European Union

Fuelled by mounting public concern at the fast-growing number of asylum-seekers and migrants crossing Europe’s borders, the second half of 2015 saw a surge in support for illiberal parties, politicians and policies.

The refugee crisis has been an opportunity to showcase the xenophobia and nativism that is central to illiberalism. Political parties on both the right and the left, and at all points of Europe’s geographic compass, seized the crisis as a chance to build political support. Among many examples, Slovakia’s left-wing prime minister Robert Fico allegedly called migration the ‘ritual slaughter’ of Europe’s nations, while two Alternative für Deutschland MEPs called for police to shoot at refugees entering Germany illegally.

Recent opinion polls show that the radical-right populist Sweden Democrats, who polled 13% in the 2014 parliamentary election, would now win 20% of the vote, just a few percentage points behind the centre-right Moderates and the Social Democrats that have long dominated Swedish politics. The Netherlands’ Geert Wilders – who has called for Islamic male refugees to be locked in camps to prevent a ‘sexual jihad’ – has seen his anti-Islamic Freedom Party surge to 29% support. As well as the publicity offered by the Brexit referendum campaign, fears about rising immigration also gave the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and its leader Nigel Farage a new lease of life after the party’s disappointing election results last May.

“The refugee crisis was an opportunity to showcase xenophobia and nativism”

Fears about the impact of refugees on Poland’s culture helped the Law and Justice party to power in last October’s election. Poland’s new government was welcomed into office by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who dedicated part of his Independence Day speech to lauding Poland’s new illiberal leaders, telling them that ‘we are with you, and we send this message to Brussels: more respect to the Polish people, more respect to Poland!’ Poland’s new leaders followed the Hungarian model immediately, with constitutional amendments limiting the independence of both the courts and the media. After the terrorist attacks in Brussels in late March, the Polish government also announced that it was reversing its initial agreement to take in 7,000 refugees as a part of the EU’s relocation plan.

Similar, albeit milder, limits to democratic freedoms are being deliberated elsewhere. In Latvia, the parliament has debated controversial amendments to the Criminal Code that would make public discussion of changes to the Latvian constitutional order a criminal offense with a prison sentence of up to five years.

This illiberal turn is not a new phenomenon – in 2007, Eurozine debated the rise of ‘Illiberal Europe’. But back then, illiberalism was largely limited to the new east-central European member states of the European Union. Now, though, driven by the refugee crisis, illiberalism has expanded further afield. Indeed, Donald Trump’s campaign for the US presidency has been powered by unexpectedly broad public support for illiberal language and policies such as promises to build a wall between Mexico and the US, and threats to ban Muslims from entering the country.

“Europe’s illiberal parties have been around for several decades pilfering votes from the left and the right”

Is this the end of the liberal democratic consensus that has shaped Europe since 1945? Liberal democracy has protected individual liberties such as the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion. It is underpinned by the laws and norms adopted by key European institutions such as the Council of Europe and Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). But these liberal values are not a necessary or a core part of democracy. States could be less liberal but remain democratic, as leaders like Orbán advocate. Such a consolidation of illiberalism, though, is unlikely for three reasons.

First, Europe’s illiberal parties have been around for several decades but remain relatively small. Their default position is opposition rather than government. They have become an established part of the party systems of many European states by pilfering votes from both parties of the left and the right through their appeal to the economic losers of globalisation – typically working-class men in post-industrial towns – as well as those left bewildered and alienated by the broad cultural shift towards secularism and tolerance of diversity. Except for some central European states, even where support for illiberals has swelled – as it has in the Netherlands – on the back of the refugee crisis, it is still some way short of a majority.

Second, there are significant differences between illiberal politicians in the east and west. Hungary and Poland are generally pro-EU, while Britain’s UKIP exists to be pro-Brexit and Marine Le Pen would withdraw France from not just the EU but also NATO. There are also significant east-west differences in attitudes to drugs, gay rights and other values issues. Illiberals are, well, illiberal – they find it difficult to cooperate with others. Hence, the long-standing problems in forming a stable illiberal – or radical-right populist – party group in the European Parliament. A broad pan-European coalition or movement of anti-refugee parties is unlikely.

Finally, the migrant issue will eventually fade. As the flow of refugees slows down – whether this year or next – the public fear and rage of ‘the other’ that has fuelled illiberal parties and attitudes will diminish. Mainstream parties of the left and right will roll-back the illiberal language they partially stole from the political fringes, and European politics will return to its liberal democratic default. This refugee crisis is an episode of European politics, not the beginning of a return to the institutionalised illiberal politics of the inter-war era.

 

The post Europe’s new populists are frightening – but they won’t last appeared first on Europe’s World.

Plenary sessions : The European Parliament held an extraordinary plenary session in Brussels on Tuesday 28 June for MEPs to discuss and vote on a resolution assessing the outcome of the UK referendum and its consequences for the European Union. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Council representatives also took part

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Plenary sessions : The European Parliament held an extraordinary plenary session in Brussels on Tuesday 28 June for MEPs to discuss and vote on a resolution assessing the outcome of the UK referendum and its consequences for the European Union. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Council representatives also took part

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

After declaring that Hungary ‘will not be a colony’ and won’t ‘live according to the commands of foreign powers’, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that he is instead building an ‘illiberal democracy’ based on states like China, Russia, Turkey and Singapore. He has curtailed the independence of the judiciary, purged the civil service of those who are not his ardent supporters, introduced new election rules to give himself the advantage and launched a wholesale assault on the freedom of the press. When some of his new laws – such as those criminalising homelessness and ruling-out the possibility of gay marriage – were criticised as unconstitutional, he simply changed the constitution. In his reaction to the refugee crisis, he assumed a position of rabid nationalism, prosecuting asylum-seekers entering Hungary, building razor-wire fences on the borders and flouting the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees.

The European Union seems absolutely helpless in dealing with these infringements of democracy. When you cannot correct the situation, it seems the best way out is to pretend the problem does not exist. Last December, the EU’s justice commissioner Věra Jourová made it clear this was the case by saying in the European Parliament that Hungary’s illiberal ways are not actually a problem.

The Polish general election in October was won by the extreme populist Law and Justice Party (PiS), which is both on the far right and left because while being positioned on the extreme right of the political spectrum, its economic policies are state-orientated and its behaviour towards opponents is highly authoritarian – strongly reminiscent of the pre-1989 ruling communist party. The PiS has quickly followed in Orbán’s footsteps, paralysing the Polish constitutional court and enfeebling the media. Its assault on democracy has been strongly criticised by the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe, which has decreed that an ongoing constitutional crisis in Poland poses a danger to the rule of law, democracy and human rights. But, as in the case of Hungary, Brussels is more or less powerless.

There have been no such anti-democratic constitutional changes in the other two countries of ‘New Europe’, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but even these countries have found themselves in the grip of irrational eurosceptic, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee xenophobia over the past year. Slovakia’s (allegedly) social democratic prime minister Robert Fico peddled so much fear and loathing against refugees, of which there are none in Slovakia, that he emerged seriously weakened from the general election on 6th March. Slovak voters did not vote for him, and because of his scare campaign instead put their confidence in extreme right-wing parties. An openly neo-Nazi party has entered the Slovak parliament with 14 seats as a result. In the Czech Republic, too, President Miloš Zeman systematically makes strongly fearmongering statements using factually incorrect information, and the public love him for it. The leader of the Czech “Anti-Islamic Bloc” was even invited to sing the national anthem with the president at a public event last November. The finance minister and first deputy prime minister Andrej Babiš, a powerful oligarch, supports Zeman in this and has also expressed his admiration for Donald Trump’s ‘solution to the immigration problem’.

It is quite remarkable that there is such unity defying liberal, humanitarian and pan-European solutions to the refugee crisis in central and eastern Europe. This includes some of former East Germany, because in Saxony-Anhalt, the anti-Islamist and anti-refugee party Alternative für Deutschland gained more than 24% of the popular vote in the regional elections on 13th March, and Saxony is the birthplace of the anti-Islamic movement Pegida. Large numbers of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians and East Germans now express open defiance towards European values. But what are the sources of this widespread illiberalism?

