Ideas on Europe Blog

Brexiters often claim that in Britain’s first referendum of 1975, voters were misled into believing that the Common Market – now called the European Union – was just about ‘free trade’. But that’s not correct. (Article continues after the 5-minute video.)

It was clear even before we joined the European Economic Community (as it was called then) that it was much more than just a free trading arrangement.

When we first applied to join in 1961, the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, told the nation:

“One thing is certain. As a member of the Community, Britain would have a strong voice in deciding the nature and the timing of political unity. 

“By remaining outside, we could be faced with a political solution in Europe which ran counter but which we could do nothing to influence.”

That’s hardly stating that the European Community was only about ‘free trade’.

When eventually we joined the Community in 1973, Prime Minister Edward Heath wrote for the Illustrated London News:

“The community which we are joining is far more than a common market. It is a community in the true sense of that term.

“It is concerned not only with the establishment of free trade, economic and monetary union and other major economic issues, important though these are — but also as the Paris Summit Meeting has demonstrated, with social issues which affect us all — environmental questions, working conditions in industry, consumer protection, aid to development areas and vocational training.”

Again, that’s hardly stating that the Community was only about free trade.

In 1975, two years after we joined, the new Labour government held a referendum on whether Britain wanted to remain in the European Community – the exact same referendum as we had in 2016.

The government’s pamphlet sent to every UK household for the referendum stated that the first aims of the Common Market were to ‘bring together the peoples of Europe’, to ‘raise living standards’ and ‘to maintain peace’.

The pamphlet made clear that as a member, Britain has a ‘say in the future economic and political development of the Common Market.’ If we left the Common Market, ‘Britain would no longer have any say’.

It could not have missed anyone’s attention at the time that the European Community was about much more than just free trade.

Even the Eurosceptics of the time claimed that membership of the Common Market went beyond ‘free trade’.

Their ‘NO’ campaign referendum literature, also distributed to every household, warned what they considered were the dangers of membership:

• To end a thousand years of British freedom and independent nationhood is an unheard of constitutional change.
• Do you want us to be a self-governing nation, or to be a province of Europe?
• Do we want self-government as a great independent nation, or do we want to be governed as a province of the EEC by Commissioners and a Council of Ministers, predominantly foreign, in Brussels?
• Do we want to lose the whole of our individual influence as a nation, which is still great, in order to enhance the status of Europe, which would then function largely outside our control?

Although in over 40 years of membership the fears and warnings of the 1975 ‘NO’ campaign have not materialised, their arguments haven’t changed. In fact, the 2016 referendum has simply regurgitated the same old arguments that took place in the first referendum.

There is little difference between the European Economic Community of 1975 and the European Union of today. They share the same foundational principles and aspirations.

Of course, in over 60 years since its foundation, the European Community has grown phenomenally, with more countries wanting to join. But that just demonstrates the success of the EU project.

The Conservative government under David Cameron could have saved a fortune by simply re-printing the 1975 referendum pamphlet and distributing it for the 2016 referendum.

Almost all the points and arguments remain the same. Nothing much has changed. Read the Labour government’s 1975 pamphlet and judge for yourself.

 

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Britain wasn't misled when we joined

→ Brexit Myth Breaker about 1975 (video: 5 mins) – please shareIT WAS NEVER JUST ‘FREE TRADE’: POSTER, VIDEO & ARTICLEBrexiters often claim that in Britain’s first referendum of 1975 voters were only told that the Common Market (now called the European Union) was just ‘free trade’. But that’s not correct. It was clear even before we joined the European Economic Community (as it was called then) that it was much more than just a free trading arrangement. One year before we joined, Prime Minister Edward Heath wrote for the Illustrated London News:“The community which we are joining is far more than a common market. It is a community in the true sense of that term. “It is concerned not only with the establishment of free trade, economic and monetary union and other major economic issues, important though these are — but also as the Paris Summit Meeting has demonstrated, with social issues which affect us all — environmental questions, working conditions in industry, consumer protection, aid to development areas and vocational training.”In 1975, two years after we joined, the new Labour government held a referendum on whether Britain wanted to remain in the European Community – the exact same referendum as we had in 2016.The government’s pamphlet sent to every UK household for the referendum stated that the first aims of the Common Market were to ‘bring together the peoples of Europe’, to ‘raise living standards’ and ‘to maintain peace’. The pamphlet made clear that as a member, Britain has a 'say in the future economic and political development of the Common Market.’ If we left the Common Market, 'Britain would no longer have any say'.It could not have missed anyone’s attention at the time that the European Community was about much more than just free trade. Even the Eurosceptics of the time claimed that membership of the Common Market went beyond ‘free trade’. Their ‘NO’ campaign referendum literature, also distributed to every household, warned what they considered were the dangers of membership: To end a thousand years of British freedom and independent nationhood is an unheard of constitutional change. Do you want us to be a self-governing nation, or to be a province of Europe? Do we want self-government as a great independent nation, or do we want to be governed as a province of the EEC by Commissioners and a Council of Ministers, predominantly foreign, in Brussels? Do we want to lose the whole of our individual influence as a nation, which is still great, in order to enhance the status of Europe, which would then function largely outside our control?Although in over 40 years of membership the fears and warnings of the 1975 ‘NO’ campaign have not materialised, their arguments haven’t changed. In fact, the 2016 referendum has simply regurgitated the same old arguments that took place in the first referendum.There is little difference between the European Economic Community of 1975 and the European Union of today. They share the same foundational principles and aspirations. Of course, in over 60 years since its foundation, the European Community has grown phenomenally, with more countries wanting to join. But that just demonstrates the success of the EU project. The Conservative government under David Cameron could have saved a fortune by simply re-printing the 1975 referendum pamphlet and distributing it for the 2016 referendum. Almost all the points and arguments remain the same. Nothing much has changed. Read the Labour government’s 1975 pamphlet and judge for yourself: www.1975pamphlet.reasons2remain.eu • Words and video production by Jon Danzig • Please re-Tweet and follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter:twitter.com/Reasons2Remain/status/1059017651605909504 Before commenting on the Reasons2Remain campaign page, please read our new Rules of Engagement: Rules.Reasons2Remain.com********************************************► Watch Jon Danzig's 50-minute video: 'Can Britain Stop Brexit?' Go to CanBritainStopBrexit.com********************************************• To follow and support Reasons2Remain just ‘like’ the page, and please invite all your friends to like the page. ********************************************• Please recommend Reasons2Remain in the reviews section. Here's the link: facebook.com/Reasons2Remain/reviews/********************************************• Follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter: twitter.com/reasons2remain and Instagram: instagram.com/reasons2remain/********************************************• Explore our unique Reasons2Remain gallery of over 1,000 graphics and articles: reasons2remain.co.uk********************************************• Reasons2Remain is an entirely unfunded community campaign, unaffiliated with any other group or political party, and is run entirely by volunteers. If you'd like to help, please send us a private message.********************************************• © Reasons2Remain 2018. All our articles and graphics are the copyright of Reasons2Remain. We only allow sharing using the Facebook share button. Any other use requires our advance permission in writing.#STOPBREXIT #EXITBREXIT #PEOPLESVOTE #FINALSAY

Posted by Reasons2Remain on Sunday, 4 November 2018

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A Euro-American Union: Reflections on an Academic Marriage

Anne-Marie Slaughter

In December of 1993, Andrew Moravcsik published ‘Preferences and Power in the European Community’ in the pages of the Journal of Common Market Studies, giving rise to the Liberal Intergovernmentalist theory of European integration. This month, the journal marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Moravcsik’s article with a special issue, “Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Its Critics,” devoted to assessing the legacy of Liberal Intergovernmentalism and its continued relevance in today’s crisis-ridden EU. 

Here, Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of New America and Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, reflects on her twenty-five year intellectual dialogue with, and marriage to, Andrew Moravcsik. 

*  *  *  *  *

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Liberal Intergovernmentalism happens to be Andy’s and my 25th wedding anniversary. It is thus time to celebrate many types of cross-fertilization. Andy has influenced my thinking in so many ways for so many years that sometimes I’m no longer sure how to disentangle where his thinking leaves off and mine begins. Yet we also remain strongly and occasionally even stridently at odds, with what he would call my legalism clashing sharply with what I would call his cynicism. Our differences are shaped by our disciplines as much as by our personalities and intellects, but I learn from him even in dissent.

Andy and I met in the fall of 1985, when I was a pre-doc at Oxford but on a Ford Fellowship at what was still then the Center for International Affairs at Harvard (now the Weatherhead Center). I remember this impossibly tall man standing in – filling up – the doorway of my small office, handing out a flyer to a party that he and his housemates were giving on Orchard Street. Three years later, as my first marriage ended, I went to Paris for a conference, stayed with Andy, and fell madly in love. We became a couple in early 1990, just after I became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago law school.

Anne-Marie Slaughter and Andrew Moravcsik

My name then was still Anne-Marie Burley. Andy would go to EU conferences and expand his theory of intergovernmentalism, and some graduate student not yet in on the latest gossip would innocently ask him whether he had read Burley and Mattli (1993) on the supranational-functionalist character of the European Court of Justice.  Thus we cut our academic teeth on opposite sides of an ongoing debate. But it was no accident that we were both studying Europe; we are both half-European (a Hungarian father on his side and a Belgian mother on mine), and share a culture, mindset, and sensibility that has shaped us deeply.

As a lawyer and an Oxford D.Phil schooled in the tradition of Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society, I was grappling with what the late Professor Thomas Franck used to refer to as the “existential question” that every international lawyer must face: whether and how law shapes politics. Walter Mattli and I elaborated the ways in which the European Court of Justice deployed law as both a mask and a shield for politics. Andy, by contrast, was taking on the sacred cows of European federalism, stripping away visions of peace and unity to uncover bedrock economic interests.

Will Phelan’s (2018) account of European legal integration in this issue revives that debate. Phelan essentially argues that Andy was persuaded by his wife that legal integration was driven by more neo-functionalist factors, but that he shouldn’t have been! In Phelan’s account, a true liberal intergovernmentalist explanation of legal integration would focus on the member states’ deliberate choice of a treaty enforcement system that would prohibit the kind of inter-state retaliation for violations and the invocation of safeguard mechanisms to excuse violations that characterize so many international treaties. To avoid this tit-for-tat, Phelan argues, the member states sought purely judicial enforcement through both national and supranational courts.

Phelan’s argument is novel and persuasive; indeed, he makes a real contribution to a fuller understanding of the member state and judicial motives. But what he cannot explain is exactly the dimension of the EC legal system that Walter Mattli and I focused on most – the ECJ’s decision to validate and actively encourage the use of the preliminary ruling procedure by individual litigants.  The ECJ could perfectly well have narrowed the reach of the Treaty of Rome’s Article 177 just as they narrowed the reach of 173, thereby reserving treaty enforcement to domestic courts but only with regard to cases brought by member states.

Such a decision would have accomplished the goal of substituting a domestic enforcement system for an inter-state retaliation system, but would have left decisions as to when and how to enforce the treaty in the hands of state lawyers, a far more predictable and controllable outcome. Phelan shows that some state lawyers and at least one prominent ECJ judge supported this step. Yet Mattli and I emphasize the innovation of encouraging individual litigants and their lawyers to bring as many cases as possible to enforce European law, as well as the active courting of national judges to hear those cases and refer questions of European law to the ECJ. With that step, EU law became truly like national law, invoked and upheld in accordance with the self-interest and civic commitments of both litigants and judges.

In the end, Phelan’s liberal intergovernmentalist account can co-exist with Mattli’s and my account. Indeed, fitting these two arguments together is a microcosm of the way I now think of Andy’s and my work fitting together more generally. Of course states have power; Mattli and I explicitly described the ways in which the Court as a whole and individual judges responded to increasing Member State concerns about “judicial activism” in the late 1970s and 1980s (Burley and Mattli 1993: 71). But so too do institutions and the individuals who operate them, animated by interests and ideals.

From 1990 to 1994 Andy and I lived mostly in Chicago, very happy years of cohabitation and collaboration, even though Andy was actually teaching at Harvard. Above all, we had no children! We would work at either end of our living room, an arrangement that continued in our joint study to this day. The difference is that then we had time to read and respond to each other’s work.

Andy began working on what I still think is his most important work: a liberal theory of international relations. He read stacks of books of classical liberal philosophy and political theory and derived a theory of international politics from the bottom up, starting with individuals and groups in society, moving up to governments, and finally to international institutions. I was writing what would become “Law among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine” (Burley 1992). The Berlin Wall had come down, history had ended – – although of course we were too sophisticated to believe that – – and I was convinced that in fact liberal states were bound together in different ways, and follow different rules, than non-liberal states.

Over the next two decades I came to realize, however, that the networks, more than the states they bind together, were the real story, and that a bottom-up view of global politics opened up an entire field of network design and opportunities for foreign policy webcraft (Slaughter 2017). Still, Andy’s theory, together with Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s (1977) work documenting networks among the complexly interdependent OECD states, helped provide a foundation for my work.

*  *  *  *  *

To return to our personal narrative, Andy and I moved to Harvard in 1994, and later to Princeton, where Andy continues to teach. We had our first son in 1996; our second on the first day of 1999. My memories of those years are of Andy typing away furiously on the manuscript that became The Choice for Europe, typically with Edward strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn.

We no longer had time to read each other’s work and comment painstakingly on drafts; our days were filled with logistics and the daily scorecard of joint parenting. We have both documented our odyssey as the parents of a child who seemingly overnight became a determined teenager heading firmly in the wrong direction (Slaughter 2012; Moravcsik 2015). Andy became the lead parent; I came home from Washington; we both found ourselves making choices that we did not expect but do not regret. Our story as a couple may well have more practical impact, surprisingly to us, than any of our academic work.

And in the end, Andy has perhaps influenced me perhaps most as the father of our children. He parents the way he researches and writes: with intensity, passion, and rigor. His highest accolade, which our sons have picked up, is “serious.” When Andy says someone is serious, he means committed, deep and disciplined about a work or project, whether it’s a matter of vocation or avocation. When Andy goes to hear an opera, he spends weeks in advance listening to and watching videos of earlier performances to prepare himself.

Above all, Andy is deeply committed to a set of intellectual, artistic, and moral principles, perhaps best captured by the German idea of a “gebildeter Mann,” an educated man, but equally important, a cultured man. Knowledge is sterile without culture, the highest expression of the human spirit. Indeed, at some level, the love of learning and the exploration of the endless realms of the imagination merge.

This wonderful issue is the best possible tribute to not only to the ideas and knowledge, but also to the standards and attitudes that Andy has transmitted to his students. It is a celebration of thirty years of scholarship and teaching. And it is the perfect prelude to Andy’s next act.

References

Burley, Anne-Marie (1992). ‘Law among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine’, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 8, pp. 1907-1996.

Burley, Anne-Marie, and Walter Mattli (1993). ‘Europe Before the Court: A Political Theory of Legal Integration’, International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 41–76.

Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye (1977).  Power and Interdependence:  World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little Brown).

Moravcsik, Andrew (2015). ‘Why I Put My Wife’s Career First’, The Atlantic (October).

Phelan, William (2018). ‘European Legal Integration: Towards a More Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach’, Journal of Common Market Studies, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12782.

Slaughter, Anne-Marie (2012) “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic (July/August).

Slaughter, Anne-Marie (2017).  The Chessboard and The Web: Strategies of Connection in A Networked World (New Haven: Yale University Press).

