Atlantic Man: Euro-Bashing and Reality - United Press International.

"Nowadays ethnic name-calling is out of fashion, so it's done by the indirect device of saying "they're corrupt, they're statist, they're socialist ... and we shouldn't get mixed up with them, we're already losing our freedom because of our elites are mixed up with them." Reading between the lines, "socialism" turns out to have become a code word for saying "they're fundamentally alien to us, we should get away from them." In the case of the EU, it also means that "they're some new-fangled cosmopolitan union, and the communists and socialists were big on cosmopolitanism and unions too, so it sure sound like socialism to me."