The aim is not to make Central Europeans American. It is to remember what we once found so attractive about America.
Thirty-five years ago, Central and Eastern Europe made one of the great strategic choices of the modern era. It chose the West.
The revolutions of 1989 were revolutions of freedom. What followed went beyond democratisation and the shift from central planning to markets. In a broad cultural and economic sense, it was also an Americanisation. I use the word deliberately, and positively.
For a generation emerging from communism, America meant possibility. Free enterprise, private property, competition, technology, individual aspiration; the idea that your future need not be dictated by the state or the system you were born into. America had Coca-Cola and Hollywood, but also Microsoft and Harvard, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. To young Central Europeans, these were versions of one intoxicating proposition: the future could be bigger than the past. Along with the products came the optimism. It may be time to import some of that again.
The most successful transition nobody celebrates enough
The region should have far more confidence in its own story. Since 1989, CEE moved from dictatorship to democracy, from state ownership to private enterprise, from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, from Comecon to the European Single Market. The World Bank calls European integration a ‘convergence machine’, and it pulled tens of millions of Central and Eastern Europeans into the high-income world. The transition was not perfect. Privatisation created winners and losers, institutions developed unevenly, corruption survived, emigration hurt. But judged comparatively, CEE worked. Societies emerging from authoritarianism built functioning markets, joined Western institutions and transformed living standards within a single generation.
America was indispensable to that first transformation: strategically, through NATO enlargement and security; economically, through investment and management know-how; institutionally, through support for democracy and a new leadership class. The least measurable contribution may have been the most important one. Cultural America carried a consistent message: you can build, you can compete, success is legitimate, ambition is legitimate, the individual matters. A market economy needs laws and capital. Entrepreneurship also needs permission to dream, and America helped provide it.
We have seen this film before. Post-war Korea, Japan and West Germany all rebuilt under an American umbrella, and none of them became America. They imported principles and possibilities, then wrote their own software. Central Europe did the same, which is a large part of why the transition held.
The limits of Transition 1.0
The first CEE model was built on catch-up: privatise, stabilise, attract foreign capital, plug into European supply chains, join the EU, converge. It was remarkably effective, and it is running out of road. The World Bank now warns that productivity convergence across the wider region has slowed, and that progress on institutions, technology adoption and innovation has weakened.
CEE cannot spend the next thirty years repeating the strategy of the last thirty. Cheap labour will not make us rich. Foreign investment alone will not make us innovative. EU funds alone will not build global companies. And copying Western Europe at the very moment Western Europe is itself hunting for a new growth model is a strange definition of ambition. What the region needs is Transition 2.0, which is where a second Americanisation becomes interesting.
What a second Americanisation would mean
It would not mean cultural submission, and certainly not importing every American political battle into Bucharest, Warsaw or Prague. Europe has enough arguments of its own. It would mean rediscovering the fundamentals that made both America and post-1989 Central Europe succeed: that markets, competition, private property, merit, technological leadership and capital formation matter, and that economic optimism matters as much as any of them. Call it the operating system of a confident free society.
The first Americanisation helped CEE learn capitalism. The second should help it get better at capitalism, and that means changing the question. For three decades, Central Europe asked how fast it could catch Germany. The next question is what it can become the best in the world at: Romania converting its engineering, IT, energy and human-capital strengths into internationally owned businesses; Poland thinking in global champions and industrial scale; Czechia turning one of Europe’s deepest industrial cultures into advanced manufacturing, defence and technology; the Baltics proving small countries can be digital laboratories. The goal shifts from catch-up capitalism to frontier capitalism.
Frontier capitalism needs capitalists. One underappreciated success of the first transition is that CEE created what communism had deliberately destroyed: an entrepreneurial class. The region now has founders, family businesses, investors and real pools of private capital. The next stage cannot be driven by governments and multinational subsidiaries alone. CEE needs owners, regional headquarters, family businesses that survive generations, deeper capital markets, and successful people who reinvest rather than apologise for success. America is unusually comfortable with ambition, and Central Europe would benefit from a similar comfort.
Why this is also America’s interest
There is an American stake here too. The current US National Security Strategy states plainly that Europe “remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States,” and says Washington counts on “creative, capable, confident, democratic” allies. Whatever one makes of individual elements of the administration’s European policy, the opportunity in that worldview is real. A stronger CEE buys more American technology, opens more room for American capital, is harder to coerce on energy, strengthens Western supply chains and reinforces NATO’s eastern flank. It also gives Washington partners who understand both the value of the transatlantic bond and the cost of losing it. None of this has to rest entirely on what happens between Washington and Brussels. The United States and Central Europe can build another layer beneath it.
This time, the relationship can be reciprocal. In the 1990s it was asymmetrical: America had knowledge, capital and confidence, and CEE needed all three. Today, Central Europe has experience America can learn from, about Russia, about energy vulnerability, about what happens when ideology overruns economic reality, about rebuilding institutions from nothing. Nobody in the region is waiting for another lecture from Washington. What would help is a marketplace between like-minded people: entrepreneurs with entrepreneurs, founders with investors, universities with universities, think tanks with think tanks. They need not agree on everything. The point is to rebuild confidence around one proposition: free societies need competitive economies, and competitive economies need free people.
That will take more than another conference. It calls for permanent institutions built to study the capitalism now emerging, in the age of AI, state competition and reindustrialisation, instead of endlessly re-litigating the capitalism of 1995. CEE is an excellent laboratory in which to do it.
Americanisation without becoming American
The word will make some Europeans uncomfortable. Good. Useful ideas usually do. The aim is not to make Central Europeans American. It is to remember what we once found so attractive about America: confidence, possibility, scale, competition and the dignity of individual ambition. Behind all of it sat one belief, that tomorrow can be better than today and that human agency can make it so.
The first wave of Americanisation helped Central and Eastern Europe escape its twentieth century. The second could help it win the twenty-first. CEE no longer arrives as a student asking for the textbook. It comes as a successful graduate with experience of its own. America brings entrepreneurial scale, capital, technology and a powerful tradition of free enterprise. Central Europe brings resilience, strategic realism, industrial capability and one of the great transformation stories of modern times.
Put the two together again. Central Europe does not need saving. What both sides of the Atlantic need are allies who still believe that freedom, enterprise and ambition can build a better future. The first Americanisation was about joining the West. The second should be about renewing it together.
Photo: Dreamstime.
CEE needs a new wave of Americanisation was originally published on Emerging Europe.
