4 ms·
I do not see the EU even close as an empire. Are you perhaps British? Or Greek? The EU don't even have a common foreign policy or a cohesive monetary policy acr
by Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
I do not see the EU even close as an empire. Are you perhaps British? Or Greek? The EU don't even have a common foreign policy or a cohesive monetary policy across its member countries. The EU is imo a protective "members only club" if you're in you get good deals if you're not then tough luck.
- the-dude 5y agoMy guess he is Czech. I have heard similar sentiments from former East Bloc's. I can't blame 'em.
- gambiting 5y agoI always find it surprising when people call Czech Republic or Poland "eastern block". Those two couldn't be possibly more central European if they tried. Czech Republic especially reaches only marginally more east than Germany, and I doubt you'd call Germans "eastern Europeans".
- inglor_cz 5y agoHistorical reasons. For 40 years, the continent was split right in the middle. Back then, it was absolutely natural to speak about the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, possibly with neutral Austria and Switzerland as the weird exceptions. Of course there are huge differences between, say, Czechia and Moldova, but we were part of a single allied bloc controlled by a single power for two generations, so there are some similarities as well. You can see some of them until today in architecture etc.
- gambiting 5y agoI mean I'm Polish, and perhaps wrongly, but I have never thought about myself as Eastern European - for me that means Belarussians, Ukrainians, Romanians......for me "central European" is completely the right term for Poland, Slovakia and Czechia, but I understand it might not be the commonly accepted view.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI do not feel particularly Eastern either, but it is true that the former cohesion of Central Europe was broken into two by running completely different economic systems on parts of it. Bavaria, Czechia, Saxony and Austria used to be fairly tightly connected before 1945, now the differences between wealth of the formerly Western and formerly Eastern parts of the region are massive.
- the-dude 5y agoEastern Bloc was about political alignment. And I said 'former'. And citizens from the DDR were actually called East Germans or Ossies.
- raverbashing 5y agoWhich I find funny, maybe it's some form of Stockholm syndrome from the URSS days.
- the-dude 5y agoObviously you are not a diplomat.