More on that State of the Union Address

More news about Commission President Barroso's (not to be confused with all the other Presidents in the EU) State of the Union Address that he will be making on Tuesday. According to Daniel Hannan, Tory MEP, Daily Telegraph blogger and all-purpose Conservative eurosceptic, the rival President, that of the Toy European Parliament, is proposing to fine those MEPs who do not sit through the entire Address. Who can be so heartless as not to laugh at their predicament?

State of the Union Address

Unlike the United States, the European Union has two Presidents - there is Commission President Barroso and there is Council President Van Rompuy and both of them consider themselves to be Presidents of the EU. There's glory for you.

Commission President Barroso is about to score against the other guy - he intends to give a State of the Union Address to the European Parliament on Tuesday. As Honor Mahoney says on EUObserver

The address, given its name and the EU’s pretensions to be a heavyweight international player, attracts comparisons with the annual speech by US presidents at the beginning of each year. President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address had about 48 million TV viewers in the US and millions more globally. This reflects two things. First that a lot of what the US does affects the rest of the world. And, second, that US citizens and much of the rest of the world have a strong emotional engagement with the US and its president – be it positive or negative.

There is something else: the United States is a country and its people feel it to be so. Its President, whatever one may think of him personally, was elected according to the US Constitution that had been decided on in an accountable fashion. Would that make any difference in people's attitudes? Just asking.

What is all the fuss about?

There is a certain amount of fuss and bother about a rather silly statement made by Commission President Barroso who is clearly desperately trying to ensure that the various PIIGS are rescued by everyone else. Might the European project collapse? As I have said before, my view is that it will collapse when the Germans would have had enough of being made to feel subservient to the French but the financial debacle will contribute. Let's face it, the euro was a very bad idea from the europhiliac point of view.

Democracy could ‘collapse’ in Greece, Spain and Portugal unless urgent action is taken to tackle the debt crisis, the head of the European Commission has warned.

In an extraordinary briefing to trade union chiefs last week, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso set out an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in which crisis-hit countries in southern Europe could fall victim to military coups or popular uprisings as interest rates soar and public services collapse because their governments run out of money.

How odd. I thought being part of the European Union meant that those European values among which democracy and human rights come top are secure for ever. You mean member states are capable of reverting to their own historical precedents? Who knew?

There are a couple of aspects to this event that need to be noted. In the first place, President Barroso is not an elected president of anything, let alone the European Union, so the notion of him pontificating about democracy is absurd.

Secondly, he was addressing trade union chiefs. Whatever may have been the case long in the past, recent experience with trade unions is that they are not precisely in favour of democracy either within their own ranks or outside them. In fact, this briefing is about as undemocratic as can be, not because President Barroso is not allowed to brief trade union chiefs but because it is all part and parcel of the EU's effort to create a post-democratic structure of civil society organizations, set up by the Commission in the first place, consulting and being briefed by the self-same Commission as a substitute for accountable democracy.

Thirdly, the EU is and has always been an undemocratic, indeed an anti-democratic structure. What he means by democracy disappearing is that the democratic institutions that have already been hollowed out by the EU might disappear. That is not the same thing at all.