European Union

An EU-China high-level economic is scheduled on Monday amid renewed tensions. Later this week, EU home affairs ministers will discuss the EU-Tunisia deal and the state of play of the EU pact on asylum and migration.

Still not very far away

We’re at a bit of a junction in EU-UK relations right now.

Having bumped back from the questions of good faith with February’s Windsor Framework, the two sides got to work on the next obvious target: Horizon membership.

Seven months later – and with enough discretion that I could record a podcast saying it wasn’t coming soon, two days before it came – we got a deal.

And now?

Well, now we appear to have slipped into a gap of some kind.

Certainly, there are things that need attention right now, like car batteries, but despite pressure on both sides to rework tariff schedules, the Commission seems not to want to play ball. On the UK side, joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention also looks a bit distant.

Outside the narrow confines of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the UK is also still working out how it handles the European Political Community (EPC) summit it’s supposed to host next summer (dates and location still TBC).

In short, there’s not much sign of things going on. Which is either because those things that are going on are being kept very far from the limelight, or because there aren’t things going on.

To be clear, there is a baseline of on-going contact and interaction, to service the various agreements, but that’s rather different from substantive work on opening out new areas.

If we assume that an absence of public comment is the best marker of in-camera activity, then Breton’s statement on car batteries looks like a signifier of inactivity, or impasse. And that’s for the most obvious next step in working together.

Which takes us back round to my title: are we in a holding pattern right now, and if so, what kind of holding pattern is it?

As I’ve argued before, Sunak has approached EU relations through a strong lens of his domestic political situation. Windsor made sense as a closing-off of an obvious problem (plus a clear differentiation from his predecessor but one), and Horizon was self-contained enough to be worth the effort, but getting into bigger resets looks like a hiding to nothing, either with his backbench or with voters that increasingly don’t rate the matter as that important.

So the British government is arguably in a fire-fighting mode for the rest of this administration.

But what about the EU?

Domestic factors obviously apply here too. We’re on the run-in to European elections next spring – witness Von Der Leyen’s State of the EU speech last week, with all its pitch – which means lots of people changing jobs, even if the underlying political balance doesn’t move very much.

Add to that all the other things the EU is concerned with, from rule of law to enlargement to post-Covid reconstruction, and it might be understandable if attention is elsewhere than the UK.

But at the same time, the Union has held a long-term position of deepening ties with its neighbourhood, especially with those bits of it that aren’t actively antagonistic. That’s an uneven track, but as a rule of thumb, there’s a clear preference to doing more together.

Perhaps the current hiatus is a temporary thing, a product of everyone waiting to clear the coming election year on both sides, so that everyone can pick up in late 2024 with a clearer sense of what’s what.

However, Windsor shouldn’t leave us thinking that we’re back to regular business. The scars of the Internal Market Bill and the Retained EU Law Bill and the noises off about ECHR membership are still there and still fresh in the minds of EU policymakers.

Even if there is a change of party in London next year, that will still leave issues.

Firstly, Labour have put so many fences around policy that there might not be scope for doing much. With dynamic alignment apparently also off the table, some in Brussels might be forgiven for thinking that a full and frank discussion in the UK of trade-offs might not be about to happen.

Secondly, even if Labour are willing to conclude new deals, then at least half an eye will be on the trajectory of the Conservatives in opposition. With the possible sole exception of Michael Heseltine, the general view is that the party will drift right under new leadership, given its membership. While that might make a second Labour term more likely, the past seven years will give enough pause for thought about What Britain’s Like. Is there risk in setting up more entanglements with Labour, if a returning Tory government is going to tear things up again?

Such views are understandable, but also come with the risk of setting up a new stasis.

As a case in point, look to Switzerland.

Here we have a much closer relationship, but one with significant issues, both political and institutional. Both sides bump along, sometimes making progress, but often not: we’re nearing a decade of to-and-fro on an institutional accord that still has no clear endpoint, even if the Swiss are moving once again to get things going.

In both the Swiss and the British case, the EU has arrangements that function acceptably, even if other opportunities are left on the table, so if there are more pressing issues to work on, why not just leave things as they are, on a semi-permanent basis?

The EU’s built up a lot of experience and expertise in handling crises (you can read about this is in a couple of volumes (here and here) that I’ve contributed to), but we’re not in a crisis any more.

