Eurobloat #0124 • August 2020
August is meant to be the quiet month, the one where Brussels decamps to the Mediterranean and leaves the rest of us in peace. Instead it borrowed tens of billions in everyone's name, threatened sanctions it would not impose for months, and lost a trade commissioner to a charity golf dinner.
Folly of the Month: The Commission discovers it can borrow EUR 81 billion in your name
On 24 August the Commission proposed handing out EUR 81.4 billion in loans to fifteen member states under its SURE scheme, money the Commission itself raises on the markets by issuing debt against the EU budget. The pitch was unemployment support during the pandemic, which is hard to argue with. The quiet revolution is the mechanism. For the first time the Union is borrowing at scale in its own name, a habit that does not unlearn itself once the crisis passes. Italy alone had requested assistance on 7 August, and the precedent it sets, a Commission that taxes, borrows and disburses like a treasury, is worth rather more than the headline figure.
1. Two billion users still have nowhere legal to send their data
On 10 August, three weeks after the Court of Justice struck down Privacy Shield in the Schrems II ruling, Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders and the United States issued a joint statement promising to build a replacement. So the EU's own court demolished the data bridge the EU's own Commission had certified, and the response was to announce talks to certify another one, presumably until the court strikes that down too.
2. A dictator steals an election next door and Brussels schedules a video call
Lukashenko rigged the Belarusian vote on 9 August and beat the protesters in the streets. The mighty European Union responded on 11 August with a strongly worded statement, on 14 August with a video conference of foreign ministers, and on 19 August with a summit at which Charles Michel promised sanctions on a "substantial number" of officials. Those sanctions actually arrived on 2 October, and Lukashenko himself was not added until November. Geopolitical heavyweight.
3. Trade Commissioner resigns over a golf dinner
Phil Hogan, the EU's trade chief, attended an eighty-person Oireachtas golf society dinner in Ireland on 19 August while his own host country was under covid restrictions, then spent a week insisting he had broken no rules before resigning on 26 August. The man in charge of negotiating the Union's trade with the world could not negotiate his way around a banquet table. The gravy train, it turns out, has a buffet car.
4. The EU scraps tariffs it spent decades imposing and calls it a triumph
On 21 August the Commission agreed to drop its tariffs on American lobster, retroactive to 1 August, the first negotiated tariff cut between the two sides in more than two decades. Removing a pointless levy is welcome. One might gently ask who imposed the levy in the first place, why it took twenty years and a trade war to notice, and why we are meant to applaud Brussels for stopping doing something it should never have done.
→ ustr.gov
5. Turkey sends a survey ship, the EU sends a meeting request
As Turkey's Oruc Reis prospected for gas in waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus from 10 August, Athens asked for an emergency Foreign Affairs Council. The Union's answer to a NATO ally bullying two of its own members was to pencil in a leaders' summit for 24 September, six weeks later. Nothing concentrates Ankara's mind like the threat of a date in the diary.
6. The Commission approves a six billion euro bailout its own court will later tear up
Through the summer the Commission waved through Germany's EUR 6 billion recapitalisation of Lufthansa under its covid state-aid framework. The General Court annulled that approval in 2023, finding the Commission had not even checked whether Lufthansa could raise the money privately first. Brussels does not so much pick winners as hand them other people's money and hope no judge is watching.
7. Soldiers overthrow a government in Mali and the EU asks West Africa what to think
After Malian officers toppled President Keita on 18 August, the Union condemned the coup, demanded the detained politicians be freed, and deferred to ECOWAS to lead the mediation. An empire that fancies itself a global actor outsourced its policy on a former French sphere of influence to a regional bloc, then waited to be told what its position was.
8. Migrants pile up on Lesbos while the relocation scheme delivers a trickle
By late August the Moria camp, built for 3,000, held nearly 13,000 people, and the Commission's much-trumpeted scheme to relocate unaccompanied minors had moved only a couple of hundred. The open-borders philosophy that filled the island had no plan for emptying it, and the camp would burn to the ground within a fortnight.
→ hrw.org
9. Brussels lines up to buy vaccines nobody had yet made
On the cusp of the month the Commission concluded preliminary talks with Sanofi and GSK to procure up to 300 million doses of a vaccine candidate that did not yet exist and, as it happened, would be delayed for years. Centralised procurement was sold as solidarity. The bill, and the supply chaos that followed, landed on the member states all the same.
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