Eurobloat #0061 • May 2015
A busy spring for the project that never stops. In one month the Commission proposed to melt twenty-eight national markets into one, set quotas for human beings, marked the homework of sovereign nations, and announced that less regulation was on the way. Spoiler: it came with two new committees.
Folly of the Month: Sixteen new laws to give you one market
On 6 May the Commission unveiled its Digital Single Market Strategy, a plan to dissolve twenty-eight national markets into a single one supervised from Brussels. The pitch was that you, the consumer, should be able to buy a film in another country, so naturally the answer was a sprawling action plan of sixteen initiatives, fresh copyright rules, geo-blocking bans, telecoms overhauls and a starring role for the looming data protection regulation. Removing a barrier, in the Brussels dialect, requires building a great deal of new machinery first. Strip away the language of freedom and what remained was the familiar instinct: twenty-eight markets answering to their own parliaments are a problem, and one market answering to the Commission is the solution.
1. The schoolmaster hands back the homework
On 13 May the Commission published its country-specific recommendations, the annual ritual in which Brussels tells elected national governments how to run their economies, budgets and labour markets. France, which had blown through its deficit limits for years, was handed yet another extension and no punishment, while smaller members were lectured on reform. The grades are stern, the cane is reserved for the weak, and the favourite pupil keeps his seat.
2. Quotas for people nobody asked for
The same day the Commission launched its European Agenda on Migration, the centrepiece of which was a scheme to distribute asylum seekers across member states by a Brussels-designed key based on GDP and population. Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic said no almost at once. The system that could not control its own external borders responded by trying to compel its members to share the consequences.
3. A navy to fight the symptom
On 18 May the Council launched EUNAVFOR Med, a military operation to disrupt the smugglers in the central Mediterranean, to be conducted in cooperation with whichever Libyan authority Brussels could find. An EU naval mission whose success depended on partnership with a collapsed state was an elegant summary of a policy that addressed the boats while leaving the open door wide open.
4. Better regulation, now with extra regulators
On 19 May Frans Timmermans presented the Better Regulation package, a promise to cut red tape and deliver rules at minimum cost. The cure for too much bureaucracy turned out to be a new Regulatory Scrutiny Board, a new REFIT Platform and fresh consultation machinery. Brussels had at last noticed the burden it spent decades building, and decided the answer was more committees to admire it.
5. A due-diligence headache for 880,000 firms
On 20 May the Parliament voted for a binding conflict-minerals regulation forcing EU importers of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold to be certified by Brussels. By the Parliament's own reckoning the scheme could touch roughly 880,000 manufacturers, most of them small or medium businesses. A noble aim, achieved by burying nearly a million European firms in paperwork they will pay for and Brussels will not.
6. The competition police go shopping
Also on 6 May the Commission opened a sweeping antitrust sector inquiry into e-commerce, demanding information from retailers and content providers across the continent to hunt down geo-blocking. The Digital Single Market was barely hours old before its enforcement arm began fishing for cases against the businesses that actually sell things online. Regulate first, find the crime later.
7. The first instalment of the quota plan
On 27 May the Commission produced its first implementation package: relocate 40,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, resettle another 20,000 from outside the Union, and triple the budget of the Frontex operations Triton and Poseidon. The numbers were precise, the distribution key elaborate, and the consent of the member states still entirely absent.
8. MEPs to Commission: do not stop telling us what to do
On 20 May the Parliament passed a resolution, by 419 votes to 97, begging the Commission not to withdraw its stalled directive mandating at least twenty weeks of maternity leave across every member state. Four years of deadlock had killed the proposal, yet the instinct in Strasbourg was not to let national governments decide such things but to demand Brussels keep legislating regardless. The Commission withdrew it anyway that summer.
9. Data protection as the engine of everything
Threaded through the month's grand strategy was the General Data Protection Regulation, then deep in negotiation and sold as the trust that would make the single digital market hum. What was advertised as a shield for the individual was steadily becoming a continent-wide compliance regime, the sort of thing that ends up policed by Brussels and paid for by everyone who runs a website.
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