Imitators Spurned: Why the West Needs Central Europe to Stay in its Eastern European Place

The excitement when the barriers came crashing down – the actual wall in Berlin and the imagined Iron Curtain across Europe – soon cooled. The Westerners were disappointed with the Easterners, and the Easterners were disappointed with their disappointment. In this chapter, I elaborate on how accepting the East Central Europeans as full members of the Western club was actually never really intended. There was the usual scorn with which the privileged view those who are less rich and powerful, and who, as the more fortunate see it, have only themselves to blame. But, more importantly, full acceptance of East Central Europe was never in the interest of Western business. Western multinational corporations were not out to take on new partners. They were looking for new markets and cheap labour in Europe's East, much as they had always done in the Global South. As we have seen earlier, the universal contempt for a culturally and economically backward East in Europe is replicated in every place, along the way from England to the borders of Russia. Historically, the English felt it for the French and together the English and the French felt it for the Germans; now western Germans feel it for eastern Germans, who may feel it for Poles and Czechs the way they in turn feel it for Ukrainians and Russians. (While also western Ukrainians may feel it not only for Russians but also for eastern Ukrainians.) This transitive Orientalism is for the most part unreflecting and unexamined by those infected by it. They include not only the right-wing illiberals but, perhaps even more so, the left and liberal Bildungsburgertum , the educated classes or ‘intelligentsia’, who in each area see themselves as mediators between the local population and the prestigious culture of the West. The cultural capital they possess in the form of their familiarity with Western cultural trends and languages (now mainly English), earns them at times the respect, and at other times the resentment of their compatriots, who may see them as betraying their native roots. At the same time, it makes them feel entitled to be taken seriously as intellectual equals in the West. That is exactly what they hoped would happen once the communist regimes fell and released them from their Cold War confinement in the Eastern Bloc.

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