Ideas on Europe Blog

Sesame project https://www.sesame.org.jo/

Marina Cino Pagliarello

Diplomacy is under pressure – from climate change and trade inequalities to military conflicts on multiple fronts. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to test the continent’s democratic resolve. The crisis in the Middle East underscores the limits of formal diplomacy. Across regions, authoritarianism is on the rise, and even established democracies are witnessing growing constraints on academic freedom.

In this context, universities are stepping up not only as knowledge producers, but as institutional actors with growing diplomatic relevance. Yet as this role expands, so does the vocabulary surrounding it. Terms like science diplomacy, knowledge diplomacy, and informal diplomacy are gaining traction, but are often used interchangeably or without clear distinctions. This piece aims to offer a more precise grammar for academic diplomacy by distinguishing between these overlapping but distinct paradigms. Greater clarity is not a semantic exercise: it is essential for enabling more effective policy, alliance-building, and strategic positioning across the higher education sector.

 

Science diplomacy: strategic reach, structural limits

Science diplomacy has long been a tool of statecraft, initially aimed at bolstering national prestige and influence through scientific collaboration to promote international understanding, prosperity, and evidence-based policymaking (Flink & Schreiterer, 2010). It has since evolved to address global challenges and support sustainable development, while reinforcing domestic research and innovation systems (The Royal Society, 2010; Ruffini & Krasnyak, 2023).

The European Union has developed a particularly ambitious model of science diplomacy. Through Horizon Europe, it aligns scientific cooperation with sustainability, equity, and foreign policy goals, while maintaining global competitiveness (Lopez de San Roman & Schunz, 2018). EU bodies such as the European External Action Service (EEAS), the Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the EU Satellite Centre play a key role in integrating science and foreign policy. Reflecting this, the European Commission has recently called for science diplomacy to become a core instrument in the EU’s diplomatic toolbox, identifying it as a key element in leveraging Europe’s power and partnerships for a global role. The EU also employs two central frameworks: ‘diplomacy for science,’ promoting global research collaboration, and ‘science for diplomacy,’ using science to advance EU foreign policy objectives. As a normative power, it emphasizes reciprocal access, ethical standards, and equitable partnerships (Lavenex, 2015).

Yet the traditional model of science diplomacy presents structural limitations. Its top-down, state-centric approach often fails to capture the relational and adaptive dynamics that define effective transnational collaboration. Universities, by contrast, operate through decentralised, network-based infrastructures that prioritise education, academic freedom, and long-term societal engagement. This divergence creates friction: while science diplomacy often responds to geopolitical goals, universities pursue missions that resist transactional alignment.

The SESAME project in the Middle East exemplifies these tensions. While celebrated as a scientific facility and peacebuilding initiative, some viewed its political framing as intrusive and misaligned with local realities (Rungius et al., 2022). Despite its technical success, SESAME revealed how science diplomacy can undermine trust and autonomy when co-opted by diplomatic agendas. Recognising these limits is essential if universities are to be fully recognised as autonomous diplomatic actors.

 

Knowledge diplomacy: strategic engagement through higher education

Knowledge diplomacy has emerged as a framework for understanding how higher education, research, and innovation contribute to international cooperation and the resolution of global challenges. Defined by Jane Knight as “the role of international higher education and research in building and strengthening relations between and among countries” (Knight, 2018, p. 8), it reflects a shift toward multilateralism and the growing role of non-state actors in diplomacy. Unlike science diplomacy, which often remains state-centred, knowledge diplomacy integrates academic institutions as core participants in global engagement, fostering networks of trust, cultural exchange, and shared problem-solving. This broader vision includes not only research but also teaching, training, and the formation of epistemic communities. Universities function as hubs of innovation and platforms for intercultural dialogue, extending their influence beyond knowledge production to norm-shaping. They increasingly serve as drivers of cognitive soft power, advancing values, worldviews, and institutional models across borders.

However, the promise of knowledge diplomacy is undercut by persistent limitations, with many initiatives relying on unidirectional flows of knowledge. This dynamic perpetuates intellectual hierarchies, may impose external agendas that overlook local expertise — especially in the Global South and conflict-affected areas like Ukraine — and contradicts the very principles of inclusivity and co-creation that knowledge diplomacy seeks to promote. As Anna Wojciuk’s (2018) concept of empires of knowledge highlights, powerful institutions in wealthy nations dominate the global knowledge system, marginalizing under-resourced universities and reinforcing systemic inequalities.

An additional ambiguity lies in the fine line between diplomacy and branding. In practice, efforts branded as knowledge diplomacy may serve reputational or competitive objectives rather than reciprocal engagement. This instrumentalisation risks emptying the concept of its collaborative ethos.

To be effective, knowledge diplomacy requires more than content delivery. It demands strategic vision, one that recognises the need for equitable partnerships, adaptive frameworks, and long-term capacity-building. Without this, the term risks remaining aspirational – conceptually rich, but operationally limited.

 

Informal diplomacy: relational mechanisms and the power of trust

Informal diplomacy refers to trust-based dialogue and cooperation led by non-state actors, a tradition rooted in Track II or multi-track diplomacy theory (Montville, 2006). Unlike state-driven approaches, it relies on adaptive, relational processes outside formal diplomatic frameworks. This mode of engagement is particularly well suited to addressing global challenges where flexibility, co-creation, and mutual learning are essential. Building on this tradition, universities are increasingly operating as infrastructures of informal diplomacy. Rather than serving as passive instruments of national policy, they act as autonomous actors: convening stakeholders, mediating cross-border cooperation, and fostering soft-power relationships.

Findings from HEIDI (Higher Education Informal Diplomacy) project illustrate this role. Based on a survey of 201 universities across 52 European alliances and complemented by around 30 interviews to senior university leaders, the data show that 96.49% integrate internationalisation into their institutional strategy, and 91.87% prioritise partnerships with non-EU actors. These partnerships are not confined to academia. Alliances reported active collaborations with 134 embassies, 116 NGOs, 75 UN agencies, and 66 humanitarian organisations (Cino Pagliarello, 2025). These are not coordinated by governments: rather, they reflect universities’ own diplomatic agency.

What sustains these collaborations is not regulation, but trust. Across interviews, trust consistently emerged as the key mechanism enabling continuity and speed, particularly when formal structures were absent or uncertain. This approach was especially visible in the immediate response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within days, university alliances mobilised to support displaced students and staff. Some created dedicated platforms, others offered relocation assistance or language programmes. These actions were not symbolic. As one alliance representative observed: “These were soft power in action.”

But informality should not be mistaken for institutional weakness. On the contrary, it demands strategic clarity, long-term coordination, and autonomy from state control. Its strength lies in its adaptability — the ability to operate across governance gaps, respond to crisis, and build diplomatic ties grounded in shared purpose. For universities acting on the global stage, informal diplomacy is no longer peripheral: it is a core infrastructure of international engagement.

To clarify the conceptual distinctions outlined in this piece, the table below compares science diplomacy, knowledge diplomacy, and informal diplomacy across key features: actors, objectives, modes of engagement, and limitations. While overlapping in purpose, each model reflects a different logic of international cooperation — from state-driven influence to relational trust-building — and highlights the need for a more precise grammar of academic diplomacy.

Table 1: Comparing the three diplomacy models

Feature Science diplomacy Knowledge diplomacy Informal diplomacy Main actor States, institutions Universities, research networks Universities, alliances, NGOs, etc. Objective National influence, research collaboration Knowledge exchange, academic partnerships Trust-building, adaptability, collaboration Approach Top-down, policy-driven Institutional, capacity-building Relational, flexible, transnational Limitations Lacks grassroots engagement Reinforces power imbalances Harder to institutionalise

Source: Author’s synthesis.

 

Conclusion: toward a clearer grammar of academic diplomacy

As universities step into roles once reserved for governments and multilateral bodies, the vocabulary surrounding their international engagement must evolve with precision. The proliferation of terms – science diplomacy, knowledge diplomacy, informal diplomacy – reflects real transformations, but without conceptual clarity, the risk of semantic inflation is high.

A sharper grammar is not a matter of academic neatness, but of institutional effectiveness. When universities understand the affordances of each mode of diplomacy, they can calibrate strategies accordingly. But greater clarity also raises harder questions. Who legitimises academic diplomacy? What qualifies a university to act not just as a knowledge provider, but as a diplomatic actor in its own right?

Universities cannot be treated as mere facilitators of diplomacy. They are already acting as agents. The task now is to name that agency and equip it with a vocabulary that is both precise and politically consequential.

Marina Cino Pagliarello is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Florence School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute (Italy), Visiting Fellow at the LSE European Institute, and honorary lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University College London (UK).

 

Literature

Chou, MH & Demiryol, T. (2024) Knowledge power or diplomacy? University alliances and the Belt and Road Initiative. High Educ, 87, 1693–1708.

Cino Pagliarello, M. (2025). Higher Education Informal Diplomacy (HEIDI) Survey, European University Institute. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/77751

Flink, T., & Schreiterer, U. (2010). Science diplomacy at the intersection of S&T policies and foreign affairs: Toward a typology of national approaches. Science and Public Policy, 37(9), 665–677.

Knight, J. (2022). Knowledge diplomacy in international relations and higher education. Springer.

Lavenex, S. (2014). The power of functionalist extension: How EU rules travel. Journal of European Public Policy, 21(6), 885–903.

López de San Román, A., & Schunz, S. (2018). Understanding European Union science diplomacy. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 56, 247–266.

Montville, J. V. (2006). Track two diplomacy: The work of healing history. Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy & International Relations, 7, 15.

Rungius, C., Flink, T., & Riedel, S. (2022). SESAME – A synchrotron light source in the Middle East: An international research infrastructure in the making. Open Research Europe, 1, 51.

Ruffini, P. B., & Krasnyak, O. (2023). Science diplomacy from a nation-state’s perspective: A general framing and its application to Global South countries. Science and Public Policy, 50(4), 771–781.

Wojciuk, A. (2018). Empires of knowledge in international relations: Education and science as sources of power for the state. Abingdon: Routledge.

The post Beyond the buzzwords: rethinking diplomacy through the lens of higher education appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

by Nicolás Pose-Ferraro (Assistant Professor of International Studies at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay)

Since 2023, there have been renewed efforts to conclude the long-awaited European Union (EU)–Mercosur preferential trade agreement (PTA), including a 2024 successful renegotiation of the 2019 ‘agreement in principle’ between both parties. However, the agreement’s completion remains uncertain. What is driving these efforts? What threatens its conclusion?

In a recently published JCMS article, I explore the reasons for the latest push to conclude the agreement, as well as the reasons for the challenges it faces.

A geopolitical boost, but enough?

I show that a marked reduction in opposition from Mercosur’s expected distributional losers—namely, the manufacturing industry—combined with increased geopolitical incentives in the EU to conclude a deal, created conditions conducive to renegotiation. This, in turn, allowed the European Commission (EC) to address and reduce opposition from EU-based environmental civil society organizations (CSOs), ultimately paving the way for an understanding between the EC and Mercosur. However, the EU continues to face domestic political economy constraints, particularly due to the influence of distributional losers from the PTA—namely, agricultural producers—who retain the capacity to sway key actors within the EU’s decision-making process. This ongoing resistance continues to pose challenges to the agreement’s ratification. In this way, I highlight the current tension between a geopolitically-driven trade initiative of the EU and the EU’s domestic political economy constraints derived from the distributional effects of a PTA.

The article contributes to the literature on the EU–Mercosur negotiations in two main ways. First, it highlights the substantial reduction in Mercosur’s domestic political economy constraints to reaching an agreement. Second—and centrally—it highlights that the 2024 updated agreement ratification is still uncertain, despite the EU’s recent geopolitical push and the inclusion of stronger environmental commitments in the revised text.

At the theoretical level, the case study seeks to contribute to current debates on the increasing role of geopolitics in shaping trade agreements and flows as it adds the nuance that domestic political economy constraints may counteract geopolitically-driven initiatives.

The negotiation in three stages

My analysis is organized around three pre-specified stages: (1) the negotiation process that led to the ‘agreement in principle’ (2016 to mid-2019); (2) the paralysis within the EU (mid-2019 to 2022); and (3) the renegotiation that led to an updated agreement with an uncertain prospect (2023–2024).

During Stage 1, I found a marked reduction in the opposition of Mercosur’s distributional losers. This, coupled with the European Commission’s relative insulation from agricultural influence, low levels of politicization (in contrast to initiatives like CETA and TTIP), and high geopolitical incentives arising from the protectionist turn in U.S. trade policy under the Trump administration and the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU, culminated in the 2019 agreement.

In contrast, during Stage 2, much of this changed. The agreement now had to be approved by the EU Council and ratified by the European Parliament (EP), thus opening new veto points through which opposing EU agricultural producers could exert influence. In addition, the Brazilian government’s management of the Amazon wildfires, which involved denying climate change and blaming ‘global elites’ in a narrative inspired by Trump’s position, led to greater environmental CSO opposition to the deal. The result was the formation of an opposing agrarian–environmental coalition, which secured the approval of symbolic motions against the deal in the EP and several national parliaments of EU members.

So, what changed during Stage 3? ‘Increasing geopolitical challenges,’ in the words of the EC and the High Representative of the Union, such as the consolidation of the US/EU–China systemic rivalry, rising concern about the strategic implications of economic interdependence that followed COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the longstanding crisis of the multilateral trading system, and the threat to transatlantic ties represented by an eventual return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency (confirmed in November 2024), combined to increase the geopolitical attractiveness of a deal with Mercosur.

However, as opposition within the EU remained high, the EC undertook a renegotiation with Mercosur. Its aim was to reinforce the deal’s environmental commitments, thereby appeasing opposing environmental CSOs. In exchange, the EC accepted several key demands from Mercosur. Specifically, it agreed to Brazil’s demand to exclude its health sector from the Public Procurement chapter—a point it had insisted on including in the 2019 agreement. The EC also accepted to extend the transition period for the removal of Mercosur’s tariffs on industrial goods like electric vehicles, agreeing to periods exceeding 15 years, a duration it had explicitly rejected in the past. Furthermore, it accepted the inclusion of a ‘rebalancing mechanism’ designed to compensate Mercosur countries should forthcoming European Green Deal legislation undermine their market-access gains from the PTA.

The described trade-off led to an updated agreement, which was announced in December 2024. However, ratification in the EU is far from guaranteed. While the inclusion of newer binding commitments linked to the Paris Agreement as a result of the renegotiation did appease environmental CSO opposition, agricultural producers continue to be mobilized against the deal and find in countries like France and Poland a voice to express their opposition at the EU Council. Whether these countries may be able to form a ‘blocking minority’ at the Council to prevent its approval is still an open question.

