DBWI: European Union expands into Eastern Europe instead of stretching south into North Africa?

[The Militant Doberman]

Back in 1987 Kingdom of Morocco applied to join the European Community (precursor to the modern E.U.), becoming the 1st Maghreb nation to do so. After much deliberation, Brussels agreed that Morocco meets the criteria of joining the Community due to historic ties and mutual influence Morocco had on mainland Europe and visa-versa. The Kingdom became an official E.U. member seven years later in 1994.

Morocco became the starting point of European Union’s “southern expansion” which saw Tunisia, Mali, Sahrawi Republic as well as newly-formed ex-Algerian & ex-Libyan* Berber & Arab states join the organization in the 1990s and 2000s.

What if instead of expanding south into North Africa the E.U. instead tried to move into the Balkans & Eastern Europe? Would there still be the Eurozone Crisis? The Migrant Crisis? The rise of Eurosceptcism which saw the U.K. voting to leave the Union? And what about the E.U.’s energy policy in an ATL where gas-rich petrol-states and sparsely-populated deserts full of solar power potential aren’t part of the union?

* - OOC: Stipulating here that the Algerian Civil War and an (earlier) Libyan Civil War has led to the breakup of these 2 countries into smaller states, thus being analogues to the breakup of Yugoslavia.

 

[Whiteshore]

A good POD for an Eastern European expansion of the EU could be avoiding the rise of the Union of Sovereign States (or generally having Russia have a worse 1990s) considering that while Russia is no longer communist, it still has lots of influence in the region.

 

[Dolan]

A good POD for an Eastern European expansion of the EU could be avoiding the rise of the Union of Sovereign States (or generally having Russia have a worse 1990s) considering that while Russia is no longer communist, it still has lots of influence in the region.

Well, Premier Yeltsin just said to the Politburo that after more than 60 years trying to make Communism works, they aren't, and pretty much flipped the Soviet Union into the Russian Union of Sovereign States we all knew today, while the Eastern European dictatorships ended up scrubbing the Hammer and Sickle out while maintaining their power.

A much more drastic fall of Communism might actually work in favor of EU spreading Eastward.

 

[AltoRegnant]

Europe would have a lot better relations with middle eastern powers. Otl the EU has been called anything from Neo-Colonial to a Third French Empire. Maybe have East Germany reunite with the West to pull it that way? Otl there was a lot of movement of people that, while it didn't slavicise Germany, did lead to it joining Austria's "Germanic but not german" club.

It's a shame really, the Berlin Wall might've come tumbling down, but when it became clear East Germany didnt want to unite, the west basically had to sell their half of the city, since they couldn't use an enclave for their capital outside the cold war. Hence the Frankfurt government

 

[Dolan]

It's a shame really, the Berlin Wall might've come tumbling down, but when it became clear East Germany didnt want to unite, the west basically had to sell their half of the city, since they couldn't use an enclave for their capital outside the cold war. Hence the Frankfurt government

It's a shame that Eastern Europe is basically Dictator's Club under Russia, who didn't even bother to profess allegiance to Communism now, just being a military alliance between dictatorships.

All while North Africa and Middle East have turned to a mostly successful Democratic nations.

 

[stodge]

Let's be honest about this - whether it had been a move "east" or, as happened, a move south, the motivation was purely economic.

The Western European economies needed cheap labour and plenty of it to maintain their standard of living and prosperity. The North African or Maghreb countries could provide that (as well as some lucrative investment opportunities as witnessed by the luxury hotels and new deep-water cruise port at Agadir).

The creation of the Single Euro-Maghreb Market was just a mechanism to bring the people to the money in the same way the factories drew workers from the countryside in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Socially, of course, it's been catastrophic - the ghettoes (and let's not beat about the bush, that's what they have been allowed to become) for the migrant North African and later Sub-Saharan workers in the main European cities such as London, Paris, Munich and Rome have become hotbeds for social problems. It has also fostered the rise of extreme anti-EU and anti-African political parties across Europe and whether the Front National, the Westdeutsche Erst or the British National party, all have found plenty of support among the indigenous working classes who have found their jobs and wages taken by workers from Morocco, the Berber Republic and Mali.

It's fine if you are in the middle or upper class enclaves or in rural areas - the migrants clean your car, look after your garden and serve your coffee in town. Many wealthier families have taken a couple of African "servants" just as their forebears had domestic servants in the 1920s and 1930s.

The riots of 2011 and again last summer had disturbing racial overtones and the deaths of Senegalese migrants in a housing estate in Birmingham were appalling.

