European Union

Written by Marcin Grajewski,

© mrallen / Fotolia

Challenges to security in Europe will take centre stage at the NATO summit in Warsaw on 8-9 July when its heads of state and government will discuss issues ranging from Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and its growing military assertiveness to turmoil across the Middle East and North Africa, and the future of the military alliance.

This note highlights a selection of commentaries, studies and reports by some of the major international think tanks and research institutes on European security and defence published in the run-up to the NATO summit. More reports on the subject can be found in a previous edition of ‘What Think Tanks are thinking’ from in November 2015.

NATO summit

NATO Summit 2016: From reassurance to deterrence. What’s really at stake?
Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, June 2016

The Warsaw summit and the return of Western nationalism
Danish Institute for International Studies, June 2016

Warsaw summit
Atlantic Council, June 2016

NATO Summit 2016: NATO must reaffirm its “open door” policy
Heritage Foundation, June 2016

National priorities for the NATO Warsaw summit
German Marshall Fund, May 2016

NATO defence planning between Wales and Warsaw: Politico-military challenges of a credible assurance against Russia
Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, January 2016

What NATO for what threats? Warsaw and beyond
Istituto Affari Internazionali, December 2015

Preparing for NATO’s Warsaw summit: The challenges of adapting to strategic change
Danish Institute of International Studies, December 2015

Other studies

Restoring the power and purpose of the NATO alliance
Atlantic Council, June 2016

Time to restore conventional deterrence-by-denial
Egmont, June 2016

A new strategy: Implications for CSDP
Clingendael, June 2016

All not quiet on NATO’s eastern front
Carnegie Europe, June 2016

A threat-based strategy for NATO’s southern flank
Carnegie Europe, June 2016

Security in the Baltic Sea Region: Activation of risk potential
Finnish Institute of International Affairs, June 2016

The future of Transatlantic security
Rand, June 2016

Evaluating future U.S. Army force posture in Europe
Centre for Strategic and International Studies, June 2016

NATO must stop crowding Russia
Cato Institute, June 2016

European defence: From strategy to delivery
Clingendael, May 2016

Embedding NATO into the European Union Global Strategy: The missing link?
European, May 2016

Closing NATO’s Baltic gap
International Centre for Defence Studies, May 2016

Russia: A test for Transatlantic unity
Transatlantic Academy, German Marshall Fund, May 2016

A historic reminder, an ever-present dilemma? Assessing Brexit’s potential consequences for European security
European Policy Centre, May 2016

Russian “countermeasures” to NATO are coming
Brookings Institution, May 2016

EUISS yearbook of European security 2016
European Union Institute for Security Studies, April 2016

Envisioning European defence: Five futures
European Union Institute for Security Studies, April 2016

For a “new realism” in European defense: The five key challenges an EU defense strategy should address
German Marshall Fund, April 2016

A new Helsinki needed? What security model for Europe?
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, April 2016

The parliamentary dimension of defence cooperation
Clingendael, April 2016

European defence spending 2015: The force awakens
European Union Institute for Security Studies, April 2016

Do we need an EU army? Which way for the European security and defence cooperation
Mendel European Centre, March 2016

NATO’s guns point the wrong way
Friends of Europe, March 2016

NATO, the US and Baltic Sea security
Swedish Institute of International Affairs, February 2016

The annexation of Crimea: Lessons for European security
Fondation Robert Schuman, February 2016

Ensuring deterrence against Russia: The view from NATO’s front-line States
Heinrich Böll Stiftung, February 2016

Forces terrestres et réassurance: Quelles options pour l’Alliance?
Institut français des relations internationales, January 2016

The defence of Europe before European Defence: Returning to the Schuman method
Fondation Robert Schuman, January 2016

A stronger CSDP: Deepening defence cooperation
Clingendael, January 2016

Defence budgets and cooperation in Europe: Developments, trends and drivers
Istituto Affari Internazionali, Consortium of Think Tanks, January 2016

Reinforcing deterrence on NATO’s Eastern flank: Wargaming the defense of the Baltics
Rand, January 2016

NATO and European security: back to the roots?
Istituto Affari Internazionali, December 2015

The EU, Russia and the quest for a new European security bargain
Clingendael, December 2015

European strategy, European defence and the CSDP
Egmont, November 2015

L’Europe à la croisée des chemins: La politique de défense et de sécurité a besoin d’initiatives franco-allemandes
Institut français des relations internationales, November 2015

