Imagine the howls of “ray-cist!” if they did.
No one dares claim the credit for capturing those diligent white migrants, Christian in culture and capable of quick assimilation. In Brussels, however, it is taboo to talk of this epochal shift of wealth. Up to a third had higher education they’ve driven much of the West’s growth. As frontiers fell, there was a human haemorrhage in CEE as the West hoovered in ten million of its workers. But as so often in history, the biggest impact was unforeseen. Capital from the Old EU was to compensate. CEE was weak after communism but was forced to throw open its borders prematurely. To see what’s going on, start with the deal struck when the eleven joined in or after 2004. It’s the colonial status of CEE that really splits the EU, not any over-hyped cultural cleft. The East’s purported nastiness merely matches supposed Western sins (compare Hungary on gender with Denmark on its Muslims, say). “They’re lurching away from liberalism, even as their hot paws reach out for our largesse!” This kind of thinking is doubly skewed. “See those pesky Poles, Czechs and Hungarians,” your typical Eurocrat will whine. In the West, those in the know are not just quiet, they egg on the bien-pensants who are convinced that the Old EU keeps the East afloat. Clotilde Armand, a Frenchwoman who is a mayor in Bucharest, has also been clear that “much of the wealth in Europe flows from the poorer countries to the richer ones”. “We’re not a colony, we’re not a second-class member”, Slovenia’s premier growled at the European Commission last year.
The elites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) rarely rock the boat as they hate to admit the facts many have been co-opted or cowed. Amid the schisms which increasingly sunder the EU’s West from its eastern members, both sides are, for their own reasons, careful to suppress the bloc’s big economic secret: that the Old EU runs the eleven newish members in Central and Eastern Europe as a colonial fief.Īgainst logic and justice, the EU’s 340 million western rich suck in wealth from the 103 million eastern poor.