ABSTRACT
Eurocrats of the European Union (EU), by contrast, work for a very different and very much more important body. The fifteen Council of Europe employees here interviewed settled in Strasbourg in order to pursue a career in the European institutions. The EU retiree is almost a generation older, an Alsatian now just into his eighties, back in Strasbourg after an illustrious career that began with the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg and proceeded to a thirty-year span at the center of the ever-developing EU in Brussels. A widely-held opinion is that it is the image of Strasbourg that has been so greatly burnished by the presence of the European institutions. A limited number of European sites are host to such a cohort of high-level, highly-educated international civil servants. Brussels and Geneva come directly to mind, but in their wake are a few lower-profile centers such as Strasbourg.
