Eurobloat #0171 • July 2024
July offered a perfect miniature of the project: while it fumbled the serious questions of war and leadership, its most tangible achievement, the one that actually reached every citizen, was a redesigned bottle cap that pours your drink down your shirt.
Folly of the Month: the cap that spills your drink, by decree
From 3 July, under the Single-Use Plastics Directive, every plastic bottle cap sold in the EU had to remain tethered to the bottle. Across the continent, citizens discovered their drinks now dribbling over their hands and chins, courtesy of a rule devised in Brussels to combat litter. Of all the things a union of nations might achieve, the one that touched every European this month was making it slightly harder to drink from a bottle. The micro-mandate is the macro-philosophy: no detail of daily life is too small to improve by force.
1. A directive for the end of your bottle
The tethered-cap rule, years in the making, applies to bottles up to three litres across the bloc, under Single-Use Plastics Directive 2019/904. Somewhere a great deal of official effort went into the geometry of a cap, and it shows.
2. The executive renewed without a public vote
On 18 July the Parliament re-elected Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president with 401 votes. The most powerful office in Europe was handed out, once again, in a secret ballot of insiders that no citizen took part in.
3. The rotating presidency goes rogue
Hungary took over the rotating presidency on 1 July, and within days Viktor Orbán flew to Moscow to meet Putin on a self-styled "peace mission". The system that hands the Council's chair around like a parcel discovered it had handed it to someone with his own foreign policy.
4. The Union boycotts its own chair
Furious, von der Leyen branded the trip an "appeasement mission" and ordered commissioners to snub meetings in Budapest. A bloc reduced to boycotting the country currently chairing it is a bloc at war with its own machinery.
5. Freelance diplomacy, Budapest edition
Orbán followed Moscow with trips to Beijing and to Trump in Florida, conducting his own grand tour in the Union's name. The rotating presidency was never meant to be a personal world tour, but the rules assumed everyone would behave.
6. The AI Act hits the statute book
On 12 July the AI Act was published in the Official Journal, setting the clock running on the rules industry had pleaded for time to absorb. Brussels does not let a competitiveness crisis interrupt its legislating.
→ artificialintelligenceact.eu
7. Litter as the pretext for redesigning your life
The cap rule was justified as a strike against beach litter, the familiar formula by which a real problem licenses an absurd intervention. The sea is not noticeably cleaner; your sleeve is noticeably wetter.
8. Grand strategy, fumbled; bottle caps, mastered
Set the spectacle side by side: a presidency in open revolt, a war on the doorstep, and the EU's surest, most universal act of the month was reattaching a cap. The project regulates the trivial with confidence and the serious with paralysis.
9. The cap as the perfect emblem
No single rule has done more to make the EU tangible, and faintly ridiculous, to ordinary people than the tethered cap. It is the whole philosophy in a thimble: harmless intentions, universal reach, and a small daily indignity nobody asked for.
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