Eurobloat #0040 • August 2013
August is the month when Brussels is meant to be on holiday, yet it still found time to hand Chinese exporters most of Europe's solar market, restrict arms to a country it goes on funding anyway, and circulate a draft that would quietly bury net neutrality. A productive summer for the people who never ask first.
Folly of the Month: A managed market, signed off for Beijing
On 2 August the Commission formally accepted a price undertaking from Chinese solar exporters, ending the largest anti-dumping case in EU history. The settlement, in force from 6 August, set a minimum price of 56 cents per watt and handed Chinese firms a tariff-free quota of seven gigawatts a year, which is to say roughly seventy per cent of the European market. So having spent months posturing about unfair competition, Brussels resolved it not by letting prices fall for European consumers, nor by standing firm, but by central planners in two capitals agreeing in private how much of a market each side may keep. Free trade it was not, and free it certainly was not.
1. The recession is over, by a third of a percent
On 14 August Eurostat reported that the eurozone had grown by 0.3 per cent in the second quarter, the first growth since 2011, and the relief in Brussels was deafening. Six years of bailouts, austerity and lectured-at member states, and the great achievement on offer was a number you would struggle to measure on a kitchen scale.
2. A fact-finding mission to discover Spain is being difficult
When Madrid throttled the Gibraltar border with hours-long queues, David Cameron telephoned Barroso on 16 August to plead for an urgent EU monitoring team. Barroso declined to rush, said the matter was being watched, and suggested the two countries sort it out between themselves. The single market guarantees free movement right up to the point where one member decides otherwise and the Commission would rather not get involved.
3. Tough on Egypt, but not too tough
After four hours of emergency talks on 21 August, EU foreign ministers agreed to suspend export licences for equipment that might be used for internal repression in Egypt. They also agreed to keep the economic aid flowing. A gesture firm enough for the press release and soft enough to keep the cheques moving, which is how Brussels likes its principles.
4. Net neutrality, quietly drafted out of existence
By 30 August campaigners had picked apart the Commission's leaked "Connected Continent" draft and found that, under the banner of protecting an open internet, it would let telecoms operators strike paid prioritisation deals and carve the network into fast and slow lanes. Neelie Kroes presented it as a gift to consumers. It read more like a gift to the incumbents, written in Brussels and dressed up as freedom.
5. The inquiry that will fix everything
Through the summer the Parliament's civil liberties committee pressed on with its grand inquiry into the NSA's PRISM and the GCHQ Tempora programmes, holding hearing after hearing. The mass surveillance of European citizens was, naturally, intolerable, though the same institution was at that very moment drafting its own data-retention and message-handling ambitions. Outrage at being spied upon pairs oddly with a keenness to do the spying.
6. Lights out for the reflector bulb
From 1 September, looming over the last days of August, the next stage of the EU's ecodesign ban removed the brighter halogen and incandescent reflector spotlights from sale. Brussels has spent years deciding, watt by watt, which bulbs Europeans may screw into their own ceilings, and counts each prohibition as progress. The lights dim on schedule, whether anyone asked for it or not.
7. Cheaper roaming, courtesy of the people who made it expensive
The summer's lower roaming caps, in force from 1 July, were still being trumpeted in August as a triumph for the European traveller, with data roaming some 36 per cent cheaper. The catch is that the same regulators spent a decade tolerating the extortion before graciously capping it, then claimed the credit for the relief.
8. The directive that knows best about your cigarette
All summer the Lithuanian presidency pushed the revised Tobacco Products Directive towards trilogue, complete with plans to ban menthol and regulate the e-cigarette, in some readings as a medicine. Member states had only signed off their general approach in June, yet by August they were being hurried into closed-door bargaining to settle the wording before they could think. The schoolmaster sets the pace, and the pupils are told to keep up.
9. Six billion euros and a guarantee for the young
The Youth Employment Initiative, the EU's six-billion-euro answer to mass youth unemployment, was being readied over the summer to bridge the young into jobs that the eurozone's own policies had done so much to destroy. First you engineer the crisis with a single currency nobody can leave, then you announce a fund to mop it up. The cure is always more Europe, and the bill always lands on the taxpayer.
→ employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu
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