Géza Mezei

Hungary and the Construction of Europe

 

 

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The Soviet veto of the Marshall Plan and the Cominform strategy

The Marshall Plan, successful both economically and politically, probably became the best known and most influential American initiative ever. Two generations of those post-war politicians who played a decisive role in the rehabilitation of Europe were convinced that without the generous support of the United States, Stalin's henchmen would have seized power not only in Prague and Budapest, but also in Berlin, Rome and perhaps even in Paris. Stalin in turn considered the Plan a declaration of war, a threat not only to his plans for Europe, but also to Soviet-German relations. The aid plan rekindled and then fanned the dictator's suspicion of the outside world. Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's dramatic walkout at the Paris conference convened to discuss the Marshall proposals (2 July 1947) also had grave consequences for the hopes of a unified Europe.
The Soviet answer to the American initiative came in September 1947, when the nine European Communist Parties Stalin deemed the most important met in Poland, and their Information Bureau (Cominform) was set up. In accordance with the 'Cominform strategy,' the Communist Parties in the people's democracies sought, from the autumn of 1947, to establish invulnerable power positions, which involved the annihilation of all organised opposition, and as a result of which uniform regimes came into being throughout the region. The countries of Eastern Europe came under the complete hegemony of Moscow, their sovereignty becoming purely formal.
The Communist takeover in Prague (February 1948) and the Soviet blockade of the western sectors of Berlin (from June 1948) highlighted the image of an aggressive Soviet foreign policy, an inauspicious image which was to remain vivid long afterwards, and was instrumental in stirring those European nations which escaped Soviet control to seek an ever closer union.
Over and above the historical economic retardation of Eastern Europe, the immense development gap between the two parts of the continent is chiefly the result of the Cold War. Moscow forcefully held back the countries east of the Elbe, its own security zone, from the emerging Western economic civilization: it prohibited membership not only in the institutions that came into being under the aegis of the European Recovery Programme, but also in those that were set up in the wake of the Bretton Woods Conference (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank).
Stalin's answer was to enforce an autarchic economy based on Soviet economic penetration and dominance, its embodiment being the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon), set up in 1949. According to certain though far from conclusive estimates, between 1945 and 1955 the Soviet Union withdrew what was the equivalent of 13 billion dollars from the occupied Eastern and Central-European countries, almost exactly as much as Washington provided for those countries which participated in the Marshall Plan. A further interesting parallel is that Austria paid 1.5 billion dollars worth of compensation to the Soviet Union, and received aid to the same value under the Marshall Plan. (Borhi 2000)
1947 marked the beginning of the systematic breaking off of all well-established economic ties between the countries east of the Elbe and the West. The fate of these countries had been sealed, before the final political assault, on the level of their economies. By the end of the Forties the private sector in commerce, industry and banking had ceased to exist and a market economy had disappeared, just as had their self-regulating societies. Once the one-party system was established and the separation of powers was abolished, their parliaments lost their functions. The economy became the servant of politics, the forced development of heavy industry, for instance, being motivated not so much by economic as by political considerations. (To appreciate the turn in economic relations, it is only necessary to consider the fact that the Soviet Union had become Hungary's chief foreign trade partner by 1949, although in 1938 it had been responsible for merely 0.11 per cent of all Hungarian imports and exports.)
The last phase of establishing Communist hegemony in the states of the Soviet cordon sanitaire started in 1947; in return the United States, between 1948 and 1950, extended, its policy of containment to cover politics, the economy, traffic and diplomacy in the region. The American embargo policy completed the isolation of these countries.
The economy of Western Europe, on the other hand, developed faster between 1950 and 1975 than ever before or since. This boom laid the foundation of everything that was to take place in Europe in the second half of the century. The continuous growth in welfare provisions mitigated and then overshadowed the grave and bitter social conflicts of the interwar period, thereby consolidating the political institutions of parliamentary democracy in Western Europe once and for all.

