Facebook Credits to save EU

No fool.

With sovereign debt getting out of control, Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Füle is proving he is anything but. As soon as flight restrictions were lifted, he jumped on a plane to Palo Alto for a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. On the agenda: the accession of Facebook to the European Union.

The logic is simple. Facebook will soon have as many netizens as the EU has citizens. And a high proportion of them like Europe and would be happy to help it through its funding crisis. Facebook is now the only planetary mechanism for liking things and Füle’s idea is that accession of the social networking site will streamline the business of exchanging the virtual, but hard, currency of Facebook Credits for the real, but soft, currencies in the Union.

Only adolescent pimples erupt on Facebook.

Another advantage of this Web 2.0 deal is that there is no need for a new treaty: the Heads of Government and State of the 27 current EU members just have to invite the twenty-eighth to be their friend.

And Füle told the Brussels Jungle he even has a workaround for the impasse currently afflicting Belgium: “I had Yves on the phone earlier, and he’s given me his password. It’s no big deal: nobody on Facebook reads the Belgian press.”