EU - Paternal or Fraternal?

RJC

One of the things that strikes me about the current economic gulag we find ourselves in is that the EU seems to be adopting a less than fraternal approach to it and is behaving more like a paternal figure to a family errant children.

I don't think this is helpful -

Let me explain:

I meet people from all over Europe and they tell me that they have the worst recession in Europe. How do they know this? Their high unemployment rate, their local media telling them, their politicians introducing cutbacks abd the EU threatening them.

Sound familar?

Recently I was at a social function with some Italian, Finnish, UK and Irish people. Each one of us told the above story and then we all burst out laughing. We (as individual citizens) realised what nobody else was telling us:

we are all in this together and the petty sniping by politicians (whether from Berlin to Athens or Brussels to Dublin) is pointless at best and dangerous and destructive at worst.

Rather than anyone in the EU telling all of us (by this I mean Brussels and the national goverments commnicating with the citizens) that if we all work together we'll get out of this we have each country in it's own isolated bubble living in an atmosphere of economic fear and uncertainty which leads to emnity and resentment (think about the petty squabble between Germany and Greece earlier this year).

You never seen freely availabe EUROSTAT figures presented in a format that makes the EU citizen get some perspective on their own national situation. - I mean, I'm sure the stats exist but how often do you see a nice, user-friendly graphic showing where we all are in relation to each other and showing us all that even though the boat has hit the iceberg we're all in it together (i.e. a bit of solidarity).

If you think about your own children you can draw the parallels - the kids in their late teens and early 20's (UK, Germany, France, Etc) resent the problems the younger kids are causing by their behaviour (Spain, Ireland, Greece, etc) - I remember my own childhood - I was the eldest boy and my younger brothers had an easy time compared to all the things I had to do -

I accept that this may be the wrong forum for this point but as it is called 'TalktoEU' you might send it onto someone who can add it into the big 'suggestion box' in Brussels. I know lots of people who would feel a whole lot better off if they felt just a morsel of solidarity from the EU.