Europe

"Instead of increasing intra-European harmony and global peace, the shift to EMU and the political integration that would follow it would be more likely to lead to increased conflicts within Europe."

"Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war."

"What is clear is that a French aspiration for equality and a German expectation of hegemony are not consistent."

"A critical feature of the EU(European Union) in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw... The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits."

"When the Monetary Union was founded in 1992, it was a common understanding among economists that a monetary union of states of very different economic strength could function only if either economic policy was communalized as well or the strong states were willing to pay for the debts of the weaker states. Politicians ignored this warning. The financial crisis showed that the economic experts were right. The Monetary Union deprives the states of a number of fiscal instruments such as revaluation or devaluation of the currency. This contributed to the crisis."

"The fundamental problem of European monetary union lies in its incompleteness or lopsidedness. There was a much better preparation for the monetary side of monetary union than for the fiscal concomitants that should have underpinned its stability (and prevented the threat of large-scale monetisation of fiscal debt burdens). No adequate provision on a European basis existed for banking supervision and regulation, which, like fiscal policy, was left to diverse national authorities."

"The eurozone’s significance was more than symbolic. It implied the gradual synchronization of its members’ economies, including monetary policy, national investment and transfers between rich and poor regions. For northern Europe the euro bound Germany into ever closer union. For Spain, Italy and Greece, it was a double-edged sword. It signified merger with Europe’s most sophisticated economies, but also economic adjustments for which these countries were by no means ready. Britain had joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism, but dropped out with the pound under extreme pressure on ‘black Wednesday’ in 1992. The Major government declined to join the euro. It also ‘opted out’ of Maastricht’s ‘Social Chapter’, which covered areas such as employment rights."

"Europe’s political stability, social cohesion, economic prosperity and security are more threatened today than at any point since the Cold War, Russia is destabilizing the Continent on every front. Indigenous factors – whether long-extant nationalism, design flaws in the Eurozone, lack of a common foreign policy, or incapability at assimilating immigrants – certainly lie at the root of these crises."

"The euro is bad for Europe. The euro is bad for the Netherlands, it’s especially bad because it is a stimulus for politicians to kill the Welfare State. I look forward to a European economy using multiple currencies. In the end that will be much better: it will make us more resistant to shocks and makes us less vulnerable to what is happening now."

"What has happened, it turns out, is that by going on the euro, Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of Third World countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies."

"If there was ever a bad idea, EMU it is."

"Italians dream that the ECB (European Central Bank) will make their life easier than the Bundesbank does now... The new central bank is certain to establish itself at the outset as a direct continuation of the German central bank."

"The most serious criticism of EMU is that by abandoning exchange rate adjustments it transfers to the labor market the task of adjusting for competitiveness and relative prices... losses in output and employment (and pressure on the European central bank to inflate) will predominate."

"Once Italy is in, with an appreciated currency, the country will soon be back on the ropes, just as in 1992, when the currency came under attack."

"The most likely scenario is that EMU (Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union) will occur but will neither end Europe’s currency troubles nor solve its prosperity problems."

"Twenty-five years ago we [Poland] were eastern Europe. When we joined Nato and the EU, we became central Europe. Now, because of our resilience in the face of the financial crisis, we are northern Europe."

"Though in 1346 there were few differences between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were worlds apart. In the West, workers were free of feudal dues, fines, and regulations and were becoming a key part of a booming market economy. In the East, they were also involved in such an economy, but as coerced serfs growing the food and agricultural goods demanded in the West. It was a market economy, but not an inclusive one. This institutional divergence was the result of a situation where the differences between these areas initially seemed very small: in the East, lords were a little better organized; they had slightly more rights and more consolidated landholdings. Towns were weaker and smaller, peasants less organized. In the grand scheme of history, these were small differences. Yet these small differences between the East and the West became very consequential for the lives of their populations and for the future path of institutional development when the feudal order was shaken up by the Black Death."

"I remember vividly in 1974 being in the mass of people, descending the streets in my native Lisbon, in Portugal, celebrating the democratic revolution and freedom. This same feeling of joy was experienced by the same generation in Spain and Greece. It was felt later in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Baltic States when they regained their independence. Several generations of Europeans have shown again and again that their choice for Europe was also a choice for freedom. I will never forget Rostropovich playing Bach at the fallen Wall in Berlin. This image reminds the world that it was the quest for freedom and democracy that tore down the old divisions and made possible the reunification of the continent. Joining the European Union was essential for the consolidation of democracy in our countries. Because it places the person and respect of human dignity at its heart. Because it gives a voice to differences while creating unity. And so, after reunification, Europe was able to breathe with both its lungs, as said by Karol Wojtiła. The European Union has become our common house. The “homeland of our homelands” as described by Vaclav Havel."

