A big meeting of the 15 EU heads of state in Laeken has ended today in a Billy Wilder-style farce of childish squabbling about who gets which brand, spanking new taxpayer-funded lavish office in Brussels. Just how precursive is this going to prove, I wonder?
The meeting itself was supposed to address the problem boldly identified by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt that the ‘EU is out of touch with the people’. (No kidding, Guy??!!) Cue, huge conflab in Laeken to discuss ways in which the EU ‘can be made to be more relevent to people’s lives’ (or similar).
Of course, what all this euphemistic twaddle translates into is the bold fact that nobody loves the Eurocrats and the Eurocrats know it. They know it and don’t like it because, like all potentates they require not just our lives but our hearts and minds as well. Without the latter they can never quite feel secure. So they want us to love them, to hang their pictures on our walls, to quote their speeches and fill our bookshelves with their ghosted biographies. That way we need them, they need us, we’re all in this together and we march forward to a happy fEUture
But it won’t happen. Governments, all governments, have been a stick-and-carrot operation but the EU has no carrots and using the stick will bring them down more quickly than us. They can still bully and threaten but what precious little ability our political masters had to inspire loyalty or devotion bit the dust long ago and that kind of thing is impossible to resurrect. They can always try the singles columns
“German technocrat, 53, cuddly and sincere. Hobbies include drafting pointless laws and constructing vast bureaucracies. Seeks willing and compliant polity for mutual dependence leading to full union”
More likely though they will have left Laeken with instructions to their minions to draw up a convoluted brobdignanian set of regulations designed to ‘bring the people closer to the EU’. Expect them to be trumpeted joyously through the usual channels within a month or two – and then promptly forgotten about
The EU is now like some old dowager empress, seized with money and power but repulsive and unloved. How long can they live without it until they die of a collective broken heart?
