Happy Holidays, Europe! It’s that time of year again: time for the annual Christmas letter you didn’t ask for and probably won’t read — even though it’s super-important and relevant to you, the European citizen.
That means it’s time to reflect, take stock and take note of everything that’s happened over the past 12 months, or “two semesters” as we call it here at home. Time to count our many blessings — and then have that count audited and submitted to a trilogue, where it will be quietly adjusted. Time to sing our favorite Christmas carols, like “(I’m Drafting Up A) White Paper,” “Joy to the Regions” and “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before we start with the holiday wishes, we need to do a full recounting — a tour-de-table, if you will — of everything we did this year. Just kidding! We know how much you enjoy these annual updates but this year we’ve decided to summarize, be brief, be concise, be focused, and keep it to just four pages. Single spaced. Both sides. If you have any suggestions or comments please use track changes.
We started the year as we always do: with a work program! We’re sure we don’t need to remind you what each of our plans and proposals was in this year’s program, but we can assure you they were comprehensive, achievable, sustainable and smart.
It seems like only yesterday we were listening to Grandpa give his traditional “State of the Union” speech about how everyone was going to have to do more with less. But we knew he was, as usual, only half-joking.
It hasn’t all been wonderful this year, of course. We’ve had to deal with our little troublemakers.
He really meant we could keep going big on the small things, like what time of day it is in summer or winter in various countries. Because you wanted it, we’re moving from a system that may be annoying but is fairly standard to one that says, “It’s summertime all the time, except where it isn’t. Now go to work in the dark.”
Even if that had been the Commission’s only achievement of 2018, it would have been a memorable year. Right? In any case, we can report that grandpa’s been doing great. Apart from a few flare-ups of his sciatica — wink! wink! — he’s been full of good cheer.
We’re also very proud of young Martin, who got a great promotion this year to a job he was born to do: running everything! We shouldn’t brag, but it was obvious there was never any question of anybody else beating him out for the position. You might have expected some kind of political scandal or public outcry that the promotion wasn’t handled fairly, but no! Pretty much everyone was cool with it. One can only imagine what Martin’s next step will be in life… Hashtag blessed!
Summits! How could we forget those? We had so many of them and the memories are still… vivid: There was one in February and one in March. And there was one in June. And one in September, and October and December! There may have been others but you get the idea! And the list of accomplishments from these meetings speaks for itself.
For the EU, 2018 was definitely another year.
Still, we don’t want to give the impression it isn’t good to see all of you so often throughout the course of the year, especially since you never call? And even if the dinner-table discussions can get … awkward.
It hasn’t all been wonderful this year, of course. We’ve had to deal with our little troublemakers. Viktor keeps getting away with everything! And Theresa, well, she’ll be leaving home soon — we think! — and seems to have her life all planned out. We hope she’ll be able to visit, but you know how hard it is to stay in touch across borders these days.
Anyhoo, we could go on like this for a lot longer, and you’ll see in the annexes that we have done just that. But in this kind of “executive summary” we can only say that, for the EU, 2018 was definitely another year.
Happy Holidays and all the best for the 2019 — a year that, apart from the possibility of a disruptive Europe-wide election, a Brexit-induced economic downturn and the rise of the robots, promises to be filled with peace and joy!
P.S. You may have noticed we did not send our traditional fruitcake this year. We’ve decided there are too many nuts around this place already, ha-ha!
Craig Winneker is director of communications for ePURE, the European renewable ethanol association and a former news editor with POLITICO.