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Brexit: what does France think?

Fri, 17/06/2016 - 11:40

Not necessarily bad news? (Illustration: Michel Gaillard)

Not that anyone in Britain cares what the French think. As a matter of fact, even the French themselves don’t care that much. They have other ‘cats to whip’ as they say around here: social unrest, terrorist murders, drunk hooligans. There have been surprisingly little surveys in this normally poll-obsessed country, and while the British polls are quoted and analysed by some media, Le Monde recently simply shrugged their shoulders and drily noted that ‘In France, the Brexit provokes neither debate nor consensus‘. Others, like the financial monthly Capital, summarised the shoulder-shrugging differently: ‘Brexit? Not necessarily bad news!’.

In this context it is interesting to have a closer look at some data tables kindly provided by Céline Bracq and Gaël Sliman from the Odoxa polling institute. A poll they conducted earlier this spring for the daily newspaper Le Parisien highlights that a majority of French citizens would rather like the UK to remain in the European Union. The poll was very quickly and rather superficially quoted upon in the Financial Times, but did not seem to raise any eyebrows on the other side of the Channel. But then again: who cares in Britain what anybody else might think on the continent?

As could be expected, the data on the French attitude towards a potential Brexit reveal more about the French themselves than about the UK’s role in Europe. To no surprise they are deeply split both on UK membership, as they are on most EU matters.

One of the questions simply asked whether the Brexit referendum was ‘an important event for Europe’. It appears that the event is indeed considered important across all age groups (around 65%), but most of all among the over 65 years-old (79%). As for almost all things European, the higher the CSP or the revenues per household, the stronger the concern among respondents. More interestingly, although not too surprising for those who follow French attitudes towards Europe since the 2005 referendum, is the divergence between voters of traditional mainstream parties (they are over 80%, no matter left or right, to consider the event important) and those who find themselves close to the Front national or the extreme left-wing parties, where the scores are significantly lower.

The comparison with other European countries is also of interest. It appears that the French are less opposed to a Brexit than people in Italy, German or Spain (where between 65% and 76% of respondents declared themselves ‘favourable’ to British membership. In France only 54% have this attitude. It also seems that their patience is wearing out: in a similar poll in 2013, 58% of them were displeased with the prospect of a Brexit, today only 42% declare themselves ‘opposed’.

Finally, independently from the Brexit question, the poll also enquired about current attitudes toward the Euro. Bad news for the Front National: 68% of the French seem to be determined to keep the Euro. That’s a score that the ‘Remainers’ in a for the time being hypothetical ‘Frexit’ referendum would hardly achieve. Contradictory? Not in the French mind, it seems.

Albrecht Sonntag, EU-Asia Institute
at ESSCA School of Management.

Follow us on Twitter: @Essca_Eu_Asia

 

 

 

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Categories: European Union

What the EU referendum campaigns say on social media

Fri, 17/06/2016 - 09:55

With last than a week to go until the EU referendum, the campaigns on both sides are now in overdrive. Since late January, we have been following the social media campaigns, particularly on Twitter, to understand better the messages that different groups are making, the way in which they frame and the extent to which their followers have been picking these up. In this post, we want to bring together our weekly analyses, to give the bigger picture. With almost 28,000 tweets from ten different groups, we have been able to draw a number of basic conclusions.

Leave dominate online

Throughout this campaign, Leave groups have been both more visible and more popular than their Remain opponents. In terms of followers, this is true whether we look at the two lead groups – Vote Leave and Stronger In – or the Conservative and Labour pairs, or indeed the camps as a whole. The reasons have been rehearsed in our earlier posts, but reflect the much longer establishment of eurosceptics online, plus the more visceral nature of their campaigning. Indicative of this is the dominance of Leave.EU, which even without securing the official designation, has maintained a clear lead over any other group, with 1.5 times as many Twitter followers as all the Remain groups in our sample. The pattern is also found on Facebook.

If we consider volumes of output, then the disparity is smaller, although in only two weeks in our sample period have the Remain camp tweeted more than Leave. While the last two weeks have seen a massive increase in tweeting by the two official groups, this has still seen Leave produce more content.

 

The campaign has not obviously caught the public’s attention

For several months now, we have been awaiting the break-through moment of this campaign, when the man or woman on the street really gets into the debate. This would be reflected in a number of markers, including increased numbers of followers and improved rates of retweeting groups’ content. However, this has not happened so far. While Twitter follower growth has strengthened in recent weeks, it has not approached the rates seen around the time of Cameron’s European Council deal. This suggests that the majority of those who are deeply engaged with the issue have been so for a long time and the it remains a marginal issue for the large majority of voters. Clearly, this has implications for turnout, which looks set to be a key consideration in the outcome of the referendum.

Likewise, when we consider our standardised measure for audience engagement – the average number of retweets per tweet per follower – then there is no clear movement either for groups as a whole or for individual groups. If there has been any pattern then it is that the more focused groups have a generally better rate of engagement than the broader ones. Of course, this measure masks the generally larger effect of engagement by Leave, driven by the much larger follower base.

Looking at the engagement measure over time, if we compare the period before the official campaign began in mid-April with that since, then we see that rates for different type of framing generally are lower, with the partial exception of negative arguments, although this is not a significant difference.

 

Campaigns have become less positive over time

A long-standing discussion on this blog has concerned whether negative campaigning is as successful as it has been suggested for other elections. We discuss this below, but a more general observation is that both sides have become more negative in their framing over time. This has also been true of the three main groups: Stronger In , Vote Leave and Leave.EU.

As we noted last week, the advent of the TV debates has contributed to this very substantially, given the scope for immediate critiquing of opponents, but the trend long predates these events. Our analysis does not yet offer up a convincing explanation for why this occurs, but it will one of the avenues that we will explore in more depth in the coming months. One possibility is that there has been a shift from generic arguments to more specific reaction to events, which produces a similar type of effect to that found with the TV debates.

This shift has also resulted in a clear growth in the use of negative comments about other groups. All of the big three have seen this, again with the TV debates providing rich pickings.

Negative campaigning might work

If there has been a growth in negative framing, then it has not been an unambiguous benefit to groups. Taking our sample as a whole, we do not find that negative framings clearly out-perform positive ones on our engagement measure. Positive arguments and negative comments about other groups are neck and neck, while negative arguments and positive mentions of one’s own group trail a bit behind. Even when we break this up by weeks, there is still not a clear pattern: of particular note would be the last fortnight, which contained the TV debates, but does not show any improvement for negative frames.

The campaigns have been (mostly) consistent in their approach to twitter

Our analysis shows that there has been some notable consistency in the way the groups have used twitter throughout the course of the campaign. This is demonstrated in the 7 days snapshots of tweets for key time periods during the campaign, shown below.

In terms of issues, Leave EU’s message has been dominated by tweets about: 1) politics; 2) criticism of the EU; and 3) business, trade and the economy. We also see a drop off in the number of tweets related to their own campaign after the announcement of the designated groups on the 15th April.

Stronger In’s twitter campaign has been built primarily around business, trade and the economy, with spikes in other issues at certain times. For example, at the beginning of June there is a significant jump in the number of tweets related to domestic issues. Overall, the campaign has builts its message around a core message on business and the economy and the actions of the other campaign.

Vote Leave has conducted a very different social media campaign to Stronger In. It has used twitter to promote its own campaign efforts, rather than engaging the opposing campaign, or to focus on specific issues. Rather, the campaign has focused consistently on a range of issues – politics; domestic issues; immigration; business, trade and the economy; security – but none of these have come to dominate the campaign’s message on twitter. This is a contrast to Stronger In’s predominate focus on business, trade and the economy over other issues.

For this most recent week we have seen a jump in tweets about the opposing campaign from both the designated campaign groups. With Stronger In dedicating almost 30% of their tweets to the leave campaign, and Vote Leave just over 20%. This is in part, likely to reflect the nature of the TV debates in the last week, which formed a significant proportion of the tweets from the campaigns this week and accounts, in part, for the significant increase in the number of tweets generated (see discussion above). In contrast, the number of tweets dedicated to the other campaigns by Leave EU has been significantly lower, at around 2.5%.

 

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Categories: European Union

Is the EU as green as it used to be?

Thu, 16/06/2016 - 11:18

With the referendum on UK EU membership fast approaching, both the Leave and Remain campaigns have put forward their views on the future of environmental policy in the UK and its relationship with the EU. This political debate raises a number of questions:  how green is the European Union; how effective or in some cases cumbersome are its regulations; will the UK be more pro-environment, or more influential outside the block. These questions have informed academic debate on EU environmental politics and policies since the early 1990s.

Twenty-four years ago a special issue in the Journal of Environmental Politics brought together for the first time research studying the ‘green dimension’ of the European integration process: from the rise of green parties in national political systems to the role of key European institutions in ‘greening’ policies (making them more environmentally-friendly) and to key concepts such as environmental policy integration. Interestingly, this first stock-taking exercise took place in the shadow of what was then felt to be a great threat for EU environmental policies: British demands for repeal and repatriation of environmental legislation in the wake of the Danish ‘no’ to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

Back then, environmental policies were at the heart of the British ‘hit list’ of policies to be repatriated. Now, environmental issues are struggling to be heard in the EU referendum debate. Over the past twenty-four years or so, researchers on EU environmental policy and politics have ploughed the furrows delineated in the 1992 special issue – investigating how green the European Parliament really is, how successful environmental policy integration has been, and the role of Green political parties and environmental groups across the EU – as well as developing new agendas for research. In the early 1990s, slow progress stimulated concerns over the implementation of EU environmental policy, while from the run-up to the Kyoto Protocol (in the mid-1990s) onward, the EU’s climate policies and its role as an environmental leader gained traction. Finally, the 2000s saw a surge in research on the effects of the EU on its member states, and the effect of the three waves of enlargement to Central and Eastern European Countries on the functioning of the EU and on its green credentials.