Filed under: International Relations, PUBLICATIONS Tagged: At a glance, CSDP, defence policy, EU army, European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), Marcin Grajewski, Nato, what think tanks are thinking

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Monday 4 July 2016
13.00 Meeting with President of Argentina Mauricio Macri (photo opportunity)

Tuesday 5 July 2016
Strasbourg
09.15 Report to the European Parliament on the European Council of 28 June and the informal meeting of 27 EU leaders on 29 June 2016

Friday 8 July 2016
Warsaw
EU-US leaders' meeting

EU-NATO cooperation event

NATO SUMMIT
14.30 Welcome by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and President of Poland Andrzej Duda
15.15 Family photo
20.30 Intervention at the North Atlantic Council working dinner hosted by President of Poland Andrzej Duda and chaired by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg

Saturday 9 July 2016
Warsaw
NATO SUMMIT
09.00 Intervention at the summit meeting on Afghanistan
12.00 North Atlantic Council meeting

 

The EU referendum was only a week ago, and already the false claims and promises of ‘Leave’ campaigners are painfully unravelling.

• THEY SAID that outside the EU, Britain could control migration. This would relieve on public services.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying that leaving the EU can’t radically reduce migration and that fears about immigration didn’t influence the way people voted.
• THEY SAID that we send £350m a week to the EU, which could be spent on the NHS instead.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying that the claim was a mistake. It was never promised. They’re not able to spend that much extra on the NHS.
• THEY SAID Britain doesn’t need preferential access to the EU Single Market.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying that we should have preferential access to the Single Market.
• THEY SAID there will be an end to ‘free movement of people’.
  - BUT NOW they’re talking about ‘free movement of labour’.
• THEY SAID Britain has a great future outside the EU; that we’d get out country back and ‘take control’.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying they don’t have a plan for Brexit. They never did. The government should have had a plan.

Now, it seems no one is in control. Welcome to getting your country back.

• Sources:
• BBC News​: ‘Reality Check’
• The Mirror​: What will happen to immigration into the UK after vote to leave the EU? 
• The Guardian​: ‘Leave campaign rows back on key immigration and NHS pledges’ 
• Metro​: ‘Operation Backtrack begins over THAT £350million NHS claim 
• New Statesman​: ‘Tory Brexiter Daniel Hannan: Leave campaign never promised “radical decline” in immigration’

• Click to read

_________________________________________________

Other stories by Jon Danzig:

• First 7 days after Referendum shock
• Blame the politicians, not the voters
• Leave campaign is relying on lying to win
• List of the latest articles by Jon Danzig

To follow my stories please like my Facebook page: Jon Danzig Writes

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• The Reasons2Remain Facebook Community continues to support the case for Britain’s membership of the EU, and now, the actual impact of the Brexit vote. Join us!

• Share on Facebook and Twitter:

The #Brexit bodge: what #Leave campaigners said then, and what they say now. Share my blog: https://t.co/m2547xjJzD pic.twitter.com/UlxBu9s81D

— Jon Danzig (@Jon_Danzig) July 1, 2016

The post The Brexit Bodge: What they said appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

http://tvnewsroom.consilium.europa.eu/uploads/council-images/thumbs/uploads/council-images/remote/http_7e18a1c646f5450b9d6d-a75424f262e53e74f9539145894f4378.r8.cf3.rackcdn.com/Schermata_2016-07-01_alle_11.15.56_thumb_169_1467364820_1467364820_129_97shar_c1.png

The European Union signs an agreement with Tuvalu on the short-stay visa waiver.

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Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola & Tamson Pietsch

Across the world, higher education is rapidly changing. Universities are increasingly seen as key engines of a ‘knowledge economy’, producing the innovation and the workers crucial to new industries. Driven by rankings that claim to measure ‘world-class’ status, and by the incentives and liberalised regulations of national governments, many universities are promoting themselves as ‘global’ institutions and competing to attract renowned researchers, international students, and grant income. These changes are profound—they reshape the long-standing relationship between universities and the nation-state, and reconstitute opportunities for social mobility, and the way millions of individuals see, understand and navigate the world. They are changes that, put simply, are deeply political.

These shifts often go under the adopted narrative of the ‘globalisation of higher education’—a discourse which tends to treat this new terrain as largely a smooth space through which people, money, and knowledge travel seamlessly, a-politically, and for the mutual benefit of all involved. Such analyses, however, tend to under-estimate the competing interests involved in these changes, and the asymmetrical power relations and political contestation at local, national and regional levels that are configuring and reconfiguring contemporary higher education in ways that go well beyond the initial expectations and imaginations of the actors involved.

