 Illustration / Tomasz Walenta
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The anti-anti-Americans
Central Europeans may be wary of the Bush administration's war plans, but they're not at all wary of the United States
By Laura Secor, Globe Staff, 3/2/2003
T'S NOT THE FIRST time the Bush administration has appeared to reorder the world with a turn of phrase. First the "axis of evil" united Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. More recently, "old Europe" was severed from "new Europe" in the sniffy pronouncement of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. According to this supposed distinction, old Europe-France, Germany, and Belgium-is pacifist, anti-American, noisy, and irrelevant. New Europe-the formerly communist countries east of Berlin-is muscular, loyal, and receptive to all things American, from McDonald's franchises to preemptive war.
Rumsfeld's dismissive language went over like a lead balloon in both Europes. But it also touched a nerve. Something is different about the Central European countries-Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic-that have already joined NATO and whose leaders now back the Bush administration's threat to disarm Iraq by force. It's not just that anti-Americanism hasn't put down roots there. It's that when push comes to shove, when forced to choose between loyalties to the United States and Europe, these countries cast their lot with the United States. Opposition to the threatened war in Iraq may be pervasive-82 percent in Hungary, 75 percent in Poland, 67 percent in the Czech Republic-but it is conditional and cautious. What's more, opposition to the war has little to do with fears, common among protesters in the United States and Western Europe, of an increasingly unbridled American lust for empire.
Many Central Europeans explain this as a matter of knowing on which side their bread is buttered. The European Union may hold the key to the region's economic future, but Central Europeans are hardly eager to put their full trust in leaders like President Jacques Chirac of France, who responded to the Central European support for Bush's war policy by telling them they'd missed a "great opportunity to keep quiet." When it comes to securing the borders of these small, oft-invaded countries, the only credible guarantor is the United States.
"If our security is threatened," says Jiri Pehe, a writer and legal scholar who directs New York University in Prague and has worked as an adviser to former Czech president Vaclav Havel, "we know we can't rely on France or Germany. It has never paid off in our history, quite frankly."
During the Cold War, Central European dissidents drew support from the United States far more than they did from Western Europe. These public figures have long since settled into lives of political and cultural influence, and their debt to the United States is not forgotten. "The majority of the former dissidents have a great sympathy for the United States," says Czech Christian Academy president Tomas Halik, "and they were always very critical of the anti-Americanism in Western European countries, because in communist times we felt that it posed a danger to the strength of the anticommunist alliance."
Andras Bozoki of Central European University in Hungary describes Western European anti-Americanism as "a critical stance toward what they call the McDonaldization of the culture, or shopping malls and hamburgers and all of those things." He adds that "this sort of cultural criticism is very new and undeveloped in East and Central Europe," where American-style commercialism only began to take root a decade ago. If anything, says Pehe, during the Cold War, American culture held a romantic allure, particularly in Czechoslovakia, where writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike were "cult figures."
Many Czechs emerged from the Cold War viewing the United States in something of a rosy light-as "a guarantor of human rights or freedom," says Milada Anna Vachudova, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in Czech politics. Two-thirds of Czechs may oppose war with Iraq, says Pehe, but "a lot of those people at the same time understand quite well, or much better than West Europeans, the arguments of the Bush administration that this totalitarian regime should somehow be removed. People identify with that because we ourselves experienced a totalitarian regime, and we hoped that somebody would help us."
The flexing of American power, commanded by a vocally unilateralist administration, has set much of the world on edge, fanning the flames of anti-American feeling. But in today's Central Europe, outright anti-Americanism remains a badge of extremism. Czechs associate it with the unreconstructed communists of the far left, and Poles and Hungarians with the religious nationalists of the far right.
Still, this does not mean that moderate Central Europeans are uncritical of the American policies their governments endorse. Jerzy Jedlicki, one of Poland's most distinguished historians and essayists and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, believes Poland ought to be supporting the Western European position on Iraq rather than the American one. If Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Jedlicki reasons, he is most likely to use them if provoked. In his view, the Bush administration seems single-mindedly bent on invasion, and might be disappointed if the weapons inspections actually worked. "Although I love America, I do not trust the White House position now," he explains. "Is that consistent? I think it is."
