Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Two major borders have become established over the centuries:
firstly the boundary of Charlemagne’s empire, which marked deep
enough cultural divisions that could still be seen in the first boundaries
of the European Community, and secondly the border along
the Elbe, which historians consider the dividing line in the economic
development of Europe. It is this second border that set the deepest
division of Europe, well before the international conferences of
the Second World War. Since the start of the modern era, an economic
model characterised by the freeing of peasants, dynamic
urbanisation and the birth of industrial capitalism has taken shape
in Western Europe. To the east of this border, a different model is
dominant, with societies remaining more rural, a second serfdom
developing in most of these countries, the growing strength of the
landowning nobility, and industrialisation only emerging long after it
did in western countries.
There are also differences in the political and social model. In the
West we see a determined march towards freedom, the emergence
of the representative system and of political society, whereas in the
East these developments appear only sporadically. A particular
feature of Central Europe, seen in Czechoslovakia, Poland and
Hungary, is the coexistence of the two development trends. The
fact remains that all the countries in the enlargement to the east
were lagging behind the West, in both their economic development
and their political evolution. Where the West had urbanisation and
capitalism, in the East the rural economy dominated the urban
economy; where the West had a strong parliamentary system and
civil society, in the East there was a tendency towards authoritarianism
and structural weakness of the marketplace. The Soviet
regime imposed on the people of the East merely served to
strengthen and exaggerate these structural differences.
Divergent memories?
The obvious success of the political enlargement operation
stands out clearly against this backdrop. The courageous – though
risky – decision in favour of a ‘big bang’ operation in the 1990s,
conducted intelligently by the EU institutions and with astonishing
efficiency by the national governments, opened the EU’s doors to
eight post-communist countries (as well as Cyprus and Malta). In
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