Eurobloat #0008 • December 2010
December 2010 was the festive season in which Brussels gave itself a permanent bailout machine, a new army of diplomats and a bigger budget, then asked the rest of us to admire its restraint.
Folly of the Month: A two-line Treaty change to make the bailouts forever
On 16 December the European Council agreed a tidy two-line amendment to Article 136 of the Treaty, blessing a permanent mechanism to rescue euro members in trouble. The amendment was deliberately kept small, and routed through the simplified revision procedure, precisely so that voters would never get to hold a referendum on whether they wanted to underwrite each other's debts forever. The genius of the design is its honesty about its own dishonesty: a structural change to the constitutional order of the Union, drafted to be invisible enough that nobody need be asked. A stability mechanism that dare not speak its name to the people who pay for it.
→ eur-lex.europa.eu → en.wikisource.org
1. The continent gets its own foreign office
On 1 December the European External Action Service was formally launched, a fully fledged diplomatic corps with embassies, ambassadors and a baroness in charge of speaking for twenty-seven countries that already have foreign ministries of their own. It was, by Brussels standards, a low-key affair, which is to say only a few thousand new salaries.
2. A bigger budget for the year everyone went broke
On 15 December Parliament adopted the 2011 budget with payment appropriations up 2.9 per cent on the year before. Across the Union governments were slashing pensions and shutting hospitals, but the one institution that produces nothing decided it deserved a little more.
3. Ireland is rescued, on terms set in Brussels
On 7 December the ECOFIN Council formally adopted the decision granting Ireland an 85 billion euro programme, with around a quarter of it, some 22.5 billion euros, drawn through the new EU-level stabilisation fund. Dublin kept its parliament, its flag and its anthem, and surrendered every meaningful decision about its own budget to a troika of supervisors.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
4. A 648 million euro fine for screens made in Asia
On 8 December the Commission fined six Taiwanese and Korean panel makers more than 648 million euros for a price-fixing cartel, while the firm that confessed walked away paying nothing. Brussels reaches across two oceans to discipline companies that do not vote in its elections, which is at least one place where its ambition knows no borders.
5. Twelve members club together to ignore two
Unable to agree a patent regime with all twenty-seven on board, twelve member states wrote to the Commission in early December asking to press ahead without Italy and Spain through "enhanced cooperation". When unanimity is inconvenient, the rule that protects every member quietly becomes the rule that two of them may be left behind.
6. Democracy you may have, if you can fill in the form
On 15 December negotiators agreed the rules for the European Citizens' Initiative, the gift of letting a million people across at least seven countries politely ask the Commission to maybe consider a proposal. Collect the signatures, clear the committee, meet the thresholds, and the prize is that Brussels is invited to think about it and need do nothing at all.
7. EU-wide prison terms, set in Strasbourg
On 14 December Parliament approved the anti-trafficking directive, fixing minimum maximum penalties of at least five years across the Union. Trafficking is a vile trade and every member already punishes it, yet the criminal law of twenty-seven nations is now to be calibrated by a chamber in Strasbourg.
8. Your restraining order, now valid across the continent
Also on 14 December Parliament backed the European Protection Order, so that a protection measure granted in one country follows the victim into another. A humane idea, and one more strand by which national justice systems are stitched into a single web answerable to Brussels rather than to their own courts.
9. Come in, the queue is forming
On 17 December the European Council granted Montenegro candidate status, adding another applicant to a club whose existing members were busy bailing one another out. The project that cannot balance its own books is still recruiting, on the cheerful assumption that more Europe is always the answer.
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