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Comment by leto_ii | Hacker News Reader

Also a Romanian here. My take is similar to yours, but I would go even further in saying that the 90s were even more catastrophic in terms of privatization and liberalization. Remember the 'shock therapy' years? Prices doubling every few months? Entire industries collapsing, prized factories being sold for scrap metal? Millions losing their jobs etc. - a lot of that stuff didn't have to happen that way. A lot of it was forced via Washington Consensus type reforms.

To my mind the EU was our salvation not so much because of its economic nature, but because of its political one. The free market was the price we had to pay in order to be able to travel, work, study abroad, earn real wages that we could use to invest back into our own country etc. The EU also insured a decent degree of geo-political, strategic stability. Without the EU we may have ended up like our neighbors to the North/East.

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In the long run, free trade might not be a cost...

Adjusting to a new trade regiment will always be painful in the short term.

But many factories have moved labor intensive parts of production to eastern europe. Which wouldn't have been possible without the EU.

In Poland some share similar sentiment, but it was better to get rid of of all these inflexible, low quality companies than providing them with life support. Problem was with management and technology. You would need to get rid of whole management hierarchy, and at that time there was nobody who could replace it. Some relicts from communism still lingers here and there, for 30 years after fall of communism unable to turn profit. Or corrupted managers moving ideas or technologies to “friendly” companies outside. If you allowed these companies to exist there would be a more chance for forming oligarchies like in Ukraine, instead of that we have more robust middle class.

I don't know the situation in Poland very well, but I think in general in Romania you (assuming you're Polish) are perceived as a success story.

In Romania it's actually quite hard to buy products and services that are not provided by some foreign company. Most banks, all big shopping chains (as GP noted), lots of the food and clothes, agri-business, almost all the telcoms are foreign. As a matter of fact, even though we have our own currency, a lot of products are pretty much directly priced in euros: cars, home appliances, electronics, apartments, land, rents, utility bills. All of these go up when the euro goes up (they don't go down when the euro goes down - and the euro never goes down).

That's a story told by the neoliberals. Meanwhile, a some of the communist-era companies survived and are thriving: PKO BP, Orlen, LOTOS, KGHM, PGNiG etc. The post-communist management and culture didn't prevent them from transforming into basically modern companies that aren't different from their foreign competitors.

one bank, 3 distribution companies, and one from mining segment. I wouldn't call this a success.

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