Nah. Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Northern Spain, Northern Italy. Those are really wealthy and quite efficient places. And most of those have been so for decades if not centuries.

If the EU consisted of just those places it would probably be as productive per capita as California.

> anywhere the Hapsburgs ruled

... which is why Austria and the Netherlands are so poor and backwards??

I think it was the communism - it was a really bad economic system that was so out of touch with the reality of human beings and the past thousand years that people had no other choice but to engage in corruption (bypassing the system).

There's the communist revolution, which gave power to people who were not fit to wield it. There's the dekulakization, which liquidated millions of people who knew what they were doing. Then there's the forced collectivisation...

It's not that simple. To read more about the economy there visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federa...