Eurobloat #0101 • September 2018
September was the month Jean-Claude Juncker stood in Strasbourg and proclaimed the arrival of "the hour of European sovereignty", then spent the rest of it stripping member states of their vetoes, ordering platforms to install upload filters, and proposing to abolish the clocks. When the Commission talks about sovereignty, it always means its own.
Folly of the Month: The internet gets a filter it never asked for
On 12 September the European Parliament adopted its position on the Copyright Directive by 438 votes to 226, waving through Article 13, the provision that obliges platforms to police everything their users upload. Brussels insisted this was not an upload filter, while simultaneously requiring exactly the automated machinery that no honest person could call anything else. Article 11, the so-called link tax, was thrown in for good measure, a scheme so successful in Spain and Germany that it had already failed in both. The technology cannot tell a parody from a pirate, but that, evidently, is a problem for the users to solve and the Commission to ignore.
1. One hour to delete, or else
Also on 12 September the Commission proposed that hosting firms remove "terrorist content" within sixty minutes of an order, backed by fines and a duty to deploy "automated detection tools". Nothing says proportionate free-speech policy quite like a one-hour stopwatch and a demand for machines to decide what counts as terrorism.
2. Hungary sent to the headmaster's office
The Parliament voted 448 to 197 to trigger Article 7 proceedings against Hungary, the first time it had ever done so on its own initiative. Brussels grading an elected national government on its homework, then threatening to dock its voting rights, is precisely the schoolmasterly overreach that makes the case for governing oneself.
3. Abolishing the clocks, because 0.1 per cent of you asked
On the same busy 12 September the Commission proposed scrapping seasonal clock changes, citing a consultation of 4.6 million responses, 84 per cent in favour. That is roughly 0.8 per cent of the Union, three quarters of them German, and on this the Commission was prepared to legislate time itself.
4. The hour of sovereignty, minus your veto
In his State of the Union address Juncker proposed extending qualified majority voting to foreign policy, sanctions and civilian missions, ending the national veto in the name of a "stronger global actor". The paradox, that abolishing your veto requires you to use it one last time, was left as an exercise for the member states.
5. Ten thousand new border guards by 2020
Juncker also announced a reinforced Frontex with 10,000 standing border guards, an admission, four years after the migration crisis, that the external border had never actually been guarded. Stopping illegal entry is the right goal; that it took the Commission this long to discover the perimeter exists is the folly.
6. The truth ministry, outsourced to Silicon Valley
On 26 September the Commission unveiled its Code of Practice on Disinformation, a "self-regulatory" pact for Facebook, Google and the rest to police what Europeans may read. Handing the job of deciding what is true to the very platforms Brussels claims to distrust, and calling it voluntary, is a fine way to build a censor while denying you have one.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
7. Salzburg: the Chequers ambush
At the informal summit in Salzburg on 19 and 20 September, leaders told Theresa May to her face that her economic framework "will not work", a piece of theatre that did more for the Leave cause than any campaign poster. Donald Tusk later garnished it with an Instagram cake snub, proving the Union can be both humourless and graceless at once.
8. Solidarity with the regimes that stop the boats
The same Salzburg leaders agreed to deepen cooperation with "third countries, including Egypt" to stem migration. The open-borders idealists of Brussels quietly discovered that the boats only stop when you pay an unsavoury government to stop them, then called the arrangement solidarity.
9. A bigger asylum agency to manage a system nobody fixed
Among the State of the Union proposals was a reinforced EU Asylum Agency, more Brussels machinery layered on a Dublin system that every member state agrees is broken and none will reform. When the answer to a failed central scheme is a larger central scheme, you have found the Commission's entire philosophy in miniature.
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