CHINA AND Russia are gaining wealth and influence in Europe with energy, banking, telecommunications and infrastructure deals that may entangle allies in relationships they cannot readily escape. Such moves should be checked, especially on the frontier of Central Europe. To its credit, the Trump administration reversed its predecessor’s approach and has re-engaged with this region, emphasizing common values and interests.

The challenge is that U.S. foreign policy will need to blunt European Union (EU) policy in order to compete for the loyalties of our erstwhile allies in Central Europe.

The problem is four-fold. First, different histories have bequeathed different cultures and perspectives to Central and Western Europe, which will converge only slowly. Second, Brussels requires that EU members adopt the same general domestic policies, which are usually informed by culturally progressive values that are at odds with Central European cultures—what works in Paris may not be suited for Bratislava. Third, clear policy failures by Berlin and Paris, along with the negative electoral reactions these have engendered in both East and West, have undermined confidence in the West and emboldened Central Europe. And fourth, the political elites in Brussels, Berlin and Paris seem oblivious—they do not seem to recognize that Central European nations hold different perspectives, nor do they see any need to change course.

To its credit, the EU has been enormously successful in moving the impoverished, formerly captive wards of the Soviet empire—namely, the four members of the Visegrád Group (V4): Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia—from failed command-economies to vibrant free-market economies, resulting in strong economic growth and low unemployment. The V4 countries certainly appreciate this, which explains some positive polling on attitudes towards the EU. Yet, on the other hand, a recent Eurobarometer poll found that only 33 percent of Czechs and 51 percent of Slovaks saw EU membership as “a good thing.” Why is this? Perhaps it is because while economic advancement is easy to embrace, EU policies have moved into the social and cultural realms—aspects of daily life in which Central Europeans are more conservative.

WHAT SEPARATES Europe’s East and West—the opening that China and Russia see as an opportunity—are the different cultural attitudes that lie beneath the surface, perhaps reflecting different stages of development, but resulting from contrasting historical experiences.

Absorbed for centuries into a succession of foreign empires—Ottoman, Russian, German or Austro-Hungarian—the V4 countries emerged from those ruins only in 1918. By the late 1930s, more decades of isolation and repression began under Nazi and Soviet regimes, with uprisings crushed in 1956 (Budapest) and 1968 (Prague) and martial law imposed in Poland. Emerging from this fresh hell as late as 1991, and finally joining the eu as recently as 2004, it should not be surprising that Central Europeans have different values. Last exposed to the fullness of European civilization in the 1930s, they are still learning just how much that civilization has changed.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, for instance, is condemned for blatantly favoring “Christian culture” over multiculturalism, limiting immigration in a rejection of open borders, and supporting what used to be called “traditional family values.” Political and cultural progressives in the West may find such views repulsive, but they seem to forget that these views were widespread until only relatively recently. The United States, for example, severely limited immigration from about 1924 to 1965. Likewise, until recently, it was characterized as a Christian, or Judeo-Christian, country, and the traditional “nuclear family” was valued with little criticism or controversy.

Orbán’s views may seem dated here in the West, but he does not hold office here—and vilifying him will only drive him and his supporters into the arms of our adversaries. Of course, Orbán should be held to account for his embrace of Vladimir Putin and increased friendliness with China, to say nothing of his authoritarian ruling style. But to say that all of his views are an aberration of the contemporary norm is to impose a foreign standard on culturally distinct people.

As with Trump, the Orbán challenge is larger than one leader’s opinions. Polling confirms that large numbers of Central Europeans perceive an East-West divide in values; 52 percent of Poles and 51 percent of Czechs agree that “[t]here is a conflict between our county’s traditional values and those of the West,” according to a Pew Research Center poll. Even American democracy scholar Marc F. Plattner, a noted critic of Orbán, concedes that one of the reasons Orbán is successful in convincing his supporters that EU leaders are trying to enforce distinct, progressive views on them is “the fact that the ‘Brussels elites’ he is so fond of attacking tend to hold views close to those of U.S. liberals on social and cultural issues.”

Much of this would not matter if the EU focused on its original mission of creating and maintaining a free-trade, travel and currency zone for the aim of economic growth through greater efficiencies and economies of scale. The problem is that the EU has taken on a much more ambitious mission. 

