European Union

The EU has given the green light to Berlin to provide €40 million in state support to construct the country’s first on-shore LNG terminal that will increase security of gas supply and is expected to operate into 2044.

Germany wants to ramp up export credits for climate-friendly technologies while cutting back support for polluting ones, but without phasing out public funding for fossil fuels entirely, prompting criticism by environmentalists.

 

Between March and June 2023, I completed a RENPET-funded research stay at the KU Leuven Faculty of Social Sciences, within the Leuven International and European Studies department” (LINES). By embarking on this residency halfway through my PhD, I sought to get more acquainted with the top-tier research carried out at LINES and gain access to KU Leuven’s outstanding facilities all over Belgium, which include extensive bibliographic resources. 

 

During my stay, I took advantage of the institution’s proximity to Brussels: I conducted interviews with public officials from EU institutions and attended various international academic conferences and research seminars. My residency was very rewarding – and even surpassed my expectations. 

 

A Variety of Experiences

 

Additionally, I had the opportunity to experience KU Leuven’s dynamic academic life, including the Research Day of the Faculty of Social Sciences’ Doctoral Programme. I also delivered a guest lecture with bachelor students from American University, as part of a joint programme involving this institution and KU Leuven. My lecture addressed the evolution of global health governance and the EU’s interaction with it, paying particular attention to the effect of crises like COVID-19. This complemented the programme’s overall focus on the EU’s responses to external shocks.  

 

Closer to the end of my stay, I presented a draft of a book chapter – which will be one of the components of my PhD – at a “LINES session”, in which early-career scholars affiliated with the department discuss their work in progress in an informal setting. I also engaged with LINES researchers and other RENPET members at the 2nd RENPET annual conference, which took place at my home institution (IBEI) in late May-early June. This event allowed me to obtain additional feedback on my research.  

 

My RENPET residency at KU Leuven has been instrumental in propelling my PhD forward. During my stay, I finalized my first PhD article and submitted it to an academic journal, completed the first draft of a co-authored book chapter, and started working on the third component of my PhD – a journal article within a Special Issue to which other LINES and RENPET researchers will also contribute. In more formal terms, my three-month research stay in a prestigious university abroad will render me eligible for an International Mention, an honorary qualification awarded in the Spanish system that will add value to my PhD diploma. 

 

My gratitude goes to…

 

I am very grateful to Dr Kolja Raube (my host at the LINES department) and Dr Katja Biedenkopf (the coordinator of LINES) for warmly welcoming me and assisting me at every step, including in the months prior to my arrival. Special thanks also go out to Charlotte Debeuf (my wonderful office mate), Franziska Petri (my friendly office neighbour and fellow commuter from Brussels), and the rest of professors and colleagues from the LINES department. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Ingrid De Wachter, Greet Louw and Amin Mirabdollah for their kind and resourceful support in various capacities. Finally, I would like to thank UACES and RENPET for their generous sponsorship and for presenting early-career scholars with this valuable opportunity, among many others. 

 

More About the Author

 

Óscar Fernández is a PhD candidate in the program Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, under the supervision of Dr. Robert Kissack. He obtained a predoctoral contract from the H2020 research project ENGAGE (Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe). His fields of interest are the European Union’s external action, global health governance, international security, and conflict management. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Pompeu Fabra University, a Master’s degree in Advanced European and International Studies from the Centre International de Formation Européenne, and a Master’s degree in Internationalization from the University of Barcelona. Prior to joining IBEI, he was senior researcher at the EsadeGeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics and junior researcher at the World Health Organization. 

 

 

The RENPET network invites applications from PhD students and Early-Career Researchers (within 5 years of their PhD) working in EU Foreign Policy, EU external relations or related fields to apply for bursaries to support an extended residency (2-3 months) at one of the network institutions. Find out more on the RENPET website. Apply for a residency via the UACES website.  

The post RENPET network residency at KU Leuven appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

To date, existing measures to give young people a say in the policies that affect them have either been limited to areas such as culture or education, or have been designed for young people rather than with or by them.

The European Commission opened a formal investigation on Microsoft on Thursday (27 July) over concerns the company might have bundled its collaboration product Teams with its productivity software part of the Office package.

A recently proposed universal ban on ‘forever chemicals’ in the EU would have a negative impact on pharmaceutical innovation and access to medicines, the pharmaceutical industry has warned.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo made three big mistakes during the election campaign that led to the Popular Party's underperformance.

The recent boom in generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT has spurred a flurry of multilateral initiatives as regulators attempt to respond to the breakneck pace of development of AI systems, write Carisa Nietsche and Camille Ford.

