It's amusing to know that both Butan and Tovi are French and relate that to what they say here. As a "neighbour" and speaking the same language I have had the occasion of learning about French people probably more than other people here do, without being French myself. Of course disclaimer, the following will be absurdly reductory.
I view many French people to either have nostalgia or even the illusion of still being a great power. This is the recurring theme among the euroskeptic French mainly. The amusing part of it is that the ruling class has grown out of this bubble, only keeping up the grand discours for show, but the population isn't that fast. Hence unlike the UK, France isn't outright sabotaging the EU. Just a little bit outside of euroskeptics, you have the basic leftists that resent the fact that the EU as a whole is more liberalist than socialist, and certainly a lot more liberal than France will ever be and has ever been. The right wing in France is made up almost entirely of conservatives, hence it's not about one or the other party winning an election, France is plainly not liberal. They also resent their poor economic health against more liberal countries of similar size and development such as the UK and Germany. More importantly, the US is hated for its capitalism and every enemy of the US can only be a good guy. French european leftists do not understand why the EU is not more like France politically but believe that it would if the people in the EU were better represented, hence push for a more geopolitically independant EU that would be strong enough to fight evil capitalism.
Yeah, Russian geopolitics are all about making the neighbours of USA hate it. So very hard that. Especially since all those countries don't already hate USA for being such a nice and non-exploitative neighbour, that is totally not attempting to screw everyone over at every opportunity. There was also never such a thing as Cold War or a reaction against Tchetchen. Also, evul CSTO is forcing itself west, imposing itself unto the unwilling western european countries, that are totally not afraid of a particular country, that totally did not occupy them for 40+ years not so long ago. x guy, you are a real smart fellow.
Works too.
All those West-Germans beg to differ. They had Americans building a fucking wall to prevent them joining the East, right ? Also the US had to repress lots of revolts in Western Europe during the Cold War, sometimes even with tanks, right ?
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