Volume 11 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2002

Special Reports

The Other Central Europe
Jacques Rupnik

Is the specter of nationalism haunting Central Europe once again? Since the velvet revolutions of 1989, the countries of Central Europe have been the success story of the transition to democracy, and their mutual cooperation in the Visegrad Group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) has gone hand in hand with their integration into the European Union, scheduled for 2004. This trajectory has been seriously damaged by an upsurge in preelectoral nationalist fever that does not hesitate to compromise future cooperation in the name of settling past scores. Thus the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, demanded the repeal of Eduard Benes’s 1945 decrees (concerning the forfeiture of citizenship and goods of the German and Hungarian populations expelled from Czechoslovakia) as a precondition for the entry of the Czech Republic (and Slovakia) into the European Union. In response, the Czech, Slovak, and Polish prime ministers canceled their meeting scheduled for March 1 in Budapest, effectively putting an end to the Central European cooperation of the last decade. The Visegrad variant of Central Europe is on the verge of being replaced by another variant—the transplantation of nationalist populism from Bavaria to the plains of the Danube.

The chain reaction of nationalisms that are arising simultaneously and also reinforcing each other is creating a new political order. Since Wolfgang Schüssel and Jörg Haider’s coalition came to power in Vienna, Austria’s relations with the neighboring Czech Republic have deteriorated, with the focus on two themes: the closing of the Temelin nuclear power plant, located near the Austrian border, and the repeal of the 1945 Benes decrees concerning the Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, the majority of whom settled in Bavaria, though some also live in Austria. As soon as a compromise on the nuclear power plant was found, under the aegis of the European Union in November, Austrian pressure for repeal of the decrees became more pronounced.

At that point, the Czech prime minister, Milos Zeman of the Czech Social Democrat Party, chose to demonstrate that there is little difference between his country and its neighbor in terms of old-school nationalism. In a January interview in the Viennese weekly magazine Profil, he described the Sudeten Germans as Hitler’s “Fifth Column,” implicitly espousing the notion of their collective guilt. And, as if that were not enough, he recommended, during a recent trip to Israel, that his hosts break the deadlock with the Palestinians by adopting the method that was so “successful” for the Czechs in 1945: expulsion. This was sufficient for Edmund Stoiber, leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and defender of the Sudeten Germans, to take up the question of the decrees and demand that the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, cancel his planned visit to Prague, which Schröder did in order to defuse an electoral debate with Stoiber.

As soon as Stoiber was invested as the leader of the opposition, he went to Budapest to lend his support to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, at his party congress and who is also in the midst of a campaign. Orban returned the favor within days by taking up, before the European Parliament in Brussels, one of CSU’s pet themes: the repeal of the Benes decrees as a precondition for the Czech Republic’s entry into the European Union. Insofar as the decrees concern the former Czechoslovakia, and thus also the property confiscated from the Hungarians of Slovakia at the liberation, the Hungarian leader’s comments were a godsend for Slovakian nationalists, such as former prime minister Vladimir Meciar, who will not hesitate to mobilize themselves against the “Hungarian threat” in their electoral campaigns. Four years of remarkable work by Mikulas Dzurinda’s government in Bratislava, to integrate the representatives of the Hungarian minority into the government and, more generally, into a politics of dialogue and neighborly relations with Hungary, were jeopardized.

The national-populist logic of the electoral campaigns mutually reinforce each other. If they are successful, it could well mean the nearly simultaneous electoral victories of Orban in Budapest, Vaclav Klaus in Prague, Meciar in Bratislava, and Stoiber in Berlin. Although not identical, each man contributes in his own way to the displacement of a democratic, Central European model, integrated into the EU. This new, right-wing model, with its extension of Alpine populism to the East (Berlusconi–Bossi in Italy, Blocher in Switzerland, Schüssel–Haider, and Stoiber, represents a mix of ethnic nationalism and the closing of borders, the egoism of the well-off and vituperations against the bureaucracy of Brussels.

