Eurobloat #0062 • June 2015
June was the month Brussels decided that the cure for a currency union held together with string was more currency union, that the cure for a migration crisis was a quota imposed from Luxembourg, and that the cure for Greece was a referendum it had no intention of respecting. Even the lawyers joined in.
Folly of the Month: The court that told Germany to relax about printing money
On 16 June the Court of Justice handed down its Gauweiler judgment and blessed the European Central Bank's Outright Monetary Transactions scheme, the never-yet-used plan to buy up government bonds whenever a member state's borrowing costs become inconvenient. A group of German parliamentarians had asked their own constitutional court whether an unelected central bank may rescue governments by the back door, and the German court, sensibly nervous, referred the question to Luxembourg. Luxembourg's answer was that this was simply "monetary policy", that the proportionality was fine, and that Germans should stop fussing. So the highest court of the Union, asked to police the limits of the ECB's mandate, discovered that the limits are precisely as wide as the ECB says they are.
1. Five presidents, one report, zero referendums
On 22 June the presidents of the Commission, the Council, the Eurogroup, the ECB and the Parliament published "Completing Europe's Economic and Monetary Union", a plan to drag the eurozone towards common external representation and, eventually, its very own treasury. Nobody can name a fifth president off the top of their head, which is rather the point, and at no stage did any voter ask for a euro-area finance ministry.
2. Greece told to vote, then told it had voted wrongly
In the small hours of 27 June, after a week of summits that solved nothing, Tsipras announced a referendum on the creditors' terms, to be held on 5 July, and recommended that his people reject them. The genius of the single currency is that it can turn an entire nation's democracy into a one-week inconvenience to be managed, and then ignored once the votes are counted the wrong way.
3. A guarantee, a guarantee of a guarantee, and 315 billion that does not exist
On 24 and 25 June the Parliament and Council approved the European Fund for Strategic Investments, the heart of the Juncker plan. The arithmetic was a marvel: 16 billion euros of EU budget guarantee plus 5 billion from the European Investment Bank would, by the alchemy of leverage, "unlock" at least 315 billion in investment. When a salesman tells you that twenty-one billion is really three hundred and fifteen billion, you should count your fingers.
→ eib.org
4. Quotas drawn up in Brussels for people who never landed in Brussels
On 8 June the Commission issued its recommendation for a European resettlement scheme, complete with a "distribution key" allocating people to member states by an objective formula devised in an office. Restricting and controlling who enters a country is a matter for that country, yet here the Commission decided that the proper response to a migration crisis was a spreadsheet telling each capital its share.
5. A navy with no port, no Libya and no plan
On 22 June the Council launched EUNAVFOR Med, an Italian-commanded naval operation against Mediterranean smugglers that was, at that stage, permitted to operate only on the high seas and not where the smugglers actually keep their boats. Tackling the people-smuggling business while being forbidden to go anywhere near Libya is the sort of half-measure that only a committee of twenty-eight could mistake for resolve.
6. The privacy regulation begins its march behind closed doors
On 15 June the Council agreed its "general approach" on the General Data Protection Regulation, and on 24 June the three institutions sat down for the secret "trilogue" haggling that would produce the final text. A law sold as protecting the citizen's privacy was negotiated in rooms the citizen was not allowed to enter, and the result would later become Europe's favourite instrument for fining anyone who builds anything online.
7. Sanctions renewed, principles optional
On 19 June the Council rolled over the Crimea measures and on 22 June extended the broader economic sanctions on Russia until January, all duly linked to a Minsk ceasefire that nobody was implementing. Brussels does firm resolve very well when the resolve costs it a press release; the gas kept flowing throughout.
8. The trade vote that the Parliament could not face
On 9 June, the evening before MEPs were due to vote on their recommendations for the TTIP trade talks, President Schulz suddenly postponed the whole thing and bundled 116 amendments back to committee. The official reason was that there were simply too many amendments; the real reason was that the two largest groups could not agree among themselves and preferred chaos to a recorded vote.
9. Roaming charges abolished by the people who invented roaming charges
On 30 June the negotiators reached a deal to end mobile roaming fees and to write the Union's first "net neutrality" rules, the open-internet provisions later condemned as riddled with loopholes. We are expected to cheer the Union for graciously removing a cross-border charge that existed in the first place only because the single market it boasts of had never quite managed to be single.
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