A Festival of Rationalization

José Manuel Barroso is working the only force-multiplier available to a European Union not interested in actually doing anything to earn that respect:

We need to revisit the structures of global governance, to ensure that they work better for people everywhere, and in the interests of both current and future generations. The EU has led the discussion within its own structures and taken it to wider international fora. We welcome the emerging economies' call for reform of global institutions.

In other words: the think the world should voluntarily come under the same undemocratic headlock that the populous entities are putting the smaller or less wealthy members of the EU, and we should, of course employ Europe-centered institutions to do it, the ones dominated by European employees.

The economic crisis has made progress in the negotiations of the Doha Development Agenda in the World Trade Organisation even more important.

The WTO framework, to which the EU has always given priority, is increasingly recognised as being fundamental to our prosperity. It helps to anchor the global economy in an open, rules-based system based on international law

That is, the Doha round that the Europeans killed to maintain tacit protectionism.

Multilateral engagement is essential for dealing with these threats. The EU has multilateralism in its DNA. Others, too, can benefit from its experience. Europeans are long-standing champions of the United Nations and international cooperation, and continually seek to ensure that stability, freedom, democracy, and justice prevail as cornerstones of international relations.

Which is an interesting way to put the passive-aggression that charaterizes anything that happens between EU member states or in the UN where the most extreme and vile resolutions, as unenforcable as they all are, come from nation-states that can do it without any consequence to themeselves, and at no cost to themselves. Pledging tp spend others' money and issuing a pandering condemnation of the politically unpopular hardly amounts to sane or responsible action, let alone "global governance".

As it is, what is in the EU's DNA is totalitarian statism whose only addition in the past 20 years has been to put a smily face on it. If, as Barroso claims, that the EU has a growing role, or lessons to teach the world, their historically-recent revelation that they should stop dragging the rest of civilization into their internecine wars and awful top-down authoritarian ideas about social organization (Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etal), there is scant proof that it won't do as much harm in this century as it did in the 20th century.