Ideally, policy debates should serve to bring together the fullest information, the brightest minds, and the sharpest arguments in order to find solutions. That is, the optimum combination between what is best and what is feasible.

In the real world, shaped by ordinary human fallibility and the extraordinary egotism of professional politicians, that is usually not what happens. But the EU is still special in just how atrociously, hopelessly, for crying-out-loud bad it is at the solution game. Because it is not just playing it badly, it’s not playing at all.

Instead, in the upside-down, white-is-black, Israel-is-defending-itself-and-Iran-is-just-so-damn-mean alternate universe of the EU, the space where policy debates should take place has long been fully clogged up by three pernicious weeds of swamp-á-la-Brussels. First, those elaborately underhanded backroom deals that eliminate even the faintest remains of transparency and accountability. For a fresh – if also foul – example, just check out the recent double-dealing between the EU parliament’s oh-so-democratic Centrists and the at-least-not-so-hypocritical far right. A deal so obviously perfidious, even Berlin doesn’t like to be associated with it – in public, that is.

Secondly, there is that old bureaucratic panacea: hyperactive lethargy. If you can’t devise a rational solution to a public need to find broad support with most of 27 national governments (not to speak of their voters who matter little anyhow), just keep churning out inefficient non-solution papers, strategies, and plans that everyone can at least agree to keep talking but do very little about. That’s the pattern in which the EU is currently not addressing, for instance, its quite possibly medium-term-lethal problem of decaying competitiveness.

And finally, there is the doctrinally most demanding way of shutting down genuine policy debate: the hammer of the Brussels inquisition. That, of course, is not a specific office but a pervasive attitude of narrow-minded conformism always ready to promptly pounce on any heretic who offers........

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