Did I tell you about the new Article 291?
The conference went well, and my fellow panel members, Mark Gray from the European Commission’s spokesman’s service, and Gregor Schusterschitz, from the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were both informative and insightful. But, in what is surely an early example of Lisbon fatigue, the audience were all done after a day of wrapping their heads around such sexy (but actually very important) topics as comitology after Lisbon. Aftewards, Mark, Gregor and I remembered and compared the dreams of
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing with the prosaic reality of today’s Treaty. Ah! What might have been! If only! That led us to invent a new party game. It goes like this: if the European Union decided to have its own Mount Rushmore, where would it be and who would be represented? Answers on a postcard, please…
Jean Monnet, Robert Schumann, Jacques Delors and Walter Hallstein would be my first (off-the-top-of-my-head) choice, but then I suppose it wouldn’t represent the north-south-east-west-big state-small state-left-right balance.
Whoever would end up on it, we’d probably end up constructing a small garden behind it with statues of everyone remotely linked to the EU over the last 50 years in it…
Let’s say Plato, Leonardo, Newton and (could be either Kant or Beethoven) Place? some high point in the Austrian Alpen, a faraway island in the Mediterranean sea would do, or any point in the “border” between the western/eastern blocks would do (for different reasons…).
It’s difficult for me to imagine a Mount Rushmore with the likes of Coudenhove-Kalergi, Schuman, Mazzini or… Winston Churchill… First postcard is nicer.