Welcome to Wider Europe, RFE/RL's newsletter focusing on the key issues concerning the European Union, NATO, and other institutions and their relationships with the Western Balkans and Europe's Eastern neighborhoods.
I'm RFE/RL Europe Editor Rikard Jozwiak and, this week, a slight break from the usual program to answer a burning question: What actually happens in Brussels during the summer?
How Brussels Functions During Its Long Summer Vacation
I got an out-of-office reply from a European Commission official the other day, saying that he will be back in the office on September 3. Given that this e-mail enquiry was sent in mid-July, that is quite some summer vacation. But then again, this is Brussels, and I've grown used to it over the years covering the European Union and NATO.
If there is one date that Brussels types (and I include myself in this) universally recognize as important, it's July 21. Why? Well, firstly, because it is Belgian National Day, so there's a public holiday with evening fireworks and fairground attractions in many of the city's parks. But more importantly, it is considered to be the "cutoff day" for officials and bureaucrats, a "mental vacation signpost" of sorts.
Granted, this year, EU ambassadors of the 27 member states are still meeting on July 26, and the bloc's agriculture ministers are also convening in the Belgian capital the day before. But otherwise, everyone in the Brussels bubble knows that by July 21, the working desks should be cleared, flip-flops and swimwear packed, and all outstanding political issues resolved. Because nothing really happens in the EU until September 1. No summits, no council meetings, no European Parliament plenaries or committees, no diplomatic or official gatherings. Go to Brussels' EU quarter, about a square kilometer or two of modern office buildings in concrete and glass roughly in between the airport and the historical city center, in August and you'll find a ghost town.
In Europe, this is not considered particularly extraordinary. Many national parliaments have recesses that stretch into several weeks over the summer -- often to coincide with school holidays that in most EU member states run for a good chunk of July and all of August. EU legislation mandates that all member states must grant all workers a minimum of four weeks paid vacation per year -- many companies and state institutions across the EU offer more. In EU institutions, officials often also get perks such as "travel days" to and from their home country; staff often accumulate enough free days to cover well over a month.
One justification for the longer vacations that you often hear from Brussels types is that it makes economic sense. I can't prove that the numbers stack up, but looking at the most visited countries in the world by tourists, France and Spain top the list and another four EU member states make the top 10. Tourism -- and the whole service-sector infrastructure built around it -- is crucial for so many EU countries' GDP. Or as one Brussels official wryly remarked to me just before jetting off, "It's my European solidaric duty to go to the Mediterranean and spend, spend, spend."
The long Brussels break can, however, cause some bemusement around the world, as international crises don't just stop because EU officials are on the beach or hiking in the Alps. One Brussels old-timer put it succinctly: "Countries and leaders who want to make mischief know that the best time to strike is around Christmas or in late July/August. We just pay less attention."
In fact, foreign policy issues almost always disrupt EU officials' vacations. Just look at the last three years. In 2020, it was the rigged presidential election in Belarus and the subsequent crackdown on demonstrators. In 2021, the Taliban took over Kabul and Western countries had to scramble to evacuate personnel from Afghanistan. And last year, there was much debate in the countries bordering Russia -- notably the Baltic trio and Finland -- about limiting or even prohibiting the entry of Russian holidaymakers from coming to places like Helsinki and Tallinn in order to head south to the bloc's warmer climes. Despite the absences, the EU reacted relatively quickly to all three events, organizing quick meetings with key officials, putting out timely statements, and eventually coming up with policy proposals.
But perhaps the most glaring example of an August mishap, in which the EU was caught completely flat-footed, was the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. It was my first summer in Brussels as a journalist and I remember the EU response as being pretty chaotic. The bloc's foreign ministers met in Brussels shortly after the war and couldn't really agree on anything, as they were so divided on how to deal with Russia. No sanctions were imposed on the Kremlin -- in fact, they couldn't even agree on suspending talks on a new EU-Russia partnership agreement that was in the works at the time or even whether to send a monitoring mission to observe the cease-fire.