To understand the ways universities are engaged in these processes we need to think in terms of a transnational politics of higher education. Higher education institutions do pull (and push) people, money, and knowledge across borders, but they do so in highly uneven ways. National, regional, and local boundaries are not simply transcended by these connections, but continually work to condition the nature of movement, and to direct and shape it. Higher education institutions find themselves operating within a transnationally striated space marked as much by difference, competition, and particularity as by the convergence around a ‘global’ model or market.

While there are common pressures that force universities to act in similar ways, these pressures are not uniform, impersonal or universal. The transnational forces of neoliberalism, global ranking systems, American hegemony, and the functional exigencies of economic integration often play out differently in different locations. And they are, moreover, continually being made and re-made by actors with a variety of objectives. Within the worlds of higher education there exists significant variation across institutions—variation that, in some cases, seems to be growing rather than diminishing. It is not apparent that developments in Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America are necessarily aiming to achieve the same ends, or even using the same methods.

Understanding the profound transformations we have seen in higher education during recent decades means attending to this variation, as well as to its causes and consequences. As argued in our recent book, it means attending to the transnational politics of higher education, and to three core attributes that help to fashion it.

 

The legacy of history

First, those interested in the politics of higher education in the present need to take seriously the history of the university and the ways in which its relationship with empire, nation and class is being refashioned in the era of market capitalism. It is no surprise that wealthier institutions are well placed to navigate the changing winds of local and ‘global’ imperatives. It is they who have taken the lead in offering online courses, leading big collaborative and high investment projects; they who tend to rank highly on research measures and have the ability to negotiate to their advantage with governments at home and abroad. European empires and the languages and religions that travelled with them, sit at the heart of these temporal legacies. They created deep cultural and economic infrastructures that continue to determine routes of travel and shape the global landscapes of knowledge and expertise.

 

Tensions in reform enactment

Second, we need to consider the way university reforms are enacted at national and institutional levels, leading to radically different outcomes in different contexts. For example, the wishes of international financial organisations or norms around academic freedom often find themselves in conflict with the wishes of national governments, local citizens or institutional administrations.

This was the case for post-apartheid higher education in South Africa where the language of the university as a site within a ‘global knowledge economy’ quickly replaced the arguments promoted by anti-apartheid activists who envisioned higher education as emphasising democratic citizenship, de-racialisation, and economic redistribution. This outcome stemmed from the interventions of international institutions, funding agencies, and philanthropic organisations, as well as domestic political actors, who favoured the language that conceptualised the university as strictly an institution of economic development. The ability of South Africans to produce their own, potentially fairly radical, understandings of higher education was thus foreclosed.

By contrast, while the so-called ‘American model’ of higher education has travelled to the Middle East in the form of branch campuses, these campuses have been required to incorporate the unique kefala system, which rigidly controls all foreign labour. As a consequence, the notion of ‘academic freedom’ supposedly embedded in the American model of higher education continually comes into conflict with very real frictions on the grounds. In these moments of tension we can begin to understand and identify the various national and international actors who have a stake in ‘globalisation’, and how they advance and protect their claims through and within it.

 

The rise of the regional dimension

Third, we need to develop a more careful consideration of the importance of geographic regions and the ways in which they are emerging as new players in the governance of tertiary education. As regional organisations become increasingly involved in the business of higher education, we see political processes driven by supranational forces that both work through and bypass national agencies. Yet even these regional processes are inflected by distinctive local and national pressures and ambitions.

Regional influences, for example, have been extremely powerful in ushering in reforms in Europe. Policymakers in newly emerging democracies such as Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia accepted that restructuring their national higher education system was part of the strategy to ‘return to Europe’ after the fall of Communism. University actors there also saw the opportunity provided by Europe’s Bologna Process as a way to reform university governance according to their visions of faculty independence vis-à-vis university administration, and university autonomy vis-à-vis state control. But the purposeful activation of constitutional and legal provisions, and the different national policy formulation procedures involved, has generated variations of higher education reforms in these three countries. EU efforts directed towards standardising the recruitment of researchers to higher education and research institutions have also proven to be incredibly challenging.

