Samuel Vaknin

“ Never has Europe been more fractured. It is now a continent of four speeds. The rich core of the European Union, notably Germany and France, constitutes its engine.
The mendicant members - from Greece to Portugal - enjoy inane dollops of cash from Brussels but have next to no say in Union matters.
The shoo-in candidates - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and, maybe, Slovakia, if it keeps ignoring the outcomes of its elections - are frantically distancing themselves from the queue of beggars, migrants and criminals that awaits at the pearly gates of Brussels. ”

“ The former communist countries in transition are supposed to be miraculously transformed by the accession process. Alas, the indelible pathologies of communism mesh well with Brussels's unmanageable, self-perpetuating and opaque bureaucracy. These mutually-enhancing propensities are likely to yield a giant and venal welfare state with a class of aged citizens in the core countries of the European Union living off the toil of young, mostly Slav, laborers in its eastern territories. This is the irony: the European Union is doomed without enlargement. ”

“ Muslims can serve as an invaluable bridge between Europe and Russia, the Middle East, Asia, including China and other places with massive Muslim majorities or minorities. As most world conflicts today involve Islamist militants, global peace and a functioning "new order" critically depend on the goodwill and communication skills of Muslims.
Such a benign amalgam is the only realistic hope for reconciliation. Europe is ageing and stagnating and can be reinvigorated only by embracing youthful, dynamic, driven immigrants, most of whom are bound to be Muslim. ”

“ Long before Enron and World.com, the tech bubble and Wall Street's accounting frauds and pernicious conflicts of interest - transition has exposed the raw and vulnerable nerves running through the foundations of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Eastern Europe is a monument to the folly of unmitigated and unbridled freemarketry. ”

“ Yet, deep underneath, transition - perhaps because it was so thoroughly botched - taught us unforgettable lessons about markets and the way they work, namely that "objective", "mechanical" capitalism is a mirage.
Perhaps the most important moral is that, like all other economic processes - transition is, mostly, in the mind. Successful capitalism requires education and experience. The blind in east Europe were led by the one-eyed. ”

“ As The Economist noted correctly recently:
"The Poles may differ with the French over security but they will be with them in the battle to preserve farm subsidies. The Czechs and Hungarians are less wary of military force than the Germans but sympathize with their approach to the EU's constitutional reform. In truth, there are no more fixed and reliable alliances in the EU. Countries will team up with each other, depending on issue and circumstances."
Thus, the partners, Germany and central Europe, scarred and embittered, will survive the one's haughty conduct and the other's backstabbing. ”

“ Equilibrium is never the result of honed negotiating skills - and always the outcome of forces matched in battle. Attrition, fatigue, a yearning for stability, a willingness to compromise - are all provoked and enhanced to the acutest level by bloodshed and atrocities. It is an inevitable phase. The road to peace is bloodied.
The Balkan has never been as politically fragmented as it is today. It has never been under the auspices of only one superpower. ”

“ Russia's population is hungry and abrasively materialistic. Its robber barons are more American in spirit than any British or French entrepreneur. Russia's business ethos is reminiscent of 19th century frontier America, not of 20th century staid Germany.
Russia is driven by kaleidoscopically shifting coalitions within a narrow elite, not by its masses - and the elite wants money, a lot of it and now. In Russia's unbreakable cycle, money yields power which leads to more money. The country is a functioning democracy but elections there do not revolve around the economy. ”

“ European "capitalism" is really a hybrid of the socialist and liberal teachings of the 19th century. It emphasizes consensus, community, solidarity, equality, stability and continuity. It places these values above profitability, entrepreneurship, competition, individualism, mobility, size, litigation and the use of force. Europeans firmly believe that the workings of the market should be tampered with and that it is the responsibility of the state to see to it that no one gets left behind or trampled upon. ”

“ But even a much-debated phase-in period of 10 years would burden the EU's budget - and the patience of its member states and denizens - to an acrimonious breaking point.
The countries of central and eastern Europe are new consumption and investment markets. With a total of 300 million people (Russia counted) , they equal the EU's population - though not its much larger purchasing clout. They are likely to while the next few decades on a steep growth curve, catching up with the West. Their proximity to the EU makes them ideal customers for its goods and services. ”

“ With the implosion of communism in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, large swathes of central and eastern Europe found themselves devoid of an internal market, an economic sponsor, or a military umbrella. ”

“ Very like the Church in the Middle Ages, communism sought to monopolize and permeate all discourse, all thinking, and all intellectual pursuits. Communism was characterized by tensions between party, state and the economy - exactly as the medieval polity was plagued by conflicts between church, king and merchants-bankers.
In communism, political activism was a precondition for advancement and, too often, for personal survival. ”

“ The harsh truth is that there is no central European economy without Germany. And, at this stage, there is no east European economy, period.
Consider central Europe's most advanced post-communist economy.
One third of Hungary's GDP, one half of its industrial production, three quarters of industrial sales and nine tenths of its exports are generated by multinationals. Three quarters of the industrial sector is foreign-owned. One third of all foreign direct investment is German. France is the third largest investor. ”

“ For some countries - notably Estonia - joining the EU would translate into a de-liberalized and re-regulated future. Others would find the EU's brand of the market a comfortable and dimly familiar middle ground between America's harsh prescriptions and communism's delusional model. The EU's faceless and Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Brussels - Moscow revisited - should prove to be a relief compared to the IMF's ruffians.
The EU is evolving into a land empire, albeit glacially. The polities of central and eastern Europe were always constituents of empires - reluctantly or by choice. ”

