Poland, at 80% of the average EU GDP per capita, have, amid much fanfare, surpassed the EU’s southern periphery, but they still lag behind European powerhouses such as Germany at 115% and the Netherlands at 130%. It has long been recognized in the East that the EU does not rectify inequalities, but rather rearranges them through competition among European societies.

Second, doubts have emerged regarding the EU’s prestige and economic weight. The global polycrisis, a series of mutually-reinforcing crises ranging from the 2008 financial downturn to the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine, has undermined Europe’s confidence. Even though the eastern enlargement bolstered the EU’s self-image as a world power, with its civilizational values and a socioeconomic model the world unconditionally looked up to, “geopolitical Europe” today supposedly finds itself defending those values and that model against the rest of the world. According to analyses by the prestigious think tank ECFR, this struggle is intertwined with an identity crisis among Europeans, with doubt from the rest of the world regarding the EU’s viability, and with Europe’s “vassalization” and subordination to the USA.

In response to its somewhat partial equalization within an EU grappling with this crisis of identity and power, Central Europe is adopting one of two strategies today: Either sovereigntist, or pro-European. Even though sovereigntists such as Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán and Slovak PM Robert Fico (who oppose the European mainstream) and pro-Europeans such as Polish PM Donald Tusk and Czech PM Petr Fiala (who consider themselves part of the mainstream) view themselves as adversaries, both strategies share two common characteristics. First, they aim to free the Eastern countries from Western European domination and leadership within the EU. Second, they are not exclusive to Eastern competition between local authoritarians and advocates for a return to Europe. They align with the broader political landscape across the EU, which is currently shifting towards a center-to-far-right reconstruction. Additionally, both strategies can be seen as outcomes of submitting to the pro-European aspirations in the 1990s and 2000s, which soon gave way to skepticism, disappointment, and sovereigntist resistance in the 2010s.

The submission of the 2000s

The eastern enlargement of the EU entailed Central European submission to symbolic, material, and formal inequalities within the EU. These disparities were even evident in the accession conditions, which framed the entire transformation of Eastern Europe within the image of a (neo)liberal EU while normalizing competition among countries to meet the minimum standards of (Western) European civilization. The 1993 Copenhagen criteria not only established technocratic, much stricter accession requirements than previous enlargements, but also mandated candidate countries to gradually implement standards and rules that the older Member States had avoided. The year 2004 did not mark the removal of inequalities between the West and the East. On the contrary, the EU’s new eastern members remained relegated to the status of less-developed societies in need of political guidance, playing economic catch-up with the more developed regions of the EU.

One reason Eastern European societies accepted this subordinate position was their own belief in European inequalities. Back then, the pro-European Czech President Václav Havel and the sovereigntist Czech PM Václav Klaus disagreed on almost everything, except perhaps that the Czechs, as historically the most developed nation in Eastern Europe, deserved to be among the first to join NATO and the EU. It was primarily the Central Europeans who, through their own competition to join western structures, justified their own superiority over the rest of the post-communist area. As one of the intellectual fathers of the concept of Central Europe and a co-founder of the Visegrád Four, Havel clearly expressed these privileges during the accession negotiations. Klaus went even further, opposing any such Central European alliances with the argument that they would drag Czechia back to the East, hindering the country’s Western integration.

Another reason this subordinate position was accepted is that the promise of socioeconomic convergence with Western European affluence and symbolic equality with Western Europeans gained a tangible foundation with the accession to the EU. The internal market amplified the influx and impact of international private investments which, combined with public investments from EU funds, raised hopes for comprehensive modernization. This modernization was expected to cascade from the west to the east of the EU, and within the east, to cascade from central cities such as Prague or Warsaw to peripheral regions such as Ústí nad Labem or Podlasie. The east became dependent on these funds and investments as competition for accession was replaced with competition for socioeconomic catch-up and deeper integration. Initially, Slovakia excelled in this, increasing its GDP per capita from 52% of the EU average in 2004 to 74% in 2010, and soon adopting the euro.

The gradual fulfillment of these “innocent” aspirations opened up new space for ambitions of power as well as for unconcealed skepticism. This new dynamic led to the continent being divided into the pro-American “New Europe” in the east and the forgetful “Old Europe” in the west. New Europe was much more willing to take part in the westernization and democratization of the global South alongside the USA, including the use of force as seen in Iraq in 2003. Meanwhile, skepticism was growing in the East regarding Western Europe’s stance towards Russia. When Poland’s sovereigntist President Lech Kaczyński, during a solidarity visit to Tbilisi, warned against “Russian imperialism” and criticized Western allies for their indifference, he was scorned from the West for his Eastern “irrationality.”

Just four years after the EU enlargement, skepticism deepened when hopes of convergence collided with the global financial crisis. Initially, some Eastern economies felt the impact, and, by the mid-2010s, the Eurozone’s debt crisis had more or less destroyed the perception of the EU as an economically powerful and stable bloc. Romania, the Baltic states, and Hungary found themselves almost on the brink of bankruptcy. International aid for these countries came at the cost of strict neoliberal reforms imposed by the European Commission, devoid of any hint of solidarity. Meanwhile, Central Europeans showed zero solidarity with Southern Europe. Most Central European elites backed Germany’s tough stance on heavily-indebted Greece, reinforcing their own belief that the EU was an alliance of debt and regulation rather than stability and prosperity. Any conciliatory gestures towards bridging the east-west inequality within the EU vanished.

The resistance of the 2010s

If the 2000s saw a period of submission favoring pro-European forces structurally, the 2010s came to be the era of the sovereigntists. The Eurozone crisis opened a Pandora’s box of the global and EU-wide polycrisis, entwining issues such as populism, migration, climate change, Brexit, Donald Trump, the pandemic, Russian aggression, and inflation. Viktor Orbán, the primary architect of the sovereigntist strategy, capitalized on nearly every one of these crises. The lingering symbolic and economic disparities were also seized upon as opportunities by the sovereigntists. Each crisis and issue served as a mirror reflecting demands for equality with Western Europeans while fostering skepticism towards the EU’s (neo)liberal mainstream and towards the notion of Western European societies being the civilizational norm.

Despite its varying impact on different countries and their regions, the economic crisis played a pivotal role. It disrupted the pro-European promise that Eastern workers would achieve steady socioeconomic convergence in the European internal market in exchange for accepting lower-pay while working for Western European investors. The crisis reversed, halted, or at least slowed down any such convergence. Orbán regained power in 2010, leveraging the sovereigntist slogan of “We won’t be a colony” in response to the strict debt management measures. While Poland weathered the crisis successfully, the then-future Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, following his electoral triumph with Law and Justice (PiS) in 2015, declared his ambition to liberate the country from excessive economic and decision-making “dependence” on foreign capital. Despite being seen as a growth leader and increasing its GDP per capita from 69% of the EU average in 2015 to 80% today, Poland has not escaped the bounds of Eastern economic dependence.

The pursuit of socioeconomic equality was pragmatically complemented with doubts about the very economic model with which the Central European countries had been trying to catch up. This skepticism stemmed from the aftermath of the economic crisis, as austerity measures and a lack of investments caused Europe to fall behind economically and technologically compared to the USA and China. Back in 2008, the EU’s GDP slightly surpassed that of the USA, but today it is lagging behind the USA by one-third. Klaus and other Central European neoliberals had been rallying against what they saw as excessive social and environmental regulations from Brussels and Western Europe since the 1990s, and now they found satisfaction. The weakening welfare state in Western Europe and the underfunded efforts to combat climate change embodied in the Green Deal allowed sovereigntists to criticize what they deemed “socialism” coming from Brussels.

The post-2015 migration crises provided further opportunities to deepen the doubts and the fear of a diminishing survival instinct. For possibly the first and last time since joining the EU, Central European leaders resurrected the Visegrád Group as a united bloc with a clear objective. Suddenly, the Kunderaesque notion resurfaced: The belief that, unlike their post-communist counterparts, Western European societies were unable to protect the values of Western civilization. The Central European response was clear. Fiala, now Czech Prime Minister but an opposition leader at the time, suggested solving the migration crisis by reducing “social benefits” and “defending the border” with barbed wire. Czech President Miloš Zeman rejected the principles of relocating and redistributing migrants among EU Member States, arguing that inviting “hard-to-integrate Muslim migrants” or people from the global South in general would jeopardize not just European, but also primarily Czech identity and security. This stance represented a rejection of the perceived Brussels “dictate” and the concept of a culturally and racially more diverse society. Additionally, it was another expression of a lack of solidarity with the EU’s southern periphery.

By the end of the 2010s, the socioeconomic gap between the west and the east of the EU had somewhat narrowed, but the symbolic one had widened. The fault lay also with Western Europeans and the European mainstream. The calls for equalization and the resistance itself reinforced Western European stereotypes about the irrational, autocratic, and corrupt societies on the eastern periphery. A caricature of this attitude was epitomized by the Belgian liberal Guy Verhofstadt, who considered the governments of Orbán, Morawiecki, Babiš, and Fico all equally “more of an existential threat than Brexit” to “Europe’s soul” and the EU. In line with Verhofstadt, many Western European politicians, experts, and journalists rushed to propose ways to “protect the EU’s values” or to discipline Eastern European societies by cutting EU funding for them. Western European elites had not abandoned their stereotypical view of the East, which only strengthened the Eastern sovereigntists presenting themselves as defenders of their nations against the contempt coming from Western Europe.

