Central Europe Unclear as Light Shifts from the West
By Cameron Munter, Skytop Contributor / September 7th, 2021
Cameron Munter served as ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the Bin Laden raid. He was ambassador to Serbia during the Kosovo independence crisis. He served twice in Iraq, in Mosul as Provincial Reconstruction Leader and in Baghdad as Deputy Chief of Mission. In the course of three decades as a career diplomat, he was also NSC Director in the Clinton and Bush White Houses, and served overseas in Warsaw, Prague, and Bonn.
Munter studied at Cornell and earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, and has taught at Pomona College, Columbia University School of Law, and UCLA.
Currently a consultant in New York, Munter was President and CEO of the East West Institute, a nonprofit engaged in global conflict prevention. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy, and serves on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards.
After the Wall
There was a time, not too long ago, when it was convenient to think of the countries east of Germany as a kind of unit: successful aspirants to European and Transatlantic institutions (EU and NATO), nearly all of them using the Euro or planning to join soon, their economies linked as suppliers to Germany’s formidable export machine, raucous democracies that demonstrated the wisdom of Europe’s project of integration after 1989.
Now, as with many revelations in international affairs in the last ten years, the picture of Central Europe is less clear.
Even the core element of the region – the Visegrad Four – are very much in disarray. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary were the first out of the block in the race to take their rightful places in Europe and by extension in the world after the fall of communism. Now, Hungary is very much an outlier in EU politics (and its leader, Viktor Orban, delights in his role as leader of an “illiberal” state while gladly accepting EU funding for domestic projects); Poland, whose Law and Justice Party seeks to limit judicial and press freedom (and is also often at odds with Brussels); and even if the Czech and Slovak experiences are much less troubling to friends of democracy, the ruling Andrej Babis’ ANO party in Prague and the legacy of Robert Fico’s Smer party in Bratislava show that populism is alive and well in both countries.
The impressive performance of the Baltic States and some disturbing trends in Romania and Bulgaria point to a rather incoherent picture. Rather than seeing an ever-increasing alignment with European norms, the countries of Central Europe are diverging, each in its own particularist way.
Central Europe off-piste, Paving New Paths
In this, Central Europe reflects the lack of energy in the core of Europe.
The Lisbon Treaty and other triumphant documents of the early years of the 21st century seemed to portend a Europe that would not only continue broadening and deepening but would have a significant impact on its surroundings. There is the EU’s approach to its Southern Neighborhood, intended as the Euro Mediterranean Partnership, to build democracy and prosperity in the Maghreb. The Eastern Partnership with Ukraine and the Caucasus to bring these countries into line with European norms and practices.
The failure of the Arab Spring, and attacks on Georgian and Ukrainian sovereignty by Russia, reversed this momentum.
Now, in recent years, the south and the east are not the objects of European policy, but sources of concern, from the threat of a resurgent Russia to the prospect of mass migration from the south (a prospect made only more alarming by recent news from Afghanistan). In other words, it’s clear to these newer members of the European Union, in Central Europe, that the promise of competence and confidence may have been overestimated.
A Cultural Schism
Much of the concern in Central Europe, as indeed, in many parts of the globe is cultural. The same yearning for an idealized past (without gay rights, for example, or equality for women or dark-skinned migrants) that we see elsewhere is a serious part of the policies espoused by Orban in Hungary or Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. Orban and Kaczynski welcomed Donald Trump’s presidency, not only because of his populist style but because he could express dissatisfaction with the larger powers of Western Europe even more forcefully than they.
The Central Europeans find their own ways ahead, increasingly breaking with consensus – the Poles wanted to open Fort Trump for American soldiers, while the Hungarians signed a sweetheart deal with the Russians on civil nuclear energy cooperation.
Enter Joe Biden
It’s generally accepted that “Europe” breathed a huge sigh of relief when Biden took office, and the rhetoric from his foreign policy team was familiar and soothing to those who remembered previous traditions of transatlantic cooperation in politics, diplomacy, and military matters. But two things have happened this year: first, Biden has made it clear that China is his priority, and he wants to engage with Europe on broad issues like the pandemic, climate change, digital governance, and trade.
Donald Trump had been ready for deals, breaking with tradition to find new advantages; that suited some Central Europeans fine, as they saw a path to gaining American attention. On these bigger, more conceptual issues that Biden raises, in the big capitals – Paris, Berlin, Brussels – often get America’s attention. Central Europe? Not really on the screen, or so the Central Europeans might think. Just as Biden justifies the retreat from Afghanistan by his prioritization of other challenges, he is increasingly perceived in Central Europe as absent from these complex, particularist issues of Central Europe because, yes, he has more important things to do.
Who To Turn To?
So, if the Americans – who led the fight against communism and the efforts to democratize Central Europe in the 1990s – are distracted, and the Western Europeans are disorganized, to whom do the Central Europeans turn? For the moment, they turn inwards, and the result is a wide variety of paths ahead, in politics, in diplomacy, in society.
According to legend, in 1956, as Soviet tanks surrounded the beleaguered radio building in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising, the broadcasters issued a defiant final message: that the freedom fighters were ready to die for Europe. The notion that there was a Europe (or more broadly, a western world) that was orderly, fair, and decent was a powerful inducement to those who lived under communism to resist the gray reality of the erstwhile bloc and aspire to being part of a core of civilization. It worked, and the wall fell. It’s only in recent years that the realization seems to have taken hold that Europe – as it is today – might not be what these countries expected.