From The Economist: Wrongly labelled: The economic downturn has made it harder to speak sensibly of a region called —eastern Europe—
IT WAS never a very coherent idea and it is becoming a damaging one. —Eastern Europe— is a geographical oddity that includes the Czech Republic (in the middle of the continent) but not Greece or Cyprus (supposedly —western— Europe but in the far south-east). It makes little sense historically either: it includes countries (like Ukraine) that were under the heel of the Soviet empire for decades and those (Albania, say) that only brushed it. Some of those countries had harsh planned economies; others had their own version of —goulash communism— (Hungary) or —self-managed socialism— (Yugoslavia).
Already unreliable in 1989, the label has stretched to meaninglessness as those countries’ fortunes have diverged since the collapse of communism. The nearly 30 states that once, either under their own names or as part of somewhere else, bore the label —communist— now have more differences than similarities. Yet calling them —eastern Europe— suggests not only a common fate under totalitarian rule, but a host of ills that go with it: a troubled history then; bad government and economic misery now.
The economic downturn has shown how misleading this is. Worries about —contagion— from the banking crisis in Latvia raised risk premiums in otherwise solid economies such as Poland and the Czech Republic—”a nonsense based on outsiders’ perceptions of other outsiders’ fears. In fact, the continent’s biggest financial upheaval is in Iceland (see article, article), and the biggest forecast budget deficits in the European Union next year will not be in some basket-cases from the ex-communist —east— but in Britain and in Greece. The new government in Athens is grappling with a budget deficit of at least 12.7% of GDP and possibly as much as 14.5%. European Commission officials are discussing that in Greece this week…
Of course Eastern Europe was always a political construct arising from a natavist world view coupled with anti-communist politics of the Cold War. Geographically, the center of Europe is in Lithuania, and Poland is resolutely in the middle of Central Europe.
It is also interesting to note that several Cold War constructs still prevail. Poles are the last “Eastern Europeans” who need a visa to travel to the United States, and at a prohibitive cost at that. Also, there is still a lack of degree equivalency so that Poles coming to the U.S., as doctors, dentists, and in other professions, must finance a whole second education. All of this is what’s left of an unfortunate history, one, as the article suggests, that we must get beyond.
