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Norway has not applied for EU membership. A referendum last held in 1994 prohibits it. Referenda were also held in Finland and Sweden in the same year. The pro-EU side gained a cautious win in both countries.Denmark joined the EEC in 1973.France has been lukewarm about several countries joining… If not all. Opposing EU expansion is almost like a tradition by now.France did not want Finland in. The reasons were presumably geopolitical. Finland shares a thousand-mile border with Russia.New members in 1995.France did not turn down the membership application. At least, I don’t think so.But it took some convincing on Finland’s part, Germany putting in a good word for Finns, and Sweden joining at the same time.Those were different times… The days right after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

For some time, the undisputed largest party in the world by membership was the Communist Party of China, which has 90 million members (about 6% of the total population).But during the 2010s, another party saw its membership explode until it surpassed the CCP’s member count.Emblem of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), IndiaThe Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist party in India, has grown like crazy in recent years; when it took power in 2014, it had 35 million members, less than half of CCP members at the time (80+ million).In an effort to expand its clout among the Indian population, the BJP went on a recruitment overdrive, promoting itself on social media and making it extremely easy for voters who didn’t belong to the party but would otherwise support it to join.To join the BJP, interested applicants simply called the BJP’s toll-free number or signed up on the BJP website, and paid a paltry fee of five rupees (about 6–8 US cents).The BJP also went to the countryside and signed up as many people as possible, with a special focus on the poor and uneducated, presumably because there are so many of them and it’s not difficult getting such people to join with a little persuasion and promises of goodies.In a span of 3–4 months, the BJP saw its membership more than double — from 35 million in December 2014 to 88 million in March 2015, surpassing the CCP by over a million members.Here’s how the BJP surpassed China’s Communists to become the largest political party in the worldIf the BJP’s figures are credible, that means it has long overtaken the CCP to become the largest political party in the world.The BJP has continued to grow since 2015, having come a long way in consolidating its control over India; in August 2019, the party’s president announced it had managed to recruit 70 million new members, bringing the total number of members to 180 million — which is double the size of the CCP.BJP inducts 7 crore new members, creates membership drive recordBy comparison, the CCP has barely grown; on average, about 2–4 million new members are inducted each year. In fact, around the time that the BJP was straight up trying to recruit everybody, the CCP was cutting back on the number of new members, hitting record low recruitment rates from 2012 onwards.Being the elite party in a one-party state, the CCP is not trying to outflank rival elites in elections like the BJP is, so it has no incentive to win over as many members as possible. Being an elite party, it also considers its members to be the best and brightest of Chinese society — one that not everyone is entitled to join — hence the complicated process for recruiting new members (papers, tests, and screenings that usually last for more than a year). There are certain circumstances where someone can join the party right away (e.g. during a natural disaster when there is a need to coordinate between the party and essential workers on the ground), but these are rare.This is in stark contrast to the BJP’s approach, which is to literally turn the BJP into a party of the masses.There was a time when the CCP saw itself as a mass party and was a lot more liberal in its approach to recruiting new members, but that started to bite back at the CCP as corruption and lack of discipline became issues within the party. Then Xi Jinping came in, kicked out a bunch of party members, and put a cap on new ones.

My brother-in-law is a governor at his local school.A few years ago, he was involved in the selection of a new member of staff.Mostly, the applicants had reasonable CVs (resumes) but the covering letters seemed much lower quality.Of the 20 applicants, 7 had included spelling mistakes on the covering letter1 of the applicants had included a spelling mistake in the word “teacher.”