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No one's celebrating as EU turns 50 Catherine Field At 50, the European Union suddenly finds itself in a troubled middle age where the future is uncertain, friends are few and the critics and mischief-makers are many. Since Irish voters on June 12 rejected the Lisbon Treaty aimed at boosting the EU's powers, it has been a de facto open season for attacking European institutions. Leading the charge is the newly ascendant camp of eurosceptics, which portrays the EU's executive commission as smug, over-powerful and unaccountable, the European Parliament as a money-gobbling talking shop and European integration as an assault on national sovereignty.
(Article continues below) But, for the first time, the pro-EU camp is making some eerily similar noises. These voices say that if the European project has lost its attraction to the people, the fault lies with an arrogant and aloof European Commission. French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week blamed Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson for torpedoing the Lisbon pact. He accused Mandelson of stoking fears among Ireland's farming community by offering concessions on EU agriculture subsidies at the World Trade Organisation talks. French Fisheries Minister Michel Barnier - himself a former commissioner - said "there is a problem of transparency and trust and of working together" with Brussels. His anger was sparked by an EU ban on tuna fishing in the Mediterranean that took effect just as French fishermen were struggling with higher fuel prices. In Brussels, officials say such attacks are hypocritical and demagogic. They say the commission simply administers the laws approved by member states and that each commissioner is approved by the European Parliament, whose members in turn are democratically elected in the 27 EU nations.
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