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Another ambitious plan for cooperation in the early Fifties, the European Defence Community, would hardly have been thought of without the Korean War, which made West-European decision makers fear that Communist aggression against South Korea would be replicated in divided Europe, especially in Germany.
Quite obviously, it was the Cold War that gave birth to unity in Europe. Beside the effect of the Soviet threat as a negative integrating force, the Iron Curtain effectively sealed off East and Central European countries from the successor states of Charlemagne's empire. The quickly rebuilt West-European economies were the most developed part of the continent (being also relatively homogenous), which offered an appropriate basis for experiments in enhanced cross-border cooperation.
Strangely enough, quite a few intellectuals in Western Europe believed Communism was the best strategy for the modernization of Eastern Europe. Though they did not necessarily agree with the rough and ready, indeed brutal methods of the Communists, they were inclined to consider their policies a significant advance when compared to interwar stagnation.
The British historian Hugh Seton-Watson in 1954 commented these far-reaching plans struck the imagination, impressing the foreign observer. He also argued that it is certain that large-scale industrialisation, public works and mechanisation of agriculture are the right remedies for the rural overpopulation and poverty and the lack of manufactured goods, which were so striking in the old Eastern Europe (Seton-Watson, 1954).
At the beginning of the fifties, the then highly influential Jean-Paul Sartre still considered Soviet Communism "the highest our age could aspire to. [He noted that] the Gulag may well be objectionable and fearful. But were we not perhaps overobsessed by it? Is there any real reason why its existence should trouble us?"

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From the perspective of power politics, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 could have become an excellent precedent for bargains with Moscow - offering at the same time an opportunity for the early termination of the Cold War, before the two hostile blocs in Europe became firmly entrenched in their positions. Instead, during the fateful days of October-November 1956, the limitations of American (and Western) diplomacy and that of the Containment Doctrine became painfully apparent. American diplomacy was caught between the false alternatives of an all-out nuclear war and doing nothing. Moreover, Western policy was ready to accept immobility, at the price of grave injustice, and thus created a model for Western attitudes towards subsequent East-European revolts against Soviet rule.
Paradoxically, the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution meant that Communist ideology lost its significance in Europe. The Soviet intervention deeply compromised the ideology in the eyes of the Western Communist Parties and left-wing intellectuals, who thenceforth considered the Soviet Union as yet another imperialist power, rather than the fount of new wisdom. The phase of the Cold War in which profound emotions were stirred ended in 1956. The Polish and the Hungarian events put paid to the illusions that some Europeans had still entertained concerning the Soviet world.

