Eurobloat #0162 • October 2023
October 2023 was the month the Commission decided that the proper response to a war in the Middle East was a legally binding letter to a website, while its leaders gathered in Granada to plan the future of Europe and discovered they could not agree what to write down.
Folly of the Month: Brussels appoints itself editor of X
A few days after Hamas attacked Israel, the European Commission fired off its first formal demand under the Digital Services Act, ordering X to explain how it was handling disinformation and giving it until 31 October to answer. The novelty here is not that a social network is full of nonsense during a war, which is a permanent condition, but that Brussels now believes the cure is an unelected commissioner with subpoena powers grading the moderation policy of a private American company. Penalties, the Commission helpfully noted, would depend on the replies. A continent that cannot agree on a migration paragraph among twenty-seven governments has somehow found perfect clarity on who should decide which posts you are allowed to see.
1. Granada, or the summit that dared not speak migration
EU leaders met in Granada on 5 and 6 October to design the future of Europe, and the future turned out to be a declaration with no mention of migration, because Poland and Hungary refused to sign up to it. Two governments insisting that a sovereign matter remain a sovereign matter is the most honest thing that happened all month, so naturally the Council President issued his own migration text in his own name, for the second time running, pretending unanimity he did not have.
2. A carbon tax that insists it is not a tax
On 1 October the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism switched on its transitional phase, obliging importers of steel, cement, aluminium and the rest to file quarterly emissions reports for the privilege of trading with the bloc. No money changes hands yet, which is the clever part, because by the time the bills arrive in 2026 everyone will be used to the paperwork. It is also, conveniently, earmarked as a future EU own resource, which is to say a Brussels revenue stream that no national parliament ever voted to create.
→ taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu
3. The Crisis Regulation that defines an emergency for you
On 4 October ambassadors in Brussels stitched together the migration Crisis Regulation, the missing piece of the Pact, after Italy was talked round and Germany won the argument over NGO rescue boats. The result is a Brussels-authored definition of what counts as a migration emergency, handed down to the very member states actually receiving the boats. Power flows one way in this arrangement, and it is not towards the coastline.
4. Chat Control summoned to explain its own lobbying
On 25 October the Parliament's civil liberties committee hauled Commissioner Johansson in to answer questions about the lobbying behind her proposal to scan everyone's private messages for child abuse material. When the flagship policy for protecting children is itself under investigation for how it was sold to the public, the policy is the problem. Mercifully the committee would soon move to gut the indiscriminate scanning, but the instinct to read every citizen's chats remains very much alive in the building.
5. A spyware ban with a spyware exemption
On 3 October MEPs adopted their position on the Media Freedom Act, voting to protect journalists from having their phones bugged, except as a last resort, on a case-by-case basis, when a judge says so. A ban on snooping that comes with a list of occasions on which snooping is permitted is not a ban, it is a schedule. The bloc that lectures the world on press freedom could not quite bring itself to stop placing spyware on reporters.
6. Glyphosate: no majority, so the Commission decides anyway
On 13 October member states failed to reach a qualified majority either to renew or to reject glyphosate, with eighteen in favour, three against and six abstaining. The democratic verdict was therefore a shrug, at which point the procedure helpfully provides that the Commission gets to decide for everyone regardless. Whatever the merits of the weedkiller, a system in which deadlock among elected governments simply hands the pen to Brussels is working exactly as designed, which is the worry.
7. The AI Act trilogue stalls on who gets to watch you
On 24 and 25 October negotiators on the AI Act inched towards rules for foundation models and then stalled, while the real fight raged over biometric surveillance. Parliament wanted to ban live facial recognition; several governments, France at the front, demanded national-security carve-outs broad enough to drive a surveillance van through. The continent that wishes to regulate everyone else's algorithms cannot decide whether its own police may scan your face in the street.
8. Parliament refuses to sign off the Council's books, again
In the October II session MEPs once more refused to grant the Council discharge for its 2021 budget, citing a lack of cooperation on how the money was spent. This has now happened every year since 2009, which is to say one EU institution has openly declined to certify another's accounts for fourteen years running and nothing whatever has changed. In any other organisation that would be a scandal; here it is an annual tradition.
9. Lagarde pauses, having raised rates ten times first
On 26 October the European Central Bank finally held interest rates steady, leaving the deposit rate at 4 percent after ten consecutive increases, and presented stopping the pain as an achievement. The bank that spent years insisting inflation was transitory now takes credit for the bruises from beating it back down. Christine Lagarde called the decision unanimous, which is easy once there is nothing left to argue about.
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