Will Central and Eastern European Countries Dismantle the European Union?—Contrasting European Developments to Current Trends in the US

This paper analyzes the historical background of the current developments in Central Eastern Europe, in other parts of Eastern Europe and in previously member countries of the former Soviet Union. The author concludes that the political and economic transformation of these countries to a solid democracy and well-functioning market economy have not been successful for most of them yet, and this may have serious consequences on the European Union, too. The paper contrasts these trends with what we can observe in the United States now. The author turns to the “hard facts” next, when he discusses the different factors of human and economic development and the issue of migration in the Central and East European post-socialist countries and in a selected group of advanced countries.

constitution and the legal system of the United States, its attacks on free media and speech are very similar to what we can observe in Hungary and in other CEE countries, and on the agenda of extreme right political groups in Western and Southern Europe.
Initially, the European crisis has been triggered by the collapse of the real estate market in the United States and the ensuing shocks at US stock exchanges in 2006-2007, but its roots reach much deeper than the effects of the financial turmoil in the United States. Will developments in Europe and the US converge and lead them into the same dark pit? Will the failure of several CEE countries to create a stable and solid political democracy and a sound market economy, and the resurgence of nationalist and racist groups in these countries and in a number of West and South European countries, too, ultimately result in the disintegration of the EU? As for the United States, will the world's leading political democracy resort to segregation, scapegoating certain ethnic groups, closing its borders and embracing authoritarianism?

Literature Review and Methodology
Section 2 is a verbal analysis of recent and previous-pre-World War II and socialist-development in indicators on the level of education in different countries from OECD PISA Report 2016. Since-as I discuss in this paper-populism, authoritarianism and politically high-level corruption go hand-in-hand in most of the CEE countries, I also collected data from Transparency International's database on corruption. I present those data in the Appendix. groups in my analysis. Finally, I conducted a simple linear regression analysis on the relationship between my composite HDI indicator and its components by countries and country groups to see which factors have the largest impact on these countries' social, human and economic development.

Background
The deepening European crisis started with the US's real estate, then financial crisis and with Greece's financial collapse. Then it quickly accelerated with the explosion of the Syrian refugee crisis accompanied by an increasing inflow of Muslim immigrants (Note 4). Yet, what may lead to the destabilization of the European Union is not the financial shock or the successive waves of immigrants, but the widening and deepening rift between West European and Central and East European values and attitudes toward political democracy, human rights and individual liberty.
The international financial crisis enfeebled the "immune system" of European countries and rendered them vulnerable to more acute "auto-immune" diseases, manifested in the EU's inability to solve the Greek government debt crisis or the current immigration crisis. However, the decisive factors of a deep-seated malaise lie much deeper: they are related to an increasing confusion about the fundamental values of political democracy and a sound economic system, especially in a growing number of CEE and other East European countries.
The US has been similarly and deeply affected by the worldwide financial and economic crisis and migration. The latter issue has become the centerpiece of president Trump's agenda as it has the authoritarian right-wing political parties and groups in Great Britain, France and Italy, and even in Scandinavian and other North European countries, not to mention the extremist Central and East European nations. However, the US had left most of the effects of the recent economic crisis behind already in 2011-2012, while the EU member states continue to struggle with the issues of economic recovery and first of all, with high unemployment rates that are close to 10% in several EU member countries. As can also be derived from the data in Table 1, the current proliferation of extremism, nationalism and racism in the US-supported by president Trump and his close allies-have nothing to do directly with past economic or political problems, nor in the EU member countries. However, the neglect and abandonment of large groups of the US or those of the European population by the previous governments who had been adversely affected by the recent financial and economic crisis created a fertile soil for extremist and violent policies and social groups in the US and in Europe, too.
In January 1992, I published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled "Why Eastern Europe Is Going Nowhere?" Now I must admit I was wrong. Several East European countries are unfortunately heading toward a specific direction: toward dictatorial, racist and corrupt politico-economic systems the prefiguration of which can be partly found in pro-Fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, and in part in the "actually existing socialism" between 1950s and the late 1980s. However, I must emphasize a very important difference between the US and CEE countries: while the system of checks and balances are still in place in the United States-although the current president and his aids try to undermine this crucial guarantee upholding a democratic and just political system in the US-as yet no such safeguards can be found in several CEE countries. However, should the current trends gather force in the US, they will considerably weaken the system of checks and balances, as well as the US's leading position in the global economy. While the United States has been a "model" for democracy, individual freedom and liberty for most people around the world, today its leading role is fading.
How could the promising start of the Central and East European political and economic transition of the early 1990s from "actually existing socialism" morph into a dismal East European "actually own loyal minions. In addition, the conservative, right-wing political parties adopted increasingly nationalist and racist ideologies and practices. Right-wing extremism reached back to the Nazi epoch, as well. These political practices merged into the current populism, extremism and authoritarianism in many of the Central and East European countries.

