Why ageing revolutionaries in Eastern Europe hate migrants, cyclists and vegetarians

Jaroslaw Kaczynski Photo: Piotr Drabik

Eastern Europe recently got a lot of bad press in the West because authoritarian and anti-liberal politicians won elections in one country after another and started rolling back the liberal political order, often with little opposition from the society. Then Donald Trump happened in the US and suddenly Eastern Europe doesn't look so bad. Yet it still needs an explanation why are we seeing such a backlash to a liberal, globalized world in Eastern Europe.

What we have here is a conflict between globalization and political transformation in Eastern Europe. After the Berlin Wall fell Eastern Europe experienced a transformation from communism to capitalism, from autocracy to democracy and from a closed society to an open society. The digital transformation also took place at the same time. Yet the most important transformation taking place in Eastern Europe now is one of globalization. The anti-liberal movement in Eastern Europe is mostly an anti-globalization movement.

The anticommunist revolutionaries in Eastern Europe probably didn't imagine that after communism their countries would become part of a globalized world. They often wanted to resurrect a pre-war conservative, agrarian society as they imagined it. This imagination was often very romanticized. Those revolutionaries also thought that their country should be a part of a wider Europe, but their understanding of that Europe was also very romanticized. Their knowledge of Western Europe often came from literature, like the Agatha Christie novels.

The post-communist reality came as a shock. The old, pre-war agrarian Eastern Europe didn't come back from the dead. The globalized, multicultural Western Europe also wasn't what the revolutionaries in Eastern Europe imagined it would be. Yet the revolutionaries, now in power, thought that they can strive to achieve Western level of prosperity without copying parts of their societies they didn't like. The revolutionaries said to their people that "we don't need to copy their every folly" and tried to forge a special path for their countries.

Yet over time weird things started happening in Eastern Europe. Young people started going to Africa to work as volunteers. One vegetarian restaurant was opened after another and they were followed by vegan restaurants. Young men started growing ridiculous looking beards and started cycling. Western follies started arriving to the East.

The aging revolutionaries started striking back. Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski told the German newspaper Bild:

The previous government carried out a leftist programme there (in the public media). It was as if the world was according to a Marxist model which has to automatically develop in one direction only - a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians who only use renewable energy and fight all forms of religion.

Waszczykowski railed against cyclists and vegetarians because they were already in Poland. He and his friends consider it to be a foreign, non-Polish import that has to be stopped. It's a culture war between a conservative and a globalized world.

In this culture war the Eastern European conservatives get most of their inspiration from American conservatives. Much is talked about Vladimir Putin's Russia's attempts to influence Europe with his anti-globalization, anti-liberal initiatives, but Russia's actual influence isn't that great. US has managed to supplant Russia's intellectual position in Eastern Europe in only a few decades. Eastern Europe is still influenced by old conservative ideas like dislike of homosexuality or anti-Semitism, that stem from the communist or pre-war time, but even there one can find similar influential ideas that stem from the US.

In 2015. the refugee crisis made anti-globalization the main issue in Eastern Europe. This region has won a lot from opening up to the world but the scope of change is just too fast for too many. The anti-globalization crowd is often described as the people who didn't get a piece of the growing prosperity of Eastern Europe. That's only partly true. While some people did lost big during the transformation, most people in that part of Eastern Europe that is now part of the European Union have now a much higher standard of living than 30 years before. That is also true of pensioners and low income workers.

The biggest reason for this anti-globalization movement is the cognitive difficulty of understanding modern world. The people who are now 50+ in Eastern Europe grew up and got their education in a very different world. After the transition they had to learn how to get by in a capitalist democracy. They had to learn to use computers, to speak English and to acquire all kinds of skills needed to thrive in this new world. For a grown-up this was hard, but most people managed to do it sufficiently well.

Yet their societies, instead of slowing down, started changing even faster. Instead of laying back and enjoying what they had achieved these middle-aged people were forced to witness discussions about gay marriage and accepting foreign refugees. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for those discussions. It looked like big change in society and previous experience had shown that big change in society is often problematic and sometimes outright dangerous. Being suspicious and resisting change seems for them like a wise stance.

For young people it's very different. They were raised in a new world and often know very little about communism. Young people have difficulty understanding why their societies are so much more conservative than Western societies. The young are impatient to move on much faster so that their societies would not only be as rich as the West, but also as liberal as the West. Of course that also means bicycle lanes, vegetarian restaurants, craft beer, other cultures, renewable energy and gay marriage. For the young, the East must have everything that the West has.

Not all old people in Eastern Europe are not conservative and not all young people are liberal, but there is definitely a serious generational fight taking place in Eastern Europe right now. This conflict gets very little coverage in the West, which is a pity, because the existing analysis in the West too often turns to some old atavistic impulses to explain Victor Orban or Jarosław Kaczyński.

Seeing the current turmoil in Eastern Europe as a fight of generations also tells us how it will end. The young, who are liberal, will win. No matter what the conservatives say - there is no deep cultural tradition behind conservative ideas in Eastern Europe. It's just a reaction to the world that is changing too fast.