The EU has spent decades disenfranchising its Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states and their voters. Not coincidentally, it has spent the same period complaining that these countries voice anti-EU sentiments, support anti-EU candidates, and use their vetoes to block joint EU action.
Over that period, some CEE members have used their blocking powers more than most. Of 48 vetoes of EU-wide measures, 34 were lodged by six Central and Eastern member states, most notably Hungary, which accounted for 21, according to tracking data published by Michal Ovadek, an assistant professor at University College London.
On the other hand, there is substantial evidence showing that newer members have been excluded from senior positions and sneered at or ignored by more established members, most famously when French President Jacques Chirac told pro-US countries that they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up” in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Just a year later, eight CEE countries joined the bloc, with those words still ringing in their ears.
There may now be an opportunity to change. The defeat of Viktor Orbán’s anti-EU government in Hungary’s general election on April 12 provides an opportunity for the bloc to reset the relationship, and perhaps to bridge divides long in the making.
This division has been documented in a series of detailed studies by European Democracy Consulting (EDC), a pro-EU non-profit organization based in Austria that focuses on European democracy and institutions.
EDC started systematically researching the issue after it found “a worrisome pattern of under-representation for Central and Eastern Europe” in a 2019 review of the bloc’s leadership. It has since surveyed 73 EU agencies, 90 positions, and 539 individual office-holders from 1952 through 2023 and drawn the same conclusion.
The 10 new member states that joined in 2004 included the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. They were joined by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and Croatia in 2013, making up the 10 states EDC identifies as the EU’s Central and Eastern members. That is almost one-third of the bloc’s membership.
And yet despite this eastward expansion, since 2004 Western and Southern Europe have captured between 83% and 89% of the bloc’s leadership posts, EDC found after its researchers surveyed the roles of president, general secretary, director, and executive board member across the bloc’s decision-making and executive bodies. This does not include the European Commission, where each country is automatically assigned one post.
In 2023, the most recent year for which EDC published analysis, Western European citizens alone — excluding Southern Europeans — received 73% of all new appointments, while not a single person from Central or Eastern Europe was appointed to a leadership post.
EDC has called for reforms to enable each of the EU’s five regions to hold a 20% share of leadership appointments. If change is not delivered, Eurosceptic opinion and parties will grow, it warned.
It wants the bloc’s leadership to acknowledge the problem and its likely negative impact and set out a plan of action with measurable targets so progress can be publicly tracked. Most importantly, it should act swiftly so it does not “leave the results of this analysis to Eurosceptic movements,” EDC said.
One measurable goal suggested by EDC is that by 2030, each region’s proportion of appointments should be less than one-third below or above its share of the bloc’s population over a rolling three-year period.
The lack of representation at the top of the EU may help explain why repeated warnings from Central and Eastern Europe were ignored before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After the invasion, some Western European leaders admitted they should have paid more attention to countries with direct experience of Russian imperialism.
“We could have listened to our friends in the Baltics more closely,” Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said six months after the full-scale invasion. French diplomat Pierre Vimont, a former envoy to Russia, agreed, telling a Hungarian journalist that “countries in your region often have a better understanding of Russian realities because of their history and geography than we Western Europeans do.”
Underestimating Moscow’s threat has deep roots, and was observed by the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1933, at a time when Western Europeans were naively looking to Russia for “inspiration and hope.” For Eastern Europeans: “Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbors knew, great wrong was being done, and terrible danger lay.”
Part of the problem is that many Western Europeans seem to cling to the notion that the central and eastern parts of their continent are “backward” in terms of national and social progress, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, and the growth of their economies since joining the EU. That has sometimes been apparent in disagreements about social issues, like gay rights and developing world migration.
Since 2023, perhaps as a result of the war in Ukraine, which touches the borders of four Central and Eastern European member states, the EU has appointed two Central and Eastern European citizens to senior positions (while each EU member state has a commissioner, their portfolios are assigned by the Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen).
Former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas was named chief of the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy, while former Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius was appointed to lead defense and space policy, the first two citizens from the Baltic republics to reach the upper echelons of the bloc.
While some progress appears to have been made since the EDC reports brought the problem to public attention, it is difficult to quantify, as there have been no reports issued in either 2025 or 2026.
Kevin J. McNamara is a former journalist and congressional aide. He is the author of Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (New York: Public Affairs), a history of the dramatic events surrounding the founding of Czecho-Slovakia in 1918.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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