Judging by the angry rhetoric to be found on the pages of Polish newspapers, the new EU members are learning all too well the "Old European" sense of entitlement to other people's money.
Newspapers in Poland, the largest new member, singled Mr Blair out for criticism, arguing that he had at best delayed, and at worst scuppered Poland's chances of securing around £40 billion in aid from the next EU budget, set to run from 2007 to 2013.
They said that he had done the nine other newcomers out of a further £47 billion to pay towards vital projects like motorway construction and environmental clean-ups.
"Britain torpedoed a summit which would have brought in tens of billions of euros for eastern Europe," the Right-of-centre daily Rzeczpospolita said.
"If it did it to humiliate France, it paid no attention to the fact that it would be the new members of the EU who would count the cost."
What a lot of cheeky nonsense. Failing to receive handouts from the taxpayers of Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands is not a "cost" under any sensible definition of the term.
Gazeta Wyborcza wrote: "If, when they get home, Messrs Blair, Chirac and Balkenende boast of having defended their country's interests, we will not applaud them. They have done it at the expense of a common Europe."
Poland's staunchly pro-EU president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, said: "The fiasco of the European summit is cause for profound pessimism."
It's cause for "profound pessimism" because the Polish government might have to wait a bit before getting a chance to feed off the teats of Western Europe's citizens? What a steaming pile of arrant rubbish! Here I was thinking it was Messrs. Blair, Göran Persson and Ahern who'd done more for a "common Europe" than any of the other leaders in the room, by taking on the risk of opening their domestic job markets to the new Europeans a full 7 years before the others were willing to do so, but the refusal of the Brits and the Swedes to add to the tax burdens of their already overburdened constituents for the sake of a lunatic agricultural scheme now makes them selfish bastards? Talk about a sense of entitlement!
If this is the sort of thing one can expect from the new Europeans in the future, the expansion of the EU will not have been worth it. The whole premise behind EU aid is flawed, and the new members were doing just fine without it; Europe does not need another set of petulant mendicants demanding foreigners' money as if it were theirs by right.
Well, I'm in Poland right now and I don't see this 'angry rhetoric' nor do I hear it from people I talk to. If anything there's general support for Britain - of course that could be just due to the kind of folks I talk to. The newsmagazine 'Wprost' (right of center), the 'Polityka' (left of center) and the Polish Newsweek all ran editorials essentially along the lines of 'we're willing to give up the ag subsidies if we don't have to implement Franco-German labor market policies'.
In regard to Gazeta Wyborcza though I'm not surprised since it's generally a pro-Franco-German economic model with a heavy dose of paternalism type newspaper.
The Rzeczpospolita quote might be out of context or guest opinion or something (I'll check) because it's usually a fairly liberal (in the European sense) newspaper.
I think maybe the Brits (especially the Telegraph) are being a bit paranoid.
Posted by: radek | June 21, 2005 at 09:12 AM