ABSTRACT
On 10 December 2012 the European Union came to Oslo. The occasion, of course, was the award to the Union of the Nobel Peace Prize. Since, however, no one person can claim to be the president of the Union, the prize was jointly received by the president of the European Council (Herman Van Rompuy), the president of the European Commission (José Manuel Barroso) and the president of the European Parliament (Martin Schulz). Even the lecture was billed as one lecture delivered in two parts by the presidents of the EUCO and the European Commission, while, the next day, it was the president of the European Parliament who represented the European Union in a visit to the island of Uttoya, where 77 young people had been murdered a year before in a fanatical protest against multi-culturalism. Indeed, the proceedings also hinted at limits to how far even the three presidents of the Union’s main institutions can between them claim to represent the European Union. They may have been on the stage, but 20 heads of state or government were in the audience, as, indeed, were a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh president, namely, the president of the European Central Bank and the representatives of the three countries who jointly held the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers.