Regular governance doesn’t have the glamour of an emergency situation, but it still requires attention and effort. Not least because several of the crises the EU has faced have come out of the failings of that regular governance: Brexit is a case in point.

As a recovering historical institutionalist, I’ll end by noting that institutions are sticky: the arrangement you put in place in a hurry because you had to often end up sticking around for a very long time, even when they don’t really work so well. Again, the Swiss model is a good example.

Whether the UK is now locked into the TCA model remains to be seen, but the next year will give us a pretty good idea.

The post Pausing, stalling or stuck? Thinking about the next steps of the EU-UK relationship appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Enhancing energy security empowers nations to heavily invest in renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. But with a stable supply of LNG, Europe can also speed up its shift away from fossil fuels.

Thousands of Greek state workers are protesting against changes to the labour law proposed by the conservative Mitsotakis government. These include a six-day week, working hours of up to 13 hours and 'on-call' contracts.

Poland's ruling party has swerved even further right as elections approach, auguring badly for EU relations.

Committee and political group meetings, Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

AMENDMENTS 56 - 119 - Draft opinion Laying down measures to strengthen solidarity and capacities in the Union to detect, prepare for and respond to cybersecurity threats and incidents
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Dragoş Tudorache

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

This is the abstract telling you something about why it's terrible and should stop, but not enough to stop you from reading the op-ed.

Journalists are invited to a seminar with lead MEPs Sabine Verheyen and Christel Schaldemose on the protection of media content online in the context of recent EU legislation.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Journalists are invited to a seminar with lead MEPs Sabine Verheyen and Christel Schaldemose on the protection of media content online in the context of recent EU legislation.

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

A small tax on the richest 0.5 percent would increase EU tax revenues by €213.2 billion, says a new report by the Greens.

EU money spent on migration in Tunisia, Libya, and Niger is likely breaching its own and international aid rules, according to a new report by Oxfam.

Following years of pressure and activism, the Dutch government published a report estimating that fossil fuel subsidies in the country amount to an annual sum ranging from €39.7bn to €46.4bn.

Europe should speed up military supplies so that it can help Ukraine alone if isolationist US politician Donald Trump re-entrs the White House.

AMENDMENTS 1 - 233 - Draft report Implementation of the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument – Global Europe
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Committee on Development
Michael Gahler, Pedro Marques, Charles Goerens, Tomas Tobé

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Opinion on Establishing the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (‘STEP’) and amending Directive 2003/87/EC, Regulations (EU) 2021/1058, (EU) 2021/1056, (EU) 2021/1057, (EU) No 1303/2013, (EU) No 223/2014, (EU) 2021/1060, (EU) 2021/523, (EU) 2021/695, (EU) 2021/697 and (EU) 2021/241
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Nathalie Loiseau

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

The next ordinary meeting of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) is scheduled to take place on Monday, 9 October 2023 from 15.00 - 18.30hrs in Brussels (SPINELLI 1G3).

The meeting agenda and documents will be published here.

SEDE missions 2023:

• Germany and Poland - 24-26 July 2023
  
• Armenia - 19-22 June 2023
  
• Romania and Moldova - 15-18 May 2023
  
• Djibouti and Somalia - 1-4 April 2023
  
• Bosnia and Herzegovina - 20-23 February 2023
  

SEDE meetings' calendar 2023
EP calendar 2023
Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

ADDE and Others
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
Reintroduction of border controls at internal borders: the ‘Returns’ Directive applies to any third-country national who has entered the territory of a Member State without fulfilling the conditions of entry, stay or residence.

Juan
DFON
The prohibition of double jeopardy does not appear to preclude the execution of a European arrest warrant against the person responsible for a fraudulent pyramid scheme set up in Spain and in Portugal

Knowledge Politics and Policies Standing Group in Prague

The 2023 edition of the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) took place in Prague, 4-8 September. The section of our ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies included nine panels on politics and policy of academic mobility and diplomacy, universities, higher and vocational education, research, and Artificial Intelligence. This year our section on Knowledge Politics and Policies took place for the 12th time and was probably one of the biggest sections we have had so far. Our panels were so well attended that in some of them the audience had difficulties to find seats, as there was standing room only. This blog post provides insights from rich presentations and discussions in a number of our panels, written by the panel chairs.

