Talk politics.

Greetings, ma'fellow navel-gazing procrastinators! I'm sure most of you (the US part anyway) are watching, fixated, with unbliking eyes the ongoing circus of the US Democratic primaries, but may I distract you for a while with something more remote and abstract? Yep. I'm talking about Erap. That country (heh?) where you dream of going to spend a one-week vacation, eat some pizza, visit a museum or two, and go back home bragging how much more cultured and sophisticated you now are. ;-)

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of the accelerated divergence of the European West from the European East, including on the most important political issues of the day. The convergence between the two halves was among the main goals of the post-communist era, the emerging democracies of the former socialist bloc almost unanimously embracing it. The first years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall were packed with effort for that kind of social, political and economic transformation. The expansion of the European economy to the East, and the gradual expansion of the EU, NATO and European liberal-democratic culture as a whole in an eastward direction, were not just a series of symbolic gestures, but actually very real steps in the same direction.

What's more, this re-integration was happening everywhere you looked: from the individual level, to families, students, communities, companies, public institutions, public culture, etc. The economic convergence was particularly accelerated, and some Central European countries even surpassed most Southern countries save for Italy in terms of average income. The rest are also coming behind, although at a slightly slower pace. The crisis decade starting from 2008, however, with all its consequences, has started to open up a gap between the European West and East once more. And now it's not just widening, but it's engulfing entire issues and processes.

The problem is, the political worldview of these societies is diverging. For years, the East European countries were systematically modelling their political systems to match the liberal model of the late 80s and early 90s. The map of that transformation looked pretty comprehensible and obvious, and it was practically applied within less than a decade. Its main elements were the democratic constitution ensuring the separation of powers, a protection of all basic individual rights, mechanisms for political representation, an independent judicial system, free publicity and plurality of ideas, instruments for protecting the minorities, etc. You know how it is.

Except, while East Europe was focused on dismantling the legislative liberal framework from the communist era, its Western counterpart saw its constituent political systems moving into a different direction. Simply said, they kind of neglected the institutional and infrastructural backbone of their democracies, and headed toward an ever deeper development and integration of various identity politics into the political landscape, where the constantly multiplying contenders for an own individual identity, rights, and privileged status, took over the center of the system, and started to dominate the discourse. With this move, they increased the political dissonance between the two parts of the Old Continent. Western liberalism was naturally met by the East with an insistence for a "majoritary correction".

The divergence was also evident in the economic dynamics and thinking. In trying to catch up economically, East Europe was using old, outdated measurement criteria for progress and development. It mostly relied on attracting production and industries, while in the West the transition was to an information (digital) economy, thus changing the overall economic structure of the continent, and setting new priorities for its future. West Europe turned to the future just as East Europe was starting to acquire the full contours of the West's former economic model. Our (Eastern) economies learned how to integrate into the production networks west of Vienna, but now they were again facing uncharted territory, having to learn anew how to keep up in the modern post-industrial realities.

Despite the significant progress, in the former communist countries, subjects like digitalization, innovation, and AI, would still long keep sounding like conclusive slogans uttered at some sort of party congress. We're witnessing divergence in terms of economic mentality as well today more often than we used to. While the East does need more markets so it could penetrate into the Western economic space better, the West is now talking of supranational (all-European) protectionism, and non-market conglomeration, and the creation of "European champions". The East wants more liberalization of the united market, while the West wants public protection from the big competitors like the US and China. Of course, these proposed "European champions" would be predominantly Western companies, as they have the resources - and their Eastern counterparts would only remain with the role of satellites. You can see how these proposals are being viewed by the East as an unfair, selfish attempt for neo-colonial restructuring and redistribution of the continent's wealth at the East's expense. We don't want to end up back on Square One where we started from in the first place, do we?

This also reflects on the perceptions for security, on the vision about the future of the Old Continent, and its place in global politics. As a whole, Western politics turns anti-Trumpism into anti-Americanism, it has suddenly grown wary of China, and is considering yet another romance with Russia. Conversely, in the East, the US is still being viewed as a guarantor for security and stability, China - as an opportunity for development, and Russia - a risk for returning to the times of dependence. If this asymmetry of perception deepens in the years to come, the tensions will naturally be growing, and the collective security systems will be weakened.

