Who's Hot--and Who's Not.(European Union membership)

A decade ago, when Czechoslovakia split in two, the Slovak capital of Bratislava didn't seem to have much to offer. Its dilapidated old town marked it as a provincial backwater. The ugly jumble of socialist "concrete modern" offices in the city center looked run-down from the day they were built. The country's leaders, ex-communists turned nationalists, quickly became pariahs of the region.

What a difference a decade makes. Today the old town sparkles with rejuvenated architectural jewels. Austrian, German and American businessmen hammer out deals in trendy new cafes and bars, where young people party late into the night. As NATO gathers in Prague this week, Slovakia will be invited to enter the alliance. No less startling, the Slovaks are set to join the EU at the same time as the rival Czechs, long presumed to be more modern and "Europeanized." "There's a real buzz in the air right now," says Jake Slegers, the executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Slovakia, who's amazed almost daily by Bratislava's transformation. "Never in your wildest dreams would you have believed that a city could change so much in such a short time."

Contrast that with the grim mood to Slovakia's north. For most of the 1990s, Poland was the poster boy for successful shock therapy in Central Europe. Successive governments could boast of 6 and 7 percent growth rates. New businesses sprouted everywhere, and foreign investors eagerly got in on the action. But that optimism has since dissipated. This year the Polish economy is expected to grow by a paltry 1.5 percent; unemployment remains stuck at 17.4 percent, and the left-wing government of Prime Minister Leszek Miller has few clues how to get things back on track. "It's true that Poland is the victim of a global slowdown, especially of Germany's slowdown," says Mariusz Ziomecki, the editor of the business monthly Profit. "But Poland is no longer the star of the region largely because of its own faults."

As the EU prepares for its "big bang" expansion, welcoming 10 new members by 2004, the perception of who's up and who's down among the newcomers has shifted--with Slovakia now in the first category and Poland in the second. Not all the changes have been as dramatic, but they're remarkable nonetheless. Look at Hungary, consistently a strong economic performer with the highest per capita foreign investment in the region. For the better part of the decade, Hungarians have been oddly downbeat. But more recently, optimism has surged. Support for EU membership has jumped from 55 to 64 percent; even the country's notoriously high suicide rate has fallen. And consider the gung-ho comeback of the tiny Baltic states, hit hard by the Russian economic crisis of the late 1990s. With Finns and Swedes leading the charge, foreign investors have flocked in, taking advantage of low taxes and tariffs to get a stake in what many international businessmen see as perhaps Europe's hottest region.

Nowhere is the mood more ebullient than in Slovenia. According to last year's Eurobarometer poll, 85 percent of the country's inhabitants say they are satisfied with their lives--2 percent higher than the EU average and much higher than the other candidate countries. That's hardly surprising. With a per capita income of about $10,000, Slovenia is much closer to EU living standards than anyone else; the figure is about twice that of Poland, and about the same as Greece. Slovenia boasts higher mobile-phone usage than many of its Western neighbors, and far more English and German speakers than any of the other candidate countries. There are worries, though. "People remember that Slovenia was the richest part of Yugoslavia," says Ksenija Sabec, a Ljubljana University sociologist. "Now they're afraid that we'll be the poor ...