Emperor Barroso?

Something to mull over in the summer holidays. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso got into hot water last week (10 July) when he described the EU as “the first non-imperial empire”. His aides put out a statement saying that Barroso, a former visiting professor at Georgetown University, was just quoting comments by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk, who teaches in Karlsruhe, has some interesting views on the EU, being of a post-nationalist mind. In an interview with the Tagesspiegel newspaper in 2005 he said that the world was moving into an era of “authoritarian capitalism” and Berlusconi's Italy was the “European test balloon of the neo-authoritarian turn”. He suggested that what was needed to persuade Europe's citizens to love the EU, was a “European Hartz IV” a programme of reforms of unemployment benefits and social welfare modelled on the Hartz programme negotiated in Germany. This would ensure that “all the basic parts of the big heart-lung machine of prosperity that keeps all the unconscious social body alive would be made from European components”. In the absence of such cross-border co-operation, we are trapped in “national hallucination chambers”. Sloterdijk also remarked that “it is admirable what the Brussels bureaucrats have managed to accomplish: a procedural unification of this heterogeneous continent”. Is it any wonder that Barroso has fallen under his spell?