Ideas on Europe Blog

Given the amount of political anguish caused already by the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) since its conception during the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) talks, it might seem odd to write today about one provision that can’t be used until late 2024 at the earliest.

However, the Art.18 provisions on consent represent a key safeguard for the Protocol’s long-term survival, whatever comes of the endless debate about what should happen.

As a reminder, the NIP can only be amended or revoked by the joint agreement of the signatories – the EU and the UK – something that appears deeply unlikely, either now or for the foreseeable future. Likewise, the Art.16 provision on safeguards only allows for a temporary and limited suspension of some parts of the NIP while the signatories find a solution: as discussed elsewhere, it’s not a unilateral (or long-term) solution.

So the only mechanism available to just one party to make a lasting change to the Protocol is Art.18.

As the graphic below sets out, the Northern Ireland Assembly gets to vote in late 2024 on whether to continue the main substantive elements of the NIP (excluding citizens’ rights) for another four years (eight if majorities of both unionist and nationalist designated MLAs can be found).

This not only accords with the intention of the Good Friday Agreement to make the Northern Irish the deciders of their situation, but also provides a way for both the EU and London [sic] to distance themselves from any repudiation of the Protocol

The coming Assembly elections will be a test of this, both in the campaigning approach of unionists (who seem very determined to push for the NIP’s collapse) and in the likely shifts in MLA numbers.

This latter point is not only about the likely rise in the number of Sinn Fein MLAs (which will help with the basic overall majority requirement), but also the potential growth of ‘other’ designated MLAs. Under Art.18(6), these do not count in the ‘cross community support’ calculations, possibly making it yet harder to achieve the necessary threshold for an eight year continuation.

However, to return to the present, consent isn’t the main topic of debate around the Protocol right now. The EU’s easement on medicine supply this week points to the on-going efforts to demonstrate how the NIP can be made to work better through engagement, but this will not be the rhetoric of the DUP and other unionists in coming weeks.

At the same time, if the current Art.16 ‘shall we, shan’t we’ argument is outridden, then Art.18 will come much more sharply into view and the way voters split this May might turn out to be crucial in deciding the outcome.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic102

The post A problem for 2024? Consent in the Northern Ireland Protocol appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The Court of Justice of the European Union is one of the most contested transnational institutions in Europe. It nonetheless cemented its authority over nearly 7 decades of integration and remains a cornerstone of the EU.

Despite severe contestation, the Court of Justice of the European Union has managed to retain its legitimacy

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) wielded extensive power for most of the second half of the 20th century. When the community was paralyzed by a political gridlock with states having difficulties achieving a necessary consensus on policies, the CJEU became the motor of integration by declaring the direct effect and supremacy of the treaties over national law. It cemented the path towards the interior market by forging the mutual recognition of standards, and even found member states in breach of their obligations when not applying EU law correctly. These bold decisions never met strong opposition, with only a few isolated criticisms that were mostly ignored by the rest of actors of EU governance, including governments.

While the turning point remains difficult to identify, the CJEU does not anymore benefit from this “benign neglect” that allowed judges to exercise their craft without opposition. The end of the permissive consensus put all EU institutions in the spotlight, including the Court. Judges are now involved in the general contestation of the EU’s authority. This trend came at its outburst with the recent rule of law debate that pits EU institutions against the governing bodies of Poland. The CJEU is a power-wielding institution under scrutiny and facing more contestation than ever. The question of its legitimacy today is more relevant than ever.

But how to make sense of/capture the legitimacy of the Court? Such a theoretical framework must account for two broad trends. Since the CJEU is a constituting ruling organ of the EU, it must adhere to a set of standards that are applied across the entire polity, including by other institutions. However, the use of common legitimacy standards must be crafted to the specificities of the judicial branch of the EU. The Court does not draft laws; it theoretically interprets them. Its members are not directly controlled by the people through elections; these are appointed.

The use of canonical legitimacy theories of the EU such as Scharpf’s or Schmidt’s – namely the division of legitimacy between ‘input’, ‘throughput’ and ‘output’ – is relevant, but must be tailor-made to judges. Input refers to shared values between powerholders and subordinates, leading the latter to accept with ease the decisions of the former. The CJEU would be deprived of input since it is a transnational body that is not submitted to popular will (unlike rulers directly elected by citizens). The statement should however be nuanced. The Court does possess indirect input legitimacy since governments (endowed with direct democratic legitimacy) appoint judges to the bench, and retain the prerogative to remove them from office at the end of their term. The treaties signed by these governments expressly delegated to the CJEU the power to interpret the treaties and secondary law. And judges themselves embody a core principle shared across member states judiciaries: they are appointed according to a meritocratic logic, i.e. governments must provide the best candidates whose suitability is thoroughly assessed by an expert committee.

Throughput refers to the respect of good processes of governance. This is the most important factor in adjudication. Due process and well-argued judgements may compensate for shortcomings at the input or output levels. If judges are dialoguing with the parties, are transparent about their reasoning – a common criticism made against CJEU rulings – and are responsive to challenges raised in doctrine or by national courts about previous rulings, the Court will mitigate contention and even have adverse rulings accepted by governments (such as Kadi).

Output refers to sound results of a governing institution. The Court must adjudicate cases within a reasonable amount of time, settling disputes of the parties in a case while providing guidance to the broader legal profession, and elicit compliance with EU law. The Court’s output legitimacy remains significant, especially considering that national courts – premier interlocutors of the CJEU – comply almost always with preliminary rulings.

This analysis seems at odds with current debates surrounding judicialization in the EU. “Ending the jurisdiction of the ECJ” was a red line in the Brexit negotiations for the UK, and various national constitutional courts declared various rulings of the Court ultra vires (out of the Court’s reach and therefore inapplicable in the territory of the member state concerned) during the last decade. The authority of the Court is highly contested and probably more questioned than ever.

That does not mean however that the Court has lost its legitimacy. The ultra vires rulings are the most visible reactions in a European judicial sphere whose activities remain obscure to most citizens. But these decisions remain statistically marginal in a population of thousands of uncontested cases issued by the CJEU every year. The Weiss ruling issued by the German constitutional court was the only ultra vires decision declared against the original decision of the CJEU of 2018, meaning that the other 848 decisions handed down by the Court during the same year (CJEU’s annual report) did not trigger this reaction.

Moreover, the concept of legitimacy crisis must not be confused with political crisis. The former refers to the absolute rejection of the Court’s authority in the EU, while the latter refers to temporary tensions and problems caused by the weakening of previous institutional arrangements. Some rulings of the Court were not applied in some member states or saw their application delayed by a few weeks. But none raised the idea that the Court should be stripped of some of its powers or be replaced by another (quasi) judicial body such as an arbitration panel, despite the recurring accusation of judicial activism and even of a “gouvernement des juges”.

In 2015, the Court convinced the Member states to double the number of judges at the General Court (from 28 to 56) and obtained a budget increase of at least 13,5 million euros at a time when every other public authority was asked to adopt a strict austere approach to spending. This commitment showed that the Court could generate the trust of national governments even when the EU is under stress. The current Polish crisis even displays that the CJEU is not suffering a legitimacy crisis: lower judges disapply orders from the (politically captured) judicial hierarchy to disapply EU law and stop sending preliminary references to the CJEU. Despite strong coercive measures employed by national authorities (such as suspensions and pay cuts), some judges keep faith in the Court and the EU’s judicial system.

Overall, the CJEU’s legitimacy has not faded away. The Court is a systemic actor in the EU and its role remained steady despite the numerous constitutional changes adopted since Maastricht. Contestation is sharper than ever, however. The Court is taken in the midst of all the socio-economic distress suffered by the entire EU since the late 2000s. Rulings involving core state powers are at times contested and compliance may be delayed, but the ship is still sailing, although in uncharted and increasingly troubled waters.

The post The contested but upheld legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

There is no doubt that French politics have been ever strongly tilting to the right for months now. It’s not even exaggerated to claim that the political discourse is dominated, if not polluted, by far-right vocabulary and semantics. Want to study first-hand the mechanisms of the Overton window? This is the place.

Paradoxically, at the same time, all three right-wing pretenders that are currently jockeying for position in the race to win the second spot for the second round of the presidential election are battling with serious credibility issues.

The primary curse

In November 2016, the great comeback of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) was ended before it had even started. With no more than 20% of the votes he was eliminated in the first round of the primaries organised by the party he had himself rebranded as Les Républicains.

Nicolas Sarkozy at the Sens Commun rally in 2014.

His credibility had already been severely tarnished two years before, when he set out to reconquer the party’s presidency in order to have the necessary resources at hand for a successful presidential bid in 2017. Shortly before the party’s conference in November 2014, he was filmed addressing a rally of the reactionary movement of the traditional catholic movement Sens Commun. He promised them to reformulate, once elected again in 2017, some aspects of same-sex marriage law (officially named “marriage for all”) of 2013. But when the audience started to chant “Repeal! Repeal!”, he caved in immediately: “If you prefer (…), if that makes you happy, frankly, it doesn’t cost me much!”

Just an anecdote. But one that illustrates two of the major weaknesses of the Républicains, who claim to be the heirs of true Gaullist faith and want to position themselves as the grand old party of the moderate right.

On the one hand it highlights that the system of party primaries has revealed itself to be an unintentionally radicalising force, both for the party chair in in 2014 and for the presidential nomination in 2016 and 2021. Each time, the intended moderate, conservative no-nonsense discourse has massively hardened under the pressure of a radical, vocal and highly mobilised minority among party members, pushing candidates to adopt extreme right-wing issues and vocabulary.

On the other hand, the anecdote points to the Gaullist’s fundamental dilemma: even in an increasingly polarised France, the presidential race is still won in the centre. Right there, where local and regional conservatives were perfectly able to impose themselves, as could be observed both during the municipal elections of 2020 and the regional elections of 2021. But that’s local politics. On the national level, the rightward tilt intentionally launched by Sarkozy has left the liberal-humanist centre up for grabs. It was immediately seized by Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche. With the consequence that the formerly Republican right now shamelessly adopts far-right discourses while wanting to sell themselves as moderate.

It’s a paradoxical situation: half of the French electorate will give their vote in April to a candidate explicitly labelled as right-wing. And that’s without even counting Macron’s voter base (stable at 25%), despite the obvious overlaps with moderate Républicains in terms of policy preferences and human resources.

Even more disturbing is that more than a third of the vote will in all likelihood go to candidates who unambiguously belong to the far right. That’s three times more than what the infamous Alternative für Deutschland obtained at the German parliamentary elections last autumn.

And despite this discursive hegemony, the right will have serious difficulties in its conquest of the Elysée palace. All three candidates who may reasonably hope to enter the second round are caught in the credibility trap.

Valérie Pécresse between a rock and hard place

Before she entered the primaries of Les Républicains, Valérie Pécresse had gained a strong profile since 2015 as the respected leader of the Ile-de-France, one of Europe’s most economically powerful, most densely populated regions, which hosts both France’s richest municipalities and poorest suburban ghettos. Her main accomplishment was a successful budget consolidation, for which she even received praise from the court of auditors (very rare in France, for good reasons!). Her self-description as “a mix of two thirds Angela Merkel and one third Margaret Thatcher” was deemed pretty accurate and she was comfortably re-elected in 2021.

Campaign poster of Valérie Pécresse, inspired by the traditional postal stamps with the effigy of the Republican allegory “Marianne”.

Considering her bourgeois-catholic origins and her political career following graduation as top student in two elite schools (HEC and ENA), you would expect her to be firmly rooted in the liberal wing of Gaullism, as embodied for instance by Jacques Chirac. To no surprise, Sarkozy picked her for a ministerial post in 2007.

Yet, all of a sudden, in order to have the slightest chance in the 2021 primaries, she felt obliged to change in tone and style. All of a sudden, it was all about seemingly exploding crime, presumably uncontrolled immigration, and apparently threatened national identity. Issues that were imposed on her by the nationalist and xenophobic hardliner Eric Ciotti, who had come first in the first round of the primaries.

That sounded all strangely inauthentic, and even now, in the hottest phase of the election campaign, it simply does not sound convincing. Since her nomination in December, she has been stagnating in the breathlessly published, but generally rather reliable polls, at around 15% of voting intentions. And her big rally on 13 February, in front of 7,500 supporters in the Parisian Zénith concert hall, hyped as the kick-off for the decisive campaign weeks, was an oddly embarrassing, pathetic performance.

What are you supposed to think of a speaker who very obviously does not believe herself in half of what she thinks she needs to say? How trustworthy is a conservative party that on the one hand hardens its discourse by the minute and on the other hand has been aggressively bashing a president who launched so many of the reforms that Chirac and Sarkozy always kept announcing but never had the courage to tackle in all their years in power?

Valérie Pécresse has fallen into the credibility trap. The politics she could have represented with competence and authenticity, are entirely covered by Emmanuel Macron. The politics he has been forced to embody by the party and the circumstances are very obviously not hers. In the tectonic upheaval of the national French political landscape, there’s not enough room left any more for herself and the Républicains. 

Marine Le Pen’s risky business of normalisation

At her third run for the presidency, Marine Le Pen faces a positioning conundrum of a different type. It’s been more than ten years since she took over the nationalist-populist party called the Front National from her dad. Since then she has been unwavering in her attempt to clean the party from its disreputable, unsavoury, shady aspects and turn it into an eligible alternative for all parts of French society.

The key word in this process is “de-demonizing” (French: “dédiabolisation”). In order to bestow on her party a new gentrified respectability, she purged the leadership committees of the numerous “crazy catholics” and “extreme idiots” (according to a leaked confession) and broke with all those who were unwilling to follow her path. These included her long-standing lieutenant Florian Philippot, who had been highly successful in giving the Front National a solid social appeal, and her niece Marion Maréchal, who was already considered as a future star (and competitor of her aunt) by the old hardliners.

