Part 1.
Contemporary Central Europe: Towards Decadence and Decline
The ruling establishments in Central Europe today — by which I here mean Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states and the Balkan countries — are for the most part not an impressive lot. There is little original or interesting about them. Their only ambition is to “rejoin the West,” few ponder whether this is wise at the very moment when this civilization is committing suicide.
This ambition is understandable. The Ossis want Western standards in all things: Western wealth, Western security (notably vis-à-vis Russia), and Western good government. They rightly feel that their historical trajectories and national life have been distorted, that their destiny in the European mainstream was stolen from them, because of violent occupation by the Ottoman and Russian/Soviet empires.
The inequality between the West and Central Europe is enormous. On the one hand we have the Central and Eastern European Kleinstaaterei (“small-state mess”): twenty or so recently-established regimes, the biggest having 38 million souls and many being mere statelets. These countries are still recovering from the economic deformation and intellectual stunting imposed by communism.
In the West, there is the still-awesome power of the Euro-Atlantic constellation: NATO, the NSA, the EU, the enormous influence of Anglo-Zionist academia, media and pop culture . . . with all their seductive promises of wealth, law, and liberty. It would take a very self-confident regime indeed to be immune to this power of attraction. This makes the relative independence of mind of the nationalist Hungarian Viktor Orbán or the eurosceptic Czech Miloš Zeman all the more impressive. Read more