Eurobloat #0031 • November 2012
November 2012 was the month the Union could not pass its own seven-year budget yet found time to propose a brand-new euro-area budget on top of it. When a club cannot agree how to spend the money it has, the obvious answer is to demand more money and more power, and Brussels delivered.
Folly of the Month: A blueprint to pool your sovereignty, in instalments
On 28 November the Commission published its "Blueprint for a deep and genuine economic and monetary union", a tidy phased plan ending in an autonomous euro-area budget, a "fiscal capacity" to absorb shocks, and what it cheerfully called the "progressive pooling of sovereignty". The genius of doing it in instalments is that no single step looks like the end of national budget-making, only the next one does. The document admitted many of its ambitions could be reached "through secondary legislation", which is the polite term for not asking national parliaments too loudly. More discipline for you, more solidarity from your wallet, and a new central budget to administer both.
→ ec.europa.eu → eubusiness.com
1. The summit that could not agree how to spend a trillion euros
On 22 and 23 November the leaders met to settle the 2014 to 2020 budget of roughly one trillion euros and went home with nothing. David Cameron, defending the British rebate and backed by the Dutch and the Swedes, accused Brussels of operating in a "parallel universe", which was generous given it was the universe with the spreadsheet.
2. Brussels decides who sits on your board
On 14 November the Commission proposed a directive setting a target of 40 per cent women among non-executive directors of listed companies by 2020. Quite how the composition of a private company's boardroom became a matter for twenty-seven member states to legislate jointly was never explained, only asserted.
3. The Greek arithmetic gets two more years and a promise
On 26 and 27 November the euro-area ministers and the IMF agreed to slide the fiscal targets back by two years and pledged to cut Greek debt to 124 per cent of GDP by 2020. A debt level of 124 per cent described as relief tells you everything about the baseline, and the figure was, of course, revised again later.
4. Three presidents fly to Oslo, three peace laureates beg them not to
On 30 November, ahead of the December ceremony, actual Nobel Peace laureates Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Perez Esquivel signed an open letter opposing the award, arguing that the Union stood for "security based on military force and waging wars rather than insisting on the need for an alternative approach" and demanding the prize money not be paid. The Union responded by dispatching Van Rompuy, Schulz and Barroso to collect it, three presidents being the minimum required to accept a single medal.
5. The first pan-European general strike against the Union's own medicine
On 14 November some forty unions across twenty-three countries staged what was billed as the first pan-European general strike, grounding flights and shutting Iberian transport in protest at the austerity Brussels was supervising. A project that exports the same policy to every capital eventually manages to provoke them all on the same day.
6. The autumn forecast, sailing through rough waters
On 7 November the Commission published its autumn forecast under the title "sailing through rough waters", projecting a shrinking euro-area economy and unemployment peaking near 12 per cent in 2013. The nautical branding was new, the destination was not.
7. The Annual Growth Survey, marking the homework of nations
On 28 November the Commission issued its Annual Growth Survey for 2013, setting the priorities member states were expected to take up in their national budgets. The Union that could not pass its own budget that very month was nonetheless ready to grade everyone else's.
8. The financial transaction tax acquires its coalition of the willing
By the end of October eleven member states had asked to proceed with a financial transaction tax under enhanced cooperation, and through November the Commission pressed the scheme toward authorisation. An EU-level tax levied by a self-selected club, with the institutions doing the collecting, is precisely the own-resources ambition the Blueprint set out the same month.
→ taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu
9. The fishing-net rules that even Parliament could not vote on
At the plenary of 22 November the Parliament postponed its legislative vote on the rules amending the technical measures for conserving fishery resources and protecting juveniles of marine organisms, part of a reform years in the making and still not landed. A common policy so elaborate that Brussels cannot even tell a fleet which nets to use without missing its own deadline is a fair advertisement for letting nations manage their own waters.
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