European Union

Two years ago, the European Union had its first true electoral campaign held in public for the selection of the EU’s chief administrator, the President of the European Commission. Now, although within a different institutional context, we witness a similar process in the United Nations: the first open nomination procedure for the next chief administrator of the UN, its Secretary-General.

Is Helen Clark a UN Spitzenkandidat(in)? (Screenshot from the hearings live stream, 14 April 2016)

The so-called Spitzenkandidaten-process (‘Spitzenkandidat’ means ‘top candidate’ in German) in 2014 was basically a power-struggle between the European Parliament, especially the main European political parties represented therein, and the European Council, the representation of all 28 heads of state and government in the EU. I  blogged occasionally about this process here, and I followed the process professionally while working at Transparency International.

By now, there’s also ton of research discussing the Spitzenkandidaten-process and how to interpret it. Most arguing it was a win of the European Parliament, but others disagree. The question is whether there is any resemblance to the UN’s (s)election procedure for the next Secretary-General.

With this week’s public hearings of the (first) nine candidates for the post of UN Secretary-General, the UN is also entering a new period that will require a lot of interpretation once the process is over. At UNdispatch, where the hearings and the social media reactions have been nicely covered, Mark L. Goldberg and Richard Gowen have discussed the hearings and how to interpret them in a 30-minute podcast episode well worth listening to.

Interestingly, some elements of the UN Spitzenkandidaten-process are pretty similar to that of the EU’s:

1. Just like the EP asserted the power of de-facto nomination from the European Council, so did the UN General Assembly when proposing in April 2015 to have a more transparent nomination process and now imposing the hearings upon the Security Council.
2. Just like the United Kingdom (and some other European Council members) disagreed with the parliamentary (s)election process and has tried to stop it, Russia and China do not seem to be big fans of the open nomination process. As Goldberg and Gowen discussed in the podcast, Russia was the only permanent member of Security Council not asking questions to the candidates and China only was represented through the G77 representative.
3. Similar to the EU’s Spitzenkandidaten, the ones who have come forward so far include a former prime minister with extensive UN experience – i.e. Helen Clark, kind of the Jean-Claude Juncker of the UN process – or with previous experience as presidents of the UN’s General Assembly – making Vuk Jeremic and Srgjan Kerim the Martin Schulzes of the process.
4. The UN candidates are not just present and visible in the formal hearings, but they are actually campaigning publicly, by touring around the world and (some) use social media campaigns to be visible to a wider public (as did the EU Spitzenkandidaten), although the UN’s public are rather diplomats and political leaders around the world.

There are some other elements that are relevant in both arenas, such as geographical balance, in the UN a rotation between the different regional groups, in the EU a geographical and political balance between the various top posts (European Parliament and Commission presidents, High Representative and European Council president).

The big different is the institutional setting: first, the UN General Assembly is a member state body, whereas the European Parliament is a directly elected assembly. Thus, whereas the Spitzenkandidaten-process in the EU can be seen as a struggle between (supranational) parliamentary forces and (intergovernmental) executive forces, the transparency-process in the UN is rather a struggle between the “Big Five” and the 188 other countries, or, as suggested by the absence of Russia and China in the hearings, a geopolitical fight between public policy making of the “West” and the politics of backroom diplomacy in search of traditional stability by the “East”.

There is a second difference: in the European Council, the United Kingdom could be outvoted thanks to the voting procedures for the nomination of a candidate. In the UN Security Council, each of the Big Five has a veto. In his 2015 article “The Secretary-General We Deserve?” (Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 21:4), Simon Chesterman suggests that this could lead to a situation in which there is an institutional deadlock:

If the favourite candidate(s) of the General Assembly emerging from the open hearings is (are) blocked by one of the five permanent members, a potential compromise candidate of the Security Council might be blocked by the General Assembly. A similar situation was considered possible after the 2014 European elections, when it was still unclear whether the European Council would ultimately nominate the candidate of the European People’s Party, Jean-Claude Juncker, or some other name.

The majority in the European Parliament pretty much threatened to refuse any other candidate, and in the end won this fight. However, different to the General Assembly, candidates were actually put forward by wider political groups which, in the end, could claim to be legitimised by a popular vote, no matter how invisible the Spitzenkandidaten-process had been in most countries. There is no such legitimising force in the UN General Assembly, and so it will be interesting to see how this plays out when the end of the year comes closer and the term of Ban Ki-Moon comes to an end.

