European Union

General : Ever heard of pangolins? Chances are you will never have a chance to see them up close. These mammals are the most trafficked worldwide and like rhinos and elephants are now on the brink of extinction. It's another example of wildlife trafficking poses a serious threat to the survival of our ecosystems. On Thursday 13 October, the environment committee votes on a report by Catherine Bearder on how EU and its members states should step up their efforts to combat wildlife trafficking.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : Ever heard of pangolins? Chances are you will never have a chance to see them up close. These mammals are the most trafficked worldwide and like rhinos and elephants are now on the brink of extinction. It's another example of wildlife trafficking poses a serious threat to the survival of our ecosystems. On Thursday 13 October, the environment committee votes on a report by Catherine Bearder on how EU and its members states should step up their efforts to combat wildlife trafficking.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : Parliamentarium, the Parliament’s visitors centre, has proved to be one of Brussels' most popular attractions since opening. Its permanent exhibition shows Parliament's work and explains the history of European integration in 24 languages. On Thursday 13 October it celebrates its fifth anniversary. If you are in Brussels that day, don't miss the chance to join the celebration from 17.00 to 22.00 CET.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

General : Parliamentarium, the Parliament’s visitors centre, has proved to be one of Brussels' most popular attractions since opening. Its permanent exhibition shows Parliament's work and explains the history of European integration in 24 languages. On Thursday 13 October it celebrates its fifth anniversary. If you are in Brussels that day, don't miss the chance to join the celebration from 17.00 to 22.00 CET.

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

International Trade Committee MEPs, farmers, businesses, public health and trade union representatives debated the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada on Wednesday morning. CETA can only enter into force with the European Parliament’s approval.
Committee on International Trade

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

International Trade Committee MEPs, farmers, businesses, public health and trade union representatives debated the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada on Wednesday morning. CETA can only enter into force with the European Parliament’s approval.
Committee on International Trade

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) includes different instances or organs, “the Court of Justice, the General Court and specialised courts” (Article 19 EUT).

Until today there is only one specialised court: the Civil Service. However,on September 1, 2016, the seven positions in the Civil Service, along with its powers, were transferred to the General Court.

The Regulation 2015/2422 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2015 (OJEU 24 December 2015, in force on 25 December 2015) amending Protocol No 3 on the Statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union establishes a reform on General Court in order to strengthen and allow greater work responsibilities establishing a progressive increase in the number its judges. On 25 December 2015 the number of judges (12) were increased to 40. On 1st September 2016, the seven posts of the Civil Service were transferred to the GC (along with the powers of the CS) and  from 1 September 2019 will be two Judges for each member State and therefore there will be appointed nine, reaching a total of 56.

The post Say hello to the new ECJ structure appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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There is a need to ensure a strategic framework for the cultural and creative industries as they now represent a major and growing part of our economies, Members of the Culture Committee and of National Parliaments agreed on Tuesday evening at the interparliamentary meeting on the subject.
Committee on Culture and Education

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

There is a need to ensure a strategic framework for the cultural and creative industries as they now represent a major and growing part of our economies, Members of the Culture Committee and of National Parliaments agreed on Tuesday evening at the interparliamentary meeting on the subject.
Committee on Culture and Education

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

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EU Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs meet in Luxembourg on 13-14 October 2016. Justice ministers are examining the state of play and discussing the way forward concerning the regulation establishing a European public prosecutor's office (EPPO) and the directive on the fight against fraud to the Union's financial interests (PIF) by means of criminal law.

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Welcome to Ideas on Europe.

This blog is a window to express my thoughts or comments, give news, always related to European integration.

I appreciate your comments and feedback.

All the best.

Joaquín Sarrión.

About me: https://about.me/joaquinsarrion

Twitter: @joaqsarrion

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joaquin-sarrion-esteve/37/882/558

SSRN Author Page

www.researchgate.net/profile/Joaquin_Sarrion https://universitatdevalencia.academia.edu/JoaquínSarriónEsteve

 

The post Hello world! appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Julian L. Garritzmann

Students in Finland and Germany study free of charge. In the U.S. and in Japan, in contrast, they pay tremendous tuition fees, leading to often six-digit student debt amounts after graduation. At the same time, most students in Finland and in the U.S. receive public financial student aid, while the majority of students in Germany and Japan remain dependent on their parents’ financial contributions or their own part-time work. Why is that the case? Why do some countries charge tuition fees while others don’t? Why do only some governments support students financially?