It is of course well known that since the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War and the wholesale deportation of Germans after 1945, central and eastern European societies have been extremely homogeneous, predominantly white, and have not experienced the multiculturalism that has been common in western Europe for decades. Fear of the unknown is somewhat understandable, especially when unscrupulous media outlets create the impression that Middle Eastern refugees are no different from Daesh terrorists. Social networks such as Facebook are in large part to blame for this as vehicles for the dissemination of alarmist ‘news’ and racist hoaxes. Facebook rarely removes racist hate speech, especially when it is published in eastern European languages, and this has greatly contributed to the normalisation of what was unacceptable only a few years ago. Trapped in an echo-chamber of self-generated fear and hate, most central and eastern Europeans feel that they are genuinely threatened by the unknown ‘other’, and so they grasp for illiberal solutions.

Social and economic frustration is another important factor in illiberalism’s success. Economic development across central and eastern Europe is very uneven, and there are areas that remain very poor. Most of the inhabitants of such regions are in opposition to the political and media elites in their capitals. They disdain the mainstream media, hate Brussels and fully believe all the hoaxes disseminated on Facebook, helping Islamophobic material to quickly go viral. It is this kind of frustration that brought the PiS to power in Poland, that is the source of Czech President Zeman’s high popularity, that has brought neo-Nazis into the Slovak parliament and that sustains Viktor Orbán’s power. After 25 years of low pay, the rule of multinational companies and lecturing from the West, many central and eastern Europeans are fed up. They have assumed the role of a defiant pupil of the West. They no longer want to listen, Czech political scientist Ondřej Slačálek has said, and so they have reverted to nationalism and illiberal values.

There are rough times ahead for the European Union. Nationalist populism is on the rise in both the east and the west, and it is advisable to resist nationalist pressures and defend civic principles at all cost. Maybe it is at this point fitting to think of the predicament of the former Yugoslavia. The moment Yugoslavia abandoned the civic principle after 1989, the whipping up of nationalism on all sides for political advantage led to the brutal war of the 1990s. Is this the same story we will someday be telling about the EU?

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Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

When China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at the end of 2001, its Accession Protocol stated, though ambiguously, that China would be removed from the list of non-market-economy countries by the end of 2016. During those 15 years, China and other WTO members have been free to reach bilateral agreements so that market economy status (MES) could be granted early.

China has always been especially eager to get MES treatment from the EU, its largest trading partner. From 2002 to 2012, Wen Jiabao as the Chinese Premier pushed the EU with all available means to recognise China as a market economy, but failed. Facing heavy pressure from China in this period, the EU created five market-economy criteria and inspected the Chinese situation carefully, but the conclusion in 2008 was that China only met one of the five criteria. Nevertheless, the EU was still prepared to recognise China’s MES after the 15-year transitional period came to an end. The EU’s then trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said in a speech to the European Parliament in November 2013 that ‘in 2016, China will receive market economy status’.

A turning point has come in the last three years. Inspired by the US position, some of the EU’s lawyers started to pay more attention to the wording under Article 15 in China’s WTO Accession Protocol, and challenged the EU’s original automatic recognition at the end of 2016. In the meantime, fearing that MES treatment for China would make the EU’s trade tools less effective when dealing with anti-dumping cases targeted at Chinese imports, European manufacturers – steel producers in particular – launched powerful lobbying campaigns in Brussels as well as in member states. As a result, the current trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström has stated that there is ‘no automaticity’ in granting China MES this year.

“The whole debacle demonstrates that the mutually-beneficial nature of Chinese trade relations is in doubt”

The Chinese side has dropped its request for MES from the EU, but insists that the EU follow the WTO provisions and treat China as a normal country after 15 years of its accession. Its argument is that reform has been carried out for more than 35 years in China to great success. China is no longer, as some Europeans have accused, a planned economy; the market now plays an important role in stimulating Chinese economic growth. China also argues that when the European Commission calculates dumping margins against some of its trade to the EU, the analogue country is often the United States, which is unfair because China and the US are not at the same economic level and there is a big difference between the two countries’ production costs.

