International

This week, all Euro-MPs and their assistants received a letter from the Secretariat of the European Parliament. In the letter it was stated that from now on it would be forbidden to continue using abbreviations for the EP’s buildings, each of which is named after one of the European Union’s founders. By using these names in full we would be contributing to the name-recognition of these founders, which is of course important to a feeling of European togetherness. Can this get any dafter?

When you first arrive in the European Parliament, you’re pretty sure to get lost. The architect who designed the buildings was concerned principally with their immense size and didn’t really give much thought to the question of how you might most quickly and easily get from A to B.

The designers also considered that all of these different buildings, joined to each other by means of corridors great and small, ought to have different names. Each of the four principal buildings in Brussels carries the name of one of the European founding fathers (all of whom were indeed male): Spaak, Spinelli, Antall en Brandt. It was the designers’ fervent wish that young people would want to know just who these people were, which would then lead to fascinating discussions about European cooperation. In practice, however, the (Paul-Henri) Spaak building became the PHS building and (Altiero) Spinelli ASP. And so the entire planet descended into a fog, because who on earth knows what ASP stands for?

The measure proposed is senseless. Nobody is going to write out these names in full in a letter or an email, definitely not in these twitter times. I’ve got a better idea: let’s call the buildings after where they stand in relation to each other – North, East, West, South and so forth. And have the building services provide normal signposts, because it’s rather strange if, as things stand now, even Members of the European Parliament who have been working for two years in the EP, still have to ask the way.