Interestingly, the EU UK referendum debate appears to focus more on what could happen to environmental policies were the UK to leave. But what about a Remain vote? Is the EU as ‘green’ or pro-environment as it used to be? This question was at the heart of an academic workshop (ECPR Joint-Sessions) in April 2016. Bringing together twenty-one EU environmental policy scholars, the workshop discussed emerging new dynamics and directions in EU environmental policy and politics.

The ECPR ‘Whither the Environment in Europe?’ workshop participants

Where next for the environment in Europe?

We discussed three central issues. First, the changing role of central EU institutions in environmental policy, such as the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. The Commission has conventionally been depicted as an institution churning out new legislation at great speed. By contrast, the cutting-edge research shows that the European Commission is profoundly changing, both in its inner structure and in the activities it carries out. In two of its traditionally strong sectors of activity (policy-making and enforcement) the Commission appears to be stepping back by reducing the amount of new policy proposals, and indeed, in some cases, pursuing policy dismantling. It is also actively developing concepts for environmental governance and reinforcing retrospective (ex-post) evaluation of its policies. Concomitantly, the Commission appears to allow civil society to take a more active role in checking the application of EU law, effectively outsourcing parts of its enforcement duties to environmental groups.  This, in turn, links with the role of courts, where environmental groups have gained increasing legal standing, thus potentially shifting enforcement mechanisms in the EU. A recent example if this in the UK is the victory of the environmental law firm Client Earth against the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK Supreme Court on the UK implementation of EU clean air rules in 2015.

A second set of papers considered activities in parts of the EU that have so far received less attention, such as policy implementation in the new member states, as well as the role of the EU in regional environmental regimes in the Baltic. Developing a much deeper understanding of policy dynamics at the EU’s periphery is thus one of the areas that will likely draw future attention, and it also interlinks with the broader questions on EU leadership in environmental governance and the role of its newer members, who have at times been much more reluctant to endorse ambitious policy proposals, particularly on climate change. A focus on the latter appears to be driving current environmental policy research.

Third, a number of papers picked up a return of politics and the increasing contestation of the European Union project. Linked to ideas on policy dismantling, but also the current public debates on the future of the EU, there was a real sense among workshop participants that more integration and more ambitious environmental policy isn’t necessarily the only direction of travel within the EU. This necessitates an engagement with the broader ideas of European (dis)integration, the developments at its core, the borders of the European Union, and increasingly differentiated, or regional, forms of collaboration.

Curiously, the fact that academics have increasingly focused on the minutiae of European policy making and filling gaps in knowledge about governance processes stands somewhat at odds with the ongoing societal and political debates about the future of the European integration project more generally. It appears that these ultimately political questions are forcing their way back into a field that has increasingly focused on lower-level dynamics. Much like the EU itself, the future of environmental policy in it (and its study) remain in flux.

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Categories: European Union

100% sovereignty means Britain losing power

Wed, 15/06/2016 - 12:44

The definition of sovereignty is ‘supreme power or authority’. Only one country in the world has that. North Korea.

But whilst North Korea has cast iron sovereignty over its nation and people, in the outside world it has very little power, authority or influence.

In the modern, rational, democratic world, countries recognise that sharing some sovereignty actually increases their power and strength.

NATO countries realise that in their promise to come to the immediate aid of another NATO country under attack. That’s a classic example of sharing power and sovereignty.

‘Leave’ campaigners say that Britain was misled into thinking that the European Community was only ever about free trade. That, of course, is nonsense – which any cursory study of history will reveal.

The European Economic Community (now called the European Union) was always about a Union of countries sharing some of their power, sovereignty and strength for the common good.

Back in 1962, when Britain first applied to join the European Community, there was much talk about what impact joining would have on Britain’s sovereignty.

The then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, explained to the British people:

“Accession to the Treaty of Rome would not involve a one-sided surrender of ‘sovereignty’ on our part, but a pooling of sovereignty by all concerned, mainly in economic and social fields.

“In renouncing some of our own sovereignty we would receive in return a share of the sovereignty renounced by other members.”

Mr Macmillan added:

“The talk about loss of sovereignty becomes all the more meaningless when one remembers that practically every nation, including our own, has already been forced by the pressures of the modern world to abandon large areas of sovereignty and to realise that we are now all inter-dependent.

“No country today, not even the giants of America or Russia, can pursue purely independent policies in defence, foreign affairs, or the economic sphere.

“Britain herself has freely made surrenders of sovereignty in NATO and in many other international fields on bigger issues than those involved in the pooling of sovereignty required under the Treaty of Rome.”

Over fifty years later, one might have thought these issues would have been settled and agreed by now.

But it seems some British people (actually, they most often call themselves ‘English’ rather than British) do not accept this idea of sharing some sovereignty for the common good.

They want England to have ‘supreme power’, meaning complete sovereign rule over its nation and its people, presumably just like in the ‘good old days’ when England had supreme power over its nation, its citizens and its Empire.

For those of us who belong to the modern world, we can see this makes no sense.

Britain is part of a planet that increasingly needs to work together with other nations, and working together, means sharing some power and agreeing some rules.

That’s our road to more civilisation, safely and prosperity.

That, of course, is the great strength of the European Union. 28 neighbouring countries coming together to share power and influence for the common good. It’s a huge success.

The EU is the world’s most successful economic, trade and political union of countries. No one can deny that the EU is the world’s biggest, richest economy, and that it has considerable influence in the world.

Let’s not throw that away by retreating into an island mentality. Having 100% sovereignty – like North Korea – will not make Britain Great. It will make us small.

Britain really is ‪’Stronger In’ the EU.

__________________________________________________

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Categories: European Union

Some thoughts on sovereignty, and on ‘The Day After’

Tue, 14/06/2016 - 18:03

We are inextricably part of Europe.
[No one] will ever be able to take us ‘out of Europe’,
for Europe is where we are and where we have always been.’

These words were pronounced by one of the UK’s most prominent PMs, Margaret Thatcher, on 16 April 1975. This was 2 years after the UK joined the EC: Britain consulted its population by referendum, as a fully sovereign country, seeking voters’ approval for what was a good deal.

In the 1970s when the UK joined the European Community, it was struggling economically Today, after 43 years of belonging to Europe, Britain has a dynamic economy and enjoys nearly full employment,and consults its population again, about the same issue, and again, as a fully sovereign country. The mere fact that this country is able to hold this referendum is a blatant demonstration of British sovereignty. National sovereignty is not incompatible with belonging to Europe. Any political grouping claiming in its acronym that the UK would not be an ‘independent’ country is talking nonsense. The UK expresses its sovereignty in many ways: through its international connections, through its defence, as well as within Europe, where it is in a position to encourage or to block joint decisions.

What does the UK mean for Europe? Some argue that there is incompatibility between the UK and the EU. I would argue that there is complementarity between the UK and the EU. And that each one needs the other.

Debates have focused too narrowly on benefits, from the UK’s point of view, of remaining or leaving. But there is far more at stake in the referendum. What is at stake is the Europe of tomorrow. What is at stake, is peace, democracy, and our common values. 46 million British voters will take a decision that will affect not only their country, but more than 500 million Europeans.

The British decision will occur at the worst possible time, in a context of rapid global geopolitical and technological change, affected by increased economic and financial uncertainty, rising social inequalities, an erosion of middle classes in developed economies, when we are confronted with the need to improve international cooperations in crucial areas such as currency stability, trade relations between blocs, fiscal rules, climate change, transition towards non-fossil energy sources, finance, migrations, the relative decline of Western economies, the shift of economic power towards the Asia-Pacific area. This is a unique combination of substantial challenges.

If you add to this mix the rise of anti-European nationalists, subsidised by Russia’s President Putin, and an arc of instability on Europe’s Eastern and Southern borders, stretching from Murmansk to Morocco… We are dancing on a vulcano. We are wasting time with issues of the past. The world out there is changing rapidly and is not waiting for us.

Britain has brought a lot to the European Union not just by being a net contributor to the modest EU budget. Britain has been a force for extending the Single Market, and for striking free trade agreements between the EU and other regions of the world. Britain encouraged the push for enlargement to the East and contributed to the democratic transition of these countries after the demise of soviet communism. The EU has been a springboard for the UK to promote important values which are as much British as European: parliamentary democracy; the rule of law; open markets. (Some of my fellow country citizens would even argue that the EU has become ‘too British’…’, that ‘too much English is spoken in Brussels!’) As Barack Obama put it: ‘The European Union does not moderate British influence – it magnifies it.’ In other words the UK has more impact and sovereignty as one of the three most important member states than it would on its own.

An EU without Britain would be likely to drift in a more protectionist direction. It would be a much smaller player in global affairs. It would lose one of the two countries that count in terms of defence policy. It would lose a positive force for liberalism. There is a serious risk that the European motto United in Diversity becomes Disunited in Adversity. Is this what we want at Britain’s doorstep? A fragmented mosaic of little nation-states which could so easily be bullied by Russia? Instead of having the EU as a soft power using its economic clout to put sanctions on Russia for aggressing Ukraine?

In the economic domain we have what Mario Monti calls a two-belief Europe: a group of European countries geared towards the market; and another group geared towards the consolidation of the euro area. Those believing in the market; and those believing in currency integration. Market, money. This is not incompatible: the volume of everyday transactions in euro at the City is higher than in any other international financial centre. I would daresay that the UK has the euro not as a single, but as a common currency, that de facto the euro is the second currency of the UK. This shows the extent to which we are interdependent. The challenge is to bring closer together those who believe in the market and those who believe in the currency project.

The European project, despite its shortcomings, remains the most advanced example of an economic community of countries. And it is regarded as a model in many parts of the world involved themselves in a process of regional integration. It is also envied all around the Globe by people striving for peace and democracy. Admittedly it is a ‘work in progress’ with many imperfections, but this is the best shelter that Europeans have, at a time when there is a multiplication of external and internal threats.

Who would have grounds to rejoice if, the Day After the referendum, the UK opted for a Brexit?

