Friday, July 26, 2013
In a dangerous and courageous operation, More Europe! IT experts managed to hack one Snowden’s four laptops (rumors are that Snowden uploaded thousands of documents in a Dropbox folder and accidentally posted the username and password on Twitter). Working in close cooperation with the Daily Mail, we had exclusive access to the transcripts of European Council meetings at the Justus Lipsius building. After nights and days spent looking for a stagiaire to read through all the stuff (thanks guy whose name I forgot already), we are proud to present below some of the juicier and more controversial proposals EU leaders have been secretly discussing:
1) Widespread consensus has been reached on the fact that EEAS just sounds wrong. The name is too long and the acronym too difficult to spell. European Council leaders are considering changing the name into something more appealing. As of now, the proposal that has gathered the most support is "Team Europe". France, however, seems willing to opt out.
2) Speaking English or French with a strong Italian or Spanish accent will not be a problem anymore for EC officials reporting to the Council. Official working languages of the Commission will soon include Spanglish, Itanglish, Itanch and Spanch. The change, it has been estimated, will reduce both misunderstandings and laughter by 10%.
3) The debate on where the EP should be located might be soon relegated to history. EU leaders’ views are converging toward a pragmatic European solution. A proposal backed by construction lobbies foresees the construction of 26 brand new EU Parliaments in all the 26 EU countries that have not yet been blessed with the EU democracy experience. A 6 months rotation is foreseen. The proposal has received widespread support from MEPs but discussions are still undergoing in relation to the French proposal codenamed "eat local" which will force every EP cantine to serve exclusively local food, in the spirit of the exception culturelle.
3) The debate on where the EP should be located might be soon relegated to history. EU leaders’ views are converging toward a pragmatic European solution. A proposal backed by construction lobbies foresees the construction of 26 brand new EU Parliaments in all the 26 EU countries that have not yet been blessed with the EU democracy experience. A 6 months rotation is foreseen. The proposal has received widespread support from MEPs but discussions are still undergoing in relation to the French proposal codenamed "eat local" which will force every EP cantine to serve exclusively local food, in the spirit of the exception culturelle.
4) EU leaders backed Commissioner Kroes' proposal to develop an "EU Cloud". For reasons of fairness, the cloud will be located over the skies of Malta, Greece, Cyprus and Southern Italy. This is also in view of starting the harmonization of EU citizens’ sun tan.
5) The principle of subsidiarity will be modified in order for the EU to excercize more control over former exclusive Member State competencies. EC officials, for instance, will have a say in the formation of national majority coalitions whenever democratic elections in Member States fail to deliver expected results.
6) An antidumping investigation, backed by Finland, will soon commence in order to verify the level of injury to EU industry caused by a surge in the import of iPhones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones. DG Trade officials maintain that unfair competition from smartphones imported at a price below their normal value had already forced Nokia to preemptively renounce to every form of R&D investment. “When already anticipated back in 1999 that these days were coming” - a Nokia manager explained at a hearing - “we decided that investments on R&D would have been useless anyway. We saved some money and people were happy. Now that our products suck, we demand the EC to step in."
7) EU citizenship will be revoked for all cases in which an EU citizen aged 30 or above fails to demonstrate that, in the course of his/her life, he/she had an affair with at least two nationals of other Member States. The score of a relationship with a national of one of the accessing countries will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
8) Discussions on the accession of Iceland are informally suspended. They will resume on January 2060, when whales will be extinct.
