People are from this
or that city, or district, or village. And they aspire to become
citizens of Europe and the great experiment of the European Union. They
are only hesitantly and tentatively Macedonians, or Moldovans, or
Belarusians, or Kazakhs, or Yugoslavs.
The likes of the Czechs, the Estonians and the Slovenes are well-suited
to become constituents of a larger whole. They make better Europeans
than the British, or the Norwegians. They have survived far mightier
and more bloated bureaucracies than Brussels'. They are unsurpassed
manipulators of officialdom. In the long run, the new members stand to
benefit the most from the EU's enlargement and to form its unwaveringly
loyal core.
Not yet the full-fledged individualists of the Anglo-Saxon model of
capitalism - these nations are consensus-seeking team-players. Tutored
by centuries of occupation and hardship, they are instinctual
multilateralists. They are avid Westerners by persuasion, if not yet in
practice, or geography.
Moreover, their belated conversion to the ways of the market is an
undisguised blessing.
Though still a promise largely unfulfilled, the countries in transition
could now leapfrog whole stages of development by adopting novel
technologies and through them the expensive Western research they
embody.
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