Economic and Social Development in the Post-Socialist Countries
In the following section I shall analyze and discuss the data on post-socialist countries in the period of  I compare and contrast the economic and social development of post-socialist countries with a group of advanced countries that includes: Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, with the "core" countries of the EU-labelled as "Advanced EU Countries" (Note 7) and with the South European EU member countries (Note 8). The following data tables and analysis refer to these country groups.
The political and economic transformation started with the populations' and politicians' high hope about a bright future in all East European countries. They all assumed that these countries will easily jump the band-wagon of the advanced countries' development path. Then the first shock came in the early 1990s when the previously existing foreign trade network-the COMECON-of the Central and East European countries collapsed and millions of people lost their job overnight.
The transition process of the formerly socialist countries-including the creation of institutions of a multi-party political democracy, of a legal system that is based on individual freedom and liberty, of a market economy based on private ownership and secured property rights, and the opening up to the   . I present the results in Table 2 below. Legend: Avg = average for the given period; Co.s = Countries.
As can be seen in Table 2 Earth in that period: employment in agriculture accounted for 28.8%, in industry 29.2% while in the service sector only for 42%. In the currently populist Central and East European countries, the same measures stood at 16.4%, 36.5% and 47.1%, respectively. Education and healthcare were much more developed in the latter than in the former group of countries. Central East European populist countries had attracted more foreign direct investments relative to their GDP than the entire group of post-socialist countries, too (2.3% and 1.6%, respectively). Despite these positive endowments, CEE populist countries could not reduce the gap between themselves and the advanced European countries or other advanced countries.
It is also important and interesting to observe what happened in the United States of America since the last decade of the 20 th century. As can be seen in Table 2 Table 3 below!). I also calculated the difference between the US's and the advanced part of the EU's HDI between 1990 and 2017 (See Table 4 below!). Legend: Euro A = Euro Area; EU Adv = Advanced EU member countries; Avg = Average.

Table 4. The Difference between the US's and the EU Regions' HDI between 1990 and 2017
As data in Table 4 attest, the gap between the US's HDI and different parts of the EU has been fluctuating since 1990, but it started widening recently. This is partly due to the consequences of increasing income inequality in the US after the recent financial and economic crisis, but is also connected to president Trump's populist foreign trade and industrial policy (Note 16).

