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Norbert Mappes-Niediek, author of the book “Divided European Sky”, scholar of central and south-eastern Europe and publicist, asks for it. The recurring claim that new EU members are willing to devour Western money but do not want to seize its values is a “fundamental misunderstanding”, he wrote in an article in “Europe in a different way” in the February issue Cicero Magazine.
“From an Eastern perspective, the roles of donor and recipient are changing,” he writes, asking questions that should reasonably arise for Eastern Europeans: “Aren’t Western investors paying much lower wages to our workers profiting enormously?” Are they not opposing our governments by promising to establish businesses in such a way that they no longer impose any demands on them, but are only trying to lure them in with tax donations? By the way, through your government and the EU Commission, aren’t you imposing rules on us that we will operate here later? After all, don’t they sell the products we make ourselves for low pay at inflated prices? Shouldn’t we accept that Western countries export the problems of their immigration policies to us? What do we give their experts, doctors, specialists, scientists to us? “
The eastern states are losing
As a result, “who is the giver and who is the receiver”, according to the publicist, “both sides could play ping pong for a long time.” Mappes-Niediek tends to agree with French economist Thomas Piketty, who estimates that the most successful eastern EU countries send far more money to the West than they receive from the West.
Mr Piketty reached this conclusion by comparing the profits from the Brussels budget, which actually flow largely from West to East, with the profits from the companies which flow in the opposite direction.
“After calculating the net worth, the balance of the eastern countries turned out to be negative, especially in the Czech Republic and Hungary, but the balance of Poland and Slovakia is also negative,” he notes.
This is due to the “friendly takeover” model, Mappes-Niediek explains. “In Eastern Europe, one in four people works in a company owned by a foreigner; in Germany, only one in ten of those employees. In Hungary, foreign companies produce more than half of the added value. Even in Poland , whose economy has grown rapidly for several decades, the share of foreign productive capital is twice as high as in Germany. “Two-thirds of Romania’s exports are carried out by foreign-owned companies, and in Slovakia up to three-quarters,” he continues. .
“So that in a united Europe, which was conceived as a union for the benefit of all, the final bill gets stuck again and again between the winners and the losers”, concludes the author.
Mobility as risk
Mappes-Niediek reminds the German reader of the greatest human loss in Eastern and Central Europe: after the rise of the Iron Curtain, “like many people have disappeared from the EU countries Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, but also from Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo as they appeared in the prosperous countries: around 20 percent or more ”.
This could not go unnoticed by the state of mind in the countries, the attitude of the people towards the future, he notes, citing as a saddest example Bulgaria, which lost more than a fifth of its population between 1991 and 2015. Now, Most Bulgarian children are born abroad, and there are more Bulgarians employed abroad than in their country of origin.
To the negative consequences of migration from the poorest to the richest countries in the Community mentioned in the article, must be added the serious shortage of doctors and other medical personnel in the new EU countries during the pandemic. After all, Germany alone “imported” some 50,000 doctors and an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 medical personnel, mainly from Eastern Europe, according to a euronews.de database earlier in the year.
When Germany offered financial help following the sharp rise in coronavirus infections in Poland last fall, MEP Joanna Lichozka of the ruling PiS party said: “If you want to help us, give me back our doctors.”
The mobility of workers within the European Union is often praised as a great advantage, forgetting that taxes are paid to the Community budget only by its own citizens.
“Retirement pensions and health care costs will be covered only by those who remain in the country,” Mappes-Niediek reminds the basic truth.
And he also quotes World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, who said that a true smoothing of the slope of assets in the European Union would require a “large transfer of funds from, say, the Netherlands to Bulgaria.” The current 1% of GDP in the EU budget is “ridiculously low”.
In Eastern Europe, nationalism is very different
In the article, the author tries to explain another misunderstanding in Germany that newcomers to the Commonwealth struggle to overcome nationalism. But nationalism in Eastern Europe has long been very different from that of the West: there a modern nation was formed in opposition to the central government, the great empires, says N. Mappes-Niediekas.
He also considers inapplicable the division of Europe into the West and the East by geographical poles, which is widespread in political discourse. According to him, we should already talk about the relationship between the center and the periphery. After all, the historical experience of the peoples of Eastern Europe has indelibly inscribed that center-periphery relationship. Unfortunately, “the European Union, made up of sovereign nation states, is trying not to see this,” he said.
After all, given that historical experience, “you must not be overwhelmed by the noble ideas of the great powers, including the European ones. Because in the great nations from which they were liberated, they had to defend their right to exist “in opposition to imperial ideas.
“Finally, due to their existence, they also fought in socialism, whose spiritual fathers Marx and Engels considered the small nations of Eastern Europe to be a ‘waste of nations’ (Völkerabfälle), an obstacle to their world ideas.” (This is probably the author’s reference to the article by F. Engels “Der magyarische Kampf”, in which he calls the South Slavic peoples “waste of nations” that hinder the concentration of the class struggle. F. Engels concludes the article published in 1849 with the words: not only reactionary classes and dynasties will sweep the surface, but all those reactive nations, and this is progress. ”Quoted in Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels – Werke, vol. 6, p. 173.)
“The” anti-Brussels sentiment “in the East is very different from that which led to Brexit in the West, the publicist said. And to conclude the analysis of the national dimension, it lacks constructive suggestions from Eastern Europe on how to organize the Community of a a different, freer, closer or more efficient way, because now the new members of the EU are too easy to leave everything in the hands of the “neutral center” or the “big, rich, powerful”.
Central and Eastern Europeans should remind Westerners of an old proverb
Certainly, there are not many considerations of a similar nature in the German public space; on the contrary, in the case of Eastern European countries, there is an almost automatic shift to a teaching tone.
It is of no use to authorities as wise as the historian Heinrich August Winkler’s reminder to the political and intellectual elites of his country: “It is our duty to listen to the interests of the Allies in Central and Eastern Europe and perceive them as legitimate European interests.”
Another famous historian Andreas Rödder, who provided an in-depth analysis of recent processes in his book “21.0. Brief history of the present ”(2016), is very critical of the moral-ideological elevation of the European Union to the heights of a community of values and destiny.
Excessive moralization and pressure for ever closer integration, he said, threaten the foundations of the European Union. As, by the way, there is an obvious ideological shift to the left, when even conservatives renounce traditional values, says Christian Democrat A. Rödder, who has repeatedly criticized his party in the CDU for this conflict.
Former Western defender of human rights in socialist Germany, member of the Bundestag (1990-2009) of the Social Democrats, Gunter Weißgerber, also considers Western divisions to be one of the reasons for the lack of communication in the European Union.
“Western Europeans, who are dominant in the European Union, have suffered, to their great fortune, a double dictatorship, as have Central and Eastern Europeans. If the latter see the (political) middle somewhere between the extreme left and the extreme right, then in Western Europe most so-called left liberals place it between the middle and left margins. So the current EU resembles a circus tent with a central pillar tilted to the left. In other words, political static has been violated in the European Union, ”says G. Weißgerber.
In the Polish-Hungarian confrontation with Brussels, he supports the Central and Eastern Europeans, recalling that the latter have had to defend their right to be themselves long and persistently in the past. Westerners without such historical experience simply forget this.
“When a donkey is too well, it intends to jump on the ice”, describes Weißgerber in a popular proverb, adding: “Poles, Hungarians and whites should remind you of their partners in the European Union.”
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