How The EU Advances

This post is kind of an update to earlier posts on Barroso's failure to steamroll through the European Parliament with unfit candidates, which strenghtened the stature of the EU's only democratic institution, even before the new EU Constitution gives it more power relative to the European Council (which is essentially the private club of national governments).


Progress Of The EU 

Nothing captures the essence of what is the EU better in my eyes than the above caricature. (I downloaded it some years ago, and completely forgot the source - propably a Hungarian paper.) The EU is the institutionalised form of the relationship of European countries - one that binds together political leaders not in some idealistic collective march to progress, but a constant tussle - but thus preventing violent collisions and open battle - and amazingly, this constant tussle leads to rather slow but steady progress.

European Eurosceptics should contrast this with business as usual in the previous three thousand years - no period without a major European war longer than forty years. American Eurosceptics might consider whether bureaucratic complicatedness, ineffectivity and inertia are really that big a disadvantage relative to laissez-faire competition (if bureaucratic monster Airbus's success against Boeing wasn't convincing enough).