The similarities between the EU and the country of my birth are striking, and I think the EU’s name should be changed to reflect this. A government’s legitimacy in the West is traditionally derived from divine right or popular consent or, ideally, both. In the EU and its eastern precursor, it’s neither. Like the USSR, the EU is led not by a king or elected politicians but by bureaucrats (technocrats, as they are mislabelled). For Moscow read Brussels, and power in the EU radiates from the centre to the periphery, where it’s personified by obedient figureheads cordially hated by the locals. People in various provinces mostly communicate to one another in a patois bearing some resemblance to the lingua franca, in this case castrated English. Their preferences in this or anything else are ignored: the state is the machine; the people its cogs. Most important in the light of the present economic catastrophe, in the EU, just like in the USSR, politics trump economics. As long as the state hangs on, it doesn’t matter if the people are impoverished. Now for the differences, fast disappearing: 1) While the USSR had no hard currency, the EU still does — but for how long? 2) While the USSR relied on violence to hold the union together (the last time in 1989 when the sainted Gorbachev’s special forces murdered hundreds in the Caucasus and the Baltics, a tradition lovingly maintained by Putin in Chechnia), the EU uses blackmail instead — but for how long? Are we sure that when some country, say Italy, proves recalcitrant, violence won’t be used? It’s not for nothing that France has built her armed forces to a point where all three branches are bigger than ours. So do join me in the campaign for the name change. The EUSSR, anyone?