Her disastrous, almost surrealistic performance in the television debate with Emmanuel Macron in early May 2017 certainly made many of her supporters doubt she had the necessary clout and gravitas to climb that last step in the ladder. Rather surprisingly, though, it did hardly impact her authority within the party. In 2018, she successfully imposed its re-branding to Rassemblement National (RN), a symbolic act that took the de-demonization process one step further, towards full-fledged mainstreaming.

Campaign poster of Marine Le Pen. The “M” is pronouced “aime”, as in “The France one loves”.

This consistent normalisation strategy, reflected in a still aggressive but much less verbally abusive opposition to the Macron government as well as a calm and controlled pre-campaign, seemed to work out just fine. A no-go like “Frexit” or, at the least, withdrawal from the Eurozone – both impossible to sell to the average voter and perceived by many as evidence of amateurism – was discreetly deleted from the official party programme. Until November 2021, there was no doubt that Marine Le Pen would qualify for the second round of the election like she had done in 2017, and why not with a stronger share of the vote than the incumbent President.

That was when Eric Zemmour officially announced his presidential bid. The outspokenly Islamophobic pandit/polemicist/populist suddenly offered a self-confident far-right alternative to all those who disapproved of Marine Le Pen’s rebranding. All those Vichy patriots and nostalgic colonialists, racists and homophobes, Europe-haters and authoritarians who did no longer feel at home in the mollified, assuaged Rassemblement National.

It turns out there are more of them around than previously suspected. Immediately, Marine Le Pen’s voting intentions collapsed from 25 to 17 percent. Clearly, her gentrification strategy was much less accepted among her long-standing followers than was thought. While her base seems to have consolidated since – she’s still the favourite for the second place – there is no week without a prominent party member leaving her for Zemmour. Heavyweights like Stéphane Ravier (the RN’s only Senator) or MEPs Gilbert Collard and Jérôme Rivière simply slammed the door in anger. More embarrassingly, campaign spokesman Nicolas Bay (another MEP) had to be fired for having leaked relevant internal information to the Zemmour team.

If one is to believe the latest polls, Marine Le Pen does not seem to suffer from the “rotten fruit falling from the tree”, as she poetically called the renegades. But that does not change the one big question at the heart of her rebranding as the new mainstream: how trustworthy is a candidate, who owes her political standing and popularity to anti-establishment positions and who decides, at the most important moment of her career, to adopt the behaviour codes and verbal norms of the despised “system”, the very system she vociferously (and successfully) decried all those years?

Even if she is still well placed to qualify for the second round, it remains unclear how she could possibly manage, within only two weeks, to reconquer all those disenchanted voters who left for Zemmour and simultaneously gain several million new votes in the mainstream.

Eric Zemmour and the limits of the reactionary protest potential

In the genuinely brilliant television series Baron Noir (three seasons between 2016 and 2020) the French party spectrum is all shaken up by a totally unknown populist newcomer boosted by the social networks. It’s a scenario whose plausibility was vindicated by the yellow jackets movement and feared by the governmental majority.

In real life, the meteoric maverick finally does not stem from the hardcore anticapitalistic left, but from a right wing that unmistakably deserves the adjective “extreme”. And he was not put on orbit by a diffuse protest movement on the internet, but from old-fashioned traditional media. For thirteen years Eric Zemmour wrote for Le Figaro, the formerly venerable conservative daily that has been trying hard for years now to reach the level of British tabloids. But his current name recognition is due to television exposure. More precise: to the very specifically French constellation of four competing 24/7 news channels, all available to French citizens within the basic TV offer. All four of them are under existential pressure to reach a market share beyond 1.5 or 2 percent.

In this crammed ecosystem, the only way to differentiate yourself from the competition is to engage in an uninterrupted hysterization of political life, spiced up with regular purposeful verbal transgressions that will be picked to pieces (and tweeted!) by the entire Parisian media landscape for days. On one of these four channels, CNews – an originally harmless branch of Canal+, now systematically foxified by the reactionary industrial industrialist and multi-millionaire media czar Vincent Bolloré – Eric Zemmour managed to reach, by deliberately breaking taboos, ratings of 5 percent (roughly one million viewers) in his access prime time talk show.

Campaign poster of Eric Zemmour. The slogan is a quote attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte.

In doing so, he shifted the limits of what could be said in public to a spectacular degree. Inspired by the success of the transgressive, inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump, with whom he has frequently been compared and who recently apparently even supported him in a phone call. The fact that he has repeatedly stood trial for inciting racial hatred only seemed to play in his favour with his supporters, who claim he merely says out loud what the “silent majority” (populism’s favourite fantasy) thinks.

Attempts to denounce the rhetorical mechanisms of his hatemongering – as exemplified in a strong little pamphlet by the renowned linguist Cécile Alduy – or debunk his grotesque falsifications of history – picked apart by an army of indignant French historians – also don’t have much of an impact.

What Zemmour feeds on is the deep distrust of citizens towards parties and politicians, media and experts, democratic institutions and procedures. As the yearly “Trust Barometer” of the CEVIPOF institute at Sciences Po regularly confirms, distrust and wariness are much deeper engrained in French society than in other comparable European countries (check out slides 31 and 44 here).

Eric Zemmour’s qualification for the second round of the presidential election would be a political earthquake. It would raise very fundamental questions about the causes of so much resentment, sullen offendedness, and outright hatred. It would, however, have next to no impact on the result of the election. True, Zemmour was able to conquer 15% of the electorate in one strike, just by announcing his bid. But since then, he has stagnated at exactly the same level, despite the recruitment of numerous well-known renegades both from the Républicains and the Rassemblement National, and despite a permanent media buzz.

And he remains by far the most despised political actor in France: 67% of the French declare having a bad opinion of him (Le Pen 59%); 61% refuse him explicitly (Le Pen 49%, source: recent Odoxa polls, here und here). He has a massive credibility deficit: only 23% of the French grant him the necessary competence for the job (Le Pen 35%, Pécresse 38%, source: current IPSOS survey).

Zemmour has exhausted his reactionary potential. He may serve as useful and worrying indicator for the irritability of a distraught nation whose nerves are on edge. But even in an insecure, destabilised France that is not sufficient for capturing the mainstream of society.

Parallel worlds

France’s tilt to the right is real. The “self-dwarfed left” – kudos to Nadia Pantel from the Süddeutsche Zeitung for this pertinent adjective – is close to inaudible. The presidential election campaign clearly suggests that the radical, reactionary discourse has become hegemonic. But this impression is misleading. The centre of society, the oft-invoked middle classes (which always come in the plural in colloquial French), certainly want to be taken seriously in their existential unease and anxiety, but have no wish to be governed by marginal ideologists.

As the pandemic has kindly recalled, France does not have the monopoly on disenchanted citizens and enraged conspiracy theorists caught in their filter bubbles. The same goes for the slow and painful decline of previously hegemonic popular parties in an increasingly fragmented political landscape. But what distinguishes France from other comparable democracies is the astonishing, striking discrepancy between the political spectrum on the national and the local level.

While Socialists of all shades of pink, moderate down-to-earth Conservatives and more and more pragmatic Greens are entrusted with the government of all regions and the overwhelming majority of cities and small towns, the national level is almost entirely dominated by a kind of cultural struggle between political movements that play next to no role in local affairs.

This spectacular gap between political realities may perhaps serve as an approach to explaining why a rather well-functioning daily life in a profoundly liveable country is permanently overshadowed by a shrill siren of decline and civilizational despair.

Fortunately, with regard to the forthcoming elections, it is possible to predict with a good deal of probability that while the hardened discourse of the right may reflect certain non-negligible tendencies, the political actors that are pushing it are not perceived as credible leaders by society at large. Emmanuel Macron is likely to benefit from the credibility deficit of his opponents. He is certainly not everybody’s darling, yet when it comes to competence and what the French call “embodiment of the presidential function”, he is clearly identified as number one.

Macron’s probable re-election will first and foremost be based on his credibility edge. It will, however, not change anything to the toxic discursive and mediatic environment that continues to poison French political life and public debate.

This is post no. 4 of the ‘France 2022’ series.
The previous ones can be found here.
All ‘France 2017’ posts can be accessed here.

The post France 2022: The credibility gap appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Just 24-hours after the EU referendum on 23 June 2016, I posted this on my blog:

‘Just over half of those who voted bought manky lies dressed up as a better life after Brexit. They were told they’d get their country back. Their lives would be transformed. 

‘More jobs, homes, schools and hospitals. Less migrants. No more rule from Brussels. We’d be British, and Great Britain again.

‘They were duped. They were deceived. They were sold a dodgy time share by cowboy politicians, who made claims and promises they can never deliver because it was all a delusion.

‘Those conned voters, when they realise they’ve paid dearly for faulty merchandise, will need support and direction. The rogue politicians will need to be kicked out.

‘We can do without those politicians. We cannot do without voters.’

James O’Brien on LBC has consistently agreed with this line; blame politicians, not voters, he implores.

In a broadcast two years ago he said:

“Blame the people who sold it, please, not the people who bought it. That’s going to be my most important message for the next couple of years.”

It’s the same message I posted just a few hours after the referendum result, but now of course, it’s almost six years later.

Today, we are all rapidly realising that politicians must own and take full responsibility for the horrific, catastrophic mess that Britain has got into as a direct result of Brexit.

DAVID CAMERON – the Prime Minister who called for an unnecessary referendum not for his country, but as he confided in Donald Tusk, “only for his party”.

He then led an inept, lacklustre referendum campaign that was so appalling that anyone would think he wanted to lose.

BORIS JOHNSON – the Prime-Minister-wannabe who used to be a Remainer, but then at the last minute, switched sides to be the Brexit poster-boy, as he thought that would be his best route into 10 Downing Street (he was right).

To win, he lied on a colossal scale – the biggest deceit being his claim that Britain sends £350m a week to the EU, that could instead be spent on the NHS.

MICHAEL GOVE – another PM-wannabe, who also lied to win, telling the nation that EU migration in the decade following the referendum could be as high as 5 million.

But it was based on another lie – that Turkey would be joining the EU soon, which Gove must have known was impossible.

NIGEL FARAGE – the on-off-on-off UKIP leader who introduced the nation to raw racism, turning Britons against EU citizens living here who were actually helping our country to thrive.

He called for racial discrimination laws to be scrapped, and said he wanted not just Brexit, but the end of the entire EU.

He also conveniently forgot his pre-referendum announcement that if the result was 52%-48% he’d want another vote (but only if the result was 52% for Remain).

THERESA MAY – another former Remainer who changed sides so she could put her career before country. In other words, she wanted to be PM more than she didn’t want Brexit.

She over-interpreted the referendum result, ignoring that almost half of those who voted didn’t want Brexit.

Instead, she acted as if Brexit had won 100%; did her best to demean and bypass Parliament to get her way, and used vile, Nazi-type terminology such as, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

JACOB REES-MOGG – the upper-class MP with the honed posh-voice who promoted Brexit pretending it would benefit the poor, whereas in reality, it’s only some of the rich who are prospering from it.

On the one hand he claimed Britain had no real power in the EU, then called for Britain to be “as difficult as possible” if there was a long extension to our membership.

“We could veto any increase in the EU budget,” he claimed and “obstruct” an EU army and “block” Mr Macron’s “integrationist schemes”.

‘Shurely shome mishtake’ as Private Eye would say. How is it possible for a country that has no power in the EU to wield such power in the EU?

Rees-Mogg did, however, say that it could take “50 years” to reap the benefits of Brexit. What a useful get-out clause…

DOMINIC CUMMINGS – the unelected Svengali-style string-puller who masterminded the Leave victory all based on lies, mistruths and false promises.

He is the man who gave Britain Brexit.

His primary insight was to weaponise unregulated social media. 

Of course, in their day, the Nazis were ahead of the curve in their use of broadcast media, but Cummings didn’t add anything that Goebbels didn’t know.

………………

There are many other politicians who must take full responsibility for Brexit.

Remember this: most voters in Britain didn’t vote for Brexit – Leave was only supported by 37% of the electorate. 

That would not be enough for Leave to have won in most democracies across the world that hold referendums, where at least 50%, and often at least 60%, of all registered voters would be required before such a big change could happen.

It wouldn’t even be enough, under Tory legislation, for a trade union to call a strike, which requires the support of at least 50% of all its members before a walk-out can go ahead.

What’s more, in the general election of 2019, most voters did not vote for the Tories; most voters voted for parties that wanted another referendum on Brexit. 

The Tories only won their landslide 80-seat majority with just 1% more votes than they got in the 2017 general election, in which the Tories lost their majority entirely.

Johnson got his 80-seat majority with the votes of less than 30% of those eligible to vote.

Our system of politics and voting is broken and unfit. It’s allowed a result that the country at large didn’t, and doesn’t, want.

What a cunning, clever, coup this has been.

The bottom line: Blame politicians, not voters, for Brexit. We can do without lying politicians. We can’t win without voters.

• Watch this 2-minute video of James O’Brien on LBC explaining why we must not blame voters.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

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I need some work done at home and invited firms to quote.

“That’s a smart van,” I said in passing to the managing director of a limited company that visited last week.

“Oh, we’ve got six of those,” he replied.

We went through the project.

In the past, companies had sent me quotes with the words “plus VAT”. That’s annoying as well as unlawful. I’m not a business and need to know the final price I’m to pay.

So, I said, “When you do your quote, please clearly show the full price, including VAT.”

“Oh,” the young man looked surprised. “So, you WANT to pay the VAT?”

“If you’re VAT registered, it’s a legal requirement,” I replied.

“Oh, not really,” came the response. “If you pay me cash, you won’t have to pay any VAT, at least not on the labour!”

“That would be unlawful,” I said.

“Up to you,” he said, without batting an eyelid; without even knowing who I was. 

After all, I could have been a tax inspector for all he knew.

It got me thinking. 

Loss of VAT to the government.

Loss of income tax too, as the cash paid obviously wouldn’t go on the books.

If anything went wrong with the work, no come back. This was quite a large project, and if the firm messed up, there’d be no receipt, no proof, no going to court, no redress.

But actually, worse than that: loss of revenue for the NHS, for schools, for roads, for sewers, etc.

This was cheating and fraudulent.

CHEATING AND FRAUD

But then I got thinking some more.

The government does cheating and fraud.

Its ministers hand out multi-million contracts to mates without going through the proper procedures. The courts have ruled that’s unlawful.

What’s more, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the government will be ‘writing off’ over £4 billion in fraudulent claims for programmes such as the furlough scheme, pandemic support for freelance workers and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’.

Most of those who made unlawful claims will just get away with it. They won’t be pursued.

Last year, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that taxpayers will lose tens of billions of pounds to Covid-19 support schemes because the government dropped basic fraud checks and rolled out the programmes in haste.

Last month, Theodore Agnew, UK minister for efficiency and transformation, resigned his post.

Why? Because of the government’s ‘failure to tackle fraud’.

In an article for the Financial Times he wrote:

‘Fraud in government is rampant. Public estimates sit at just under £30bn a year. There is a complete lack of focus on the cost to society, or indeed the taxpayer.’

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said Agnew’s resignation was “a damning indictment of the chancellor and the government’s failures on fraud”.

• Billions of pounds lost because of the government handing out unlawful contracts to their mates.
• Billions of pounds lost because of the government turning a blind eye to those taking government money fraudulently and who won’t have to pay it back.

Billions. Billions. Our money. Public money.

Billions. Heaven knows how many hospitals, doctors, nurses, medicines that would pay for. Or schools. Or roads. 

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

So, is it any wonder that if the government can get away with it, many businesses and individuals think they can too?

Not charging VAT and not paying tax is a fraud. But as the government also does fraud or doesn’t care if others do fraud, what does it matter?

Of course, we’ve always had a ‘black market’. But my subjective view is that it’s now much more prevalent.

In the old days, the government had schemes such as Business Links, that helped businesses to do things professionally, honestly, with a view to growing reliable and successful enterprises.

But the Business Links were all closed under David Cameron’s savage austerity cuts.

It was of course a false economy.

Because today, a culture of dishonest business, and dishonest government, will bring down Britain and result in an unreliable, unsuccessful country with unreliable and unsuccessful enterprises. 

It’s leading to a ‘Broken Britain’. A country that will rapidly go downhill, with the basic services that so many of us rely upon becoming increasingly decreased.

Does the government care? Of course not.

This week Steve Barclay, Number 10’s new Chief of Staff, pledged that Boris Johnson’s government would “step back” and favour a “smaller state.”

I’ve lived long enough to know what that means.

It means cuts to the services that are the glue that keep the country and its communities functioning and intact.

It means less money for hospitals, schools, roads and sewers, to name but a few.

RICH BASTARDS

Does the government care? Of course not.

They are mostly rich bastards. They don’t need the state. They don’t need government, even though they are the government.

• Hospitals? They don’t need NHS hospitals. They have their own private hospitals they can access.
• Schools? They don’t need state schools. Most of them went to private schools, as do most of their children.
• Roads? Well, of course they need roads. But they’ll be pot-ridden roads, so government ministers can no doubt take private jets instead (at least Boris Johnson can – he’s got two of them in Union Jack colours).

Why else would the current government be so uncommitted to trying to get back billions lost to fraud?

Why else would the current government be so cavalier with public money, giving out unlawful contracts to their mates, who were often not at all qualified or even able to deliver for the public?

As I write this, the pavement immediately outside my house is gushing out thousands of gallons of water.

It’s a serious leak of a water pipe, splurging out drinking water from the pavement at a rate of knots, which is not sating anyone’s thirst, but instead overwhelming the nearby sewage system.

Of course, I reported this major leak to Affinity Water. But that was over three weeks ago.

They texted me to say that “emergency” works to repair the leak would take place outside my property on 9 February. They would be sure to let me know if they couldn’t attend.

But they didn’t attend and didn’t let me know.

I rang them and asked, “What’s going on?”

They replied they had to get the local council to put up traffic lights, and all that would take time.

But today, the water is still going to waste.

According to UNICEF, across the world, 2.2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water.

And right now, outside my house, thousands of gallons of safe drinking water are literally going down the drain.

Affinity Water had the temerity yesterday to ask for my feedback. Could I please score my “recent experience” from 0 (very dissatisfied) to 10 (very satisfied).

Of course, I gave them ‘0’ and explained:

‘I reported an emergency leak of water coming out of the pavement outside my house. I have not been kept informed and the leak has still not been repaired.

‘This is a disaster for the environment and a waste of thousands of gallons of good water.’

‘Thank you. Your feedback is important to us…’ was the texted reply.

GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CARE

Does the government care? Of course not.

They’ll allow good water to go to waste, or for raw waste to go into good water. After all, we’re no longer beholden to EU directives that aim to prevent this happening. 

The government will ‘urge’ private water companies to tackle the problem, without ensuring they do.

Then, when they’ve left government, ministers will no doubt have the chance to work for such companies on lucrative contracts.

It’s all part of ‘Broken Britain’.

Last month I drove a friend to Stansted Airport. On the way back, driving on the inside lane of the M11, my car went over a significant pothole, which I suspect damaged one of my wheels.

A sizeable pothole, in a motorway. All part of Broken Britain?

Of course.

And expect more of Britain to be broken in the years ahead.

We’ll have less government, that has less money, because so much will have been lost or wasted, and the government won’t care.

It might take a generation to undo the damage that is taking place to our country.

It starts and ends with the government.

If the government acts dishonestly, they cannot expect the country’s people, and the country’s businesses, to act honestly.

We so much need a different government, but if that’s to be Labour, then they have to be much clearer and much bolder in explaining their plans to fix Broken Britain.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Theofanis Exadaktylos from the University of Surrey, in England. Bonjour, Theofanis!

 

 

 

 

euradio · Covid-19 policies : how does political trust make a difference in responding to a common crisis ?

 

 

Theofanis, you are associate professor of European politics, and together with three colleagues you are about to publish a book on “Policy Styles and Trust in the Age of Pandemics”. Can you let us know more about it?

As we all know, since 2020, there has been a wide variety of policy responses by national governments. Some governments immediately and proactively took measures to stop the virus spread, some waited for clarity to decide their course of action and others downplayed the severity of the threat, continuing life as if nothing had happened.

 

So what how does your research explain these differences?

It’s explained by national ‘policy styles’. And in responding to crises, this policy styles are correlated with the political trust expressed by citizens.

Crises are moments of flux and extreme uncertainty. They expose vulnerabilities and frequently prompt political leaders to think outside the box to reassure citizens they are still in control. But the degree of freedom also depends on the administrative capacity their countries have, and the way problems and solutions are conceived in the national context. Effectively, policy makers inherit commitments, institutional arrangements, ways of doing things and norms that form a country’s policy style.

 

How does “trust” play into this?

Compliance to any public policy is linked to the levels of political trust within a country and, policy makers need to have a good estimation of how high or low that trust is. When governments are faced with new challenges they turn to “institutional memory”. Some governments are better in anticipating problems while others only react; in some countries consensus is required in decision-making whereas in others a top-down approach is the norm.

Citizens’ expectations are important. Pandemics require a public that makes conscious choices to comply to measures issued by a government. Lack of voluntary compliance will lead to more stringent measures, including fines and strict lockdowns. Compliance to measures also depends on whether they are perceived as ‘imposed’ or ‘organically developed’, especially in the context of democratic societies.

Countries like Denmark or Sweden have a more legitimate and efficient public administration system, and citizens tend to trust the bureaucracy of their country, compared to Greece or Italy for example. If trustworthiness and legitimacy are low, the capacity of a government to do its job is decreased, and implementing any measure is quite hard.

Legitimacy and political trust are even more important in the context of a pandemic when non-elected officials expand their decision-making roles. In Britain, Hungary and Poland, for example, experts have been at the receiving end of targeted blame.

 

How does it work in countries that have a high level of trust in their government?

In systems with more inclusive processes, like in Sweden, high trust magnifies the capacity of a government to act, leading to decentralised responses.

Conversely, in systems with lower policy capacity and lower inclusiveness, citizens lack faith in the system and expect central authority to take over. Greece is a good example for that. Lack of trust weakens the capacity of a government to act and the capacity of citizens to behave in a way they see fit.

 

These are the extremes. What happens in countries that are ‘in between’?

When high capacity coincides with low trust, the tendency is not to trust policymakers but put faith in the capacity of the state, for example, in the health system, to handle the crises. Hence policymakers will pursue more centrifugal responses to avoid taking the blame. This was the case in Britain, where policy makers tried to diffuse responsibility away from the central government in London.

When on the other hand, there is high trust but lower policy capacity (for geographic or demographic reasons), policymakers and citizens know that the health system may not cope if left without strong political direction. In this case, policymakers may choose a centripetal response because it allows more control over outcomes. This is the example of Norway where the government managed to acquire emergency powers to react, contrary to its inclusive policy style.

 

So what’s your conclusion after two years?

There is a vast variety of policy response across Europe , not only for the effectiveness of measures in containing spread, casualties and economic impact, but also in the timings and ways that measures were eased, dropped or re-introduced.

And we are not out of the woods yet. The pandemic is still evolving today with unknown outcomes. Therefore, whatever the national policy styles and levels of political trust, we should hope that national governments and citizens not only learn from past experiences but also from each other.

 

Thank you very much, Theofanis, for sharing your research with us. We’ll put a link to your book on the website. “Ideas on Europe” will be back next week. We will welcome Joanna Ciesielska-Klikowska, from the University of Lodz, in Poland.

 

First published on eu!radio.

 

 

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Boris Johnson is “not a complete clown”, his new communications director, Guto Harri, said this month adding, “he’s a very likeable character.”

Really?

I would say instead that Boris Johnson is a completely dangerous clown, and nothing he’s done for the country is at all likeable.

Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, questioned the seriousness of Mr Johnson and his new chief of communications. She said:

“Did I mention that there are no serious people left to serve? They think it’s all just one big joke, don’t they?” 

Was Boris Johnson ever Prime Minister material?

For sure, he likes to have – or more accurately, to get – a laugh.

But how appropriate is that when the country is reeling from the devastating consequences of Brexit, the impact of Covid, the danger of Climate Change, and on the imminent horizon, the possibility of war between Russia and Ukraine?

They say we get the politicians we deserve. But do we really deserve a Prime Minister like Boris Johnson, who tries to make fun of everything?

He and his party are having a good laugh at our expense.

People say that Boris Johnson reminds them of Benny Hill. He looks the part – especially when he can’t be bothered to dress properly.

But this is serious.

Our country is being commanded by a clown. Britain is now the laughing-stock of the world.

Behind the jokes, the laughter, the faux joie de vivre, however, is something truly sinister.

Britain is being led to ruin.

Brexit isn’t working. Trade with our neighbouring countries – our most important export and import market in the world – is severely disrupted.

The situation in Northern Ireland as a result of Brexit is close to collapse, with the Good Friday Agreement in danger of falling apart.

Sleaze and corruption abound.

Does Mr Johnson care?

For sure, business is suffering from both Brexit and Covid. “F*** business,” retorted the minstrel Prime Minister.

Beware. The jokes hide the lies and the real game.

The fiddlers – our political masters – are steeped in sleazy, corrupt, and nefarious activities.

Whilst the front man elicits guffaws from the electorate, those behind the scenes are furtively dismantling what was once Great Britain, taking what they can, increasing their power, reducing our democracy.

• We didn’t get our country back. We threw it it away.
• We didn’t take control. We lost it.

This year, we must up our fight to get back our country, to get back our continent, and to Get Brexit Undone.

Agreed?

• Watch this 2-minute video demonstrating that Boris Johnson is a clown

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The EU referendum was entirely flawed according to criteria set by former Brexit Secretary and ardent Brexiter, David Davis, on how referendums should be “done properly”.

In July 2016, Tory MP, Mr Davis, accepted the result of the EU referendum and the dual-role of Brexit Secretary and Chief Brexit Negotiator in Theresa May’s new government.

But back in 2002, when the Tories were in Opposition to the Labour government, Mr Davis spelt out what he considered to be the gold standard for good referendums.

On the basis of that speech, the 2016 EU referendum failed on every point.

Mr Davis was opposing Labour’s plans to hold referendums on regional assemblies, because he considered that the structure of the proposed referendums would be undemocratic.

In summary, Mr Davis said that:

“In a democracy, voters have to know what they’re voting for”

But in the EU referendum, voters couldn’t know what they were voting for. The Leave option was not defined.

(This was also a point made by Philip Hammond, then Foreign Secretary, six months before the referendum. Mr Hammond was sitting next to Mr Davis when he made his speech in 2002).

“The proposition has to come first, and the vote afterwards”

But that’s not what happened in the EU referendum. There was no clear proposition before the referendum on how the UK would leave the EU and on what terms.

“Referendums should be held when the electorate are in the best possible position to make a judgement”

But in the EU referendum, the electorate was not in any position, let alone the “best possible position”, to judge whether the UK should leave the EU, and nobody knew then what the terms of leaving would be.

Referendums should be held when the arguments, for and against, “have been rigorously tested”.

