Central Europe: Happy hotch-potch

Date: 31/01/04

What is different about new EU members from central Europe

CONTIGUOUS they may be, consubstantial they are not. The countries of central Europe (not, they insist, eastern Europe, which each of them says begins to their east) are growing tired of being lumped together in generalisations of all kinds, as they prepare to join the European Union, together with Cyprus and Malta, on May 1st. So here is a brief attempt to set the record straight.

Not every country in central Europe is a poor, small place with bad roads, corrupt officials, a rackety Russian-built nuclear-power plant and a squabbling coalition government. They are all rather charming, in their different ways. And they are all rather different, in their different ways.

Start with “poor”. The eight newcomers to the EU have an average GDP per head of about one-quarter of today's EU average. But that conceals some wide differences. Incomes in the richest country, Slovenia, are three times those in the poorest, Latvia - a far greater gap than exists inside the EU now.

However, measured by purchasing-power parity, which takes prices into account and so gives a better indication of local living standards, the whole region looks better off. Slovenia's GDP per head rises to more than 70% of the EU average. Its average wage in 2002 was higher than that of Greece or Portugal. Cross the border from Austria into Slovenia and you have to look hard to notice the difference.

Slovenia could be called “small”, at 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles) in area, yet it is still seven times the size of Luxembourg and 70 times Malta. But the three Baltic countries find it irritating to be tagged as “tiny”. Each is bigger in area than Belgium, the Netherlands or Denmark, albeit less populous than any of them. Poland, the biggest country in central Europe, will be the sixth-biggest country in the EU in both area and population.

Linguistically, the central Europeans are more diverse than the Union they join. Each has a different national language (if one accepts Czech and Slovak as separate languages), or roughly one for every 6m people, not counting Russian and the Romany dialects spoken by the region's largest minorities. Today's 15 EU countries make do with 11 national languages among them, or one for every 34m people. Half of central Europe's national languages are Slavic in origin. Latvian and Lithuanian stem from the Baltic branch of the Indo-European tree. Estonian and Hungarian are Uralic languages, distantly related to one another, closely related to Finnish in the case of Estonian, and perhaps more distantly related to Japanese.

Politically, the central European countries all escaped from communism at the turn of the 1990s, albeit from different manifestations of it. The Baltic three were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union for half a century. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the latter two were one country until 1993) had titular independence, but they were run from Moscow by national communist parties, and garrisoned with Soviet troops. Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia, which favoured a more liberal brand of communism and sparred ideologically with the Soviet Union. Pro-American feeling in the region correlates closely with lingering anti-Russian sentiment. It is strongest in the Baltic countries and Poland, a touch weaker in Hungary and the Czech Republic, weaker still in Slovakia and Slovenia.

All of which is not to say that all generalisations about central Europe are false. Many are at least half-true. Rural populations are large everywhere. Nationalism is rarely far from the political mainstream. Squabbling coalition governments are the rule except in Slovenia, which is also the only country with decent roads. The beer is excellent everywhere. So drink to diversity - but skip the food. The region lacks any national cuisine worth celebrating.

Feature says it is inaccurate to lump together all the new countries joining the EU from Central and Eastern Europe as if they were all similar.