Eurobloat #0119 • March 2020
March 2020 was the month Brussels learned that a continent of borderless solidarity is wonderful right up until a virus arrives, at which point seventeen member states slam their frontiers shut, the masks get confiscated, and the central bank announces it is not in the business of helping anyone in particular.
Folly of the Month: The ECB tells Italy it is not here to close spreads
On 12 March, with Italian hospitals filling and markets in freefall, ECB President Christine Lagarde announced to a press conference that the bank was "not here to close spreads," that this was "not the function or the mission of the ECB," and that there were "other actors" who should deal with such things. The single currency was sold to Rome as shared destiny; the woman running it managed to suggest, live, that the destiny was Rome's alone. The yield on the ten-year Italian bond leapt and the Milan exchange fell some seventeen per cent in a single afternoon. She spent the rest of the day backtracking on television, which is the modern European equivalent of an apology.
1. Seventeen member states close the borders that were never supposed to exist
At least seventeen states slammed their internal frontiers shut, leaving lorries of food and medicine stuck in queues of twenty to fifty kilometres along the German, Polish, Czech and Slovak borders. The single market, that crowning achievement, lasted exactly as long as nobody needed anything urgently delivered.
2. The Commission seizes the right to ration everyone else's masks
On 15 March the Commission published Implementing Regulation 2020/402, requiring a licence to export protective equipment outside the EU. Having discovered that confiscating the wider world's masks is not, in fact, a good look, it tweaked the scheme on 19 March with Regulation 2020/426 to spare Norway, Switzerland and a few microstates, then kept the export ban firmly in place for everyone else. Solidarity, it turns out, has a permit office.
3. The slot rules that send empty aeroplanes round the sky
Brussels finally waived the "use it or lose it" airport slot rule on 30 March, the very rule that had forced airlines to fly all-but-empty "ghost flights" purely to keep their landing rights. A masterstroke of deregulation, marred only by the fact that the EU had built the absurdity in the first place and waited for a pandemic to admit it.
4. Greece is rebranded a "shield" after years of being the open door
On 3 March the three EU presidents flew to the Evros to thank Greece for being Europe's "aspida," its shield, after Ankara opened the taps and bused tens of thousands of migrants to the frontier. After a decade lecturing Athens about welcoming all comers, Brussels rediscovered the merits of a guarded border the instant Turkey used the open one as a weapon.
5. The €750bn bazooka that should have come before the gaffe
On 18 March, six days after telling Italy it was on its own, the ECB launched a €750bn Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme to buy precisely the bonds Lagarde had said it was not there to support. The bazooka was real; the only mystery is why the institution chose to spook the markets first and reassure them afterwards.
6. Coronabonds, the summit, and the can kicked fourteen days down the road
At the six-hour video summit of 26 March, nine governments demanded common European debt and the Netherlands and Germany flatly refused, so leaders did the European thing and ordered the finance ministers back to design proposals within fourteen days. Solidarity, it turns out, is always two weeks away.
7. State aid rules suspended, having been imposed in the first place
On 19 March the Commission adopted a Temporary Framework letting governments hand companies up to €800,000 in aid that competition rules had forbidden the week before. Vestager was praised for the flexibility, which is a generous word for a rulebook that bends the moment its authors find it inconvenient.
→ competition-policy.ec.europa.eu
8. The EU diktat on airport slots required emergency lawmaking to undo
Parliament rushed through, almost unanimously and within a fortnight, three emergency bills to suspend its own slot rules, top up the Solidarity Fund and create an investment initiative. The speed was impressive; the spectacle of a legislature scrambling to repeal the burdens it had so carefully constructed was more impressive still.
9. Brussels declares war on disinformation while running short of masks
On 19 March the External Action Service published its special report counting over a hundred cases of "pro-Kremlin disinformation" about the virus, a tidy reminder that even mid-crisis there is always budget for a task force monitoring what other people say. The hospitals wanted ventilators; the EEAS supplied a narrative assessment.
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