Comment
The Barbarians are coming – but where from?
The Times – April 24, 2004
The Barbarians are coming. It’s a nightmare come true for anyone who dislikes the thought of the fortifications down the middle of Europe being swept away by the eastward expansion of the EU. From next Saturday, there’ll be nothing left to stop the pasty-faced hordes of rowdy foreigners that you’ve feared for so long. Unmannerly, unqualified and quite possibly unwashed, they’ll be free to swarm across the Continent in ever greater numbers to disrupt the hard-working order of your life.
At least, they will if you live east of Berlin: in Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Tallinn or Ljubljana. These once lovely and sophisticated metropolises, already scarred by communist rule, are bearing the brunt of the changes now as they come under attack from the worst of the West: an onslaught of crass stag-party drunks, wannabe second-home buyers and seekers after cut-price plastic surgery.
Prague, the first cultural war zone, has been swamped ever since the Velvet Revolution by beery Westerners colonising flats with views of the Charles Bridge or roaming the streets looking for sex. Fifteen years on, it’s a shadow of its former self. Ivan Klima, the novelist, complains that it has lost its national colour and become kitsch. No wonder. The centre is packed with men dressed as Mozart and salesmen touting tacky T-shirts with tragically unfunny jokes on the front: “Czech it out”, “Czech mate”, or “Member of Prague Drinking Team”. The “drinking team” part isn’t a joke at all. The local police blame Brits alone for 20 per cent of all weekend night violence.
Now, tempted by media excitement about the cheap houses, beer, markets and women of the new Europe, which will suddenly get much easier to lay hands on come May 1, the marauding armies have set their sights on the rest of Europe. And some of the new neighbours have some funny plans. One diplomat at a Central European embassy in London was called out of her office to advise a passing British bobby. He’d bought a house in her homeland, he said; he wanted to know how to import guns.
Meanwhile, estate agents in Budapest are rubbing their hands with glee at the influx of buyers sniffing at chic city flats or pretty country cottages by Lake Balaton (a snip at under £50,000). Irish buyers are the keenest, they say happily, because of the property boom their own country has enjoyed in the EU; they want to be in on the ground floor when it happens again in Hungary. Great for them. But it’s hardly surprising if there are glum faces among the only people who won’t do well out of it: the Hungarians trying to buy a home at home, who will be priced out of the market.
In Bulgaria, the taxi drivers at Sofia airport regale you with stories of how the last Brits they picked up asked to be driven to the coast — 250 miles away — where they bought three or four holiday homes. As a result, overcharging for a run into central Sofia has reached ridiculous levels.
My friend Adolfas, a Lithuanian journalist, is terrified by the likely cost of EU membership. “Things will get better in a generation, sure,” he says lugubriously, “but for years all we’re going to see is prices shooting up to London levels and shops full of German food, while our salaries stay firmly in the ex-Soviet Union.” He should worry. Things would be far worse if he lived in Tallinn, the pretty cobbled Estonian capital, which, to the horror of its usually phlegmatic local people, has become a hot stag-party destination. Friday night flights to Tallinn have filled up with very exuberant British men singing football songs, goosing the stewardesses and passing out in the loos. Check out the websites, Tallinnpissup.com or stagabroad.com, for the “medieval lesbian strip shows” and “totty tours” they are seeking.
Fortunately the goal of the Brits is to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible, so a strange apartheid reigns in the old town. There are four or five bars where the revellers go, but the bulk of the better places are mercifully untouched. Baltic officials and diplomats are cautious about expressing an unfavourable opinion of the new visitors, though they do admit that they would rather promote their countries’ also burgeoning cultural and nature tourism.
Still, sometimes the truth will out. At one party celebrating EU accession, I caught a group of Baltic businessmen and officials cackling together over a subversive plan to keep out Britain’s worst by encouraging cheap airlines to land their boozier passengers miles from their capitals, in unwelcoming disused military airports. It was only wishful thinking, though. After May 1 all the regulations that have limited air travel east will be swept away, and ever more aircraft rocking to the chant of “always look on the bright side of life” will fill the Baltic skies.
It’s been a long, long time since British bookshelves displayed lumps of the dismantled Berlin Wall — a mark of enthusiasm for the reunification of a divided Continent. Today our collective fear of being overrun by impoverished Easterners has become so all-consuming that it has closed most minds to their equally valid reservations about our joining them. Worry we might, but we shouldn’t forget: this is going to hurt them far more than it’s going to hurt us.
Vanora Bennett is the winner of the Orwell Prize for journalism