It is Monday and the weekend has been spent reading all about ill-tempered euro-summitry. This crisis has been building pace since the French and Dutch rejected the Constitution, giving journalists plenty of time to fill up those column inches with analysis, lamentation and jeremiad.
Meanwhile, it being Monday, there really ought to be a list on the blog. So in spirit with the times we present the top 10 EU crisis cliches for journalists. Many of them have appeared in the pages of our own fine organ, some of them, in fact, used by me.
1. Crisis can mean Opportunity - According to the Chinese character/ancient Mongolian proverb/wisdom of the ages. It is true, of course, in crisis there often is opportunity. But sometimes it is just the opportuity to get out of a crisis.
2. The imminent triumph of Blairism - Blair is the last man standing from his generation of European leaders; Blairism is the only credible idea Europe has. This crisis presents a golden opportunity for Blair (see 1).
3. Look out, here comes China! (and maybe India) - Unless we all pull together, we'll be assembling plastic toys for the children of a new global Chinese elite, or polishing the shoes of invading Bushite US stormtroopers, or some other horrible fantasy that means we should all embrace the third way which is the only credible European ideological game in town (see 2).
4. Polish plumbers - They turned France against the Constitution, they represent the complexity of cross-cultural labour migration, they are an emblem of the new Europe. Or are they just people from Poland who are quite handy with a spanner?
5. Straight bananas - They are the europhiles' favourite eurosceptic scare story, because they are so absurd. So absurd, in fact, that no europhobe can ever have taken them seriously. So they are in fact a pernicious myth about europhobes.
6. Faceless bureaucrats - Sounds terrifying, like something out of a 1970s conspiracy thriller-cum-horror movie. Imagine them, taut featureless pallid skin covering their heads, arms stretched out zombie-style, strange guttural noises coming from the place where there mouth should be ... aaaargh.
7. Brussels gravy-train - This one sounds fun. All aboard! Choo-Choo, mint sauce with that lamb, Monsieur?
8. The Democratic Deficit - Step one for reducing the democratic deficit: stop using words like 'deficit' to describe the relationship between people and power. What is a democratic surplus? Can we put some democracy on deposit and cash it in later when really important decisions have to be made?
9. Pluck - It is a rule of journalism that the pluck of a nation is in inverse proportion to its land mass and its population. So the Dutch (small country, medium sized population) were quite plucky in rejecting the Constitution, but not as plucky as Luxembourg (tiny country, tiny population) in siezing the agenda as chair of the EU rotating presidency. Malta is just too plucky for words.
10. The New Europe - The bit east of Germany. Is it really 'new', or was it always there, only we forgot about it for half a century because it was in Russia's sphere of interest, as we had agreed it would be in 1945? Estonia was a country before you went there on your stag weekend, mate.
