The Ouroboros is a serpent devouring its own tail, an ancient emblem that entered Western consciousness via Egyptian iconography and Greek magic. In alchemy, it represents the eternal return — a cycle of self-consumption and rebirth.
In the natural world, certain reptiles, such as rat snakes, have been known to consume themselves in a fit of confused instinct. This 'gilded serpent' survives by feeding on its own momentum, and it is the ultimate symbol of the self-perpetuating system.
Following the clamour surrounding the AD5 Generalist Competition — which attracted more than 170,000 candidates — uncomfortable questions have begun to surface within the 'Brussels bubble'. Of the tens of thousands of applicants, a disproportionate number were Italian. Conventional wisdom suggests this is a symptom of a stagnant domestic job market, driving young people abroad.
However, this may miss the mark. The reality could be that the Italian education system has been singularly successful in making EU studies part of the furniture, effectively preparing candidates for the Berlaymont. If economic desperation were the primary driver, we would expect to see a similar number of Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese candidates, yet they remain comparatively underrepresented.
But beyond the demographics of the applicant pool lies a more fundamental, often ignored question: is the EU recruiting problem-solvers, or is it selecting for those who prioritise institutional perpetuation over radical efficiency?
Mechanical elegance vs bureaucratic bloat
Beyond the high EU administrative overhead — which accounts for a notable share of the budget — we must ask where the European project is heading. In the private sector, decision-makers are haunted by a singular, lean question: how can we best manage limited resources?
The answers are found in the economy of means, adaptability, and a ruthless cost-benefit analysis of every head on the payroll. Private firms tend to operate with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker, constantly asking: 'What happens if this part is removed?'
The philosophy of Swiss watchmaking — where perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove — is the antithesis of the modern administrative state. In high-end horology, mechanical noise is the enemy. Every component must justify its weight and friction, increasing power reserve and enhancing long-term reliability.
By contrast, public administrations are often subject to institutional expansion. Unlike the private actor who survives by streamlining, the bureaucratic structure tends to grow through incremental accumulation. It is zero-based discipline versus ad aeternum existence: a choice between a system that treats every resource as scarce and one that treats its own growth as an inevitable law of nature.
This one-way mechanism of growth was famously codified in 1961 by Alan Peacock and Jack Wiseman as the 'ratchet effect'. They observed that during times of social upheaval — wars, depressions, or pandemics — the public’s tolerance for taxation and intervention shifts upward. Crucially, when the crisis dissipates, spending never returns to its original baseline. It settles at a new, higher ceiling.
Later, in 1987, Robert Higgs, in his work Crisis and Leviathan, expanded this concept into a chilling institutional reality: the administrative state uses national emergencies as a catalyst for permanent encroachment. In the European context, this dynamic is strikingly visible.
From the Eurozone debt crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, every supposedly temporary rescue mechanism eventually hardens into a permanent pillar of the Brussels financial architecture. The emergency vanishes; the bureaucracy remains.
Towards zero-based discipline
To break this cycle, one must look toward Zero-Based Budgeting — a radical departure from the incrementalism that currently governs the Union. In the private sector, this approach requires every project to be justified from the ground up, as if it were being undertaken for the first time.
It eliminates the zombie programmes that persist simply because they were funded the year before. Instead, it forces a fresh annual look at the merits, costs, and justifiability of all programmes, past and proposed, while exploring new ways to achieve the same objectives.
Currently, the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework — MFF — is negotiated through a gruelling process that prioritises political compromise over lean efficiency. Because these negotiations are so volatile, the path of least resistance is to keep existing programmes on life support while layering new priorities onto them.
This is how we arrived at the current €2.07 trillion in combined funds for the MFF 2021–2027, in current prices. It is a sedimentary layer of spending: 1960s-era agricultural subsidies still command nearly a third of the budget.
The justification for this ad aeternum growth is rooted in the European Added Value argument — the idea that certain challenges, such as climate change or border management, are handled more efficiently at EU level than by 27 individual member states. The result is a bloated financial structure that is increasingly difficult to steer and harder to justify.
Advocating for a transition toward this model is a call for a modern, high-performance administration. Under a zero-based system, the European institutions would be required to justify every line item from a floor of zero at the start of each MFF cycle.
It would force a radical re-evaluation of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Cohesion Funds, asking whether they deliver measurable outcomes or merely serve as political transfers. The current trajectory is unsustainable precisely because it lacks a sunset clause for failure.
By breaking the cycle of incremental growth, the EU could finally align its massive financial firepower with its strategic needs, ensuring that taxpayers’ money is not just spent, but invested in ways suited to future challenges.
William Niskanen, Public Choice theory, and Parkinson’s Law
To understand why the EU struggles to shrink, one must look to Public Choice theory — specifically the work of William Niskanen. In this Niskanian world, the public organisation is viewed as a budget maximiser rather than a problem-solver.
Success for a Directorate-General in Brussels is rarely defined by the efficient resolution of a crisis — an outcome that would, logically, lead to the department’s downsizing. Instead, survival lies in acquiring more. It is a perverse incentive structure where the primary objective is to spend rather than to be right.
Under current fiscal rules, failing to exhaust an annual appropriation is often seen as a strategic failure; a surplus is not a saving, but rather a risk to future funding. Thus, the institution evolves into a self-perpetuating Leviathan that views fiscal contraction as an existential threat.
Parkinson’s Law further codifies this administrative hunger: 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion.' Within the European institutions, this law operates in tandem with Niskanen’s budget-maximising logic. When a department is granted a multi-billion-euro allocation, the internal machinery does not seek the most efficient path; it creates an ecosystem of hiring, procedures, meetings, and reports to justify the spending.
The result is a Kafkaesque structure of its own making. Complexity is added not to improve the output for the European citizen, but to signal the importance of the work being done. It is the organisation’s survival instinct: spending is the only way to guarantee its future existence.
We see a dynamic of permanent growth, in which the administration becomes a victim of its own duration. Managing the Union becomes a more vital task than achieving the results the Union was created to deliver.
We return, inevitably, to the Ouroboros. Has the European Union become a gilded serpent — feeding on its own tail to sustain itself? It appears to justify its existence by solving the very complexities its own bureaucracy has created. Unless it introduces a structural shock — a move away from the comfort of incrementalism and toward a design that treats public funds as a scarce resource to be earned — the structure will only continue to grow.
It is the golden cage that must rediscover its role as an agile tool for progress, rather than become a static monument to its own history. If the EU is to reclaim a paramount role, it must shed its skin and undergo profound reform.
