This, from Bloomberg, seems like a negative development (or continuation of an old story, as the case may be):
A high-speed train line linking the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the three former Soviet Baltic states, to Warsaw and Berlin may never be built if the European Union's six richest nations have their way.
The leaders of Germany, France, the U.K., Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands will push to curb EU spending at a meeting in Brussels on June 16 and 17, while protecting such favored programs as farm subsidies. The eastern European newcomers worry that aid for their planned roads, bridges and power stations will be cut a year after joining the world's largest trade bloc.
The sparring illustrates the economic divide that opened in Europe after the EU expanded beyond the former Iron Curtain. French and Dutch voters rejected the region's constitution three weeks ago partly over concern about the cost of helping such new entrants as Slovakia and Poland, where wages are less than half than in Germany.
Not the the overall goal is necessarily a bad one:
France, the Netherlands, Germany, the U.K., Sweden and Austria all pay more into the EU budget than they get out of it. Their governments want to cap spending at 1 percent of gross domestic product because of slow economic growth, high unemployment and widening budget deficits.
But the one-size-fits-all policy looks to be increasingly stressful in an expanded EU:
Germany's jobless rate is at 11.8 percent, near a post-World War II record, while the country's economy expanded just 1.7 percent for the three years through 2004, according to EU statistics.
In eastern Europe, by contrast, economic growth has buoyed stocks and currencies across the region. The Polish zloty has risen 13 percent against the euro in the past 12 months. The Czech koruna is up 5 percent and the Slovak koruna 3.9 percent.
Most eastern European stock markets have outperformed those in the west. This year, the benchmark indexes in Estonia and Hungary have risen 35 percent and 25 percent respectively. That compares with a 4.8 percent gain for the U.K.'s FTSE 100 and a 7.9 percent increase for Germany's DAX.
And when it really gets down to it, the trade-off here is between expenditures on infrastructure in growing countries where the return to capital is high, and redistributive policies within the mature economies of "Old Europe":
The older members not only are pushing to lower the ceiling on spending. They refuse to give up their own entitlements: farm aid in the case of France and an annual 5.2 billion-euro rebate for the U.K.