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It’s a mark of the quality of the public Brexit debate that the title of this post could refer to pretty much any aspect of the negotiations to date: the mixture of ignorance, indifference and confusion has produced more than its fair share of mistimings and incorrect sequencings.

But today I’d like indulge in my own piece of (partial) mistiming, following a very useful discussion yesterday while giving evidence to the Exiting the EU Committee in Parliament.

The session was focused on the process and practice of ratifying the Withdrawal Agreement, but discussion also strayed into the transition and the movement to the future relationship from that transition.

As all the witnesses underlined, when transition ends (whenever that might be), it ends with a cliff edge, unless an agreement is in place to maintain some form of formal EU-UK cooperation. In that respect, it’s like 29 March 2020, but with the added complication that we currently don’t have a mechanism to extend transition as we can Article 50.

The question that arose was one of how one might square that cliff edge with the difficulty/impossibility (depending on how you feel about it) of concluding a comprehensive future relationship treaty of a kind that’s never been attempted before.

Part of the answer might lie in provisional implementation, which would allow a substantial amount of the contents to be in operation during the (likely lengthy) ratification process. The CETA example gives an indication of how that worked in a potentially-not-dissimilar case.

But that still leaves the complexity of drawing up and signing a single text. As CETA underlined, that single text contains everything and someone in the process might take exception, as Wallonia demonstrated in ratification.

So I’d like to try out some ideas here about how one could break up that single text into multiple ones, to help reduce the cross-linkage that delayed CETA approval and to potentially allow for a more stable move from transition to the end-state future relationship.

The architecture of this multiple-text would be relatively simple, in theory.

At its core would be a framework treaty. This would provide for a general structure of interactions between the EU and UK, including a management/dialogue process as well as a dispute settlement mechanism. Logically, these could be the same as those used in the transition period. In substantive policy terms, you’d also have the maintenance of the transition provisions, but with a mechanism for their suspension as new, sectoral agreements could be reached.

Those sectoral agreement would form the second element, and could be constructed as narrowly or as broadly as required, with negotiation and implementation running at variable speeds.

The merits of this approach would be multiple.

Firstly, it would move transition off the Article 50 basis to the proper one (Arts.207, 217, etc), thus removing a major legal headache for the EU and so providing much more stability for both parties.

Secondly, given the broad acceptance of the transition model to all parties now, the securing of the framework text might be simpler than engaging in to detailed modelling of the end-state future relationship, especially when some parties still aren’t sure what they want that end-state to be.

Thirdly, the framework text would not have to be a complete translation of transition into a new text: if parties could agree within those negotiations that they would end participation in specific areas, then that could already be included, allowing everyone to show that it wasn’t simply a holding exercise. Fisheries and agriculture might be obvious examples of this.

Fourthly, by push substantive changes out to sectoral agreements, it would be possible to avoid progress in one area getting held up by delays in another. So security cooperation could be fast-tracked, while arguments about services continue.

Fifthly, this arrangement would avoid some of the problems of the Swiss model, where multiple treaties were agreed simultaneously and are cross-linked. The EU doesn’t like this, since it’s complex and fiddly. In this proposal, the framework would be the single master document, and could impose conditions on what happens in the case of violation of any sectoral text (e.g. recourse to dispute resolution, or revision to transition provisions). The framework could also create a streamlined ratification process for the sectoral texts, to reduce ratification delays.

But problems would remain.

The central one is the framework document still remains a big and daunting document, and ratification would need to be in place by the end of transition, to ensure it was fully effective. That might be possible, because it’s more about can-kicking than making final decisions on the end-state, but equally that can-kicking might be cause for concern for some parties.

Much would depend on local political conditions around the negotiations. If parties (and particularly the UK) remain at the high level of politicisation on the subject, then the holding pattern that this approach would suggest might not be an option, especially if transition itself had to be extended to allow for ratification to be completed.

However, in the absence of clear consensus about what the end-state should be, thinking about ways to avoid falling off the cliff edge might be of interest.

And this brings us back to getting ahead of ourselves.

All of this clearly depends on an agreement being reached on Article 50 and the Withdrawal Agreement. That said, there are also the active discussions on the Political Declaration, where parties might usefully begin to think about where they’re heading, and how.

Too often in Brexit, decisions have been taken by default or in haste, because we’ve not had the capacity or willingness to raise our eyes from the immediate challenges that surround us.

In those cases, and in this case, that means making less-than-optimal choices. So maybe we can try to change how we do things.

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As it stands, the United Kingdom is due to leave the EU on 29 March 2019 (as a consequence of invoking Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union on 29 March 2017 by the UK government), when the period for negotiating a withdrawal agreement will end unless an extension is agreed. The so-called “Great Repeal Bill” (which would repeal the European Communities Act of 1972 and converge in UK law all enactments previously in force under EU law), subsequently renamed the European Union (Withdrawal) bill,  was introduced to the House of Commons on 13 July 2017 and became law in June 2018.

This Act inter alia legislates for formal incorporation of up to 20,000 pieces of EU law onto the UK by:

– conversion of directly applicable EU Regulations into the UK law

– preservation of laws that have been made in the UK in order to implement its obligations imposed onto the UK as a consequence of its EU membership, and

– continuing to make available in the UK those rights enshrined in the EU treaties, that are relied upon directly in court

One of the areas of a particular regulatory concern in this regard is the situation with EU standards, or more precisely – EU Harmonised Standards, which set benchmarks for the safety and quality of products and services across multiple sectors —from energy and healthcare to transport — to protect consumers and facilitate cross-border trade.

As stated on the DG GROWTH website,

“A harmonised standard is a European standard developed by a recognised European Standards Organisation: CEN, CENELEC, or ETSI. It is created following a request from the European Commission to one of these organisations. Manufacturers, other economic operators, or conformity assessment bodies can use harmonised standards to demonstrate that products, services, or processes comply with relevant EU legislation.

The references of harmonised standards must be published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The purpose of this website is to provide access to the latest lists of references of harmonised standards and other European standards published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU)”[1].

There are currently 33 areas for regulating production of goods and performance of services in the EU covered by Harmonised Standards approach.

And whereas the above-mentioned European Union (Withdrawal) bill may preserve those EU standards applicable in the UK, it will not necessarily be reciprocal for British standards being valid or accepted throughout the EU after the 29 March 2017, as the UK will become a so-called ‘third country’ overnight.

In the subsequent chapters we will analyze various approaches and scenarios and will attempt to make suggestions as how to achieve a workable modus operandi.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/european-standards/harmonised-standards_en

 

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Many people, including politicians and journalists, don’t understand the difference between ‘free trade’ and ‘frictionless trade’. This has caused a huge misunderstanding across the country, leading to the mess we are now in.

In summary, ‘free trade’ means that goods (sometimes only some goods) can be exported and imported between countries without tariffs – hence the phrase, ‘free trade’ or ‘tariff free’.

But those goods, even though tariff free, still have to go through customs and are subject to checks, often causing many delays.

And even though it’s called ‘free trade’ there are other barriers as well as customs – such as regulations, restrictions, strict compliances and complicated documentation, which hold things up. (See the graphic for some examples).

So, for example, a Canada-style trade agreement between the UK and the EU – so coveted by ardent Brexiters – could give us tariff-free trade, but it wouldn’t give us frictionless trade with the EU, which is vital to so many of our manufacturers.

(BMW UK imports around 90% of its parts from the EU to enable it to manufacture the Mini in the UK. If we no longer have frictionless trade with the EU, says BMW, it would destroy their just-in-time manufacturing process, meaning they would be ‘forced’ to move their Mini factory to Holland).

‘Frictionless trade’ means that goods, as well as being tariff free, go through customs without any checks. In fact, it means that for trade between those countries, there aren’t any customs or borders. 

Furthermore, with ‘frictionless trade’ there is a ‘level playing field’ between countries for the movement of goods – removing many of the barriers that exist with ‘free trade’ only.

That makes exports and imports between those countries super-efficient, leading to streamlined delivery of products, and of course, increased profits and more successful national economies.

But frictionless, although making international trade simpler and more easy, is more difficult to establish than just free trade. It means that countries have to enter what is known as a ‘customs union’ to enable borderless trade to take place between them.

Countries in a customs union agree a common external tariff for imports from non-member countries. The tariff revenue may then be shared between members, with the possibility that the country that collects the duty retaining a share (between 20 and 25% in the European customs union) to cover the additional administration costs associated with border trade.

A ‘customs union’ cannot just be based on trust. If countries agree to flatten their borders, then those countries need to agree rules, terms and conditions. And they need to agree on a mutually acceptable court to intervene if those rules are breached.

That’s so the process of sending goods between each other is not abused, for example, to export substandard or dangerous goods, or exporting goods that are banned, to another country in the customs union.

Agreeing those rules is fiendishly complicated, which is why it can take many years, sometimes decades, before countries can agree on the strict and comprehensive terms and conditions to enable them to open-up their borders to other countries for the purposes of trade.

But there’s more. For frictionless trade to function most fully and most successfully, it needs what are called the ‘four freedoms’ – free movement of goods, services, capital and people.

These ‘four freedoms’ represent the cornerstones of the EU’s Single Market, helping the EU to become the world’s largest and most successful trading bloc.

Although it would be technically possible to implement just some and not all the ‘four freedoms’, the success of the EU has been to conjoin all these freedoms into a single market, so that they work seamlessly together.

Studies show that the EU’s gross domestic product (GDP) has grown by several percentage points thanks to the Single Market and its four freedoms. This is hardly surprising, when one considers that two-thirds of all goods produced in the EU are exported to another EU country.

THE UK COULDN’T FUNCTION WITHOUT THE ‘4 FREEDOMS’

To try and understand how the EU couldn’t fully function without all four freedoms, imagine how our own union of the United Kingdom also couldn’t fully function without these four freedoms.

The UK currently benefits from two single markets. Our country’s single market. And our continent’s single market. They both operate in the same way and on the same principles.

Free movement of people, goods, services and capital between the three countries of England, Scotland, Wales and the province of Northern Ireland form the basis of our union of the United Kingdom.

It’s our single market. Just like the EU’s Single Market, it’s the glue that keeps us together.

Enabling people, goods, services and money to move without borders or restrictions across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is what makes us a functioning unity. It’s helped to make the UK one of the world’s richest and most successful countries, with common standards, values and history.

Free movement of people, goods, services and capital work together. They cannot be separated without causing discord and disorder across our nation.

Mess with just one of the four freedoms and our union of the UK would come undone. Not only business and employment would be affected, but peace and stability would be put at risk if we could not have the freedom to move, to do business, to trade, to send money and to work, without friction, across and between our four member ‘states’ of the UK.

It’s the same with the EU. The EU functions as a cohesive single market of 28 countries, just as the UK functions as a cohesive single market of four ‘countries’.

The EU Single Market is the glue that keeps European nations together. It has helped to make Europe the richest and most successful continent on the planet, with common standards, values and history.

The UK’s Single Market, and the EU’s Single Market, both represent significant achievements. They work.

But here’s one vital difference.

Frictionless trade between the four members of the UK is vital to our smooth functioning as a nation. But doing business with each other doesn’t make the UK significantly richer.

To do that, we need the UK to export our goods and services (and we export far more services than goods).

Doing frictionless trade with other EU countries makes Britain richer. Easy exports and imports with the EU bring us prosperity.

If we lose borderless, lowest-cost trade with our most important customers and suppliers right on our doorstop, Britain – and Britons – will be poorer.

Our frictionless exports to the rest of Europe bring us wealth. Yes, exports to countries outside the EU also bring us wealth.

But we need BOTH. And ONLY in the EU do we have both.

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On BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary, Sir Keir Starmer, claimed that Britain could be in the EU Customs Union and still be free to negotiate its own trade agreements with other countries around the world.

This goes against the founding principles of the EU and everything that EU leaders have been saying from the start is impossible. (Article continues below the video.)

Andrew Marr asked Sir Keir:

“Have you spoken to a single senior figure inside the EU – anyone in any authority who has told you this is a runner?”

Sir Keir answered, “Yes.” But when Mr Marr asked him, “Who?”, he answered:

“I’m not going to disclose confidential meetings.”

This shouldn’t be kept confidential. If Sir Keir really believes that Labour could achieve a trade agreement with the EU that, frankly, goes against the very essence of what the European Union is all about, then he should be completely open about it.

As Mr Marr pointed out to Sir Keir, Article 3 of the Founding Treaty of the European Union clearly states that the EU shall have “exclusive competence” in its Customs Union.

Earlier this month, the EU’s Chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, asserted that allowing Britain to be in its Customs Union whilst at the same time entering into its own trade agreements with other countries would, “run counter to the very foundations of our Single Market of Europe.”

He added it would mean the UK could apply “lower tariffs” than the EU, thereby competing head on with the Single Market.  Asserted Mr Barnier:

“We believe this would create a serious risk of trade flows going elsewhere, to the detriment of our companies.”

Countries in a customs union agree a common external tariff for imports from non-member countries. The tariff revenue may then be shared between members, with the possibility that the country that collects the duty retaining a share (between 20 and 25% in the European customs union) to cover the additional administration costs associated with border trade.

But Sir Keir insisted:

“I would not have surfaced this as a Labour Party position if I hadn’t had the assurance that this was a negotiation that could be had.”

A negotiation had with who? Sir Keir refuses to say.

Clearly not with Mr Barnier, or the EU Council President, Donald Tusk.

Immediately after the referendum Mr Tusk warned that the Brexit negotiations would, “stick unconditionally to the Treaty rules and fundamental values.”

He added:

“There will be no compromises in this regard.”

Sir Keir’s proposal seems more, classic, cake-and-eat-it fantasy: promising to the British electorate a Brexit that simply cannot be delivered.

EU law expert, Professor Steve Peers commented:

“The UK could negotiate trade deals about services and non-tariff barriers, but not tariffs.”

However, being able to negotiate tariffs outside of the EU appears to be what Sir Keir is proposing.

I contacted Sir Keir to ask him:

“Can you please clarify if you meant that the UK could be in the EU Customs Union whilst also independently negotiating its own tariffs with other countries across the world?”

I pointed out to Sir Keir’s office:

“On the face of it, it seems as if Sir Keir is claiming that the UK could be in the EU Customs Union but at the same time negotiate its own tariff arrangements with other countries, which would go against EU rules. We look forward to clarification.”

But his office simply wrote back to say,

“Keir’s comments were consistent with what Jeremy Corbyn set out in his Brexit speech earlier this year when he said:

‘We have long argued that a customs union is a viable option for the final deal. So Labour would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure that there are no tariffs with Europe and to help avoid any need for a hard border in Northern Ireland.

‘But we are also clear that the option of a new UK customs union with the EU would need to ensure the UK has a say in future trade deals.’

But that simply explains The Labour Party’s Brexit policy; it does not explain how this policy could ever be achieved, or who in the EU would support such an arrangement.

A spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats told me,

“Labour’s proposal is like something out of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. It is just fantasy.

“No-deal or any deal, Brexit will take a sledgehammer to the UK economy. Labour must wake up to that. Sadly, Jeremy Corbyn opposition to Brexit is as absent now as it was during the referendum campaign.

“Liberal Democrats demand better.”

Liberal Democrats say they are, “united in fighting Brexit and giving the people the final say, including the option to remain in the EU.”

