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)

Most European of Nations

Italy was always the country that looked towards Europe for good government as an alternative to the arbitrary stagnation of their own politics. With the end of the Cold War, there was a sense of renewal during the "clean hands" campaign but the underlying lack of checks and balances in their political system reappeared under the abuses of Berlusconi. (There is a similar story for Britain under Blair.)

Now that Romano Prodi is retiring from the European Commission, he is returning to the fray of Italian politics in order to challenge Berlusconi for Italy's political leadership. His bias, seemingly influenced by the BBC, was already clear during Italy's presidency of the European Union:

Prodi launched a broadside in November against his right-wing rival's coalition government, arguing that it has caused anguish to Italy. That earned the rebuke of European conservative leaders, one of whom argued, "This is improper conduct for someone who holds an office which should guarantee neutrality for everybody."

There are few other countries in the EU where the Commission is viewed as atraining ground for the top job rather than the graveyard for political elephants. it also repeats a point that bears repeating. The one-way gravy train of Europe is still influenced by elections and a possible Prodi victory bears this out. He would steer Italy into the Franco-German camp of integrating counterweight, a possibly irreversible step.

France and germany may well bide their time until a government more sympathetic to their aims is returned in Italy. Once three of the original six line up, will not the final retiring member, Holland, conform?

(22.56, 29th December 2003)

The Revengers' Salad

There is a delicious irony that Blair, master of spin, has been undone by his own inability to stay "on-message". After claiming that a network of laboratories manufacturing weapons of mass destruction had been located, Blair was contradicted by Paul Bremer, the governor of Iraq, who stated that the information was false.

It was, he suggested, a 'red herring', probably put about by someone opposed to military action in Iraq who wanted to undermine the coalition.

'I don't know where those words come from but that is not what [ISG chief] David Kay has said,' he told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme. 'It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me"

Now, Blair must have jumped the gun and is probably privy to more information than Bremer, as a Head of State. However, his search for public justification leads him into yet another public storm about weapons of mass destruction and the Hutton Report will be published soon.

Perhaps President Bush should issue Blair with a pager and scripted press releases...

(9.47, 28th December 2003)

Redirection

Just a link to the post that I have written on White Rose concerning the Schengen Information System and its incorporation of biometric data.

(23.52, 27th December 2003)

Frontpage Symposium

Frontpage Magazine recently ran a symposium entitled "European Union and the Death of NATO?"

In the differing views and the interesting idea of Israel in NATO, most participants agreed that NATO could not survive if the European Union achieved the harmonisation of defence and foreign policy. None had any words of praise for the de facto federation or its leadership and accepted that, in the short-term, such a development was detrimental to the interests of the United States.

However, one of the contributors, Vladimir Bukovsky, viewed the EU as a Menshevik body. The EUSSR. After all, one of the questions that plagues observers of the EU is: how does the EU fit into the European political traditions. Is it socialist, jacobin, a weberian technocracy, a corrupted bureaucracy, a Holy Roman Empire - what is it?

What is the EU today? It is an undemocratic superstate (governed by 25 unelected Commissars as opposed to just 15 in the former Soviet Union); which most nations join involuntarily, under tremendous pressure; which is socialist by nature (just read their Social Charter!); which has the same ideological goal of eliminating national states; which already has its own nomenclatura (about 30,000 unaccountable bureaucrats who don't even pay taxes); which has the same type of in-built corruption as the Soviet Union used to have ( last week, according to the same article in the WT, the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg released a 400-page report that found "systematic problems, over-estimations, faulty transactions, significant errors and other shortcomings" in the EU budget).


EU auditors could vouch for only 10 percent of the $120 billion the bloc spent in 2002. It was the ninth successive year the auditors were unable to certify the budget as a whole). And so on, and on, and on. I can spend hours pointing out those similarities. Admittedly, it is a much milder version of the Soviet Union (as yet), but a version nonetheless. Simply put, this is a Mensheviks' version, not the Bolsheviks' one. This is why two years ago I called it EUSSR, and this quip is becoming very popular in Europe today.

(17.32, 26th December 2003)