It ended up with the French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, getting involved in cease-fire negotiations, while the leaders of the three Baltic states and Poland (as well as non-EU member Ukraine) rushed to Tbilisi to show support. In short, it was a mess, and, in the end, Brussels failed to enact any meaningful and coherent measures as a response to the war.
The experience of the Georgia war was, however, a catalyst for a rethink on how the bloc should function in the dog days of summer. Two years after the Georgia war, the creation of the EU's diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service, has undoubtedly improved the strategic thinking and coordination in the bloc.
But perhaps the biggest boon for European diplomatic coordination has been technological progress. Today, all EU officials are glued to their smartphones, many communicating in Signal or WhatsApp groups. That, combined with online meeting platforms such as Teams or Zoom, the use of which was perfected during the coronavirus years, means that officials and bureaucrats are much more flexible and able to discuss and then approve a statement even from a Tuscan farmhouse or the wilds of the North Sea coast.
What hasn't changed is that EU officials (or their deputies) still have to meet physically in Brussels to enact policy, for example, imposing sanctions. Member states' ambassadors to the EU can, however, make those decisions without ministers in the related policy fields. With a green light from their respective capitals, they can make decisions -- such as sanctions or, to use a recent example, green-lighting more money to Ukraine -- via the so-called "written procedure," meaning that they give their OK within a certain time limit, usually a day. They can also utilize the "silent procedure," which means something is considered passed in the Council of the European Union -- where the 27 EU member states meet and make decisions, usually by unanimity on foreign-policy-related issues -- unless a country breaks the silence within a set period of time.
But what about NATO, the other giant institution in the Belgian capital? It tends to have a bit more of an "American" flavor to it, in this case, meaning shorter vacations. The North Atlantic Council, the military alliance's main decision-making body, continues its meetings into August, although it does usually take a two-week break in the middle of the month.
In the almost-empty offices of the European Union, there are a few unfortunate officials left to run the show. One official I spoke to said they will try to take online language classes this summer, if time allows. Another has an even more ambitious goal: reading up on all the thousands of pages of legal acts that constitute the EU's 11 sanctions packages imposed on Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
For journalists, it can be a similar story. Apart from preparing future obituaries of EU leaders, my favorite memory was discovering the sometimes absurd artwork in the European Parliament building. (One notable example is a giant metal horse given to the parliament by the former and late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.) I even witnessed the sprucing up of the European Parliament's Tree of Integration -- a six-story staircase bedecked with a tangle of connected iron bars. Once a year, a cleaner is equipped with a feather duster and tasked with giving it a rubdown. Quite a spectacle.
Looking Ahead
As mentioned above, not much is happening in Brussels this week, but EU ambassadors are still meeting and could potentially make some key decisions. One is that they could give a green light to more sanctions on Belarus. A proposal to hit the Lukashenka regime harder was put forward in January but has been blocked, mainly by Lithuania, as it also contained sanctions derogations for Belarusian potassium.
The mineral is one of the main sources of income for the Belarusian regime, and if it was allowed to be transported again, it would most likely cross Lithuanian territory, something Vilnius is firmly against. This new package is smaller and only really suggests tightening screws on Belarusian aviation and battlefield components. Crucially, it doesn't contain any opt-outs, including for potassium, for already sanctioned products, meaning that Vilnius can probably give its thumbs-up.
Another possible EU decision could be the cancellation of asset freezes and visa bans on some of the over 1,800 mostly Russian individuals and companies the EU has targeted since the invasion of Ukraine last year. The EU's legal service has identified a few weak cases, meaning that Brussels most likely doesn't have enough evidence that these individuals legally can be said to contribute to the "destabilization of Ukraine's territorial integrity."
These are individuals or companies that EU lawyers have likely determined would be cleared of wrongdoing if they challenged the sanctions in the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, the bloc's supreme court in terms of EU law. According to my sources who are familiar with the talks but not authorized to speak on the record, two or three people could very well be delisted already this week.
This is all a long way of saying that it's also my time to take a short summer break -- and, of course, contribute to Greece's GDP! The next newsletter will appear on August 14.
Feel free to reach out to me on any of these issues on Twitter @RikardJozwiak, or on e-mail at jozwiakr@rferl.org.
Until next time,
Rikard Jozwiak
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