When dealing with China’s MES, the EU needs to take into consideration at least three pivotal questions. First, how should the EU revise its own legislation to avoid violating the provisions of the WTO? Of the four points under Article 15, point one’s second sub-section will definitely expire on 11th December. This will require adjustments to EU law, in particular Council Regulation No. 1225/2009, or Europe may risk conflicting with the WTO rule. But the problem is the difficulty of achieving a common position in the Council and the Parliament. As a matter of fact, it is not impossible to maintain trade defence measures against Chinese imports, including anti-subsidy and countervailing measures. Even if in anti-dumping investigations, where China is selected as the analogue country, the EU has the possibility of introducing higher import tax against those Chinese enterprises that dump in the European market by removing the ‘lesser duty rule’, but of course, this may need the approval of the legislative bodies first.

The EU must secondly consider how to balance different interest groups within Europe. In other words, not only the voices of stakeholders in the steel industry, but also those who benefit from free trade should be taken into account. It is of course not an easy task to deal with the different positions of member states, so it will be a big challenge for the EU to align the interests of transnational industrial sectors with those of the 28 member states.

“A ‘no’ to China’s MES will most probably initiate a series of steps taken by Beijing to punish Brussels”

Last but not least, how should the EU take care of its overall relationship with China? The decision taken by the EU will have a direct impact on EU-China relations at least in the short term. Although China has not specified its plan of revenge yet, a ‘no’ to China’s MES will most probably initiate a series of steps taken by Beijing to punish Brussels by, for example, withdrawing Chinese investment from the Juncker Plan, suspending the purchase agreement with Airbus, slowing down negotiations on the Bilateral Investment Agreement, dividing the EU by exploring bilateral cooperation projects with some member states that are more favourable to granting China MES.

No matter what decision the EU takes, and especially if no decision is reached by the time limit, the whole debacle demonstrates that the mutually-beneficial nature of Chinese trade relations is in doubt. Unfortunately for China, some economic problems have appeared with poor timing – signs of stagnation and its huge overcapacity for steel production have seriously lowered international optimism over the Chinese economy, which have worried Europeans about the possibility of increased trade disputes with China in the coming years. The common understanding of the EU-China relationship now tends to lean towards the view of a zero-sum game.

The EU needs to hurry up and form a policy as soon as possible, otherwise the WTO dispute mechanism may interfere when the deadline expires. But who knows, maybe a final WTO ruling is the best solution. In this way, the EU does not need to face what is probably ‘mission impossible’ for its institutions.

IMAGE CREDIT: FLICKR/CC – European External Action Service

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The NATO Summit in Warsaw will be a key meeting to decide on next steps in ensuring the Alliance’s collective defence. Strengthening and modernizing NATO’s defence and deterrence posture will be at the core business of the Summit. To successfully adapt NATO to a rapidly changing security environment, the Warsaw Summit will need to consider in its deliberations several relevant and highly important issues.
Further information
Draft agenda and meeting documents
Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : The UK referendum and its consequences are discussed during an extradition plenary session in Brussels on Tuesday 27 June. In addition the financial repercussions of the refugee and migrant crisis are discussed at a joint committee meeting, while political groups are also preparing for next week's full plenary session in Strasbourg.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : The UK referendum and its consequences are discussed during an extradition plenary session in Brussels on Tuesday 27 June. In addition the financial repercussions of the refugee and migrant crisis are discussed at a joint committee meeting, while political groups are also preparing for next week's full plenary session in Strasbourg.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

In the end, it was the Little Englanders who determined the outcome – believing in Brexit as a route to ‘take back their country’. Yet if they were worried about the UK’s lack of influence in the EU and the wider world, the impact within three short days on global stock markets, currencies and risk indicators should already tell them they were wrong.

UK politics is in turmoil. The only political leader prepared for a Brexit outcome appeared to be Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, who, on Friday morning, made a well-prepared, sharp speech, moving rapidly to take the advantage, arguing for a potential second independence referendum.

As the Tories and Labour descend into desperate in-fighting and recrimination, the UK public – or rather the English and Welsh public – is split like never before.

There are many stories to tell on which social group voted which way – the most pro-EU, but with the lowest turn-out by far, being the 18-25 year olds. Yet despite the valid recriminations against Jeremy Corbyn for his half-hearted and almost invisible presence in the campaign, in the end it was the Tories that determined the outcome.

