Mamma and Nurse went out one day,
And left Pauline alone at play;
Around the room she gaily sprung,
Clapp’d her hands, and danced, and sung.
Now, on the table close at hand,
A box of matches chanced to stand,
And kind Mamma and Nurse had told her,
That if she touched them they would scold her;
But Pauline said, "Oh, what a pity!
For, when they burn, it is so pretty;
They crackle so, and spit, and flame;
And Mamma often burns the same.
I’ll just light a match or two
As I have often seen my mother do."
(Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter)

The "The Sad Tale of the Matchbox" - now a century and a half old - may not deal specifically with cigarette lighters, but it remains highly topical just the same. Not long ago, the subject of lighters was even raised in the Federal Assembly in Berlin. There, the federal German states were to have implemented a new ordinance designed in Brussels as part of German law. The regulation on lighters prescribed that throughout Europe, disposable cigarette lighters would have to be child-safe - at least the cheap plastic variety careless parents tend to leave lying around, the kind with which small children like to play. As far as the technology goes, it is rather simple to construct a lighter in such a way that tiny thumbs are unable to ignite it, although this raises prices by a couple of cents or so.

Yet in the Federal Assembly on October 13, the planned regulation turned out to be a non-starter. “Excessive regulation, an out-of-control bureaucracy,” fumed Emilia Müller, Bavaria’s Minister to the EU, when the relevant agenda item, number 33, came up for a vote. Utterly exorbitant test procedures were prescribed, or so she claimed, requiring the participation of 100 children no older than 51 months of age. These stipulated that two children be present in a room, and even the distance separating their chairs was specified, as Emilia Müller pointed out scornfully. In her opinion, none of this had anything to do with “the real lives of actual people living in this country”. Bureaucracy from the green table in Brussels. We intend to resist, said the Minister.

How courageous! Ms. Müller had shielded Germans from the Brussels bureaucracy, from those highly-paid officials who spend all day sitting in their offices, finding nothing better to do with their time than conjure up absurd regulations such as those prescribing the curvature of cucumbers and the sizes of tractor seats. And one can already imagine the fists banging on the regular’s tables if Germany had actually introduced child-safe cigarette lighters at the behest of Brussels, if they had actually been tested on a hundred children perched on tiny chairs separated by exactly 2 meters. What nonsense – don’t these people have anything better to do? And don't children play with matches as well? Shouldn’t they be made child-safe?

Emilia Müller apparently succeeded in persuading her Bavarian colleagues to such a degree that the majority voted, without even posing questions, against the regulations. And this despite the fact that just a few days earlier, all of the relevant expert bodies of the General Assembly had approved the lighter regulations, including the supervisory Committee for Labour and Social Policy. The committee’s active chairperson, Christa Stewens, is also a Bavarian minister, and sits together with Emilia Müller at the Cabinet table in Munich. They have never, one assumes, spoken about disposable lighters.

If nothing else occurs to you, the Commissar of German Industry Günter Verheugen once said, then lambast Europe. The bureaucracy in Brussels lends itself to such bad-mouthing, for the Commission’s spacious office palace "Berlaymont" on Rond-Point Schuman in Brussels’ European Quarter is seen as an oasis of mushrooming regulations. National politicians enjoy pouring scorn onto the commission and stylising themselves - like Emilia Müller - as defenceless victims of bureaucrats with a mania for regulation. In the end, most citizens are totally unaware of the fact that many regulations and guidelines are not hashed out at "Berlaymont" at all, but rather in Paris, Madrid or Berlin. The notorious safety rule concerning tractor seats, for example, originated some years ago in Germany, where a Bavarian manufacturer had invented a particularly safe model, and hoped the new guideline would help him to market his product more effectively.

As a matter of fact, the curvature of cucumbers and the sizes of apples are specified. But the ideal dimensions, etc., are by no means prescribed by the Commission. They are based, instead, on worldwide standards designed to simplify commerce.

And when Commissar Verheugen tried to eliminate ordinances controlling packaging, deeming them superfluous, the government in Paris lodged a protest. The French insisted that milk, sugar, and instant coffee had to be sold in bags and jars that were standardized throughout Europe – because it simplifies things for industry.

In many cases, granted, only a small step separates well-intended consumer protection from burdensome over-regulation. With its guidelines on sun screens, for instance, the Commission wanted to require masons and landscapers to wear a fairly ludicrous type of hat. In the final analysis, it is reasonable to expect that adults will know enough to apply sun block or wear a cap.

But are child-safe lighters really an instance of superfluous bureaucratic paternalism? Do they represent an excessive burden on manufacturers?

The saga of 2006/502/EC, of the "Commission Decision of 11 May 2006 requiring member states to take measures to ensure that only lighters which are child-resistant are placed on the market and to prohibit the placing on the market of novelty lighters" – in brief: the regulations on cigarette lighters – begins in 1998. Back then, the Commission asked experts at the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) to develop standards for child-safe lighters. There was nothing unusual about that – the EU has the authority to set standards for certain products, provided they protect consumers.

There were good reasons for officials at the Directorate for Consumer Protection to take up the question of lighters: as early as 1993, the USA began requiring that disposable lighters be "child resistant" (just as Canada, Australia and New Zealand would do not long after). Meaning that they must be difficult enough to use that small children are incapable of lighting them.

It took three years, in any event, for the European standard "EN 13869" to reach completion. This fact has less to do with the Brussels bureaucracy than with the convoluted coordinating procedures taking place in the Rue de Stassart, where the CEN is located: conferring there are the 19 different national institutes on standards - among them the German Institute for Standardization (DIN).

Again and again, the experts from the member nations are consulted in order to insure that in the end, no one disagrees. This interminable process it designed to prevent any one individual member nation from declining to adopt a standard for technology-related reasons.

The Europeans are disinclined to engage in experimentation; instead, they have decoded to orient their own measures to the US-American norm. These specify that lighters costing less than two dollars (in Europe, the limit is two euros) must be provided with child safety features. No one is interested in regulating expensive silver Cartier lighters, since their owners tend to return them quickly to their jacket pockets after use. The definition of "child safe" is very specific: in a test involving one hundred children younger than 51 months of age, at most 15 should be capable of striking a flame.

In 2001, when the EN 13869 standard was completed, a new club, the "Association of European Importers of Cigarette Lighters," or "Elias" for short, was founded on the initiative of a Hamburg firm that imports disposable lighters from China. At their first meeting, held in a dignified hotel salon in Frankfurt, the ladies and gentlemen in attendance made no bones about their aims: they meant to provide a counterweight to the manufacturers of lighters. As it happens, the manufacturers lobby is in favour of stricter standards, and regard the Commission’s efforts as laudable. Soon thereafter, representatives of Elias were seen frequently in Brussels, and conspicuous numbers of reps of Chinese manufacturers could be observed hanging around the capitals of the member states. As they like to explain to the responsible officials, the standards covering lighters would – by discriminating against cheap Chinese wares - constitute an infringement of free trade. They are agitating to have the standards modified or else scrapped altogether. The lobbyists’ offensive has begun.

With far-reaching consequences. When the Commission wants to issue prescriptions determining which conditions a product must fulfil, they publish a so-called "harmonized standard." But Brussels cannot do so in the case of lighters, because suddenly member states are lodging protests. They are bothered by the test procedures. The experts at the CEN and at the Commission can hardly believe their ears. These days, they are hearing the same arguments from the EU member states that were raised earlier by the importer's lobby: over using 100 children in the tests, over predetermining the distance between chairs, over the criterion which specifies that at least 85 children must be unable to light a flame, over the supposed fact that all of this is far too expensive and far too complicated for manufacturers.

Too expensive? Bic, the French manufacturer of disposable lighters which leads the market worldwide, has long produced for the US-American market, and has therefore been producing child safe lighters since 1993. Of course, as explained by Bic at Clichy-la-Garenne near Paris, child safety measures raise production costs. Incidentally, Bic child-proofs their lighters by using special cogs that are difficult for children’s thumbs to rotate. But the test procedure needs to be run only once for each model, which can hardly be said to present insurmountable difficulties. Too complicated? In the meantime, test groups with children are common worldwide. According to consumer protection advocates, there is simply no other way of reliably testing whether a given product is safe for children or not. The same is done, for example, in the case of the lids or caps on bottles containing chemicals or medicines.

The Commission must submit to the veto of its member states. So, a billion or so disposable lighters lacking child safety features still flood onto the European market every year.

Yet in 2004, the United States published the latest statistics regarding fires caused by children playing with lighters. According to these figures, the number of dead and injured children was roughly 60% down from 1993, that is to say, before childproof lighters were legally mandated. Back then, there were an estimated 5,000 fires, with 170 deaths and 1,150 injuries involving children younger than five years of age.

At the same time, in 2004, the new EU guidelines on product safety came into effect. They simplified the process by which Brussels has the authority, in urgent cases, to ban specific products for one or more years. In this case, the Commission can even go a step further by compelling member states to accept the product standardization as regulatory law. This it does only in extremely rare cases - only in three instances to date. But urgency is indeed present, it has been decided in Brussels, in view of the 30 to 40 children dying annually within the territory of the European Union who played with lighters (the figures are an extrapolation of the annual average of five documented cases of such deaths occurring in Great Britain).

The Commission has now firmly resolved to ban cigarette lighters lacking child safety features. It is engaging in a renewed attempt, one that is being shot down yet again by several member states in the EU committee responsible for product safety. This time, they are disturbed by the two-euro limit. Cigarette lighters costing less than two euros must fulfil the new standards. Experts chose a price limit because it's simpler to deal with than technical descriptions of lighter constructions. Commission experts designed a new regulation, number 2006/502/EC. Finally, the committee composed of experts from the responsible national ministries have reached an agreement.

The new ordinance will be published by the Commission in May 2006. At that point, as stipulated by the European covenants, it must be implemented by the member states in individual national regulatory statutes. This they are expected to do by September 11, 2006. Eight months later, all disposable lighters failing to conform to Commission requirements should have vanished from the market. Over the summer, requirements for child-safe lighters will be adopted by 19 EU nations.

On October 13, when Bavaria sabotaged the German regulations on lighters in the Federal Assembly, there was consternation in Brussels. No one is surprised to learn that the Bavarian minister Emilia Müller claims that Germany's citizens are being harmed by excessive bureaucracy from Brussels. After all, they hear this sort of thing every day. But they cannot understand why Ms. Müller is badmouthing internationally-recognized testing procedures. Still, the criticisms themselves are familiar, since they are identical with the arguments trotted out by the lobbyists. In the meantime, Commission officials and experts from the Institute of standards have been making an effort to convince German politicians of the soundness of the proposed guidelines. They are unlikely to find themselves short of arguments.

PS.: On November 12, as reported in the newspaper Dagblad van het Noorden, a four-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister were seriously injured in an apartment fire in a Rotterdam suburb. A helicopter rushed the children to a hospital, where both died. An inquiry determined that they have been playing with a cigarette lighter.

*

This article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on December 2, 2006.

Dr. Jeanne Rubner is editor for Western European politics and the EU at the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

translation: Ian Pepper