Friday, November 25, 2005

The Ugly Face of the EU, artistically speaking...

I have always been concerned with the way, the free trade agreement has evolved into the Supra-Bureaucracy EU, but I have always been more interested in economic "problems" and civil rights issues in respect to the EU. However, Marginal Revolutions has pointed me to another terrible face of the EU and their restrictive forces.

It seems as if EU officials have cooped with Unions to ban Eastern European musicians (who are paid less than the state-funded Germans and French) from the Central European stages. Private Orchestras had employed those new classic players, because they could turn down prices and costs that way. Of course, German-French artists or better their unions were angered by it.
The French even got so far as to forbid performances of those non-unionized players in their country. Germany seems to be close at French's heels, if I interpret the outrage of German Unions correctly.

Not only that I think this is laughable when viewed in context of Leftists in French and Germany, who called the EU a neo-liberal institution, but I also believe that it is a sad and racist fact of the new European Economic Community. It shows that we are far from free market and that the free movement of workers and people has been abolished shortly after the treaty allowed it.

Artistically, I am very depressed, because many fantastic players came from the East, not the least of them was Rachmaninoff (one of the best piano composers of the 20th century) or his successor Horowitz. This kind of prejudice is the way Socialdemocrats want the world to be, but I don't want to live in such a life and I think so don't want the Bulgarians that have been hired by Hartung.

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