Eurobloat #0131 • March 2021
March 2021 was the month the European Union discovered that nothing says free movement quite like a QR code you must show at the border. While member states scrambled for jabs the Commission had failed to order, Brussels found time to design a passport, threaten its suppliers, and lecture everyone about freedom.
Folly of the Month: A papers-please app, rebranded as freedom
On 17 March the Commission proposed the Digital Green Certificate, a scannable QR pass recording who had been vaccinated, tested or recovered, to be checked at borders across the continent. The official insistence that this would not be a precondition for free movement was a marvel of doublespeak, since the entire purpose was to decide who got to move freely. Having spent decades abolishing internal frontiers, the EU reinvented them and shipped them as an app, then promised it would all be temporary. Brexit Britain, free to set its own rules, watched the bloc build a centralised health-status register and quietly counted its blessings.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
1. Threatening to seize the vaccine it could not be bothered to use
On 4 March Italy, with the Commission's blessing, blocked 250,000 AstraZeneca doses bound for Australia, the first use of the EU's export-control mechanism. Later in March the bloc threatened wider export bans and sent the Carabinieri to inspect an AstraZeneca plant near Rome, all over a vaccine its own member states were busy hesitating to administer.
2. A pay-transparency directive for the whole of Europe
On 4 March the Commission proposed binding pay-transparency rules, complete with reporting duties, pay-assessment obligations and a new layer of enforcement, because twenty-seven national labour regimes were apparently not enough. The folly is not the goal but the reflex: every problem in Europe, Brussels concludes, requires another Brussels directive.
3. Parliament declares the entire EU a freedom zone
On 11 March the Parliament voted, 492 to 141, to declare the whole Union an LGBTIQ Freedom Zone, a gesture aimed squarely at Poland and Hungary. Declaring freedom by resolution costs nothing and changes nothing, which is precisely why a chamber that cannot deliver vaccines finds it so irresistible.
4. The continent's credit card, finally activated
On 25 March the Parliament cleared the Own Resources legislation underpinning Next Generation EU, the machinery that would let the Commission borrow 750 billion euros on the markets on behalf of all members. Joint debt was always sold as a one-off emergency measure; the machinery, naturally, is permanent, and the bill lands on national taxpayers who never voted for it.
5. A compass for 2030, pointing firmly at Brussels
On 9 March the Commission unveiled its 2030 Digital Compass, a plan to set continent-wide digital targets and then grade member states on how well they hit them. The schoolmaster instinct is the tell: the EU no longer governs so much as it inspects, scores and reports on the homework of its own members.
6. Suing a member state for daring to run its own courts
On 31 March the Commission referred Poland to the Court of Justice over its judicial disciplinary regime and asked for interim measures to suspend it. Whatever one thinks of Warsaw, the spectacle of Brussels demanding the power to switch off a national court system is centralisation dressed as principle.
7. A grand human-rights gesture that promptly backfired
On 22 March the Council imposed its first Magnitsky-style sanctions on Chinese officials over the Uyghurs, a rare flash of spine that Beijing answered within hours by sanctioning MEPs and scholars. The episode duly torpedoed the EU's own prized investment deal with China, proving that the bloc's strategic autonomy amounts to picking fights it has no plan to win.
8. Laying the groundwork for an AI rulebook
On 22 March the Commission's Regulatory Scrutiny Board signed off with a positive opinion on the impact assessment for the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence Act, clearing the runway for the world's most ambitious attempt to regulate a technology before anyone quite understood it. Europe cannot build the engines, but it is determined to write the manual.
9. Modernising the rules for watching fishermen
In the March plenary the Parliament adopted its position on overhauling the EU fisheries control system, updating monitoring rules in force since 2010 with fresh tracking and reporting obligations. It is a small thing, but a telling one: even as the bloc fumbled a pandemic, it found the bandwidth to fine-tune how closely it surveils a trawler.
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