An American Abroad.(European politics)(Brief Article)

During an exceptionally good dinner at a small Parisian restaurant, after the second set of plates had been dispatched, a French friend of mine leaned back in his chair, narrowed his eyes thoughtfully and said to no one in particular, "I think my four favorite kinds of mushrooms are, in order, les cepes, les morelles, les girolles et les chanterelles." Then he slapped his palms flat on the table, as if to say fin du debat, and took a solid gulp from his wineglass.

The other French people at the table agreed not at all. How can one rank les chanterelles below les girolles? The passionate discussion lasted until the cheese arrived--prompting a new discussion involving cheese rankings, counter-rankings and debate. I stayed out of it. Because, like all good Americans, my favorite kind of cheese (not to mention mushroom) is the kind you find on pizza.

Classifications, rankings, sets and subsets--these are truly French passions. They can organize anything on paper, which goes far in explaining the European Union, with its explosion of councils and commissions and committees. For those of you keeping score at home, the European Commission is made of Brussels bureaucrats with enormous power: the Council of Ministers is a powerful group of bureaucrats appointed by the individual member states; the Committee of Permanent Representatives is a group of bureaucrats from member countries, with membership weighted to reflect each country's size and population. I mean, the whole thing just seems so French.

You can see them now, the Brussels crowd, leaning back from 300-euro lunches, slapping their palms on the table and declaring, "I think my four favorite European Union organizations are, in order..." Trouble is, what works for cheese does not work for government. Nor are mushrooms and bureaucrats much alike, except that both need careful washing.

Americans are surprised at how rapidly Europeans have ceded power to the tangle of institutions that is "Brussels." We're amazed that they've given up so much of their idiosyncratic oddness. "Don't you miss the franc?" I asked a French friend. He scoffed. "Why would I miss such a thing. It was... it was..." He groped for the right word. "It was so illogical." (Will he say the same when his unpasteurized Reblochon--among the Top Cheese Faves at dinner--bites the dust, victim to the EU's agricultural standard-setting?)

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