In the EU, money gets stolen from you in a more subtle way. For example, the COVID situation, with unlimited money-printing was a tax on the people who had savings, and supporting a specific subset of the economy, or, delaying the tax in the essence.

There is no lesson of "democracy" to give. At best it is a guided democracy, and this is very generous.

For example, VPNs are going to be forbidden, and the free speech compared to the US is a little toy.

Elections are often a facade in many EU countries.

In France for example, it's always the "right" (btw you can be socially or jailed if you support them by using the wrong words) against the existing party, and communists are begging it's better to vote for the existing party, than support the newcomers.

It's a loop, this is why there is this joke that voters are "beavers", because at every elections they are asked "build a dam" against competition.

There is the same beaver thing, over and over again for 30 years.

Even people that are actually elected you have nowhere your word near their decisions (and even less near Von der Leyen and similar people).

Poland understood long time ago that it needs a safe country, and that they need to make sure that the people in their country are fine and safe before helping the whole planet.

Hungary and Poland are a little bit in the same boat, their relative independence saves them (e.g. refusing the EUR currency, refusing some policies) that allows them to have more leeway to support the local people, while benefiting of the funds from the EU and Schengen.

The EU prevents your money from being stolen, except when the EU itself decides to withhold or deduct it. Hungary has lost over a billion euros in ECJ daily fines...

If you push it even further, this is forgetting about the hundreds of billions that are centrally distributed to third-parties (and this is just Ukraine!). So, your money, our decision.

> The largest EU benefit is that it makes democratic and rule of law backsliding unlikely.

On the contrary. Since the EU has no meaningful penalty mechanism other than withholding funds, and enormous capacity for shared damage absorption, once a country passes a certain threshold of development membership in the EU actually encourages government misbehavior including democratic backsliding, because it insulates the government from many potential adverse consequences.

For example, governments around the world have to fear violent revolution. But in the EU, the shared desire for law and order is so strong that the rest of the members are likely to support a member state in repressing such a revolution with essentially any degree of brutality, regardless of the condition of that state’s democracy, because the alternative (a successful coup in an EU member state) is impossible to contemplate.

Yet you can see crowds of young anti-woke Germans on X claiming that Poland's been growing only because of their (i.e. the Germans') money.

Also, the reason you've given doesn't explain why it worked so much better for Poland than for Czechia, Slovakia and a few others.

A lot of it also was behind a requirement to basically "fix your shit".

You could get the money but you had to get bureaucracy to be right and transparent to cut down on fraud, and that helped the rest of the govt to have less fraud.

Much of the stabilization was due to the strong domestic market. Recall that Poland was the only country to avoid the 2008/2009 recession. It is tight global integration that causes recessions to spread.

Can't agree more. Given its geography and population, one would expect Poland to be a major economy, but it's been occupied or even completely erased from existence for large stretches of industrial modernity. The period since 1989 is the longest stretch of true sovereignty that Poland has had since the 18th century.

The fucking krauts (both the German/Prussian and the Austrian/Hapsburg varieties) can and should toss them a few złoty for economic development as recompense for the horrific treatment they've dealt Poland over the centuries. It would be nice if the Russians would too, but that's not the reality we currently live in.

>Also worth noting: Poland didn't receive a dime of reparations after the War.

Poland received virtually all of the lands that were considered Prussia though.