“The UK has voted to put its own existence as a state at risk”

Tory voters, according to a post-referendum poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft, split 58% to 42% for Brexit. Apart from UKIP, all the other parties – Labour, the Liberal-Democrats, Greens and Scottish National Party – had close to two-thirds to three-quarter majorities for remaining in the EU.

David Cameron, a Tory Prime Minister, called a referendum he didn’t have to call, and failed to persuade his own Tory voters to back him. His resignation was a foregone conclusion.

What comes next is unclear. The UK has voted to put its own existence as a state at risk. It has chosen to undermine its economy, its domestic politics and its influence in Europe and the world. It has also damaged the EU, and impacted negatively on the wider world. It is historic folly on an unimaginable level.

The economic impacts will unfold in the days, weeks and months ahead – the immediate falls in the pound, the euro and other currencies, and in stock markets, were predictable. Already, reports are coming in of financial players – banks, hedge funds and others – looking to move staff and operations out of the UK. Foreign direct investment into the UK is bound to fall.

The political outcomes will reverberate in unpredictable ways in the months and years ahead. Much attention now is on Scotland – a poll on Sunday suggested a big shift to 59% support for independence. Also on Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon said the Scottish Parliament might block any legislative consent needed as part of the UK’s Brexit process.

This is just the beginning of a major political, constitutional and economic crisis in the UK. Within hours of the result, in the early hours of Friday morning, Sinn Fein had called for a vote on reunifying Ireland, Spain called for joint control of Gibraltar – while, predictably, far-right leaders in France and the Netherlands called for their own referendums on leaving the EU.

The Tory Brexit side – Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are in disarray. While Johnson could be the UK’s Prime Minister by early autumn, unless stopped by an alternative candidate such as Theresa May, the Brexit leaders never had a clear story as to what voters would get instead of the EU.

With the scaremongering over immigration pushing Brexit over the finishing line in the referendum, it is hard to see any deal that keeps full access to the Single Market – the EEA option always looked like a hard sell after a ‘Leave’ vote. Yet Westminster has a majority of MPs who support staying in the EU – what sort of deal they might vote for is quite unclear.

“Scotland – a poll on Sunday suggested a big shift to 59% support for independence”

The EU now has to deal with the Brexit mess, along with its other huge challenges – both in the eurozone and the refugee crisis. The EU’s leaders are right to push for a rapid move on Article 50, allowing at least some sense of control and attempts at reducing uncertainty to begin. But the political disarray in the UK means that this may take a few months rather than days.

Scotland will want some clear answers from the EU as to the basis on which, if it became an independent state, it could remain in the EU, negotiating its status as a new member state. Unlike the scaremongering at the time of the 2014 independence referendum, the EU owes Scotland some clear answers – without taking a position on the desirability of Scottish independence or not.

In the end, Cameron was hoist by his own petard. He called the Brexit side ‘Little Englanders’ but he had presided for six years over a eurosceptic government that had seen the UK’s influence in the EU slide, and that had led the UK’s wider foreign policy to be almost invisible. That, and the UK’s failure to play a major, constructive role in any of the EU’s current challenges during his premiership, meant Cameron could not make a strategic and broad case for EU membership, arguing the benefits of solidarity, stability, rights and values.

As the EU struggles to find its own way forward now, it should heed this lesson. The EU’s ‘Fortress Europe’ approach to the refugee crisis, its abandoning of the values underpinning its enlargement process in its EU-Turkey deal, and its lack of urgency or weight in dealing with the levels of youth unemployment across the EU, point to an EU that has lost its sense of solidarity, and has no idea how to tackle the disaffection of much of the EU public.

The EU in its own way is also at risk of becoming a ‘Little Europe’. The UK currently lacks – outside of Scotland – any strategic, high-level political leadership. The EU has to show it can provide strategic, high-level and creative leadership at this critical time. Business as usual will not do.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC / FLICKR – frankieleon

The post Brexit – a spiralling crisis begins appeared first on Europe’s World.

It’s telling that almost all the British public debate since Friday’s announcement of the result of the EU referendum has been about British politics: who’s succeeding David Cameron? What’s happening to Jeremy Corbyn? Or Scotland?

