{"id":1831,"date":"2008-08-22T08:57:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-22T08:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2008-08-22T08:59:27","modified_gmt":"2008-08-22T08:59:27","slug":"romania-truly-european","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/romania-truly-european\/","title":{"rendered":"Romania: Truly European"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ah&#8230; The 2007 accession states of Bulgaria and Romania&#8230; What to make of them? At the time I was both <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1441\">optimistic<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1439\">pessimistic<\/a> all at once. A year and a half on&#8230;?<\/p>\n<p>After <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1805\">Bulgaria being told off<\/a> last month (for, y&#8217;know, little things like being economically backward, corrupt, and ignoring human rights and the rule of law) now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.setimes.com\/cocoon\/setimes\/xhtml\/en_GB\/features\/setimes\/features\/2008\/08\/21\/feature-01\">EU agricultural funds have been suspended to Romania<\/a> due to dodgy management.<\/p>\n<p>Oh dear&#8230; Doesn&#8217;t look like letting them in was such a good idea now, does it?<\/p>\n<p>The thing is, though, unlike Bulgaria&#8217;s blatant unsuitability for EU membership, I reckon this simply shows how much Romania&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1315\">getting into the spirit of things<\/a>. The Commission has suspended payments of just 28.3 million euros to Romania &#8211; that&#8217;s three times <em>less<\/em> than France was fined back in 2006 for dodgy use of CAP funds. Mismanagement of EU agricultural payments is a long and noble tradition &#8211; by following the examples of <a href=\"http:\/\/europa.eu\/rapid\/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP\/06\/1068&#038;format=HTML&#038;aged=0&#038;language=EN&#038;guiLanguage=en\">France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Ireland<\/a>, Romania is merely underlining its commitment to European values.<\/p>\n<p>Makes you proud, doesn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ah&#8230; The 2007 accession states of Bulgaria and Romania&#8230; What to make of them? At the time I was both optimistic and pessimistic all at once. A year and a half on&#8230;? After Bulgaria being told off last month (for, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/romania-truly-european\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[112,58,178,129],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-balkans","tag-bulgaria","tag-cap","tag-eu","tag-romania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}