European Union

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Somewhere in Whitehall, there’s a small office. In it, a bright young thing is working hard on Brexit. As the afternoon sun bounces down to the tiny window that provides the only fresh air, a spark flares up in the bright young thing’s mind. They dash down the corridor to their line manager, bursting through the door to breathlessly stutter: “I… I think I’ve solved how to do it.”

This, to a not inconsiderable extent, presents how many in government would have liked things to go over the past two years: a model to solve all the problems and leave everyone stunned by its beauty and creativity: Britain is GREAT at cunning plans, indeed.

Sadly, things haven’t quite worked out like this.

The breadth and depth of the issues involved, plus the rather arbitrary red lines that May set out upon her entry into Number 10, have made both simple and cunning solutions impossible. The best our imagined bright young thing might come up with is that something’s got to give.

In fairness to the government, this last point has been evident for quite some time: the difficulty has been in deciding what should give and how that’s going to be broken to all involved.

Neither of these are easy, even before we add in the obvious political and reputational costs that would be incurred. In the very worst case, the government might make a concession that leads to its demise as a viable political unit: leadership contests, party splits, general elections, ‘out of power for a generation’, etc., etc.

But at the same time there is also the ever-stronger conviction that to leave the EU without a deal would be an unnecessary and deeply counter-productive move: the ‘freedom’ it might generate would be lost in the miasma of uncertainty and damage to the UK’s standing in the international community. As the on-going discussion about an FTA with the US underlines, the UK is very much a demandeur: its need to show it can still get deals means everyone else can set a high price. Domestically, there’s also plenty to worry about as it is, even if things do run smoothly.

So let’s play the game for a bit: what does the UK have to give way on?

The big one is the balance between alignment, territorial integrity and the Irish border. If the ability to diverge matters more, then the backstop looks the least painful way to do that. The DUP won’t be happy, but if Labour get on board with the package, then it doesn’t matter (in Commons arithmetic terms, at least). If diverging isn’t so important – and remember there’s a difference between diverging and having the potential to diverge – then full UK alignment on backstop terms might work, And if neither of those work, then the UK government needs to get ready for a no deal outcome.

The smaller issue is the role of the Court: it matters, but less so, not least because technical work-arounds look more viable (mainly because they’ve already been tired out elsewhere). But essentially it requires the UK to give way on its very literal interpretation of this red line, which was never realistic in any case (as government lawyers doubtless pointed out at the time).

The cover for all this is some kind of ‘temporary‘ arrangement: witness the by-the-by noting that given the current inability to go either the customs partnership or maximum facilitation, we might just have to live with a decade or so of full alignment: lift your eyes from the mud to look at our bright, bold future.

At some level this makes sense: if people are willing to accept that this is a complex change and takes time to do properly, then the deferral might be worth it. However, if they consider it to be another step down the road of endless delay, then it’s not going to work.

Of course, much hangs on which ‘people’ we’re talking about.

In essence it’s the Tory backbench that matters here. Cabinet has its splits, but the agency of any faction to impress its preferences depends on the 1922 Committee and the ERG. Likewise, a determined backbench can stymie any attempt to reach across the aisle by prompting leadership challenges.

As I’ve noted before, the backbench isn’t minded to crash the Brexit bus, but that doesn’t mean it won’t exert a good deal of pressure on May and the Cabinet’s work over the coming months. Any putative challenger needs the cover of a conclusion of a deal before moving in, so might feel that concessions are acceptable, especially if it allows them to strengthen their case that they would have done a better job, if only they’d been in charge at the time.

However, as so often in this process, nothing is really certain. Individuals might prove inflexible, by design or by accident. Events might conspire to deny enough room for manoeuvre. The EU might succumb to hubris and overplay its hand.

Pretty much the only thing that’s clear is that the rest of 2018 are not going to be easy going for anyone involved in this. A bright young thing might decide to just keep their head down, rather than get stuck in: that might make sense for them, but not for the process as a whole.

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REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on Libya
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Pier Antonio Panzeri

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SEDE organized a public hearing on soldiers' rights in EU Member States with representatives of the European Organisation of Military Associations (EUROMIL) and the Geneva Centre for the Democratic control of Armed Forces (DCAF).
Location : Altiero Spinelli, room A3E-2
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Presentation by Emmanuel Jacob, EUROMIL
Presentation by William McDermott, DCAF
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On 15 May, SEDE organized a public hearing on soldiers' rights in EU Member States with representatives of the European Organisation of Military Associations (EUROMIL) and the Geneva Centre for the Democratic control of Armed Forces (DCAF).
Further information
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Presentation by Emmanuel Jacob, EUROMIL
Presentation by William McDermott, DCAF
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

AY
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
According to Advocate General Szpunar, the Court is not competent to answer questions asked by the issuing judicial authority of a European arrest warrant on whether the executing authority can refuse to execute that warrant

Deutsche Lufthansa v Commission
Competition
The Commission must re-examine the request made by Lufthansa and Swiss concerning the waiver of their pricing commitments for the Zurich-Stockholm route

will take place on Monday 18 June, 15:00-18:30 and Tuesday 19 June, 9:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30 in Brussels.

