Austria’s interior minister Gerhard Karner recently stated that the government he is part of still believes that the Schengen area is “not functioning,” which is why they do not agree to expand it with the addition of Romania and Bulgaria. During a meeting with the Romanian interior...
Austria has a bad history with xenophobia at the beginning of the 20th century and later. The Nazi were popular before Hitler took the power in Germany. They aren't the victims people think. They were more proactive with the regime.
Nowadays, it's for electoral purpose and for internal politic agenda. It has mostly nothing to do with Romania and Bulgaria.
It was the official narrative of the allies after WW2. They expected the Austrians to fight against the Nazis. It didn't work. After that, the Soviet liberated Vienna but the west didn't want them to joint the east block. The less to Stalin, the better. The cold war began...
The world had to wait 1991 to see a Chancellor expressing apologize.
a nightmare of “equal but inferior” relationships between the west and east...Germany
Pretty sure that this is Austria doing it and for domestic political reasons.
And while I agree that attempts by countries to leverage their "inside before others" position to block other members is obnoxious, there have been vetoes from any number of countries. A while back, Greece was threatening to veto things to shift positions on Cyprus, for example.
If the eastern countries were not run by prostitutes they’d split and form their own block.
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Well, you're Serbian, yes? You are not in the EU. And you do have CEFTA. And you've got that Open Balkan thing.
But you don't want just that, because it's small, yes? Same thing applies to the EU at a larger scale.
Thing is -- something that I usually point out to people from Germanic EU musing about how cool it would be if they could go break off into their own bloc -- is that none of the Germanic/Latin/Slavic blocs are all that large on their own. Individually, you've got something like the population of a Brazil.
I'm in the US, and we're expected to bypass the EU in population this century, and we're a lot more-politically-integrated. Even with that, we're the shrimp among the largest powers -- as China and India develop, they're gonna get a lot beefier in terms of clout than they are today, even if today they're poor, because they can leverage that population.
So if the EU says "okay, not only am I gonna stay somewhat politically-not-integrated at the bloc level, but I'm gonna split into a couple of blocs" and on top of that have a smaller population than anyone else even before the bloc pie starts getting cut up, it's gonna be tough to get enough population to have a lot of clout, I think.
I mean, that's an option, but I'm saying that it's inevitably going to impact the EU's position in the world.
Serbia wants to go into the EU because it has not other alternative. And there reason there is no alternative is because the breakup of Yugoslavia was orchestrated in such a way that the republics could never reunite. After the fall of communism in the USSR, the powers that be didn't want another socialist country to remain in Europe. But more than that, even if Yugoslavia managed to transition to a market economy while remaining a federation, the existence of Yugoslavia might have made countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and even Hungary, Belarus, and Moldova more eager to enter into some kind of a "southeast european block" than pursue a tough shock doctrine course of EU integration.
The EU will not survive the next 100 years. The countries are too different and the cultural and ideological faults are already exposed.