From the Economist: Europe's fraying fringe
Travel the ex-communist region between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas, and, sadly, you will not find one united, modernising government. Instead, there is sleaze and racism in Slovakia's government, eccentricity and petulant incompetence in Poland, an admission of blatant lying by Hungary's prime minister, and no government at all in the Czech Republic. Throughout the region, communist dictatorship has all too often given way to incompetence and corruption, not the yearned-for freedom and the rule of law.
Decades of totalitarian rule damaged the way people in power think and behave; and the harm has not been repaired. Getting into the European Union and NATO transformed parts of national life in the new member states, but left swathes untouched, particularly bits run by the state. Schools and universities, for example, are vital for the shift to an economy driven by brainpower instead of cheap labour, but they remain state-run, rigid and mediocre.
Eastern Europe's remarkable political failure (see article) matters not just because of economics. Weak, deceitful, clownish, boorish, squabbling, thuggish and corrupt politicians in the east risk destroying the flagging enthusiasm of west European voters for further enlargement of the EU. Yet the “European perspective”, as the bureaucrats call the chance of membership, is the one thing tugging the bruised and battered countries of ex-Yugoslavia towards peace and co-operation. Without it, conflicts will flare up unchecked, at best local, at worst turning into wider conflagrations.
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Russian menace and muscle change the geopolitical rules for the Soviet Union's former satellites, both those sheltered by the EU and NATO and those outside. In one sense Russia is still weak: its state institutions are bloated and incompetent; its population is collapsing, its economy woefully dependent on natural resources. But it increasingly has the ability to create mayhem in what the Kremlin terms the “near abroad”.
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