Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Return to Europe—By Way of EU Membership

The following article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 Open Society News.

Heather Grabbe, director of OSI–Brussels and former senior advisor to the European commissioner for enlargement, describes how the EU accession process helped candidate countries turn into more stable democracies—with a push from the Open Society Institute and the Soros foundations on the ground.

Looking back upon the transition process in Central and Eastern Europe raises two significant questions for the European Union: First, how much impact did the European Union have on the transitions to democracy in the region? And second, five years after the historic accession of eight former communist countries to the European Union, how strongly do the new and old member states share "European values"?

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, joining the European Union and NATO was seen as crucial for ending the divide between Western and Eastern Europe. EU membership, as the late Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek often said, would allow former communist countries to take their rightful place in Europe. Former Czech president Vaclav Havel described joining NA TO as a crucial way of ending the lingering and simplistic prejudices that he described as "West good" and "East bad." Leaders and citizens in Central and Eastern Europe saw EU membership as offering the prospect of belonging to a club of powerful states and acquiring equal rights with the rich countries of Europe. The painful separation from the rest of Europe described by Milan Kundera in his famous essay "The Kidnapped East" was over. No longer did Central and Eastern Europeans feel like the poor relations denied the passports, money, and opportunities enjoyed by their Western counterparts.

The hope of many was that EU enlargement would erase the political traces of the Iron Curtain. The first five years of membership have fulfilled some of these expectations. On the whole, the 27 member states of the European Union share a general preference for democratic and pluralist politics; economies that are integrated into global markets; strong social welfare systems; and relatively tolerant and open societies. They display considerable variation in their national positions, of course, but there is no sharp division between old and new members as predicted by former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Only on policy toward the East is there a marked difference, with several new members much more hawkish on Russia than are Germany and Italy, for example, and with most of the new members favoring a more open  EU approach to the possibility of future membership for Ukraine and other eastern neighbors.

There is no doubt that the prospect of joining the European Union drove major reforms and influenced many key political choices during transition. In pursuit of membership, governments in candidate countries used EU technical and financial assistance to incorporate large amounts of legislation from the European Union and strengthen their state administration to implement and enforce the new laws. EU guidance shaped many of the public institutions which are now central to upholding democracy and keeping societies open-from electoral commissions to independent and accountable judiciaries.

The accession process also created new roles and opportunities for the European Union and nongovernmental organizations such as the Open Society Institute and its network of foundations. The European Union had much wider influence in the political and economic development of postcommunist Europe than it ever did on the politics and economies of the first 15 member states. The formal "competences" (legal powers) of the European Commission are very limited in areas such as education, culture, health, human rights, and minority protection—as member states prefer to decide these issues domestically. But because the conditions for membership were much more wide-ranging for postcommunist Europe than EU policies for the existing member states, the commission had to develop the expertise to assess the quality of democracy for the first time. In practice, this meant the commission often relied on the assessments of NGO s such as the Soros foundations and our grantees, and still does so for the Balkans and Turkey.

The Soros foundations in candidate countries also used EU membership as leverage to advocate for reforms that opened societies. As the European Union pushed for improving standards of democracy, governance, and rights from above, OSI worked from below by making concrete proposals to governments about how to achieve the goals set by the European Union.

To the frustration of many in the region, the European Union provided no answers to some of the most painful issues in the transition, such as lustration laws that would limit the political participation of members or collaborators from the previous regime, and access to police files kept on individuals-because its original member states never wanted a European-level policy on such sensitive domestic issues. The European Union also provided little guidance on how to help vulnerable groups who had lost the most in the economic reforms-the old, the unemployed, and those living in the countryside. In the 1990s, the European Union's policy advice to the wannabe members was much more liberal than the economic policies practiced by its member states, focusing on macroeconomic reforms and private sector development, but paying little attention to social welfare systems.  However, when the countries approached membership, EU funding for social inclusion objectives helped governments start spending money on marginalized groups, most notably the Roma, which they would otherwise have neglected.

The second question—how established have "EU values" become in postcommunist Europe?—is difficult to measure. EU values tend to be very general, such as "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law"—and it's hard to separate intended transfers from the socialization effects of officials meeting their EU counterparts regularly, taking on their EU ways of speaking and behaving. Officials and politicians quickly learned what was and was not politically correct in EU debates-for example, on treatment of the Roma, asylum seekers, and criminalization of homosexuality.

Overall, the European Union's major contribution to democratic transition was to provide an anchor for the process that kept it going during difficult times and across changes of government. The accession process was a framework which gave governments a sense of direction and motivated them, even when the European Union had no precise solution to propose. It was highly effective in improving standards of governance and observance of rights; indeed, Italy and some other old members might now find it difficult to meet the conditions for membership whereas new members like Hungary and Estonia clearly met the standards.

For postcommunist societies, the importance of the accession process lay not in the technical requirements for membership and the meetings of officials, but in the parallel growth of contacts between people—the organic integration of economies and societies across the former divide. The road to EU membership provided fantastic new opportunities, especially for the young and those who wanted to travel and work abroad.

Possibilities that had been unthinkable under communism arrived year after year: visa regimes were progressively lifted, scholarship programs opened up, entrepreneurs and businesses large and small developed relationships that put new products on store shelves, and foreign direct investment brought completely new kinds of jobs.

The magic of joining the European Union lies in this double opening up of societies—that the European Union was pressing governments to introduce better policies and institutions, while at the same time ordinary citizens were meeting their fellow Europeans in universities, companies, schools, and parliaments. In doing so, they found that their values, interests, and concerns had not diverged that much during the half-century of division.