If it is so hard to name the region’s countries, maybe they are not a region at all. And perhaps they do not want to be one. “Central and Eastern Europe” sounds too dull; “new democracies” like a bunch of newcomers; “ex-bloc” forces them to remember things they would rather forget. They are not interested in themselves. They look more to the West than to one another. “Our countries communicate through Brussels and Washington rather than directly,” said Veselin Vackov, a journalist in Prague. “We may have a common interest, but hardly a common voice.”
Long gone are the times when artists like Pole Jan Englert, singers like Czech Helena Vondrackova, and athletes like Lithuanian Arvydas Sabonis enjoyed fame throughout “the region.” Serbian writers, Polish film directors, and Czech TV series were easily recognizable from Sopot, Bulgaria, to Sopot, Poland. Today there are only distant remnants of that cross-cultural pollination. A Bulgarian might whistle the biggest hit of the Hungarian rock band Omega or put in a disc of ex-Yugoslav rock band Bjelo Dugme. “When we were on the ex-communist reservation together, we had nothing left but to communicate with one another,” said Vackov, a Bulgarian who has been the editor-in-chief of a major Czech daily newspaper for nine years. “Today the whole world is open to us – and thank God.”
In her book, A Biography of No Place, Historian Kate Brown explored the shifting borders and identities of a similar region. What it boiled down to was that only governments seemed to really car about borders and group identity. As Vassilev says "the only things that bind them are memories of totalitarianism and NATO membership. If they need, and find, a common purpose, they will find a common name as well."