In summary, whereas the two recent or ongoing (s)election procedures for the President of the European Commission and the Secretary-General of the European Council share some common dynamics and elements that make them look similar in some sense, the institutional setting and the geopolitical dimension of the (s)election of the UN Secretary-General makes this process a much different beast to the EU’s recent process. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to see whether the UN’s General Assembly manages to impose its transparent process onto the Security Council, just like the European Parliament did on the European Council.

The post (S)electing the next Secretary-General of the United Nation: similar to the EU’s Spitzenkandidaten-process? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Location : Brussels JAN 2Q2
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Programme
Poster
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs will hold on 20 April, jointly with the Subcommittee on Security and Defence, a hearing on "Securing the External Borders of the EU - a challenge for External and Internal Security".

The objective of the hearing is to discuss the way the EU's naval operation to combat people smuggling in the Mediterranean, border assistance and capacity building in the Sahel, and Frontex operations function together. The current crises in the EU neighbourhood demonstrate how deeply internal and external security are interlinked.

Location : Room Paul-Henri Spaak (5B001), Brussels
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Programme
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

On 20 April, SEDE will hold an exchange of views with Amada Paul, European Policy Centre and a representative from the EEAS (tbc) on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its impact on the stability in the South Caucasus. In the 1920s, the region was assigned the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Upon the end of the Soviet Union, this frozen conflict escalated into open war which lasted from 1988 to 1994. Recently hostilities erupted again with mutual shelling of positions along the line of contact.
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Draft agenda and meeting documents
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

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Will Sunday's referendum help or hurt Beppe Grillo, right, leader of the FIve Star Movement?

Referendums in Europe are often a blunt weapon against the establishment. Italians will be voting in one on Sunday and, of course, it could end badly for Matteo Renzi, the country’s restless centre-left premier. But more likely the result will buck the trend. Indeed this referendum may actually turn the tables and leave the anti-establishment Five Star Movement licking its wounds.

The issue is slightly obscure – oil and gas drilling rights – and the politics is far from straightforward. As the FT’s James Politi explains, Italians will vote on whether to stop renewing offshore licenses for facilities within 12 miles of the coast. The latest polls show the pro-ban environmentalists will win handsomely. But the critical question is whether they will come near the 50 per cent turnout threshold. That is where the real politics comes in.

Mr Renzi is firmly on the side of indifference. He says the referendum is a waste of time and has urged voters to not to bother. In an interview today with La Repubblica he calls it “a hoax”. This all conveniently helps him hedge his position and avoid looking too friendly with Big Oil and Italy’s energy giant Eni. More importantly, it also puts Italy’s leading populist party, the Five Star Movement, to the test.

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The current crises in the EU neighbourhood demonstrate how deeply the EU’s internal and external security interlink, how essential it is for the EU and for its Member States to ensure effective and appropriate controls over the external borders. The SEDE/LIBE joint hearing on 20 April will in particular address how the EU's naval operation to combat people smuggling in the Mediterranean, border assistance and capability building in the Sahel, and Frontex operations function in concert.
Further information
Hearing programme
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Dalli v Commission
Law governing the institutions
The Court has confirmed the inadmissibility of the action brought by former Commissioner John Dalli in relation to his resignation allegedly requested by ex-President Barroso

All European Final of the European Law Moot Court Competition will take place at the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg on 15 April

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

As the debate about Britain’s place in Europe intensifies ahead of June’s referendum on EU membership, the role of the press has come under close scrutiny. Alastair Campbell, who was director of communications to the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, recently attacked the majority of the UK press for having “totally given up on properly informing the public”.
Meanwhile, writing on the coverage of the referendum in March 2016, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee said the referendum was “a battle of strength, a war to the death” between the government and press owners Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch about “who rules the country”.
While it is easy to exaggerate the short-term impact of newspaper coverage, it is true that a large proportion of British voters feels ill-equipped when asked to decide about continued membership of the EU. Research conducted in 2013 by the independent UK Electoral Commission to test different referendum questions found “low-levels of contextual understanding of the EU, with some participants having no knowledge of the European Union, or the status of UK membership of the EU, at all”.
More importantly, this research showed that participants themselves felt under-informed – and some told the survey staff they had changed their voting intentions as they “became more aware of their lack of knowledge, or thought more in depth about what being a member of the European Union means”.
It would be worrying for a thriving democracy if citizens’ knowledge of the EU remained so low come June 23 that they could not confidently connect their personal preference with the voting choice. It is also worrying because British citizens are the least well-informed in Europe, according to analysis of Eurobarometer survey data by the LSE’s Simon Hix.
The survey contained three simple questions with true-and-false answers such as whether Switzerland is member of the EU or not. Nearly a quarter of British respondents got this question wrong (only Greek Cypriots scored lower here) and only 28% could answer all three questions accurately (just above Latvia).
Sound and fury
So why is public knowledge so low? The electoral commission study considered the media a crucial source of individuals’ knowledge about the EU. Single issues gleaned from it, or from personal experiences, influenced initial voting intentions.
But not all media types are trusted equally. A representative European survey in September 2015 shows that 73% of people in the UK “do not tend to trust” the printed press – the highest figure among all EU member states and a staggering 23% higher than the EU average. The “do not tend to trust” figure for UK television, meanwhile, is 46% – in line with the EU average.
Yet the press is a major source of information about the EU and often sets the agenda for television, which is why many researchers worry about some of the longstanding traits of UK press coverage of the EU.
One very basic issue is accuracy of reporting about how decisions and laws are made in the EU. Press coverage frequently depicts the European Commission as if it had the same powers as a conventional government backed by a majority in parliament and able to have its proposals ratified and implemented. This is inaccurate as the overwhelming majority of legislation can be amended and potentially rejected by the European Parliament as well as by national ministers in the Council, who in turn are accountable to their own parliaments.
Getting it wrong
On the same day that The Sun published its controversial claim that the “Queen Backs Brexit”, the paper also acknowledged that it had confused an opinion by an advocate-general of the European Court of Justice with an actual ruling of the “euro judges”. It is a seemingly trivial example, but part of a broader picture of many press stories containing false alarms about alleged regulatory frenzy against larger condoms and prawn cocktail flavour crisps. Some of these stories are plain wrong, others result from unnecessary national “goldplating” of EU directives as Boris Johnson conceded when giving evidence before the Commons Treasury Select committee.
Another example of deficient press coverage were the 2014 European Parliament elections. Large parts of the press failed to explain to their readers and voters that a change in the Lisbon Treaty meant that one of the candidates nominated by the two large party groupings had a good chance of becoming Commission president. As Simon Hix shows, this resulted in large differences in British and German media coverage of Schulz and Juncker, which also partially explains why Britain ended up in a minority of two (against 26) when opposing the winner of the parliamentary elections as Commission president.
In turn, this misjudgement on the part of the press was partly the result of its overreliance on the government for interpretation of EU issues. In the past this has often translated into a rather one-sided picture of what actually happens behind closed doors at the Council and a failure to appreciate that genuine government victories are much rarer than compromises.
The ‘battle of Brussels’
However, as press attention on the EU has fluctuated strongly depending on the influence of eurosceptics on government majorities, readers can easily miss out on coverage of EU initiatives that are important in their own right and potentially far-reaching consequences, for better or worse. And the familiarity of UK journalists with Westminster’s confrontational culture leads many journalists to cover “Brussels” as a battle of national interests between member states, thus missing the equally important left-right conflict within the various groupings in the EU institutions.
Claims that media coverage of the EU is biased are naturally contested and are difficult to measure accurately. However, a representative survey conducted in November 2015 asked British respondents about how their country’s press presented the EU. British respondents were much more likely to identify negative bias against the EU (23%) than the EU average (11%). British television was seen as more objective (46%) in its EU coverage than the press (37%), but even here the perception of negative bias was ten percentage points higher than the EU average.
It is to be welcomed that some papers, prominent among them The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, have recognised the problem and try to provide their readers with essential and usually accurate information about the EU and what British membership means in practice, not just different opinions. However, as more newspapers enter campaigning mode, this switch may intensify some of the problems described, and further damage – rather than enhance – readers’ trust in the press.

Christoph Meyer is Professor of European and International Politics at King’s College London.

*this is a slightly longer revised version of a piece first published on The Conversation and the ESRC UK in a Changing Europe Initiative

The post Press coverage of the EU is failing readers and voters* appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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When the European Commission first opened up proceedings to examine whether Poland had violated European norms, it said they would wait until constitutional scholars at the Council of Europe examined the situation first. Well, it’s been a month since the Council slammed the new government in Warsaw – and Frans Timmermans, the Commission vice-president in charge of rule-of-law issues hasn’t done anything yet. The European Parliament yesterday did its best to make sure he doesn’t forget.

MEPs yesterday voted 513 to 142 in favour of a motion censuring Poland’s right-wing, conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government and ordering it to reverse changes to the country’s top court that have left it paralysed. As procedural slaps on the wrist go, it was relatively strong. And while it is legally little more than a strongly-written letter, it also called on the Commission to push ahead with its unprecedented probe into Warsaw’s “threat to constitutional democracy” – which technically could result in sanctions.

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