European Union

AMENDMENTS 1 - 76 - Draft report Recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice President of Commission/High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the Institutional Framework Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 155 - Draft report Report on the 2018 Commission Report on Turkey
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

AMENDMENTS 156 - 319 - Draft report Report on the 2018 Commission Report on Turkey
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

AMENDMENTS 651 - 900 - Draft report Establishing the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument
Committee on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Development

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

AMENDMENTS 901 - 1150 - Draft report Establishing the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument
Committee on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Development

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

DRAFT REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, to the Commission and to the Vice-President/ High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the association agreement between the EU and Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Juan Fernando López Aguilar

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 21 - Draft opinion Discharge 2017: General budget of the EU - European External Action Service
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Committee and political group meetings, Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2019 - EP

RECOMMENDATION on the draft Council decision on the conclusion, on behalf of the Union and of the Member States, of the Protocol to the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement establishing a partnership between the European Communities and their Member States, of the one part, and the Kyrgyz Republic, of the other part, to take account of the accession of the Republic of Croatia to the European Union
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Cristian Dan Preda

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

REPORT on EU Guidelines and the mandate of the EU Special Envoy on the promotion of freedom of religion or belief outside the EU
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Andrzej Grzyb

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the comprehensive agreement between the EU and the Kyrgyz Republic
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Cristian Dan Preda

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Not the curry in question, just a stock photo of someone who eats off chopping boards…

Like the rest of you, I spent much of Christmas trying hard not to think too hard about Brexit, and for the most part I succeeded.

Right up until about 0100 on 1 January, when I lay awake in bed like some modern-day Scrooge, thinking about Brexits to come.

Experience told me that then wasn’t the time to share with loved ones, so I’ve saved it up for you lot instead.

You’re welcome.

The curry

For reasons that needn’t bother us here, we stayed in on New Year’s Eve: this became the plan relatively late in the day, but we put into effect some options. a contingency, if you will.

That contingency centred on ordering a curry from our regular provider. For context, they deliver super-fast (current record is 20 minutes and the mean is only about 10 minutes more), the food is always really good, and we’ve never had problems before.

Of course, we knew that NYE was likely to be a bit different, as others might have had the same idea as us, so we called at 6.30 to order early: we’d cover the gap to midnight with movies and family board games (it’s non-stop fun round ours).

In the spirit of the season, the adults consumed some alcohol and everyone consumed some nibbles, while we chatted and waited.

Time passed.

After an hour-and-a-half, I tried calling the curry house for an indication of when the curry might arrive. Both numbers were engaged, and remained engaged every one of the times we tried for the next hour or more.

Initially, this wasn’t a problem, but by the time 9 o’clock was heaving into view, we were talking about further contingencies: trying to piece together something from the (rather bare) cupboard, basically, since no one was in a condition to drive anywhere, and shops and restaurants would be closed.

Just as we were about to get going on cooking some plain pasta, the doorbell rang. The curry was there, delivered by an apologetic guy who explained that he’d been drafted in at 8 o’clock to help with the backlog of deliveries.

Obviously, our frustration was tempered by the smell of the food, so down we sat to eat. Whereupon it become apparent that the curry had been prepared with its usual speed and efficiency. At 6.30.

Fun through it was to observe the younger members of the family compete on how far they could bend their poppadoms (very far, BTW), it did rob the meal of something (enjoyable poppadoms, mainly), as did the missing bits of the order.

So middle-class, so what?

You don’t care about my curry, and nor should you: we eventually got a meal that still tasted good for the very large majority of its parts, plus we made the getting-to-midnight bit of NYE quite a bit simpler.

But for me, laying there some hours later, it underlined some key points about contingency planning (because that’s the crazy-fun kind of guy I am).

Most obviously, contingencies need preparation: the more critical the situation, the less scope there is for making things up as you go, there and then. We’d not planned for no-curry, but we had some food in the house: if we’d been dealing with something involving a system critical to life, then we’d have made absolutely sure we had everything in place, plus back-ups.

