European Union

General : The European Parliament has had an eventful six months. MEPs worked hard to help member states contain the migration crisis, updated rules for the protection of personal data and adopted new measures to fight the terrorist threat. Those with an interest in European politics were also very keen to read about it on our website. Revisit the articles that proved the most popular in the first half of 2016.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Since Britain voted to leave the EU are we any wiser what it all means? Uncertainty seems the safest prediction for now. Yet given that Britain has played an important role in EU environmental policy, we need to try to make some sense of it.

Towards a more German style EU environmental policy?

In the 1980s, Britain preferred generalist environmental quality standards, whereas the Germans wanted strict emission limits and targets. EU environmental policy now has both! Yet without British experts at the table, across all the EU institutions, future EU environmental policy will unquestionably change in tone and quality. Perhaps it will become more comprehensively German?

Would that be a bad thing given that Britain has played an almost laggardly role in some recent EU environmental negotiations (notably the new Renewables Directive)? However, the hope that Brexit might actually be a boon for more ambitious EU environmental policy making is naïve. There are plenty of other states, such as Poland, willing to dilute Brussel’s green credentials. In fact, the absence of Britain will more likely weaken green agendas in policy sectors such as agriculture and fisheries, two areas where the British have long demanded ‘greening’. 

Environmental policy during the renegotiation

In the forthcoming negations the only slight advantage the UK may have is that the EU states could be quite divided over how to treat the British. However, the Article 50 process has a timer attached, so after two years, Britain is ejected from the EU – deal or no deal. That will put British negotiators under a lot of pressure. Single market access, free movement of people and adherence to the acquis (the body of EU rules) will likely form the substance of negotiations. As such it is not likely that environmental policy will feature extensively. That might be a good thing, because the British may simply agree to continue to apply the EUenvironmental acquis, as far as is practicable, or some such formula.  

Until negotiations are finished, EU environmental policies continue to apply and have force of law. That point is not trivial because the EU has been central to recent British litigation on air pollution and potentially fracking, where litigants were hoping to get a referral to the EU Court of Justice. Presumably post 2019 or later, that strategy will be exhausted. After Brexit we can suggest that British environmental law remedies will be simply less diverse and more uncertain, unless perhaps litigants can make extensive use of the EFTA Court.

Whatever party is in power in Whitehall will in the future matter more, because they will be less constrained by EU laws. A future Tory government, hell bent on fracking and perhaps led by an open climate skeptic, would have more freedom to dismantle key policy norms that have underpinned British environmental policy in the last decades, notably the centrality of climate change.

What UK influence in the future?

One immediate consequence of Brexit must be that British negotiating power over existing environmental policy dossiers is now badly dented, as nobody will take their views seriously.   This raises a question of future influence for business and government alike. The British chemicals industry must be left puzzling its fate. On the one hand many firms would be delighted to see the back of the demanding REACH directive, and perhaps they may sense an opportunity for competitive advantage. On the other hand, access to the single market will probably require that British chemicals be produced to EU standards. The same logic will apply for what is left of the British car industry. Crucially, there will be no British negotiators at the table when rules on chemicals and cars are eventually toughened up. 

Policy after Brexit

How will British environmental policy style and content likely change? Literature on policy path dependence would suggest much of the detail of British environmental policy will carry on as it was before Brexit. Literature on policy convergence and learning, might suggest that even outside of the EU, British thinking and policy on environmental matters will continue to be influenced by, or copy and learn from EU approaches; although Britain may become more open to policy learning from the USA, Australia or New Zealand as well. Divergences will likely be slow enough to gather pace, however, after two decades, British environmental policy may be quite different, at least as regards specific details.

