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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

If EU "colonization" was so bad, why did formerly developing countries like Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, etc work so hard to join the EU, and currently developing countries like Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Bosnia, etc still try to ascend into the EU?

And also the fact that HDI metrics of most of Eastern and Southern Europe only broke the 0.9 (very very highly developed) because of EU funding and support.

Edit: you aren't arguing that the EU is a neo-colonial/imperialist project. I answered as such assuming you are anti-EU. +1 on Snyder btw - highly recommend reading "Postwar" if anyone has the time.

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I don't think the claim is that the EU is colonizing people, but rather the impulse for the large European countries was basically "we can't be relevant by having huge colonies any more so let's try being relevant by being a unified block"

Which is basically true, though the primary motivator was to interlink economies to avoid another war in Europe as started ww1 and ww2

Ok. That can be argued (and was a major impetus behind the Benelux Pact which turned into the EEC), but you cannot deny the amount of development the EU brought to countries that ascended to it.

Just look at Croatia versus Serbia despite having the same ethnicity, language, and civil war, or Romania versus Moldova, or Poland versus Belarus despite both sharing the same HDI in the early 1990s.

Sure, small European countries had a different motivation than the large ones, but also having a say on the world stage was even less possible for them disunited.

Imagine how little the US might care about possible threats to the Baltic states from Russia if the borders to the EU and NATO were still at Germany.

Croatia is hugely dependent on tourism. Serbia does not have access to nice beaches and islands on the Mediterranean. In addition, its exports to the EU are taxed quite heavily

Yet the average Croatian has a higher household income, life expectancy at birth, and literacy rate than Serbia - despite Croatia having a lower HDI than Serbia in the 1990s, and lacking any major cities or industries (which were concentrated in Bosnia and Serbia during the Yugoslav era)

Not sure how your argument refutes mine but okay.

Oh also to add, regarding literacy rates, even before WW1 because Croatia and Slovenia were Austro-hungarian, and the rest was Ottoman, the literacy rates were way different, with the former being much much higher. Currently, its probably about the same with Croatia and Serbia.

There's a pretty big difference between how the Spanish Empire worked, and how the EU works. For one, it's not like heavily armed conquistadors are setting out from Brussels to Tblisi or something to forcibly indoctrinate Georgians into the brilliance of the EuroZone.

Insofar as the EU relationship to its member states is extractive, its not principally extractive, nor is it primarily parasitic in nature. And anyway, EU expansion is driven entirely by applications to join, not efforts to annex.

That's not to say that anything like the EU is necessarily good, just that its unambiguously not a colonial/imperialist project, and its a weird non sequitur to act like it is.

By "neoimperialist" I mean the tankie talking point. Not the return of Pizarro.

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