Eurobloat #0065 • September 2015
September was the month Brussels worked out that consensus is overrated when you have the numbers, and that the cure for a continent overwhelmed by uncontrolled arrivals is a Commission spreadsheet dividing people up by GDP. Throw in an emissions cheat the regulators somehow never noticed and a transatlantic data pact found to be worthless, and you have a vintage month.
Folly of the Month: Solidarity, defined as outvoting whoever disagrees
On 22 September the Council forced through a scheme to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers across the Union with mandatory national quotas. Four member states, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, voted against and were simply outvoted by qualified majority, an unusual way to settle a question that goes to the heart of who a country admits within its own borders. Brussels called this solidarity. Slovakia and Hungary called it political and headed for the courts, having grasped that a quota imposed over your objection is not a shared burden but an order. The arrivals, meanwhile, declined to be allocated and kept walking north, which rather undercut the spreadsheet.
1. The data pact that was never safe
On 23 September, Advocate General Bot told the Court of Justice that the EU-US Safe Harbour arrangement, the legal basis on which the personal data of half a billion Europeans had crossed the Atlantic for fifteen years, was invalid and offered no adequate protection at all. A reassuring discovery to make a decade and a half after waving it through.
2. More Union, said the man in charge of the Union
On 9 September Juncker delivered his first State of the Union, titled Time for Honesty, Unity and Solidarity, and prescribed the usual remedy for every European difficulty, which is more Europe. The honesty did not extend to admitting that mandatory relocation quotas were already being rejected by the very capitals he was lecturing.
3. The emissions the regulators never spotted
Dieselgate broke in September, exposing software designed to fool the very emissions tests the EU type-approval system was built to enforce. Brussels had spent years writing limits while the actual cars on its roads quietly exceeded them, and its first instinct was to ask the Commissioner whether there might be a plan to look into it.
→ beuc.eu
4. A brand-new court, because one supranational layer is never enough
On 16 September the Commission unveiled its Investment Court System, a permanent tribunal with fifteen appointed judges to settle investor disputes under TTIP and every future trade deal. Having decided private arbitration was undemocratic, Brussels proposed to replace it with a standing institution of its own design, which is progress of a sort.
5. A billion euros to fix the problem the open border created
At the informal leaders' summit on 23 September the EU pledged at least 1 billion euros to UN refugee agencies and the World Food Programme, plus money for the Western Balkans and Africa. A generous way to outsource a crisis the Union's own incoherent border policy had done so much to magnify.
6. The fence that worked, and the Commission that disapproved
Hungary sealed its barrier along the 175km Serbian border in mid-September and arrivals through that route duly collapsed, from over 138,000 in September to a few hundred by November. Brussels disapproved on principle, the migration commissioner Avramopoulos declaring that erecting fences was not a positive step and that Europe had fought to pull such things down, as though a frontier that actually held the line were the failure rather than the cure.
7. Parliament demands real-world tests, eventually
On 23 September MEPs on the environment committee pushed for a real driving emissions procedure, voting 66 to 1 to close the gap between laboratory figures and what comes out of an actual exhaust pipe. A fine sentiment, arriving only after a scandal proved the laboratory figures had been fiction for years.
8. The bank that promised flexibility
On 3 September the ECB signalled it was ready to expand its bond-buying, raising the share of any single bond issue it could hoover up from 25 to 33 percent, with inflation stubbornly refusing to obey. Six years of unconventional measures and the cure was always one more dose of the same.
→ ansa.it
9. Parliament blesses its own quota plan
On 17 September MEPs voted to back the Council's emergency relocation decisions, rubber-stamping the scheme before the dissenting capitals had even been outvoted on the larger one. A reminder that in Brussels the destination is agreed first and the deliberation is arranged to arrive there.
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