European Union

General : On Saturday 2 May in Strasbourg and on Saturday 9 May in Brussels and Luxembourg, the European Parliament and other EU institutions will open their doors to the general public in order to celebrate Europe Day in a fun and festive way for the whole family.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

At least that’s the forecast of ‘The Supplement’, a popular Sunday afternoon programme on French television (Canal+). Each week, it includes a trendspotting clip named ‘sexy tomorrow’, introducing a someone or something that may become a game changer.

In the edition of 26 April, the game changer was ‘Politico’, the American news site that just opened a Brussels office in Rue de la Loi (see the clip, in French of course, here). With a staff of more than 40, when most major traditional newspapers hardly have more than two permanent correspondents in the European capital, www.politico.eu certainly sees a future in Brussels for itself.

Some European media reacted with mixed feelings between scepticism and a bewildered welcome. The gist of reactions could perhaps be summed up as ‘Haven’t they understood that there is no European Public Sphere waiting for them?’ As a matter of fact, there is. One week of testing Politico suggests that it is very clearly aimed at the Brussels microcosm and hardly likely to be read beyond the bubble. Just subscribe to the ‘Brussels playbook’ sent out each morning and you will understand that this is for insiders. Who else would subscribe to a ‘Brussels playbook’ anyway?

For the anecdote, when one long-term Washington reporter of Politico told Barack Obama during a White House press conference that she would be moving to Brussels soon, his reaction was not to quip about how she would shake up the European Union, but a rather mediocre joke about how ‘Belgium must have been waiting for a good dose of Politico-style journalism’ (quoted from memory). Interesting to think that the American president spontaneously thinks ‘Belgium’ first, not ‘EU’. Maybe things have not changed so much after all since the days of George W. Bush? Obama’s recommendation to the lady about to leave for Brussels? ‘Try the waffles. They are delicious.’

Time will tell whether Politico will have a return on its remarkable investment. In order to be profitable, it will have to sell quite a few subscriptions to its professional information newsletters on healthcare, energy/environment and technology. If these pick up among the business and lobbying community, they may be indeed ‘sexy tomorrow’.

I wouldn’t bet on the tongue-in-cheek predictions of Canal+, though. In the edition of 22 March, the man hailed as ‘sexy tomorrow’ was Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, who despite his seemingly limitless self-confidence may be more quickly ‘sexy yesterday’ than he thought. At least that’s what you can read in … Politico!

The post Brussels will be ‘sexy tomorrow’! appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

You’ll have noticed that I’ve been posting much less recently. It’s not just because life has been so blinking exciting since I got to Australia. It’s partly that there has been so little to say that’s related to EU issues and digital media. I will keep this blog going, not least for the Multilingual Day of Blogging (which I enjoy so much), but if you’re looking for my pearls of wisdom (ahem), then you can look at antoniamochan.com, or follow my Australian-focused Twitter account @antoniam.

FleishmanHillard publishes today its EU Environment and Chemicals legislation timeline. What can industry expect from the EU in the coming  years? Our timeline provides a tour d’horizon of the most important milestones to look for.

Click to enlarge

When he took office, Commission President Juncker promised the Commission would be “bigger on the bigger things” and would support industry’s growth and jobs. His “10 priorities” said it clearly: “We need to bring industry’s weight in the EU’s GDP back to 20% by 2020”. Surprisingly to many, this did not seem to include ambitious environmental targets: sustainable development and the environment were hardly mentioned in the 10 priorities. In the mission letter he sent to the new Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Karmenu Vella, priority was given to the avoidance of new environmental legislation and ensuring existing rules are “fit for purpose”. The first move of the Commission was to withdraw the circular economy package and its legislative proposal on waste, which threatened to become overly broad and burdensome. This move was strongly criticised by NGOs, MEPs and Member States, and the Commission now needs to demonstrate its environmental ambition. In this context, what can be expected this year for environment and chemicals?

Ensuring that existing legislation is implemented and supports competitiveness

EU environmental policy is well developed, and a driver for global progress. It is however often criticised for burdening industry and for being applied unequally by Member States. Making it “fit for purpose” therefore means, in Juncker’s agenda, ensuring that existing rules are not only properly applied, but that they also support EU jobs and growth. This is why 2015 will see the evaluation of a broad range of existing EU policies on water, environmental liability, environmental noise and the birds and habitats directives. These evaluations could lead to future policy proposals to tackle inefficiencies and unnecessary burdens.

What this means for now is that industry should participate in the early stages of this process. The Commission would likely welcome any information on the current practical implementation of existing legislation.

Revising the waste legislation in a push towards a circular economy

In 2015, all eyes will be on the upcoming circular economy proposal. Whilst focus will of course be on the proposal, the main legal impact will come from the revision of the waste legislation which it will contain. Juncker’s Commission made the controversial move of withdrawing the original proposal, promising to replace it with a more ambitious one. It will have to prove it is able to present a package that makes economic and environmental sense. The proposal is expected for the end of the year. MEPs expect a strong signal to make sure that toxic substances are kept out of the production stream early on, taking into account the importance of waste and recycling for sustainable growth.

Whether or not the Commission will answer these calls remains unsure. What appears at this stage however is that the Commission is looking to ensure its proposal will be realistic and can actually be implemented by industry without creating unnecessary burden. Despite the Commission’s limited environmental agenda, the real question is whether the Parliament and Council will accept its proposal or will decide to strongly enhance it.

An ongoing focus on industry’s emissions into the environment

Meanwhile, work will continue on industrial emissions into air and water. There are ongoing discussions on the emission of pollutants from medium combustion plants, and the Commission recently adopted a watch list of substances to be monitored in surface water. The emission of hazardous substances in the environment will continue to be the focus as the Commission is currently working on the elaboration of a similar watch list for groundwater, and is expected to come forward with a proposal for a strategy to tackle the presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment.

Although these topics attract less political attention than the circular economy, they could be the source of significant regulatory obligations for industry. Preparatory work is ongoing to define substances of interest and ways to measure their presence into the environment.

A new beginning for EU chemicals legislation?

Concrete changes are also expected in chemicals legislation this year. On nanomaterials, the Commission has been due to present proposals on the definition of nanomaterials and their regulation under REACH since 2014. They are now expected for the first half of this year and could impact a large number of chemical producers and end-users as nanomaterials are more and more closely examined by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The Commission originally planned to present a proposal for the creation of an EU-wide register but now appears to have changed its thinking on this, seeing it could create additional burden with uncertain results in terms of consumer information and protection.

Meanwhile, the implementation of existing regulations on biocides, REACH and RoHS will continue, but industry stakeholders are invited to transmit experience of the advantages and difficulties of implementing EU chemicals legislation across Member States and sectors. This feedback will be crucial in feeding into the ongoing evaluation of existing chemicals legislation, its interaction with health and safety legislation and its overall impact on the EU’s industrial performance. It will be important for industry to take this opportunity to make its voice and concerns heard (see our previous blog post on the REFIT of chemicals legislation).

The work plan of the Commission for 2016 should contain the long-awaited proposal on endocrine disruptors and could contain a number of new proposals on chemicals legislation. Whether or not they will drive change is partly in the hands of industry. If companies do not make their voices heard in the ongoing evaluation and consultations they are likely to see any existing flaws and inefficiencies maintained.

Lucie L’Hôpital, Rob Anger, Aaron McLoughlin, Pauline Tawil, on behalf of the M&I team

von Storch and Others v ECB
Economic policy
The Court of Justice confirms the inadmissibility of the action brought by 5 217 individuals against a number of ECB ‘decisions’ of 6 September 2012, including that relating to OMT

USDAW and Wilson
Approximation of laws
The Court clarifies the term ‘establishment’ in connection with collective redundancies

In the real world, the notions of security and defence are often used interchangeably. One of the flagship external policies of the European Union – the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) – also consists of both concepts. However, in the EU Treaty, these two elements have distinct funding bases. External security funding remains firmly anchored in the EU’s budget, while the defence/military component is controlled and funded almost exclusively inter-governmentally. This division is also reflected in the research domain, leading to a paradoxical situation: while the EU’s research budget (channelled through its current multi-annual framework programme, Horizon 2020) is arguably the largest research budget in the world (reaching around EUR 70 billion), defence research in Europe remains underfunded, to the detriment of European defence capabilities and economic interests. While the European Defence Agency (EDA) has successfully initiated some small-scale defence research pooling initiatives (reaching around EUR 350 million since its creation), it remains a drop in the ocean of needs. This paper analyses the current state of play, and some actions proposed to foster synergies between security- and defence-related research, focusing on a preparatory action (PA) and a pilot project in support of CSDP-related research.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

As the climate continues to change at alarming rates, many have lost faith in traditional international approaches to address the issue. As a result, climate policy innovation and associated experimentation are en vogue.[1] The thinking goes that if old approaches are perceived to be failing, we need new and innovative ones. The hope is that successful innovations will spread as policy-makers, civil society and businesses learn from one another. But what do we know about climate change governance experimentation, and are these hopes justified?

On the face of it nobody directly opposes the idea of experimenting. After all, experimentation drives tremendous progress in the natural sciences, so why should we not apply the approach more widely to governance? The idea also fits well with the evidence-based policy-making agenda, another fashionable idea, holding that experiments may be a key source of evidence for policy-makers. However, there is more to experimentation than readily meets the eye. A recent workshop on “Climate Change Policy and Governance: Initiation, Experimentation, Evaluation” organised by the Innovations in Climate Governance (INOGOV) research network including 26 European countries, focused on how experiments materialise and challenge existing policies, practices and regulatory systems. Thirty scholars from Europe, the US and Australia discussed new empirical and theoretical analyses, showing how diverse the topic of experimentation is. The emerging discussions highlighted that conducting, interpreting and using experiments may not be as straightforward as one may think.

First of all: what are experiments? There were numerous partly conflicting ideas among the workshop participants. Some broadly viewed all policies as potentially failing experiments in the sense that no one can ever exactly foresee policy outcomes in complex socio-ecological systems. Others took more narrow definitions as a starting point with specific criteria that echo statistical experimental designs. Such experiments can, for example, explore a novel policy instrument that is applied and evaluated in restricted regions before being adopted nationally. Our understanding of experiments will affect how we approach and use them. Crucially, experimenting also raises tricky issues of risks, duties and wider social implications. For example, who is to blame if a governance experiment goes wrong and who will bear the consequences? Leaving a legacy, experiments are never fully reversible. They will, at the very least, provide a new perspective on what is doable, and after that the world is never completely the same.

In many cases the purpose of experimenting is nothing short of learning how to change the world. But a single experiment will not suffice – multiple and repeated experiments in different places may be necessary. Crucial issues thus relate to learning and transferability. How can the experiences gained in one experiment be transferred to another? Some will argue that the context is so decisive that possibilities for duplication are limited,[2] but we know from practical experience that policy solutions are copied and multiplied within and across sectors and countries. Thus ‘upscaling’ happens. The mechanisms of these ‘upscaling’ processes and transitions are an area of considerable theoretical and practical interest.

On the whole, the workshop highlighted that there are many outstanding questions to answer before we may experiment our way out of climate change. This is of course not stopping politicians from touting experimentation as a potential solution to various societal issues: for example, following a recent national election, Finland’s Prime Minister-elect Juha Sipilä has declared that Finland should become an “experimental society”. But what it takes for an experimental society to ‘come true’ and whether this is even desirable cries out for in-depth research and an informed public debate.

With this year’s climate summit in Paris rapidly approaching, the INOGOV network is a good place to nurture this debate. Focusing on where climate governance innovations originate, how they diffuse and what effects they have, it seeks to bring together communities of scholars, as well as civil society and businesses, in order to accelerate humanity’s search for solutions to address climate change. Whether experimentation is among these solutions is one of the critical questions the network will discuss.

 

[1] See also Castán Broto, V. &  Bulkeley 2013. A survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities. Global Environmental Change 23: 92–102

[2] This has been a lively debate in for example development studies. Thus D.K. Forbes in ‘The geography of underdevelopment’ (Croom Helm 1984) refers to the impossibility to replicate development success stories.

The post Can we experiment our way out of climate change? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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Donald TUSK, President of the European Council, at the European Parliament.

Download this video here.

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The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) has provided a forum for dialogue between Europeans and Asians since 1996.

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This is the second of two blogposts on Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
The first one is available here.

Only 6 cents the word!

Ten years after the premature death of his constitutional treaty, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, now aged 89, is still an undiscouraged believer in the European project. Concerned by the current crisis of the European Union, he proposes in a recent book a project names ‘Europa’, which an inspired plume – himself or the publisher? – felt the need to subtitle ‘Europe’s last chance’.

The utter cliché of this subtitle notwithstanding – after all, even Jean-Claude Juncker thought it was necessary to dramatize his mandate at the helm of the Commission with the same words – an essay by Giscard always deserves a look. He certainly has a record of European leadership that spans from the 1970s, when he was a driver of both enlargement – paving the way for Greece, Spain, and Portugal – and deepening of the community, through the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS).

It turns out that only one third of this already very thin book (184 pages printed in very large font, hardly more than 30,000 words sold at € 16.90, which makes roughly 6 cents the word) is actually dedicated to the ‘Europa’ project that gave the publication its title. The rest is a kind of recapitulative short-cut of how the EU got where it is today. Apart from some nice anecdotes – like the moment in Bremen in 1978 when he invented an English name for the forthcoming ‘European currency unit’ with the aim of producing an acronym that would recall a French medieval currency – there is strictly speaking no added value in these fireside souvenirs.

The ‘Europa’ project’ itself is, in a nutshell, yet another draft for a two-speed Europe, with a core of 12 in a Union of 28. The core would naturally work towards fiscal harmonisation by 2030, backed up by a European treasury (issuing Eurobonds) and based on a principle of redistributive solidarity. Note that Giscard does not anticipate any major popular resistance to fiscal union – on the contrary, he expects it to be very well received by the European people – and he foresees harmonisation of retirement age in the long run.

‘Europa’ would be run by a ‘directoire’ (in parallel to the EU and Eurozone institutions). For reasons of democratic legitimacy it would also convene a ‘Congress of the people’ composed of MEPs and national MPs. The tone of the proposal is itself very ‘directoire’-like, especially when it comes to identify the eligible members of the future core-Europa: ‘The participation of Ireland and Finland may also be envisaged’. Good to know! Envisaged by whom? Under what conditions? Would they even be asked?

The book is rife with self-congratulation: oh, the days when Helmut Schmidt and himself created and managed the European Council! Of course, their successors at the heads of today’s European governments entirely lack the necessary leadership qualities and the indispensible vision (he does not mention that his friend Helmut, who wrote the preface to the book, used to advise each politician with ‘visions’ to go and consult an ophthalmologist).

The author also has a strong tendency to over-simplify things (despite, obviously, better knowledge). Three examples: 1) Needless to say that Chirac and only Chirac is to blame for the French ‘no’ vote to the constitutional treaty in May 2005. 2) The resurgence of national identities is mainly due to the scapegoating of Brussels by the current generation of European politicians. 3) if Europe is perceived as ‘the sick man of the planet’, the main reason is ‘permanent Euro-bashing by the Anglo-Saxon press’.

It saddens me to write this, but reading this project is an experience that comes close to marking an undergraduate term paper while not being able to suppress some deep sighs. Had I to mark this text, what would I be supposed to put in the margin of sentences like: ‘Thus the project of Robert Schuman was approved by six states, more or less from the Holy Roman Empire. These were the founding countries. They have remained so until today.’

Unlike the average undergraduate student, however, Giscard is touring schools and media with his term paper, as if there was any serious chance of seeing his project only even discussed by any current European leader. He has also set up a website, as thin as the book itself, which even in the core-Europa of twelve, only Francophone readers will be able to consult (perhaps that’s because he is, as he proudly recalls on the front page, a member of the Académie Française). If you do happen to be among these, you can consult or download the book for free (click here).

This post should by no means be understood as cheap scorn or mockery. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has great merits both for European integration and for modernising the French Republic without being prisoner to ideological dogma (some of his reforms were more leftist and lasting than Mitterrand’s!). And his advocacy in favour of European integration is sincere and wholehearted. One untimely, uninspired, and unnecessary book will not change this record.

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