Similarly, governments in Asia have invested huge sums to upgrade their national flagship universities from teaching-oriented to research-intensive institution – a process that has involved alliances with foreign institutions, international staff recruitment, and attracting overseas students. But in practice the reports of scientists and scholars reveal there are still many on the ground implementation challenges especially in the realm of new ideas, critical questioning, transparent decision-making, academic independence and basic research. It is thus essential to attend to the various vested political and institutional interests during implementation to see how they translate external reforms for domestic and institutional purposes.

 

Navigating the contemporary higher education landscape

Universities and the individuals who work in them are both local and global actors. They are rooted in specific social, political and economic communities, yet their authority comes from their claim to be representatives of a culture and learning that is apparently ‘universal’ in that it is recognisable and even tradable beyond the boundaries of particular localities. To maintain their status and power, universities need to maintain their relevance on both fronts: they need to meet the political, economic and social needs of particular regional and national contexts, and they need to sustain their connection to changing culture and knowledge.

Far from converging around an imagined ‘American model’ or fragmenting as a consequence of ‘crisis’, across the world universities are operating as savvy political actors, working within complex, changing, and multi-scalar processes, and producing and reproducing the social world of higher education in highly heterodox ways. Seeing them in this way helps us understand the unequal geographies or ‘worlds’ that characterise contemporary ‘global higher education’, the parties who stand to lose and gain by its new alignments, and the transnational politics that helps to fashion them.

 

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola and Tamson Pietsch and contributors, address these questions in The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global / Transforming the Local (Routledge, 2016). You can read more at the book’s Website.

The post Towards a transnational politics of higher education appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Where to begin? First order treachery, the double Brutus, a “cuckoo nest plot” – this is a political assassination that will go into Conservative party lore alongside the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher. On a cold summer morning, Boris Johnson’s career was laid waste in a matter of hours by his campaign director and confidante Michael Gove, the Brexit-whisperer who convinced him to turn on Brussels. Politics in a democracy does not get more savage than this.

Was this betrayal plotted over months, days, hours? What role did the chancellor George Osborne play? Was Mr Johnson making his own overtures to step aside for Theresa May, the home secretary? The Westminster lobby have done a wonderful job of reconstructing the high-intrigue and low-skulduggery of Johnson’s undoing.

Read more

On 30 June 2016 the Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on a directive to reduce emissions of air pollutants. This so-called new NEC Directive sets stricter national limits from 2020 to 2029 and from 2030 onwards. 

"With this directive we will combat air pollution, a killer that annually causes over 400 000 premature deaths. The reduction of emissions of certain pollutants will ensure substantial health benefits. I am very pleased that after years of negotiations we were able to reach this agreement on the last day of the Dutch presidency, for all the people in Europe".

Sharon Dijksma, Dutch Minister for the Environment and president of the Council

The aim of this directive is to further address the health risks and environmental impact of air pollution. It is also meant to align EU law with international commitments (following the revision of the Gothenburg Protocol in 2012).

Pollutants

The new directive set national limits for the emissions of five pollutants: sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, non-methane volatile organic compounds, ammonia and fine particulate matter.

National emission limits

The national emission limits for each pollutant from 2020 to 2029 are identical to those to which the member states are already committed  in the revised Gothenburg protocol. New stricter reductions from 2030 have now been agreed.

With the new commitments, the health impact of air pollution is estimated to be reduced by about 50% in 2030 (compared to 2005).

Emission levels for 2025

Indicative emission levels for 2025 will be identified for each member state.  They will be determined on the basis of  a linear trajectory towards the emission limits that will apply from 2030. However, member states will have the possibility to follow a non-linear trajectory if this is more efficient.

If member states deviate from the trajectory planned, they will need to give the reasons and explain the actions they intend to take  in order to get back on track.

Flexibility

Some flexibility to comply with the limits is foreseen, under certain circumstances. For instance, if one year a member state cannot fulfil its commitment due to an exceptionally cold winter or dry summer, this country will have the possibility to average out annual emissions with those of the preceding and subsequent year.

Timeline and next steps

The Commission presented its proposal as part of the 'Air quality package' in December 2013. This file follows the ordinary legislative procedure. The European Parliament voted its position on the proposed directive in October 2015. The Council agreed on a general approach in December 2015. This directive needs qualified majority to be adopted by the Council.

In June 2016 a compromise text proposed by the presidency of the Council was supported by Coreper. On 30 June the text was in principle accepted by the European Parliament.

The European Parliament is expected to vote it in the autumn. Then the text will be submitted to the Council for final adoption at first reading.

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Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

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You may manually download this video in WMV (833Mb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Location : asp
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP