The EU as a Colonizer of Eastern Europe
I’ve spent a some time in Hungary/Budapest. There, I noticed the arrival of Western corporations buying up prime real estate. Buildings of exquisite architecture that formerly housed a post office were turned into a McDonald’s, others into a Tesco, a Starbucks, or a Bavarian restaurant.
This instilled in me the impression that the European Union had become a colonizer of Eastern Europe, and that mostly American (through their EU franchises), British (before Brexit), French, and German investors were buying up ‘cheap’ Eastern European property. Increasingly, China is also catching up to this game through partnerships with Eastern European regimes.
Although the Hungarian people had voted for joining the European Union in a referendum, by now, most Hungarians I spoke to had come to regret this decision.
The explanations given to me were of the following template:
“We wanted to join the EU because we thought our incomes would go up. But now that we are a member, all that’s happened is that rents and food prices have gone up but our salaries have remained the same. We used to be poor when we were part of Soviet Russia but the food was cheap and the rents affordable.”
This, clearly, is not the message the superior Western ‘cousins’ want to hear. Western Europeans are the ones who greatly benefited from the low-cost labor migration coming in from Eastern Europe. At the same time, Eastern Europeans saw their most skilled workers leave their countries so that only the less-skilled ones stayed behind.
What Western Europeans might welcome as the beneficial arrival of nurses, doctors, and surgeons from Eastern Europe, also means their Eastern hometowns lost a great surgeon, an established doctor, or a friendly nurse. The labor migrations that benefited some Eastern European individuals simultaneously robbed the Eastern peoples of access to qualified staff.
In the end, the Eastern European elites, the rich status quo, were the ones who benefited from joining the EU. Their big construction companies, for example, won most of the EU subsidies to renovate their nations. The money flowed into the pockets of well-established families.
Joining the EU was not a benefit to the Eastern European peoples. And this spells doom for the EU project. I’ll explain why with the following anecdote:
A 19-year-old woman I met in Budapest told me she could barely save 60 Euros a month working as a dishwasher at an expensive tourist restaurant. She was living in a basement apartment room without windows for 15 Euros a month. She calculated that, although she was an EU citizen, she would have to save up a whole year just to spend one long weekend in Paris.
The money Eastern European kids can earn in their own countries does not afford them to travel to Western Europe. The other way around, Eastern Europe is so cheap even lower-class Westerners can afford to spend a full week partying in Budapest without even looking at their budget.
The girl I mentioned had also tried working as an au pair in Britain (pre-Brexit). She was placed with a Muslim immigrant family whose wealth far exceeded that of Eastern Europeans. She left after a few weeks, since the family treated their au pair as though she were a slave. She told me, “even the children of the family treated me like a slave”.
Let that sink in. An Eastern European woman is classed as a slave to immigrants from outside the EU. That is how big the financial inequality between Eastern and Western Europe really is.
The blunt truth of the matter is that Eastern Europeans are culturally, linguistically, geographically, and economically more related to Russia than to Western Europe. Western Europe merely acts as the colonizer of Eastern Europe to its own great benefit, even housing millions of immigrants from outside the EU while Eastern European families are literally living on the edge of poverty.
Don’t be surprised, then, when you hear Eastern Europeans say, “We were better off in the Soviet Union.” And that foretells the future, for if Eastern Europeans cannot benefit from their EU membership, they will easily vote to join the next big Union that promises them a better life.