Ideas on Europe Blog

About a year ago, I attended a meeting in Cambridge, to discuss the aftermath of the EU referendum.

Alongside all the rage and fury of those who felt they had been cheated, one woman asked me specifically about how to mitigate the impact of Brexit on her area of expertise, namely the conservation of rare natural habitats.

About which – specifically – I know nothing.

How I was able to give some advice to her, and it’s the same advice I will give now to all those who feel they have a stake in Brexit and who want their voice to be heard.

Some context here might be useful.

Brexit is huge. It covers and shapes everything right now. Every bit of public policy is affected by, and affects, Brexit. As can been seen in the legislative agenda for the current, long Parliament, there really isn’t anything else of note happening in the UK right now. Even on the EU side, while there is some more bandwidth available, it’s still a very involved and involving process.

Which means several things are happening.

Firstly, very few people have an overview of the entire process. In the UK, they sit in Number 10 and DExEU; in the EU, it’s Task Force 50 and some national chancelleries. Those individuals are exceptionally pressed by demands on their time, because they are the first point for arbitrating between the myriad different pressures for influence.

Secondly, most of the other people involved in the UK are not specialists in the EU, but rather in their area of specialisation.

Finally, as the opening phase of negotiations has shown, positions on either side are not reversibly set.

All of this leads to some logical points of pressure for those seeking to advance their agenda.

For those with issues that are very policy-specific, the most productive way forward is to provide ideas to those involved that marry up the policy-specific aspects with a framework that fits into broad Article 50 objectives. To take the opening case, it might be assumed that nature conservation is not on the radars of the key protagonists in London and Brussels, and that then local officials are caught up with bigger environmental regulation matters. By producing a set of policy recommendations that show those local officials how they can handle the specific issue as part of what they have already said about their plans, the activist might well be able to upload her preferences to that group, who might in turn be trying to upload this to the national negotiating team, who might in turn put it on the table as part of a bigger package.

In short, in a world with a huge pile of issues and specifics, any idea about how to advance is likely to have a good deal of traction.

But it’s possible to go further than this. Most obviously, building links with counterparts in other EU states opens up the possibility of advancing ideas and preferences that already have the buy-in of all local policy communities. Just as the EU makes decisions by working from the technical to the political, so too will Article 50 proceed.

Of course, this does not really work for more cross-cutting agendas, since the people to influence – the main negotiating teams – are under both extreme time pressure and close political scrutiny.

Here the approach might be better described as side-stepping. A head-on assault is unlikely to work, unless one can count on a very strong groundswell of public support, something that has been noticeably absent to date.

Instead, it would be more productive to try to feed the issue in via specific policy areas, in the manner already described.

To take one illustration, rather than pushing for a general, full preservation of citizens’ rights, as some have done, it might be more useful to focus on securing certain key provisions that then force movement in other areas. Thus the UK’s suggestion that five years’ residence will be needed to secure settled status might be a focus, since removing that requirement might also keep more freedom of movement than otherwise might be possible.

And this suggests a final option: the block-buster.

Within Brexit negotiations, there are several highly-problematic issues; ones that have no immediately obvious solution. The Irish border is the most significant one right now.

If one could find a credible solution to this, then potentially that could leverage change in other areas of policy. In the Irish case, that might include moving preferences on free movement, customs checks, identity cards, trade barriers and more. The negotiating parties might be willing to bend on these if they saw it as a price worth paying for the resolution of the other issue.

Of course, the very fact that no-one has come up with such a plan suggests that this is not easily done.

However, the basic strategy for anyone remains simply one of making yourself useful and constructive.

The post How to get what you want from Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Could Europe’s struggle against Islamic terrorists become a guerrilla war?

Mike Ungersma looks for signs.

It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2% active in a striking force, and 98% passively sympathetic.

T E Lawrence,  ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ on guerrilla warfare [1]

In Syria, ISIS appears on the edge of defeat.  Cornered into a warren of narrow streets of Raqqa and Mosul, a few hundred determined fighters carry on, facing certain death.  But in the eyes of tens of thousands of fellow Muslims, it will be a heroic end bringing martyrdom and the promise of eternal life.  Where once thousands fought against the coalition, only a handful remain.  Observers on the ground tell us most have fled.  While no one is sure where, the fear is those who came from Europe may have returned there, battle-hardened and very experienced in the skills of irregular warfare.[2]

They will be going home to communities scattered across Europe and be seen, not as conquerors returning from a war to establish the 21st century’s first caliphate, but as sons and fathers (and a handful of daughters) who answered a particularly powerful and persuasive call – Jihad.  What will be their attitude as they recall their brutal exposure to war, toward their involvement in what many Muslims regard as an ultimate duty: participation in a holy war against infidels.  And crucially, how will they be greeted by their families and friends?

They will find the neighbourhoods they left have grown in size and purpose – almost nations ‘within nations’, especially in Britain, France, Germany and the Benelux countries.  There, despite the efforts of governments and charities to integrate Muslims, despite the countless initiatives to prevent Islamic extremists from spreading their messages, the ‘Islamification’ of dozens of European cities continues a pace.[3]

Sociologists[4] tell us these societies are increasingly unified, territorial and isolated, walled off from outside influence by language, religion and culture.  Subjected to what they regard as discrimination and prejudice, their populations are growing at a rate outstripping their non-Muslim hosts.  Worryingly, they show signs of become almost sovereign entities with their own schools, churches, and even a legal system, Sharia law.  They are as impenetrable from the outside, alien and hostile to European traditions and European history.

With these Jihadi now back on their streets, back in their mosques answering questions and relating their exploits to the admiring young and naive, the question that must be high on the agenda of Europe’s counter-terrorism experts is: Do they pose a new and more dangerous threat? Unthinkable as it may seem, might these emerging Muslim ‘nations’ soon gain a new attribute: a dedicated, determined and experienced army of Jihadi to protect them from us?  Will they become Islam’s promised ‘soldiers of the God’ to protect their mothers and sisters from insults and derision, shield their fathers and elders from taunts and threats by ultra-right extremists, and guard their mosques and holy places from further attack?  In short, are these former ISIS fighters a vanguard of a larger, more organised and trained guerrilla force that could carry terrorism to a frightening new level in Europe?

The situation is unprecedented, though anticipated two decades ago by the American historian Samuel P. Huntington in his controversial The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order:

Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.[5]

Nor is the future – given increasing Muslim settlement in Europe – much brighter. French politicians and intellectual, Pierre Lallouche:

History, proximity and poverty insure that France and Europe are destined to be over-whelmed by people from the failed societies of the south.  Europe’s past was white and Judeo-Christian.  The future is not.[6]

Huntington and Lallouche were writing as the 20th century drew to a close.  Since then, the situation has clearly worsened.  Should the terrorism Europe has already suffered become even more intense and more frequent – that is, show signs of being organised and directed – the response could be ugly.  Periodic vigilante attacks aimed at Muslims and mosques, could escalate to a systematic effort by the state to bring both sides under control.  Armed troops now routinely deployed in France and Belgium, could become an everyday sight in every European country, including Britain. Is the imposition of martial law, cloaked in the disguise of ‘aiding the police’ next?

Something has to give it seems.  Robert Verkaik, author of The Making of a Terrorist, wrote recently in the London Guardian, that Scotland Yard and MI5 share a database of 23,000 jihadist “subjects of interest”.  Of these, 3,000 are seen as posing a serious threat, and another 500 are given “the highest priority.”  In addition, there have been 8,000 referrals to the ‘Prevent’ anti-extremism programme.  He concludes: The security services are “drowning” in the sheer volume of intelligence and suspects.[7]

Furthermore, the jihadis know how to play the game – with cynicism.  To waste the time of the police and counter-terrorism authorities, they behave provocatively, “knowing that they’ll come under surveillance, but remain just on the right side of the law so as to ‘suck up’ resources”.[8]

Already the calls for action are becoming increasingly shrill: In his opening line to The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray,  associate director of the Henry Jackson Society and associate editor of The Spectator, writes: “Europe is committing suicide, decadent and godless, and rendered helpless by our relativism, we have become easy prey for a resurgent Islam.”  As the few remaining committed Christians stare at the ‘bare, ruined choirs’, that have become bingo halls or social centres, Islam flourishes in every European country.

And, many argue, from the million Syrians accepted in Germany to the unstoppable flow of ‘refugees’ across the Mediterranean, we have brought this on ourselves. Rod Little, reviewing Murray’s book in the Sunday Times notes that opponents of mass immigration have always been dismissed as racist.  “But the Strange Death of Europe, he writes,  mordantly exposes many of the familiar canards that we have been fed on the subject – such as the claim that immigration brings great economic benefits, or that Britain has always been a nation of immigrants.

One of those presumptions was undermined last year when Dame Louise Casey published her controversial study into social integration of immigrants, and found “high levels of social and economic isolation in some places, and cultural and religious practices in communities that are not only holding some of our citizens back, but run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws.” The report, commissioned by former Prime Minister David Cameron, also found that “by faith, the Muslim population has the highest number and proportion of people aged 16 and over who cannot speak English well or at all.[9]

Or take the recent words of Sara Khan, a British Muslim and CEO of Inspire, an independent non-governmental organisation working to counter extremism and gender inequality.  Writing in the London Evening Standard, she says

The response after every Islamist attack is the same: politicians claim the perpetrators don’t represent the Muslim community – as if such a unified body even exists.  The reality is that the terrorists do represent a certain group of Muslims in the UK – one that promotes a supremacist, intolerant, anti-Western Islam on campuses, at community events and on line.[10]

In the event of a drastic escalation in violence – terrorism and an inevitable state-sponsored response – the result would be an asymmetric war terrorists could be certain of losing – the odds are too great, overwhelming even.  But the price all would pay, Muslims and everyone else, would be very high indeed.  At that level, repression of the terrorist threat would mean historic restrictions and unprecedented sacrifices of freedoms Europeans have taken for granted for decades.