The rise and fall of détente and the limitations of Hungarian Goulash Communism

In the Sixties De Gaulle and French politics exerted a great (and lasting) influence on the political reflexes and institutional habits of the 'Brussels Europe', which was assuming its shape in the wake of the Treaty of Rome. More and more the Community came to resemble De Gaulle's idea of a confederation, while federalists kept losing ground. The habits of thought gaining currency were the preference for intergovernmental cooperation to supranational community policies of functional integration (the so-called 'Monnet-method'). The Luxembourg compromise was also symbolic of a significant change in the spirit of the Community: from then on it was the more selfish, pragmatic approach that the member states favoured, the 'cost-benefit' considerations that they watched closely. These new attitudes came to affect more and more the atmosphere of negotiations, especially after the first enlargement of the Community.
In Western Europe the welfare state stood for a period of full employment, rapid population growth and relative social peace. Contrary to expectations, political violence was steadily diminishing after 1948. Democratic governments managed to keep Communist parties at bay without giving rise to authoritarian regimes. The war strengthened the need for social solidarity, and enduring prosperity provided the new welfare states with the means necessary to satisfy and support these expectations and needs.
Competition outside the customs frontiers of the Common Market was practically limited to North America. The US and the Soviet Union were the world's two political poles, but the two largest economic powers were America and Western Europe, or more precisely, America and the European Economic Community, as North-American companies began to favour the Six to Great Britain when it came to investment.
Fears of Europe becoming Americanised were dispersed by the second half of the Sixties. Most Europeans appeared to have outgrown their inferiority complex in relation to their overseas protector. The end of empire for the large European colonial powers did not entail their economic decline; on the contrary, Western Europe was becoming an ever more powerful agent in the world economy, at a time when American economic growth seemed to loose momentum. The federalist enthusiasm which American officials overseeing the Marshall Plan had encouraged appeared to have become a thing of the past. In Western Europe old-fashioned nation-states were stronger than ever.
Few in the 1940s would have anticipated that forty years later in all countries west of the Iron Curtain less than ten per cent of the population would be employed in agriculture, with Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula being the only exceptions. (In 1950 every third person in Spain and Portugal was engaged in agriculture; within thirty years these ratios had dropped to fifteen and eighteen per cent, respectively.) One of the most profound and most important social changes in the second half of the 20th century was the disappearance of the peasantry in Western Europe: the common agricultural policy even accelerated the process by encouraging large agricultural units (farms). Similarly, urbanisation has proved one of the most enduring legacies of the Communist policy of industrialisation in Eastern and Central Europe.
Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960) advocated a less polarised view of politics, and social scientists in general insisted that social problems were limited in number, could be quantified and were ultimately manageable. In Raymond Aron's view: "In the affluent society towards which Western Europe is gradually moving, no political party has a doctrine as such... our society is not without its problems... but it does not have one big problem" (Vinen 2000, p. 375).
In defiance of the orderly and calculable conditions of the Western societies, the activists of 1968 celebrated irrationality, spontaneity and the three M's (Marx, Mao, Marcuse). The dramatic events of those years, however, failed to have a long-lasting effect, with perhaps the sole exception of the birth of environmental movements. The relative stability of Western Europe became strikingly obvious when Warsaw Pact tanks appeared on the streets of Prague in August 1968.
August 1968 unmasked both the bankruptcy of Soviet policy and the utter subordination of the East-European satellites to Moscow: the intervention also signaled the demise of De Gaulle's romantic if little-developed idea of a "Europe stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals". The idea behind this notion was that Paris could bridle the German economic giant with the help of the confederated Slavic states.
The late 1960s also brought about a second period of détente: the need to harmonise interests seemed of pressing importance both in the East and the West. The increased stability of the strategic balance and the fear of nuclear weapons on the part of both sides produced a growing number of mutual interests, a state of affairs described perhaps most wittily by Chou En-Lai as the two superpowers sleeping in the same bed, even if they dream different dreams (Fontaine 1982, p.12).
