Does Joining the European Union Weed Out Corruption?

I’ve got to admit that I’m baffled by this post at RealClearWorld:

If ever there were a country that the European Union could benefit, that country is Macedonia. Bordering several troubled countries that arose from the bloodstained ashes of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, with a helping hand, could become the peaceful example that this patch of the Balkans sorely needs.

Stuck between Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Greece, Macedonia is a land-locked country of slightly more than 2 million souls. It is also a country typical of the Balkans, with its troubled past and the potential for future violence. Macedonia is a European nation in trouble, and the European Union should help it. The question increasingly is whether Macedonia still wants that help – and all the strings that come attached to it.

I’m well aware of Macedonia’s problems with poverty, corruption, and lack of economic development. They’re problems all too common among the European former subjects of the Ottoman. All experienced several hundred years of oppression by the Turks followed by misrule by German princes and, in the case of Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic, by Communist bosses.

I’m not sure the European Union and even less the euro would do much to produce the changes that Macedonia needs—foreign direct investment and development under conditions that would gradually build economic, political, and social institutions. What it is more likely to experience is a flood of German goods and the squelching of its domestic economy. Consider the example of Greece.

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