Eurobloat #0052 • August 2014
August is meant to be the quiet month, when the Berlaymont empties and Europe goes to the beach. Instead Brussels found time to ban your hoover, lose two satellites, dish out farm subsidies, and reward its grandees with new titles. Quite a holiday.
Folly of the Month: The sanctions boomerang, paid for by your peaches
The EU slapped sectoral sanctions on Russia, Russia banned EU food imports on 7 August, and European fruit growers were left with mountains of unsold produce. Brussels then rode to the rescue of the mess it had helped create. First, on 11 August, came a dedicated package for peaches and nectarines, with the share of crops that may be withdrawn from the market for free distribution doubled from 5 to 10 per cent. Then, on 18 August, the Commission announced up to 125 million euros of emergency support for perishable fruit and vegetables, a fund so eagerly claimed that it had to be suspended by 10 September. So the grand strategy was: provoke a retaliation that wrecks your own farmers, then spend taxpayers' money buying their peaches and throwing them away. No one in the Commission, naturally, was held to account for the bill.
→ themoscowtimes.com → eubusiness.com
1. Your vacuum cleaner has been declared too powerful
From 1 September the EU's ecodesign rules barred any vacuum cleaner rated above 1,600 watts from the market, with a further squeeze to 900 watts pencilled in for 2017. The Commission insisted, in the soothing tone of a schoolmaster, that weaker machines clean just as well and you will hardly notice. Which? was less sure, suggesting people would simply run the feebler models for longer, which is one way to save energy by using more of it.
2. The flagship satellites that missed
On 22 August Europe launched two Galileo satellites, the jewels of its very own answer to American GPS, and within hours Arianespace admitted an anomaly had dumped them in the wrong orbit. A frozen fuel line, it later emerged, had sent the pride of the EU's space ambitions wandering towards the Van Allen radiation belt. A fitting emblem for a project that aims high, costs a fortune, and ends up somewhere nobody intended.
3. Top jobs carved up over dinner
At a special summit on 30 August the European Council handed the presidency of the Council to Poland's Donald Tusk and the post of foreign policy chief to Italy's Federica Mogherini. Two of the Union's most powerful offices, each running for years and paid for by you, settled in an evening of horse-trading between national leaders. The citizens whose continent these two would now speak for were not consulted at any point.
4. The same dinner could not decide on Russia
The very summit that distributed the trophies could not bring itself to act on the Russian forces then pouring into Ukraine. Rather than impose anything, the leaders merely "asked for the preparation" of new economic sanctions, a fresh package that would not actually enter force until 12 September. Decisive on its own job titles, the Union needed another fortnight to decide anything about an invasion.
5. Draghi's sermon from the mountain
At Jackson Hole on 22 August the ECB's Mario Draghi warned that inflation expectations were slipping and called for action on "both sides of the economy", which in Brussels dialect means more coordinated fiscal policy steered from the centre. The cure for a continent the euro had bound into a single straitjacket was, predictably, more management from above. The speech was duly read as the overture to money-printing on a grand scale.
→ piie.com
6. Subsidising the cheese mountain, again
Not content with rescuing peaches, the Commission announced on 28 August that it would finance the temporary storage of butter, skimmed milk powder and protected-name cheese to cushion the same Russian ban. The butter mountains and milk lakes that the Common Agricultural Policy spent decades being embarrassed about quietly returned, this time blamed on Moscow. The cheese scheme proved so popular with producers who had never exported to Russia that Brussels had to slam it shut by late September.
7. The right to be forgotten becomes the right to be censored
Following May's Court of Justice ruling, search engines spent the summer of 2014 quietly deleting links to lawful, published news at the request of anyone who would rather their past stayed buried. By the autumn Google had assessed close to half a million web addresses and quietly removed roughly four in ten of them, an entire machinery of memory-holing erected by judicial decree. A right dressed up as privacy turned out, in practice, to be a tool for editing the public record.
8. Brussels signs the cheque for Ebola
As the West African Ebola outbreak worsened, the Commission spent August scaling up its response and reaching for the chequebook on the continent's behalf. The instinct, as ever, was to make the Union the visible global benefactor and, in time, to appoint a dedicated EU coordinator to oversee it all. A crisis is rarely allowed to pass without Brussels finding in it a new role for Brussels.
9. Mare Nostrum sails towards the rocks
Through August the argument simmered over Italy's costly Mare Nostrum sea operation, which critics across Europe judged to be drawing ever more boats towards the Mediterranean crossing. By the autumn it would be wound down and replaced by the smaller, border-focused Frontex mission Triton. For once a retreat from an open-ended commitment, though it took a year of mounting numbers and a great deal of Brussels hand-wringing to get there.
→ ecre.org
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