A salient trait in the history of European attempts at integration in the Seventies was what came to be called Euro-pessimism. In a radically different political and eco-nomic environment it became evident that what the federalists championed was an illusion, namely that integration would sooner or later automatically spill over from the economy and trade toward foreign policy, defence strategy and other jealously guarded preserves of national sovereignty. The 1973 oil crisis only further aggravated disagreements within the Community. By the end of the decade the future of the EC looked dim: low economic growth and stagflation, that peculiar mixture of high unemployment and inflation, depressed each and every member state.
It is a historical irony that the real victims of the crisis that followed 1973 were the countries of 'existing socialism' and the Soviet Union. Though Western Europe was shaken by the recession, the hard years passed without serious damage. The Soviet bloc, on the other hand, had to deal not only with its inherent and ever graver problems, but also with those of the mutable and trouble-ridden world economy, which were increasingly making themselves felt beyond the Iron Curtain.
In the climate of détente, under the conditions of extending trade between East and West, the growing trade gap of the East-European countries initially seemed as unproblematic as the Western loans drawn to finance the import of modern technology and consumer goods. From 1975 it became more and more obvious that it was an illusion to believe that the East-European economies would be immune from the crises that afflicted the Western countries. The Communist regimes, which had devoted such energy to building up heavy industry in a bid for national self-sufficiency now found themselves facing new difficulties.
From 1973, government-aided credits for exports to the East amounted to one fifth of all export credits in the EEC, even though the Comecon countries took only four per cent of all exports from the Community. Hungary was the first country to avail itself of the opportunities, and by 1977 its Western credits had risen to 8 billion dollars. The elite of the Hungarian Communist party considered these loans important for the maintenance of paternalistic state-socialism, dubbed 'goulash Communism'. However, this policy (especially from the early Eighties) only worsened the crisis in the Hungarian economy, as the economy was far too inflexible to make efficient use of Western loans. It became increasingly difficult to maintain an image of Kádár's Hungary as an oasis of stability and of - if not abundance - a constantly rising standard of living.
By the middle of the Seventies the second generation of staff officers at NATO and the Warsaw Pact had been busy planning for war between them, a war which was never actually fought. The superpowers engaged only by proxy, as in Cuba, Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East, in the form of giving support to various warring parties.
It may not be by chance that John Foster Dulles was the last American statesman to speak about the 'liberation' of Eastern Europe. The new language of détente sought to dismiss ideology from world politics. The new idiom of diplomacy was enriched with reassuringly implausible bombast: it was difficult to imagine that Brezhnev was really interested in Marxist theory, or that Nixon or Kissinger truly cared for human rights.
The 1975 Helsinki Final Act sealed the West's acceptance of a division of Europe (and of Germany), and the Kremlin's again decisive say in the European concert of nations. On the other hand, the 'Helsinki process' and mushrooming contacts between the eastern and the western parts of Europe, gradually undermined the totalitarian regimes, based as they were on isolation. The fatal dependence of these economies on Western loans left the one-party states with little leeway. To boot, the third basket of the Helsinki Accords gave new encouragement to civil disobedience and human rights movements (Charta '77).
In any case, soon after Helsinki Moscow turned out to be using détente as an instrument for expansion. And détente proved reversible. Despite arms control agreements, greater communication and economic interchange, it could not transform the fundamental postwar paradigm. Three critical elements made this paradigm durable: the military occupation of Eastern Europe (including the GDR) and the direct military threat to Western Europe and the US posed by Soviet forces; the virtual irreversibility of the Soviet-type regimes in Eastern Europe, as confirmed by Soviet military interventions, such as in Hungary in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia in 1968; and the nature of the Soviet regime itself.
At the end of the Seventies the Soviet empire seemed firm, invulnerable and everlasting. The intensive modernisation of Soviet military might was accompanied by the forceful expansion of political influence. Yet the apparent victories and successes in reality contributed more to the inertia of the empire, and produced forces which, within a decade, would initiate its fatal crumbling.

