“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the European Commission.” As taglines go, it’s hardly original, but it’s what came into my head this past week when, speaking about the EU response to the refugee crisis, a Commission official declared at a briefing for the press: “We have moved with supersonic speed.”

This was a bold claim to make, particularly in the same week that the BBC launched a remake of the 1980s children’s television series "Danger Mouse." Was the Commission really putting itself on a par with that renowned fighter against international crime and experienced exponent of supersonic locomotion?

The official was specifically referring to steps the European commissioners approved last Wednesday to respond to the EU's refugee crisis. Those steps are worth examining in detail, because they tell us something about the constraints under which the EU is laboring, and the current mindset of the Commission.

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To be fair, Kristalina Georgieva, a vice president of the Commission who's responsible for the budget, was slightly more measured than her official, in her own assessment. The Commission had, she said, “acted quickly to align our resources with priorities, doubling the EU funds available to help refugees and the communities receiving them.”

But even that verdict teeters on the brink of misleading exaggeration: The available funds are not yet doubled, and the resources are not yet aligned. What the Commission did this week is a first step to achieving its aim, announced the previous week, to find a further €1.7 billion for the refugee crisis (€801 million in the 2015 budget and €900 million in the 2016 budget), to add to a total of about €6 billion for managing refugees and migrants in 2015-16. The Commission proposes to amend the EU’s budget for 2015, while also flagging its intention to change the draft budget for 2016 that was published earlier this year and is currently under negotiation with the member states and the European Parliament.

In putting together the amendment for 2015, the Commission went through the existing, approved, budget, to see which budget-lines looked as if they would remain under-spent at the end of the year. It is the institutional equivalent of checking your coat pockets and looking down the back of the sofa in a quest for spare change.

The search was apparently productive. Brussels reckons it can divert to the refugee crisis €400 million from the existing budget lines for foreign policy that cover similar purposes, or from emergency reserves.

And a hunt through the rest of the budget, across other policy areas, has also turned up tens of millions of euros. It helps, for example, that Europe hasn’t suffered too many earthquakes, floods, fires, and freak storms this year. So the Commission is proposing to raid the EU Solidarity Fund, which is supposed to help member states afflicted by such natural disasters. The calculation is that if there are disasters between now and the end of the year, the assistance will come out of the 2016 budget — a reasonable enough position given that the Council and Parliament are only now approving aid to Greece and Bulgaria for snowfall and floods suffered in January and February.

At the end of all that, the Commission’s proposal is to increase the budget for 2015 by €330.7 million and it will come up with a proposal in the next week or so to amend the draft budget for 2016 by €900 million.

Urgency at the speed of Brussels

Yet, for all the Commission’s claims that it is moving with great speed on the refugee crisis, it is striking that this proposed budget amendment is not about paying out money, but about preparing to make promises to pay. In the jargon of the EU, the increases are being made to the budget for "commitments" — promises to pay, which will not be turned into actual payments until next year at the earliest. The Commission is not seeking to increase the 2015 budget for payments (i.e. bills that will be presented and paid this year), though there will be advances paid to the Commission’s partners in providing emergency aid such as the Red Cross, World Food Programme and UNICEF.

Indeed, while the Commission gives the impression of being in a hurry, the primary reason for urgency is not a pile of unpaid bills, nor the hundreds of refugees landing each day on the Greek islands.

Rather, the sense of rushing to beat a deadline comes from the EU’s own unwieldy budget procedures. The Commission’s proposal to amend the budget for 2015 has to be approved by both the Council of Ministers (the member states) and the Parliament. Even the proposal to shift spending between foreign policy budget lines requires their approval, albeit the process is less onerous.

What haunts this procedure is the memory of last autumn, when amendments to the budget for 2014 were dragged into the bad-tempered negotiations between the Council and the Parliament over the draft budget for 2015. MEPs refused to agree on the relatively small changes to the 2014 budget, because they wanted leverage over the bigger deal — the annual budget for the following year. If this week’s proposal to increase funding for refugees is not agreed swiftly, so the Commission’s thinking goes, then it may get caught up in arguments over support to dairy farmers, or why the Parliament is refusing to cut staff numbers.

So, after the Commission’s scramble to prepare budget amendments at “supersonic” speed, the Commission now has to persuade the Council and the Parliament to move with similar urgency. The member states’ officials began a consideration of the proposed amendment on Thursday, to be continued on Monday, and if all goes well a decision might even be put to ministers next week. Georgieva presented her proposal to the budget committee of the Parliament on Wednesday, just after the college meeting of commissioners.

The most optimistic scenario is that the Parliament could vote on the proposal at a plenary meeting on October 14, just before the next EU summit on October 15-16 when national leaders will once again review the refugee crisis. The more pessimistic scenario is that the proposal lingers into November, when the negotiations on the 2016 budget intensify.

Activism deferred

This examination of the proposal and the budget procedures tells us something about the nature of the EU, beginning with an old lesson: The EU is ill-equipped for emergency action. The decision-making procedures are cumbersome and the traditional instruments of power — foot soldiers and independent sources of revenue — are missing.

The Commission is often misleadingly described as the executive arm of the EU, and indeed it is not in this case an institution with the independent power to make things happen.

Even if the Commission’s migration management proposal includes a request to authorize the creation of another 120 posts spread across Frontex (the EU’s border agency), the European Asylum Support Office, and Europol, that seems unlikely to transform these organizations from essentially coordinators and advisers into the European police, border or immigration forces that some fear and others desire.

The Commission is, for the most part, acting as an intermediary, channeling money to national administrations, to NGOs, and to the EU agencies. It does have some money under its direct control under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, with which it can respond to short-term emergencies, but most of that fund is distributed through shared management with national administrations. The Commission agrees programs and projects with the member states, which are then jointly funded. It follows the pattern, for instance, of the EU’s regional aid schemes.

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In times gone by, in response to a crisis as great as the one that has lately convulsed Europe, the Commission might well have sought to seize control and carve out a new role for itself. Obvious instances would be the fall of the Berlin Wall, the mad cow crisis, war in Bosnia, and the sinking of oil tankers off the French coast.

Across different policy areas, crises have been exploited by the Commission to build its remit.

But there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for such activism at the top of either the Commission or the Council, from either Jean-Claude Juncker or Donald Tusk. What we are now seeing is something much more subdued: a bureaucratic response that respects the constraints imposed by the EU’s member states. It may yet prove inadequate. By the standards of international bureaucracies, the Commission may be moving at above average speed, but it hardly constitutes competition for Danger Mouse.

Tim King writes POLITICO's Brussels Sketch.