A bluffers' guide to EU-speak.
You join a conversation and a smoothie in an expensive suit is burbling: "We had a very useful ITC meeting, took a decision on QMV to apply the Copenhagen Criteria on human rights to Turkey . . ."
What do you do? Remark (à la Adrian Langan, EU expert at Bill O'Herlihy Communications) how odd it is that an organisation employing a zillion translators is incapable of translating its jargon from English into English. Or slink away and find the bluffers' guide to EU acronyms (which may or may not exist).
Meanwhile, here's 10 of the best:
IGC (Inter-Governmental Conference): Gets everyone extremely excited. It's a European Council meeting but a really important one, where Bertie reigns as king.
QMV (Qualified Majority Voting): Prime ministers vote for something and each has a different number of votes, according to size of country.
Copenhagen Criteria: A kind of EU-quality ISO quality mark, meaning the standards you have to reach to join the EU (e.g. "Got to sort out human rights in Turkey first . . .")
Petersberg Tasks: Could be an airport novel but is named after a Berlin suburb. Relates to foreign policy and what the EU would be authorised to do in the event of war breaking out, say, in the Balkans.
Lisbon Agenda: A Must. Presidency press officers not injecting this into every second sentence are dead meat. Has the vague-ish aim of making the EU the most dynamic and knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.
JHA: Not a Palestinian terrorist organisation. Stands for Justice and Home Affairs and EU ambitions to get a consensus on terrorism, smuggling, and so on.
CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy) - or not so common, as in the case of Iraq and lots of other stuff.
COPS (French acronym for Policy and Security Committee), also known - and often within the same documents announcing one of its incredibly frequent meetings - as PSC.
PSC: See COPS.
EcoFin: Bound for Punchestown in April with your placard? This one stands for European Council of Finance Ministers.
COREPER: a member state's permanent representation to the EU (though how were you to know, given that it's another French acronym?). We've nearly doubled our COREPER quotient for the presidency.