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But first and foremost, in East-Central Europe the Eighties were a decade of a multidimensional, chronic and deepening crisis. The quasi-fall of the Soviet-type regime in Poland in 1980-81 emphatically indicated the increased vulnerability of the paternalist systems of 'advanced socialism'. The Polish crisis also warned Moscow that the old, harsh modes of exercising power had become obsolete. Though General Jaruzelski's rescue attempt seemed an acceptable solution for an apparently unmanageable problem, his introduction of military dictatorship (replacing the collapsing rule of the party) held little promise for the future.
It seemed as if the Soviet leaders, having amassed a colossal military might, had lost their faith in its usefullness.
As for Kádár's Hungary, what seemed to have experienced a fatal breakdown was the mechanism that had been the major socioeconomic support of this regime: the policy which tried to secure the passive loyalty of the majority of society for outdated forms of government not through abortive or half-heartedly executed reforms but by moderate, and controlable, portions of a consumer society. What lay at the heart of the troubles of 'the most cheerful barracks' (of the Soviet bloc) was again the crisis of the paternalistic state: having stimulated political and economic expectations and hopes which it was incapable of satisfying, firmly refusing at the same time calls for political reforms, the one-party state was confronted by ever graver dilemmas.
One such dilemma in the Eighties was the necessity and impossibility of economic reforms. The behemoths of the postwar forced industrialisation showed themselves as economic irrationalities, yet (at least for the ruling elite) seemed to possess a symbolic meaning. In the context of this economic policy, Western credits helped, more than ever before, the deferment of painful economic decisions. Western bankers put their minds at ease with the notion of a Soviet guarantee covering all the East-European economies, which they imagined eliminated the dangers of insolvency. (The none too holy alliance of Western bankers and Communist Party elites cast Eastern Europe into the abyss of a serious debt crisis. These nations' total debt of 6 billion dollars in 1971 had risen to 100 billion by the end of the 1980s.)
The Soviet empire, one-dimensional as it relied solely on the power of its military-industrial complex, was a peculiar formation in Europe. The mighty centre of the realm was in many respects poorer and less developed than its "colonies." It must have been conspicuous to Soviet army officers stationed in Hungary that life there was far richer and fuller than in the remote provinces from where they were recruited. Many Soviet citizens in the Eighties still lived in the false belief that the shortages of bread in Moscow or Kiev were due to exports of food as aid for their East-European 'brothers and sisters'.
There was, perhaps no better illustration of Paul Kennedy's famous theory of imperial overstretch than Moscow's efforts to practise world politics. The problems of this overextended empire only grew when in December 1979 - by a disastrous move - the Soviet Union decided to intervene in defence of its puppets in Afghanistan. The Afghan quagmire was to be the Vietnam of the Soviets. The Soviet withdrawal ten years later became a crucial symbol of Gorbachev's perestroika.

