The forgotten Parliament of the European Union
Travel to Luxembourg on the train from Brussels, the true heart of the European Union. The Parliament is on the outskirts, distinguishable by its array of 25 or so flags, all of which have to be taken down and rotated each day, to avoid giving precedence to any one country.
The Parliament is on the edge of the ancient walled citadel of Luxembourg, a country so small that it seems not to need a separate name for its main town. Visitors to the still active administration building can see the mothballed auditorium with its smoothly upholstered seats, each with its own microphone and voting button, and headphones connected to the booths for translators. All are sadly now mothballed and unused. But then, the European Union already has two other Parliaments.
Everyone knows that the European Union wastes lots of money. Naturally then it has not one, but three separate Parliaments, each with its own huge back-up bureaucracy. What is less well appreciated is that the Europeans see this as “job creation” and the buildings as national monuments. The Anglo-Saxons seem to think this is bad, but as any convinced European could tell them, money spent like this creates more money.
Curiously enough, under the European Union's constitution, those debates in the Parliament have no significance at all anyway. Even if there is an effort to give the Parliament a rubberstamp role recently, the arrangement is that all the decisions (with the possible exception of the single vote every few years over whether to accept the new make-up of the European Commission) are made elsewhere. Quite unlike other parliaments, of course!
No one has ever tried to blow up this Parliament, and there do not seem to be many protests outside it either. It is the Perfect Parliament.