Eurobloat #0038 • June 2013
A whistle-blower told the world that everyone is being watched, and the European Union, faced with a genuine question about its citizens' privacy, reached for the only tool it owns. It proposed more European Union.
Folly of the Month: Reding finds a silver lining in mass surveillance
Edward Snowden revealed the American PRISM programme, and Europe's institutions were appropriately scandalised, for about a day. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding then announced that the cure for being watched by Washington was to hand Brussels its long-stalled EU-wide Data Protection Regulation, a centralising project that had been gathering dust for want of an excuse. A surveillance scandal became a marketing opportunity, the loophole-riddled Safe Harbour was suddenly intolerable, and the lesson drawn from a foreign power reading your email was that your own national data authorities should be overruled by a single rulebook written in Brussels. Nothing says respect for privacy quite like using it as leverage.
→ europarl.europa.eu → techcrunch.com
1. Parliament wants to scrap Safe Harbour, then keep the trade deal
On 11 June the Parliament debated PRISM in Strasbourg and began working itself towards a resolution calling for the suspension of the Safe Harbour arrangement and the Swift bank-data deal. Some MEPs also demanded that the freshly announced transatlantic trade talks be frozen in protest. Furious enough to halt the negotiations, not quite furious enough to actually do it.
2. The transatlantic trade deal nobody can name is launched
At the G8 at Lough Erne on 17 June, Barroso and Van Rompuy stood beside Obama and Cameron to announce negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Estimated to be worth as much as one hundred billion pounds to the EU economy, by the sort of estimate that always accompanies these things. Years of acronyms and sherpas would follow, and the deal would quietly expire unmourned.
→ gov.uk
3. Twenty-five hours to agree who gets to take your money
On 27 June, after twenty-five hours of talks, EU finance ministers agreed the bank bail-in rules. Shareholders first, then bondholders, then uninsured depositors over one hundred thousand euros, all to be raided before any government cheque, with national authorities answering to a new EU framework. Cyprus had been the rehearsal, and the response to a banking union nobody voted for was, naturally, more banking union.
4. Six billion euros to abolish youth unemployment by Friday
The European Council of 27 and 28 June endorsed a Youth Guarantee, with six billion euros earmarked for regions where more than a quarter of young people are out of work. A continent-wide scheme, run from Brussels, to fix a problem that Brussels-imposed currency rigidity had done much to create. The London School of Economics noted it was unlikely to have any immediate impact, which proved generous.
5. Nine hundred and eight billion euros, flexibility included
The same summit blessed the political agreement on the seven-year EU budget, a tidy nine hundred and eight billion euros. Guy Verhofstadt celebrated that Parliament had secured the flexibility to spend all of it, unlike the last period when a mere fifty-five billion went unspent. The tragedy of European budgeting, it seems, is money that survives untouched.
6. Germany blocks the car emissions law it helped write
Brussels had a deal to cap new-car emissions at ninety-five grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, and at the end of June Berlin simply stopped it, asking for the vote to be postponed to protect BMW, Daimler and Audi. The instructive part is not that a member state defended its own industry, which is its right, but that the EU had once again engineered a rigid target detached from who would actually have to live with it. The schoolmaster was overruled by the largest pupil.
→ rte.ie
7. Croatia joins a club in the middle of a fire
On 1 July, the immediate sequel to June's preparations, Croatia became the twenty-eighth member state. Admitting a new country to a currency-stricken union mired in bailouts and youth unemployment is the kind of timing only Brussels could call historic. The accession treaty had been ratified, the flags were ready, and the eurozone crisis was politely not mentioned.
8. A new regulation so customs can seize more of your parcels
On 12 June the Parliament and Council passed Regulation 608/2013 on customs enforcement of intellectual property rights, strengthening the power of customs authorities to detain goods at the border. Another layer of enforcement, another repealed predecessor, and another reminder that the single market's idea of free movement comes with inspectors attached.
→ wipo.int
9. The monthly naughty list
In its June infringements package the Commission published its latest decisions against member states deemed to have broken EU law, the routine ritual in which Brussels grades the homework of national governments and threatens those it finds wanting with the Court of Justice. A standing reminder of who is the schoolmaster and who is the pupil. The list, as ever, was long.
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