A continent divided

The row over Iraq has split Europe in two. In one camp: France and Germany. In the other: Latvia, Lithuania and many more former Eastern bloc states. As 'old' and 'new' Europe square up for a fight, who, asks Mary Dejevsky, will win?

The US Defense Secretary is not a man to express himself in diplomatic niceties when an unadorned insult will do. But even Donald Rumsfeld cannot have anticipated the furore unleashed by his remarks about "new" and "old" Europe. Now, four weeks after the event – a question-and-answer session with foreign reporters in Washington – the outcry over the Pentagon hawk-in-chief's new division of Europe is louder than ever, thanks largely to a counter-offensive launched by that other world-class straight-talker, President Jacques Chirac of France.

Rumsfeld had appeared to divide Europe into two: the old Franco-German axis and the rest. It took Chirac, ever prickly on matters of French and European identity, just hours to appoint himself and his Gaullist ministers the official spokesmen and defenders of "old" Europe. Even then, the whole dispute might have faded away, had not a clutch of essentially "old" Europeans, such as Britain, Spain and Italy (how old does old have to be?), celebrated Rumsfeld's rebranding of them by publishing an open letter in support of the United States. This letter was also signed by three of the "new" European countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – the first former communist states to join Nato and among the 10 countries which have qualified to join the European Union in 2004

In truth, the substance of this open letter, published to great fanfare across Europe, was not great. It was a lukewarm expression of support for the US perspective on Iraq and the world and it did not support any rush to war. But its symbolic value was huge. The philosophical split between "old" and "new" Europe identified by Donald Rumsfeld had been made manifest, and the countries categorised as "old" Europe, led by France, felt slighted – especially as most of them, including the EU's current president, Greece, had been neither asked to sign the letter nor informed of its existence.

A second open letter along the same lines, signed by 10 Baltic, Balkan and former Eastern bloc states, attracted rather less attention when it was published a few days later, but added to the Franco-German irritation. Here, after all, were 13 countries, only three of them members of Nato and none of them yet full members of the European Union, putting their oar into the increasingly nasty transatlantic dispute between the US, and France and Germany.

"Old" Europe's fightback began in earnest at the UN Security Council a week ago, when France argued successfully that weapons inspections should continue, describing war as a very last resort. It continued at Nato, where France and Germany, along with Belgium and Luxembourg, delayed and then limited US plans to install missiles in Turkey. But it reached its archly magnificent climax at Monday's emergency EU summit in Brussels, where Chirac first secured the exclusion of the not-yet EU members from the discussions and then roundly ticked them off for having dared to weigh in on European policy from outside the "family". They were being "childish", "irresponsible" and "badly behaved". They had, he said, "missed a good opportunity to shut up".

So "old" Europe has had plenty of chances to express itself since Rumsfeld tore up the map of the continent. "New" Europe's opinion of the whole matter has received less attention.

At first, all one could hear from the east were the apoplectic cries of "new" Europe's political leaders. Full of hurt pride and incensed at the perceived insult from Chirac, they spurned his advice to "shut up". The Bulgarians called in the French ambassador and read the riot act. Poland's deputy foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, called Chirac's comments "harmful and unnecessary". "We believe," he said, "that our entry into the EU is a real chance for us, but also a chance for the EU."

From the Baltic states, an editorial in the Latvian newspaper Diena said: "This is no longer Napoleon's Europe, but the Europe of former dissidents such as Vaclav Havel." From far and wide, Chirac was accused of doing exactly what he objected to the US doing: dictating to other countries how they should behave. Their message was that the future of Europe lay as much with them as with the "old" Europeans, and if that meant a less dog-in-the manger, more outgoing, Atlanticist Europe, so much the better.

At this point it is worth stepping back and reflecting for a moment on the whole bizarre picture. Go to any of the major cities or the countryside of "new" Europe and look around. What do you see, if not the history and heartland of a very old Europe? "New" Europe, so-called, contains some of the quaintest, most fairytale architecture and landscapes of this continent. In manners, the "new" Europeans are punctilious, in their social discourse, they are restrained, at times stiff and parochial. Much of old Vienna and Austro-Hungary is irrevocably stamped on their character; as in the 18th and 19th centuries, they still idolise France as the acme of cultural refinement and civilisation. And despite the energetic spurts of free-market growth that followed their liberation from the dead hand of Soviet communism, their economies are now sluggish.

These contradictions help to explain at last some of the fury of the French president. No less pertinent was the sense, not restricted to France, that the Americans had set out to fish in Europe's troubled waters and hook some extra allies for themselves at a time when their Iraq policy was leaving Washington increasingly isolated.

But "new" Europe's response to the fracas was more complex than its leaders' knee-jerk defences of national pride might suggest. Beyond the ritual objections lay a far more variegated appreciation of the whys and wherefores of the distinction that Donald Rumsfeld and Jacques Chirac had separately drawn.

There was some anger about Chirac's remarks. From the Czech Republic, the deputy editor of Lidove Noviny, David Schorf, describes them as an "unprecedented attack on the sovereignty of our country... the sort of behaviour reminiscent in the Czech Republic of the Brezhnev era". He adds: "Fortunately for us, Chirac has not sent in the tanks yet to shut us up."

But there was understanding, too, that the "new" members would not have a full voice until they were full members of the EU, and even then they would not see themselves as anything like global players. The general response to Chirac's remarks in Latvia, says Aivars Ozolins of the Diena newspaper, was "indignation, coupled with amusement that the French president could have made such a diplomatic mistake". From Hungary, Endre Aczel, a commentator with Nepszabadsag newspaper, says: "We are not in the family yet, so I think he's right to say we don't have those rights because we are not members."

