Tag Archives: romania

Bulgaria and Romania to Enter in 2007?

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Amidst all the fanfare about negotiations opening on Turkey’s membership, we shouldn’t lose sight of other things that are in the pipeline. EU enlargement commissioner G?nter Verhuegen has just given Bulgaria and Romania the green light for a January 2007 target date.

?For the year 2007 we feel that accession may be appropriate and these two countries will be ready by then,? Verhuegen said.

?Negotiations with Bulgaria are technically speaking closed. We wish to conclude negotiations with Romania by the end of the year, we are aware that this will be difficult.?

Now I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood here. I am perfectly happy with Bulgaria and Romania as EU members, under the right conditions, just as I am happy with Turkish membership. But I do think that Turkey’s point about the same standards being applied is a valid one. I personally – and based among other things on extensive converstaions with migrants from these countries – have plenty of reservations about just how ‘ready’ these societies are if we are using the yardstick currently (correctly) being applied to Turkey. Corruption and lawlessness would be among the issues that immediately spring to mind. So, if there is a time to ‘turn the screw’, it is now.

Mid-term I am still convinced that Turkey will have much more to offer economically. Both Rumania and Bulgaria already suffer from many of the major problems facing existing EU member states – low fertility, rapid ageing, serious problems in paying pensions moving forward – and they have the added problem of the meaningful functioning of their democratic processes. Turkey is already making important steps forward, it would be nice to feel re-assured that the other two were.

Addendum: North Sea Diaries has a spoof text of a speech Erdogan might have made to the Turkish parliament explaining how the EU meets Turkey’s criteria as a suitable place to be. As our diarist wryly puts it “he made it clear the EU would be allowed to join Turkey”. You can find a summary of the speech he actually made in Strasbourg here.

Pigs threaten Romanian EU membership

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No joke, unfortunately

“Across Romania, fear is growing of a looming porcine genocide as the country prepares to negotiate its way into the EU. For the fact is that most pigs are bred and slaughtered here in a way that fails to meet EU standards, and no one is prepared to invest the money needed to get our piggeries up to Union levels. But will our beloved pig be permitted to put the supreme national interest in jeopardy?
[…]
The problem is that, in Romania, we have a hard enough time comprehending and protecting human rights, let alone animal rights. Veterinarians are few, but our human health services are in ruin as well.

Indeed, most people cannot afford proper medication, and hospitals suffer from gross under-funding. So it seems to most Romanians not only preposterous, but immoral, for the EU to care so much for a pig’s last moments of life when it seems to care so little for the everyday life of ordinary Romanians.

Moreover, how is our government supposed to get millions of farmers to give up their barbaric ancestral habit? By trying to coerce them with fines? In America, I am told, a slang word for the police is “pigs.” Are we to have pig police here?

Our ruling social democratic party has its stronghold in Romania’s rural areas. If Romania’s peasants come to believe that the EU insists that they hug their pigs, not butcher them with knives, their fidelity towards the social democrats will wither.

Those lost votes, however, won’t go to responsible center-right parties, but to the fiercely nationalistic, anti-European, Greater Romania Party, perhaps the closest thing Europe now has to a fascist party. This is a nightmare that both European and mainstream Romanian politicians want to avoid.”

But:

“Fortunately, there seems to be a way to conciliate both EU bureaucrats and even our most diehard peasants. Our ugly pre-Christmas ritual butchery can be christened a “traditional, folk custom,” a sacred rite deeply embedded in the fabric of Romanian nationhood. The proximity of Christmas will provide the ritual with a religious patina.”

Also see this story from the Moscow Times