In Europe the Virus Raises New Walls Between East and West

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On May 20, as I neared the border with Austria, I was so stressed that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to speak when I got to the crossing. It was my first trip out of the Czech Republic after two months of the pandemic lockdown, and I hadn’t seen my mother in all that time. She was in Vienna recovering from cancer chemotherapy and a broken ankle; I wanted to bring her home to Prague. What if I couldn’t get across to Vienna for some reason? I had medical permission for my mother to travel in case they asked. But what would I do if the border officials had some other question that was impossible to answer? What would I do if they didn’t let me through?

From a legal point of view, it was an irrational fear. The Schengen Agreement among the members of the European Union allows for passport-free movement across borders. The barbed-wire fences that separated East from the West during communism were torn down 30 years ago. It’s been a godsend for Europeans in the East. We’d lived through the nightmare of impermeable borders for decades—an era when a decision to cross into the West, to escape communism and the Soviet bloc, was one of life or death. Today, poll after poll among Central and Eastern Europeans say the free movement of peoples is among the great achievements of the EU—though many comment sardonically that it’s the only achievement.

I did get through to Vienna and have brought my mother home where she can play with her grandkids. But my fears weren’t groundless, and I still have them—and many other feelings—in spite of successfully navigating the border. In Ukraine they compare the Covid-19 lockdown to Soviet times, saying the virus is “like radiation after Chernobyl. You don’t see it, but it hits you.” The disease may have a similarly invisible effect, attacking the health of Eastern Europeans but also affecting how we view the world, particularly how we perceive our relationship with the rest of the EU. Suddenly, borders matter again.

For many of us, the pandemic brought on unpleasant, suffocating historical déjà vu. It had made the border off-limits— restricted and shut for this unprecedented health crisis. The news carried stories of the return of armed border guards and even reports of occasional shootings at some of the frontiers. On April 29, for example, Polish border guards fired two shots at a man who tried to cross into Poland from the Czech Republic. He was detained.

The effects were felt far from the borders. At Easter, when my 81-year-old neighbor handed me freshly baked challah bread over the fence that separates our gardens, she wept as she asked me whether she’d ever get to see her four kids again. They all live in Germany. I told her that of course she would—though I didn’t really believe it myself. The spirit of unity in the EU evaporated quickly with the lockdown as governments ran their own battles against the virus. At times, I felt as if the free world I’d been living in for the past three decades had ceased to exist.

That kind of feeling has made many Eastern Europeans—both EU members and not—more conscious of their historical differences with their neighbors in the West. The specter of the past emerged when the military was called in to help in Romania and Serbia in the fight against the coronavirus. The ban on large gatherings reminded us of times when crowds would be seen as suspicious and subversive by the secret service. In Ukraine, citizens had to carry identification documents with them again; if they wanted to move through the streets, they’d need special permits. Serbia put a curfew in place even stricter than the one imposed by its strongman leader Slobodan Milosevic when he waged wars in the 1990s.

Going to a grocery store in the first few weeks of the lockdown was a trip back in time: full of empty shelves and no idea when yeast or toilet paper would be available. This time, unlike the communist past, we had money to spend. But like during the Soviet era, there was also nothing to buy. The face masks gave me flashbacks, recalling for me the drills we went through in primary school. For a couple days each year, we’d practice putting on gas masks, inexplicably placing our hands in plastic bags, and quickly lying down with our faces to the ground imagining that the West had launched a nuclear attack on Czechoslovakia.

We listened to our leaders and sheltered in place, and, so far, we’ve weathered this first wave of the virus better than France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. But any civic pride in this comparative achievement gives many of us pause. It’s one thing to follow rules in an extraordinary health emergency—the voluntary but painful adherence to restrictions on movement for the sake of the greater public good—but, having lived under authoritarian governments, we are wary of how this “success” strengthens the anti-democratic trends and surveillance tendencies of the region. Indeed, as the virus spread, Hungary’s four-time Prime Minister Viktor Orban cemented his rule to stay in power indefinitely (he has since said he is willing to relinquish his authority). Poland’s ruling party altered election rules and voting practices in place for the past 30 years to hold a ballot during the lockdown, including voting by mail, which the opposition says has never been properly tested on a national level.