At the same time, there was some concern that in speaking out now, the "new" Europeans might have overplayed their hand and allowed themselves to be drawn into an American game. "There is a danger of an American trap," says Wojtek Jagielski of the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza. David Schorf, Jagielski's equivalent in the Czech Republic, agrees: "I hope our political leaders will realise that our European neighbours are closer than the US, and that economic subsidies will come from Brussels, not Washington." Reluctantly, most "new" Europeans seem to accept that there is a difference in worldview between the "old" and "new" Europe, born of the former Eastern bloc states' bitter experience of communism. In Latvia, Aivars Ozolins of Diena speaks for many when he says that the "old" Europeans do not feel under the same sort of threat as the "new" Europeans: "We feel the need for the sort of 'hard' security that only the United States can provide." Jagielski says that many Poles also felt indebted to the US for being in the vanguard of the political struggle for democracy in Eastern Europe in the Seventies and Eighties.

In Bulgaria, Petar Karaboev, the deputy editor of Dnevnik newspaper, says that EU enlargement was "in a way like going to school, so you can't expect to graduate after just a few lessons". And Jagielski agrees, saying that Poles see themselves somewhat like "students or younger brothers" of "old" Europeans: "We want to follow them in how they behave, think and talk." But, he adds, "there is no big difference in our dreams and our hopes". And he feels that among his 16-year-old son's generation, the differences are dying out. But other Poles subscribe more to the pained response of Endre Aczel of Nepszabadsag, who says: "It hurts Hungarians to be called 'new'. We are rejoining Europe, but we don't consider ourselves younger Europeans. You've had the Hungarian state here for a thousand years."

The notion that the "new" Europeans were any more enthusiastic about a war on Iraq than the "old" Europeans is almost universally rejected. Across Eastern and Central Europe, public opinion against a war without a UN mandate is running almost as high as in Britain, even if far fewer people demonstrated on the streets last Saturday. "New" Europe might see the US as the guarantor of its security, but it has misgivings as deep as "old" Europe's about what it sees as Washington's unilateralist tendencies.

Which brings us back to Donald Rumsfeld. When he made his remarks about "new" and "old" Europe, he was widely misinterpreted. What he actually said to the Dutch journalist who asked him about European hostility to a possible war was this: "Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire Nato Europe today, the centre of gravity is shifting to the east."

The fact is that Rumsfeld was being slightly more subtle than usual. He did not divide the European countries crudely into "old" and "new", though he did place France and Germany squarely in the camp of the old. What he was articulating is a widespread view in Washington that the accession of the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe will shift the balance in Europe and make the "old" continent as a whole more Atlanticist, more hawkish in its defence policy and more attuned to the preoccupations of the United States, than it may currently be. That the Europeans, "old" and "new", took the remarks so personally and distorted them so much, has simply confirmed the US administration in its preconception of the "old continent" as incapable of unity, backward- looking and preoccupied with itself.

Additional reporting by James Palmer

The New Europe: a user's guide

Czech Republic

About 80,000 sq km of landlocked Eastern European that's produced luminaries such as Vaclav Havel, the novelist Franz Kafka and the tennis player Martina Navratilova. Famous for the unremitting beauty of its capital, Prague, where the quaint, the ornate and the gently crumbling are to be found in profusion – as are the bargain-beer-seeking masses of Britain.

Estonia

The smallest, but most fascinating of the ex-Soviet republics boasts a profusion of small islands off its coast, through which weave ships full of Finns on vodka cruises. Relics of Russification (including Peter the Great's palace at Kadriorg) strew the landscape, but the remaining minority Russian community still get a hard time from the Estonians. The capital, Tallinn, is a medieval gem: like walking through a Gothic fairytale.

Hungary

While the capital Budapest vies with Prague for the role of the hub of the new Europe, rural Hungary basks in the comfortable obscurity of former Imperial glories: from the medieval townscapes east of the Danube to the handsome Austro-Hungarian flourishes of Sopron in the west. Culturally speaking, organised crime is a problem, but music is a strength: Liszt, Bartok and Kodaly were all native sons.

Latvia

"The land of pigs and potatoes" is how other Balts describe Latvia, a low, flat and heavily wooded country that will never win any prizes for scenery. Much of the capital, Riga, resembles a typical, grey Soviet conurbation, but the old city has some admirable Art Nouveau architecture. Staple diet: herrings and pilchards; favourite pasttimes: people-trafficking and lynx-hunting.

Lithuania

The largest Baltic republic once commanded a huge slab of Eastern Europe, stretching as far south as the Black Sea, but its frontiers have shrunk to an Ireland-sized slice of Central Europe. The countryside – plains, wolf-haunted pine forest and swamps – is unchallenging, but the capital, Vilnius, has a vast cathedral, whose façade is lifted straight from the Parthenon. As in Latvia, people-trafficking is rife; as in the Czech Republic, admitting to being a gypsy is ill-advised.

Poland

A land of farmers (a fifth of the population work in agriculture), hills and lakes. Most visitors converge on Krakow, the medieval masterpiece where Steven Spielberg filmed Schindler's List. But further south, the Tatra mountains offer plausible (and very cheap) skiing. Famous sons and daughters tend to be have social consciences: Marie Curie, the Pope and Lech Walesa, the anti-communist Gdansk shipyard worker.

Simon Calder