Political Critique: Eastern Europe according to British media: More likely to go to Italy for cappuccinos than join the ethnic fighting in Kosovo

But a closer look revealed two recurring, patronising patterns. The first was seeing the accession as a unification of Europe and the true end to the Cold War, and the second was the equation of the pre-2004 EU with Europe itself. I’m not exaggerating when I say these came up in all, I repeat, all articles. [...]

In these articles, the new members gained a more genuine Europeanness – one of a Western European nature. Numerous articles implied that the key to becoming a European is to follow Western standards and to open up one’s markets to Western investors, or as they put it, “catching up.” The authors were also pretty clear about who deserved credit: “the EU’s finest minds have spent years getting the ten newcomers’ economies, and social and trade policies and just about everything else in line with EU norms.” [...]

As the coverage in 2004 celebrated the new members’ democratic and economic achievements, I expected that the coverage between 2010-2016 about the new Hungarian and Polish governments’ actions in undermining those exact same democracies would be more negative in tone. I was surprised to find, however, that both The Telegraph and The Daily Mail supported the new governments – not necessarily because they endorsed their policies, but, in line with British media’s traditional Euroscepticism, because they saw them as allies against the EU. The Guardian, on the other hand, while it condemned the new policies as anti-democratic, typically saw them as deviations from a standard western path of development. [...]

Despite their differences, there was one thing all papers had in common: their attempts to contextualise the covered events all turned into explanations of “how this region operates.” Similarly to our travellers before, these explainers take the West’s presumed ignorance about the region, and set out to correct it with their personal insight. Nevertheless, most of them cite either only one cause for the present circumstances, or, when they cite multiple, they connect them linearly and coherently, becoming simplifying rather than informative. The causes they “reveal” are vague phenomena from the countries’ histories, which are shown to be in a direct causal relation with contemporary cultural attitudes.

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