Even the coalition Government which took over after the vote to leave the EU in 2017 has talked about "quotas" or "limits" on migrant numbers and indeed the old West German notion of "gastarbeiter" is doing the rounds in the European capitals but the problem is so many industries and sectors are dependent on cheap migrant labour and that has unquestionably fuelled Western Europe's extraordinary prosperity.

In Britain, the decision to leave the EU was unquestionably related to concerns on immigration stoked by Farage and the BNP but the trade off between the economic consequences of staunching the flow of cheap labour and the political consequences of so doing aren't fully resolved.

 

[Dolan]

Socially, of course, it's been catastrophic - the ghettoes (and let's not beat about the bush, that's what they have been allowed to become) for the migrant North African and later Sub-Saharan workers in the main European cities such as London, Paris, Munich and Rome have become hotbeds for social problems. It has also fostered the rise of extreme anti-EU and anti-African political parties across Europe and whether the Front National, the Westdeutsche Erst or the British National party, all have found plenty of support among the indigenous working classes who have found their jobs and wages taken by workers from Morocco, the Berber Republic and Mali.

Well, that's exactly the Talking points of Eastern European Autocracies who prided themselves for keeping their population as genuine European, and for better or worse, the Eastern European population in general agreed that their Westerner Cousins are now commiting cultural and demographic suicide, that they genuinely deem their own brutal, despotic government as necessity to keep those (sorry) "Ciemnies" away from invading their motherland.

 

[More Than A Feeling]

The closest the EU got to a eastward expansion was when Estonia decided to become more western and joined. Besides them most are still the same as they were in 1985. You would have to create tension within the bloc. Maybe WW3?

 

[stodge]

While there have been and are similarities with the Chinese evolution from rigid Maoism in the 70s to the economic powerhouse of the 21st Century, the Russian and East European experience has been different.

As the inheritor of the Gorbachev reforms in the wake of the failed 1991 putsch by the last of the hardliners, Yeltsin, as with Milosevic and other leaders, saw the need to move from Communism to authoritarian nationalism but that stoked up its own problems and issues.

The re-defining of the Warsaw Pact in 1995 was accompanied by some less-than-subtle political changes of which Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceaucescu along with Todor Zhivkov were the main losers. The new generation of post-Communist leaders (both those who had inherited and those who had been able to see what was coming and deftly switch horses) have used nationalism to break up the failed COMECON and re-establish their national economies as part of what would become the Minsk Block in 2000 - the east European free trade zone.

Yeltsin set the trend and that was followed by both Primakov and more recently Stepashin, despite the attempts of the former Communists, led by Vladimir Putin, to turn back the clock. The Stepashin Reforms are a long way from capitalism as we would understand it but the emergence of competition, private ownership and liberalisation has allowed a spirit of entrepreneurship to take root as noted by President Obama on his visit to Moscow in 2015.

Obviously, Yugoslavia remains a concern as we all know. The secession of Slovenia was one thing but the uneasy tension between Croatia and Serbia threatens to drag in both the Pact and NATO.

 

[AltoRegnant]

Obviously, Yugoslavia remains a concern as we all know. The secession of Slovenia was one thing but the uneasy tension between Croatia and Serbia threatens to drag in both the Pact and NATO.

Not to get into chat territory, but Obama is considering meeting Stepashin and Joška Broz to negotiate a peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia before ethnic tensions boil over into ww3. The problem of course is that the Sepratist parties in Yugoslavia all have different ideas-- Croatia is split between the Democratic League and the much, much more culty Croat Constitutional Concord.

Ooc: the idea is that Obama's first term was the 2012 race

 

[stodge]

Well, I wouldn't want to get into trouble with @CalBear either by bringing contemporary politics into it.

It's going to be an issue whoever wins in November - however much America may wish not to be so concerned about Europe (and that's entirely understandable with both China and of course that idiot in Pyongyang claiming he is the "only true Communist" left), the problem in a multi-polar world is there is no hiding place.

Some see the multi-polar world as preferable to the Pax Americana which would have resulted from a collapse of the Warsaw Pact but it has kept Washington fully engaged around the world. At least, the end of Soviet Communism and the death of Castro brought about rapid change in Cuba.

The whole Indo-Pakistan business is a further example of changing attitudes - the emerging economic relationship between the RUSS and India is a counterweight to the Sino-Pakistan rapprochement but it keeps a degree of tension across Asia as well.

 

[Joseph890]

Arguably Israel situation could be better if the EU hadn’t expanded into Africa because now they’ve kind of been forced into maintaining very good relations with RUSS and the Minsk Block Because all of the countries they used to trade with in Europe have become very anti-Israel. I mean the one positive is that Eastern Europe is much more tolerant towards Judaism than it was before the reapproach.

