John Bosnitch on the EU

I recently found an interesting article written a couple of years ago by John Bosnitch, a Serbian activist from Canada. I believe that he wrote this piece in order to advise a Serbian child who had been told to write a school report on 'Why Serbia deserves to join the EU'! Even then the argument against joining the EU was overwhelming. Below is an extract. For those with time on their hands, it might be worth reading the whole thing.

Source: Byzantine Sacred Art blog

And so we face a historic challenge. Shall we finally join the German-led Europe after all these battles for our freedom?

If it were merely a free-trade deal like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) the loss of sovereignty would be limited and Serbia would remain an independent state. But that is not what the EU represents. Instead the EU represents an effort of the ruling classes of each member state to form a common union in which the economic reward is merely a bribe in search of the surrender of sovereignty -- which is their trophy. With national independence snuffed out, the EU ruling elites will eventually operate the place as a single country, ruled mainly from Berlin and the European central bank in Frankfurt. It will have its own army and all the member states will have to send troops to participate in its “adventures.” In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Sudan, and maybe even in Russia, young Serb men would be in arms, extending Western-style “freedom,” the essence of [Roman] Catholicism and “human rights” to our brother Slavs at the end of a rifle barrel.

The costs sound bad, so what about the benefits? Well, being at the far end of the new German empire, instead of seeing things flow our way, we would certainly see all of our best and brightest youth heading to the center of European power in flows so great that they would dwarf the past flows of Yugoslav gastarbeiters (guest workers) into Germany, the brain drain that we have seen during or since these latest Balkan wars, and certainly the period of forced indoctrination of Serb youths in Ottoman Turkey as kidnapped janissaries.

Most of the main economic activity in the EU is based in the center of the EU -- in Germany and France. They make the AirBus planes and Mercedes cars -- we might be “permitted” to make some tires for each of them. Our free-for-all agricultural industry will be totally mechanized and the early-morning markets in the piazzas (public squares) will be replaced by sterile supermarkets full of frozen foods -- have you ever tasted a tomato anywhere in the EU (or even America) that tastes as good as a fresh tomato from an open market in Serbia? No, I did not think so.

As a sign of things to come, as soon as the pro-EU opposition seized power in their October 2000 coup in Serbia there were hundreds of truckloads (hundreds of thousands of tons) of genetically modified soy beans (unwanted anywhere else) being dumped into northern Vojvodina as the first doors opened to “superior” Western and EU goods. Since then, German investors have bought up most of the privatized Serbian industries, and even the media. Today, Germans own the main newspapers that Serbs read in Belgrade. Entry to the EU will make the surrender of Serbia’s independence and the collapse of national self-sufficiency even more complete.

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