Banana Retorts

When, many, many, many years ago, I started work as a beardless trainee at the brand-new Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an older colleague with long years of service taught me that you need only three things to succeed in public administration. “Always walk fast in the corridors, carry a thick bundle of documents—just change them now and then so they don’t turn yellow—and if there’s a queue at the photocopier, say out loud that you have something urgent for the minister.” At the time I found this enormously funny; I thought the old fox was joking. Today, after more than thirty years of working in bureaucracy, Slovenian and European, I am no longer quite sure it was just a joke.

Officialdom is a world that often gets badly on the nerves of people who don’t belong to it but have to deal with it. Often with good reason. True, the public perception of bureaucrats is often a caricature, but it is also true that bureaucrats often behave like caricatures. On the other hand, no large system can be run without rules and structures and people who enforce those rules, put them into practice and provide the services expected of them. Lashing out indiscriminately at every official and at officialdom as such is therefore not only unfair but also harmful. The key to a bureaucracy as it should be is its efficiency, transparency, integrity and, above all, democratic oversight of it, including by a critical public.

It was from this perspective that I read the criticism of the Brussels bureaucracy recently published in Večer by my fellow columnist Vesna Godina. I generally avoid polemics between columnists, because they too often degenerate into tiresome hair-splitting and a clash of wounded egos. But then again, what is wrong with a robust exchange of views? Let thoughts and ideas strike sparks. And from that perspective, with all due respect to my colleague, I must admit I was not overly enthusiastic about her text on the European Union. Not because it is critical, but because of how it is critical. An evident lack of knowledge about the subject you are writing about is hard to compensate for convincingly with ideological platitudes and far-fetched anecdotes.

I very much agree that Brussels needs to be watched closely. It is a large (although this size, which is often bandied about, needs to be put in comparative context) bureaucratic apparatus with exceptional influence, and where there is great power there is also the possibility of great mistakes or abuses. It is even more important that the Brussels bureaucracy, as the holder of exceptional executive power, be subject to democratic oversight. And in this respect things are certainly not as they should be. The democratic deficit that has always plagued the EU remains a problem, despite the growing role and influence of the European Parliament in recent years and decades. That EU leaders are aware of this is clear; that they are not prepared to tackle the predicament effectively is clear too. The latest example is the Conference on the Future of Europe, launched with great fanfare in early 2020, which almost no one talks about anymore, nor about its results.

But you won’t learn much about this predicament of the European Union from my colleague Godina’s text. Instead of critical reflection on the challenges and problems besetting the project of European integration today, the author preferred to focus on a collection of anecdotes and populist platitudes, in the style of the former Brussels correspondent of the British Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson, who with stories about Brussels bureaucrats supposedly wanting to regulate the curvature of bananas and about European standards for condoms that Italian willies supposedly couldn’t meet, stoked Euroscepticism among the British public (the Italians probably weren’t thrilled either) and prepared the ground for Brexit, which brought him political gains and power. We also know what liberation from the Brussels colonial yoke has brought British citizens.

What bothers people most is the astronomically paid bureaucracy, says Ms. Godina. True, Brussels bureaucrats (and Strasbourg ones too) cannot complain, and we cannot complain, about our salaries. Any whining about this would be a tasteless mockery of the many Europeans who don’t know how they’ll make it to the end of the month. But European salaries are not set by guesswork either. The main parameters are the incomes of comparable professional profiles in the member states, so that the European institutions remain an attractive employer for the most capable candidates. These parameters are, of course, pushed up by what people with comparable profiles can earn in the richer member states. If that were not the case, only people from poorer member states would work in the institutions. Alternatively, staff could be paid differently according to the country they come from. That would, of course, be unacceptable. And despite the author’s outrage at Brussels salaries, the latest data show that fewer and fewer candidates from some member states, especially the Scandinavian ones, are applying for competitions. The reason is that at home, with their education, they earn even more “astronomical” salaries than in Brussels.

Members of the European Parliament get on people’s nerves, says my colleague. Now that one really doesn’t hold water. The European Parliament (which can also mess up, make no mistake) is the most important part of democratic oversight of a system that affects our lives in such important ways. Unreasoned and sweeping mockery of MEPs and the European Parliament, and the resulting low turnout in European elections, is shooting ourselves in the foot, as it weakens the body that we elect and that represents European citizens. Such a disparaging attitude toward a directly elected body further worsens the democratic deficit, but that of course is not important to the author; what gets up her nose, or rather the noses of the people in whose name she wields her pen, are the salaries of Brussels bureaucrats.

Even more astonishing is the crowning proof of the EU’s baseness and harmfulness that the author draws from the sharp price increases that followed the introduction of the euro, most recently in Croatia. Dear colleague, you don’t have to be an expert in economics and monetary mumbo jumbo to understand that the blame for this swindle, neither in Croatia, nor in Slovenia, nor in the other countries that adopted the euro, lies not with Brussels but with those in Croatia, Slovenia and elsewhere who used the currency changeover to round prices in euros up generously.

I lack the space, and even more the will, to comment on the remaining “arguments” about a wicked and colonialist capitalist Europe. The EU has made, and will probably continue to make, mistakes. Its response to “resolving” the financial crisis in 2009 under German influence was not only wrong and harmful but also objectively prepared the ground for the rise of nationalist populism, which today, paradoxically or perhaps not, attacks the European Union and its democratic values with arguments similar to those my fellow columnist uses in her text. Stories about international cabals pulling strings from behind the scenes, sucking the blood of honest people and running our lives, are older than the EU, but with it they have found a new target, popular at both extremes of the political spectrum.

Yet despite populism, and precisely because of it, it is essential that we be critical of the EU. As citizens, we have the opportunity to vote responsibly and wisely in European elections and send people there who will know how to protect citizens’ interests effectively and oversee European executive power. As a country, we could be more self-confident and determined in Brussels (and elsewhere) about what we think is right and what is not. Calimero-style whining about the nasty, nasty Brussels colonialists is of course a possible alternative, but personally it doesn’t convince me.

While we must not forget the mistakes, we must not overlook the achievements either, and above all the importance the European Union has for stability, security and prosperity in Europe. Its conduct during the Covid crisis and its response to the consequences of Russian aggression show that the EU has learned from its mistakes. A few days ago the European Digital Services Act came into force, which requires greater accountability and transparency from digital platforms, protects users and, above all, regulates such an extraordinary field with such far-reaching and potentially dangerous influence on society on the basis of democratic values. Without the EU, in the digital and consequently the analog world, we would be dancing to Chinese tunes and to Musk’s caprices and interests. This is just one example among many.

Above all, we must never forget how and why the process of European cooperation and unification came about. As the antithesis of a bloody historical experience in which millions of people were murdered. Europe was, and remains, a peace project that protects Europeans from themselves. That is no excuse for sloppy work, for mistakes or abuses, but an obligation to get its house in order and behave responsibly toward the citizens it serves. If, in the heat of outrage over salary levels, the euro price of a shopping basket from Konzum or the shape of bananas, we forget how European states traditionally settled their mutual relations in the period before European integration, we certainly run the risk of history repeating itself, one way or another.