Ideas on Europe Blog

Ingvild Reymert

Two newly published papers investigate variation in professorial recruitment both across countries and disciplines but also within these processes which must be understood as sequential decision-making processes.

Academic recruitments are crucial decision-making processes for universities where those hired are responsible for carrying out the universities’ two key missions: teaching and research. Academic recruitments are also highly important for academics as these processes represent critical junctures for their career. Hence, it is no surprise that academic recruitment often is a hot topic among academics, however the research on academic recruitment is scarcer.

In our newly published paper, we argue that academic recruitment varies across countries and disciplines where disciplines encounter different hindrances for attracting the best researchers. In a second newly published paper I also show that academic recruitment includes internal variations as these processes must be understood as sequential decision-making processes comprising of a series of judgment processes.

 

Variation across disciplines and countries: Disciplines encounter different hindrances for attracting the best researchers

Academic recruitment differs across disciplines where disciplines have their own evaluating cultures and apply specific criteria when assessing candidates. For instance, when evaluating candidates for academic positions economists more strongly emphasize the number of publications in highly ranked journals than their colleges in disciplines like physics, cardiology, sociology and informatics.

In our newly published paper “Barriers to attracting the best researchers: perceptions of academics in economics and physics in three European Countries” (Reymert, Vabø, Borlaug and Jungblut 2022), we surveyed researchers in economics and physics in the Netherlands, Norway and the UK and found that different disciplines and countries also encountered different barriers. When asked what they perceived as the most pressing barriers to attracting the best researcher to their institutions economists emphasized salary level and institutional prestige as the main barriers to attracting the best researchers, while physics underlined competition from non-academic actors and career opportunities in their recruitments. We further found differences between countries. In Norway, limited institutional prestige was a key barrier to attracting the best researchers, while researchers in the UK highlighted salary level. Respondents at Dutch universities claimed that they experience multiple, equally important barriers.

 

Variation within recruitment between different stages of the process

Professorial recruitment does not only vary across countries and disciplines, but there is also much variation within the process itself, as recruitment must be understood as sequential decision-making process consisting of a series of judgment processes. In my recently published paper “Handling Multiple Institutional Logics in Professorial Recruitment” (Reymert, 2022) drawing on interviews and semi-confidential reports from recruitment process in Norway I showed that these recruitments are five-stage processes: designing an announcement text, screening applicants by their CV and bibliometrics, a more profound evaluation of selected candidates by peers, interviews with the highest ranked candidate and approval of the final candidate ranking at department or/and faculty level. These phases of the process were assigned different tasks and overseen by different actors who evaluated the candidates using different criteria.

In the paper I relied on the institutional logics framework and showed that these phases were influenced by different institutional logics. While an organizational logic concerned with organizational strategic needs dominate the crafting of the announcement text and the interview process, an academic logic still dominated the peer review process with peers more concerned about which candidate displayed best research quality according to disciplinary standards and not who satisfied organizational needs. The sequential nature of the recruitment process with alternating institutional logic separated the logics avoiding potential clashes between them. A theoretical contribution of the paper is thus how sequential problem-solving can decrease tension between conflicting logics, which represents a type of compartmentalization strategy described by Kraatz and Block (2008).

In relation to the discussion of whether universities are becoming more organized, managerial and rationalized, the paper showed that even though the academic logic still remains the most dominated logic in academic recruitment, these processes are becoming more organized with a stronger reliance on an organizational logic. This could partly be due to how universities are confronted with increased complexity when recruiting professors. Internationalization has both increased the number of candidates and made the pool of candidates more heterogeneous. At the same time professors are increasingly expected to satisfy multiple skills. The desirable professors must no longer only possess excellent research skills but increasingly satisfy multiple qualifications such as excellent teaching skills, ability to receive grants, administrative skills, superior social skill, be able to engage in dissemination activities and so on. In this more complex landscape university must act more strategically to attract the best scholars. Academic recruitment today thus requires stronger organizational capability and stronger organizational actorhood.

Ingvild Reymert is Head of Section and Associate Professor at OsloMet, Norway.

 

References:

Reymert, I., Vabø, A., Borlaug, S.B., Jungblut, J. (2022) Barriers to attracting the best researchers: perceptions of academics in economics and physics in three European countries. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00967-w

Reymert, I. (2022) Handling Multiple Institutional Logics in Professorial Recruitment. High Educ Policy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-022-00294-w

Kraatz, M. S., and E. S. Block. (2008) Organizational implications of institutional pluralism. The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism. 243-275.

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In his speech to the second African Union (AU) and European Union (EU) Joint Ministerial Meeting, Josep Borrell addressed the AU arguing that “The EU is your number one partner on peace and security issues. No other partner matches the level of our support – without any kind of hidden agenda. No other partner. At all levels thanks to our political, financial and technical support” (AU, 2021, p.1). Capacity-building is at the forefront of the EU engagement in the African continent. Supporting African countries in building capacities is seen as a way to promote security and development in the world.

My PhD dissertation uses norm diffusion theories to understand how capacity-building unfolds in non-Western contexts. The project aims to spotlight the processes over the constitution of the meaning of norms in the security field and the complex processes and mechanisms of their translation and localisation. Two international peacekeeping training centers serve as case studies: the Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units based in Vicenza (Italy) and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center (KAIPTC) based in Accra (Ghana).

With support from the UACES Microgrant, I was able to disseminate my preliminary findings by organizing presentations and by sharing reports in both institutions. In Ghana, I shared my findings at the Faculty of Academic Affairs and Research (FAAR) at KAIPTC in August 2022. In Italy, I organized a public presentation at the Research Office at the CoESPU in December 2022. The UACES Microgrant enabled me to develop a brief video capturing the main findings of my research and then I shared them in front of a group of military and police officers who conduct capacity-building activities in Africa. The participants provided critical feedback and additional insights that will feed into a scientific article as well as into further work on my PhD project.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Helene Dyrhauge, from Roskilde University, in Denmark. Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

In January 1973, almost fifty years ago, Denmark became a member of the European Economic Community, as it was called at the time. It was the Community’s very first enlargement! How does the country think about this anniversary?

Denmark has always had a rational view of the EU, focusing on the benefits of the memberships – mainly the benefits of the single Market. The political dimension and ideational discussions about the future of the EU have never been important for the EU debate in Denmark.

As a matter of fact, Denmark joined the EU because of the UK and it’s a standing joke that Denmark mainly wanted to protect its export of bacon and therefore follow the UK into the EU. Clearly, there was an economic rationale for joining.

However, is was not the same the other way round, though: there were no major public discussions of a possible Danish exit following the Brexit referendum. Some of the right-wing parties did try to drum up support for an all-in-or-out referendum, but the public and the major parties continue to value the economic benefits of being part of the EU.

This economic understanding of the EU and the integration process became problematic during the flurry of treaty changes and political integration steps over the 1980s and 1990s.

 

Yes, we remember the Danes rejecting the Maastricht Treaty and obtaining some “opt-outs”. Can you quickly recall how that worked out?

Yes, it was a close referendum in 1992: 50,7% said no and 49,3 said yes. The result sent shockwaves through all member states.

The political parties started looking at ways for Denmark to remain in the EU. They came up with the “national compromise”, which identified 4 problematic policies, and the Danish government asked the other member states for an opt-out of the treaty. This resulted in the so-called Edinburgh Agreement where Denmark obtained its 4 opt-outs: The Euro, the Union citizenship, Justice and Home Affairs, and Defence.

Oddly, there has almost always been a substantial support for overall EU membership: opinion polls even show an increase in support overtime, but this public support vanishes once you start to discuss the different policy fields.

 

And what has happened to the opt-outs over the years?

The Union citizenship was removed in the Amsterdam Treaty, so it is no longer relevant. For the others, all Danish governments since 1992 have wanted to remove them. Although the political parties all have a central policy towards EU membership, many of the parties have internal disagreements about their support for the EU. This was evident in the Euro referendum in 2000, and the Justice and Home Affairs referendum in 2015. The electorate said “no” to removing the opt-outs on both occasions.

As a result, politicians and governments seem to have accepted the electorate’s decisions and there are currently no more discussions about joining the Euro.

 

And what about the defence issue?

Like others, Denmark has mainly focused on NATO instead of EU defence corporation. Well, at least until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to a discussion about national security and Danish defence cooperation. Many Danes were concerned about security, especially in the Baltic Sea, and the government held a referendum about the defence opt-out, where 66,9% voted yes to remove the opt-out. Which is a big support and clearly reflects the concerns about national security following the war in Ukraine.

 

Ukraine asked for EU membership. What was the Danish position on central and eastern European countries joining the EU?

Denmark was a big supporter of the democratisation process in Central and Eastern Europe. At the time, the foreign minister Uffe Ellemann Jensen, championed the Baltic countries’ membership of both NATO and the EU. He was one of the first foreign government representatives to visit the newly sovereign states.

In 1993, Denmark held the rotating council presidency, when the member states decided to accept the application from the 10 Central and Eastern European countries and adopted the three Copenhagen criteria, which are now written into the Lisbon Treaty. The first criterium about democracy, rule of law and protection of minorities, has become even more important in the meantime, especially in terms of the internal discussion of democratic backsliding in certain member states.

 

How do you see the future of Denmark’s EU membership?

In general, I think Denmark will continue its pragmatic approach, focusing on the economic benefits of its membership.

But the energy transition is also very important for Denmark. It sees itself as a climate leader and has a strong green energy technology, which is pushing the energy transition at home. So, Denmark is likely to continue to push the green transition agenda at the EU level.

 

Ideas on Europe will be back next week, and we will look at another of these anniversaries. Interview by Laurence Aubron.

 

 

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It’s often helpful to try and tackle familiar problems from unfamiliar angles: it makes you think again about what’s what and maybe it opens up some new ideas.

And so I present my t-shirt.

[yes, that is a finely-tuned physique it contains, but let’s leave that for another time]

A night’s sleep disturbed by the seeming lack of understanding about the basic choices the UK faces when it comes to economic relations with the EU had got me to some wild thoughts about another graphic. Possibly involving graceful curves. Which isn’t me.

Then I pulled out this top and a much simpler way of trying to work through the issue presented itself.

The t-shirt is – of course – not just a t-shirt. It’s an example of how modern economies work.

Beyond its material existence as a piece of clothing, it also comes out of a system of production that has to comply with numerous bits of regulation: standards on health and safety; approvals for the chemicals used in dyes; intellectual property rights for designers; obligations on truthful marketing; rules-of-origin for raw materials; and much more.

It’s also (and this was the clincher) a fine piece of British manufacturing. Lovely people, Restrap: totally recommend all their kit.

Like UK-EU relations how?

Using the t-shirt we can start to make perhaps more sense of options than would be the case with dry economic theory.

Let’s start with a baseline case: someone in another country that the UK doesn’t have any trade deals with hears about this t-shirt and wants to buy one.

Apart from having to sort out payment and shipping, the customer in our imagined country might encounter a number of additional barriers before they can pull it on.

The most basic of these would be either a limit on the number of t-shirts that can be imported each year from the UK (a quota) or a charge applied to each t-shirt being imported from the UK (a tariff). These are both classic ways of protecting domestic producers.

You can deal with these kinds of barriers with a free-trade agreement (FTA). Usually these involve reducing quotas and/or tariffs, but in the case of the FTA that the UK signed with the EU – the Trade & Cooperation Agreement – they went for zero quotas and zero tariffs, largely because these didn’t exist beforehand to be removed.

Great stuff, but not actually ‘free trade’.

Remember all those rules I mentioned beforehand? Well those are still in place, so our customer in country X might find the importer who’s bringing in the t-shirt has to satisfy national authorities of compliance with those various regulations and standards.

One big thing you can address is the question of where something comes from.

In our case, country X authorities might be concerned that even if the UK rules on producing t-shirts mean they’re not a competitive threat to domestic producers, maybe a UK firm is just acting as a conduit for much cheaper producers elsewhere, taking advantage of the UK’s low tariffs with them.

Similar, the t-shirt might be made in Yorkshire, but the raw materials will come from elsewhere, cotton not being a big crop in God’s Own Country. But because enough work has been done on those materials inside the UK, per UK rules (which reflect international norms), it’s now a UK-made product. More complicated items, like bicycles, are more complicated, but the same idea applies.

You can start to solve both these kinds of problems with a customs union.

All parties in such a union agree to have the same tariffs in place with third countries, so that you don’t get the direct problem of diverting trade through the low-tariff state or the indirect one of bypassing tariffs by doing work on things to make them ‘locally made’. Now, wherever goods enter the customs union, they get the same treatment, which means it’s no longer something that needs to be checked at internal borders. Indeed, you don’t need internal tariffs at all.

All good stuff, but there’s still a lot left on that original list. What if country X requires all text on items to be provided in the local language? Then the producer now has to either make a new version or supply some translation: neither’s a big deal in this case, but it’s still extra cost to do and if it needs to be signed off, that’s still paperwork.

So the big step to address these barriers is to have a common or single market.

As the name suggests, you’re trying to make something that’s more like the conditions you’d expect to find within a country. I hadn’t have any additional checks or controls when I bought this Yorkshire item from Surrey, so why do the same with country X?

In principle, you can do this – it’s more or less what you have in the EU, for example. But it’s very much bigger thing than an FTA or a customs union.

That’s because it can involve an awfully large number of things.

Importantly, it’s not simply about removing differences in rules on producing and moving goods (which itself includes manufacturing, transportation protocols, workers’ rights, environmental protection and more).

It’s also about removing differences on offering services (e.g. accessing the help service should I need guidance on, um, making my t-shirt work), moving capital (e.g. being able to have transaction-cost free purchase options in other countries) and allowing workers to move too (e.g. to make it possible to hire the finest t-shirt makers from across the area without restrictions).

Suddenly, the simple idea turns out to be really quite involved, especially because you can’t just do these things for t-shirts: you do them for the entire economy.

And there we go

This last point is the key one.

A lot of what we talk about when we look at UK-EU relations is specific cases: visas for musicians, rules on fish, proper cheese from France.

But in many – maybe most – cases, the principles involved are ones that tend to imply much bigger and more generalised processes.

Certainly, in each of these situations – no specific deal, an FTA, customs union, a single market – there is a degree of wiggle room. The EU’s single market has various gaps in it, for example, just as the UK has mixed in a very high level of integration with the EU for Northern Ireland alongside its otherwise very minimal FTA.

However, wiggle room is not the same as the fundamental differences that come with each basic option.

The more you work together to remove barriers to trade, the more you limit yourself in what you can do with third countries and what you can do domestically.

A customs union is not just an agreement on common external tariffs; it’s also an obligation to negotiate as part of that union in tariff discussions with other states.

A single market is not just a means to get full and free access to your partners’ markets; it’s also a permanent negotiation about addressing emerging barriers and a significant intrusion of your partners into making decisions about what happens in your country.

The t-shirt dilemma

Which brings us back to the t-shirt.

Economic integration is also political integration. None of the steps to ‘improve trade’ outlined above comes without some political implication domestically.

That’s always been the case, both in the abstract and in the particular case of the UK and the EU. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

Too often, we have seen either a framing that is solely economic or solely political, without really trying to put them together. It’s not that ‘X% hit to GDP’ or ‘taking back control’ is wrong, just that neither is the full picture.

And so it is with our t-shirt, which by this point is starting to wonder if some other piece of clothing might not have been pulled out of the chest of drawers.

The t-shirt is both an item of clothing, to be traded as a product, and a representation of UK domestic producers, generating local value and competing in a globalised market.

The more we can recognise those different aspects and the need to take a considered view of how they might best be balanced, the better we will be able to make the big choices about what basic model of economic relations with the EU best serves our collective needs.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Natasza Styczynska again, from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland.

 

Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

You are currently part of a pioneering higher education initiative. Tell us more about it.

Almost 25 years ago the Bologna Process was launched and in 2010 the European Higher Education Area started to function. The main idea behind the process was to create compatible and coherent higher education systems in Europe. The idea was received with scepticism by some, but also with a lot of enthusiasm, and since then many double and joint programmes have been created on the master level, as well as international training programmes.

What seemed much more difficult to set up were joint programmes on the Bachelor, or “BA” level, which were desirable but hard to achieve due to legal constraints.

But where most people only see the problem, we in our university see the challenge, and now I am talking to you right in the middle of the first semester of the first ever Joint BA in European Studies.

More than 250 students from 35 countries started their studies in the Una Europa Joint Bachelor of Arts in European Studies – in short “BAES” – on the 1st of October and are about to prepare for their first exams. As a team of academics from eight universities working on preparing the programme over almost 3 years, we are now excited to see it function.

 

To what extent is this programme unique?

It’s both the concept and the scope. The eight universities that make up the Una Europa university alliance have combined their expertise to create a unique multidisciplinary and multilingual curriculum based on high-quality teaching and exceptional student mobility opportunities.

During the course of their studies, students can choose among several specialisations and travel between 8 European universities in eight attractive cities – Krakow, Leuven, Madrid, Bologna, Helsinki, Berlin, Paris and Edinburgh.

This joint programme is the first realisation of the vision of a common European university announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and supported by the European Union institutions and member states.

 

And what do the students say?

The programme has met with an enthusiastic response from students. Henrik Arhold, the first student to register for the programme told us that he chose BAES because of the interdisciplinary approach and the mobility dimension. In his words, “having the flexibility of choosing your specialisations and the opportunity of studying in up to three different countries lays an excellent academic foundation for a students’ future professional and political lives in Europe and beyond.”

At EU!radio, you are well placed to know what it’s like to give multinational cohorts of students a European perspective. If I am well informed, you are currently recruiting your 33rd intake, right?

 

That’s true, but I’m relieved I don’t have 250 of them each time! Tell us about the contents of the study programme.

Over the three years, BAES students will study fundamental aspects and values of the European Union and European states and societies. They will learn to critically analyse Europe’s role in the world. Some of the courses have a common curriculum and are taught in a hybrid format at all degree-awarding universities.

Mobility is supposed to allow students to master European languages and immerse themselves in other cultures and feel all around Europe at home. In 2025 the first cohort will obtain their degree and be ready to start professional careers as public servants, experts in European affairs, civil society organisations or international institutions. Some of them will choose to continue their studies or obtain further practical skills – we are confident the BAES will provide a solid ground for both options.

 

“Ideas on Europe” will be back next week, and we’ll move from Poland to Ireland, with Mary C. Murphy, from the University College in Cork. Interview by Laurence Aubron.

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Last week, Anton Spisak at the Tony Blair Institute produced an excellent paper on how the UK-EU relationship might be fixed. I heartily recommend it to you as an overview of where we are and what might be the way forward.

Of course, being a practical-minded sort, I did have some queries, as set out in this thread:

As a project based on a dispassionate evaluation of costs/benefits it works well IMO, especially in being explicit about the likely destination being something that is a mixed economy of distance and cooperation, rather than any off-the-shelf 'X-style' package

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) November 28, 2022

Central to my response was a question mark about how to get going the serious debate on what relations should look like. Politicians appear to either not know about the necessary details and trade-offs or not want to spend valuable political capital on a topic that is – frankly – a turn-off for most voters.

It’s no coincidence that ‘get Brexit done’ has been the most successful gambit since 2016: it’s an expression of frustration/disgust at [waves hand expansively] all this. It’s also not really a policy with any substance behind it.

This week has only underlined the point further. Labour’s big constitutional policy paper didn’t mention how relations with the EU (which include the Northern Ireland Protocol’s extensive entanglement and differentiation) might affect matters, while Kier Starmer himself tried to park whether he would rejoin the Single Market, to little avail.

Right then

A thread on why Starmer is mostly wrong, a little bit right and massively disingenuous on this

1/ https://t.co/gvx9E2oJkB

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) December 5, 2022

This really just demonstrates the point that Westminster currently looks like a place where there might be serious discussion of what the 2016 referendum result means in terms of the kind of society the UK should try to be or of its place in the world.

Instead, it looks as if the next government will be just as prone as the current one to treat EU matters in a reactive fashion, fighting fires as they appear.

So what to do?

In other European states, such profound debates have typically ensued in the wake of major national trauma or change: the end of the second World War, the collapse of Communist regimes, etc.

That’s not really a sensible option for the UK: even if you wanted to raise the referendum itself to that level, the fact that it was precisely on this issue makes it very hard to use it in that way. Plus, if we haven’t used that moment during the past 6.5 years, why would we rake it over again now?

An alternative would be to wait until barely anyone cared/noticed, and then change policy either to address obvious problems or to match someone’s interests. That might be a technocratic agenda or it might be a deeply political one, but in the absence of quite so much heat in public debate the temptation to sit things out now is clear.

The problem here is that the issue is unlikely to ever dip off the political radar: witness the concern of leavers about precisely this kind of approach being taken by their opponents. Even Starmer’s rebuffing of the Single Market ‘right now’ was taken by some as a clear signal of an agenda trundling down the line.

In addition, even tinkering to fix the problem would probably not resolve matters, given both the extent of ties and their dynamic nature. Even small steps might have big effects, which could reignite politicisation and undermine confidence in the policy.

Which leaves the option of recasting and recontextualising Brexit into something bigger.

As much as Brexit was about being in or out of the EU, it was also evidently a moment for articulating a lot of other discontents and disillusionments within the British polity.

The long-term drift towards more managerial modes of government have also meant that big-picture strategies for the country have been in short supply, especially ones that establish a strong and compelling narrative about what the country embodies and how it can head there.

Put like this, relations of any kind with the EU – or any other part of the world – become functions of self-image and of actualisation: foreign policy becomes an articulation of values and interests where how we do things is informed clearly by what we are trying to achieve.

Precisely because such a strategy/narrative is all-encompassing, it side-steps the problem of voters (and politicians) not wanting to get into the Brexit thing again.

Likewise, it helps with any fire-fighting because it identifies strategic objectives that can guide responses and inform actions. Yes, things will still come up, but now within a framework that goes beyond ‘make it go away’.

The problem is obvious: who’s going to produce such a strategy?

Logically political parties are central to this, but partisan approaches also tend to be less durable, for all the reasons you might imagine.

Organic, bottom-up deliberation and pressure would be much more lasting and consensual, but incredibly hard to make happen in any organised way (by its nature).

But these barriers should not stop us from trying.

If we have learnt anything from recent politics, then it is that apathy and lethargy in political debates leaves the ground to whoever wants to fill the space. And often those that do are not the most representative of social or political interests, coming as they do from the more extreme parts of the spectrum.

In a week where even a country like Germany – which has hardly experienced the tumult of politics found in other states – can be the subject of a serious coup plot, we have to remember that democracy is founded on participation and engagement.

For citizens, that means being active in political choices and being thoughtful about who represents you. For media, that means facilitating robust public debate. For academics, that means providing evidence-led and impartial contributions from our work.

If the path forward on Brexit isn’t yet clear, then that should not stop all of us working to find ways to address the matter together. Otherwise someone else might do it for us.

The post Talking better about Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The content of this post was presented at the launch workshop of the EUFutures Research Network held at City, University of London on 4 November 2022.

Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Professor of Law, Kent Law School

@aperrykessaris

https://amandaperrykessaris.org

This post explores how we might draw on design-based methods to enhance our willingness and ability to work across disciplines when conceptualising and investigating EU legal (dis)integration.

From a designerly perspective, EU legal (dis)integration is a messy or ‘wicked’ problem (Rittel and Webber 1973)—that is, it is open, complex, networked and dynamic; and involves competing, often incompatible, values and interests. As such, it requires interdisciplinary approaches. But interdisciplinarity is itself a messy process of negotiation—conceptually, empirically and normatively.

To sense and make sense of messiness requires approaches that are structured enough to offer analytical purchase, yet flexible enough to accommodate diversity.

Like other sociolegal scholars, I see sociology as the discipline with the greatest potential to create the kind of structured-yet-flexible spaces needed to accommodate interdisciplinary understandings of the economic lives of law, including EU legal (dis)integration. To take a sociologically-informed approach to law is, as Roger Cotterrell (2018) puts it, to reinterpret law as a social phenomenon; to do so systematically—by drawing on sociological conceptualisations of social life as occurring on multiple levels (for example, actions, interactions, regimes and rationalities), across multiple dimensions (for example, instrumental, traditional, affective, belief, material), and in multiple forms (for example, ad hoc and long-term, impersonal and trusting); to do so empirically, with reference to real world examples; and to do so with normative direction, specifically with a view to nurturing the ‘well-being of law as a practical idea’.

So, sociologically-informed approaches are well-suited to generating conceptual spaces within which to negotiate—that is, to co-identify and co-synthesise—empirical and normative insights about EU legal (dis)integration from across the social sciences.

But identification and synthesis are processes—messy, experimental processes which, not least in an interdisciplinary context, require an unusual level of collaboration and communication. Here sociology has less to offer. We need instead to look to methods that, albeit not all individually exclusive to, are in combination characteristic of, design-based disciples such as graphic design, interaction design and systems design. I follow Nigel Cross (2011) in referring to these methods as ‘designerly ways’.

Designerly ways

Views differ as to which of these ways are essential to design. I choose to highlight three specific characteristics because they strike me both as distinctive, and as especially relevant to lawyers (Perry-Kessaris 2019, 2021).

The first is designerly mindsets, which are simultaneously practical (able to make things happen), critical (able to see what is wrong with things) and imaginative (able to see what is not yet or still, for us, present) (lawyers share these traits). This mindset is reflected in and sustained by specific, mutually reinforcing, processes and strategies.

Designerly processes emphasise experimentation—that is, iterative rounds of divergent (relatively ‘creative’) thinking in which we generate as many ideas as possible and follow where they lead; and then convergent (relatively ‘scientific’) thinking in which we test those ideas, whittling them down to the ones that fit best the situation at hand.

Finally, designers make ideas visible and/or tangible not only in their final outputs, but also as a research strategy—as a way of sensing and making sense of things along the way. In this way they emphasise experiential communication; and one consequence of that emphasis is that collaboration is both prompted and facilitated.

In combination, these ways are especially well-suited to addressing ‘wicked problems’, such as EU legal (dis)integration. This is, first, because they prompt us to accept indeterminacy—that is, for example, it might be possible to reach a shared understanding of what ‘the’ problem or ‘the’ solution is; and, second, because they facilitate us to proactively embrace that indeterminacy by working provisionally—that is, experimenting towards possible alternative possibilities. More specifically, and of particular importance to those with an interest in law, designerly ways prompt and facilitate us to experiment by working abductively, that is, drawing on intuition (Perry-Kessaris 2021).

Designerly ways in practice

We increasingly see design, designers and non-designers working in ‘design mode’ (Manzini 2015), playing a central role in addressing social problems (Perry-Kessaris 2019, Allbon and Perry-Kessaris 2022). Indeed, the European Union itself has explicitly turned to design through its plans for a ‘New European Bauhaus’ – an interdisciplinary initiative intended to create ‘a space of encounter’ in which those living in Europe can ‘imagine’ and then collaboratively ‘build’ a ‘beautiful’, ‘sustainable and inclusive future’. Like its early twentieth century German namesake, the new Bauhaus is expected to draw explicitly on expertise from design, art, architecture, craft and making (Perry-Kessaris 2022).

What does a designerly approach look like in practice; and how might it be deployed by multi-disciplinary groups of researchers to address the messy problem of EU legal (dis)integration?

Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), a civil society organisation, uses designerly ways to work with communities, corporations and governments across the world. Their work is underpinned by that of economist Kate Raworth  (2017), who argues that economic thinking and practice can and ought to be reframed through this infinitely scalable metaphorical device of a double ring or ‘doughnut’. The inner ring represents the ‘social foundation of well-being’, as manifested in human development indicators such as equality and basic physical needs, below which no one should be allowed to fall. The outer ring represents the ceiling of ecologically damaging impacts, such as resource depletion and pollution, above which we must not allow ourselves to go. Between the two is the ‘safe and just space’ within which economic thinking and practice ought to take place. The doughnut graphic communicates the overall approach accessibly to diverse lay and expert audiences. Projected on a wall as a digital artefact it creates a structured-yet-free conceptual space in which to synthesise the multiple values, interests and constraints that shape any scenario or world. When made material—laid out on a floor—it creates a physical space for participants to explore and engage with possible futures.

What if…

To illustrate how we might draw on design-based methods to enhance interdisciplinary investigations of EU legal (dis)integration, I will engage in a little speculative—‘what if’—event design which draws on my experience in working with legal researchers.

What if scholars from a range of disciplines are invited to a participatory workshop aimed at addressing the following question: What are the respective merits of each discipline (political science, sociology, economy, history, law) in explaining ‘the way EU law is created, applied, used, transformed in the process of EU integration’?

The event, set out in Figures 2-5 below, would comprise four stages, each building on insights generated in the previous stage.

 

 

 

Conclusion

I am confident that designerly ways can generate structured-yet-flexible enabling ecosystems within which we are better, or differently, able to sense and make sense of the world, both individually and in collaboration; and that these are the kinds of spaces that we must generate if we are to develop interdisciplinary approaches to investigating EU legal (dis)integration. I hope I have tempted you to consider those possibilities.

References

Emily Allbon and Amanda Perry-Kessaris eds (2022) Design in Legal Education. Routledge.

Roger Cotterrell (2018) Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic thought and social inquiry. Routledge.

Nigel Cross (2001) ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science’ 17:3 Design Issues 49.

Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2022) ‘Could alternative econo-legal futures be made more possible and probable through prefigurative design? Insights from and for Cyprus’ 72:4 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 623-650 

Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2021) Doing sociolegal research in design mode Routledge.

Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2019) ‘Legal design for practice, activism, policy and research’ 46:2 Journal of Law and Society 185-210.

Kate Raworth 2017 Doughnut Economics

Horst W J Rittel and Melvin M Weber (1973) ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’ 4:2 Policy Sciences 155-169.

The post How might designerly ways prompt and facilitate interdisciplinary understandings of EU legal (dis)integration? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Amelia Hadfield again. Professor Amelia Hadfield is Head of Department of Politics, Founder of Centre for Britain and Europe, and Dean International at the University of Surrey. Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

One of the ‘Big Ideas’ of 2022 is the ‘European Political Community’. ‘Ideas on Europe’ mentioned the EPC for the first time back in May, and in October it had its big launch in Prague. Can you update us on where things stand?

The EPC was instigated largely by French President Emmanuel Macron. There was the usual ‘summer of scepticism’, in which the idea was received pretty coolly by various Member States. Some, however, felt the opportunity to bring together key European states in a freer, less constrained structure, with a loose agenda, might actually produce results.

As a concept, EPC is wide in scope. To quote Macron, it represents a “new European organization [that] would allow democratic European nations that subscribe to our shared core values to find a new space for political and security cooperation, cooperation in the energy sector, in transport, investments, infrastructures, the free movement of persons and in particular of our youth.”

Ultimately, some of this fell away: the war in Ukraine dominated the security aspects, and led the energy conversations. As did tricky issues regarding mobility. But discussions on a wider Europe remained.

 

Are there any achievements yet?

The simple fact that it actually got off the ground is an achievement ! With 44 countries in attendance, widening the nature of the conversations about Europe beyond the EU.

The loose agenda was another win, I think. The freer forms of diplomatic interaction were able to provide more authentic opportunities to address key issues facing the continent. From a UK perspective, there was a positive resetting of relations with France in particular, with a commitment to restart regular UK-France bilaterals, including a long-overdue summit in 2023. I would suggest that EPC helped the ‘warming up process’ that is gradually seeping into some EU-UK relations, including in the realm of defence.

 

And was there a breakthrough in the field of defence?

Not exactly a breakthrough, but certainly a helpful development. Members of the PESCO, the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation group, invited the UK to join the project, alongside other third countries participating, including Norway and the United States. This feels like a good step forward, post-Brexit.

Moreover, the discussion of European energy security requiring strategic attention, as well as ideas about managing the next stages of the war in the Ukraine, pointed implicitly to the idea of the EU as an increasingly robust foreign policy actor, capable of onshoring key assets and adopting a more pragmatic approach to principles. Indeed, EPC “highlights an effort by European to take on increased responsibility for managing their own affairs” by aligning both EU and non-EU participants (including EU institutions) and discussing overarching security issues with the widest possible range of voices.

 

44 members, you said! Who was invited?

Some key non-EU states attended, including Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as the UK. This reinforced the sense that the EPC isn’t just another ‘EU only’ club. At the same time, Emmanuel Macron’s initial wish that EPC gather ‘like-minded democratic countries’ was possibly weakened. Still, the EPC sent a strong message to Moscow.

 

And did anything go wrong?

A final communique would have provided clarity for what actually WAS achieved in Prague. It’s one thing not to have an explicit agenda, or informal sessions, but contemporary summits are inevitably judged by the tone of their final communique. Given the widespread nature of political situations facing the 44 countries in the room, including their varying perspectives to the EU, as well as critical policies like enlargement, a brief statement could have gone a long way. For instance, the EPC could have usefully commented on its role as a broad European forum, quite separate from EU enlargement.

 

What do you think comes next?

The next three EPC meetings have already been lined up, with biannual get-togethers, one of which is in lockstep with the EU Council Presidency. There is a challenge in appearing as something of an antechamber for those in the accession queue, a rehabilitation clinic for the UK, and a pseudo-G20 for those with no interest in EU enlargement. Macron worked hard throughout summer 2022 to reassure states ahead of the Prague meeting that enlargement and membership were unrelated to the overall purpose of the EPC, but it is bound to remain an untidy, underlying dynamic.

Provided it can retain a degree of uniqueness in terms of its members, and aspects of strategic autonomy – albeit widely interpreted – in its approach, the EPC reduces the risk of becoming ‘just another’ diplomatic talking shop and become an authentic forum for meaningful dialogue.

‘Ideas on Europe’ will be back week, and we will welcome Natasza Styczynska from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Interview by Laurence Aubron.

 

The post European Political Community : More than an EU Antechamber appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

One good reason for doing this regular tracking report is that is means we (i.e. I) can abreast of what is an ever-changing landscape of interactions between the EU and the UK.

As a case in point, I’d rather missed that the past couple of weeks have been packed with meetings of the numerous Trade & Cooperation Agreement bodies. Possibly that’s a reflection of the lack of substance behind most of those, possibly because the key forum – the Partnership Council – is now some 18 months since it last (and, indeed, first) met.

As the graphics below point up, the architecture of regular interaction is present and the channels are open should both sides wish to use them.

But the absence of substantive shift in policy by Rishi Sunak means that while there is a stream of more informal work going on around the Protocol, this has not translated into a need to make more of the WA/TCA bodies.

As usual, you can follow the hyperlink below each one to a PDF version with clickable links to minutes and agendas for each meeting.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic75

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic85

Meanwhile, one area that isn’t seeing any obvious activity is the UK’s stated project of removing Retained EU Law (REUL) from the statute books.

Since the government launched its tracker back in June, there hasn’t been a single instance of repeal, amendment or replacement that wasn’t already there.

The generous interpretation would be that someone’s not updating the tracker (the last edit is in September), but as I discuss in a thread on Mastodon (below) there’s probably more reason to think that the big block that remains in force is actually useful.

[and don’t worry too much about that ‘sensitive content’ warning – it’s just a graph, regardless of what the blur might look like to you]

Finally, you might want to sign up (again) to my podcast, A Diet of Brussels, which is now not only the very first Brexit-related podcast but also one of the few remaining ones.

I might not reach the production values of Brexit Republic (which I heartily recommend to you), but I will be producing new, monthly episodes that might be of interest as I think we’re moving into a new phase of things.

If that sounds like I might be becoming more positive, note that I’m calling that new phase ‘Long Brexit’…

The post EU-UK monthly tracking: November appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On October 25th, Tous Migrants, a French migrant advocacy organization, announced that it had filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights concerning the death of Blessing Matthew, a young Nigerian woman who died after crossing the Franco-Italian border. This appeal is based in part on new evidence in the case that came to light in an investigation by Border Forensics.

Blessing Matthew was 21 years old, from Nigeria, and had graduated high school there. She arrived in Italy in the autumn of 2016 but was unable to secure the right to stay or find work, so she decided to continue her journey. On the night of May 7th 2018, she crossed the border from Italy to France. Two days later her body was found in the Durance River, several kilometers downstream from the border. The sequence of events that led to her death was unclear until Border Forensics conducted an investigation to reconstruct the events. Using new witness testimony from one of Blessing’s fellow travelers, alongside additional evidence, Border Forensics conducted a spatio-temporal analysis to visually reconstruct the scene. Border Forensics has shown that French police may have endangered Blessing in a way that led to her fall into the river and ultimately to her death.

Border Forensics takes an innovative approach combining academic inquiry and activism with the goal of revealing border violence and seeking mobility justice. Their investigations bring together civil society, academics, and migrants and their families in a way that recognizes the distinct knowledge that each party contributes. This enables them to reveal new information about the violence that takes place at borders around the world. In Blessing’s case, the previous investigation by the French police was inconclusive with contradictory statements from the police who saw Blessing the night she died. The two attempts to bring the case to court in France were dismissed, so the new evidence from Border Forensics that has been brought to the ECHR is the last resort to seek justice for Blessing.

Blessing’s death falls into a larger pattern of police repression and violence at the Franco-Italian border. Migrants are criminalized for their mobility, facing verbal and physical violence from French police, and being refused entry to France despite their right to claim asylum. Residents of the town of Briançon and activists have mobilized in solidarity with migrants, running a shelter for migrants and going to the border and look for people who are in need of assistance after crossing. My doctoral research considers how citizens and migrants act in solidarity together in this region despite the threat of criminalization. I spent a year conducting fieldwork at this border, and with the support of a UACES microgrant, I was able to return after I had completed my fieldwork in order to share my findings with the people who have contributed to my research. As an activist academic, I seek to ensure that my research is engaged with community priorities and done in a way that is not extractive. Even though I am no longer in the field, collaborating with Border Forensics to translate the investigation and publicize it in English is a way for me to contribute and stay engaged in the cause for justice at this border.

The post Justice for Blessing: Contesting Police Violence at the Franco-Italian Border appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Vytautas Kuokštis and Ringailė Kuokštytė

 

How can we explain the very uneven economic outcomes in EU member countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially considering that the shock was largely symmetric?

In our article for the Journal of Common Market Studies, we analyse quarterly data on economic growth and show that institutional quality, measured using the World Bank Governance Indicators and the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index, helped to moderate the economic shock, thus contributing to the divergence among EU countries.

Theoretically, the role of institutions may be expected to matter through a few important channels. Higher-quality institutions are likely to contribute to better policy decisions and their superior implementation. In the case of the pandemic, one would expect such institutions to be associated with more appropriate responses regarding the timing of both healthcare and economic measures, as well as the scale and efficacy of these measures. Besides, higher-quality institutions are more trustworthy, which may have encouraged businesses not to curb their investment during the pandemic; similarly, they may have led citizens to more fully comply with regulations, as a consequence of which less stringent measures may have been needed. Uncertainty was less of an issue in this institutional scenario.

Furthermore, institutional quality in terms of economic freedom facilitates a faster and more effective reallocation of resources in the realm of activity by economic actors. The mechanism of market prices, with its inherent ‘profit and loss signals’, in lieu of information distributed by a centralised authority, provides better guidance as to viable economic options in a given disaster-like context.

Taking advantage of an extended period of the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore its several waves, our analysis employs these theoretical expectations by focusing on the possibility that institutions mattered more when the shock of the pandemic was more severe.

We find that the importance of institutional quality waned over time as the pandemic shock became less severe. In 2020, the shock was more substantial, given the newness of the virus. Extreme uncertainty that ensued and the lack of vaccines only exacerbated this shock. As revealed in Figure 1, the influence of higher-quality institutions was substantial and significant in 2020, but not in 2021.

 

Figure 1. Marginal Effects of Institutional Quality (World Bank and Economic Freedom) on Quarterly Economic Growth in 2020 and 2021 (with 95% confidence intervals)
Note: The models adjust for forecast GDP growth, tourism share, virus deaths, and time fixed effects.

 

Furthermore, the role of institutional quality was particularly significant when the virus spread reached its highest levels. Figure 2 shows that, at low levels of institutional quality measured, here, in terms of the Economic Freedom Index, increasing deaths had a statistically significant and substantially important negative effect on economic growth. However, this effect weakened at higher levels of institutional quality. In fact, at the highest institutional quality levels, increasing deaths had no statistically significant adverse effect on growth. We observe the same patterns using the World Bank governance predictor.

 

Figure 2. Marginal Effects of 10 Per Cent Increase in Deaths on Quarterly Economic Growth at Different Levels of Economic Freedom (with 95% confidence intervals)
Note: The model adjusts for forecast GDP growth, tourism share, the interaction between years and institutional quality, and time fixed effects.

 

Furthermore, the institutional perspective helps to shed some light on EU countries’ individual experiences. Figure 3 shows country-based average residuals (unexplained positive and negative deviations) in economic growth for EU members in 2020. The dark-shaded bars depict the unexplained growth estimated based on the regression model that only adjusts for the extent of the virus spread, economic structure, and forecast GDP growth. The light-shaded bars are based on the model that additionally adjusts for institutional quality.

The institutional perspective is helpful in better explaining the growth experience of both the largest over- and under-performers. In particular, a relatively bad performance of countries such as Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Greece is less surprising given their low level of institutional quality, whereas the opposite is true for countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. That is, their good economic results during the pandemic are not as startling when one considers the quality of their institutions.

 

Figure 3. Unexplained Economic Growth of Individual EU Member States
Notes: The dark-shaded bars represent the average of residuals for each EU country over the quarters of 2020, based on the model that includes cases, deaths, growth forecast, and tourism share in the economy. The light-shaded bars represent average residuals based on the model that additionally takes into account institutional quality. The x-axis represents GDP growth (in percentage).

 

The article contributes to offering additional evidence that institutional quality matters in dealing with shocks. Practically speaking, the COVID-19 pandemic yet again exposed the underlying institutional heterogeneity within the euro area and the EU more generally. Without closing gaps in institutional quality, it is hard to expect substantial convergence among EU members in the future. This should also inform EU financial assistance, as a special emphasis should be placed on improving institutional quality, especially given that aid effects are also likely to be conditional on the institutional environment. The potential of the EU’s most recent financial instrument, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, to transform EU economies and narrow down developmental gaps is also contingent on the institutional quality of particular member states. Institutional reforms would not only enhance member states’ long-run growth prospects but also help bolster their resilience to shocks.

 

 

Authors:

Vytautas Kuokštis

Vytautas is an associate professor at Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science. His research interests focus on comparative and international political economy.

Contact: Twitter, Department Twitter, Personal Website

 

 

Ringailė Kuokštytė

Ringailė is a researcher at General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania. Her research interests include EU politics, international cooperation, and defence policy.

Link to academic profile.

The post High-quality Institutions Insulated EU Economies during the Pandemic appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This blog entry is a repost from The Progressive Post‘s article ‘What role for health promotion in the European Health Union?’ by Charlotte Godziewski, published on the 26 October 2022 as part of the Dossier entitled ‘Moving towards a Healthier Union‘. 

 

So far, the European Health Union is largely focused on the necessary task of improving health security. A more comprehensive Health Union also needs to consider health promotion. But what does health promotion mean? Is it merely an instrument to nudge individual behaviours, or can it be more than that? A truly health-promoting Union requires a more social Union.

Health has become a classic example of the EU cooperating and furthering integration in response to crises. The bovine spongiform encephalopathy (‘mad cow disease’) crisis was pivotal in strengthening food safety standards. The 2003 SARS outbreak propelled the creation of the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC). Now, with Covid-19, we are witnessing the development of a broad and ambitious – if somewhat vague – vision of EU health: the European Health Union.

While giving more attention to health is seen by most as a welcomed improvement, it is also important to look at the kind of further EU integration in health: What are the underlying rationales and avenues currently explored under the proposed European Health Union, and what are the potential opportunity costs of neglected options?

So far, the European Health Union’s aim is to ‘[protect] the health of Europeans and collectively [respond] to cross-border health crises‘. Its action plan focuses on health security, industrial strategy for medical countermeasures, and digital innovation. However, very little is said about the importance of health promotion. Health promotion has been reduced to exhorting and nudging people to take responsibility and make healthy choices. If health promotion is understood in these narrow terms, it is understandable that the EU does not concentrate its Health Union efforts on it, especially considering its limited formal competences in that area.

But health promotion can and should be so much more. Factors that shape population health are numerous and far-reaching. In the early 2000s the World Health Organization produced a body of work focused on the so-called ‘social determinants of health’. These are the social conditions under which people live, and they include, for example, access to decent housing, education, health care, active transport, safe urban spaces etc. Now research is increasingly interested in understanding macro-social determinants of health. These are the socioeconomic and political conditions, processes and power dynamics that affect population health directly and/or indirectly via complex and multileveled causalities.

Austerity is a good example of a macro-social determinant of (ill-)health. The austerity measures taken in response to the Eurozone crisis have been disastrous for health: Greece, Spain, and Portugal saw a rise in suicide rates and infectious disease outbreaks, while access to healthcare services became restricted. Research has demonstrated that, more than the crisis itself, it was the type of fiscal response and the strength of social protection mechanisms, that decisively shaped health outcomes. As such, the EU’s economic governance and fiscal coordination activities contribute to shaping public health, not only because they impact healthcare systems, but also because they prescribe the general direction of member state’s public spending.

Compared to the Eurozone crisis, the EU’s Covid-19 response was a clear improvement. The EU fiscal rules have been suspended by the triggering of the General Escape Clause within the Stability and Growth Pact. This means that member states have more freedom to spend and borrow as they see fit to rebuild their economies. The EU also made a €806 billion stimulus package (NextGenerationEU) available. This differs considerably from the austerity imposed a decade ago. The question is whether this reflects a lasting shift in how policymakers view public spending, and whether they recognise the importance of well-resourced public and social services for promoting health beyond exceptional crisis times. 

To develop a long-term vision for a healthier EU, we need to understand health promotion not merely as disease prevention at an earlier stage, limited to nudging individual behaviours. Rather, health promotion can be a transformative endeavour to create conditions of life that are conducive to good health at a population level. This has been referred to as a ‘salutogenic’ approach to public health – one concerned with the origins of good health, rather than focusing only on preventing disease.

What does this mean for a European Union? Article 168 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) states that “a high level of human health protection shall be ensured in the definition and implementation of all Union policies and activities”. This does not need to translate into more health and healthcare competence conferral. Instead, taking Article 168 seriously means creating sustainable, health-promoting conditions of life through the EU’s own, already existing competences. If understood in those terms, a European Health Union that promotes health should be a transformative project, one that creates a more social Europe.

In short, a progressive Health Union should not just build resilience to face a crisis-ridden future, it should mainly work to heal those crises. Doing the latter is more complicated. It requires more fundamental rethinking of taken-for-granted ways of working. It is likely to face more institutional obstacles and does not depend on the EU alone. Meanwhile, securitising the supply chains of medical countermeasures and improving the use of artificial intelligence to prepare for future pandemics is certainly useful and it is more easily compatible with existing EU competencies and an orthodox view of the EU as a market-creating project. However, this alone does not address the root causes of vulnerability to future pandemic outbreaks, which include rising inequalities, but also climate change. In addition to new and improved health security mechanisms, the European Health Union needs to translate into a more social, environmentally sustainable, and global justice-oriented Union. All this is also central to promoting health.

The post What role for health promotion in the European Health Union? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Brexit used to sit on the far side lines of politics.

Indeed, the word ‘Brexit’ was only invented in 2012, and until the referendum, most people didn’t know what it meant. (Now it’s in the Oxford English dictionary.)

An in-depth study by the Migration Observatory showed that:

• The volume of press coverage mentioning ‘immigration’ or ‘migration’ declined from 2006 to 2011 before rising each year from 2011 to mid-2015

Furthermore, when the press explicitly described immigrants and migrants during 2006-2015, 3 out of 10 times it was with the word ‘illegal’.

In 2004, when the Labour government permitted migrants to come here from new EU member states (formerly hidden behind the ‘Iron Curtain’) they were welcome. The British economy was doing well, and businesses were desperate for more workers. EU migrants coming here filled a chronic labour and skills gap.

It wasn’t until after the Tories won the 2010 general election, and severe austerity measures were imposed, that some tabloid newspapers, and some politicians, started to heavily scapegoat migrants as the cause. But even then, Britain’s membership of the EU was not a majority interest subject.

Some on the fringes of the Conservative and Labour Parties thought Britain should leave the EU, but they were small in number.

• Most MPs and members of the House of Lords strongly supported Britain’s membership of the EU (and indeed, most of them voted for Britain to Remain in the European Union.)
• Most people in Britain also didn’t want Britain to leave the EU.

We’d been members for around 40 years, and it was not a big deal. Polling consistently showed that most people in the UK supported our continued membership, even in the year before the referendum.

So, how did Brexit become mainstream?

It started when leading politicians, who should have known better, got scared of a little Eurosceptic party called UKIP, which promoted a fear and dislike of migrants, and blamed the EU. UKIP was considered a threat to the mainstream of politics and so everybody started talking their language of fear.

Slowly and surely, the new language allowed migrants and foreigners to be blamed for our problems, with leaving the EU presented as the solution. It was the start of the rot. It led us directly to Brexit.

There was no rational reason to fear migrants. But senior politicians in both the Conservative and Labour Parties began to be fearful of UKIP. Instead of bucking the UKIP trend, they fell for it; they unwisely helped to promote and prolong it, along with most British newspapers, also guilty of inciting UKIP’s message of xenophobia.

Reported the BBC on the rise of UKIP in 2014:

‘David Cameron’s historic pledge to hold an in/out referendum on UK membership of the EU if the Conservatives won the next election was interpreted by some as an attempt to halt the rise of UKIP, which senior Tories feared could prevent them from winning an overall majority in 2015.’

(Repeat: Previously hardly anyone in Britain was concerned about Britain’s EU membership – it was a minority issue on the far fringes of politics.)

In the same year, Nigel Farage, the then leader of UKIP, told The Telegraph,

“Parts of the country have been taken over by foreigners and mass immigration has left Britain as unrecognisable.”

It was nonsense of course. Britons didn’t have a serious problem of migration before the likes of Nigel Farage told them they did. If you look at a 2014 map of where UKIP had the highest support, it was mostly in the areas of Britain with the least migration.

And conversely, in the areas with lots of migrants, UKIP mostly had the least support.

The foreign-born of Britain only represent around 12% of the population – that’s a normal proportion for most modern, thriving western democracies. Even among those 12% of foreign-born are many considered to be British, such as Boris Johnson, born in New York, and Joanna Lumley, born in India.

And citizens from the rest of the EU living in the UK represented only 5% of the population – that’s small and hardly ‘mass migration.’

A few weeks after the 2016 referendum result, the then Tory MP, Oliver Letwin, said that British politicians “made a terrible mistake” in failing to take on the argument about immigration, the argument spread by UKIP.

He told The Times:

“We all, the Labour party and the Conservative Party alike … made a terrible mistake, which was not to take on the argument about migration.” He added that UKIP exploited the failure of mainstream politicians to “put the counter-argument” that “migration enriches the country in every way.”

Gandhi got it right when he said:

‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is really fear.’

Our main political parties and national newspapers could have saved us from an irrational fear of migrants that led directly to Brexit. Instead, they pandered to UKIP and promoted the fear. And now the fear has won, and it is still being encouraged by politicians and papers.

But:

• Migrants are a boon, not a burden for Britain.
• EU membership has helped our country and did not hinder it.

Somehow, facts need to win over fear. And until that happens, Britain is on a dangerous and debilitating path.

 

• Watch my 13-minute video: How newspaper lies led to Brexit

 DAILY EXPRESS FRONT PAGES: The 2011 headline that millions of families were benefit cheats was entirely incorrect. See Full Fact report. And the 2015 headline that illegal immigrants were pouring into Britain was also false. See Full Fact response.

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• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
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The post The bias changed and we got Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Another month, another Prime Minister.

The ructions in Westminster might well have launched a thousand memes about lettuce, but have also clearly put any policy work on hold.

This holds true for British EU policy, where the only clear shift since Boris Johnson’s time in office has been a shift in discourse and framing: both Truss and Sunak have gone down the path of warm words and conciliatory statements, instead of a reflexive rejection of anything ‘European’.

Obviously, at this stage in proceedings, it is hard to make any firm judgements about Sunak’s intentions, but the early indications are that he will follow Truss in talking up the possibilities of working better with the EU, but without much scope for moving on policy substance.

This was already evident during Truss’ brief stint:

So earlier this week I was dubious about the substance behind Truss' European charm offensive

Spoiler: still dubious, albeit for different reasons

1/ https://t.co/D56hsI1Vxa

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) October 7, 2022

And it’s where I am now on Sunak:

Let's have a first crack at Sunak's EU policy

best guess for far: continuity Truss, for better or worse

1/

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) October 27, 2022

As a reminder, EU policy matters, whether or not a Prime Minister has it as a priority item (which neither Truss nor Sunak do): it touches on multiple fundamentals of British polity, politics and policy, which both requires attention and imposes constraints on the ability to flex positions:

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic111

It’s also useful to consider how that plays out in the Northern Irish context across the post-referendum PMs: Sunak seems set to follow Truss rather than either Johnson or May.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic110

The basic challenge remains one of a lack of strategic direction for European policy, something that a new PM will not change by itself. While the new tone will welcome, that cannot be a long-term solution for the problems that exist.

The post Have you tried turning it off and on again? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent war that followed, the idea of Europe is once again in question argued Gerard Delanty in his speech at the 15th Ecumenical Social Week organized in Lviv.

 

Demonstration against Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in Ljubljana, Slovenia held in February 2022. Credit: European Commission Audiovisual Centre. 

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent war that followed, the idea of Europe is once again in question. The formation and identity of Europe throughout history has been very much bound up with the aftermath of war and the attempt to establish peace. Since 1945, there is general agreement that if Europe stands for anything it is peace. It is now widely accepted that the identity of Europe is not based on an underlying substance that guarantees unity in face of its diversity and there is nothing particularly unique or singular about its culture. Its identity is necessarily contested and a product of whatever meaning Europeans have given it. One such meaning is the normative value of peace. But what does that mean? What does it mean to invoke the notion of peace as the core value of European integration.

It is certainly the case that the period since 1945 has been one of extraordinary peace in Europe as a whole. The project of European integration from its early beginning in the 1950s to the present European Union can be seen as built on the belief in the necessity to establish lasting peace in Europe. This was an elite driven project that was the product of visionary leaders who sought to create the conditions for lasting peace between Germany and France, countries that had been at war with each other three times since 1870. There can be no doubt, too, that the relative success of this desire for peace was connected to the advancement of democracy and prosperity. Now, while I do not think that this needs to be called into question, the notion of Europe as a peace project needs to be re-assessed. This is because the presuppositions upon which it was built no longer exist.

It could be argued that the current situation in which the largest country in Europe has been invaded by an expansionist superpower is an exception, much like the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I believe this is the wrong approach to take. It would be to exclude too much, as well as European failure to intervene to stop the genocide in Srebrenica in 1992 and its later inadequate response to the Kosovo war in 1999. The narrative that has become a legitimating myth of European integration of progressive peace needs to be re-written to take into account not just the current situation but the structural conditions of the very possibility of peace, which after 1945 were very much based on economic and political cooperation.

Looking back over the past 70 years or so, we can see that the relative peace that was established in Europe was made possible by a framework of economic and political stability that no longer exists, having come to a slow demise over the past two decades. In many ways the fundamental aspirations of the post-war project of European integration have been realised. The current geopolitical crisis is a crisis of stability. So, hence the title of my talk.

The post-1945 period was indeed a period of peace, but it was more so a period of stability. We should not mistake stability for peace. The conditions of the post-war peace was made possible by a new kind of war, namely the Cold War and the possession of nuclear weapons by the two superpowers. The peace that was established was a phoney peace, as argued by many critics such as E.P. Thompson and Herbert Marcuse, who also pointed out that the peace the Cold War established made possible the struggle to control the ‘Third World’, where the real war took place. In this period, when the USA and the USSR scrambled to control the Third World, many of the European nations were actively conducting wars to retain their colonial possessions, and several of them were dictatorships in this period. The Treaty of Rome was signed in the middle of the Algerian War. It makes little sense calling Spain under the Franco dictatorship peaceful. The absence of war was often tyranny and terror. Peace must also be just.

Peace in Europe was secured at the price of major restrictions on democracy, leading to a pervasive crisis in legitimation in the 1970s. This peace was possible only through the balance of capitalism and democracy, a balance that has now broken down amidst the crisis of neoliberalism and the rise almost everywhere of radical right-wing nationalism. I think this situation can be seen as a crisis of stability, which now also extends to a questioning of the EU itself, as reflected in the monumental catastrophe of Brexit. But the current instability goes beyond these movements to encompass the ecological crisis and let us not forget the Covid pandemic. The Ukraine war is entwined in an energy and food crisis.

For these reasons, I think we need to rethink the idea of Europe as a peace project, not to reject this idea but to give it a different foundation. The reconciliation achieved between France and Germany and between Poland and Germany was one of the great achievements of the previous century, as was the project of European integration. But as the memory of the war recedes and the improbability of a war again between the founding nations of the EU, a new rationale has to be found. We cannot assume the existence of an endogenous permanence of a ‘peaceful Europe’.

Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace in 1795 argued that peace needs to be perpetual, that is eternal. Treaties between states secure a kind of peace that is conditional on a treaty. What needs to be created, he argued, it a perpetual peace that does not depend on the highly conditional nature of treaties. Creating a lasting peace requires a fundamental transformation in political community. Now, some of the answers Kant found are not very helpful for us today (he regarded democracy as despotic) but his argument for what he called the right of hospitality and a new cosmopolitan law that goes beyond international treaties continues to be relevant.

In many ways the war in Ukraine challenges the viability of cosmopolitanism. Russia is in the grips of a pathological ultranationalism that has been a rallying call for white supremacist nationalism in the USA; Europe has failed to solve some of its most pressing problems, which have also been exacerbated by the revival of xenophobic nationalism. But, as I see it, cosmopolitanism is not a zero-sum condition, either present or absent; it is not just an ideal and nor is it a reality that is negated by anti-cosmopolitanism; it is rather a condition that is to varying degrees present and has been a product of a learning process in Europe since 1945 when a pacific orientation did take place coupled with democratization. This learning process is incomplete, but it did begin, despite the limitations imposed on it by the structural conditions that I mentioned. In Russia, too, under Gorbachev it had a brief moment but was abated and, sadly, probably failed entirely. But there is much evidence that elsewhere such a learning process has taken place, as for example the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland in 1998; the dissolution of armed struggle by secessionist nationalist movements, such as ETA; the peaceful resolution of the Cyprus conflict etc.

While I believe that peace in Ukraine will triumph in the end, it is not guaranteed. It needs to be defended. This is also why the political situation in Ukraine is important to understand for Europe as a whole. War and tyranny have been a major part of European history, but so too have been resistance to tyranny and war. The uprising in Kyiv in November 2013, the so-called ‘EuroMaiden Uprising’ against the suppression of the Association Agreement with the EU, must be placed in the wider context of the uprising in 1989/90 in central and eastern Europe and other ones, for example the protests in European cities against the disastrous war in Iraq in February 2003. Some of these protests did not succeed: in 2014 Russia invaded and seized the Crimea; the war in Iraq went ahead despite massive opposition by European publics. But the lesson of history is that resistance to tyranny in the end delivers results even if those results are not available to those who fought for them. The uprisings that led to the end of Soviet dominance in central and eastern Europe did succeed in at least some of their aims and, so far, Ukrainian resilience against a formidable enemy is showing startling results.

An unfortunate paradox of peace is that it sometimes needs military action to defend it. That is the predicament that we have today. NATO has acquired a new relevance, but in my view, it has a role to play only if, first, it is entirely a defensive organization (and I think was well demonstrated in its successful intervention in the Kosovo War). There is no appetite today for a war against Russia. Second, Europe must assert its own identity rather than being subservient to the USA. The widespread support that has been expressed for Ukraine in Europe is at least one expression of a new kind of European identity that is nurtured by the awareness of the interconnected nature of the European nations. This accords with an important characteristic of cosmopolitanism, namely empathy with those who suffer.

I have argued in various publications that Europe today is ‘post-western’, in the sense that it is no longer defined by the context of the Cold War when it was largely shaped by the western core states allied to the USA. Since 1989, Europe has been redefined in a way that encompasses the wider diversity of civilizations that have constituted its history. This, what I have referred to as an ‘inter-civilizational constellation’ includes the relation to Russia, as it does the Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim heritages. The term captures the sense of multiple and entangling civilizations, as opposed to a singular and now discredited notion of ‘Western Civilization’ and its modern successor ‘The West’. Inspired by T.W. Adorno’s use of the term, the concept of a constellation suggests a pattern that is not underpinned by a fixed or objective structure.

With the widening of the civilizational diversity of Europe since the end of the Cold War and the widening the EU, there is inevitably less certainty as to the unity of Europe. The absence of certainty should not in itself be a source of insecurity and the consequent fear that uncertainty nurtures. But, when combined with a crisis of stability the conditions are created for a sense of insecurity that is easily expressed in hostility and not, as Kant said, hospitality.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my thanks to the conference organizers for their kind invitation to speak at this conference and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for organizing my trip to Lviv.

 

This post is a transcript from Gerard Delanty’s speech at the 15th Ecumenical Social Week Conference: “Wandering Identity: Considering meanings and Values” organized in Lviv. It has been previously published by the Ecumenical Social Week website.

The post The Crisis of Stability and the Idea of Europe Today appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

For most of the UK’s five decades as a member of the European Union, Britain didn’t want to leave. On the contrary, most Brits wanted us to stay.

What’s the proof of that? Well, apart from polling over the years, look at governments and general elections.

• From 1959 to 2016, every UK government and every UK Prime Minister strongly wanted Britain to be a member of the European Community.

Since we joined the European Community in 1973 right up to 2016, at every general election, all the main parties wanted us to stay in the EU, with just one exception.

• What was the exception?

It was the general election of 1983, when Labour’s manifesto – described then as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – pledged to get Britain out of the European Community.

Labour lost that election by a huge landslide. Arch Eurosceptic, Tony Benn, lost his Bristol seat.

• Since then, Leaving was a minority call on the far side lines of British politics for most of our decades of membership.

Just two years before the referendum, in 2014,  Ipsos UK polling showed that Britain’s support for wanting to remain in the EU was the highest it had been in 23 years – 56% in favour of remain, just 36% for leave, as reported at the time by The Guardian.

• This, despite the apparent rise of UKIP, that the Tories and Labour seemed so scared about.

A year later, in 2015, the Ipsos poll showed that support for continued EU membership was even higher – a staggering 61% in support of remaining, with just 27% supporting leave, as reported by The Independent.

What does this all mean?

• It means that many, if not most, of those who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum would have voted Remain just a year or two earlier.

Somehow, in the months, weeks and days leading up to the referendum, many of those who previously would have supported Remain were cajoled and convinced to switch to Leave.

• Of course, many of them now realise that they were conned with lies and false promises in what was a fundamentally flawed referendum.

Eventually, truth will prevail. It usually does.

It’s becoming increasingly, painfully, and shockingly obvious that Brexit cannot deliver its promised land, and that Britain – and Britons – were better off being in the EU.

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So, Rishi Sunak has today been crowned the second ‘unelected’ Tory Prime Minister in as many months. 

Is the country ‘Ready for Rishi’? Well, the country has no choice. The new Prime Minister has been anointed by just 194 Conservative MPs. We don’t get a say. Although in the UK we don’t directly elect a Prime Minister, Mr Sunak will head yet another new Conservative administration, with a new manifesto, without a mandate from the country.

He says he’ll abide by his party’s 2019 manifesto prepared by his predecessor (bar one), Boris Johnson. But how can he?

Everything has changed since 2019. Covid. War in Ukraine. Energy crisis. Cost of living crisis. Inflation crisis. Bank interest crisis. Increased taxes. Swingeing austerity cuts. And a half-baked Brexit. 

None of that was covered in the Conservatives 2019 manifesto.

Back in June, Lord Heseltine, former Tory deputy Prime Minister, asserted:

“If Boris goes, Brexit goes”

At the time, I wrote that this was nothing more than grandstanding, wishing thinking. And so, it’s turned out to be. Boris has gone. But Brexit is staying. With a new Prime Minister who’s a much bigger Brexiter than Johnson ever was.

No wonder that far right Brexiters of the Tory party support Sunak. In the referendum, Sunak argued for Brexit and supported Boris Johnson’s bus lie. He wrote for his website in February 2016:

“If we leave the EU, we will immediately save £20 billion [a year].”

Not so hot on maths then, is our ex-Chancellor.The UK never sent the EU £20 billion a year, and in any event, in real terms EU membership cost us nothing – on the contrary, it was hugely profitable for UK.

Mr Sunak also told the Yorkshire Post:

“I believe that appropriate immigration can benefit our country. But we must have control of our borders and we can only do that outside of the EU. 

“As an EU member, every one of Europe’s 500 million citizens has a legal right to move here and there is nothing the UK government can do to limit those numbers.”

Oh dear. Doesn’t Mr Sunak know that Britain ALWAYS had control of our borders when an EU member? And all 500 million citizens of the EU would never move to the UK, because Britain would never have 500 million job vacancies – the primary reason for EU citizens coming here.

(Now we have a record number of job vacancies because EU citizens are NOT coming here.)

And Mr Sunak also said: “It can’t be right that unelected officials in Brussels have more say over who can come into our country than you.” Again, complete nonsense. The EU is run by elected politicians. And the UK Parliament democratically agreed to EU’s free movement of people.

Mr Sunak told the Conservatives Party annual conference last year:

“I was proud to back Brexit. Proud to back Leave.

“And that’s because despite the challenges in the long term, I believed the agility, flexibility and freedom provided by Brexit would be more valuable in a 21st century global economy than just proximity to a market.”

But erecting Brexit barriers to trade with our biggest, closest, and most lucrative export and import market (Europe) is directly damaging Britain’s growth and wealth.

In any event, it never had to be either/or. In the EU, we had both – trade with our neighbours, AND trade across the world.

So, here’s the bottom line. Boris Johnson has gone. But Brexit is staying. 

And the new Brexiter in charge of Britain isn’t budging. Sunak won’t call for a new general election.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

– the more things change, the more they stay the same.

• Watch this video showing how Boris Johnson’s bus claim was untrue:



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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome again Dr Simona Guerra, from the University of Surrey, in the UK.

 

Listen on eu!radio.

 

 

Simona, I remember very well how last May you spoke to us about the “early women of European integration”. But it seems, you’re far from finished on this topic!

Actually, the more I read and research about the life and work of these women in the early years of European integration, the more I wonder how our politics and history textbooks could miss them. It is true: they were not many. But these are amazing lives and contributions to Europe that I am discovering!

 

That sounds like a really enjoyable field of study!

It is! The women of the early years of the European integration process were the trailblazers of the EU we know today. As the Parliament was not yet directly elected, these women had to be first elected in their national parliament, and then assigned to the European chamber by their national government, creating a possible bottleneck towards their representation on the European level.

In fact, unsurprisingly, and as research would suggest, the initial pace of progress, in terms of representation of women, was rather slow, and never reached 10% before the direct elections starting in 1979.

 

And today, you want to put one of these women into the spotlight.

Yes, have you ever heard the sentence: “Politics is too important a business to be left to men”? Käte Strobel said that, in the 1960s already! So let me introduce to Frau Strobel, Member of the German Parliament for the SPD, the Social-Democratic Party, right from the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949. She was in office in the European Parliament of the Six between 1958 and January 1967. She was, logically, a member of the Socialist group, and later became its Chair, between 1964 and 1967.

Of course, political groups in the 1950s and 1960s were not the groups that we know today, but in June 1953, the Common Assembly (as it was called at the time) passed a resolution, unanimously, that established the rules to form a political group, helped to institutionalise them, and saw the emergence of the first three of them, the Christian Democratic Group, the Liberal Group, and the Socialist Group.

Interestingly, Strobel has remained the only female leader for the Socialists up to 1994, when Pauline Green from the UK was appointed as Chairwoman. Currently, the now called Socialists and Democrats are under the leadership of their third female leader, only, with Iratxe García from Spain. It shows how institutions can be resilient and hostile to women, via unwritten rules, and practices that simply not favour them.

 

Back to Käte Strobel: tell us who she was.

Strobel has quite an interesting profile. She stands out across these early women, as she has a lower level of education compared to the average of her colleagues at the time, having attended primary and technical school at Nuremberg, her birthplace. It was her personal experience of the war and its aftermath that affected her view of Europe and politics. In her work she sought to secure peace in a united Europe. She left the European Parliament to later become a Federal Minister in Germany, first of Health, later of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (from 1969 to 1972, under Willy Brandt as Chancellor), and she is well known for her work at the domestic level. Myself, however, I am quite impressed by her work at the European level.

Sicco Mansholt, the Dutch Commissioner for Agriculture, considered the father of the Plan that renovated agricultural policy, took office in 1958, and the debates in the Committee for Agriculture between Strobel and Mansholt offer an excellent example of the battle of the young Parliament for transparency and accountability, already in these early years.

Strobel was sceptical of the acceleration of integration and asked for more information, requesting an agriculture that was closer to both producers and consumers. In quite a few occasions, she asked Mansholt for clarifications, in particular on the data he was presenting and asked to ensure that the Commission would have consulted the Parliament about the negotiation process with the member states. Strobel proposed cutting down taxes between 1959 and 1960 and asked for more harmonization across member states before moving forward with an accelerated integration that required radical changes and would give priority to negative integration, which mainly consists of removing barriers to trade rather than deepening integration.

 

Definitely a very lucid actress of the early integration process. Thanks for sharing her story with us. And keep on doing your research in the archives!

I will ! It is clear that women were active actors of the early stages of the European integration process, and I keep asking myself: how have we missed them?

The post Käte Strobel Pionnière de la Construction Européenne – Simona Guerra appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome again Rebecca Dobson Philips, from the University of Sussex, in the UK.

 

 

Listen on eu!radio.

 

Bonjour, Rebecca. You are a specialist in “governmental ethics”, a very particular field of research. And I presume the mandate of Boris Johnson as Prime minister is a particularly interesting period in this respect.

Yes, it is! Boris Johnson led the UK during a time of turmoil, shaken by the COVID pandemic and emergency procedures. At the same time, Britain was embroiled in the ongoing struggle for control over the country’s direction as it embarked on its exit from the European Union.

It’s important to note this context because it makes it all the more difficult to make clear-cut judgements about many of the so-called scandals of Johnson’s premiership. It also makes it difficult to assess the long-term impact of this time. For example, was Johnson’s premiership merely a blip or does it signal a longer-term decline in standards in public life?

 

But didn’t Johnson, and members of his Cabinet, break the conventions and rules associated with ethics and expected standards in public life?

There is little doubt about that. One of the peculiarities of the UK ethics system is that much of it relies upon convention rather than rule; and the accountability mechanisms in place for breaching these have been particularly challenged.

In terms of Ministerial Conduct, sovereignty resides in Parliament, but the control of parliament is in the hands of the Executive. This means that mechanisms for holding Ministers to account ultimately rely on the cooperation of the Prime Minister.

 

What exactly are these rules and conventions?

They are set within an overall framework called the “Seven Principles of Public Life”. These include selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.

The view of many political observers is that these principles have been repeatedly flouted. Ministers are also governed by the Ministerial code, which refers to these principles and a set of rules that Ministers are expected to abide by. The Prime Minister is the ultimate authority over the Code, which means that he or she decides on any penalties for breaching the Code. The PM is assisted in this decision-making by an Independent Ethics Advisor, who is responsible for providing impartial advice and investigating any concerns.

In an unprecedented situation, Johnson lost two of his Ethics Advisors within two years for failing to follow their advice. Sir Alex Allen resigned in November 2020, when Johnson overruled his advice on whether or not Priti Patel, the then Home Secretary, had breached the Code over bullying allegations. And in June 2022, Lord Geidt resigned in relation to Johnson’s parties held at Downing Street while the entire country was in COVID lockdown.

 

Were there any further consequences?

There was an investigation into the matter by senior civil servant Sue Grey, which while ostensibly independent, suffered from allegations of political meddling.

There was also a police investigation into the alleged parties, and both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak were issued with fixed penalty notices by the Metropolitan police for breaching lockdown rules.

Johnson became the first PM in history to have been found to have broken the law while in office.

 

But that’s not what finally brought down Johnson and his administration, is it?

No, you’re right. Johnson’s administration was ultimately brought down politically by his handling of the Chris Pincher Affair, which involved an MP who was subject to sexual harassment claims, and led to mass resignations of Ministers from government. It was therefore political rather than bureaucratic accountability mechanisms that ultimately took their toll on his leadership.

In terms of ethics and standards in public life, Johnson’s long-term legacy is yet unknown. Much will depend on the willingness of his successors to reinvigorate the system of ethics and support the development of more effective accountability.

They have the tools necessary at their disposal including a Committee on Standards in Public Life with more than 25 years’ experience advising the Prime Minister on ethical and standards matters. A strong stance on these issues is yet to be forthcoming from the current Prime Minister Liz Truss, but failure to address the fraying of standards over the last few years risks further erosion of trust in and the integrity of the UK’s democratic system.

 

Many thanks, Rebecca, for sharing your insight on these complex issues that are always difficult to understand from the outside. Ideas on Europe will be back next week, and we will welcome Simona Guerra again, from the University of Surrey.

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ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies at the ECPR General Conference 2022 in Innsbruck

It was particular joy to meet again in person at the General Conference of the European Consortium of Politics Research (ECPR) last week 22-26 August. After two years of virtual conferences due to Covid, this time the ECPR General Conference took place in the beautiful city of Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. It brought together more than 1500 participants in more than 500 panels as well as roundtables on some of the troubling current topics such as the war in Ukraine and equality, diversity and inclusion policies.

 

This was the 11th time that a section dedicated to knowledge politics and policies was organized at this conference. The section endorsed by the ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and Policies included eight panels on topics such as knowledge governance, higher education and research policies, scientific advice and politics of Artificial Intelligence. We were happy to see good attendance and engagement at our panels. Below are insights in some of the panels, provided by the panel chairs.

 

Neonationalism & Higher Education

The Panel on the Rise of Neonationalism and its Impact on European Higher Education explored the different ways in which rising new nationalisms in Europe are affecting higher education policy. Papers highlighted different domains around which higher education and nationalisms interact including challenges to institutional autonomy, academic freedom, minority language rights and international education policy efforts. Katja Brøgger introduced the panel by outlining the complex zones of contestations between universities, the state and international polities such as the EU and considering implications for the university. Neema Noori and Mikhail Beznosov presented their paper (co-authored with Artem Lytovchenko) on the distinct trajectories of post-soviet language policies in higher education in Uzbekistan and Ukraine, against the backdrop of competing nationalisms and minority language policy. Rasmus Harsbo then presented his work on the relations between the state and the university in Poland, underlining how recent changes are characterized by political efforts towards counter-elite populism. Next, Ester Zangrandi presented her study on France, outlining the different ways recent higher education policies and political discourse are affecting the freedom of academics and the autonomy of their institutions. Finally, Hannah Moscovitz presented her study on the government rationales behind education nation branding in the UK and Scotland, highlighting implications for how economy and nationalism intersect in multinational states.

 

Scientific Advice

The panel Scientific and Technical Advice for Global Governance (re)considered characteristics of knowledge-policy interfaces in global environmental governance and explored struggles in such interfaces. The first paper “Intergovernmental Expert Organizations as Pre-Negotiation sites: The Case of the IPCC” by Kari de Pryck (University of Geneva) looked at the construction of controversial tables and boxes in the approval of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the IPCC. The second paper “The Role of Expertise in Shaping Politics of Nuclear Knowledge: A Case Study of Think Tanks” by Marzhan Nurzhan (University of Basel) proposed a comparative study to research the role of expertise on nuclear knowledge production. The third paper “Savant, Nomadic and Rooted Experts: A Career Typology of the United Nations’ Environmental Programme (UNEP) Professionals” by Krystel Wanneau (University of Vienna) analyzed the career and networks experts in UNEP. The final paper “Pathways of Scientific Input into Intergovernmental Negotiations for a new Agreement on Marine Biodiversity” by Ina Tessnow-von Wysocki and Alice Vadrot (University of Vienna) researched the ways in which science feeds the negotiations for a new treaty to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity in the high seas.

 

Knowledge Governance

The panel Issues in national and transnational knowledge governance feature five papers. Adrienn Nyircsak presented her study on universities as epistemic actors in transnational policy learning. Focusing on European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (QA) in Higher Education as a case, and using the practice perspective, the study compares three peer learning activities. The findings suggest that the institutional set up of these activities is the key condition for facilitating (or impeding) peer learning, that direct interaction between governance levels is relatively limited, as well as that each activity has “blind spots” reflecting the composition of participants and the epistemic positions of hosts. This was followed by Marco Cavallaro’s study concerning competition in EU framework programmes (co-authored with Peter Edlund and Benedetto Lepori). The analysis specifically compares the individual curiosity driven bottom up ERC grants and consortia-led top-down Societal Challenges grants. While preliminary analysis shows that both types are constructed and perceived as scarce and desirable, there are also important differences related to the openness of topics, actors involved in competition, understanding of excellence and selection and profile of evaluators. EU research funding programmes were also in the focus of the third paper presented by Tatyana Bayenova, though in this case from a science diplomacy point of view. The study focuses on the tensions in the relationship between, on the one side, the EU and, on the other side, the UK and Switzerland, historically rather successful in attracting EU research funding. Two inter-related aspects of science diplomacy emerge: how both sides engage in diplomacy for science, as well as how, in particular when the overall relationship is contentious, scientific cooperation is used for diplomacy.

 

Relationship between interest intermediation at national and European level was the focus of the fourth paper by Martina Vukasovic, who analyses homogeneity / heterogeneity of organizational attributes of national level interest groups. Using the case of national unions of students, the analysis postulates policy positions as key organizational outputs and explores the extent to which similarity of issues the unions focus on and their preferences concerning these issues can be explained by isomorphic pressures stemming from structuration of national and European level policy arenas. The fifth study presented by Mari Elken zeroed in on collaborative governance processes, specifically analysing the case of multi-annual performance agreements introduced in Norway in 2016. Conditions such as the high level of trust between the actors involved, recognition of existing power, knowledge and resource asymmetries, framing of the process as open and inclusive, ambiguous and shifting purpose of the agreements, as well as implied linkage to funding are identified as crucial for the process. Moreover, the analysis highlights how aforementioned conditions, in interaction with concurrent reforms in Norwegian higher education, contributed to a rather varied set of approaches to developing and implementing performance agreements.

 

Higher education & research policies

The panel International policy dynamics and national filters – The global politics of higher education and research policies chaired by Jens Jungblut (University of Oslo) discussed the interplay between global dynamics and national policymaking with regard to higher education and research policies. Using a variety of empirical contexts, each presentation unpacked the complexities of policymaking in the knowledge policy domain. In the first presentation Elisabeth Lackner (University of Oslo) presented a study investigating the influence of organized interest on a White Paper regarding quality assurance in Norwegian higher education. Her study highlighted how different groups of actors where more or less successful in imprinting their preference into the new policy. The second presentation by Erlend Langørgen (University of Oslo) presented results of an exploratory study focusing on partisan politics with regard to research policy in Western Europe. With the help of election manifesto data, the study shows that there are partisan differences regarding research policy and that parties also assign differing levels of salience to this policy field.

 

The third presenter, Andrew Gunn (University of Manchester) presented a conceptual paper that combined several classical approaches from political science to disintegrate diffusions processes in higher education policy. His presentation highlighted the ongoing tension between global homogenization and national differentiation in this policy field using different conceptual approaches to explain why this tension persists. The fourth presentation by Anna Prisca Lohse (Hertie School) focused on the effect that Brexit and Covid19 had on English, German, and French student mobility policies. Using a mixture of historical and sociological institutionalist approaches, the paper highlights that both crises are created different types of policy responses in the different countries leading to a complex interaction between different institutional pillars. In the final presentation, Alina Felder (University of St. Gallen) presented a study of the European University Initiative using it as an example for projectified policymaking by the European Union. Using interview data, the analysis put a special emphasis on the role of the Covid19 crisis for fostering this type of policymaking approach and discussed the effectiveness that it can have in the long-term.

 

Politics of Artificial Intelligence

This was the third year that the section included a panel on Power, Politics and Policy of Artificial Intelligence. Some of the research presented in previous editions of this panel has already been published, while much more is under preparation. This year the panel discussed four contributions based on work in progress. Inga Ulnicane and Tero Erkkilä presented an emerging research agenda on politics and policy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) focusing on questions such as distribution of power and the role of ideas in AI politics. Regine Paul discussed insights from her very interesting research on risk-based AI regulation in the European Union (EU) competition state. Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson and Malin Rönnblom (drawing on work co-authored with Vanja Carlsson) shared their conceptual framework and plans to undertake empirical research to study implementation of AI in the Swedish public sector. Finally, Justinas Lingevicius gave an overview of the results of his research on framing military AI in the EU strategic discourse.

 

Business meeting of the ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies

Next steps

During the conference, we also held our traditional Standing Group meeting to discuss our activities such as the next edition of excellent paper award from an emerging scholar, our Europe of Knowledge blog, and future conference panels. If you are interested in our work, please join our Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies. We are already starting to prepare for our section at the next ECPR General Conference in Prague, 4-8 September 2023. See you there!

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