THIS IS the second issue: an EU doing things it was originally not intended to do. The progressive values embraced in Brussels, combined with ad-hoc and/or unilateral decisionmaking in Berlin and Paris, has shifted the EU agenda away from trade, travel and a common currency and into influencing Europe’s social and cultural life—a more personal and intrusive form of politics. Then came the sudden, unprecedented demands in 2015 that a million-plus unvetted migrants be distributed around EU states, seemingly dropped into every town and village. This was never an EU priority, and it certainly was not something that EU members had previously consented to. The Dublin Regulation, which EU members had agreed to, stipulated that asylum seekers must apply for asylum in the first EU country that is entered. Why, asked the V4 countries, should they be obligated to host migrants who didn’t enter through their borders, particularly since most of these individuals intended to apply for asylum in Germany or Sweden instead?

These sorts of progressive EU initiatives are advocated by people who had the luxury of growing up on the right side of the Iron Curtain. They have known only relative freedom and prosperity, and are so self-assured of their own good intentions that they feel confident they can build a transnational order based on abstract principles—assumed to be universal—that are derived from the application of human reason and the assumption of human goodness. Because these principles are thought to be universal, the resulting EU policies are uniform, taking no account of the harsh and uncertain histories of its eastern members, who rely on skeptical realism—and not utopianism—as their ethos. The West prizes self-expression; the East, self-discipline. 

Brussels-led EU efforts to unify domestic policies across Europe thus resemble, to those in the East, the foreign policies of an alien power. In fact, it feels eerily familiar; comparisons have been made to the mandates from Moscow during the Soviet Union. This is why the eu’s eastern critics invoke domestic sovereignty; indeed, the V4 countries may feel they finally acquired domestic sovereignty—just in time to lose it.

Mountains of online reports make clear that Brussels is busily at work on issues, objects or ambitions such as—to quote its documents—social justice, gender-impact, income redistribution, solidarity, social exclusion, prison conditions, anti-Gypsyism, climate change, exploitation, discrimination, a living wage, anti-poverty programs and a participatory economy. There is much more of this, of course, the breadth of which leaves little room for EU members to govern themselves. In resisting a handful of these policies, Central Europe’s members are lectured to, threatened with sanctions and hauled into court. Until recently, Washington joined in these sorts of thumpings.

There are some examples of note. Until 2008, for instance, EU rules insisted that bananas “must be free from malformation or abnormal curvature” and that cucumbers must be “practically straight.” Today, merchants are forbidden to claim that water can prevent dehydration or that prunes can have a laxative effect. In 2019, the EU forced Slovakia to withdraw a 2.5 percent tax on a select category of retailers, and it dragged Czechia into court for failing to post energy-performance certificates in certain buildings. Meanwhile, Russia and China offer Central Europe economic investments and benefits without making anyone submit to such extensive legal and regulatory regimes.

More vexing are situations of the kind Latvia has found itself in. Eastern EU members are often accused of tolerating higher levels of corruption but, oddly, Latvia was ordered by the European Court of Justice this year to reinstate a central bank governor—whom Latvian authorities had detained on suspicion of corruption. The EU court ruled Latvia didn’t have “sufficient” evidence, though “sufficiency” could have perhaps been weighted in Latvia’s favor, since the institution at risk is Latvia’s own national bank. Since previous probes of Latvian banks revealed Russian money laundering and illegal dealings with North Korea, it seems the investigators might be trusted with this latest case. Instead, the EU Court of Justice ruling said it cannot “take the place of the national courts having jurisdiction ... nor even ... interfere with the preliminary criminal investigation being conducted ...” and then did just that. 

Most challenging are demands that reflect values that have yet to gain widespread support in the East. When the EU proposed a treaty on women’s rights in 2011, Slovakia signed it, thinking its purpose was to combat violence against women. A closer reading revealed that it redefined “gender” as the “social roles, behaviors, activities and characteristics that a particular society considers appropriate for women and men.” Majority-Catholic Slovakia defines marriage in more biological terms as a union of a man and woman. Bratislava amended its constitution in 2014 to reflect this choice, and in March 2019, the Slovak parliament voted 101-28 against ratification of the treaty. Of the seven EU member countries that have not yet ratified the treaty, six are in Central Europe; the seventh is the United Kingdom.

Not surprisingly, gun control has become an East-West issue. Firearms manufacturing has long been a staple industry in Czechia, where hunting is popular. The Czechs have a very low murder rate and see little gun violence, which explains why Prague filed a lawsuit in 2017 against an EU directive tightening gun ownership. Still being litigated, the case is pregnant with irony. The Brussels directive, it turns out, was a response to the sharp rise in terrorist attacks in 2015—the year German chancellor Angela Merkel took the unilateral decision to welcome a million-plus migrants into a Europe whose internal borders were unpoliced.

