Airstrip One

Pathetic Pieties

The EU was setting out the "Austrian solution" for Serbia tonight: everyone who is acceptable group together to keep out the unsavoury nasties with their history of torching villages and living off the narco-economy. After all, the Serbs decided to vote for the nationalists because the "democrats" were not providing Serb voters with what they wanted: security, jobs, economic prosperity and also a touch of national pride.

European diplomacy was more concerned with picking at the scabs of the Balkan wars, living up to the ideals of their transnationalist ideology and preserving Kosovo in aspic so no independent observers could witness its sad decline into a mafia state under the veneer of an EU protectorate. In order to comply with the dictates of the West, the Serbs had to surrender their leaders to a war crime tribunal, witness the destruction of cultural treasures in their historical heartland and meet the stringent conditions attached to reconstruction aid.

Javier Solana stated that,

"I appeal to all democratic forces to work together in order to ensure that a new government based on a clear and strong European agenda can be formed rapidly," Mr Solana said.

However, expenditure demonstrates that the EU used the unimaginative stabilisation and accession process, without taking into account Serbia's particular problems as a defeated nation. This one size fits all approach that made no concessions to local sensibilities is a standard problem of the trannational approach. It does not understand nationalism and ignores its effects upon the political process.

Serbia required more attention from the European Union and greater skill in strengthening its moderate nationalists. This would have paid more dividends than poncing around like some Jacobite pretender imagining they have a claim on the global throne.

The Serbs can vote for whomever they like but the return of the nationalists was far more likely with the policies that the EU pursued.

(23.27, 29th December 2003)