Kosovo's Flag: notice anything familiar about it?

So, a third European Muslim state struggles into life, its parturition attended by a gaggle of EU midwives, infuriating Serbia and Russia into the bargain. One can see Serbia’s point. Against its will part of its Sovereign territory is being ripped from it, a part that is of immense national importance to Serbian identity and heritage.

 
It is as if Kent and Sussex became inhabited by minority which transmogrified into a majority and achieved independence against England’s will, taking with it its access to the battlefield of Hastings and Canterbury Cathedral: for thus is the fate of the battlefield of Kosovo Polje (The Field of Blackbirds), which marks a fundamental moment in the creation of Serbian identity, and of a host of important religious sites of considerable importance to the Serbian Orthodox Church.
 
Actually not all EU members are enthusiastic about this development. Spain has already refused to recognise the existence of Kosovo as an independent sovereign state, it having residual concerns that to do so will send the wrong message to the Basques and the Catalans who, it believes, would be able to use Spanish approval of Kosovo’s independence as a significant political weapon in their struggle for their own independence. Greece is also likely to follow suit. It does so both as a traditional supporter of its fellow Orthodox Christian states and out of concern at its own encirclement by Muslim States to its north and east.
 
Spain is right to be concerned at the message this act will send out were it to support Kosovo’s cleavage from Serbia. The British Foreign Minister, David Miliband, seems untroubled, unthinking even, of that same message and how it might be seen by Scottish nationalists. What else might one expect from someone just out of short trousers who has been in parliament for five minutes and has never had a proper job?
 
The real loser, however, is the EU, notwithstanding its enthusiastic support for the move. At the very heart of its Constitution lies the notion of the ‘common foreign and security policy’ enshrined as it is in Article 24 (1) of the amended Treaty on European Union (aka the Treaty of Lisbon):

The Union’s competence in matters of common foreign and security policy shall cover all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union’s security, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy that might lead to a common defence.

Indeed so determined is the EU to muscle its member states out of the way when it comes to foreign policy that Article 24 (3) makes it mandatory for member states to support the policy upon which it has decided:

The Member States shall support the Union’s external and security policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union’s action in this area.

Spain’s streak of independence, therefore, will become a thing of the past when the Treaty of Lisbon comes into force for it will be obliged to obey the dictates of the common foreign policy cobbled together by the Euro Nabobery, its own national interests sublimated into the greater good.
 
That is the theory, on the face of it. Somehow one cannot see the likes of Spain or France meekly submitting to a policy which is inimical to its own perceived interest and Spain’s very swift refusal to recognise Kosovo is a clear indication of this. What then for the concept of a ‘common foreign and security policy’?
 
Meanwhile, since the war with Serbia over Kosovo, the Serbian minority that once inhabited Kosovo has, by various means, been cleansed from it whilst NATO and, more importantly, the EU, in its desire to appease Muslim opinion, looked firmly the other way. Access by Serbs to Kosovo Polje will become a matter of risking life and limb. And the destruction of the religious sites has already begun. 

See also:
 
Kosovar Endgame, 11 February 2008
 
Kosovo’s Independence Will Stir Up Trouble. Who Will Benefit? 12 December 2007