In reaction, more Czechs sought guns; 11,000 new firearms permits were issued between 2015 and 2017. Radio Prague reported that “Police say the rising trend of gun ownership has been caused by fears over migration, terrorist attacks, and fear of personal assault.” In Germany, firearms offenses were dropping until 2015—then rose more than 25 percent in the following two years, according to The Wall Street Journal, which said, “Gun ownership is rising across Europe . . . spurred in part by insecurity arising from terrorist attacks.”

In an admission of defeat for Brussels, this EU directive was heavily amended in 2017 after taking Czech criticism, among others, into consideration. The European Commission noted that the newly amended directive has “more flexible rules for hunting and target shooting in order to avoid unnecessary impediments.” These changes though were introduced well after the 2015 migrant crisis had abated, and the EU leader primarily responsible for said crisis is only recently being held to account.

MERKEL’S OUT-of-control migration crisis erupted just in time to cripple plans by a new French president, Emmanuel Macron, to deepen and strengthen the EU. The worst effects of the migrant crisis were blunted by the leaders of the V4 countries, but the future of the EU is now on hold indefinitely. Such failures undermined the EU and tarnished the reputations of its two most powerful countries, without whom nothing important happens in Europe.

Brussels is prone to invoke the “rule of law” and “democracy” whenever it points an accusatory finger eastward, but there was nothing democratic, or lawful, about Merkel’s unilateral decision to allow one million-plus migrants into Europe in 2015.

Even two years later, a report from the German Bundestag concluded that Merkel’s government had offered no legal justification for its decision. Not only did the chancellor not put the issue to an EU vote, but neither did she seek a Bundestag vote; she merely discussed it with a few ministers and aides. According to a detailed report by Der Spiegel in 2016, Merkel also ignored pleas by then-Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and Dieter Romann, head of the German Federal Police, that she impose border controls. Merkel also failed to seek permission to suspend Germany’s asylum laws, which were aligned with the EU Dublin Regulation that all migrants must be returned to the EU country from which they entered. More to the relevant point, EU treaties do not call for open borders on the frontier.

While disregarding the democratic process, Merkel can also be held responsible for further rule-of-law crises—surges in both street crime and terrorism-related arrests, which the V4 countries avoided.

After burying the issue for six months, for instance, a leaked police report forced German authorities to concede that about 1,200 women were assaulted by as many as 2,000 men on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, Hamburg, Duesseldorf, Stuttgart and other cities. What’s more, “There is a connection between the emergence of this phenomenon and the rapid migration of 2015,” said Holger Münch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office. Most of the suspects were said to come from North Africa, and half of them had been in Germany for less than a year.

This set the table for anti-immigrant demonstrations that erupted in the eastern German city of Chemnitz in August 2018 after two Middle Eastern men were questioned in the fatal stabbing of a local man. Indeed, according to a government-sponsored study, violent crime rose by 10 percent in the two years following the migrant crisis. More than 90 percent of that has been attributed to young male refugees between the ages of fourteen and thirty. Given that the Merkel government has been accused of covering up the full scale of migrant criminality, these numbers could very well be higher. The Wall Street Journal revealed that in Berlin, organized crime is already dominated by a dozen Arab, Chechen, Lebanese and Kurdish families, who are now recruiting among the refugees who arrived in 2015. While the population of foreign nationals in Germany is 12.8 percent, they account for 28.7 percent of murders and manslaughters and 34.7 percent of all crime.

In Central Europe, people are safer. Rates of crime, violence, and vandalism are reaching historic lows in all V4 countries, trending downward for ten years in three of the countries, according to statistics from Eurostat. The ratio of people reporting such incidents in 2017 ranged from 5.4 percent in Poland to 9.3 percent in Czechia. In France and Germany, crime rates are much higher—14.2 percent in Germany and 13.9 in France—which is double the V4 average of 7 percent—and trending higher in Germany.

More serious is the spike in terrorism in Western Europe. While worldwide terrorism-related deaths decreased in 2016, that same year terrorist deaths in Europe rose to a historic high. The Institute for Economics & Peace’s 2017 Global Terrorism Index ranked France as the number-one country amongst Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for terrorist incidents. Outside of that group, it out-ranked highly unstable countries, such as Ethiopia, Lebanon, Mali and Palestine for terrorism. France was also the only European country to make the list of “50 Worst Terrorist Attacks in 2016,” at number seventeen, with the other forty-nine attacks taking place in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The following year, the number of terrorist-related deaths in Western Europe dropped by more than half, but the number of incidents increased by 11.4 percent, while global terrorism was still declining.

