International

The European Commission this week presented its findings on the situation in Romania and Bulgaria. These were, in a word, devastating, and the Commission openly casts doubt on whether these countries should have been allowed into the European Union at all. Since the publication of the findings, however, things have remained surprisingly quiet. Parties which attempted to put the SP and other doubters under pressure to agree to the removal of border controls and to accept the two countries into full membership of Schengen now have nothing much to say. At most they express strong criticism of Romania in particular, a country in which what almost amounted to a coup d’état has taken place. Generally speaking it’s nice to be proved right, but in the meantime the people of both nations are suffering under state systems which hardly even merit the term ‘semi-democratic’, with raging corruption and organised crime in abundance.

When I visited Bulgaria a few years ago I was astonished by the wealth visible in some neighbourhoods. The Bulgarians with whom I spoke, who worked for a national integrity bureau, made no secret of the fact that what I had seen were the homes of the Bulgarian mafia. On the coast the mafia already had most properties in their hands and as a result could simply do as they liked. An odd business in a country which had just been admitted to the European Union.

In Romania the prime minister attempted last week, using undemocratic methods, to depose the president. Only after the European Commission began to put pressure on the PM did he promise to run a clean ship and turn things around. At the same time research from Transparency International shows that corruption in both countries is growing.

There are people in Brussels who are attached to the ideal of one big Europe, a Europe that can play a powerful role in the world. These are the people who wanted Greece in the eurozone. They are also the people who accused the SP of wanting to make Bulgarians and Romanians into second class citizens by maintaining border controls with both countries. Nonsense, of course: those Bulgarians and Romanians who want to travel with honest intentions would experience little or no hindrance from such controls which are, on the other hand, certainly a means of ensuring that organised crime from these countries doesn’t fan out across Europe. The SP has maintained a consistent line in relation to this. We too hope that democracy and the rule of law triumph in both of these countries. When that happens we will be in a position to trust legal and customs cooperation with them, but until then border controls must remain in place. That is in the best interests of the Netherlands, of Europe, and certainly of ordinary people in Romania and Bulgaria who are just as anxious to see an improvement in the situation as we are.