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Yet when the idea of giving economic aid to the countries of the former Soviet bloc mooted, the differences in the interests and ideas of the Western allies soon surfaced, and the concept of a new Marshall Plan resulted only in the establishment of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The liberated countries' hopes of massive and generous economic aid, much like the post-war European Recovery Program, were frustrated. The primary reason for this seems to have been the absence of an acute sense of danger within the EU: in 1947 the United States, 'the empire by invitation' mobilised its resources and stabilised the disorganised Western economies in order to block the Soviet threat, in 1990, however, once 'the barbarians' had withdrawn from the gates, no such threat was apparent. Then the Gulf War in 1991 for some time diverted the attention (and financial resources) of the West from the East European countries, though the latter were still in need of economic aid.
Nor did the new bank have the expected catalystic effect on investments. Despite significant economic reforms, the volume of investments in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, the three countries best-known to Western investors, was disappointingly low. In Hungary, the most successful Central-European country, less than a billion dollars were invested by Westerners in 1990, and 1.5 billion in 1991, which may have amounted to 60 per cent of all foreign investment in the region but was less than one per cent of all foreign direct investments in the world.
It seemed to be of symbolic significance that while Western Europe contemplated new vistas of integration, and with the December 1991 Maastricht accord called for new forms of cooperation between the member states, the East showed signs of disintegration, reflected first by the birth of an independent Ukraine, then the crumbling of the Soviet Union, and the appearance of new states, and the Minsk agreement. Yet the breakdown of Soviet power and the fall of communist regimes in Europe took the West by surprise. It had accepted the status quo as an earnest of stability. Europeans, who had lived under the Damocles' sword of East–West confrontation, had to learn to live in a new world after 1989-90, where the earlier black-and-white certainties had been replaced by facts that were more difficult to comprehend and contain, especially for Westerners.
The most immediate result was that the Community found itself - practically overnight - confronted by a bunch of potential applicants for membership, aid supplicants, as well as providers of new investment opportunities. At the beginning of the Nineties Brussels seemed to have no coherent Eastern Policy, no comprehensive vision for the integration of the eastern part of the continent. There was also a danger of the Union becoming more and more 'introverted'. The end of the Cold War undermined the foundations of the Community (and with it German-French cooperation), because German reunification upset the prevailing balance and produced unforeseen economic difficulties.
In addition, new, pressing questions arose for the Community and then the Union: could the ambitious programme of economic, political and military integration be maintained in the presence of the need to find answers for the political and economic desires of the new democracies? Could the dynamic of European unification be retained without the stimulus of the Soviet threat? Could the Union become the vanguard in a process that was to unite the whole of Europe without sacrificing much of the existing cohesion and institutional discipline within the organisation?
Enthusiasm in Western Europe over the end of the Cold War and the democratic revolutions in the East was soon overshadowed by fear of mass migration and the recurrence of the nationalist conflicts of the twenties and thirties. Many thought the fall of the communist regimes had created a frightful zone of political uncertainty, instability, chaos and civil wars, and did away with an international system which for forty years had stabilised international relations.
The momentous changes of 1989 brought independence to East and Central European countries and the possibility of democratic government, but did not really create a chance for economic recovery. The region liberalised trade, often more thoroughly than the developed countries of the West. The newly elected governments considered it an 'entry fee' to Europe to open their economies to the world.
The liberalisation of the economy was most complete in Hungary. Many think that whatever Hungary achieved during its economic transition were closely linked to this liberalisation. And whoever thinks this opening made the country far too vulnerable may be countered with the argument that without this policy Hungary could not have become the most important target area for foreign investment in the region.
A whole generation of UN development officials had in the past stood for the myth of the 'trickle down' theory. It was held that even if initially only a privileged minority takes benefit from development aid, their newly attained standard of living would later trickle down to the lower classes, and the 'demonstration effect' might encourage modernisation. There were many signs of the Washington Consensus* offering similar solutions for the welfare problems of transitional Eastern Europe. These reform suggestions reflected a dominance of the neoclassic principles of the Chicago school of economics. They relied on the assumption that abolishing elements typical of economies not based on the market, reinstating private property and a laissez faire market will, as it were, automatically solve the economic, and even social, problems of the transition societies.** In accordance with the idea of 'creative destruction', the economies of these countries shrank quickly, and the decline which followed the transition was in some countries greater than during the Great Depression.
The recipes of Thatcherite economic policy, which a decade earlier West-European politicians had related to with understandable wariness, were during the transition of the Eastern economies applied at a breathtaking pace. As for investments, the Western governments made only limited commitments, letting private capital act freely. Even investments by the latter proved insufficient: be-tween 1990 and 1993, 12.5 billion dollars were invested in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, when Singapore alone saw half that sum invested in a single year.

