EU leaders race to secure two trillion euro budget deal

The crisis arrived on a timeline that assumed institutions capable of processing it at a speed they last achieved when a treaty could be drafted, ratified and forgotten within a single ministerial career. The institutions, naturally, processed it at the speed they are equipped for, which is the speed of a previous era, and so on Thursday the leaders of the European Union sat down to divide nearly two trillion euros among years that have not yet occurred, on behalf of governments that may not survive to spend them.

The multiannual budget is an elegant machine, and it is worth admiring before measuring its failure. Its whole purpose is to defeat time. Seven years, 2028 through 2034, are fixed in advance so that farmers, regions, laboratories and border agencies may plan without consulting the weather of each national election. The device was built on a sound premise: politics is volatile, so lock the money up before the volatility can reach it. Its defenders will say, with real force, that the more turbulent the electorate, the more necessary the lock. That is the strongest case against my complaint, and I take it seriously.

But a lock works only if it closes before the burglar arrives. The trouble is lead time. To bind the years 2028 to 2034, the Union must begin bargaining years beforehand, and the bargaining now takes longer than the political weather stays constant. The volatility that the framework was designed to keep outside has walked into the negotiating room and taken a chair. France votes before the first euro of this budget is disbursed. Every leader at the table knows it, and every leader therefore negotiates with two counterparts: the French president present, and the French president possible. The second never speaks, yet sets the terms, because any concession made now must be one that a eurosceptic successor cannot easily disown.

Here the dynamo shows itself. The accelerating force is not money, of which there is a great deal, nor even nationalism, of which there has always been a great deal. It is the shortening of the political half-life relative to the instruments meant to outlast it. A generation ago the interval between agreeing a budget and spending it was a quiet stretch in which governments changed politely and successors honoured the bargain out of habit. That interval has not grown shorter. The habit has.

The Union’s response follows the usual law. When an institution senses its tempo slipping, it does not accelerate; it adds a deadline. Christmas has been nominated for the purpose. One pictures a deputy director in a Brussels annex, coat over the back of his chair, revising a spreadsheet of cohesion allocations at eleven at night while a paper star someone taped to the window turns slowly in the draught from the radiator. He is a capable man, educated for a world in which a deadline concentrated minds. In this one, a deadline mostly concentrates leverage. Whoever is willing to let it pass, and whoever expects to gain from the delay, holds the stronger hand. If eurosceptic parties expect to grow stronger, the rational strategy for their sympathisers in present governments is to be slow. No one need sabotage anything. The calendar does the work.

That is the entropy, measured as plainly as I can measure it. Disorder in the system is no longer produced chiefly by disagreement about money, which bargaining can settle. It is produced by disagreement about who will be in the room to honour the bargain, which bargaining cannot settle at all. Unanimity, the old safeguard of sovereign equals, compounds the problem: the Union now needs the consent not of twenty-seven governments but of twenty-seven governments discounted by the probability of their own replacement.

I do not conclude that the leaders are foolish, or that the framework should be abandoned. Fools would at least be easier to forecast. I conclude that the seven-year horizon, invented to make the Union slower than its politics, has become slower than its politics in the wrong sense: it is no longer an anchor dragging against the current but a long boat that cannot turn in a river that now bends faster than it was built to steer.

Somewhere before Christmas, perhaps, a figure will be agreed and announced, and the leaders will shake hands for the cameras. The photographers should take care to capture every face. The money is fixed until 2034; the faces are guaranteed for considerably less.