Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blasted his European allies Thursday for what he portrayed as the continent’s slow, fragmented and inadequate response to Russia’s invasion nearly four years ago and its continued international aggression.
Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Zelenskyy listed a litany of grievances and criticisms of Europe that he said have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid an ongoing U.S. push for a peace settlement.
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The same EU exported model that made Poland, Romania and Bulgaria as rich as they are today. But also what made Hungary or Greece what they are today, right?
Turns out corruption and internal politics have more influence than anything, but the EU has been a net gain overall for any country that actually gave it an honest try.
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Relative richness, compared to how they started in the 90’s after communism. In 2000 Spain had an average salary of 1443€ and Romania 143€. In 2018 Spain grew to 2295€ but Romania to 965€ an almost 7 times increase.
Current minimum salary in Romania is 814€. It was 40€ in 2000. Your average IT person in Romania right now makes ~70% as a much as a Spaniard but their rent and prices are less than half compared to Spain. Lower skill jobs are still lagging, but it’s been getting better and better.
All of this success is partly due to the EU pulling strings on Romanian politicians in exchange for funds and partly having a political and justice system that has mostly been doing acceptable. If you compare 90’s Ukraine and Romania they had a similar shitty start and the same access to opportunities including the EU. One embraced that and the other did not.
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My argument is that the shit that these countries go and have gone through is mostly self inflicted. 90s Romania was insanely corrupt with an “everyone for themselves” attitude like you wouldn’t believe. I was there so I know. People would give bribes even to the local pool to go in without paying a normal fare. Even the priests took bribes. The guy that was chosen as the first president was a former communist elite and he went to town on fucking the country over and people rioted over it. The poverty and suffering was fully internally manufactured.
People nostalgic for the communist system are idiots. Looking at the data economically it might not look bad, but there were extreme supply issues, famine and the authoritarian regime were in full swing in the final years and were the catalist for the fall of the whole system. The years leading up to that is when Romanians learned to survive by any means necessary and infused the society with the corruption that led to the experience of the 90s.
2000s is when people finally had enough and started aspiring to the European model and things started to turn around. You can totally see it on the GDP graph that you showed, 90s was not really capitalistic, it was wild oligarchy west where the only people with any opportunity were former communist elites with money and influence to create their local mafias. Those mafias continued to permate the society in some places to this day.
My argument is that overall the EU has been a net benefit for Romania. Now if you want to get into how capitalism as a whole is not great, especially for the lower classes, then sure, we can agree on that. But this is not what betrayed Romania, Romanians betrayed Romania.
Blame the victim