Eurobloat #0067 • November 2015
November 2015 was the month the Union watched its open borders buckle and concluded that the obvious remedy was to draw up a single ballot paper for the whole continent. When the house is on fire, redecorate the parliament.
Folly of the Month: A continent-wide constituency for a continent that did not ask
On 11 November the European Parliament voted, by 315 in favour, to reform the Union's electoral law, and tucked inside the worthy talk of "equal visibility" sat the real prize: a joint, transnational constituency in which lists would be headed by each party family's chosen candidate for Commission President. The idea was to manufacture a "European public sphere" by abolishing the inconvenient fact that voters live in actual countries. Member states, sensibly, smothered it; the Council quietly dropped the joint constituency when it finally adopted a text in 2018. Brussels spent the month of the worst border crisis in a generation drafting itself a bigger ballot.
1. Three billion euros to Ankara, and the accession talks back on
At the summit of 29 November the EU agreed to hand Turkey an initial three billion euros, re-energise its long-stalled accession process and aim to lift visa requirements for Turkish citizens by October 2016, all so that President Erdogan would mind Europe's external door. The Union that lectures the world on values bought its way out of a crisis by paying a strongman and dangling membership. Solidarity, it turns out, has a price list.
2. Valletta: a slush fund for Africa to take its people back
On 11 and 12 November European and African leaders met in Malta and launched a 1.8 billion euro "Emergency Trust Fund for Africa", with the candid aim of encouraging African states to readmit migrants who had reached Europe. Strip away the development-speak and the deal was simple: cash now, in exchange for taking people back later. A grand summit to admit that the borderless project needed borders after all.
3. Schengen is "in danger", and everyone quietly reintroduces borders
On 12 November the Council President warned that "the future of Schengen is at stake", while Sweden and Norway slapped controls back on their crossings to stem the flow. The flagship achievement of the borderless Union proved to be a fair-weather arrangement, abandoned the moment the weather turned. The members fixed the problem the only way that worked: by acting like countries.
4. An EU blacklist of suspects and a renewed push for passenger records
On 25 November Parliament adopted a resolution calling for an EU-wide blacklist of jihadist suspects and a swift agreement on collecting every air passenger's name records by the year's end. The Paris atrocities were terrible; the reflex to answer them with a centralised register of travellers and suspects, run from Brussels, was the usual one. Each emergency becomes a fresh argument for the Union to file you away.
5. Europol gets new powers and a unit to decide what you may read
On 26 November Parliament and the Council struck a deal handing Europol broader powers, including formal blessing for its Internet Referral Unit, which exists to secure the "swift removal" of online content the agency dislikes. An EU police body with a mandate to flag web pages for deletion is exactly the kind of quiet machinery that never shrinks once built. They call it cooperation; the rest of us call it a censor with a logo.
6. A whole new Prospectus Regulation to undo the old prospectus rules
On 30 November the Commission proposed a new Prospectus Regulation, lifted thresholds and trimmed paperwork, all sold as making it "easier for companies to raise funding". One cheers the lighter rules and then remembers who imposed the heavy ones. The same institution that buried businesses in prospectus law now takes a bow for digging out a corner of the hole it dug.
7. The schoolmaster grades the class: State of the Energy Union
On 18 November the Commission published its first "State of the Energy Union" report, complete with a factsheet marking the homework of every single member state. The Union increasingly styles itself as the teacher and the capitals as pupils, to be assessed, ranked and corrected. Nobody voted for Brussels to issue national report cards, but here they are.
8. A mandatory common format for telling Brussels about your vape
On 24 November the Commission adopted an implementing decision prescribing a single, mandatory format through which manufacturers must notify every electronic cigarette and refill container, field by field, through a common entry gate. Pages of obligatory variables for a small bottle of liquid: this is the nanny instinct in its purest administrative form. Somewhere a committee felt that liberty had been served.
9. The relocation scheme that relocated almost nobody
Through November the grand plan to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece ground on, having moved only a trickle, with even Germany reluctant to take its share and several states treating the quotas as an intolerable violation of their autonomy. A scheme designed to override national choice failed precisely because it tried to override national choice. The lesson, predictably, went unlearned.
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