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Conclusions: Hungary's place in Europe restored

What was originally the economic community of six nations has changed beyond recognition by the Millennium. The Keynesian and corporatist model of the nations of a 'small Europe' underwent significant alterations during the crises of the seventies, and the single European market and the euro now encourage a new, market-centred economic liberalism. At any rate, European integration has not been a preordained movement toward federal union, but rather a series of pragmatic bargains among national governments based on concrete national interests, relative power, and carefully calculated transfer of sovereignty.
On the other hand, the contrast between the single European market, constrained as it is by the forces of global economy, and the political structures, determined by customs, cultural traditions and geography, may become even more pronounced within the Union's quasi-federal structure.
But how shall we take today what Ralf Dahrendorf called a decade ago "the obvious moral responsibility of Europe's luckier states" for the social and economic stabilisations of the states of East and Central-Europe? How can it be avoided that the Union become an internally divided, morally injured and not too efficiently functioning fortress? Does the Union's institutions have the sufficient 'institutional imagination', which could prepare them for this unprecedented new enlargement?
For forty years, Europe was built by a paternalistic political elite, which sought to heal the injuries caused by French–German enmity. It is not by chance that on the basis of their moral and political authority they were considered the founding fathers of Europe. The present generation of politicians are birds of another feather. The current tasks are, nevertheless, not in the least simpler than those after the war: the reconstruction of Europe (also) includes the extension of the Union to territories beyond the former Iron Curtain - at a time when support for the European institutions is at best fragile. Will the present generation of politicians be able to raise their horizons, and make the sacrifices that necessarily come with the enlargement (but are still controllable), or will they retreat behind the bulwark of narrow national, local or sectoral interests?
Despite the missed chances and the risk still ahead, Central Europe (and, for that matter, Hungary) belong to Europe restored: if not on moral and cultural grounds alone, then surely thanks to the look and feel of the market economies these countries have created. The Union's new Central-European members will change Europe too - redirecting at least some EU money from the continent's Atlantic and Mediterranean edges to its landlocked centre will alter not just Europe's memory of itself, but also its future look. On the other hand, the emerging multi-speed Europe, in which countries move ahead at different speeds on different issues, can make integration acceptable to the many and different European nations.
More and more, the EU will remain the only significant unifying force in Europe, even if it is uncertain where the Union's 'final' borders on the east and south-east might some day lie. Unlike other unifying forces in the past - France under Napoleon or Germany under Hitler - this is not an empire in the making, but an institution which countries join voluntarily and to whose management and multilevel governance system they make their own contribution. In this regard, the EU is the first successful post-modern multinational institution in the world, and a possible model for future global political structures.
The Union still has the aura of Europe's rich men's club and membership in it is seen as a sign of economic and political success, of having made it into established Europe. Meanwhile, during the candidacy process, the goal of membership has given stability, anchorage and direction to the efforts to reform foreign and economic policy on the part of the countries involved. Candidates are perhaps less aware that membership would not mean any automatic acquisition of prosperity but would rather imply a continuous commitment to the increasingly stringent acquis communautaire, as regards, for instance, the opening of markets and the reduction of subsidies.
Whenever the single market arrives, Europe's new members will have, in some respect, to endure long transition periods before fully enjoying its advantages. Austrians and Germans in particular fear a flood of new migrants. This is unduly alarmist. Most Hungarians are stay-at-homes, few would move from one side of the country to the other, much less to Berlin, in search of a better job. Even so, restrictions on labour will remain in effect for up to seven years after accession, though Finland and the Netherlands are looking to open their borders to the newcomers sooner.
Admitting the new members to the EU club will not be the triumph hoped for by the generation of 1989. Indeed, rather than answering any cry for freedom, Brussel's bureaucrats will be busy fending off more mundane requests for subsidies and aid. Moreover, rather than welcoming the newcomers to a booming, confident club, the Union itself is experiencing difficulties, with some of its biggest economies - hamstrung by the monetary union and the stability pact - struggling for growth themselves. Hungary and the other new members may well wonder what they have got themselves into.
Yet, one reason why small states like Hungary are keen on the idea of the EU is that club members enjoy an element of equality (a veto on major issues, for one thing), which the 'buffer' countries in Central Europe have never had before. Another cause for optimism is a new sense that the EU may be turning into a club where uniformity is less stifling. Some members belong to a single currency, others to a border-free zone; still others to a tentatively emerging defence club. If the EU is becoming more varied, a multi-system affair, (but hopefully not one with first- and second-class members) Hungary and the other new members might find it easier to belong.
On the other hand, the admission of these new countries may not be as costly as some in Paris and Berlin fear. After all, Central Europe, and especially Hungary, was never as backward as the Cold War and its after-effects made it seem. Ravaged by the Second World War and what followed, the region also has a history of democracy, high culture and relative prosperity. Proper reintegration with the more fortunate half of Europe, painful though it may be, is long overdue.

 

Géza Mezei
has published extensively on the history and politics of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century and on international political institutions. Since 1992 he has worked in various functions in the Parliamentary Assembly and in the Directorate of Political Affairs at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.