Make no mistake, ISIS veterans are returning to our streets and neighbourhoods, and they are unlikely to respond to initiatives such as Britain’s ‘Prevent’ and other such initiatives. Young  Muslims may be beyond persuading.  Instead and predictably, the returning ‘warriors’ and those they can convince, will feel there is a score to be settled.  Defeated in Syria, their dreams of a new world-dominating caliphate in shatters, the life-changing experience of seeing death of friends and comrades up-close, in a word – ignominy. Everywhere and at every opportunity – they will want to get even.  ‘Post Traumatic Stress’ takes on a fearful meaning for these young men and women who were willing to give their lives for their beliefs.  Are they still willing to make this sacrifice?

Perhaps this is the real tragedy surrounding the awful, shocking, heart-rendering events of Paris, Nice, Berlin, Brussels, Manchester, and on and on.  The distorted and grotesquely displaced idealism of young Muslims.  A dilemma made more profound because there seems to be no answer, no solution.  There is an inevitability about it that haunts everyone.

Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, has characterised the response of Western elites to the terrorist outrages as a combination of sentimentality and apology, what he calls a “Kumbaya sentimentality”. Now, however, he senses a new feeling:

We have certainly heard a reprise of that tired song in the immediate aftermath of the Manchester massacre.  But we have also heard some refreshingly discordant, refreshingly adult notes.  There is anger in that descant, justified anger.  There is also the burgeoning awareness that the culture under threat, whatever its faults, is very much worth preserving.  That dual reality – a newfound awareness fired by anger – may yet rescue us from our more hapless selves.

[1] T. E. Lawrence, On guerrilla warfare, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edition (1929) Accessed on-line

[2] “ISIS: Up to 5,000 jihadists could be in Europe after returning from terror training camps abroad.” independent.co.uk, February 20, 2016

[3] “5 facts about the Muslim population in Europe”, The Pew Research Center, July 19, 2016 Accessed on-line

[4] Can mostly Christian countries integrate Muslims? This new book shows what must be done.” The Washington Post, December 1, 2015

[5] The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington, 1996

[6] Quoted in Strangers at the Gate, Judith Miller, New York Times Magazine, September 15, 1991

[7] Robert Verkaik, quoted in The Week, London, 17 June 2017, p 23

[8] Ibid, from an article by Dipesh Gadher in the Sunday Times

[9] “Segregation at ‘worrying levels’ in parts of Britain”, Dame Louise Casey warns, BBC, 5 December 2016

[10] London Evening Standard, Tuesday 6 June 2017.

The post Ultimate Jihad? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

18 June: finally, the last visit to the polling station.

Ever since I started to talk to the French about their political system and listened to their perceptions of what was going wrong in the Fifth Republic – a little more than three decades now – I had this impression, unbacked by any robust statistical evidence, of a quite large majority at the centre of the political spectrum that found no adequate representation in the institutions.

Of course, I also bumped into people from the extremes: heavily leftist teachers for whom communism had never been discredited and who explained to me that the GDR was the better Germany; or football fans who esteemed that the ‘Black-Blanc-Beur’ World Champions of 1998 were ‘not really French’.

But there also was this longing, shared across a wide range of middle-class people of different sensitivities and levels of education, for a national assembly, in which ‘common sense’ and ‘collective purpose’ would overcome an entrenched left-right divide that was felt to be overblown by both artificial rhetoric tradition and the electoral system. The one single most-hated feature of political life, beyond the ritual disgust with the priviledges and the famous disconnectedness of the political elite, was ‘systematic opposition’, leading to fake indignation at each and every measure of the government and obstructionism by principle. If only the ‘reasonable’ people of the left and right could get their act together and form a coalition of those willing to serve the nation rather than their own career! Alas, French political culture would never allow for a compromise-seeking ‘grosse Koalition’ of German inspiration.

And then, the miracle happened.

Last Sunday’s 2nd round of the legislative elections has virtually flooded the French Parliament with ‘reasonable’, ‘common sense’ people, eager to follow Emmanuel Macron in his historical demolition of the sterile rhetoric postures and ready to introduce a new manner of bridging existing ideological divides for the sake of the common interest of all.  If this is a minority, as Mélenchon and Le Pen were quick to assert – both because of the high abstention rate and their respective claim to be the only true representative of ‘the people’ – it’s a very impressive one. In its diversity of profiles, it’s a ‘très grande coalition’ in its own right. They might as well spell it with a ‘K’.

And it is a first step on the way to fulfil the presidential promise of achieving a ‘renewal in faces and practices’ that was so often repeated over these long campaigns. Two thirds of the 577 faces in the Parliament are totally new, at the same time pushing the feminisation of the Assemblée to an unprecedented level of 38%.

As for the ‘new practices’,we will have to wait and see. For the time being, the government seems decided to practice what they preach: within a few days only no less than four ministers of Edouard Philippe’s first cabinet have been nudged out for affairs that smelt too much of these ‘old habits’ that citizens are simply no longer willing to tolerate.

At the moment of writing, the astonishing coherence between what is clearly turning into a ‘strong and stable leadership’ in the best sense of the word and the endearing enthusiasm of these fresh French politicians of a totally new type is nurturing a kind of hope and confidence that seemed totally out of reach in the kingdom of ‘declinism’. How long will it last? Not everybody is in love with Macronia: opposition, both in the streets and at the edges of the Assemblée’s hemicycle, is likely to be loud, virulent, and nasty. The forthcoming battle for labour law reform will see a fair share of fear-mongering and class-struggle, which may make the Russian hacker attack of April seem like the ‘good old days’.

Anonymous – probably a French voter in June 2017.

So let’s enjoy the moment while it lasts. We, the people, are too exhausted anyway by this long and incredibly tense election marathon. Being a citizen is a rather hard job in this country. If it was only about walking to the polling station on four election Sundays (plus several primaries)! All these endless TV debates you have to watch, all the articles and interviews you have to digest. All the nerve-wracking cliffhangers, twists and rebounds of this fascinating drama – it’s just too much. Whatever bad losers may be tempted to say, the record low turnout of 45% last Sunday, compared with the very high interest for politics that was sustained over all these months, is simply due to election fatigue. Especially as the first round had provided the certitude that the die was cast, the majority for Macron was sure, and the citizenship job had been done to the satisfaction of her Majesty the Fifth Republic.

So where does that leave us at the end of the 25th and last post of this blog’s election marathon? More puzzled than ever about the Fifth Republic. The past months has confirmed every grudge I held against her. The hyper-personalisation of the presidential regime is not good for French democracy. The constitution remains both contradictory and vague in parts. The sequence of the different elections is far from ideal. The electoral system is not fair.

But without all these flaws and shortcomings, would the encouraging outcome of the marathon have been possible at all? In the very first post of the series, dated 1st November 2016, I prepared for a rather sad journey, ‘with no providential saviour in store and hardly any light at the end of the democratic tunnel’.

Ever since I have been living in this country, I was never more pleased to have been told wrong in such a flagrant manner.

This is the last post of the French 2017 election marathon.
All twenty-five posts can be found here.
This blog should be back after the summer break,
enlarging the perspective again to European integration issues.
Thanks for having accompanied me on the journey!

The post France 2017: La grande coalition appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

I know that I should be writing about the fall-out of the General Election and the impact on Article 50 talks, but until we get a bit further down the line on this – specifically to a Conservative-DUP agreement – it doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. It’s like last year, and the year before, where every day throws up a new surprise and twist, rendering previous comment/analysis wrong. Let’s take this as me agreeing with Jonathan Dean’s fine piece.

If you really want some thoughts, then check out my Twitter feed (here, here and here) or the new Diet of Brussels episodes (here and here). And consider if agreeing with Jonathan is the same as changing my behaviour.

Instead, I’m going to focus on one of those hardy perennials of Brussels, mobile phone roaming.

Today marks the end of charges on roaming across the EEA: your data/minutes allowance is good in your home country and all the other countries involved, with no additional cost for their use (although you still pay extra for international calls).

It’s the classic good-news story and one that the EU has been able to wheel out for many, many years. Doing useful things for people and standing up to big business.

But it also exposes the limitations of the EU, both politically and organisationally, and offers an insight into how things work in practice.

There is a long and convoluted background to today’s change: for the bare bones you can read the Wikipedia page, or for a bit more juice you can look at Ryan Heath’s insider look in Politico. In essence, this has been over a decade of the Commission – or rather, bits of the Commission – pushing to trim back roaming charges in the face of stiff opposition from mobile phone companies, some member states and even the public (most memorably with the farcical press release (and U-turn) last summer on limits).

As with so many areas of policy, the Commission is limited in how fast it can move legislative elements through the system: primarily this is because of the need to work with member states and the European Parliament, but it also comes from the internal divisions within the organisation, all the while floating in a sea of lobbyists. In this case, the approach was to start on the most egregious cases of over-charging, before slowly tightening the noose on roaming charges.

This is the same kind of pattern seen with eurozone governance reform, or CAP payments, or environmental standards: gradual policy moves, over long periods, often not achieving much more than a vague approximation of single and unified rules.

You can see this in many ways, but thinking of our current situation there are three perspectives that stand out.

The first sees this as a bad thing, because it slows us down. Barriers between member states, differences in regulation, additional costs to citizens: all these are detrimental to ‘making Europe work’, freeing it up to achieve its full potential, economically and socially and politically. If only the EU could push things through more quickly – compress the delay in getting to where we are obviously heading – then we’d be the better for it, as we spend less time transitioning and more time in the new situation.

The second sees this as a bad thing, because it’s inexorable. Yes, the EU takes ages to do things, but it does them in the end, rolling over the hard-fought opposition of other interests. The Commission can afford to be patient, because it knows member state governments come and go and market situations change, but ultimately it will have its way, right or wrong. Maybe its intentions are sincerely-held, but that almost doesn’t matter, as it acts more like a dog with a bone, rather than a knight on a white charger.