But in the EU referendum, the Leave arguments had not been tested, let alone “rigorously tested”.

Claims and promises made by the Leave side had not been debated or agreed in Parliament before the referendum took place.

“Referendums should be held when people know exactly what they’re getting”

But no one who voted for Leave knew what they were getting, let alone “exactly what they’re getting”.

“This means that legislation should be debated by Members of Parliament on the floor of the House of Commons and then put to the electorate for the voters to judge afterwards.”

But the legislation to leave the EU was debated after the referendum and not before.

“It does not mean that we ask people to vote on a blank piece of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards.”

But that’s exactly what happened with the EU referendum.

The Leave choice represented an entirely blank sheet of people with government filling in the details much later and without a second, confirmatory referendum on whether ‘the people’ supported those details.

A referendum should be “treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it.”

But the EU referendum WAS treated as a substitute for Parliamentary decision-making.

According to Mr Davis as Brexit Secretary, the final decision to leave the EU had been made by the referendum and was therefore a “point of no return”, even though the referendum was supposed to be an advisory poll only.

Parliament was denied any opportunity to specifically debate and vote on WHETHER the UK should leave the EU. The referendum was treated as a replacement for, and superior to, Parliamentary decision making.

Indeed, when Parliament debated the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, Mr Davis as the Brexit Secretary told Parliament in January 2017:

“It is not a Bill about whether the UK should leave the European Union or, indeed, about how it should do so; it is simply about Parliament empowering the Government to implement a decision already made—a point of no return already passed. 

“We asked the people of the UK whether they wanted to leave the European Union, and they decided they did.”

“It’s important that referenda are not used simply as a snapshot of volatile changes of opinion, perhaps as a result of pressure of government propaganda”

But the referendum ONLY represented a snapshot of “volatile changes of opinion” and certainly as a result of propaganda, much of which transpired to be untrue or incorrect or undeliverable.

“It’s because referenda are supposed to reflect the settled will of the people that we need to have thresholds below which they do not carry the day.”

But leaving the EU hardly reflected “the settled will of the people” let alone a stable or consistent will.

For most of the UK’s four decades as a member of the EU, most polls consistently showed that a majority supported membership.

Furthermore, the marginally close referendum result of 52%-48% could not reflect that “the settled will of the people” was to leave the EU.

As for a “need to have thresholds” for referendums, no threshold was set for the EU referendum, and only a minority of the electorate supported Leave, with the majority of registered voters either voting for Remain or not voting.

Although Mr Davis expressed varying views on what a threshold might be for a referendum, the EU referendum failed to have ANY threshold.

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I have written to Mr Davis to ask him why, in view of the criteria he set in 2002 on how a referendum should be “done properly”, he could ever have considered the 2016 EU referendum and Brexit win to be fair and democratic?

• Watch: 2-minute video of speech by David Davis in 2002:

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Watch: 40-second video of Philip Hammond, in 2016, confirming that the EU referendum was flawed

Click here to view the embedded video.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Prof Ben Tonra from University College Dublin, in Ireland.

 

 

 

 

 

euradio · The EU foreign policy paradox – Ideas on Europe

 

 

Foreign policy challenges are high on the EU’s agenda, but the member states are still having trouble working in common in this field.

True. Whether we are talking about addressing China’s human rights violations, Russian threats towards Ukraine or indeed one of Europe’s signature successes, the agreement on Iranian nuclear weapons, too often we are witness to individual capitals going their own way and in some cases, even vetoing restatement of well-established EU policy as in the case of the Middle East peace process.

 

But, Ben, didn’t the Lisbon Treaty promise us the final chapter on the Europeanization of national foreign policies?

In truth, the Treaty of Lisbon delivered a lot: the creation of a strengthened post of High Representative for foreign and security policy, the establishment of the European External Action Service and – in recent years – a huge acceleration in the development of defence policy, including the creation of the new European Defence Fund, the establishment of DG DEFIS in the Commission and now 60 individual projects to strengthen European military cooperation through PESCO.

At the same time, we must acknowledge that the EU’s international capacity is almost entirely a function of what its member states will allow it to do. And each of the 27 comes to the common EU foreign policy table with its own national perspectives, geographies and histories – a whole national baggage that shapes its response to foreign policy events, threats and opportunities.

 

So how can that be overcome?

The Member States know what the problem is – indeed they are collectively at the root of the problem.

They are trapped in a paradox: most of them ardently desire that the Union would speak strongly on the major foreign policy challenges of our times and deploy the Union’s significant resources towards those ends.

At the same time, they are reluctant – deeply reluctant – to cede power to the EU institutions in such a way as would make that possible. Whether it is hubris, fear or ego – each national capital is determined to hold on to the reigns of its own power.

As a result, the member states continue to struggle to carve agreed positions from their multiple perspectives and to design processes – such as the new Strategic Compass – to guide member states along a path which will build upon shared foundations. The problem of course is that the rest of the world is not going to wait for the Union to get its act together. Moreover, for some actors – such as Russia – the EU’s weaknesses and its incoherence – actually represent an opportunity to exploit.

 

So, what is to be recommended?

It is difficult to tell.

Certainly, it is unwise for the Union to overpromise and underdeliver. Statements such as ‘the Union must learn to speak the language of power’ or to commit to providing a ‘geopolitical Commission’ are off the mark. Frankly, ‘power’ – in the sense of traditional military power – is a foreign language to the European Union – and will likely continue to be so for some time to come.

Furthermore, considering the nature of threats coming from some member states within the Union towards its values and principles, the Union cannot rely on unanimity to deliver a strong, coherent foreign policy. The member states may need to get creative and exploit the opportunities for differentiated action. This of course also opens Europe to the danger of fragmentation – so one has to choose such a course carefully and with maximum support.

 

Differentiated action – would that not the opposite of a common policy?

I don’t think so. It would acknowledge that a European foreign policy which was not anchored in European values is not worth the name – and it would free those participating from the dead weight of the laggards and the subversives. It would, potentially, build a European foreign, security and defence policy that was seen to work.

 

Thank you very much, Ben, for this insight. All hope is not lost! “Ideas on Europe” will be back next week, and we will welcome Theofanis Exadaktylos, from the University of Surrey, in England.

 

First published on eu!radio.

 

 

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Many studies on the politicization of the EU see the main dividing line running between transnational EU elites on one side and nationalist leaders whipping up anti-EU sentiments on the other. But the politicization of Europe is not a one-way street, as transnational democratic counter-movements have also emerged in response to recent EU integration pressures. As we show in our new JCMS article, which compares European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs) of European trade union federations, popular counter-movements are not necessarily constrained by national silos and nationalist outlooks. But under what conditions are labour alliances succeeding or failing in politicizing EU policymaking across borders?

Pairing two campaigns that were organized by similar actors allowed us to focus on key differences that explain the different outcomes of the campaigns. Our comparison reveals that actor-centred factors matter, namely unions’ ability to create broad social movement coalitions. Successful transnational labour campaigns, however, also depend on structural conditions, namely the prevailing mode of EU integration pressures faced by unions at a given time. Whereas the successful Right2Water ECI of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), pre-emptively countered commodification attempts by the European Commission in water services, the unsuccessful Fair Transport ECI of the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF) attempted to ensure fair working conditions after most of the transport sector had already been liberalized. Vertical integration attempts by EU executives that aim to commodify public services are thus more likely to generate successful counter-movements than the horizontal market integration pressures on wages and working conditions that followed earlier successful EU liberalization drives.

 

Strong union-social movement alliances: EPSU and ETF share similar structures of small secretariats with little authority over national affiliates, as well as similar methods of influencing Brussels policymaking. In other respects, EPSU was even in a weaker position compared to the ETF. Being the first to launch an ECI, EPSU could not learn from earlier campaigns, also its Right2Water campaign had a much smaller budget. EPSU succeeded against these odds as it could rely on union-social movement alliances that spanned from the local-community to the global level. Trade union officials were working together with grassroots activists, as more than half of the organizations assisting the collection of signatures belonged to grassroot movements, including the global justice and environmental movements. Such a wide-spanning web of alliances was not present in the ETF campaign and consequently it had difficulties reaching a broader audience.

The two campaigns had different goals and framed them in different ways to the public. EPSU’s ECI combined its anti-privatization message with an agenda of human rights that was broad enough to unite actors with diverging views on the details of water sector management. By focusing on the threat of privatization, EPSU also identified precise targets of discontent: the European Commission and the two large water multinationals, Veolia and Suez, which had benefited most from water services privatization in the past. The other goal of the Right2Water campaign, to make water services a human right connected a set of positive goals, such as good drinking water and wastewater facilities. The framing of the Fair Transport initiative was built around the idea of fair competition between all transport operators. These demands side-lined the point that, no matter how fair competition is, it still creates inequalities and tensions. This alienated the ETF campaign from more radical unions who were against competition tout court and it had little currency among workers in the EU’s East and South. ETF also framed its Fair Transport ECI exclusively in industrial relations terms which made it difficult to find non-union allies. Social movement-union coalitions and framing around well-defined goals are actor-centred factors that can explain the different outcomes of the campaigns. At a deeper level, however, actors’ choices in the two cases were structured by the different modes of EU integration.

 

Horizontal vs. vertical EU integration. We distinguish between two modes of EU integration pressures: vertical integration advances through direct interventions by a ‘supranational political, legal or corporate authority’; horizontal integration refers to the increasing exposure to transnational market pressures. Horizontal integration reinforces the opacity of power relations and provides few tangible targets for mobilization, while vertical interventions are easier to politicize, albeit within a limited timeframe, as the impact of vertical intervention increases horizontal competition in the medium term.

After the earlier vertical EU laws liberalizing one transport modality after another, horizontal market pressures are prevalent in the transport sector. This hinders transnational action, as horizontal integration puts workers in competition with each other across different transport type (public versus private) modality (rail against road) and geographical areas. By contrast, the Commission’s more recent vertical liberalization attempts in the water sector, that started with the proposal of the Services in the Internal Market (Bolkestein) directive, provided crystallization points for successful transnational collective action.

Similarly, the more service providers are subject to horizontal market integration pressures, the more difficult it becomes to find a common platform with service users. Whereas vertical EU laws motivated unions, consumer groups, environmental NGOs, and even municipal water companies to support the Right2Water ECI, horizontal competitive pressures across modalities go a long way towards explaining the absence of such alliances in the Fair Transport case. Had the Fair Transport ECI focused on public rail transport, it would have been easier to attract support from environmental groups. This idea did not prevail however, given ETF’s aim to also represent workers from other modalities competing with rail.

Our findings have several implications for EU integration scholars and union activists alike. For activists we send the optimistic message that the lack of day-to-day cross-border contacts between workers (a characteristic of non-traded public services including water provision) does not have to be a hindrance on transnational action. Public service unions can create effective transnational links not only with unions in other countries, but also with social movements. For the theory of EU integration, we highlight the importance of interest politics at the meso-level, and show how vertical and horizontal integration pressures shape social actors’ ability to politicize the EU across borders, which is a precondition for its democratization.

The blog draws on the JCMS article Why Do some Labour Alliances Succeed in Politicizing Europe across Borders? A Comparison of the Right2Water and Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiatives

 

 

Imre G. Szabo and Darragh Golden are postdoctoral research fellows in the ERC project Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime at University College Dublin.

 

 

 

Roland Erne is professor of European integration and employment relations at University College Dublin and principal investigator of the ERC project Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime.

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EUHealthGov started 2022 with its third quarterly seminar on 12th January – a roundtable on EU competition policy in healthcare which aimed to identify future directions in light of the 2020 CJEU Dôvera judgment regarding private and state health insurance in Slovakia, and the Casa Regina Apostolorum case (currently on appeal to the CJEU) concerning state subsidy of certain Italian hospitals. We were delighted to be joined by a range of experts from across Europe to consider how these challenges to the state aid rules may give the EU courts scope to clarify or reaffirm earlier approaches as private sector delivery of healthcare becomes more widespread in European healthcare systems.

Dr Mary Guy (Lancaster) introduced the discussions by setting out the approaches taken in previous cases and how the EU competition law framework in healthcare cases indicates a distinction between healthcare purchasing and providing activities. Conceptions of competition and solidarity have also characterised case law to date with distinctions which may prove less sustainable as more Member States experiment with expanding private sector delivery of healthcare. While responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have affected the application particularly of the state aid rules, the wider competition law framework in healthcare cases continues to develop along established lines.

Professor Johan van de Gronden (Radboud University Nijmegen) discussed the Commission and General Court’s findings in Casa Regina Apostolorum to outline distinctions between social insurance-based and taxation-funded healthcare systems. These seem to indicate that the latter has more room for manoeuvre under EU competition policy than the former, prompting the question of whether the trigger of an economic activity can be reconceptualised to be neutral to the design of Member State healthcare systems, or to refocus attention on the extent of public financing of healthcare.

Dr Bruno Nikolić (Ljubljana University) considered how Casa Regina Apostolorum fit with analyses in earlier case law, highlighting the inconsistency of referencing social health insurance cases when assessing the nature of health service providers under EU competition policy. This seems to prompt ongoing questions about the dividing line between economic and non-economic activities in health, and why we would (in general) exclude health services provided in public healthcare systems from EU competition policy.

Dr Marc Wiggers (Loyens Loeff Amsterdam) compared and contrasted approaches taken by the EU institutions Dôvera with the Dutch state aid case which accompanied the 2006 competition reforms in Dutch healthcare with the move from state sickness funds to private health insurance. By setting out an examination framework comprising social objectives, solidarity, the scope for profit-making and state supervision, it is possible to see how distinctions between profit and solidarity may emerge between the EU and national levels.

We look forward to developing this conversation in the future!

A recording of the event is available here.