It is certainly consistent with the views of many of Jedlicki's counterparts in Hungary, where sentiment against the war-and in favor of joining the European Union-appears stronger than in Poland and the Czech Republic. Tamas Meszerics, a political scientist at Central European University, says he would support the war only if it were backed by an unambiguous UN resolution. Andras Bozoki of Central European University notes that nobody can clearly determine the Bush administration's motives. Is this a war about weapons of mass destruction, oil, democracy, or geostrategic advantage? And how much attention has the United States paid to what will happen after Saddam is gone?
None of these arguments are unfamiliar to those following the debate over war in the West. But strikingly absent is the outrage that has greeted American unilateralism both at home and in Western Europe. "Czech political commentators are more worried about France and Germany assuming an `imperial' role in the European Union," quips political journalist Bohumil Pecinka by e-mail.
In the Czech Republic, according to Pehe, some intellectuals argue that American global leadership is preferable to the leadership of international institutions, like the United Nations, which accord equal weight to autocratic countries and democracies. "The United States is no Soviet Union and it is no China," Pehe says the argument runs. "It is the most democratic country and perhaps its domination is a better solution than this kind of confused state of affairs in which we have to rely on decision-making from countries such as China and Libya." Hungarian political philosopher Zoltan Miklosi, however, cautions that the checks and balances of institutions like the UN help protect the interests of small nations. Might the countries of Central Europe later regret giving American hyperpower a free pass?
So far, the Central European countries have formed a pro-United States stronghold within NATO. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the alliance on the eve of the 1999 Kosovo war, which enjoyed widespread support in all three countries. At that time, the Hungarians had a front-row seat to the horrors in neighboring Yugoslavia, but today, they find that war with Iraq seems comparatively distant and lacks urgency. Miklosi notes that only in the last couple of weeks has it become a popular topic of conversation in Budapest's cafes.
In fact, the debate over Iraq may matter most to Central Europeans for its impact on the European Union, which the three countries stand poised to join as early as next year, provided their populations approve referendums in the coming months. Hungarian approval is considered highly likely, but the referendums are not sure things in Poland or the Czech Republic. Jacques Chirac dealt a serious blow to accession advocates two weeks ago, when he lashed the Central Europeans as "infantile" and insinuated that they had damaged their chances of joining the EU. (Such haughtiness does not emanate only from the French leadership. The French leftist Regis Debray recently maintained on the New York Times Op-ed page that subservience comes naturally to former Soviet satellites, who've now transferred their slavishness to the United States.)
The French rebuke to Central Europe, says North Carolina's Vachudova, adds "another layer of what has really been over the last year-and-a-half a barrage of signals from Western Europe that the candidate countries are considered in some way to be second-class, or that they have no power in this relationship." Even more than the elites, says Vachudova, the populations of Central European countries believe that "these sorts of cultural, civilizational questions really matter."
Sure enough, the day after Chirac's remarks, Jiri Pehe spoke at a public forum where intellectuals and analysts were to persuade their audience to vote "yes" on the referendum. "I've never seen such a level of hostility toward the EU as I did in that meeting," Pehe recalls. "People were arguing, look, I'm in favor of the EU but not this kind of EU, and if the French and Germans think it should be their EU, then perhaps they should have it for themselves."
What's at stake is not just a matter of courtesy between Chirac and the candidate countries. It's the question of when and how an enlarged European Union can develop a common political culture, and eventually a shared foreign policy enabling Europe to participate effectively in world affairs. Once the Central European countries actually join the EU, they will have "tremendous bargaining power," Vachudova notes.
As the EU's most muscular and populous members, France and Germany may not wish to share foreign-policy decision-making with the former eastern-bloc countries Chirac so publicly scorns. Indeed, some speculate that Chirac aims to provoke Poles and Czechs into voting against EU membership, so that the balance of power within the EU will remain tipped toward the west. Either way, Meszerics worries that the flap over Iraq will prove a major setback to the formation of a shared foreign policy.
"The EU sooner or later must have an institutionalized, common foreign policy. Whatever we think about its desirability, I don't think it is avoidable," he says. "Now if it is not avoidable, then postponing it by five to eight years because of the rift over the war in Iraq is a mistake. And a costly mistake, at that."
If the French desire a strong, united Europe that can act as a counterweight to American power, alienating Central Europe may cost their own project the most of all.
Laura Secor is the staff writer for Ideas.
This story ran in the Boston Globe on 3/2/2003.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
