Walking Away - CC / Flickr

I have a problem. A serious problem. I’m beset by some kind of political depression.

It’s not because I fear the result of the UK’s forthcoming general election – even if Labour wins there will be scant optimism. The battle is about who cuts what, when – aside from occasional forays into whether Brown is a bully or whether Cameron u-turns on marriage tax. Brown is battered, Cameron is weak, and Clegg is non-existent. Will even 50% of the population be enthused enough to vote? A heavily indebted, inward looking, security paranoid, deeply unequal population needs some cause for optimism, but where is that to be found?

In the meantime workers are ranting about refinery closures in France, increases in pension age in Spain, and everything in Greece. Meanwhile in Brussels everyone is playing silly power games about a nomination to Washington, and everyone is trying to undermine the High Rep for Foreign Policy who was supposed to help the EU play a greater role in world affairs. Fat chance. [UPDATE: more on the strikes in The Economist here]

To deal with all of these things 2 things are lacking: incentives and leadership. To deal with any of these issues we need strong, optimistic and visionary leaders, at national and also at EU level, people who can show that solidarity or common EU action or whatever is in the interests of everyone. People that can create a narrative that brings together business and worker interests, people that can persuade the baby boom generation that they don’t have to mess up absolutely everything for the generation coming after them. Where are those people? Or maybe it’s because the incentives are wrong within political parties, hence preventing those people emerging?

Beyond that all of this is intensely personal. Here I am, a political motivated individual with good skills (particularly when it comes to internet politics) and I’m effectively pottering around the edges. I’m designing websites for politicians but the sites do not come close to pushing the boundaries of net politics as all the individuals concerned are in the same restrictive structures that prevent the emergence of visionary leadership… Since the Atheist Bus Campaign I have no major, concrete online deliverable that I can point to.

Offline is no better – I just cannot bear political meetings that are filled with bla bla for hours on end, never-ending lists of reasons why X or Y cannot be accomplished, and interminably dull speeches designed by speakers to make themselves look intelligent rather that actually getting to the crux of an issue. It all depresses me enormously.

But what the hell is the conclusion of all of this? What should I do? I’m an intensely political person, driven by ideology and some desire to make the world a better place (oh how naive that sounds). But I’m terribly lacking inspiration and ways to do that just now.

There is one line I really dislike in the FT piece though:

Based in Bruges, it has for 60 years fed prospective civil servants an unabashedly federalist diet of courses for a post-graduate degree in political studies.

Oh come on folks, is that the best that FT journalists can do?

Of course the College of Europe by its very nature is not going to a bastion of opposition to the European Union. The fact that people are motivated to go there means, almost by definition, that they have an interest in EU politics and think that the EU is important in some way. But that does not equate to federalism, be that either the twisted British use of the word, or the correct political science definition of it.

The College of Europe in my experience was a rather practically orientated, non-ideological place. I would certainly count myself as one of the most forcefully ideologically motivated people who was there during my year in Bruges 2003-04. I was even criticised for having views that were too concrete and too stridently expressed.

No, the College of Europe is a place that fills students heads with facts about how the European Union works, and also equips them with some of the skills and approaches in order for them to deal with the EU’s machinery in Brussels. For a start the College’s own bureaucratic morass is a good training for the bureaucratic treacle that greets anyone in the European Commission.

Bruges is also a good place to meet people who will be in the corridors of power and to hence find a job in Brussels. If anyone’s in any doubt that’s a means of motivating people then see the enormous amount of comments on my posts about Commission jobs here and here (more comments there than on the rest of my blog put together) – a secure job is a much greater motivation that federalism is ever going to be.

But of course British journalists need to fit any EU story into the well-worn (and now increasingly broken) eurosceptics versus federalists frame. Problem is that the College of Europe does not fit the frame.