Eastern Europe or Solvent Europe?
If you want to say intelligent, well-informed things, it's a good idea to hang around intelligent, well-informed people and pay attention to what they say first. In a major departure from my usual method of writing the first thing that comes into my head and hoping to distract readers from my basic ignorance with smart-arsed comments, I actually sat and listened to somebody who knows what they are talking about for a change. Edward Lucas is International Editor of The Economist magazine and is a recognised expert on Eastern Europe, which is odd since he just spent 20 minutes persuading me that Eastern Europe doesn't exist.
Mr Lucas is not attempting to discredit the evidence of the compass, but rather to point out that the assumption that the economies and societies of countries in this part of Europe have certain factors in common is just nonsense. This is especially important because these 'factors in common' tend to be negative ones. Western journalists, says Lucas, use the term 'Eastern Europe' as a shorthand for 'bad government, corruption and economic weakness.' In fact, among the 10 countries that joined the EU most recently, including Poland, there are far more dissimilarities than similarities and none of them are in as much economic trouble as so-called Western European states such as Greece, Portugal and Italy.
Mr Lucas is not a big fan of Silvio Berlusconi. He went to some lengths to point out that Berlusconi, a politician who essentially owns his country's media and has been implicated in more criminal and immoral activity than Al Capone, represents an almost Platonic model of what the West thinks of when it thinks of Eastern European politics – except that he's the leader of one of the founding Western states of the EU. Most actual Eastern European politicians look like a line-up of choir boys in comparison. According to the most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia are less corrupt than Italy and Greece – the two cradles of Western civilisation.
The recent fate of Greece, which is still called ‘Western’ despite it being further east than Warsaw, has been a good example of how mixed up our perceptions have become. Until recently Western Europeans were relatively unimpressed by Poland's economic growth because it looks quite hard to fail when the EU is paying for half of every new road, power station and railway line. "We'd be doing well too," went the thought, "if somebody was shovelling billions of other people's money in our direction." Unfortunately this has all gone out of the window now that we've had to start sending suitcases full of cash to Greece. The amount of money that's being talked about for the European Emergency Fund makes the money spent in Eastern Europe so far look like the change you find down the back of the sofa. It's all the more striking when you consider that the money spent in Eastern Europe has gone on useful things like roads, powers stations and railways, while the far greater sums sent to Greece will buy exactly nothing.
I've seen the Greek finance minister on TV and I strongly suspect he's simply eating the cheques.
It's easy to forget that the greatest European economic disaster among the recent catalogue of European economic disasters took place in Iceland, which is as far West as it's possible to get in Europe, while the one economy on the continent that managed to grow while all others were plummeting like absent-minded parachutists was Poland's. When Italy, Portugal and Belgium eventually collapse in a heap of imaginary money taking the reputations of Western European banking institutions with them, I'll be glad I live not in Eastern Europe, but in Solvent Europe.
Jamie Stokes specjalnie dla Wirtualnej Polski