As an American, but one very familiar with Central and Eastern Europe, I believe that integrated Europe is extremely important for several reasons. First of all, it is important for maintaining peace and stability, and thus, for overcoming terrible legacies of the Second World War, so devastating to Europe and the rest of the world. Secondly, European Union plays a crucial role in creating economic opportunities for all of its members. The current crisis should not make us forget how prosperous Europe is and can still be. Thirdly, European integration might be a driving force behind a process of creating broader sense of political identity. Europeans have so many different cultures and nationalities and there is a need to bring them together, so that they have some shared sense of community. Any European project has to take this into account, but at the same time create means for people to cultivate their own national identity at the local level.

The process of European integration has gone through a number of changes since the early 1990s. Some of them were very encouraging, and some problematic. The first dramatic change occurred right after 1989, when the long-lasting Soviet domination over a large part of the continent collapsed and many nations suddenly had to reinvent their states, drawing upon their own democratic traditions. In Poland or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, i.e. countries with some history and strong feelings for democracy, this transformation proceeded quite smoothly. In other states it was less clear on what traditions new institutions should be built. In Hungary, where I now live, there have been strong democratic traditions, but also strong authoritarian traditions, dating back to the Habsburg era. The same is certainly true of Romania, Bulgaria and other countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. These were the initial challenges, later developing in the 1990s.

At that time there were two major steps, Eastern Europeans were eager to take in order to revive and develop their democratic traditions. The first one was the NATO accession. Joining the alliance which has been at the center of the Cold War, but which was really committed to the defense of democracy, was a very important moment for them. Being admitted to the group meant becoming a member of the democratic community. The EU accession – the second of the steps – was more complicated, but perhaps even more important. Undoubtedly it created more excitement among the public, also because of some practical advantages of participating in the common market and being able to travel within the Schengen zone.

Ten years after the accession, we clearly see that at least some expectations of the public have not been met. Why? Firstly, there was a structural problem from the very outset. European Union was designed largely as an economic project and it failed to create effective instruments of political participation for the public. Centralization of the European bureaucracy in Brussels and the development of a highly structured regulatory governance system created a growing frustration among the Central European societies, and indeed among other European peoples as well. A democracy deficit at the highest levels is one of the major problems EU needs to tackle in order to develop. It has been partially addressed by the growing political influence of the European Parliament, which has become a more active player in representing opinions of the European electorate. But I think there is still a lot to be done in order to give people a sense of participation. Otherwise, they will always turn for help only to their national governments, which can sometimes act against Brussels.

The second big factor undermining trust in the European project was obviously the economic meltdown. The way the euro crisis has been managed so far seems to prove that southern and eastern regions of the EU are treated as secondary areas by the central economies of Germany, the Benelux area and to a lesser extent France. Economic instability has also created some further tensions, since people affected by the crisis want to identify the causes of it and punish those, who are allegedly to blame, i.e. immigrants and ethnic minorities. As a result in many European countries xenophobic sentiments are on the rise. The anti-immigrant, anti-Roma perspective that you see in Europe today is very disturbing. These are pan-European phenomena, not specific to the Central and Eastern Europe. Naturally, different politicians in different countries are using these processes to foster their own interests. This is particularly true in Hungary, but in other countries as well.

Will these two factors undermine the whole process of European integration? We should do all we can to prevent it. European integration is of crucial importance for the reasons of peace, stability, economic prosperity and democratic rule across the whole continent. This is even more true today than ever. That is why I was pleased to see Croatia becoming a member, and I think it is of crucial importance to bring in other Balkan countries. Dynamic European integration, even if it has serious problems today, should continue and must not be reversed.

* John Shattuk is an American legal scholar and diplomat. He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1993 to 1998, under President Bill Clinton. From 1998 to 2000 he served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Since 2009 he has been the President and Rector of Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. This article originally appeared in Kultura Liberalna.

I am on the road this month, now in Paris. For the previous three weeks, I have been teaching a course, “Social Movements, Publics and Politics,” at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. I also squeezed in, the weekend before last, work in Sofia, Bulgaria, consulting, along with Sandrine Kott, on a European Union research project “Regime and Society in Eastern Europe.” The research was from and on Bulgaria (Ivajlo Znepolski), Germany (Thomas Lindenberger), Hungary (Adam Takacs), and Poland (Dariusz Stola), studying “State and Society in Eastern Europe, 1956 – 1987.” While in Sofia, I had an opportunity to spend a few hours exploring the protests there, a chance to observe an exciting social movement confronting seemingly intractable problems. The protest, the research and the teaching were interestingly related: Here are some preliminary notes on the protest, as illuminated by my seminar and the reports of the European scholars.

