I know Poland is in limbo one because of the period of socialist inefficiency, and two because the minister Balcerowicz's shock therapy reforms were largely an experiment to see what happens when you let trade unions run the show. The experiment however failed to take into account that Solidarity was a special type of a trade union which concerned itself less with representing the labour interests since they in effect put millions out of work, and more with kissing up to the Vatican and various American and E.U. interests, as long as they got some kickbacks out of it. Their motto was dismantling socialism which also meant indiscriminately shutting down the communist era industrial worksites, even profitable ones, rather than turning many around or more effectively looking for investment partners to bring them up to date. The result was deindustrialization on a massive scale, and in its place opening up of supermarkets owned by multinationals.
And if Ukraine decides to join the E.U. the economic slump in Eastern Europe will spread, as the E.U. taxpayers will have to fetch the bill, roughly about 50 billion euros to bring the Ukraine's infrastructure up to date, the multinationals will benefit at no cost to them since they will transfer a lot of their investments in Eastern Europe into Ukraine to take advantage of the cheaper labour there, and finally Ukraine's agriculture will be a stiff competition to Eastern Europe's agriculture much of which struggles or gets subsidized again because of cheaper labour.
Oh, and then Spain will demand the admission of the entire Latin America into the E.U. to keep it balanced, and so that E.U.'s internal matters and interests are evenly represented.