In any case, the analysis illustrates that the Mercosur agreement is in the middle of a clash between geopolitical incentives and domestic political economy constraints.

Dr. Nicolás Pose-Ferraro is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and member of Uruguay’s National Researchers System. His research focuses on the political economy of trade negotiations and the processes of trade policy preference formation within business associations in Mercosur countries.

 

The post Between Geopolitics and Political Economy: The European Union–Mercosur Negotiation appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In 1997, a little-known Russian political thinker, Aleksandr Dugin, published The Foundations of Geopolitics. Inside, he laid out a blunt and chilling plan.

Russia, he argued, would not rise again through tanks and bombs alone. It would use propaganda, political subversion, disinformation and destabilisation, especially across the West. One of Dugin’s most striking claims was that Russia should work to cut the United Kingdom off from the European Union.

He described Britain as “an extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.” – a piece of Europe that, in his view, needed to be severed from the EU’s institutional core. Many analysts now argue that after Vladimir Putin came to power, the Kremlin began acting on elements of Dugin’s vision.

Putin has never formally endorsed Dugin, and the two are not personally close. Even so, the pattern is difficult to ignore. Some observers caution against overstating Dugin’s influence. But the parallels between his 1997 blueprint and the Kremlin’s later actions are striking.

From the annexation of Crimea to hybrid operations across Europe, Russia’s moves have often echoed the geopolitical logic laid out in Dugin’s book: expanding Moscow’s influence, disrupting Western alliances, and weakening the EU from within.

Nearly two decades later, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union appeared, to many, to be a domestic rebellion: against elites, globalisation, or Brussels bureaucracy, depending on whom you asked. Yet beneath the headlines, growing evidence points to something more deliberate and far-reaching: signs of a Russian effort to divide and destabilise Europe by exploiting internal political fractures.

This article does not seek to blame Leave voters, who took part in the 2016 referendum in good faith. Instead, it asks deeper questions about the context that shaped the Brexit landscape: the long-running Russian strategy, the Kremlin’s evolving hybrid tactics, and the hidden networks of influence, and money that reached into British political life.

We will explore how Dugin’s ideas appear to have influenced Putin’s worldview, how Russia’s hybrid operations targeted both Britain and the wider European project, and why Brexit should be seen not just as a national rupture, but as part of a broader international strategy.

This is a story few have heard – about how a major turning point in British history may have been shaped by a geopolitical doctrine conceived in Russia in 1997.

Russia’s covert war on Europe

Aleksandr Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) was not just an academic exercise. It became one of the most influential works shaping Russian geopolitical thinking in the post-Soviet era.

In it, Dugin argued that Russia’s revival as a great power would not come through military conquest alone. Instead, it would require systematically weakening the cohesion of its Western rivals, particularly the European Union and NATO. He called for Russia to disrupt Western alliances, encourage separatist movements, spread anti-Americanism and form tactical partnerships with countries hostile to the US-led international order.

One striking recommendation was to separate Britain from the European Union. Dugin saw the UK as a key bridge between the United States and the European continent, a link that, if broken, could seriously weaken both.

His prescriptions were not limited to diplomacy or trade. They included the use of psychological operations, disinformation, political influence and subversive campaigns to sow division and encourage fragmentation.

While Dugin remained a theorist, Vladimir Putin became the figure who later brought many of these ideas into practice. Rising through the ranks of the post-Soviet security services, Putin came to power in 2000, determined to restore Russia’s national pride and global standing. While Dugin himself remained outside official structures, his ideas found an audience among military strategists, foreign policy thinkers, and nationalist advisers close to Putin.

For Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union was, as he famously put it:

“the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Under his leadership, the Kremlin invested heavily in state-controlled media outlets like RT (formerly Russia Today), online troll farms such as the Internet Research Agency, covert financing of populist movements and cyber capabilities designed to hack, leak and disrupt Western democracies.

While global attention often focused on Russia’s military interventions in Chechnya, Georgia and later Ukraine, much of its most damaging influence work occurred in the shadows. These efforts encouraged political division, amplified extremist voices and systematically undermined Western institutions from within.

Experts argue that this approach closely mirrors the blueprint laid out in Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics.

Chace A. Nelson, writing for The Strategy Bridge, stated:

“A single book, written in 1997, signalled every significant foreign policy move of the Russian Federation over the following two decades.

“From the annexation of Crimea to Britain’s exit from the European Union, the grand strategy laid out in Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics has unfolded beautifully in a disastrous manner for the western rules-based international order.”

Stanford University’s Europe Center has described the book as “one of the most influential works in post-Soviet Russia,” noting its significant impact on Russian military, police and foreign policy elites. The Atlantic Council warned in a 2017 report that Russia was conducting “an intensifying campaign of hybrid attacks across our allied territories, interfering directly in our democracies, sabotaging industry and committing violence.”

Bengt Jangfeldt, summarising Dugin’s strategy, noted that it includes:

“Sowing geopolitical chaos in the United States’ internal politics… and encouraging separatism, conflict, extremism, and racial division.”

Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment observed that:

“the nationalist-imperialist worldview that the Putin regime is imposing on Russians is intended to feed on the past and exploit historical memories and concepts to reshape and manage the mass consciousness of the Russian people.”

Observers such as former Labour Minister for Europe Dr Denis MacShane warned in 2017 that Putin resented dealing with the EU as a bloc, and saw Brexit as a strategic opportunity to fracture Europe, not just diplomatically, but geopolitically.

As MacShane wrote at the time:

“The Russian president told Bloomberg in September 2016 that Brexit would lead to a smaller EU. Putin has always resented having to deal with the EU and insisted that only bilateral relations mattered for Russia.”

Crucially, Putin’s strategy has never been only about projecting power abroad. It is also about reshaping the geopolitical environment so that Russia can advance its interests without direct confrontation. At the centre of this effort lies a calculated push to unravel the transatlantic alliance, weaken the European Union and, critically, drive deeper wedges between Britain and its European neighbours.

And nowhere was this destabilising strategy more consequential than in the United Kingdom.

Russia’s fingerprints on Brexit

The 2016 Brexit referendum was one of the most consequential political moments in modern British history. It also became a high-profile target for Russian interference.

By mid-2016, Moscow had already tested its hybrid tactics across Europe and the United States. The US intelligence community’s January 2017 assessment concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, using cyber operations, propaganda and influence campaigns to undermine confidence in Western democratic processes.

In May 2015, the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, publicly warned that Russia was employing a wide range of “hybrid tactics” to undermine Western democracies. These tactics, often referred to as hybrid warfare, include the coordinated use of military, political, economic, and information strategies to destabilise target countries.

The Brexit referendum became a prime opportunity for Moscow to apply its hybrid strategy by encouraging the UK’s separation from the European Union — a move that would weaken the Western alliance and disrupt European cohesion. One of the most visible forms of interference came online.

A 2017 investigation by the University of Edinburgh identified over 400 Twitter accounts operated by the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), Russia’s so-called “troll farm,” which had actively posted about Brexit in the months leading up to the June 2016 referendum.

According to the BBC’s October 2018 report, more than 10 million tweets posted by suspected state-backed Russian and Iranian “troll farms” were shared online by Twitter in an attempt to influence public opinion. Early analysis by the BBC’s data journalism team indicated that the word “Brexit” was mentioned in 3,789 tweets linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), nearly all of which were published on the day of the vote or afterwards.

In 2017, Facebook admitted for the first time that some Russia-linked accounts may have used its platform to try to interfere in the EU referendum vote in June 2016.

But Russian activity extended beyond social media.

In 2019 the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee concluded that Russian state media outlets such as RT and Sputnik had “spread disinformation and promoted discord” during the referendum. The committee found that this coverage disproportionately supported Leave campaigns and undermined trust in EU institutions.

Questions were also raised by the UK Parliament, the Electoral Commission, journalists and intelligence experts about possible links between prominent Brexit campaign figures and Russian interests.

Arron Banks, the co-founder of Leave.EU, was reported by The Guardian in November 2018 to have held multiple meetings with Russian diplomats before the referendum. These meetings prompted concerns about potential financial offers or influence. No evidence of crimes was found and no charges were brought.

Banks has consistently denied any improper dealings or Russian backing. In 2022 he partly won a libel case against journalist Carole Cadwalladr, with the High Court finding that her claims caused serious harm. However, the court also upheld the public interest defence for much of her reporting.

Further concerns emerged around Boris Johnson’s connections to Russian-born media mogul Evgeny Lebedev, son of former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev. In 2023 Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary Boris, the Lord & the Russian Spy reported that British intelligence had warned Johnson against elevating Lebedev to the House of Lords. Johnson proceeded regardless, overruling those concerns.

The documentary also noted that Italian intelligence had monitored Johnson’s unguarded visit to the Lebedev villa in Umbria in April 2018.

At a private diplomatic gathering after the referendum, then Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko is reported to have said:

“We have crushed the British to the ground. They are on their knees, and they will not rise for a very long time.”

This quote was cited by journalist Luke Harding in his book Shadow State and independently reported by others.

Senior Conservative figures also raised concerns. Dominic Grieve, former Attorney General and Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, repeatedly warned of the government’s reluctance to investigate Russian influence. Patience Wheatcroft, a Conservative peer, argued that transparency over foreign interference was essential to protect democracy.

Perhaps most troubling is the UK government’s response, or lack of one. In its 2020 Russia Report, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament stated that “the government had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes,” effectively acknowledging that no meaningful investigation had been carried out.

By contrast, the United States launched multiple high-profile inquiries into Russian interference, including the Mueller Report of March 2019.

The UK’s Russia Report concluded that the UK had “actively avoided looking for evidence.” As the committee warned:

“Protecting the UK’s democratic discourse and processes from hostile foreign interference is a central responsibility of Government, and one which it is failing to fulfil.”

At the press conference launching the Russia Report in July 2020, ISC Chair Julian Lewis emphasised the need for stronger inter-agency coordination and urged Government-wide action to safeguard UK democratic systems from foreign interference.

In 2025, new Parliamentary debates revived these concerns. MPs cited evidence that the group known as Conservative Friends of Russia had played a role in cultivating Kremlin access and influence within British politics. Despite multiple warnings, ministers continued to resist calls for a full inquiry.

As former Europe Minister Dr Denis MacShane wrote back in 2017:

“If more evidence surfaces that the narrow Brexit result was influenced by an unfriendly foreign power, it will be harder to argue that a stolen poll should be the final word on Britain’s relationship with its friendly neighbours.”

The implications are serious. If foreign actors exploited vulnerabilities in Britain’s political and media systems to influence the outcome of a constitutional referendum, it raises urgent questions about the integrity of British democracy. That concern applies not only to the events of 2016, but to all future elections and referendums.

Without proper investigation or accountability, the UK remains at risk from similar campaigns in the years to come.

 The Russia Report cover-up

In July 2020, after months of political delay, the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) finally released its much-anticipated Russia Report. The document raised serious concerns about Moscow’s interference in British political life, and, perhaps more significantly, the British government’s failure to respond.

The report concluded that no government department or agency had taken responsibility for investigating Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, or in UK democratic processes more broadly.

The ISC said it was “astonished” that ministers had not even asked the intelligence agencies whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 vote. According to the committee, this amounted to a deliberate political decision. As the report put it:

“The government had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes. We were told they had not seen any evidence, but it was not clear whether they had actively looked for it.”

Public anger intensified when the government delayed publication of the report until after the December 2019 general election. This delay fuelled widespread suspicion that damaging political information was being suppressed.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas condemned the delay as “utterly reprehensible,” adding that the public deserves clarity on what the government knew and when, and called for full transparency to safeguard democratic integrity.

The decision to release a heavily redacted version of the report drew further criticism. Key sections were withheld from public view, prompting concern that damaging political connections were being concealed.

Despite intelligence warnings following the 2018 Salisbury poisoning, there is no public evidence that Theresa May’s government launched any serious investigation into Russian interference in Brexit.

Subsequent Conservative governments under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, and the Labour government under Keir Starmer, have also declined to initiate a formal inquiry into the 2016 referendum’s vulnerability to foreign influence.

Adding to public concern is the network of political links between Russian-connected individuals and senior figures in British politics. The Russia Report raised questions about the Conservative Party’s ties to wealthy Russian donors. Many of those donors had gained UK citizenship or residency through the now-abandoned “golden visa” scheme.

One notable example was the Conservative Friends of Russia, a lobbying group later rebranded as the Westminster Russia Forum. It was established in 2012 to promote UK–Russia ties. Although the group was presented as a networking platform, critics argued that it served as a convenient backchannel for Kremlin influence, especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In 2025, Parliamentary debates revived these concerns. MPs cited evidence that the Conservative Friends of Russia had provided access and influence to Russian officials, including former ambassador Alexander Yakovenko.

The Russia Report warned that the UK had become a “top Western intelligence target” for Moscow, not only because of Britain’s global diplomatic influence but also due to its “very favourable business environment”, a diplomatic way of describing London’s reputation as a hub for dirty money, influence-buying and financial secrecy.

Despite the known risks, the ISC found no evidence that the government had taken systematic steps to defend British democracy. The refusal to investigate Russian interference in the Brexit vote is not just a matter of historical record. It raises serious questions about the present and future integrity of UK elections.

Without proper accountability, the country remains exposed to further attempts at influence and disruption, a threat that has grown since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and amid rising geopolitical tensions in 2025.

Chatham House analysts echoed the concern in a 2021 report, warning that:

“Failing to investigate foreign interference leaves the UK dangerously exposed to continuing hybrid attacks, including disinformation, cyber operations, and political influence.”

 The legal battle to expose Russian interference in Brexit

With the UK government’s refusal to investigate Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, despite warnings from the Intelligence and Security Committee, a critical legal question has emerged:

Does a government have a duty to safeguard the democratic process when credible foreign interference is alleged?

This question now sits at the heart of a landmark case before the European Court of Human Rights.

A cross-party group of British MPs, peers and campaigners, including Caroline Lucas (Green Party), Ben Bradshaw (Labour), Alyn Smith (SNP) and Molly Scott Cato (Green Party), brought the legal challenge in 2021. They argued that the government’s failure to investigate potential Russian interference in the Brexit vote violates citizens’ rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically the right to free and fair elections and democratic participation.

Explaining their decision, Caroline Lucas told The Guardian in March 2022:

“As President Putin wages a war of terror on the Ukrainian people, he’s been waging another war on the very principles of democracy.”

“The Russia report is clear that there is credible evidence of Russian interference in UK electoral process – and yet our government has consistently refused to investigate these serious conclusions.”

Ben Bradshaw echoed this concern, stating:

“When a hostile foreign power interferes in our democratic processes and the government does nothing to investigate, that is a betrayal of the public trust and a breach of its legal obligations.”

Lord Ricketts, who was national security adviser from 2010 to 2012 and is supporting the legal action, commented:

“Given the importance of knowing the extent of past Russian interference in assessing the risk for future elections, I do not understand why the government would choose not to investigate.”

The seriousness of the issue was underlined in December 2023, when a junior Conservative minister, Leo Docherty, Minister for Europe, acknowledged in the House of Commons:

“The Russian Federal Security Services, the FSB, is behind a sustained effort to interfere in our democratic processes.”

Caroline Lucas, speaking again in Parliament in April 2024, added:

“There has still been no serious investigation into Russian interference in the Brexit vote. What is the Government afraid of?”

Despite these warnings and the legal action, successive UK governments — under Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer — have declined to launch a full investigation into the 2016 referendum or broader concerns about foreign interference in British democracy.

This legal battle has implications not only for Britain, but for Europe as a whole. Governments across the continent are wrestling with how to defend against hybrid threats and preserve the integrity of democratic elections.

From Russian interference in French and German elections to Kremlin-linked disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe, the challenge is escalating. In Romania, TikTok was reportedly used to spread pro-Russian narratives during electoral campaigns. Investigations are ongoing, and Romanian authorities have raised concerns with EU partners.

Critics argue that without effective mechanisms for accountability or redress, democratic systems remain wide open to future interference — whether from Russia, China, or other actors intent on exploiting political vulnerabilities.

At the same time, the ECHR case faces political resistance.

Brexit itself was partly driven by opposition to European institutions. In recent years, UK governments have signalled their intention to reduce reliance on rulings from the European Court of Human Rights — or even to leave the ECHR altogether. Nonetheless, the legal challenge highlights that this is not merely a political debate. It is a question of fundamental rights.

As the case progresses, it will test the limits of democratic safeguards in the age of hybrid warfare.

 Beyond Brexit: Why all Europe is now worried

While Brexit was a significant milestone in Russia’s strategy to destabilise the West, it is increasingly clear that Moscow’s ambitions extend well beyond cyberattacks and disinformation.

Across the continent, European nations are preparing for the possibility of direct military conflict with Russia.

In the United Kingdom, Defence Secretary John Healey warned in June 2025 that Russia is “attacking the UK daily” through cyber operations. He stressed the need for Britain to be “battle-ready” and announced plans to invest £6 billion over five years in munitions production and to procure up to 7,000 long-range weapons.

The UK government also released a new strategic defence review. It described the most significant overhaul since the Cold War. The review included plans to acquire up to 12 nuclear-powered submarines and to establish a new cyber command focused on Russian-linked threats.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer reinforced the urgency of the situation. Speaking in June 2025, he said:

“The threat from Russia is real, and it is growing. We must stand united with our European allies to ensure the defence of democracy and peace across the continent.”

Germany has also accelerated military preparedness. In May 2025, General Carsten Breuer, the country’s top military official, warned that NATO must be ready for conflict with Russia by 2029. He cited intelligence that Moscow is stockpiling weapons far beyond those used in Ukraine.

Poland, acutely aware of its location and its history, has responded by transforming itself into what many now call a military powerhouse. This response has been driven by growing fears about Putin’s long-term intentions. Under successive governments, and particularly under centrist and pro-European Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Poland has rapidly expanded military training, defence procurement and civil readiness.

By late 2024, analysts described Poland as having the strongest military in Europe. Its capabilities were said to surpass those of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. This transformation has been credited to record defence budgets, modernised weapon systems and a society-wide focus on deterrence.

Following national elections in June 2025, the new Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing Eurosceptic, declared:

“Russia remains the biggest threat to Poland and to peace in Europe.”

The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have all increased defence budgets and expanded civil preparedness measures, fearful of an attack by Russia. Each country remains acutely aware of its border proximity to Russia and its own history under Soviet occupation.

Finland and Sweden, also fearful of Russian aggression, have both joined NATO, abandoning long-standing neutrality in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its broader threats.

French President Emmanuel Macron issued a similar warning in April 2024. He said:

“Europe must be prepared to defend itself. No one can pretend Russia’s ambitions will stop at Ukraine.”

Despite Moscow’s repeated denials of aggressive intent, European governments remain deeply sceptical. They recall how President Putin repeatedly claimed there were no plans to invade Ukraine, right up until Russian forces crossed the border in February 2022.

Analysts continue to debate Putin’s ultimate goal. Some argue he seeks to expand Russia’s borders and restore an imperial sphere of influence. Others believe his aim is to destabilise Europe enough to preserve his own regime and maintain geopolitical leverage.

As The Conversation noted in March 2024:

“Putin has no successor, no living rivals, and no retirement plan, and his eventual death will likely set off a vicious power struggle inside Russia.”

Whatever his long-term intentions, European leaders are no longer treating the threat as hypothetical. The UK’s experience with Brexit is now viewed as part of a broader Kremlin strategy to divide and weaken Europe. Defending democracy, national sovereignty and territorial security across the continent will require a united, coordinated and long-term approach. The stakes are no longer only political. They are existential.

This isn’t just about Brexit. It’s about Europe’s survival. This investigation does not aim to blame Leave voters. Many made their decision in good faith, motivated by sincere beliefs about sovereignty, identity and the future of Britain. But it does seek to uncover a more difficult truth.

The Brexit vote was not simply a domestic decision. It was influenced by a broader international strategy, shaped by decades of Russian planning, manipulation and interference.

Aleksandr Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, laid out a long-term vision. It called for the separation of Britain from Europe, the fracturing of the transatlantic alliance, and the weakening of institutions that held Western democracies together.

In the years that followed, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin adopted and adapted many of these strategic ideas. It deployed a sophisticated arsenal of hybrid tactics: cyberattacks, disinformation, covert funding and political influence. Brexit was a significant success in that campaign. Not because it aligned ideologically with Russian goals, but because it disrupted European unity and destabilised one of NATO’s key members.

The implications go well beyond 2016. If the UK can hold a constitutional referendum without properly investigating potential foreign interference, what does that say about the resilience of its democratic systems? If external actors can amplify political divisions, spread falsehoods and build quiet relationships with influential figures, what defences are truly in place?

This challenge is not unique to Britain. Across Europe, the Kremlin has worked to destabilise democracies, embolden extremist movements and undermine international alliances. From the annexation of Crimea to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, from targeted assassinations to acts of sabotage, Russia’s ambitions have only grown more aggressive.

In 2006, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London using radioactive polonium-210. The UK High Court later ruled that this was an act of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism.

In 2018, former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, and British citizen Dawn Sturgess died, after exposure to a military-grade nerve agent that was capable of killing thousands. This prompted the coordinated expulsion of Russian diplomats by Western allies.

In 2019, Georgian exile Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was shot dead in a Berlin park by an assassin linked to Russian security services.

In 2020, prominent Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned by the Novichok nerve agent while on a domestic flight over Siberia. He survived after being treated by doctors in Germany, but then went on to die, allegedly killed, in a Russian prison in 2024.

In 2021, Germany accused the Russian security services of mounting a “wholly unacceptable” cyberattack on members of the Bundestag.

In 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, despite President Putin claiming just hours before the attack that Russia had no intention of occupying Ukraine or using force.

In 2023, the UK government disclosed a Russian campaign to hack MPs, journalists and think tanks. Ministers confirmed the FSB was behind a “sustained effort to interfere in our democratic processes.”

In 2024, EU authorities warned that Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns were targeting the European Parliament elections, promoting far-right parties and undermining public trust in EU democracy.

In 2025, Russia-linked hackers posing as journalists targeted staff at Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

These were not isolated incidents. They were part of a systematic strategy: to intimidate, to destabilise and to project Russian power across Europe.

As Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in We Need to Talk About Putin (2019),

“For Putin, violence is not a last resort but a tool of statecraft, a signal to the world that Russia cannot be ignored, and a warning to any who would challenge his rule.”

Human Rights Watch, in its 2021 global report, noted that:

“Russia’s government systematically uses violence, coercion and fear not only to silence domestic critics, but to project its authoritarian reach across borders.”

In May 2025, the UK government announced the construction of six new weapons factories. This marked an acknowledgement that the Russian threat is no longer merely informational or political. It is military, material and potentially existential.

By June 2025, the warnings had escalated. Fiona Hill, a former White House adviser and one of the world’s foremost experts on Russia, told The Guardian that “Russia is at war with the UK”, adding:

“We are already in a war situation, a hot war.”

Dr Hill also warned that the United States “is no longer a reliable ally”, and urged Europe to act with unity and urgency.

In June 2025, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned in London that Russia was arming faster than the entire NATO alliance and could be ready to launch an attack within five years.

“Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO does in a year … Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years. We are all on the eastern flank now.”

The NATO Secretary General added that without a major increase in defence spending, British people “better learn to speak Russian”.

That warning was echoed just days later in the UK government’s own security strategy. In June 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed that Britain must now prepare for the possibility of an attack on UK soil, citing Russia’s military build-up and Iran’s use of overseas operatives as direct threats to national security.

The report, as covered by The Guardian, described the UK as facing a future in which domestic war could no longer be ruled out. It comes amid growing evidence of Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics – from cyberattacks to political interference – already undermining democracies from within.

This is not a distant or hypothetical threat. The Kremlin’s interference in British democracy was part of a broader pattern. It was a warning that too many ignored.

Military readiness is important, but it is not enough. Defending democracy also requires political will, legal accountability and a firm commitment to protecting the information space. That includes public inquiries, strong electoral safeguards, stricter regulation of political finance, and a more informed and resilient public.

Above all, it requires recognition of what is truly at stake. Brexit was not just a domestic decision. It was a product of an international hybrid campaign designed to weaken the West from within. Until that is understood and confronted, the UK and Europe will remain exposed.

Brexit may have been decided in Russia in 1997 – but the defence of democracy must be decided now.

• Watch: Putin and Brexit – The interference they tried to bury

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

• My other articles about Russian interference:
• March 2025 – Europe united against Putin and Trump
• February 2025 – How Brexit played into Putin’s hands
• February 2024 – The Russian Connection – update
• February 2023 – A vote for Brexit was a vote for Putin
• March 2022 – Putin’s fingerprints are all over Brexit
• February 2022 -Back to the USSR?
• November 2017 – European Union or a new Soviet Union?
• December 2013: Latvia From Soviet Union to European Union

Some further reading

This section lists some of the sources referenced or relevant to the investigation of Russian interference in British democracy and the Brexit referendum. 

1. Geopolitical Doctrine and Dugin’s Influence

• Aleksandr Dugin – The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997)

This 1997 book lays out a strategic vision for Russia to reassert itself by destabilising the West, not through military force but via ideological, economic, and informational subversion. Dugin called for the severance of the UK from Europe, described Britain as a U.S. outpost, and advocated for disrupting NATO and the EU. Though never officially endorsed by Putin, the book has reportedly been used in Russian military academies and closely reflects many elements of Kremlin hybrid warfare.

No official English translation exists, but two credible English-language sources provide detailed summaries:

Putin’s Playbook by Chace A Nelson

Stanford Europe Center – Dugin’s Foundations

2. Russian Hybrid Warfare Strategy

• Atlantic Council – Strategy of ‘Constrainment’

This 2017 report sets out how the West should respond to Russian hybrid threats. It outlines how Russia uses economic coercion, disinformation, political influence, and cyber operations to destabilise adversaries. It argues for a coordinated Western strategy to contain and deter Kremlin aggression without triggering di

3. Political and Financial Influence in the UK

• Catherine Belton – Putin’s People

Belton’s book investigates how Putin and former KGB operatives used state power and illicit finance to consolidate control in Russia and extend influence abroad. It documents Kremlin efforts to build financial networks in the UK and co-opt elites. The book strengthens the case that Russia’s use of money and kompromat is strategic and imperialist in aim.

Publisher’s page (HarperCollins)
The Guardian review

• The Guardian – The Westminster Whistleblower (2025)

This article recounts how a whistleblower named Sergei sought to expose a Kremlin-linked effort to influence British political decisions. It highlights both personal testimony and the wider context of UK-Russia connections. The piece underscores the risks taken by insiders trying to reveal covert foreign influence.

5. Parliamentary and Government Reports

• ISC Russia Report (2020)

The UK Intelligence and Security Committee’s report found that the British government had not properly investigated Russian interference in the Brexit referendum. It accused ministers of failing to ask intelligence a gencies to assess Kremlin influence, and concluded that the UK was a ‘top target’ for Russian political disruption. The report’s delayed release and heavy redactions prompted allegations of political suppression.

UK Parliament PDF download
Gov.uk summary page

6. Legal and Electoral Challenges

• European Court of Human Rights Case – Interference in Brexit Referendum

Filed in 2021 by British parliamentarians and campaigners, this ECHR case argues that the UK government violated citizens’ rights by failing to investigate credible evidence of foreign interference in the 2016 referendum. Applicants claim this undermined democratic integrity, breaching Articles 3 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

7. Investigative Documentaries and Original Material

• PBS Amanpour – Interview with Carole Cadwalladr

In this televised interview, journalist Carole Cadwalladr describes Russian disinformation as a form of ‘military assault’ on the West. She discusses the vulnerabilities of democratic institutions to manipulation and the lack of accountability in the UK after Brexit. Her statements support the framing of hybrid warfare as an ongoing, systemic threat.

 

The post Was Brexit decided in Russia in 1997? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Vanessa Aichstill

On 7 May 2025, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) Court delivered its highly anticipated ruling in Joined Cases E-1/24 TC and E-7/24 AA, offering crucial guidance on the interpretation of European Economic Area (EEA) rules on access to beneficial ownership information. The questions arose: how should this provision, originally part of the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (Directive 2015/849, AMLD IV) and now incorporated into the EEA Agreement, be interpreted under EEA law, especially considering that the CJEU had declared it invalid for breaching fundamental rights and considering that the AMLD V revision process remained stalled?

The EFTA Court, which has no jurisdiction to declare EEA provisions invalid, was now tasked with providing advisory opinions in two cases:

• In Case E-7/24 AA, the request was denied on the ground that the applicant was not typically involved in anti-money laundering efforts and thus lacked a legitimate interest.
• In Case E-1/24 TC, access was refused because the applicant named only the alleged beneficial owners, without identifying the specific legal entities concerned.

This judgment marks a significant development in the evolving relationship between fundamental rights and transparency in EEA law and raises important questions about judicial dialogue, legal coherence, and the limits of the competence of the EFTA Court.

Setting the Scene: C-37/20 and C-601/20 Luxembourg Business Registers

The AMLV IV adopted in 2015, marked a significant step in the EU’s effort to enhance financial transparency and combat the misuse of corporate structures. A key feature was the introduction of public access to registers of beneficial ownership allowing anyone to identify the natural persons ultimately owning or controlling legal entities. The aim was to strengthen the fight against money laundering, terrorist financing, and financial crime by increasing corporate transparency and accountability across the internal market.

The cases centred on the interpretation of Article 30(5)(c) of AMLD IV, which allowed access to beneficial ownership information for any person or organisation demonstrating a “legitimate interest”. In its judgment in C-37/20 and C-601/20 Luxembourg Business Registers, the CJEU held that this amendment infringed upon the fundamental rights to respect for private life and the protection of personal data, enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR), and therefore declared it invalid. Consequently, this provision was amended by the Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (Directive 2018/843, AMLD V), which significantly broadened access by granting any member of the general public the right to obtain such information.

Right of Access to Beneficial Ownership Information Legitimate interest

The first questions answered by the EFTA court concerned the notion of “legitimate interest,” which is not legally defined in this context. While it generally refers to a lawful or justified interest, its meaning in the AML framework must be interpreted in light of the directive’s transparency objective. The substantiation of a legitimate interest is both a necessary and sufficient condition for accessing information in the beneficial ownership register. EEA States may further specify this concept in national law and even introduce legal presumptions, in line with the principle of national procedural autonomy. They may also adopt or maintain stricter rules, including broader access rights for other purposes, provided these comply with EEA law, the GDPR, and fundamental rights. Accordingly, the Court held that persons whose sole link to money laundering or predicate offences is the harm suffered to their financial interests may have a legitimate interest under Article 30(5)(c) AMLD IV but are subject to a case-by-case assessment.

While such access may interfere with fundamental rights, that interference can be justified if it is appropriate, necessary, and proportionate. Proper application of national rules implementing Article 30(5)(c) AMLD IV, particularly regarding the notion of legitimate interest and evidentiary standards, helps safeguard this balance. Accordingly, the Court found that access to beneficial ownership information constitutes a proportionate interference with fundamental rights, provided the applicant can demonstrate a legitimate interest.

Identification of specific legal entities

While AMLD IV sets out the requirement to demonstrate a legitimate interest as the sole substantive condition, EEA States retain procedural discretion under the principle of national procedural autonomy (see recital 42 of the AMLD V), subject to compliance with the principles of effectiveness and equivalence. However, such procedural rules must not make access to information excessively difficult. Importantly, a legitimate interest may exist even where the applicant cannot name the legal entity, especially in cases involving investigative journalism or concealed ownership structures. Requiring such identification as an absolute condition could undermine the directive’s purpose and fundamental rights. Therefore, once a legitimate interest is demonstrated, access cannot be denied solely due to the applicant’s inability to identify the relevant entity.

Finally, the Court confirms again that the AML framework does not, as such, prevent EEA States from granting broader access for other legitimate purposes, provided that data protection rules are respected. Importantly, it emphasises that access to beneficial ownership information is not merely a matter of balancing privacy rights against public interest in combating financial crime, but must also be viewed through the lens of the right to information as part of the freedom of expression (see Tandberg).

Protection of Fundamental Rights

The Liechtenstein Government argued that the request was inadmissible, as AMLD IV had not yet entered into force in the EEA at the time. The Court recalled that under Article 98 EEA Agreement, incorporation and repeal of acts require a Joint Committee decision, and that Article 102 EEA Agreement obliges the Committee to safeguard legal certainty and homogeneity. Citing the second recital and Article 1(1) EEA Agreement, the Court emphasized the special relationship between the EU and EFTA States and the goal of extending the internal market across the EEA. It also noted that a gap between the two EEA pillars has existed since 1992 and has widened over time. This gap refers to the growing backlog in incorporating EU legal acts into the EEA Agreement, which delays their application in the EEA EFTA States and challenges the principle of homogeneity that underpins the internal market.

One of the major developments in EU law is the adoption of the CFR, which, along with its case law, is also relevant for interpreting EEA law. While the EEA Agreement does not contain an explicit fundamental rights provision, its first recital affirms shared commitments to peace, democracy, and human rights. The EFTA Court has consistently held that fundamental rights form part of the general principles of EEA law and must guide its interpretation. National courts are therefore obliged to interpret and apply EEA law in a manner consistent with fundamental rights. In doing so, the Court draws on common constitutional traditions and international human rights instruments, particularly the ECHR, to which all EEA States are parties. The ECHR and ECtHR case law are key reference points, and pursuant to Article 52(3) CFR, rights under the Charter have the same scope as their ECHR counterparts, though EU law may offer higher protection. Articles 7 and 8 CFR, which protect private life and personal data, mirror and reinforce the safeguards found in Article 8(1) ECHR. As such, there are no compelling grounds under EEA law to consider that the level of fundamental rights protection diverges from that under EU law. The Court invokes fundamental rights to justify interpreting the provision as it stood before the contested amendment, effectively setting aside its legal effects within the EEA context.

Conclusion

The judgment marks a significant development for the EEA legal order. While the issue of divergent validity between EU and EEA provisions previously arose in cases such as Schrems (C-362/14) and Test-Achats (C-236/09), timely action by the EEA Joint Committee ensured that invalidated EU provisions were removed or amended within the EEA framework. This is the first time the EFTA Court has directly addressed such a mismatch, setting an important precedent, especially in the fundamental rights context.

Critically, the judgment also reflects the pragmatic nature of the relationship between the EU and EEA legal orders, shaped by the structural backlog in incorporating EU law into the EEA Agreement. As the Court acknowledged (para 51), the temporal and legal gaps between the two pillars have continued to widen. Against that backdrop, the ruling demonstrates a flexible, case-by-case approach to safeguarding the homogeneity of the EEA while recognising the practical constraints of legal alignment in real time.

 

This article is based on discussions that took place during the workshop organised at the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies on 15-16 May 2025 as part of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539.

—

Vanessa Aichstill is a PhD Candidate/Research and Teaching Assistant at the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies, University of Salzburg.

The post Between Two Pillars: Validity Gaps and Legal Reality in the EEA appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The team of the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies (SCEUS) will bring you fresh commentaries and analyses on current challenges to European integration. We are an interdisciplinary group focusing on the economic, legal, and political developments of the European Union and currently a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.

It is through the Centre of Excellence that we came to the idea of launching a new blog series on Ideas of Europe. While the current project focuses on economic governance, migration, and the rule of law as core challenges to European integration, our team is interested in a wider range of issues, such as foreign policy, climate, cohesion, and digital policies. Combined with our expertise in EU and domestic institutions, we aim to offer you a fresh perspective on ongoing debates related to EU policy-making, democracy, and integration.

Our aim is to use this blog as an inclusive platform to express views and commentaries from a wide range of members, from our European Union Studies students to guests, and participants of our many events.

We hope that you will be interested in our work and look forward to discussing many challenging topics with you!

The post Welcome to our new blog “Navigating EU Challenges with SCEUS”! appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

It was exactly 50 years ago, on 6 June 1975, that the UK learnt the result of its first-ever national referendum, on whether to remain in the European Community.

The result was emphatic. Over 67 percent voted to stay, a 35 percent margin in favour of remaining, a decisive outcome. All four nations of the UK voted to remain. Britain spoke with one voice, and that voice was for Europe.

Now compare that with the second referendum, held on 23 June 2016.

Out of just over 33 million valid votes, only 17.4 million were for Leave. That amounted to a margin of just 4 percent, well within the margin of error for a decision of such historic weight.

And unlike in 1975, the UK did not speak with one voice. Only England and Wales voted to leave. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain, as did Gibraltar.

So, while the 1975 referendum was decisive and united the country, the 2016 referendum was divisive  and split it, by nation, generation, education, and worldview.

Brexit supporters often claim the issue is settled. But democracy is never a one time event. Polls now show a clear and consistent majority believe Brexit was a mistake and would vote to rejoin the EU if given the chance.

Britain was never truly united behind Brexit.

Millions directly affected were denied a vote, and half the nations of the UK rejected leaving the EU. And yet, we are told the decision cannot be revisited.

What other major national decision is treated as untouchable, no matter how much has changed? Even in our personal lives, we revisit past decisions. We change course when circumstances change.

Democracy did not stop in 1975. It did not stop in 2016. Nor should it now.

One day, the people must have the chance to review Brexit, in a new, free and fair vote.

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

The post The first referendum was decisive, the second divisive appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Three weeks before the EU referendum, Sir John Major issued a stark warning to the British people.

On 5 June 2016, the former Conservative Prime Minister appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show and accused the Leave campaign of being “fundamentally dishonest” and “verging on the squalid.”

He warned that the public was being fed “a whole galaxy of inaccurate and frankly untrue information.” He was angry. Rightly so.

John Major called out the key flaw at the heart of the Brexit campaign: it was all promise, no plan.

“What they have NOT done is to tell us what would be the position if we were to vote to leave.”

That line rings louder with each passing year.

He dismissed claims that Brexit would boost jobs and trade as pure fantasy. “We would lose a huge amount in terms of national income through trade,” he said – because UK businesses would sell less to the EU’s Single Market.

He foresaw the damage. He foresaw the deceit. And he made it clear who would suffer most:

“the everyday man and woman in the street.”

John Major wasn’t alone. Many of those who understood how the EU works tried to sound the alarm. But the truth was drowned out by slogans and misinformation – and by Brexiters who refused to say what would happen if they won.

And now? Everything he warned of has happened – and worse. There’s been no trade boom, only red tape. No £350 million a week for the NHS, just staff shortages and collapsing services. And far from taking back control, the UK is isolated, its influence diminished.

• Watch the video. Hear his words. And ask: what if we’d listened?

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

• Transcript of full John Major interview

The post John Major saw the lies of Brexit – and told us appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Following the EU-UK summit last month, I’ve finally got my ducks in a row on trying to track the substance of what follows.

You’ll recall that apart from the Security & Defence Partnership, there was not a single definitive legal instrument. Instead, there was lots of language about ‘working towards’ things or ‘exploring possibilities’: all very nice, but not really enough in an era of questions about the depth of international commitments.

Hence the tracker. As I’ve noted in my Bluesky thread on this, I’m only tracking those elements that seem to produce a formal agreement between the parties: potentially the list could grow, but let’s wait and see.

Rob Francis has written that Commission mandates for SPS, ETS linkage and Youth Experience aren’t coming until the autumn of this year, so formal negotiations seem unlikely until the back end of 2025. Given that each of these could throw up a bunch of issues (such as how much the UK is prepared to accept EU rules, and how much this is going to cost in contributions), reaching an agreement on any of these by the time of next spring’s summit looks hopeful.

Hence the tracker covers the entire lifetime of this Parliament.

Of course, if polls continue to be as unclear as now, the shadow of a non-Labour government is liable to cast a shadow on any negotiations from about 2027 onwards (given the time it’ll take to conclude, ratify and implement any individual deals), so this is the best opportunity for both sides to nail things down and minimise the chance of new administrations making bold choices.

As for the rest of the list, I’ve seen nothing to indicate timelines. Even if most of it is highly technical, it’ll still need work and political attention, something that’s been in short supply so far.

So the big question is whether long-term incentives will outweigh short-term distraction.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic141

The post Tracking the UK-EU reset appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In early June 2016 – nine years ago – the UK stood on the edge of a knife.

YouGov’s poll-of-polls showed Remain and Leave running neck and neck ahead of the EU referendum. On 26 May, Remain led with 46% to Leave’s 42%. But by 1 June, the two were tied at 44%.

Even on the eve of voting day, no one could confidently predict the outcome. Some polls gave Leave the edge; others put Remain just ahead.

A day earlier, or a day later, and the outcome could have flipped. That’s how precarious the decision was.

For most of Britain’s 43 years as an EU member, public opinion leaned against Brexit. Ipsos Mori polling in June 2015 showed a record 75% in favour of staying in the EU.

But in the turbulent months before the vote, millions shifted to Leave, swayed by a campaign later revealed to be influenced by Russian disinformation and targeted anti-migrant sentiment.

[Watch theRussianConnection.co.uk]

Yet there was another key factor: turnout. Nearly 13 million eligible voters stayed home. According to the first post-referendum poll (Ipsos/Newsnight, 29 June 2016), these non-voters leaned towards Remain by a 2:1 margin. If they had voted, the result might have swung the other way.

On top of that, millions directly affected by the result were excluded: Britons abroad for over 15 years, and EU citizens living, working, and paying taxes in the UK.

A single day’s vote, on a question so close and unresolved, should never be allowed to lock a country in for generations.

General elections happen every few years. Voters can correct past choices and change governments. But with Brexit, no such democratic correction has been allowed. Since the referendum, the UK has had three general elections. Yet there has been no opportunity to revisit Brexit – no further referendum, no fresh public mandate, no attempt to see whether the public has changed its mind.

That is not how a mature democracy should handle a decision of such scale and permanence. Especially when the original vote was so finely balanced, so easily swayable by time and circumstance, and clearly left the nation divided.

A democratic decision isn’t a one-day contract for eternity. It must allow room to adjust, revisit, and renew based on the evolving will of the people. Britain deserves another say – not because democracy was ignored in 2016, but because true democracy doesn’t stop.

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

The post Brexit: What a difference a day made appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

About a new Issue of Public Reason, a Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy.

• How did It All Begin?

The Volumes contain Papers presented at the ECPR Summer School of Political Epistemology on July 27-31, 2020. The ECPR Standing Group on Kantian Political Thought organised the Summer School. Keele University and Jagiellonian University co-convened the Summer School.

The purpose of the Summer School was to convene scholars at different stages of academic careers. The aims were to meet and discuss key methodological issues in normative political theory, in particular in political epistemology.

There were 9 teaching sessions and 9 delegate presentations during the 5 days. I participated as a Paper presenter, hoping to receive feedback, make contacts, and that a scientific publication could grow out of this project.

Finally, authors from Canada, Estonia, Germany, Poland, the UK, and the US contributed to the Volumes.

• The Content of the Volumes

Jakub Szczepanski (Jagiellonian University) summarises in “Introduction” that the presentations discussed the role of knowledge and justification in politics; the problem of deep disagreement; epistemic injustice; democracy; the role of theory in politically relevant epistemic processes; constructivist and contractual accounts of justice; the role of sincerity and trust in politics; the epistemic value of electoral processes; the use of ignorance in political processes, included populism, propaganda and manipulation; uncertainty, and freedom of speech.

Robert Weston Siscoe (University of Notre Dame), “Epistemic Democracy and the Truth Connection.” The author discusses epistemic democracy and its relationship with truth. Siscoe argues that democracies have a truth-tracking feature and that they trace truth better than other political institutions. The article also discusses what truth is and how to trace it.

Lingyu Jing (University of York), “Speaking Truth to Power? A Foucauldian Theory of Whistleblowing in a Nihilistic World.” The article departs from the view that there is no truth outside power in our post-truth era. Therefore, the argument goes, whistleblowing, that has always been subjective, is even more losing its meaning.

Manuel Knoll (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), “The Significance of Deep Disagreements on Justice, Values, and Morals for Political Epistemology.” The author asks whether there is knowledge about values, the good, the just, and the morally right that could be applied to political issues. Knoll argues that there is no ultimate moral knowledge to ethically orientated political decisions but deep disagreements. The article refers to deep disagreements as disagreements in good faith that cannot be resolved through the use of reasons and arguments. Deep disagreements are resistant to rational solution because of a clash of underlying principles or framework propositions. Although political decisions are usually based on some kind of knowledge, the central question of political epistemology is whether there is any knowledge that can ethically orientate political decisions

Jaanika Erne (University of Tartu), “On the Meaning of Democracy in the European Union.” The author focuses on the limits of defining democracy. The aim is to show the functional nature of law, and the politics of meaning. Although law is aiming at being complete, it functions in the context of incompleteness of even the broadest research units – categories. Because empirics in itself cannot explain empirics, an empirical analysis can only circle. This happens even when one increases the number of categories. Only the question „Why?” will unveil the explanatory and interpretive dimensions. 

Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (Birkbeck, University of London), “Political Knowledge: Measurement, Elitism, and Dogmatism. Public Reason.” The author shows the importance of the question of measurability of knowledge specifically in political elections. Ahlstrom-Vij asks what political knowledge is and how is it measured. The article argues that standard political knowledge tests measure political knowledge. The author uses counterfactual modeling to show the difference such knowledge can make to political choice.

John E. Roemer (Yale University), “Epistemological Issues in the Theory of Equality of Opportunity.” The author asks about the optimal policy of equal opportunities. In the end of the article he states that recruiting for social positions on the basis of merit alone is now quite rare.

• About Public Reason

Public Reason characterises itself as a peer-reviewed open-access journal of political and moral philosophy. The journal is also available in print. It publishes articles, book reviews, and discussion notes from all fields of political philosophy and ethics, included political theory, applied ethics, and legal philosophy.

Public Reason publishes also texts from other areas of philosophy if they are relevant for issues of moral and political philosophy.

The journal is committed to a pluralistic approach. It promotes interdisciplinarity and original perspectives, the ideals of critical thinking and clarity. The journal addresses the international philosophical community, and a broader public interested in political and moral philosophy. See the journal’s website at https://publicreason.ro/home

The post Public Reason, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2023 and Vol. 16, No. 1, 2024 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Starmer’s new EU deal may be a “Brexit reset” – but Britain remains adrift, and the damage isn’t undone.

We’re still outside the Single Market, with lost rights, new barriers, and no real plan to go back in.

That said, the new agreement this week between the UK and EU is a welcome sign of thawing relations – a shift away from the confrontational politics of the past decade.

For that, the Labour government deserves some credit. The deal removes some Brexit barriers – including student exchanges, pet travel, food exports, security cooperation, and a proposed Youth Mobility Scheme for young people.

These are practical changes that will make life easier for businesses, students, and travellers alike. It also signals an intention to rebuild trust with our European neighbours.

Yes, this is a fresh attempt to improve UK–EU relations after years of damage and division. But we should be clear: this is still Brexit.

• The UK remains outside the EU Single Market and Customs Union.
• British citizens have lost freedom of movement.
• UK companies still face costly trade frictions.
• Musicians still struggle with touring.
• Brits still need extra paperwork to live, work, study or retire in the EU.
• And EU nationals here remain subject to the Hostile Environment – from renting a flat to crossing the border.

For sure, this new agreement is better than what came before. But it’s nowhere near as good as what we once had.

We left Erasmus+ – only now to seek partial re-entry.

Freedom of movement is gone – and the new “Youth Mobility Scheme” may only allow limited, temporary stays for young people. Even if finalised, it cannot replicate the full rights we lost.

And while this new deal softens the blow for some sectors, it does not undo the deep economic harm caused by Brexit.

According to the OBR, the UK economy is now forecast to be 4% smaller than it would have been had we remained in the EU – a lasting hit to wages, growth, and tax revenues.

Rejoining the Single Market would bring far greater benefits.

Full EU membership would go further still: giving us back a seat at the table, a voice in decisions, and rights we once took for granted.

The new deal shows that rebuilding our relationship with Europe is possible. But it also highlights the absurdity of what we threw away – and how hard it is to claw back even fragments of what we had.

Call it a reset if you like – but the only real reset is rejoining the EU.

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky 

The post A softer Brexit – but we still have Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

One of the joys of listening to Radio 4 is that while having my regular daily walk yesterday I heard a lovely discussion about the 50th anniversary of Jaws, the film that created the summer blockbuster and gave us some top meme-worthy comment.

It feels apposite to mention this because one of my main takeaways from this week’s UK-EU reset summit was the realisation that we are now entering a semi-permanent state of negotiations between the two, which in turn means more work for me and further vindication of my decision to stick with studying UK-EU relations. Truly one of the last jobs for life that people used to have.

Since I’ve been busy having such thoughts, I come late in the day to the business of analysing the various documents produced on Monday: the Joint Statement, the Common Understanding and the one actually-concluded document, the Security and Defence Partnership (SDP; half of which is cribbed from the EU-Japan piece, as Anton Spisak notes) . You’ll also want to read the Commission’s Q&A, since it’s less ambiguous about what’s what.

If you want run-throughs, then I recommend Anton’s piece, as well as David Henig‘s and Steve Peers‘, the last of which is worth quoting at a bit of length for its conclusions, with which I fully concur:

Finally, it’s notable how many Rubicons have been crossed with this reset deal. As noted already, the UK now accepts the market access/integration trade-off. But the EU now accepts agreeing this trade-off with the UK in limited fields: the UK can have one foot several steps up the Barnier escalator, but the other one firmly on the ground. The EU has also accepted a Swiss-like complex legal relationship with the UK, having opposed it in principle for years. (In fact, the EU already conceded this point when agreeing the TCA; but that treaty hid its legal complexity better than the reset deal does). The UK has accepted an agreement with the EU as regards movement of (some) EU citizens; although it might claim this arrangement will simply resemble its youth mobility treaties with many other countries, the extent of that similarity will be dependent upon the details of the final deal. Above all, the EU, having accepted freer movement of some goods and demanded the freer movement of some people, can no longer lecture the UK on cherry-picking or cake-eating – what with all the crumbs and cherry juice smeared across the EU’s own mouth.

Rather than rehashing all these colleagues’ fine efforts, I’ll stick to adding some further thoughts.

Substantively, the package here is both more extensive than most had anticipated and less developed. Rather than sticking the Nick Thomas-Symond’s three-basket model we have a Common Understanding with five main headings, plus the bits that don’t fit in within them, like fisheries and the very idea of regular UK-EU summits.

At times, this all reads like someone has asked ministries/DGs to throw in anything they’d like to see discussed, which might not be a million miles from how the process went in the UK, but it sets a wide open terrain for negotiation.

And it is negotiation. Barring the SDP, there is not a single final decision. Even the fisheries access that generated much interest in the British press is only a political agreement, with a legal text at least a month away. As I note in my summary graphic below, there are a handful of commitments to negotiate, plus more vague intentions to do more together or to ‘explore possibilities’.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic140

Moreover, there’s not a single date for any of this to happen, even the topics that both sides agree will be negotiated. Therefore an early marker of how much effort is being put into this will be the speed with which the Commission produces and agrees mandates for SPS, Emissions trading, Energy market integration and youth mobility/experience.  The speedy release of the competition cooperation text on Tuesday might be a good sign, but equally the fact it wasn’t ready to go with this package suggests that none of this will be easy.

On that point, it’s clear that this is not an era of unbridled euphoria and working together, but regular international relations, with each side pushing its interests hard. The French squeezed on fisheries over the weekend, just as the British evidently got youth mobility/experience parked to avoid more “it’s not freedom of movement” arguments that would just further link that scheme to freedom of movement in people’s minds (as more than one person has commented to me this week).

Indeed, it is the practice of the UK government in all this that raises the most concerns.

Across public policy there appears to be a profound aversion to open policy-making, instead keeping things in-house and driven by focus-group polling. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it does raise the risk of generating policy that lands badly. In this case, the harrumphs from devolved bodies, scrutiny bodies, sectoral interests and others with interest in the matter speak to the consequences.

A case in point is eGates. This was something that has been under negotiation for quite some time, held up by the EU’s delays in implementing the Entry/Exit System and some member states’ quibbles over legal barriers. The government decision to present this as an immediate benefit very quickly fell over in the face of, well, facts and took away from what was still a story that would have been a positive selling point.

If we are now entering a permanent negotiation then the government will need to work more on its narrative around this process. To return to Steve’s quote earlier, this isn’t an escalator back to membership, but equally it’s not clear what the underlying logic is. Put differently, everyone knows the government’s red lines, but it’s not clear why those are red lines.

As more and more cooperation occurs, that will mean more and more instances of the UK becoming a rule-taker: SPS, ETS and energy markets are all explicitly framed this way in the Common Understanding. That creates a discursive tension with the control that has been taken back, which requires some vision of why this works to be articulated.

Therefore, my second big indicator will be the extent to which the government is both able to articulate that vision and the effort it puts into so doing. The three-basket model was evidently a placeholder, but the public statements from Starmer this week don’t offer a replacement beyond the UK ‘being back’.

This will matter when the various negotiations start to come home to roost. While there is no explicit cross-linkage, undoubtedly that will occur at points when it suits one or more of the parties involved: remember too that all of this is happening on top of the previously-described reviews and negotiations within the TCA itself.

Youth mobility/experience is perhaps the most likely flashpoint. The wording on Monday was a classic piece of “we have agreed absolutely no principles or even whether it will happen at all”: as I’ve written for The Conversation, the problems are almost all domestically British ones, even as the EU genuinely struggles to see the issue. But now it’s a totemically-important item for some member states, there will have to be some kind of reckoning.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic127

So, early days on all this.

What matters is partly about political will on both sides, but also about capacity. The lack of interest in European media was palpable, reflecting the low salience of building more ambitious relations with a country with whom the EU already has a serviceable relationship. There has been no public discussion about whether the British machinery of government has the capacity or skills to run multiple, permanent negotiations of a kind that it hasn’t tried before.

Monday was full of good vibes and warm words, but it’s not those moments that will define how the relationship works in practice.

The post We’re gonna need a bigger tracker… appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Manfred Stock, Alexander Mitterle and David P. Baker

What do universities teach us?

A common trope in public discourse today is that the university serves as an ideological hub: a place that infuses the minds of the new generations with ideas that threaten contemporary worldviews. In such discussions, the sweeping impact higher education has on society is narrowed towards questions of gender, race, inequality, colonialism, global hegemony, and capital. The critique takes a staunch Hobbesian view of the university: who controls the university “programm[s]” what people think.

Only vaguely do such accounts discuss the educational impact of the university on the transformation of work. Without the cognitive and specific skills acquired in physics, law, engineering, or political science a vast number of jobs could not be performed adequately. Surprisingly, the professional function of advanced education is often perceived as just responding to the demands of the economy: Technological change and market forces create new occupations, and then universities simply respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills – often over-educating the demand.

Advancing earlier Parsonian and new institutionalist ideas on higher education, we emphasize an underappreciated yet growing concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrolments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process we refer to as the academization of occupations and develop in our recent book, How Universities Transform Occupations and Work in the 21st Century: The Academization of German and American Economies (Stock, Mitterle, & Baker, 2024).

Such a process has tremendous implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations, but it also emphasizes the non-linear relation between higher education and employment. If the university is productive in its own rights the knowledge and skills acquired in the university may create very different pathways into employment than envisioned by those instituting new degrees. In the following we briefly outline the argument for academization and then provide examples from seven case studies across two most-different OECD countries regarding education-to-work-pathways – Germany and the U.S.

 

The Academization of Occupations

Put succinctly, academization is a process by which more aspects of occupations, job content, and preparation are permeated by the full range of institutional products of formal education. As mass advanced education increases, the number of occupational fields of action and jobs in work organizations tailored to college graduates also increases, but academization also represents a profound transformation beyond expanding enrolment.

Take, for example, one of the key institutional products of academization and the cultural power of the university to transform occupations—the degree program. The expansion of applied degree programs in Germany and majors, minors, and graduate degrees in the U.S. reflects a logic of academization that implies material and social classification with consequences for job activities. The degrees awarded on successful completion of academic programs do not just represent and classify the curricular study programs nor just the corresponding expectations in terms of a graduate’s abilities, competencies, and skills in a material sense. They also classify programs as a legitimate and appropriate basis for performing specific practical tasks, providing services, and solving practical problems. As such, academic degrees also specify responsibilities for specific occupational fields and the working capacity of the graduates produced by universities.

Far beyond mere boundary maintenance among occupations, the combination of educationally enhanced cognitive functioning and specialized knowledge—acquired through degree competition—contributes to the human capital stock, productivity, wage differentials, and an education-oriented reordering of the occupational hierarchy, and thus to the social stratification system (cf. Baker et al., 2024; Mitterle et al., 2024). Degrees also classify and reclassify areas of professional responsibility and, hence, also employment positions. Often such classifications do not primarily stem from the world of work itself or even from work experience. Instead, over the long course of the university, they emerge from an academic process of knowledge production, redefining cultural ideas, and institutionalizing these with new areas and degrees in both countries examined here (Baker, 2011; Stock, 2016).

  Comparative cases of academization: institutionalizing expectations for the world of work

Contrasting country cases highlights consistencies in the process as well as the institutional forces from within national education systems that make certain dimensions of academization of occupations more salient. In each country, degree classifications are integrated with social classifications shaped by that nation’s unique educational structure. This mechanism aligns academic qualifications with occupational fields (such as public sector roles) in both material and social terms, thereby institutionalizing expectations regarding the practical applicability of academic skills, as well as the definition of roles within organizations and across occupations.

As a result, academization functions recursively across disciplines, occupations, societal expectations, and state regulations and policies. While each academic degree follows its own distinct trajectory, there are informative commonalities across cases—consider three of these.

First, across its various disciplines, the academic world increasingly classifies societal challenges as requiring authoritative interventions involving both high and low technologies. Entrepreneurship education, for example, emerged in response to the growing economic and technological significance of entrepreneurial activity, despite persistently high failure rates. Universities were tasked with studying and teaching entrepreneurship as a formal discipline, with the aim of reducing the frequency of start-up closures. Interestingly, this emphasis did not fundamentally reduce business closure rates, but it did make entrepreneurialism a theoretical—academic—subject for both teaching and research. The curricular focus of these programs reinforced an entrepreneurial culture that increasingly privileged the knowledge and practices of founding within “a theory of the company” as a rightful topic within universities.

A similar example is the set of academic business concepts behind full automation, developed within companies during the 1970s, which ultimately laid the groundwork for today’s digitalization agenda to emerge primarily as an academic endeavour. Both developments were further reinforced by the internal coherence of university mathematics, which reframed diverse occupational activities as mathematical problems, enabling the quantification of entrepreneurship and organizational efficiency.

Second, an expanding academic community constructs demand for new skills and services in specific occupational fields. This is accompanied by growing the number of graduates taking those skills into occupations, but this also includes the upgrading of skills and services based on the university’s knowledge systems. Thus, knowledge and competencies that can draw on scientific (i.e., all kinds of science, including behavioral and social sciences) evidence are valued more highly than those that are derived from generalizations based purely on experience or outdated knowledge. The fact that with educational expansion this is not merely an elite process but is now spread widely across all types of jobs and occupations adds further legitimacy to academization. When graduates with academic qualifications are available and lay claim to occupational areas of responsibility, this can devalue the knowledge base of those who have previously occupied these roles directly or indirectly.

The case of preschool education the U.S. shows the direct path: Scholarly research and the expansion of bachelor’s degree requirements went hand in hand, increasingly infusing early childhood education with cognitive skill requirements obtained in the university. In Germany, early childhood graduates met an institutionalized and highly valued and expansive vocational education system, leading to perceptions of mismatch in childcare practice among graduates, often channelling them into leadership or quality assurance positions. Indirectly they incrementally transform the discourse on early childhood education reframing the educational setting, parental views of child learning, and quality procedures in place.

Third, the construction of new skills through the academization process can lead to new job descriptions through synergy and also conflict: for instance, “architectural engineering” as a degree combines mathematical and technical skills with architectural imagination, anticipating and increasing overlap between the occupations, but also instituting new ways of combining building knowledge – such as in digital building modelling and maintenance. Learning therapy, in contrast, is structured through an academic struggle between pedagogy and psychology on the role of social and individual factors in learning problems, translating into different expectations and job profiles for practitioners.

In terms of both construction of new occupational and work categories to meet new social needs, the academization argument and the cases briefly presented here reconceptualize the relationship between university education and employment away from outdated historical social and material classifications.

The analysis of academization – as the first of its kind – built on country and case studies introduces the process of academization of occupations to the sociology of occupations, work, and ultimately the social stratification of post-industrial society. The cases do make clear that without a theory of academization many salient empirical trends of education, employment, worker skills, and advanced capitalism will remain underexplained.

 

Manfred Stock is at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Institute for Sociology. Alexander Mitterle is at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Centre for School and Educational Research / Institute for Sociology. David P. Baker is at the Pennsylvania State University (US), Department of Sociology and Criminology.

 

Literature:

Baker, D. (2011).  Forward and backward, Horizontal and Vertical: Transformation of Occupational Credentialing in the Schooled Society. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility: A Journal of the International Sociological Association, 29(1), 5-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2011.01.001

Mitterle, A., Mathies, A., Maiwald, A. & Schubert, C. (Eds.), Akademisierung – Professionalisierung. Zum Verhältnis von Hochschulbildung, akademischem Wissen und Arbeitswelt. Wiesbaden: Springer.

Baker, D., Schaub, M., Choi, J. & Ford, K. (2024). Education: The Great Equalizer, Social Reproducer, or Legitimator of New Forms of Social Stratification? In M. Berends, S. Lamb & B. Schneider (Eds.),  The Sage handbook of Sociology of Education. Sage.

Stock, M. (2016). Arbeitskraft- und Stellentypisierungen. Organisationssoziologische Überlegungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Bildung und Beschäftigung. In M. S. Maier (Eds.), Organisation und Bildung (pp. 73-91). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Stock, M., Mitterle A. and D. P. Baker (Eds.) (2024) How Universities                                                             Transform Occupations and Work in the 21st Century: The Academization of German and American Economies. Series on International Perspectives on Education and Society, Emerald Publishing: Bingley, U.K.

The post Academization: How Universities Transform Occupations and Work in the 21th Century appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Today marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War – Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945.

What has VE Day to do with the European Union? Everything.

The European Economic Community – which later became the European Union – was created in the aftermath of the war with one overriding purpose: to build a lasting peace on a continent that had torn itself apart.

That was the passionate aim of the EU’s founding architects, including our own wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

Afer all, Europe had been infamous for nations resolving their differences through violence, invasion and war. Both world wars began here.

So, the EU was never just about economics or trade.

It was a political and social project as much as an economic one – a community of European nations committed not only to working together, but to never again going to war with each other.

The founding vision, set out in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, was to create ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ – not simply a union of states, but of citizens, bound together by shared values, cooperation, and peace.

Winston Churchill saw it clearly. In his landmark Zurich speech of 1946, he said:

“We must build a kind of United States of Europe. The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important.”

That dream took shape just over a decade later, when six nations – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – founded the EEC in 1957.

It was a remarkable feat. Some of these countries had been brutal enemies only a few years earlier. Four had been occupied by Nazi Germany.

And yet they came together, determined that war between them must become unthinkable.

It worked.

In the 80 years since 1945, no EU member has ever gone to war with another. That is an extraordinary achievement on a continent with such a violent history.

Whilst NATO has protected us – so far – from external threats, it’s the EU’s deep political and economic structure that has helped to prevent war between its members.

This is what many Brexiters never understood – or chose to forget.

The EU is not just a trading bloc. It’s a peace project. A human project. A bold, ongoing effort to build unity where once there was destruction.

By leaving, the UK sent a message: that we no longer value this remarkable peasce project as our neighbours do.

And that’s a tragedy.

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky 

• Related article: The Peace Project that Brexit Never Understood

The post The EU was started to stop war appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Reform UK party is making headlines.

In the most dramatic shift in local politics for a generation, the party won around 677 council seats across England according to early results – more than any other party – and gained control of several councils for the first time.

They also secured multiple mayoral positions, further cementing their newfound influence on the national stage.

And in Runcorn and Helsby – a former Labour stronghold – Reform won a Westminster by-election by just six votes, the narrowest margin since the Second World War.

But is this a true reflection of national sentiment? Or a political mirage?

The success of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party can be neither denied nor ignored. But it must be understood in context.

Local elections are often marked by low turnouts and protest votes. In Runcorn and Helsby, only around 15% of the electorate voted for Reform. That’s hardly a national mandate.

Reform’s online presence and media attention far exceed its actual share of the vote. In a general election context, with higher turnout and broader scrutiny, the picture could look very different.

Polling paints a different picture.

Consistently, surveys show that a majority of Britons now believe Brexit was a mistake. Support for rejoining the EU exceeds opposition, particularly among younger voters and professionals. The public mood is shifting – but that shift is not yet reflected in party politics.

The truth is, Brexit supporters have done what pro-Europeans have not: Built a coordinated, media-savvy, emotionally resonant campaign.

Farage has dominated the airwaves for years, with a message that is simple, repeated, and amplified. Reform’s rise is the product of that persistence. Meanwhile, the pro-EU side remains fragmented, underfunded, and largely absent from mainstream political discourse.

We have the facts, but we’re not telling the story. We have the public gradually moving our way, but we’re not offering a compelling, united vision to channel that support.

And I say this not to criticise others, but to speak plainly.

I’m just one journalist, working without the backing of any political party or organisation. I’ve been posting articles, videos, and graphics on this topic for over a decade. And I’m far from alone – many others are working tirelessly to present the case for EU membership.

But it’s not enough.

What’s needed now is a coalition of voices – campaigners, creatives, economists, and everyday citizens – who believe Britain’s future lies in Europe and are willing to say so, publicly and proudly. To challenge Reform and the forces behind it, we need more than scattered voices.

We need a coordinated, professional, long-term campaign to present the alternative: a hopeful, forward-looking vision of Britain’s place in Europe and the world.

We cannot change the past – but we can shape the future. If Reform’s rise tells us anything, it’s that the appetite for change is real. The question is: will we leave that hunger to be filled by anger and division? Or will we finally work together to offer a better way forward?

The choice, and responsibility, is ours.

Reform is loud. We are quiet. That’s the real problem.

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

• Related post: Labour’s Reform-style rhetoric against migration simply won’t work

• Related post: When did Britain vote for Nigel Farage’s ‘real’ Brexit?

• Related post: Brexiters are outnumbered

The post Is Farage a mirage? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Linda Wanklin

Cecilia Ivardi

Cecilia Ivardi and Linda Wanklin

In Political Economy, we have historically examined the policies through which countries acquire skills as a national effort. Traditionally, skill provision has been considered a matter occurring within well-defined national borders. Scholars have investigated how economic elites secure the necessary skills and workforce for industries that foster economic growth (see research on growth regimes, Hassel and Palier 2021). However, we argue that this approach is no longer possible. Production increasingly spans multiple countries and value chains grow more intricate. Therefore, skill provision has evolved into a transnational endeavor that transcends national borders. We show that the strategies for sourcing skills now foster international networks.

 

International pressures on national skill needs

Rising political-economic pressures have a transnational nature. First, the geography of production is changing. Previously, companies often outsourced only lower value-added processes to low-income countries. However, consumer demand is stagnating in saturated advanced economies and only increasing in middle-income economies and BRICS countries. Companies now find it more profitable to “produce where they sell”, meaning producing goods directly in the markets where demand is growing instead of outsourcing parts of the production (Herrigel et al. 2015; Fort 2017; Tintelnot et al. 2018). Second, advanced economies face demographic decline. They have a shrinking labor force, which is a particularly serious problem for the mid-skilled jobs that often used to be filled through vocational education and training (VET).

These pressures have implications for countries trying to secure adequate skills for their industries. On the one hand, companies that now produce abroad require a skilled workforce that can conduct operations abroad. On the other hand, at home, countries must grapple with the need for labor migration to fill in the shortages in their labor markets and focus on attracting the influx of workers that they need.

 

Transnational skill formation

We conduct a case study of Germany since the financial crisis. Germany has traditionally been seen as a nationally anchored “skills machine” (Culpepper and Finegold 2001). Its economic model is based on exports and reliant on the skills provided by the national skill formation system (Baccaro et al. 2022). Thanks to the widespread availability of specialized mid-skilled labor trained in the VET system, the German export-led growth model has achieved unparalleled competitiveness.

However, the trends described above threaten the symbiosis between economic growth and the skill formation system. On the one hand, German companies have increasingly started to “produce where they sell”, meaning that they retain only high-level engineering and design in Germany while conducting most production activities in foreign locations (Herrigel et al. 2017). At the same time, VET has become less popular among youth, which, combined with demographic decline, creates an urgent problem of skills shortages particularly in the middle of the skills distribution, such as in the care, hospitality, retail, crafts, and construction sectors.

 

1.      VET transfer

We argue that a coalition of state actors and employers has devised a transnational approach to source skills for the German economy.  This strategy rests on two pillars. First, the coalition has intensified the transfers of VET to foreign contexts. They are financed through official development assistance to the VET sector (which has increased to 400 million USD/year in 2022). Skill formation transfers involve adapting domestic VET concepts, institutions, and training models to foreign contexts at the firm, sector, or system level (Li & Pilz 2023).

These transfers occur through bilateral cooperation on VET reforms, sectoral incentives to implement German training standards, and firm-level initiatives, including the modernization of training processes and the issuing of internationally recognized certificates. Transfers are managed by the ministry responsible for the economy, which funds the German Chambers of Commerce Abroad (AHKs). AHKs provide services to facilitate VET transfers tailored to the needs of German firms and – increasingly/more recently – link training abroad to the migration of mid-skilled workers to Germany. Large German multinational companies benefit from this strategy – however, they are not its frontrunners because, as is well known in Political Economy, they possess the resources needed to train workers on-the-job and do not require a coordinated infrastructure of VET transfers.

 

2.      Labor migration

The second pillar is the liberalization of labor migration. The coalition has increasingly opened the migration policy regime to mid-skilled workers, which was traditionally hard to access for anyone who was not highly skilled (e.g., in the IT and medical sectors) to access. They eased entry for mid-skilled workers through measures such as the 2012 Recognition Act, the 2016 Western Balkan Regulation, and the 2020 and 2023 Skilled Worker Immigration Acts. These reforms have linked foreign-trained workers to the German labor market, including standardized VET recognition abroad, transnational skill partnerships, and information platforms to streamline migration processes.

Increasing openness of the regime is visible in a four-fold increase in labor migration from non-EU countries since 2010, rising from 85,000 in 2010 to 351,000 in 2022. The ministry responsible for development cooperation has driven these efforts, among others, by changing its approach to migration. Once skeptical of the brain drain that labor migration can cause in the countries of origin, it now acknowledges the importance of funding training abroad to meet domestic labor market needs. Domestic employers’ associations, concerned about skill shortages, have encouraged labor migration to align with their needs and have obtained more autonomy in the recognition of foreign diplomas. Although the rise of right-wing populism in Germany has mobilized negative sentiments toward all migrants, this concern primarily affects refugees and asylum seekers and, to a lesser extent, labor migrants, towards which public opinion has remained more neutral – therefore, public opinion has not hindered these efforts.

 

Conclusion

Scholars interested in understanding how countries pursue economic growth must consider the way in which they source skills. In an age of globalization of production structures and skill shortages, skill formation has become a profoundly transnational effort. The approach to skills sourcing activities should be comprehensive, and not merely confined to the study of initial VET, as is common in studies of skill formation systems. Initiatives that transfer education systems and efforts to manage labor migration are seamlessly integrated into skill provision strategies and should be considered part of our research focus.

 

We encourage further research in this field and caution against perceiving the countries where labor is sourced as passive policy-takers, since these countries often recognize some benefits of migration, including reduced youth unemployment and increased remittances (Wanklin 2025). In conclusion, even institutions traditionally anchored within a national context, such as skill formation, are influenced by transnational processes and interdependencies that undermine their connections to the national political economy and their contours become increasingly transnational.

 

Cecilia Ivardi is a PhD candidate in Political Economy at the University of St.Gallen. She is involved in the research funded by the Swiss Leading House GOVPET, focused on the governance of Vocational Education and Training (VET). Her research focuses on how advanced democracies adapt to societal transformations such as the rise of the knowledge economy and examines the policy areas of education, labor markets and migration. She is particularly interested in the ideas and discourses through which national elites steer adaptation processes. To study these, she uses a mixed-methods approach that combines insights from discourse network analysis (DNA) with case studies.

Linda Wanklin is doctoral researcher at the University of St. Gallen, where she is finalising her PhD in International Affairs and Political Economy. As a researcher within the Swiss Leading House GOVPET, she is primarily interested in the governance of skill formation systems and policy transfer initiatives in the field of vocational education and training (VET), aiming to explain their rise. Her research is predominantly theoretical. In addition to her doctoral studies, Linda works as a thematic expert for the Donor Committee for dual VET in development cooperation (DC dVET). Her research interests are, among others, driven by her previous experience working in the field of international development for various organisations, including the German Development Cooperation (GIZ), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

This blog post is based on their paper that won the 2023 Award for Excellent Paper from an Emerging Scholar from the ECPR Standing Group ‘Knowledge Politics and Policies’. The award was celebrated during the 2024 ECPR General Conference. This was the seventh time this prize was awarded. Previous winners are Anke Reinhardt, Adrienn Nyircsák, Alexander Mitterle, Justyna Bandola-Gill, Emma Sabzalieva, Olivier Provini and Que Anh Dang.

 

References

Baccaro, L., Blyth, M. and Pontusson, J. (2022) Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Culpepper, P.D. and Finegold, D. (2001). The German Skills Machine: Sustaining Comparative Advantage in a Global Economy. New York, Bergham Books.

Fort, T. C. (2017) ‘Technology and production fragmentation: Domestic versus foreign sourcing’, The Review of Economic Studies, 84, 650–687.

Hassel, A. and Palier, B. (2021). Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies: How Have Growth Regimes Evolved?, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Herrigel, G. (2015) ‘Globalization and the German industrial production model’, Journal for Labour Market Research, 48, 133–149.

Herrigel, G., Voskamp, U. and Wittke, V. (2017) ‘Einleitung: Globale Qualitätsproduktion – Annäherung an ein neues Muster transnationaler Produktion’. In Herrigel, G., Voskamp, U. and Wittke, V. (eds) Globale Qualitätsproduktion Transnationale Produktionssysteme in der Automobilzulieferindustrie und im Maschinenbau, Frankfurt am Main, Campus.

Li, J. and Pilz, M. (2023) ‘International transfer of vocational education and training: A literature review’, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 75, 185–218.

The post Growing through skills: The integration of transnational dimensions into growth regimes appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Brexit was never the will of the British people – it was the will of a frustrated minority, and even that support has now collapsed.

For most of our five decades in the EU, Britain was broadly pro-European. In the 1975 referendum, every part of the UK voted decisively to remain, with a huge 35-point margin. Pro-Europe sentiment remained strong for years. Polls in 2014 and 2015 showed Remain support at 56% and 61% respectively – well ahead of Leave.

The 2016 referendum was the anomaly. The Leave win was narrow – just 4% – and only 37% of the total electorate voted for it. Two of the UK’s four nations, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted clearly to remain.

This was not a national consensus. Unlike in 1975, when the public voted with knowledge of the terms of membership, the 2016 referendum was held before any exit deal was known – and no confirmation vote followed.

Today, the British people have seen the consequences.

The economy is weaker, exports are down, and British citizens have lost their freedom to live, work and love across the continent. Promised benefits never materialised. Instead, businesses struggle with red tape, and farmers and fishers feel betrayed.

Now, poll after poll confirms what most of us feel: Brexit was a mistake. According to YouGov, 55% of Britons now say the nation was wrong to vote to leave the EU in 2016, with the same proportion saying they would support rejoining. Just 11% believe Brexit has been more of a success than a failure.

And now, a new poll this month reveals that a clear majority of UK voters want the government to prioritise rebuilding trade ties with the EU, rather than seeking a new economic deal with the US. Voters see Europe as key to future prosperity and security.

There’s also a new urgency. With Donald Trump back and threatening global trade with new tariffs, American democracy is under strain and no longer a stable ally. The UK must secure its future by aligning more closely with Europe – our neighbours who share our values, our economy, and our security interests.

Britain’s natural home is in the EU, among partners who respect international law, uphold democratic norms, and work together to face global challenges – from climate change to military threats.

We must stop pretending Brexit was a done deal. In a democracy, no decision is forever. When the facts change, when the people change their minds, when the nation suffers – there must be a democratic way forward.

It’s time to ask the British people again. Not out of bitterness, but because the country deserves better. The Brexit experiment has failed. Let’s restore our place in Europe – and our future.

Sources

• Ipsos poll  (2014)
• Ipsos (2015)
• YouGov ‘Few Britons think Brexit was good for anything’
• National Institute of Economic and Social Research: Revising the effect of Brexit
• The Guardian ‘Voters want Keir Starmer to focus on rebuilding trade ties with EU, poll reveals’ 

• Join the discussion about this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

The post It’s time to rejoin the EU: Britain deserves a new say on a broken Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

by Matti Ylönen (Academy of Finland Research Fellow; Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki)

A few years ago, the idea of the Brussels effect took the European Union (EU) circles by storm as an exciting new framework for understanding the global exemplary impact of the EU rules. Now, it faces tumultuous waters as Donald Trump has returned to the White House, bringing with him Elon Musk and the backing from the emerging American tech oligarchy. They portray the EU more as an adversary than an ally, being irked by the major Acts and competition policy measures that the EU has introduced to reign in the power of large online platforms, digital gatekeeper firms, and large language models.

To grasp the challenge that the new world political situation poses for the Brussels effect, we must start by revising its original definitions. Anu Bradford devised the Brussels Effect in the 2010s to understand how the stalemate in global governance and American politics had given an outsized role for the EU as a global rule-maker. The big breakthrough of this concept came with her 2020 book The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. In this blog post, I summarize my reconceptualization of the Brussels effect, recently published in JCMS.

Bradford envisioned the de facto effect encompassing Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) adjusting their global conduct to the EU rules. The de jure effect involved third countries adopting EU-style regulations for legislative simplicity, for enticing MNEs, or through policy diffusion via ‘economic and political treaties and via international organizations and governmental networks’. I illustrate Bradford’s original theory with Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. The original Brussels Effect

Bradford’s theory was a welcomed expansion from the theories of ‘Europeanization’, ‘market power Europe’ and ‘normative power Europe’, but its one-directionality and its focus on EU rules (instead of institutions) hindered its applicability in situations where the EU policy faces significant lobbying efforts or resistance. Moreover, the original definitions of de facto/jure effects lacked analytical tools for understanding how such effects may evolve over time. These are some of the key issues that I address in my reconceptualization of the Brussels effect.

Accordingly, Figure 2 below receonceptualizes the Brussels effect with systematic definitions of instrumental/structural power drawn from the International Political Economy (IPE) literature. (In key role here are two IPE articles: How does business power operate? A framework for its working mechanisms, and Structural power and bank bailouts in the United Kingdom and the United States.)

Whereas instrumental power means the power of A over B to make B to do something they otherwise would not do, structural power concerns the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political economy. It can be divided into two aspects. First, automatic capacities can be exemplified with the power that the control over the US dollar supply wields to the United States, given how decisions over the US monetary policy influence other jurisdictions. Second, structural power can manifest in agents’ strategic mobilization of resources that derive from their structural power.
Figure 2. The reconceptualized Brussels Effect

The ability of the de facto effect to make MNEs use EU requirements as a yardstick for their global operations essentially involves structural power as an automatic reaction to EU rules. Such adaptation is automatic in a sense that it does not require active involvement from the EU – companies adopt rules modeled after the EU because they want to avoid multiple overlapping reporting systems.

In the reconceptualiztion of the original Brussels effect, the EU’s structural power also affects third countries as an automatic reaction – either through direct exemplary influence, or through the lobbying efforts multinational corporations. When mediated by private firms, this power can be either instrumental or structural, depending on the amount of leverage they have over particular governments.

Now that the two mechanisms of the Brussels Effect have been given unified definitions, opportunities emerge for a broader inquiry into the two-way power relations associated with this effect. First, we much consider how the Brussels effect has taken on a life of its own in the speeches and texts of prominent EU policymakers. This tendency is addressed in the middle of Figure 2 by highlighting the potential socializing role of the Brussels effect.

The successful mainstreaming of this effect can even turn it into a conscious policy goal for European policymakers, signaling its transformation from an automatic capacity to strategic mobilization of the EU’s resources in its external relations. Such tendencies also highlight the need to approach the EU as (a set of) institutions instead of defining the Brussels Effect merely as the global impact of the EU rules. Institutions (such as the Commission or the Parliament) may advance the Brussels Effect also in more indirect ways that what can be captured with the term ‘rules’ .

Second, Figure 2 tackles the attempts by MNEs and third countries to influence or even derail the Brussels effect across policy processes. Such advocacy efforts are captured by highlighting the power of these actors to influence EU rules in different stages of policymaking. This advocacy can signal either instrumental or structural power, depending on the power resources an MNE or a third country possess.

The top-right corner of Figure 2 also introduces the modified de facto effect. It involves situations where companies are lobbying for EU-styled rules in third countries in form, while aiming to dilute their contents. In my article, I argue that such dynamics have characterized, for example, the dynamics surrounding the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The second part of my article addresses various forms that such advocacy can take across the EU’s policymaking cycle, building on the five background conditions that Bradford outlined for the Brussels effect to occur: market size, inelastic targets, regulatory capacity, stringent standards, and their non-divisibility. Two of them – market size and inelastic targets of regulation – are practically beyond influence for external actors. However, external actors can try to influence the remaining pillars. Figure 3 captures such dynamics.

Figure 3. Ways to undermine the necessary background conditions of the Brussels Effect

An important, novel starting point for Figure 3 is that the potential forms of the Brussels effect can change significantly as EU rules progress from the drafting stage to political, juridical and enforcement stages. If third countries copy EU-styled rules immediately after they have been ratified, they essentially mimic the political will of the EU. However, such policy diffusion can take very different forms after the EU rules have been tested in courts and enforced, possibly with significantly altered outcomes. This aspect has received insufficient attention in the literature.

Figure 3 also highlights how external actors can weaken regulatory capacity and the stringency of standards in various stages of policymaking. Regulatory capacity can be weakened through exerting ‘epistemic authority’ by flooding decision-making processes with misleading policy inputs. Poaching skilled policymakers from the EU institutions may also serve similar purposes. Stringency of standards, in turn, can be weakened for example by court cases with malicious intent. Finally, the non-divisibility of the EU rules can be weakened by weaponizing other policy fields (such as trade policy) to counteract the EU’s measures.

In conclusion, my reconceptualizon of the Brussels effect empowers this framework with the analytical tools for understanding the advocacy dynamics surrounding this effect in a pivotal situation where American tech executives are calling for Trump to counteract the EU’s competition and tech policy rules. Importantly, this contribution can also help policymakers to identify the weakest links in the EU policy processes for external influence. Such an understanding is crucial for strengthening the institutions that sustain democratic decision-making in the Union.

Matti Ylönen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, acting as a Principal Investigator in a project “Seeing Like a Tech Firm: Advocacy in the Era of Platform Capitalism”. He has published extensively on the political roles of various private actors in global political economy.

The post Reconceptualizing the Brussels Effect amidst the looming tech oligarchy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

While President Trump brands his tariff-heavy economic policy as “Liberation Day,” it is, in truth, a declaration of a global trade war.

His imposition of sweeping tariffs on most imports to the United States is provoking retaliatory tariffs on American exports – an economically self-harming spiral that will ultimately make everyone poorer, including Americans.

In stark contrast stands the European Union.

The EU Single Market offers free, frictionless trade among its members – benefiting businesses and consumers alike.

This system, rooted in cooperation rather than confrontation, has created the largest and most successful trading bloc in the world.

The EU’s model is so attractive that most countries in Europe are either members or are actively seeking membership. That includes:

27 full EU member states
10 countries formally applying to join the EU
4 non-member countries in the EU Single Market
3 negotiating to join the Single Market

That’s 44 out of 51 European countries committed in some way to the EU project.

The outliers? Belarus, Russia, and – uniquely – Britain, the only member-state to have left the EU.

And not only most European countries want to be in the EU.

Trump’s tariff regime and erratic international behaviour have alarmed America’s closest allies.

In a revealing March 2025 poll by Abacus Data, 44% of Canadians said they supported their government exploring EU membership if Trump continued down a path of economic nationalism and annexation threats, while only 34% were opposed and 23% were unsure.

While the EU currently restricts full membership to European nations, the idea of expanding its reach is gaining traction as a stabilising global force.

But Britain’s decision to leave the EU has brought economic pain, not prosperity.

The UK economy has underperformed compared to EU economies since 2016, with losses in trade, foreign investment, and labour force dynamism.

UK exports to the EU fell sharply post-Brexit, and supply chain frictions have become the norm.

Meanwhile, EU countries enjoy:

Tariff-free and frictionless access to one another’s markets
Shared standards and regulations that cut red tape
Collective bargaining power on the global stage
Freedom of movement for citizens and workers
Stronger security cooperation on everything from cyber threats to policing

This isn’t just about trade – it’s about belonging to a political and economic union that defends democratic values, environmental standards, and social protections.

In the face of rising authoritarianism and isolationism, the EU offers a platform for peace, prosperity, and shared sovereignty.

In 1948, Winston Churchill famously said:

“We cannot aim for anything less than the union of Europe as a whole.”

Churchill’s vision of a united Europe is nearly fulfilled.

Yet Britain now sits outside the EU – like Russia and Belarus. We oppose their actions, certainly, but do we really want to be grouped with Europe’s outsiders rather than its democratic partners?

While populist parties exist in most EU countries, none of the EU’s 27 members is seeking to leave.

Quite the opposite: membership applications and pro-EU sentiment are rising. In countries such as Ukraine and Moldova, joining the EU is seen not only as a route to prosperity but as a shield against authoritarian threats from Moscow.

Even in Britain, public opinion is shifting. Polls consistently show a clear majority now believe Brexit was a mistake.

The economic evidence is mounting – and so is the political will for change.

Trump’s tariff-driven nationalism may grab headlines, but the EU’s quietly successful model of cooperation is what delivers real, long-term benefits.

For Britain, the choice is clear:

Align with global protectionists and economic saboteurs
Or rejoin the most successful peace and trade project in human history

It’s time to liberate ourselves – not through tariffs, but through renewed European solidarity.

Join the discussion about this article on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

________________________________________________________________________

TRUMP’S TARIFFS IN HIS FIRST TERM IN OFFICE

Between 2018 and 2020, during President Trump’s first term of office, the United States launched a major trade confrontation by imposing widespread tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of imports.

The goal was to reduce the US trade deficit, revive domestic manufacturing, and pressure trade partners – especially China – to agree to more favourable terms.

Instead, the result was an economically damaging trade war with global consequences.

The tariffs began with steel and aluminium, then expanded to include a wide range of goods from China, the EU, Canada, and Mexico.

In response, these countries hit back with retaliatory tariffs on American exports, particularly agricultural products.

What followed was a surge in farm bankruptcies, particularly across the Midwest, where soybean and dairy producers lost key export markets almost overnight.

Meanwhile, the steel and aluminium industries – supposedly the intended beneficiaries – also suffered job losses. Although prices for domestic steel temporarily rose, the higher input costs hurt manufacturers that rely on imported components, from carmakers to construction firms.

The tariffs also failed in their central aim: reducing the trade deficit. By 2020, the US trade deficit remained largely unchanged, as importers shifted supply chains rather than returning production to the US.

For American consumers, tariffs acted as a tax. Prices increased on goods ranging from washing machines and electronics to canned beer and bicycles.

Studies by the Federal Reserve and academic institutions concluded that nearly the entire cost of the tariffs was passed on to US households and businesses.

The broader impact included uncertainty in global markets, reduced business investment, and strained diplomatic relations with key allies.

In short, the US tariff war from 2018 to 2020 caused disruption across multiple sectors, raised costs, and weakened trade relationships – without achieving its economic objectives.

When President Biden took office in 2021, many expected him to roll back the tariffs – but he largely left them in place.

Tariffs on over $300 billion of Chinese imports remained, along with duties on steel, aluminium, and other goods.

While Biden eased tensions with allies like the EU by converting some tariffs into quotas, he kept most of Trump’s trade policies intact.

Rather than reversing the tariff war, Biden focused on domestic industrial investment and supply chain resilience.

As Trump now moves to impose even broader tariffs on all imports to the United States, history offers a clear lesson: protectionism may offer the illusion of strength, but in reality, it brings economic damage, isolation, and long-term decline.

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

Footnote: The 2018–2020 timeframe covers the core period when the US imposed sweeping tariffs and the most direct economic impacts were observed. After 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted global trade, making it harder to isolate the effects of tariffs alone.

Sources of evidence:

• The Economic Effects of the 2018 U.S. Trade Policy: A State-Level Analysis 
• The impact of the 2018 trade war on U.S. prices and welfare 
• The U.S. Trade Deficit: How Much Does It Matter? 

________________________________________________________________________

BLANKET TARIFFS DON’T WORK (THEY NEVER HAVE)

As trade tensions rise again in the US, we must remember one thing: no country in history has ever made itself better off by imposing blanket tariffs on all imports.

It has never worked – and it never will.

Just look at the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of the 1930s. It was supposed to protect American jobs during the Great Depression.

Instead, it sparked a global trade war, collapsed international markets, and deepened the economic misery.

World trade fell by more than 60%.

Or take Argentina, where protectionist policies in the 2000s caused runaway inflation, supply shortages, and long-term economic decline.

India, too, suffered from decades of self-imposed isolation until it opened up in the 1990s and began to grow.

The pattern is always the same. Broad import restrictions lead to rising prices, empty shelves, economic isolation, and weakened competitiveness.

There is not a single modern example of blanket tariffs making a country stronger or richer.

By contrast, open, rules-based trade works.

The EU Single Market, built on free movement of goods, services, capital and people, has delivered prosperity, growth, and geopolitical stability.

EU GDP has grown significantly since the development of the Single Market, with countries like Germany and the Netherlands thriving through trade.

China’s economic rise accelerated after it reduced tariffs and joined the WTO in 2001. Export-led growth fuelled rapid development – not isolationism.

Yes, the EU uses tariffs – but strategically and only when necessary, such as when a trading partner unfairly subsidises its industries. The goal is always fair trade, not retreat from it.

Free and frictionless trade doesn’t happen by accident. It requires shared rules, mutual trust, and political alignment.

That’s what the EU provides: a stable, democratic framework for trading cooperation and collective strength.

Compare that with President Trump’s closed-shop tariff policies, which failed during his first term in office – raising prices, hurting farmers and manufacturers, and doing nothing to reduce the trade deficit.

Now he promises even more tariffs, which risk even greater economic damage. It’s a race to the bottom.

The immediate market response underscores this risk.

Following President Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement on 2 April 2025 of sweeping new tariffs – including a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and much higher rates on specific countries and products – global stock markets plummeted.

In the two days that followed:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by approximately 3,900 points, a drop of just over 9%.
• The S&P 500 declined by around 600 points, falling by almost 11%.
• The Nasdaq Composite dropped by roughly 1,900 points, marking a fall of more than 11%.

These were the most significant two-day losses for these indices in history, wiping out an estimated $6.6 trillion in global market value.

Major tech stocks were hit especially hard – Apple lost over $600 billion in market value in the two days following ‘Liberation Day’, while Nvidia’s market capitalisation fell by nearly $400 billion.

Other chipmakers also suffered steep losses amid fears of tariff-driven supply chain shocks and rising consumer prices.

International markets were hit just as hard.

• The FTSE 100 fell by over 6%, its worst two-day performance in five years.
• Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped nearly 9% over the same period.

The global sell-off reflected deep investor alarm over the potential economic fallout of Trump’s blanket tariffs and growing fears of a full-scale global trade war.

Britain now faces a clear choice.

• Stay lost-at-sea, stuck between a failing US trade policy and a thriving EU.
• Or rejoin the bloc that shares our values and boosts our economy.

The EU offers Britain a future. Trump’s America offers only decline.

Let’s stop drifting. It’s time to come home.

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky

Sources of evidence:

• Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and Its Impact on the Great Depression
• Argentina’s Protectionist Policies Leading to Economic Challenges
• India’s Pre-1990s Protectionism and Subsequent Economic Liberalization
• EU Single Market’s Contribution to Economic Growth
• China’s WTO Accession and Export-Led Growth

TRUMP’S MISLEADING ‘TARIFF’ CHART

During his ‘Liberation Day’ announcement President Trump held up a chart claiming to list the tariffs that other countries charge for USA imports. But it was nothing of the sort. 

The figures in that graphic aren’t actual tariff rates. They refer to trade deficits, not the tariffs charged by each country on U.S. imports.

That’s been confirmed by independent fact-checkers, including Euronews, PolitiFact and BBC.

It’s a common confusion (and perhaps a deliberate one), but it’s important to distinguish between a trade imbalance and an actual import tax.

For example, in his chart Trump claimed that the EU charged the USA a tariff of “39%” on imports from the USA. But that isn’t an actual tariff. It refers to the trade deficit between the US and the EU – not the tariffs the EU charges on US goods. They’re not the same thing.

In reality, the EU’s average tariff on U.S. goods is around 1%, according to the European Commission – and many goods, especially under sector-specific agreements, already move tariff-free.

As for “reciprocal” tariffs, the US also imposes tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and uses subsidies in key industries like agriculture and steel.

A trade deficit simply means one country imports more than it exports. But that’s not the fault of the exporter – it reflects things like consumer demand, industrial focus, and competitiveness in the importing country.

As many economists have pointed out: if a country isn’t exporting enough, it should focus on improving its products, boosting competitiveness, or investing in innovation – not blaming its trading partners.

Also, it’s often overlooked that the U.S. runs a significant trade surplus with the EU in services, including finance, tech, and consultancy. But this isn’t reflected in the rhetoric or the “tariff charts” doing the rounds.

If we want a fair view of the EU–U.S. trade relationship, we have to consider goods and services. The EU isn’t “taxing” the U.S. unfairly – especially when actual EU tariffs average around 1%, and many sectors are tariff-free under WTO rules and bilateral agreements.

Reciprocity only makes sense when the whole picture is considered.

Putting up blanket tariffs may sound tough, but in reality, they often just raise prices for consumers, hurt exporters, and trigger retaliation. Long-term, it’s smarter to grow trade, not restrict it.

• Join the discussion about this full post on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky 

________________________________________________________________________

• Related poster: Almost every European country is now in the EU or wants to be.

• Related video: The peace Brexit forgot

• Related video: What the UK has lost – the EU Single Market

The post Let’s liberate ourselves from Trump’s so-called ‘Liberation Day’ appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Myroslava Hladchenko

Global university rankings have got prominence in recent decades. Nation-states develop evaluation policies drawing on the assessment criteria of world rankings aiming their universities to take higher positions in these rankings (Salmi & Saroyan, 2007). QS Rankings is one of them. It is a profitable business that generated €46 m in revenue in 2019 (Shahjahan et al., 2022). Research assessment by QS Rankings takes the form of citations (excluding self-citations) per faculty indicator (Staff, 2021).

 

Since the 2010s Ukrainian media and the education ministry have traced the positions of Ukrainian universities in QS Rankings (Higher Education, 2011). However, since 2022, everyday survival has taken priority over research in the lives of Ukrainian scholars. The paradox of war is that, while life-threatening conditions, shelling, blackouts and economic recession are the part of everyday reality, work obligations and responsibilities remain the same as they were in pre-war life. This applies to all, including scholars. Despite the war, Ukrainian scholars continue to publish which deserves respect. As well, Ukrainian universities participate in QS Rankings 2025.

 

However, QS is a for-profit company the aim of which is not to contribute to societal well-being but to increase its profits. Elsevier which provides data for QS is another for-profit company the aim of which is also to increase revenue. The same concerns publishers issuing Gold Open Access journals, as many of them are oriented on publishing as many articles as possible to ensure profits.

 

The university is a key institution for social and economic development in a knowledge-intensive society (Mohrman et al., 2008). University performance is supposed to result in the quality of life, technological progress and social well-being of the nation. These are the ends that the university is supposed to achieve through research. Publications are just one of the means of achieving these ends. QS Rankings has turned the means of universities into their ends. The university’s position in the global ranking reflects, first, the economic development of the country. Second, the university position at the national level. A university cannot increase its position in the ranking, if there is no economic growth and beneficial conditions for science in the country. On the other hand, the university should contribute to economic growth at the national level.

 

The examination of the assessment of six Ukrainian universities in QS Rankings 2025, first, raise concerns regarding the mismatch between the faculty staff of universities announced on the QS Rankings website and the number of authors affiliated with the explored institutions in their research outputs. Second, it is unclear why the articles in the journals discontinued from Scopus are still in Scopus and correspondingly they are not excluded from the research output assessed by QS Rankings. Third, QS Rankings uses closed data. University managers do not have access to these data and cannot use them while developing research assessment policies. While developing the research assessment policies, universities mostly use SciVal provided by Scopus for a fee. However, there is a mismatch in data that shows SciVal and data that uses QS Rankings. First, QS Rankings normalises only by disciplines but SciVal normalises by year, discipline and document type. As conference papers are less cited than articles, normalisation by a document type results in a high FWCI shown by SciVal. Second, QS Rankings excludes self-citations but SciVal provides data including self-citations.

 

The IRN (International Research Network) index introduced by QS Rankings requires universities to increase the number of countries they collaborate with. It means that not academics but QS Rankings decides with whom they need to collaborate. Aiming to increase the IRN index, Sumy State University gives points if the article increases the number of collaborating countries. This is nothing else but means-ends decoupling.

 

The study findings resonate with the other studies that raise concerns about the ability of QS Rankings as well as other rankings to be a trustworthy assessment tool (Chirikov, 2023; Teixeira da Silva, 2024; Shahjahan, et al., 2021). In 2024, the University Zurich has withdrawn from the ranking published by Times Higher Education magazine. University announced that rankings create false incentives focusing on measurable output, forcing universities to increase the number of publications rather than prioritise the quality of content (Swissinfo, 2024). In 2023, Korean universities boycotted QS Rankings because of the IRN index (Jung & Sharma, 2023).

 

Six Ukrainian universities participating in QS Rankings 2025 have publications in discontinued from Scopus and MDPI journals. MDPI journals is a fast and easy way of publishing for a fee. The question is why academics from a country at war with underfunding science and low salaries are ready to pay an unaffordable APC (article processing fee). Arguably there is a high degree of international collaboration in articles in MDPI journals because Ukrainian academics are interested in finding a foreign co-author able to pay an APC. However, the question is who benefits from publications with a high APC except for publishers that make revenue? Academics publish at the cost of science because the money spent on APCs could be invested in science.

 

The findings highlight that articles (co)-authored by Ukrainian academics co-affiliated with foreign institutions or foreign academics have a higher impact than articles authored by only Ukrainian researchers. The share of articles authored by only Ukrainian authors ranges from 52.6% to 73.3%. Thus, Ukrainian academics have the space to strengthen collaboration with foreign colleagues.

 

To summarise, the research assessment criteria at the global, national and university levels must be oriented towards scientific excellence that results in economic growth and societal well-being. Ukrainian case shows that means-ends decoupling at the global, national and organisational levels results in diversion of critical resources, both financial and human. This negatively impacts on the development of society, the economy and the fulfilment of the talents of individuals in academia as well.

 

Myroslava Hladchenko is researcher in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her research focuses on higher education, universities and research assessment. This blog post is based on her recent article Hladchenko, M. (2025) Ukrainian universities in QS World University Rankings: when the means become ends. Scientometrics 130, 969–997. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05165-2  

 

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding through the MSCA4Ukraine project, which is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the MSCA4Ukraine Consortium as a whole nor any individual member institutions of the MSCA4Ukraine Consortium can be held responsible for them.

 

References

Chirikov, I. (2023). Does conflict of interest distort global university rankings?. Higher education, 86(4), 791-808.

Higher Education (2011). Ukrainian universities at first in the global rankings http://vnz.org.ua/statti/879-ukrayinski-vnz-upershe-v-mizhnarodnomu-rejtyngu-zadovoleni-ne-vsi

Jung, U., and Sharma, Y. (2023) Korean universities unite against QS ranking changes https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20230704195008557

Mohrman, K., Ma, W., & Baker, D. (2008). The research university in transition: The emerging global model. Higher Education Policy, 21(1), 5–27

Salmi, J., & Saroyan, A. (2007). League tables as policy instruments: Uses and misuses. Higher education management and policy, 19(2), 1-38.

Shahjahan, R. A., Grimm, A., & Allen, R. M. (2021). The “LOOMING DISASTER” for higher education: How commercial rankers use social media to amplify and foster affect. Higher Education, 1-17.

Shahjahan, R. A., Sonneveldt, E. L., Estera, A. L., & Bae, S. (2022). Emoscapes and commercial university rankers: the role of affect in global higher education policy. Critical Studies in Education, 63(3), 275-290.

Staff, W. (2021). Understanding the methodology: QS World University Rankings https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/understanding-methodology-qs-world-university-rankings

Swissinfo (2024) University of Zurich withdraws from international university ranking https://education.am/abroad_en/tpost/48hm4eipi1-university-of-zurich-withdraws-from-inte

Teixeira da Silva, J. A. (2024). How are global university rankings adjusted for erroneous science, fraud and misconduct? Posterior reduction or adjustment in rankings in response to retractions and invalidation of scientific findings. Journal of Information Science, 01655515241269499.

The post Ukrainian universities in QS World University Rankings: when the means become ends appeared first on Ideas on Europe.