The EU-Mozambique Country Strategy Paper for 2008-2013 signed in December 2007 has a total budget of € 622 M. Funding from the 10th European Development Fund (EDF) is allocated to several priority areas.
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Now it’s Hungary’s turn. Viktor Orban, the polarising Hungarian premier, announced yesterday that his country would be holding a referendum on whether it should be forced to take in refugees as part of EU policies to relieve Greece and other overwhelmed frontier countries suffering the biggest influxes of migrants from the war-torn Middle East. By our count, that would make five countries holding referenda on EU policies in the course of about a year: Greece’s “oxi” on a the terms of a third eurozone bailout; Denmark’s “no” on opting-in to EU policing and judicial policies; an upcoming April Dutch referendum on the EU integration deal with Ukraine; Britain’s June plebiscite on EU membership; and now Mr Orban’s migration poll.
Throw in two more referenda – an Italian one in October on a non-EU domestic reform issue, and the always referendum-happy (but non-EU member) Switzerland – and you have a continent that seems to have gone delirious for direct democracy. As Tom Nuttall, the Economist’s Brussels-based Charlemagne columnist, pointed out in January, it’s not as if referenda are a new phenomenon. But when political leaders begin applying it to EU policies – which are always the product of multilateral horse-trading in Brussels – it could grind the already slow-moving European legislative machine-work to a halt.
In some ways, the rash of referenda is a bit of birds coming home to roost. Founders of the European project were overtly elitist about how they went about integration. “I thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of a community of which they had no practical experience,” Jean Monnet, the intellectual godfather of the EU, once famously said. In more recent times, referenda results were either worked around – after France and the Netherlands rejected the EU’s “constitutional treaty” in 2005 it was largely rebranded the “Lisbon treaty” with tweaks that made plebiscites unnecessary – or re-run. Ireland voted twice on both the Nice and Lisbon treaties after rejecting them the first time around.
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