German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now. And they are still benefiting from slave labor, stolen precious metals, and art they got during the WW2. Not to mention the Marshall Plan. They really can't be complaining.
German working class is displaced or has their salaries driven down by either Poles or Romanians working in Germany while their families live cheaply at home or by corporations moving factories to Poland and Romania.
You have no clue what you are talking about. I wonder why this sort of obnoxious reasoning always comes from Poles and never from Czech people for example.
I believe this is called competition, encouraged since the EU markets are open and freedom of migration is guaranteed. If it wasn't for those guys, you'll have migrant workers from Ukraine, or India or some other place. However, I suspect that before the Poles and Romanians came to DE, you already had quite a bit of migration from Spain, Italy and Turkey, isn't that right?
> German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now.
Yes they do.
> And they are still benefiting from slave labor
Not sure whether that really matters now-a-days for the economy.
> stolen precious metals
One of the cores of industrial and mine centers that made the German Empire thrive during the Belle Epoque, are now owned by Poland.
> Not to mention the Marshall Plan.
Half of Germany, didn't got to get it but where instead paying reparations for whole Germany. Sorry, I'm a bit tired of acting like Germany only got the history of being on the west side of the iron curtain. It got both treatments.
> Sorry, I'm a bit tired of acting like Germany only got the history of being on the west side of the iron curtain. It got both treatments.
Well glass that has half of water is still better that glass fully empty. Poland didn't get any war reparations and after being more destroyed during the war than germany (warsaw burned to the ground) and pretty much occupied for many decades after the war then how polish companies supposed to compete with any western economy including germany?
Sure, did you read that I didn't think that? The issue is a lot of domestic politicians are from the western part and don't acknowledge that situation with their actions. The only party, that managed to add this to their public image is the far right party, which is a huge problem.
No working class of a developped country will benefit from anything of value by using lower cost markets to import stuff and workers. CEOs and shareholder will in the shortterm and that is all they want so they can get rewarded next earning quarter. On the long term they will loose but they will already have moved to another company.
Europe is a scam to ruin countries and a dictatorship that now wants to remove vpns and freedom of speech from its citizen
It turns out it's not that hard to grow an economy once countries all around you stop trying to kill your culture, exterminate your population and steal your lands.
Surely there are more than 20 countries that have been in a position where their neighbors aren’t all trying to exterminate them for at least as long as Poland.
When you lose 20% of your population and then spend 50 years under communist rule because your allies sold you out, there’s really only one direction left to go—up.
A lot of people either forget, or never learned, that Poland was once one of the largest and most influential states in Europe.Yes it was long time ago, but the potential was always there. The real challenge was surviving the consequences of being caught between neighbors whose ideologies gave rise to two of the deadliest systems of the 20th century.
Sure, but the explanation is still Poland’s potential and its capacity to fulfil it. You could be free all you want and still plateau on some immediate post-war rebound gains.
Which in some ways is what happened here in Slovenia. We used to be doing much better than other communist countries (as a part of Yugoslavia), exited relatively peacefully, entered the EU, and everything seemed to be going great until the 2008 financial crisis.
Then it seems our politicians stopped being pragmatic and started bringing up ideological issues more often, which divided the population, while IMO not doing nearly enough to promote further development of the economy.
So now we have a population split on ideological issues, while Poland and Croatia are overtaking us economy-wise. We have had every advantage (geographically at the crossroads of multiple trade routes, sea access, EU funds, hard-working population, didn't turn into a Russia-style oligarchy...) but mostly slept on it.
Well there are plenty of countries that aren't facing those conditions now, or in the recent past and still have shitty economies. It undersells how hard it is to build a strong economy and therefore undersells how hard Poland has worked.
You can provide cheap labor inside of a trading block and still be economically a mess, Mexico comes to mind and Turkey was sending workers to parts of Europe starting in the late 1940s. Poland did a lot more than just supply cheap labor, and it really undersells all of the work they've put in to develop their work force, education, economic policies, and so on.
Hundreds of billions in subsidies and Polish workers displacing West European workers inside and outside of their country have nothing to do with the success of course.
The EU is based on greedy West European corporations maximizing shareholder value at the expense of their own populations.
The EU is too big and should be reduced to the Western core countries. I wonder how Poland would fare then.
I don’t understand why people constantly mention EU subsidies and not mention the billions of wealth destroyed or taken during the world wars, partitions, or the deluge.
That is not true. Poland run substantial trade deficits (as opposed to China) up to very recently giving sizable marked for products manufactured by western Europeans and thus __helping__ and not hindering West European workers. And this trade deficit was enabled by mainly external investments (and little but by subsidies). Also since PL was converging this investments were more profitable then in the west.
Also I am of not very popular anymore opinions that not distorted trade help both sides of the trade and immigrants really help economy of country that they immigrate into. Including workers.
Most of the subsidies go back to the western Europe in the form of cheap products, and cheap labor. Also these subsidies were used to buy technology, machinery and goods from the West. Let's have Germany pay few trillions in reparations, and we can give back the billions in subsidies. Deal?
Sure, Germany pays reparations, Poland gives back Pomerania and Silesia (which were part of the reparations) and Western Europe forms a new EU so we don't have to deal with Poles any longer. Deal?
Germany lost the war. That's just small price they should be paying for exterminating millions of people and destroying many countries. And these lands were Polish, and Czech way before there were Germans. That's why Prussia had a systematic depolonization going on in the 1800s on these lands. They wanted remove the inhabitants of these lands for a long time..
In these discussions we see some people hating the models, while others love them. What I find interesting is that this is exactly how we feel about other people - some people will love working with you while others can't stand being in the same room you're in.
I find it funny that everyone complains that Europeans currently just talk and never act.. Every time Europeans acted, it ended in either a world war, of half of the war colonized.. So not sure if you really want Europeans to act..
I'm not sure how we went from the "act" being "invest in their own defense" to "start ww3" but I am quite confident no one is complaining they are not doing that, lol.
Humans being the same everywhere, the ideal condition of "we can defend ourselves, yet have no expansionist tendencies" doesn't tend to keep the words after the comma for very long.
This is also why anarchies are not very stable.
The international order, with each nation being kinda like an individual person, has few enough actors that the distinctions between "anarchy", "democracy", and "dictatorship" are blurry.
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