My research (Garritzmann 2015; 2016) investigates these and related questions. Here, I want to summarize three key insights: the four worlds of student finance, how have the four worlds of student finance emerged, and why policy change becomes increasingly unlikely. Interested readers can find much more detailed analyses in my recent book “The Political Economy of Higher Education Finance: The Politics of Tuition Fees and Subsidies in OECD Countries, 1945-2015”.

 

The Four Worlds of Student Finance

How do the higher education tuition-subsidy systems differ across countries? (How) Have they changed over time? Along which dimensions do higher education systems differ at all? In order to answer these questions, I compiled information on more than 80 aspects of the higher education funding systems of 33 OECD countries between 1995 and 2015. This dataset allows to comparatively answer questions such as: How many students pay tuition fees? Do all, some, or no students pay? How much do students pay on average? Do all students pay the same and if not, how do the amounts vary and why? Who sets the level of tuition fees in the first place? How much public financial support do students receive? Do they have to pay back this money or not? Chapter 2 of my book presents and discusses this data in detail.

A core insight from the detailed analysis of this data is that the advanced economies (OECD countries) fall into four groups:

-          In a first country cluster, hardly any student pays fees, but public financial student aid is also meager at best. This is the case in most continental European countries.

-          In a second country group, students also study free-of-charge, but at the same time they receive large public support. This is mainly so in Nordic Europe.

-          A third group, comprising the USA and other Anglo-Saxon countries, is characterized by the combination of substantial tuition fees and generous public support (at least in the form of student loans).

-          In a final group, students pay similarly high tuition amounts, but the majority does not receive any public support. This is the case in Japan, South Korea, Chile, and other Latin American and Asian countries.

I call these four groups the “Four Worlds of Student Finance”.

 

How have the Four Worlds of Student Finance emerged?

The main research question that my book seeks to answer is why and how the Four Worlds have developed. Why do the countries differ so considerably? This question is particularly interesting because I also found that when we look back at the 1940s and 1950s, these country differences did not exist at all. In the immediate post-World War II phase the higher education systems of all countries were almost identical: Tuition fees were low or inexistent in all countries, there was no public student aid, and enrollment levels were very low everywhere (about one to five percent of each cohort went on to higher education at this time). So why have the countries developed into four very different directions although they had an almost identical starting point?

My research shows that the reason for this development is political. Detailed qualitative case studies of four countries (Finland, Japan, Germany, the USA) over seven decades (1945-2015) as well as thorough analyses of a large amount of quantitative data show that the emergence of the Four Worlds of Student Finance can be traced back to the respective partisan composition of government. Whether students pay tuition or not and whether they receive subsidies or not depends on which political parties were in government during the postwar period.

More particularly, I show that in some countries (for example in Sweden) progressive leftwing parties were in office for decades, seeking to establish equality of opportunities and socio-economic upward mobility. To achieve this, they banned tuition fees and introduced generous student support systems to facilitate access for children from lower strata. The low-tuition—high-subsidy system was born.

In other countries (for example in Japan), conservative rightwing parties were predominant over a long period of time. These governments pursued very different goals: They tried to keep higher education as elitist as possible and feared that the expansion of higher education would lead to a “massification” and a decline of the quality of higher education. Conservative parties therefore did not install any student aid and “outsourced” the expansion of higher education in the tuition-dependent private sector, safeguarding the elitist character of their public universities. This pushed countries in the direction of high-tuition—low-subsidy regimes.

In still other countries, neither leftwing nor rightwing parties predominated in office, but rather took turns. My analysis shows that in these cases it matters crucially for the higher education systems how long leftwing and rightwing parties were in office. That is, not only the partisan composition of government but also the duration of parties in office matters. This can, for example, explain the development in Germany (low tuition, low subsidies) and the U.S. (high tuition, high subsidy).

 

“Nothing’s gonna change”: Policy change becomes increasingly unlikely

A third major finding is that over time the higher education systems of all countries have become increasingly path-dependent. That is, while there has been a lot of policy change in the 1960s and 1970s setting countries on their respective paths, no country (with the exception of England) has altered its higher education finance system considerably after the 1980s. Countries that charged tuition at the beginning of the 1980s continue doing so today and – if anything – have raised the amounts. Countries without tuition fees remain tuition free. The same applies to financial student support: Path dependencies prevail and the Four Worlds of Student Finance seem increasingly stable.

Why is that the case? I show in the book (see also Garritzmann 2015) that over time the influence that governments can exercise on higher education finance systems decreases. This is so because of “positive feedback effects”, that is citizens adapt their political preferences to the respective systems that they are socialized in. As a consequence, a public opinion develops that favors the respective status quo over any policy change. It thus becomes politically very costly for parties to change the higher education system fundamentally. The experiences by Labour and the LibDems in England (the only country that has experienced major change) underline this perfectly. We are thus increasingly unlikely to witness any considerable policy change. Put bluntly, Sen. Sanders will not abolish tuition in the USA and Finland will not introduce any (for most of its students).