Almost nothing has been discussed about how this decision will play out with the rest of the European Union.

At one level, this reflects the speedy resignation of Cameron, which would appear to make him now head of a caretaker administration, able to claim that constitutionally he is unable to make any decisions beyond the mundane, including notifying the EU of the UK’s intention to withdraw and invoke Article 50 proceedings.

With the European Council seeming to accept that it has to receive a formal notification to start Article 50 – either a letter or a minuted statement at a summit – there does not appear to be any politically-viable means of forcing the UK to start that process without their express consent.

However, this does expose a basic tension for other EU leaders. On the one hand, they don’t want the UK to leave, for a wide variety of reasons. On the other, if the UK is going, they would like it to be dealt with as quickly as possible. With all the other problems that the EU is facing, a drawn-out Brexit process is most unwelcome.

With talk in London now of an October notification, to be made by a new Tory leader, the key imperative for the EU27 is to make the most of the time to plan, since they control Article 50 once it begins.

This planning will take in two basic elements: the how and the what of the process.

The how is simply a function of never having to have done this before. While the Greenland exit in 1985 offers the nearest model of proceedings, the EU has moved far beyond its then competences and there is no parallel framework of the Danish government involvement on non-exit matters. In short, this is a white page exercise.

Such procedural questions – who speaks for the EU27? How are positions coordinated? How are decisions reached? – overlap to some extent with the content aspect, the what.
In essence, there are two models the EU can work from.

The first starts from the UK as a member state and takes things away. Most obviously, that means voting rights and representation in institutions, but after that, the UK could be offered everything it has now.

The attraction of this is that the UK is obviously already compliant with EU requirements, as a current member state, so there’s no transition into compliance. A framework agreement could be put together quite easily, whereby the EU27 and the UK agree a process for the latter to notify the former of its intention to withdraw from a given area of policy, with the EU27 then indicating any knock-on effects (legal, financial, etc.) and some relatively simple approval process. If financing kept pace with such an arrangement, then that needn’t be an issue: more complex would be linking different legal elements together.

The big problem with this model is that is clearly clashes with the likely British intention to limit free movement of workers, which is a fundament of the internal market: would it make any sense to use this maximalist model without the core of the activity?

This leads then to the second model, which starts from a position of no relationship at all and adds elements in. This addresses the free movement issue more easily and also allows each member state to decide quite what it’ll bar to the UK.

This approach is also more future-proofed, as it rests on the structure that would apply if there was no agreement after two years, at which point the UK could leave, with no residual rights beyond those present elsewhere in other international agreements.

However, this minimalist strategy has the problem that it would increase the economic costs of Brexit to all involved, since more barriers would emerge. This would take much longer to negotiate and a framework arrangement of the kind outlined above would probably not be possible. Also, if the EU27 did hold out any hope of the UK rejoining in the future, this would make that harder.

Moreover, there are some challenges of the EU27, whatever approach is taken.

Firstly, member states have very different positions on Brexit and what price to impose. To take the most obvious example, Ireland has a very strong economic, political and security imperative to keep the UK very close. Countries that would gain from limiting British access to markets – those with financial centres or car manufacturing, for example – might be much less amenable.

Secondly, member states will be conducting this entire process with at least one eye very firmly on their domestic audiences. There is considerable pressure in countries such as France, the Netherlands and Denmark for similar votes to the British one, so these governments have no incentive to offer the UK a deal that looks even close to being ‘better’ than their current terms of membership. The politics run completely against the economics here.

Finally, the EU27 will have to think to the future on this process. Now that exit is established as possible, there is going to be the possibility that it happens again, not least for the reasons just mentioned. Thus governments might consider what might work in their favour, should their country’s time come. This will be particularly the case for Eurozone members, which face a degree of complexity that will make Brexit look like a walk in the proverbial park.

With meetings of the original founding members and of the EU27 permanent representatives over the weekend, and a European Council this week, expect heated debate across Europe, even as the UK continues to work out its own way forward.

 

The post What’s the EU going to do? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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After the shock, the reality. Across Europe, politicians, officials, voters and businesses have asked themselves a simple question following the Brexit result: what now?

