What's the EU ever done for us then?

Max McGuinness on the creation of a new think tank.

Yesterday marked the official launch of a new think-tank - the European Council on Foreign Relations(ECFR) - devoted to promoting a common European foreign policy, which has, incidentally, seen fit to employ this writer as an editor and factotum in its Paris office.

The EU is, we think, a rather good thing. Fifty years since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, this organisation, often seen as inseparable from expressions like "bureaucracy", "lunch", "expenses", "jargon", and "Up Yours Delors!", has in fact accomplished rather a lot on a none too generous budget. For a start, not a shot has been fired in anger in Western Europe since its creation and this virtuous hegemony of peace and prosperity has now been extended to the the borders of Asia. Free trade and economic co-operation between member states has made us all richer.

Thanks to the euro, none of us get swindled by the banks each time we nip over to Carcassone or Bilbao for the weekend. And we have the unique privilege of being  members of the only international polity governed and conceived on the basis of the rule of law rather than the power politics of narrowly-defined national interest which defined preceding centuries.

But one area where Europe has little to show for its fifty years is foreign policy. While America goes around bombing whatever it wants, China buys up half of Africa, and Russia bullies its neighbours, the EU has never even tried to exert itself in international affairs.

In the spirit of a lot done, more to do, we think Europe should start getting out of the house a bit more often and spreading the word of the incomparable benefits of peace, love, and understanding(but not all that stuff about banning pints of Guinness and removing the tasty bits from sausages).

So go and check out our nifty Statement of Principles on our website(and sign it yourselves if you feel like it), which has been drawn up and signed by such all round good eggs as former German Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the new IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and our generous supporters George Soros and Sigrid Rausing. 

Comments

[Jason O'Mahony]

Congratulations. And give those Eurosceptic bastards hell.