Eurobloat #0029 • September 2012
A cheerful month in Brussels. The lights went out on your last cheap bulbs, the President called for a federation, and the central bankers quietly took charge of the lot. When the answer to a crisis caused by too much Europe is always more Europe, you start to wonder whether the diagnosis was written before the symptoms appeared.
Folly of the Month: Barroso demands a federation of nation states
On 12 September, José Manuel Barroso stood up for his State of the Union address and called, with a straight face, for a "federation of nation states". He insisted this was "not a superstate", which is the sort of thing you only need to say when everyone in the room suspects it is. His logic ran in a tidy circle: globalisation demands more unity, more unity demands more integration, and more integration demands more democracy, by which he meant a new treaty handing further powers to the institution he ran. The euro had been broken by a currency built without a country, and the prescribed cure was, naturally, the country.
1. The European Central Bank is handed Europe's banks
On the same busy 12 September, the Commission proposed a Single Supervisory Mechanism, parking ultimate oversight of the euro area's banks at the European Central Bank. Even Angela Merkel wondered aloud how one body in Frankfurt would watch six thousand banks. The reassurance was that most of them would still be supervised nationally, which rather raised the question of why the new layer was needed at all.
2. The ECB also takes charge of the bond markets
Not content with the banks, on 6 September the ECB unveiled Outright Monetary Transactions, a promise to buy struggling members' government bonds without any stated limit. The Bundesbank president cast the lone vote against, which tells you how comfortable Germany's own central bankers were with an open chequebook. The announcement alone calmed the markets, which is a polite way of saying the threat of unlimited intervention did the work that elected governments would not.
3. Your last cheap light bulbs are switched off
From 1 September the final stage of the incandescent ban took effect, retiring the humble 25 and 40 watt bulbs after the 60 watt models had already gone. The reward was the compact fluorescent tube, that flickering grey companion full of mercury that took a minute to warm up. Few projects capture Brussels so well as banning a thing that works in favour of a thing that does not, then calling it progress.
4. A trade war over solar panels
On 6 September the Commission opened its largest ever anti-dumping investigation, this time into roughly twenty-one billion euros of Chinese solar panels. The greenest continent on earth thus set about making the cheapest green technology more expensive, in the name of protecting producers from the very competition that was driving prices down. Consumers wanting affordable solar power were not consulted.
5. Parliament blesses the fish discard ban
On 12 September MEPs set out their position on reforming the Common Fisheries Policy, including the centrepiece ban on discarding unwanted catch. The policy that had spent decades forcing fishermen to dump perfectly good fish back into the sea now proposed to forbid the dumping it had mandated. Nobody in Brussels was asked to account for the years of waste; they simply moved on to managing the next set of quotas.
6. Brussels sets the price of your phone calls abroad
The 2012 roaming regulation continued to bite, with Brussels dictating the maximum a mobile operator could charge for a call, text or megabyte of data across the union. It is sold as a gift to the holidaymaker, and the lower bill is welcome, yet the principle is that a committee in Brussels now sets retail prices across a continent. The same authority that cannot run a fishery is trusted to price a telecoms market.
7. The Schengen schoolmaster wants marking rights
The long-running fight over Schengen governance rumbled on, with the Commission pressing for an EU-level system to inspect and grade how member states police their own borders. Brussels wanted its own experts making announced and unannounced visits, and wanted the power to reintroduce controls decided at the European level rather than by the country whose frontier it was. Governments wanting to control who crosses their own borders were cast as the problem to be supervised.
8. Brussels promises to unleash the cloud by regulating it
On 27 September the Commission published a strategy with the heroic title "Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe", promising six hundred billion euros of growth and two and a half million jobs by 2020 if only the union would standardise, certify and write model contracts for the entire industry. The plan to set free a market that was already booming was to cut through what the Commission called a jungle of standards by planting a tidier one of its own. Nothing unleashes innovation quite like a committee in Brussels drafting your terms and conditions for you.
9. A workshop on the future of sugar quotas
On 17 September the Parliament's researchers convened a workshop on the future of sugar production quotas, a system of state-set output limits that had distorted the European sugar market for the better part of fifty years. The Commission wanted them gone; the Parliament and several member states wanted them kept, and would later prolong the very rationing the single market was supposed to abolish. Only in Brussels does ending a quota count as the controversial option.
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