Paris — Twenty-five years ago, in February 1991, the leaders of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary met in Visegrad, a Hungarian town overlooking the Danube. Those three countries had recently broken free of the Soviet bloc; their newly elected leaders, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Jozsef Antall, had taken an active part in the liberation. Two, Mr. Havel and Mr. Walesa, had been jailed for their activities.
The Visegrad meeting had one central purpose: to accelerate the integration of the three countries into a free, democratic and prosperous Europe, through NATO and what was then the European Economic Community of 12 member states. Western European leaders looked favorably on the Visegrad Group: Central Europeans could practice regional cooperation before joining the adults’ group of what would become the European Union.
Visegrad was where the kings of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland parlayed in 1335. Since then, these nations had gone through many wars and occupations, their borders redrawn several times, or even dissolved altogether.
Today, the Visegrad bloc is experiencing a resurgence of sorts. In a splintering familiar to Central Europe, the Visegrad Three became four: Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in 1993, giving way to the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
All four joined the European Union in 2004. But when they get together today, it is to fight the union. Over the centuries, they have been dominated by Prussia, Austria, Germany and Russia; in 2016, the common enemy is Brussels. To Western Europeans, it is unsettling to see a new East-West divide emerging, threatening to fracture the European Union itself.
The Visegrad countries’ opposition to Brussels is different from Britain’s. They don’t want to leave the union, they just refuse to abide by some of its rules. The Romanian-born French political scientist Pierre Hassner has reminded us of the concept of “collective neurosis,” a notion devised by the Hungarian philosopher Istvan Bibo in his 1946 book “The Misery of the Small Eastern European States.” Bibo described the existential angst of Eastern and Central European states leading sometimes to “political hysteria.”
Political hysteria reigns today over the European Commission initiative to assign refugee quotas to each member state. Mr. Havel and Mr. Antall, the voices of reason, have passed away. Mr. Walesa, the hero of the Solidarity movement, is fighting accusations of collaborating with Poland’s former Communist authorities. In parliamentary elections in Slovakia, where Prime Minister Robert Fico has indulged in fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric, a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties just won 14 seats.
The new rulers in Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest flatly refuse Muslim refugees. They don’t want the ethnic, religious and cultural homogeneity of their societies to change. They see multiculturalism as a failed model.
Hearing such messages from Donald J. Trump or Marine Le Pen is bad enough, but from the leaders of these new democracies?
The way these leaders practice democracy, bending the rule of law as far as they can within an elected government, is equally unsettling to the older democracies of Western Europe. Another French political scientist, the Czech-born Jacques Rupnik, has identified two converging trends.
“We are witnessing a democratic regression and identity-related tensions on migration, and both phenomena are strengthening each other,” he told me. “The same nationalist conservative authoritarianism at work in domestic politics also applies to the response to the refugee crisis, notably different from the European Commission’s and most other member states’ responses.”
Once the poster children of post-Communist transition, these countries were not supposed to take such a turn. With its so-called goulash socialism, Hungary was the most liberal of the Soviet satellites and eased peacefully into democratic rule. Poland was more restless, but once it had been the catalyst for the collapse of Communism, it managed the shock therapy of moving to a market economy with impressive discipline. The Czechs and Slovaks, it was hoped, would behave as Mr. Havel’s enlightened heirs.
But no Communist country had ever experienced these radical shifts to democracy and market economics. Only Czechoslovakia had enjoyed genuine democratic rule, between the two world wars. The end of the Cold War made Europeans euphoric: Once democratic institutions were built, free elections held and centralized economies replaced with capitalist ones, everyone assumed the job was done.
Joining NATO and the European Union was the icing on the cake. In 2008, with “end of history” hubris, a World Bank report proclaimed that the transition was over. Mission accomplished.
Obviously, it was not. The effort to transform the economy was so demanding for the new democratic elites that little attention was paid to nurturing a new political culture. Modern Hungarian and Polish politics look riven with the legacy of Communism, trouble with sharing power, conspiracy theories and exclusionary discourse toward opponents.
Another, overlooked, factor is that most people in these countries are still poor. Despite nonstop economic growth since 1992, Poland’s gross domestic product is only 68 percent of the European Union’s per capita average. When Poland’s foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, says the world should not move in one single direction — “toward a new mix of cultures and races, a world of cyclists and vegetarians” — he is rejecting the progressive social values perceived as part of the Western European economic model.
The Visegrad bloc has welcomed European Union subsidies, so crucial to their development. But we in Old Europe never really insisted that a democratic culture and diversity were also part of the deal; we didn’t think we had to.
Is the rise of so-called illiberal democracy threatening the union’s cohesion? Maybe. But Euroskeptic populist movements are far from a purely Central European phenomenon; they are also on the move in the union’s founding member states. Twenty-five years after the Visegrad summit, Europe is still searching for unity — but the mood has shifted: from solidarity to recrimination.