And so Croatia is to join the EU, the culmination of the horrific Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s that began when and because Germany unilaterally recognised the UDIs of two former Hapsburg provinces, Slovenia (already now in the EU) and Croatia.
Revisit this, from January:
A group of Croatians are putting their faith in God in the hope that they will not have to join the EU.
A series of posters have gone up around the Adriatic port of Split showing the image of the Virgin Mary with the message: "Please save us from entering the EU."
The message adds that the EU is evil and will bring GM food, pollution, crime and spiralling debt for average citizens.
It concludes: "What else do we get with entering the EU?"
Police are now investigating whether the billboards that were not signed are illegal.
Croatia expects to enter the EU in 2012.
The EU is in no sense the sort of multinational, multiethnic entity within, to and through which it has been, and it remains in principle, the mission of the Croats to bear witness. It has killed Social Catholicism as a force above local or, in the German case, certain State level in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Irish Republic (where it was never all that influential) and elsewhere.
It has destroyed the circumstances that made possible Social Catholicism's less overt, but nevertheless discernible and sometimes powerfully effective, influence in Britain, primarily in and through the Labour Party, though not exclusively so. It confers legislative power over huge numbers of people on Stalinists, Trotskyists, neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, and others just as agreeable as those. Its publications refer to the holidays of every religion except Christianity. It stands on the brink of admitting Turkey.
Antemurale Christianitatis? The EU is no Christendom of which to be the Ramparts. Rather, Croatia would be serving the historic, and always vitally necessary, mission of the Croats as a people precisely by staying out of the EU and by proclaiming loudly and often why she was doing so.
The European Union is the most remarkable peacetime achievement that we have managed for a century. 28 nations working together to solve their problems in peace. It's a pity that David Lindsay has become a victim of the narrow nationalism preached by the rightwing press in the UK. There's nothing very Catholic in such vitriol about people who are committed to working together for common solutions.
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