Brussels blog

Just read the latest version of Sarko’s “European pact on immigration“.

To recap, this is his plan for European countries to bring their immigration policies closer together. EU interior ministers broadly backed the measure at their meeting in Cannes on Monday.

But it’s hard to see how the pact – which has already been watered down - will actually change things.

At heart, the plan (which isn’t legally binding)  calls for improved frontier controls, effective removal of illegal entrants and better organisation of legal immigration. Sure – but the EU has said this sort of stuff on multiple occasions.

Yes, the union has made strides on common rules, for example abandoning internal border controls across much of Europe and agreeing to harmonise asylum standards.

Yet progress on unified immigration policies is often slow and becomes mired in spats between member states. 

Immigration is one of the most nebulous topics here in Europeville, with differences in countries’ geographic, demographic and economic situations making agreement on common rules tricky, to say the least.

These factors, and varying traditions and political stances towards immigration, complicate matters yet further.  For example, the EU has tried for ages to agree on a “bluecard” scheme to attract skilled workers, but has yet to succeed.

Sarko owes his election victory last year in part to his tough stance on immigration. However, France’s own domestic proposal to establish immigration quotas is in disarray after an independent commission set up to look at the question concluded that they were unworkable.

And the French president may yet find that progress on his goals for Europe is slower and more cloudy than hoped.

A big and rather heavy parcel arrived in the Brussels office last week.

It contained three weighty tomes – including Norman Davies’ 1,365 page work ”Europe a History.” Also in the box were three discs, two large, glossy picture books and two brochures – all linked to the western Polish city of Wroclaw.

The package came from Poland and promotes the city, which is vying to host a new EU agency – the European Institute of Technology.

Evidently, national pride and political prestige is at stake when choosing the location of new EU bodies (countries are due to decide on the EIT this week).

If a country secures an EU agency, politicians can tell voters that they won something for them in Brussels. This is even though the EIT concept has been much watered down, under pressure from big, rich member states such as the UK, and the headquarters will employ just 60 people.

Brussels hopes that the institute will turn more high-tech discoveries into money-spinning products and help Europe close the innovation gap with rivals such as the US and Japan.

Poland is competing with Spain, Hungary and an Austrian-Slovak alliance to house the EIT. The chosen area will hope to gain fresh investment, as well as boost its high-tech industry credentials.

All the candidates have lobbied in Brussels ( you wonder how many of these Polish packages have been sent).  Barcelona’s bid gave ministers and diplomats an iPod with videos of its site.

The campaigning reminds me of a Finnish-Italian spat in late 2003 over the location of a new EU food safety agency. Here’s a teaser from the story that my colleagues wrote at the time…

Plans for the location of a dozen new European agencies have stalled, thanks to an epic tussle involving the merits of Parma ham.

Matti Vanhanen, Finnish prime minister, vowed this week to block a deal on the siting of the European Union bodies covering areas from satellites to police training – until he resolves a battle with Italy over a new food safety agency.

The dispute has become a question of national pride, with Mr Vanhanen insisting his country has the perfect facilities for the food agency.

But Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister, has blocked the transfer of EU staff to Helsinki for almsot two years,  claiming the agency should be based in Parma.

“The Finns don’t even know what prosciutto is, “Mr Berlusconi famously stormed at a summit in 2001.

Read more here.

Italy won the agency, by the way…

The daily press briefing at the European Commission’s star-shaped Berlaymont HQ in Brussels is an event rarely noted for its humour.

Yesterday’s menu, for example, included questions to the Commission on the subjects of organised crime in Bulgaria, a court judgment on Sweden’s alcohol taxation rules, the Macedonian elections, and Greek asylum policy, among others.  

So you might see why a bizarre exchange yesterday between journalists and a spokesperson over the age of a new, female commissioner was rather out of the ordinary.

A reporter said that she was writing a profile of Androulla Vassiliou, the new Cypriot commissioner responsible for health policy, and had failed to find out her exact age from her office.

In fact, the journalist said that she was told that it was very rude to ask the age of a Cypriot commissioner, but that she could say that Mrs Vassiliou was “around 65″

The spokesperson’s response at the podium was that it was indeed rude in the commissioner’s culture to ask a woman’s age.

Next came a brief exchange about whether the answer could be found on the commissioner’s online CV – it couldn’t as of Tuesday night- and if the reluctance to disclose Mrs Vassiliou’s exact age was in line with the Commission’s transparency rules. 

Tricky. 

Can national cultural mores be transported to Brussels, capital of the 27-country Europe?

Do we need to know a commissioner’s exact age? What difference does it make that, in this case, the commissioner is female? 

And does the public have a right to know such details about EU officials who make big decisions over European citizens and industry?

The most fun stories to cover from Brussels are usually those about big, messy fights. And such scraps are all the juicier when Viviane Reding, pugnacious EU telecoms chief, is involved.

For a start, she sparks robust and outspoken responses from the industry.

“Belarus is better for business than Brussels,”a top telecoms executive claimed last week in connection with Reding’s most recent efforts to cut mobile phone fees.

This reminded me of an attack on Reding in 2006, when she revealed legislation to cap lucrative roaming charges: one operator likened the proposal to central planning in the ex-USSR.

Here was Brussels bringing a law that not only commanded popular support but also, rarely, won rave headlines in Europe’s most eurosceptic media. The Luxembourger took on the industry (companies such as Telefonica, Vodafone and more), and won, forcing them to slash the price of overseas mobile calls.

Evidently, the success emboldened her. Victory seems to be everything for Reding, a journalist-turned-politician who outfoxed heavyweight colleagues in the European Commission to pass the legislation.

But now she is fighting on multiple fronts in the fast-moving telecoms sector. With only a year or so left on the legislative timetable before the European parliament’s elections, her battle plan is hard to predict.

At the top of her to-do list is a drive to force operators to cut the fees they charge customers to send text messages and use mobile internet while abroad.

This seems a politically irresistible quest, especially when you see stories like this: “A couple have been hit with a bill of £11,000 after downloading four episodes of the sitcom Friends via a mobile phone.” Some operators have already reduced charges as a result of Reding’s call for action.

At the same time, Reding also seeks to re-write the telcoms rulebook, bigtime. She wants to establish an EU telecoms authority who wants a new EU uber-agency, (but what exactly would it do?) liberalise radio spectrum and boost Brussels’ powers over the telecoms sector. Oh yes, she’s also trying to give national authorities the right to break up some of Europe’s biggest telecoms companies.

Reding wants everything: no wonder the telcoms industry is bridling in response. It’s too early to know what she will win, and what she’ll lose in her quest to leave her mark. But there’ll be fights galore along the way.