This is the worst take I've ever seen from you tbh
. Legit makes me surprised, your posts are usually much higher quality.
Right off the bat, you're off. The West moving away from Ukraine has nothing to do with corruption, it's simply about the obvious inability of Ukrainians to win. Nobody actually gives a fuck about corruption of any kind. The "concerns" about how democratic and whatever Ukraine is, is just a face-saving mechanism to barely cloak the real reason, which is that the West is simply unable to manufacture enough weapons and ammunition for Ukraine to defeat Russia.
Not sure what the current numbers are, but I remember some analysts mentioning a couple of months ago that Russia is producing some seven times or so the amount of missiles the entirety of NATO does. Sure, the numbers could pick up over time, but that would take years, and nobody in the West has the stomach for a years-long war which could eventually still end with a Ukrainian defeat anyway, so they are slowly cutting their loses.
The remarks about Ukrainian corruption had been here ever since the beginning of the conflict. Nobody gave a shit about it when it looked like Ukrainians could decisively win on the battlefield with the help of Western tech, while Western sanctions destroyed Russian economy. Now that the counteroffensive hadn't really gone anywhere and Russian economy is outpacing most of Europe, people are starting to pretend that the West actually cares about corruption and that's why they are starting to cut their losses.
Really
? That's quite a surprise to me, given that I live in one of those countries.
Also trade, politics, security, and so on. There's absolutely no reason for any of those countries to not want to be in the EU, even if we weren't getting any money from that. Our biggest trade partners are with it, and realistically, we'd have to follow it's trade rules one way or another, whether as members of the EEA or the EU itself, and it's clear that the second is superior.
1)THose countries have done a lot of reforms, which is why corruption here is currently dozens of times less of an issue than it was before those reforms to become EU members were undertaken. Compared to where those countries were in the 90s in this regard, currently, they are basically an entirely different world.
They were made.
How don't those countries have free markets
? I legimitely don't understand this remark. The "single market" thing isn't just some catchphrase EU politicians use, the trading rules and norms in all EU countries are almost completely set by the EU, the national governments' powers in those areas are quite limited. If I remember right, there was a case during the Brexit process which decided that the only thing the national governments can regulate is international inward investment and maybe some other niche parts of the economy. Even EU politicians were surprised at how wide the court decided that the Commission's powers were, and Brexiters didn't quite know whether to be happy that the process will be easier, or use it as propaganda about how evil the EU is.
There's a reason why just about all indexes measuring the ease of trading across borders and so on just slap the same rating to all EU members, it's because all of those countries are equally open to each other because they're following the same rulebook.
All of those countries are majority urban. Slovakia's got the largest share of rural population in the EU, and it's still over 50%. Poland is more urban than Austria, while Hungary is less rural than Italy and Bulgaria is just a tiny bit less urban than Germany, btw.
The average for 2023 based on 27 countries was 74.4 percent. The highest value was in Belgium: 98.19 percent and the lowest value was in Slovakia: 54.03 percent. The indicator is available from 1960 to 2023. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.
www.theglobaleconomy.com
In none of those countries does agriculture account for even 5% of the real GDP, with Poland in particular being less agrarian than Spain or Finland.
en.wikipedia.org
The "oligarchy" stuff is mostly just used by political factions within those countries to smear their opponents when their opponents are in power. Sure, there's some shenanigans here, but the mere fact that the governments had changed in Poland and Slovakia recently shows that they are much less actually "oligarchical" than Russia, or even the United States at this point, both places where the government is actually making moves against the opposition and trying to make it impossible for the opposition candidates to run for office.
Russia has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world, while most of CEE has among the smallest, with Slovakia being several times rated by multiple agencies as the country with the lowest Gini index in the world.
en.wikipedia.org
The rich and powerful control the government pretty much everywhere.
How
??
The witholding of funding is just done for political horse trading and to push those countries in line with what the majority of the EU already does. Romania and Bulgaria are several times more corrupt than those three, yet they've received much less ire from the EU than Hungary has, simply because it's not actually about corruption and whatnot, which nobody actually cares about, it's about politics.
If anything, the fact that the EU has never moved beyond pushing the rebels into line with stopping the cohesion funds and other ones shows that they have absolutely no desire to escalate beyond just irritating those governments into going along with what the rest of the EU does. Since they want those countries to follow them politically, why would they want them to not be in the EU, where they can be regularly pressured due to the continously opened political and diplomatic channels between the members, rather than outside of the EU, where those countries would genuinely have no reason to follow EU's decisions, as there would be no carrot hanging on the end of the stick anymore, not to mention the much degraded diplomatic channels between them that would result from that?
And why the hell would the EU and NATO ever do that
? Like, I'm genuinely curious, because I honestly don't understand those types of views.
Why, the hell, would the EU and NATO willingly choose to reduce themselves and let their adversary become stronger? In the entire history of geopolitics, the amount of times when countries have willingly chosen to become smaller and weaker can be counted on one hand, while there are innumerable amount of conflicts fought over tiny pieces of land. Russians themselves have fought two wars to keep control of Chechnya, a tiny republic that's dozens upon dozens of times less important to it than those countries are to the EU. Why in the hell would the EU ever willingly choose to lose 10+% of its population to its adversary, knowing for a fact that this will just result in said adversary becoming stronger and it weaker, for no real reason?
Every single day that the Russians are attacking Ukraine instead of moving into the Baltics proves that despite anything they are saying, they don't actually want a conflict with the West. Heck, they aren't just not attacking them, they are drawing soldiers from the regions bordering those countries, actual NATO members, and sending them to Ukraine. It's pretty blatant that they know that there's no actual threat of a NATO invasion to them when you look at stuff like this actually.