 

[Kven]

Finland probably could have become part of the EU, instead of Väyrynen redefining the Paasikivi-Kekkonen doctrine.

 

[Mooze17]

Arguably Israel situation could be better if the EU hadn’t expanded into Africa because now they’ve kind of been forced into maintaining very good relations with RUSS and the Minsk Block Because all of the countries they used to trade with in Europe have become very anti-Israel. I mean the one positive is that Eastern Europe is much more tolerant towards Judaism than it was before the reapproach.

Eh the alliance was pretty natural after the switch from Left Wing Communism to Right Wing Authoritarian Nationalism, especially with the EU becoming more friendly too Muslim nations after the expansion into Sub Saharan and North Africa, and a quite popular Right Wing Israeli party is now advocating that Israel should apply similar strategies as Russia towards keeping its own minorities down.....

 

[Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck]

Those 5 millions of Egyptians and 4 millions of Turks would not have come to Europe. It would be 300,000 Libyans less as well.

 

[stodge]

Eh the alliance was pretty natural after the switch from Left Wing Communism to Right Wing Authoritarian Nationalism, especially with the EU becoming more friendly too Muslim nations after the expansion into Sub Saharan and North Africa, and a quite popular Right Wing Israeli party is now advocating that Israel should apply similar strategies as Russia towards keeping its own minorities down.....

I think notions of "Left" and "Right" are misleading in this instance. Some of the old faces are still there but what we saw was both a generational shift (long overdue) and the de-Marxification of these countries' political ideologies. The references to Lenin, Marx, Stalin and the rest were dropped in favour of more national-focused symbols (often medieval autocrats and warriors).

In some countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia, we even saw multi-party elections at local and provincial level and that foreshadowed the rise of Green movements within the Minsk Block.

The EU's problems aren't with Green politics buy with anti-migrant racist political movements - plenty advocating the militarisation of the Mediterranean and we all know about the problems on the Canary Islands with sub-Saharan migrants.

Gaddafi was a useful "ally" for a while but he was wept away by the economic and demographic pressure of Berber migration and while the most gruesome of the pictures can only be found on the Dark Web, the picture of his body being despoiled by the Berber revolutionaries in Tripoli was perhaps an indicator of the forces Europe had set in motion which would sweep Algeria and other parts of the region.

Then we have the whole business of the Sahrawi Republic, Morocco and Mauritania - the Americans were adamant it wasn't a NATO matter and refused to support any military action so the French were left to provide the peacekeeping force which patrols the Morocco-SADR border and the SADR-Mauritania border.

 

[mauriceq]

I think notions of "Left" and "Right" are misleading in this instance. Some of the old faces are still there but what we saw was both a generational shift (long overdue) and the de-Marxification of these countries' political ideologies. The references to Lenin, Marx, Stalin and the rest were dropped in favour of more national-focused symbols (often medieval autocrats and warriors).

In some countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia, we even saw multi-party elections at local and provincial level and that foreshadowed the rise of Green movements within the Minsk Block.

The EU's problems aren't with Green politics buy with anti-migrant racist political movements - plenty advocating the militarisation of the Mediterranean and we all know about the problems on the Canary Islands with sub-Saharan migrants.

Gaddafi was a useful "ally" for a while but he was wept away by the economic and demographic pressure of Berber migration and while the most gruesome of the pictures can only be found on the Dark Web, the picture of his body being despoiled by the Berber revolutionaries in Tripoli was perhaps an indicator of the forces Europe had set in motion which would sweep Algeria and other parts of the region.

Then we have the whole business of the Sahrawi Republic, Morocco and Mauritania - the Americans were adamant it wasn't a NATO matter and refused to support any military action so the French were left to provide the peacekeeping force which patrols the Morocco-SADR border and the SADR-Mauritania border.

I would agree that a simple directional dichotomy doesn't really describe the political situation in the Eastern Bloc.

While RUSS elections are nominally multi-party, it is important not to be fooled by the controlled opposition parties as a remnant of the overtly communist era. Although, now that we're on the subject, election integrity has been increasingly questioned in the EU as well, not just in the African countries that have failed to live up to the promises of expanded rights as a supposed condition for joining.

For the last part, I would concur that the EU has a strong French influence especially following the withdrawal of Britain. Some citizens of other EU countries have lamented that they are paying for modern-day French colonialism and puppetry in Africa.

ooc: sorry if this was too long from the original thread posting.