An occasional entry in a series on why Europe can be unfairly maligned,
Gunther Verheugen, the powerful German commissioner for industry, has been in the headlines this week. Photographs have been circulated that show him holding hands with his assistant on a nude beach in Lithuania. The German media have leapt on the story; his wife has told reporters she knew of the trip. Both assistant and Verheugen deny an affair. They are acknowledged though in Brussels to be very close, and that you cannot get through to him without first passing through her. It has been speculated that the story of their close relationship was brought to the attention of the press by EU officials enraged at his recent strong attacks on the regulating instincts of the EU bureaucracy. Which brings us to the subject of this post.
There is a good argument - and Verheugen makes it frequently - that says that Europe wants to introduce too much regulation. It doesn't follow that all the regulation it wishes to introduce is poor and superfluous.
In some cases Europe wants to introduce entirely sensible regulation which is banned by veto-holding member states, the result of which being that Europe can have poorer rules on a subject than the US.
This is not a Europhile screed. Sometimes EU regulations can be absurd. For instance, the law on protection from optical radiation - sunlight to you and me - which would have required builders and masons to wear a fairly ridiculous shape of hat. Another rule concerned the ideal ergonomic shape of a farmer's tractor seat.
But these overreported examples must not obscure the fact that sometimes governments are responsible for foisting legislation on the commission - those seats were a German - and other times, goivernments are reactionary when it comes to sensible laws, the stupidity of which decision is obscured by clouds of euroscepticm unfairly targeted blather.
Consider the example of cheap disposal lighter and children's safety. (Cheap lights, under two euross, since dear ones pose little threat: Cartier lighters fall beyond regulation, since their owners reintrudce the implement into their pockets quickly after use.)
Europe does not have child proof lighters. The US does. They are cheap, the modification costing only a few more cents, and they save lives. In 2004, the number of children who died from fires in the USA was down 60 percent on 1993, the year the regulations were introduced: in that latter year there were an estimated 5,000 fires, with 170 deaths and 1,150 injuries involving children younger than five years of age. Since then, Australia, Canada and New Zealand followed suit. Not Europe, though.
Why? Because domestic importers intervened to put pressure on national governments. The regulations that require childproof safety catch for cheap lighters woulkd discriminate against lighters from China, which lack such a feature. Brussels is replete with lobbies and special interest groups, from the inernational timber association to the association of international bus manufacturers. In 2001 one of the more abstruse members of the club was formed, the "Association of European Importers of Cigarette Lighters," or "Elias" for short, was founded on the initiative of a Hamburg firm that imports disposable lighters from China. Their motive was simple: to oppose legislation that could harm their business prospects.
At their first meeting, held in a hotel in Frankfurt, the ladies and gentlemen in attendance made no bones about their aims. Chinese commercial representatives started visiting member state capitals, complaining that the regulation harmed free trade. Their anxiety was based on the following Hobson's choice. Raising the prices beyond the limit of 2 euros at which safety catches did not need to be installed would erose the competitive price advantage with manufacturers in Europe and Japan; installing the safety catches, while only a few cents, would first require buying expensive patents - and these were held by European firms. Either way, the Chinese would be in trouble, Towns such as Wenzhou, with 200 manufacturers made over 850 million lighters annually, provided Europe with 80 percent of its imports. The importers' lobby went into action. Not by apppealing to European alytruism towards manufacturing towns in China, but to euroscepticism about Brussels bureaucracy.
And the results were soon on display.
When the commission wanted to publish its paper on harmornised standards, they came up against objections from national capitals. The testing requirements for the new lighters were too complex, absurd. The test for child proof standards required 100 children no older than 51 months of age, no more two children present in the same room, even the minimum space between their chairs was specified. A lighter passed the test if 85 out of the 100 children couldn't light it up. Bavaria's minister for Europe had a field day when she presented the testing requirements to the Bavarian parliament in October, scoffing at these symptoms of “Excessive regulation, an out-of-control bureaucracy”, she scornfully pointed out how little this had to so with "normal people living normal lives in this country". And promised to take the battle to her government, who would take it to Brussels. The commission had been presented with the "overly bureaucratic" argument before, in direct representations from the importers' lobby.
But are these tests really so ridiculous? In fact, Bic at Clichy-la-Garenne near Paris has been carrying out these tests since 1993, since as the world's largest manufacturer of disposable lighters it caters also to the American market. The tests are not so onerous since they only have to be conducted once for each model; and such scientific testing is standard in all manufacturing areas where there is consumer protection - in medicine packaging for instance, when making childproof caps.
But the commission must submit to the member states veto, and still a billion or so lighters without safety mechanisms flood into Europe every year.
Unwitting though Bavarian ministers for Europe may be about this, there is a tradeoff between Chinese jobs and European child safety - and in this case the winners were Chinese jobs (and European importers.) But to say it onesidedly it is victory against against excessive regulation - when "pro business" America has had rules for 15 years on this - is, as must be evident, far too simplistic. A few weeks ago, in Holland a four-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister were seriously injured in an apartment fire in a Rotterdam suburb. A helicopter rushed the children to a hospital, where both died. An inquiry determined that they have been playing with a cigarette lighter.
