If someone’s bitter disappointment with the outcome of a fair democratic election can lead to an attempted assassination of the country’s prime minister, the democratic transformation promised by the West has all but failed.
A savage assassination attempt on Slovak prime minister Robert Fico has furnished yet another proof of the fragility of Eastern Europe’s regimes after a century of independence.
This is not to say these countries have a particularly salient track records of attempted political kills. Over the past decades, assassination attempts have rocked the seemingly prosperous Sweden, the embattled Serbia and even the US (with President Kennedy gunned down in Dallas). 1978 saw the assassination of the Italian former PM Aldo Moro. Each of those tragedies was prompted by a specific set of circumstances and did not reverse the course of history. But when it comes to Eastern Europe, an attack on a statesman tends to trigger a grave domestic or even international crisis.
What it really means is that these countries are not stable enough, and internationally, they often find themselves in the crosshairs of more powerful foreign forces. And while economists sometimes talk of ‘late industrialisation’, a matching political phenomenon, one experienced by Eastern Europe, would be ‘late state formation’, for want of a better phrase. Whether a country can overcome this hassle and succeed is still up for debate. At least, to date, we have yet to see political regimes that would have caught up and cleared this crucial impediment.
No wonder many commentators have now brought up the 1914 murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo that led to the outbreak of World War I. This reaction shows that Eastern European states are still mostly associated with the great empires of yore rather than viewed as independent entities. Their fate does not belong to them.
Importantly, an overall sane person trying to assassinate an official just because they are unhappy with the policy being pursued by the ruling party is a major political event in and of itself, symptomatic of the West’s botched post-Cold War mission, which was to stabilise the former Soviet satellite states.
One of the purported goals both the EU and NATO have been pursuing over the recent decades was to support the democratic transformation of Eastern Europe and help these countries create functional political systems. Now, if someone’s bitter disappointment with the outcome of a fair democratic election can lead to an attempted assassination of the country’s prime minister, the democratic transformation has all but failed. Worse still, the recent tragedy has spurred talk of other Eastern European leaders, whether in Poland or in Hungary, now having to look over their shoulder. Quite sensibly, it begs the question: Seeing as the external control exercises by the ‘old West’ has not brought the sustainable development, what was it all about in the first place?
Robert Fico, who is now fighting for his life, is undoubtedly a man of high professional and moral standards. Just like his political supporters, he puts his own country first. But this path becomes dangerous as the powerful external forces are only viewing Eastern European states as pawns for their global endgame. Above all, these forces include the US and the UK, which only seem to be worried about their potential confrontation with Russia and China. The rest is merely an instrument un their struggle for global dominance. This dynamic changes the policymaking to a point where they are no longer bothered by their relations with partners per se. Instead, they are contemplating the way these nations can be utilised in a game they will not have any gains from.
This leads to the split among the ruling elites and the public as the future of their countries solely hinges on the mighty external whims that translate into Western media torching the Eastern European politicians they do not like. Even in the wake of the chilling assassination attempt, the front-page headline in a major British publication linked the shot Slovak PM to Vladimir Putin.
For more than 15 years now, the very same Slovakia has been hosting a large international conference funded by the EU and the British arms industry lobby groups. On the surface, the event is run by a local non-profit allegedly concerned with European security. But its political mission has been to perpetuate the Slovaks’ and other Eastern Europeans’ alleged ‘pro-US’ choice. Propped up by the funds of overseas corporations, these non-profits wield a significant influence over the country’s foreign policy.
In other words, Western shot-callers are buying their way into the loyalties of some local elites that could not care less about people’s views of what their country’s foreign policy should look like. No wonder the West is extremely outraged by Georgia’s attempt to pass the foreign agent legislation, for these laws will take a heavy toll on the corrupt leverage mechanisms.
After the Cold War was over, this model was adopted by the US and its closest allies with regards to all of the small and middle-sized countries of the region. The strategy was precisely to secure their elites’ loyalties in exchange for money or access to Western perks. In the Baltic states, this has been further bolstered by infiltrating the governments with former expats. The same goal was pursued through the appointment of Eastern Europeans to various roles with the EU and NATO’s bureaucratic agencies. Only those who had been lobbying for the US interests in their domestic political endeavours were rewarded with sinecures.
But this is just the consequence of the overarching geopolitical plight Eastern Europe was caught up in. A much bigger challenge is that even without the US or large European nations sabotaging their independence, building sustainable statehood in Eastern Europe is foiled by its place in the present-day world.
These countries arrived on the political scene when the largest international players had already dug in. Even China, with more than a century of harrowing political turmoil (1837–1949), had weathered the storm leveraging its millennium-long political independence. Despite being largely a pawn in the 18th-century politics, India had come off the back of centuries of large-state experience. At the dawn of the 20th century, Russia, Germany, France and Britain were all empires with a mature political landscape. As for the relatively young America, the lack of a political pedigree had been overcome thanks to the careful nurturing thereof and the country’s position as an ‘island’ amid the global political scene.
On the other hand, Eastern European nations had not had a storied political landscape or traditions of being a proper state. The subsequent topsy-turvy of the 20th century did not make their plight any easier.
The statehood that emerged in the aftermath of World War II was doomed too as a lot of the Nazi sympathisers and previous government backers fled westwards, only to begin sabotaging these countries’ development. The end of the Cold War did not fix those woeful challenges either. In most cases, it just reinstated the power of those who had been railing against the Communist way of doing things. As a result, the Eastern European countries just switched their allegiances without undergoing any fundamental change. They remained fledgeling states, as had been the case for decades prior.
Therefore, the policies upheld by the likes of Robert Fico or Viktor Orbán do not just challenge the external control exercised by the US or the UK. They throw down the gauntlet to the entire political scene of the region. Domestically oriented Eastern European leaders are an utmost necessity, albeit a totally unnatural phenomenon, history suggests. That is why their lives will always be on the line.