The third sees this as a good thing, because it marks a democraticisation of the EU. The checks and balances between institutions and member states, the input of civil society and economic interests, the gradualism: all these mark a maturing democratic system, where no one part of the system has unlimited power.

No one of these three views is intrinsically right, but when we look at the EU, we might do well to consider that all three have popular currency in different parts of the Union. If you’re only hearing one of these, then maybe you need to move outside of your bubble. And today’s as good as any to check this.

The post Roaming wild: A parable for the EU today appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In calling the election, Theresa May rejected Alice’s belief in politics as a game in which all should have prizes. She saw the election and Brexit negotiations as processes in which she would win and others would lose. Her opponents foresaw an outcome in which all would be losers: the Brexiteers because the prize they claimed was not a unicorn but a turkey, and the Remainers because the effect of a hard Brexit would be far worse than they predicted.

The election result creates the prospect of an Alice-in-Wonderland outcome in which all may have prizes. People wanting to leave the European Union have seen the return to Downing Street of a prime minister committed to Brexit. More than four-fifths of the popular vote went to MPs elected on manifestos pledged to respect the referendum result, the position of Labour as well as the Tories.

They make up more than nine-tenths of the new House of Commons. Half of all voters would like Brexit to happen as soon as possible and another quarter, after voting to remain last year, now give their resigned consent. According to an election day poll of actual voters, only 28 per cent would like to see Brexit abandoned if at all possible.

Having given the EU notification of the decision to withdraw from the EU by 30 March 2019, it is now virtually impossible for the UK to withdraw its withdrawal. Nor is there a desire in Brussels to see its most awkward and unstable member remain. Postponing the date of withdrawal would require the unanimous consent of 27 member states. It would also require a majority vote of the British Parliament to reject the referendum result.

The failure of Theresa May to secure a parliamentary majority is a major victory for opponents of a hard Brexit. UKIP, the only party that campaigned with an unambiguous commitment to a hard Brexit, won just 1.8 per cent of the vote and no seats.

More than 53 per cent of the UK vote went to parties favouring some form of soft Brexit, that is, an agreement offering the prize of keeping a significant number of benefits of EU association in exchange for contributing to the EU’s budget and accepting absence from deliberations in which decisions are made affecting the UK. Having endorsed remaining in the EU less than a year ago, Theresa May can hardly assert that there are no features of EU membership worth retaining.

The terms of Brexit, whatever they are, will require endorsement by a majority in the House of Commons and a majority in the House of Lords, where the swing vote is in the hands of cross-bench peers. In a House of Commons of 650 members, there are a total of 315 Labour, SNP, Liberal Democrat, Plaid Cymru and Green MPs elected on manifestos that endorsed some form of soft Brexit. Collectively, these parties won a larger share of the total vote, 53 per cent, than was cast for leaving the EU in last year’s referendum.

Instead of being assured of parliamentary support for whatever she decides Brexit means, Theresa May will have to negotiate with MPs, including dozens of Tories who voted remain in the EU referendum. Tory voters are also divided in their views about the EU. Lord Ashcroft’s election day poll found that two-thirds favoured Brexit and one-third favoured remain. Those favouring the EU contributed twice as many votes to the party’s narrow lead over Labour as did former UKIP voters.

If upwards of a dozen of Tory MPs reject hard Brexit conditions there will be no majority in the Commons. While the Lords lacks the authority of election, its members can collectively claim more knowledge of relations with Europe than any team of frontbench spokespersons.

The election outcome has created new opportunities for a soft Brexit. Theresa May’s red line conditions set out in indelible ink have been replaced by question marks in pink water colour. The mad game of political croquet that is about to commence could produce a win-win settlement. Brexiters would gain a prize denied to Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, namely the UK Parliament no longer being bound to accept the authority of Brussels. Those who want an association agreement with the EU can use their newly gained parliamentary strength to win substantive prizes too.

To bring about a settlement will require British politicians to stop playing winner-take-all games and prepare for compromise as soon as discussions start with the EU later this month. The EU has re-affirmed the three issues that must be settled before talks about access to the single market can commence.

They are the post-Brexit status of EU citizens in the UK and of British citizens living in the single market; the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; and the size of the divorce bill that Britain should pay to cover existing commitments to the EU budget.

Ironically, the election has achieved a prize goal of Brexiters – returning control of British government to Parliament–but not in a way that was expected, weakening the authority of Downing Street. A new Prime Minister would not change the arithmetic of Parliament. Its assent to any Brexit measure is subject to approval by MPs who were not elected to support a Tory government.

Key players in parliament are no longer hardline Brexiters but people who can craft soft Brexit measures that can attract cross-party support. Step forward Labour spokesperson Keir Starmer and Liberal Democrat Vince Cable–and don’t turn your back on members of the House of Lords such as Peter Mandelson.

The post Voters endorse an Alice-in-wonderland Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In October 2015, I gave a speech to international journalists in Germany called, ‘Newspaper lies can cost lives.’ Less than a year later, Britain voted for Brexit, with one of the main reasons cited as ‘too many migrants’. How did such a fear and dislike of migrants develop? Newspaper lies played an enormous role. Video; 14 minutes:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The post How newspaper lies led to Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

It’s time to take your good old Max Weber out of the shelf again. His definitions of sources of authority are as pertinent as they have ever been. What did he write about ‘charisma’ again? ‘The exemplary character of an individual person’, ‘endowed with specifically exceptional qualities’, and by whom ‘new normative patterns are revealed’ to his/her ‘recognisers’.

In a country whose citizens are completely exhausted by what I dubbed already last autumn the ‘election marathon’, Emmanuel Macron’s charisma and promise of renewal has been the only unbroken mobilising force that made people walk to the polling stations yesterday. More than half of them decided it was no longer worth it. Even the reliable old rule according to which high abstention invariably benefits the extremes is made obsolete by En marche!

It was the Fifth Republic’s logic in full splendour: charismatic authority precedes what Weber named ‘rational-legal authority’. The only election that really counts is the excessively personalised choice of the new President, who is then bestowed with a parliament whose only reason of being seems to be the docile confirmation of the new monarch’s wishes. The one sentence that was to be heard across the entire country over the last five weeks was a compliant ‘We need to give the new president a majority’ or, in its simpler version: ‘Give him a chance’. Which, subliminally, corresponds almost to an anxious ‘Give ourselves a (last) chance’.

It’s ‘de Gaulle 2.0’ or ‘1958 reloaded’! Made possible by the 2001 calendar reform that changed the sequence of votes, placing the legislative elections in mid-June, one month after the presidential vote. The original intention had been to avoid systematic dissolutions of parliament (like the ones decided by Mitterrand in 1981 and 1988). But the Macron effect boils down to the dissolution of the entire party spectrum!

At first sight, the month between the entry of the new President and the first round of the legislative elections does not seem a long time. But that is to underestimate the sheer awe that follows the enthronement of the new monarch. While the time is too short for messing anything up or making major strategic mistakes, there is more than enough time to take a firm grip on the symbolic attributes of power, dress up in the gown of greatness at international summits, set up a promising new team that gets to work, launch first reforms and announce an agenda. In other words: simply act as if the follow-up elections were a pure formality and treat all other parties as if they already were ‘the opposition’.

As a result, the very same party leaders who had been serious contenders for supreme reign just a few weeks ago, are reduced to humbly asking citizens ‘not to give the President too much power’. Not exactly the most mobilising campaign manifesto. And a counter-productive one with that, especially when uttered by those who over the two previous mandates precisely had ‘too much power’ and did nothing substantial with it.

Those among the French who found the energy to overcome election fatigue and actually went to vote yesterday have decided that Emmanuel Macron was to have as much power as possible. In each single one of the seven districts of our nicely mainstream Western Département of Maine-et-Loire, the En marche! candidate finished first and will no doubt end up elected next Sunday. The large majority of them totally unknown some weeks ago: a retired senior emergency nurse, a 35-year old female infantry officer, a 36-year old mechanics engineer, to name but three examples of all those newcomers who never had run an election campaign in their lives. They all benefited from the Charisma bonus.

The joyful Macron revolution, staged in strange simultaneousness to the UK’s sad self-demolition, raises some not so joyful questions. Is that then what we are left with in our 2017 late modernity: does the functioning of democracy really depend on the emergence of a charismatic leader who surfs on his ‘specifically exceptional qualities’, as Weber had it, and obtains full rational-legal authority in the wake of his surge? Does it really all depend on leadership or the absence of it? On the (quite accidental) availability of outstanding talent and human resources? On good luck?

Emmanuel Macron and his government will be very closely observed for the manner in which they will push their labour market reform against the opposition that is likely to form in the streets rather than in Parliament; they will be tested on their credibility when it comes to the new political ethics they promised; they will be scrutinised by their peers on the European scene. What I am most curious to see, however, is whether he will keep his promise to reform the electoral code and introduce proportional voting against the deeply engrained French aversion to governmental instability and coalition building. Reforming, for the sake of just representation of political minorities (including unpleasant extremes), the very system that provided him with an unprecedented majority – now that would, in Weberian phrasing, certainly ‘reveal new normative patterns’ in French politics. And a new and different kind of charisma.

This is post # 24 on the French 2017 election marathon.
All previous posts can be found here.

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Early this month I had the fortune to attend the biannual conference of the European Studies Association (EUSA) in Miami. As always, and as it could not be otherwise, I attended as many panels on the European Monetary Union as I could. I also discussed the future of the Euro with a number of colleagues over dinners, lunches and breakfasts. Yes, I admit it, I am a Euro freak. But there are not so many opportunities to discuss this topic with American or America-based scholars, so one needs to make the most of it.

One of the things that I noticed from the previous EUSA conference two years ago in Boston is that the mood on the Euro has changed.

