The exercise will cost in excess of $40 billion over the next three
years. The EU's population will grow by 75 million souls.
In the wake of the implosion of the USSR in 1989-91, the newly
independent countries of the Baltic and central Europe, traumatized by
decades of brutal Soviet imperialism, sought to fend off future Russian
encroachment. Entering NATO and the EU was perceived by them as the
equivalent of obtaining geopolitical insurance policies against a
repeat performance of their tortured histories.
This existential emphasis shifted gradually to economic aspects as an
enfeebled, pro-Western and contained Russia ceased to represent a
threat. But the ambivalence towards the West is still there. Mild
strands of paranoid xenophobia permeate public discourse in central
Europe and, even more so, in east Europe.
The Czechs bitterly remember how, in 1938, they were sacrificed to the
Nazis by a complacent and contemptuous West. The Poles and Slovenes
fear massive land purchases by well heeled foreigners (read: Germans).
Everyone decries the "new Moscow" - the faceless, central planning,
remote controlling bureaucracy in Brussels. It is tough to give up hard
gained sovereignty and to immerse oneself in what suspiciously
resembles a loose superstate.
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