“The threat to democracy is here,” says Vaclav Maly, an auxiliary bishop of Prague who’d been one of the key faces of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that overthrew the pro-Soviet regime. “There are some tendencies toward authoritarianism. We have to be on the lookout’’ that they disappear with the virus.

That will be complicated because of the way pandemic fears have empowered nationalists but also let borders take on greater significance—once again defining East and West. Easterners are more than annoyed when Western Europeans talk about them in terms of imported labor: How soon can migrant workers return to pick fruit in Spain or take care of the elderly in Italy or Austria? That’s only strengthened the populists and nationalists. It also remains to be seen how the proposed 750 billion euro European recovery bond—which mostly benefits Covid-ravaged Italy and Spain—goes down with the eastern membership of the EU.

Meanwhile, the largest wave of returnees to the region in 30 years—more than 2 million made redundant by factory and workplace shutdowns in the West—were hardly welcomed back with warmth. Many locals feared they were bringing back the virus from the world beyond. In some countries, they were placed in severe quarantine, separated from their families and isolated in shabby temporary housing. Serbian authorities didn’t at first take the pandemic seriously (some joked that drinking would be a cure), but then they realized that 400,000 emigre Serbs were returning home from the West—putting at risk not just the lives of senior citizens in nursing homes but also throwing an unexpected demographic factor into elections scheduled for June 21.

While the wealth gap between East and West isn’t as huge as it once was, it remains: The average Eastern European takes home 55% of what their Western counterpart makes, up from 37% in 2004 after the first wave of EU enlargement. Still, earnings in Bulgaria, the poorest EU state member, are a third of those in Germany. It’s what’s driven and still drives millions of Eastern Europeans to leave their homes to find work and better lives elsewhere in the EU. Many of my relatives have worked the low-paying jobs in the West: cleaning homes and offices, taking care of the elderly, or driving taxis and trucks. For years we’ve left our families behind for months at a time to earn a wage that exceeds anything we would make back home.

As Western European countries try to reboot their economies, I fear that there may be more restrictions on where labor is from—or an exacerbation of bias against where you’re from, a situation in which migrants are being treated as second-class workers. That will only worsen the psychological divisions between East and West.

“In the next period we can expect to see an atmosphere of increased hostility against the migrant worker for several reasons,” says Zarko Puhovski, a political science professor at the University of Zagreb. “First, because of continuing health issues, everyone will be looking at outsiders suspiciously. Another reason is that all the countries that needed seasonal workers are now faced with rising unemployment. All these factors are pushing states to turn inward.” This socio-economic divide could be more tenacious than the iron-fisted Cold War politics that split the continent.

Indeed, after communism but before countries in the East began acceding to the EU and the Schengen Agreement, Eastern Europeans were still treated like aliens. At the border we’d have to get off the bus to have our bags searched, and we were questioned about how much money we had and where we were going. Since then—for Czechs, it’s just been 13 years—I’ve had to explain to my kids what borders were and what we used to experience while crossing them. They had no clue and probably didn’t believe half of what I said because they live in a free world.

Now, borders are suddenly full of meaning and emotion again. I grew up in Bratislava, the capitol of Slovakia, just one hour away from Vienna. But I was able to visit Austria only after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. I wasn’t impressed the first time I went. I expected to see what I thought the West would look like: everyone living in skyscrapers and drinking Coca-Cola. I was 11 years old and thought as a child. No longer.

On this last trip to Vienna, I was stopped and questioned, but because of my fears, I was surprised by how brief and friendly the exchange was, even with my poor command of German. As I maneuvered my car into Austria, history once again intruded. I thought of all those people who were separated for decades from their loved ones, who weren’t allowed back to visit their sick or dying parents, not even to attend their funerals. I sobbed as I drove on to see my mother.
 
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