Quote Originally Posted by Alex_krsk View Post
Speaking about western ukraine it has some chances to join as an agricultural area like romania or moldova with no industry at all.
Yes, I agree. If they split the country somehow (countries with any border conflicts whatsoever cannot join), and then if they do EXACTLY what Brussels says, for ~10 years, then they can probably join...
Moldova will probably join at some point, but it needs to resolve the Pridnestrovie / Transdniestr situation and upgrade the industry... just for starters.

Lord only knows how Romania got into the EU!
They must have just dropped the actual requirements for some political reasons.
It was sort of underdeveloped in socialism I think, then things got WORSE in the 90s, some Western companies entered the market place (very visible there, with German companies and Italian).
Then suddenly the whole country is in the EU.... Including the gypsies who were the only ones that were ready. "Paris, here I come!"

I have actually never seen anything like Romania in Europe. I didn't think it existed.
Both Belarus and Ukraine are much better developed. Even Moldova, I think ( I visited all these countries in 2011).

I don't think the EU will ever do that again, there has been A LOT of criticism about how Romania and Bulgaria got into the EU in the first place, they were not actually fully qualified.

And the EU has taken them for a ride. They've got nothing to show for their membership so far, other perhaps the property bubble at the coast in Bulgaria. But EU companies are doing great business there.

In Romania, almost everybody seemed to suffer from depression. They thought they were crap and couldn't even believe anybody would want to visit their country.... Can you imagine!

A very large proportion of the population just left for Spain, Italy, the UK, Germany...

It was really tragic. Several completely normal people who had even lived abroad told me that Ceaucescu and socialism was better than how they have it today (as EU citizens). To me, all this was totally unexpected. I thought things were getting better there, and they loved the EU. But the reality was the opposite. And they told me the corruption is horrible.

I was touched, and felt really badly for them. Partly guilty, because I used to be tremendously in favour of EU expansion eastwards, when I was at university in the 1990s. I was even in an organisation that worked for it. But look how it worked out.