European Union

A Russian court has sentenced Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist for US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), to 6-1/2 years in prison for spreading false information about the Russian army, the court revealed on Monday (22 July).

Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign in the battleground state of Wisconsin on Tuesday (23 July) for the first time as a presidential candidate after enough Democratic delegates pledged to endorse her, clearing her path to the nomination.

Even with US sanctions in place, fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor and his affiliates continue to spread Russian disinformation in Moldova using the social media platform Facebook.

Russian forces are conducting drills involving Yars mobile nuclear missile launchers, Russian media reported on Tuesday (23 July), in what would be the second such exercise in less than a month.

The United Arab Emirates hopes to reactivate trade talks with the European Union by the end of the year, the UAE trade minister said on Monday (22 July), and is optimistic the talks would be bilateral.

Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Monday (22 July) he had been "scared" by Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro's warning of a "bloodbath" if he loses elections on Sunday.

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković on Monday (22 July) criticised the mayor of tourist resort Dubrovnik for publicly using a slogan of the country's World War II pro-Nazi regime.

It’s a busy summer for the European Parliament, with this week seeing the formation of committees and MEPs voting on the committee chairmanship on Tuesday (23 July). 

The EMA’s safety committee, which keeps a watchful eye on the safety of all medicines for human use in the EU, has elected a Swedish member, Ulla Wändel Liminga, as its new chair for a six-year term. 

Local authorities are failing to crack down on illegal imports of medicines from Asia. A truck smuggling 114,000 packages of medicines has been seized by Bulgarian authorities at a Turkish-Bulgarian border crossing.

Europe has vast differences in the stages of a medicine’s journey, from approval to pricing, and reimbursement, leading to significant delays and unequal patient access - often depending on a patient's residence.

In a rebuke of Hungary's controversial solo diplomatic efforts on Ukraine, the EU's informal meeting of foreign and defence ministers will take place in Brussels instead of Budapest, the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell said on Monday (22 July).

Tensions between Meta and the EU intensified on Monday (22 July), with the European Commission and European consumer authorities saying the US tech giant may be breaching consumer protection law with its “pay or OK” model.

The European Commission has accepted commitments by Vifor, part of the global biotechnology giant CSL, to redress what it said was possible unfair "disparagement" of Danish company Pharmacosmos.

‘Decenter:  to cause to lose or shift from an established center or focus. Especially: to disconnect from practical or theoretical assumptions of origin, priority, or essence’ (Thesaurus dictionary, 2024).

 

The call for decentring European studies has grown stronger and louder by the year. The need for a re-thinking of Eurocentrism in EU external action has been undeniable – one could think about the example of the (in)famous speech Borrell delivered in November 2022 at the College of Europe, whereby he made clear that the EU is a well-tended garden whose ‘gardeners’ shall, at all costs, protect it from the jungle threatening its borders.

 

Even though the decentring agenda is known mainly in academia and selected policy circles, the importance of bringing this discussion one step further is increasingly such in a growing complex world, whereby issues of race, inequality, and coloniality are becoming increasingly central. This blog argues that this agenda should be further radicalised and (re)constructed because, in its current formulation, it carries two main dangers: creating dynamics of ‘Othering’ and promoting forms of ‘narcissistic recentering’. This argument is based on the draft review paper on decentring presented at the UACES Graduate Forum, where I critically analyse over 30 academic publications that embrace and operationalise the decentring agenda.

 

The decentring framework as it is currently conceived welcomes us to reason in three fundamental steps: provincializing, engaging, and reconstructing. The three intellectual steps would allow both academics (and, one day, policymakers) to engage in an interesting exercise: first, provincializing means abandoning Eurocentric ontological and epistemological frames, moving beyond the ever-historical, cultural, racial, political, and social centrality of Europe as the ultimate model to imitate economically, socially, and politically. Secondly, engaging means entering relations with partners (or ‘Others’ more in general) to discover their own historical, cultural, social, and political structures – how they matter, how they came to be, and how they relate to “ours”. Finally, reconstructing means bringing the two perspectives together – but in an optic to make the European Union a more legitimate and stronger actor on the global scene, rather than to even more strongly recognize the need to provincialize our understanding of the world.

 

These intellectual steps come together as a sort of Hegelian dialectics, whereby a thesis (the EU) meets an antithesis (the ‘Others’) to engage in a synthesis (understanding each other better) which, however, is dangerously producing and reproducing hierarchies of power that are currently structuring our world.

 

First, the provincializing exercise should be one of re-learning, more than un-learning, first and foremost to understand that ‘Others’ also form part of our shared history, and their values, world views, struggles and identities have been profoundly shaped, altered, and directed by their relationship to Europe, through colonial exploitation and violence. Ignoring dynamics of co-constitution, especially with specific regions of the world where colonialism had its most significant impact, means rejecting in the first place the provincialisation effort that the framework prays for in the first place. Re-learning, rather than unlearning, is fundamental in disentangling complex dynamics of co-creation, while, at the same time also seeking to understand, to uncover and to incorporate those epistemologies and ontologies that were silenced during colonial times. This intellectual engagement is much more complex than simply looking into how “different” others seemingly are from the European model. Decentring would mean eliminating the idea that Europe is the model in the first place.

 

Secondly, from this reasoning, it naturally follows that the step of engagement derives directly from the genuine need to re-learn, together with un-learning, to abandon existing hierarchies that put Europe at the center.

 

Thirdly, reconstruction should not consist of a ‘narcissistic recentering’ exercise – reconstruction should not be about making the European Union stronger, more legitimate, and more capable of ‘extracting’ good deals from its partners. It should be about reparative justice, the destruction of built-in hierarchies, and the end of Western capitalism as the go-to models that the world should adhere to. It should be about recovering and uncovering common epistemologies and ontologies that would make the world a more diverse, inclusive, and just.

 

To do so, the European Union – and by that, I mean both the academics studying it, and the policymakers building it – should come to terms with a complex past, built around civilisational hierarchies and race, whose consequences are still impacting third countries and ‘internal Others’ in the EU to this day, but are too often left invisible.

The post A reflection around decentering European studies appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

With over 400 million tons of plastic produced annually worldwide, half of which is designed for single use, and less than 10% recycled, the need to improve circularity is imperative. The upcoming delegated act from the Single-Use Plastics Directive (SUPD) could provide much-needed clarity on recycled plastic content and support this innovative solution for greater plastic circularity.

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Renault's CEO Luca De Meo expressed doubts over the timeline for transitioning to electric vehicles in Europe, adding the carmaker has to bring down costs if it wants to deliver on its EV goals.

As Paris makes final preparations for the Summer Olympics, the grand opening ceremony along the river Seine on Friday (26 July) has created an unprecedented security challenge that organisers hope won't dampen the party vibe.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's decision not to back Ursula von der Leyen as European Commission chief was driven by fear of losing rightwing grassroots supporters, analysts say, but may curb her influence over EU choices.