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With the new ‘traffic light’ government in Germany, one could have expected a game changer in Germany’s approach to fiscal integration. Instead, the coalition agreement is a compromise between maintaining the old fiscal regulatory framework and showing some moderate opening towards new European spending powers.

The so-called ‘traffic light’ coalition in Germany is made up by the the Social Democrats (SDP), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP) (Photo: Francisco Welter-Schultes, CC0 1.0)

The coalition agreement of the new German government led by Olaf Scholz does not advocate for providing the EU with stronger spending powers after the pandemic – something often discussed and considered necessary for a better functioning of the EU. As a result, the agreement mirrors much more the position of the Liberals (FDP, in favour of the ‘old’ EU fiscal rules) rather than the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens (in favour of new spending powers). The approach to EU fiscal integration of the Scholz cabinet will thus probably be marked by much more continuity to the previous Merkel governments than expected.

SDP, Greens and FDP: different preferences on EU fiscal integration

Such continuity is surprising considering the party manifestos of SPD and Greens. SPD and Greens want to permanently provide the EU with a more autonomous spending capacity through new European taxes. Next Generation EU should become a permanent fund for investments, thus opening the doors to a fiscal union. The Stability and Growth Pact should be reformed to make it more flexible. Institutionally, both parties support more powers of the Commission and the European Parliament on EU fiscal policy. On the contrary, the FDP is against more spending powers for the EU. The party aims at strengthening the existing fiscal rules. For FDP, Next Generation EU and its ‘debt-oriented’ approach are to be temporary limited and one-off and should not lead to a debt union (Schuldenunion, a word much used by the Merkel governments).

Hence, whereas SPD and Greens wish to institutionalize a new EU fiscal capacity after the pandemic, the Liberals want as soon as possible to re-institutionalize the fiscal rules of the Stability and Growth Pact (currently suspended due to the pandemic). Against these divergences, what is the fiscal synthesis included in the ‘traffic light’ coalition agreement between the SPD (red), the Greens (green) and the FDP (yellow)?

The coalition agreement and EU fiscal integration: (almost) no big surprise

Given that SPD (25.7 %) and Greens (14.8 %) together obtained 40.5 % of the votes against the Liberal’s 11.5 %, we would have expected a game changer in Germany’s approach to fiscal integration. Instead, the coalition agreement is a light compromise on keeping in place the old fiscal regulatory framework and showing some moderate opening towards new European spending powers. As a matter of fact, the coalition agreement aims to strengthen and deepen Economic and Monetary Union but does not specify how to do so. The three parties want to secure growth, to preserve the sustainability of debt and to provide sustainable and climate-friendly investments. However, they plan to do so without substantially amending the Stability and Growth Pact. Crucially, Next Generation EU is defined as an instrument limited in time and amount whose conditionality must be effectively enforced. SPD, Greens and FDP commit to the agreement on the recovery fund and on the new own resources of the Multiannual Financial Framework, but the coalition agreement adds that ‘related proposals will be examined accordingly’. Germany should remain an anchor of stability (Stabilitätsanker) in Europe. The coalition agreement identifies solidity of public finances as tenet of the budgetary and finance policy of the new coalition – both at national and at European level.

We would have expected a game changer in Germany’s approach to fiscal integration. Instead, the coalition agreement is a light compromise on keeping in place the old fiscal regulatory framework and showing some moderate opening towards new European spending powers.

The future of EU fiscal integration after the COVID-19 pandemic: no paradigm change envisaged

In an article published in 1993, Peter A. Hall distinguished three types of policy change: the goals, the instruments and the settings. If a policy faces a re-definition of its goals and instruments, it will experience a radical, i.e. a paradigmatic change. On the contrary, if change affects the instruments and their settings only, change will be moderate, i.e. incremental: it adds new elements to the existing policy without subverting its core functioning. If we read the three party manifestos through the lenses of paradigmatic policy change, we see that SPD and Greens argue for the need of a paradigmatic change to EU fiscal integration, whereas the FDP would support some form of incremental change – making the pre-pandemic regulatory framework stricter.

Surprisingly enough, the fiscal synthesis of two parties in favour of paradigmatic change and one party supporting an incremental change results in a much less ambitious text than expected. There is no mention of increasing the EU’s spending capacity nor any other concrete measure on how to complete the Economic and Monetary Union. On the contrary, the Stability and Growth Pact should be more effectively enforced. No priority is granted to the introduction of new resources to the EU budget.

By stressing member states’ exclusive responsibility for their fiscal policy as a tenet of fiscal integration, the text closes the door on establishing a fiscal union. The need for increasing investments at EU level and in Germany has been recognized, but the preservative approach in favour of the status quo remains there. As a result, a significant deepening of integration after the pandemic will be difficult without having Germany on board. This seems true considering that the presidency of Emmanuel Macron – who had repeatedly advocated paradigmatic change to EU fiscal integration – is about to finish. Recent polls suggest he is the favourite for re-election but it is too early to predict the outcome of the French election of 10 April 2022. In Italy, the fate of the Draghi government depends on whether Draghi himself remains prime ministers or becomes president of the Republic. The lack of ‘propulsive force’ on the side of the new German government might result in losing the critical juncture of the COVID-19 pandemic to significantly advance on the road towards closer EU fiscal integration.

A traffic light strongly blinking yellow: the finance ministry led by the FDP

Crucially, the FDP seems to have influenced the fiscal policy of the new government more than its proportional weight in the coalition would have suggested – both at European and at national level. The leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, has become the new German finance minister. This ministry is given a particular importance in Germany. According to §26 of the procedural motion of the German government, if on a matter regarding public finances the government decides without or against the vote of the finance minister, the latter can veto such decision. The veto can only be overcome through unanimity among the ministers, otherwise the decision needs to be stopped. In addition to that, the finance minister clearly plays a key role on EU fiscal policy through his vote in the ECOFIN Council – which impacts both on issues pertaining to the enforcement of EU fiscal rules as part of the Stability and Growth Pact and also on decisions regarding new resources to the EU budget.

The FDP seems to have influenced the fiscal policy of the new government more than its proportional weight in the coalition would have suggested

The new German government will have to be judged based on what it concretely does. So far, we only have political plans on paper. What will then be possible in practice is another issue. However, on EU fiscal integration the new coalition agreement seems to blink more yellow than red or green. A traffic light blinking yellow might on some occasion be the moment immediately before proceeding forward. On some others, it might be the sign for stopping.

The post The German ‘traffic light’ coalition: no commitment to stronger spending powers for the EU appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The arrival of 2022 has brought both continuity and change to the UK’s relationship with the EU.

The resignation of Lord Frost in December has precipitated a major reorganisation (possibly still on-going) of the government’s management of EU and Brexit affairs, but the new point on the relationship – Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – has very much stuck to the same talking notes on the Northern Ireland Protocol as her predecessor.

The reorganisation starts to break up the significant collection of roles that Frost had built up in the past couple of years, probably more because of his proximity to Boris Johnson than through any conscious project of coordinating the multiple aspects of the work.

The move of the bilateral relationship out to the FCDO fits with a more natural model of diplomacy, and normalises EU relations as just part of the furniture, but it comes with a number of real challenges for Truss and her junior minister, man of letters Chris Heaton-Harris (who is presumably going to be even more delayed with that book).

Firstly, WA and TCA implementation covers a wide range of departments’ activities, so lots of coordination will be needed. Secondly, Johnson will retain a big interest in the portfolio, so handling the FCDO-No.10 connection will also need much attention.

The work on borders and on ‘Brexit opportunities’ is still up in the air; as Jill Rutter well argues, each could be well snaffled up by other departments, either as an on-going whole or in parts. That this remains unaddressed in the near-month since the FCDO move suggests stasis is the more likely option, given the limited shelf life of each project.

The graphic below summarises the changes and we’ll come back to it as anything happens.

On the continuity front, the switch from Frost to Truss has also seen the continuing ambiguity about how hard the UK wants to push to close the Protocol negotiations with the Commission. The initial contacts with the latter seem to have been couched – again – in terms of getting things sorted ‘as soon as possible’, rather than to any fixed timeline.

One question that lingers is that of whether the continued threat of using Article 16 carries either any weight in Brussels or even any seriousness in London: certainly, it has the air of being ritualistically waved about, rather than being ready to go.

I’ve discussed this question in the newest episode of A Diet of Brussels, and didn’t really come to a clear conclusion, mainly because the increasingly wounded Johnson might still go either way on this. Invoking Article 16 might be a way to rally the party to his cause once more, but it also risks making the ‘doneness’ of Brexit even more open to question.

So all still to be settled then.

Just like last year. And the ones before that.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic97

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How fitting: this spring, ARTE, the brainy French-German TV channel, will broadcast a second season of ‘En thérapie’, the French version of ‘In Treatment’ (itself based on the Israeli TV hit “Be Tipul”). 35 new episodes of people on the psychiatrist’s couch, composing what Le Monde called ‘an immobile travel across French society in the wake of the 2015 terror attacks.’ The first season, broadcast in early 2021, had been a totally unexpected success, more than doubling the channel’s average audience.

The exact broadcasting slot is not yet communicated, but end of April would no doubt be the best timing. The election campaign France is likely to have over the next months will leave the entire nation ripe for an in-depth collective therapy, worn out by endlessly quoted hysterical tweets, tired of its own paradoxes, and no wiser than before in its painful post-election hangover.

The first days of the new year have given a taste of what is to come. The polemic around the European flag under the Arc de Triomphe – meant to announce the French Presidency of the European Council, but threatening to ‘erase French identity’ according to the supposedly moderate conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse – has been a good teaser for the manner in which the presidential campaign will unfold. Ridiculous in its fake indignation and yet worrying in its real obsession with polarising at all costs.

Not to mention Emmanuel Macron’s carefully calculated “piss off”-interview with Le Parisien – which not only resulted in yet another predictable bashing of the President’s presumed contempt for ordinary people, while causing serious translation headaches for news correspondents across the continent, but also in over 230,000 new first jabs in one week, bringing the French vaccination rate to 92.2% of eligible individuals.

Two inflamed polemics in less than a week, and that’s while the President has not even declared his own candidacy yet. The Fifth Republic’s implacable logic of full confrontation and permanent rhetorical overbidding has set in and will continue to take speed over the next weeks, fuelled by a very peculiar media landscape.

French election campaigns are a painful experience for any observer who follows them with a minimum of empathy for this country. De Gaulle’s introduction of the direct election of the President, through a referendum in 1962 following the dissolution of a parliament refusing to be bulldozed, has held the Fifth Republic in a terrible stranglehold. What I wrote at the outset of the campaign five years ago is just as valid today: rather than refer to ‘path-dependency’, we should speak of ‘path imprisonment’.

France has always been a highly complicated society that is extremely difficult to understand from outside. Even the most scrupulous, well-intended observers rely on a good dose of stereotypical knowledge and seemingly revealing key words. But the relative stability of political behaviour patterns at the surface of the Republic cannot conceal the dramatic changes French society has undergone over the last decades. After having spent the past thirty years in this idiosyncratic sociocultural, linguistic and political environment, I wonder if it has not become increasingly difficult to decipher.

One more reason to accompany the weeks and months ahead with a modest attempt at addressing some of the issues that will dominate the unfolding election campaign. A lot of different topics deserve to be scrutinised,

• starting with the deep soul-searching across the entire political spectrum of what still holds the country together,
• but also more technical aspects, like the planned and unintended consequences of primaries held (or painstakingly avoided) and the disturbing uncertainty surrounding the legislative elections in June,
• the seemingly unstoppable decline of the left and the strange phenomenon of the huge gap between the national and local/regional level of politics, dominated by two totally different ideological forces and fault lines,
• ongoing attempts at historical revisionism and forthcoming challenges to collective memory,
• and even the good old proverbial French pessimism deserves a second look in the light of recent surveys.

Without any pretension to be able to explain everything, it’s a good moment to invite French politics to lie down on the couch again.

The post France 2022: Back on the couch appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The next steps in the EU’s constitutional development must involve greater care for the wider Europe, Andrew Duff argues. He proposes the introduction of a new category of EU affiliate membership, allowing the EU’s western and eastern neighbours alike to become stable and reliable partners.

Enlargement must only proceed if it enhances the EU’s own security and that of the applicants. (Illustration: Dati Bendo/European Union)

One of the more diverting exercises in literary criticism during 2022 will be the simultaneous publication of NATO’s Strategic Concept and the EU’s Strategic Compass. Why do we need two documents to define the security interests of the West? The answer, like most things, lies in history. France feared that NATO would serve to expand American influence in Europe while Britain opposed the development of a security policy under EU auspices. Brexit has helpfully removed the British blockage on Europe’s common foreign and security policy. President Macron, meanwhile, advocates European sovereign autonomy not as a substitute for US engagement but as a supplement to it. The provocations of President Putin, not least in Ukraine, stimulate the coming together of the EU and NATO.

Security architecture

In my recent book Britain and the Puzzle of European Union (forthcoming 2022) I propose a reform of security architecture to underpin the new alignment. A European Security Council, chaired by an EU defence minister, would combine the efforts of the two Brussels based organisations — keeping the Americans alongside while encouraging Germany to upgrade its contribution to Europe’s defence against Russia. The purpose of the Security Council is to help NATO think strategically while enabling the EU to act militarily.

An early benefit of such a new configuration would be a common policy on enlargement. NATO’s open-door policy led to the glib promise in 2008 of NATO membership to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova as well as to the haphazard admission of Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia — none of which has added to Europe’s security (indeed, rather the contrary). In a similar and uncoordinated spasm, the European Union in 2003 offered the prospect of enlargement to all six countries of the Western Balkans. The EU also allowed its 2014 association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to be portrayed as being preparatory to candidacy for membership. This lax approach was, of course, encouraged by the UK which saw eastern enlargement as a way to blunt the federal tendency in Brussels.

