Eurobloat #0063 • July 2015
July 2015 was the month the single currency stopped pretending to be a partnership of equals. A democratically elected government was marched through Brussels at three in the morning and handed a pen, and the Union called the result a rescue.
Folly of the Month: Greece is saved, provided it surrenders first
After an all-night summit ending on 13 July, the eurozone agreed in principle to lend Greece up to 86 billion euros, on condition that Athens legislate a list of tax rises, pension cuts and asset sales drafted in Brussels and pass the first batch within three days. A referendum the week before had rejected austerity by 61 per cent, which Brussels treated as a scheduling inconvenience. The Eurogroup formally opened negotiations on 16 July and the European Stability Mechanism agreed in principle to grant support on 17 July, the schoolmaster having confirmed the homework was done. A monetary union sold as shared prosperity turned out to be a mechanism for instructing a member state which laws to pass and how quickly.
→ consilium.europa.eu → en.wikipedia.org
1. Solidarity, minus the bits that count
On 20 July, interior ministers were meant to share out 40,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy as a grand demonstration of European togetherness. They managed 32,256, with Austria and Hungary declining to take a single person, which is one way of discovering what solidarity is worth once the cameras stop.
2. The relocation machine gets a permanent setting
Not content with a one-off shortfall, the Commission published proposals on 9 September drafted through this same summer push for a standing crisis relocation mechanism, so that Brussels could allocate people to capitals automatically and in perpetuity. Nothing says respect for national borders quite like a central quota engine that runs without asking anyone first.
3. Parliament wonders whether you may photograph a building
On 9 July the Parliament adopted the Reda copyright report, but only after an amendment that would have restricted freedom of panorama, the right to share a holiday snap of a public landmark, was beaten back by half a million signatures. The Union had to be talked out of treating tourists with cameras as suspected pirates, and considered it a near miss rather than an absurdity.
4. A second carbon market, denser than the first
On 15 July the Commission proposed overhauling the Emissions Trading System, tightening the annual cap and reshuffling free allowances across some fifty sectors, complete with two new Brussels-run funds to dispense the proceeds. A scheme already baffling enough to need its own consultancy industry was made more elaborate, and the cure for complexity was, as ever, more rules.
5. The Court tells patent holders how to negotiate
On 16 July the Court of Justice ruled in Huawei v ZTE that a company holding a standard-essential patent may abuse its dominant position simply by asking a court to stop an infringer, unless it first follows a Brussels-approved licensing dance. Luxembourg now choreographs commercial negotiations between two Chinese firms, which is a curious use of a European court.
6. TTIP: yes to trade, no to anything decided elsewhere
On 8 July the Parliament finally passed its TTIP recommendations after President Schulz had been forced to cancel an earlier vote when his own house could not agree. The headline demand was scrapping the investor-state dispute system in favour of new courts staffed by publicly appointed judges, the Union's instinct being that disputes are tolerable only when the referees are on its own payroll.
7. A REFIT platform to fix the rules it keeps making
Following its better regulation drive, the Commission spent the summer standing up the REFIT Platform, a body whose job is to spot the red tape that Brussels itself produces. There is something instructive about an institution that must convene a permanent committee to be reminded that its laws are too many and too heavy, while continuing to write more.
8. Security with one hand, your travel records with the other
On 9 July the Parliament adopted its resolution on the European Agenda on Security, in which it declared that the right to use encryption must remain intact and condemned the blanket collection of innocent people's data, then in the same breath pledged to finish the EU Passenger Name Record directive by the end of the year. Brussels disapproves of mass surveillance in principle and signs up for a continent-wide database of everyone's flights in practice, which is the sort of consistency only a parliament can manage.
9. VAT harmonisation arrives dressed as a favour
The Digital Single Market plans pressed through this summer promised to spare small traders the misery of twenty-eight VAT regimes by extending a single Brussels portal and scrapping low-value import relief. Helpful, until you notice the burden being simplified was invented by the same Union now charging admission to its solution, and the simplification quietly pulls more tax plumbing towards the centre.
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