The Eastern Partnership is a typical long term EU technocratic instrument.

I understand that politics is the art of the possible, and that good government technocracy is limited to the attainable.

Head of the Egyptian Armed Forces General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi said in an announcement broadcast live minutes ago that the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court will be the new interim president and that a technocrat national government will be formed.

Like leftists everywhere, the French left favors a large degree of state control of the economy, together with technocratic rather than liberal solutions to social and economic problems.

The Commission was originally created as a technocratic body relatively independent of either national or supranational control correctly so, given its mandate.

The glacially technocratic and apolitical International Monetary Fund, in its latest report on the eurozone, goes as far as mentioning political union and ex ante fiscal risk sharing as conditions for any monetary union to work.

In English, as in several other European languages, the term austerity derives from the Greek austeros, which means harsh and severe, whereas for Germans it is merely a technocratic savings scheme, a Sparprogramme.

Then they freed themselves of all but the lightest contact with their political masters they became independent technocrats, a monetary priesthood that spoke in Delphic terms obscure to mere mortals.

I understand that politics is the art of the possible, and that good government technocracy is limited to the attainable. But it would be good if Obama remembered that we dwell not in the Republic of Plato, but in the Roman sewer of Romulus.

When democracy fails to deliver economically or politically, perhaps it is to be expected that some people will look for authoritarian solutions. And, for many economists, delegating economic policy to technocratic bodies in order to insulate them from the folly of the masses almost always is the preferred approach.

Like leftists everywhere, the French left favors a large degree of state control of the economy, together with technocratic rather than liberal solutions to social and economic problems. This type of thinking has played a vital role in the development of European institutions.

But central banks new role as supreme arbiters of policy truth is fraught with hazard. Given that the solutions that emerge from their disputations and analyses will be the product of technocratic not democratic processes, they are likely to trigger populist backlashes.

Yet, despite this, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the EU s role in Pakistan bears all the hallmarks of the pre Maastricht polity that it no longer wants to be technocratic, apolitical, and marginalized by the United States.