NO ONE will stand up for Europe these days, sigh its dwindling band of supporters. National leaders stay mute about the bits of the European Union they like and rage against those they don’t. Eurosceptics are given free rein to vent their populist outrage. The advantages of European integration—freedom to work and travel, trade and cross-border investment, grants for poor areas—are banked and forgotten. The challenges are magnified and manipulated.
That leaves only the leaders of the EU institutions to mount a defence of their troubled project. And so this week Charlemagne clambered aboard the gravy train to Strasbourg to watch Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission (the EU’s executive arm) deliver his “state-of-the-union” address to the European Parliament. The annual speech, a wheeze cooked up a few years ago, features the closest thing the EU has to a president, grandstanding before the closest thing it has to a legislature.Well-meaning it may be, but this ersatz accountability is ill-suited to times of crisis. In their addresses to Congress, American presidents typically proclaim the strength of their union in rousing...Continue reading
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