Emancipation

The Russian aggression in 2022 propelled the eastern EU countries into the spotlight as Europe’s leaders. While the pandemic had highlighted their peripheral status, the response of some Central European countries and the Baltic states to the invasion of Ukraine signaled, according to international and local media, a “shift in the center of power towards the east”. In a somewhat ironic reminiscence of Kundera’s 1980s essay, it was once again the Russians who played a role in bringing part of the East symbolically back into the West. The Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, under Fiala’s partly sovereigntist and partly pro-European government, which might otherwise have been programmatically empty, as well as Poland’s sovereigntism, took on a new European significance. In practice, this marked a revival of the skepticism and ambitions of “New Europe.” With the return of the pro-European forces to the Polish Government, Tusk’s pro-European strategy became an equal alternative to Orbán’s resistance. Neither approach required submission anymore; both were striving for assertive emancipation.

Let us first have a look at the resurrection of the pro-European strategy. The immediate and constant support to Ukraine from Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia, as well as the Baltic states and other Northern European countries, is certainly admirable. The eastern critique of the initial indifference and passivity of Western European countries, a stance rooted in the 2000s, is understandable, too. However, the Central European and Baltic aid to Ukraine against Russia also reflects ambitions of power, namely, the aforementioned eastward shift of power in Europe. The post-war recovery of Ukraine is often seen as an “opportunity” for another convergence of the eastern EU countries, potentially repeating the “colonization” through investment which they experienced from Western Europe. While the criticism of Russian imperialism is valid, it also highlights the self-absorption of Eastern Europeans, who face disinterest from the global South on this matter. According to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, this is the last “colonial war,” as colonialism is considered a “closed issue” in the West. Consequently, Central Europeans acknowledge framing the EU as ultimately a peace project in a world dominated by imperialisms which are perceived as strictly non-Western. Those who are skeptical towards Western Europe’s reluctance to further engage welcome the EU’s vassalization in relation to the USA – this time not to spread Western values in the global South, but to defend these values in Europe.

Alongside the pro-European strategy, the sovereigntist approach persists, reproducing past resistance in the context of broader global and non-western trends. Despite the Russian aggression destroying Orbán’s aspirations to unite Central Europe as an ultra-conservative counterbalance to what he sees as an ultra-progressivist Western Europe, Fico’s authoritarian transformation and return to power, as well as Czech ex-PM Babiš’s pragmatic shift towards this stance, illustrate the enduring vitality of sovereigntism. Of course, not even Orbán liberates the EU from its dependence on the USA as he patiently awaits Donald Trump’s return to the White House. While he talks about the colonization of his country by the EU and by Western investors, he continues to collaborate with the German car industry and initiates new partnerships with Chinese e-car producers for the European internal market. Orbán’s and Fico’s calls for a “peaceful solution” and their indifference towards Russian imperialism ultimately reflect not just a more cynical version of the former Western European stance towards Ukraine, but also serve as a counterbalancing maneuver in response to the increasing importance of China and the global South, as well as the increasing importance of Trump’s potential comeback.

The European mainstream at last?

The pro-European and the sovereigntist strategies compete at both the domestic and (Central) European levels. They share some common ground, though, including their views on EU reconstruction. In fact, they both represent a distinctive response to the original ambitions of Central Europe as well as its skepticism surrounding the partial equalization of the EU’s eastern periphery, all while the EU itself grapples with doubts about its once rarely questioned social, economic, and value-related dominance in global relations. Notably, these strategies are not unique to the East, but align fully with the center-to-far-right vision of transforming the EU into a “Fortress Europe.”

Central European political elites largely agree on migration, the green transition, and the EU economy. It therefore comes as no surprise that Tusk, like Orbán and Fico, has publicly rejected the new migration pact. This agreement, coming nearly a decade after the migration crisis, aims to resolve disputes over relocation principles so as to satisfy all Member States. Their shared objectives – to prevent illegal migration, mainly from non-European countries, and to shield Central European states from excessive responsibility for managing it – are often mentioned as another example of common ground for Central European politicians and a reason for them to cooperate. Shared skepticism towards green regulations and the Green Deal, and efforts to reduce and delay those regulations in order to enhance the EU’s competitiveness, unite politicians ranging from the anti-Russian Czech MEP Alexandr Vondra to the pro-Russian Orbán.

At the same time, these commonalities align with the gradual shift of European mainstream politics towards the far right, making them key subjects in the June elections to the European Parliament. This transformation is fueled by the rise of the far right across Europe and by the integration of its agendas into public discourse, with the assistance of all major center-right parties. Examples include the acceptance of Italy’s post-fascist PM Giorgia Meloni into the European mainstream, the far right’s involvement in the governments of Sweden and Finland, the victory of the far right in the Netherlands, and the rise of the German AfD in polls. The success of right-wing parties locally is expected to be mirrored in the upcoming EU elections.* A new center-to-far-right European Parliament could symbolically align with the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2024. The ironic question of the 2020s is whether full Eastern participation in a right-wing reconstruction of Europe will finally bring the post-socialist Member States the political and economic equality they have long sought.

The text was originally published before the elections in the biweekly magazine A2 in an issue titled "Central European Dreaming about Europe," created with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Prague office.