Eurobloat #0177 • January 2025
January brought a confession dressed as a strategy. After years of insisting its rulebook was Europe's great gift to the world, Brussels published a "Competitiveness Compass" conceding that the rules are precisely what is holding Europe back, then promised to address it in some future package.
Folly of the Month: needing a compass to find the exit from your own maze
On 29 January the Commission unveiled "A Competitiveness Compass for the EU", built on the discovery that the bloc has fallen badly behind America and China. Strip away the management-speak and it is an admission that decades of Brussels rules made European business uncompetitive. That the institution responsible needs a special "compass" to locate the way out of a maze it built itself is the whole tragedy in a single document.
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com
1. A quarter of the paperwork, admitted to be pointless
The Compass promises to cut reporting burdens by at least 25 per cent. Welcome news, and also a confession that a quarter of what Brussels demanded was never worth demanding.
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com
2. Even the insiders call it a U-turn
Brussels-watchers noted that the Compass marks an open pivot from rule-making to deregulation, an admission that the previous five years went too far. The direction is right; the lack of any contrition for the lost decade is striking.
3. The lobby that wants the maze kept
Some 270 groups wrote demanding the simplification be dropped and the rules preserved in full. There is always a coalition in Brussels whose deepest conviction is that the paperwork must stay.
4. A strategy whose main product is a future strategy
The Compass itself cuts nothing; it merely promises an "omnibus" in late February that might. Brussels has reached the stage of announcing the announcement of the reform.
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com
5. Critics christen it the anti-competitiveness compass
It did not take long for the wits to rename the document, noting that an institution famous for throttling enterprise was unlikely to rediscover dynamism by writing another communication. The name fits.
6. More single market, naturally
Among the cures on offer is "deepening" the single market, which in practice means more harmonisation decided centrally. The answer to too much Brussels remains, with iron consistency, more Brussels.
7. Built on Draghi's gloomy verdict
The whole exercise leans on Mario Draghi's report warning that Europe is falling behind. When your flagship strategy is founded on an autopsy of your own competitiveness, optimism is hard to fake.
8. Simplification by the people who complicated it
The reform of the rules is, as ever, entrusted to the very institution that wrote them. Asking the rule factory to design its own off-switch rarely ends with the lights going out.
→ legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com
9. A compass is not a course change
For all the talk of direction, January ended with the machine still pointing where it always points: towards more rules, more integration and one more strategy to fix the last one. Knowing which way is out is not the same as walking there.
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