The European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights is probably the foremost unifying document of the bloc’s 500 million residents. But the decision to transform it into a performance piece is ultimately goofy and divisive.

In the hopes of making its colorless language a bit more animated and tangible, the Charter will be performed as an 80-minute epic poem alongside music, dance and artistic interpretation at the EU’s Fundamental Rights Conference in December. In the meanwhile, the Vienna-based EU Agency for Fundamental Rights is faced with the task of designating a poet for the job and tending to the subsequent resentment of countries that feel they’re being snubbed by the language choice. The original call for poets stipulated that the piece would be written only in English, “the literary language,” a display of Anglo snobbery and the type of thing that makes those proud Europeans who speak other languages really huffy.

As the EU Observer explains, “It is a move that is likely to provoke the ire of francophones, already smarting from what they view as the galloping advance of the English language within the EU institutions and European communication with citizens at the expense of French.”

There’s also the issue of how to put parts like the “right to strike” clause (which, ironically, the British decided to opt-out of) into a performance piece. Even the most brilliant of poets and choreographers are bound to struggle with stuff like, “Workers and employers, or their respective organizations, have the right in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action." Maybe EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy can just throw all 54 of the Charter’s chapters into his famed haikus.