At the beginning of last week, Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso announced on The Andrew Marr Show on British TV that, should Scotland vote in a free and fair referendum for independence, then EU membership for this land with its 40 years inside the union and a long democratic history, would be “almost impossible.”
By the end of the week, Ukranian authorities were opening fire on civilians, and even after a hundred dead, the EU was still offering an Association Agreement to the killers.
In the last week we have seen the moral bankruptcy of the EU exposed.
As we reach the end of Barroso’s second and last term, it is useful to quote one of the poets who found their voice in the First World War, the slaughter and carnage we will remember this year.
W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem, The Second Coming, a line that sums up the second coming of Barroso: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’.
Germany has filled the vacuum and the EU is now a two tier project. Germany sits supreme, everyone else is in the undermensch division.
Barroso admitted as much in a little noticed section of the Marr interview, when he said, ““I can tell you the most acute moments of the crisis when I was speaking with President Obama or President of China or Prime Minister of Japan, the question they were putting was not so much what is going to be the level of deficit of Greece, but do you believe that this economic and monetary union is going really to develop?”
He continued, “Do you think that Germany will be behind it? That was the question.”
It seems that Barroso only gets consulted because world leaders want some inside track on German intentions.
This is affecting those who support the European project most of all. The Eurosceptics are enhanced every time Barroso opens his mouth. The pro-Europeans have an ever more difficult task of trying to persuade people to support the EU.
Ask one to make the case for the EU and they’ll eventually mumble something about trade benefits and so on. The Eurosceptics say they want the EU replaced by a mere free trade area, which is what Barroso has reduced us to.
Talk of values has all but vanished, social Europe is history and the business lobby roams free in the Berlaymont corridors.
Unable to keep the citizens happy, the highest levels of power have decided to work as hard as they can to keep their business friends happy. To be fair, they have had a fair amount of success at this.
The European elections take place in May. In June comes the recriminations and business as usual horse trading.
There is another line in the Yeats poem that also rings horribly true in Brussels, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”