Our Anglo-American colleagues are less gloomy on the single currency, although they are still quite sceptical. Matthias Matthijs is one of them. He showed figures indicating how trust in the democratic system has collapsed over the past years in the Mediterranean countries and claimed that this was due to the Euro straightjacket and the imposition of austerity by Brussels.

Those who follow my publications (or my Twitter account) know that this causality does not convince me. Rather, my sense is that disenchantment with democracy in these countries has more to do with internal factors, mainly corruption and the lack of meritocracy and job opportunities for the young. This is at least the case in Spain, and it is likely to be valid also for Portugal and Greece. In Italy the story might be closer to what Matthijs describes. But yet again, here I believe this is more due to the fact that Italian leaders blame the Euro, Germany and Brussels for Italy’s ills instead of tackling the real problems of their country.

As a matter of fact, the comparison between Italy and Spain demonstrates that the Euro is not an anti-growth device, as sometimes argued. The external circumstances are roughly the same for both countries. Both are in the monetary union and both are told by Brussels that they need to reduce their deficits to shrink their public debt. Both have benefited from the ultra-loose monetary policy of the European Central Bank and the drop of oil prices. But Spain is growing for the third year in a row at more than 3%, while Italy is stuck below 1%. This in itself shows that the Euro does not impede high growth rates. The Baltic countries and Ireland are other examples that contradict this thesis.

Not many have noticed but the fact is that in 2016 the Eurozone had a higher growth rate than the US! This explains why the overall sentiment in the Old Continent, but also in the US has shifted. Those US based scholars that predicted a Euro break-up at the previous EUSA conference in Boston in 2015, admit now that they had underestimated the political will prevalent both in the South and the North of the monetary union to stick together. A sentiment that has only increased after the Brexit vote and the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House.

As Daniela Schwarzer from the German foreign-policy think-tank DGAP explained in a roundtable we had on why the Euro is still so popular, if one looks at the economic side of EMU, one can flirt with the idea of a break-up, but once you analyse the historical and political trajectory of the single currency, then the possibility of an implosion becomes less likely.

Waltraud Schelke, Matthias Matthijs, Vivien Schmidt, Kathleen McNamara and Erik Jones in a panel on the legitimacy deficit of the EU.

However, this does not mean that the Euro is a robust and consolidated construction yet. The good thing about the EUSA conferences is that there are always representatives from the European Central Bank and this year there were some from the ESM (the European Stability Mechanism). Some of them (certainly not all) were complacent, saying that EMU only needs a couple of minor reforms to be sustainably. This is too overoptimistic. There is a reason why Emmanuel Macron is asking for a Eurozone budget to increase investments, a finance minister, and a Eurozone parliament. As I have explained elsewhere, monetary unions do not survive without political unions to underpin them and the earlier European leaders understand that, the better.

Of course, this also means that the analysis on the future of the euro at EUSA conferences will continue to be divided between those who believe that fiscal and political integration is feasible, and likely, and those who don’t. And it happens that the former tend to live and work inside the Eurozone , and the latter look at it from the outside. Only time will tell whether the “insiders” base their analysis on wishful thinking or whether they are closer to the truth than the “outsiders”.

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And so the latest disruption to the process of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU draws to a close. Much like the delay in Article 50 notification before it, this General Election has achieved little, except to underline that the British political system still hasn’t got its head around the entire matter.

While there will be countless pieces exploring what the results mean for Brexit, the basic message is going to be that they don’t mean much. If the Tories are returned, then there is no sign of any plan beyond the banalities that litter the White Paper: If Labour pull a surprise victory out of the bag, then they look no more able to fashion a coherent set of objectives. Only in the event of a hung Parliament, where the SNP and LibDems hold the balance of power, might something come of it all, but even then one hesitates at the thought of the media onslaught that would ensue.

Underlining all of this confusion is the passionately held belief that Brexit shouldn’t be the key debating ground for this election. Certainly, May called it on the basis of needing a strong mandate, but the real focus has been on the character of the leaders: if there was a visible policy, there is was social care that has stuck out. There is something of a sense that Brexit is important, but there’s nothing to be gained by talking about, as it’s a giant bear-trap, and one that many voters lack interest in.

Thus we end up where we left off, in April at the start of this election: with confused policies and confused politicians.

And the clock ticks down all the while.

If there is a winner from all this, then it is the EU. It has been able to work on its positions, fleshing out ideas without direct challenge from the UK, building consensus for the Commission team.

Neither side gains from a non-deal, but the onus is much more clearly on the UK to secure a package, so the ability to pull something together as the EU has done can only be to its advantage. As I have suggested before, May is best understood as someone who recognises that a deal on EU terms is coming down the line, so it makes sense to gather as much political capital as possible in anticipation of the storm. Sadly, that approach looks much less viable today.

There is a certain calmness in the EU’s actions. Part of that comes from the necessity of patience in an organisation that often takes a very long time to make any decision. But it also reflects the strong negotiating position that it holds in these talks: there have not been the tensions between the EU27 that many – including myself – anticipated, and all of the likely outcomes are ones that the EU can live with. Either the UK abandons leaving, or it agrees to an EU-designed deal, or it falls out without a deal: the first two axiomatically work for the EU, while the final path at least looks not to contaminate the rest of the EU.

In short, this general election has been a distraction: as we head to 19 June and the start of substantive negotiations, that will become even more apparent.

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On 25 May 2017, NATO leaders met in Brussels to celebrate the opening the new headquarters in Boulevard Léopold III. The location of the new headquarters is historically very significant: during construction four unexploded bombs from both the First and Second World Wars were found underneath. This should serve as an excellent reminder for what NATO stands.

While the official opening ceremony was a good occasion for the heads of state and government to come together, one issue – or rather, the presence of one person – surpassed the significance of the meeting: it was the first visit to Brussels by the 45th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. Prior to the NATO meeting, much debate surrounded his visit. The stakes were high, because NATO has to face international disagreements and challenges as well as external threat that require urgent responses. As Sophia Besch, Research Fellow at CER, has outlined the task for the European allies was to contain Trump and to convince him about their efforts and contributions to NATO. On the other hand, Jeremy Shapiro, Research Director at ECFR, gave a more sober outlook for the meeting: ‘Trump will give an ordinary speech, make various extravagant promises, and the meeting will pass with neither incident nor substance.’

Besides the opening ceremony, the thematic focus centred around the issue of burden-sharing among NATO allies. Already during previous meetings with allies, Trump emphasised that European countries owe his country vast amounts for paying for European security. In one of his Tweet storms, he summarised his claim after the meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in April 2017: ‘Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defence it provides to Germany’. At the 2014 Wales Summit, NATO allies already agreed on the target of 2 percent of GDP towards NATO defence. However, this target is not only far from realistic and appropriate for some nations. It could also spur new suspicions, especially in Europe. If one imagines that Germany met this target any time soon, as of current, 2 percent of its GDP would amount to $75 billion (€67 billion, £58 billion). Surely, some of its neighbours would become worried.

In addition, this approach to burden sharing does not reflect the actual needs to make the Alliance more flexible, responsive and overall more secure. It is acknowledged that a contribution to collective defence is vital for its survival. But the 2 percent goal does not measure well the actual needs. Instead, it is suggested that a more accurate measure of both burden and risk sharing is required. The more worrying problem is not how to meet this target, but how the money is spent. For a robust and capable Alliance, its members should focus on acquiring capabilities reflecting the current security environment, i.e. one that requires tools and capabilities that respond to cyber threats and hybrid warfare. Further, they should focus on creating deployable militaries that can contribute effectively to NATO’s major operations. Lastly, allies’ contributions to burden sharing should take into account a country’s overall contribution to international and Euro-Atlantic security, i.e. its participation in non-NATO security and defence frameworks.

The outcome of the NATO meeting last month the recommitment of the allies to the 2 percent target as well as the decision to join the counter-terrorism coalition against Daesh. NATO leaders agreed on an action plan enabling states to participate in the fight against terrorism through the coordination of training and capacity building. Yet, as stressed by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, this would not translate into engagement in combat operations.

Despite the importance of the meeting and the allies’ recommitments, NATO leaders neglected one pressing issue. How will they deal with one of their members – Turkey? Prior to the meeting in May, clashes between Turkey and other allies, most outspokenly with Germany as well as Austria, which is one of NATO’s partners through the Partnership for Peace programme, have troubled internal politics within the Alliance. Since the slash over campaign visits by Turkish officials in the light of Turkey’s referendum, German-Turksih relations have been tense. Then, for the second time within one year, Turkey has denied German officials access to the air base in Incirlik. These internal troubles and scuffles indicate the incoherence and diminished trust among members. Though both Germany and France voiced complaints over Turkey’s recent behaviour during the meeting, these have not received much attention and have been pushed into the shadow of Trump’s limelight appearance.

It has long been argued that NATO is only a defence alliance. Yet, with its transformations in the last three decades, it has become a truly political organisation as well. In this regard, NATO has to step up and improve its internal coherence alongside its defence capabilities. Only in a joint and collective fashion it is able to face its external threats and security challenges. It is therefore at stake and in the hands of NATO leaders as well as the Alliance as a whole to come together and revive common interests and values. This is far more significant and pressing than to denigrating and pointing fingers at each other as well as more important than shining light on those allies whose current policies and statements have been vague, ambiguous and not very trustworthy.

Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant at the University of Kent and a Visiting Scholar at KU Leuven.

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The UK’s Government is wrapped in a contradiction on Brexit. On the one hand, Theresa May states that no deal is better than a bad deal. On the other hand, the Conservative Manifesto also states that getting the Brexit negotiations right will define “our economic security and economic prosperity”.

