Best and worst neighbour

[Levike]

So according to your personal and sincere opinion:

In the last years which country has been the best neigbour of your country?
And which has been the worst?

And please explain why.

[IpseDixit]

Worst: Vatican City State. The Vatican lobby should keep their fucking hands off Italian politics. Oh, and it would also be nice if the Vatican bank stopped laundering money for mafia ...

Best: anyone else except for San Marino... another money sucking parasite listed on the black list of financial and fiscal havens (alongside the Vatican )... I have some issues with Switzerland as well to be honest...

[linguoboy]

Best: Mexico
Worst: Canada

[mōdgethanc]

Best: Mexico
Worst: Canada

I know, right? All those drugs and illegal immigrants coming into the country - when will they get off their asses and fix the border?

[linguoboy]

Best: Mexico
Worst: Canada

I know, right? All those drugs and illegal immigrants coming into the country - when will they get off their asses and fix the border?

It's not "the border" we need to fix; it's our drugs and immigration policies.

All I know is I'll take Peña Nieto over Harper any dingdang day of the week.

[mōdgethanc]

All I know is I'll take Peña Nieto over Harper any dingdang day of the week.

Don't blame me; I voted for the other guy.

[Limagne]

Best: Switzerland, because I like how it is the opposite of France in many ways (federalism, multilingualism, neutrality...).

Worst: the Comoros, because it's basically a failed state.

[mōdgethanc]

Sorry, Comoros being a failed state affects you how, exactly?

For what it's worth, Comoros scores better on the FSI than the Phillipines and only slightly worse than Israel. At least it's not Somalia.

[Saim]

These are the most common attitudes I come across in the countries I know best, although I don't necessarily share them:

[flag]ur[/flag]
Best: China (big brother)
Worst: India, Afghanistan (refugees, they hate us 'cause we meddle)

[flag]en-AU[/flag]
Best: New Zealand (Anglos)
Worst: Indonesia ("stop the boats!!!!")

[flag]sr[/flag]
Best: Montenegro (Serbia with beach), Macedonia (Serbianized mini-Bulgaria, they also hate Albanians), Greece (not Slavs, but Orthodox, and have a territorial conflict with Albanians)
Worst: Albania ("Kosovo je Srbija!!!"), Croatia

and for added bonus:

[flag]ca[/flag]
Best: Occitania (Visca la Vall d'Aran!), Balearic Islands ("insular Catalonia" )
Worst: Castile (opressors), Aragon ("jealous they haven't preserved their language"), France (opressors), Andorra ("they ignore us!"), Valencian Country ("they're all a bunch of Spaniards"), Basque Country ("damn them and their higher level of self-government!")

Regarding my own opinion, I think Pakistani Punjab, Serbia and Australia have all been bad neighbours more than they've had bad neighbours.

-[flag]ur[/flag] Punjab monopolizes all the power in the Pakistani State, and the Pakistani State brutally opresses Balochistan, and constantly meddles in Afghanistan. Enough dick-waving contests with India.

-[flag]sr[/flag] needs to get over its territorial conflicts with Albanians, Croats and Bosniaks and its inferiority complex with the West. Yes there was oluja in Croatia, and Serbs in Kosovo have been discriminated against, but Serbs have done worse.

-[flag]en-AU[/flag] needs to stop whining about boats.

-[flag]ca[/flag] nationalists need to realize that the Basque Right is no worse than the Catalan Right in terms of solidarity between Spanish national minorities, and that its not the Aragonese or Valencians that are the problem but rather those that happen to be xenophobic Spanish nationalists.

Worst: Vatican City State. The Vatican lobby should keep their fucking hands off Italian politics. Oh, and it would also be nice if the Vatican bank stopped laundering money for mafia ...

Ideally it shouldn't even be a state. Victor Emmanuel II had the right idea.

[Lur]

They should invade and annexionate the Vatican and everything within it.

[Saaropean]

I don't think you can define a best and worst neighbour for Germany and Canada.