"In the very different circumstances and culture of Eastern Europe, in contrast, Communist regimes successively collapsed in 1989. The end of the Cold War had been long envisaged, but largely through negotiations between states. That was not to be the key element in 1989. Instead, Gorbachev unintentionally provoked the fall of the Soviet bloc. His attempts to push through modernisation in Eastern Europe (which totally surprised the East German leadership who argued that there was no need for reform or openness) left the regimes weak in the face of popular demand for reform and for more change. Moreover, Gorbachev was unwilling to use the Soviet Army to maintain these regimes. Visiting Prague in April 1987, Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention in order to uphold Communism (‘the defence of the Socialist Commonwealth’ in Soviet terms), intervention which had been used in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Instead, Gorbachev claimed that ‘fraternal parties determine their political line with a view to national conditions’. On 7 December 1988, he announced, significantly at the United Nations in New York rather than at a Communist gathering, that Eastern European states should be free to choose their own political path. This was a clear signal for change, and for a reduction in international tension. In his speech, Gorbachev also declared that the Soviet armed forces would be cut."

"Just pause for a moment to reflect on what we've done. Germany is united, and a slab of the Berlin Wall sits right outside this Astrodome. Arabs and Israelis now sit face to face and talk peace, and every hostage held in Lebanon is free. The conflict in El Salvador is over, and free elections brought democracy to Nicaragua. Black and white South Africans cheered each other at the Olympics. The Soviet Union can only be found in history books. The captive nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics are captive no more. And today on the rural streets of Poland, merchants sell cans of air labeled "the last breath of communism." If I had stood before you 4 years ago and described this as the world we would help to build, you would have said, "George Bush, you must have been smoking something, and you must have inhaled." This convention is the first at which an American President can say the cold war is over, and freedom finished first."

"I have visited most parts of the Central European country, and am familiar with people from every district. Shall I picture them all to myself? Then in thought I am in a peasant's cottage in Lower Germany, in a country house in Upper Germany, in an Alpine inn, in a little town in Bohemia, in the industrial region in Upper Silesia, in a shop in Posen, in an hotel in Tatra, with friends in Budapest, at the port at Triest, at home in Berlin, in the splendid old cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna, in the silence of the Böhmerwald, on the shore at Rügen; and so on continually forms arise of men, women and children, and I hear every German accent, from the broad Frisian Plattdeutsch to the Tyrolean Mountain German, from the softness of the Lower Rhine to the sharpness of East Prussia, from the Mecklenburg calm to the Viennese liveliness, and in addition there is the sound of Danish in the North, French in the West, Italian and Croatian in the South, Tzechish in Bohemia, Magyar, Roumanian and Polish in the South-East and East. (...) And nowhere are limits or divisions sharply fixed."

"We, representing together more than fifty million people constituting a chain of nations lying between the Baltic, the Adriatic and the Black Seas, comprising Czecho-Slovaks, Poles, Jugoslavs, Ukrainians, Uhro-Rusyns, Lithuanians, Roumanians and Italian Irredentists, Unredeemed Greeks, Albanians, Zionists, and Armenians, wholly or partly subject to alien domination (...) We have suffered destruction of our cities, violation of our homes and lands, and have maintained our ideals only by stealth, and in spite of the tyranny of our oppressors. We have been deprived of proper representation and fair trial. We have been denied the right of free speech, and the right freely to assemble and petition for the redress of our grievances. We have been denied free and friendly intercourse with our sister states, and our men have been impressed in war against their brothers and friends of kindred races."

"Who rules East Europe commands the heartland, who rules the heartland commands the world."

"If you ask me what is my native country, I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg, Vienna and Munich, and I have a Hungarian passport; but I have no fatherland. I am a very typical mix of old Austria-Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my country is Hungary, my mother tongue is German."

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place."

"The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy. Turkey and Persia are both profoundly alarmed and disturbed at the claims which are being made upon them and at the pressure being exerted by the Moscow Government."

"(...) There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration. (...) I don't believe (...) that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Rumanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union."

"Over Central Europe there rises the heavy smell of boiled cabbage, stale beer, and the soapy whiff of overripe water melons (...) The frontiers are vague and irrational; and it is only the smell which permits one to identify [the region] with absolute certainty."

"(...) Three fundamental situations developed in Europe after the war: that of Western Europe, that of Eastern Europe, and, most complicated, that of the part of Europe situated geographically in the center – culturally in the West and politically in the East."

"I assume there is such a thing as Central Europe, even though many people deny its existence, beginning with statesmen and journalists who persist in calling it "Eastern Europe" and ending with my friend Joseph Brodsky, who prefers to reserve for it the name of "Western Asia." In these decades of the 20th century, Central Europe seems to exist only in the minds of some of its intellectuals."