DRAFT REPORT Implementation of the common security and defence policy – annual report 2023
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Sven Mikser

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

Germany's federal states have agreed on proposals to improve the catalogue of eco-schemes, a new instrument under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to reward sustainable farming practices, whose take-up has so far been lower than hoped.

NGOs are suing the European Commission for having approved France's national plan for implementing the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) despite allegedly breaching EU law - a move that French Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau calls a "destructive battle".

A European Parliament draft report about online services’ addictive design paints a damning picture of the mental health consequences of excessive screen time and calls for new EU rules to address the problem. Addictive design, which refers to capturing users’...

The European Commission and international health agencies are closely monitoring a growing incidence of avian influenza in mammals. Despite the low risk, the Commission says it is prepared to act in case human-to-human transmission starts.

People on the tourist island fear the impact of the loss of summer trade after fires that ravaged businesses and homes. EURACTIV's media partner, The Guardian, reports.

The relentless march of climate change has taken a devastating toll on Europe's Alpine regions. From altered river flows to moving borders and shifting local economies, EURACTIV examines the multifaceted consequences of Europe's melting glaciers.

Just 17 African leaders are going to Putin's summit despite his food-deal games, in a sign of how the Ukraine war has harmed his standing.

The EU Ombudsman has launched an investigation into the role of the EU's border agency Frontex in the mid-June sinking of the Adriana trawler that led to hundreds of people drowning.

The best protection against poverty is employment. However, at the European level, this principle seems to be failing. It is not only the quantity of jobs that matter, but also fair wages.

A conversation with Scott Arthurson: For our podcast by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Scott Arthurson, doctoral student and politics tutor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 

 

UACES Podcasts · Scott Arthurson on Populism and it’s definitional dilemmas Transcript of the interview is as follows:

 

 

This podcast is inspired by the research you presented at UACES’ Graduate Forum Research Conference in June 2023 and in your presentation, you discussed populism and its definitional dilemmas. One of the angles you explored was populism as an analytical category. For those of us who missed your presentation, could you tell us a bit more about this perspective?  

 

Of course! I borrow this term from Peter Worsley. I mean populism is mostly a category applied by intellectuals to divide up, categorize, and make sense of the world. It is something used to talk about and analyze.  

It’s rarely used as a rallying cry or term of self-identification: these days, it’s rare to find anyone claiming to be a populist, or calling for more populism, especially in Europe. When they do, they are often reacting to others calling them a populist, or criticizing mainstream rhetoric about populism. 

The term also isn’t very grounded in historical examples. There once was a party in the United States in the 1890s, that called themselves Populists. But most scholars of “populism” barely mention them. Instead, populism is used to compare various recent parties and politicians – even when they have very different political goals and methods.  

This makes it different from other contested political concepts like democracy, socialism, liberalism, freedom, equality, or conservatism. While people argue over what these words mean, the argument is more grounded either in movements laying claim to the concepts or in concrete historical examples. 

In contrast, populism is a bit of a catchall label to identify some political illness or pathology. 

Several scholars noted these problems early on – Peter Worsley in 1969, for instance, or Margaret Canovan in 1981. As they said, there’s never been a Populist International. Populism is not an identity, a rallying cry, or a brute fact in the world. It’s something we project onto it. It’s very open to interpretation. That’s what Peter Worsley meant when he called it a purely analytical category. 

Similarly, Canovan points out that the meaning of populism fluctuates depending on who is interpreting it – which is mostly intellectuals, academics, journalists, and so on. 

Even if the concept of populism turns out to be a useful analytical category, it has powerful rhetorical effects and shapes how we think about various political divides in Europe today, such as the tensions between the EU and popular democracy. It is often used to posit lots of different political actors as an Other, as a threat to the existing order.   

 

 

 Part of your research paper outlines how narrow definitions of populism can be problematic. Can you detail why this is? 

 

Good question. The concept of populism has been applied to many different political actors and accumulated a lot of different connotations. It’s been applied to Third World anti-imperial movements, McCarthyism, popular politics and economic policy in Latin America, Margaret Thatcher, Nazism and communism, radical right parties in Europe since the 1980s, and anti-austerity left politics like Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, Bernie Sanders and Podemos. 

It’s been defined as a political strategy manipulating the masses to gain power, as the ideology of the middle class, as a counter-hegemonic discourse, as illiberal democracy, as a thin ideology counterposing a virtuous people to a bad elite, as the endorsement of the cultural-political low over the high, and so on and so on. 

One logical response to this chaos is to narrow down the term’s connotations, to arrive at a definition that accommodates all the different cases. This is what you’d call a minimal definition. On the upside, you get a definition that fits the cases. But there are problems. 

First, you might come to something so narrow that it doesn’t say much. 

The only thing shared by almost all things called populism is they’re some kind of appeal to the popular as a source of value or legitimacy. But this applies to most democratic politics. Yet, strangely, we don’t call it all populist. 

This brings us to the second problem: the things in common between the cases may not be the real reason they bear the same label. Supposing we defined populism as any popular appeal against an elite. 

Now, someone might label something populist partly due to other connotations they associate with the term – for example, that it is dangerous, or anti-pluralist –  even if they can just justify the labelling on the basis of the official definition. 

Worse, the reason may lie mostly outside of the populists themselves. For example, they might all have a similar relationship to the interpreter. Supposing you heard a group of friends calling other groups “enemies”, and you wanted to define what an “enemy” is. Now, you might be able to find some things all these enemies have in common. But the real reason for the label here is the relationship these groups have with their interpreters.

Alternatively, you can define populism by including more necessary connotations but narrowing the cases it applies to. So you might say, like Jan-Werner Muller does, that appealing to the people against an elite is not enough to constitute populism. Rather, populism entails a claim to exclusively represent the people, while really only standing for a fraction of them. Therefore it is not just anti-elitist, but anti-pluralist, anti-democratic, and deceptive. Any so-called populists who don’t meet this definition aren’t really populists at all. 

But this creates new problems. First, it can be arbitrary, and at odds with normal usage. Muller is pretty vague in some of his work about whether the original U.S. Populists are populists at all or the status of a number of left-wing populists. You see this even more with Kurt Weyland’s definition, which excludes some of the most famous cases of populism in Europe. 

Further, such definitions reinforce very specific connotations which in practice get ascribed to anyone people commonly think of as a populist. 

So either way, you aren’t capturing the real usage of the term. You either suppress important connotations, which nonetheless persist in how people think of populism. Or you cut off important cases of populism, which people will keep calling populism anyway. 

 

 

 

You make interesting points there. Building upon this, can you explain why research about populism matters?

 

Narrow definitions are a way of simplifying the world, and imposing particular ideological perspectives.  If our goal is clarification and understanding of a term’s usage, it makes more sense to me to map the various ways it is used, rather than drawing strict boundaries around its meaning. 

This mapping also provides resources for critique – once we understand how a term is really used, we are in a better to assess this usage, it’s effects, and how we might prefer to define it if we do wish to enter the ideological fray. 

In my case, I propose a definition of populism which has a very broad criterion for what all cases of populism have in common, but I combine this with an open-textured criterion relating to how intellectuals fill out the meaning of the term. 

 

 

 

At the Graduate Forum Conference in June, you discussed your research on a panel with two other academics with different specialisms. Did you find presenting your research in this environment particularly useful? Were any insights from the other PhD researchers interesting to you and your research?  

 

I enjoyed it! I thought the other panellists’ papers were really fascinating – and while they were looking at very different subject matter, they crossed over with mine in some interesting and unexpected ways. One paper on abortion laws and women’s rights in Poland, for instance, ended up addressing issues with contested concepts, including democracy, which is something pretty central to my own work. Such crossovers were eye-opening as to how certain problems I need to unpack in my own work are not unique to it, but occur in different ways in different contexts. 

Above all, it was great to have a chance to discuss our work afterwards, share our thoughts and ideas, and share some quite specific feedback on the papers themselves – I think having read each other’s papers was helpful for this. 

 

 

 

Good to hear that you had a good time! You also came quite a long way to the event in Barcelona, as you’re based at the University of Melbourne in Australia. How did you find out about our Graduate Forum Research Conference and did you find it useful for networking? 

 

I was searching online for conferences in Europe relevant to my studies. I wanted to get over to Europe, partly to meet more academics in my field, and to spend more time in the European context, since it’s the main focus for parts of my thesis. The UACES was one of two conferences I attended on this trip. I also took the opportunity to do some further travelling and see some people I know here. 

It’s always good to meet people in your field. Part of this is making professional contacts and meeting future collaborators. But what I value most is the chance for intellectual discussions and relationships with people interested in similar questions and topics. That helps to challenge, refine, and reshape your ideas and how you express them – and to bring them back to a shared frame of reference. Ultimately, if we’re studying politics or European Studies we want our ideas to connect to real issues, and I think dialogue helps us to do this. 

I met some lovely people, learnt a lot, and had some great discussions at the conference. I hope to stay in touch with some of the other researchers I met there. 

 

 

 

Thank you so much, Scott, for telling us more about your research and the conference. It was a pleasure meeting you. I recall you are a doctoral student and politics tutor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 

The post Populism and it’s Definitional Dilemmas appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Some EU countries offer 'digital nomad visas' to attract high-skilled workers and boost their economies, but there is no unified framework at EU level, resulting in pitfalls and legal uncertainties.