Eurobloat #0143 • March 2022
With tanks rolling across Ukraine, the Union gathered at Versailles to discover its inner sovereign, then spent the rest of the month writing rules for app stores, batteries and bottled detergent. Nothing says strategic autonomy like a new tax and a committee.
Folly of the Month: Brussels appoints itself referee of the smartphone
On 24 March the Council and Parliament struck their deal on the Digital Markets Act, a thick rulebook aimed squarely at a handful of mostly American firms the Commission has decided to call gatekeepers. Any company above a turnover or valuation threshold must now open its messaging service to rivals, beg permission before combining its own data, and let Brussels pick the defaults on devices it never built, on pain of fines up to ten per cent of global turnover and twenty per cent for daring to repeat the offence. The theory is more choice for users. The practice is a permanent supervisory relationship in which officials in Brussels decide how a product you bought is allowed to work. Europe could not build a single one of these companies, so it has settled for the next best thing, which is governing them.
1. A carbon tax that just happens to belong to the EU
On 15 March the Council agreed its negotiating mandate on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a levy on imported steel, cement, aluminium, fertiliser and electricity. The cover story is fighting carbon leakage. The interesting detail is the Commission's plan to keep most of the proceeds as a new own resource, which is the polite term for a tax that flows to Brussels rather than to the capital that used to collect it.
2. The joint shopping trip for gas
In its REPowerEU communication of 8 March the Commission proposed pooling European demand to buy gas, hydrogen and LNG on behalf of member states, aggregating their orders so they cannot outbid each other. A sensible-sounding remedy for a crisis that decades of energy dependence on Moscow helped create, and one that conveniently parks another lever of national policy in Brussels' hands for safekeeping.
3. Versailles, where the EU declared itself strong
On 10 and 11 March the leaders met at Versailles and issued a declaration promising to take more responsibility for Europe's own security and to act more autonomously. Grand words, no deadlines, and a pointed nod to NATO, the alliance that was actually defending the continent while the summit drafted its communique on strategic sovereignty.
4. Brussels comes for your battery
On 10 March Parliament adopted its position on the new batteries regulation, and on 17 March the Council followed with its general approach. Among the ambitions: a legal requirement that the battery in your appliance be removable with commonly available tools. The Union cannot keep the lights on, but it has firm views on how your e-scooter should come apart.
5. A regulation to redesign nearly everything you own
On 30 March the Commission tabled the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, extending the old energy-product rules to almost any object on the market: furniture, mattresses, tyres, detergents, paints, even iron and steel. Making sustainable products the norm, they call it. Making Brussels the design authority for the contents of your house is closer to the truth.
6. European values, the Commission helpfully reminds you, are not for sale
On 28 March the Commission urged member states to scrap golden passport schemes and review citizenship already handed out, having noticed that sanctioned Russians had bought their way into free movement across Schengen. A fair point buried in an awkward one: the very borderless area Brussels prizes is what turned a national passport racket into an EU-wide security hole, and Brussels now wants to grade member states on the citizenship they grant.
7. A committee to investigate the spies
On 10 March Parliament voted to set up the PEGA committee of inquiry into the use of Pegasus and similar spyware, after revelations that several EU governments had aimed it at journalists, lawyers and politicians. A rare and welcome instinct: when the state buys software to read the private messages of inconvenient people, that is the scandal, not the privacy of the people being read.
8. The protection directive nobody could find for a decade
On 3 and 4 March the Council unanimously triggered the Temporary Protection Directive for the first time ever, to receive those fleeing Ukraine. The instrument had sat unused since 2001 through every previous arrival the Union swore it could not handle, which rather invites the question of why a tool for orderly, time-limited protection was kept in a drawer until it suited the politics.
9. Yet another committee, this time about the pandemic
At the same March plenary that produced the spyware inquiry, Parliament also stood up a brand-new special committee on Covid-19 to draw the lessons of the pandemic. Two years late, with the crisis ebbing, the Union reached for the one response it never runs short of, which is another committee with a mandate, a chair and a budget.
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