Barroso fears ‘fragmentation’ of EU if Scotland votes yes

In the Guardian on Tuesday Angus Roxburgh raises a number of thoughtful points about the current spats in the Scotland debate.

The former BBC Europe Correspondent says he is leaning very close to voting yes in the referendum and despairing of the last few days of debate.

He asks: why would the EU expel Scotland “knowing that this would cause utter havoc?” “Why would anyone want to inflict such disruption on themselves?”

Well, without attempting to answer that I can try to answer a different question, which is why would European President Jose Manuel Barroso say what he did?

Read more: Barroso, Scotland, EU (and Nato?)

Speak to people who’ve spoken to President Barroso privately and  they tell you he is “terrified of fragmentation” in the EU.

The outgoing EU Commission president thinks copy-cat separatist movements infused with hope by a successful Scottish independence campaign could take off and threaten the entire EU project as member states lose vital organs, turn inward, are reduced and destabilised.

It won’t be President Barroso who presides over all this though. His term of office ends this autumn and we are some way off knowing who his successor will be.

Read more: Salmond: Osborne’s independence ‘diktat has backfired’

And it’s the 28 member countries who actually decide on the basis of unanimity whether a new country can join.

But he probably speaks for a few fellow senior Eurocrats who’ve had the same worries as him and the same conversations with leading politicians from countries like Spain, Belgium and Germany.

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