Eurobloat #0134 • June 2021
June 2021 was the month the Union discovered that the answer to a pandemic was a permanent scanning infrastructure, and the answer to almost everything else was more Europe. It also borrowed half a continent's worth of money in its own name and then could not agree to keep buses of migrants out.
Folly of the Month: A papers-please app for the whole continent, in a record sixty-two days
On 9 June the Parliament waved through, and on 14 June the institutions formally adopted, Regulation (EU) 2021/953 establishing the EU Digital COVID Certificate, a scannable proof of vaccination, testing or recovery that member states began checking at their borders within days. Brussels boasted that it had written this surveillance scheme into law in a record sixty-two days, which is roughly fifty-nine days faster than it can ever decide anything that returns power rather than takes it. The thing was sold as a tool to restore free movement, which is a curious way to describe a continent-wide requirement to present a state-issued certificate before you are allowed to cross the lines on the map. We were assured, naturally, that it was temporary.
1. The digital identity wallet nobody asked for
On 3 June the Commission proposed a European Digital Identity Wallet, an app every member state would be obliged to issue so that citizens could carry a Brussels-blessed identity on their phones. A voluntary scheme that obliges twenty-seven governments to build it is a curious sort of voluntary, and a single harmonised ID for 450 million people is exactly the sort of thing that never gets misused.
2. The Union learns to borrow in its own name
In June the Commission proudly raised twenty billion euros through a single ten-year bond, the largest the EU had ever issued, the opening act of the NextGenerationEU borrowing spree. Joint debt was promised to be a one-off emergency measure, which in Brussels is the technical term for a permanent new power that national parliaments will be repaying for decades.
3. A binding 2050 target handed down to all twenty-seven
On 28 June the Council adopted the European Climate Law, making the 2050 climate-neutrality goal and a 55 per cent 2030 cut legally binding on every member state whether their voters chose it or not. It also conjured up a European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, because nothing reassures a sovereign nation like being graded by a new EU panel on homework Brussels set itself.
4. Parliament discovers a European right it was never given
On 24 June MEPs adopted the Matic report, 378 to 255, declaring that abortion is a right and lecturing member states on how to legislate on a matter that the treaties leave squarely to national capitals. The Parliament cannot fix its own travelling-circus headquarters, but it has found time to instruct twenty-seven democracies on questions their own constitutions reserve to themselves.
5. The 387-billion-euro greenwash
On 25 June the Commission, Parliament and Council struck their deal on reforming the Common Agricultural Policy, parcelling out a 387-billion-euro budget and presenting it as a green transformation. Critics promptly branded it greenwashing, which is the polite term for spending a third of a trillion euros and changing remarkably little except the press release.
6. Macron and Merkel try to dine with Putin, and get a no
At the European Council of 24 and 25 June, France and Germany sprang a plan for an EU summit with Vladimir Putin, only to be slapped down by leaders who had no wish to watch Paris and Berlin speak for the whole continent over dinner with the Kremlin. The Baltic states and Poland, having actual experience of the neighbour, vetoed the cosy idea, and for once Brussels overreach was stopped by the members rather than the other way round.
7. The borders the Union could not hold
From June onward Belarus began bussing and flying migrants towards Lithuania, Latvia and Poland in numbers far above anything seen in 2020, and the Union that lectures everyone on open borders found it had no idea how to close one. Lukashenko worked out the single fact Brussels refuses to admit: an open external frontier is a lever any unpleasant regime can pull at will.
8. A fresh front in the war on Big Tech
In June the Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google's advertising-technology business, the latest salvo in Brussels' long campaign to manage an American industry it could never build. The probe would grind on for years, employing a great many regulators and producing, as ever, more proceedings than products.
9. Brussels takes Hungary to task over a radio station
On 9 June the Commission fired off a letter of formal notice to Hungary over the silencing of Klubradio, opening an infringement procedure that would eventually be marched all the way to the Court of Justice. Budapest's treatment of an independent broadcaster is grubby enough, yet the spectacle of the Commission as headmaster-in-chief, red pen poised over each member state's conduct, is its own small lesson in where power now sits.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
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