@MetaPhrastes the EU has been incredibly effective at preventing wars between it's members, before they were always at war, since the EU never again. And you just need to step out of the EU to see wars...

You don't have to be a economist to see how much the Romanian and Bulgarian economies improved since joining. But there are no magic pills, it takes time.

So yeah, hopefully it's only you with such a simplistic and alienated view, unfortunately we know you aren't the only one.

@boem

How do you think Romania and Bulgaria would have done without the EU?

Well, we need to consider where the countries are coming from and where they are at. For the south-eastern countries we need to keep corruption as a major factor in mind too. Wasnt there a croatian eu parliamentarist, who had 600.000 Euros in a sportsbag at home? In Hungary people happily vote for Orban, who tells them the EU is betraying them, while he and his crownies are lining their pockets with EU money meant to develop Hungary.

Even former Eastern Germany still has areas with poverty even though German reunification was close to twice that long ago.

Now I am not saying everything in that process went as well as one could have hoped for, far from it in fact, but it serves as a point of comparison for what can be expected under real world circumstances that was available around the time those countries made their decision to join the EU.