[John_KZ]

>Last year Greece stopped the European Union from criticising China’s human-rights record at a UN forum. Hungary and Greece prevented the EU from backing a court ruling against China’s expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Maybe if the EU hadn't forced Greece to sell their largest port to the highest bidder they'd do better. Some German lobbyists thought they'd get it for pennies, then the Chinese stepped in and bought it for a half-decent price. Also Greece, Hungary and Czech Republic would be much fonder of the "European" side (a euphemism for "Franco-German Bank interests" at this point) if they weren't treated like second-class colonies to be milked and dumped to the trash.

I can assure you that the cental European lobbies will abuse the periphery up until the very last drop of patience runs out.

In this case, they lost a piece of the carcass they were tearing up because they were too sure no other preditors were around. But if they keep pushing the smallest countries this way, nobody will care about allegiance to "Europe" (whatever that means) in the future. I wish the US would step in and stop them from destroying the EU, but I guess they don't care much, which is disappointing.

[thefounder]

I think the real issue is that we still talk about small countries instead of small states with the same European citizens. There wouldn't be such a big issue if a corporation from CA(i.e Apple) were to buy the Long Beach port or some big factories from Detroit, MI. I may be wrong but I believe China is not paying only for the value of the asset itself. It's also paying to get better access to the EU market and/or even buying political support from Greece, a kind of "strategic aquisition"

[John_KZ]

I have to disagree with 2 parts about your argument. One is that centralization and capital concentration isn't a problem. The other is that the origin of ownership is irrelevant. That's also not true.

If interests of one region buy up all the production of another, they inevitably move all production to one place, their original base. Ports, mines and railways are a generally an exception to a the rule, but still lots of positions on management, engineering, logistics etc are lost in the selling country/region and moved to the buying one.

To elaborate on the US-EU analogy:

In US, some regions concentrate more wealth and power than others, having the majority of production and/or headquarters based there. But in the US there's real freedom of movement. You can work in Montana one day, move to Florida the next, and it's no big deal. The residents of economically disadvantaged areas have to carry the burden of moving away for work, but that's the only burden they face.

In the EU there are 24 official languages. Simply put, you can't just move anywhere you'd like to be. Learning a new language takes many years. I've been using English almost daily for 10+ years and I still come across new words quite often. Primarily due to this reason, in the EU, freedom of movement is allowed only on paper. Workers from disadvantaged areas have to take on a huge burden if they decide to move. They have to learn a new language, a new tax system, a new everything from workplace H&S rules to mains outlet types. Also they often face a lot of discrimination (even if language skills aren't a dead giveaway, ethnic differences are usually visible to us, even if they would seem minute to an American). So essentially when a factory moves from Italy or Slovenia to Germany, the locals lose a lot more than just the inconvenience of having to move across a couple states for work.

[thefounder]

The tax system and H&S rules are not such a big issue. They are different in the US as well. The language is an issue and without a common/EU language or some tech innovation there is no way to fix it completely.