European Union

In response to Ukrainian sanctions, Moscow has published a list of 322 individuals and 68 businesses that have allegedly damaged the interests of Russia and its citizens. In addition to ministers, legislators and business leaders, the list includes the son of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Media in both countries discuss whether the sanctions are justified.

On the first of November, Finland always publishes tax data from the previous year. Nearly all media outlets list the income of prominent individuals. One can search online for the tax information of those who have earned more than 100,000 euros. And at the tax office information about people who've earned less than that can be requested. Is Finland doing the right thing?

After Merkel's announcement that she will not stand for election as leader of the CDU at the next party conference, Europe's leading politicians have expressed their respect for her decision and in particular her commitment to Europe. Europe's commentators are already looking ahead and discussing what qualities her successor will need, especially as regards their role in European policy.

A Euro-American Union: Reflections on an Academic Marriage

Anne-Marie Slaughter

In December of 1993, Andrew Moravcsik published ‘Preferences and Power in the European Community’ in the pages of the Journal of Common Market Studies, giving rise to the Liberal Intergovernmentalist theory of European integration. This month, the journal marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Moravcsik’s article with a special issue, “Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Its Critics,” devoted to assessing the legacy of Liberal Intergovernmentalism and its continued relevance in today’s crisis-ridden EU. 

Here, Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of New America and Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, reflects on her twenty-five year intellectual dialogue with, and marriage to, Andrew Moravcsik. 

*  *  *  *  *

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Liberal Intergovernmentalism happens to be Andy’s and my 25th wedding anniversary. It is thus time to celebrate many types of cross-fertilization. Andy has influenced my thinking in so many ways for so many years that sometimes I’m no longer sure how to disentangle where his thinking leaves off and mine begins. Yet we also remain strongly and occasionally even stridently at odds, with what he would call my legalism clashing sharply with what I would call his cynicism. Our differences are shaped by our disciplines as much as by our personalities and intellects, but I learn from him even in dissent.

Andy and I met in the fall of 1985, when I was a pre-doc at Oxford but on a Ford Fellowship at what was still then the Center for International Affairs at Harvard (now the Weatherhead Center). I remember this impossibly tall man standing in – filling up – the doorway of my small office, handing out a flyer to a party that he and his housemates were giving on Orchard Street. Three years later, as my first marriage ended, I went to Paris for a conference, stayed with Andy, and fell madly in love. We became a couple in early 1990, just after I became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago law school.

Anne-Marie Slaughter and Andrew Moravcsik

My name then was still Anne-Marie Burley. Andy would go to EU conferences and expand his theory of intergovernmentalism, and some graduate student not yet in on the latest gossip would innocently ask him whether he had read Burley and Mattli (1993) on the supranational-functionalist character of the European Court of Justice.  Thus we cut our academic teeth on opposite sides of an ongoing debate. But it was no accident that we were both studying Europe; we are both half-European (a Hungarian father on his side and a Belgian mother on mine), and share a culture, mindset, and sensibility that has shaped us deeply.

As a lawyer and an Oxford D.Phil schooled in the tradition of Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society, I was grappling with what the late Professor Thomas Franck used to refer to as the “existential question” that every international lawyer must face: whether and how law shapes politics. Walter Mattli and I elaborated the ways in which the European Court of Justice deployed law as both a mask and a shield for politics. Andy, by contrast, was taking on the sacred cows of European federalism, stripping away visions of peace and unity to uncover bedrock economic interests.

Will Phelan’s (2018) account of European legal integration in this issue revives that debate. Phelan essentially argues that Andy was persuaded by his wife that legal integration was driven by more neo-functionalist factors, but that he shouldn’t have been! In Phelan’s account, a true liberal intergovernmentalist explanation of legal integration would focus on the member states’ deliberate choice of a treaty enforcement system that would prohibit the kind of inter-state retaliation for violations and the invocation of safeguard mechanisms to excuse violations that characterize so many international treaties. To avoid this tit-for-tat, Phelan argues, the member states sought purely judicial enforcement through both national and supranational courts.

Phelan’s argument is novel and persuasive; indeed, he makes a real contribution to a fuller understanding of the member state and judicial motives. But what he cannot explain is exactly the dimension of the EC legal system that Walter Mattli and I focused on most – the ECJ’s decision to validate and actively encourage the use of the preliminary ruling procedure by individual litigants.  The ECJ could perfectly well have narrowed the reach of the Treaty of Rome’s Article 177 just as they narrowed the reach of 173, thereby reserving treaty enforcement to domestic courts but only with regard to cases brought by member states.

