European integration: Central Europe’s perspective

An exhibition dedicated to the Central European contribution to European integration was opened at the Berlaymont building in Brussels on the 28 June. This is the text of my address.

* Europe as a whole is better understood from the periphery than from the centre, the perspective is different and one has a better view of the processes that have made Europe. This particular insight is from Czesław Miłosz, who came from the periphery of the periphery, the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands. This insight enhances Central Europe’s role in understanding the positives of European integration, though whether its voice is strong enough is another matter. But this relative weakness also means that Central Europe is far more committed to integration in order to safeguard its autonomy and agency. Sometimes this perspective from the periphery spills over into irony, an irony that those from the edge of Europe have a clearer sense of what Europe is than those from the centre.

* The Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, observed that Central Europe is Europe’s early warning system. Because Central Europe’s European experience of modernity was delayed and as a result attenuated with fewer domestic resources to shape modernisation, it has experienced many of the processes of modernity in a more extreme form. Kafka’s insight into the soulless, absurd bureaucracy of modernity is to be contrasted with Weber’s legal-rationality. Another example is Latvia’s extraordinary success in overcoming a major economic crisis largely through its own efforts can be contrasted with Greece or Ireland or Portugal. The Good Soldier Schweik recognises from the outset that there is no glory in war – in striking contrast to the patriotic outpourings of 1914 in France or Britain or Germany.

* One of the contributions of István Bibó, the Hungarian political theorist, is the emphasis that he places on the domestication of power, the framing of power by institutions, procedures and law. In this context, the importance of consistency and credibility in the exercise of power is central, above all when the political actors involved are unevenly matched. If power is exercised without principle, for its own sake, then the legacy will be ressentiment, a sense of injustice, and these are thoroughly corrosive of democracy.

* Central Europe has its own, often significantly different, experience of a multiculturalism, one in which there is multilingualism and the coexistence historic high cultures, not migrant cultures. The rise of parallel societies in the West as the outcome of immigration should prompt a closer look at how one can structure parallel societies effectively.

* In international relations, the Central European states generally have enjoyed much less agency, much less freedom of manoeuvre, than the West Europeans. They have all been subordinated to a landward empire, but have never enjoyed the status of having been former colonies. This makes European integration doubly important, in as much as the integration process provides for the parity of esteem of each member state of the EU and at the same time offers a degree of security from intervention in their internal affairs. When this principle is breached, however, the consequence is a palpable rise in Euroscepticism.

* So, in an ideal world, Western Europe would do well to listen to the Central European voice. Unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world.

Sch. Gy.