Now we ask the really important question: which factors have driven the change of the countries' HDI
in different groups of countries? To answer this question, I used a simple linear regression analysis to relate the HDI to its components. The regression function I applied was as follows: where the definitions of the explanatory variables are given above, except ANNIpCG t , which stands for the annual growth of the adjusted net national income per capita in the different country groups in period t. I included this variable in the analysis to test the widespread assumption that a country's human (economic and social) development is mostly driven by its economic growth.
After I derived the parameters of the explanatory (independent) variables from the regression function,  values) to unity. By doing so, I ultimately received the contribution of each factor to the composite HDI's changes in percentages. I present the results by country groups in Tables 5.a-5.e below. I included the HDI values in these tables, too, in order to evaluate the impact and the direction of change in the explanatory factors on HDI. Table 5.a presents the results for the whole group of post-socialist countries, including the East European, the Middle Asian, the Asian and the Latin-American countries, too. This is a fairly heterogeneous set of countries regarding their level of economic development and that of their social and legal institutions. Consequently, the less-developed post-Soviet and Balkan countries plus China dominate the results of the whole group. Legend: *** = significant at 0.01 level; ** = significant at 0.05 level; * = significant at 0.10 level; ANNIpCG = Adjusted Net National Income per Capita Annual Growth Rate.
As can be seen in Table 5.a, HDI improved in the entire group of post-socialist countries between 1990 and 2012, but it started fluctuating after that year. The most powerful factor that initially drove the growth of HDI was the considerable improvement of the healthcare indicators, especially the rapidly decreasing mortality rate in the less-developed post-socialist countries. The improving welfare indicators had a very similar impact on the group's average HDI. Interestingly, education had a much weaker impact on human development than the previous two components. Finally, the impact of economic growth did not have a considerable effect on the group's HDI and it frequently changed even in the opposite direction than the post-socialist countries' human development index. Table 5.b presents the results of the populist CEE countries. This is a fairly homogenous group regarding their level of economic and social development. Legend: *** = significant at 0.01 level; ** = significant at 0.05 level; * = significant at 0.10 level; ANNIpCG = Adjusted Net National Income per Capita Annual Growth Rate.
Human development in the CEE populist countries had some similarities to, but also some differences with the whole group of the post-socialist countries at the beginning of the transition period: human capital formation dominated the factors of HDI, but healthcare rather than welfare-as it happened in the entire post-socialist group-came next. However, from 1995 on, healthcare has driven HDI to a decrease in this group, and healthcare actually drifted toward a full collapse in some populist countries, first of all, in Hungary (Note 17). As the political and economic transformation progressed in these countries, human capital took over the leading role in affecting changes of the composite HDI. In the early years of transition human capital formation had a positive impact on HDI. This could be attributed to the fact that these CEE countries attracted a large number of foreign universities, educators and students from the advanced countries. In addition, global companies offshored some of their R&D activities to these countries, too. However, as OECD's latest PISA Report attests (Note 18), the quality of education considerably deteriorated in most populist countries during recent years, and HDI moved along as can be seen in the previous table.
We can observe a more transparent and straightforward relationship between the change of per capita national income and HDI in this group: when the change of per capita national income had a negative effect on HDI, it could not be compensated or rebalanced by the other factors of HDI. This was Legend: *** = significant at 0.01 level; ** = significant at 0.05 level; * = significant at 0.10 level; ANNIpCG = Adjusted Net National Income per Capita Annual Growth Rate.
Data in Table 5.c. show that it has been healthcare and welfare-the latter one especially during and after the recent worldwide financial and economic crisis-that had the largest impact on the advanced countries' human development. Human capital did not have such a strong effect as the other two factors.
This is the direct consequence of the fact that education, literacy and R&D have already been at a high level in these countries for a long time, without a considerable change. Economic growth played a fluctuating role in human development, but it clearly contributed to the decrease of HDI between 2011 and 2016. Legend: *** = significant at 0.01 level; ** = significant at 0.05 level; * = significant at 0.10 level; ANNIpCG = Adjusted Net National Income per Capita Annual Growth Rate.
Interestingly, in the European advanced countries it has been human capital formation that had the largest impact on HDI as can be seen in Table 5.d. The second important factor has been the growth rate of per capita net national income that reflect the fact that these countries have been struggling with the problems of the EU's operation and could much hardly adjust to the new conditions during and after the recent financial and economic crisis.  In the South European EU member countries, it have been the healthcare and the welfare indicators that had an important effect on HDI. However, as in the advanced EU member countries, net national income per capita had also a very strong impact on these countries' social and economic development.
The above results pose an intriguing and important question: while the growth rate of the per capita net national income did not have a large impact on the countries' HDI, especially before the recent worldwide crisis, the change of this indicator frequently had a negative impact on HDI. We may even conclude from this finding that it is not the level of per capita national income-or per capita GDP-that results in the improvement of education, healthcare and welfare services, but the latter factors drive the countries' economic development (Note 19