Their long-suffering intellectuals especially celebrated this return to the Western fold, expecting continuity with a Europe they had long idealised and without whom they lost an essential part of their identity. Kundera observed: “The moment Hungary is no longer European—that is, no longer Western—it is driven from its own destiny, beyond its own history: it loses the essence of its identity.”
Yet, four decades on, deep disillusionment has set in. Many in these nations now speak of a new kidnapping—not one enforced by tanks and commissars, but by a Western world that has itself abandoned the very traditions for which Central Europeans fought. The West they longed for was one of cultural continuity, reverence for the past, and the balancing of liberty and identity.
Instead, they found themselves absorbed into a European Union and a transatlantic alliance which increasingly defined themselves by globalist, progressive values, while discarding the historic pillars of Western civilisation: family, Christianity, tradition, and national sovereignty.
Uncomfortable Truths
This shift has not gone unnoticed. In Hungary and Poland, ruling parties openly proclaim their resistance to an imposed ideological conformity from Brussels and Washington. Slovakia and the Czech Republic, traditionally more Europhilic, are witnessing a growing debate about whether the West they rejoined still resembles the one they once admired. The West of Montaigne, Burke, and St. Thomas Aquinas has seemingly given way to a West of bureaucratic universalism, secular post-nationalism, and an intellectual climate where dissent from progressive orthodoxy is met with scorn.
From the perspective of the Visegrád countries, this realisation proved unsettling. The grand project of ‘returning to Europe’ was meant to be a restoration of the nation as rooted in metaphysics, not an exchange of one materialist ideology for another. Communist totalitarianism stripped away faith, community, and national pride in favour of an enforced collectivism. Now, the liberal materialism of modern Western institutions seems equally dismissive of these values—though this time, not in the name of class struggle, but of a ‘tolerant’ cosmopolitanism. Where once Soviet apparatchiks dictated permissible thought, today it is Brussels’ supranational bureaucracy that attempts to homogenise cultures under the banner of ‘universal values’—values that, to many in Central Europe, appear conspicuously detached from their heritage.
Kundera warned that without its cultural core, the West itself might one day lose the ability to recognise its kidnapped brethren. The question now facing the Visegrád nations is whether the West itself has indeed been kidnapped—this time not by foreign occupation, but by an internal revolution that has severed it from its own past; a revolution which Kundera already foresaw when he first wrote the article (though, as the EU was then still relatively modest in its aims, he saw in mass media the great threat which would do away with a culture authentically lived and shared): “By virtue of its political system, Central Europe is the East; by virtue of its cultural history, it is the West. But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe. Central Europe, therefore, should fight not only against its big oppressive neighbour but also against the subtle, relentless pressure of time, which is leaving the era of culture in its wake. That’s why in Central European revolts there is something conservative, nearly anachronistic: they are desperately trying to restore the past, the past of culture, the past of the modern era.”
Eyes of a Stranger
Where does this leave Central Europe? Its dilemma is a profound one. These nations remain strategically reliant on the EU and NATO, yet their cultural instincts are increasingly at odds with the ideology shaping those institutions. Up until now, the solution has been defiance—Budapest and Warsaw insist on their own vision of Europe, a Europe anchored in sovereignty, faith, and tradition. Yet tensions keep building. With each new clash—whether over migration policy, judicial independence, or social legislation—fear deepens that the West is demanding from Central Europe a surrender not just of political autonomy, but of the very identity it rightly reclaimed in 1989.
One might ask: is there a way forward? Central Europe’s fate is bound up with that of the broader West, and yet it remains distinct, burdened by its particular history. Kundera’s remark remains as urgent today as it was in the 1980s: “The real tragedy for Central Europe, then, is not Russia but Europe: Behind the Iron Curtain, [Central Europe] did not suspect that the times had changed and that in Europe itself Europe [i.e. its cultural underpinnings and significance] was no longer experienced as a value.”
The tragedy of Central Europe today is that it may not have returned to the West at all, but rather has found itself adrift—once kidnapped by an empire, now orphaned by a civilisation that no longer recognises its former self.
