10-28-2009, 03:09 PM
Quote:I'm an ignorant American, I admit it. I don't even follow my own countries politics that closely and end up learning lots of stuff when I skim threads here and do more research, I'm rarely up to date on it though. So give me some edu ma cation. :)
Cool finally a post on topic!!! :D
I am not sure I am the one to edumacate you.....I am far from the expert. I can give you some opinions though.
There is joining the EU, and there is the european constitution, which are two different things. The first one is usually easier for 'the people' especially for all the eastern european countries. Being less rich, they will gain a lot financially just by joining. Signing for the consititution means that some things will be governed by the EU, instead of the national governments....and this might give problems because there are many hot button issues that the different countries think much differently of such as; soft-drugs, abortion, animal rights, farmers subsidies etc. Of course some of these issues are used by the populist parties in the various countries.
Certain examples are however (in my opinion) just plain wrong: There is Ireland which has been getting enormous amounts of subsidies from the EU (Ireland was the poorest country to join), after this they have been playing the finance game becoming the country with the highest GNP in the EU, after which they started to do difficult around agreeing with the EU constitution. Then came the crisis, which hit Ireland very bad (of course with all that financial malpractice) and now the people vote FOR the constitution.
The Czech republic, one of the later members has some fears that germans that have been chased of there property after WO2 now try and get their stuff back via legal means (EU court), and apart from that their leader is a bit weird.
And so there are many examples.
The cons will usually weigh more than the pro's for the people (much more visible). The fact that we probably need to form a strong EU to be able to compete globally is much less important in the eyes of the voters.
That said, on the other hand I think the leaders that (in my eyes rightfully) try to make this EU work are ignoring serious concerns by the people. My example of the freedom of press in Italy. The strange behaviour of Ireland, and of course the fact that (direct) financially some countries (eg holland) pay a lot to countries that can be very aggressive against the things we stand for. The Polish that don't accept homosexuals, the French that complain about our soft drugs eventhough we don't have so much drug related problems as they have, the Spanish that like Bull fighting and want to ban a womans right to have an abortion, the corruptiom in many countries etc. etc.
Luckily not all of these things will be falling under 'EU-law', but people get scared as you can imagine.
I still think the whole EU is a good thing and I see it as a chance to slowly educate the more conservative states in order to modernize the way of thinking, but of course things can also go the other way around.