Since the Lancaster House speech earlier this year, Theresa May has been consistently and repeatedly stating that the UK would be prepared to walk away from the Brexit negotiations. What only became clear during the election campaign is that the UK Government directly links the future prosperity of its citizens to the outcome of the UK negotiations with the EU.  This is important because for the Conservative Party to argue that “getting the Brexit negotiations right is central to everything – our economy, our finances, our position in the world. Get Brexit wrong and we get everything else wrong. From looking after our elderly to educating our children, everything depends on getting Brexit right”, fundamentally contradicts the rationale for no deal. Indeed, underlying that the UK needs to “get the Brexit negotiations right” to secure its future security and prosperity implies that no deal is in itself the bad deal.

During last week’s BBC Leaders Special on Question Time David Dimbleby asked the PM “what is a bad deal? People are very confused, you talk all the time about a bad deal which you won’t accept. Can you explain what in your mind would be a bad deal?”. In her response Theresa May said the following: “Well yes. I think on the one hand, David, you have got politicians in Europe, some of whom are talking about punishing the UK for leaving the EU, I think what they want to see in terms of that punishment would be a bad deal, and secondly, you have got politicians here, in the United Kingdom, who seem to be willing to accept any deal, whatever that is, just for the sake of getting a deal, and I think that the danger is they would be accepting the worse possible deal at the highest possible price”. A few minutes later, a member of the audience asked the PM to “quantify in billions of pounds what is a good deal” regarding the so-called Brexit bill. The Prime Minister’s answer: “well the… I am not going to give you a figure on that . . . because we need to go through very carefully what as part of the negotiation what rights and obligations the United Kingdom has”.

The PM’s response further confirms her ambiguity in defining what a bad deal is and the rationale to walk away from the negotiations with no deal. In her response to the member of the audience, Theresa May seems to accept that there will be a Brexit bill to be agreed (which depends on agreeing the rights and obligations of the UK in the EU). However, in her response to David Dimbleby, the PM states that the “punishment” (the Brexit bill) is a bad deal and therefore no deal would be a better outcome. Paradoxically, in another response to a member of the audience, May also states that “several EU politicians want to get on with trade talks very quickly”. This reinforces the view that when May talks about the “punishment” that European politicians want to inflict on the UK she is not referring to the possibility of the talks on the trade deal to collapse but, rather, to what the EU will demand for settling the UK/EU accounts on previously agreed commitments (the Brexit bill). What is important to note here is that the EU has stated that this financial settlement must precede and be agreed before any trade talks begin. As such, the refusal of the PM to quantify what the UK is willing to accept paying suggests either the UK Government has not given much thought about the issue (in fact, the possibility of a Brexit bill was not even mentioned during the EU referendum campaign), or that its intention is to use the Brexit bill as a reason for walking away from the negotiations with no deal.

But when  ”sufficient progress” regarding the Brexit bill (as well as on EU/UK citizens rights) has been achieved, which will allow the negotiations to proceed to the next stage, then the question is what constitutes a good (“right”) and a bad (“wrong”) Brexit deal? Interestingly, the UK Government is somewhat clear on what it seeks from the Brexit negotiations. As it is stated in Theresa May’s Article 50 letter, the goal of the UK is to establish a “new deep and special partnership” with the EU “in both economic and security cooperation”. In economic terms, “getting Brexit right” means, in the words of David Davies (Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), retaining the “exact same benefits” of membership of EU membership of the Single Market  By the same token, “getting Brexit wrong” means getting a Brexit deal where these exact same benefits are not guaranteed. Crucially, as a no deal will put the UK and EU trading under WTO rules those tariff and non-tariff access will be lost. As such, accordingly to the UK’s Government own terminology, no deal also means “getting Brexit wrong”. In other words, no deal is also a bad deal. Therefore, the open question is which outcome is worse – no deal or a deal that does not deliver the “exact same benefits” of EU membership?

An important caveat here: walking away from the Brexit negotiations table with no deal will not prevent the EU from taking action against the UK in international courts. That is, the financial accounts between the UK and EU will have to be settled regardless whether the UK leaves the negotiation table or not. As such, no deal is the worst possible deal for it not only does not avoid the Brexit bill, it also prevents a (soft) Brexit deal on trade, security and on UK/EU citizen rights deal with the EU to come about, and finally, it also breaks a key pledge of the Leave campaign – a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU. One thing is certain though: the Conservative Party’s threat of walking away with no deal (the hardest form of Brexit) is incompatible with the same Conservative Party’s goal of “getting the Brexit negotiations right”.

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Blogs are increasingly relevant to researchers and, for those starting out in contributing to them, it can be useful to reflect on the differences with other outputs, writes Anthony Salamone. He sets out some suggestions on how to approach writing for an academic blog, including how to gain the most from the experience.

Inga Ulnicane

View from Exhibition ‘The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined’. Photo from Belvedere http://www.winterpalais.at/

Tackling Grand societal global challenges has become a popular goal of knowledge policies and governance including many science, technology, innovation and higher education strategies and initiatives. Over the past 15 years, the European Union, many international organizations, national governments, private foundations, scientific societies and universities have declared their priority to address societal challenges in the areas such as environment, energy and health. Why and how does the Grand societal global challenges concept have become such a popular idea? Where does it come from and what kind of change does it involve? In my recent article ‘Grand Challenges’ concept: a return of the ‘big ideas’ in science, technology and innovation policy? (Ulnicane 2016), I trace the origins of this concept and its global diffusion and analyse it in the context of a long-term evolution of science, technology and innovation policy.

Origins and global diffusion of the Grand challenges idea

The Grand Challenges concept became popular in 2003 when Bill Gates announced his Grand Challenges in Global Health programme to fund research on diseases affecting people in the developing world. He presented the Grand Challenges idea as based on a century-old model referring to the famous 1900 speech by German mathematician David Hilbert, in which he formulated 23 unresolved mathematical problems that influenced mathematical research in the 20th century. Soon after the Gates announcement, the idea of Grand Challenges started to spread globally being taken up by governments, universities and scientific societies in particular in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom (see Box 1). Popularity of the Grand societal challenges idea increased during the times of economic crisis when the need to increase legitimacy and impact of science, technology and innovation and present them as sources of future sustainable growth and wellbeing increased.

1900 Hilbert’s speech Mathematical Problems

1988 Wilson’s speech ‘Grand challenges to computational science’

2003 The Gates Foundation: Launch of Grand Challenges in Global Health

2007 Grand Challenges initiatives of University College London and Princeton University

2007 European Research Area Green Paper: focus on identifying societal challenges     requiring research efforts beyond national capacity

2008 (February) National Academy of Engineering: 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering

2008 Expert report on Grand Challenges in European Research Area

2009 (July) Lund Declaration ‘Europe must focus on the Grand Challenges of Our Time’

2009 (September) A strategy for American innovation: focusing on Grand Challenges

2010 European Institute of Innovation and Technology launches Knowledge and Innovation Communities to address Grand Challenges

2010 (May) Grand Challenges Canada launched

2010 (October) ICSU Earth System Science for Global Sustainability: Grand Challenges

2010 (October) Europe 2020 flagship initiative Innovation Union

2011 The Royal Society ‘Knowledge, networks and nations’ report

2012 The OECD ‘Meeting Global Challenges through Better Governance’ publication

2014 EU Horizon 2020 launched with societal challenges as one of three priorities

2015 The Lund revisited declaration on tackling Grand Challenges

Box 1 Chronological list of examples indicating global diffusion of Grand Challenges concept (Ulnicane 2016)

In the European Union research and innovation policy the idea of Grand societal challenges started to appear at the same time as in other regions, namely some ten years ago in 2007 and 2008. The major step in establishing the Grand Challenges idea as a key priority for EU research and innovation policy was the Lund Declaration ‘Europe must focus on the Grand Challenges of Our Time’ adopted during the Swedish Presidency in 2009. This declaration played a key role in preparation of the current EU research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 in which societal challenges along with excellent science and industrial leadership are the key priorities. The societal challenges priority in the Horizon 2020 has been allocated the highest amount of funding of approximately 30 billion Euros of initially planned almost 80 billion Euros for the whole program. This funding is dedicated to seven broad societal challenges:

• health, demographic change and well-being;
• food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine, maritime and inland water research, and the bioeconomy;
• secure, clean and efficient energy;
• smart, green and integrated transport;
• climate action, environment, resources efficiency and raw materials;
• Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies; and
• secure societies – protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens.

Grand societal challenges: change or continuity in science, technology and innovation policy?

Although the Grand societal challenges concept has become popular and widely used around the world, the way that it is taken up in different contexts can vary considerably. Nevertheless, some typical features of this idea can be identified: tackling Grand Challenges usually involves addressing real-life problems that request boundary spanning collaborations across different scientific disciplines, sectors and countries involving heterogeneous partners from research, engineering, business, policy-making and civil society.

Are these characteristics new? Taking a long-term view on the evolution of science, technology and innovation policy since its emergence after World War II, a number of similar earlier ideas can be recognized. Already in his 1939 book on the social function of science Bernal argued that science has to assist human needs. More recently similar ideas can be found in Mode 2 approach focusing on knowledge production in the context of application, transdisciplinarity, heterogeneity, reflexivity, social accountability and quality control as well as in the ideas about the third mission of university arguing that in addition to the two traditional missions of teaching and research universities also have to contribute to social and economic development. Similarly, the need for collaborations and interactions among heterogeneous partners is well known for example from triple helix approach emphasising university-industry-government interaction. Furthermore, international collaboration has been well established research practice (Ulnicane 2015) already for a long time.

Thus, in the case of the Grand societal challenges concept it is possible to see important continuities of earlier ideas and established practices. At the same time, the concept also presents a novel combination of earlier ideas and established practices by focusing on tackling global real-life problems through boundary spanning collaborations among heterogeneous partners. For a better understanding of this new combination of different features it would be necessary to study how and by whom ‘real-life’ problems to be tackled are defined (as ‘real-lives’ can differ considerably), what motivates different partners to contribute to boundary spanning collaborations, how local, national and global concerns are addressed in such collaborations, etc.

Grand societal challenges concept: Just a fashion or a paradigm shift as well?