Taken together, my research shows that when we want to understand why higher education systems differ across countries and time, the answer is politics. Careful attention to the political process also helps understanding which reform potentials are still possible today and how policies could be designed to enable at least incremental change.

 

Dr.Julian L. Garritzmann is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and senior researcher at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). His research interests include education systems and policies, political parties and party competition, the interrelation of social policies and educational policies, and public opinion towards social investment and social compensation policies. In addition to his new book, his research has appeared in Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, and West European Politics.

 

References:

Garritzmann, Julian L. (2015) Attitudes towards Student Support: How Positive Feedback-Effects Prevent Change in the Four Worlds of Student Finance. Journal of European Social Policy, 25(2):139-158.

Garritzmann, Julian L. (2016) The Political Economy of Higher Education Finance. The Politics of Tuition Fees and Subsidies in OECD Countries, 1945-2015. Palgrave Macmillan.

The post The Politics of Higher Education Tuition Fees and Subsidies appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Ranks and Vasiļevičs
Intellectual and industrial property
The initial acquirer of a copy of a computer program, accompanied by an unlimited user licence, may resell that copy and his licence to a new acquirer

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Warsaw tore up a mooted $3.5bn deal with Airbus, starting a diplomatic war with Paris and worsening an already strained relationship with Berlin in the process.

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In 2002 Romano Prodi, then-president of the European Commission, anticipated the EU to become a ‘real global player’, capturing an era when the European Union (EU) was determined to achieve ‘sustainable stability and security’ within the EU, and, ‘from Morocco to Russia and the Black Sea’.

So what happened to these aspirations?

Today, the EU lacks leadership, frustration grows within the Union, while increasingly failing to make a positive impact beyond. The result of Britain’s referendum was but one example of this wider crisis. Can this be simply attributed to lack of unity? The problem, as the Bratislava summit nears, is somewhat deeper and more alarming. Drunk on its self-perception, the EU has lost creativity of thought, which threatens the survival of the integration project.

Unfortunately, this is not merely a crisis affecting the EU’s policy-makers, but also the academic field and think tanks that provides the Brussels elites with tools to think about Europe. Perhaps, at the core of this problem is the fundamentally dangerous belief in the civilising mission of the European integration (spurred on by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas and his intellectual heirs), whose thinking has proliferated in Brussels and beyond.

Habermas, as one of the most important thinkers in Europe, can be satisfied –  the combination of his beliefs in emancipation (moving from exclusive state structures towards inclusive universal moral frameworks) and the importance of European integration as its instrument have been heard across the Continent. Few of his heirs would dispute that anything but an ‘ever closer union’ and ‘European values’ are simply but the only means to a brighter future, not only within the Union’s borders, but also beyond.

It is not that Habermas has been uncritical of the EU. After all, on more than one occasion the German philosopher highlighted the lack of institutional legitimacy and democratic participation of the European demos in the political process. However, the core problem here is not merely the problem of critiquing the current state of the European integration (though this too is fundamentally absent). Rather, there is a genuine lack of critique of the EU integration project as an end itself – its aims, intentions and, above all, the increasing inability and, indeed, heresy of diversity. The European Union, for its part, has turned into an instrument of obedience and control, victim of its own normative agenda. Where ‘Europe’ was once supposed to be a project of liberty, it is increasingly turning into a project of subversion.

Consequently, there is a lack of critique of the EU integration project as an end itself – its aims, intentions and, above all, the increasing heresy in diversity. The EU has turned into a victim of its own normative agenda. Where ‘Europe’ was once supposed to be a project of liberty, it has increasingly been turning into a dictatorship of thought, by those who spent decades arguing that the enlightened European project will solve issues that sovereign states no longer can. As a result, there is a little understanding of the internal and external consequences of thinking about the civilising mission of an ‘ever closer union’ as the only vision for the Continent’s future.

In this logic, alternatives have no place in Europe. The question of ‘Brexit’ provides an important case. It is not a question of believing in the UK’s exit from the Union, but rather that the argument for ‘Remain’ must be subject to scrutiny.  Instead, as we have witnessed quite often over the past months, ‘Leave’ has been perceived as a ‘lunacy’ or ‘suicide’.

