Here’s a fine piece by the Economist’s “Charlemagne” that attempts to explain what those notorious eurocrats (or, at least, the members of their professional civil-service class) are really like. It’s not unsympathetic (thus Charlemagne appears to come close to sharing the eurocratic view that “nationalism” is always a bad thing), but, even allowing for the fact that my own graduate school memories of Brussels are, ahem, 30 years old, it seems pretty fair:

Here’s a key extract:

Brussels is a very odd town, but it is much less Sodom and Gomorrah than it is like the Vatican. Europe is at heart a faith-based project for most people who inhabit the Brussels institutions, or at least it was when they first took the entrance exams and joined the project. If they become more cynical with the passing years, they never quite lose that spark of faith, is my sense of it. It is much too unsubtle to say they are in it for the perks: like saying priests only want to become archbishops for the robes, the mitre and the palatial residence. Yes, the Brussels bubble has its share of venal and lazy officials paid more than they deserve. Yes, you do hear stories about keen young things being taken on one side and told to start taking long lunches or trim their hours, in order to avoid showing up their elders. The staff trade unions at the EU institutions are certainly a ghastly bunch, forever whining and moaning about their conditions without showing the slightest awareness that they have some of the safest jobs in the world, at a time of global recession. I have also always thought it was a subtly corrupting decision to exempt Brussels-based officials from the (cripplingly high) income taxes levied in Belgium and charge them special (low) EU taxes. I think it denies EU officials the instructive moment of resentment that I feel every year as I hand over my tax payment to the Belgian state: a resentment that makes me alert to every sign of public waste and maladministration around me . . . They are often highly educated, in a geeky sort of way: the EU exams are hard to pass, and the finer points of EU treaties (like the finer points of theology) do not appeal to everyone. I have written before that many of them live in a bit of a gilded cage, bored in corners of the institutions where nothing much is happening, and glumly resigned to the realisation that promotion has less to do with merit than with politics and semi-acknowledged quotas of top jobs for various countries. That explains why there are so many choirs, book clubs or sports clubs for Eurocrats. These are clever, bored people. The town’s defining ethos of anti-nationalism is often admirable. EU officials are easy to get on with, and a decent bunch in my experience. But it brings problems: I find a lot of people in this town at best naive about how much integration public opinion will accept, and at worst a bit hostile to democracy. Get a Brussels dinner party onto referendums, and hear people rave about the madness of asking ordinary people their opinions of the European project.

That “a bit” is an understatement, to put it mildly, but read the whole thing.