Quote Originally Posted by Crocodile View Post
And does Germany have a choice?
Well, as the biggest and richest country in Europe, they could say (essentially); "Stuff the EU & Yankees go home -- enough of foreigners, we can go it alone! Watch your back neighbours!"
But if they turned their back against the EU, then everyone would turn against Germany and we would have a terrible situation in Europe. So even if Germany COULD do that, and some people probably want to, they know it's not worth it. As it is now, nobody dislikes Germany, but the two world wars are not forgotten and it would not take much for other Europeans to turn against DE for that reason. In England, people LOVE to bring up the war when speaking with Germans. Really bad form, I think.

The original idea behind the EU was to tie up the French and German economies so much that they could never start a war against the other, without hurting themselves. It's worked really well...

Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
В
Европейском союзе, а не в Европе. Самый большой язык Европы - русский (около 100 000 000 носителей).
That's why I am trying to learn Russian!


Quote Originally Posted by Ramil
That's 'True Finns' resemble national-socialism very strongly and we both know who advocated this particular -ism in Germany not so long ago.
Well... As much as I like Finland... as you probably know, they practically invited the Nazis in during the war. There has never been any discussion or reconciliation about that in Finland - nobody feels bad about it.

If you go to Finland, one of the things you'll notice quite quickly, is that there are practically NO immigrants. Everyone looks Nordic/Finnish. Not even any Turkish or Greek people, certainly no Black or Middle Eastern people. Just Finns essentially and a few Baltic people and Russians -- and you only realise they are not Finnish when they speak.
They just don't like to have foreign people in their country and for various reasons, nobody has ever emigrated there, and they take almost no refugees.