For [flag]en-ca[/flag] Canada, it doesn't work because it only has 1 neighbour [flag]en-us[/flag] (SPM and Greenland only count for geeks).

For [flag]de[/flag] Germany, it doesn't work because she ignores most of her 9 neighbours [flag]dk[/flag] [flag]pl[/flag] [flag]cs[/flag] [flag]de-at[/flag] [flag]de-ch[/flag] [flag]fr[/flag] [flag]lb[/flag] [flag]fr-be[/flag] [flag]nl[/flag] (in the double sense of not knowing and not caring much about them, except if you happen to live near a border, but then you only know your direct neighbour).

[mōdgethanc]

They should invade and annexionate the Vatican and everything within it.

[linguoboy]

They should invade and annexionate the Vatican and everything within it.

I like "annexionate". It makes me imagine they've assigned the job to Trogdor.

[Itikar]

They should invade and annexionate the Vatican and everything within it.

Actually they did. Thank Mr. Mussolini for giving back a sovereign state to the Roman Catholic Church.

As for the topic:
Austria/France: disputes about illegal immigration and border control.
Switzerland: offers safe haven for Italian tax dodgers and politicians' bank accounts.
San Marino: same as Switzerland, but at least we surround it from every side.
Vatican: same as San Marino and Switzerland, plus it puts its nose in Italian affairs as said by IpseDixit. However it has cool coins, cool post marks and cool signs written in Latin.
Slovenia: for exclusion it is the best neighbour. They even sell fuel at a lower price. Only pay attention to the motorway ticket, because it is even more expensive than the Swiss one.

[IpseDixit]

They should invade and annexionate the Vatican and everything within it.

Actually they did. Thank Mr. Mussolini for giving back a sovereign state to the Roman Catholic Church.

I've never understood why this didn't change with the end of the war and the defeat of the fascists.

[Levike]

[flag]ro[/flag] This is for Romania

Best: Bulgaria because everyone goes there for holiday. We love Bulgaria.

Worst: Hungary because this is the only neighbour that sometimes causes problems.
I don't remember having problems with the other ones.

[Jurgen Wullenwever]

I don't think you can define a best and worst neighbour for Germany and Canada.

For [flag]en-ca[/flag] Canada, it doesn't work because it only has 1 neighbour [flag]en-us[/flag] (SPM and Greenland only count for geeks).

For [flag]de[/flag] Germany, it doesn't work because she ignores most of her 9 neighbours [flag]dk[/flag] [flag]pl[/flag] [flag]cs[/flag] [flag]de-at[/flag] [flag]de-ch[/flag] [flag]fr[/flag] [flag]lb[/flag] [flag]fr-be[/flag] [flag]nl[/flag] (in the double sense of not knowing and not caring much about them, except if you happen to live near a border, but then you only know your direct neighbour).

In Sweden we know nothing of our neighboring states, and we share a border with Germany too, but the Germans know more about Sweden than we do about Germany. At least Germany has rose-tinted TV shows about Sweden.

[Varislintu]

I guess it goes without saying that Russia is the "worst" neighbour for Finland. It doesn't share many of our ideals, and it has a history of being unable to keep its hands to itself. However, our relations are still cordially optimistic. We get a lot of rich Russian tourists, and a lot of Russians also move here. As a resident minority they're pretty invisible and friendly and don't cause any particular problems. Probably some Finns treat them pretty bad even so, because of our historical russophobia. They probably get called bad names occasionally.

The best neighbour? I don't know, probably Norway, since most of the time we hear absolutely nothing about it. A sign of a lack of problems, I guess. But sweden is the one we interact with and talk about the most, and also try to emulate a lot of the time.

[Itikar]

I've never understood why this didn't change with the end of the war and the defeat of the fascists.

Me neither, along with the lese-majesty law.
Likely they were both useful for the elites who ruled our land in the aftermath.

[IpseDixit]

In Sweden we know nothing of our neighboring states, and we share a border with Germany too.

You share a border with Germany? Really?? Where exactly?