Organisations or interest groups who wish to apply for access to the European Parliament will find the relevant information below.

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Length of video : 151'
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The EU-Western Balkans summit takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 17 May 2018. It is hosted by Boyko BORISSOV, Prime Minister of Bulgaria, which currently holds the Presidency of the Council. The President of the European Council, Donald TUSK, chairs the meeting. He is representing the EU together with the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude JUNCKER. The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica MOGHERINI, and the Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes HAHN, are also expected to be present.

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On 10 February 2014, the EU adopted negotiating directives for a bilateral EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement  to consolidate existing bilateral relations in the areas of political dialogue, cooperation and trade.

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AMENDMENTS 1 - 328 - Draft report Recommendation to the Council on the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly
Committee on Foreign Affairs

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The EU celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaties a year ago by pledging to enhance the EU’s role as a global player, in line with the 2016 Global Strategy. This was intended to develop the EU’s role in security and defence matters, starting with increasing support for the European defence industry and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) as a whole, as well as reinforcing existing or developing new partnerships and pushing for further global engagement in support of the UN system, NATO and rules-based multilateralism. What progress has been made since 25 March 2017? What are the European Parliament’s positions on these issues, and what are the prospects for the future? Answering these questions is crucial for ensuring the effectiveness of the EU’s strategies, policies and actions and for the credibility of the EU project in future.
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EHEA Ministerial conference in Yerevan in 2015. Photo credits: Fernando Miguel Galan Palomares

Martina Vukasovic

 

Embodying multi-level and multi-actor characteristics of governance

That governance of higher education and research takes place across several governance levels – institutional, national, European – is, arguably, common knowledge. The beginning of the Bologna Process and the launching of the Lisbon Strategy almost 20 years ago greatly intensified European integration and Europeanization in these two domains, as evident in European funded cooperation programmes, national reforms and institutional adaptations. While these developments are marked with various tensions between governance levels, as well as different policy domains, they are also characterized by strong involvement of stakeholder organizations, adding the ‘multi-actor’ aspect to the ‘multi-level’ description of governance arrangements.

 

What is interesting is that many of these ‘new’ actors are multi-level organizations themselves. For example, the European University Association (EUA), a consultative member of the Bologna Follow Up Group and contributor to public consultations organized by the European Commission, has national rectors’ conferences and individual universities as members, both of which are active in policy development in their own domestic policy arenas. The same goes for other university associations and alliances (e.g. EURASHE, LERU), European Students Union (ESU), professional and disciplinary organizations. Moreover, institutions, decision-making and advisory structures at the European level – such as the European Research Council or the Advisory Group on the European Qualifications Frameworks – are connected to national or institutional policy-making through their individual members and their own connections that span governance levels.

 

It is such collective non-state actors that operate across governance levels – i.e. transnational actors – that are the focus of the recently published special issue of the European Educational Research Journal, co-edited by Tatiana Fumasoli (Institute of Education, University College London), Bjørn Stensaker (Department of Education, University of Oslo) and Martina Vukasovic (Centre for Higher Education Governance, Ghent University).

 

Transnational actors as expert platforms, (latent) interest groups, meta-organizations, and linkages between governance levels

In the introduction to the special issue, the co-editors present various theoretical perspectives that have been employed thus far in analysis of transnational actors, including European integration, multi-level governance, comparative politics, policy analysis, organizational sociology and higher education research. These perspectives highlight different attributes of these transnational actors, e.g. their role in interest intermediation is particularly interesting for comparative politics, while the fact that many of them are meta-organizations – organizations of other organizations – is specifically visible through the lens of organizational sociology. The five contributions to the special issue each employ one or more of these perspectives, focusing on the shifting relationship between governance and knowledge, and on how new actors influence the processes and outcomes of decision-making within the field of higher education.

 

The European Qualifications Framework Advisory Group (EQFAG) is analysed by Mari Elken, who sheds light on the conditions conducive to organizational stability and legitimacy of a key organization in European knowledge governance. Elken’s study of how EQFAG was institutionalized shows that, while the EU constructs policy arenas to be filled up, actors profit from room to manoeuver and flexibility with regards to their new roles, suggesting that European level policy arenas can (also) act as opportunity structures for policy entrepreneurs.

 

Martina Vukasovic and Bjørn Stensaker compare two university alliances – EUA and LERU – focusing on how diverse membership bases (i.e. comprehensive vs selective) and diverse resources lead to somewhat differentiated roles and representation of interests in European policy-making. While both alliances have rather easy access to EU decision-makers, the bases for their legitimacy are different, affecting their positioning as well as the breadth and ambiguity of interests they advocate for.

 

Looking at three European student organizations (ESU, ESN, and AEGEE) Manja Klemenčič and Fernando Miguel Galan Palomares investigate the conditions determining insiders and outsiders in European knowledge policy processes. Their article shows how legitimacy plays a major role in accessing EU institutions and policy processes, even when organizational structures and resources are similar.

 

Tatiana Fumasoli and Marco Seeber provide a mapping of European academic associations, focusing on their missions, structures, and positioning. Their findings articulate a nuanced landscape where traditional scholarly associations coexist with socially orientated academic associations. Equally, their article offers an insight into the different patterns of centre–periphery structures from a geographical, political, and resource perspective and highlights the coexistence of traditional and innovative academic organizations with varied levels of access to European institutions.

 

Finally, Bo Persson investigates the role played by key Swedish science policy actors in the process of building the European Research Council (ERC) in the 2000s. The article shows how national policy actors have leveraged on their organizational capacity and legitimacy to contribute to European agenda-setting and policy formation. Importantly, the article shows how national policy actors are able to do this partly through bypassing their own state authorities, thus becoming embedded in the European policy arena.

 

Key ingredients for understanding governance of the Europe of knowledge

The in-depth analyses provided in this special issue show how European transnational actors can be conceptualized and compared according to their mandates and missions, organizational structures and decision-making processes, through their linkages to the EU institutions, the levels and types of influence in policy-making, and their position in the broader arena of European knowledge policies. These characteristics can be seen as the outcome of policy design, and of strategic intent, but also as the result of incremental and organic changes. Overall, while expertise and legitimacy could be considered requirements to access and influence policy processes, we suggest that organizational structures, resources, identities, and decision-making processes of these transnational actors need to be scrutinized further. The latter point implies that insights from comparative politics and organizational studies might be combined into a valuable framework for studying European governance in general, and that we need more studies in this area if we are to understand the governance of the Europe of Knowledge.

 

Martina Vukasovic is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG) at Ghent University. In her research she combines insights from comparative politics, policy analysis and organizational sociology in order to analyse multi-level multi-actor governance in knowledge intensive policy domains (e.g. higher education, research). More specifically, she focuses on the role of stakeholder organizations in policy processes, the interaction between European, national and organizational level changes, and the relationship between policy coordination and policy convergence. She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo and a joint MPhil (Erasmus Mundus) degree by the universities of Oslo, Tampere and Aveiro.

The post Transnational actors: Gateway to exploring the multi-level and multi-actor aspects of higher education and research governance appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The next AFET meetings are scheduled to take place on:

Wednesday, 16 May 2018, 09:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30, room JAN 2Q2

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Mike Ungersma argues the West may have made  

fundamental mistakes in confronting Putin’s Russia

“Russia is unlucky with timing. Everything that happened 150, 200 years ago in other countries is happening here as we speak.  You guys had your civil wars in long-ago centuries. The last murder of your king was in 1649.  We killed out Nicholas II 100 years ago.”

Russian industrialist Vladimir Potanin, Lunch with the FT

Imagine a country where your grandparents could speak of their land invaded twice in their lifetimes, two wars that saw tens of thousands of their homes destroyed, their factories looted, their cites wasted, and above all, millions of their young men killed in the worst combat in modern times. It is almost impossible, to think of any nation that has suffered more in terms of loss than Russia. But that was long ago, and while Russia has mostly recovered from the disaster, it did so along a different path than its European neighbours.

Sold on a perverted form of Maxism, led by a series of dictators starting with Stalin, the country’s post-war development stalled, stuttered from one achievement to another – all of them modest and comparatively insignificant – while the remainder of Europe moved forward, first haltingly and then spectacularly with its modified and tempered form of capitalism.  But in the East, dramatically and without warning, the “Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics” staggered and collapsed leaving behind a colossal and confused muddle of states.

The events that followed are sadly familiar.  Russia moved from a centrally planned economy to rampant oligarchy and the single-handed rule of Vladimir Putin.  By international standards the performance of its economy is mediocre at best, and almost totally reliant on the fluctuating demand for its gas and oil exports. And even they, especially oil, face an uncertain future as the world seeks more environmentally friendly alternatives.  As President Obama remarked in his last press conference, Russia “does not produce anything anybody wants to buy.”

The question that arises is why?  Why did this vast nation end up as it is today?  Given the same chances the nations of the rest of Europe had, what prompted Russians to choose the road toward continued tyranny – however disguised?  And importantly, what could the West have done to encourage Russians to steer a different course?

“The problem with the Soviet people is our country was like a cell.” It is the comment of one of those oligarchs – Vladimir Potanin, in his luncheon meeting with the Financial Times’ Henry Foy in Potanin’s private country club he built for himself and his friends an hour’s drive from Moscow.  “We were cut off,” Potanin tells Foy.  “And then we became suddenly open…those who had appetite for risks and understanding and skills of course had an advantage.”

What the “system” produced  – if corrupt and colluding government and private interests can be called a system – was a Russia where all of the state’s important assets were sold off in the infamous ‘loans for shares’ scheme.  The government callously used the country’s most valuable resources as security for loans that according to Foy, both bankers and politicians knew would never be repaid.  It resulted in a handful of oligarchs controlling 50 per cent of the entire Russian economy.

If individual nations have a certain dominant psychological characteristic, then Putin’s response to all of this was highly predictable.  Russia was like the person who fails in achieving anything important and then lashes out at others, seeking to draw attention away from his failures.  Putin flexes Russia’s military muscles to demonstrate that the country remains a powerful player on the world stage. Moreover he uses the internet’s social media to sabotage everything from Western elections to objective journalism because it is the only instrument short of open aggression available to him.  He struts and boasts, and like Donald Trump, tells the his countrymen he is determined to “make Russia great again.”

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of ordinary Russians, who for centuries have shown no real interest or understanding of representative government.  Russia, under czars or commissars, has produced no great political thinkers or philosophers – they are very thin on the ground.  Because they are not ‘citizens’ in any Western sense, Russians seem bored with the very idea of democracy with its tedious insistence on wide-spread public discussion and consultation, and its elaborate and complex electoral systems intended to insure the majority rules but only without trampling on the rights and wishes of those who disagree.  It’s easier to let Putin decide.

Could it all of this have been prevented?  Could Russia at a crucial turning point in its history – the fall of the Berlin Wall – have been steered and nudged toward democracy?  Does the West share any culpability for the present situation, what some are describing as a new “Cold War”?  The answer must almost certainly be – Yes.

Mikhail Gobachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika were bold moves that ultimately won him a Nobel prize in 1990, but they were met with indifference in the West – NATO continued to regard the now-prostrate Soviet Union as a threatening enemy.   His successor, Boris Yeltsin, continued with significant reforms.  They failed to work.  Confronted with sagging oil prices, corruption and the rise of the oligarchs, Russia’s economy not only stagnated but fell into deep recession.

In her book, The Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organised Crime, Johanna Granville writes: “Yeltsin’s policies led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market”.  Wall Street was busy, seeing a chance to profit from the decaying corpse.

Not only was the West indifferent to the democratizing opportunities that events in Russia threw up, in many ways it sought to exploit Russia’s weaknesses as its economy collapsed.  It is what historian Niall Ferguson has called “Western overreach.”  One by one, former Warsaw Pact allies of the Soviet Union were invited to join NATO.  Writing in the journal Foreign Policy earlier this year, Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said

Days after the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in March 1999, the alliance began a three-month bombing campaign against Serbia — which, like Russia, is a Slavic Orthodox state. These attacks on a brother country appalled ordinary Russians, especially since they were not carried out in defence of a NATO member, but to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo, then a Serbian province.

And the view from the Kremlin?  Steil writes: “Moscow knew that its former vassals, by joining the alliance, had now bound themselves to support Western policies that challenged Russian interests. The farther east NATO expanded, the more threatening it would become.”

And where NATO led, the European Union was not far behind.  By 2004, no less than eight former Warsaw Pact nations were offered accession to the organisation, the largest single enlargement in the Union’s history.  And in 2007, they were joined by two more former Communist countries, Romania and Bulgaria.  Russia’s historic buffer against another German invasion had disappeared.

In this context, Putin’s reaction – seen by Professor Ferguson as a “striking impersonation of Michael Corleone in The Godfather – the embodiment of implicit menace” – is hardly surprising.

Now, the West, faced with an increasingly hostile Russia, with its newly re-elected president, maybe it should consider the advice of Vladimir Potanin, the oligarch featured in the Financial Times interview:

 Maybe this is why it is so difficult for the western world to understand Russia.   I return to this word: tolerance.   You guys finished with certain issues many centuries ago.  We are living through them.  Mine is a generation born in the Soviet Union, and you do not understand what that means.  You are asking from us certain behaviour.  But we were born in a concentration camp.  Do you really expect from us behaviour of kids born in London?  When you guys are teaching us, be careful, be polite.

Mike Ungersma, Cardiff, Wales, May 2018

The post Dealing with the Russian bear appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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Ministers of Foreign and European Affairs of the EU27 meet on 14 May 2018 in Brussels.

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