Eurobloat #0100 • August 2018
August is the month Brussels is supposedly on holiday. Even so it found time to abolish the clocks, audit America's soybeans and leave rescue ships circling outside its own ports.
Folly of the Month: The Union appoints itself keeper of the clocks
After a four-week online poll that closed on 16 August, the Commission announced that 4.6 million people, the largest response it had ever received, had told it they were tired of changing their clocks twice a year. The interesting part is the arithmetic: roughly 3.1 million of those replies, fully 70 per cent, came from Germany alone, which is to say a self-selected sliver of one country was treated as the settled will of half a billion Europeans. Brussels then decided that the answer to a problem each member state could fix for itself was a single directive harmonising time across the whole continent. When the cure for a minor irritation is a new EU-wide law, you have understood the institution.
1. Greece leaves the bailout, eight years and 289 billion euros later
On 20 August the third Greek rescue programme formally ended, with Commissioner Moscovici declaring a path to success. Behind the celebration sat the bill: 288.7 billion euros lent since 2010, a debt mountain stretched out to the 2060s and a country that had been governed from Brussels and Frankfurt for the better part of a decade. The euro that was meant to bind nations together had instead spent eight years deciding who in Athens could be paid.
2. The blocking statute, or how to order companies not to obey reality
On 7 August, the day Washington reimposed sanctions on Iran, the EU's updated Blocking Statute came into force, forbidding European firms from complying with American measures. The Union thereby instructed its own businesses to choose between a fine from Brussels and exclusion from the dollar. Unsurprisingly the firms quietly chose the dollar, and the law became a monument to wanting to look defiant without paying for it.
3. The Aquarius circles, and nobody owns the open border
For five days in mid-August a rescue ship carrying 141 people was refused by Malta and Italy while four countries argued over responsibility, until a hand-assembled coalition shared them out and Spain blinked. This is the open-borders model in action: a grand principle at the centre and a frantic scramble at the edge every time a real boat appears. The Union that lectures members on solidarity could not arrange a berth.
4. The Diciotti standoff: Salvini does the maths Brussels would not
Days later Italy's own coastguard ship sat in Catania with 177 people aboard while Rome refused to let them off until other capitals agreed to take a share. Whatever one makes of Matteo Salvini, he had simply made explicit the question the EU spends its life avoiding: if migration is a shared European duty, where exactly are the other twenty-six members. The answer, as ever, was a church, Albania and Ireland improvising a rescue the system could not.
→ hrw.org
5. Brussels grades Warsaw's judges
On 14 August the Commission sent Poland a reasoned opinion over its Supreme Court law, giving an elected government one month to rewrite its own judiciary or be hauled before the Court of Justice. Whatever the merits of the Polish reform, the spectacle is of the centre setting itself up as headmaster over national parliaments, red pen in hand. Power flows in only one direction in this Union, and it is never back towards the capitals.
6. A bridge falls in Genoa and Brussels rushes to defend its rulebook
After the Morandi bridge collapsed on 14 August, killing dozens, Italian ministers pointed at EU spending caps, and within forty-eight hours the Commission issued a brisk statement insisting its fiscal rules were blameless and that Italy had enjoyed plenty of flexibility. The reflex is telling. Faced with a national tragedy, the institution's first instinct was a press release protecting the reputation of the Stability and Growth Pact.
7. The Commission begins counting America's soybeans
On 1 August the Commission proudly published its first bi-monthly report on imports of American soybeans, boasting of a 283 per cent rise as proof that the Juncker-Trump handshake was working. Set aside that the EU cannot order anyone to buy a soybean, the price did the work. The point is that Brussels now runs a standing bureaucratic mechanism to tally beans bought by private traders, so it can take the credit at regular intervals.
8. Stockpiling medicines for the exit Brussels said was unthinkable
Through August, pharmaceutical firms including Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Novartis stepped up stockpiling on both sides of the Channel ahead of Brexit, while the UK quietly asked suppliers for six extra weeks of stock. The negotiators in Brussels preferred to present a clean break as a calamity rather than admit that a continent which cannot guarantee the movement of aspirin without a treaty has built something fragile. Leaving merely exposed the dependence; it did not create it.
9. The upload filters wait in the wings
By the end of August the Copyright Directive was being readied for its September plenary, with Article 13 set to push platforms towards automated filters that scan everything users post. Inventors of the web and the founder of Wikipedia had written to warn that machines cannot tell a parody from an infringement. Brussels heard the warning and pressed on towards a vote, because the appetite to police what ordinary people upload rarely goes hungry for long.
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