Perhaps, the path chosen by the British people may well turn out to suicidal. However, there is a need to critique the wider belief that simply more integration is the only rational remedy to on-going crises and challenges – more EU on the external borders, more EU in monetary affairs, more EU in defense policy. Alternatives are side-lined, perceived as either mad or heretical – after all, how could anyone possibly want to willingly live outside this great project without, like Norway, paying a high price for it?

It is not that the ‘Leave’ campaign have provided the right solutions (rather the opposite). Unfortunately, a Union set on simply promoting a singular vision of the future (however bright) merely breeds intolerance to alternative visions rather than ‘unity in diversity’, as the EU’s motto claims. After all, as one of the founding fathers, Robert Schuman made clear: ‘Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan’.

And what of the European integration project’s external dimension?

Potential new members of the Union must conform to EU conditions. This, of course, makes every sense if you wish to join any club, whether this involves a weekly game of squash or a monetary union; but clubs generally provide different membership options, dependent on members’ willingness than the club’s expectation.

But what of those who have little or no possibility (or wish) of joining the club? Must they also conform? According to the believers in the primacy of EUropean values, the answer is an obvious yes. As one EU official put it to me not so long ago with regards to the countries of the eastern neighbourhood – ‘they are our neighbours, and so must be close to our rules’. Our Rules, Our Neighbours. End of conversation.

The tragic case of the small Republic of Moldova provides a good example. Locked between the neighbourhood power struggles of the EU and Russia, Moldova’s internal politics is constantly determined by geopolitics. Yet, the country has been highlighted as the star pupil of the EU’s regional programme, and Moldova is the only eastern neighbourhood country to receive a visa-free regime as a ‘carrot’ for its efforts to follow EU norms.

Due to EU priority conditionality and financial support, Moldovan Border Police is, arguably, the most modern government institution in the country, while irregular migration reaching the EU through Moldova is in the 10s. No doubt, a remarkable success when compared to the dire situation in the Mediterranean, where ‘illegal’ migration is in the 100,000s.

This, however, is a sharp contrast to its socio-economic and political situation. Marred by emigration, corruption, oligarchy and political instability, Moldova highlights the dangers of limiting relations with its neighbours merely to conformity with European norms and values. Again, perceived as the only possibility for reform, the Union arrogantly disregards third countries’ interests and needs. Consequently, Moldova is left with a state of the art border management, and an oligarch-controlled political system that has witnessed 6 governments in 6 years, and €1bn euros stolen from its banks.

The heresy of diversity from an ‘ever closer union’ as an end, therefore, has major consequences. Within the Union, the democratic exercise exemplified in the UK referendum is snared at; externally, the EU pushes it own narrowly-defined reform agenda, as the only means of reaching the paradise.

However, as the Czech priest-reformer Jan Hus (burnt at stake for ‘heresy’ against the Catholic Church) stressed: Obedience is heresy. The EU, in its current state, in much the same way as the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, requires not obedience, but resistance by questioning the end mission of a narrowly-defined project. It must be recognised that salvation does not merely exist in Brussels-centred catechism.

Resisting does not mean striking down the Brussels Leviathan. Rather, it requires the ability to imagine different visions of Europe, playing closer attention to the needs, interests and, indeed, different understanding of how Europe ought to be achieved – recognising that the challenge to its future existence does not lie in diverging voices, but in seeking conformity. Each club needs rules, but these rules are important only as long as they stimulate productivity or creativity. As soon as they seek to control, they become a hindrance and a threat to the system they seek to uphold.

As history has taught us, a singular vision of the future can have dangerous consequences. To this extent, however potentially costly, the British referendum should serve as a point of departure for a new vision of Europe where critical voices are not simply ignored. Let us, therefore, put behind crusading and search for obedience. The aim, as we move towards the Bratislava summit, must be to kill the necessity of an emancipatory (civilising) Europe, not only to revive our thinking about Europe, but to make Europe again a relevant interplay of productive and dynamic ideas.

Igor Merheim-Eyre is a doctoral researcher at the University of Kent and a visiting scholar at KU Leuven

This article was originally published by EurActiv on 15 September 2016.

The post ‘The European Union has lost its creativity: We need a new vision of Europe’ by Igor Merheim-Eyre appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

DRAFT OPINION on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the European Union Agency for Asylum and repealing Regulation (EU) No 439/2010
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Ramona Nicole Mănescu

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

The Budgets Committee demanded more funds, in a vote on Tuesday, to help young people into jobs, to boost economic growth and assist third countries with a view to mitigating the migration crisis. MEPs had earlier reversed all the cuts proposed by the Council to the draft 2017 EU budget. Part of the additional funds are expected to be financed via new appropriations to be obtained through the ongoing mid-term revision of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF).
Committee on Budgets

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP