Transcriber: Jerzy Pa Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
(Polish) Good morning, thank you.
I'm going to talk today about something
for which there never has been
and for which there still is no place
in our "new normal."
I'm not talking about my ability to speak Polish.
As you can hear, it's disastrous.
I'm talking about something else.
Eastern Europe.
(English) For those who don't speak Polish,
and maybe for those who do but don't understand my Polish,
(Laughter)
I want to talk today
about a concept which doesn't exist anymore.
A concept which I have been devoting the last 30 years of my life to,
but I think it's now time to get rid of.
And that concept is Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe is a concept
that started with the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
And it sort of made sense then, it really meant "eastern-ruled Europe"
rather than Eastern Europe,
because, as you can see, Prague is to the west of Vienna,
Helsinki is on the same longitude as Tallinn,
and there were bits of Eastern Europe which were, like Yugoslavia,
or Albania, not really under Soviet rule.
So even then it was a pretty untidy concept.
But it sort of made sense.
Western Europe, basically free, Eastern Europe, basically not.
But since the fall of the Iron Curtain this term has stayed.
It's become a kind of lazy, anachronistic shorthand.
Very handy for journalists,
for commentators, economists, even politicians,
who want to try and talk down, I think, the countries of the East.
The idea is that this is a place where people are very poor,
where politics is very unstable,
which is not really integrated into the European mainstream.
Countries which are a bit weird, a bit different, it's "Eastern Europe"
It's almost used as a term of abuse.
"The food was really bad, it was like 'East-European.'"
This, incidentally is a Roma settlement somewhere in Serbia,
I think, outside Novi Sad.
And many people would say, "That looks kind of East-European."
And I think this is totally out of date and unfair.
And if you start off just looking at economics,
because I work for The Economist and we always like the numbers.
OK, so, Eastern Europe is not poor.
There are so-called East-European countries like Slovenia
which are richer than some countries in Western Europe.
More important is the trajectory.
All the ten new members of the EU
or new-ish, since it's not that new now,
have deficits that are falling and economies that are growing.
There's not one of them,
not even Hungary is in the same basket-case category as Greece,
which is supposedly a West-European country.
So the economics, I think, beyond doubt,
no longer means anything to say Eastern Europe.
And it's not just economics, it's culture as well.
You all know who this is, I don't need to tell this audience.
But I'm just going to whiz through.
These are people from the supposedly obscure, marginal,
not in the main stream part of Europe.
That was Copernicus.
Chopin,
Liszt,
Dostoevsky,
Conrad, Polish, [born in] Cracow,
Mary Curie,
Kundera, Kafka,
Kandinsky, Chagall.
I just started off with the Cs and the Ks and added another two,
but you could really fill a whole talk just putting pictures of people
from this supposedly marginal, non-mainstream part of Europe.
The list of good security is the idea
that Eastern Europe is this vulnerable bit of Europe
that consumes security and doesn't provide it.
Again, not true.
Countries in Eastern Europe tend to spend more on security
than those in Western Europe.
You've got countries like Poland and Estonia,
which are nearly up to 2% of GDP.
You've also got countries like Slovakia and Lithuania
which are pretty much given up.
You've got countries that are neurotic neutrals
like Ukraine, supposedly Eastern Europe.
You've got countries which are ardent Atlanticists,
like the Czech Republic or the Baltic states.
So there's no security conception in which Eastern Europe makes sense.
And I think that the key point to remember here
is that it's about integration.
Eastern Europe is integrated into Western Europe,
to the point where the concept doesn't make sense any more.
Look at NATO, you have so-called West-European countries
like Ireland, Switzerland, Austria,
Finland, Sweden, which are not in NATO.
You've got all the EU10 in NATO,
and countries outside the EU10 which are trying to join.
So it isn't to do with NATO. It's not to do with Schengen.
When I arrived from Britain yesterday,
I went as a non-Schengen visitor into the Schengen zone.
The Schengen zone includes lots of East-European countries
and it excludes countries like Britain,
which are not in Schengen, so it's not about that.
It's not about the Euro.
You've got three East-European countries,
Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia which are in the Euro.
And you've got Denmark, Sweden, Britain, Switzerland, which are outside.
So I can see no sense in which this category makes sense.
And there's one test I want to do.
There is only one country in Europe
which is a member of both the EU and of NATO,
and obeys the rules of both those clubs.
It meets the debt and deficit and inflation criteria
for the Euro zone, and it's in the Euro,
and it also meets NATO's rule
of 2% of GDP going on defense spending.
A country that 20 years ago was not even on the map.
Well, 20 years and two months ago.
A country which people just wrote off as another East-European basket case.
Can anyone guess which country that is?
The one country in Europe, in NATO, which actually meets the rules.
(Audience) Estonia.
Correct, very good, you win a prize.
Now, if we don't have Eastern Europe any more as a concept,
and I think we shouldn't, what do we have instead?
Well, I think we should have some new categories.
This, for example, is the old Hanseatic League.
A kind of very early, free-trading version of the EU.
Based on cities, really, rather than countries.
And I think that "Baltic Europe" kind of makes sense.
It's not just that the people around the Baltic Sea
all eat herring with boiled potatoes, which people tend not to...
Actually, you could stretch this down to Holland as well,
they eat herring there as well.
But these are countries which are mainly Protestant,
although, obviously, Poland is an exception.
They all have solvent, strong, stable governments.
They are instinctively free-trading and distinctly open,
and nowadays they're all pretty worried about Russia.
And it's a major part of NATO's thinking,
its thinking about Baltic security
in a way that actually involves supposedly non-NATO Sweden and Finland.
So I think "Baltic Europe" kind of makes sense.
Another one that makes sense is "Danube Europe."
This is the great European river.
And you can see if you just take the Danube itself,
then that's Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria.
And if you want to be kind, a tiny little bit of Moldova.
If you include the tributaries to the Danube,
it includes other bits of ex-Yugoslavia
and the Czech Republic as well.
So I think, Danube Europe kind of makes sense,
in fact, the Hungarian president made a big thing
with their six months of the year of promoting Danube Europe.
Another one, on a slightly less happy theme,
this is a German map, just to show I'm not trying to make the Anglosphere
the dominant cultural hegemon.
This is Roma Europe. The tints show the percentage of Roma population.
Again, this is not...
Roma is a terrible European social problem.
Very bad education, very bad housing, lots of discrimination,
lots of criminality, very high birth rate.
A really big problem, particularly, I think,
for our children, going forward:
failure to do Roma integration.
But again, it's not just an East-European problem.
Spain has a big Roma population, done pretty well with it.
Turkey, big Roma population.
Also some of the traditional East-European countries,
but then, again, not others.
I think, what we're now seeing, is a new emerging pole in Europe.
And I say, pole, not because of Poland but because it's a pole of attraction.
And that is the countries roughly around the Baltic Sea, which I showed you
but adding to that, Austria,
Switzerland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
And those are countries which all have a lot of things in common.
They are stable politically.
No worries about weird extremist parties.
We have those worries a bit further east,
a bit further south, and a bit further west,
but in that core chunk of Europe you have basically stable politics.
You have strong economies.
No one anywhere near a bailout, no-one's worried about credit ratings.
The credit ratings are going up.
Basically, these ones around here, the Baltic
and Central Europe.
And they have strong economies.
Their credit ratings are either stable or improving.
And some of these supposedly "East-European basket cases"
now have much stronger credit ratings
than even the really serious founder members
of the Euro and of the EU, like Italy.
So, you've got strong economies, you've got strong politics.
You've got a sense of confidence and a sense of internationalism.
And then around that blob in the middle,
which in my map was colored bright blue,
we then have a kind of red horseshoe.
The red horseshoe is countries that either have wobbly economies
or wobbly politics or both.
It starts with Russia.
And I can't say Russian politics is terribly wobbly,
it's all too predictable.
It's a case of one-man, one-vote.
The man's called Vladimir Vladimirovich.
There’s a electorate of two, but the other guy's vote doesn't count,
and so, he's just voted himself back in.
So you've got Russia, you've got Ukraine.
Again, I'm going slightly backwards.
You've got Romania and Bulgaria with quite serious problems.
You've got ex-Yugoslavia problems,
and then you go south to Italy, again, with Berlusconi
who if he was an East-European leader, everybody would be saying,
"Of course, that's so East-European,
this overlap between politics and business,
and this guy who runs a media empire.
He's very corrupt, he's in with organized crime."
You know, Berlusconi would make a perfect cartoon character,
as an East-European leader,
but actually, he's the prime minister of Italy.
You've got Spain, Portugal, both in terrible difficulty.
Some people would say the one thing the Eastern Europe still has
is that it takes a lot of money from the West.
And that's kind of true.
In the 2007-2013 financial perspective in the EU,
tens of billions of Euros went East to build new roads,
the new bridge, which I came across today in Cracow, very nice,
big change from when I was a student here 25 years ago.
The traffic's changed as well.
So you have a very big transfer from West to East.
But those sums are dwarfed by the size of the bailout.
You know, in one EU summit meeting they sort of think,
"Oh, well, 100 billion may be not enough, 200 billion?
300 billion? Make it half a trillion. That should do the trick."
These gigantic sums which are going to bail out Greece,
and by implication, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and maybe Belgium.
The bailout of Dexia alone, I think,
was more than Poland received in an entire year from the EU.
So I don't even think this idea of Eastern Europe
as the recipient makes sense.
So, (Polish) There is no Eastern Europe.
(English) It's time to put this anachronistic,
damaging, disparaging, irrelevant,
conceptually flawed idea of Eastern Europe in the dustbin.
Let's deal with the countries of Europe as they are.
And if we make categories, make them real ones,
with real common characteristics.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)