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East joins West: New members of EU have mixed feelings

By Glenn Frankel and Keith B. Richburg
The Washington Post

MARTIN STERBA / AP Young Czechs wave EU and Czech flags during a concert marking the European Union's enlargement and Czech Republic's entry in Prague's Old Town Square late yesterday.

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WARSAW, Poland — Eight former communist countries in Eastern Europe will make history today when they formally join the European Union (EU). But they will enter the group as second-class members, scarred by internal political struggles, poverty and divisions between citizens who embrace the West and those who fear they are already losing ground to it.

Fifteen years after the Berlin Wall fell, the eight have traded the straightjackets of planned economies and one-party rule for the risky pleasures of democracy and capitalism. With some people prospering and others mired in unemployment, many are deeply skeptical about this next step in modernization. In a recent poll in the Czech Republic, for example, less than 10 percent of those surveyed said they expected their standard of living to improve after joining the union.

As full members starting today the eight countries will enjoy reduced restrictions on their citizens' short-term travel into the current 15 states (Norway, Switzerland and Iceland remain non-members). Most goods will pass to and from fellow member states without customs duties. The newcomers' national budgets will get a net addition of $30 billion in EU subsidies. And after years of observer status, their representatives in Brussels, Belgium, will cast formal votes in EU decisions.

They will also have to contend with often painful and disruptive competition with the union's current members and with each other.

Slovakia, one of the poorest of the new members, recently beat Poland and the Czech Republic to land a contract with the South Korean conglomerate Hyundai for an $870 million factory that will manufacture Kia cars for sale across the expanded union. The promised 2,400 jobs at the plant are desperately needed in the three bidding countries; only one has won them.

Leaders throughout the new members are determined to wrest their countries' rightful share of EU wealth from the bureaucrats at the union's Brussels headquarters.

The eight do line up together in viewing the United States, not the EU, as the prime guarantor of their security, especially against any rebirth of imperial ambitions in nearby Russia. Their earlier induction into the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance was for them as important a rite of passage. Breaking ranks with EU cornerstone states France and Germany, most have dispatched peacekeeping forces to Iraq, not out of strategic ambitions, but simply because Washington asked them to.

For many, the real divisions are not between pro-Americans and pro-Europeans, but between haves and have-nots.

"Those who support the EU also support America, NATO, openness and everything pro-Western," says Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, director of the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw. For those who feel left behind, "the picture is much darker. People fear the unknown, and fears are prevailing over hopes right now."

Interviews with politicians, analysts and ordinary citizens suggest that most of the countries are more concerned with internal political struggles than their place in the world. Since 1993, Lithuania has had 11 governments, Latvia 10 and Poland six. Four of the current administrations in the eight East European states joining the union are at or near collapse. Many face corruption charges like the kind that recently triggered the impeachment of Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas.

The EU's supporters say membership will bring greater stability, less corruption and tougher environmental controls. The EU enforces standards for everything from baking a croissant to building an oil refinery. Still, most of the new members agree that having survived the Soviet empire, they don't want rule from Brussels.

The addition of 10 new members — the island nations of Malta and Cyprus are also joining — will mean a leap from a grouping of generally affluent and well-ordered countries to a disparate collection of 25 states with a total population of 455 million.

EU officials dealt with each of the newcomers separately in negotiations and played them off against each other. Some of the nations' hopes have gone unfulfilled — Eastern Europe's farmers will get EU subsidies at 24 percent of the level provided to their wealthier counterparts in France and Germany. Workers from the eight ex-Soviet countries will be denied the unrestricted right to take permanent jobs in the 15 existing members for up to seven years.

Use of the euro, the common currency of 12 EU countries, will be put off for at least several years while the new entrants make adjustments in their economies and national budgets.

In some of the eight former communist countries, a panic over possible price increases has driven tens of thousands to hoard basic foods in a spectacle reminiscent of the bad old days of communism.

Back then, the "five-year plan" — recurring attempts to match supply to demand far in advance — sometimes led to shortages, precipitating wild runs on anything from rice and sugar to toilet paper.

Not all former communist countries have been hit — Hungary, for instance, has reported no shopping craze, possibly because prices of basic foods have already been at EU levels for months.

But in neighboring Slovakia, consumer groups are predicting rice and other basics could rise by up to 25 percent. The buying frenzy is also being fanned by supermarket advertising campaigns urging shoppers to buy now, before prices go up.

Pensions average less than $200 a month in Slovakia, but 79-year-old Maria Krajcovicova recently stretched her budget to buy 22 pounds of sugar and 11 pounds of rice.

Merchants speak of similar fears in the neighboring Czech Republic.

Libor Marton, a director of the rice importer and packager Lagris, said retailers ordered "four to five times" more than normal at the peak of the rice rush several weeks ago.

In Poland, the Auchan chain temporarily limited customers to one 22-pound bag of sugar apiece. In Tallinn, Estonia's capital, sugar wholesaler Hajas said it sold 2,000 tons in March — four times the monthly average.

An employee of Tallinn's SuperNetto chain told local television that shelves in one store were repeatedly swept clean of sugar and salt, with customers "grabbing the products from each other within seconds."

Latvia last month experienced a similar run on coarse salt used for pickling. A Russian TV station seen in the countryside had falsely claimed the salt would cease to be available once the country joined the EU.

"It's amazing," commented Henrijs Fogels, managing director of Kesko Foods, about some customers checking out with more than 100 pounds of the stuff.

"I don't know what they are going to do with all that salt."

The Associated Press provided details of hoarding.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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