Eurobloat #0005 • September 2010
A continent that had just been bankrupted by its banks responded the only way it knew how, by building three new buildings full of regulators. September 2010 was the month the EU decided that the lesson of the crisis was more Europe, and reached for your light switch on the way out.
Folly of the Month: Three new regulators, because the crisis was clearly a shortage of regulators
On 22 September the European Parliament approved the new European System of Financial Supervision, conjuring three pan-European authorities out of the wreckage: a banking authority in London, a markets authority in Paris and an insurance authority in Frankfurt, all open for business by 1 January 2011. The supervisors who had presided over the boom were not sacked, they were promoted to a higher tier and handed a bigger map. National regulators had failed, so the obvious remedy was to add a layer above them with power to overrule them, on the theory that a mistake made in Brussels is somehow more European than the same mistake made at home. Three cities got a prestige agency each, which is the EU's idea of a problem solved.
1. Brussels orders France to explain its own borders
After France put Roma migrants on charter flights to Bucharest, Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding compared a member state to the 1940s and announced the Commission would open infringement proceedings against Paris. Whatever one thinks of the flights, the spectacle was instructive: a national government enforcing its own borders, and the EU treating that as the offence requiring punishment.
→ hrw.org
2. Your 75-watt bulb was declared illegal
From 1 September the clear 75-watt incandescent bulb joined the 100-watt on the banned list, the second instalment of a phase-out drawn up in Brussels for the good of the planet. Europe could not agree a budget or a border, but it could agree precisely how brightly you were permitted to light your kitchen.
3. A returns deal with Pakistan, signed by the open-borders club
On 21 September MEPs approved a readmission agreement letting the EU send back people residing without authorisation to Pakistan, a country the Union itself notes had not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention. The same institution that lectures member states about freedom of movement was quietly shopping for somewhere to send people, which tells you the open border was always a slogan rather than a conviction.
4. The EU takes your gas supply firmly into its own hands
Parliament backed a new regulation on security of gas supply, the EU's first legally binding grab at an area that used to belong to national energy ministries. Sold as solidarity after the Russian gas cut-offs, it was in practice another competence quietly migrating from the capitals to the Commission, where competences go and do not come back.
5. Luxembourg dismantles a German law from the bench
On 8 September the Court of Justice ruled in Carmen Media that Germany's state monopoly on sports betting and lotteries broke EU free-movement rules and could not stand. A national parliament had decided how its own citizens might gamble, and unelected judges in Luxembourg decided otherwise, which is the EU's favourite way of legislating without an inconvenient vote.
6. Mr Van Rompuy reports to Parliament, and calls it democracy
On 22 September the European Council's unelected President addressed MEPs for the first time as the Lisbon Treaty requires, reporting back from his summit of strategic partners. A man no voter chose, briefing a chamber most voters ignore, on a meeting held in private, was presented as a triumph of accountability.
7. New rules for the insect repellent in your shed
On 22 September Parliament gave a first-reading blessing to a sweeping biocides regulation covering everything from slug pellets to the chemicals that treat your tap water, by 550 votes to 22. The cause is unimpeachable and the paperwork enormous, which is the EU's signature combination: a noble aim wrapped in enough authorisation procedures to keep a small city of officials employed.
8. The investigation that became a decade of fines is loaded
Through September the Commission was busy assembling the complaints from rival search firms that it would turn into a formal antitrust probe of Google that November, the opening shot of Brussels' long campaign against American technology. What began as a few grievances would mature into billions in fines, a reminder that an EU investigation is less an inquiry than a slow-motion levy.
→ phys.org
9. Brussels gives itself a State of the Union, just like a country
On 7 September the Commission President José Manuel Barroso stood up in Strasbourg and delivered the first ever European Union State of the Union address, a ritual borrowed wholesale from Washington. A man no electorate chose, heading an institution most voters cannot name, surveyed the affairs of a continent from a podium as if the Union were a nation and he its president, which is precisely the conceit the whole exercise was designed to plant.
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