Posted Sunday, April 4, 2004; 11.52BST
Demand to study abroad is also high. At Charles University in Prague, there are four applicants for every spot in the E.U.-sponsored Erasmus student-exchange program, which provides scholarships to study in Western Europe. And young people know that if they want to get ahead in the new unified Europe, they need to speak the languages. According to an E.U. survey conducted last year, 81% of people aged 15-24 in the accession countries believe that foreign-language skills are the most important job qualification, compared to just 44% in the current E.U. member states; 83% report that they already speak a foreign tongue, compared to 68% among the E.U.'s current membership. English is the most popular, and fashionable, lingua franca. A new advertising campaign for the Polish vodka Luksusowa targets young consumers not with promises of hot sex or fast cars but with free English lessons.
Those lessons were absorbed long ago by the region's emerging entrepreneurial class. Unlike their parents, these young people see the E.U. not as a refuge from political oppression but as a market to exploit. "The E.U. is the best club in the world," enthuses Katia Jurgec Bricman, 35. She quit a teaching job five years ago in Kotlje, Slovenia, to start a porcelain business with her husband, Jure. They now produce 8,000 cups, saucers and vases a year, many for export to Italy and France. The stability of European markets and the eventual adoption of the euro will make it easier to plan for the long term, says Jure. "We will be equal with other businesses in Europe," he says. "To be equal will be enough for us, because right now we are the Third World."
Maciej Sledzinski and Andrzej Smialek look forward to equality, too. They met 15 years ago while studying industrial design in the picturesque medieval Polish town of Kraków. In 1993, while they were still students, they helped start Ergo, a firm that makes point-of-sale dispensers for clients like Nestlé and Philip Morris, in a crumbling warehouse on the city's outskirts. As barriers between Poland and the E.U. have fallen, Ergo's profits have risen. The two are keenly aware that in Poland some of their peers are already shying away from the challenges of the E.U., and not everyone will thrive under harsher competition. "We have two speeds: one for those who are comfortable with E.U. enlargement and modernization, and another for those who are not," says Sledzinski. "I see the E.U. as an opportunity. There's more competition, but we can handle that." He and Smialek have a running start: their business is already operating abroad.
For those who don't make a successful transition, times could be tough. Young Czechs and Poles face the highest unemployment rates in decades. The jobless rate in Poland for people between 19 and 30 is 30%, double what it was a decade ago, and in the Czech Republic, it's 15% for 20- to 24-year-olds. Unlike their Western neighbors, young Central and East Europeans have little in the way of social safety nets. And young people don't get much of a helping hand from their parents either, since family wealth is practically nonexistent due to low incomes under communism.
The blight has consigned men like Antonín Hornák, 25, to history. An unemployed mechanic, he lives with his wife and baby daughter in the same attic room that he occupied as a child in an impoverished region of South Moravia in the Czech Republic. Unable to find a permanent job, he has been forced to take odd seasonal jobs. "I want to live in a world where jobs are plentiful, so young people can earn a decent living and find accommodation so it would be a joy to start a family," he says. Over beers, he and his friends fantasize about the imagined security of communist times. "We were born in the wrong era," he says.
Even among those with immaculate job qualifications, competition for work is fierce. Just four years ago, Zoltán Török, 34, an economist in Budapest, couldn't find anyone willing to take a research job at his bank for €30,000 a year, more than four times the average salary in Hungary. Last year he posted the same job and got 15 applications within two weeks. In the 1990s, "it was easy to make fast progress in one's career," he says. "You left university and already qualified for middle-management positions." That's no longer possible because there are now far fewer jobs and far more qualified applicants. Some people blame the E.U.-mandated reforms for making a bad situation worse. Katerina Konecná, 23, is the Czech Republic's youngest M.P. representing the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. Konecná is too young to remember the era of Soviet rule and doesn't advocate turning back the clock, but she believes the E.U. is forcing reforms to take place too quickly for ordinary Czechs to keep up. "Integration is necessary," she says, "but not right now."
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