Europe vs. the Corner Store

The little grocery shop in the building where I grew up in Budapest closed Friday. A trivial event, perhaps, but one connected to momentous transformations in Hungary.

On Saturday, Hungary became one of the 10 new members of the European Union. The shop’s owners couldn’t afford the upgrades needed for “Euro-conformity,” including separate freezers for meat and dairy and a new bathroom with a shower for the staff, whose size would have to double. So, they decided to shut it down.

Such are the trade-offs of EU membership, and they point to why so many Hungarians are uneasy about joining “Europe.”

As every tourist knows, you can tell a lot about a country by visiting its food shops. The little grocery at No. 27 Veres Palne utca has been a barometer of Hungary’s evolution through the decade and a half since the fall of communism.

It opened before the big changes, during an early wave of private enterprise creation. The undercapitalized business pioneers of the late 1980s were shopkeepers and taxi drivers -- people long on ambition and short on cash -- who could get by on little more than sweat equity.

As trade opened up with the world after 1989, the shop saw many changes. Exotic fruits, unfamiliar cheeses and fine wines filled its shelves. One by one, familiar Hungarian brands were replaced by Western ones, or they reappeared in prettier packaging -- and at higher prices.

In recent years, as its surrounding buildings were renovated from bullet-pocked half-ruins into elegant, pale-yellow apartment houses, the grocery shop became an anachronism. The storekeeper still knew you by name, and she would even make change for the new, high-tech parking meters lining the street. But the place seemed shabby and a little dirty, a remnant of a bygone world that Hungary, or at least the downtown street where the grocery was located, had nearly left behind.

Now it’s over -- or rather, it’s finally beginning. The pale blue flag of the European Union has been ceremonially planted in the Budapest parliament adjacent to a Hungarian flag that has seldom stood alone in the last century -- its serial cohabitation with the Austrian, German and Soviet flags marking the usually tragic compromises Hungary has made to prosper, or to survive.

Which is why you don’t hear the sounds of rejoicing in the streets, even though the country is finally getting what it has yearned for: “a place at the table,” “club membership in the civilized world,” the chance “to take our place where we rightly belong” -- to quote the cliches that for decades have echoed in the coffeehouses and the newspaper pages of Budapest.

There is something ironic about a nation that has struggled with mighty powers for so long, only to willingly throw itself into a multinational mega-state whose affairs are organized in capitals of other countries. When I asked a friend, who is a member of the Hungarian parliament, whether his colleagues were prepared for what it meant to follow directives from Brussels, he simply answered, “We have no idea.”

The long-term consequences of the big bet on Europe will take years to play out. All signs indicate that although Eastern Europeans came late to the party, they are likely to profit from it. Meantime in Hungary, where you can still find street signs from the communist years crossed out with red paint, the changeover is the latest in a series of Tarzan-like leaps toward what, one can only hope, is a more promising future.

Until then, the transition to EU membership will boil down to little daily adjustments. They say the price of milk will plummet as Slovak dairy farmers flood the market, but the price of sugar may skyrocket as Hungarian producers go bust. You may look in vain for the chocolate bar that you’ve loved since you were a kid, but you’ll be able to fly to London on a discount airline for the cost of a restaurant meal. And for those lamenting the loss of the little grocery in Veres Palne utca, a shiny, clean, Euro-conforming supermarket is opening down the street.