Central Europe is becoming yet more intriguing. With the rise of populism in Hungary and Poland and the Russian bear growling on the borders of former Warsaw Pact countries, news stories are compelling.
So, too, is how the former Communist countries of central Europe are still, in many ways, processing their past enslavement.
But this effort to grapple with history isn’t preventing an embrace of the wider world, especially by the young. The energy and confidence we see in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic States is often missing on the western side of the continent.
That may sound an odd remark. Western Europeans, and Americans for that matter, still tend to view countries on the other side of what was the Iron Curtain as backward oddities. Isn’t the new breed of populists supposed to be an echo of the dark 1930s: anti-Semitic, militantly nationalistic, and all about building “illiberal societies”?
Don’t they tell Brussels to stop bossing them around, and aren’t they flirting with Russia, which is eager to draw its former satellites back into its orbit?
But when the narrative prism gets shifted a little, a much more complicated image emerges of countries trying to work out what should be the preserve of nation-states and what challenges can only be faced as members of a bigger community.
The first thing that’s striking when traveling through central Europe is how, more often than not, people, especially youngsters and adults under the age of 40, have the ability to speak several European languages and are keen to do so.
That isn’t the case in Italy, Spain, or even France, and, unsurprisingly, Great Britain, where younger people mercilessly torture the French language and have caught the habit of their elders who see a failure to understand English as perverse.
Central European youth seem to feel more at home across the continent than many of their western peers and tend to be better traveled. Czech and Lithuanian students are among the top five European nationalities taking up the opportunity to study abroad under the auspices of the European Union’s excellent Erasmus higher education exchange program.
Péter Krekó , an analyst at Political Capital, a Budapest-based think tank, told me the other day that, for young Hungarians, “when it comes to working abroad, and when it comes to studying, they predominantly go west, to Germany, Austria, London, and the United States. Anyone under the age of 40 speaks English as a second language, rather than Russian.”
That places cultural limits on the appeal of Russia.
“The young are different from the older generations,” says Julius Horváth, an economics professor at the Central European University. “They are much more exposed to the influence of the west. They travel frequently to Germany, Austria, and England. They are already quite cosmopolitan Europeans and have high expectations and they’re building up a strong pan-European sense and they’re ambitious.” He added, “They also work with a greater intensity.”
But Horváth cautions there’s an educational divide across central Europe and Europe as a whole. The well-educated and skilled have great advantages and opportunities, but those who aren’t get left behind, and it isn’t always because they are less industrious. Many times it comes down to luck, the families they’re born into, and geography.
Globalization can strike down an industry. Horváth said, “Something happens in Asia or Latin America and that can upend everything.” It is those who are struggling who see populists as holding out solutions for their plight. Horváth concluded, “We have to make sure there is a compensation mechanism.”
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
