New Europe: Eastern Disillusion

By the numbers, Latvians should be smiling. Two years after joining the European Union, the tiny Baltic republic has emerged as the bloc's economic front runner. Growth in the first quarter hit a startling 13 percent. Trade is flourishing. Foreign investment has more than doubled in three years, and tens of thousands of young Latvians have found work in the bars and building sites of Britain and Ireland. The promised all-European future has arrived. "This country is no longer a gray area," says Martins Gavritis, spokesman for Latvia's central bank. "It's part of a big affluent market with clear rules."

So why the grumbles? The latest figures from the EU's own pollsters reveal the Latvians are the continent's leading Euro-skeptics. Support for membership is just 29 percent, below even those Brussels-baiting British and Austrians. Nor are they alone in their perversity. At the European summit in Brussels last week, leaders had one more paradox to add to their worry list: the strange disconnect between the benefits that the EU has delivered to Eastern Europe and its unpopularity with those new citizens. Says Giles Merritt, secretary-general of the Brussels-based lobby Friends of Europe: "Everything seems to be going according to plan, yet these countries seem to be universally gloomy."

The contrast is striking. Already quickening before 2004, growth rates in Eastern Europe have accelerated since the newcomers reached Brussels. Last year the 15 older members managed only a sluggish rate of 1.5 percent, compared with nearly 10 percent for, say, Estonia or 6 percent for the Czech Republic. "The new members have benefited hugely from integration with the larger and prosperous economies of Western Europe," says Katynka Barysch of the Centre for European Reform in London. But don't look for much gratitude. According to the pollsters, support for EU membership in the 10 new states averages just 40 percent.

Certainly, a public distaste for the EU does no harm with voters. Elections in the Czech Republic earlier this month returned to power an avowedly Euro-skeptic government. In recent months the Polish government has courted popularity at home by its refusal to accept EU norms on a range of issues from cross-border mergers to the treatment of homosexuals. And the ruling coalition in Warsaw these days includes the ultranationalist Self Defence Party, pledged to renegotiate the terms of Poland's membership.

Where does the disillusionment come from? As Europe's more established Euro-skeptics tell it, the newcomers are finally awakening to the EU's inherently undemocratic--even sinister--nature. "The gap between the views of the elected and the electors has widened to a chasm," says Nigel Farage, a member of the European Parliament for the United Kingdom Independence Party, just back from a trip to Slovenia to drum up support for a newly formed Euro-skeptic party. "People are now saying: 'We jumped straight out of the Soviet frying pan into the fire--an organization that wants just as much control over how we run our lives'."

Perhaps that's so on the fringe. But the more likely explanation has to do with the EU's failure to deliver promptly on expectations that were always too high. Memories of communist-era deprivation have grown faint, yet the rewards of becoming "European" have yet to fully arrive. "People thought of joining the EU as the fulfillment of an old dream," says Hungarian political analyst Krisztian Szabados. "They had always wanted Western living standards; the day after we joined they woke up and found nothing had really changed." (Back in 2003 more than 80 percent of Hungarians voted to join the Union; today, only 44 percent believe membership is a positive.)

The reality, of course, is that economic revolutions do not happen overnight. It takes years to turn all that largesse from Brussels into new roads and airports--not to mention Western European incomes and living standards. "People see GDP rising--but not their salaries," says Algirdas Paleckis, a pro-European M.P. from Lithuania. According to EU figures coming out last week, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia remain the EU's poorest nations when measured in terms of purchasing power. Even the Slovaks, the darlings of free-market ideologues for their dramatic economic reforms, still trail far behind the Greeks or Portuguese when it comes to incomes and spending power.

Particular sectors have their own grievances. In the heady days before admission to the bloc, applicants closed their eyes to the inevitable drawbacks. No longer. Farmers must now learn to deal with higher standards and cheap competition; fishermen have come to understand how aid is dependent on cutting their fleets. And then there's all the meddlesome regulation. "Compared with today, the bureaucracy in Soviet times was nothing," says Raita Karnite at the Institute of Economics in the Latvian capital, Riga.

But the grouches of Old Europe, still squabbling last week over the proposed constitution, must share the blame. Over the past year or so, they've done little to welcome their new partners. Remember the attempts to cut back the aid promised to the newcomers, that featured so largely in last winter's unseemly wrangle over the EU budget. Or this month's strict interpretation of euro-zone rules that will keep Lithuania out of the common currency. "We need a common sense of purpose, and at the moment that is very much lacking," says Sebastian Kurpas of the Center for European Policy Studies, a Brussels think tank. After all, who enjoys a club where members just bicker over the bills?