Why Europe looks like an extended vacation - by M.N. Hebbar
AROUND the chancelleries of Europe and the dining tables of Brussels’ Eurocrats, officials sip exquisite wines and pore over battle plans to rescue and revitalise a dormant EU and offer it an opportunity to determine a viable future or fade into pathetic irrelevance. Strangely, prospects are bright for both scenarios. If Europe seems to be on extended vacation, it’s because the ‘pause’ envisaged by Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, has lost its way even as he struggles to sort out the institutional reforms that the EU has been crying out for ever since the EU constitutional treaty was blocked by French and Dutch ‘No’ votes in the referendums. The deadlock between the member states has now extended to a ‘pause’ to enlargement as well. There will be no more admission of new members after Rumania and Bulgaria.
‘Enlargement’ has now become a jittery word. It brings forth equally jittery responses such as ‘absorption capacity’, implying that new members will be sucked into the system and vanish, or at least need to be painfully digested. The member states know that there is a backlash against the inexorable enlargement process, an “enlargement fatigue”, especially in founder member states such as France.
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