In March 2005 Canadian writer Stephen Henighan made a trip around Eastern Europe. What he found there confirmed impressions formed on an earlier trip that, contrary to many media reports, “New Europe” and “Old Europe” are not irrevocably split. In the article that follows, Henighan puts events such as the French and Dutch rejection of the proposed European Union constitution and forces such as anti-Americanism into a new light that suggests that on many fronts public opinion in Europe’s two halves is converging.
When I first began traveling in Central and Eastern Europe in the
late 1980s, the dividing lines on social questions were stark. Western
Europeans supported the welfare state; Eastern Europeans craved the
free market. Western Europeans defined themselves as anti-racist;
Eastern Europeans expressed hostility towards ethnic minorities.
Western Europeans saw feminism as a progressive force and often
disapproved of pornography; Eastern Europeans considered feminism to
be a Communist conspiracy and viewed the spread of pornography as
evidence of personal liberty. Above all, Western Europeans regarded
the United States as a shallow culture promoting a foreign policy of
dubious probity while Eastern Europeans worshiped America and all its
works.
During the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall these oppositions
began to erode. Their erosion has been uneven and contradictory, yet
undeniable. Beneath the divisions on economic policy, a growing
convergence of cultural outlook between older and newer members of
the European Union is taking shape. Donald Rumsfeld’s January 2003
dismissal of France and Germany as “a problem” and his hopeful
statement that “the center of gravity is shifting to the East” laid
the cornerstone for a U.S. policy of exploiting residual Cold War
idealism about the United States in Eastern Europe to undermine
Western European objections to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In two
speeches of breathtaking cynicism in Bratislava, Slovakia on February
24, 2005 and Riga, Latvia on May 7, 2005, George W. Bush claimed the
spirit of 1989 as the inspiration for the U.S. invasion, telling his
Bratislava audience: “It is important to pass on the lessons of that
period…. By your efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and across the
world, you are teaching young Slovaks important lessons.” Bush’s
desire that Eastern Europeans, remaining forever mindful of their
experiences under Soviet rule, will offer unquestioning support to any
foreign adventure to which the U.S. attaches the “freedom” label,
depends on a vision of Europe that is already outdated.
Donald Rumsfeld, it seemed, had highlighted the differences between Eastern and Western Europe just as these differences were going into decline.
In 2002, after attending a conference in Athens, I hit the backpacker
trail through Greece. My fellow backpackers, many of them young
northern Europeans, spoke fluidly neutral Euro-English. They all
disliked the United States, an issue that arose early in any
conversation since I usually had to explain that I was not American
but Canadian, at which point my fellow travellers relaxed and opened
up. In that spring lull –post-September 11 but pre-Iraq invasion–
disdain of the United States, in Europe as in other parts of the
world, was muted by comparison with the virulence it would assume
later, as the Bush doctrine slouched towards Baghdad to be born. I was
surprised that when I reached Bulgaria, where I visited two Bulgarian
friends whom I had met on earlier travels, the attitudes of the
Scandinavians and Germans who had crossed my path in Greece did not
feel alien. The forces driving the repudiation of the United States
were different, but the attitudes were similar. In Bulgaria, the
turning point had been the 1999 bombing of former Yugoslavia,
conducted by NATO but blamed on the United States.
One day I climbed Mount Vitosha, above Sofia, with my Bulgarian
friend Tereza. We rode a ski lift up the mountainside then hiked
through the trees into a rock-scarred landscape where spars of
stale-looking snow resisted the tepid June warmth. Tereza was far more
cosmopolitan than most citizens of introverted, mountain-ringed
Bulgaria. The five languages she spoke included Turkish. Tereza’s
fluent Turkish made some of her friends uneasy: Bulgaria’s Turkish
minority, resented as a reminder of the centuries when the country was
ruled by the Ottoman Empire, is treated with hostility by mainstream
Bulgarian society. During the 1980s Bulgaria tried to force its Turks
to adopt Slavic names. Tereza’s interest in Turkish culture
originated in her long-term relationship with a Turkish man, as a
result of which she continued to spend part of each year in Istanbul.