Popularity of the Grand societal challenges concept suggests that it has become a new fashion in knowledge policies similar to earlier fashions such as Mode 2 knowledge production in the 1990s and the term Big Science in the 1960s (Rip 2000). As earlier fashions in science policy, the Grand societal challenges concept captures a feature of science that has become more relevant and creates an occasion for policy-making (Rip 2000: 29). Additionally, two types of response identified in the cases of earlier fashions can be seen: some policy makers, analysts and enterprising scientists embrace the new fashion, while others especially from the old elite and spokespersons for established science reluctantly accommodate ongoing changes (Rip 2000: 31). At the moment, the Grand societal challenges concept is only one of fashions in knowledge production; other – similar and contrasting – contemporary fashions include scientific excellence, impact, open science and responsible research and innovation.

Being a fashionable policy concept does not require that it is a completely new idea. The same way as the latest fashion collections can draw their inspiration on art and traditions from earlier decades and centuries, also fashions in science policy build on earlier (and sometimes forgotten) ideas and practices. (Exhibition ‘The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined’ demonstrates how renown contemporary fashion designers use elements from the Greek mythology, the portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, post-revolutionary France etc.)

But how deep and far-reaching are the policy changes brought by the fashionable Grand Challenges concept? Is this just a new label for incrementally changing policy ideas and practices or does it present a paradigm shift in science, technology and innovation policy? Does the Grand Challenges concept present a new policy paradigm, i.e. ‘a framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goals of policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing’ (Hall 1993: 279)? To assess the magnitude of the changes, a systematic study and comparison of earlier and recent science, technology and innovation policies would be necessary addressing questions such as, e.g. If and how the hierarchy of policy goals and the nature policy problems have changed? How are these changes translated into new policy instruments? Are some old policies discontinued? Does the focus on societal challenges lead to the radically new ways of defining, implementing and evaluating policies? Or is the current fashion of Grand Challenges rather a ‘normal policy-making’ (Hall 1993: 279) with some broad continuities and some changes in policy instruments and their settings?

Dr. Inga Ulnicane (University of Vienna, Austria) undertakes research and teaching on global and European science, technology and innovation policy. Her research has appeared in Science and Public Policy, Journal of European Integration, Journal of Contemporary European Research and International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy. She has completed a commissioned study on the European Research Area and knowledge circulation for the European Parliament. She is one of conveners of the ECPR Standing Group ‘Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’ bringing together more than 170 researchers from around the world.

References:

Hall, P. (1993) Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: the case of economic policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics 25(3): 275-296.

Rip, A. (2000) Fashions, Lock-ins and the Heterogeneity of Knowledge Production. In: M.Jacob and T.Helstrom (eds) The Future of Knowledge Production in the Academy. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press, pp.28-39.

Ulnicane, I. (2015). Why do international research collaborations last? Virtuous circle of feedback loops, continuity and renewal. Science and Public Policy, 42(4), 433-447. doi:10.1093/scipol/scu060

Ulnicane, I. (2016). ‘Grand Challenges’ concept: a return of the ‘big ideas’ in science, technology and innovation policy? International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy, 11(1-3), 5-21. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJFIP.2016.078378

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Emmanuel Macron’s entry on the diplomatic scene – from the NATO and G7 summits last week to the meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday – may already be regarded as a positive and very encouraging achievement, but everybody, in France and elsewhere, agrees that the new President’s real and primordial challenge is the capacity to carry out the domestic reforms. In a country that has the hard-earned reputation to be unreformable, the realisation of his economic and social agenda is what Macron will ultimately be judged upon. He has one unsuspected ally: a large part of the French public has fully understood that the retirement age needs to be adapted, that fiscal policy needs a serious overhaul, and that a stronger influence on the EU comes only with respect of the deficit rules and evidence of new growth potential. And many of them have also realised that French labour law and labour relations result in a kind of societal contract that serves everybody well, except the unemployed and job-creators. Some have named the determination with which different stakeholders protect the status quo of manifold vested interests, ‘the collective choice for unemployment’. The result is a mixture of extreme reluctance by small and medium-sized enterprises, even at times of entrepreneurial success, to hire new employees on a permanent basis (the highly protected Contrat à durée indéterminée), and the simultaneous incapacity of the system, to avoid large layoffs and social plans in the wake of the country’s continuing de-industrialisation. If all attempts at reforms aiming at making the labour market more fluid have failed over decades, the reason has been a strong popular resistance fueled by the logic of class struggle. Each time the trade unions have managed to reactivate the fear of the dismantling of the ‘French social model’ – the French emotional knee-jerk equivalent of the ‘NHS’ – and each time the government in place has been unable to overcome the discrepancy between radical ideological principles and practical economic constraints, between the desirable (in the absolute) and the feasible (within the social-democratic, but capitalistic default setting of contemporary Europe). This time around, the key will lie once again with the trade unions. Unlike their German counterparts, the French unions have always been characterised by ideological pluralism rather than unitary organisation according to industrial sectors. This automatically results in fierce competition for membership among them, which in turn leads to rhetoric grandstanding in negotiations and over-bidding each other in drwaing ‘red lines’. Trade unionism has always been a minority movement in France, but it has successfully claimed the moral right and duty to speak for the ‘unenlightened’ majority (and take the entire country hostage in their fight).

Class struggle staged by ‘Force Ouvrière’ at the time of the ‘Amiens Charter’

The ideological roadmap of French trade unionism was graved in stone in 1906 in the so-called ‘Charter of Amiens’ (the capital of Picardy which, in a nice coincidence, happens to be Macron’s birthplace and the theatre of one of weirdest moments of the recent election campaign around the aptly named Whirlpool factory). This manifesto whose radical anti-capitalism has never really been put into question has deeply impregnated the language of French social relations. Its major semantic component is distrust. Managers and even self-made entrepreneurs are by definition class enemies. A company’s overarching goal can only be profit maximisation by ruthless exploitation of workers. Compromise is treason. Accordingly, German style co-determination practices are looked upon with defiance. Which is understandable, given all the negative connotations conveyed by the vocabulary in vigour. Unlike the German ‘Arbeitgeber’ (= ‘providers of work’), the French term ‘patronat’ reduces this specific social group to its purely hierarchical dimension of domination. The etymology of ‘patron’ reveals of course its religious, medieval roots, inevitably smelling of pre-industrial authority structures and inducing neo-feudal perception and behaviour patterns. Not exactly what you would call ‘social partnership’.

‘Hang all the bosses under the Avignon Bridge.’ French semantics with charming smiles.

These are no doubt the reasons why in 1998 the French employers’ federation changed its name from CNPF (where ‘P’ stands for ‘Patronat’) to MEDEF (where it is replaced by ‘Entreprises’). Unfortunately, its representatives have had trouble changing their own rhetoric accordingly, and their internal power struggles often lead to the same kind of stupid over-bidding as on the trade union’s side. Their current president, Pierre Gattaz, is no exception to this rule, regularly missing excellent opportunities to just shut up for a while. In a lovely compendium on French-German stereotypes and contrasts published twenty years ago, Ingo Kolboom very rightly recalled in his contribution about labour relations in both countries that ‘words are more than just designations; they are complex interpretations of reality, transformations, repressions, and projections, the support of desires and social strategies’ (R. Picht et al., Fremde Freunde, Munich, 1997, p. 268). France offers a linguistic and cultural environment in which trade unions simply have no choice but systematically base their actions on an unwavering presumption of contempt (‘mépris’) with regard to employers’ attitudes towards employees. Which in turn explains that strikes or similar radical actions, rather than being the ultimate means of struggle once negotiations have failed or justified requests have remained unanswered, are in fact a pre-condition of negotiation. They are called with the aim of increasing bargaining power and they inevitably raise the face-saving stakes on all sides by lifting discussions from pragmatic deal making to the level of moral indignation. Such is the minefield that Emmanuel Macron has chosen as his first area of reform. The speed with which he and his new Prime Minister Edouard Philippe have already invited each single trade union leader for long, individual dialogues to both the Elysée and Matignon give evidence to their determination, whatever the outcome of the legislative elections.

Holding out a hand to the trade unions: Emmanuel Macron and Philippe Martinez from the CGT.

Surprisingly, what clearly has been a suicide mission for any government of the last twenty years, all of a sudden does not even seem out of reach any more. Listening to the very careful wording of the trade unionists these days, one cannot help but find they are somehow aware that the new President has managed to install a ‘now-or-never feeling’ in the country over the last weeks. They seem to feel that ‘the times they are a-changin’ and for the time being, they don’t want to be the ones that ‘stand in the doorways’ and ‘block up the halls’. Macron’s tightrope walk is the most passionate political endeavour this country has seen for a long time. It’s more than a reform. It’s full-size cultural change in the making. If he manages to shift the semantics of labour relations from the lexical field of class struggle to a Monnet-inspired new vocabulary of common interest and joint effort, he will have achieved more in a few months than others over their entire mandates.

Albrecht Sonntag @albrechtsonntag

This is post # 23 on the French 2017 election marathon. All previous posts can be found here.

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This Tuesday, while most of us where thinking of other things, I was at the Social Market Foundation, talking about Brexit and euroscepticism.

In the course of questions at the end, I was asked whether British pro-Europeans displayed the same range and variety of positions as sceptics, to which I noted mobilisation hadn’t really happened. A bit more harshly, I said that a lot of pro-EU activity consists of going a demo in London, followed by lunch at Pizza Express, which probably wasn’t enough.

As a general rule, if I’m going to be snippy, then I feel I should explain myself, so you can judge better whether it’s warranted or not.

In essence, pro-Europeans have faced two interlinked issues, one on the supply side and one on the demand side.

Demand: a lack of fundamental challenge

If we consider mobilisation around the issue of European integration, then identity plays an important role. For sceptics, the threat to a core part of their social identity – their nationality – has endlessly been used to move people to action: we often focus on the control part of “let’s take back control”, but we also need to consider the half-hided ‘us’ too. National identity is taken as natural and eternal, a bedrock on which we act out our daily lives and our sense of community: the Manchester attacks demonstrate that all too well.