I was at the protest on a Sunday, a slow day apparently. The protest routine: daily, people gather in front of the government building at 6:00 PM. There is a human ecology in the gathering. Friends meet each other at agreed upon places in the plaza and then march together to the Parliament building, attempting to disrupt the politics as usual. Informal groups with peer pressure keep the protests going. People come a number of days a week, visible to their friends and colleagues, as well as the nation and beyond: small group social interaction links with and fortifies the large social protest.

During the week, people gather in large numbers after work; on weekends, a smaller group gets together, perhaps a thousand or two on the Sunday I was there. Yet, it still was impressive, enthusiastic chanting and whistling, inventive placards, coupled with interesting discussions. I was there on the thirty seventh day of the demonstration, and it has continued (on day forty, there was violence). Through a few quick exchanges, I felt I had a sense of the general contours and direction of the movement.

The protesters are outraged by Parliamentary machinations, demanding the resignation of the present government, calling for new elections. They are trying to break a cycle of corruption, which has led to political and economic stagnation, and national impoverishment. Quite obvious to me: Bulgaria in 1989 had a much stronger economy than Poland. The reversal is now striking. Everywhere in Sofia, I could perceive the legacies of communism. Wroclaw more resembles Paris in comparison.

There are concerns that the present government is leaning towards Russia, away from Europe: thus along with the Bulgarian flag, the European Union flag is everywhere. There are hopes that if they keep the daily ritual going that in September, unions would join in. After the police broke up a protest blocking the Parliament building last Wednesday, there is hope that the European Union will somehow do something.

The protesters want to put an end to the national decline. Earlier in the year, there were anti-austerity protests, sparked by electricity price increases, leading to the resignation of the right of center government and elections in May that were quite inconclusive. Now, the socialist led governing coalition, including the socialists and the Turkish minority party (combining to have the support of 120 seats in the 240 seat parliament), cynically governs with the tacit support of a xenophobic nationalist party.

Cynicism provoked protest: the appointment of media mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the national security agency, the appointment of an oligarch to oversee, among other things, oligarchic corruption. Although he has resigned in response, the demonstrations continue, demanding new elections, seeking to form an electoral coalition of small parties who did not make it into parliament, hoping that somehow the distance between the political class and the broad public will be diminished.

Viewed from afar, the situation looks hopeless. The regime and society appear to be worlds apart, no matter which party is dominant. A rotation of leadership changes little. No election result would appear to have the potential to break Bulgaria’s downward spiral, supported by corruption, center, right and center. But looking closely, as was the common theme of my seminar and the EU research team, there is overlooked promise.

I was very impressed by the form of the protest. The demonstration has become a daily ritual for tens of thousands of citizens. They don’t all attend every day, nor do they bodily occupy a space, day and night (though there is a small occupation across from parliament). Rather they have made protest a regular aspect of Sofia’s everyday life. The regularity of the protests reminds me of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their struggle against the Argentine Junta and its dirty war, although these protesters have no claim to martyred status. They meet daily rather than weekly. Everyday ordinary participation demonstrates democracy. Indeed it may help form democracy.

In my course and in my commentary with the European researchers on the topic of state and society in the good old bad days around the old Soviet bloc, I emphasized a key proposition of Hannah Arendt, my favorite political thinker. She maintains that in politics the means are an important part of the end. The way we do politics, the way we appear when we act politically, is an important consequential political fact. With this in mind, the creativity of the protesters, the way they are centered on the problem of politic cynicism and corruption, was very impressive. A young woman told me that in her judgment as the protests began she thought that a key sign of the seriousness of the protest would be if older people joined in. The presence of young and old together was quite striking. The fact that a medieval historian who clearly looked westward for his political inspiration and was liberal in the European sense of the term, underscored the importance of unions joining the protests, suggested to me a view of the common good that went beyond narrow orientation or interests. While the corruption is found across the political spectrum, this appears to be matched by protests that are across the social and political spectrums. A new alternative public is in formation.

The two key propositions of my Wroclaw course: the new “new social movements,” the movements of and after 2011, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and beyond, are distinctive in the way that they constitute diverse independent publics, and a key to their success is maintaining the diversity: something that tragically has not happened in the Arab world. In Bulgaria, there still is promise.

In the EU research project, an overall basic finding is that social changes, changes in the way people live and interact with each other, have a way of shaping even the most repressive regimes. Regime action has a way of creating social forces beyond their control (Stola). Expertise has a way of significantly limiting political – ideological mandates (Lindenberger), and philosophy and critical thinking are imperfectly controlled by ideology and political repression: cultural creativity has a way of persisting even under the most repressive conditions (Tokacs and Znepolski). While I lack the knowledge to know how this might lead to the next move in Bulgarian development, the social vitality, good humor and openness of the protesters, combined with their resolute democratic action, provide grounds for hope. The sort of creative political action I observed long ago on the Polish political scene (before, during and after Solidarność) is now observable in Bulgaria.