Subsequent events suggest that those of us who expressed disquiet at these facile promises were correct. (Indeed, one may chastise oneself for not being more outspoken against them at the time.) As I have written recently in a European Policy Centre paper Dealing with the Neighbours, there is still a basic dishonesty at the heart of the EU’s enlargement policy. All potential candidate states suffer to a greater or lesser extent from an excess of nationalism, antisemitism, ethnic and religious tension, and unstable rule by corrupt judges and politicians. Most are quarrelling with their neighbours.

The prospect of further enlargement is viewed with alarm by most of the current member states. Although the Commission has introduced stricter verification of the accession process, Emmanuel Macron makes it clear that the Union will no longer continue to amiably ignore the Copenhagen enlargement criteria. Even were the technical accession requirements to be met, the EU’s rule of rigid unanimity (involving 27 national parliaments or referendums) poses an insuperable obstacle to actual enlargement (Art. 49 Treaty on European Union, TEU).

The problem, however, goes deeper. It is not only the case that the potential candidates are ineligible for membership, but also that the government of the EU itself is so muddled and inept that it cannot possibly shoulder the burden of running the Western Balkans or face Kremlin aggression with a united front. Failure to proceed with political reform of the Union since 2005 has rendered it incapable of enlarging. The time is over when the Union could pretend to welcome applicants when they pretended to be ready.

Affiliate membership?

I have proposed that at the next revision of the EU treaties a new category of affiliate membership is created (Art. 49a TEU). This would allow those European states which commit to the values of the EU and fall within its regulatory orbit but which do not espouse the goal of political, economic and monetary union to become stable and reliable partners.

For the EU’s western neighbours — Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and the UK — affiliate membership would imply an upgrading of their present, different, unsatisfactory association or free trade agreements. Partial official engagement of the affiliate states with the political, administrative and judicial institutions of the Union would enable the partnership to develop in a stable, legitimate and democratic fashion. Some attributes of EU citizenship could be shared with affiliates in a spirit of good neighbourliness (Art. 8 TEU). Full participation in EU spending programmes could be envisaged. Affiliate status should be regarded as a durable settlement rather than a springboard for full membership.

For the EU’s eastern neighbours, affiliate membership would encourage economic and political convergence on EU norms without the challenge of leaping improbable hurdles involving the ultimate sacrifice of national sovereignty. It should encourage regional collaboration between, for example, Albania and Serbia. It would allow for closer political cooperation with Brussels and the systematic joint management of EU funding. Affiliate EU membership underpinned by the European Security Council would provide eastern Europe with an unprecedented level of stability and security.

Affiliate membership would also offer, should it be needed, a parking place for any current EU member state that sought to dissociate itself from an EU on the path towards federal union. Relegation to affiliate status would avoid the humiliation of secession (Art. 50 TEU).

Intermediate accession?

Working on the same assumption that the EU’s present enlargement policy is bust, the Centre for European Policy Studies has published a comparable but alternative proposal to mine. Michael Emerson, Milena Lazarevic, Steven Blockmans and Strahinja Subotic suggest that the candidate states should be admitted in stages to full membership of the Union. They propose an ingenious template for gradual accession in phases, involving partial participation in EU institutions. In the final pre-accession phase, after meeting various tests, the ‘new member states’ would be admitted to the EU Council but deprived of their right of unilateral veto. It is hoped that their participation only in decisions of the Council taken by qualified majority vote (QMV) would act avant la lettre as an example for all member states to emulate. Emerson and his colleagues are more optimistic than me.

Our two papers agree on many things, however, including the necessity of treaty revision, the extension of QMV and the need for a smaller Commission. We insist that the EU should reflect more deeply than it has done on the implications of Brexit for the constitutional evolution of the Union. Enlargement is not an academic exercise: it must only proceed if it enhances the EU’s own security and that of the applicants. It can hardly be in Serbia’s interest to join a Union which is not working well.

The next steps in the Union’s constitutional development must involve greater care for the wider Europe. It’s surely time to experiment. Maybe the Conference on the Future of Europe can help. Addressing the problem of the EU’s neighbourhood — east and west — has to involve the neighbours directly in constitutional discussions. Differentiated integration does not stop at the borders of the EU 27. A European Union more confident about its own region will be in a better position to project its values and protect its interests worldwide.

The post The Wider Europe: a time for experiments appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The corona recovery fund, now formally known as Next Generation EU, has been the European Union’s (EU) most important response to the economic and social damages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unprecedently, the 27 member states entrusted the European Commission to borrow €750 billion and to allocate the money – in large parts in the form of grants – to the European countries hardest hit. Given member states’ opposing attitudes towards common debt and their different immediate reactions to the pandemic, the establishment of the Union’s corona recovery fund was remarkable. What explains the creation, timing, and scope of the recovery fund? Why was the Union able to agree on such comprehensive measures in a very short time?

Our article stresses the decisiveness of France and Germany – the Union’s “big two” – their tight bilateral political cooperation, and their crucial role in EU politics. We show why and how France and Germany, starting from different poles, came together and established joint positions on the corona crisis, paving the way for an overall European agreement. Applying and further advancing the “embedded bilateralism” approach, we find instances of crucial Franco-German leadership including agenda-setting, comprise-building, and coalition-building.

 

Franco-German leadership in the corona crisis

Agenda-setting: When the new coronavirus started spreading rapidly across Europe from late February 2020, member states, including France and Germany, initially took national measures for its containment. Deep divisions on the adequate European measures crystallized when France joined a group of other countries calling for the introduction of “corona bonds” while Germany advocated the use of existing instruments and credits only. In light of a dramatic downturn of the European economy, the pandemic would soon pose a major threat to the stability and cohesion of the EU.

French and German civil servants and policymakers – at first largely behind the scenes – started intensifying their bilateral consultations, seeking to overcome differences and find common ground. On 18 May 2020, President Macron and Chancellor Merkel proposed an EU recovery fund totalling €500billion, financed through common debt. The interviews we conducted for this research revealed that only a small number of people were involved in the preparations, with Macron and Merkel having had at least two direct exchanges per week since early April. France and Germany thus gave important political spin and weight to the upcoming “official” Commission proposal on a recovery instrument, released only nine days later.

Compromise-building: The Franco-German initiative most of all was a bilateral compromise in that both countries had developed joint positions and had deviated from previously held national positions. Germany, for its part, accepted the notion of common EU debt and direct financial transfers between member states. France, in turn, backed away from corona bonds and joint liability and agreed on tying the recovery fund to the EU’s regular budget with the respective political and economic conditions attached.

Beyond that, France and Germany represented larger camps of member states, taking their concerns and “red lines” into account. While France pushed for a rapid crisis response targeted at the particularly hit Southern countries, Germany – in line with other Northern countries – insisted the recovery fund to be a one-off instrument. When national leaders at their European Council meeting in mid-July signed off the recovery package proposed by the Commission, individual camps of member states – due to the unanimity required – obtained some concessions. The “Frugals” secured rebates on their contributions to the EU budget, while the Visegráds watered down provisions on a rule-of-law clause. Yet, the overall size and financing of the recovery package, as France and Germany had jointly advocated, remained.

Coalition-building: When Hungary and Poland in December 2020 still threatened to veto the package due to the planned conditionality clause, France-Germany signalled that they were willing, if needed, to move ahead with only 25 member states and establish the recovery fund on an intergovernmental basis. This threat of exclusion during political gridlock has had a prominent precedent from the time of the Eurozone crisis: When the British government vetoed the French-German proposal for new debt rules and a fiscal compact, the latter two moved ahead with a coalition of like-minded member states outside the EU’s regular framework.

 

Advancing European integration theory

France and Germany during the corona pandemic thus provided important leadership services. They gave guidance and orientation for an EU in deep crisis and enabled swift and collective action. Scrutinizing the two countries’ leadership role, our article advances the theoretical debate, especially about EU crisis politics. Scholars seeking to explain how the EU managed to find answers to pressing challenges or, by contrast, struggled to overcome joint-decision problems, usually invoke the grand theories of European integration: Supranationalists hold that Community institutions like the Commission enjoy great autonomy and, independently from member states, pursue policies leading to more integration. Intergovernmentalists, by contrast, claim that deliberation and consensus-seeking among all member states best address common problems.

However, these accounts often cannot explain why certain positions are established and how exactly moments of crisis can be overcome. The missing variable, we contend, is political leadership. Stressing the political dynamics between the national and European levels, the embedded bilateralism approach holds that France and Germany play a particularly important role in EU politics. As founding and the Union’s largest member states, they share a special responsibility for the European project. Embedded bilateralism shows why and how France and Germany, beyond their respective national preferences, at times develop common or even joint preferences, themselves being the result of their unique bilateral political relationship and role in Europe. Moreover, due to their overall size and joint resources – not least in economic and financial terms – these two countries can lay the groundwork for larger European compromises.

Other more recent EU crises show how difficult common solutions are if France and Germany themselves do not find together. The ongoing crisis in the EU’s migration and asylum system, for example, to date has led to little Franco-German leadership. Instead, we have seen instances of unilateral German action and half-hearted French support for a revision of the Schengen regime. Other than during the corona crisis, the two pivotal countries in the case of migration and asylum so far could not agree on joint political objectives and the adequate means to achieve them. As the corona crisis reminds us once again, without a prior Franco-German agreement the pre-structuring and shaping of larger European bargains and outcomes are difficult or unlikely.

 

This blog post draws on JCMS article, “Embedded Bilateralism, Integration Theory, and European Crisis Politics: France, Germany, and the Birth of the EU Corona Recovery Fund.”

 

 

 

Ulrich Krotz is Alfred Grosser Professor at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris. He is the author of, among others, “Shaping Europe: France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics” (2013, with Joachim Schild), “History and Foreign Policy in France and Germany” (2015), and contributing co-editor of “Europe’s Cold War Relations: the EC Towards a Global Role (2020, with Kiran Klaus Patel and Federico Romero).

 

Lucas Schramm is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute. In his dissertation, he analyses past and more recent political crises in the process of European integration, seeking to explain the variation in crisis outcomes. His recent publication includes the co-authored article “An Old Couple in a New Setting: Franco-German Leadership in the Post-Brexit EU” in Politics and Governance.

The post How France and Germany created the EU corona recovery fund appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Who sets the European Union’s policy agenda? The complex nature of the EU’s legislative process, combined with the lack of a clear hierarchy among the core EU institutions, means that it is hard to disentangle the policy contributions of different institutions and determine which one is ultimately responsible for the legislative priorities of the Union.

The ever-increasing criticism of the “Euro-bureaucrats” and the democratic deficit in the EU, along with the policy influence wielded by the European Council during recent crises, complicated this picture even further, leading to competition between the EU institutions and their Presidents. This inter-institutional power struggle recently culminated in the infamous “Sofagate” incident in Turkey, exposing the tensions between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel on the world stage.

 

Which institution sets the European Union’s policy agenda?

Even though the European Commission has the right of initiative, whether this ‘power of the pen’ gives the Commission a monopoly over the agenda-setting process has long been debated. This is because the Commission, despite its formal status, has often found itself competing with other actors and institutions to determine the legislative priorities of the European Union. In the meantime, the changes introduced in successive treaty revisions between the Maastricht Treaty (1993) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) have fundamentally altered institutional dynamics and inter-institutional relationships. While the Commission has retained its formal powers to introduce legislation, it has increasingly lacked the ability to shape the proposal once the process began. On the other hand, both the European Parliament (EP) and the European Council (EUCO) have gained new powers, in addition to the informal opportunities for agenda influence that they already enjoyed. While the EP works with the Council of the European Union (Council) to delay, amend, veto, or adopt legislation as the EU’s only directly elected body, EUCO identifies broad interests and sets general guidelines for the entire Union without any initiative from the Commission or any involvement by the Parliament.

The Commission’s resources, technical expertise, and status as an honest broker in European affairs still enhance its agenda-setting powers, making it possible for the Commission to correctly identify the policy preferences of the EP and the Council and strategically devise policy initiatives that both reflect its own priorities and have a high probability of success. This, however, creates an interesting puzzle: if the Commission must tailor its policy proposals to fit the preference configurations of the other core EU institutions to be successful, can we still talk about the Commission’s autonomous policy influence? Or should we interpret this strategic move as a sign that its independent influence is in decline? If the latter, should the Commission be seen more as a technical agenda-setter than a political one?

Indeed,  recent research suggests that the legislative priorities of the Commission are more and more frequently failing to be translated into EU polices by the other legislative actors, and this is especially when these priorities do not reflect the publicly announced priorities of the other core institutions. In fact, the likelihood of Commission priority initiatives being successful drops by more than 30 percent when it acts on its own. This decline is even steeper when the Commission attempts to propose initiatives aimed at introducing new policy arenas into the EU legal sphere, highlighting its strength as a provider of technical expertise, rather than its political agenda-setting capacity.

 

How much agenda-setting power does the Commission have?

This is not to say that the Commission is entirely dependent on other core EU institutions, however. Nearly sixty percent of the initiatives highlighted in the Commission’s Annual Work Programmes were translated into legislative outcomes between the years 2000 and 2014, which is substantial, though well below that of most EU member state executives to which the Commission is sometimes compared. Perhaps more importantly, almost forty percent of these lacked explicit congruence with the legislative priorities of the other core institutions.  Moreover, despite the clear impact of the changes wrought by the Lisbon treaty’s increase in the policy roles of the European Parliament and European Council, the relationship between the Commission and the Council remains the most critical one.

