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Updated: May 31, 2025
With the GDP per capita of most candidates at one fifth the EU's, this would be a perverse, socially unsettling and politically explosive outcome. Aware of this, the European Commission denies any intention to actually accept cash from the candidates. Their net contributions would remain theoretical, it pledges implausibly.
Quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Sandor Richter, a senior researcher with the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, concluded that the first intake of applicants will end up underwriting at least $410 million of the EU's budget in the first year of membership alone.
Its forces are keeping the fragile peace in Balkan hot spots, like Macedonia. It will contribute to the EU's long-heralded rapid reaction force. It owns the bulk of the, frequently overdue, sovereign debts of Russia, Ukraine and other east European countries. One tenth of Germany's trade is with the candidate countries, a turnover comparable to its exchange with the United States.
They have survived far mightier and more bloated bureaucracies than Brussels'. They are unsurpassed manipulators of officialdom. In the long run, the new members stand to benefit the most from the EU's enlargement and to form its unwaveringly loyal core. Not yet the full-fledged individualists of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism these nations are consensus-seeking team-players.
Franz Fischler, the Austrian EU's agriculture commissioner, hinted that miserly production quotas for cereals, meat and dairy products, offered by the EU to the seething applicants, can be augmented. Hungarian farmers, for instance, are entitled to up to $38 million of SAPARD money annually.
Still, NATO's chances of replacing the EU as the main continental political alliance are much higher than the EU's chances of substituting for NATO as the pre-eminent European military pact. the EU is hobbled by minuscule and decreasing defense spending by its mostly pacifistic members and by the backwardness of their armed forces.
Germany and its colonies share other interests. As The Economist noted correctly recently: "The Poles may differ with the French over security but they will be with them in the battle to preserve farm subsidies. The Czechs and Hungarians are less wary of military force than the Germans but sympathize with their approach to the EU's constitutional reform.
This upset the EU's ten new members, slated to join as early as May 2004. With spending capped, they are unlikely to enjoy the same pecuniary support bestowed on the veterans, even after 2013. As it is, their agricultural benefits are phased over ten years and face an uncertain future when the CAP is, inevitably and finally, scrapped.
EU enlargement is a thinly disguised exercise in mercantilism tinged with the maudlin ideology of embracing revenant brothers long lost to communism. But beneath the veneer of civility and kultur lurk the cold calculations of realpolitik. The applicant countries the EU's hinterland would do well to remember this. Winning the European CAP By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
Mild corporatism is rife and manifest in central wage bargaining. For some countries notably Estonia joining the EU would translate into a de-liberalized and re-regulated future. Others would find the EU's brand of the market a comfortable and dimly familiar middle ground between America's harsh prescriptions and communism's delusional model.
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