Funny

I agree. I also think that privilege plays a large part in this selective blindness.

For me as someone who has seen first hand the effects that the EU has had in a country like Romania, it would be hard to put those idealism glasses back on even if i wasn't a Marxist.

I also understand why some people even from the periphery defend it, because there is also a privileged strata there that benefits from the EU. These tend to be the people who, thanks to their job being connected to a Western company or working in the digital domain, can make "western European wages" while living in a south or eastern European country. These are the people who regularly travel around Europe and have a more cosmopolitan outlook and are fanatical supporters of the European project.

But this is a small minority, while the majority of the working class, and especially those living outside of a handful of big cities, have largely been left behind. It's actually a very similar dynamic to how you have some people with a much more liberal and pro-US outlook in countries in Latin America. Those whose material conditions, their income levels and the way they earn their money, alienate them from the way that the majority of people in their own country live.

And at the same time i've also experienced personally the way many people in a country like Germany (here again not necessarily those at the lower socio-economic levels but those with a higher education and a degree of financial comfort, intelligentsia, labor aristocracy, skilled professionals) can be completely blind to this dynamic and idealize the EU because it works for them, and because the people who they do interact with and talk with from the peripheral countries are precisely those few with the means to afford to travel around a lot and be "citizens of Europe".