SKOPJE, Macedonia, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- Pomp and circumstance often disguise a sore lack of substance. The three days summit of the Central European Initiative is no exception. Held in Macedonia's drab capital, Skopje, the delegates including the odd chief of state, discussed their economies in what was presumptuously dubbed by them the "small Davos," after the larger and far more important annual get together in Switzerland.
Yet the whole exercise rests on a series of politically correct confabulations. To start with, Macedonia, the host, as well as Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and other east European backwaters hardly qualify for the title "central European." Mitteleuropa is not merely a geographical designation which excludes all but two or three of the participants. It is also a historical, cultural and social entity which comprises the territories of the erstwhile German and, especially, Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) empires.
Moreover, the disparity between the countries assembled in the august conference precludes a common label. Slovenia's Gross Domestic Product per capita is seven times Macedonia's. The economies of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary are light-years removed from those of Yugoslavia or even Bulgaria.
Nor do these countries attempt real integration. While regional talk shops, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African Union, embarked on serious efforts to establish customs and currency zones, the countries of central and eastern Europe have drifted apart and intentionally so. Intra-regional trade has declined every single year since 1989. Intra-regional foreign direct investment is almost non-existent.
Macedonia's exports to Yugoslavia, its next door neighbor, amount to merely half its exports to the unwelcoming European Union -- and are declining. Countries from Bulgaria to Russia have shifted 50-75 percent of their trade from their traditional Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation partners to the European Union and, to a lesser degree, the Middle East, the Far East and the United States.
Nor do the advanced members of the club fancy a common label. Slovenia abhors its Balkan pedigree. Croatia megalomaniacally considers itself German. The Czechs and the Slovaks regard their communist elopement as a sad aberration, as do the Hungarians. The Macedonians are not sure whether they are Serbs, Bulgarians or Macedonians. The Moldovans wish they were Romanians. The Romanians secretly wish they were Hungarians. The Austrians are sometimes Germans and sometimes Balkanians. Many Ukrainians and all Belarusians would like to resurrect the evil empire, the USSR.
This identity crisis affects the European Union. Never has Europe been more fractured. It is now a continent of four speeds. The rich core of the European Union, notably Germany and France, constitutes its engine. The mendicant members -- from Greece to Portugal -- enjoy inane dollops of cash from Brussels but have next to no say in Union matters.
The shoo-in candidates -- Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and, maybe, Slovakia, if it keeps ignoring the outcomes of its elections -- are frantically distancing themselves from the queue of beggars, migrants and criminals that awaits at the pearly gates of Brussels. The Belgian Curtain -- between central European candidates and east European aspirants -- is falling fast and may prove to be far more divisive and effective than anything dreamt up by Stalin.
The fourth group comprises real candidates, such as Bulgaria, and would be applicants, such as Romania, Macedonia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Croatia. Some of them are tainted by war crimes. Others are addicted to donor conferences. Yet others are travesties of the modern nation state having been hijacked and subverted by tribal crime gangs. Most of them combine all these unpalatable features.
Many of these countries possess the dubious distinction of having once been misruled by the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire. In a moment of faux-pas honesty, Valerie Giscard D'Estaing, the chairman of the EU's much-touted constitutional convention, admitted last week that a European Union with Turkey will no longer be either European or United. Imagine how they perceive the likes of Macedonia or Albania.
As the EU enlarges to the east and south, its character will be transformed. It will become poorer and darker, more prone to crime and corruption, to sudden or seasonal surges of immigration, to fractiousness and conflict. It is a process of conversion to a truly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural grouping with a weighty Slav and Christian Orthodox presence. Not necessarily an appetizing prospect, say many.
The former communist countries in transition are supposed to be miraculously transformed by the accession process. Alas, the indelible pathologies of communism mesh well with Brussels's unmanageable, self-perpetuating and opaque bureaucracy. These mutually enhancing propensities are likely to yield a giant and venal welfare state with a class of aged citizens in the core countries of the European Union living off the toil of young, mostly Slav, laborers in its eastern territories. This is the irony: the European Union is doomed without enlargement. It needs these countries far more than they need it.
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