As money flowed into the island’s banks after Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, and the country embarked on an urban boom, he landed a lucrative job in construction building roofs, at first for sleek homes and shops, and then for the manicured mansions that took over lush land formerly rich in olive groves and grape vines. Those trends only accelerated after the country was admitted into the euro currency union in 2008.

But in the last two weeks, he has watched the foundations of his country buckle under a banking collapse. The severe terms of the country’s €10 billion, or $13 billion, international bailout have tied up everyone’s cash, forced huge losses on the biggest savers and are expected to hasten a deep recession that might take years to overcome.

Mr. Alexandrou, 30, says he understands that the Cyprus crisis was brought on by bank mismanagement and even financial corruption. What most pains him and many others here, though, is the feeling that Cypriot solidarity with the European Union has been shattered by international finance officials willing to let their country’s 860,000 citizens suffer for the sins of a powerful few.

Cyprus, they say, is no backward poor cousin to the European Union. And neither do they consider it a financial casino. Instead, it is a country with a small, but remarkably multilingual, solidly educated and until now comfortably middle-class population — people who consider themselves precisely the type of Europeans the rest of the Union should be proud to have anchor its border with the Middle East. That is why many Cypriots now feel such shock and anger at what they consider their economic excommunication from the European project.

“Not everyone here is Russian, or making money illegally, or laundering money,” Mr. Alexandrou said. “Most of us are normal people living normal lives.”

He sat, face grim, with his wife, Aliki, and their energetic 18-month-old son, Alexandros, in the living room of their modern white house on the outskirts of Nicosia. “Now we see that nothing good has come from European solidarity,” he said.

For Cypriots, joining the European Union and adopting the euro were signature achievements. After decades of internal strife and foreign occupation, first by British forces then by Turkey in the divided north, Cyprus saw acceptance into the European family as a promise of newfound stability and the chance to forge a more modern economy.

During the boom times, Mr. Alexandrou acknowledged, Cyprus, like many European countries, lived above its means. But while it is time for the country to pay for its follies, he said, “there is the sense that no one in Europe really cares what happens to us.”

Some of their fellow Cypriots have vented their resentment in protests, shouting anti-German epithets and burning the E.U. flag. Cypriots are relatively stoic compared to their more fiery brethren in bailed-out Greece, but there is deep-seated anger over the perception of Europe’s kicking Cyprus while it is down.

“We made sacrifices to integrate Cyprus into the great European family,” Antigoni Papadopoulou, a member of Parliament, said last week as Cyprus scrambled to negotiate its bailout. But “there is a real lack of European solidarity,” she said.

With the encouragement and subsidies of Brussels, Cyprus moved away from a broad-based, heavily agricultural economy toward an emphasis on services supporting business, finance and communications. Manufacturing was also allowed to lapse, with locally made goods — whether shoes or pharmaceuticals — all but disappearing.

Cyprus’s leaders seized the opportunity to recast the island as a strategic hub at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Their ambition was to emulate the wealthy, discreet European money havens of Luxembourg and Switzerland, while securing a comfortable way of life for their people.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/global/cypriot-middle-class-feels-betrayed-by-europe-union.html?partner=rss&emc=rss