Brussels Edition: Soviet-Style Planning

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As Soviet as it sounds, the European Union works with five-year plans. This morning, the bloc’s envoys in Brussels begin a three-day marathon session to debate the EU’s strategic agenda for 2019-2024. The five-page draft we’ve seen builds on the platitudes leaders agreed to at their Summit in Romania last month. You would be excused for dismissing it as just another gab-fest if it didn’t feed into discussions for the allocation of the bloc’s next trillion-euro budget — so there’s a lot at stake. Two things stand out in the draft: a fortress-Europe approach to migration and the explicit acknowledgement that climate change is now an “existential threat.”