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rfmcdonaldFrom the Globe and Mail
"In Lithuanian bar, peasants toast Europe"
They've joined the club, but they don't expect the EU to improve their lot, DOUG SAUNDERS finds
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, May 17, 2003 - Page A10
EISISKES, LITHUANIA -- To see what happens when a backwater becomes a world power, go have a morning beer with Denis and Miroslav at their dark and cheerless bar along a little-travelled road in this village on the border between Lithuania and Belarus.
The two men, aged 26 and 25, make a bare living smuggling vodka, cigarettes and sometimes people across this forgotten frontier. Taking advantage of the tax and pricing differences between these nations, they exchange greenbacks for black-market goods in furtive trips through farm fields along the border.
Not for much longer, though: The village is about to become the eastern edge of the newly expanded European Union, a 25-nation behemoth whose economic and political power make its borders, and its citizenry, worthy of strong defence.
During the next few months, Europe will transform itself from a tightly knit family of well-known Western nations into a federation stretching from the Atlantic to the Russian border, with a population larger than the United States and an economy that is set to become the world's largest.
This is a crucial historic moment, as officials and citizens of this political entity are facing an impossible question: What is, and what is not, a European?
For Denis and Miroslav, the prospect of joining the 450 million citizens of this mighty "united states of Europe," with a single set of laws, a lack of internal borders and a single currency, is a challenge to the mind and the heart.
"My girlfriend is in Belarus, but now I can't marry her, because then I wouldn't be a European," says Denis, who offers a dejected shrug and takes a long drag on his cigarette. "I don't want to be on the outside when they make this part of Europe. I can probably make more money living in Belarus and smuggling things, but Belarus will never be part of Europe, and I want to be a European."
Miroslav says he is more likely to leave. "Before, we could just put dollars in an envelope and walk across the border, come back the same day. With these new laws, we'll really have to think about it. People are going to be cut off from their families. Why is it going to be Europe here, and not Europe over there?"
Their dilemmas are Europe's dilemmas. The union of 25 nations into a single political and economic entity has left millions of people wondering what kind of club they have joined.
In a string of referendums, citizens of 10 Eastern European nations are voting by overwhelming majorities to join the EU, a decision that involves compromising national sovereignty, economic independence and half the nations' laws to a complex parliament in Brussels. Last weekend, Lithuanians decided by more than 90 per cent to join. Slovaks decide this weekend, and Poles, who are the most divided on this question, will vote in three weeks.
As its borders expand, this week the EU is moving closer to becoming a superpower by debating a constitution, a bill of rights, and an elected president. While the Iraq war showed Europe is not united on foreign affairs, France and Germany are considering a European army, and in less visible legal and economic matters, the EU is very much a superpower.
According to a survey published last week by The Economist magazine, more than 50 per cent of the laws that apply to citizens of EU member nations are written by officials in Brussels, not by national governments.
With these powers, and with a currency that rivals the U.S. dollar as the world's main reserve, the EU must face the difficult question of where its borders lie. As the map of the world is redrawn and the old Cold War boundaries disappear into history, millions of people are asking the same question as Miroslav: Where does Europe end? Who are the Europeans? Who gets excluded?
"This is something that nobody in Europe seems to agree upon, and it it is going to be the subject of a very heated debate," said William Hitchcock, a historian of European integration. "They will have to decide where the eastern border of Europe lies, and to what extent it's worth spending money to help increasingly poor and needy nations join."
An hour's drive from this village is a graffiti-covered glacial rock bearing a metal plaque reading Centrus Europus: The Centre of Europe. In 1989, a French geographer calculated that this point is the continent's geographic centre -- that is, if Europe is assumed to include Belarus, Ukraine and of course the vast expanse of Russia.
But politics is unlikely to catch up with geography soon, as people in this village are well aware.
To get to Eisiskes, you leave the tight-knit capital of Vilnius and drive south through deep Lithuanian pine forest. Like most villages in the Baltic borderlands, its ramshackle wooden houses and horse-drawn wagons seem far removed from the gleaming modern industrial farms of Western Europe. These farms are tiny, their fields hand-harvested, their owners peasants in every sense of the word. Yet even here, on a dirt crossroads at the edge of the village, people are engaged in the great European debate.
Inside the rickety but neatly decorated farmhouse he shares with his 80-year-old mother, his 18-month-old daughter and several other family members, Slavek Kisiel, 33, was debating the merits of joining Europe with his friend Zdislaw Lakis, 40.
"Look at us," Mr. Kisiel said, his sweeping gesture taking in both the wood-heated living room and the barren fields outside where potatoes and rye are to grow. "We're stuck in the 19th century."
Indeed, there was little to suggest that the past century had taken place. A single electric light hung in the main room, a rusted tractor gathered weeds at the edge of the yard. The village boasted a barren bar, an almost empty hotel and a modern gas station.
Mr. Kisiel is one of the few people who have ever left the village, so he knows of what he speaks. "If I go down to Poland, I see them living in the 20th century. In Italy, they're in the 21st century."
His friend, Mr. Lakis, laughed. "Yeah, and if you go across to Belarus, you're going back to the 18th century."
Economically, their analysis is more or less correct. People in Italy earn an average equivalent to about $27,500 per year, slightly below the Western European average, while Poles get by on about $6,500 a year. In Belarus, the per capita income is around $1,300 a year. This is about what the Kisiel family lives on, officially, far below the Lithuanian average of $5,200 a year. This is supplemented with the milk from their three cows, the excellent rye bread and smoked ham they produce, and some black-market income.
"I don't think it will help me to be a European," said Janina Kisiel, the matriarch. "I'm doing this for my grandchildren. I'll die soon, but she shouldn't have to live like this," Mrs. Kisiel said, gesturing to 18-month-old Augustyna. "She needs to live in the modern world. She shouldn't be stuck behind with the Belarussians and Ukrainians."
If nobody really knows what a European is, there is a broad consensus as to what it is not. Places such as Moldova and Belarus, with autocratic governments that have barely moved beyond the age of Joseph Stalin, will never satisfy the rigorous standards of political freedom and economic order necessary to join the EU.
Who else will be European? Turkey has applied to join, but many members of Europe's Christian majority balk at the prospect of supplementing their continent's 15 million Muslims with the 60 million living in Turkey. But other prospective members, such as Bulgaria and Romania, are even further away than Turkey in terms of economic stability and political rights. Why should they be included, but not Turks?
These debates are well known even to the impoverished residents in this village on Europe's new frontier, whose few hundred residents are a confusing mixture of ethnically Polish, Russian, Belarussian and Lithuanian peasants and smugglers. It is difficult to find anyone here who voted against joining Europe -- or anyone who thinks it will improve their lives in the slightest.
"Now it's Lithuania with Lithuanian laws, and soon we'll have to live under European laws. Life is very difficult, and I don't think it will get any easier for me," said Mr. Kisiel, the farmer. "I won't be able to sell my milk, but I can say I'm European."
Denis the smuggler, on to his third beer at 10:30 in the morning, acknowledges that even he, facing the prospect of losing his furtive livelihood, has voted to wrench his country away from this hodgepodge of forgotten states in favour of joining the daring project of Europe.
"We'll survive -- we'll think of something to do," he said with a wry smile. "A lot of things are going to cost more, but we're better off being Europeans."
"In Lithuanian bar, peasants toast Europe"
They've joined the club, but they don't expect the EU to improve their lot, DOUG SAUNDERS finds
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, May 17, 2003 - Page A10
EISISKES, LITHUANIA -- To see what happens when a backwater becomes a world power, go have a morning beer with Denis and Miroslav at their dark and cheerless bar along a little-travelled road in this village on the border between Lithuania and Belarus.
The two men, aged 26 and 25, make a bare living smuggling vodka, cigarettes and sometimes people across this forgotten frontier. Taking advantage of the tax and pricing differences between these nations, they exchange greenbacks for black-market goods in furtive trips through farm fields along the border.
Not for much longer, though: The village is about to become the eastern edge of the newly expanded European Union, a 25-nation behemoth whose economic and political power make its borders, and its citizenry, worthy of strong defence.
During the next few months, Europe will transform itself from a tightly knit family of well-known Western nations into a federation stretching from the Atlantic to the Russian border, with a population larger than the United States and an economy that is set to become the world's largest.
This is a crucial historic moment, as officials and citizens of this political entity are facing an impossible question: What is, and what is not, a European?
For Denis and Miroslav, the prospect of joining the 450 million citizens of this mighty "united states of Europe," with a single set of laws, a lack of internal borders and a single currency, is a challenge to the mind and the heart.
"My girlfriend is in Belarus, but now I can't marry her, because then I wouldn't be a European," says Denis, who offers a dejected shrug and takes a long drag on his cigarette. "I don't want to be on the outside when they make this part of Europe. I can probably make more money living in Belarus and smuggling things, but Belarus will never be part of Europe, and I want to be a European."
Miroslav says he is more likely to leave. "Before, we could just put dollars in an envelope and walk across the border, come back the same day. With these new laws, we'll really have to think about it. People are going to be cut off from their families. Why is it going to be Europe here, and not Europe over there?"
Their dilemmas are Europe's dilemmas. The union of 25 nations into a single political and economic entity has left millions of people wondering what kind of club they have joined.
In a string of referendums, citizens of 10 Eastern European nations are voting by overwhelming majorities to join the EU, a decision that involves compromising national sovereignty, economic independence and half the nations' laws to a complex parliament in Brussels. Last weekend, Lithuanians decided by more than 90 per cent to join. Slovaks decide this weekend, and Poles, who are the most divided on this question, will vote in three weeks.
As its borders expand, this week the EU is moving closer to becoming a superpower by debating a constitution, a bill of rights, and an elected president. While the Iraq war showed Europe is not united on foreign affairs, France and Germany are considering a European army, and in less visible legal and economic matters, the EU is very much a superpower.
According to a survey published last week by The Economist magazine, more than 50 per cent of the laws that apply to citizens of EU member nations are written by officials in Brussels, not by national governments.
With these powers, and with a currency that rivals the U.S. dollar as the world's main reserve, the EU must face the difficult question of where its borders lie. As the map of the world is redrawn and the old Cold War boundaries disappear into history, millions of people are asking the same question as Miroslav: Where does Europe end? Who are the Europeans? Who gets excluded?
"This is something that nobody in Europe seems to agree upon, and it it is going to be the subject of a very heated debate," said William Hitchcock, a historian of European integration. "They will have to decide where the eastern border of Europe lies, and to what extent it's worth spending money to help increasingly poor and needy nations join."
An hour's drive from this village is a graffiti-covered glacial rock bearing a metal plaque reading Centrus Europus: The Centre of Europe. In 1989, a French geographer calculated that this point is the continent's geographic centre -- that is, if Europe is assumed to include Belarus, Ukraine and of course the vast expanse of Russia.
But politics is unlikely to catch up with geography soon, as people in this village are well aware.
To get to Eisiskes, you leave the tight-knit capital of Vilnius and drive south through deep Lithuanian pine forest. Like most villages in the Baltic borderlands, its ramshackle wooden houses and horse-drawn wagons seem far removed from the gleaming modern industrial farms of Western Europe. These farms are tiny, their fields hand-harvested, their owners peasants in every sense of the word. Yet even here, on a dirt crossroads at the edge of the village, people are engaged in the great European debate.
Inside the rickety but neatly decorated farmhouse he shares with his 80-year-old mother, his 18-month-old daughter and several other family members, Slavek Kisiel, 33, was debating the merits of joining Europe with his friend Zdislaw Lakis, 40.
"Look at us," Mr. Kisiel said, his sweeping gesture taking in both the wood-heated living room and the barren fields outside where potatoes and rye are to grow. "We're stuck in the 19th century."
Indeed, there was little to suggest that the past century had taken place. A single electric light hung in the main room, a rusted tractor gathered weeds at the edge of the yard. The village boasted a barren bar, an almost empty hotel and a modern gas station.
Mr. Kisiel is one of the few people who have ever left the village, so he knows of what he speaks. "If I go down to Poland, I see them living in the 20th century. In Italy, they're in the 21st century."
His friend, Mr. Lakis, laughed. "Yeah, and if you go across to Belarus, you're going back to the 18th century."
Economically, their analysis is more or less correct. People in Italy earn an average equivalent to about $27,500 per year, slightly below the Western European average, while Poles get by on about $6,500 a year. In Belarus, the per capita income is around $1,300 a year. This is about what the Kisiel family lives on, officially, far below the Lithuanian average of $5,200 a year. This is supplemented with the milk from their three cows, the excellent rye bread and smoked ham they produce, and some black-market income.
"I don't think it will help me to be a European," said Janina Kisiel, the matriarch. "I'm doing this for my grandchildren. I'll die soon, but she shouldn't have to live like this," Mrs. Kisiel said, gesturing to 18-month-old Augustyna. "She needs to live in the modern world. She shouldn't be stuck behind with the Belarussians and Ukrainians."
If nobody really knows what a European is, there is a broad consensus as to what it is not. Places such as Moldova and Belarus, with autocratic governments that have barely moved beyond the age of Joseph Stalin, will never satisfy the rigorous standards of political freedom and economic order necessary to join the EU.
Who else will be European? Turkey has applied to join, but many members of Europe's Christian majority balk at the prospect of supplementing their continent's 15 million Muslims with the 60 million living in Turkey. But other prospective members, such as Bulgaria and Romania, are even further away than Turkey in terms of economic stability and political rights. Why should they be included, but not Turks?
These debates are well known even to the impoverished residents in this village on Europe's new frontier, whose few hundred residents are a confusing mixture of ethnically Polish, Russian, Belarussian and Lithuanian peasants and smugglers. It is difficult to find anyone here who voted against joining Europe -- or anyone who thinks it will improve their lives in the slightest.
"Now it's Lithuania with Lithuanian laws, and soon we'll have to live under European laws. Life is very difficult, and I don't think it will get any easier for me," said Mr. Kisiel, the farmer. "I won't be able to sell my milk, but I can say I'm European."
Denis the smuggler, on to his third beer at 10:30 in the morning, acknowledges that even he, facing the prospect of losing his furtive livelihood, has voted to wrench his country away from this hodgepodge of forgotten states in favour of joining the daring project of Europe.
"We'll survive -- we'll think of something to do," he said with a wry smile. "A lot of things are going to cost more, but we're better off being Europeans."