An EU report illuminates this with data on the arrest of terror suspects. In all four V4 countries, five such suspects were arrested in 2017, or one suspect for every 12.7 million people. German authorities arrested fifty-eight terrorist suspects, on the other hand, a potential terrorist for every 1.4 million citizens, while France detained 411 suspects, or one for every 162,540 people, according to Europol, the EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. The vast majority of those detained were jihadist terror suspects.

THE V4 countries arguably saved Europe from worse consequences by resisting the migrant wave. “At the beginning of the 2015–16 crisis,” a Carnegie Europe report said, “eu member states divided into sharply opposed camps.” While most northern and western European countries—at first—welcomed the migrants, the report said, “The Central European states immediately opted for restrictive policies.” The EUobserver reported that “The fiercest opposition has come from eastern European members, notably the Visegrád Four.” The V4 group urged strengthened external borders—and initially, they were ignored.

An EU Council majority voted September 22, 2015, for a legally binding plan—one its supporters also labeled “voluntary”—to redistribute migrants to member countries via quotas, breaking from the normative rule that “sensitive” decisions be unanimous. Joined by Romania, V4 members Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia voted “no,” and even the pro-eu EUobserver said, “The vote marks an unusual EU step, in terms of forcing a minority of EU states to take action on issues of national sovereignty.” Poland initially voted for the plan, but Polish parliamentary elections on October 25 unseated the Warsaw government—in part over this EU vote. The election was won by the opposition Law and Justice party, which then joined its V4 colleagues in opposition, just the first of many elections—East and West—that revealed popular opposition to migrant relocation and unguarded internal EU borders.

At first critical of the V4 countries, western EU states quickly emulated them. Budapest was widely condemned in 2015 for building a fence along its 110-mile border with Serbia to stop migrants, while Germany still welcomed them. Often unmentioned, however, is that Hungary had more asylum requests than any other EU country in 2015 on a per-capita basis—three times more than Germany and sixteen times more than France. Condemnations aside, within weeks many other EU members followed Hungary’s lead.

Public opinion began to harden against Merkel’s open-door policy that fall—a trend no doubt accelerated on November 13 by the terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis. With multiple suicide bombings and mass shootings that killed 130 people and wounded 413, it was the deadliest outbreak of violence in France since World War II. By Christmas 2015, EU leaders were discussing how to strengthen external borders—as the V4 countries had originally urged. By March 2016, despite earlier proclamations to the contrary, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and Germany restored internal EU border passport checks and patrols. The EU and Turkey also agreed that month that Ankara would keep migrants that attempted to pass through, or take them back, slowing the flow to Greece, in exchange for about $3.4 billion in aid.

Hungary and Slovakia sued the EU over its compulsory relocation quotas, but their arguments were rejected in September 2017 by the European Court of Justice. The EU followed up with legal proceedings against Czechia, Hungary and Poland for refusing to accept migrants according to the quota system. While Slovakia was spared this fate because it agreed to take in a small number of migrants, it made clear its opposition to Brussel’s policy.

Still, the V4 flipped the focus from unquestioningly welcoming migrants to stemming the tide. Under a 2018 compromise agreement—reached at a European Council summit that some insiders dubbed “Saving Private Merkel”—migrants are to be sent to United Nations centers in North Africa or an EU country-of-entry, as per the Dublin Regulation. Detainees can make asylum claims, but member countries are not required to accept migrants with approved claims, nor to host detention centers. About $570 million was pledged for African countries to manage migration, and to bolster security at the eu’s external borders. “These days,” The Economist wrote, “Mrs. Merkel talks more about controlling Europe’s outer borders than about managing the burden of refugees who cross them—the V4’s order of priorities.”

Despite this, the EU sued Hungary in the European Court of Justice for violating rules on the treatment of asylum-seekers, and the EU Parliament in September 2018 opened disciplinary proceedings against Budapest, exacerbating the East-West divide.

Like Merkel, French president Macron wagered Europe’s future on grandiose plans. Macron created a new political party, En Marche!, in 2016, ran for president in 2017 and won a triple-digit majority in parliament that May, becoming France’s youngest leader since Napoleon Bonaparte. He immediately became the only EU national leader to dare advocate for greater EU integration and a stronger euro.

