LOL, just ask the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, and co. Here's how this "freedom of labor" works in practice:
"""Humiliating wages, inhuman working conditions and coercion in a country that has declared itself the leader of the EU,” writes Jurnalul National in the wake of an investigation on working conditions of east Europeans in Germany, published by Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and aired on German public television channel ARD. The probe revealed the existence of a mafia-like organisation, which recruits Romanian workers for German companies, and then confiscates their identity papers and threatens them with death if they go to court to have their employment contracts enforced."""
And it's not just some isolated "mafia like organisation" -- the same things happen to migrant workers from all countries and accross tons of fields.
The "common European market" is a lure for smaller countries to become Germany's satellites and for Brussels bureaucrats to rule over the will of the seperate nation-states.
Imagine a Washington tens times more in bed with big corporations and Wall Street, ten times more bureaucratic, and favoring a few states while fucking over the majority of the others. Oh, and with bodies that nobody voted for in power.
Completely absurd. All my extended family in Ukraine (plus all my former friends, classmates, and teachers) support the protests. Some were involved in parties such as Klitschko's Udar and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna. Please keep listening to Radio Moscow.
The protests are not about prosperity or even about joining the EU. They are about preventing Russian-controlled mafia from running the country.
As it stands, however, the Ukraine is probably decades away from that – but I can’t see how that could possibly be a bad thing to work towards.
Big claims need big justifications, I guess. The EU experience wasn't all that good for Greece, for example.
Having to defang their military a bit to be considered for EU admission didn't exactly work out ideally for Turkey, either...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis... http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/07/greece-a...
Greece got itself into a bloody mess by overspending, and while low interest rates due to Eurozone membership may have made that easier, it is in no way the fault of the EU that the Greek people elected an inept government. OTOH, EU membership now helps them get out of this mess with billions and billions of euros.
The EU’s achievements when it comes to prosperity and peace are mind-boggling.
But this joining would be one direction, Ukraine would not be allowed to export into EU thanks to various regulations. Also Ukraine already has common market with Russia, and this would have to close.
This deal is actually really bad for Ukraine.
Anytime you read about a nationalist movement or an independence movement, someone is being manipulated. Independent nations are no longer possible in the modern world. Every country is now dependent on, and must cooperate with its neighbors. For Ukraine, that means its largest trading partner, Russia. Even the other EU countries are busy coming to all kinds of agreements, accords and treaties with Russia.
BTW-Do you get your news from RT?
Seen from EU, EU hasn't really enough coherence to deal effectively with its internal problems, much less participate in any international power struggles. And the population is deeply tired of expansion. The only empires in the minds of EU are the ghosts of the British and French colonial empires. So EU has neither the will nor the capability to do something like this.
>>> but it could just as well be part of a clever complex multi-year gambit by the Russians who have a strong tradition of playing chess
You realize that not all Russian are the same, not all of them drink vodka, are chess grandmasters, wear ushankas with red stars, play balalaykas and dance with bears on the streets? Traditions of chess have absolutely nothing to do with modern Russian politics (actually The Godfather would be much more instructive there than The Luzhin Defense), though of course Russia meddles with Ukrainian affairs - it's a huge country neighboring them and having centuries-old ties, along with the little fact that it also carries a lot of Russia's gas lines. But that is a trivial conclusion, not very illuminating.
It is? We should play some time, this could get interesting.
It's naive to ask for evidence in such issues. As if they put out official statements and bank account transactions. These kind of things are exposed years or even decades after the fact.
That said, we do have evidence and hard facts for similar sponsoring of other "orange revolutions" and under-the-table deals in the past 2 decades. It's a constant presence in the history of lesser states, when the interests of superpowers collide with theirs, a practice as old as the "Voice of America".
In practice, when you see sponsored foreign "organisations" working in some place to help "bring democracy", just think "change the regime to some puppet who will do us favours". Superpowers don't do such things out of the goodness of their heart. That's why you only see them in places like Ukraine and Iraq, and not, say, Arabia or Latin America dictatorships [1]
>BTW-Do you get your news from RT?
I don't know about him, but I get "my news" from studying the political climate and being in the middle of decades of European and Eastern European history. And I'm not even Russian/Ukraine, I'm from EU.
Now, don't get me wrong, the protesters are genuinely believing that they are doing the right thing and fighting for change etc. It's just that that's a feeling that's very easy to create and manipulate in people, selling them "change" and "hope" and offering them the same shit in a different package.
Quite like people thought this Obama guy was the "Hope" that would change everything once he gets elected, only to get mostly same-old, same-old.
[1] From Wikipedia:
Activists in each of these movements were funded and trained in tactics of political organization and nonviolent resistance by a coalition of Western pollsters and professional consultants who were partly funded by a range of Western government and non-government agencies but received most of their funding from domestic sources.[nb 2][2] According to The Guardian, the foreign donors included the U.S. State Department and USAID along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society Institute.[34] The National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supported by the U.S. government, has supported non-governmental democracy-building efforts in Ukraine since 1988.
Former president Leonid Kravchuk accused Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, of financing Yushchenko's campaign on 14 September 2005.[36][nb 3] Yushchenko denied Berezovsky financed his election campaign.[36] Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine.[37] At first Berezovsky refused to confirm or deny Kravchuk's allegations, but in November 2005 he did claim that indeed he had heavily financed the Orange Revolution.[38][nb 4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution#Involvement_o...
People have democratically elected Yanukovch in hope that he will be the next "Kouchma" (second president of Ukraine), who grew up Yanukovych politically. But the difference between Kouchma and Yanukovuch started to frighten people with every new Yanukovych step from the moment of his inauguration. The part of Ukraine that voted for Yanukovych is now also shocked. It is Yanukovych who changed the situation and brought awful changes.