For Eastern Europe, 9/11 did not ‘restart’ history

I recently eavesdropped on a conversation between two artsy-looking types in a pub in my hometown of Budapest. They discussed postmodernism, populism and other things that are fashionable to fear. They also discussed the widely held view that the global, liberal consensus ended on 9/11, when ‘history came crashing back’ and they ‘realised that global politics still has its bloody underbelly of death and destruction’.

I was baffled. If I had heard this conversation in London or New York, I would have brushed it off as part of Westerners’ tendency to regard every local event as global. But these were not Westerners, and more than that, the story they told simply wasn’t true.

Following the implosion of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the ‘bloody underbelly of destruction’ was still very visible in the former Eastern Bloc. In the Balkans, a bloody decade-long war followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Russian troops intervened in Transnistria, a breakaway state in Moldova, and many are still there today. In the Caucasus, what became known as the First Chechen War erupted. For those of us in the eastern periphery of Europe, history never ended.

During the 1990s, the Western intelligentsia spent untold emotional labour developing a ‘postcolonial’ worldview so as to reckon with the imperial past. But the countries in Europe that were neither colonies nor colonisers remained entirely outside of the scope of Western thinking. Europe, in the minds of Western Europeans, was just that: the Western part.

Today Western European elites look down on Eastern Europe. They blame the East for the division besetting the European Union, indeed for the failure of the project of European unification. This was all too visible in the shrillness of the Western media’s coverage of the recent Slovakian and Polish elections, in which Eurosceptic populists faced off against pro-Brussels technocrats. The message from assorted outlets was clear: Eastern Europeans are not behaving as they should.

If you want an even clearer example of the stark differences between Eastern and Western Europe, just look at Germany’s electoral map after last week’s regional elections. The right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first in the eastern state of Thuringia and surged in neighbouring Saxony. Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht also made huge gains in the East, while the mainstream, technocratic coalition parties were crushed. The project to unify the European body politic, and destroy the vestiges of the old Cold War East-West divide, has been a failure.

In response to this failure, many among Eastern Europe’s elites have become hysterical. Their near religious desire to be ‘part of the West’ has become difficult to take seriously. As a result of their pursuit of this ‘one true path’ of EU integration, they have lost their ability to represent the people. Yet they continue to exert an increasing influence on a powerful minority.

Those right-wingers who claim to have found the other path are often copying-and-pasting slogans and reasoning from the American right. We are but one step away from Polish and Hungarian nationalists characterising the fight for true Hungarianness or Polishness as the right to bear arms. Today, those who fight against Western influence in Eastern Europe are too often fighting with Western weapons.

There are significant differences in public opinion between East and West around global political events, from Ukraine to Israel. These differences reflect people’s different historical experiences. It is much easier to believe that the elites are lying to you, when you spent 50 years under a totalitarian system in which elites were indeed lying to you. This is one reason why the pro-Palestine movement, towards which Western elites are increasingly sympathetic, is markedly less popular in Eastern Europe. Many in the east regard elite moral posturing over the war in Gaza as just that – posturing.

The truth is that different experiences lead to differing political realities. The problem in Europe is that these differing realities are never brought out into the sunlight. Too often Western elites fail to see how Eastern Europe is different. They just think it lacks something, that it is insufficiently Westernised. They don’t recognise that Eastern Europeans simply have different historical experiences and traditions, which inform different political outlooks.

The West’s failure to acknowledge these profound differences will only inflame the East-West divide. In most of Eastern Europe, public resentment towards Western, EU elites is already starting to grow. As a result, populist parties will continue to channel this frustration and talk up the moral bankruptcy of the West – all while they conveniently refuse to criticise non-Western powers for their respective moral and political failings.

This growing division is not helped by the fact that the West is riddled with guilt regarding its own imperialist history. Western elites, like self-flagellating monks, use this guilt to signal their moral superiority to those in other nations who seem to lack a sense of shame about the past. Hence the West views Easterners’ displays of national pride with suspicion.

Today, the differing imperial histories of Europe stand in the way of any mutual understanding between East and West. Some parts of Europe were subjugated under empires. Sometimes Christian peoples were subjugated by non-Christian imperialists. And sometimes people were subjugated by those who spoke very similar languages and held very similar beliefs.

All of these different experiences of empire are obscured by the West’s view of Europe as a homogenous bloc. Globalisation has meant that those of us in the grayscale of imperialism are invisible. European elites’ project of EU integration, their commitment to the one and only true, Western ‘path’, has rendered the entirety of Eastern Europe silent.

There’s no doubt that 9/11 was a dreadful, world-shattering event. It changed the world because it changed the West. It did not, however, restart history. History had never stopped for us in the East, as the wars in Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia surely testify. We have to start acknowledging that Europe is not a uniform territory. It is a collection of nations and peoples with very different historical experiences and outlooks. Unless we recognise this, to talk of Europe is to talk of a place that doesn’t exist.

Peter Ungar is an MP for the Hungarian Green Party.