The Parisian mindset of the EU and its truly horrendous costs.

Graham Robb in his very readable book "Discovering France" published in English by W.W. Norton ISBN 978-0-393-33364-0, makes much of the domination of Paris and Parisians in what people understand as France. On page 307 he writes in amplification of the effect of this fact on the provinces (..."which is to say in 1880, 99.9 per cent of the land and 94 per cent of the population,") as follows:

"Since so much of what was written about France was published in Paris and written for Parisians - or for urban bourgeois who looked to Paris as a model - the state of cultural civil war was never as obvious in books as it was in daily life. A cyclist (such as this book's author - blog editor's note) on holiday in the Vendée in 1892 found that a few disobliging remarks about Parisians ensured cooperation and courtesy from the local peasants, who had an instinctive antipathy to the capital. The word 'parisien' is still uttered as an insult in many parts of France, and any visitor with derogatory things to say about Paris is always likely to be treated sympathetically, even by bureaucrats."

The writer of this blog, from several years of living in SW France, can also attest to the accuracy of the above observations.

The effect of this superiority, as felt by Parisians, is reflected in the infrastructure of the entire country of France. The maps provided by Mr Robb on page 224 of the Norton paperback edition, some of which are reproduced below, illustrate this fact very clearly:

So how has this mindset been transferred to the EU, and with what results and disastrous economic consequences, to obtain detail on that visit this linked pdf file

I will be posting further on this topic, with some recent images of the resulting complete waste of infrastructure development and the shameless shovelling of the costs onto local communities. One example of which "LGV EST"  budget is provided below as a taster:

Budget:
Other sources (RFF): €557,304,000
Total project cost covered
by this Decision: €633,300,000
EU contribution: €75,996,000
Percentage of EU support:
Works: 12%

From Wikipedia we learn Alsace must pay €300 million to the TGV Est for what appears to be little material gain:

• This will be the first LGV construction in which local communities have had to participate financially together with the state government and European Union. The contribution was fixed following a capital structure group discussion of the communities, depending on the time decrease for users in relation to the Île de France. Alsace has therefore had to pay almost €300 million. It is possible that this financial model will continue for the second phase.

Normally this blog would not concern itself with what at first appears to be a local issue involving only France, but as France's credit rating has today become crucial to the world's economic crisis, it seems worth informing a much wider audience of the sheer waste underway in a purely propaganda based, typically "Parisien" grandiose project.