ABSTRACT
Reactions to the Nobel Committee's decision to award the European Union (EU) its Peace Prize in 2012 were predictably mixed. What was perhaps less predictable was that the EU's own leaders would greet such news with feelings of foreboding and a profound sense of their own shortcomings. Yet this was the reaction of Martin Schulz, the socialist President of the European Parliament, when he joined European Council President Herman van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso to collect the prize in Oslo. Schulz was reminded of Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks and its account of the decline of a great family business, squandered by the later generations who could not emulate the heroic deeds of their forefathers. Thinking back on the achievements of the first generation of postwar European statesmen, Schulz worried that present day leaders were similarly watching a great political project fall apart (Kripa 2012b).