  • A viscerally anti-European media mogul.
  • A few sorcerer’s apprentices gambling on their country’s future to gain a personal political advantage.
  • Unscrupulous populists.
  • And Putin, who subsidises extremist parties across Europe to exacerbate its divisions.

If, however, the UK opted to remain a member of the European Union, this choice would send an unequivocal message to all the populists and new extreme-right parties across Europe - from France to Poland, from Germany to Sweden, from Hungary to the Netherlands, from Austria to Belgium – that despite disappointment about the way the Union works, and despite the UK’s relentlessly Europhobic press, even in the most Eurosceptic member state of the Union, there is no majority to abandon the acquis of the last six decades, which has become a matter of course for two generations.

One last word:

European integration is far from perfect, but it has been the indispensable cement between a huge diversity of nations and cultures which have been able to live in peace for six decades. If the gap between Europe and its citizens continues to be exacerbated by populists whose ultimate aim is the disintegration of Europe, our democracies will be threatened in their core. We take it for granted since 1945 that the ‘Never again’ of post-War times will always apply to Europe, that there will never be a war again in Europe. If the EU was disappearing tomorrow, what certainty would we have that a war between Europeans, between France and Germany, would still be unthinkable? Who would have imagined in the former Yugoslavian Federation of 1987-88, that its populations would endure ten years of civil wars, massacres and dreadful atrocities, on European soil, for absolutely nothing?

Let us not play with fire. We are in the same boat: let us not saw the boat into two!

Jean-Marc Trouille is Jean Monnet Chair
in European Economic Integration
at Bradford University School of Management, UK.

This is the text of a speech given at a public debate
held on 7 June in Ilkley.

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Categories: European Union

It’s their country they want back, not yours

Sun, 12/06/2016 - 14:23

‘We want our country back!’ is the clarion cry of many who want Britain to leave the European Union.

But whose country do they want back exactly? Your country? My country? Or really, just their country?

Before we leave the European Union and possibly change our country forever, we need to have an idea what country we’d leave behind, and what country we’d get instead, if we vote for Brexit on 23 June.

Look carefully at those Tories who are running the ‘Leave’ campaign and calling for Britain to completely change direction outside the EU.

What could be their real motive?

Those leading Tories – Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, John Whittingdale, Priti Patel and others – have in this campaign viciously attacked their own government and Prime Minister.

It’s been a nasty and sustained ‘blue on blue’ offensive.

Do they know what they’re doing?

Probably yes. The referendum presents for them a possible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win power for their style of right-wing Conservatism.

  • When they say, ‘Let’s take back control’, they really mean, ‘We want to take control’.
  • When they say ‘Bring back power from Brussels’, they really mean, ‘We want that power’.
  • When they say, ‘We want our country back’, they really mean ‘their’ country. The true-blue right-wing Tory Britain of the past that they sorely miss.

These Conservatives have taken a calculated but clever risk. They know that if the referendum results in Brexit, it will mean the end of David Cameron‘s premiership and those now in government who support his Remain campaign.

Then what?

There would be resignations and a new leader of the Conservative Party would be elected by the party’s membership.

According to YouGov, Boris Johnson would be front-runner by far to become Tory Leader.
On Brexit, we could have a new brand of Conservative government, with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

Another election would not legally be required until 2020.

The country we’d be ‘getting back’ on Brexit would be run by possibly the most right-wing Tory government anyone of us can remember.

Instead of our current alliances with Europe, we could be back to ‘Rule Britannia’ with orthodox Tory Eurosceptics as our new political masters. They could have uninterrupted power for almost four years.

Opposition? What opposition? Labour and Lib-Dems are in disarray.

If these Tory hopefuls get ‘their country back’ on Brexit, what could Britain become?

For an answer, take a close look at what these right-wing Tory Brexiteers stand for. Here are some brief examples:

Iain Duncan-Smith: Long-term Eurosceptic and former Tory leader, he was until recently the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions. The social policies he proposed were described by the European Court of Justice as ‘unfit for a modern democracy’ and ‘verging on frighteningly authoritarian.’

Michael Gove: He was last year appointed as Secretary of State for Justice, with a mandate to scrap the Human Rights Act – which might only be possible if Britain leaves the European Union. As Education Secretary, Mr Gove was widely criticised for his heavy-handed education reforms and described as having a “blinkered, almost messianic, self-belief.”

Boris Johnson: He’s the ‘poster boy’ of the Leave campaign and the likely new Prime Minister if Britain backs Brexit. His buffoonery and gaffes delight some, but horrify others. He once joked that women only go to university to find a husband. He has often dithered on big issues, wavering last year on whether to return to the House of Commons whilst still London Mayor. Some have criticised him for allegedly joining ‘Leave’ only because of the possible opportunity to become Prime Minister.

Priti Patel: She’s the Minister for Employment. In a pro-Brexit speech last month she said, “If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.” TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady responded, “Leave the EU and lose your rights at work – that’s the message that even Leave campaigners like Priti Patel are now giving.”

Chris Grayling: He’s the Leader of the House of Commons and previously Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. He provoked the first strike by barristers and solicitors for his cuts to legal aid. He backed reforms to curb the power of the European Court of Human Rights. He caused outrage with his comments that Christian owners of bed and breakfasts should have the right to turn away gay couples (he later apologised).

And waiting in the wings is UKIP leader, Nigel Farage who said he puts victory in the referendum above loyalty to his party. Mr Farage said he would back Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister if Britain votes for Brexit – and could see himself working for Boris’s government.

Imagine our current Tory government morphing into a new government consisting only of right-wing Eurosceptic Tories. With the softer pro-EU Conservatives disbanded because they lost the referendum.

A new Conservative government that wouldn’t be subject to the progressive rules and safeguards of the European Union – such as on workers’ rights, free movement and protection of the environment.

Then imagine that we might not have an opportunity to vote-out such a new government until 2020.

If you’re one of those who say ‘we want our country back’ – have a think about what country you’d be getting back if we left the EU, and who’d then be in charge.

Is the EU so bad, and the alternative so good, that we’d want to risk exchanging what we’ve got, for what we’d get?

__________________________________________________

This article has now been published by The Independent newspaper:

You won’t ‘get back your country’ if you vote for a Brexit – you’ll give it to the most right-wing UK government in recent history

__________________________________________________

Other stories by Jon Danzig:

To follow my stories please like my Facebook page: Jon Danzig Writes

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— Jon Danzig (@Jon_Danzig) June 12, 2016

 

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Categories: European Union

It isn’t just about trade

Fri, 10/06/2016 - 19:26

Eurosceptics often claim that they love Europe, but hate the European Union. They assert that Britain can still be part of Europe without having to be part of the European Union.

That, of course, is true to an extent, but it rather misses the point and purpose of the EU.

The European Economic Community – later to be called the European Union – was started in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the express intent of avoiding wars on our continent ever happening again.

That was the passionate resolve of those who are regarded as the eleven founders of the European Union, including our own war leader, Winston Churchill.

After all, Europe had a long and bloody history of resolving its differences through war, and indeed, the planet’s two world wars originated right here, on our continent.

So the EU was never just an economic agreement between nations.

It was always also meant to be a social and political union of European nations to enable them to find ways not just to trade together, but to co-exist and co-operate in harmony and peace on many levels as a community of nations.

The goal, in the founding document of the European Union called the Treaty of Rome, was to achieve ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ (which is rather different to ‘ever closer union of nations’.)

Just one year after the Second World War, in 1946, Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Zurich, Switzerland in which 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.”

At the time Churchill did not envisage Britain joining the new Union of Europe, but he was later to change his mind.

In March 1957 the European Economic Community (EEC) was established by its six founding nations, France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg.

This was a remarkable achievement, considering that these countries only a few years previously had been fighting in a most terrible war, and four of the founding nations had been viciously subjugated by another of the founders, Germany, during their Nazi regime.

In a speech four months later in July 1957 at Westminster’s Central Hall, Churchill welcomed the formation of the EEC by the six, provided that “the whole of free Europe will have access”. Churchill added, “we genuinely wish to join..”

But Churchill also warned:

“If, on the other hand, the European trade community were to be permanently restricted to the six nations, the results might be worse than if nothing were done at all – worse for them as well as for us. It would tend not to unite Europe but to divide it – and not only in the economic field.”

Maybe this is the point that many in the ‘Leave EU’ campaigns simply don’t get. Here in Britain we don’t seem to understand the founding purpose of the European Union – and on the rest of the continent, they don’t understand why we don’t understand.

The European Union isn’t just about economics and trade, and never was. It’s about peace, and a community of nations of our continent working together for the benefit and protection of its citizens.

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Categories: European Union

Quantifying Interdisciplinarity in the Face of Uncertainty

Fri, 10/06/2016 - 12:10

María del Carmen Calatrava

Interdisciplinarity has become a major topic in discussions of higher education structures, knowledge production and research funding. The demand for criteria and tools for its evaluation is subsequently increasing. Interdisciplinary research can be evaluated according to its many different aspects—including collaboration, integration of disciplines, generation of new areas of research or solutions to complex problems (Wagner, et al., 2011)—using both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis.

Most quantitative measures of the output of interdisciplinary research rely on bibliometric methods. Such methods present two very important advantages: (1) they deliver an objective measure of interdisciplinarity, and (2) in combination with computational tools, large datasets can be analyzed in an effective manner. They are increasingly being used to inform policy in science and technology. A recent example is a review of interdisciplinary research conducted by Elsevier and commissioned by the UK higher education funding bodies and the Medical Research Council (Pan & Katrenko, 2015). In order to be accurately representative though, it is essential that interdisciplinary measurements are conducted with reliable indicators.

 

Citation analysis based on a taxonomy of disciplines

Since interdisciplinary research is often conceptualized as the integration of knowledge, one of the most common methods for its measurement is citation analysis, in which an exchange or integration among fields is captured via discipline-specific citations referring to other fields. In other words, a publication is considered interdisciplinary when it references the publications of more than one field. Such an approach requires a taxonomy of disciplines that classify publications into disciplinary fields (Leydesdorff, Carley, & Rafols, 2013; Porter & Rafols, 2009; Rafols, Leydesdorff, OHare, Nightingale, & Stirling, 2012). Although there is no consensus as to which is the best taxonomy (National Research Council, 2010; Rafols & Leydesdorff, 2009), the one utilized by Web of Science is the one most widely used (Bensman & Leydesdorff, 2009; Pudovkin & Garfield, 2002). The data for the analysis is gathered from Web of Science. This particularly convenient bibliographic resource provides three essential features: it indexes journals in different disciplines, it provides citation records for indexed publications, and it categorizes journals into disciplines within the taxonomy. Once the references of a publication are categorized into one or more disciplines of the taxonomy, its interdisciplinarity can be measured by calculating the number of referenced fields, their proportion, and their similarity, all of which are the basis of widely-used indicators of interdisciplinarity (Porter & Rafols, 2009).

 

Missing data affects the accuracy of interdisciplinarity measurements

While analytical indicators and tools to measure interdisciplinarity have been refined over time, their results should be understood only as a proxy. The accuracy of interdisciplinarity measurements is directly related to the quality of the underlying bibliographic data, which not only needs to be correct, but also complete. Unfortunately, gathering a correct and complete bibliographic dataset is almost impossible because the data, which is typically gathered from digital libraries, is rarely complete. Even though this problem can be mitigated by gathering publication data from different bibliographic sources, it will continue to exist due to the fact that there is no bibliographic source that indexes all existing scientific publications. For example, Web of Science and Scopus do not cover books, book chapters or many regional non-English journals. Even conference proceedings, which constitute publication venues in many applied fast-changing fields such as computer science, are often not indexed.

For our most recent bibliometric analysis, we gathered 1,746 publications from Web of Science and Scopus. Even after combining the data from both digital libraries, the extraction of references was possible for only 1,068 of them (Calatrava Moreno, Auzinger, & Werthner, 2016). Another source of inaccuracy is created when publications are incorrectly categorized or are not categorized at all into disciplines. The 1,746 publications of our dataset had a total of 12,243 references, of which only 5,310 were categorized into disciplines. This poses a serious obstacle when conducting citation analysis because each citation needs to be categorized into at least one discipline. If citations remain uncategorized, they will not be taken into account in the analysis. The more citations that remain uncategorized, the less accurate the measurement will be.

 

How much missing data should we allow in a bibliometric analysis?

In order to decrease the amount of unreliable data, previous literature has selected publications with a proportion of categorized references above a threshold value when computing an index of interdisciplinarity (Rafols, Leydesdorff, OHare, Nightingale, & Stirling, 2012). This approach, however, does not take into account that uncategorized references affect the measurement of disciplinary and interdisciplinary publications in different ways. While the uncategorized references of a disciplinary publication are likely to be from the same discipline, the references of an interdisciplinary publication will reference multiple disciplines. Therefore, missing data in highly interdisciplinary publications leads to an underestimation of the extent of their interdisciplinarity.

We have developed a method that addresses this problem. Given a publication and its references (both categorized and uncategorized), our method estimates the uncertainty caused by the uncategorized references. It acts as a confidence indicator that can be used to assess the reliability of bibliographic data and thereby discard unreliable publications from the bibliometric analysis.

Our contribution is a first approach to measure interdisciplinarity taking into account the incompleteness of bibliographic data.  Further work will be needed in order to tackle other problems that still affect the results of indicators of interdisciplinary research.

 

María del Carmen Calatrava is in the final year of her PhD at Vienna University of Technology, Austria. She has an interdisciplinary background in computer science, innovation and education science. She has two master’s degrees, one in computer science and one in innovation in computer science. Her main research interest is data analysis applied to the field of higher education. She is currently analyzing the production of interdisciplinary research within the context of new doctoral structures after the Bologna Process with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Her interest in technology has led her to contribute to the field of business informatics as well.

 

References

Bensman, S. J.,   & Leydesdorff, L. (2009). Definition and identification of journals as   bibliographic and subject entities: Librarianship versus ISI Journal Citation   Reports methods and their effect on citation measures. Journal of the   American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(6),   1097-1117.

Calatrava Moreno,   M. C., Auzinger, T., & Werthner, H. (2016). On the uncertainty of   interdisciplinarity measurements due to incomplete bibliographic data. Scientometrics,   107(1), 213-232.

Leydesdorff, L.,   Carley, S., & Rafols, I. (2013). Global maps of science based on the new   Web-of-Science categories. Scientometrics, 94(2), 589-593.

Moed, H., Burger,   W., Frankfort, J., & Van Raan, A. F. (1985). The application of   bibliometric indicators: Important field- and time-dependent factors to be   considered. Scientometrics, 8(3-4), 177-203.

National Research   Council. (2010). Data on federal research and development: A pathway to   modernization. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Pan, L., &   Katrenko, S. (2015). A review of the UK’s interdisciplinary research using   a citation-based approach. Report to the UK HE funding bodies and MRC by   Elsevier. Elsevier.

Porter, A. L.,   & Rafols, I. (2009). Is science becoming more interdisciplinary?   measuring and mapping six research fields over time. Scientometrics, 81(3),   719-745.

Pudovkin, A. I.,   & Garfield, E. (2002). Algorithmic procedure for finding semantically   related journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science   and Technology, 53(13), 1113-1119.

Rafols, I., &   Leydesdorff, L. (2009). Content-based and algorithmic classifications of   journals: Perspectives on the dynamics of scientific communication and   indexer effects. Journal of the American Society for Information Science   and Technology, 60(9), 1823-1835.

Rafols, l.,   Leydesdorff, L., OHare, A., Nightingale, P., & Stirling, A. (2012). How   journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research: A comparison   between innovation studies and business & management. Research Policy,   41(7), 1262-1282.

Wagner, C. S.,   Roessner, J. D., Bobb, K., Klein, J. T., Boyack, K. W., Keyton, J., . . .   Börner, K. (2011). Approaches to understanding and measuring   interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature. Journal   of Informetrics, 5(1), 14-26.

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Categories: European Union

Registering your interest?

Thu, 09/06/2016 - 09:54

Looking around in these final weeks before the 23 June vote, there hasn’t much reason to feel that the EU referendum has come to occupy a central place in the lives of the British public. While the papers and the news programmes have been full of stories and arguments, this hasn’t seemed to fully translate into a public debate.

Let’s take a couple of markers of this.

Firstly, for all their ambivalent headline findings, the opinion polls do seem to have been pretty consistent on the volume of don’t knows. As NumberCruncherPolitics’ helpful site shows, this has hovered around the 10-15% mark since September. last year While it has drifted down since March it hasn’t moved at a rate that suggests a deep penetration of either side’s arguments, particularly if we also consider the broad stability of the polls: people don’t appear to be changing their minds very much.

Secondly, my work on social media that I’ve been blogging about each Friday has also shown that online campaigns have yet to show any big pick-up, in either followers or sharing of content. While this needs to be contextualised by the broader social media debate, it does, once again, suggest that both camps have yet to make a strong connection with the electorate.

All of which makes this week’s developments the more interesting.

Tuesday’s technical failings on the electoral roll registration website, and yesterday’s decision to extend the deadline to midnight (Thursday), was in many ways a classic piece of political ex-temporisation (i.e. making it up as you go along) and a reflection on the extent to which we still have to deal with the unexpected.*

On the other hand, it does mark one of the first instances where the public appear to have got active (albeit a skewed cross-section, not tucked up in bed of a Tuesday night): the spike easily exceeded that for last May’s general election, although in part that was down to the much greater volume of calls to register by government, media and activists.

Whatever the reasons, this mobilisation will matter.

For one thing, it means a not-insignificant number of voters will be now more likely to vote, after the drama of registering: a paradox of making it harder/more uncertain that they could vote at all is likely to be that they will now vote, as it has more value to them.

In addition, this influx will benefit the Remain campaign more, given the strong age gradient in late registrations. If there is a close outcome in a fortnight, then expect some re-visiting of this episode.

Finally, it matters because it’s given both sides a way into broader issues about the democratic life of the country. Tellingly, while Leave might have suffered from more young (more pro-EU) voters getting registered, they have been generally happy to extend the deadline. Of course, when a key part of your argument is that ‘we, the people’ need to take back control, it’s hard to then say ‘no, not you people’. Even the more wild and conspiratorial fringes have been quite constrained in their cries of a plot, at least so far.

The big challenge though is to now keep that interest and mobilisation. the TV debates might help, but if they follow the pattern established by the two to date (on Sky and ITV), then they will be more a case of not messsing up, rather than making the case. As I’ve observed elsewhere, good TV isn’t the same as good public debate and if the public doesn’t feel it’s got a voice or a role in the clash of politicians, then it’s likely to switch off, both literally and metaphorically.

Right now we stand on the cusp of matters. Which way we go from here is open. But if we want to find a more lasting settlement, then we all need to try and make the most of this time.

 

 

* Although as one academic who works a lot with online data collection told me yesterday, anyone who can’t cope with 500,000 queries, especially after having trailed the looming deadline so much, needs to take a long, hard look at themselves and their processes.

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Categories: European Union

Jean Monnet Center of Excellence & UNESCO Chair International Summer Schools – University of Macedonia

Thu, 09/06/2016 - 08:30

The Jean Monnet Center of Excellence and the UNESCO Chair at the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki – Greece), headed by Assistant Professor Dr. Despoina Anagnostopoulou (EU Institutions & Policies – Univ. Macedonia) offer two excellent opportunities for International Summer Schools conducted in English, during July 2016, at the beautiful Pelion in Greece – APPLY NOW:

08-11 July 2016 (Application deadline 5 July 2016), International Summer School in the EU Area of Freedom, Security & Justice, organized by the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence. The School aims at advancing “understanding of the law, policies, challenges and dynamics in the integration process of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (ASFJ).” It has 5 Cycles:

  • Cycle 1: Structure/institutional evolution of AFSJ
  • Cycle 2: EU Citizenship, Schengen/Free movement,
  • Cycle 3: EU Migration/Asylum Policy,
  • Cycle 4: EU Internal-External Security,
  • Cycle 5: EU Civil/Criminal Justice,

Faculty teaching:

  • Assistant Prof. Despoina Anangnostopoulou (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Associate Prof. Michalis Chrysomallis (Democritus Univ. Thrace)
  • Assistant Prof. Ioannis Papageorgiou (Aritstotle Univ. Thessaloniki)
  • Assistant Prof. Foteini Bellou (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Prof. Miguel G. Santiago (Autonomous Univ. Barcelona)
  • PhD cand./Research Assist. Niovi Vavoula (Queen Mary Univ. London).

14-19 July 2016 (Application Deadline: 10 July 2016), 1st International Summer School in European Studies and Human Rights Law: Protection of Human Rights in Europe, organized by the UNESCO Chair. The School aims at advancing “understanding of the significance of human rights protection at the international and the European level.” It has 5 Cycles:

  • Cycle 1: Universal/Regional Mechanisms for Protection of Human Rights
  • Cycle 2: ECHR,
  • Cycle 3: EU Fundamental Rights & Personal Data Protection,
  • Cycle 4: Non-discrimination (emphasis on LGBT),
  • Cycle 5: Refugees, Minorities, Cultural Rights,

Faculty teaching:

  • Assistant Prof. Despoina Anangnostopoulou (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Associate Prof. Lina Papadopoulou (Aristotle Univ. Thessaloniki)
  • Prof. Eugenia Alexandropoulou-Egyptiadou (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Associate Prof. Alina Tryfonidou (Univ. Reading)
  • Assistant Prof. Ioannis Papadopoulos (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Former Prof. Paroula Naskou Perraki (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Assistant Prof. Ioanna Papavasiliou-Alexiou (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Dr. Nikos Gaitenidis, Head of the Constitutional Values of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence (Univ. Macedonia)
  • Ms. Dagmara Rajska, Council of Europe expert

For both Summer Schools, certificates of attendance to all, and graduation certificates after passing a multiple choice exam, will be awarded.

Visit the Jean Monnet University website

For more information email: danag@uom.gr or call: +30 2310891 442 or +30 6979 348008.

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Categories: European Union

Frank Field, MP, gets it wrong on Question Time

Wed, 08/06/2016 - 10:17

On BBC Question Time last week, Frank Field, MP, got it wrong by repeating that old myth that the EU accounts hadn’t been signed-off. I wrote him an open letter – to which I am still awaiting a reply:

Dear Mr Field

On BBC Question Time last night (2 June) you told the audience:

‘I can’t remember the last time your money was accounted properly in Europe and was signed-off by the auditors. They actually cannot justify how they’re spending your money.’

This is wrong. The EU accounts are signed-off every year by the independent European Court of Auditors. Every penny of our money sent to the EU is accounted for and justified. See my full report at: www.Audit.Reasons2Remain.eu

As a leading Labour MP supporting Brexit, isn’t it important that facts are accurately presented to the electorate?

Can I please ask you to issue a correction to your comment on Question Time, or at least to give an undertaking not to repeat your inaccurate statement that the EU accounts aren’t signed-off?

Yours sincerely

Jon Danzig
For Reasons2Remain

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Other stories by Jon Danzig:

To follow my stories please like my Facebook page: Jon Danzig Writes

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  • Join Jon Danzig’s new Facebook community in support of Britain remaining a member of the European Union – Reasons2Remain
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#EUReferendum: #FrankField MP gets it wrong about #EU accounts on #BBCQT Share open letter: https://t.co/QsBOW57xhl pic.twitter.com/E8CJGJYwPq

— Reasons2Remain (@Reasons2Remain) 3 June 2016

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Categories: European Union

Exactly Like the EU, Just a Little Bit Cheesier? Discursive Links Between the EU and the Eurovision Song Contest

Fri, 03/06/2016 - 23:26

The Eurovision Song Contest can be a useful and fun allegorical tool for explaining the dynamics of the EU, writes Anna Wambach. She argues that, although comparisons between the two can create strong cognitive associations over time, if taken too seriously such links can lead to misunderstandings about how the EU works in practice.

Conchita Wurst Press Conference, Greens/EFA, CC-BY-2.0

It is tempting to equate the Eurovision Song Contest with the EU. The EU itself can appear mind-bogglingly complex and boring. So why not use the ESC to explain the EU’s unappealing institutions to its citizens in an entertaining way? There seem to be so many parallels. The ESC provides a useful means of breaking down complicated processes of supranational decision-making through a commonly shared pop culture reference. However, the equation – although tempting – is not without negative consequences, since the discursive links have the potential to mislead judgement about the EU.

Despite its objective as an opportunity for European countries to showcase themselves, the ESC has always been a political event. Voting patterns have long been interpreted as symptoms of international alliances or tensions. In the week prior to the 2016 ESC in Stockholm, this trend intensified, particularly in the UK’s debate on EU membership. British journalists, commentators and campaigners explicitly linked Eurovision to the in/out referendum in June.

The BBC started a Snapchat campaign in which it explicitly – although light-heartedly – combined the referendum debate and the Eurovision Song Contest. Vote Leave, the official campaign for the UK to leave the EU, produced a video in which it compared the UK’s status in the EU with its past performances in the ESC. The conclusion is simple: the UK is persistently outvoted by its European neighbours.

Two years earlier, in 2014, the Guardian published an op-ed in which Christina Patterson explained that the British regard both of them as a frivolous waste of money. The EU would need to change in order to lose this ESC reputation.

The list of examples goes on. The discursive link between EU politics and the ESC is reinforced every year. Discourse in this context does not refer to one communicative event or an extended piece of text but rather – in Foucault’s sense – to socially constructed knowledge or social practice, a more or less regulated way of doing things (Van Leeuwen 2008). In this case, knowledge about the EU is constructed by linking it to knowledge about the ESC.

It is understandable. Few people are interested in the details of EU policy-making. It is boring and somewhat distant. The ESC, however – love it or hate it – is certainly not boring. People can relate to it.

Particularly in the UK, many of the dominant discourses about both the EU and ESC seem to match perfectly, as the above examples illustrate. The UK’s lack of success in the ESC can be interpreted as a symptom of feelings towards the EU: no support, no understanding and blocs of nations ganging up against the UK.

The voting system combining jury and public votes can be interpreted as undemocratic – just like the EU with its unelected bureaucrats infringing on British sovereignty. The whole show – be it ESC or EU – is a waste of money in which Britain invests but never gets anything in return.

Shared cultural knowledge is used to explain a complex political process – to make it relatable. This is a handy and effective shortcut. No further explanation is needed. From a journalist’s or commentator’s point of view, this is appealing because it saves time and space. However, by discursively linking, repeating and reinforcing it year after year, it becomes manifested in citizens’ minds.

It is a powerful discursive link, but one that is misleading in two ways. Firstly, it can lead to a factual misunderstanding of the EU. Secondly, it may have an effect on attitudes towards the EU and European integration. This effect, however, is based on misjudgement. During a campaign like the British in/out referendum, but also in more routine times, this can have a negative impact on support for the EU.

The factual differences between ESC and EU are more obvious and can be pointed out easily. ESC participants go far beyond the EU’s borders – for example, the 2016 final included Australia, Israel and Azerbaijan. The ESC is run for entertainment purposes – the EU for political and economic ones. The outcome of the ESC has practically no impact on citizens’ lives, whereas the outcome of EU decision-making does very much.

The effect of this discursive construction of EU knowledge by linking it to social practices of the Eurovision Song Contest may, however, be resistant to factual clarifications. By illustrating shared, historical discourses about the relationship between the UK and the EU with ESC metaphors, common myths are reinforced rather than overcome. Because the discourses about the EU and ESC, as well as the UK’s position in either, can be so elegantly integrated, disentangling the discourses again is difficult.

If they match so nicely, and help citizens understand the EU, then one could argue that the discursive link between ESC and EU might be useful after all, if only to engage citizens in the debate. The equation of the EU and the ESC, however, is akin to drawing a caricature of the EU. It oversimplifies, exaggerates and can even be plain wrong. It might fit into historical discourses about the EU, but even those can often be misleading with regard to the relationship between the UK and EU. Therefore we should attempt to unpack and challenge those dominant discourses instead of fuelling them with pop culture references.

In the end, the link is a misjudgement of both the EU and Eurovision. Neither of them can receive a fair verdict from its audiences. In the case of Eurovision, this might not seem too dramatic. It could have more far-reaching consequences for attitudes towards the EU among its citizens, if they judge it based on a cheesy entertainment spectacle.

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of the UACES Student Forum or UACES.

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Shortlink for this article: bit.ly/1P8HRYh

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Anna Wambach | @AnnaWambach
Newcastle University

Anna Wambach is PhD Candidate in Politics at Newcastle University and a Committee Member of the UACES Student Forum. Her research focuses on how the the EU is portrayed in the UK news media.

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Categories: European Union

Destroying the village to save it

Thu, 02/06/2016 - 09:11

As we’ve moved into the last stretch of the referendum, we’ve seen the emergence of a new dynamic: the referendum-as-general-election.

In setting out more clearly what a post-Brexit future would look like, the key figures in the Leave campaign – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling and Priti Patel – have also been sketching what a post-Cameron government would look like, presumably with them in positions of power and influence.

This trend has been really come through with yesterday’s announcements on immigration – extending the non-EU points system to EU nationals – but was also arguably visible in the various pronouncements on reasserting sovereignty, via a constitutional court or a British bill of rights or a sovereignty act.

At a tactical level, there is something to this approach. Given the difficulty of keeping public engagement with the EU issue turning the referendum back into something that looks more like a general election looks potentially productive: focus on people’s unhappiness with ‘the government’ and David Cameron and kick them/him out.

Of course, this assumes people overlook that you’d be replacing one Tory government with another, but one might argue that this model is part of the explanation for why Jeremy Corbyn isn’t fighting too hard to save Cameron’s political skin: maybe the turnover of power splits the Tories and gives him more of a chance in 2020. It certainly rubs the same way as Corbyn’s general ambivalence about the EU.

There is a certain circularity in that view, since it has been precisely Corbyn’s ambivalence that created the space for Johnson and co to make this push: it’s not coincidental that the biggest figures in Leave have come from the Tories, given the depth of feeling on the EU issue and the additional prize of the party leadership.

This dominance has become self-reinforcing, as they have been able to set Leave’s agenda more and more. UKIP and Nigel Farage have been active, but marginal at the strategic level, unable to make this kind of government-in-waiting play. This suits the Leave Tories, who not only re-direct UKIP’s populist challenge, but also get Farage campaigning for them. In the long run that might cause ‘the establishment’ a problem, but not just yet.

To see the referendum as a power-play within the Conservative party is a cynical position, and I wouldn’t pretend it’s anything like the whole story, but it feels like it’s going to be the most consequential one in the short- to medium-term. Either EU membership is secured and pushed hard off the agenda by Cameron and his successor, or it’s a few years of trying to find a model that works: not there’s no rupture, no breakpoint where everything changes.

However, there is a certain irony here. As my economist colleagues like to note, there’s never a free lunch. The price that Leave Tories look like paying comes from the choices they’re making now.

Their choice of immigration control is simple and clear, but it necessarily precludes an EEA-style post-Brexit agreement, since it’s incompatible with free movement: the EU has no good incentive to break the habit of its lifetime and offer full market access without free movement of workers. That in turn closes down the option that would offer the smoothest transition out of the EU for the UK and raises the costs of building a more arm’s-length relationship, not mention the likely economic costs that most analysts suggest will be incurred.

Likewise, the legal options being laid out sound lovely – who doesn’t want have control of our decisions – but are in practice terribly complex. Having spent a day in a room with legal experts this week, I’m happy to take their opinion that the proposals are either meaningless or would imply restrictions on politicians’ power that they are going to have be incredibly selfless to accept. Making no judgment on any future government, the fact that such selflessness hasn’t been shown by any previous administration suggests that we might be sceptical about the chances of change. Moreover, even if they do happen, then they imply a change in the British constitutional order much more wide-reaching than even EU membership has wrought.

Whether the village will let itself be destroyed to save it is very much an open question.

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Categories: European Union

Brexit and the City

Thu, 02/06/2016 - 07:00

My five years as a PhD student, first in Oxford (Brookes) and then as a post-doc at LSE, have told me that the smart people from the UK, especially those working in the City, see the Euro project thus:

Cartoon by Schrank (The Economist)

European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is like a ship that has been built badly from the start. The Brits have warned the Continental Europeans about this structural flaw even before the ship left harbour (think of Thatcher), but the latter wouldn’t listen. They left port anyway, while the Brits stayed ashore convinced that this was a journey doomed to fail.

History has proven the smart people from Oxbridge and the City right. In 2010, confronted with the first big storm (the Global Financial Crisis), the European ship showed its deficiencies and water started to break into the vessel. The Brits screamed: “we told you so”, and enjoyed their Schadenfreude.

However, the ship hasn’t sunk yet. The Continentals are trying hard to fix it while at high sea. They have patched over the leaks for now, although the enterprise is hampered by the divisions in the crew (too many nationalities) and by a lack of leadership. The French and German officers do not agree on the end solution, and the only one keeping the vessel afloat is the Chief Engineer called Mario Draghi.

These troubles make the Brits, and especially the English, feel even more self-righteous about their decision to not join EMU. They are pretty convinced the ship will eventually sink. Nonetheless, they don’t want to be overconfident. They know deep down in their soles that it would be a mistake to underestimate German engineering and French keenness for grandeur so they have a speed boat ready to join at high see in case the ship is eventually fixed. Because one thing is certain. If the ship sails on, the Brits need to have a say in the direction it should take.

This metaphor sums up the view of the City of London in regards to the Brexit debate. In general the Brits have looked at the European Union project from a purely transactional perspective: “What can I get from this arrangement?” This is very different in the Continent, where emotional elements such as angst from your past (Germany), obsession to be bigger than you are (France), desire to belong to a rich club (Italy and Spain and almost everyone else) and fear from your neighbour (the CEE countries) are much more pronounced.

If there is a sentimental bias to be detected among the English (less so among the other Brits) towards the EU it works usually against further integration. The main reason is the British Empire. The Brits have not been invaded since William the Conqueror in the 11th Century and this counts. As a German official told me once: “For the Brits democracy means Westminster. They cannot envision it beyond”. This explains the British obsession to consider the European Parliament as an illegitimate body.

Both the very rational (and so far dominant) approach towards the EU but also the Empire-clinging sentimental rejection against it are very present in the City of London. As a matter of fact, these two perspectives are on opposite sides in the Brexit debate. The former is represented by the big American investment and the European universal banks. They want to stay in the EU because doing so allows them to have access to the biggest and richest market on earth. The latter is usually embodied by the smaller wealth management firms, hedge funds and stockbrokers. They think Brussels curtails the good old English tradition of laissez-faire.

This division is centuries old. The Square Mile of the City is actually the best example of a Global Village. Since London after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 overtook Amsterdam as the world’s most important financial centre, two tribes have co-existed in the City. The “Nativists” (mostly English) who have seen the success of the City intrinsically related to the British Empire. And the “cosmopolitans” (the smartest and more adventurous from the rest of the world) whose functionalist approach has always been the following: “To be as far from politics as possible to make business at ease (the off-shore component of the City being always attractive), but as close to power as necessary in order to influence it”. Thus, London was, and remains, the place to be due to its close connections to Washington and its influence in Brussels.

Of course, if the Brexit camp wins the forthcoming referendum this ideal configuration would change. The City would be further away from politics, and perhaps enjoy less regulation (although that is not assured), but at the same time it would be further away from power (both in Brussels and in Washington) and perhaps even more importantly it would give up completely on joining the EMU ship.

But what happens if eventually the ship gets fixed? Will the smart money of the City of London let it sail away? Unlikely. The ECB is already more powerful than the Old Lady. It will be even more so if EMU survives. This is why Goldman Sachs and the rest of big American and European banks have funded the “Bremain” campaign. They feel the “Nativist” camp led by Boris Johnson is stuck in an imperial illusion which won’t come back. And while they do so, they are thinking: “perhaps we should consider getting closer to Frankfurt. Not only because EMU might get fixed, but also because Westminster is becoming too insular”. And insularity is something you certainly don’t want as a banker.

EU-Asia Institute at ESSCA Ecole de Management, Angers
www.essca.fr/EU-Asia / @Essca-Eu-Asia

 

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Categories: European Union

Complacency is a killer

Wed, 01/06/2016 - 19:48

Insert metaphor about how toasters can kill if you’re not careful, apply to referendums

One of the most interesting aspects of the EU referendum campaign so far has been the extent to which things haven’t changed.

Six weeks into the official period, we still have polling that gives no clear advantage to either side, nor even an indication that attitudes have changed at all: the don’t knows still make a solid 10-15% and have done for months. As we’ve been reporting on our social media monitoring, there’s no big explosion of public interest that can be detected.

All the lines of attack taken by either side have been ones that were long apparent and all have been countered (broadly speaking) almost immediately.

There’s been no big shock (unless you though Boris Johnson was actually doing the donuts himself), either within the UK or outside.

In short, things looks very much like they did: close.

Which makes this week’s sounds from the Remain camp all the more perplexing.

To read the Telegraph, following a poll that showed a big lead for Remain, was to read a worldview that said ‘job done’: the swing had come in, the messages had got through and now it was time to just cross ‘t’s and dot ‘i’s.

Regardless of what politics might be going on behind this, this looks at best irresponsible and at worse, damaging.

If last year’s General Election taught us anything, it’s that polling has a problem and for all the remedial work done by the industry since, they still have a problem, as evidenced by the continued divergence of telephone and online polling results. If even if they didn’t have a problem, then to take one of two polls as hard and fast evidence for a swing is bad practice (as Tuesday’s ICM poll neatly demonstrated).

If that’s irresponsible, then it’s equally important to stress the scope for damage to Remain’s case.

One of the more robust findings we have to date is the ‘enthusiasm gap‘ (Leavers are noticeably more committed to their cause than Remainers, as so more likely to turn out). Remain’s big challenge has always been to convince people that they need to get excited enough about the (roughly) status quo option to go and vote. As one Remain campaigner put it to me last week, “what do we want? the same” isn’t a great rallying cry.

In such a situation, one way to get the vote out is precisely to focus on the closeness of the campaign: Austria’s Presidential elections has provided a nice demonstration that one’s vote does actually count for a lot. But if Remain try to play up a swing (whether or not it exists), then the urgency and importance of voting drops, to Leave’s benefit. With all modelling suggesting that turnout is the crucial factor, any message that plays down the importance of mobilisation is going to hurt Remain.

To be clear, there’s no suggestion that the Telegraph (or any of the other outlets that ran with the story) are trying to work to engineer a Leave vote. Instead the issue is one that has been endemic in other referendums on European issues.

Where governments have lost such votes, in every case one of the key factors has been complacency. In the case of treaty ratifications, that has been driven by the weight of other member states’ ratifications and by the impression that the government’s hard bargaining on the text will be enough to carry the day. In the case of joining policy areas, the difficulty of the government reaching agreement to get to a vote in the first place does the same.

Here we have something a bit different. The government clearly didn’t expect to be holding this vote and it has recognised that the ‘new settlement’ agreed by Cameron in March isn’t enough to make the case, so it hasn’t gone in with its eyes shut. However, the capacity to bring many big guns to bear – international leaders, all but one party leader, most economists – and the subsequent command of the rational agenda has lent the impression that things must come right. Tony Blair is the purest expression of this sentiment to date.

This is very much to miss the dynamics of what is happening. As Janan Ganesh wrote yesterday, the EU ‘debate’ looks and feels a lot like the elite talking with itself, rather than actually engaging the wider public. With old notions of deference long gone and the lure of populism hanging nearby, it seems all too possible to envisage a situation where the referendum is determined more by the alienation of the public from the political sphere than by any substantive issue.

I’ve framed this mainly as an issue for Remain – which it is – but it’s also something that Leave have to address too: if they win, then some of them will be stepping into the corridors of power very soon and they will have to make good on their promises if they are not to generate another cycle of disillusionment and disengagement.

The fight for this referendum is still very much on, but so too is the ability of politicians and other elites to speak for the people: ultimately, that matters more than any outcome on 23 June. And that’s why we have to recognise that this matters not just in-of-itself, but also as a marker of our democratic lives.

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Categories: European Union

A More Democratic EU Starts at Home

Sun, 29/05/2016 - 21:40

“Taking back control” from an anti-democratic EU is a central theme of the “leave campaign”. Even some of those advocating “stay” concede the EU needed to “reform” to become more democratic and accountable.

This response is puzzling given the existing opportunities to influence EU as well as critics’ vagueness and disagreement about how a more democratic EU should look like. The focus on allegedly undemocratic Brussels institutions misses that most of the problems as well as solutions to democracy can be found closer to home.

The most obvious way in which citizens can influence the EU is through the election of the Westminster parliament. Any transfer or sharing of new competences with the EU had to be agreed by national parliaments and the House of Commons has ratified each Treaty change since 1973 with solid majorities. Supranational law and its interpretation to the European Court of Justice only takes effect because this is what the people’s elected representatives legislated for.

Major changes to the EU such as Enlargement have been strongly advocated by successive British governments, whilst they have also blocked in the past more wide-ranging proposals for direct democracy fearing that more legitimacy for EU bodies will give them also greater power. National ministers appointed through general elections wield significant power over day-to-day legislation in the Council of Ministers and, for strategic direction, the European Council.

The UK retains exclusive competence in the areas most sensitive to UK citizens such as taxation, pensions, health, policing and remains exempt from legislation associated with the Schengen free-border or the Eurozone. The UK has consolidated its status as Eurozone outsider with guarantees that it will not be discriminated against, does not need to contribute to any bailouts and can keep its own financial supervision.

The previous government’s extensive audit of EU’s competences involving business and civil society was broadly supportive of the current distribution. It is true that the UK does not always have its way, but as my LSE colleagues have shown, British governments have voted in 97 percent of cases with the majority in the period 2004-2009 and 87 percent in 2009-2015 in the Council.

Hence, it is somewhat meaningless to measure which proportion of UK laws emanate from the EU. The widely cited study of the House of Common’s library arrived at figures of 6.8% for primary legislation and 14.1% for secondary legislation. Even these figures overestimate EU influence as the ‘degree of involvement varied from passing reference to explicit implementation’.

The second democratic channels are the elections to the European Parliament (EP). Not only has the EP acquired real power to block or change legislation in most policy areas, for instance, its rejection of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

The EP has also increasing powers over the European Commission as a hybrid body combining the powers of a regulator with more political functions of proposing new legislation. The first function relies on having appropriate expertise and is typically-shielded from undue political influence in most countries. The second function no doubt requires political accountability and democratic responsiveness and the primary body to do this is the European Parliament.

In 1999, the EP brought about the resignation of the Santer-Commission after a transnational network of investigative journalists exposed cases of corruption and wrong-doing. This case also illustrated vividly that national-based media can hold supranational institutions to account and that pan-European debates are possible.

At the 2014 elections, the major European party groupings, Socialists and Democrats and the European People’s Party (EPP) campaigned with lead candidates for Commission president after a change in the Lisbon Treaty allowed for this personalisation. When the EPP emerged as the winner on a decent turnout of 42.6 percent, its candidate Jean-Claude Juncker became President against the opposition of the UK and Hungary.

The reason why this outcome appeared as a surprise to British voters in contrast to those of other countries was because Labour and Conservatives had pretended that the Treaty change was meaningless and most British media uncritically bought this line and thus gave the candidates hardly any publicity in contrast to, for instance, Germany as the LSE’s Simon Hix showed. Given this precedent, it is likely that next time more citizens will vote in European elections according to the candidates and policies on offer, not the popularity of the domestic government.

The last avenue of influence is the Citizens Initiative which obliges the European Commission to consider new legislation on a particular issue as long as it is backed by at least one million EU citizens, coming from at least 7 out of the 28 member states. Even though if it does not force the Commission to actually legislate, it is a powerful tool to put issues on the agenda.

Given the diversity of national systems and cultures, there is no ready-made blue-print available for democracy above the nation-state. The greatest potential lies not in protracted constitutional reforms involving governments with little interests to cede power, but in changing everyday democratic practice within and across member states.

There needs to be greater scrutiny of ministers’ actions in Brussels by the media to prevent them getting away with ‘saying one thing in Brussels, and another thing to the domestic audience’ (Boris Johnson). It has been argued that the House of Common’s scrutiny of European affairs has been weak and many MPs have lacked the motivation to invest time in this role as they feel this was not going be sufficiently visible in the media and appreciated by constituencies.

The media should also report more extensively and accurately about who takes what decisions with which consequences in the EU. And civil society organisations and citizens could use more fully the existing opportunities to influence the direction of the EU and campaign for the changes they want, both at home, and with citizens in other countries. A more democratic EU starts at home, but cannot stop there.

Christoph Meyer is Professor of European & International Politics, King’s College London

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Categories: European Union

Five Things You Need to Know About Brexit

Tue, 24/05/2016 - 13:05

Ahead of the University of Edinburgh’s free online course Towards Brexit? The UK’s EU Referendum and one month before the referendum, here are five things you need to know about the Brexit debate:

European Flag, European Parliament, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

1. We’ve been here before

In 1975, the UK held its first-ever nationwide referendum on whether to stay in the European Economic Community (the precursor to the EU). The result was a two-thirds majority in favour of remaining in the Common Market. That said, it’s very unusual for a country to hold a vote directly on the question of EU membership. Most past referendums on the EU in member states have been about ratifying new treaties.

2. The UK’s not so different

Over the years, the difficult relationship between the UK and the EU has become legendary. For instance, it has opt-outs from a number of European policies, like the euro or borderless travel (Schengen). This reputation can sometimes give the impression that the UK is particularly alone or different. However, that’s not really the case. In reality, every member has its own issues with the EU – some are just more obvious than others.

3. Global interest is high

Although the referendum will be decided by UK voters, many countries, along with companies and organisations around the world, have a substantial interest in the outcome. For this reason, a number have broken with the convention of not engaging in a country’s internal debates and have expressed their views on the UK’s EU membership. However, it’s not clear what impact these interventions actually have on public opinion.

4. The facts? It’s not as easy as that

The EU can be quite complicated and the referendum debate has featured topics such as the economy, migration, security and democracy. Many people will be looking for information before the vote. However, most of the questions around these issues come down to personal opinion, rather than factual answers. While facts and evidence do naturally exist, they can only inform. In the end, voters will have to make up their own minds on whether EU membership is worthwhile or not.

5. The referendum won’t end the debate

This June’s vote is just the latest landmark in the UK’s history with the European Union. Whatever the outcome on 23 June, the referendum won’t settle the issue. If the result is to leave, the negotiations that follow will focus on what kind of relationship the UK will have with the EU going forward. If the result is to remain, the debate on EU membership will continue and calls for a second referendum will likely materialise. Either way, the saga will carry on.

Find out more – join the free online course: 
Towards Brexit? The UK’s EU Referendum

This article was originally published on the FutureLearn blog.

Please read the comments policy before commenting.

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How to cite this article:

Salamone, A (2016) ‘Five Things You Need to Know About Brexit’, Britain’s Europe (Ideas on Europe), 24 May 2016, britainseurope.uk/22

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Categories: European Union

Fact, ideology and logic in the EU referendum campaign

Tue, 24/05/2016 - 10:56

The EU debate is a minefield, with half-truths and whole-lies coming from both camps. The reason for this, as I understand it, is twofold. Firstly, it is impossible to know what will happen in the event that the UK leaves the EU, or indeed what will happen in five, ten or fifty years’ time if we vote to stay on 23 June. Ergo, objective fact is largely off the table from the get-go. Secondly, the notion of ‘truth’ is tricky in ideological discussions. I recently saw Peter Hitchins make a brief intervention on the EU debate and was struck by his point that the signatories of the Irish Proclamation did not stand on the steps of the General Post Office with a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the impact on the economic forecasts and trade balance of the country. They held an ideological belief and made an impassioned political decision. By the same measure, the reason that ‘facts’ aren’t working as well in this referendum debate as some (myself included) might like, is because it is not a decision that can be based solely on fact. Moreover, in most cases, there genuinely are (at least) two answers to the question at hand. Untangling the accumulation of myths, misnomers and soundbites which permeate the referendum narrative is a job for someone more intelligent (not to mention more patient) than myself. However, in the spirit of ‘have blog, will air musings’, I draw attention here to one incident which has stuck in my mind (and which I noted down at the time) as emblematic of the problem with the EU referendum campaign.

On 3 March, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme conducted an interview with Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, a member of the board of the Vote Leave campaign. Today presenter Mishal Husain put to Mr Jenkin that Sir Peter Ricketts, a recently-retired former ambassador, has raised concerns that if Britain were to leave the EU, France might cease to conduct border checks on those seeking entrance to the UK. Unusually for an MP on the Today programme, Mr Jenkin went on to directly address Sir Ricketts’ point with an equally valid counter-argument, but before he did, he made the following remarks:

‘Find me a diplomat that’s anti-EU…one of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in is because we have diplomats who have religiously and slavishly pursued the European integration policy…they all have a certain view…it’s interesting, as soon as they retire they turn out to have this very pro-European view. I’m afraid I think it rather discredits the idea that we’ve got an impartial diplomatic service.’

In the interest of brevity, I will side-step the wealth of nonsense which Mr Jenkin managed to pack around his perfectly reasonable point that the French government is a rational and responsible body and is unlikely to severe all agreements with the UK overnight should we vote to leave. I will also by-pass the irony that I agreed with this central point, and yet he managed to present it and its contribution to his broader position in a way that was so infuriatingly exaggerated, misleading and childish that, in the end, it served only to convince me that I don’t want to be on any team that he is a part of. Instead, I draw attention to Mr Jenkin’s utterly bizarre string of logic which led him to conclude that, since British diplomats are commonly pro-EU, they must have been harbouring this dirty secret for many years and are somehow damaging British interests with their partiality.

I don’t have much difficulty accepting the premise of Mr Jenkin’s concern – it seems quite likely that many British diplomats (and, I imagine, diplomats from most other member states too) are pro-EU. What I find confusing is why he thinks that this is an innate characteristic, a preference which exists and pre-existed in British diplomats independent of their professional or personal experience, as if he suspects that they all went to a secret boarding school where they were drilled in the values of ‘ever closer union’ and prepared for infiltration into the UK’s diplomatic corps, only revealing their true, traitorous identities upon retirement. To my mind, the trend that Mr Jenkin identifies can best, if not only, be interpreted as follows: British diplomats (to accept Mr Jenkin’s premise that they all hold the same view as Sir Ricketts), having spent many years living in and working with the EU, have reached the conclusion that it is a project worthy of our support and participation. Possessing what is probably the most direct experience and expertise in the matter that it is possible to have, British diplomats consider the UK’s membership of the EU to be highly valuable and have chosen to voice this view in the context of the referendum campaign. Essentially, an expert group has presented its arguments for why the UK should vote ‘remain’.

This is an example of precisely the kind of rational contribution which should be being made in the referendum campaign. The view of Sir Ricketts and his colleagues, in light of their experience and expertise, carries value and voters should be exposed to it. This is not to say that it is wholly objective, of course it is not. British diplomats have particular experiences and, to that extent, their position is unavoidably biased. Furthermore, it would be impossible for me to say that I am certain that the argument they put forward is nothing but the unequivocal truth. These things are, incidentally, also true of any view aired by Mr Jenkin and his colleagues in the Vote Leave campaign, by those in the ‘remain’ camp, or by anyone else. However, by making his background known and ‘presenting his credentials’ to the British public, Sir Ricketts has made a valuable contribution which they can scrutinise and evaluate in the forming of their own judgements. Perhaps, rather than it being pro-EU campaigners who ‘lack confidence in this country’, as Mr Jenkin asserted later in his interview, it is those (on both sides of the issue) who exploit the inherently ideological nature of the referendum debate by framing informed opinion as inherent bias who lack confidence in British voters to decide for themselves.

Having finally submitted my thesis and in light of the impending referendum, I digress in this post from health governance – please excuse the misleading platform.

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Categories: European Union

Towards Brexit? The UK’s EU Referendum

Mon, 23/05/2016 - 09:00

The UK’s referendum on EU membership is now firmly on the horizon. Referendum Day – 23 June – could well be remembered as a landmark in the UK’s relations with the rest of the world, as well as for its own constitutional settlement.

EU Grunge Flag, Nicolas Raymond, CC-BY-2.0

Campaigning has been in full swing for a number of weeks, with a plethora of claims and counterclaims from all sides on issues ranging from the economy and migration to democracy and sovereignty. Depending on the perspective, the debate has been characterised by too much information, too little, or perhaps not enough of the right kind. Many are looking for a clear explanation of the facts and an informed analysis of what’s going on.

In truth, the EU referendum has brought about a different kind of political debate in the UK. The European Union is a particularly complicated organisation, even to those of us who study it every day. Although important and worthwhile, it can be a real challenge to discuss each of the many policy areas connected with the EU in an informed and meaningful way.

In that sense, the referendum has produced a national conversation on a set of international (and often rather technical) issues. This reality makes it more difficult to have a thorough debate. It also risks demotivating those who are interested in the referendum but find the whole affair excessively complex.

This process is also a novelty for the EU. It is not the first time a country has seriously considered leaving – that was, of course, also the UK, with the 1975 Common Market Referendum (in which over two-thirds voted to stay). Nevertheless, it is out of the ordinary for a country to unilaterally seek a renegotiation of its own terms of EU membership, and then hold a referendum specifically on the question of staying in or leaving the EU.

More broadly, uncertainty has been a central feature of the debate. This is a consequence of the lack of precedent – no Member State has ever withdrawn from the EU – and the volume of issues that would need to be addressed in the event of exit. It is also a reflection of the bargaining and compromise-driven nature of the EU. Many of the questions to be answered would be decided by political leaders as they went along. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the variables at play.

Even if the UK stays, the EU will not be the same. The renegotiation would be implemented, which, if relatively limited in its reach, could still set the trend for a whole new kind of differentiation between how countries work in the EU. Beyond that, the EU is faced with a host of major challenges, each of which is and will continue to put pressure on it to adapt. This impetus may necessitate decisions on how far countries are willing to integrate.

Many are in search of facts and analysis on the EU referendum. To that end, the University of Edinburgh, in partnership with FutureLearn, is offering a free online course: Towards Brexit? The UK’s EU Referendum.

This three-week course, run by experts in the field, guides participants through the referendum – before and after the vote.

In the first two weeks, we look at the how the UK ended up having a referendum on EU membership, the campaign issues, public opinion and alternatives to being in the EU. In the final week, we reflect on the result and what it means for the UK and the rest of Europe. The course also serves as a forum to discuss the referendum as it happens with participants from around the world. It features resources to learn more about the issues and includes the opportunity to put questions to experts each week.

Whatever the result, the referendum will change the UK, and the EU as well. Join us as we explore one of the biggest decisions facing the UK in a generation: to remain in or to leave the European Union.

Towards Brexit? The UK’s EU Referendum, the free and open online course with Anthony Salamone, Laura Cram and Charlie Jeffery, begins on FutureLearn on 13 June 2016. The course is also on Twitter @EUrefMOOC and with the hashtag #EdinEUref.

This article was originally published on European Futures.

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Salamone, A (2016) ‘Towards Brexit? The UK’s EU Referendum’, Britain’s Europe (Ideas on Europe), 23 May 2016, britainseurope.uk/21

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Categories: European Union

This June’s EU Referendum is Unlikely to be the UK’s Last

Sun, 22/05/2016 - 09:00

The approaching referendum on the UK’s EU membership is set to be historic, whatever its outcome. It will either be only the second time in European history that the people of a Member State has specifically endorsed continued membership (the first also being the UK with the 1975 Common Market Referendum), or the first time such a people has explicitly opted to end membership.

Plenary Session in Strasbourg – Jan 2016, European Parliament, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

It is abundantly clear that either result would have implications for both the UK and the rest of the EU. However, knowable specifics are in short supply. This is particularly so for the option of exit from the EU, as it would by its very nature change the status quo. The high levels of uncertainty surrounding the consequences of the referendum options is partly a function of genuine unknowns of what would happen next and partly a product of the various objectives of the different campaigns.

One certainty is that this referendum will not settle the question of the UK’s relationship with the EU. In fact, it is quite likely that another EU referendum will take place in the UK in the short-to-medium term.

If the UK votes to leave the EU, the UK government will at some point afterwards notify the EU of its intent to withdraw and a process of negotiation will begin. The procedure is outlined in Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. However, the guidelines are relatively broad and leave a wide margin of manoeuvre for the negotiating parties to find an agreement on the shape of UK-EU relations. One point of clarity is that the negotiations can last up to two years – unless an extension is agreed by all parties – else the UK will automatically withdraw from the EU with no agreement.

As with many aspects of the post-vote, we cannot say how long negotiations would take (particularly if extended), what they would focus on or what the outcome would be. Consequently, the substance of an agreement could vary significantly, dependent upon the demands of the remaining EU Member States and the expectations of the (possibly reshuffled) UK government.

Separate from treaty ratification requirements, any UK-EU agreement will need to be legitimated at home in some way. Another referendum is a plausible option, for two principal reasons. First, the current referendum consults on membership, and not on alternatives to membership. The people will give an answer only on whether they wish to stay in or leave the EU, not what kind of relationship they would want in the event of exit.

Second, the shape of that relationship upon exit could vary so widely that it might necessitate the consent of the people. For instance, if significant numbers vote to leave because they want to limit EU migration to the UK, and the subsequent agreement continues to allow the free movement of people (as part of maintaining access to the single market), how could that be politically sustainable? Conversely, if the agreement takes away features of EU membership which people would prefer to retain, that could also create difficulties.

If the UK votes to stay in the EU, the question of EU membership will undoubtedly persist. With the recent precedent of holding a referendum on the issue, it will become easier to argue for a similar vote in future. Political motivations, from internal party politics to the impact of the fringe on the mainstream, could generate momentum for another referendum. It could well become a question of when rather than if the next referendum will be held.

Moreover, the UK government is obliged under the European Union Act 2011 to hold a referendum if it proposes a substantial further transfer of power to the EU. While EU treaty change is not an imminent prospect, it will happen at some point in the medium term, and it is possible that a referendum on the treaty would have to be held in the UK. Although such a vote would not be an explicit decision on staying or leaving, the result would nevertheless serve as an indirect judgement of the UK’s EU relationship.

All of these possibilities point to the prospect of another EU referendum in the UK in the foreseeable future. For a country not in the tradition of holding many (nationwide) referendums, the UK may well become more accustomed to them. Their success as a means of regulating the UK-EU relationship will depend on the turnout in the votes, how the results are interpreted and acted upon and whether they are deemed to ‘solve’ the questions that they ask.

This article was originally published on European Futures.

Please read the comments policy before commenting.

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How to cite this article:

Salamone, A (2016) ‘This June’s EU Referendum is Unlikely to be the UK’s Last’, Britain’s Europe (Ideas on Europe), 22 May 2016, britainseurope.uk/20

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Categories: European Union

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