All of the countries you named as "carrying their own weight" have the curious commonality of being net recipients of massive amounts of money from the EU cohes

All of the countries you named as "carrying their own weight" have the curious commonality of being net recipients of massive amounts of money from the EU cohesion budgets (i.e Western Europe) over the last 10 years. Very easy to spend money on big guns and other projects when you are Poland and get something like 10 billion euro net on average for the last decade. EU scary hours will begin in something like 10-15 years when Poland will be asked to become a net contributor (after they converge and some W. Europe country will inevitable come up with the idea of plugging fiscal deficits by cutting EU contributions).