In Westminster, a political vacuum has emerged. Britain has lost a prime minister and not yet filled his role. Conservatives are jostling for position as David Cameron’s successor. Labour, meanwhile, has turned inward, with shadow ministers launching a coup against their leader.

Read more

The British vote to leave the European Union on Wednesday 23rd June sent shock waves throughout the Member States and is proving particularly costly for the Eastern countries that joined the EU in the last enlargement rounds (2004, 2007, 2013). The central banks of Poland, Hungary and Romania started the day of the 24th of June trying to calm the markets, the Polish zloty slid against the Euro by 3,8% (Onoszko et al, 2016), while political leaders across the region tried to reassure their respective electorate that the economy will not be significantly affected by the vote and the rights of their citizens working and living in the UK will not change in the short term. But this was also exploited as an opportunity to reflect on specific policies, on their role in an EU without the UK and this is particularly telling for the tensions within the EU and challenges for the future.

At a closer look their views on specific policies do not differ substantially from the concerns raised by David Cameron during the renegotiation deal that took place earlier in the year, in particular on immigration, economic policy and cutting red tape. However, they differ in terms of support for further integration, with the latest entrants Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia being clear about strengthening the EU, while the four Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) are being more concerned with further reform.

The Hungarian Government encouraged the EU to engage in pragmatic politics, not in ‘political correctness’ and to listen to people’s opinions (Peter Szijarto, Minister of Foreign Affairs). Hungary’s main policy concern of curtailing immigration and rejecting compulsory quotas is shared by Slovakia, together with economic governance worries that seem certain to dominate the agenda as the later country is next to take over the EU’s rotating presidency (Robert Fico, Prime Minister of Slovakia, in BBC News, 2016). The Polish Government encouraged further reform in the EU including cutting red tape and increasing democratic legitimacy (MFA statement) and overall the feeling from Warsaw was that an important ally was lost in the fight for EU reform as a result of the UK’s decision to exit.

Seen as a triumph for ‘nationalists and populists’ by Bulgaria’s key politicians, the UK result prompted them to ask for further integration (Sofia Globe), while Romania declared its willingness to become ‘a proactive actor in the evolution of the EU, which will certainly continue after the UK vote’ (Dacian Ciolos, Prime Minister).

While Hungary supports more regional integration within the Visegrad group (Peter Szijarto, Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Polish President Andrzej Duda called for safeguards from further exits to be put in place, it looks like the region is still divided on specific issues, despite an overall declared disappointment with the result of the UK vote. The UK exit vote might have just provided the catalyst for reaching agreement on policies that have divided member states so far. Worry about a further economic downturn adds to the sense of urgency in pulling together despite some differences, which is ultimately what the EU is all about.

Dr Simona Davidescu is Associate Lecturer
at the University of York
and Research Associate at the EU-Asia Institute
(ESSCA School of Management)

BBC News ‘Brexit: World reaction as UK votes to leave EU’, 24 June 2016,  http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36614643

Ciolos, Dacian ‘Declarații susținute de premierul Dacian Ciolos în contextul referendumului din Marea Britanie’, Romanian Government, 24 June 2016, http://gov.ro/ro/stiri/declaratii-sustinute-de-premierul-dacian-ciolos-in-contextul-referendumului-din-marea-britanie

Onoszko, M.;  Levitov, M. and Chamonikolas, K. ‘Brexit Jolts EU’s Eastern Members as Polish Zloty Leads Plunge’, Bloomberg, June 24, 2016, 4:20 pm, www.bloomberg.com

Polish Government ‘MFA Statement after the announcement of results of the UK referendum on EU membership’, 24 June 2016, www.msz.gov.pl

Sofia Globe ‘Bulgaria on Brexit: A bad day for Europe, a triumph for nationalists and populists’, 24 June 2016, http://sofiaglobe.com/2016/06/24/bulgaria-on-brexit-a-bad-day-for-europe-a-triumph-for-nationalists-and-populists/

Szijarto, Peter ‘Europe must learn from Brexit, says Hungarian Foreign Minister, Jne 24, 2016, 3:19 pm, www.kormany.hu/en/hungary

 

 

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