Maidan

Twice at parties in the last week I’ve found myself gasping for breath. Each time I was chatting to pillars of the right-wing British establishment, solid Cold Warriors with whom I used to agree about the big questions of Europe’s future – America in, Germans down, Russia out – and so forth.

But Euroscepticism is corroding those comforting and commendable certainties. One of my pals, a newspaper editor, interrupted me as I praised the flat-taxes and other reforms sweeping across Europe from the new member states. “Oh, I’m not interested in that now. I’m for a pull-out.” In vain I tried to explain that the Central Europeans and Balts would regard his idea of a new EFTA – backed by NATO – as dotty and unworkable. The constitution had failed, he insisted, so the EU was dead.

Two days later it was one of Britain’s leading right-wing polemicists, a man who as speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher honed some of the choicest phrases of the Cold War. I was trying to interest him in the problems of Europe’s eastern fringes, so brilliantly outlined by my predecessor, Robert Cottrell, in his recent survey in The Economist.

He wasn’t interested. The EU would collapse, and Britain should pull out as soon as possible. But what, I stuttered, would you do about Moldova, or Belarus? “Those countries,” he replied loftily, “will have to look after themselves.” I could hardly believe my ears. A man who, only 20 years previously, had championed the captive nations’ right to be free of Soviet rule was now consigning the most vulnerable victims of Communism to the scrap heap of history.

There is something very odd going on here. Britain and British ideas of a wide, Atlanticist Europe have never been so popular in Eastern Europe. Memories of betrayals, real or imagined, of Munich, of the Warsaw Uprising, at Yalta, of the Cossacks, of Hungarians in 1956 and Czechoslovaks in 1968, are fading into history. Instead, there is enthusiastic support for British ideas about EU reform, for Tony Blair’s ideas about deregulation, dynamism, flexibility and so on. Countries wanting to join the EU see the British presidency as their big chance.

By contrast, the Franco-German axis has never looked more out-of-date and disreputable. In particular, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have fallen out of love with France in a way I would have regarded as wildly unlikely when I covered Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet the people who should be celebrating as the winds of history blow their way have given up and are huddled below decks, sneering and jeering, lost in their own world of defunct sentimental nationalism and vainglorious wishful thinking.

Fuelled by champagne and indignation, I asked both people for an alternative. If consolidating democracy and stability in the Western Balkans matters, what possible alternative is there than the big carrot of EU membership for countries that do the right things, on institution-building, the rule of law, treatment of minorities, crime-fighting, intelligence-sharing and so forth?

I would like to report that they came up with ingenious solutions that would bring all the prosperity and other benefits of the EU without any of the bureaucracy, waste, corruption, pomposity and jargon that fuels Euroscepticism in Britain and elsewhere.

Not a bit of it. For the champions of the Cold War, Eastern Europe, it seems, is once again a collection of faraway countries of which we know nothing. That was a callous and disgraceful phrase when used in 1938 by Neville Chamberlain of Czechoslovakia. And it is callous and disgraceful now.

Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist. He can be reached at edwardlucas -at- economist.com. A version of this article appeared previously in the Brussels-based weekly the European Voice.