Brussels has become reassuringly dull again
the past decade, if you asked a Eurocrat: “What’s on your mind?”, the response was usually dramatic. At the start of the decade the euro teetered on the edge of collapse. In the middle of it, Greece came close to being kicked out. A crisis flared when nearly 3m asylum-seekers arrived from Syria and other troublespots. Shortly after that, Britain, then the’s second-largest economy, voted to leave without a serious plan for doing so.
Those days are over. . Ask a passing Eurocrat what’s up and the answer is prosaic: haggling over theleaders next visit Brussels on February 20th, it will be to discuss the bloc’s spending. Britain’s departure has left a hole of €60bn in the’s funding. Spread over seven years and between 27 countries, the sum becomes easier to swallow. The upshot is that, to keep spending roughly the same,countries are being asked to cough up between 1% and 1.
To spice things up, diplomats from both ends of the debate are behaving as if a gap of 0.1% of their income—the equivalent of a cold snap in winter or a few wet weeks in summer—is a fiscal Mariana Trench. A hard-core gang consisting of the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Austria have demanded that the. Another group, led by those countries from central and eastern Europe that gorge on handouts from Brussels, are refusing to sign off on anything so paltry as a budget of 1%.
Charles Michel, who has the task of stewarding the meeting as European Council president, has threatened to keep the negotiations running until they are resolved. Unfortunately, no one believes him. At one summit during the height of the Greek crisis, Donald Tusk forced leaders to stay and hammer out a deal on bail-out terms rather than risk Greece falling out the bloc. This time, heads of government are well aware that they can simply come back in a few months and try again.
leaders will waste time fighting over pocket change. The fiscal fight is a near-perfect example of Sayre’s law, named after Wallace Stanley Sayre, an American political scientist: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” If the net contributors are routed and surrender at every turn, the budget will be about 1% of gross national income. If the Frugal Four emerge triumphant, the budget will be about 1% of gross national income.
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