European Commission Vice President Gunter Verheugen is now questioning whether small EU states should continue to have their own member of the European Commission. Germany’s Verheugen said that eliminating these positions would help fulfill the need for “an efficient, small and highly competent commission.”

The European Union’s lawmaking body, the Commission, is currently comprised of one politician from each member state—selected by the nation’s leader—overseeing a particular aspect of European operations, with a president at the top. Not elected by European voters, these commissioners are unaccountable to citizens as they make European law.

With 27 members—as of January 1—this makes for a cumbersome process. European leaders know something must be done. That’s why the EU constitution suggests reducing the size of the Commission to a rotation-based Commission comprised of no more than two thirds the number of EU members.

Verheugen’s plan would make the Commission even more efficient—but at the expense of sidelining smaller EU nations.

Verheugen added that the European Parliament—not national governments—should elect the Commission president, and the president (not the national capitals) should then be able to appoint commissioners. This is similar to French presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan, proposed last year, that “the Commission president be elected by meps [members of the European Parliament], giving him a democratic mandate to pick his own team members” (EUobserver.com, January 4).

Poland’s commissioner for regional policy, visibly offended by Verheugen’s suggestion for smaller nations to have “deputy” status, did agree with the idea of the Parliament picking the president, and the president deciding who comprises the Commission. A smaller Commission, she said, “would have to have a totally different method of selection, where commissioners are not selected by member states” (ibid., January 5).

For a good portion of his 93-year-long life, Herbert W. Armstrong forecasted the rise of a united Europe comprised ultimately of 10 nations or blocs of nations. By 1985, when he was writing a summation of his life’s work, Mystery of the Ages, the European Common Market actually consisted of 10 nations. But Mr. Armstrong didn’t claim that this was his prediction coming to pass. He said in fact that these were probably not the 10 that would ultimately steer the European Union. The biblical prophecies upon which he based his forecasts showed that the 10 nations could not include Britain, and that about half of those nations had to be from Eastern Europe. Keep in mind that Eastern Europe, at that time, was still under the shroud of the Iron Curtain, kept under the Communist control of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Armstrong never lived to see the Berlin Wall’s fall, Ceausescu’s execution or the Soviet Union’s collapse. Now we have seen those Eastern nations brought into the EU over the past few years, realizing the idea that Europe can now stand on both western and eastern legs—or breathe on its “eastern and western lungs,” as Pope John Paul ii termed it.

The apparent problem has been that the EU, though now comprised more equally of western and eastern states, has had more than two dozen members.

Those of us continuing to monitor the development of Mr. Armstrong’s predictions have been watching for Europe to dramatically downsize—not necessarily geographically, but politically.

Will this be the way Europe will formulate into 10 geographic districts or voting blocs? Perhaps. Whether the prophesied 10-nation division ends up specifically being fulfilled by Europe streamlining the Commission down to 10 unaccountable lawmakers is only something we can speculate on. Still, we clearly see the type of thinking emerging that will result in power of the Union being given over to “ten kings.”