But the evening also highlights another key part of contingency planning: the interconnectedness of processes. Put differently, there’s stuff you can control and stuff you can’t, so you either need to bring enough under your control to make your contingency work or you need to get others to also prepare for the contingency.

In the case of the curry, we’d assumed the curry place would have enough experience of NYE demand to maintain their usual service provision. And they mostly did: the food was prepared promptly and largely correctly. But there was a bottle-neck in the deliveries: the reason could have been any of  of several factors, but the capacity to unblock the problem was evidently limited. In addition, the general nature of the problem exacerbated the problem, as lots of people were obviously trying to phone in and find out what was happening with their orders, making it harder to provide that information to others.

Thus, our contingency – staying in – relied on the curry house’s contingency – ramping-up for NYE – which in turn relied on the delivery team’s situation. Our own choices – a couple of drinks – meant we’d closed down some contingencies to our contingency – driving over to the curry place, or to find a corner-shop still open.

All of which is to say that planning for even the mundane can be difficult.

And Brexit is not mundane at all: it’s systemic, it’s profound in its effects and it contains a high degree of uncertainty.

This was all thrown into some relief over Christmas by the story of the plans for cross-Channel ferries.

The government had spent £100m on securing extra capacity on routes beyond Dover-Calais, to try and reduce some of the bottle-necking that will likely ensue in a no-deal scenario. Most of that money went to established providers, but £14m went to a ‘start-up’, planning to run Ramsgate-Oostende services, but not actually yet in possession of a vessel.

Quite aside for the process issues involved – the government bypassed tendering for all this – we can see the same problems as with my curry.

The government relies on the start-up to be able to provide the service, but the start-up relies on someone else to provide it with a vessel or two; on Ramsgate harbour to dredge sufficiently-deep channels for the ferries to be able to navigate the port; and on the British and Belgian governments to provide the necessary customs and border control infrastructure in both ports to allow goods to access the ferry.

At the most mundane level, the company will need suitably skilled personnel to sail, dock and load the ferries.

Modern economic, social and political systems are characterised by these kinds of networks of different individuals and organisations, working with and across each other. To expect that any one of these – even a government – to be able (let alone willing) to cover all the risk and all the possible contingencies is at best misguided, and at worse highly problematic.

As we roll towards March, we’re going to see many more cases like the ferries, where the systemic issues and bottle-necks become apparent, alongside the limited capacity of anyone to address them.

That doesn’t mean we’re helpless, but the more there is an understanding of what is and isn’t realistic to expect, the better everyone can manage their expectations and work towards finding resolutions.

The post A story about a curry and no-deal planning appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

It’s been confirmed by both the Prime Minister, Theresa May, and the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, that the choice now is either ‘the deal’, ‘no deal ‘or ‘no Brexit’.

‘The deal’ negotiated between the EU and Theresa May is the best Brexit deal available, according to both sides. In any event, the EU is adamant: the negotiations are over, and ‘the deal’ cannot be amended or debated any more.

On or around 14 January, our Parliament will vote on whether or not it accepts ‘the deal’.

If Parliament does accept it, then sadly, that’s the end of the Remain campaign and Reasons2Remain. The long and tortuous Brexit process will have reached its conclusion, and the UK really will be leaving the EU on 29 March.

We cannot campaign to remain after we’ve left, although we are confident that new campaigns will emerge to rejoin the EU in the future.

But by all accounts, it is more than likely that Parliament will reject ‘the deal’ when it’s put to the vote in a couple of weeks time.

Then, who should choose what happens next?

(Article continues after one-minute video)

If Parliament cannot resolve the impasse on Brexit, then the choice should be put back to us, the people, by way of a new advisory referendum.

Theresa May keeps saying she’s determined to deliver on ‘the will of the people’. But before she can do that, she should find out what it is.

Yes, she needs to ascertain what the ‘people’s will’ is today, and not what it might have been over two years ago, when no one knew the fuller details of Brexit that we now know.

We now know from the government’s own reports that all versions of Brexit will cause Britain considerable damage. There is no good Brexit.

We also now know that a ‘no deal’ Brexit would be the worst option of all.

Two independent bodies – our Civil Service and the Bank of England – have completed in-depth analysis and calculations. They both conclude that leaving the EU without any deal would be catastrophic for Britain. We should not even contemplate that.

Multiple assessments, including the opinion of the vast majority of economists, confirm that Britain will be better-off, safer and with greater influence by remaining a member of the EU.

Maybe, then, it’s no surprise that over 50 polls since last year’s general election all show that a majority in the country considers that Brexit is a mistake.

But the only poll that will count is new national ballot on Brexit. If that’s the next step, Parliament will be wise to exclude ‘no deal’ from the ballot paper.

If there is a new referendum, the choice – which has to be agreed by Parliament – is likely to be ‘the deal’ or ‘no Brexit’.

IF ‘THE DEAL’ WINS, SO BE IT.

We will leave the EU on the government’s agreed terms. It will be the end of the Remain campaign, but new campaigns will emerge to rejoin.

IF ‘NO BREXIT’ WINS – MEANING WE STAY IN THE EU – SO BE IT.

The European Court of Justice has already ruled that the UK can cancel Brexit, and rescind the Article 50 notice, and stay in the EU on our current good terms.

As Mrs May keeps saying: ‘Let’s get on with it.’

The sooner the better, so that we can wrap this up and all move on from three years of Brexit chaos and calamity.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
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The post The choice is the deal, no deal or no Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

My path into political science as a profession was never planned. It started rather accidentally, quite exactly 10 years ago, without me knowing that I would end up where I am today. This year, in 2019, I will try to regularly blog about this profession, my own research, and the research of others – even if this promise may end up one of those New Year’s resolutions that never really materialise.

Why do I want to start with such a series of blog posts? Mainly because I see, in online and offline conversations, with friends and family, with colleagues, and with strangers, that academic life in general and the work of a political scientist in particular need a bit more public explaining and a little more public reflection. I also get asked quite often whether what I, what we, do is relevant for society at large. So, I feel that I should explain more, and better.

When I say “I”, what does the I stands for?

It stands for the perspective of a white, male, fully mobile, German scholar (to highlight just a few dimensions of who I am) who is working on a full-time, multi-year contract at a major German university. Currently, I am an advanced postdoc, employed in a research project at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute at LMU Munich. When I’m asked what I’m an expert on, I’d probably say that I focus on United Nations and European Union institutions and finances.

I also come from a family that values and encourages education: my parents have university degrees and have always supported my path(s), whether I wanted to become a diplomat (in my late teens and early 20s), be a PhD student in political science after realising that diplomacy wasn’t for me (in my mid-20s), turn to professional activism close to my PhD topic (in my late 20s) or start the life of a university-based political scientist (in my 30s).

Why is this relevant? Because I have learnt to know my privileges, and because my path into academia shapes how I see the world and this profession.

First, I work in an environment that under-represents women and that also lacks diversity with regard to other dimensions of social and individual personal backgrounds. On most of these dimensions, I score clearly towards traditional individual privilege. And even though the individual is pretty important in academic life, the academic system also favours well-known, rich, and Western institutions. As I work at such an institution, I have additional institutional privilege.

Second, although I am not tenured, my personal background and professional situation as well as my path into academia make that I feel less pressured by the precarious life situations that most of my peers face, in various combinations. These precarious situations include short term contracts; unwanted part-time contracts; implicit and explicit pressures to be highly mobile across countries, continents or world-wide, independent of family and relationship situations; being required to do research-unrelated teaching and to deliver on requests related to university administration while being mainly evaluated on research output and fundraising success for career advancement; etc. Although I face some of these pressures (some increasingly), my personal and professional situation eases my ability to deal with them (for now).