“ Communist managers - always the quintessential rent-seekers - were trained to wheedle politicians, lobby the state and cadge for subsidies and bailouts, rather than respond to market signals. As communism imploded, the involvement of the state in the economy - and the resources it commanded - contracted. ”

“ The Czechs, for instance, recall how France (and Britain) sacrificed them to Nazi Germany in 1938 in the name of realpolitik and the preservation of peace. They think that America is a far more reliable sponsor of their long-term safety and prosperity than the fractured European "Union".
Their dislike of what they regard as America's lightweight leadership and overt - and suspect - belligerence notwithstanding, the central and east Europeans are grateful to the United States for its unflinching - and spectacularly successful - confrontation with communism. ”

“ The denizens of the nether regions of central and eastern Europe have been the victims of successive economic utopias. They fear and suspect ideological purity. They have been conditioned by the authoritarian breed of socialism they endured, really little more than an overblown conspiracy theory, a persecutory delusion which invariably led to Stalinesque paranoid backlashes. Indeed, Stalin was more representative of communism than any other leader before or after him. ”

“ The relationship between Germany and central Europe is mercantilistic. Germany leverages the region's cheap labor and abundant raw materials to manufacture and export its finished products. Central Europe conforms, therefore, to the definition of a colony and an economic hinterland. From a low base, growth there - driven by frenzied consumerism - is bound to outstrip the northern giant's for a long time to come. But Germans stands to benefit from such prosperity no less than the indigenous population. ”

“ Germany is reasserting itself. United, it is the largest country in Europe and one of the richest. Its forces are keeping the fragile peace in Balkan hot spots, like Macedonia. It will contribute to the EU's long-heralded rapid reaction force. It owns the bulk of the, frequently overdue, sovereign debts of Russia, Ukraine and other east European countries.
One tenth of Germany's trade is with the candidate countries, a turnover comparable to its exchange with the United States. German goods constitute two fifths of all EU trade with the new members. ”

“ The central European left is more preoccupied with a social - dare I say socialist - agenda than any of its Western coreligionists. Equally, the central European right is less individualistic, libertarian, religious, and conservative than any of its Western parallels - and much more nationalistic and xenophobic. It sometimes echoes the far right in Western Europe - rather than the center-right, mainstream, middle-class orientated parties in power. ”

“ According to the United Nations Population Division, the EU would need to import 1.6 million migrant workers annually to maintain its current level of working age population. But it would need to absorb almost 14 million new, working age, immigrants per year just to preserve a stable ratio of workers to pensioners.
Eastern Europe - and especially central Europe - is the EU's natural reservoir of migrant labor. It is ironic that xenophobic and anti-immigration parties hold the balance of power in a continent so dependent on immigration for the survival of its way of life and institutions. ”

“ As Vladimir Lukin, deputy speaker of the Duma observed recently, Britain having swerved too far towards America - Russia may yet become an intermediary between a bitterly disenchanted USA and an irked Europe and between the rich, industrialized West and developing countries in Asia. Publicly, the USA has only mildly disagreed with Russia's reluctance to countenance a military endgame in Iraq - while showering France and Germany with vitriol for saying, essentially, the same things. ”

“ As China and India grow in economic and geopolitical importance, an enlarged Europe will find itself in the profitable role of an intermediary between east and west.
The wide-ranging benefits to the EU of enlargement are clear, therefore. What do the candidate states stand to gain from their accession? The answer is: surprisingly little. All of them already enjoy, to varying degrees, unfettered, largely duty-free, access to the EU. To belong, a few - like Estonia - would have to dismantle a much admired edifice of economic liberalism. ”

“ Workers, both industrial and agricultural, were lionized and idolized in communist times. With the implosion of communism, these frustrated and angry rejects of a failed ideology spawned many grassroots political movements, lately in Poland, in the form of "Self Defence". Their envied and despised enemies are the well-educated, the intellectuals, the self-proclaimed new elite, the foreigner, the minority, the rich, and the remote bureaucrat in Brussels. ”

“ Between half and three quarters of all respondents - fully 80 percent in the Czech Republic - thought that immigrants are a "bad influence on the country". Only Bulgaria welcomes immigration by a wide margin. But nine of ten Bulgarians decry emigration - Bulgarians fleeing abroad. Three quarters do so in Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland and the former East Germany.
Ironically, the more xenophobic the society, the more concerned its members are with ethnic hatred. Almost three fifths of all Czechs identify it as the major problem facing the world today. ”

“ When communism crumbled, all of Europe - east and west - experienced a protracted and agonizing transition. Privatization, deregulation, competition and liberalization swept across both parts of the continent. The irony is that central and east Europe's adaptation was more farfetched and alacritous than the west's. ”

“ A uniform exchange rate policy is only one of the concessions members of a monetary union must make. Joining always means giving up independent monetary policy and, with it, a sizeable slice of national sovereignty. Members relegate the regulation of their money supply, inflation, interest rates, and foreign exchange rates to a central monetary authority (e.g., the European Central Bank in the eurozone) .
The need for central monetary management arises because, in economic theory, a currency is never just a currency. ”