 

Contemporary issues in shaping universities

As an open topic panel, “Contemporary issues in shaping universities” addressed diverse issues from student politics in Sub-Saharan Africa, over the construction of competitive higher education regions in China, to education to work transitions.

Andrea Kronstad Felde drawing on a case study of Makerere’s student union (Uganda), discussed the party influence on student politics and decision-making and how students aimed to reinstate and reinvigorate a representative body for the students. The presentation not only fills a void of decreasing research on student politics during the last decade but adds a much-needed non-Western case study. Adding to the non-Western perspective, Taixing Sheng’s presentation (with Tatiana Fumasoli) discussed the politico-cultural project of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). Drawing on descriptive analysis, he mapped out the advances and challenges of artificially bringing together three highly diverse regions in China to establish a common competitive higher education area to rival long established global lighthouses such as the San Francisco Bay Area. In comparing the two, he provides valuable insights into utopian engineering of large cohesive economic powerhouse through metrics, cultural integration, and coercive cooperation.

Building on a collaborative chapter with colleagues from the University of Bath, Predrag Lazetic analysed political and media perceptions of students as future workers across Europe and contrasted them with student’s self-perceptions from Eurostudent data. While the public and policy discourse predominantly frames them in human capital terms as rationalist decision-makers and as an economic resource, students distanced themselves from such prescriptions, leaning towards credentialist or oppositional frames of Bildung or vocationalism. Finally, Alexander Mitterle addressed the increasing academization of work through the institutionalization of new degree programs without corresponding roots in the German labour market, namely Public Policy degrees. He shows organizational specificities, strategies and emerging field structures to which public policy schools adhere. Despite a lack of corresponding job positions, students overall find jobs according to their degree specialization and their positions.

 

Artificial Intelligence: power, politics & policy

Since 2020, a panel on AI politics, policy and power is a regular part of the Knowledge Politics and Policy section. This year’s panel started by launching a newly published special issue on Politics and policy of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Inga Ulnicane and Tero Erkkilä. This special issue, published in Review of Policy Research, includes nine articles on topics such as access to public digital services, construction of food courier profiles, intersectional bias, gender equality, policy paradigms, narratives and sociotechnical imaginaries as well as global standards and rankings. Many of these articles have benefited from the discussions in previous ECPR General Conferences, which also helped to identify five overarching themes for this special issue: social and political co-shaping of AI, the role of ideas, power, continuity and change, and interactions among developments at local, national, regional and global levels.

The talk by Meng-Hsuan Chou was based on her special issue article, co-authored with Catherine Gomes on Politics of on-demand food delivery: Policy design and the power of algorithms. Their contribution contrasts social construction of food courier profiles in Melbourne and Singapore, highlighting the role of policy. The two following talks examined AI governance in the EU. Ville Aula and Tero Erkkilä presented their study on politics of transparency, based on analysis of public consultation on the EU AI Act. Ronit Justo-Hanani drew on her recent article on AI regulation in the EU to discuss political drivers behind it. She also highlighted similarities across governance of various emerging technologies, mentioning her forthcoming book on governing nanotechnology safety. Lively discussions during the panel on issues of regulation, power asymmetries and generative AI underlined the political salience of its topic.

 

Higher education and research facing unstable circumstances

A starting point for the panel “Higher education and unstable times” was that higher education and research sectors are increasingly facing unstable circumstances. This includes societal, political, technological instability where existing institutional structures and norms may become challenged. With this starting point, the panel examined various aspects concerning the role of higher education during crisis and instability.

In the first of three papers “Resisting Big Science: Why Local Opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope Sustained Momentum”, Anna-Lena Rueland (University of Leiden), presented an analysis of how Native Hawaiians mobilized a remarkably long-term opposition towards the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi Island. In the second paper, “Education reforms in Europe’s knowledge economies: The impact of technological change on higher education”, Doglas Nunes de Sousa (Europa-Universität Flensburg) explored the role of technological change on higher education, in particular exploring the intersection between technological change, higher education policies, and labor market in Ireland and Spain, focusing particularly on the regional level. In the third and final paper of the panel, Mari Elken & Peter Maassen (both University of Oslo) examined policy changes in Europe in the area of internationalization of higher education in the context of current geopolitical and social challenges.

