Eurobloat #0079 • November 2016
A busy November in which the Parliament decided which news you may be allowed to read, the Commission proposed funding armies and rewriting twenty-eight national energy codes into one, and everybody agreed the answer to a sluggish economy was for governments to borrow harder. Power flowed in precisely one direction, as it always does.
Folly of the Month: The Parliament decides which news is propaganda
On 23 November the European Parliament voted 304 to 179 (with a heroic 208 members unable to make up their minds) for a resolution on "strategic communication to counteract anti-EU propaganda by third parties". The text lumped Russian outlets such as RT and Sputnik together with the genuine murderers of Islamic State, then proposed the EU answer disinformation with more EU-funded information of its own. There is no surer sign that an institution has lost the argument than the moment it stops debating its critics and starts cataloguing them. A union confident in its own merits does not need a committee to tell citizens which broadcasts are unsafe to watch.
1. The Winter Package: twenty-eight rulebooks into one
On 30 November the Commission unveiled "Clean Energy for All Europeans", eight hefty laws on electricity markets, efficiency and "governance" that quietly shift the writing of national energy policy up to Brussels. Sold as a gift to consumers, its real achievement is to replace member states deciding how to keep their own lights on with a single European framework that grades them on whether they comply.
2. A permit to visit a continent you can already enter
On 16 November the Commission proposed ETIAS, a new pre-travel authorisation that visa-free visitors must obtain before setting foot in the Schengen area. Having spent years insisting borders were an outdated nuisance, Brussels has now invented a centralised database and an online form so that the EU itself, rather than any member state, decides who may board the plane.
3. The Commission discovers it would like an army budget
Also on 30 November came the European Defence Action Plan and its proposed European Defence Fund, complete with a "research window" and ambitions of around 500 million euros a year for defence research after 2020. A body that cannot police its own external frontier now proposes to bankroll weapons programmes, managed by a board on which the Commission naturally gives itself a seat.
4. The Parliament wants the army to go with the budget
Lest the Commission feel lonely, on 22 November the Parliament adopted a resolution on a "European Defence Union", urging a security and defence white paper and the progressive framing of common EU defence under the next financial framework. Member states already pool forces through NATO when they choose to; the novelty here is the insistence that Brussels hold the cheque book and the command structure.
5. Freeze the Turkey talks, keep paying Turkey
On 24 November MEPs voted 479 to 37 to freeze accession negotiations with Turkey over its post-coup repression, which was the sensible call. The awkward part is that the same EU had in March handed Ankara a six billion euro migration deal and dangled visa-free travel, so it now lectures a regime it is simultaneously bankrolling to hold the door shut. Incoherence, neatly invoiced.
6. Modest growth in challenging times
On 9 November the Commission published its Autumn 2016 forecast, predicting euro-area growth of a thrilling 1.7 per cent in 2016, slipping to 1.5 per cent in 2017, with public debt still above 90 per cent of output. After two decades of ever-closer union, the headline Brussels chose for its own economy was "modest growth in challenging times", which is the language of a manager who has run out of excuses.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
7. Brussels orders the eurozone to spend more
On 16 November, alongside the forecast gloom, the Commission issued a communication titled "Towards a positive fiscal stance for the euro area", a polite way of telling member states with sound finances to loosen the purse strings. The institution that built the deficit rules now frets that members are obeying them too well, and would like them to borrow on its advice while it accepts none of the bill.
8. The European Semester reopens, schoolmaster at the ready
The same 16 November launched the 2017 European Semester autumn package, the annual cycle in which the Commission reviews national budgets and hands each capital its homework. Every year the ritual grows a little longer and the marking a little sterner, and every year the member states that wrote the cheques for the EU receive instructions from the staff they employ.
9. A pillar of social rights, consultation duly closing
Through 2016 the Commission ran its consultation on a "European Pillar of Social Rights", scheduled to wrap up by the end of December so a grand proclamation could follow in 2017. Wages and labour law have long been matters for elected national governments, but the pillar exists to plant an EU flag on them, one earnest consultation at a time.
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