Opinion: Mogherini vs ‘End of History’

A front runner, her colleagues the EU diplomats claim, Italy’s Federica Mogherini is a competent and solid candidate, but here we come to the edge of the murky waters of Brussels politics –  here, the best never wins.

Notorious for their ‘penchant for grey’, the leaders of the 28 member state bloc tend to opt for somebody with less character competence and charisma. Traditionally, the winner of a high position should step out of the unknown – a rabbit out of a hat. While lacking purple mantels and chimney smoke, the setting is close in style and sentiment – on the night of 15 July, or in the early hours of 16 July, as has happened occasionally, when the presidents and prime ministers labour to give birth to something special, consuming more time in a giant effort to produce the optimal result – it will be then that the mountain will give birth to a mouse. Again. As once upon a time at dawn a certian Mister X, pictured by his contemporaries as a ‘low degree bank clerk’ stepped into the limelight, reciting a wooden speech, which by chance appeared in his pocket.

Or a blushing obsucre somebody who is never short of words in her native language, but knowing zero of any others…zero. This is a magic EU symbol- emptiness, a key element in understanding institutional life, with bureaucrats convinced that we are living at the ‘end of history’.

This very concept was born in the mind of EU apparatchik and French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who thought personalities-as-leaders were ridiculous and outdated, belonging to other epochs, destroyed at Waterloo in Belgium. The institutions are so powerful that their leaders are needless to make their mechanisms work, producing regulations and directives, resolutions and conclusions that fall like an avalanche on European taxpayers’ heads.

In this sense, the appointment of Mogherini will mean more of a challenge to the ‘end of history’ concept, where there is no place for personalities. The South Stream gas dispute and the Polish-Baltic opposition, obsessed with the old anti-Russsian phantom, and eager to reject her appointment, are secondary to the major concept – that ‘characters’ are banned.

Federica Mogherini as a top EU diplomat will mean much more than sidelining any gas dispute.  History does not end, Monsieur Kojève! Europeans are missing their personalities so badly.

However, the citizen’s outcry for a leader in the style of past eras when history did not stand still might be never heard, crushed against the huge glass surfaces of the EU institution buildings – a flock of grounded UFOs in the midst of Brussels’ cobble-stoned streets and parks.

One might blame Mogherini for the support of the Russian South Stream pipeline or construction of Rastrelli’s Hermitage – the Winter Palace of the Russian tzars. Or even the Italian-built Kremlin chapels – one of  many Italian niceties to Russians.

However, it is not about the blame game: there is simply no place for personality in Brussels’ dead-end of history. A daughter of an Italian cinéaste, an intellectual fascinated by Pablo Neruda, is Brussels really the right place for Federica Mogherini?

“Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that and only that, can be happiest or bitterest hour of your life.” Will it be more of a bitter taste for Federica?