At 29, Borzestowski is typical of a new divide in Europe, where the most enthusiastic fans of “Western values” are often young elites in the East. Just one decade after the collapse of communism, and with membership in the European Union only a few years away, upwardly mobile young Poles, Czechs and Hungarians are thrilled to be welcomed as debutants by a global society. After living behind the barbed wire for so long, they are not as jaded about the shortfalls of democracy and capitalism as their Western peers. They are still pleased just to live in cities where demonstrations are no longer a crime, and many now cast a jaundiced eye on the antiglobalization protesters who are preparing to descend by the tens of thousands on the IMF/World Bank meeting in Prague next week (following story). For many, the Prague meeting is a coming-out bash not only for hard-charging national elites, but for all of Eastern Europe. “This is a big chance for us to sign up for the common responsibility for the state of the world and to voice our opinion,” Czech President Vaclav Havel told NEWSWEEK.
The loudest voices will be those of young East Europeans. They are the region’s first free generation in 50 years–though they are not yet free of the past. Their grandparents survived Stalinist purges, Russian tanks and violent crackdowns. Their parents resigned themselves to living with an assigned job for life, a rattletrap Skoda in the driveway and a holiday at a state-run spa. The under-30 crowd is too young to be poisoned by the previous system, but old enough to remember a child’s impression of the bad old days–television blackouts, no ice cream in winter, stores that made you wait in line for five days to buy a refrigerator. For the offspring of communism, globalization means a passport, a laptop and the right to order all the Western books and music they want over the Internet. So what of the mostly Western activists who are heading to Prague to protest the shortcomings of capitalism and democracy? “They are naive,” scoffs Michal Kaminski, at 28 Poland’s youngest member of Parliament. “They are too comfortable and have nothing better to do.”
Central Europe’s up-and-comers are too busy rebuilding their battered economies to dwell for too long on the evils of global brands. They are launching companies that create jobs and embracing the foreign investors who bring new skills and missing know-how. And they are eager to join the European Union as a way of confirming that they are, at long last, accepted as citizens of the free world. “I’m offended when people say we are going to join Europe,” says Anna Wosinska, 30, a tech specialist with the Boston Consulting Group in Warsaw who has studied in the United States, worked in Japan and paid for her first computer by picking strawberries one summer in Finland. “We may be joining the European Union, but I am European.”
Some are more European than others, at least by the measure of EU entrance procedures. The first wave of six applicants, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, may gain entrance as early as 2004, followed by a second wave of up to five countries six years later or more. They must first prove to the EU that their economies can maintain fiscal discipline and stand up to the competition. What’s striking about young East Europeans is how many believe they’ve already arrived. Daniela Cervova, 25, is a Czech getting her master’s degree in European studies. She spent two years in Germany. “I think my self-confidence is as high as that of young people there,” she says.
The East-West culture gap is certainly closing. In Prague as in Paris, young professionals brandish Nokia phones and race around in BMWs. Czechs are marrying later and postponing children to concentrate on earning and spending. Poles hire image consultants and take Thai holidays and African safaris. Everywhere in the East, the benchmarks of success are Western. Budapest sociologist Tibor Dessewffy says Hungarians can appear extremely materialistic. Never condescending to compare themselves with their poorer neighbors in Bulgaria, they instead strive, he says, to catch up to living standards in Germany, “and often come up short, so they continue to buy.”
In nations where average incomes are still a fraction of those in the EU, this yearning can cause problems. Upwardly mobile youth are a small segment of society. Poverty and unemployment still haunt rural areas. Kids from the countryside can’t afford to live away from home, even if they get into college in the big city. Marcin Wojcieki, a 23-year-old law student in Warsaw and producer of a morning radio talk show on politics, just returned from his high-school reunion in southwest Poland, where his father was a coal miner. Many of his classmates now have two kids and work in the mines, and feel left behind. “Only about half of us boarded the train,” he says.
The disparity can be large enough to divide even close families: Hungarian Zsigmond Varga, 25, runs a consulting company; both his parents are journalists. His father was a sports reporter fired for writing a book about the Soviet bloc’s boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Varga bought his first suit two years ago, but didn’t dare tell his parents because its price–about $270–equaled half their monthly income.
Many successful young professionals got an early taste for the West from parents who were able to travel abroad, or teach them a foreign language other than Russian. Andras Melis, 30, is the only child of an airline executive and customs officer, so he traveled frequently as a child. He loved the well-stocked toy stores but saw how his Hungarian friends envied the Lego building blocks he brought home. To this day he deliberately conceals his wealth; he is a cofounder of Pestiest, a mini-empire with $3.4 million annual turnover that produces glossy cultural magazines in 18 cities and runs a cafe and a radio station in Budapest. “I could buy a Rolex but I wear a Swatch,” he says. “I don’t want the guy sitting next to me to be uncomfortable.”
Melis was studying social work, just hanging out and writing poems, when his friend Andras Lang, a musician, asked him to join the fledgling business seven years ago. What started as a one-page black-and-white events list on cheap paper has ballooned in part thanks to hefty advertising by multinational companies. He’s pained to see people begging in the streets. “But the way to solve the problem is to keep improving the economy,” says Lang, 30. “Capitalism here is very aggressive, but it is evolving.”
No business is more materially driven than finance, an industry dominated by young men under 30. “I was fed up being poor,” says David Marasek, who bolted his Prague home at the first opportunity after the fall of communism. The son of a coal miner and a language teacher, Marasek left for the United States in 1990 and went on to graduate from Columbia University and work on Wall Street. Marasek, 29, returned to Prague 18 months ago and set up an investment advisory firm, Americas International Advisors. “I realized there is more money to be made here,” he says. “I wouldn’t waste a six-figure salary just because I’m homesick.”
Young Easterners turn to the West for positive role models as well. Czech chat-show queen Pavlina Wolfova, the tough, ambitious daughter of two well-known singers, spent a year in Paris to learn about an independent media before launching the country’s first television talk show on real-life issues like prostitution and domestic abuse. And financiers have warm words for the bankers who sent money and advice after the wall came down. Mihaly Boris, 26, is a top manager at Budapest’s homegrown investment bank, Concorde Securities. He drives an Alfa Romeo, owns a large apartment with Italian furniture and thinks nothing of popping over to Vienna to hear U2 or Whitney Houston. He says the anti-IMF protesters are welcome, but adds pointedly that in 1995 an IMF-backed program rescued Hungary from economic crisis. “Now Budapest looks like Western Europe, but it didn’t always,” says Boris. “The protesters won’t see that.”
The idealism of these young people is directed mainly toward the practical task of building capitalism. Gyorgy Jaksity, Boris’s boss, entered Karl Marx University in 1986 and graduated from the renamed Budapest University of Economics. Textbooks on free markets were so scarce that he wrote one. He helped reopen the Budapest Stock Exchange and to write laws governing finance and investment. At 25 he founded Concorde, now Hungary’s fifth largest investment bank. At 33, Jaksity worries about rampant materialism. “A lot of the guys who thought they were masters of the universe six years ago are now in bankruptcy court,” says Jaksity. “They spent their money buying Mercedes instead of helping their business grow.”
Ivo Lukacovic couldn’t agree more. Dubbed the Czech Bill Gates by the local press, Lukacovic displays newspaper cuttings of dot-com failures on the wall of his office in a former weapons-parts factory on the outskirts of Prague. A computer-studies dropout, Lukacovic created Seznam, the most popular Czech search engine, from an investment of $1,500, and later sold a 30 percent stake for several million dollars. The boyish 26-year-old says others failed because they were too cocky about their capacity to expand on their own, and he vows not to make the same mistake. He is in talks with a potential foreign buyer and has his own positive spin on the World Bank summit. “It will be good if there are protests and images of fires because it will grab media attention and put Prague on the international map,” says Lukacovic.
Many young East Europeans are searching for their own place on that map. Jana Uhlarikova, 18, studies international trade at the Prague Economic University. (She couldn’t get into the European-studies program because demand was so high.) She works part-time organizing corporate events for a public-relations firm, and wants to learn Spanish in addition to the English, German and Russian she already speaks. In Warsaw, Patrycja Mazuchowska works for a German company, speaks English, and met her French boyfriend while vacationing in Barcelona. “I can’t wait to join the EU so I can work anywhere I want,” she says.
Even those youth who are decidedly not avid capitalists still like to think of themselves as international types. Tadeusz Paczkowski, 29, is a member of the Klub Gaya, a group of ecology activists in southwest Poland. In 1997 he successfully lobbied for an animal-rights law and is fighting plans for a dam on the Vistula River. A vegetarian, he says he wouldn’t forbid people to eat at McDonald’s but argues that “people should see that aggressive consumption destroys values beyond repair.” He would go to Prague to protest if he could afford it. Peter Szekely can, with $50 from his mom (an accountant with a private practice). Founder of the Workers’ Party Youth Committee, he is disenchanted with the market economy that has forced Hungarian pensioners into poverty and destroyed the health-care system. “The IMF tries to build up models using America as a base, but they don’t know a thing about our life,” he says. “We need to go back to Marx.”
Well, that’s probably not going to happen. Certainly, Central Europe still has to work out the kinks in what it means to be a player in the free market. But the influence of the Yuppie elite runs deep. “We are the transition generation,” says Jacek Olechowski, 23, cofounder of an advertising agency in Warsaw, who sees the EU as a ripe new market for clients. So watch out, Westerners. As they go global, these kids from the East won’t stop until they’ve earned their rightful place in the New Europe.
