* The EU was set to stop changing its clocks in 2021, but then came Brexit, the pandemic, and some messy international bureaucracy.
Lots of people hate changing their clocks when daylight saving time begins in March, but the European Union seemed prepared to do more than just complain about it: In March 2019, the European Parliament voted to dispense entirely with biannual clock changes.
A continent full of people — tired of being plunged into early evening darkness in the fall and then having an hour of precious life yanked from their existence in the spring — were looking forward to the last year ever for moving to the eight-month-long DST period in the EU this month. Countries opting to keep to summer time would ‘spring forward’ for the final time in March, while those that preferred the winter schedule would carry out their last clock change in October.
In the US, a similar move to break the much-despised clock-changing habit has been advanced by a bipartisan group of senators, whose ‘Sunshine Protection Act of 2021’ would make year-round DST the law of the land. State-level measures along those lines have passed in California, Florida and many other states. The arguments for abolishing the practice, which emerged in the early 20th century as a means of saving energy by shifting working hours to follow the sun, are many and varied: The disruptive effects of the twice-a-year time change have been linked to higher rates of car crashes, workplace injuries, street crime, heart attacks and general crankiness.
But as the European experience shows, killing daylight saving time isn’t easy. This month, EU residents will turn their clocks forward across the continent (on March 28, two weeks after the US) without any confirmation that the practice will be abandoned next — or any — year. So what went wrong?
The main culprit for the delay is arguably the pandemic, possibly with a small side order of Brexit. The issue’s tortuous passage through the complicated mechanisms of the EU also demonstrates how easily decisions in that institution can get gummed up in the gears of international bureaucracy if there’s no one pushing hard for progress.
After the European Parliament’s vote, the change was supposed to be implemented following agreement from the European Council, the EU steering body comprised mainly of heads of state. The Council, however, then bounced the issue onto the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, saying that it couldn’t push the change through until the commission had conducted an impact assessment. The commission has in turn insisted that, no, the sticking issue is in fact the council, which needs to thrash out a common position first. The result is stalemate.
The logjam could be broken pretty easily, but Europe’s governments currently have bigger fish to fry. Over the past 12 months, EU states have been too preoccupied trying to stem the transmission of coronavirus and keeping health systems and economies propped up to worry much about daylight saving.
Brexit has added another layer of complication to the picture. Now that the U.K. is no longer a member of the union, it has no immediate plans to give up daylight saving within its borders (though the idea also has wide support there). So if Ireland follows the rest of the EU in abandoning daylight saving, it risks creating two different times on the island for half the year — one in the Republic and one in British-governed Northern Ireland.
A solution to this would be to align Northern Ireland’s time with the Republic’s, but that would grate on many Northern Irish unionists, who would now find themselves chronologically out of step with England, Scotland and Wales. This could be fixed easily if the U.K. followed the EU — but that is something that its current government have little inclination or motivation to do.
Even without these complications, getting rid of the timeshift would take some negotiation. As in the US, different geographies might favor summer or winter time. (Most of Arizona and all of Hawaii — two US states that aren’t hurting for sunshine — currently opt out of of DST entirely, as do several US territories.) While this is theoretically possible in Europe, it could get extremely complicated, with permanent time differences between countries dictated not by geography or alignment with current time zones, but by consumer choice. As the EU already straddles three time zones, the results could be madness.
While permanent summer time is generally the most popular option in opinion polls — just under 60% of French people favor it, for example — northern countries tend to be more divided. Sleep researchers in Sweden, for example, warn that opting for brighter evenings over mornings could have a negative effect on sleep patterns. The idea that an EU nation was obliged to agree to a particular choice to stand in harmony with the rest of the union would be one likely to rile populists, who already like to falsely categorize the EU as a dictatorship as it is. This isn’t enough to dissuade action, but it certainly helps put clock changes to the back of the queue.
Having said that, many countries bordering the EU, including Turkey, Russia and Belarus, have already ditched daylight saving without unleashing pandemonium. Iceland, meanwhile, sprang forward for the last time in 1968, though the notion of re-implementing DST has periodically reemerged. At its far-northern latitude, the hours of daylight swing so wildly from season to season that turning the clock back or forward an hour would be a little pointless. (As this viral video from 2009 illustrates, some Icelanders have passionate feelings on the topic.)
It’s hard to say if time is truly running out for daylight saving, though the fact that killing it off may be the only issue that truly enjoys bipartisan support in the US Congress offers a sense of its widespread unpopularity. In Europe, clock-changing will linger on at least another year. But the larger movement among governments and public health experts to abandon the practice seems to gaining momentum. One day, the continent will not be jolted by abrupt shifts of time in spring and autumn — and will likely be ever so slightly healthier and happier for it. That day’s just not coming this month.