As such, eurosceptics have always had a strong identificational base from which to work. If you want to take that to a more extreme position, then all euroscepticism might be conceptualised as nationalism, dressed in either the language of the left or the right: I hesitate to go that far, but the point is well-made.

By contrast, pro-Europeans lack the same depth of emotional belonging. Very few people indeed consider themselves just ‘European’ and those that do are typically the sort of people I mentioned in my talk: cosmopolitan types, who see the EU as part of a bigger package of European-ness. In broad terms, these are people who will have the resources and the inclination to be able to continue their Anywhere-ish lifestyles post-Brexit. Thus, the loss of EU membership is painful, but not necessarily critical in the same way that national identity is for sceptics.

This isn’t to suggest that the substantial volumes of people who have turned out (and continue to turn out) for pro-EU demonstrations don’t really care, but rather that they have more space to adapt their identification politics and so less incentive to translate action on the streets into concerted political activity.

Supply: the costs of dominance

On the other side of the equation is the paradoxical over-supply of broadly pro-EU policy outcomes. Once EU membership was secured, the political and economic establishment moved to take that as a given. Certainly, there were many issues and problems with the specifics of that membership, but the broad thrust was one of participation, that being the best way to change the things one didn’t like.

Seen in this light, pro-Europeans had no strong incentive to create specific political organisations, partly because so many others seemed to be doing that for them, partly because the issue was so environmental and structural as to make action for membership per se appear rather ridiculous. This is underlined by the sole mobilisation that did take play, namely among federalists, who were the only ones not served by the array of groups already out there.

This is true across the EU, where groups specifically devoted to promoting the EU are few and far between. If there is a difference in the British case, then it is that in the UK there was never really the same attempt by groups to turn European positions into more pro-active ones, or to integrate more fully the European with the national: instead, the British line has been very instrumental, both for politicians and economic agents.

None of this is to say that pro-EU mobilisation is impossible, but rather it will face persistent difficulties, even as the UK moves towards departure from the organisation. While there will logically be an associated shift in the establishment to a non-member status, this will not address the identificational issue, which will be made all the more complicated should there be very limited barriers to access. That membership was tried, and failed, is something that will cast a long shadow on those that would have the UK join once more.

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Brexit Secretary, David Davis, has said that Britain won’t hold ANY Brexit talks unless the EU drops its demands for €100bn in payments it claims are due.

It’s now more than likely that Britain will leave the EU without any agreement in place, which of course will be disastrous. Unfortunately, David Davis has shown he knows little about the art of negotiating.

Quite a handicap when you’re the Brexit Secretary. Refusing to talk is the way to end talks, and walking away from talks will make it very difficult to return to those talks. The Sunday Times quoted a senior Brussels negotiator as saying of Davis’s latest announcement:

“Once you walk away, you need a major concession to come back to the table and we are simply not able to provide any.”

Just as unfortunately, David Davis has shown he knows little about the EU and how it functions. Quite a handicap when you’re the Brexit Secretary. In 2012 Mr Davis gave an anti-EU speech in which he claimed that the European Commission was responsible for the laws of the EU.

“That is fundamentally undemocratic,” he said. But as he should know, the European Commission has no power to pass laws.

Only the directly elected European Parliament, in concert with the EU Council, comprising the ministers of democratically elected governments, can pass laws in the EU. Mr Davis also claimed that the EU’s foundational principles and acquis could not be changed, and that was essentially undemocratic.

But that’s not correct either. The EU is a democracy, and can be anything that all its members unanimously agree it can be. If that was not the case, there would not have been so many EU treaty changes – all of which were debated and passed by our Parliament in Westminster.

During last year’s EU referendum campaign, Mr Davis claimed that Britain would be able to negotiate individual trade deals with each of the EU’s member states. He appeared to be completely unaware that one of the main basic features of the European Union is that EU countries cannot negotiate individual trade deals and instead do so as a bloc of all its members.

Then, after Mr Davis was appointed to be the new Brexit Secretary, he boasted that Britain would be able to secure free trade areas “10 times the size” of the European Union. Liberal Democrat MEP, Catherine Bearder, had to point out that this would be 1.5 times bigger than the planet’s entire economy.

There’s only one way to ensure that David Davis doesn’t mess up the Brexit talks with the European Union. Vote Theresa May’s Conservative Party out of office on 8 June. 

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This week the Conservative Party tweeted Theresa May’s statement: ‘Sturgeon’s plan to leave the UK – Scotland’s biggest market – would mean economic chaos.’

The Prime Minister doesn’t seem to get it, does she? Exactly the same arguments also apply to her plan to leave the EU as well as its Single Market – the UK’s biggest market – which would also mean economic chaos.

Last March Mrs May made similar comments in a keynote speech giving all the reasons why the Union of the United Kingdom should remain intact. But yet again, all her arguments could just as easily and logically apply to keeping the Union of Europe intact.

Mrs May said:

“One of the driving forces behind the Union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united. Our wholly integrated domestic market for businesses means no barriers to trade within our borders.”

Yes, the exact same reasons apply to the European Union – reasons that Mrs May extolled before the Referendum, but abandoned after the Referendum in exchange for the trappings of high office.

Mrs May also said about our Union of the United Kingdom:

“The fundamental strengths of our Union, and the benefits it brings to all of its constituent parts, are clear.” 

Yes, the strengths of the European Union are also clear – that Union is the world’s largest free trading area.

Mrs May also said:

“We must take this opportunity to bring our United Kingdom closer together. Because the Union which we all care about is not simply a constitutional artefact. It is a union of people, affections and loyalties.” 

Indeed, as is the European Union.

The Prime Minister continued:

“Together we form the world’s greatest family of nations. But the real story of our Union is not to be found in Treaties or Acts of Parliament. It is written in our collective achievements, both at home and in the world.”

Actually, the European Union is the world ‘s greatest family of nations. And its collective achievements have been huge, not least of which is the achievement of presiding over the longest period of permanent peace in our continent’s history.

Doesn’t Mrs May realise that all the arguments for keeping the Union of the United Kingdom intact, are the exact same reasons for keeping the European Union intact? Undoing our Union with Europe could directly lead to the undoing of our Union of the United Kingdom.

Of course, Mrs May knows that. In April last year, when she was Home Secretary, she gave one of the most powerful pro-Remain speeches of the entire referendum campaign.

Then, Mrs May advised against Brexit because it could prove ‘fatal’ both to the Union of Europe as well as the Union of the United Kingdom. She said then:

“..if Brexit isn’t fatal to the European Union, we might find that it is fatal to the Union with Scotland. The SNP have already said that in the event that Britain votes to leave but Scotland votes to remain in the EU, they will press for another Scottish independence referendum. 

“And the opinion polls show consistently that the Scottish people are more likely to be in favour of EU membership than the people of England and Wales.

“If the people of Scotland are forced to choose between the United Kingdom and the European Union we do not know what the result would be. “But only a little more than eighteen months after the referendum that kept the United Kingdom together, I do not want to see the country I love at risk of dismemberment once more. 

“I do not want the people of Scotland to think that English Eurosceptics put their dislike of Brussels ahead of our bond with Edinburgh and Glasgow. 

“I do not want the European Union to cause the destruction of an older and much more precious Union, the Union between England and Scotland…

“We should remain in the EU.”

Do you really want  Theresa May as our Prime Minister, when she supports Britain’s membership of the EU one month, then changes her mind the next? Are you happy for Tories to be running the country, and ruining our partnership with the European Union and its Single Market, as well as potentially our Union with Scotland?

The General Election is on 8 June.

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A bit of a quiet week this week: British politicians are launching their manifestos, Macron’s naming his first administration, Trump’s Trump.

Rather than get sucking into the usual hot-take approach, I want to step back and think about the notion of awkwardness in the EU.

The UK is, famously, the ‘awkward partner’ (in George’s phrase) and so much of our understanding of awkwardness is coloured by that British experience.

However, this does tend to blind us to all the other awkward partners that are out there: it’s one of the reasons that some commentators think the EU will be much more efficient and effective post-Brexit, and one of the reasons they will be wrong.

The prompt for this is that nice M. Macron, the new liberal hope. Like those other liberal hopes, Obama and Blair, he arrives with great expectations on his shoulders, expectations that are likely not to be met.

In part that’s because politicians have less agency than most people suppose: even American or French presidents still have to answer to someone and have limits on their powers, as The Donald has been discovering this week.

But it’s also because their views are not always in line with their colleagues/partners/counterparts. And Emmanuel Macron is very much a case in point. For all that he brings new vigour and potential to the Elysée, he also comes with a set of policies that sit somewhat askew with the priorities of Berlin or Brussels.

The case for treaty reform is a good demonstration of this. Macron has sensibly talked up the need for French domestic reforms as an essential part of making the Eurozone work better, with changes to EU bodies running in parallel. However, the presentation of this as ‘unblocking’ treaty reform is – at best – disingenuous, given the deep lack of interest from German ministers to get drawn into another round of negotiations that might end up either putting them in a tricky position on debt mutualisation or resulting in cosmestic changes.

Likewise, it’s been instructive to watch EU officials first greet Macron as the saviour of France/Europe from Marine Le Pen and then to worry about ideas such as ‘buy European’ preferences.

Put differently, Macron might be a liberal hope, but he’s also very much in line with previous French leaders.

And so back to awkwardness.

France’s role in the European integration process has been one marked as much by strife as by leadership: consider de Gaulle and his empty chair, Mitterrand worrying about German unification, Chirac chiding the new member states, Hollande doing…well, not much.

The reason that France has done as well as it has been that even as it pushes for domestic advantage, it also talks up European cooperation, pushing and proposing all the time, engaging and interacting with other members. The Franco-German relationship is the strongest expression of this, but it’s also true in other dealings, as French politicians and officials try to set the tone.

And even France is not that exceptional in its approach: a quick cast around the rest of the Union will find not-dissimilar models, as countries seek to defend their interests while wrapped in a cloak of participation.

One might see this as evidence of the duplicity of European integration: saying one thing, meaning another. But if it’s true of the EU, then it’s also true of all other political systems. Wherever you look there is misdirection and considered presentation.

This is not to excuse such behaviour, but rather to remind that it is endemic. At the very least, we need to be reminded that it exists and that just because the squeaky wheel has been oiled (or taken off, in the UK’s case), that does not mean that all problems have been solved. The EEC had issues before the UK arrived, and the EU will have them once it’s left: what matters is that we keep thinking about who’s using who to their advantage.

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For over forty years, since Maurice Duverger coined the expression in 1974, ‘The Republican monarchy’ has no doubt been the most frequently used metaphor for the Fifth Republic. In countless books, essays and articles, the presidential system and all its corollaries –power, pomp and protocol – have been portrayed as a legacy of pre-Revolutionary, absolute monarchy. It is not by accident that yesterday’s ceremony of transfer of power between François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron was spontaneously referred to as ‘enthronement’ (‘intronisation’).

It is true that the French presidency is more than a political job description. As pointed out on these pages last December, the capacity of ‘incarnation’ or ‘embodiment’ of the function is a primordial asset among the check-list of qualifications required for the job. (A quality Marine Le Pen worked hard to obtain over years before throwing everything away in a particularly misguided fortnight between the two election rounds).

Emmanuel Macron, if only for his age and the narrative of pragmatic, liberal revolutionary he has created from scratch, seems to be predestined to be a different kind of Republican monarch. But unlike other candidates, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon for instance, Macron has never publicly promoted the idea of a Sixth Republic. Not only because he has identified more urgent reforms to carry out, but also because he owes the system a great deal: it is only the hyper-personalised campaign mode of the presidential election that made it possible for him in the first place to overthrow the entire political spectrum in record time without the backing of an established party and a network of local office holders across the country. In a full parliamentary democracy like Germany he would hardly have succeeded in achieving a similar upheaval (or ‘coconut shy’, as Laurent Fabius so nicely said yesterday in his official, and yet very personal, proclamation speech).

‘At the same time’ (to use Macron’s favourite conjunctive adverb), he has repeatedly announced that, if elected, he would interpret the presidential function in a very Gaullist manner, situating himself above party politics, defining the overarching political objectives, and letting the prime minister and his government do the nitty-gritty work.

That leaves us with an institutional framework, where everything remains in place and the only major factor of change may be the style in which the functions are ‘embodied’. In other words: the manners and behaviour of the president, the frequency and tone with which he addresses his citizens, the kind of personalities he chooses for top positions (starting with his first Prime minister today), the leadership style with which he manages his collaborators, the dignity of his private life.

Much has been written over the decades about the behavioural legacy of the court society in contemporary France, and much of it is perfectly pertinent. Whoever took the time to go through Norbert Elias’s painstakingly detailed, seminal analysis of The Court Society dating from the 1930s or Alexis de Tocqueville’s retrospective account of social interaction in L’ancien regime et la revolution (1856) can only be bewildered by the many behaviour patterns shaped in Versailles, which have survived all the disruptions and caesuras since 1789.

In resigned exasperation.

More recently it has become increasingly common to link the persistence of the court ‘habitus’ in French social and political culture to the shortcomings of the Fifth Republic. Former Prime minister Dominique de Villepin theorised, in a quickly drafted, somewhat disappointing little book, about ‘The Court Spirit’, which he considered to be ‘the French malediction’ (2010). More recently, the renowned political journalists Thomas Legrand and Ghislaine Ottenheimer invested significantly more in-depth field work, only to come to a similar conclusion, shaking their heads in disbelief over the enormous mismatch between what the country needs and what it is stuck with. The respective titles of their books nicely sum up their quiet exasperation with the Republican monarchy: ‘Let’s stop electing presidents!’ (2014) for the former; ‘Presidential poison’ (2015) for the latter.

Diarists of the court: Saint-Simon and Patrick Rambaud.

No one, however, dealt with the phenomenon in a funnier and more revealing manner than Patrick Rambaud. A well-known author, laureate of the Prix Goncourt and accomplished master in pastiche and parody, Rambaud has been the 21st-century ‘chronicler of the court’ since the ‘enthronement’ of King Nicolas I in 2007. What started, according to the author, as a ‘therapy against the depression’ into which Sarkozy’s election had thrown him, finally became a series of a total of eight ferocious, hilarious, and at the same time desperate diaries of the Fifth Republic’s own kind of court decadence, covering the entire two quinquennats of Sarkozy and Hollande. Lovers of classical French literature could take great delight in the wonderful imitation of the Duke of Saint-Simon’s lucid and indiscreet ‘Memoirs on the reign of Louis XIV’; others could simply marvel at the incredible human pettiness of today’s sycophants and toadies humming around his  mediocre majesty in the Elysée.

A hilarious series of eight chronicles. Not to be continued.

Over ten years Rambaud offered a most welcome cathartic laughter about the ridicule of French democracy and its wildlife populated by cynical spin doctors and vain careerists, dangerous ideologists and ruthless populists, evil corrupters and stupid corrupted (which are of course species for which France may be the best biotope, but of which is certainly does not have a monopoly).

Given the remarkable ease with which Emmanuel Macron responded to behavioural expectations during the long ceremonial liturgy yesterday, while bringing a whole new freshness and sincerity to the mandatory coronation rituals, chances are that Patrick Rambaud will have no reason to continue his chronicles. He may even be able to come off his anti-depressants.

One of the most interesting aspects of the next quinquennat will thus be to observe whether this atypical, visibly determined president will be able to change the style of the Republican monarchy from within or whether the function will inexorably impose its ‘habitus’ under the weight of tradition, apparatus, and decorum. In other words: will the new King modify the behaviour of the court, or will the court culture, slowly but mercilessly, tame the new King?

Style is not nothing. Eliminating the ridicule from the top-tier of French politics was not an official programme point in the electoral platform of En marche! It would, however inject an unexpected new stability into a ramshackle system, and shift the focus away from form to substance, open the minds for renewal. Although non-quantifiable, it would be one of the new monarch’s most outstanding and lasting achievements.

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 22 on the French 2017 election marathon.
All previous posts can be found here.

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Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, has pledged to take the country out of the European Union. But before last year’s referendum on 23 June, Ms May was a firm advocate against Brexit and for Britain remaining in the EU.

Can we trust a prime minister whose principles blow so easily in the wind? Is this really the sign of a ‘strong and stable’ leader?

The previous Prime Minister, David Cameron, felt compelled to resign after he urged the country to vote ‘Remain’ but the electorate voted instead to ‘Leave’.

But former Home Secretary, Theresa May, felt no similar compunction to go, despite the fact that she too urged the country to ‘vote remain’.

In a speech in April last year, Mrs May spoke firmly against Brexit and in favour of Britain’s continued membership of the EU.

She said then:

“My judgement, as Home Secretary, is that remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism.”

And as for replacing the trade we do with the EU with other markets, she asserted that this would be an unrealistic route. She said:

“We export more to Ireland than we do to China, almost twice as much to Belgium as we do to India, and nearly three times as much to Sweden as we do to Brazil. It is not realistic to think we could just replace European trade with these new markets.”

And there were other serious risks too.

“If we do vote to leave the European Union, we risk bringing the development of the single market to a halt, we risk a loss of investors and businesses to remaining EU member states driven by discriminatory EU policies, and we risk going backwards when it comes to international trade.”

And other risks too.

“Outside the EU, for example, we would have no access to the European Arrest Warrant, which has allowed us to extradite more than 5,000 people from Britain to Europe in the last five years, and bring 675 suspected or convicted wanted individuals to Britain to face justice.”

And leaving the EU, she said, could lead to the disintegration of the EU, resulting in “massive instability” with “with real consequences for Britain.”

In addition, Brexit might prove fatal to “the Union between England and Scotland“, which she did not want to happen.

And if Britain left the EU, she argued, we might not be successful in negotiating a successful divorce settlement.

Explained Mrs May:

“In a stand-off between Britain and the EU, 44 per cent of our exports is more important to us than eight per cent of the EU’s exports is to them.”

She added:

“The reality is that we do not know on what terms we would win access to the single market.

“We do know that in a negotiation we would need to make concessions in order to access it, and those concessions could well be about accepting EU regulations, over which we would have no say, making financial contributions, just as we do now, accepting free movement rules, just as we do now, or quite possibly all three combined.

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

In summary, Mrs May said just a year ago:

• “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.

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

But as Prime Minister, Theresa May has completely changed her tune. She will now willingly take the country out of the Union and the EU Single Market, without even a glance back, and against her own advice.

Mrs May, who moved to 10 Downing Street less than a year ago, now says:

• “Brexit means Brexit and we’re going to make a success of it.”

• “There will be no attempts to remain inside the EU.”

• “There will be no attempts to re-join it by the back door; no second referendum.”

• “As Prime Minister I will make sure that we leave the European Union.”

• “The people have spoken, we will deliver on that.”

And in a complete turnaround from her position prior to 23 June, Mrs May announced:

• “Leaving the EU presents us with a world of opportunities and I’m determined to seize them.”

How is it possible for Theresa May to take Britain in a direction which only a year ago she advocated was most definitely not in the country’s best interests?

After all, nobody forced her to be the gung-ho Brexit Prime Minister, did they?

But on 8 June, the electorate has an opportunity to force two-faced Theresa and her Tory regime out of office. 

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• All aboard for Brexit?
• Brexit Secretary, David Davis, gets 5 stars for double standards
• 70% of Mrs May’s cabinet wanted Britain to remain in the EU
• List of the latest articles by Jon Danzig

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