International trade expert, Jason J Hunter commented:

“The issue is that Keir Starmer has no evidence to back up his claim, refuses to provide anything at all, and he is contradicted by the facts and treaties.

“He’s like a one-man fantasist.”

Mr Hunter added that, in any event, it could take up to ten years for the UK to complete negotiations to be in the EU Customs Union. He added:

“In the meantime, companies are moving out of the UK and jobs are being lost. By the time we’ve got a worse deal than we already had, we won’t have much to export anyway.”

Sir Keir has proposed that any Brexit agreement would have to pass ‘six tests’ before Labour could support it:

① Does it ensure a strong and collaborative future relationship with the EU?

② Does it deliver the “exact same benefits” as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union?

③ Does it ensure the fair management of migration in the interests of the economy and communities?

④ Does it defend rights and protections and prevent a race to the bottom?

⑤ Does it protect national security and our capacity to tackle cross-border crime?

⑥ Does it deliver for all regions and nations of the UK?

All well and good, but anyone who knows anything about the EU (and one would hope Sir Keir does) must realise that the sum of the six tests can only be achieved by the UK remaining a full member of the EU.

This is not, however, Labour’s plan or policy as it has specifically ruled out the UK accepting ‘free movement of people’ – a strict pre-requisite for being in the EU’s Single Market.

Before the referendum, Theresa May said:

“It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.”

But now, after the referendum, that’s precisely what both the Tory government and the Labour opposition are expecting the EU to offer us: a better deal than they themselves enjoy.

It’s all fantasy.

It’s time that the Tories and Labour were honest with the electorate.

No Brexit is better than any Brexit. Only continued full EU membership can offer us “the exact same benefits” as we have now as a member.

Once that’s fully realised and understood, there’s only one path that can and should be taken. #StopBrexit. That’s what needs to be done.

It doesn’t matter how it’s done. A people’s vote. A general election. Or politicians simply being truthful with us at last and admitting that Brexit will destroy our country.

What matters is that it is done, and done soon. Britain is now perilously close to the cliff edge.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• Follow my Stop Brexit campaign on Facebook: Reasons2Remain

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Labour's fantasy Brexit

→ Keir Starmer proposes ‘fairyland’ Customs Union – Please shareLABOUR’S FANTASY BREXIT (Video: 6 minutes)On BBC’s Andrew Marr Show last Sunday, Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary, Sir Keir Starmer, claimed that Britain could be in the EU Customs Union and still be free to negotiate its own trade agreements with other countries around the world.This goes against the founding principles of the EU and everything that EU leaders have been saying from the start is impossible. Andrew Marr asked Sir Keir, “Have you spoken to a single senior figure inside the EU – anyone in any authority who has told you this is a runner?”Sir Keir answered, “Yes.” But when Mr Marr asked him, “Who?”, he answered, “I’m not going to disclose confidential meetings.”This shouldn’t be kept confidential. If Sir Keir really believes that Labour could achieve a trade agreement with the EU that, frankly, goes against the very essence of what the European Union is all about, then he should be completely open about it.As Mr Marr pointed out to Sir Keir, Article 3 of the Founding Treaty of the European Union clearly states that the EU shall have “exclusive competence” in its Customs Union.Earlier this month, the EU’s Chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, asserted that allowing Britain to be in its Customs Union whilst at the same time entering into its own trade agreements with other countries would “run counter to the very foundations of our Single Market of Europe.”He added it would mean the UK could apply “lower tariffs” than the EU, thereby competing head on with the EU. “We believe this would create a serious risk of trade flows going elsewhere, to the detriment of our companies,” said Mr Barnier.But Sir Keir insisted, “I would not have surfaced this as a Labour Party position if I hadn’t had the assurance that this was a negotiation that could be had.”A negotiation had with who? Sir Keir refuses to say.Clearly not with Mr Barnier, or the EU Council President, Donald Tusk.Immediately after the referendum Mr Tusk warned that the Brexit negotiations would, “stick unconditionally to the Treaty rules and fundamental values.”He added, “There will be no compromises in this regard.”Sir Keir’s proposal seems more, classic, cake-and-eat-it fantasy: promising to the British electorate a Brexit that simply cannot be delivered.EU law expert, Professor Steve Peers commented, “The UK could negotiate trade deals about services and non-tariff barriers, but not tariffs.”However, being able to negotiate tariffs outside of the EU appears to be what Sir Keir is proposing. I contacted Sir Keir to ask him, “Can you please clarify if you meant that the UK could be in the EU Customs Union whilst also independently negotiating its own tariffs with other countries across the world?”I pointed out to Sir Keir’s office, “On the face of it, it seems as if Sir Keir is claiming that the UK could be in the EU Customs Union but at the same time negotiate its own tariff arrangements with other countries, which would go against EU rules. We look forward to clarification.”But his office simply wrote back to say, “Keir’s comments were consistent with what Jeremy Corbyn set out in his Brexit speech earlier this year when he said:“We have long argued that a customs union is a viable option for the final deal. So Labour would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure that there are no tariffs with Europe and to help avoid any need for a hard border in Northern Ireland. “But we are also clear that the option of a new UK customs union with the EU would need to ensure the UK has a say in future trade deals.” [Source: https://labour.org.uk/press/jeremy-corbyn-full-speech-britain-brexit/]But that simply explains The Labour Party's Brexit policy; it does not explain how this policy could ever be achieved, or who in the EU would support such an arrangement.A spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats told Reasons2Remain, “Labour’s proposal is like something out of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. It is just fantasy.”He added, “No-deal or any deal, Brexit will take a sledgehammer to the UK economy. Labour must wake up to that. Sadly, Jeremy Corbyn opposition to Brexit is as absent now as it was during the referendum campaign. “Liberal Democrats demand better. Only the Liberal Democrats are united in fighting Brexit and giving the people the final say, including the option to remain in the EU.”International trade expert, Jason J Hunter commented, “The issue is that Keir Starmer has no evidence to back up his claim, refuses to provide anything at all, and he is contradicted by the facts and treaties.“He's like a one-man fantasist.”Mr Hunter added that, in any event, it could take up to ten years for the UK to complete negotiations to be in the EU Customs Union.“In the meantime, companies are moving out of the UK and jobs are being lost. By the time we've got a worse deal than we already had, we won't have much to export anyway.”Sir Keir has proposed that any Brexit agreement would have to pass ‘six tests’ before Labour could support it:① Does it ensure a strong and collaborative future relationship with the EU? ② Does it deliver the “exact same benefits” as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union? ③ Does it ensure the fair management of migration in the interests of the economy and communities? ④ Does it defend rights and protections and prevent a race to the bottom? ⑤ Does it protect national security and our capacity to tackle cross-border crime? ⑥ Does it deliver for all regions and nations of the UK?All well and good, but anyone who knows anything about the EU (and one would hope Sir Keir does) must realise that the sum of the six tests can only be achieved by the UK remaining a full member of the EU. This is not, however, Labour’s plan or policy as it has specifically ruled out the UK accepting ‘free movement of people’ – a strict pre-requisite for being in the EU’s Single Market.Before the referendum, Theresa May said, “It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.”But now, after the referendum, that’s precisely what both the Tory government and the Labour opposition are expecting the EU to offer us: a better deal than they themselves enjoy.It’s all fantasy. It’s time that the Tories and Labour were honest with the electorate. No Brexit is better than any Brexit. Only continued full EU membership can offer us “the exact same benefits” as we have now as a member. Once that’s fully realised and understood, there’s only one path that can and should be taken. #StopBrexit. It doesn’t matter how it’s done. A people’s vote. A general election. Or politicians simply being truthful with us at last and admitting that Brexit will destroy our country.What matters is that it is done, and done soon. Britain is now perilously close to the cliff edge. • Words and video production by Jon Danzig• Please re-Tweet, and follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter:twitter.com/Reasons2Remain/status/1055799923420119041• This video is now available on the Reasons2Remain YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/8FPrqG07oDw Before commenting on the Reasons2Remain campaign page, please read our new Rules of Engagement: Rules.Reasons2Remain.com********************************************► Watch Jon Danzig's 50-minute video: 'Can Britain Stop Brexit?' Go to CanBritainStopBrexit.com********************************************• To follow and support Reasons2Remain just ‘like’ the page, and please invite all your friends to like the page. ********************************************• Please recommend Reasons2Remain in the reviews section. Here's the link: facebook.com/Reasons2Remain/reviews/********************************************• Follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter: twitter.com/reasons2remain and Instagram: instagram.com/reasons2remain/********************************************• Explore our unique Reasons2Remain gallery of over 1,000 graphics and articles: reasons2remain.co.uk********************************************• Reasons2Remain is an entirely unfunded community campaign, unaffiliated with any other group or political party, and is run entirely by volunteers. If you'd like to help, please send us a private message.********************************************• © Reasons2Remain 2018. All our articles and graphics are the copyright of Reasons2Remain. We only allow sharing using the Facebook share button. Any other use requires our advance permission in writing.#STOPBREXIT #EXITBREXIT #PEOPLESVOTE #FINALSAY

Posted by Reasons2Remain on Friday, 26 October 2018

The post Labour’s fantasy Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In the interesting times that have been unfolding since the EU referendum, Britain is seeing the emergence of a new identity. A new cultural-political identity is being forged by British Europeans who feel a strong affiliation with the continent by virtue of background or cultural affinity. It’s an identity that’s growing out of a sense of rupture and the loss of something that was previously held securely, linked to a determination to preserve something valuable for the future.

Such British Europeans – or we, for I am definitely one – could be called New Europeans. But perhaps that’s a term a bit too fixed for this identity-in-the-making, and we could more accurately be described as ‘Emerging Europeans’ – people aspiring to become New Europeans who, with all the uncertainty about Britain’s future relationship with Europe, are not sure what form(s) this evolving identity might take.

One clear expression of this new identity can be found in the many new campaign groups and grassroots organisations that have sprung up since 2016 with the aim of stopping Brexit or putting more checks into the political process of leaving the EU. Campaigning Remainers have clear goals and tribal affiliations, so much so that the adoption of symbols and branding – the EU colours and flag on T-shirts and berets – has been rapid and straightforward. But since their goals are time-limited (assuming the Brexit negotiations will eventually lead to some conclusions) these particular political identities are necessarily time-limited.

Emerging Europeans, meanwhile, tend to be looking for resources and connections beyond the policies and politics of Brexit, a looser, less tangible set of characteristics and values deep and positive enough to underpin a sense of belonging that will endure for the rest of their lives and potentially for generations to come. The historical story that defines this identity, while in the recent past, is already clear: a piece of political expediency executed amid some long-standing party politics, a hasty referendum and an unexpected result.

(Comparisons with the identities of peoples formed by what were, from their point of view, sudden catastrophes such as Palestinian nationalism, while limited, can be instructive here: the resulting identity is about more than a yearning for recovery; it is forged by a sense of loss. In this sense, Emerging Europeans are perhaps more determinedly, consciously European than they were before the Catastrophe of the Referendum.)

But while its origins are clear, the future form of this emerging identity is obscure, and the search for constructive ways of developing this fragile new identity is on. Various ways of preserving European citizenship are under discussion – at a recent conference held by New Europeans, academics raised the possibility of legal challenges to the unprecedented stripping of 65 million people of their European citizenship, while a European Citizens Initiative is slowly gathering endorsements. But the former would involve breaking new legal ground, and the latter is a long way off the million signatures needed to get considered by the European Commission, so these measures may be more aspirational than anything else.

In any case, Emerging Europeans will need a broader set of cultural resources to sustain their connection with the continent. For some of us, this will involve physically visiting our European neighbours, with all the experiential pleasures and challenges that only travel can bring. For others, it’s likely to be more about maintaining cultural links, with a possible resurgence of initiatives such as town twinning and old-fashioned cultural exchanges, along with the emergence of new professional networks and interest-group associations. In the years to come, the next stage of the European project will usher in a host of other ways of being European that currently lie beyond the visible horizon.

Join the discussion about Britain’s evolving relationship with Europe on Facebook here and find out more about Alex Klaushofer’s book project here.

The post Emerging Europeans – a new post-Brexit identity appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This post first appeared at the EU Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy Blog 

 

Introduction

From May to July 2016, the Commission put forward a wide-ranging European Asylum package, which included the establishment of a European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA). The Council and the European Parliament reached a partial agreement on 28 June 2017 on twelve chapters of the Regulation on the future EUAA with the exception of Chapter 1 (“The European Union Agency for Asylum”), Chapter 3 (“Country information and guidance”), Chapter 5 (“Monitoring”), and Chapter 9 (“Organization of the Agency”). President Juncker announced in his speech on the 2018 State of the Union made on 12 September, the Commission’s intention to “further develop the European Asylum Agency to make sure that Member States get more European support in processing asylum seekers in line with the Geneva Convention”. On the same day, the Commission that welcomes the agreement concluded by the legislators released an amended proposal containing only targeted amendments reinforcing the operational tasks of the EUAA. This blog post analyzes the key novelties tabled in both 2016 and 2018 Commission proposals, and critically assesses what changes they will bring about to EASO’s current mandate in comparison with the mandate of the European Border and Coast Guard following Regulation 2016/1624 of 14 September 2016.

The Agency’s Monitoring Role

The European Border and Coast Guard agency determines a technical and operational strategy for European integrated border management, to which the Member States should conform to (article 3 Regulation 2016/1624). Although the EUAA is not mandated to set out a comprehensive strategy of asylum in a similar manner, the agency, through guidance on the situation in third countries of origin, will “ensure greater convergence and address disparities in the assessment of applications for international protection” (Proposal for a EUAA, COM(2016) 271 final, 04.05.2016, p. 7). The EUAA will “develop a common analysis on the situation in specific countries of origin and guidance notes to assist Member States in the assessment of relevant applications” (article 10(1) partial agreement EUAA). Importantly, as soon as the EUAA’s Management Board endorses the guidance notes, the Member States should take them into account when examining applications for international protection, without prejudice to their competence for deciding on individual applications (article 10(2a) partial agreement on the EUAA referred above).

The new monitoring role of the EUAA will also indirectly contribute to shape a common strategy of asylum in the EU. A key difference between EASO and the future EUAA will be its monitoring role in order to guarantee that the national authorities are sufficiently prepared to manage exceptional and sudden pressure in their asylum system. Should the EUAA’s information analysis raise serious concerns regarding the functioning or preparedness of a Member State’s asylum or reception systems, the agency, on its own initiative or at the request of the European Commission, may initiate a monitoring exercise (article 14(2) partial agreement EUAA).

The Member State concerned will receive the findings of the monitoring exercise and the draft recommendations of the EUAA’s Executive Director on the basis of which it should provide for comments. Taking Member State’s comments into account, the EUAA’s Management Board will, by a decision of two-thirds of its members, adopt those recommendations (article 14(3a) partial agreement EUAA). As with the EBCG’s vulnerability assessments (article 13 Regulation 2016/1624), the future EUAA will be conferred a recommendatory power in order to put forward measures to be adopted by the national authorities. Nevertheless, Member States will still maintain indirect control of the EUAA’s recommendations (see here) through the enhanced majority that is required in the Management Board.

