Every once in a while there’s real news. Gorbachev quits, the Berlin wall falls, tens of thousands of migrants arrive at your border. It takes a while to make sense of such events, and the first attempts are usually way off target. East Europeans were criticized for having short memories, despite the fact that emerging from Soviet occupation and accepting help from western countries is quite a stretch from not being equally supportive of the tens of thousands of migrants showing up at your border.
It’s not to say East European countries are faultless. I’m not about to defend any of the right wing governments that have emerged in a number of East European countries in recent years, and surely Hungary’s initial claim that the migrants were Germany’s problem was less than an inspiring act of statesmanship. But the fact that East European reaction appeared harsh may have had as much to do with geography, economics, and history going back to subjugation at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as to a post-communist period in which Hungary has arguably failed to westernize to the degree and in the manner some might imagine they should have.
It’s interesting to see the term ‘post-communism’ back in the headlines, particularly since in the introduction to my book I declare the post-communist era over and done with, at least in the Czech Republic. I stand by my conclusion that the Czech Republic as a nation has transcended its post-communist phase, though that’s not to say post-communism has altogether lost its meaning. No doubt in other parts of Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union post-communism continues to play itself out, and even in the United States where 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and across an ocean only now can a person running for President finally talk about economic egalitarianism and be taken seriously.
I had lunch at a Polish-American acquaintance’s food truck today and he told me that he and his wife were planning on retiring to Poland in ten years: “It’s a better life. It’s more for the middle class.” After six years living in Eastern Europe, and a book on the subject to boot, I couldn’t summarize it any better.