Eurobloat #0012 • April 2011
April was the month the great borderless dream met an actual boat. The Commission responded to the chaos with the only tools it owns: more proposals, more harmonisation and a central bank determined to raise rates into the teeth of a debt crisis.
Folly of the Month: Schengen survives right up until somebody uses it
Italy, swamped by tens of thousands of arrivals from Tunisia, handed some twenty thousand migrants six-month residence permits, knowing full well most would head straight for France. France replied by halting trains at Ventimiglia and turning people back. So the EU's proudest achievement, the abolition of internal frontiers, lasted exactly as long as it took one member state to test it, and Rome and Paris ended April demanding the right to put the borders back. The lesson Brussels drew was not that open borders had failed but that it needed more power over them.
1. The ECB hikes straight into a sovereign debt crisis
On 7 April the European Central Bank raised its main rate to 1.25 per cent, the first increase since 2008, to combat food and energy prices. Greece, Ireland and Portugal were drowning, and Jean-Claude Trichet chose that moment to make their debt more expensive. He was back tightening again by July.
2. Twelve shiny new levers to pull
On 13 April the Commission unveiled its Single Market Act, twelve grand "levers" to relaunch a single market it has spent decades cluttering with rules. The cure for too much Brussels, naturally, was a fresh communication promising still more Brussels.
3. The surveillance machine gets a glowing school report
On 18 April the Commission published its evaluation of the Data Retention Directive, the regime forcing telecoms firms to log everyone's communications metadata. It cheerfully declared the blanket logging "valuable" while admitting it had failed to harmonise anything and had already been struck down as unconstitutional in Romania, Germany and the Czech Republic. The proposed fix was, of course, to keep retaining the data.
4. A pan-European patent that two members refused to touch
On 13 April the Commission tabled its unitary patent proposals, pressing ahead through "enhanced cooperation" precisely because Italy and Spain would not agree. Telling two member states to be quiet and proceeding without them was hailed as a triumph of integration. The pair promptly headed for the courts.
5. Parliament greases the asylum pipeline
On 6 April the European Parliament adopted its first-reading position on the recast asylum procedures directive, advancing the dream of a single, EU-run Common European Asylum System by 2012. While Italy and France were busy slamming frontiers shut, the Parliament was busy stripping member states of room to run their own asylum procedures.
6. Free movement of workers, freshly recodified
On 5 April Parliament and Council adopted Regulation 492/2011, codifying the right of any EU worker to move to another member state and claim the same social, tax and housing benefits as the locals. Tidy housekeeping, presented as a fundamental right, that left national governments with no say over who turns up to draw on their welfare systems.
7. Brussels turns the migrant row into a power grab
Faced with the Franco-Italian frontier spat, the Commission's instinct was not to let capitals manage their own borders but to seize the controls. Within weeks it drafted its "Schengen governance" plan to make Brussels, not member states, the body that decides when internal checks may return. A national prerogative quietly rebranded as an EU competence.
8. A new tax, dressed up as saving the planet
On 13 April the Commission unveiled its plan to overhaul the Energy Taxation Directive, bolting a carbon levy onto fuel duty and ordering member states to tax petrol, diesel and gas according to a single Brussels formula. Setting your own energy taxes is, after all, far too important a matter to be left to the elected governments that have to answer for the prices at the pump.
9. The Lampedusa deal nobody wants to look at too closely
To stem the Tunisian arrivals, Italy signed an accelerated repatriation arrangement with Tunis in early April, cutting the flow by roughly three-quarters almost overnight. It worked, which is awkward, because it showed the answer to the crisis was a hard bilateral bargain rather than yet another EU framework. Brussels preferred to keep lecturing.
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