Having suffered the Nazi occupation of his native city, seen his father killed by communists, then been dumped in a post-war orphanage because his mother could not cope, Stefan Bukowski could be forgiven for being a pessimist.
Instead the retired heating engineer (69) marvels at the chances opening up for his two daughters. ”We’ve been living in a backwater for decades. Now things are changing. We can go abroad just like that. The world is open to us.”
Bukowski still pinches himself at the idea of his daughter flying to Edinburgh regularly to see her Scottish boyfriend. No visa required. A few years ago it would have been financially and politically impossible. ”Life can only get better for them. We’ve been through the worst of times here. It’s much better to be in the EU. We feel better, safer in this bigger community.”
Ewa Szastak (67) a retired Warsaw architect, agrees. ”For our generation it won’t bring that much. But the young generation will have much greater opportunities if they want to take them.”
The reason for Bukowski’s cheerfulness can be summed up in two words: European Union.
As Europe grapples with a crisis of confidence — unable to agree a Constitution, wary of Turkey, fearful of globalisation, unsure of its direction — here in Poland as across central Europe, the EU prompts smiles of approval rather than a tide of invective.
Next week Birtish Prime Minister Tony Blair is to convene an EU summit at Hampton Court to discuss what kind of Europe its leaders want — whether the more liberal flexible reformist vision championed by Britain and Scandinavia, or whether Franco-German insistence on their traditional welfare provisions should determine the EU’s ”social model”.
While the reality is infinitely more complex than that suggested by the soundbites of British Prime Minister Tony Blair or French President Jacques Chirac, one of the most striking contrasts in popular mood across Europe is that between fear in the west and hope in the east.
Stagnating
Take, for example, Germany and Poland, neighbours, the EU’s biggest member and traditional paymaster and the union’s biggest new member. Germany is wealthy but stagnating. Poland is poor but growing rapidly economically. Both have high unemployment. But there the similarities end. ”It’s a kind of miracle,” says Alexander Smolar, political scientist and head of a Warsaw thinktank. ”There’s a feeling here that we have been given a chance. The optimism verges on euphoria.”
By contrast, Germany is trapped in angst. As in Italy, women are not having babies. The population is ageing rapidly. While extremely comfortable, people are worried about pensions, about losing their jobs, hostile to reform, pessimistic about their children’s prospects. The good times are all in the past.
A global survey of 50 000 by Gallup International late last year found western Europe immersed in gloom about security and prosperity. In Germany, three out of four thought their children would suffer greater economic problems while two-thirds believed their offspring would inhabit a less safe world. The Germans, the survey said, ”are the most pessimistic in the region”.
Another survey last month by a German insurance firm found that anxiety about the future had doubled in 15 years. Rising prices, economic stagnation, and fear of unemployment were the main worries. There was anxiety about reform of the welfare state. Reform itself was a dirty word.
This contrasts with central Europe, which is emerging from 15 years of non-stop reforms since the collapse of communism. ”In a mere 15 years, all of these countries have endured economic and political changes unprecedented in their scope and speed in the history of Europe,” the Czech analyst Jiri Pehe wrote recently.
Economic recipes
For the generation growing up since the revolutions of 1989, reform is the default mode. Germany, too, went through great change over the same period as a result of reunification. But like France, Germany is now seen in the east as bogged down in resistance to change. Their social and economic recipes are no longer exportable. No one wants to buy them.
These contrasts — between rejecting and embracing reform, the gulf between pessimism and optimism — are not confined to a West-East division. The surveys found Spain, Ireland, and Scandinavia much less gloomy about the future than the core EU countries wrapped around the Franco-German coupling.
But the differences in perception and expectation between western and eastern Europe indicate that broadly Blair has won a host of allies for his reform campaign.
”We see stagnation and petrification in France, Italy and Germany,” says Smolar. ”The new [EU] countries are much more interested in openness, liberalisation and reform.”
Jan Rokita, set for a senior position in a new Polish rightwing government as a leader of the liberal Civic Platform party, put the fight for direction more bluntly. ”We are facing a choice of whether to follow the path between the German-French model of social stagnation or the Spanish-British-Irish model of liberalising the economy and society,” he told the Associated Press last month.
”If the EU is to mean that the German and the French do what they want and the other nations nod with embarrassment, then there will be no such integration of Europe.”
The Gallup poll found that only 27% of people in eastern and central Europe thought their children would live in a world less safe, as opposed to 55% in western Europe, while 49% in the east believed the young generation would be more prosperous as opposed to 22% in western Europe.
Jan Kulczyk, reckoned to be the richest man in Poland, put it this way: ”They’re full up and we’re hungry. They’re too frightened of losing and think they’ve got nothing left to gain. Whereas we’ve got nothing to lose. We can only be optimistic.” – Guardian Unlimited Â