Our friends in the East

By Chris Bowlby
BBC, Prague

The new member states have a combined GDP of less than 5% of the EU15

Enlargement of the European Union is not only about practicalities. It is also about overcoming a huge psychological gulf.

So-called "Eastern Europe" labours under an image of somewhere a little bit backwards, unstable, and some might say, fundamentally foreign.

There are some borders you can see. Maybe they are formed by mountains or a great river.

There are others you can hear.

The first time I went across the old Iron Curtain into what we still tend to call Eastern Europe, I remember it was the sounds of a new language and culture that signalled the change most clearly.

Slav languages seemed especially mysterious to someone brought up on English, French or German.

Even the music, the exhilarating syncopation of folk rhythms, marked a quick step away from the European norm.

Have you ever noticed that Prague lies west of Vienna? Czech citizen

But I was also arriving with my own cultural baggage, the sort you accumulate growing up amidst the traditional British view of the European east.

In my imagination this was a zone populated at least partly by wild brigands or backward peasants.

I had absorbed Tintin's battles with its unpronounceable villains, shivered at the thought of Dracula lurking in its castles, and cheered as the clean-cut occupants of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang defeated its crazed, child-hating tinpot dictators.

Degrees of separation

It was not long before things began to seem less strange and alarming, prompted by the patient educative efforts of the East Europeans I met. Or rather central Europeans.

There was the Czech woman who casually placed a map in front of me and remarked: "Have you ever noticed that Prague lies west of Vienna?"

Cold War geography has remained frozen in many Western minds

Ever since, I have been very wary of the term Eastern Europe, which can owe more to brutal Soviet geography than to history and culture.

In Estonia, for example, I found people mingling freely with Scandinavians, in close contact with the United States, and proud of their historic trading links with the Germans along the Baltic.

They might have once been part of the Soviet Union, but their instincts - and many of their older historical links - were definitely westward leaning.

Then there were the young Slovenes in Ljubljana who told me how they liked to shop in Italy, ski in Austria, weekend in Paris. They found the idea that they belonged to that benighted backwater called "the Balkans" utterly baffling.

What frustrates the new EU fellow citizens is a feeling that Cold War geography has remained frozen in many Western minds.

In fact, going much further back in European history, you can see a constant mental line across the continent, seen as separating not only west from east, but cultured from backward, dynamic from incompetent, and us from them.

English travellers centuries ago would talk of "taking leave of our world" when they entered a place like Hungary.

Shared history

That sense of separation has had serious political consequences too.

Think of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain's comments in 1938, as he prepared to allow Hitler to begin dismembering Czechoslovakia following the Munich agreement.

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is," he said in a BBC broadcast, "that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between peoples of whom we know nothing."

The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin determined the shape of post-war East and central Europe

I had those words quoted to me ruefully by a dignified Czech man in his 80s. He had escaped after Hitler had invaded his country, and made his way to Britain to join thousands of exiled Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and others fighting with British forces, against Nazism.

I know he will be watching his country's EU accession with great personal satisfaction, but seeing it as the paying of a historic debt, not some act of charity by a generous West.

So there are some real historical bonds across the continent if we know where to look.

Whether our joint grappling with the EU system will strengthen that bonding is another matter. But unexpected things, like a shared sense of humour, might help.

'Crazy rumours'

There is one other group I'll be remembering as the EU expands, a group that gave me one of my most amusing lessons in the mysteries of European unity.

In the early 1990s I visited a farm in central Slovakia to see how they were recovering from communist collective agriculture.

The farm manager, a young ambitious man, asked me to explain, to his mostly elderly workforce, what life would be like inside the EU.

"The problem is", he said sheepishly, "my people believe all kinds of crazy rumours. They have even been told that, as EU farmers, they would be paid if they promised to grow nothing."

I knew enough of the bizarre rules of the Common Agricultural Policy to confirm that this rumour was, at that time at least, absolutely true.

At this, the farm workers' weather-beaten faces broke into immense smiles.

They sensed that the transition from the madness of communist economics to the apparent insanity of Western European agriculture might not be such a big change after all.

And as we laughed together at the absurdities of policymaking everywhere, this did not seem like a small far-away place.

It suddenly seemed curiously close to home.

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From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 24 April, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.