Brexit Tells East: Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

In 1990, my family drove the 125 miles from a
newly post-communist Prague to the Czechoslovak border with Austria. Crippling
travel restrictions had recently been lifted, and we were going to visit the
West for the very first time. I was ten years old and, though the line of cars
at the border was several miles deep, and though it was sweltering in the back
of our yellow Škoda, I spent the trip in a state of awe at our good fortune.

By the time I’d finished fourth grade, I’d
heard stories of those who’d been killed while attempting to leave the prison that the Eastern Bloc was; the last to lose his life at the Czechoslovak border
had in fact been a child, a boy slightly younger than myself, when his family
tried to get into West Germany. But then, seemingly overnight, the old
restrictive system had begun to disintegrate. After Hungary allowed a group of
East Germans to cross into Austria, which was part of the West, many of their
compatriots hoped to follow suit. Suddenly, thousands of East German refugees
flooded into Prague, sleeping in makeshift tents in its historic center, right
near our home, before they continued on their journey. 

To be permitted to cross a national border:
this was the stuff of dreams. To realize, then and now, that you’re not welcome
when you’ve crossed, is the stuff of waking up.  
Wearing our best clothes so as to make a good
impression, we practiced polite German phrases and conversation starters on
each other, biding time until our grand audience with the West. But when we
were finally let across, the first places we entered had posted notices that
read, in glaring capitals: CZECHS, DO NOT STEAL HERE!

For the rest of the trip, we tried to keep
our voices down, hoping that no one would notice our Czech license plates. As
we drove deeper into Western Europe, the sense of longing grew. Surely we’d
meet someone, somewhere, who would not be able to tell that we were only
Czechs?

Of course, we were used to feeling second
class. This was built into our upbringing and culture. We Czechs, like other
Central Europeans, had lived for decades with a feeling of failure for not
having been able to free ourselves from Soviet dominion, along with its absurd,
backward and cruel politics, and its creaky military.

Even before communism ended, most of my
friends and I suspected that shelves in stores were not meant to be empty, that
toilet paper was not meant to be scarce, and that there were more enjoyable
ways for a seven-year-old to spend an afternoon than standing guard in a tiny uniform
in front of a pro-Soviet monument. Our parents, despite strict censorship, got
their hands on samizdat copies of Orwell novels. None of us had any doubt that
the Europe we knew was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

The West, we sensed, was a better place:
polished, rich, and free. My friends even had a slang word for cool: if
something was top-notch awesome, it was “British.” Of course, we knew to say
this only quietly, because any flattering talk of the West could be overheard
by our schoolteachers and get our parents in trouble.

We were the West’s biggest fans and groupies,
like players who hadn’t made it onto the team but kept cheering for it in the
stands. Or like players sold to another team against their will because they
did not matter enough. See under: History.

Václav Havel became president in 1989, and
the last Soviet soldier left Czechoslovakia in 1991. The countries in my region
were eager to join NATO and the EU, and we spent most of the 1990s making
reforms and pleading with the West to let us in. Fortunately for those who
wanted to look toward Europe, Russia, predominantly preoccupied with its own
economic implosion, was busy.
The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and the
EU in 2004. But the familiar long border lines lasted well into my 20s, with
customs officers meticulously checking whether Czechs – and Hungarians,
Slovaks, and Poles – headed for an Italian beach have enough money on them or
whether they are the real owners of their cars, since the EU Schengen Area that
guaranteed free movement of persons was not open to us until 2007.

There are criticisms—some unfounded, many
wholly legitimate—that my region, just like everyone else, has of the EU today.
But openness within Europe and between Europeans is the most valuable thing
about our continent. It allowed us to fully engage with Europe, trade, make,
buy, sell, move, love, learn, and earn. And more than Germany, France or
Denmark, the UK was the country with decades of familiar music, movies, humor
and literature and the greatest appeal. There are wonderful Scandinavian bands
and Dutch DJs, but Adele, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney sell out
humongous arenas – still. Britain has the culture we, in the absence of our own
regional idols and contemporary cultural giants, look up to. English is the
second language we now most comfortably speak.

As a result, for those who wanted to try
their luck abroad, many Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and other neighbors felt like
the labor market in the United Kingdom and Ireland made most sense. London
offers top English speaking opportunities in every imaginable field. It also
allows multi-national couples a shot at success that other European metropoles
simply lack. I work in international development and my husband in tech: Buona
fortuna to us in finding a competitive career for both in Rome.

And so it is difficult for me not to take the
UK rejection to stay open to Europe personally. Polls show that the decision
was largely driven by backlash against immigration, and that some of the
districts with the highest support for Brexit were those that had high
concentrations of Poles, Romanians and other Eastern and Central Europeans.
Laminated cards reading, “No more Polish vermin” and “Go home Polish scum” were
found in Cambridgeshire after the vote, and the UK Mirror just ran an alarmist
headline, “Brexit to cause immigration surge as 500,000 East Europeans ‘will
rush in before borders close.’”

Second class Europeans—Europeans who grew up
with smuggled vinyls, dreams of owning real jeans, while hiding from informers
and censors, or whose parents did—are not so welcome in the Europe we thought
we’d come to share. It does not need to be printed out in capital letters to be
obvious.

But many
people on the streets of Prague, Bratislava, and Warsaw understand another
thing, too. An inward looking, destabilized European Union is not good for
anyone except for Russia, which has never stopped seeing our region as an area
to claim, and whose now not so creaky military and bolder agents have been pushing
closer. At this time, we need a strong and unified EU to defend the sanctions
against Russia for annexing Crimea. We need the bandwidth to focus on
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and even Poland, all increasingly worried about
their long-term security. Given that for a country like mine, the last two and
a half decades were the longest period of freedom in modern history, we don’t
take not being invaded for granted. It is truly disheartening that it was we,
and other immigrants, who are perceived as the real threat to stability.

As Havel pointed out, a defining Czech characteristic is self-doubt.
Some say anxiety. I feel both now more than ever. Despite our best efforts, we
were not able to hide deeper into Europe all.