I don’t have a detailed tally of the international coverage and commentary of the major US dailies. But it seems that the American press has been strangely uninterested in one of the biggest stories facing Europe in a long time: the expansion of the EU to include the former Soviet Bloc nations (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland,Czech Republic and Slovakia). For fuller coverage, one needs to turn to the British press (among others), and I particularly recommend a perspective piece by BBC’s Angus Roxburgh:
It is hard for those of us living in Western European countries with decades or centuries of stable democracy to appreciate just what an event 1 May will be for the nations of Eastern and Central Europe who will join the European Union.
The phrase “end of the Cold War” has been much over-used, on many occasions since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communism, but this time it will not be hyperbole.
Of course, the transition won’t take place without problems. The opening of borders is heightening immigration-panic in the Western European members. Then there are the particulars of power expansion. Most importantly, there are the twin issues of fiscal cost and economic development. It looks likely that the EU is expending only a fraction of what it needs to smooth integration of nations at radically different stages of development; as Laszlo Andor writes in today’s Guardian, “The development gap between east and west can only be bridged by redistribution at least twice the current level. We know this is not politically feasible in the foreseeable future.” And the Economist warns against a repetition of German unification, in which “the east acquired all of the expenses and inflexibilities of the West German model without the high productivity that made them affordable. As a result, the eastern Länder have become Europe’s second Mezzogiorno, marked by ‘emigration, resignation and sullen apathy’, as Wolfgang Thierse, president of the Bundestag, puts it.”
But despite these problems, the expansion is an occasion worth cheering, the reestablishment of a continent-wide political and economic liberalism that’s been squelched for nearly a century. As Roxburgh describes the hopes of the new entrants, “[J]oining the EU, they hope, will not only help them improve their economies and environment, but allow them to re-take their rightful place in Europe. Having once been ejected from that position, they are likely to prove much more enthusiastic ‘Europeans’ than many of the people in the existing EU states, whose comfortable and increasingly prosperous lives over the past half-century have often made us forget how valuable peace and democracy are.”
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