Yet in spite of her appealing acceptance of Muslim culture, she had
no sympathy for Bosnian Muslims or Kosovo Albanians. Tereza dismissed
the atrocities committed by Serb forces during the war in former
Yugoslavia as concoctions of the U.S. media, cooked up to provide a
pretext for military intervention. Her hostility was reinforced by the
claim that during the 1999 bombing campaign one U.S. bomber, running
off course, had bombed Bulgaria by mistake. But the central issue was
her identification with neighboring Orthodox peoples. The bombing of
former Yugoslavia alienated Orthodox opinion not only in Serbia and
Macedonia, but throughout Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania. Older people,
who remembered tuning in to Radio Free Europe during the Cold War to
hear news reports denied them by their own media, continued to
idealize the United States. But for someone of Tereza’s generation,
the defining encounter with U.S. foreign policy was the bombing of
Serbia, whose religion she shared and whose language was mutually
intelligible with Bulgarian.
Dmitri, a friend of both mine and Tereza’s, whom I visited in a
different region of Bulgaria, also mentioned the bombs dropped on
Bulgarian soil. A bohemian with a mid-back ponytail and two
university degrees who had learned fluent English at the American
College of Sofia, Dmitri was earning his living as a hard-rock
musician. Dmitri’s political vision was in many ways more nuanced than
Tereza’s. In spite of his allegiance to Orthodox cultures, he
acknowledged the reality of Serbian war crimes and recognized that
significant differences existed between the multiethnic political
institutions that Serbian forces had fought to destroy in Bosnia and
the intransigent ethnic insurgency of Albanian nationalists in Kosovo.
Yet Tereza’s choice of a Turkish boyfriend made him uncomfortable.
The Turks had the potential to destroy Bulgaria. What if the Turkish
minority regions began to fight for their independence and NATO
bombers came in to support them? Dmitri was considering applying for a scholarship to attend a foreign university. The thought of studying outside Bulgaria made him feel
guilty; he was susceptible to the criticism that too many young people
were leaving the country. One thing was certain: he would not be
studying in the United States. His friends from the American College
of Sofia had made that mistake. They had returned home after a year,
disgusted by the closed-mindedness of American life, and transferred
to universities in Western Europe. So where was he going? Dmitri
mulled this over. Holland, perhaps. He wanted to live in an open
society.
The difference is that no one in Western Europe is trying to drive out traditional ethnic minorities: the hostility is directed at immigrants.
My friends’ disaffection with the United States surprised me. It left
me unprepared, however, for the raging hostility to all emanations of
United States influence that I encountered during a trip through
Romania and Hungary in March 2005. Donald Rumsfeld, it seemed, had
highlighted the differences between Eastern and Western Europe just as
these differences were going into decline. Within the countries
formerly dominated by the Soviet Union, a generational divide was
opening up. After the death of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan,
the Romanian magazine Curierul Românesc (The Romanian Messenger), the
international voice of the country’s intellectual elite, ran a lead
editorial under the headline (in English) “Thank You, Mr. President!”. A breathless editorial hailed Reagan as the bestower of “freedom”
(not the way he will be remembered in Nicaragua, El Salvador, or
Honduras). After reading this gushing praise, I set off on my trip
ready to wrestle with the diametrically opposed outlooks of a Europe
divided between East and West. Taking refuge from a blizzard in northeastern Romania in the home of
a teacher with whom I was acquainted, I was introduced to her family,
then to her fiancé. Romulus was a startling figure. A man in his
mid-thirties, six-foot-four with black hair receding into a thinning
widow’s peak, and with riveting blue eyes bequeathed to his dark Romanian
face by some Ukrainian ancestor, he had trained as an engineer and now
worked in the non-profit sector. The great achievement of his life was
his traveling. Romulus had toured the Balkans on a bicycle, sleeping
rough or in accommodation offered to him by people he met along the
way. On a later trip he had hitchhiked from northeastern Romania to
Iraq, then back through the Middle East as far as Libya. He retained
many views typical of Orthodox society (NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia
came up immediately), but it was the broadening of his horizons that
had stoked his hatred of the United States. Having become acquainted
with the impact of U.S. influence on the wider world, rather than
measuring the United States strictly on the basis of its Cold War duel
with the Soviet Union, he had reached dire conclusions. We retreated
to an upstairs room to sit out the blizzard, and ate and talked for
eight hours. My acquaintance the teacher became less vocal in her
fiancé’s presence; in this way, as in the endless rounds of food with
which the family supplied us, traditional values remained intact.
