After all, imagine the following scenario: you have a government that is infested by ex-commie dickheads. You need to develop you infrastructure, tourism, etc. Some clever guys write some projects documentation about road reconstruction, tourist rennovation, etc. and propose them in front of the EU funding orgs and finally some money are distributed for those projects. The ex-commies are nice clever guys that have their circles of business-friends owning construction, etc. companies. There are many projects and their business-friends win most of the bids. Nice.
Some time passes and you see some projects stalled or finished incompetently. Large ammounts of money are hmmm...missing. The EU which funds the projects with their taxpayers' money are really interested about the progress of those projects and some nice fat EU guy visits your country and says something about corruption in your country.
The immediate effect: 2-3 newspapers in Western Europe have articles screaming about the misery and corruption in your country. "We should not let them in" and etc. You have some local news too - in all ex-commie owned media. And they all are something like "EU is a facist nationalistic organisation that do not care about us at all. They impose on us unrealistic bullshits just because they don't want our beautiful prospering country in. They are a bunch of retards that serve the policy of our worst enemies like Greece that want our country dead!"...
Now imagine what most of your folks will think after that (this happens at least 2-3 times/year here)...