Good column on the effect of Eastern Europe on the EU. I was not aware of the extent of the American Technology that had been bought there. The Wireless is obvious. No country without a good legacy wired system would install one today. Can the EU Bureaucrats let loose the reins? I doubt it.
washingtonpost.com
Europe's Real Modernizers . . .
By David Ignatius
Friday, December 13, 2002; Page A45
PARIS -- The problem with our media culture of endless anticipation is that when the big events finally happen, they seem almost an anticlimax.
That's the case with this week's European summit, which is to embrace a plan today in Copenhagen for the enlargement of the European Union eastward to include 10 additional countries.
This is the triumphal end of a story that began with the Red Army's horrific conquest of Eastern Europe in 1945. That nightmare officially ends today, as West and East agree on the promise of one united Europe, with democracy and free markets stretching from the firths of Scotland to the Baltic Sea to the Danube.
"Look East" should be the motto of this united Europe. For the 10 new members, far from being a burden, can bring a needed energy and dynamism to the union. They can blow apart the bureaucratism and welfare-state culture that still hobble much of Europe, if the core 15 will let free markets function the way they should.
To see the promise of enlargement, consider the experience of one aggressive multinational company, the global software giant Microsoft. For the past two years, Microsoft has found that Eastern Europe has been its hottest market in the world, with annual sales growth of over 30 percent, according to the company's Czech-born chief for Eastern Europe, Jan Muehlfeit.
The reason Eastern Europe is such a booming market for technology, says Muehlfeit, is that it started with virtually nothing when the Berlin Wall fell 13 years ago. There were no mainframe "legacy systems" to nurse along, no existing infrastructure to protect. They had to start from scratch.
And the countries of Eastern Europe have been surprisingly aggressive in adopting new technology. Eastern Europe had about 50 million mobile phone connections by the end of 2001, and Gartner Dataquest predicts this will grow to about 139 million by 2006, for an annual growth rate of 16 percent. Next year, the number of wireless subscribers is expected to grow by 34 percent in Eastern Europe, compared with just 7 percent in Western Europe, according to the London-based telecommunications research group EMC.
Some of the new technology being installed in Eastern Europe makes the West seem dowdy by comparison. Microsoft is creating a paperless customs service for the Czech Republic that will be one of the most modern in the world. It is building a government Internet portal for Romania that will give citizens easy access to vital services, from getting a driver's license to bidding on government contracts.
In Croatia, Microsoft is building a complete e-government system that will allow officials to communicate instantly with one another and the public through tablet PCs. Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic are thinking of buying similar e-government systems.
What will transform Europe is the fact that the freedom-loving, technology-adopting people of the East are paid a small fraction of what workers in the West earn. Indeed, this year's GDP per-capita in the 10 new member nations is just 39 percent of the core EU average, according to official EU statistics.
That wage differential means Europe can expect the "giant sucking sound" of labor-market migration that Ross Perot predicted would follow the North American Free Trade Agreement. Companies in Western Europe are likely to move factories east in search of cheaper labor, just as Eastern workers are moving west seeking higher-paying jobs. Wages will rise in the East (and, for some jobs, fall in the West) until that differential is gone. Both developments will be good for Europe, shaking up the ossified labor markets that are limiting growth in countries such as France and Germany.
This infusion of human capital will invigorate a Europe that often seems short of new ideas and energy. It will be a process of "creative destruction" that will destroy some old, outdated institutions even as it creates new ones. Indeed, it's a process that will test how tolerant Europeans are of the realities of modern capitalism.
Smart companies have been hiring in Eastern Europe for years. Microsoft, for example, estimates that 700 software developers from there are now working at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
The final liberation for today's conservative, future-shy Europe will be its embrace of Turkey and its millions of Muslims. Europeans resent hearing it from Americans, but the fact is that they are in denial about the racial tensions that have developed with their own Muslim minorities. That's why "Christian Europe" is afraid of Turkey, but it's a fear that is unworthy of the new Europe that is being born. That new Europe needs to offer equality and opportunity to its Muslim citizens and neighbors as much as white Americans needed to heal the legacy of slavery.
A secular, free-market democracy, Turkey has long been hammering at Europe's door (for several hundred years, it might be said). Today's meeting in Copenhagen is likely to signal that in a few years, Europeans will open that door at last -- and let in all the energizing disruption that will come with incorporating Turkey's 60 million Muslims. Not least, this can help Europeans avert the "Clash of Civilizations," in the acceptance of a modern, Muslim Turkey as part of the new Europe.
That kind of cross-cultural fertilization has refreshed America for more than a century, and it will do wonders for Europe. Look East, Europe. Change is good. |