It would be reassuring to interpret this worrisome evolution as a short-lived crisis due to approaching elections, and doubtless the players have made this calculation. But it also suggests the presence of deeper causes, in the first place, of a “past that won’t pass” and is still susceptible to manipulation. For the Czech prime minister who speaks of the “Fifth Column” of the Reich, the 1945 expulsion put an end to a history of Czech and German coexistence in Bohemia, which Munich and the war had compromised once and for all. For the Sudeten Germans and their Bavarian protector, history seems, on the contrary, to begin in May 1945 with their brutal expulsion from Bohemia. The debate of German historians over the Nazi past seems not to have touched the refugee organizations. When Orban, allied with the ultranationalist Istvan Csurka, an adept of Greater Hungary, assumes a privileged right to look after the state of Magyar minorities in neighboring countries; when Schüssel says, in substance, “We had to compensate the Jews, the Czechs must now compensate the expelled Germans,” both are proposing quite personal reinterpretations of history and putting them to questionable political use.

Indeed, three different aspects of these trends must be sharply distinguished. First, there is the difficult and painful debate about history, which could not take place in Cold War Europe, that is becoming all the more necessary for the sake of future reconciliation on the Franco-German model.

Second, we must reconsider the ethical condemnation of expulsions and the notion of “collective guilt,” which was a by-product of the war and European totalitarianism and has no place in today’s democratic Europe. This is what President Vaclav Havel courageously maintained during his first trip to Germany in January 1990. His excuses were apparently misunderstood at home and taken as a sign of weakness in Bavaria. Such a debate about history is not easy, however, in the context of heated political controversies about the past in Prague and a new German fascination with the “lost provinces” of the East, as shown in the special issue of Der Spiegel at the end of March as well as Günter Grass’s bestseller on the topic.

Third, the demands to retract legal orders emerging from the Second World War, issued from behind noble words about the rights of man, are in fact demands for restitution that do not concern the former Czechoslovakia alone. When Erika Steinbach, president of the Association of the Expelled, writes in Die Welt am Sontag (March 3) that the task of settling problems linked to the expulsions is “the duty of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia,” then the specific problematic is expanded from the 1945 Benes decrees to the whole of Central Eastern Europe implicated in the expulsion of German populations and eventually endorsed by the victorious countries in the Potsdam Accords of 1945. In the thirties, the bête noire of Central Europe was “the order of Versailles.” Today it would be Potsdam.

Distinguishing these three dimensions was the object of the Czecho-German declaration adopted by the prime ministers and solemnly approved by the parliaments of the two countries in January 1997. The Germans expressed their regret for Munich and the destruction of Czechoslovakia, the Czechs for the “wrongs and injustice” inflicted on the German population by their expulsion. The two parties committed themselves to “not encumbering their relations with political and juridical questions of the past.” But this is precisely what is happening. It began with the resolution of the European Parliament, initiated by the Bavarian CSU deputies, “concerning the progress of the Czech Republic on the way to integration” that “invites” the Czech government to repeal the 1945 decrees deemed incompatible with European legal order. A few days later, the Austrian parliament adopted an analogous resolution concerning the former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia (in particular, Slovenia).

These resolutions, antecedent to recent declarations that are even more explicit, represent an instrumentalization of the process of EU enlargement gone awry, as well as an inversion of the philosophy on which the Union was founded: overcoming controversies of the past through cooperation directed toward the future. Today there are some who exploit their Eastern neighbors’ “desire to join Europe” in order to settle the accounts of the past. Two foreseeable consequences make this return of (or to) history a dangerous game.

First, there is no better way of turning public opinion in certain candidate countries against the European Union than by letting local populists sow the idea that the EU is merely the instrument of their powerful German neighbor. For Central Eastern Europeans, the EU should be a means of balancing an asymmetrical relationship with Germany. It risks being perceived as an indicator of this asymmetry. But above all, this “other” Central Europe of centrifugal nationalisms also risks making a case for those who would not be sorry to see EU and NATO enlargement compromised. Let them settle their problems first, it could be argued, rather than bringing them into the Union. An editorial of the Washington Post, on March 4, 2002, argued that if Orban (who Bush refused to receive) had made such comments before the country’s entry into NATO, its application would have been rejected.

The European Union must accommodate a double goal for 2004: enlargement to the East and the adoption of a new constitution. This crucial enterprise of redefining the European project should not be compromised by the artisans of the “other Central Europe” who, rather than thinking responsibly about the future of an enlarged Union, prefer to look in history’s rearview mirror.

Jacques Rupnik is director of research at the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales, Paris.

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