Having substantially more access to policy expertise than the other institutions, the Commission continues to hold a unique position within the EU institutional structure that’s helps it to chart the tumultuous political waters of inter-institutional policymaking within the Union. Nevertheless, because it lacks a direct role in the decision-making aspects of the policy process, is often unable to ensure its priority legislation is adopted.

Together these trends suggest that interpretations of the EU political system that ascribe the role of political executive to the Commission fundamentally misunderstand the Commission’s current role. The combination of an increasingly powerful and independent EP, and the formalization of the European Council, have combined to reduce the need for the unelected, often technocratic Commission to serve this function. While those who hope for a clear parliamentary-style EU with the Commission at its head may find this result dispiriting, perhaps the fact that the Commission is most successful in pursuing its policy objectives when these reflect the public priorities of the democratically elected EU institutions may reassure others hoping for a more democratic and electorally linked political executive.

 

This blog draws on the JCMS article “Power or Luck? The Limitations of the European Commission’s Agenda Setting Power and Autonomous Policy Influence”

 

 

Buket Oztas an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Furman University. Her research focuses on the changing institutional dynamics in predominantly Muslim countries, with particular interest in post-Islamism and transnational identities, and includes an ongoing research initiative on the agenda-setting powers of the European Commission.

 

 

Amie Kreppel is a Jean Monnet Chair (ad personam), Director of the Center for European Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has served as President of the EUSA and has been both a Braudel Fellow at EUI and a Fulbright-Schuman Chair at the College of Europe.

Twitter handle: @akreppel

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Theresa May and the shaping of the Brexit process

With the provisional entry into force of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the dust is far from settled on the Brexit process. And yet the culmination of the formal stages of talks on the terms of withdrawal and the future relationship – however ‘thin’ and contested – offers an opportunity to reflect on the key moments that shaped the negotiations over the years.

While Boris Johnson’s bombastic approach and set-piece parliamentary stunts have attracted more attention recently, it was under his predecessor, Theresa May, that the contours of the Brexit process were decisively shaped.

May’s interpretation of the Brexit mandate as binding, her resolve to keep the Conservatives united and her corresponding failure to reach out to the opposition, her secretive and centralised decision-making style, and her push for a ‘bespoke’ deal through a ‘hard bargaining’ strategy – all of these left indelible marks on the Brexit process.

In the end, May’s catastrophic defeat in the UK Parliament, on three separate occasions in 2019 (15 January, 12 and 29 March) not only highlighted the difficulties of Brexit, but also exposed to many the flaws in May’s negotiating strategy and the pitfalls in her closeted and uncommunicative approach to the mammoth task of EU withdrawal. The prime minister’s defeat also set the stage for Johnson’s usurpation of her role, and the ensuing efforts to drive and harder bargain and ensure greater autonomy from EU rules after withdrawal.

May’s failure to pass the Withdrawal Agreement in early 2019 did not surprise some – least of all her critics – but it is puzzling that a prime minister would undertake to secure an agreement without the requisite support at home. ‘Involuntary defection’, as the literature on negotiations terms such occasions, happens rarely, precisely because leaders have little incentive to sign up to terms which their domestic support base might reject.

 

Explaining the fate of the Withdrawal Agreement

The conventional wisdom has it that May’s early approach to the Brexit negotiations – her unsuccessful hard bargaining, her failure to reach out to the opposition, and her numerous strategic errors – cost her the support of Parliament.

But this view makes a number of assumptions which – with no desire to exonerate May – we might find questionable.

It assumes a “better” deal might have been available, which is at odds with the EU’s clear and unchanging offer of the terms of withdrawal and with the imbalance of power between both sides. It assumes soft bargaining might have worked better than hard bargaining, when it is more likely a conciliatory approach would have landed May in a similar situation, not least vis-à-vis her Conservative compatriots.

It also assumes that MPs were voting on the basis of a deal they wanted to see, when in reality there was very little chance the UK could negotiate a deal that would fully satisfy the outlandish aims of the hard Brexiteers or the bespoke goals of softer Brexit supporters, let alone those who wished for the UK to remain in the EU. The reality is that MPs would always be voting for a least-worst outcome, and that they had their eyes on the alternatives to an agreement as much as the agreement itself.

 

Take-it-or-leave-it

Acknowledging this, I argue in a recent article, provides the key to understanding the failure of May’s Withdrawal Agreement: It would always have to have been passed under some form of duress, given the inequalities in the EU-UK relationship and the divergence between domestic and external ‘win-sets’ – that is, between Brussels and the Tories.

And the requisite pressure could be easily supplied by a combination of the Article 50 process and the executive’s traditional dominance under the UK constitution.

Article 50 established that a damaging ‘no deal’ cliff-edge would become the default outcome in the event both sides failed to negotiate an agreement within two years, and locked this commitment in through the unanimity requirement for the granting of any extension.

The UK constitution, meanwhile, afforded the government considerable leeway in determining the timing and the nature of any vote on the terms of withdrawal, effectively allowing the government to run the clock down with impunity until a final vote, which the government indicated might be offered after the UK had left the EU.

Combined with fortuitous political circumstances – namely, the extremely low proportion of pro-Brexit MPs and a widely held belief that the mainstay of opposition would come from Remain supporters, for whom a ‘no deal’ scenario was unconscionable – these factors, when taken together, offered the prospect of presenting the negotiated agreement to parliamentarians with no effective choice of an alternative.

Under conditions so propitious to passing any agreement better than ‘no deal’, it is perhaps no wonder May took liberties with her demands and decided against any overtures to the political opposition.

 

The changing circumstances of the vote

But the circumstances of the final Brexit vote – and indeed the government’s advantageous position – was greatly altered by the political and constitutional upheavals wrought about as the negotiations got underway.

Support for ‘no deal’ Brexit increased precipitously within the Conservative party, as political entrepreneurs sought to highlight the deficiencies in the deal May was negotiating. While not all Conservative no deal supporters were likely to support going over the cliff, the shift in position made them less vulnerable, on the face of it, to May’s threatened outcome were they not to support her deal.

Not only did Conservative support for no deal shift the parliamentary calculus, it also influenced the government’s signalling strategy, making it far more complex. Instead of claiming that ‘no deal was better than a bad deal’, May changed tack, and by late 2018 was offering a more confusing choice between ‘no deal’, her deal, and ‘no Brexit’.

Although the ‘no Brexit’ threat was aimed at pro-Brexit Conservatives, its emergence proved a game-changer for Remain supporters, giving them more reason to reject May’s deal. The possibility of Brexit not happening at all was reinforced, in

Most important, perhaps, the circumstances of the vote itself shifted, as parliamentary activists – mainly Conservatives but with cross-party support and the tacit backing of Commons Speaker John Bercow – sought to take advantage of May’s non-existent majority to wring concessions out of the government on the circumstances of the vote.

Parliamentarians succeeded in obtaining a commitment to a ‘meaningful vote’ from the government in late 2017 by holding hostage the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, thereby ensuring the government would not leave the vote until the last minute. As the vote approached, in January 2019, they also tied the government into presenting new proposals to Parliament in the event the deal was rejected, and over the subsequent weeks Conservative rebels – acting in unison with the Labour opposition – would succeed in committing Parliament against ‘no deal’.

Taken together, what these developments amounted to, over the course of 2017-2019, was to remove the beneficial combination of political, constitutional, and discursive factors that enabled the government to present its naturally unpopular Withdrawal Agreement to legislators as the only palatable option against the damaging (and inevitable) no deal backdrop.

 

Why it matters?

Re-assessing the reasons for May’s dramatic defeat in early 2019 are important, not least because of the consequences it came to have for the Brexit process, and thus the subsequent direction of the UK also. Accounting for the change in the vote’s circumstances not only helps us understand the reasons why May was unsuccessful in her efforts to deliver Brexit, but also why she made key decisions which – coupled with these altered circumstances – would seal her fate as prime minister, and that of her preferred Brexit outcome.

And there are good theoretical reasons to play closer attention to this period, not least given the relative obscurity of examples of involuntary defection. May’s experience with the Withdrawal Agreement helps us to understand how the ‘rules of the game’ – so often treated as exogenously defined by existing theories – can change during the course of negotiations. Moreover, it shows that change can come from below, not just from above, as domestic actors in weakened circumstances find innovative legal and political ways to shift the balance of fortunes in their favour.

 

This blog post draws on JCMS article, “Deal or No Deal: Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement and the Politics of (Non-)Ratification”

 

 

Benjamin Martill is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, where he conducts teaching and research on Brexit, European security, and the politics of foreign policy. Benjamin is co-editor (with Uta Staiger) of Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (UCL Press).

 

Twitter: @EdinburghPIR

The post Deal or No Deal: Revisiting Theresa May’s Brexit Defeat appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

After several systemic crises in a decade, emergency politics has taken hold in Europe. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and later the Covid-19 pandemic, governments have responded with exceptional measures. Along the way, they have accumulated extraordinary powers. We might be tempted to think that this form of politics is the natural consequence of crisis-fighting. Yet the rise of exceptionalism is only a symptom of a more enduring crisis of party democracy. Simply put, partisan politics has become more difficult to deliver in contemporary democracies. As a result, less conventional forms of politics are gaining ground.

In the wake of several systemic crises, emergency politics has become a common feature in European politics.

The world is short of many things these days, from cars and petrol to microchips and building materials. But it has had no shortage of crises lately. In 2008, the global financial crisis shook the world economy with catastrophic consequences in terms of economic damage and job destruction. Barely a decade later, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought entire countries to a standstill. Its devastating effects are still being felt across the globe and threaten a new wave of infections.

In Europe and elsewhere, governments have responded to these crises with exceptional measures, thanks in part to the extraordinary powers they have claimed for themselves. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, for example, governments bailed out ailing banks and implemented massive austerity policies amid popular protests. Recently, national executives have adopted other extraordinary measures to fight the pandemic, from paying workers’ wages to rolling out mass vaccination programs at short notice.

Exceptional measures for exceptional times?

These “exceptional measures for exceptional times”, as former European Commission President Barroso once put it, have had a lasting effect on contemporary democratic politics. Actions departing from conventional practice are presented as necessary responses to exceptional threats. Sovereign rescue packages and constitutional reforms have been rushed through parliaments and justified on survival grounds. Unprecedented policy measures are being passed by executive order. Emergency politics has become a persistent feature of European politics.

As part of my doctoral research, I have studied some relevant implications of this exceptionalism. This form of politics has both institutional and discursive manifestations. Institutionally, exceptionalism expresses itself in the abuse of extraordinary executive powers. Often, governments use these powers to pass far-reaching measures through emergency procedures, circumventing debate and negotiations in parliaments. As a political discourse, exceptionalism relies on hyperbolic and alarmist language. It appeals to emergencies and exceptions to justify political action. It presents urgent decisions that go beyond the usual as inevitable. Typically, exceptionalism takes the form of “decide now, act immediately, explain quickly, and validate later”, as scholar Julia Black expresses it.

Investigating the governments’ responses to the Great Recession, I found that governing parties extensively appealed to exceptionalism to justify many of their economic responses. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Labour government relied on exceptionalist appeals to justify the nationalisation of four banks. Similarly, the Conservative-led Coalition invoked a fiscal emergency and a Greek-style scenario to pass the 2010 ‘Emergency Budget’, which sanctioned the most ambitious fiscal austerity programme of the G7.

In Spain, another country that had left- and right-wing governments during the crisis, emergency politics also gained momentum. From the abrupt turn to austerity by the social democratic government (PSOE) in May 2010 to the bank nationalisation carried out by the conservative cabinet (PP) in 2012, both governments justified controversial choices on exceptionalist grounds. But the Spanish case is particularly revealing in another respect. The extensive use of decree laws to pass far-reaching measures has become a major institutional manifestation of exceptionalism. Originally conceived in the Spanish Constitution as an exceptional instrument for extraordinary situations, the decree law has become a common legislative tool in recent years.

Between 2008 and 2014, the two Spanish governments passed 121 decree laws, 60 per cent of which were directly related to their economic crisis responses. Figure 1 shows the relative percentage of decree laws over the total number of laws in each legislature, a good indicator of ruling parties’ reliance on this legislative tool. The two legislatures with the highest relative use of decree laws coincide with the crisis period (the two rightmost bars in the graph): approximately one third of all legislation was passed using this extraordinary mechanism.

Ruling by decree: Relative use of decree-laws by Spanish governments (1979-2015). Source: author’s own elaboration from data compiled in Martín Rebollo (2015). Note: The indicator measures the relative percentage of decree laws for each parliamentary term since Spain’s transition to democracy. The bars are arranged in ascending order, starting with the legislature displaying the lowest relative use of decree laws and ending with the legislature with the highest relative percentage. Colour shows details about the party in government.

The endurance of emergency politics

But was this exceptionalism an exception? Fast forward a few years, and identical outcomes have been observed in the UK, Spain and elsewhere during the Covid crisis. Thus, following the initial outbreak of infections in March 2020, the British government announced an “unprecedented [economic intervention] in the history of the British state”. These were “unprecedented measures, for unprecedented times”, as the Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak insisted during the public announcement. Quite unprecedented, too, is the number of decrees that the Spanish coalition government has approved during the pandemic. By the end of 2020, the coalition between the centre-left PSOE and the far-left Unidas Podemos had approved all kinds of measures by decree, breaking every historical record.

This exceptionalist rhetoric and the over-production of decrees have gone hand in hand with the accumulation of extraordinary powers. In Spain, several states of alarm have been declared and later challenged by the Spanish Constitutional Court. In the UK, the government has used the pre-existing Public Health (Control of Disease Act) 1984 and new fast-tracked legislation, the Coronavirus Act 2020, to claim sweeping emergency powers to manage the pandemic. The Spanish and British governments could not be more ideologically opposed, yet they have ended up governing the pandemic alike.

In a way, this is unsurprising. In the face of an unprecedented crisis, unprecedented measures follow, regardless of which party is in office. And living through several crises in a decade might explain the persistence of politics in the emergency register. Yet this form of politics has had lasting consequences on the quality of democracy and on the identity of political parties.

The outlasting effects of exceptionalism

In countries such as Spain, legislative constraints on the executive have weakened and government accountability has suffered as a result, as shown by the Varieties of Democracies (V-Dem) indicators. Across Europe, many exceptional measures have outlived the emergency that initially justified them. From the way banks are supervised to fiscal constraints, these reforms have reshaped entire regulatory systems with little public scrutiny.

More significantly, many of these measures are at odds with the political identity of the parties that adopted them. In the last decade alone, we have seen conservative parties nationalising private banks with public funds and paying workers’ wages; liberal parties, once committed to “tax-cuts-always-work”, raising taxes across the board and creating new ones; and social democratic parties slashing public spending and cutting public pensions.

Understandably, parties’ choices are no longer self-evident to their supporters and voters. As exceptionalism takes hold, government action ceases to reflect distinctive ideological commitments. For in the emergency register, different parties act and sound increasingly alike.

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What is resilience and how do different disciplines and fields approach it? What does resilience mean in different sectors? And what does resilience involve in times of global pandemic? These are some of the questions addressed in a new open access book Towards resilient organizations and societies. A cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary perspective, edited by Rómulo Pinheiro, Maria Laura Frigotto and Mitchell Young. In this Q&A, they tell about origins of the book as well as their findings and lessons for future research and practice.

 

Q1: What have been the rationales and origins of this book?

The book originates from a 2018 EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) panel on the topic. It became apparent in the discussions that there is a need to connect different streams of research alongside multiple theoretical and methodological traditions to both take stock of developments in the field as well as move forward in the context of a more integrative research agenda. This aim has become even more apparent following the COVID-19 health pandemic, where considerable policy attention has been paid to resilience at multiple levels; individuals, communities, territories, nations, world regions, organizations, and institutions, including political and economic ones. The book represents a first step in the rather ambitious effort to further develop and integrate novel conceptual as well as empirical insights on the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of resilience.

 

Q2: What is resilience and what does your book contribute to the studies of resilience?

Simply stated, resilience is the ability of an individual, entity or system to adapt to emerging circumstances whilst retaining both function and identity. In the introductory chapter for the volume, and after having systematically reviewed the existing literature and perspectives on the topic, we, the editors, refer to three basic principles at the heart of resilience as a property, process, and/or outcome.

First, the interplay between stability and change, with resilience being located at the intersection between the two.  Second, the relationship between resilience antecedents or triggers, what we term ‘adversity’, versus the degrees of change or ‘novelty’ that result from the adaptation to such internal or external adversities. In this context, we refer to three types of resilience per the degree of novelty, namely: absorptive (low novelty/a return to the old normal); adaptive (medium novelty/change within limits or threshold); and transformative (high novelty/renewal, including the delineation of new limits or threshold). Third, temporality, taking into account process-related aspects that occur before (foresight), during (mechanism) and following (outcome) a disruptive event or adversity. Finally, we note that resilience not only is a multifaceted phenomenon but also a multi-scaled one (macro-meso-micro levels), and thus there is a need to unpack how these levels co-evolve and influence one another over time.

As for the book’s unique contribution, it: a) advances a new conceptual framework (as described above), b) sheds light on a set of empirical cases from various sectors and levels, and (c) sketches out, in the conclusive section, a novel methodological framework for future inquiries involving scholars from various social science traditions and perspectives.

 

Q3: Your book looks at resilience across a number of sectors from a fire brigade and shipyard to universities. What commonalities and differences do you find across the sectors?

The empirical cases provide new evidence of the challenges facing individuals, organizations and systems while attempting to adapt to changing, often disruptive circumstances. They go about this process in very different ways depending on contextual circumstances, both local and global, of which historical path-dependencies, resource-dependencies as well as formal and informal rules were found to play a critical role. Whether an organization is either public or private seems to be less significant for resilience when compared to the extent to which their operations/functions are affected by the confluence of political constraints and economic events, what Barry Bozeman famously termed ‘publicness’. High levels of publicness, as is the case of transportation providers, universities, or the military, to name a few, result in growing complexity in processes of adaptation due to the multiple, often contradictory demands posed by stakeholders such as governmental agencies, funders and surrounding communities. Similarly, internal diversity – in terms of technology, values (sub-cultures) and functions – results in increasing complexity as regards adaptation to external events. Following systems theory, we found that ‘pre-requisite diversity’ is a necessary condition for adaptation under situations of considerable environmental complexity and turbulence. Likewise, in many instances leaders, both formal and informal, as well as the social capital (trust) they help nurture throughout the organization (and beyond) were also found to play an important role.

Turning back to our typology, most of the empirical cases in the book (6 out of 10) were characterized as pertaining to high levels of change or novelty, with the remaining four cases evenly distributed across the minor and medium novelty dimensions. As far as procedural aspects are concerned, 6 out of the 10 cases encompass more than one temporal dimension, with 4 cases illustrating resilience at all the three stages: from foresight to mechanisms to outcomes. What is more, in several situations, the authors provide critical evidence of the interplay between levels of analysis or resilience scales. Each cluster (total of 4), comprising different types of organizations (for a visualization, see Fig. 12.1, p. 316), is discussed in detail in the last section of the book, which is freely available as open access.

 

Q4: What is a post-entrepreneurial university?

We coined the phrase ‘post-entrepreneurial university’ as a way of expressing a university model that encompasses elements of the entrepreneurial university but in a way that supersedes the strong inflections of New Public Management (NPM). This is similar to how public policy has in many sectors (though less so in higher education) moved to a post-NPM discourse.  In order to do this, we trace the entrepreneurial university discourse back to its roots in the works of two major scholars – Burton Clark and Henry Etzkowitz and their respective schools of thought over the concept – one sociologically and the other economically based. We show how the alignment with NPM co-opted and overrode many of Burton Clark’s original ideas, but contend that applying a post NPM understanding to the concept would resolve some of the inherent tensions (we identify three related to actorhood, efficiency, and diversity) to its implementation that have arisen largely due to the economic interpretation of the concept.

In short, we suggest embracing a resilient actor model of the university (as opposed to a strategic actor one), as we had originally proposed in a 2017 chapter (Pinheiro and Mitchell 2017) in Theory and Method in Higher Education Research, could re-engage and energize the entrepreneurial university concept by allowing it to embrace a more biological systems oriented strategy and positioning model; one in which slack, requisite variety, and loose coupling are engaged in an attempt to create a university that ‘thrives’ rather than ‘wins’.

 

Q5: Your book takes a multidisciplinary approach to resilience. Which scientific disciplines contributed to the book? What did each of them bring to the studies of resilience? Did you also see any tensions in how different disciplines approach resilience?

Resilience is a multidisciplinary concept in nature: first raised within the physical sciences, it has been subsequently adopted across a wide range of disciplinary fields and their respective epistemological, methodological and theoretical traditions. This has led to challenges when it comes to definitions and approaches, most notably as regards comparisons across disciplinary domains. Overall, resilience might appear as a concept that is in danger of concept stretching: as a buzzword that is not clearly analytically defined and poorly empirically studied. Even considering only resilience as a social phenomenon, each subfield has contributed to a progressive blurring of the definition, especially by relating resilience to different complementary concepts such as adaptation, fragility, flexibility, resistance, inertia, etc. Thus, while resilience has become specialized in each subfield, it has evolved within disciplinary boundaries along parallel paths with little cross-fertilization.

The chapters composing the bulk of this volume attest to this eclecticism: there are 11 different fields and sub-fields (organization studies, emergency management, high reliability organizations, sociology of professions, public management, human resource management, complex systems, higher education studies, organizational culture, performing arts management, regional studies) approaching resilience from perspectives of management, sociology, political science, economics and decision making. In the last chapter, we identified the limited overlap of references among the empirical chapters, signaling the low cross-fertilization of resilience studies across research areas, as well as a high specialization of studies in their respective fields: only 9 of the 114 references on resilience are shared between more than one chapter. This supports the claim that a stronger interdisciplinary approach to resilience is needed, beginning with the recognition of a common problem at the intersection of disciplines. Then, building on MacMynowski (2007), what is needed for a truly interdisciplinarity approach is to transcend the tendency to approach research questions from the standpoint of a single analytical framework associated with a specific disciplinary tradition, and rather to develop an integrative approach that takes into consideration synergies across the various traditions in a co-production and co-creation exercise. This did begin to happen at the meetings among the authors of this volume in the different stages of writing and preparation.

 

Q6: What are the main lessons from your book for practitioners and policy-makers?

The endorsement at the front of the book from Enrico Giovannini, currently Italian Minister of Sustainable Infrastructure and Mobility, captures very well the usefulness of this book for a practitioner audience, which is that it provides a framework and examples for designing policies, organizations, and systems that enable resilience. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, but especially now, resilience has become something of a buzzword, and we need to be careful about what we mean by it. Hopefully, we don’t want to simply go back to exactly how things were in 2019, but rather, to learn and change, while retaining the essence of living in a world where we could meet and move about freely without concern that our health was at stake. The European Union has referred to this as ‘bouncing forward’. The society we will live in post-Covid-19 has the potential to be safer, healthier and more sustainable than before, but we must understand in that case that resilience involves both stability and change.

The book provides a model for understanding resilience that can be applied practically by considering the three elements of resilience – time, adversity, and essence— when setting forth policy and organizational changes. Readers can refer to the chart in Chapter 12 to help guide them to chapters that address the types of organizations or systems and other key dimensions of resilience that they are interested in. The chapter further analyzes lessons learned from the other chapters, grouping them according to the dimensions of novelty and temporality. As practitioners attempt to build resilience into their own areas of responsibility, clarifying these dimensions should be helpful. The dimension of novelty refers to the question of knowledge and the extent to which the adversity or the triggers for resilience are known or unknown. The dimension of temporality asks about when and how we can build for and recognize resilience: resilience foresight attempts to address resilience before the adversity, mechanisms are about how it works in the midst of the adversity, while outcomes refer to the state of things after the adversity has passed. Finally, the book shows the value of working across boundaries, and the importance of a partnership between outsiders (researchers from multiple disciplines) and insiders (practitioners). Many of the chapters reveal that resilience is perhaps most effectively designed for in co-creation environments.

 

Q7: What would be interesting avenues for future research?

We argue that the most interesting and challenging avenue for future research is in the elaboration of an interdisciplinary perspective on resilience. This requires great openness towards different perspectives, approaches and traditions that might easily clash especially under typical publish-or-perish time constraints. Our experience working on this book for more than two years, shows that the process of discussing openly about the epistemological premises of our fields and our chapter contributions built awareness and co-operation for each-other’s work, and enabled us as editors to highlight the holistic understanding of resilience that emerges from the various chapters in the book. It is an eclectic representation, but not an inconsistent one.

Additionally, we proposed four possible directions for future studies. First, where collective actors are concerned, this volume focused on those characterized as having a high degree of publicness, and future studies encompassing a broader range of organizational types (public, private, hybrid, etc.) and degrees of novelty (low, medium and high levels) could shed light on the extent to which resilience antecedents and mechanisms affect and play out differently across a broader population. Second, the volume’s empirical findings lend support to the claim that resilient organizations are, in essence, learning entities—even if they resort to different strategies to learn about themselves and/or their surrounding environments. Future inquiries could, for example, shed light on the key actors, structures and processes associated with different types of learning (and their interactions) at different temporal scales—before, during and after the unfolding of major events triggering resilience behaviours. Third, following systems thinking, there is a need to continue to open the black box associated with nestedness between the micro (agents), meso (organizations) and macro (society) levels of analysis, both within organizations and across organizational fields. Most notably, it is imperative to understand how these levels emerge, coevolve and interact with one another in non-linear ways. Finally, methodologically speaking, future studies should seriously consider adopting both mixed methods and longitudinal design approaches as a means of capturing the complex and dynamic essence of resilience as a property, process and outcome.

 

Information about the book editors:

Rómulo Pinheiro is a Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Agder (UiA), Norway, where he is also Deputy Head of Department of Political Science and Management and member of the Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT) and for Advanced Studies in Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) based at UiA. Rómulo’s research interests are located at the intersection of public policy and administration, organizational theory, economic geography, innovation and higher education studies.

Maria Laura Frigotto is an Associate Professor in Organization Theory and Management at the University of Trento (Italy) where she is a member of the Department of Economics and Management, of the Institute for Safety and Security (ISSTN) of the School of Innovation and of the Ph.D. Program in Economics and Management. Her research focuses on novelty, especially in its unexpected and emergent form, in relation to resilience and innovation. She has studied emergency management organizations such as civil protection agencies and paradigmatic events such as the 911 terrorist attack in New York, but also very different contexts such as the operatic sector.

Mitchell Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European Studies at Charles University, Czech Republic. His research focuses on knowledge governance and science policy in the EU and Member States both internally through science diplomacy as a tool in foreign policy. He is chair of the ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and Policies. He teaches courses on EU policies, comparative political economy and European economic integration.

 

References:

MacMynowski, D. P. (2007). Pausing at the brink of interdisciplinarity: Power and knowledge at the meeting of social and biophysical science. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 1–14.

Pinheiro, R. and Young, M. (2017). The University as an Adaptive Resilient Organization: A Complex Systems Perspective, J. Huisman and M. Tight (eds.) Theory and Method in Higher Education Research, Volume 3, Emerald Publishing, pp. 119-136

 

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