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The EU's faceless and Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Brussels Moscow revisited should prove to be a relief compared to the IMF's ruffians. The EU is evolving into a land empire, albeit glacially. The polities of central and eastern Europe were always constituents of empires reluctantly or by choice. In some ways they are better suited to form an "ever closer union" than the more veteran members.
The cotton, rice and groundnut oil subventions generously doled out to growers in the United States the EU's most vocal critic harm the third world smallholders and sharecroppers it purports to defend.
Eastern Europe and especially central Europe is the EU's natural reservoir of migrant labor. It is ironic that xenophobic and anti-immigration parties hold the balance of power in a continent so dependent on immigration for the survival of its way of life and institutions. The internal, common, market of the EU has matured.
The West is just discovering this truth and is opening its gates albeit xenophobically and intermittently to poorer foreigners. For what is immigration if not the importation of ambitious indigents, certain to revitalize the EU's rich and somnolent economies? The countries of central and eastern Europe, thus, stand to benefit twice.
But it would need to absorb almost 14 million new, working age, immigrants per year just to preserve a stable ratio of workers to pensioners. Eastern Europe and especially central Europe is the EU's natural reservoir of migrant labor.
Health, sanitary, standards-related and quality regulations render a lot of the supposed access theoretical. Still, it is true that the EU's larger economies are more open to international trade than the United States. Gaymard flaunted a telling statistic: the EU absorbs well over two fifths of Brazil's farm exports.
But even a much-debated phase-in period of 10 years would burden the EU's budget and the patience of its member states and denizens to an acrimonious breaking point. The countries of central and eastern Europe are new consumption and investment markets. They are likely to while the next few decades on a steep growth curve, catching up with the West.
Germany's economy is five to six times the aggregated output of the EU's central European new members plus Slovakia. According to the New York Times, there are 1800 American firms on German soil, with combined sales of $583 billion and a workforce of 800,000 people.
Eustace was very much annoyed, and said it was disgraceful, and that Harold was always getting into scrapes, and would ruin him with all the county people, just as he was beginning to make way with them a petulant kind of ingratitude which we had all learnt to tolerate as "old Eu's way," and Dora announced that if he was put in prison, she should go too.
The EU's commissioner for enlargement is a German, Gunter Verheugen. The dilapidated expanses of the former Soviet satellites are Germany's natural economic hinterland on the way to the way more lucrative Asian markets. Hence Germany's reluctance to admit Turkey, a massive, pro-American, potential competitor for Asian favors. Integrating Russia would be next on Germany's re-emerging Ostpolitik.
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