The Norwegian experience in perspective

Finally, the Norwegian experience has been bandied about as a guide for what the future will look like: formally outside, yet informally following and applying many EU policies in return for single market access. This suggests we should expect continuity. Yet this ignores key details, notably scale. Norway is a small state, for whom the borrowing of standards from a large regulatory regime such as the EU simply makes sense. However, Britain as a very large state may not embrace this “policy follower” role. Moreover, the Norwegian party political elite have a working consensus on engaging with the EU in this way. Norwegian civil servants are dispatched to Brussels to follow policy developments, they attempt to influence negotiations and agendas from the outside as best they can, and then work hard to implement whatever deal emerges, back home in Oslo. Pragmatism rules.

There is no guarantee that future Tory or Labour governments will endorse that sort of sensible, if servile, relationship. Moreover, while Norway agreed in 1994 to implement most of the environmental acquis, the agreement did not include environmental measures relating to a number of key areas: farming, fishing, forestry, conservation, or climate change. Would the UK split the environmental acquis the same way….or perhaps agree to continue to implement those laws and policies in place before 2019….or 2016? The Norwegian precedent raises as many questions as it resolves. 

We are back then where we started: uncertainty. For which, a quote from Voltaire seems most apt for our first stab at making sense of Brexit: “uncertainty may be uncomfortable but certainty is absurd.”

The post What a difference a vote makes? Second guessing British-EU environmental policy interactions after Brexit. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Chair of the European Parliament’s Human Rights committee MEP Elena Valenciano (S&D,ES) expressed on Monday her concern and solidarity with Cuban human rights activist and Sakharov Prize Laureate 2010 Guillermo Fariñas and other Cuban human rights activists on hunger strike. Mr Fariñas is on a hunger and thirst strike to protest against the torture and mistreatment of political prisoners by the Cuban Government.
Subcommittee on Human Rights

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Chair of the European Parliament’s Human Rights committee MEP Elena Valenciano (S&D,ES) expressed on Monday her concern and solidarity with Cuban human rights activist and Sakharov Prize Laureate 2010 Guillermo Fariñas and other Cuban human rights activists on hunger strike. Mr Fariñas is on a hunger and thirst strike to protest against the torture and mistreatment of political prisoners by the Cuban Government.
Subcommittee on Human Rights

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Jens Jungblut

The 24th World Congress of Political Science organized by the International Political Science Association (IPSA) took place from July 23 until July 28 2016 under the title “Politics in a World of Inequality”. The conference was held in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland) and around 3000 participants, mainly from political science, were attending it.

Originally the conference was supposed to take place in Istanbul, but due to the security situation as well as the contentious relationship between the Turkish political scientists and the Turkish government the IPSA and the local Turkish organizers decided earlier this year to move the conference to Poland. In light of this and due to the recent events in Turkey the topic of academic freedom was a reoccurring theme at the conference being addressed both in the opening as well as closing ceremonies and in the context of a special roundtable.

Members of the ECPR Standing Group on Politics of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation organized a panel at the conference under the title “Knowledge Policies and the State of Inequality: Instruments For or Against?”. The panel examined how policy actors instrumentalize knowledge policies to increase and decrease the state of inequality between citizens, between nations, and between the world’s geographical regions. As a point of departure, the panel assumed that policymaking is a complex process, involving multiple actors across governance levels with diverse interests and preferences, and that instrument choice thus reflects the policy actors’ ambitions, compromises made, and the intended effects of implementation.

Martina Vukasovic. Photo credits: Deanna Rexe

The panel consisted of three papers. First, Dr. Martina Vukasovic from the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG) at Ghent University presented a paper entitled “The legitimation of funding decisions in higher education: the role of policy framing” that she co-authored with Dr. Jelle Mampaey (also CHEGG). The paper explored the frame elements employed by various actors – government, higher education institutions and associations, student unions etc. – in the public debate on increasing tuition fees in Flanders. The paper in particular distinguished between three frame elements – cognitive, normative and causal – and explored which actors use which frame elements and whether this mix changed over time. The findings from the Flemish case highlighted the strong reliance on causal elements – claims about expected effects of specific policy decisions – as well as increasing use of normative elements as the debate progressed. In addition, the actors who argued against the increase of tuition fees employed the normative elements more often than the actors arguing against. Second, Dr. Deanna Rexe from Simon Fraser University presented her research paper titled “Tuition Policy Instruments in Canada: Public Policy Choices for What Problems?“, which explored policy actor perceptions of higher education problems and policy instruments in Canadian higher education policymaking systems, and their effects on both substantive and procedural policy instrument selection.

Jens Jungblut. Photo credits: Deanna Rexe

Finally, Dr. Jens Jungblut from the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel presented a paper that he co-authored with Prof. Peter Maassen from the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. In their study, entitled “The Quality of Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa: Comparing Intra-regional Inequalities in Higher Education”, the authors used higher education as an exemplary part of the public sector to explore three sets of changes: 1) the dynamics regarding higher education’s provision of service to society, 2) recent changes in the quality of governance in higher education, and 3) the relationship between the two. They assume that due to higher education’s growing importance for national development strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the importance of the quality of governance for social progress, it can be expected that there is a link between an improved provision of service to society and increased quality of governance. In their conceptualization of the quality of governance they follow Fukuyama and suggest that the two main dimensions of the concept are capacity and autonomy of the administration. As their research project is still in the phase of data collection, the authors were only able to provide some empirical results on recent changes with regard to the delivery of services to society. Their results showed that universities in Sub-Saharan Africa significantly increased their student enrollments, numbers of graduates as well as the number of research articles produced. In a second analytic step the authors plan to survey and interview a number of administrators both in higher education institutions and the government to assess potential changes in the quality of governance in the sector as well as relate these findings to the ones regarding the delivery of service.

The 25th World Congress of Political Science will take place in July 2018 in Brisbane (Australia).

The post Knowledge Policies and the State of Inequality: Instruments For or Against? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Arthur Beesley in London

Europe is transfixed these days by Brexit, terrorism, migrants and the populist advance. But the riddle of Greece remains.

A damning new report by the IMF’s in-house inspectorate finds fault on several grounds with the fund’s approach to the country. This is backwards-looking exercise, which takes stock of bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Yet there are clear implications for the next phase of the long battle to restore fiscal stability in Athens.

Read more

On behalf of the Slovak presidency of the Council

In order to cover meetings organised in Bratislava during the Slovak presidency (informal Council meetings, the Bratislava summit, etc.) media must follow a two-step procedure.

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This one-off step consists of a security check of your application. You must submit your application no later than 21 days prior to the first event you wish to attend. No late application is available.

This request can be introduced at any time, even if the event you wish to register for is not yet open (e.g. Bratislava summit). It is a one-off requirement, which entitles media representatives to a 6-month pass for all presidency events.

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• Ministerial conference on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes (22 - 23 August)
• Gymnich (2 - 3 September)
• ECOFIN ( 9 - 10 September)
• AGRIFISH (11 - 13 September)
• "Bratislava summit" - Informal Meeting of Heads of State and Government (16 September)
• Speakers of Parliament (6 October).

Important: Separate registration is required for each event. Media representatives will not be granted access to the event venue unless they have obtained accreditation and their registration has been duly approved. Neither accreditation nor registration is possible at the event venue.

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For any queries regarding accreditation please contact the Slovak presidency at media.skpres@mzv.sk or +421 908 674 501

German Chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear at a press conference that she will stick to her open-door refugee policy. In response to the attacks of the last two weeks she presented a nine-point plan against terror. Some commentators praise Merkel's stance as courageous and reassuring. Others criticise her obvious lack of a plan.

Hillary Clinton has been officially nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate to run against the Republican Donald Trump. The European media debate whether she can really capitalise on her bid to become the first woman in the White House.

The recent Islamist-motivated terrorist attacks across Germany and France have left Europe in a state of fear and anxiety. Some commentators urge calm, saying that these are just ordinary criminals. Others believe that the terrorists are instruments of a political-religious campaign.