For more than seven years, Derk-Jan Eppink worked as a senior official behind the scenes in the European Commission. The Commission is hardly known to the general public, but makes decisions which affect the daily lives of almost half a billion Europeans. Now that he has left the Commission to take up a new job in New York, he looks back on his time in Europe.
Eppink's book gives the reader a rare and ironic glimpse of life in Europe's corridors of power. In his inimitable style, he sketches a portrait of the 'European mandarins', the European Commission's senior administrators, of whom a German Euro-Commissioner recently said that 'they have too much power and are too little controlled'.
Derk-Jan Eppink was a member of the cabinet staff of the European Commissioner Frits Bolkestein. Later he worked for the Estonian Commissioner, Siim Kallas. For many years he was a political journalist, writing first for the Dutch NRC Handelsblad and then for the Belgian De Standaard. His first successful book, Belgian Adventures, was also published by Lannoo.