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Since late 2013, when the Ukraine crisis first erupted, the British government has insisted that we need to support Ukrainian people in making a ‘European choice’.
Setting aside the irony that the UK chose to leave the EU in 2016, many Brits might still consider it a good choice. I’m pro-European, possibly because I grew up in Germany during the height of the cold war, the son of a working-class British soldier. In my view, Britain gained considerable economic, social and cultural benefit, as a sovereign nation, within a wider peaceable European community of five hundred million people.
What has never been clear to me is why, in ‘choosing’ Europe, Ukraine should cut its ties with Russia. When Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1971, our country was not asked to cut off our relationship with the USA. We could be friends with Europeans and Americans.
I don’t think most people in Ukraine, whether they are native Ukrainian or Russian speakers, would have chosen to lose half a million men and women to death or injury in a war with Russia. Or twenty percent of their land, or seventy percent of their power generation and most of their heating during bitterly cold winters. Or for the Ukrainian economy to be smaller than it was in 2008 and unlikely to return to pre-war levels until after 2030.
At the heart of this so-called European choice is a simple, unavoidable reality.
Ukraine is too poor to join Europe on equal terms. Yet western leaders continue to press Ukraine to choose Europe and not Russia or, indeed, a balanced relationship with both (even better).
In theory at least, there are good economic reasons why Ukraine might want to join the EU because it is significantly poorer than European member states. If Ukraine could match European economic development, it would undoubtedly be a good thing, you’d think.
The problem is that the EU project is built on the rich countries subsidizing the poorer countries (and, actually, subsidizing some of the richer countries too).
When only poor countries join the EU, the system needs to create more money to subsidize them, which means the rich countries pay even more to keep the club together. That’s one reason, as well as geography, that you don’t find rich countries queuing up to join the EU. If they did, the balancing effect would make it easier for poor countries like Ukraine to join.
Ukrainian membership of the EU would throw everything into the air and inevitably force some countries that currently benefit from EU funding, to start paying in. Ukraine’s size and fecundity is its economic curse, when it comes to Europe. With a large, well-educated, pre-war population of forty-one million people, Ukraine would become Europe’s fourth largest country. It would have by far the largest area of agricultural land, which is also the most fertile in Europe, and account for over twenty percent of EU farmland. The Financial Times assessed in 2023 that it would cost the EU €196bn to bring Ukraine into the EU, on the same terms as other Member countries. That’s because Ukraine is so much poorer than the rest of the EU, with income just 13% of the EU average. Size matters when it comes to EU funding; the poorer you are, the more you get. Which seems fair.
Unfortunately, that money would have to come out of the pockets of richer EU countries, actually, every EU country. Czechia, Estonia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia and Cyprus would between them lose around €11.2bn each year in cohesion funding alone if Ukraine joined on the current arrangement. Across the board, EU farmers would see twenty percent cuts in income from agricultural subsidies.
The violent demonstrations by Polish farmers in March 2024 at the flood of cheap Ukrainian grain imports, would pale in comparison to unrest across the whole of the EU, should open access be granted to Ukraine’s farms. That’s why, just weeks after war in Ukraine started, French President Macron said that it would ‘take decades’ for Ukraine to join the EU; he understands precisely the social upheaval that would erupt among French farmers, by far the largest recipient of Common Agricultural Policy funds, at the prospect of big cuts to their incomes.
While affluent Britain was an EU member, the issue of our net contributions to the European budget bedevilled a succession of governments until Brexit was forced upon us. It is my view that Ukrainian membership of the EU would stoke support for nationalist parties like the National Rally in France, Alternative für Deutschland and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, not to mention the Law and Justice Party in Poland and elsewhere.
So, Ukraine’s EU membership pathway (much like its NATO membership aspiration), is a big can of worms that is routinely kicked down the road by European states. Perhaps the biggest roadblock, ironically, would be Poland, one of the most steadfast countries in providing support to Ukraine since the war started. Poland’s economy has boomed since it joined the EU in 2004.
Like Ukraine, Poland is big, and bountiful, yet its population is smaller than Ukraine’s by around 5 million and it possesses just a third of the agricultural land. Its income is below the EU average yet still five times higher than Ukraine’s. Poland receives by far the largest payouts from the EU in the form of grants and agricultural subsidies of around €16bn each year. Of this, Poland receives so much EU cohesion funding (almost €11bn each year) that it soaks up a quarter of the total, way ahead of its closest rivals Czechia and Romania.
Poland would lose most of its EU funding if Ukraine joined the EU and may even creep into net-contributor territory. Poland would literally be paying for Ukraine to join the EU. Little wonder Poland’s war-hungry Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was so keen for Ukraine to keep fighting Russia, long after it became obvious that Ukraine could not win. Poland doesn’t want Ukraine to join the EU and neither do other heavily subsidised EU Member States.
EU countries don't want Ukraine to join the EU, but the EU 'elite' have no problem dishonestly telling the Ukrainians (and the collective of EU citizens) that they do; just like the EU 'elite' have no problem directing their national broadcasters to describe/portray 'Syrian' terrorist group HTS as plucky "rebels". Plucky rebels socking it to the nasty Poot'n.
The deception/oppression of the European public has become systematic. Don't like the candidate that is running away with the Romanian election? Just cancel the election!
I would describe myself as a natural pro-European. I was a remoaner at Brexit-time, in fact I would have described myself as a remoaner fundamentalist. Nearly a decade later, with seemingly each passing day my antipathy towards…
The facts and figures on the EU subsidies regime are telling, but the potential impact of Ukraine on the EU’s “free market in labour” could be even more significant. Workers in some of the historically lower-Income countries - like Poland - would see their wages under pressure from immigrant labour for the first time, and they probably wouldn’t be very happy about it.