<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/25/poland-change-europe-high-achievers-country>
"When the iron curtain was swept away on that miraculous night of 9 November
1989, it exposed some of the deepest differences between geographical
neighbours the world has ever recorded. The 13:1 GDP per capita gap between
Poland and soon-to-be united Germany was twice that between the US and Mexico.
That same night, my pregnant mother and her brothers were workers in the shadow
economy on an eco-farm near Frankfurt, helping to meet the needs of a newly
minted class of environmentally aware Germans. My family admired that country
where “you never got lost on a highway”. People in Germany drove immaculately
clean cars and manual labourers could play
Stille Nacht on several
instruments – which they did at the farm for Christmas 1989 – leading my mother
to marvel at an education system that could so universally equip people not
just with marketable skills but also with an ingrained sense of beauty.
Neighbouring countries tend to have comparable levels of development. A common
security context, investment spillovers, migration, remittances and regional
supply chains create geographical pockets of welfare or poverty that transcend
borders on the map. It takes a solid physical barrier – the Himalayas between
China and Nepal for instance, the barbed wire that runs along the Korean
border, or the Berlin Wall – to maintain economic chasms such as those that
existed between the Poland and Germany of my mother’s era.
But eastern Europe’s economic prospects were rapidly revived by the economic
integration that took off in Europe in the 1990s. Reunified Germany wanted to
have something akin to “the west” in its immediate eastern neighbourhood even
if this required a degree of political heavy-lifting elsewhere in the EU.
France was much less keen on adopting post-communist orphans in a united
Europe."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
