Eurobloat #0118 • February 2020
February was the first full month without Britain, and the Union marked its newfound freedom by failing to agree a budget, drafting rules for machines, and watching its border deal with Ankara collapse on the last day of the month.
Folly of the Month: A two-day summit that agreed on nothing
On 20 and 21 February the heads of state and government held their first special summit dedicated to the 2021 to 2027 budget, and after two days of haggling Council President Charles Michel emerged to declare that they needed more time. The first European Council without Britain was supposed to show how well the club could run on its own. Instead it revealed that twenty-seven governments could not agree how to plug the sixty to seventy-five billion euro hole the departing British had left behind, with the net contributors refusing to pay more and the net recipients refusing to take less. Parliament, naturally, was disappointed, not because Brussels wanted to spend less, but because it wanted to spend more.
1. The White Paper that floated a face-scanning ban and then thought better of it
On 19 February the Commission published its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence, having quietly dropped an earlier draft idea of a temporary ban on facial recognition in public places in favour of a vague promise to hold a broad European debate. When the institution that wants to regulate everyone else's algorithms cannot decide whether it minds being watched in the street, the rest of us should worry.
2. Brussels discovers it would like your data to be sovereign
The same day brought a European Strategy for Data, promising common European data spaces and technological sovereignty, which is Brussels code for moving control of information away from the people who created it and towards the people who write the rules. The single market for data turns out to mean a single rule-maker for data.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
3. Twenty-seven seats handed out, forty-six kept just in case
With Britain gone, the Parliament shrank from seven hundred and fifty-one seats to seven hundred and five, redistributing twenty-seven British seats among fourteen member states and pocketing the other forty-six in reserve for future enlargement. Even when the EU gets smaller it keeps the spare chairs warm, confident that one day there will be more members to seat.
4. Brussels draws up a blacklist and the offshore islands make the cut
On 18 February the finance ministers added the Cayman Islands, Panama, Palau and the Seychelles to the EU list of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions, scolding low-tax territories for the crime of charging people less than Brussels would like. A union that cannot agree its own budget still finds time to name and shame anyone whose tax rate undercuts its members, which tells you what really offends Brussels about a low tax bill.
5. The grand plan to shape everyone's digital future
Alongside the data and AI papers came a communication grandly titled Shaping Europe's Digital Future, setting the Commission's tech agenda for five years and trailing fresh rules on platforms, competition and data governance. Brussels cannot build a competitive technology sector, so it has settled for regulating one into existence.
6. The schoolmaster opens a file on minimum wages
The Commission spent February running the first stage of its consultation on an EU-wide minimum wage instrument, gathering replies from twenty-three social partners on a matter that the treaties leave squarely to member states. Wage policy is national competence, which in Brussels merely means a competence the Commission has not yet annexed.
7. The border deal with Ankara falls apart on the last day of the month
On 28 February President Erdogan declared Turkey's borders to Europe open, abandoning the 2016 deal in which Brussels paid him billions to hold migrants back, and warning of millions on the way. The EU built its migration policy on a single grubby bargain with a strongman, and the moment he wanted leverage he simply switched the flow back on.
8. Greece becomes a shield while Brussels reaches for the chequebook
As tens of thousands massed along the Evros river, Athens closed the border and suspended asylum claims, and the Commission's instinct was to praise Greece as a shield and promise hundreds of millions of euros. After years of lecturing capitals about open borders, Brussels was suddenly grateful for a wall and ready to pay for it.
9. The summit that failed gets a starring role in the next plenary
So total was the budget collapse that the Parliament scheduled a special debate with Charles Michel for the following session to dwell on the failure, while its own negotiators issued statements lamenting the absence of a deal on the budget and on new own resources. Translation: the only lesson Brussels drew from a wasted two-day summit was that it should have demanded its own taxes sooner.
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