 

Knowledge policies in a globalized world

Standing room only for the Knowledge policies panel

In the panel “Shaping knowledge policies in a globalized world – Actors, structures, and policymaking dynamics” the different contributions addressed the key question how knowledge policies in today’s globalized higher education world come about. In the first contribution Silje Svartefoss from the University of Oslo analyzed the policy process leading to the creation of two mission-oriented innovation policies in Norway. Focusing on coordination of different actors as a key challenge the presentation highlighted that the two mission-oriented policies encountered different levels of coordination challenges that can partly be traced back to the number and type of actors involved in the process.

The second contribution by Tim Seidenschnur from the University of Kassel and Leonie Buschkamp from the University of Hannover presented a theoretically well-grounded analysis of dynamics of competition in three distinct organizational fields, namely a company, higher education, and the arts. Using extensive empirical material from the three contexts, they manage to trace differences in the way competition materializes which they explain by specificities of the organizational fields under study.

The third contribution by Yiran Zhou from the University of Cambridge presented a detailed analysis of the Chinese Discipline Evaluation in higher education focusing on its specific Chinese characteristics. Her work highlights the fact that the lack of precision in defining what the term “Chinese characteristics” refers to in the context of this evaluation scheme is by no means a flaw of the system but rather a desired imprecision that provides more room to maneuver to the state agency that is in charge of conducting these evaluations. This can be explained as one tool in the toolbox that the Chinese state uses to ensure control over their higher education system.

In the final presentation Jens Jungblut from the University of Oslo presented the main findings of a recently published edited volume. This book presents a comprehensive assessment of the politics of higher education policy in Western Europe, the US and Canada along 5 key aspects of policymaking. Through multiple levels of comparison, the volume also traces differences and similarities across contexts, contributing to the conceptual debate between sociological and historical institutionalism.

 

European Universities initiative

The panel “European Universities Initiative – taking stock and looking forward” focused on one of the most recent EU flagship projects, which concerns the establishing of transnational alliances of universities. Developed rather quickly (in less than a year), it garnered significant EU-level support and funding despite (a) concerning an area in which the EU has only supporting competence and (b) the overall crisis of the European integration project. Five papers were presented, two focusing primarily on EU level developments, while the other three explored the impact of EUI on national and institutional levels.

A paper by Alina Felder and Martina Vukasovic covered the process leading to the launch of the first call of proposals and in particular the role of associations representing interests of higher education institutions. Nadia Manzoni explored the extent to which the European Universities Initiative triggered a new wave of institutional changes in the EU, in particular concerning emerging transnational governance structures.

Antonin Charret’s study put Member States’ positioning towards the EUI front and centre, both in relation to the EU level developments as well as in relation to the participation of their universities in various alliances. In her paper, Marina Cino Pagliarello analysed whether and how transnational alliances developed within the EUI framework act as informal diplomatic actors. Finally, Marco Cavallaro (in a paper co-authored with Agata Lambrechts) provided novel evidence concerning the extent to which the goal of relative balance between excellence and inclusiveness within the scheme has been achieved. This varied set of papers, each focusing on a different aspect of the EUI, provided ample material for discussion concerning the novelty of this flagship project, its impact on European, national and institutional levels and theoretical and methodological approaches suitable for studying it.

 

Standing Group affairs: excellent paper award and membership renewal

As every year, during the conference we held the business meeting of our Standing Group. The highlight of the meeting was the award ceremony for the winners of the latest edition of our excellent paper award for emerging scholars – Dr. Adrienn Nyircsák and Anke Reinhardt. Soon the call will be out for the next round of the excellent paper award – stay tuned.

Excellent Paper Award winners Dr. Adrienn Nyircsák and Anke Reinhardt

At the moment, one of the key items on the Standing Group’s agenda is membership renewal. If you are a member of the Standing Group, please log into your My ECPR profile, go to ‘My Groups’ and renew your membership by 30 September. If you are not a member yet but would like to join our group, you can join here, by following ‘Join Standing Group’. We would like to continue and expand our collaboration and see many of you in the 2024 edition of the ECPR General Conference in Dublin next August. We hope to have a bigger room!

The post ECPR Knowledge Politics and Policies 2023 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.