Foreign Affairs
Complaints about Central Europe’s “democratic backsliding” don’t hold up under scrutiny.
Boarding my U.S.-bound plane once in Dublin, a stewardess cheerfully reminded the line of long faces that it’s never too early to plan next year’s vacation. The sentiment resonated more than the charitable stewardess knew. A cubicle beckoned. If I were going to seek truth, beauty, and goodness on my beloved Old Continent, the occasional weeklong vacation would be an inefficient route.
Since that time, I’ve been blessed with undeserved opportunities to live, work, and travel across Central Europe, so I feel compelled to challenge some of Roger Ream’s assertions in a piece last week in The American Conservative.
Mr. Ream describes a fantastic itinerary, one I’m sure we’d both recommend. Alas, too many visitors turn to establishment politico-journalistic narratives to make sense of what they experienced, and his analysis is guilty of this. It is a sort of “cubicle-ization” of regional knowledge consumption, and it plagues modern anglophone discourse.
Mr. Ream laments the region’s perceived political and economic maladies. He asserts that “‘democratic backsliding’ is actually most stark in Central and Eastern Europe” and cites a report from the Swedish V-Dem Institute arguing that Hungary and Serbia are “‘electoral autocracies’—places where elections are neither fair nor free.”
Neither the rhetoric nor the claims are novel. In an Atlantic piece before last year’s Polish parliamentary elections, the author Anne Applebaum (wife of then-opposition politician and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski) warned the contest would be “neither free nor fair.” After her side prevailed—and it wasn’t particularly close—Applebaum didn’t have to defend her status as an opinion-shaper on the region.
Likewise, in his recent book Goodbye, Eastern Europe, the author Jacob Mikanowski quips, “In several countries (Hungary, Belarus, Serbia), the state has effectively been captured by a single ruler or political party.” Categorizing the Carpathian neighbors—Mr. Ream’s chosen victims too—with Belarus is patently absurd, but such sentiments have the blessing of much of academia and corporate journalism.
And the V-Dem Institute that compiled Mr. Ream’s cited research? Its partners and financial sponsors include the European Commission, the World Bank, USAID, Facebook, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation—a who’s who of transnational power brokers. Ostensibly objective institutions like V-Dem enjoy outsize influence in crafting regional opinions, but their output deserves the reception of, say, China Media Group’s reporting on the Middle Kingdom.
It’s a daunting struggle for any country that challenges transnational dogmas. The only real antidote is to spend time there—really, truly spend time there and absorb the realities of local life. The reality in Serbia is a big-tent ruling party that mostly defies ideological classification, something many Americans would find enviable at the moment—not to mention, very democratic. Its track record includes standard neoliberal economic reforms and a singular focus on EU accession (careful what you wish for,