Eurobloat #0004 • August 2010
August is the month Brussels pretends to be on holiday. In reality it spent the recess shipping the bank records of half a billion people to the United States, commissioning a poll that discovered, to nobody's astonishment, that the cure for Europe was more Europe, and watching its sacred free-movement project collide with a member state that took it at its word.
Folly of the Month: Free movement, until somebody actually moves
The great achievement of the European project is that any citizen may live anywhere in the Union. The great embarrassment of August 2010 was discovering what happens when they do. France, faced with Romanian and Bulgarian Roma exercising precisely the free-movement right the EU spent decades building, began clearing camps and flying people out, an interior-ministry circular of 5 August instructing prefects to dismantle illegal camps "in priority those of the Roma". Brussels had constructed a Union with no internal borders and no plan whatsoever for what a member state should do when the borderless flow becomes inconvenient. The Commission's eventual response was not to fix the incoherence but to wag a finger at Paris, the Union that demands open borders also reserving the right to grade the members who live with the consequences.
1. Your bank statements, now with extra Washington
On 1 August the EU-US Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme agreement entered into force, the deal under which European financial-messaging data held by SWIFT is handed to the US Treasury. The same institutions that lecture everyone about data protection arranged for the bank records of EU citizens to be posted to another continent, and called it a triumph of cooperation.
2. The EU polls the EU and finds the EU popular
On 26 August the Commission unveiled its Spring Eurobarometer under the headline that EU citizens favour "stronger European economic governance". A self-commissioned survey concludes that the answer to Europe's troubles is more power for the people who commissioned the survey. Funny how the in-house pollster never returns a verdict for less Brussels.
3. A telephone for your car, by order of Brussels
August saw Directive 2010/40/EU on Intelligent Transport Systems take effect, naming an "interoperable EU-wide eCall" among its priority actions, the scheme to put a mandatory emergency-calling box in every new car. Member states managed road safety for a century without a Brussels mandate for an automatic dialler, but the Union has never met a device it did not wish to legislate into your dashboard.
4. The stress tests that could not find the crisis
The EU's much-trumpeted bank stress tests in July had waved Ireland's banks safely through. By August the ratings agency Standard & Poor's was estimating the cost of rescuing those same Irish banks at up to fifty billion euros. A Europe-wide audit designed to reassure markets had managed to overlook one of the largest banking collapses on the continent, and not a single examiner was held to account.
→ rte.ie
5. Pakistan drowns while Brussels consults
As catastrophic floods left some twenty million Pakistanis in misery through July and August, the Union that styles itself a humanitarian superpower responded by drafting a list of seventy-five tariff lines and waiting for a Council mandate in September and a WTO waiver thereafter. The fastest help the EU could offer a drowning country was a proposal to perhaps lower some duties, eventually, subject to committee.
6. The presidency of permanent integration
Belgium took its turn in the chair from 1 July, run by a caretaker cabinet and government-less at home, dutifully making the consolidation of economic governance a headline priority. A country unable to form its own cabinet was nonetheless certain that the real problem was insufficiently centralised budgetary discipline for everyone else.
7. The most privacy-invasive instrument it ever passed
Through 2010 the Commission limped on with its "evaluation" of the Data Retention Directive, having written to member states in July begging for evidence that storing every citizen's call and internet records actually catches anyone. Its own data-protection supervisor would call the scheme the most privacy-invasive instrument the Union ever adopted. Brussels built mass surveillance first and went looking for a justification afterwards.
8. Smile for the airport scanner
The Commission spent 2010 advancing its case for body scanners at EU airports, its June communication brushing aside the privacy and health objections of its own fundamental-rights agency and data-protection bodies. The recurring instinct of Brussels when freedom and surveillance collide is to find surveillance "a valid alternative" and freedom a regrettable obstacle.
9. The lights go out on schedule
As the month closed, the next phase of the Union's incandescent-bulb ban loomed for 1 September, this time outlawing the seventy-five-watt bulb. Brussels could not rescue Pakistan or audit a bank, but it could reach into every household in Europe and decide, watt by watt, which lamp you were permitted to switch on.
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