Life of a European Mandarin
By Derk-Jan Eppink
Lannoo €24.95(£17.50)

Derk-Jan Eppink, a Dutch civil servant, has done something unique. He has written a genuinely entertaining book about the European Commission.

Of course, there is no shortage of books about the commission and the workings of the Brussels bureaucracy. But most of them are horribly dull. They are written by academics and aimed at other academics, or students or would-be eurocrats. Nobody would consider reading them for pleasure.

Eppink’s work is different for three reasons. First, he was a journalist before he was a civil servant: he can tell a story and has an eye for anecdotes. Second, although he thinks that the European Union is definitely a force for good, he does not have a religious belief in “the project”. As a result, he is able to ask awkward – and important – questions about the future of the EU. Last but not least, he has a sense of humour.

Eppink can take something that sounds very dull – a discussion with a French trade unionist about the EU’s postal-services directive, for example – and turn it into an amusing story that tells you something important about how the EU operates. (In this case, that French trade unionists are a powerful and stubborn force working against economic liberalisation.)

The author also has a refreshing interest in the macabre and the tawdry that enlivens his account of working as a civil servant, charged with improving the functioning of the EU’s internal market. He claims that Britain was forced to make important concessions on the free movement of goods after a case involving German importers of inflatable rubber women. He gives an account of a bizarre debate over whether the cross-border movement of corpses was the responsibility of the EU’s internal-market directorate or the health department.

Not all Eppink’s anecdotes are hilarious. And some of his literary devices can irritate. His habit of referring to the commission as “the Princess” begins to grate after a while. But, in general, he is successful in jollying along the reader with anecdotes, as he carefully builds up a picture of how the European institutions work. There are separate chapters on the commission, the European parliament, the Council of Ministers and the role of the commission’s president.

Gratifyingly, Eppink seems to believe that one of the most important Brussels institutions is the Financial Times. He writes that: “The most prestigious newspaper for the mandarins is the Financial Times. An issue isn’t an issue until it has appeared in the pink pages of Britain’s premier daily.” Less gratifyingly, he devotes quite a lot of space to what he regards as his successful efforts to manipulate FT coverage of his boss, Frits Bolkestein, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market. The picture that Eppink paints of the European bureaucracy is – perhaps unintentionally – rather horrifying. The commission is ultra-hierarchical and full of back-stabbing time-servers. The president is treated as a sort of god – even if, like Romano Prodi, he has a habit of falling asleep in meetings. Individual commissioners are treated as minor deities, and civil servants compete fiercely for their ear. If a commissioner wants an informal chat with a junior official, civil servants higher up the pecking-order will do their utmost to prevent it happening.

Commission officials believe that, collectively, they are doing great work. But this doesn’t stop them from devoting a lot of energy to frustrating each other’s initiatives.

Perhaps all large bureaucracies behave like this. But reading Eppink’s book made me profoundly grateful that I am never likely to work for the Brussels bureaucracy.

Most of the book is an insider’s account of the workings of the commission. But Eppink has thought hard about the future of the EU. Unlike most Brussels insiders, he is prepared to acknowledge the fundamental difficulty with the European project. “She [the commission] assumes that the public admires her unreservedly, but in this she is gravely mistaken. Her aim is the unification of Europe, whether the public wants it or not.”

Eppink is also sceptical about the EU’s efforts to force through a set of institutional reforms – initially as a constitution and now as a “reform treaty”. He notes – accurately enough – that “Europe’s main problem is not the fact that it does not yet have a president, but rather that it is saddled with a political agenda that belongs to the past.”

Comments such as these have endeared Eppink to some British eurosceptics. But the sceptics are wrong if they think that Eppink is one of them. His views on the commission – and the European project – are more interesting, nuanced and tolerant than that.

The writer is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator