When Jorg Heider’s Nationalist anti-EU party gained a small role in the Austrian government a while ago, the EU was so shocked that they actually imposed various diplomatic sanctions on Austria. Not surprisingly this caused an entirely understandable and entirely predictable upsurge in anti-EU sentiments in Austria from people resentful of crass interference in their own internal affairs.
But I have always though it ironic that this should have happened to Austria. In Bosnia- Herzegovina the EU has its own political gauleiter called the ‘High Representative’, namely Austrian Wolfgang Petritsch. Although his job is to implement the Dayton Peace Agreements, he has never really hidden his true objective. He has often said that Bosnia-Herzegovina must follow the same route as other countries in the region towards European Union membership. Similarly we are told how important the introduction of democratic institutions are for ‘stability’ in the region. Yet when the largest Croat political party in Bosnia, the HDZ-BiH, representing largest single bloc of Croat votes, dares to use its democratic mandate to oppose the will of both the EU and the socialists in Sarajevo, our Austrian ruler sends in NATO troops last April to seize Hercegovacka Banka, the bank used by the HDZ for its funds. Democratic politics is fine it seems, just so long as it does not actually do anything that displeases the EU. One does not have to be a supporter of the HDZ (and I am not) to be horrified.
So it is hardly surprising to me that various members of the EU elite across ‘unified’ Europe are expressing ‘concern’ and demands for ‘explanations’ why pro-superstatist Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero has been forced to resign from Silvio Berlusconi‘s government in Rome. The Spanish President of the EU Josep Picqué and Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel are going to deliver a report on this ‘situation’ in Italy. It seems they genuinely feel they must have some say in who is and is not in the Italian government, just as they felt towards Austria. I have no doubt that if Italy was not one of the larger EU nations that people in Brussels would not be at least making contingency plans for ‘special action’ if the grip of the EU started to seriously deteriorate in Italy (a remote possibility at best, to be frank). It is only a matter of time before even the smallest twitch of independent thinking from the elected representatives of an EU ‘nation’ (province) produces increasingly severe responses from the stasis superstatists. I wonder what bank Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia Political party keeps its money in?
However if you want to see a glimpse of the true future of ‘democratic’ Europe, don’t look at Italy or Austria, look at post-war ‘democratic’ Bosnia-Herzegovina.
