During a speech at the College of Europe, in Brugge, Belgium, Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has suggested the European Union should work towards including Russia, Middle Eastern and North African countries,
I have often suspected that the EU secretly wanted to regain all the ground the Roman Empire once held.
He then told (with acknowledgement to Burger King) a double whopper: "The truth is that the EU has enlarged, remodelled and opened up.”
And here it comes…
“It is not and is not going to become a superstate. But neither is it destined to become a superpower."
He went on more frankly, that a successful EU must be prepared to "deploy soft and hard power to promote democracy and tackle conflict beyond its borders" and its goal "must be a multilateral free-trade zone around our periphery".
So one could be forgiven for interpreting what he is suggesting as; if you are a neighbour of the EU, then one way or another, you will be persuaded to fit in with what the EU wants and in the longer term will probably be swallowed up and if the ‘softly softly’ approach doesn’t work then there is always the hard way.