Whereas the Commission did not initially propose that the EUAA’s Executive Director should be able to appoint experts from the staff of the agency to be deployed as liaison officers in Member States, the provisional text agreed on 28 June 2017 indicates that liaison officers “shall foster cooperation and dialogue between the Agency and the Member States’ authorities responsible for asylum and immigration and other relevant services” (article 14a(3) partial agreement EUAA). Like the EBCG’s liaison officers, they will facilitate the monitoring role of the agency by reporting regularly to the Executive Director on the situation of asylum in the Member States and their capacity to manage their asylum and reception systems effectively (article 14a(3) partial agreement EUAA).

 

The EUAA will thus be in charge of monitoring “the operational and technical application of the CEAS in order to prevent or identify possible shortcomings in the asylum and reception systems of Member States and to assess their capacity and preparedness to manage situations of disproportionate pressure so as to enhance the efficiency of those systems” (article 13(1) partial agreement EUAA). With this aim, the agency will namely assess the national procedures for international protection, staff available and reception conditions (i.e. infrastructure, equipment or financial resources) on the basis of the information provided by the Member State concerned and by relevant intergovernmental organisations or bodies, as well as by means of analysis on the situation of asylum and on-site visits that the agency may undertake (article 13 (3) and (4) partial agreement EUAA). This new monitoring task of the EUAA could so ultimately contribute to the effective and harmonised implementation of the CEAS by the Member States (see, here, here and here).

The Agency’s Expanded Operational Mandate

The EUAA will be in charge of organising and coordinating the appropriate operational support at the request of the Member States or upon the initiative of the agency in cases where the national asylum and reception systems are subject to exceptional pressure.

Following the lead of the EBCG’s Rapid Reaction Pool, an asylum reserve pool of a minimum of 500 persons should be made available by the Member States for their immediate deployment and should assist those national authorities subject to extraordinary migratory pressure (article 19A(6) partial agreement EUAA).

Moreover, the future Regulation on the EUAA details the functions of the agency in the recently established hotspots. Upon the request of a Member State facing an exceptional and sudden migratory pressure, the EUAA’s Executive Director should draw up a comprehensive reinforcement package consisting of various activities coordinated by the relevant Union agencies, and deploy Asylum Support Teams (ASTs) as part of migration management support teams (article 21(1) partial agreement EUAA). In 2018, the European Commission proposed to further expand, upon the request of a concerned Member State, the scope for the use of the migration management support teams to any situation and not necessarily limited to circumstances of extraordinary migratory pressure (new article 21, COM(2018) 633 final).

The Agency’s Competence to Intervene

Another important novelty that the EUAA will bring is the possibility of making an emergency intervention. This will happen if the functioning of the CEAS is jeopardized due to:

• the insufficient action of a Member State to address the disproportionate pressure on the asylum and reception systems in a Member State (article 22(1) partial agreement EUAA) or
• the refusal of the competent national authorities to request or accept assistance from the EUAA (article 22(1) partial agreement EUAA) or
• the unwillingness of a Member State to comply with the Commission’s recommendations to implement an action plan intended to address serious shortcomings identified during a monitoring assessment (article 14(3a) partial agreement EUAA).

The procedure set out in article 19(1) of the EBCG Regulation regarding situations at the external borders requiring urgent action will be, to a more limited extent, replicated for the EUAA. The proposal for a Regulation on an EUAA originally stated that the Commission would be the EU institution in charge of adopting a decision by means of an implementing act to be taken by the agency in order to support the Member State concerned. However, the provisional text finally states that the Council should be the authority responsible for adopting such an implementing act like it is the case for the EBCG (article 22 partial agreement EUAA).

Three days after the Council adopts its implementing act, the EUAA’s Executive Director will draw up an Operational Plan and determine the details of the practical implementation of the Council’s decision (article 22(2) partial agreement EUAA). Subsequently, the Member State concerned will have three days to reach an agreement with the Executive Director on the Operational Plan and will immediately cooperate with the agency to facilitate the practical execution of the measures put forward (article 22(4) partial agreement EUAA).

The Agency’s Role in Examining Asylum Applications

Another novelty in comparison to the EASO will be the involvement of the EUAA in the examination of international protection applications. Several provisions of the EUAA mention that the agency will assist or facilitate the Member States in examining the applications of international protection submitted to their asylum systems. Alongside the operational and technical assistance that the EUAA should provide to Member States upon their request, the agency will facilitate the examination of applications for international protection (article 16(2)(b) partial agreement EUAA) submitted to the competent national authorities. In this regard, the Asylum Support Teams (ASTs) “should support Member States with operational and technical measures, including (…) by knowledge of the handling and management of asylum cases, as well as by assisting national authorities competent for the examination of applications for international protection and by assisting with relocation or transfer of applicants or beneficiaries of international protection” (recital 16 partial agreement EUAA).

The European Commission’s proposal tabled on September 2018 mainly centers on expanding the EUAA’s role in the administrative procedure for international protection. Specifically, the new Article 16a states that the EUAA’s asylum support teams should, among other measures, identify any needs for special procedural guarantees, carry out the admissibility and substantive interview, assess the evidence, and prepare decisions on applications for international protection. This means that, upon the request of a Member State, the future EUAA will be able to draft decisions on asylum applications. However, the text of the Regulation highlights that the decisions on individual applications for asylum remain the Member States’ sole responsibility (Article 16a).

Assessing the extent of the Agency’s power to examine asylum applications

Recital 46 of the Commission proposal repeats that “the competence to take decisions by Member States’ asylum authorities on individual applications for international protection remains with Member States”. The Commission, both in 2016 and 2018, clearly establishes that the future EUAA cannot be conferred decision-making powers.

The question to be answered is whether the EUAA will be able to jointly process applications for international protection, and if it cannot, to what extent the agency may support the processing of asylum applications. In 2013, the Commission adopted a study in which the concept of “joint processing” was defined as “an arrangement under which all asylum claims within the EU are processed jointly by an EU authority assuming responsibility for both preparation and decision on all cases, as well as subsequent distribution of recognized beneficiaries of international protection and return of those not in need of protection” (p. 114). This study put forward four options that progressively move from supporting the Member States in processing asylum applications through an agency such as EASO/EUAA, to designing a centralized EU authority with decision-making powers and responsible for all asylum processing.

Currently, the Member States remain exclusively competent to adopt decisions concerning the admissibility and applications for international protection. The next level of European integration would entail the introduction of a mechanism of joint processing in situations where a Member State is subject to an extraordinary number of asylum applications. Joint processing teams of EASO would be deployed and make recommendations on asylum cases to the requesting Member State, which would continue to have exclusive decision-making powers.

The ASTs of EASO deployed in the Greek hotspots are in practice already adopting recommendations on the admissibility of the international protection applications. These recommendations are in fact largely accepted by the Greek Asylum Service’s officials when adopting a decision (see here, here and here). Precisely, the future EUAA, upon the request of a concerned Member State, will formally be conferred the power to facilitate the examination of applications for international protection. Actually, the envisaged EEUA Regulation provides a legal basis to the practice that the EASO has already developed in Greece as acknowledged by the European Ombusdman in its decision on a complaint about EASO’s role in that Member State.

However, the future EUAA will be far from deciding, in first instance and in appeal, every asylum application within the EU. Instead, the European Commission has opted to reinforce the operational tasks of EASO and maintain the Member States as the exclusive decision-making authorities. Centralizing the asylum decision-making process would ensure a full harmonization of the national procedures and foster a consistent evaluation of protection needs. Nevertheless, this option demands a “major institutional transformation” and “substantial resources” that can only be envisioned in the long-term.

There are also doubts as to whether article 78(2) TFEU is a sufficient legal basis for conferring the power to exclusively adopt binding decisions on all asylum claims to a EU authority. Pursuant article 78(2)(d) TFEU, the EU shall ensure: “(…) common procedures for the granting and withdrawing of uniform asylum or subsidiary protection status”. The 2013 Commission’s study on the feasibility of joint processing of asylum applications in the EU considers that article 78(2) TFEU, read together with articles 78(1) and 80 TFEU, represents an adequate legal basis and opens up the possibility for a completely harmonized EU-based approach for joint processing of asylum applications within the EU. Tsourdiunderlines however that a EU-level processing scenario in which decisions would be entirely undertaken by a EU authority instead of the Member States is legally impossible under article 78(2)(e) TFEU “which envisages that ‘a Member State’ is ultimately responsible for the examination of an application” that is the legal basis if the Dublin regulation.

Conclusion

Although the European Commission keeps referring to a fully-fledged agency for asylum matters in the EU, the EUAA will neither be conferred decision-making powers regarding asylum applications, nor executive or enforcement tasks on the ground. As is the case with the EBCG that did not establish a European Border Guard for managing the European external borders (see here, here, here or here), the future EUAA will rather be given an assisting role in the examination of applications of international protection by Member States (see here). The EUAA will be far from processing and deciding asylum applications made in the EU. Instead, the future Regulation on the EUAA opts for reinforcing the operational tasks of the agency and maintaining the Member States as the exclusive decision-making authorities. This should be de jure the situation in the future but once again one will have to check what will happen de facto.

The post From EASO to the European Agency for Asylum: “Business as Usual?” appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Debate on 2021-27 budget is underway

The EU Commission wants to have agreement on the guidelines for the budgetary framework period 2021-27 by the planned summit in Romania on May 9th2019, based on proposals it made in May this year. Although agreement that early is unlikely, the debate on this issue of fundamental importance is underway and hardly anyone is paying attention. It is true that the EU budget at close to 1% of GDP is small in relation to total public expenditure at all tiers of government, of 40-50% of GDP, and that it is smaller in relative terms than most people in the EU think it is. However, the absolute amount of money is large at about €1trn proposed over the period 2021-27 and the image of the EU amongst voters is and will be affected by where the money goes.

As argued in by last blog, the priorities for spending need radically changing from the priorities of the early 1990s when the present structure of the budget was established under Jacques Delors, in line with present day priorities like migration and climate change.

 

Commission links budgetary compliance to rule of law

Another issue which the Commission rightly emphasized in a whole new and separate section of its proposals is ensuring that the money goes where it is intended and thus the link between spending and the rule of law. While the Commission has to authorise spending, its administration and thus ensuring that the funds are spent as intended is mainly in the hands of national and local tiers of government, with the courts taking a role if there are allegations of fraud or corruption. Because of justified concerns of embezzlement by organized crime,  the southern regions of Italy have received less than would otherwise have been their due over decades. However, Italy has been consistently characterised by a judiciary whose actions may have sometimes been controversial but have virtually always been independent of the government of the day. For example, during Silvio Berlusconi’s long periods as head of government over 20 years he was continually been in conflict with the courts.

The separation of powers between executive, parliament and judiciary is a fundamental precondition of the rule of law and of democratic institutions as developed over the last 250 years. Amongst the Copenhagen Criteria laid down at the European Council in Copenhagen in 1993, future members  were required to respect the rule of law and under the detailed Conditions for Membership, Chapter 23 on the Judiciary and Fundamental Rights made clear that this required an independent judiciary, since the rule of law must apply to all, including government. But even if the Criteria were met at the time that new members acceded, there was no guarantee that they would continue to be met. And indeed there has recently been a row-back over the Criteria, especially in Poland and Hungary regarding the independence of the judiciary (for example in Poland judges have been made to retire earlier than under previous rules to make way for government appointees). Such backsliding seems of most concern amongst new member states but there should also be no complacency about actual and possible developments in older member states.

The introduction to the section of the May 2nd, 2018 budget framework proposals on Sound Financial Management and the Rule of Law does not pull its punches in linking the two, stating that: “Only an independent judiciary and legal certainty in all member states can ultimately guarantee that money from the EU budget is sufficiently protected”.

 

Murder of journalists investigating corruption and misuse of EU funds

The link between ensuring EU money is spent as intended and the rule of law was tragically illustrated by the murder in February 2018 of the Slovak journalist Jan Koviak, together with his girl-friend, who had been investigating corruption involving the governing party Smer and links between crime in Slovakia and the Calabrian organised crime group N’drangheta, which among other things appears to have been passing on advice on how to embezzle EU agricultural funds. More recently a TV presenter in Bulgaria who had investigated fraudulent use of EU funds was killed on October 6th, although in this case it is possible that the killing was not linked to her work. On October 16th, 2017, the leading independent journalist, who had alleged corruption at a high level in the Maltese government, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed. While her work was not specifically concerned with EU funds, if the level of corruption is as serious as she alleged, it would certainly warrant a high degree of concern as to whether the use of EU funds in Malta is or will be free from misuse.

 

Budget debate is central to the future of the EU

The issue the Commission is highlighting is therefore a serious one with concerns not limited to the countries mentioned above. There is little chance that the proposal will be adopted as it stands, given that all member states have to agree to the budgetary framework and some will feel it is directed at them. On the other hand the budget also has to be agreed by member states which are not keen on continuing to hand over large net payments to countries which they do not think share their view of the EU’s values. Agreeing the next budgetary framework is therefore likely to be difficult both for this reason and because there will be big differences on the priorities for the new budgetary period. A long stand-off is probable and a crisis with no budget agreed, or only one to carry on essential administrative spending, is possible. Although non-administrative budget expenditure is not essential to the EU’s functioning it does indicate its objectives and values. The coming debate is therefore crucial to the EU’s future. It is also crucial that be an open debate. @

The post The Link between the EU’s Budget and its Values appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The European Union consists of 28 member states. All treaty changes or enlargement of the EU require the unanimous consent of every single member, however large or small.

The Union of the United Kingdom consists of four member states: England, Scotland, Wales and the province of Northern Ireland.

In the referendum, two of them voted to remain in the EU: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Yet the UK government is going ahead with Brexit, without the unanimous consent of all the UK’s member states.

That couldn’t happen in the European Union, where all member states of the EU, however large or small, each have an equal vote and a veto on new treaties.

• If the UK was run on the same democratic principles as the EU, then the UK could not leave the European Union without the unanimous agreement of all its four members: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

But in the 2016 EU referendum, the democratic wishes of Scotland and Northern Ireland were ignored by the UK government, splitting the United Kingdom in two.

Similarly, Gibraltar – a British Overseas Territory which also had a vote in the EU referendum and chose by 96% to Remain in the EU – saw their objections to Brexit ignored.

Why offer Gibraltar a vote in the first place if their vote basically – and literally – counted for nothing?

• Even though Northern Ireland voted for Remain, one party – the pro-Brexit DUP – is being allowed to dictate what future relationship the province will have with the EU (and therefore the entire UK’s relationship with the EU).

That’s because it’s only the DUP that’s keeping the Tories in power, following last year’s general election, in which the Conservatives saw their majority wiped out.

• Theresa May called for a snap general election last year as she said she needed a bigger mandate to push through her brand of Brexit.

But even though she lost her mandate entirely, she’s still going ahead with her hard Brexit plans, as if the general election had never taken place.

• The EU’s remaining 27 member states will have a greater say and vote on the final Brexit deal than the devolved areas of the UK and the overseas territory of Gibraltar, who are being given no say.

Even the European Parliament will have a more meaningful vote on Brexit than our Parliament in Westminster. The European Parliament can withhold consent to the final Brexit agreement, thereby giving it a veto.

• Theresa May has never wanted our Parliament to have a meaningful vote on Brexit – that’s why the issue had to be dragged through the courts, when she tried to pass Brexit by bypassing Parliament (something she’s continued to attempt to do, despite the High and Supreme Courts damning rulings against her).

Nonetheless, Parliament will only have the power to accept or reject the Brexit deal on offer. If Parliament rejects the deal, the government would have to propose a new plan – but Parliament would not have the power to amend such a plan, unless the Speaker of the House decided otherwise.

• Brexiters claim that the EU is ‘undemocratic’.

But in reality, the EU is more democratic than our system in the UK, where we still have an unelected second chamber; where the wishes of devolved UK states can be ignored, and where we still have an antiquated voting system of first-past-the-post (MEPs are voted to the European Parliament using a system of proportional representation).

• Brexiters tell us that the EU is run by faceless bureaucrats.

But the truth is that all EU laws can only be passed by the democratically elected European Parliament, in concert with the Council of Ministers, that comprise the ministers of democratically elected governments of EU member states.

The European Commission is the servant of the EU, and not its master. The European Parliament elects the Commission President, must democratically approve each Commissioner, and has the power to dismiss the entire Commission.

(If that isn’t democratic, I don’t know what is.)

• Brexiters claim that if the EU doesn’t like the result of a referendum, it just calls for another referendum ‘until it gets the result it wants’. But this is entirely untrue.

The EU has no power to call for a referendum in a member state, let alone to call for another referendum if they ‘don’t like the result’. Only a national government, with the consent of their parliament, can call for a referendum or subsequent referendums.

Furthermore, there is nothing undemocratic about having another vote. That’s precisely what democracy is about.

• For example, France and Ireland voted in favour of the Maastricht Treaty. But Denmark did not.

The Danish government subsequently negotiated four significant concessions to the Treaty on Economic and Monetary Union, Union Citizenship, Justice and Home Affairs and Common Defence.

Consequently, Denmark, with the democratic consent of Denmark’s Parliament, presented these new concessions to the Danish electorate in a second referendum. In this second referendum, the Danes voted in favour of the Treaty, based on the concessions negotiated.

• Similarly, Ireland voted against the Treaty of Lisbon. The Irish government then negotiated significant concessions to the Treaty, and with the consent of Ireland’s parliament, held another referendum, in which Ireland voted in favour of the Treaty based on the amendments negotiated.

None of this was undemocratic. It was democracy at work.

Does anyone really think that the citizens of Ireland, or Denmark, both proud and independent peoples, could be ‘forced’ to vote in a way they didn’t want?

• Just after the referendum, Brexiters mocked that a region of Belgium, called Wallonia, had the power to block the new free trade agreement between Canada and the EU.

But that shows how Belgium, a country only a tenth the size of the UK, has a better democracy than ours.

Unlike in the UK, under Belgium’s constitution, regional parliaments such as the one governing Wallonia, must give their unanimous agreement before Belgium, as an EU member state, can give its consent to any EU Treaty.

The regions of Belgium have much more democratic power than our devolved parliaments of the UK. That’s how Wallonia came to block the EU-Canada agreement, called Ceta.

Eventually, Wallonia sought and received assurances about the Ceta deal, and lifted their objections, so the EU-Canada free trade agreement could go ahead, which it did.

The EU-Canada trade agreement, incidentally, is calculated to be worth an estimated £1.3bn a year to Britain – but of course only whilst we are an EU member.

During 2016, whilst the parliaments of Belgium and all the other EU countries were democratically considering Ceta, the UK’s international trade secretary, Liam Fox, had to apologise to MPs for not allowing our Parliament to have a debate on the Ceta deal.

• There’s something else that makes Belgium arguably more democratically accountable than the UK.

Since 1894 voting in Belgium’s elections has been compulsory. Everyone must vote.

Contrast Belgium’s system of compulsory voting with what happened in Britain’s referendum, where around 20 million people who could vote, didn’t vote.

That included around 13 million who registered to vote but didn’t, and a further estimated 7 million who could have registered to vote, but didn’t.

What a difference 20 million voters could have made to the EU referendum result if it had been compulsory for them to vote.

Polls indicate that those 13 million who registered to vote but didn’t would have supported Remain 2-to-1.

So, in summary:

• The Tory government is going ahead with Brexit, without the unanimous consent of all the UK’s four member states, and without the consent of our overseas territory, the state of Gibraltar.
  
• Only a minority of the electorate voted for Leave, just 37% – the majority either voted for Remain or didn’t vote.  In most referendums around the world non-voters do count, and a  ‘super majority’ is required before change can take place. (Just 37% of members would not be enough to change the constitution of most political parties.  Just 37% of the electorate wasn’t enough to give Scotland its own assembly in a 1979 referendum, even though the ‘Yes’ vote won. Just 37% of MPs would not be enough to call for an early General Election. Just 37% of a trade union’s members – under the law – would not be enough to call for strike action.)
• Many people directly affected by the outcome of the referendum were denied a vote: Britons who’d lived abroad for more than 15 years (even though the Tory manifesto promised them a vote) and citizens from the rest of the EU who had made Britain their home, in many cases for decades.
• Although Northern Ireland voted for Remain, just one small Northern Ireland party, the pro-Brexit DUP, is being allowed to have the final say on the province’s (and therefore the UK’s) future relationship with the EU, because that party is keeping Mrs May and her Tories in office.
• The government has refused to give Parliament a vote on whether Britain should leave the EU, saying the decision was already made by the referendum. Yet, the Supreme Court ruled that only Parliament could make the decision, as the EU referendum was advisory only. This is now a legal challenge against the government. See A50challenge.uk
• The Tory government plans to use ancient Henry VIII powers to prevent Parliament from having a say on which EU laws and protections should be kept, amended or scrapped after Brexit.
• The Tory government does not want our Parliament to have a proper vote on the final Brexit deal – there will be no option for Parliament to reject Brexit if it doesn’t like the deal. Parliament will be able to reject the deal, in which case Britain could end up leaving the EU without any deal.
• The Leave campaign had to rely on lies to win. All the reasons to leave the EU were based on misinformation, mistruths and false promises. (Yes, all of them).
• Evidence is now emerging of alleged fraud, and criminal acts by Vote Leave, Cambridge Analytica, and Aggregate IQ: illegal overspending, psychologically profiling and targeting people with online ads, based on masses of stolen data. All this could have illegally swung the referendum vote in favour of Leave – especially as the margin for Leave was wafer thin.
• Lawyers are consequently calling for the Brexit vote to be declared void for irregularity, but the government has shown no interest.
• Unlike in other democracies that have held second referendums, the government is refusing the give us, ‘the people’, a second say on Brexit, even though nobody knew anything about the final and finer details of Brexit in the referendum (and we still don’t know).

So, which has the better system of democracy: the EU or the UK?

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So, no breakthrough, but also no collapse. Not the most ringing endorsement for yesterday’s European Council discussion on Article 50, but given the possible alternatives, certainly not the worst it could have been.

Still the focus remains on the backstop for Ireland.

Usefully, we might remember that this backstop has become an issue for two, interlinked reasons.

Firstly, it’s evident that the period from leaving the EU next March to the end of 2020 is almost certainly not long enough to negotiate a comprehensive new EU-UK relationship that would provide a durable legal basis for keeping the Irish border as open as it is now. Secondly, even if it were long enough, the UK still hasn’t settled on a confirmed consensus view on what that new relationship should be.

Next-to-impossible to negotiate something when you don’t know what you want.

As a result, the EU (driven by Ireland) wants a backstop to protect those parts of the Good Friday Agreement that fall within its competence, not because that’s optimal, but because it can’t rely on the UK to get its act together.

That the UK hasn’t been the most reliable of negotiating partners also hasn’t helped.

In any case, it’s been that time shortage that has been central in driving backstops: neither the EU nor UK wanted an indefinite transition period, so they extemporised.

This past week has seen a revisiting of this assumption, for what seem to be rather obvious reasons.

A longer transition means more time to sort out that new relationship, so less likelihood of needing a back-up plan in the form of a backstop.

Of all the options on the table, it is one of the very simplest, not least because both sides agreed the terms of transition already, so the paperwork is almost entirely ready to go. Indeed, when that was agreed, back in the spring, there was almost no opposition to its existence or form from opponents of Theresa May and it attracted minimal attention from any one (excepting the occasional academic).

Despite what Nigel Farage and others say, transition is not ‘staying in for longer’, because transition’s entire existence is based on the Withdrawal Agreement, which in turn supposes that the UK and EU have agreed terms for leaving. Thus, in strict legal terms, the UK would no longer be a member state.

But…

But yes, there are problems, and some big ones at that.

While May will go with the line that she’s delivered on getting the UK out of the EU on her schedule next March, it will be into a transition that is as close to membership as it’s possible to imagine: literally everything as before, but without representation or a vote. In that sense, Farage would have a point and getting over a line on a technicality is never a good look, even if you’re not already on a caution from your own party.

Moreover, extending transition beyond December 2020 means that the UK will find itself entering a new financial cycle of the EU budget, without a rebate mechanism – so net contributions would go up considerably – and without full planning by the EU for accommodating spending allocations to the UK – so some substantial financial engineering will be required in 2020.

Crucially, a longer transition means more chance of the EU making a decision that causes real problems for the UK, which will undermine the already-thin legitimacy and accountability of the transition system.

And there’s the moral hazard argument: more time is well and good, but it reduces the pressure to reach a timely agreement on the future relationship, so both sides will still be likely to face a situation where another extension to transition is required to avoid a new cliff-edge moment.

So…

The temptation in all this to work just to immediate concerns: what can May get through Parliament, or what will fly for the Irish to sign up?

That’s important, but it can’t be the only perspective. These decisions are going to have lasting impacts on the lives of millions, and the more that they can be discussed and evaluated, the better.

However, one key point is going to have to be accepted in this process.

Brexit is about change, divergence and disentanglement. It necessarily and fundamentally implies costs, primarily in the shorter-term but also beyond that. Whatever form Brexit takes, there will be negativities – opportunity costs to businesses, citizens, politics – and there is no cost-free option. Indeed, even abandoning Brexit entirely isn’t without substantial costs, certainly in reputational terms.

In all the debate about how Brexit proceeds, this basic reality is too often brushed to one side. Maybe now is the time to face up to it.

The post The pros and cons of a longer transition appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Conference 2018 (12-13 July, KU Leuven, Belgium)

In parliamentary democracies the cabinet makes policy decisions. When a cabinet is formed around a coalition of parties, the responsibility for decision-making is shared. However, coalition parties remain politically independent actors, resulting in competition and disagreements over policy issues. Whilst coalition partners may not always disagree, they often do: Saskia Smellie considers recent developments in German coalition politics and its effects on domestic policy-making and international politics.

Reichstag parliament, Berlin © travelwitness/AdobeStock

The ramifications of coalition politics have become starkly apparent during the European Union (EU) migration crisis; not least in the case of Germany in June 2018. The German Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner and conservative sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU), sparked a crisis described as the ‘greatest challenge ever to Merkel’s authority’.

The dispute, which came ahead of elections in Bavaria later in the year, stemmed from a breakdown of emergency talks on refugee policy, related to Seehofer’s so-called ‘master plan for migration’. The 63-point proposal, which falls largely within the Interior Minister’s remit, included measures enabling asylum-seekers registered in other EU countries to be turned away at the Bavarian-Austrian border, without initiating the Dublin regulation.

Under the Dublin regulation asylum seekers claim asylum in the first country through which they enter the EU and can be sent back to that country to make a claim. Turning away asylum seekers at the German border without implementing the Dublin return procedure would effectively mean suspending the regulation and reinstating an internal EU border. With the CSU supporting Seehofer’s plans, the junior and arguably more ideologically driven coalition partner held the more moderate and senior conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party to ransom. If Merkel were unable to reach a satisfactory deal with other EU member states to reduce immigration, Seehofer and the CSU threatened to act unilaterally and impose the border checks in Bavaria against the chancellor’s will. The crisis deepened still further when Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz stated that he planned to reinstate Austrian borders if Seehofer went ahead with his proposals.

This is not the first time that disagreement between coalition partners on immigration policy has had far-reaching consequences in Germany. Refugee policy is cited as one of the reasons for the collapse of coalition negotiations after the German federal elections in September 2017, which left the country without a government until March 2018. When a new Grand coalition between CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was finally formed, the leader of the CSU secured the cabinet post of Interior Minister. Seehofer has been Merkel’s harshest critic since the summer of 2015, and the most vocal member of the government to come out in opposition of Merkel’s Willkommenskultur. In his new role as Interior Minister he has greater power to oppose, contest and constrain Merkel’s immigration policies.

It is striking that the crisis incited by Seehofer’s controversial migration ‘master plan’ threatened not only the German coalition government but also negotiations on the future of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker hosted a mini-summit on migration in Brussels on 24th June 2018, ahead of a European Council summit, reportedly on Merkel’s request. The initiative provoked anger from the Italian government when the Commission sent out a draft EU accord, ahead of the summit, which included key measures Merkel required to placate Seehofer and the CSU.

The perception was that greater priority had been given to Germany’s domestic crisis than to member states experiencing a high influx of migration on the eastern and southern EU borders. Moreover, the Commission was seen as overstepping its remit in a policy area reserved to the European Council. The Visegrad Group (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), which are united in their anti-immigration policy and opposition to the redistribution of refugees in the EU, chose not to attend the mini-summit at all. Nevertheless, Merkel appeared to secure a commitment from Macron that France would take back returned asylum seekers, in an agreement with Germany, suggesting a possible resolution to her domestic crisis through bilateral means. In the end, Seehofer was persuaded to soften the language in his plan and remove the point on turning back asylum seekers, in return for the coalition government agreeing to introduce tougher asylum policies.

This episode demonstrates the impact that coalition politics can have not only on domestic politics but also on international negotiations and relations. In the case of immigration policy, a junior coalition partner that holds the role of Interior Minister and demonstrated arguably more populist views on immigration ahead of a regional election, not only came close to collapsing the coalition government but also directly affected negotiations at an EU level. Within the context of the EU migration crisis and the increasingly salient and international nature of migration politics – with a growing focus on controlling borders, push and pull factors between neighbouring states, and outsourcing immigration controls to third countries – this example of domestic actors constraining international negotiations is one of many.

The ongoing consequences of Germany’s coalition disputes on immigration, for both the federal government and future negotiations on the Common European Asylum System remains to be seen. However, the incident does clearly demonstrate how a dispute between coalition partners in a cabinet can quickly escalate to have ramifications for international relations and negotiations on the international stage.

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of the UACES Graduate Forum, UACES or JCER.

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Saskia Smellie | @S_Smellie

Saskia Smellie is a PhD researcher in Politics & International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include comparative immigration policy, EU asylum and refugee policy, ‘burden-sharing’ and foreign policy analysis. She is a co-author of the report ‘Scottish and UK Immigration Policy after Brexit: Evaluating Options for a Differentiated Approach’.

 

The post Merkel, Coalition Politics and Negotiating the Common European Asylum System: Constrained by Domestic Actors? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

There will be a lot of talk about the extreme right’s entry into the Bavarian parliament and the impact of yesterday’s election on the federal government in Berlin. But the most important fall-out may reside in a significant shift in political semantics.

For as long as I can remember, Bavaria has always been described to me as a very particular Bundesland. Not because it was my parents’ favourite holiday destination during my childhood (and has remained, indeed, a blessed corner of Europe), but because the Bavarians insisted on being ‘different’ from the rest of the bunch (to which they generically referred to as ‘Prussians’).

Strictly speaking, it’s not even a Bundesland, since it’s officially called a Freistaat, as if it wanted to remind the others that they could quit the federation any time. Some Germans consider the Bavarians as ‘arrogant’, but that’s the kind of reproach you earn mainly by performing better than anybody else. And they do, in practically all statistics: economy, security, health, education, employment, football, you name it.

The impressive Bavarian mansion in Brussels.

Even on a European level, it’s difficult not to be impressed with Bavaria. With its 13 million inhabitants it would the 9th biggest member state, and in economic terms, with its GDP of 600 bn Euros, it would even be number seven, before Poland. And they don’t hide their opulence: their wonderfully megalomaniac ‘château’ representation in Brussels, in direct vicinity of the European Parliament, does not go unnoticed.

***

For as long as I can remember, this model region was managed by the CSU, the powerful local variant of the Christian Democrats, whose hyper-domination of Bavarian politics over half a century was shoulder-shruggingly explained by the fact that the country was ‘deeply conservative’. A very appropriate adjective for a region that not only did have quite a few assets worth ‘conserving’, but that had also managed to reconcile, as pointed out in a famous slogan, ‘laptops and leather trousers’. Developing world-class industry, research, and infrastructures was not mutually exclusive with preserving a strong, surprisingly inclusive, cultural heritage embodied in ostentatious identity markers (including a nightmare dialect).

Yesterday’s election to the regional parliament in Munich has attracted unprecedented international attention. This was mainly due to the fact that the CSU has been identified as the main problem child of the current coalition in Berlin, at least partly responsible for the stalemate in an increasingly ‘ungovernable’ Federal Republic, as well as for the apparent decline in Angela Merkel’s authority. European media are already wondering whether the Bavarian election results will weaken the federal government even further.

Results as provided by the Bavarian authorities.

And there will be quite some hand-wringing about the extreme right’s entry into the Bavarian Landtag. The AfD went from zero to ten percent – how shocking! Was not Munich the birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s movement? The kind of fear-mongering that shallow international television coverage loves to indulge in. They could just as well point out that 10.2% for an openly xenophobic party with an aggressive single-issue anti-migrant agenda is actually a rather poor result in the very region that has been more exposed than any other to the influx of refugees from the famous ‘Balkan route’ since August 2015. To put it differently: both parties who focused massively on the migration issue were rather unsuccessful in Bavaria. The CSU lost roughly a fourth of their voters in comparison to the 2013 election, and the AfD, which recruited 28% of their electorate precisely from former CSU voters, remained below their score in the federal elections a year ago and way behind current national opinion polls.

In a nutshell: Bavarians proved remarkably resistant to several variants of populism. They rejected the religiously tainted identity populism of current minister-president Markus Söder – whose infamous ‘crucifix law’ backfired even among many Bavarian Catholics – and only a minority of them were ready to embrace the xenophobic and nationalist populism of the AfD. At least that’s my reading, against the very particular backdrop of a soul-searching Germany in the autumn of 2018.

The most intriguing fall-out from this election is, however, the hi-jacking and re-definition of the term ‘conservative’ by the Greens, who doubled their results from five years ago, reaching an all-time high of 17.5%. They managed to do so in proposing a new brand of ‘conservatism’: the one they promote – not unlike their successful neighbours in Baden-Württemberg – shifts the core connotation of the term towards ‘sustainability’. And it carries, mostly implicit, but visibly understood by many, a secondary connotation of urgent change, transposing to their country Tancredo’s famous message to the Prince from Lampedusa’s Leopard: if we want to preserve what made Bavaria a great place, we need to change our ways.

How green has Ms Bavaria become?

Are we witnessing the arrival of climate change and biodiversity worries, in combination with issues of social sustainability, in mainstream politics in Western Europe? It would be about time. It’s probably too early to earmark 14 October 2018 as a ‘potential turning point for Europe’, as Florian Eder suggests in his (always excellent) Brussels Playbook today. In Bavaria, the Greens will remain in opposition, but the fact that they obtained 30% of the vote in the region’s major cities shows that their influence is not likely to decline over the next years. Especially if birds and insects continue to disappear, overhot summers last forever, and the automotive lobby has nothing to offer but big, fat SUVs and threats about job losses.

The future of German politics will be conservative. The question is what people will want to conserve, and who are the politicians who will propose the most credible brand of conservatism.

The post Deeply conservative appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Arron Banks, the insurance tycoon and Brexit campaigner who bankrolled both UKIP and Leave.eu, has launched a vitriolic campaign to deselect Remain-supporting Tory MPs who represent ‘Leave’ constituencies.

Mr Banks, whose application to join the Conservatives was rejected, said the aim and slogan of his campaign, called ‘The Blue Wave UK’, is to:

‘Make the Conservatives Conservative again’

But if Conservatives are to be ‘Conservative again’, they would naturally support Britain’s membership of the EU.

That’s because, traditionally, all Tory Prime Ministers and governments had, until now, strongly and consistently favoured Britain being in the European Community.

• It was because of Conservatives that the UK applied to join the European Community in the first place.
• It was because of Conservatives that the UK eventually joined the European Community.
• It was because of Conservative support that Britain’s continued membership of the European Community was won by a landslide in the first referendum of 1975.
• It was because of Conservatives, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, that the Single Market of Europe came into existence.
• The Conservative government in the 2016 referendum officially supported the UK’s continued membership of the European Union.
• Most Conservative MPs voted for Remain in the 2016 referendum.

Since the European Community was founded in 1957, with just one exception, the passionate resolve of all past Conservative Prime Ministers was that Britain should join it and remain in it.

That one exception is today’s Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May.

Mrs May is Britain’s only Prime Minister ever to go against membership of the European Union and the cherished Single Market of Europe.

Some argue that Conservatives of today are not the same as Conservatives of yesterday. They have become more like UKIP.

Indeed, shortly after Mrs May became Prime Minister, the then UKIP MEP, Roger Helmer, told BBC Radio 4 in October 2016:

“I like what Theresa May is doing.

“She seems to have picked up about 90% of UKIP’s programme. In some ways, she’s gone far beyond what we would have done.”

Theresa May is taking Britain out of the EU, whereas all previous Prime Ministers (both Tory and Labour) wanted Britain to be in.

If only today’s Conservative MPs – and today’s Tory Prime Minister – were true Conservatives of the past, then the party that championed our membership of the European Community would not now be relishing the prospect of Britain’s departure from it.

What would past Tory Prime Ministers make of their legacies being destroyed by their own party?

 WINSTON CHURCHILL: It was one of the Tory party’s greatest leaders, Winston Churchill, who passionately promoted the ‘Union of Europe as a whole’ and is recognised as a founder of the European Union.

In his famous Zurich speech of 1946, Churchill said,

‘We must build a kind of United States of Europe.. The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important..

“If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.’

At London’s Albert Hall, in May 1947, just a few months after his Zurich speech, Churchill spoke as Chairman and Founder of the United Europe Movement to ‘present the idea of a United Europe in which our country will play a decisive part..’

In May 1948 Churchill said in the opening speech to the Congress of Europe in Holland, that the drive towards a United Europe, ‘should be a movement of the people, not parties’.

Churchill, who also proposed a European ‘Charter’ and ‘Court’ of Human Rights, continued,

‘We aim at the eventual participation of all the peoples throughout the continent whose society and way of life are in accord with the Charter of Human Rights.’

During this momentous speech, Churchill proclaimed:

‘We cannot aim at anything less than the Union of Europe as a whole, and we look forward with confidence to the day when that Union will be achieved.’

When in in 1961 Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, applied for Britain to join the European Community, Churchill wrote:

“I think that the Government are right to apply to join the European Economic Community..”

He added:

“We might well play a great part in these developments to the profit of not only ourselves, but of our European friends also.”

 HAROLD MACMILLAN: In a pamphlet explaining to the nation why he had applied for the UK to join the European Community in 1961, Prime Minister Macmillan wrote:

“By negotiating for British membership of the European Economic Community and its Common Market, the present Conservative Government has taken what is perhaps the most fateful and forward looking policy decision in our peacetime history.

“We did not do so lightly. It was only after a searching study of all the facts that we came to accept this as the right and proper course.”

Mr Macmillan continued:

“By joining this vigorous and expanding community and becoming one of its leading members, as I am convinced we would, this country would not only gain a new stature in Europe, but also increase its standing and influence in the councils of the world.”

Of great pertinence to today, Mr Macmillan added:

“Accession to the Treaty of Rome would not involve a one-sided surrender of ‘sovereignty’ on our part, but a pooling of sovereignty by all concerned, mainly in economic and social fields.

“In renouncing some of our own sovereignty we would receive in return a share of the sovereignty renounced by other members.”

 SIR ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME: Mr Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was briefly prime minister for one year from 1963. He supported Britain’s application to join the European Community, although Harold Macmillan’s application had been vetoed by the French President, Charles de Gaulle.

In his party’s manifesto for the general election of 1964, Sir Alec stated:

“We remain convinced that the political and economic problems of the West can best be solved by an Atlantic partnership between America and a united Europe. Only in this way can Europe develop the wealth and power, and play the part in aiding others, to which her resources and history point the way.”

Later, as Foreign Secretary in Edward Heath’s government that took Britain into the European  Community, Sir Alec said in a speech in Parliament in June 1971 on the importance of the United Kingdom’s membership:

“I think the time has come when we must say to the public in our country that the future prospect ahead of us is uncertain unless we can expand our markets and unless we can become part of a bigger organisation; for trade, for investment, and also for political reasons.”

The following month in Parliament he said:

“I have never made it a secret that I cannot see an alternative which would offer as good a prospect for this country as joining the E.E.C. [European Community].”

And he also stated:

“I, too, have concluded through the years that membership of the Community would be advantageous to Britain.”

 EDWARD HEATH: It was Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who joined Britain to the European Community on 1 January 1973, following the backing of Parliament after 300 hours of debate.

On the evening of 28 October 1971, Mr Heath addressed the House of Commons during the momentous debate on Britain joining the European Community. He said:

“Surely we must consider the consequences of staying out. We cannot delude ourselves that an early chance would be given us to take the decision again.

“We should be denying ourselves and succeeding generations the opportunities which are available to us in so many spheres; opportunities which we ourselves in this country have to seize.

“We should be leaving so many aspects of matters affecting our daily lives to be settled outside our own influence. That surely cannot be acceptable to us.

“We should be denying to Europe, also – let us look outside these shores for a moment – its full potential, its opportunities of developing economically and politically, maintaining its security, and securing for all its people a higher standard of prosperity.”

Mr Heath added:

“..tonight when this House endorses this Motion many millions of people right across the world will rejoice that we have taken our rightful place in a truly United Europe.”

Parliament did endorse the Motion by 356 votes to 244, and Britain subsequently joined the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973.

 MARGARET THATCHER: Two years later, in 1975, the Labour government offered the British people a referendum on whether the country should remain in the European Community. Tory leader and future Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, strongly campaigned for the country to remain in the Community.

In a speech in Parliament on 8 April 1975 supporting Britain’s continued membership of the European Community, Mrs Thatcher said:

“Membership of the Community enhances our effective sovereignty by giving the British Government increased influence and bargaining strength.”

She added:

“That is what sovereignty in the modern world is really about and that is why Britain is stronger inside the Community than she would be outside it.”

And pertinently to today, Mrs Thatcher said:

“If we were now to withdraw, it would be a leap in the dark. We should not have any idea of the trading conditions into which we were coming out or of the effect on sterling.”

In another keynote speech on 16 April 1975 during the referendum campaign she said:

“It is not surprising that I, as Leader of the Conservative Party, should wish to give my wholehearted support to this campaign, for the Conservative Party has been pursuing the European vision almost as long as we have existed as a Party.”

As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher also pushed for, and made possible, the Single Market of Europe.

In September 1988 in Bruges, Mrs Thatcher gave a major speech about the future of Europe. She said:

“Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.”

Mrs Thatcher added:

“Let Europe be a family of nations, understanding each other better, appreciating each other more, doing more together but relishing our national identity no less than our common European endeavour.”

Crucially she said in support of the Single Market:

“By getting rid of barriers, by making it possible for companies to operate on a European scale, we can best compete with the United States, Japan and other new economic powers emerging in Asia and elsewhere.”

 JOHN MAJOR: It was former Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, who negotiated and won Parliament’s backing to sign the Maastricht Treaty, that among other benefits gave us EU Citizenship rights allowing us to reside, work, study or retire across a huge expanse of our continent.

He called for Britain to be at ‘the very heart of Europe’.

At the Tory Party Conference of 1992, just six months after John Major won a surprise victory that year in the General Election, he said to the party faithful:

“I speak as one who believes Britain’s future lies with Europe.”

And Mr Major warned about Britain walking away from Europe:

“We would be breaking Britain’s future influence in Europe. We would be ending for ever our hopes of building the kind of Europe that we want. And we would be doing that, just when across Europe the argument is coming our way. We would be leaving European policy to the French and the Germans.

“That is not a policy for Great Britain. It would be an historic mistake. And not one your Government is going to make.”

And Mr Major crucially added:

“Let us not forget why we joined the Community. It has given us jobs. New markets. New horizons.

“Nearly 60 per cent of our trade is now with our partners. It is the single most important factor in attracting a tide of Japanese and American investment to our shores, providing jobs for our people..

“But the most far-reaching, the most profound reason for working together in Europe I leave till last. It is peace. The peace and stability of a continent, ravaged by total war twice in this century.”

 DAVID CAMERON: Theresa May’s predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, also strongly supported Britain’s continued membership of the EU, and his government’s official advice to the electorate during the Referendum was to vote for Remain.

In a speech on 9 May 2016 in support of the UK remaining in the EU during the referendum campaign, Mr Cameron said:

“I believe that, despite its faults and its frustrations, the United Kingdom is stronger, safer and better off by remaining a member of the European Union.”

And he added:

“We are part of a single market of 500 million people which Britain helped to create. Our goods and, crucially, our services – which account for almost 80% of our economy – can trade freely by right. We help decide the rules. The advantages of this far outweigh any disadvantages.”

Most pertinently to today’s debate within the Tory party on what kind of Brexit Britain should have (which has still not been settled), Mr Cameron said:

“The Leave campaign are asking us to take a massive risk with the future of our economy and the future of our country.

“And yet they can’t even answer the most basic questions.

“What would Britain’s relationship be with the EU if we were to leave? Will we have a free trade agreement, or will we fall back on World Trade Organisation rules?

“The man who headed the WTO for 8 years thinks this would be, and I quote, ‘a terrible replacement for access to the EU single market.’

“Some of them say we would keep full access to the EU Single Market.

“If so, we would have to accept freedom of movement, a contribution to the EU budget, and accept all EU rules while surrendering any say over them.

“In which case, we would have given up sovereignty rather than taken it back.

“Others say we would definitely leave the single market – including, yesterday, the Vote Leave campaign – despite the critical importance of the Single Market to jobs and investment in our country.

“I can only describe this as a reckless and irresponsible course. These are people’s jobs and livelihoods that are being toyed with.

“And the Leave campaign have no answers to the most basic questions.”

Of course, today’s Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May also shared these sentiments before the Referendum, when she campaigned for Remain and declared:

“I believe it is clearly in our national interest to remain a member of the European Union.”

And she concluded then (as opposed to now):

“Remaining inside the European Union does make us more secure, it does make us more prosperous and it does make us more influential beyond our shores.

“I believe the case to remain a member of the European Union is strong.”

So yes, Mr Banks, lets support your campaign aim to make “Conservatives Conservative again.”

The truth is that today’s Conservative MPs who support Britain’s  membership of the EU – the ones you want deselected – are in fact the true Tories.

We need those traditional pro-EU Conservatives, more than ever, to represent the majority of Britons who now don’t support Brexit.

• Video: Winston Churchill makes the case for a United Europe

• Video: Former Prime Minister, John Major, on the case for another referendum

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Prime Minister Theresa May has unveiled the first details of Britain’s new tough Brexit immigration system, claiming that it will bring to an end free movement of people “once and for all”.

But this new ‘system’ will considerably hurt Britons and UK businesses.

The Prime Minister declared:

“Two years ago, the British public voted to leave the European Union and take back control of our borders. When we leave we will bring in a new immigration system that ends freedom of movement once and for all.”

It means EU citizens will no longer have the right to come and live and work in the UK.

But it also works the other way around:

• UK citizens will lose ‘the right’ to live, work, study or retire across much of our continent (all 27 EU countries, and any new ones joining, plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein).
• We may also have to apply and pay for visas to go on holiday or business trips across much of our continent.

Theresa May’s announcement assumes that ‘free movement’ has been bad for Britain, and that it’s meant we lost control of our borders. This is incorrect.

Free movement of people – a cornerstone and foundational principle of the EU – has been a boon not only for our continent, but for our country too.

• It’s meant that British workers have all of the EU and EEA countries to seek work.
• And it’s meant that British businesses have all the of the EU and EEA to seek workers.
• This system has worked well.

Britain has record numbers of high employment and low unemployment. So, what’s the problem?

Citizens from the rest of the EU in the UK represent just 5% of our population – that’s small, and hardly ‘uncontrolled immigration’.

Furthermore, the vast majority of those citizens are in gainful employment, making a significant NET contribution to our Treasury and economy, and doing jobs that we simply don’t have enough Britons to do.

Only a small proportion are taking unemployment benefits (about 2% of the UK’s total claimants).

As for borders, we already control them. Everyone coming to the country or leaving has to pass border controls.

Under existing rules, EU citizens are not allowed to move to another EU country unless they can afford to do so. They can’t just arrive and claim benefits. Furthermore, Britain can refuse entry to, or deport, EU migrants who are considered a threat to the country’s security, health, etc.

Our jobs market has been an excellent controller of inward EU migration. If there are no jobs, EU migrants either mostly don’t come or don’t stay.

We need millions of migrants in Britain because we have millions more jobs than Britons to do them.

But under Mrs May’s new plans, complicated and burdensome tiers of bureaucracy will be imposed on businesses before they can hire a member of staff from the EU or any other country.

Lower paid foreign workers will be given the lowest priority and British firms will be discouraged and deterred from hiring them.

So, who will work in our care homes, restaurants, hotels, farms and factories when we don’t have enough Britons to do that work, and just as pertinently, not enough Britons who want to do that work?

In a statement announcing the immigration shake-up Mrs May said:

“For the first time in decades, it will be this country that controls and chooses who we want to come here.” 

But this is a smokescreen.

When she says “we” will control and choose who comes here, she doesn’t mean you or me. We will have no control over who comes here.

It will be civil servants deciding who can come here, in a new and complicated system that will involve businesses having to pay the government considerable fees before they can hire an employee from abroad.

If Britain had many millions of unemployed Britons, such a policy could be understandable. But with more Britons at work than ever before, and the lowest unemployment rate for decades, there is no evidence that EU migrants here have taken British jobs.

On the contrary, there is considerable evidence that EU migrants here have helped to expand our economy, creating more jobs for all of us.

But as well as hurting British businesses, Mrs May’s new plans will hurt Britons. Brexit means we will lose ‘the right’ to live, work, study or retire across a huge expanse of our continent.

How backward is that?

Ironically, the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, this month ridiculously compared the EU to the defunct USSR. But it was the USSR that also restricted free movement of people.

By contrast, the EU has opened up our continent for its citizens to freely move across it.

Free movement of people across Europe was a prescient vision of Winston Churchill.

After the first British victory of the Second World War at El Alamein, Prime Minister Churchill wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, on 21 October 1942:

‘Hard as it is to say now.. I look forward to a United States of Europe, in which the barriers between the nations will be greatly minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible.’

In a lecture about this in December 2011, Oxford Professor of Government, Vernon Bogdanor, described Churchill’s letter as, “remarkably prescient” adding that he thought the comment, “would get him expelled from the Conservative Party today”.

EU citizenship rights have taken decades to win and achieve. These rights were fully debated and democratically passed by our Parliament in Westminster.

Our current burgundy UK passports, embossed with ‘European Union’ on the front, currently give us the right to reside, work, study or retire across the entire European Union plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Those rights for Britons will be lost when we are scheduled to leave the EU in March 2019, although the right is anticipated to be briefly and temporarily extended in a so-called transition period until December 2020 (but only if we leave the EU with a deal in place).

But Brexiters apparently can’t wait for our passports to turn from burgundy to blue, and to lose the EU symbol on the front and all that it represents.

• Our new blue British passports will give us the privilege of enduring longer queues at border controls when visiting EU/EEA member states after Brexit.

That will be fun, won’t it?

• Our new blue passports will also mean we will NOT have any guaranteed rights to live, work, study or retire across our continent.

So much for progress.

Over the course of our membership of the EU, millions of Britons have taken advantage of our EU citizenship rights, mostly to work in other EU countries, but also to study, retire and buy holiday homes and residences.

Without EU membership, going to live and work in other EU countries will still be possible, but it won’t be a ‘right’, so it won’t be as easy as now, and in many cases, it simply won’t be achievable.

• Before the EU, British citizens most often had to apply for work and residency visas to live in other European countries.

Nostalgia beckons. Those times are soon to return.

• Our EU citizenship rights also mean that when we live and work in any other EU country, we can enjoy many of the same rights as the citizens of that country, including reciprocal employment rights, the right to access state healthcare and education, and to vote in local and European Parliament elections.

Not to worry. We will also lose those rights after Brexit.

Losing the right to free movement to live and work across our continent will be a HUGE LOSS when Brexit happens, scheduled for 11pm on 29 March 2019.

It’s no surprise that many Britons living in the rest of Europe, and many citizens from the rest of Europe now living in Britain, are still anxiously awaiting the outcome of the Brexit negotiations to know for sure what will be their rights after Brexit, if any.

Let’s summarise what’s on the horizon, unless we can democratically reverse our course:

• Brexit means losing rights, not gaining any.
  
• Brexit means Britain cutting itself off from the mainland of Europe.
• Brexit means we will be poorer, and with less sovereignty, fewer rights and protections, restricted trade and travel, and diminished power after we’ve left.

No wonder so many Britons are now saying, ‘We want our continent back’.

• Video: What we lose when we leave

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The government has drafted in a minister to oversee the protection of UK food supplies following rising fears about the impact of a no-deal Brexit.

Tory MP David Rutley, a former Asda and PepsiCo executive, was appointed to the post of Food Supplies Minister on 3 September, but the appointment was only announced at the end of last month.

Mr Rutley previously ran the home shopping and e-commerce businesses at Asda.

The possibility that the UK will leave the European Union in March next year without having secured a deal has raised serious concerns about food shortages, with some manufacturers stockpiling ingredients.

The UK is not self-sufficient in food and has to import most of it.

Last month, the government published its latest ‘No Deal Technical Notice’ providing further details of the implications of the UK leaving the EU without any deal in place.

Ian Wright, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation warned that it laid bare “the grisly prospect of a no-deal Brexit.”

This included, he said, chaos at the ports, serious disruption to food supplies, increasing business costs, rising consumer prices and more bureaucratic burdens on producers, suppliers, manufacturers and retailers.

Commented Mr Wright, “While the UK may not run out of food and drink it will certainly be scarcer and more expensive.”

He added:

“UK shoppers, who have become accustomed to all year-round availability of a wide range of safe, high-quality food and drink at all price points, will face a very rude awakening.”

The Guardian reported that food industry insiders welcomed the appointment of Mr Rutley as food supplies minister, after warnings that delays of only half an hour at UK ports and the Irish border would risk one in 10 British firms going bankrupt.

One food industry business leader told the newspaper:

“The issue at the ports is a big threat. The UK always has been a net importer of food. If the ports don’t work then exporters will be struggling and importers will have a challenge too.”

The executive added that while some food manufacturers were already setting aside additional supplies, stockpiling was not possible for products with a short shelf life, such as milk or vegetables.

Many have reacted with shock to the news that Britain needs a minister to ensure the country has enough food.

Commentated writer, Emma Kennedy:

“Oh joy. We’re getting a Food Supplies Minister for when the food chain collapses. Brexit’s just SUPER isn’t it?”

LBC radio presented, James O’Brien added:

“We are about to become the first country in history to impose economic sanctions on ourselves.”

Labour MEP Seb Dance described the move as “bonkers”. He said:

“The government – instead of looking at imminent Brexit food shortages and thinking, ‘It’s our duty to ensure that doesn’t happen’ instead appoints a food-shortage minister to oversee the mess.”

Government ministers have previously considered plans to deploy army helicopters and trucks if a Brexit-deal cannot be agreed.

The army would take food and medical supplies to vulnerable and elderly people, according to news reports.

Whilst the government has tried to play down the risk of such drastic shortage, it is feared that not securing an agreement with the EU could stop imports of food and vital supplies.

Earlier in the summer the Prime Minister, Theresa May, did not deny stockpiling, but told Channel 5 News the Government is being responsible. She said:

“Far from being worried about preparations that we are making, I would say that people should take reassurance and comfort from the fact that the Government is saying we are in a negotiation, we are working for a good deal.

“I believe we can get a good deal – but because we don’t know what the outcome is going to be let’s prepare for every eventuality.”

The news that Britain is to appoint a new Minister to ensure adequate food supplies for the country has brought back memories of when Britain was facing a food shortage because of World War Two.

In April 1940, Lord Woolton, a prominent businessman, was appointed Minister of Food.

His mission was to guarantee adequate food supply. In the dark days of summer 1940, with a German invasion threatened, Woolton was responsible for ensuring food stocks were in place, even if the shipping could not get through.

Although the country is not now at war, the circumstances seem eerily similar to today.

The brief of our new food supplies minister, Mr Rutley, is also to guarantee adequate food supply.

In the dark days of autumn 2018, with a no-deal Brexit threatened, Rutley will be responsible for ensuring food stocks are in place, even if the shipping cannot get through after March 2019.

But there is one big difference. Brexit is self-inflicted. We don’t have to do it.

Was life in Britain really so bad before 23 June 2016?

Yes, there were many things that needed fixing. But instead of fixing them, Brexit is going to burden Britain with yet more things to fix.

There are no benefits to Brexit. Not even one.

• Photo of Lord Woolton by Yousuf Karsh

• Photo of David Rutley, MP, by Chris McAndrew

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When viewed as a normative power, is the European Union (EU) an exceptional actor? Aiste Pagirenaite dissects the Economic Partnership Agreements negotiated between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States, and argues that the EU’s norm promotion tools also serve its strategic interests.

© Image by Corgarashu

Two of the most prominent accounts explaining the EU’s role as a global actor are known as Normative Power Europe (NPE) and Civilian Power Europe (CPE). These accounts, introduced by Ian Manners and François Duchêne respectively, are marked by at least one common flaw – they present the EU as a type of exceptional actor, a ‘civilising power’ and value promoter.

It is doubtful to what extent the EU acts in a normative way: the normative dimension of the EU global actorness should not be disclaimed but it is unlikely that the EU has an exceptional normative role in international sphere, as some kind of ‘force for good’.

The ability to spread norms is not a phenomenon unique to the EU – for example, the United States (US) foreign policy has been usually marked by ‘strong normative under-, if not overtones’ and even the Soviet Union sought to adopt a certain kind of ‘normative’ or ‘civilizing’ role.

Interestingly enough, the US international actorness is often presented at odds with normative EU power. However, the US foreign policy has clearly been marked by normative aspects, especially during the first part of the twentieth century when Woodrow Wilson’s announced his Fourteen Points and ‘institutions that would civilise international politics’ were created.

Even events such as the invasion of Iraq, led by hawkish foreign policy, should not be interpreted as merely a manifestation of hard power politics. US actions were also driven by a Wilsonian view of liberal democracy. Wilson’s original objective was similar to the one of the EU today: strengthen peace in the world by incentivising the creation of ‘binding normative commitments’ among countries. However, over time the importance of US military means has overshadowed its normative power, hence it is less surprising that the US image as a norm promoter tends to be met with scepticism.

The US experience is a useful lesson for the EU because it reveals that attempts to justify external action by referring to norms ‘often lead to suspicions of hypocrisy and hidden agendas’. Returning to the example of Iraq invasion: the official rhetoric attempted to justify the US actions as a fight against human rights violations of the Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, ‘many countries, especially non-democratic Arab countries’ perceived the US normative rhetoric as a veil for its self-interested intentions.

The US experience clearly exposes the consequences of promotion of non-reflective and self-gratifying normative image in the international arena.

Although military methods of norm spreading took over in the case of the US, it does not guarantee that the EU’s external relations, which are civilian in nature, protects them from becoming a ‘self-righteous [and] messianistic project’. Therefore, it is argued by scholars Thomas Diez and Sonia Lucarelli that a significant amount of self-reflectivity is needed in EU actorness studies, while paying attention towards perceptions of ‘others’.

The investigation of the EU actorness reveals that norm promotion tools can sometimes be utilised for the EU’s strategic interests. This revelation does not necessarily deny any normative role of the EU, but it should be kept in mind that the organization is not blind to its own needs.

This issue is clear when external perceptions of the EU’s global action are analysed, which reveal that attempts to portray the EU as a type of different normative force are sometimes seen as hypocritical (especially in the Southern countries), thus actually harming the image of the EU, instead of promoting it.

Most of the criticisms towards the EU, coming from the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP), are directed towards inconsistencies between development aid, human rights and trade policies.

The bargaining style of the EU’s elites is often perceived as patronising, arrogant and inconsiderate of ACP concerns, thus being more reminiscent of attitudes of colonial patron rather than a normative actor. EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements) are often blamed by African elites for ignoring Africa’s heterogeneity because of their ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and efforts to impose the EU’s own model of integration externally. Investigation of EPAs negotiations reveals that critical attitudes regarding the EU’s domineering bargaining style have strong substance.

For example, the EU insisted that EPAs were to be signed with seven regions within the ACP and not with the group as a whole, reducing its negotiating power, since regional groups are smaller and thus it was harder for them to push for agreements favouring developing countries. Moreover, EPAs are based on WTO rules regarding trade ‘reciprocity’ which disadvantages poorer economies (such as the ACP block) because their goods and services cannot compete with the EU’s. In addition, a neoliberal economic model is assumed to be the ‘aspiration’ for the ACP countries without more profound discussion about possible alternatives.

In brief, the EU only vaguely follows its normative rhetoric in its action towards African countries. More often, it adopts harsh bargaining techniques of ‘coercion and manipulation’.

Accounts on the EU actorness contributing to the NPE/CPE discourse often lack careful investigations of the measures used by the EU to spread its norms – sometimes criticised for their imperialist nature. Jan Zielonka compares the EU to an empire because of its aim to ‘assert political and economic control over various peripheral actors through … economic and political domination’.

However, the EU is a different type of empire than the contemporary US or nineteenth-century Britain. Zielonka claims that because of the ‘polycentric’ governance, indefinite borders and ‘soft forms of external power projection’ which resemble the world system in the Middle Ages before the emergence of capitalism and nation states, the EU could be understood as a ‘neo-medieval empire’.

Instead of asserting its power through military instruments, which conventionally could be expected from an imperial power, the EU uses bureaucratic and economic means while also claiming that its norms and policies are ‘right’. Thus, the EU is able to legitimise the use of ‘sanctions, bribes and even coercion’ while achieving its own goals.

Claiming that the EU’s integration model is universal and pushing other actors to accept its norms ‘by applying economic incentives and punishments’ (for example, the EU included conditions regarding democracy into trade agreements with Latin American and North African countries) indeed manifest patronising under-tones.

To sum up, even though the EU can be seen acting as a normative actor in some areas (e.g. the famous Manners example of the EU’s endeavour of international death penalty abolition), the NPE/CPE discourses should be investigated more attentively. A wide range of the EU’s policies towards developing countries and their negotiating processes must be taken into account. Furthermore, the image of the EU as a ‘force for good’ is too idealistic and self-righteous, because the EU also follows its own interests in policy areas.

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of the UACES Graduate Forum, UACES or JCER.

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Aiste Pagirenaite is a Master’s graduate in International Politics and Europe at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. She previously studied Journalism and European Politics at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and Danish School of Media and Journalism, Denmark, where she analysed the EU’s relations with the Visegrád countries. Her master’s dissertation analyses the relationship between EU development policy and issues of global distributive justice while in general her research focuses on European Studies and questions of social equality.

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An opinion by Jolyon Gumbrell

Elections for the European Parliament will take place from the 23rd to 26th May 2019. If the UK leaves the European Union on 29th March 2019 – then the British electorate will not have the chance to vote in the European elections of that year or ever again, and therefore forgo the right to send their elected representatives to the European Parliament. It is therefore quite urgent that Article 50 is rescinded in order to allow the British people the right to participate in European democracy. A true peoples vote would be to allow the British people to vote in the European elections of 2019.

I signed the e-petition to “rescind Art. 50 if Vote Leave has broken Electoral Laws regarding 2016 referendum”, which was later debated by the House of Commons on 10th September 2018, as the petition had gathered almost 200,000 signatures. I do not believe there has to be a second referendum to rescind Article 50 in order for the UK to remain in the EU. It has already been proven that the referendum was a fraud and the public were lied to by both the Vote Leave and Leave.EU compaigns. There are also may questions of the source of the multi-million pound donation made by Arron Banks the founder of Leave.EU, and the contacts he had with the Russian embassy in London in the run up to the 2016 referendum. The result of the 2016 referendum should be proclaimed null and void on grounds of national security, because of Russian government interference in the referendum campaign.

The public were not given the correct information to make an informed choice, and were not told that they would personally be stripped of their EU citizenship – as they would no longer be citizens of an EU member state. They were also not told they would lose many of the rights and freedoms which are offered to citizens across Europe, as well as losing the freedom to travel, study, and work in another EU country without visa restrictions. My view of the referendum is that some dodgy salesmen peddled a dodgy product called Brexit to an unsuspecting British public in 2016.

The Labour Party does not need to go along with this Brexit scam, and I was unhappy that Jeremy Corbyn pushed his party to vote with the government to trigger Article 50 last year, when the public should have been told the uncomfortable truth about the terrible consequences of Brexit.

Many people believe that the UK can remain in the European Single Market and the Customs Union after the UK has left the EU. However this would still be bad for the country as the UK would no longer have representation in the European Parliament, the European Council, or the Council of the European Union. I believe the only option for the UK is to retain its full membership of the European Union or face economic decline and isolation. We also need to remember that the 27 other members of the EU may not wish the UK to cherry pick which parts of the EU it wants to remain in, as that would endanger the integrity of Europe.

The only safe deal is for the UK to remain a full member of the EU along with all of the rights and obligations which that involves. The peoples vote would then be for British citizens to elect their representatives for the European Parliament in May 2019, which would not be the case if the UK leaves the EU in March 2019.

Sources

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-09-10/debates/765648D6-5872-49B6-AA13-4E9AC0DA923C/VoteLeaveCampaignElectoralLaw

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/Democracy_in_the_Crosshairs_.pdf

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2018

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It’s crunch time in Art.50. Or, at least, a crunch time.

Rather than try to follow the individual twists and turns, many of which aren’t in the public gaze just yet, I’d like to step back and consider an environmental factor to these negotiations, namely who carries the cost.

As I’ve discussed before, Brexit is unusual for a negotiation in that it is not a positive-sum, but a negative-sum, exercise: there are costs to be apportioned, on both sides.

(In correspondence about that post, Michael Lipton (emeritus of Sussex) rightly pointed out this actually makes it an “all-round negative game”).

As a result, each side loses from playing.

Quite aside from the question of “why then play?”, the main issue is thus one who carries what cost, and what will they do when they find out about it?

And that’s why this matters now, since assorted pigeons are coming home to roost, pennies are dropping and any other metaphor you care to use is occurring, as the potential points of compromise come into focus.

But one thing I’ve not really done here yet is set out the potential set of losers and their veto powers, i.e. what they can do to slow or block decisions being made against them.

So let’s have a try.

The UK

We can start by looking at those who will be carrying costs, but who have no immediate power over the negotiations, because they have no formal role. That includes the general public, economic operators and civil society in general. Not everyone loses in this, as the reconfiguration of economic and social relations with the EU will allow some to thrive: however, globally-speaking, they will be outweighed by those who have to soak up transitional costs and opportunity costs on future behaviour.

For those who do have a formal role, there is a distinction between those who have a simple veto role – to just block – and those who can get ideas taken up. Of course, the former should derive some of the latter’s powers from their veto-player role, but I’d argue that is limited by the practice of the process.

To illustrate, let’s think about the parties in the Commons other than the Conservatives.

They can use their votes on the Bill to implement the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) to block its progress. However, both the government and the EU say that amendment of the WA can’t happen, because no re-negotiation is acceptable to the EU. This means the Bill is largely a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

It’s clear that part of Theresa May’s strategy to make sure that this means those parties (and her own) are faced with a choice of the deal she brings back or leaving with no-deal. As much as parties might not like the deal, if the only alternative is no-deal, then the calculation is that bad is better than worse, so one buys into it.

For the DUP, there’s the added frisson of whether breaking the confidence and supply agreement is worth voting against a deal that might then get approved in any case.

Of course, Parliament could decide to go down the second referendum route, but this does not – in of itself – change the shape of the WA, except possibly re-opening the revocation pathway. But it also opens right up the dangers of a public voting to leave with no-deal, at a time when no party is looking particularly competent on matters Brexit.

Which brings us to the Tories. individual MPs can vote against the WA, but again with the danger of producing a motion of no-confidence that could take Parliament into a snap general election, where May might not look like the same kind of credible leader they had in 2017 [sic].

Alternatively, they could push for a leadership contest, but with no certainty about whether they could remove May, or replace her with someone more amenable to their objectives.

As a result, much of the action in the party seems to have been to let May get on with crafting a deal, while simultaneously getting arguments in early about why they could change course after 29 March, when they move to replace her: whoever’s in charge has poor choices to make, so let May make them, then blame her further down the line.

This also seems to apply to Cabinet, given May’s tight control of the negotiations (via Olly Robbins) and her rhetorical steadyfastness in defending ‘Chequers’: there seems to be enough division among Ministers to make a December 1990 move against the PM unlikely.

The EU

Things are a bit simpler on the EU side, in part because the costs look more manageable (especially compared to the UK’s): in all the viable outcomes, EU costs are markedly outweighed by those to be borne by the UK.

In attention, the most crucial concentrations of costs have become key parts of the EU’s mandate. Ireland is central in this, with the backstop intended to protect against worst-case scenarios.

Of course, what’s not clear is whether the Joint Report commitments given by the UK could still be made to apply in the event of no-deal: this is, at best, debatable. Hence the relatively advanced state of no-deal contingency planning in Ireland.

More protected is the protection of the integrity of the single market within the EU, which continues to be challenged within and without.

There’s also the ring-fencing of Article 50 from the rest of the negotiations that the EU and UK will have on their future relationship. By demanding resolution of the end of membership issues, the EU has hoped to increase its leverage and ensure that the future isn’t too entangled in the past. However, once again, it’s not clear if that will work, especially the likely difficulties of transition.

All this comes before we even get to the outlines of any WA deal. That’s going to set up a path to a reduction in market access and alignment with the UK, plus potential knock-on effects in non-economic domains of policy. Plus there’s the wider reputational cost of losing a key member state.

The danger still remains that if Brexit is just treated as ‘oh, those Brits’ then the EU will miss how it is also a reflection on the state of European governance and a call for further action to address political and social disconnection and discontent.

To pull this together, no-one really comes out of this looking better than before. The question is whether that’s enough to push local or general status quos into question, in which case we’ll be seeing the effects of Brexit reach very much further than they already have.

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Britain’s vote to leave the EU has led to a flood of books, articles, blog posts, and more than enough tweets. I know because I’ve added my own share. It includes my new textbook, Understanding Brexit: A Concise Introduction. Concise is 75,000 words and whether anyone can fully understand Brexit is a moot point. Brexit is the dominant issue in UK politics because so much is at stake. But are we – academics, writers, Leavers, Remainers, journalists, politicians, officials, businesspeople – talking and writing about it in ways that make sense? I’m reminded of how before the EU referendum there was discussion of, to borrow from the report from British Future, ‘How (not) to talk about Europe.’ It’s time we discussed ‘How (not) to talk about Brexit.’ As a start, I would like to suggest seven rules.

Rule 1: Be more specific about what it is you’re referring to when you say ‘Brexit’. 
Academics love to define things, except, it seems, when it comes to large all-encompassing terms, which is what ‘Brexit’ has become. It’s increasingly as useless as ‘globalisation,’ ‘neoliberalism,’ or ‘Europeanisation.’ Brexit can be used to summarise a series of political processes unfolding at various levels and timeframes, but we would benefit from examining and naming them more specifically. Failure to do so risks turning ‘Brexit’ into a shorthand for most of British politics.

Rule 2: Don’t let talking about Brexit drown out the rest of British politics.
Given how much it touches on, studying Brexit can be the best way to understand the contemporary UK. To a point, that is. Brexit is not British politics, only a part of it. It has, however, taken up so much of the bandwidth of British politics that one would be forgiven for thinking that it is British politics. That does a disservice to the many challenges and debates facing the UK that are largely independent of Brexit and always have been. Of course, Brexit will have an effect on so much of life in the UK, but the UK already has the powers to change such absurdities as an unelected House of Lords, the UK’s stark and growing levels of inequality, poor infrastructure spending, or the need for sustainable military capabilities. Obsessing about Brexit can be a distraction from these and other issues.

Rule 3: You cannot be neutral. Whatever you say will be part of the fight to define the narrative of Brexit. 
The fight to define the narrative of Brexit, i.e. what it was the British people meant when 52% of them who voted did so for Leave, has, whether you like it or not, been the central struggle of British politics since the referendum. Onto it have been hooked a whole host of issues ranging from choices about the UK’s political economy through to the UK’s standing in the world. This fight won’t end soon. Not only because withdrawing from the EU is not a short-term process, but because Brexit is about what sort of country the UK wants to be. This doesn’t mean everything you say has to be driven by politics. There exists a wealth of data, information and analysis which goes beyond the partisan bickering found in most outlets where the focus can be on the internal bickering of the Conservative and Labour parties. Whether it’s the plethora of EU reports on Brexit or UK parliamentary reports (never overlook the evidence sections), a lot of issues have been covered by high quality analysis that can, if we use it, create a better informed and high-quality fight.

Rule 4: Don’t assume the British people or elite understand the UK state and politics. 
In the early stages of drafting Understanding Brexit my publisher warned me not to take for granted a general reader’s knowledge of the topic. I sympathised from having taught political science for over a decade. Knowing how few people understand the EU, I included a section on the EU’s evolution, institutions and key policies. In doing so I overlooked that a lot of people in Britain, including all the way up to Ministers of the Crown, have rarely thought about or been taught about the UK state, its evolution and how it operates. If Brexit is about what type of country Britain wants to be, then that in part stems from varying levels of knowledge and satisfaction at its current setup. I’ve often found that explaining Brexit involves helping fellow Britons understand our country.

Rule 5: Recognise that the British (and you) are on a steep learning curve about the UK, the EU, and the wider modern world (especially trade).
It follows from Rule 5 that when talking about Brexit you need to take into account that many in Britain are being presented with a series of questions and debates about the country’s identity, society, political economy, trade, security, international position, constitution, legal system, sovereignty, unity, party politics and the attitudes and values that define it. Those debates long predate the vote, but the referendum and result not only brought them together but poured fresh fuel into each. And this is before we turn to the need to learn about such matters as free trade deals, tariffs, non-tariff barriers, regulatory convergence, WTO schedules and so forth. Whether it’s the British public, ministers, officials, journalists or experts, we have all been put on a steep learning curve. The process involves lots of uncomfortable questions and silences for everyone including you.

Rule 6: Remember that Brexit can bore people. A lot. 
It might have come to dominate British politics, but that does not mean Brexit excites people. Pollsters have long pointed out that the issue of Europe has rarely excited the British people. The topic only excites when it connects to issues that people do care about: immigration, the economy, housing, English identity, Scottish independence, or the NHS. For those ‘Brexhausted’ there is no sign of a let-up. The outpouring of books, articles, chapters, reports, media articles, TV programmes, conferences, assemblies, workshops, speeches, art work, plays, even poems, looks set to continue. In part this is because so much remains to be explored and discussed, not least some big questions about the UK itself. Hopes the referendum would be cathartic, settle Britain’s ‘European question’, or be a great exercise in democratic debate have been dashed by a debate and result that has instead added to existing divisions, created more questions than answers, and left Britain with a debate that often distracts from the day to day needs of the country.

Rule 7: Don’t patronise, belittle or ignore the British people. 
All sides have been doing this, including Leave. Too often I have heard Remain supporters belittle the British people for the choice made with a slim majority. That result has left some on the Remain side too willing to apologise for Britain and dismiss it as a country doomed to oblivion. It has added to a certain sense of decline and guilt about Britain’s past that has long overhung and hamstrung British pro-Europeanism. Commentators elsewhere in the EU have not helped. The UK is not the aberration some elsewhere in the EU want it to be. British Leave voters are not all peculiar, racist hangovers of Britain’s imperial past. They can and do, to a certain extent, mirror feelings found across Europe. The vote was a vivid reminder that nation states and nationalism still matter. Leave campaigners and those who have rushed to study Leave have also failed, and sometimes failed miserably to not patronise the British people.

Despite protestations to the contrary, it’s clear to all but the most ardent Leave voters that the process of withdrawal has not been going to any Leave plan because, of course, there was no plan. The rush to celebrate, sympathise with, or study the 52% who voted Leave has meant largely ignoring or taking for granted the voice and concerns of the 48% who voted Remain. That explains why Theresa May, Leave campaigners and many analysts blinded by a one-sided focus on Leave voters were shocked when in the 2017 General Election it was the votes of angry Remain voters that played a crucial part in unexpectedly depriving the Conservatives of their parliamentary majority.

This post first appeared on the Clingendael Spectator, the magazine of the Clingendael Institute.

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