‘Don’t come to a beefeating club if you’re vegetarian’

8 July 2006

His election transformed him into, arguably, the world’s most powerful bureaucrat, with the right to set trade policy for nearly 500 million people, and awesome authority to enforce the rules of the single market.

Last year President Bush experienced the cool blandness of Mr Barroso’s presidential suite for himself, when he became the first US president to visit the EU institutions in Brussels. The American leader was working to mend fences after the Iraq war — but also acknowledging the realpolitik of trade diplomacy with a European bloc that now takes in 25 nations, making Europe the largest market in the world.

When standing next to leaders like Mr Bush, Mr Barroso concludes, size matters. ‘In China today they have much more respect for Europe than before. We still are very small for them, I imagine, but for them Europe is now 500 million people; that is becoming interesting for them.

‘An enlarged Europe is a precondition for a powerful Europe. This is very important, because in some sectors of public opinion in, let’s say, the older member states, there is this idea that Europe is now weaker because it enlarged. This is completely false, completely false. Europe is becoming interesting because of its dimensions.’

Mr Barroso rejects both what he calls ‘a kind of negative nostalgia [for] a kind of “Europe miniature”’ and, he says, the old vision of ‘a super federal state’. He envisages the Commission ‘not as the admiral, but as the pilot’.

But didn’t some of his predecessors — Delors, for one — pride themselves on their admiral’s plumage? ‘Oh,’ he says, with a wave of the hand, ‘when I was a boy, my mother told me it was very bad manners to make comparisons. There were different phases in European integration. I have a great respect for all my predecessors, but today we are in a different situation.’