Ask most Europeans what they think about the EU, and they’ll tell you it’s relentlessly dull. It’s all bureaucrats in statement eyewear overseeing arcane regulations about the curvature of cucumbers; impenetrable corridors in the staid outposts of Luxembourg and Strasbourg; and a multiplicity of councils, commissions, parliaments and courts — the precise remit of each entirely mystifying to the layman.
Yet this dullness is integral to the union’s purpose as a peace project. As political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar observed in Passage to Europe, the EU was supposed to represent a “flight of history into bureaucracy” — an attempt to swap the “unpredictability and pathos” that had long characterised relations between European states with “sober interweaving interests”. Wars would be replaced with consensus, law and tedious regulations; potentially incendiary political and ideological divisions would be blunted by heavy technical jargon and compromise. The resulting facelessness was embodied in an apocryphal question attributed to Henry Kissinger: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?”
But all is changing. The EU is becoming less boring and less democratic, and it has acquired a face: European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, who last month confirmed that she will seek another five-year term.
The “Queen of Europe” has been described as “Napoleonic”, “dictatorial”, and “imperious” by detractors, impressions that have been aggravated by her personal idiosyncrasies and flamboyant, patrician air. She is, after all, the wife of Heiko von der Leyen, a scion of an aristocratic family that made its fortunes in silk. She is also a dressage rider and performs in equestrian events, her equine passion inherited from her late father, Ernst Albrecht, one of the nascent EU’s first civil servants and a prominent politician in Germany’s CDU. When Von der Leyen’s pony was mauled to death by a wolf in 2022, the Commission announced that it would downgrade their protection status to allow for culling, much to the horror of wildlife conservationists. An energetic mother of seven, she allegedly sleeps in a modest 25-square-metre room on the 13th floor of the Commission’s Berlaymont building. She is also said to maintain an ascetic discipline in other areas of life, refraining from both alcohol and meat.
Yet such eccentricities fail to capture the transformations within the EU since she came to power. Indeed, her reign is defined by the re-dramatisation of European politics — something which will continue if she manages to secure another term in June, which she probably will.
Von der Leyen’s tenure has been marked by an acceleration of what Perry Anderson has termed “European coups” — the gradual agglomeration of power in Brussels. Even the manner in which she became Commissioner in 2019 represented a break with a procedure designed to lend the EU executive greater democratic legitimacy. In 2003, a Franco-German agreement established the foundations of what would become the Spitzenkandidaten (“lead candidate”) process, whereby the political family with the most votes in the European Parliamentary elections would secure the office of Commissioner for its pre-chosen candidate. But in 2019, Von der Leyen was not the Spitzenkandidat of her European People’s Party (EPP) — instead, she was handpicked by EU leaders Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. The EPP’s Spitzenkandidat, Manfred Weber was thwarted by Macron, who viewed him as unqualified. Von der Leyen, on the other hand, was a long-time Merkel loyalist and, as Macron noted, spoke French exceptionally well. The then-German Defence Minister was also amenable to closer military cooperation with France and had spoken of the need to create “an army of Europeans” — another point in her favour for Macron.
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