Such a decision would have accomplished the goal of substituting a domestic enforcement system for an inter-state retaliation system, but would have left decisions as to when and how to enforce the treaty in the hands of state lawyers, a far more predictable and controllable outcome. Phelan shows that some state lawyers and at least one prominent ECJ judge supported this step. Yet Mattli and I emphasize the innovation of encouraging individual litigants and their lawyers to bring as many cases as possible to enforce European law, as well as the active courting of national judges to hear those cases and refer questions of European law to the ECJ. With that step, EU law became truly like national law, invoked and upheld in accordance with the self-interest and civic commitments of both litigants and judges.

In the end, Phelan’s liberal intergovernmentalist account can co-exist with Mattli’s and my account. Indeed, fitting these two arguments together is a microcosm of the way I now think of Andy’s and my work fitting together more generally. Of course states have power; Mattli and I explicitly described the ways in which the Court as a whole and individual judges responded to increasing Member State concerns about “judicial activism” in the late 1970s and 1980s (Burley and Mattli 1993: 71). But so too do institutions and the individuals who operate them, animated by interests and ideals.

From 1990 to 1994 Andy and I lived mostly in Chicago, very happy years of cohabitation and collaboration, even though Andy was actually teaching at Harvard. Above all, we had no children! We would work at either end of our living room, an arrangement that continued in our joint study to this day. The difference is that then we had time to read and respond to each other’s work.

Andy began working on what I still think is his most important work: a liberal theory of international relations. He read stacks of books of classical liberal philosophy and political theory and derived a theory of international politics from the bottom up, starting with individuals and groups in society, moving up to governments, and finally to international institutions. I was writing what would become “Law among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine” (Burley 1992). The Berlin Wall had come down, history had ended – – although of course we were too sophisticated to believe that – – and I was convinced that in fact liberal states were bound together in different ways, and follow different rules, than non-liberal states.

Over the next two decades I came to realize, however, that the networks, more than the states they bind together, were the real story, and that a bottom-up view of global politics opened up an entire field of network design and opportunities for foreign policy webcraft (Slaughter 2017). Still, Andy’s theory, together with Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s (1977) work documenting networks among the complexly interdependent OECD states, helped provide a foundation for my work.

*  *  *  *  *

To return to our personal narrative, Andy and I moved to Harvard in 1994, and later to Princeton, where Andy continues to teach. We had our first son in 1996; our second on the first day of 1999. My memories of those years are of Andy typing away furiously on the manuscript that became The Choice for Europe, typically with Edward strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn.

We no longer had time to read each other’s work and comment painstakingly on drafts; our days were filled with logistics and the daily scorecard of joint parenting. We have both documented our odyssey as the parents of a child who seemingly overnight became a determined teenager heading firmly in the wrong direction (Slaughter 2012; Moravcsik 2015). Andy became the lead parent; I came home from Washington; we both found ourselves making choices that we did not expect but do not regret. Our story as a couple may well have more practical impact, surprisingly to us, than any of our academic work.

And in the end, Andy has perhaps influenced me perhaps most as the father of our children. He parents the way he researches and writes: with intensity, passion, and rigor. His highest accolade, which our sons have picked up, is “serious.” When Andy says someone is serious, he means committed, deep and disciplined about a work or project, whether it’s a matter of vocation or avocation. When Andy goes to hear an opera, he spends weeks in advance listening to and watching videos of earlier performances to prepare himself.

Above all, Andy is deeply committed to a set of intellectual, artistic, and moral principles, perhaps best captured by the German idea of a “gebildeter Mann,” an educated man, but equally important, a cultured man. Knowledge is sterile without culture, the highest expression of the human spirit. Indeed, at some level, the love of learning and the exploration of the endless realms of the imagination merge.

This wonderful issue is the best possible tribute to not only to the ideas and knowledge, but also to the standards and attitudes that Andy has transmitted to his students. It is a celebration of thirty years of scholarship and teaching. And it is the perfect prelude to Andy’s next act.

References

Burley, Anne-Marie (1992). ‘Law among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine’, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 8, pp. 1907-1996.

Burley, Anne-Marie, and Walter Mattli (1993). ‘Europe Before the Court: A Political Theory of Legal Integration’, International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 41–76.

Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye (1977).  Power and Interdependence:  World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little Brown).

Moravcsik, Andrew (2015). ‘Why I Put My Wife’s Career First’, The Atlantic (October).

Phelan, William (2018). ‘European Legal Integration: Towards a More Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach’, Journal of Common Market Studies, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12782.

Slaughter, Anne-Marie (2012) “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic (July/August).

Slaughter, Anne-Marie (2017).  The Chessboard and The Web: Strategies of Connection in A Networked World (New Haven: Yale University Press).

The post A Euro-American Union: Reflections on an Academic Marriage appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

It’s a mark of the quality of the public Brexit debate that the title of this post could refer to pretty much any aspect of the negotiations to date: the mixture of ignorance, indifference and confusion has produced more than its fair share of mistimings and incorrect sequencings.

But today I’d like indulge in my own piece of (partial) mistiming, following a very useful discussion yesterday while giving evidence to the Exiting the EU Committee in Parliament.

The session was focused on the process and practice of ratifying the Withdrawal Agreement, but discussion also strayed into the transition and the movement to the future relationship from that transition.

As all the witnesses underlined, when transition ends (whenever that might be), it ends with a cliff edge, unless an agreement is in place to maintain some form of formal EU-UK cooperation. In that respect, it’s like 29 March 2020, but with the added complication that we currently don’t have a mechanism to extend transition as we can Article 50.

The question that arose was one of how one might square that cliff edge with the difficulty/impossibility (depending on how you feel about it) of concluding a comprehensive future relationship treaty of a kind that’s never been attempted before.

Part of the answer might lie in provisional implementation, which would allow a substantial amount of the contents to be in operation during the (likely lengthy) ratification process. The CETA example gives an indication of how that worked in a potentially-not-dissimilar case.

But that still leaves the complexity of drawing up and signing a single text. As CETA underlined, that single text contains everything and someone in the process might take exception, as Wallonia demonstrated in ratification.

So I’d like to try out some ideas here about how one could break up that single text into multiple ones, to help reduce the cross-linkage that delayed CETA approval and to potentially allow for a more stable move from transition to the end-state future relationship.

The architecture of this multiple-text would be relatively simple, in theory.

At its core would be a framework treaty. This would provide for a general structure of interactions between the EU and UK, including a management/dialogue process as well as a dispute settlement mechanism. Logically, these could be the same as those used in the transition period. In substantive policy terms, you’d also have the maintenance of the transition provisions, but with a mechanism for their suspension as new, sectoral agreements could be reached.

Those sectoral agreement would form the second element, and could be constructed as narrowly or as broadly as required, with negotiation and implementation running at variable speeds.

The merits of this approach would be multiple.

Firstly, it would move transition off the Article 50 basis to the proper one (Arts.207, 217, etc), thus removing a major legal headache for the EU and so providing much more stability for both parties.

Secondly, given the broad acceptance of the transition model to all parties now, the securing of the framework text might be simpler than engaging in to detailed modelling of the end-state future relationship, especially when some parties still aren’t sure what they want that end-state to be.

Thirdly, the framework text would not have to be a complete translation of transition into a new text: if parties could agree within those negotiations that they would end participation in specific areas, then that could already be included, allowing everyone to show that it wasn’t simply a holding exercise. Fisheries and agriculture might be obvious examples of this.

Fourthly, by push substantive changes out to sectoral agreements, it would be possible to avoid progress in one area getting held up by delays in another. So security cooperation could be fast-tracked, while arguments about services continue.

Fifthly, this arrangement would avoid some of the problems of the Swiss model, where multiple treaties were agreed simultaneously and are cross-linked. The EU doesn’t like this, since it’s complex and fiddly. In this proposal, the framework would be the single master document, and could impose conditions on what happens in the case of violation of any sectoral text (e.g. recourse to dispute resolution, or revision to transition provisions). The framework could also create a streamlined ratification process for the sectoral texts, to reduce ratification delays.

But problems would remain.

The central one is the framework document still remains a big and daunting document, and ratification would need to be in place by the end of transition, to ensure it was fully effective. That might be possible, because it’s more about can-kicking than making final decisions on the end-state, but equally that can-kicking might be cause for concern for some parties.

Much would depend on local political conditions around the negotiations. If parties (and particularly the UK) remain at the high level of politicisation on the subject, then the holding pattern that this approach would suggest might not be an option, especially if transition itself had to be extended to allow for ratification to be completed.

However, in the absence of clear consensus about what the end-state should be, thinking about ways to avoid falling off the cliff edge might be of interest.

And this brings us back to getting ahead of ourselves.

All of this clearly depends on an agreement being reached on Article 50 and the Withdrawal Agreement. That said, there are also the active discussions on the Political Declaration, where parties might usefully begin to think about where they’re heading, and how.

Too often in Brexit, decisions have been taken by default or in haste, because we’ve not had the capacity or willingness to raise our eyes from the immediate challenges that surround us.

In those cases, and in this case, that means making less-than-optimal choices. So maybe we can try to change how we do things.

The post Getting ahead of ourselves appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

We wholeheartedly welcome the release of Aasiya Noreen, also known as Asia Bibi, after eight years in prison, following the ruling of the Pakistan's Supreme Court, overturning her conviction for blasphemy which is unfortunately punishable by death under Pakistan’ laws. Mr McAllister and Mr Panzeri also emphasised “Pakistani authorities must continue to uphold the rule of law and Pakistan’s international commitments on human rights”.

We condemn the violence by extremist elements in Pakistan and hope that, in the light of the past violence against victims of blasphemy, allegations by vigilantes as well as those who criticised blasphemy laws, the Pakistani government will do its utmost to provide safety to Ms Bibi, her family and those courageous persons defending freedom of expression and religion.

Mr McAllister recalls that the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee visited Pakistan in April last year and held in-depth exchanges of views with the authorities and civil society, including human rights defenders, on the human rights situation in the country.
Further information
European Parliament resolution of 15 June 2017 on Pakistan, notably the situation of human rights defenders and the death penalty
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

A European Parliament’s delegation of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Subcommitee on Human Rights, headed by Chairman David McAllister met with António Guterres the UN Secretary General, in New York on Tuesday.
The delegation of MEPs explored ways to reaffirm the importance of cooperation between the EU and the UN in order to promote and guarantee multilateralism while there are growing threats to democracy worldwide. The need to enhance the credibility of multilateral diplomacy to achieve real results was underlined. The EU is strongly committed to promoting a rules-based global order with multilateralism as its key principle and with the UN at its core. UNSG Guterres insisted on the fact that the EU is a vital and honest broker.
Further information
Read the complete text of the press statement
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

The standardisation of armaments has been a long-standing focus of EU efforts to enhance the Union’s military effectiveness, to improve capability development and to support the competitiveness of the European defence industry. Armaments standardisation is a process that can lead to cost savings for defence spending by injecting added-value in defence production processes and the avoidance of capability and equipment duplication. Standardisation is a method of improving interoperability within and between European armed forces and a process that can enhance the operational effectiveness of Europe’s militaries. Both the EU and NATO have taken measures over many years and decades to enhance armaments standardisation in Europe. Yet the nature of the contemporary global defence market is that many more technologies and components integrated into military systems are sourced and/or produced in the civilian sector. The line drawn between defence equipment and capabilities on the one hand, and civilian products and technologies on the other, is increasingly blurred. In this context, and in relation to recent developments on EU defence cooperation, this study analyses the standardisation approaches taken by the EU in relation to maritime information sharing and remotely piloted aircraft systems. It makes recommendations on how EU approaches to armaments standardisation can be expanded and enhanced.
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

As it stands, the United Kingdom is due to leave the EU on 29 March 2019 (as a consequence of invoking Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union on 29 March 2017 by the UK government), when the period for negotiating a withdrawal agreement will end unless an extension is agreed. The so-called “Great Repeal Bill” (which would repeal the European Communities Act of 1972 and converge in UK law all enactments previously in force under EU law), subsequently renamed the European Union (Withdrawal) bill,  was introduced to the House of Commons on 13 July 2017 and became law in June 2018.

This Act inter alia legislates for formal incorporation of up to 20,000 pieces of EU law onto the UK by:

– conversion of directly applicable EU Regulations into the UK law

– preservation of laws that have been made in the UK in order to implement its obligations imposed onto the UK as a consequence of its EU membership, and

– continuing to make available in the UK those rights enshrined in the EU treaties, that are relied upon directly in court

One of the areas of a particular regulatory concern in this regard is the situation with EU standards, or more precisely – EU Harmonised Standards, which set benchmarks for the safety and quality of products and services across multiple sectors —from energy and healthcare to transport — to protect consumers and facilitate cross-border trade.

As stated on the DG GROWTH website,

“A harmonised standard is a European standard developed by a recognised European Standards Organisation: CEN, CENELEC, or ETSI. It is created following a request from the European Commission to one of these organisations. Manufacturers, other economic operators, or conformity assessment bodies can use harmonised standards to demonstrate that products, services, or processes comply with relevant EU legislation.

The references of harmonised standards must be published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The purpose of this website is to provide access to the latest lists of references of harmonised standards and other European standards published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU)”[1].

There are currently 33 areas for regulating production of goods and performance of services in the EU covered by Harmonised Standards approach.

And whereas the above-mentioned European Union (Withdrawal) bill may preserve those EU standards applicable in the UK, it will not necessarily be reciprocal for British standards being valid or accepted throughout the EU after the 29 March 2017, as the UK will become a so-called ‘third country’ overnight.

In the subsequent chapters we will analyze various approaches and scenarios and will attempt to make suggestions as how to achieve a workable modus operandi.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/european-standards/harmonised-standards_en

 

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Delegations

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - Draft recommendation on the proposal for a Council decision on the conclusion of the Agreement in the form of an exchange of letters between the European Union and the Kingdom of Morocco on the amendment of Protocols 1 and 4 to the Euro-Mediterranean Agreement establishing an association between the European Communities and their Member States, of the one part, and the Kingdom of Morocco, of the other part
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP