European Union Leaders Agree to Slimmer Budget - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Why should a Latvian cow deserve less money than a French, Dutch or even Romanian one?
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In a system that requires unanimous approval of budget decisions, what Latvia wants for its dairy farmers — or Estonia for its railways, Hungary for its poorer regions or Spain for its fishermen — is no small matter.
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The colossal effort that was required to agree to a sum of about 960 billion euros ($1.3 trillion), a mere 1 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product, exposed once again the stubborn attachment to national priorities that has made reaching agreements on how to save the euro so painful in recent years.
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the ordeal as “not a pleasant experience,” but said, “It only happens every seven years, so we can tolerate it.”
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Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands were among the Northern European nations that fought hard to reduce agricultural subsidies and increase spending on research and development to bolster the bloc’s global competitiveness.
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The spectacle of European leaders haggling through the night over amounts of money representing rounding errors in their national accounts demonstrated vividly their reluctance to make collective policies that erode their nations’ sovereignty.
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“What we’re seeing is that European integration is very important to European leaders as long as it doesn’t imply that someone has to be paying for someone else,”
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farm spending remained the largest single portion of the budget, accounting for about 38 percent of the total — although that was down from about 42 percent in the previous seven-year budget period.