This Sham EU!

Yesterday's EU Foreign Ministers meeting on Kosovon independence highlights the dangerous fiasco which the EU has already become. David Miliband provided a first class illustration of muddled thinking on Radio 4's Today programme at five to eight this morning. Similar stubborn, closed and disjointed thought processes were there displayed as in the interview on the same programme with Wolfgang Ischinger last Friday, who it appears was one of the 'troika' charged with finding a solution to this centuries old sovereignty and ethnic dispute. I linked this latter interview earlier and will try to find time to provide a transcript later today as it is a fine example of why this present EU should most assuredly be doomed. One bright piece of news, today however, Czech President Vaclav Klaus has been re-elected for another five year term - at least one of the 27 former EU States will have a Head that is beneath the clouds and whose feet remain firmly on the ground, report from here. John Laughland writes as brilliantly as usual in today's, Comment is free,in the Guardian pages, linked here, of which these extracts provide a flavour: Parallels between Kosovo in 2008 and Bosnia in 1908 are relevant, but not only because, whatever legal trickery the west uses to override UN security council resolution 1244 - which kept Kosovo in Serbia - the proclamation of the new state will have incalculable long-term consequences: on secessionist movements from Belgium to the Black Sea via Bosnia, on relations with China and Russia, and on the international system as a whole. They are also relevant because the last thing the new state proclaimed in Pristina on Sunday will be is independent. Instead, what has now emerged south of the Ibar river is a postmodern state, an entity that may be sovereign in name but is a US-EU protectorate in practice..... The article concludes: This tragic situation is made possible only because there is a fatal disconnect in all interventionism between power and responsibility. The international community has micro-managed every aspect of the break-up of Yugoslavia since the EU brokered the Brioni agreement within days of the war in Slovenia in July 1991. Yet it has always blamed the locals for the results. Today, the new official government of Kosovo will be controlled by its international patrons, but they will similarly never accept accountability for its failings. They prefer instead to govern behind the scenes, in the dangerous - and no doubt deliberate - gap between appearance and reality.