THE WEEK THAT WAS... (August 26, 2013)

Last Friday the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote: ‘True, the EU is a tough sell these days. It is dominated by Germany, a nation uneasy about dominance. It includes France, a nation that had turned malaise into fetish. It southern littoral is an economic horror show. Its more than 500 million citizens feel underconsulted and patronised. It is a divided club, with 17 members in the Eurozone and 11 members outside. Inside the Eurozone the agony of the euro has demanded a federalising push…’.

Is Roger Cohen one of these many Americans (and not only Americans…) who think that all the problems of the EU could be solved by transforming it into a United States of Europe? No, as a regular reader of his, I know he isn’t that naive. He certainly believes in a sort of EU but in the quoted column he is lecturing the British newspaper The Daily Mail and The Sun (far by and away the bestselling newspapers in England) for their obsessive Anti-Brussels Syndrome. In spite of the deplorable condition of the EU, Cohen’s conclusion is: Britain needs the EU and vice versa! He pities the British Prime Minister David Cameron who has to do the European job in a country where the agenda of the mass circulation tabloids weighs so heavily on public opinion.

With more or less nine months to go till the elections of the new European Parliament, the EU is indeed in disarray and not a model of ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’. The shortlist reads: the UK and Spain are fighting over Gibraltar; confusion about a third bailout for Greece; Poland on collision with ‘Brussels’ about ‘illegal’ coal plants; The Netherlands asking for ‘code orange’ on EU labour emigration because of the imminent opening of the borders for Romanian and Bulgarian workers; ‘Brussels’ threatens to hold up payments to fresh memberstate Croatia because it is not-implementing EU laws to bring warcriminals to court. And lastly: Iceland pulls out of the negotiations about an EU-membership. Do you blame them?