Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> The Eastern bloc regimes, for all their hideous faults (and there were
> many) grew a heck of a lot faster and had more social and economic
> equity under neo-Stalinism than many other peripheral countries in Asia,
> Africa and Latin America (many of which had no less barbaric governments).
> Eastern Europe ran into problems only when it tried to marketize
> everything all at once -- now the smarter countries, like Poland and the
> Czech Republic, are instituting Central European-style controls over the
> marketplace and creating developmental states of their own. You could
> argue that the 50-year-old guerilla struggle between Eastern European
> citizens and noxious governments/the Soviet Empire gave them the political
> and social tools, ironically enough, to deal with the new imperialists:
> the finance-mad elites of the European Union, who send trade delegations
> and bankocrats to Prague the way Moscow sent emissaries to the
> Czechslovakian Politburo.
The charge of imperialism against Brussels
is not a very believable one when one
considers that there are only about
20,000 EU employees in Brussels (about
the same number of county employees in an
ordinarily sized Europan county). At present
also, I believe, the federal solution in EU is
not very popular. Anybody who has seen the
industrial wastelands created by communist
regimes in Eastern Europe would not care
much about marxist-leninist "growth economies".
> Problems, but also vast opportunities. Germany has, so I'm told, something
> like 50% of the external debt of Russia; European banks own most of
> Eastern Europe's debt, and have been financing mini-booms in Poland and
> Slovenia. West Germany's absorption of the East has cost money, yes, but
> the $100 billion in annual subsidies from West to East has also spurred a
> round of new investment, and kept the German economy relatively insulated
> from the overaccumulation crisis which hit the US in the early Nineties,
> and Japan in the mid-Nineties. The EU will blossom only if a similar
> redistribution takes place from rich EU lands to the poorer ones -- say,
> something like 5% of EU GDP or some $400 billion a year. You could give
> them the money, or just raise it via Euro-denominated debt.
Membership in EU will in the first round
guarantee redistribution to Poland, the
Czech Republic and Hungary. Estonia is on
its way and of course Slovenia to becoming
growth economies.
A sensible US quote, in my opinion, can be
found underneath:
”Europe’s impeding creation of a monetary
union with a single currency,
the euro, will be the most important
change in the global economy well into
the next century. It will have a more
lasting impact than virtually any
other economic event that can be
imagined such as the reemergence of Japan as
a powerhouse or the extension of NAFTA
throughout South America. And it could
pose a serious challenge to America’s
economic supremacy.”
This written by a former economic expert
on President Carter's staff.
Greetings
Bertil Haggman