“Charlemagne”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/06/bureaucrats_brussels writes about European Commission officials.

bq. I would not be astonished if a majority of the [British] public assume that EU officials are primarily motivated by pay, perks and privileges. Actually, from Mr Farage’s point of view, I suspect the truth is still more worrying. EU officials, in my experience, want “more Europe” because they want “more Europe”. … EU officials live in a world in which nationalism is the great evil. … They are often highly educated, in a geeky sort of way … The town’s defining ethos of anti-nationalism is often admirable. EU officials are easy to get on with, and a decent bunch in my experience. But it brings problems: I find a lot of people in this town at best naive about how much integration public opinion will accept, and at worst a bit hostile to democracy. Get a Brussels dinner party onto referendums, and hear people rave about the madness of asking ordinary people their opinions of the European project.

I found this pretty interesting because I was thinking about writing a piece last week about how Charlemagne himself represents a political tendency that is “a bit hostile to democracy.” The occasion of this critique was his “linking”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne to a “piece”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/14997/part_2/eurosceptics-against-the-nation-state.thtml that he wrote under his own name before he worked for the _Economist_ which is all about how one _needs_ to have restraints on national level democracies for the European project to work.
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