Such a divergence is of a fundamental character, and if it grows into an institutional chasm in the way future risks are being managed, and the international peace system is being approached, this would directly hit the very core of unity in the broader Western world. While the West is more concerned with the threat of terrorism, the East is more focused on immigration and the refugees. What's more, to the east of Vienna, more and more politicians are embracing the notion that our part of the continent is being dumped into a peripheral buffer function once more, as it has been so many times in the past. The EU's border control, migration and refugee policies, do create such an impression, I have to admit. The Western Balkans are definitely heading towards such a role, serving as cannon-fodder and a proving ground for testing various new risks and models, not to mention a messy chessboard for the various "big players" to play on and mess around with each other from a safe distance. Not a nice place to be in if you're a local.

As for the EU's "Green Pact", it has also exposed, and potentially accelerated, the divisions between West and East Europe. The intensifying "greenening" reflects a real change in the public perceptions of the former, while the latter rather perceives this as a hasty over-reaction with radical and unforeseen consequences. The upcoming forced energy transition will certainly cost lots of jobs, especially in the former communist countries, which already have a rather unstable flexibility rate, and uncertain abilities to cope with rapid change, and adapt through substituting one type of employment with another. It simply lacks the infrastructure to do that so quickly, and it's now being put in a uncomfortable situation.

The planned changes are not just huge, they're very fast, and this will significantly burden the fledgling Eastern political and economic systems. Until a couple of years ago, the Eastern elites were hoping they'd be able to slow down the "green change", but the latest EU parliamentary elections clearly show the further direction where things are going. What's more, the Eastern discontent was further exasperated by the planned "greenening" of the Euro funds themselves. The cohesion money will remain there to stay for a little longer, granted, possibly with some notable reductions, but there'll now be a huge "green compotent", which will additionally make the beaten paths for convergence more difficult to traverse. Same about the European financial instruments that used to play a good complimentary function in some key sectors like the infrastructure, competitiveness, etc - until now.

A particularly high risk is coming from the emerging debate on the question whether the EU should try to impose some sort of unified, All-European cultural model. The value basis of the Union has always been fairly multi-faced and pluralistic, which was one of its main features and sources of attraction. It was resting upon basic principles like human rights, protection of minorities, separation of powers, pluralism of ideas, etc. The big question now is whether this palette of values won't start to be arranged in a single, specific, mainstream way, which will be officially presented, institutionalized, and universalized.

For instance, this dilemma is very visible on the questions of minority protection and anti-discrimination. That issue could be interpreted in many ways, but the main shift is from a protection of individual rights towards assigning a special status to every collective identity (be it social, ethnic, sexual, etc), and a deeply institutional embedding of its corresponding worldview into the institutional framework of the entire continent, any consequences for the identities of the majority notwithstanding. This process is already at a fairly advanced level in the West, but still deeply problematic in the East. Striking a balance and finding an equilibrium point between these cultural discrepancies is a key task for the coming years. If the EU fails to manage with it, it's risking a radical deligitimization. In simpler words: if it forcefully imposes one single worldview on everybody at the expense of large parts of the continent, it'll lose credibility among those parts. And that's a certain recipe for disintegration.

The European East is also experiencing another sort of fatigue that the West is simply unable to comprehend. The fatigue of the eternal second, the one who constantly has to catch up. And no, it doesn't emerge from the demographic catastrophe in parts of the East (a consequence of the sudden opening of the wall between the two, the economic shock, and the subsequent flow of people in a westward direction). Not even from the incomplete and unsmooth, unequal realization of the post-communist dreams. And neither does this fatigue come from the self-pity from the unrealized national and clerical utopia that some folks might've harbored in their minds.

No, actually the fatigue comes from the successes of convergence - but the constant shifting of goals and realities, the ceaseless need for adaptation and change - now that's what tends to make you tired. And that's actually the deepest layer of the remnant communist heritage: the difficult, uncomfortable rejection of the timeless, complacent comforts of the never-changing political system that we spent half a century living in. Of course, these dynamics of divergence are neither fully one-directional, nor are they even irreversible. Their overcoming, and our adaptation to them (because if there's one thing that we Eastern Europeans have in common, it's that we're very adaptive), will remain one of our most important tasks for the coming years and decades. Because, if that fails, Europe will never be truly united and whole.