"In the work of Havel and Konrád there is an interesting semantic division of labour. Both authors use the terms "Eastern Europe" or "East European" when the context is neutral or negative; when they write "Central" or "East Central," the statement is invariably positive, affirmative, or downright sentimental."

"Every Central European family has its own stormy history in which family catastrophes and national catastrophes are mingled. History is more than erudition here, it is the inner meaning of actions, a validating tradition, a largely unconscious norm and parameter for conduct today."

"Europe is living through an exceptional period. Part of our continent torn up from its roots almost half a century ago is now aspiring to return. Back to Europe! This expression is gaining currency these days in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe."

"I'm delighted to be here in Eastern, I mean Central Europe."

"Eastern Europe is now east-central Europe."

"Tell me where Central Europe is, and I can tell who you are."

"Central Europe is a dynamic historical concept, not a static spatial one; therefore its frontiers have shifted throughout the ages."

"In the late nineteenth century, the concept of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa was launched to coincide with the political sphere of the Central Powers. In the inter-war years, a domain called "East Central Europe" was invented to coincide with the newly independent "successor states" – from Finland and Poland to Yugoslavia. This was revived again after 1945 as a convenient label for the similar set of nominally independent countries which were caught inside the Soviet bloc. By that time the main division, between a "Western Europe" dominated by NATO and the EEC and an "Eastern Europe" dominated by Soviet communism seemed to be set in stone. In the 1980s a group of writers led by the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, launched a new version of "Central Europe", to break down the reigning barriers. Here was yet another configuration, another true "kingdom of the spirit"."

"For all the participants in this fascinating debate, "Central Europe" was defined, not by geography, but by values. "Central Europe" was, in György Konrád's words, a Weltanschauung, not a Staatsangehörigkeit (i.e., a way of looking at the world rather than a question of citizenship); for Leszek Kołakowski it was a "culturally connected area"; for Stefan Kaszyński a "state of mind"; for Czesław Miłosz "a way of thinking"."

"No one writing about Transcarpathia can resist retelling the region's favourite anecdote: A visitor, encountering one of the oldest local inhabitants, asks about his life. The reply: "I was born in Austria-Hungary, I went to school in Czechoslovakia, I did my army service in Horthy's Hungary, followed by a spell in prison in the USSR. Now I am ending my days in independent Ukraine." The visitor expresses surprise at how much of the world the old man has seen. "But no!," he responds, "I've never left this village!""

"Indeed by 1919 there could be no question of saving the old arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe. The nationalists had already torn them apart. From the distance of seventy years it is customary to regard Austria-Hungary as a tranquil exercise in multi-racialism. In fact it was a nightmare of growing racial animosity. Every reform created more problems than it solved. Hungary got status within the empire as a separate state in 1867. It at once began to oppress its own minorities, chiefly Slovaks and Romanians, with greater ferocity and ingenuity than it itself had been oppressed by Austria. Elections were suspect, and the railways, the banking system and the principles of internal free trade were savagely disrupted in the pursuit of racial advantage immediately any reform made such action possible. Czechs and other Slav groups followed the Hungarians' example. No ethnic group behaved consistently. What the Germans demanded and the Czechs refused in Bohemia, the Germans refused and the Italians and south Slovenes demanded in the South Tyrol and Styria. All the various Diets and Parliaments, in Budapest, Prague, Graz, and Innsbruck were arenas of merciless racial discord. In Galicia, the minority Ruthenians fought the majority Poles. In Dalmatia the minority Italians fought the majority South Slavs. As a result it was impossible to form an effective parliamentary government. All of the twelve central governments between 1900 and 1918 had to be composed almost entirely of civil servants. Each local government, from which minorities were excluded, protected its home industries where it was legally empowered to do so, and if not, organized boycotts of goods made by other racial groups. There was no normality in the old empire."

"Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members."

"Concernant en tous les cas les pays candidats, (...) honnêtement, je trouve qu'ils se sont comportés avec une certaine légèreté. Car entrer dans l'Union européenne, cela suppose tout de même un minimum de considération pour les autres, un minimum de concertation. Si, sur le premier sujet difficile, on se met à donner son point de vue indépendamment de toute concertation avec l'ensemble dans lequel, par ailleurs, on veut entrer, alors, ce n'est pas un comportement bien responsable. En tous les cas, ce n'est pas très bien élevé. Donc, je crois qu'ils ont manqué une bonne occasion de se taire."

"There are several kinds of monsters in western popular culture today: werewolves, vampires, morlaks, the blood-countess and other creatures of the underworld. (...) Vampirism, and (...) monstrosity has been fundamentally intertwined with Eastern Europe (...) [I]s it only an accident that the four most enduring popular culture villains, Frankenstein, Count Dracula (Nosferatu), the Morlak and the Golem had emerged in Europe during modernity (...)? That all four creatures are connected somehow to Eastern European regions?"

