Back in 80s there was a short of anecdote in Brussels, all the serious decisions were taken in the after-summit semi-informal dinners with all the leaders enjoying their foie gras and French wine while their assistance were running like mad negotiating in the hotel rooms  above the dinning hall. Some anecdotes from that period with Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand have reached the public in memoir books. However the EU summit has reached new heights since they are going to decide the top jobs in EU hierarchy during an informal …working dinner skipping the summit.

But this time there is a huge difference, in the place of Margaret Thatcher will be Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy will try to stand in the heights of Francois Mitterrand, the only common thing Angela Merkel has with Helmut Kohl is their conservatism and Italy was balancing between Bettino Craxi, Amintore Fanfani and Cuilio Andreotti with none of them compared with the unique Silvio Berlusconi. And it was the time when Europe was transforming, taking a more solid shape while the world was getting in a new era, the post cold war era with Mikhail Gorbachev signalling the new wind of change that overtook the whole world.

What is left from that era is …Barroso! The decadence of all the hopes for an active European Union, for a union that could have played decisive role in the international scene. The European Union lost its influence starting in Africa and Middle East and later internationally when they decided to change from allies to followers of the American foreign policy and especially of the George W. Bush administration’s policies. That period was bad for the Americans but it was definitely the period the Europeans lost their dignity with final strike when Donald Rumsfeld talked about old and new Europe, describing old Europe as a bunch of arteriosclerotic old hippies – apparently I’m still waiting for an apology – slow minded who need guardians.

And it was people like Barroso, like Solana, like Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi who let that happen and it is the very same people who are going to find their successor o lead Europe back to its international position sometime between the salmon soup and the creamy desert! It feels like Europe’s dignity has become the desert! How sad! And what a defeat is going to be if they all agree that the future of Europe lays in the hands of Tony Blair as the new EU president. If the 90s signalled the beginning of the European decadence then 2010 will mean that we reached the bottom.

This last decade the EU has succeed in only one thing, to disappoint its citizens and unfortunately the blame is going to the people who actually led us there and not to the institutions or the fundamentals of the Union. Men and women too small for their mission, who used the union for their opportunistic and personal agendas often suspiciously representing interests alien to the Union and its foundations. Barroso was a mistake and we saw that from the very beginning of his presidential appearance. From the beginning he tried to rule Europe using the method of share and rule, working for the powerful and manipulating the weak of Europe. As a committee he failed in every step of the EU foreign policy and he was a disaster when it came to the economic policy. The expansion regarding its timing and the way it was done it was a catastrophe that Europe will need time to stomach and somehow the man has put the blueprint of the future president.

As a result of those failures we all saw in the last Euro-election the number of the euro-sceptics increasing and finding settler in nationalistic and extreme right parties. The move to those parties has nothing really with how much the European citizens support or not the European Union, it has mainly to do with how much the European Union as it is now has disappointed its citizens. And by replacing Barroso with Tony Blair the leaders of the European states don’t help much.

Europe needs to re-establish itself and what happened with the constitution and the Lisbon treaty should sound as a warning on that direction. However when the European Union is led from people like Sarkozy, Brown and Berlusconi any expectation seems naïve and perhaps Thatcher’s wish for a loose partnership than a Union looks more realistic. And all that while the European leaders will eat the European dignity as desert in their informal working dinner!