The map at the bottom correctly excludes Switzerland. It does however include Norway and Iceland.
Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein (EEA), and Switzerland ("Special Relationship") are basically EU in all but final official membership. They even contribute to the EU financially.
But it does look that they probably meant Sweden (according to the text of the article)
It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy and I wonder if that's where a lot of the discontent comes from. It seems like there a lot of micro-nations in eastern Europe that have outsized influence over the union as a whole.
Would you give an example of when that has happened?
> It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy
The EU intentionally admitted many poorer countries, to promote freedom, security and stability in Europe in the long term. Without EU membership, they would be under pressure from Russia and others.
> discontent
What discontent do you mean? There's always something, of course.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur, at least as far as Eurozone's anemic growth is concerned. France and Germany stagnating isn't caused by Poland or Romania growing. It is mostly their own internal systemic problems. There were times when German and Polish economies were both healthy, as little as 10 years ago.
Sweden, another rich EU member, should grow by healthy 2.2 per cent this year, but Sweden is a lot more willing to actually reform its way out of problems than Germany is. Smaller countries have less inertia in such situations, and more maneuvering space.
in the U.K - a polish skilled workers are choosing to remaining in Poland instead of moving to the uk.
for the US - a lot of firms are setting up polish offices - hence when you hear 'a.i' efficiency most of those jobs have moved to Poland or India. Whether it's big tech, big banks and small funded VC startups. What remains in the US are just senior+, staff software engineers.
I'm in the UK. The smartest developers I worked with in my ~20 year career were all Polish.
The hardest-working and most skilled tradespeople that worked on my houses were Polish.
Had a lunch in Warsaw with a German friend who had relocated there. He said it was more Conservative than Germany and there was more freedom of expression.
Over forty years of Communist rule and they were never able to pull them away from their commitment to the Catholic church. Also lots of excellent museums and large parks.
Remarkable culture
Is the boom related to the removal of PiS in 2023? Is it linked to Ukraine (businesses and people relocating across the border? Arms sales?)
Or what aspects of conservatism, and what aspects of freedom of expression, are you referring to here?
Conservatives = resist change Progressive = encourage change
and change goes both ways -/+ right? We know this.
In Poland, they want to have a place to call home that feels European, feels Western. In the UK if you say that, straight-to-jail.gif or less flippantly, threatened and shunned by either people who don't want you to have an opinion or people afraid of them.
It's a sorry state of affairs.
I mean, Brexit was the ultimate discontent and it didn't just come out of nowhere. It's still very recent history and, as far as I know, the circumstances that caused it haven't really changed.
And of course, out of the middle class crisis in the 21st century. You have the same discontent outside the EU, except it doesn't get blamed on Bruxelles. That's how Trump gets elected, for example.
Then instead of accepting the changing circumstances of the world, it is blamed on a single entity “EU” that is single handedly causing all their woes. Just leave and your lives will be better. Well, they learned.
This is how you get people to vote for someone like trump. They claim it is all the fault of some X, get people riled up, promise to fix X, get voted, and then you have to actually make their lives better.
Yes, the States' GDP is ginormous, and yet it's basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one on most metrics that actually matter to people.
Things don’t look great for the poorest Americans, but the average American isn’t living a life that’s even remotely third world.
The average American has decent health insurance. Our system can be painful and I'm not advocate for it, but the average American is not going bankrupt due to medical issues.
Even then, there are many surprises in terms of what you have to pay yourself and how expensive certain things are. Basically any chronic disease will be very expensive. And don’t lose your job either because then you can kiss the insurance goodbye as well, kicking you even further down. Potentially deep into debt.
The US system sucks in a lot of ways, but it works OK for most Americans. If you're very poor, you'll have Medicaid and it'll cost you nothing. If you're an average middle class person, you'll have decent health insurance and your costs will be affordable. There's a slice of people in the middle who don't qualify for medicaid but don't have decent health insurance, and they're going to have serious financial trouble. But most Americans aren't in that situation.
There's a tendency to look at the worst situations and assume it applies to everyone. How we treat the least fortunate is extremely important and I won't defend the US here, but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care, and "it's basically a third-world country...."
Gdp is not really a great measure of how well an economy works for it's inhabitants, if it was we should all spend our time breaking each others windows.
And abortions due to fetal abnormalities are no longer permitted in Poland.
Isn’t that at odds with „conserve freedom“?
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