"I am one of the servants of Allah. We do our duty of fighting for the sake of the religion of Allah. It is also our duty to send a call to all the people of the world to enjoy this great light and to embrace Islam and experience the happiness in Islam. Our primary mission is nothing but the furthering of this religion. ... Let not the West be taken in by those who say that Muslims choose nothing but slaughtering. Their brothers in East Europe, in Turkey and in Albania have been guided by Allah to submit to Islam and to experience the bliss of Islam. Unlike those, the European and the American people and some of the Arabs are under the influence of Jewish media."

"In Eastern Europe, countries still struggle to fulfill the promise of a strong democracy, or a vibrant market economy. Who to look to better than you? Who to look to better than Central European countries that 20 years ago acted with such courage and resolve, and over the last 20 years, have made such sustainable progress? You can help guide Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine along the path of lasting stability and prosperity. It's your time to lead. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus can benefit from your personal experiences."

"Around the same time, communism in Central and Eastern Europe finally fell, but its economic rivalry with capitalism had, of course, long since been decided. It’s easy to think that these countries were never close to the market economies, but in 1950 countries such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had a GDP per capita about a quarter higher than poor Western countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. In 1989, the eastern states were nowhere close. The eastern part of Germany was richer than West Germany before World War II. When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, East Germany’s GDP per capita was not even half that of West Germany’s. Of these countries, those that liberalized the most have on average developed the fastest and established the strongest democracies. An analysis of twenty-six post-communist countries showed that a 10 per cent increase in economic freedom was associated with a 2.7 per cent faster annual growth. Political and economic institutions have improved the most in the Central and Eastern European countries that are now members of the EU, not least the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Today, they are some of the freest countries in the world and have more than tripled average incomes since independence. But one can also observe a recent reformer like Georgia. It was seen as an economic basket case, but after the Rose Revolution in 2003 it increased per capita incomes almost threefold and cut extreme poverty rates by almost two-thirds."

"In the late 1800s, Europe had a peaceable bull’s-eye in the northern industrialized countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Low Countries), bordered by slightly stroppier Ireland, Austria-Hungary, and Finland, surrounded in turn by still more violent Spain, Italy, Greece, and the Slavic countries. Today the peaceable center has swelled to encompass all of Western and Central Europe, but a gradient of lawlessness extending to Eastern Europe and the mountainous Balkans is still visible. There are gradients within each of these countries as well: the hinterlands and mountains remained violent long after the urbanized and densely farmed centers had calmed down. Clan warfare was endemic to the Scottish highlands until the 18th century, and to Sardinia, Sicily, Montenegro, and other parts of the Balkans until the 20th. It’s no coincidence that the two blood-soaked classics with which I began this book—the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric poems—came from peoples that lived in rugged hills and valleys."

"Central Europe has several recognizably common architectural features that make some towns in Galicia look remarkably like towns in Transylvania and Slovakia; shared musicians—Liszt, Chopin, Mahler, Dvořák, Smetana, Bartók, Kodály; shared writers, such as Musil, Gombrowicz, Koestler, Brod, Mickiewicz, Kafka, Roth, Zweig, Faludy; and some peculiar shared traditions, such as the tiny coffee spoon and the oversweet desserts with whipping cream."

"Eastern Europe caused constant alarm in the Soviet supreme leadership. The suppression of the Hungarian Uprising had been traumatic for Khrushchëv. He had thought he was relaxing communist rule for everybody’s benefit but found that societies west of the Soviet Union hated their oppressors. The Prague Spring was less traumatic for Brezhnev, who had never promised reform in eastern Europe; his conscience, if he had one, was untroubled by his decision to send Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia in 1968. But military action dealt only with the symptoms. It offered no fundamental cure for the malaise of communism across the entire eastern half of the continent. From Stalin to Brezhnev the sickly phenomena persisted. The ‘colonies’ in eastern Europe had turned into a multinational drain on the Soviet budget. Nuclear missile bases had to be supplied if the threat of attack by NATO was to be faced down. The Soviet army also maintained garrisons which needed equipping and financing. These disgruntled troops were locally very unpopular and Moscow took the precaution of secluding its contingents well away from regular contact with the country’s civilian inhabitants. It was a most peculiar empire which resorted to such expedients. This was not all. Communised economies in eastern Europe were constructed on the Soviet model. It is true that Poland refrained from collectivising most of its peasantry; but industry, commerce, finance and transport copied the templates invented in the pre-war USSR. The result was permanent economic inadequacy. The countries of eastern Europe lacked the USSR’s abundance of natural resources. If Moscow wished to salvage the situation, it had to reconcile itself to the unceasing subsidisation of gas and oil exports."