To launch this effort, Macron scheduled a much-touted speech 120 days into his presidency. Unveiling a sweeping agenda for the EU at the Sorbonne on September 26, 2017, Macron conceded the “ambition” of his plans—a word he used thirty-six times. He was careful to say he would need to partner with Merkel’s Germany to enact his plans.

Macron was less careful in his choice of a date for this speech. German elections were already scheduled for September 24. That day, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and allied Christian Social Union lost sixty-five seats in the Bundestag, while her coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party, lost another forty seats. In their place, Alternative fur Deutschland, a party opposed to mass migration and founded less than five years earlier, picked up its first ninety-four seats. Deprived of a parliamentary majority, Merkel clung to power, ending talks about a stronger EU. Given that similar electoral eruptions were already sweeping the continent, might Macron have held off on such grand announcements?

Local elections on October 29, 2018, saw Merkel’s coalition suffer a third defeat. The next day, Merkel announced she would surrender leadership of her party in December 2018 and step down as chancellor in 2021. These rebukes were reinforced in the May 2019 elections to the European Parliament, which saw a significant increase in the size of the “Euro-skeptic” bloc.

NOTHING BETTER illustrates the eu’s East-West divide than the May 5, 2018, celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx in Trier, his western German birthplace.

Had Marx been born in eastern Germany, it is unlikely his birthplace would throw him a party. Yet Trier celebrated with three exhibits at four museums, the unveiling of a huge statue of Marx (18 feet tall and weighing 2.3 tons), conferences, workshops and musical performances—three hundred separate events in all. Why? The statue was a gift from China, which is waging a campaign to breathe life back into the corpse of Marxist ideology.

In the East, such behavior is shocking and offensive. “To come from a country that experienced Marxism in practice—as I do, being from Slovakia—is to shudder over such fawning,” said Miriam Lexmann, a former Slovak parliamentary representative to the EU. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who hails from Luxembourg in the West, sees it very differently. He not only joined the celebrations in Trier but strongly defended Marx—in remarks delivered in a church—absolving him of any responsibility for the actions of his adherents. “Marx isn’t responsible for all the atrocity his alleged heirs have to answer for,” he said. Maybe so, but Marx-inspired communism has an ongoing global homicidal record of about 100 million and counting, including the family members and loved ones of eastern Europeans who are EU citizens.

In such ways are doubts cast on EU sermons about the sanctity of shared EU values. “What does it mean, or portend,” asked Lexmann, “when Juncker honors an architect of collectivist tyranny and oppression at a time when many democracies are struggling?”

HOPE FOR change will have to rest with Washington.

This is why the Trump administration pivoted to Central Europe. A. Wess Mitchell, former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs; Jakub Grygiel, former senior advisor to the secretary of state; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all focused on building better relations with the V4 countries, in part to wean them away from Russia and China, particularly Hungary, which does business with both.

But countering the influence of Russia and China will take time and effort, as well as a carrot-and-stick approach that will of necessity have its ups and downs.

The V4’s most anti-Russian country received the first carrots. In only his second overseas trip, Trump visited Poland in July 2017, and met with President Andrzej Duda, who was hosted at the White House in September 2018 and June 2019. Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó met Pompeo in Washington in May 2018, then Pompeo visited Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in February 2019—the first time a secretary of state has visited Slovakia alone in twenty years. Pompeo said, “It has been too long since America has been deeply engaged here.” The White House then hosted Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, Slovak prime minister Peter Pellegrini, and Hungary’s Orbán this past spring.

Then Orbán was hit with a very public stick. The day after he visited the White House on May 13, where Trump flattered him repeatedly in a joint news conference, an official leak indicated the United States had prepared anti-corruption sanctions to be directed at Orbán’s closest associates—unless Orbán adopts friendlier policies already urged upon him.

More could be done: recruit the infrastructure sector to bid against Chinese and Russian firms on Central Europe’s projects, perhaps with government support; require U.S. officials to have standing meetings with their counterparts in Central Europe; launch public diplomacy initiatives that drive home messages about our common values and interests. It also would not hurt to speak up—as Trump did in his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2017—for the rights of all peoples to live their domestic lives as they wish, as long as minority rights, just laws and democratic values are protected.

Kevin J. McNamara is an Associate Scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), a history of the dramatic role of the Czecho-Slovak Legion in World War I, the Russian Revolution and the founding of Czecho-Slovakia in 1918.

Image: Reuters