The difference was that while during the Cold War those values had made
young Romanians pro-American, in the era of globalization adherence to
tradition contributes to a welling anti-Americanism. In Romulus’s eyes everything was a U.S. conspiracy: not just the
bombings and invasions, but even the European Union, at first glance a
counterweight to the influence of the United States, was in fact doing
the U.S.’s work, he claimed, by stripping Eastern Europe of
competitive industry. Like Dmitri in Bulgaria, Romulus linked his
anti-Americanism to a quest for a society that was “open.” For a
Romanian this implied a potentially disconcerting shift in values. A
rambling, diverse country of 21 million people, Romania has always had
large minority populations. Today there are more than two million Roma
(called “Gypsies” by some), between one and a half and two million Hungarians, a few
thousand Germans (the remnants of a community that once numbered
700,000) and, in the country’s border regions, outposts of Serbs,
Bulgarians, Ukrainians, and Turks. There was a large Jewish population
until it was destroyed by the Holocaust. Some Romanian rulers have
governed by turning the majority against the minorities. The Communist
dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu owed his survival until the last week of
the 1980s, in part, to the promotion of a nationalism that depended
on the brutal oppression of ethnic Hungarians. In the post-Communist
era local politicians, most notoriously Gheorghe Funar, the
ultranationalist two-term mayor of the city of Cluj-Napoca (which
Hungarians call Kolosvár) who was defeated in June 2004, have
appealed to similar instincts. Romanians are acutely aware that they
will enter the European Union in 2007 with the largest minority
populations of any recent E.U. adherent. (Slovakia, already an E.U.
member, has substantial, but smaller, Hungarian and Roma minorities.) The E.U. has set adequate provision for minority rights as a
condition for Romania’s entry. The current picture is mixed, as are
Romanians’ feelings. The far-right Greater Romania Party polled 12.7%
of the vote in the 2004 presidential elections; yet the new
center-right government of President Traian Băsescu contains three
ethnic Hungarian cabinet ministers. When I mentioned to my hosts in
the snowstorm that I had heard people speaking Hungarian in the
streets of their town, they nodded their heads. “This is normal. There
have always been Hungarian people here. They have their churches, they
have their lives…this is normal.”
“I don’t want to say it, but learning English is a duty for him. I don’t want to say it, but it’s almost like Russian was before.”
The embattled equilibrium between traditional ethnic assertion and a
greater openness perceived as integral to modernity is present in both
Eastern and Western Europe, narrowing the gap between them. Even the
liberal paradise of Holland has bred a successful far-right party and,
in the aftermath of the assassinations of the party’s leader Pim
Fortuyn and of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, has fallen victim to
ethnic strife of almost Eastern European intensity. The difference is
that no one in Western Europe is trying to drive out traditional
ethnic minorities: the hostility is directed at immigrants. The
immigrant, by definition, is visible; the historical minority is often
maintained in a state of invisibility. My literary companion during my
travels in Romania was Întoarcerea huliganului (The Hooligan’s
Return), Norman Manea’s ironic, beautifully digressive memoir of a
Jewish-Romanian childhood and youth, capped by an account of his
return visit to Romania in 1997 after long-term exile in New York.
Manea’s book is published by Polirom, the best Romanian publishing
house; yet Romanian intellectuals to whom I expressed my enthusiasm
for Manea’s writing grew tense or claimed not to have heard of Manea.
At the same time, Manea’s descriptions of the southern Bukovina of
his childhood remain oddly myopic because, in his meticulous narration
of the region’s social dynamics, the Roma population disappears. It is
impossible to travel in Bukovina without being surrounded by the Roma,
yet Manea pretends that they don’t exist even though they shared his
own community’s fate of being incarcerated, transported, starved, and
murdered during the Holocaust.
This refusal to see others who are different was prominent in my mind
as I arrived in Hungary. Having had the mongrelized bulk of its
territory sheered away by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, modern
Hungary is an ethnically uniform rump where, as in most of Western
Europe, internal minority issues are cast primarily in terms of
recent immigrants, in Hungary’s case from China, Russia, or Ukraine.
Yet the fate of the Magyar minorities living outside Hungary, not only
in Romania but in Slovakia, former Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, continues
to elicit strong emotions, which culminated in Hungary’s provocative
decision to extend citizenship to Hungarians living outside Hungary.
As the largest minority group, the Hungarians in Romania are the
beneficiaries of much of the passion expended on this issue. When I
first spent a month in Hungary in 1989, at a time when Romania’s
Hungarians were suffering persecution by the death-spasms of the
Ceauşescu dictatorship, I found this rallying to the defence of a
beleaguered culture uplifting; in the democratic context of the
present, the violent hatred of Romania expressed by many Hungarians
can feel like a retrogade obsession.
Members of Romania’s ethnic Hungarian minority, aware that they are economically better off than other Romanian citizens,
are often more sanguine about the situation than people in Hungary. Endre, an ethnic Hungarian
professor from Cluj, told me: “Romanian law says that wherever
Hungarians are 20% of the population we can have bilingual signs and
government services in Hungarian. Personally, I would prefer a system
more like that enjoyed by the Swedish minority in Finland: wherever
you have 3000 Swedes you get services. Here in Cluj there are 60,000
Hungarians, but because we are 18.9% of the population, we have no
services. Still, in many smaller towns mayors have authorized
services for Hungarians even in cases where we are 15% or less of the
population.” My Budapest friends Pisti and Julcsi shared the vision that
characterized the condition of Hungarians in Romania as one of
continuing oppression. Julcsi and I have been friends and colleagues
for fifteen years. Her husband Pisti and I disagree about politics.
Having graduated from an experimental bilingual (English-Hungarian)
school established in Budapest by UNESCO, Pisti speaks stunningly
fluent English and grew up worshiping the United States. But, during
my latest visit to Hungary, I discovered that raising his two young
sons in the early 21st century was making it difficult for him to
harmonize his nationalism with his idealistic vision of the U.S.A.
Pisti’s bookish older son Tibor, now aged ten, is already making
speeches about the need to save the Hungarian minority in Romania; but
father and son have different views of the United States. “For me,” Pisti said, “learning English was a statement. It was about
my freedom. It meant I could go into downtown hotels where they sold
Newsweek and Time and get information my government didn’t want me to
have. Tibor’s generation has English all around it. He knows he has to
learn it but he’s become indifferent.” “What about English as the language in which Europeans communicate
with each other?” I asked, remembering my travels in Greece. “The fact remains that the United States of America is the biggest
source of English in the world today. When my son turns on the
television and sees American soldiers going into somebody else’s
country and killing people, it doesn’t exactly help the language.” He
hesitated, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t want to say it, but
learning English is a duty for him. I don’t want to say it, but it’s
almost like Russian was before.”
The European Union is not in the business of eradicating nationalism
but of containing nationalist impulses within a legislative framework.
In both Eastern and Western Europe, closer formal associations with
nearby countries have thrown national traits into starker relief. The
rejection of the European constitution by France and Holland in May
2005, in the name of the preservation of national values, demonstrates
that cultural nationalism in Europe is a broad-based force, not merely
a bogeyman unleashed on Eastern Europe by the collapse of Communism.
Any clearly articulated nationalism, no matter how democratic,
multiethnic and peace-loving the nation, will produce a dislike for
the United States, whose current global quest for “freedom” mandates
cultural homogenization as the pre-condition for commercial
efficiency. Orthodox countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, and
countries with large Muslim populations, such as France, have reached
a common point of hostility towards the U.S. more swiftly than relatively
undiluted Catholic societies such as Hungary or Italy. Poland, with
its fratricidal antagonism to Russian culture, will persist longer
than other nations in seeking solace across the Atlantic. Yet this
year, for the first time, I found I was able to criticize U.S. foreign
policy in front of young Poles without provoking outrage. National
differences will endure in Europe, however the future of the European
Union unfolds; but the rift between “Eastern Europe” and “Western
Europe,” antiquated Cold War notions whose times are now past, is
destined to fade away. To phrase the issue in Donald Rumsfeld’s terms,
New Europe is growing Old.
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