Third, when I study the United Nations and the European Union institutions and finances, I look at the world through the eyes of a Western European scholar, despite some East European socialisation and despite my urge to better include different perspectives into my work. So far, I focus mainly on the powerful in my research, not the powerless. I build on the notions of democracy, bureaucracy, culture, politics, etc. that I have grown up with, perspectives that my own, mostly male, mostly Western, exclusively white professors and academic supervisors have rarely questioned, at least not fundamentally. So my perspective is well enough into the current mainstream to not feel marginalised academically, even when I work on so far unexplored issues.

In light of this, my goal for this year is not to explain “how political science works” as if this was an objective perspective where personal and institutional factors don’t matter. I simply would like to share more often what I do, whether it’s researching, teaching, publishing or communicating science; to share more frequently what I learn, whether it ends up in academic publications or not; and to publish one or the other commentary on academic life as I experience it, without having to go through the lengths of the traditional academic publication process.

PS: If I blogged at least weekly, something between 500 and 1000 words per article, I’d end up with around 25,000 to 50,000 words, that is 4-6 academic articles or about half an academic book. If academia stays the way it is, this will not be counted as academic publishing and it will not be considered by search committees. Because it’s on social media.

It means what I write here is not registered on Google Scholar or in the Social Science Citation Index, and it therefore does not count in academic terms. That’s fine for me. It’s fine because the only blog post that I managed to write in 2018 – I was much more prolific in previous years – already has about as many views as the first peer reviewed academic article I ever published (paywalled, published more than two years earlier in 2016). My only blog post last year was in German [Google translation]), about why major academic conferences and political science as a profession are not as bad as reported in a major German newspaper. I take this as an encouragement to write more about my job and my profession, whether it counts or not.

The post 2019 in Political Science – A Personal Account (1) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

…whatever be cause or effect, the disintegration of culture is the most serious and the most difficult to repair.

T S Elliot, Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, 1948

What words can be used to portray the present state of European and Western culture?  Diluted, fragmented, anchorless, drifting, and increasingly meaningless? Are we living in the mere afterglow of the brightest moments of a civilization now dimming?  Or, are these false notions?  Does Europe remain a coherent whole, its culture, traditions and heritage intact and unthreatened?

To pull back, to ‘zoom out’ in an attempt to discern the process of a declining civilization, to assess the state of health of a culture comprising centuries of shared recognition is no small intellectual task.  Nevertheless it was undertaken by the  Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Elliot in his famous post-war essay, Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.  Elliot, the Nobel Prize for Literature winner for that same year, was convinced that Europe as a historic focus for our common values and beliefs was indeed in trouble.  Writing  three years after the close of the Second War, he laid the groundwork for his observations by first arguing that ‘culture’ and religion were inseparable, the opposite sides of the same coin:

The first important assertion is that no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion: according to the point of view of the observer, the culture will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.

By culture, Elliot meant the aggregate of human excellence and achievement in every sphere, and not just the more modern and narrower notion of art, literature and music.  As for religion, it was the accumulated and shared recognition of our Judaeo-Greek heritage.  And, it is the linking of these two – culture and religion, that Elliot sought to underscore and emphasize.

. . . we may ask whether any culture could come into being, or maintain itself, without a religious basis. We may go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people.

The decline of religious belief and practice in western society is well documented.  The impact of that decline less so.  If Elliot is right, might it mean a concomitant decline in western culture as well? Can there be a Europe, a Western civilization without the foundation of Christianity and its precursors?  Or, is the very essence of two millennia of the ethics derived from our Judaeo-Greek heritage so ingrained that even a thin vestige remains a permanent basis for our day-to-day functioning as a society, informing virtually everything from law to art?  Put another way, can we successfully cling to long-recognised beliefs without believing?

For the culture we know, for its evolved system of values to survive, Eliot thought three conditions must be met:

The first of these is organic (not merely planned, but growing) structure, such as will foster the hereditary transmission of culture within a culture: and this requires the persistence of social classes. The second is the necessity that a culture should be analysable, geographically, into local cultures: this raises the problem of ‘regionalism’. The third is the balance of unity and diversity in religion — that is, universality of doctrine with particularity of cult and devotion.

To take the most contentious, why ‘social classes’?  In an era of mass democratization, the smoothing out, flattening and blurring of racial, ethnic and even sexual distinctions, now inflamed and driven by social media, may be the first hint that trouble lies ahead.

In her 1961 book, The Crisis in Culture: It’s Social and It’s Political Significance, German-American political scientist Hannah Arendt traced the origin of class to the second half of the 19th century:

Society began to monopolize “culture” for its own purposes, such as social position and status. This had much to do with the socially inferior position of Europe’s middle classes, which found themselves as soon as they acquired the necessary wealth and leisure in an uphill fight against the aristocracy and its contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking. In this fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role as one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself socially, and to “educate oneself” out of the lower regions, where supposedly reality was located, up into the higher, non-real regions, where beauty and the spirit supposedly were at home.

This evidently is Elliot’s ‘transmission of a culture within a culture’ at work.  It clearly would not have worked had there been no ‘upper class’ to envy, admire and imitate.  The trouble Elliot foresaw was also predicted by Hannah Arendt, albeit more than a decade later.  For both it was a fragmentation of the social classes and the uses they put to culture which was at the root of the problem.

Instead of enriching life, thought Arendt, culture was increasingly becoming utilitarian, a method of social advancement, and not an end in itself.  This, of course, is what is behind the rise of mass culture, a culture to be bought and sold.  For Elliot that meant fragmentation and decline:

If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the classes in which culture is, or should be, most highly developed, has already taken place in western society — as well as some cultural separation between one level of society and another. Religious thought and practice, philosophy and art, all tend to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with each other.

What neither could have known or even anticipated was the re-emergence of another totally different culture, one that had swept much of the then known world in the middle ages – including significant parts of Europe.  It is, of course, Islam, and today it is happening as Christian culture falters and stumbles, unsure of itself, questioning its relevance to modern life and hence its very future.

In an ironic echo of early Christian and Jewish values, the religion of Mohammed is demanding and uncompromising.  To step aside invites harsh punishment.  It is disciplined, organised and above all, rising in influence within Europe.  The overwhelmingly Muslims migrants causing so much political turmoil in Europe are a  growing in every respect – in numbers, and in economic and even in political power.  Abandoning much of what is taken for granted by Muslims as their religious duty, Christians have made their ‘deal’ with God.  ‘Render onto Caesar’ has become manifest, best seen in the West’s insistence on the strict separation of church and state.  In Islam there is no such concept.

We must turn to Roman history to see what could be the outcome of what the late American historian Samuel Huntingdon thought would become a ‘clash of civilizations.’  Gibbon in his Decline and Fall, saw the incursion of Christianity into Rome as fundamental to the Roman collapse. In his autobiography Gibbon says “…I believed, and as I still believe, that the propagation of the Gospel, and the triumph of the church, are inseparably connected with the decline of the Roman monarchy…”

Modern scholarship on the relationship between Christianity and the fall of Rome is more nuanced, as was Elliot himself in his essay, noting that “. . . the culture with which primitive Christianity came into contact (as well as that of the environment in which Christianity took its origins) was itself a religious culture in decline.”

Whatever is happening, whatever will be its outcome, this conclusion by Elliot seems indisputable:

… the one thing that time is ever sure to bring about is the loss: gain or compensation is almost always conceivable but never certain. 

If there is neither heaven nor hell; neither saints nor sinners, what will we tell the children?

 

Mike Ungersma

Christmas, 2018, Benicassim, Spain

 

 

The post Neither Heaven nor Hell; Neither Saints nor Sinners appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Declaration by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the alignment of certain third countries with Council Decision (CFSP) 2018/1656 of 6 November 2018 amending Decision (CFSP) 2017/2074 concerning restrictive measures in view of the situation in Venezuela.

On 21 December 2018, the Council prolonged economic sanctions targeting specific sectors of the Russian economy until 31 July 2019.

The EU and Japan today notified each other of the completion of their respective ratification procedures of the EU-Japan economic partnership agreement. The agreement will become effective on 1 February 2019.

Weekly schedule of President Donald Tusk 7-11 January 2019