Romano Prodi conducts himself like a bolshie and narrow-minded innkeeper, who simply cannot be bothered to find room beneath his roof for the many people waiting outside who need shelter. The President of the European Commission announced last Sunday that the European Union will soon be full, and that there is no prospect of countries such as Ukraine and Belarus becoming members. This is a shameful and imprudent slap in the face to anyone in those former Soviet republics who hopes, by establishing a political culture founded on democracy and the rule of law, to become fit for membership of the EU.
It is no use Mr Prodi predicting, in his ineffably feeble way, that the EU will come to be surrounded by a ‘ring of friends’. If the Prodian vision is pursued, the EU will come to be surrounded by a ring of dangerously discontented states, which can never affirm their nationhood, both to themselves and to the wider world, by gaining election to the club of nation states on their borders.
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