Ideas on Europe Blog

In theory, building a tall structure has no upper limit.  Given a sufficiently large base resting on bedrock, the right materials and deep pockets, a skyscraper could literally reach the upper atmosphere and even beyond.  This architectural fact was discovered millennia ago, but only came into its own in the period of Europe’s great Gothic cathedrals.  Once the problem of supporting the outer walls was solved with ‘flying buttresses’ and other techniques, medieval builders were soon engaged a fierce and expensive competition to outdo one another.  At Chartres, Reims, Cologne, Paris and countless other cities, civic leaders vied with one another in an expensive and lengthy contest with their neighbours to build taller and more elaborate cathedrals to demonstrate their faith, wealth, ingenuity and pride.

This enterprise, sometimes called the ‘Gothic imperative’ by historians, came to a sudden and dramatic halt in the French city of Beauvais.  Visit today, and one learns that this rather strange structure was begun in 1225 by Bishop Milo of Nanteuil and financed by his family.  Even as it is, the Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais is regarded as a typical example of French Gothic – minus one important feature: its tower.  Intended to be the tallest structure in the world at the time, the architects and craftsmen pushed this defining feature of the medieval Gothic church to an extraordinary 153 meters, the height of a modern fifty story skyscraper.  Then, in 1573, having tested the technology of the time to its limits, the tower collapsed, and with it Beauvais’ hope of becoming the proud centre of dominance in stone and mortar of human endeavour.  Cathedral construction in Europe continued, but with far less hubris and arrogance.  Architects and their patrons across the continent were duly chastised, and literally “went back to the drawing boards.”  The Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais remains unfinished to this day, a testament to the folly of over ambitious goals.

Now, many of Europe’s leaders seem obsessed with another ‘imperative’ – the construction of a federal state, what many refer to as the ‘United States of Europe’.  Their rationale is persuasive.  More than two dozen modern nations, joined in creating a ‘supernation’ with a central government, finance system, foreign policy and trade relations with the rest of the world, perhaps even an army, and a population of more than 500 million. A truly united Europe is an attractive and appealing prospect, the logical outcome of the dream of the European Union’s idealistic founders who wanted a continent united in peace and prosperity.

Since it appears to be the model, perhaps the ‘United States of America’ itself is worthy of closer examination in terms of its own path to unity and federation.  How did it come about? What is the ‘glue’ that holds it together? And crucially, is it the model Europe should follow?

§

“Politics follows nationality wherever politics is free.” The view of American political scientist Michael Walzer.  He points out that from Plato through Marx to the near present, all political thinkers have assumed “One people equals one nation.”  He adds: “The only exception to this is the United States.”

Take a typical American street in an archetypal American Midwestern town, say, Lafayette, Indiana. Roberts Street in this very ordinary community is short, less than a half mile long.   Perhaps forty homes line the leafy avenue, stretching from a small local factory at one end to a school at the other.  When the first grade teacher at Linwood School, Mrs Goris, (Dutch) calls the roll of her six-year-olds, the names sound strange to the English ear: “Sietsma, Hockema, Van de Graaf, Dwyer, Korschatt, Buit, Wieringa, Kellogg, Niemansverdriet, Klaiber, Grey” and on.

This is the exception Walzer means.  Each of the families these children represent can trace their American identity back no more than one or two – or, at a stretch – three generations.  They are of Dutch, Irish, German, Italian, Czech, Scot and English descent.  Indeed, many of their grandparents would struggle with the English the children readily use each day.  Somehow, these disparate peoples – mostly European migrants – left behind their European identity, much of their culture, their ancient rivalries, and ultimately their language to become something new and different: Americans.

They are the product of the largest single voluntary peacetime migration in world history, and it took place largely in the 19th century.  Within decades of their arrival – mostly through Ellis Island in New York Harbour – Chicago had more Poles than Warsaw, New Jersey more Italians than Milan, New York more Jews than Tele Viv, and Cincinnati more Germans than Cologne.  Later they would be followed by wave after wave of Hispanics whose arrival would eventually make America the third largest Spanish-speaking country on Earth after only Mexico and Spain itself.   The ‘melting pot’ was truly blending mankind’s many ‘flavours.’  It continues to this day – America is genuinely a ‘work in progress’, unfinished but with a clear trajectory, a ‘nation of nationalities.’  It justifies E pluribus unum, the Latin slogan that appears on everything from the Presidential seal to dollar bills, “Out of many, one.”

These immigrants were to make their new homes in a democratic republic, the first to be freely established since the ill-fated Roman endeavour two millennia before.  Moreover, it was a federal republic, what the Merriam-Webster dictionary says is a nation -

formed by a compact between political units that surrender their individual sovereignty to a central authority but retain limited residuary powers of government

The founders of this new and revolutionary project, were very nervous, fearful even, of central government.  Their carefully worded constitution for the thirteen original states made it clear that only those powers that the states specifically delegated were to be exercised by a central governing authority located in the new capital of Washington.  This historically unique limitation on power was the defining characteristic of the new Republic of the United States of America.  For the next two centuries, indeed, to this day, it was to become the main focus for political turmoil and eventually, a bitter and costly civil war.

After all, the thirteen had only come together in the Philadelphia meeting in 1787, eleven years after the American Revolution that had separated all of them from the British Crown of George III.  Their first years were not happy ones.  As former colonies their rivalries and differing views about the future soon surfaced, and the nascent national government spent much of its time arbitrating their many disputes.  Something had to be done.  Their shared experience against the British, their isolation from Europe, their fear of another war with their former colonial master, their problematic relationship with the native American Indian tribes among them, and now the recognition that they needed to act in greater harmony – all provided the reasons behind the gathering in Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence itself had been signed.  It was May of 1787.

These were all ‘transplanted’ Europeans.  The infant Congress had asked each of the thirteen states to send representatives to the Pennsylvania.   Fifty-five, representing the four million citizens of the newly independent colonies, were to craft a new agreement or alter the existing one.  That became the central question: “Do we fix the present government we have, set up in haste in the days and weeks after the Revolution, or do we create a new one?” Were they thirteen individual nations in need of a supra-national agency to do their bidding, or where they a country requiring a central government?

When the latter was agreed, their attention turned to a myriad of details focusing on how much power this new national institution was to have, and what was to be retained by the former colonies.  Some argued that ‘States Rights’ should be enshrined in the document.  Others wanted a stronger central government.  The result was the Tenth Amendment, an attempt to disperse and weaken any attempt by future Presidents and Congresses to accumulate more and more power to themselves.  As James Madison, an advocate of a new central government, wrote:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace negotiation, and foreign commerce; the powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.

Incorporated into the famous Bill of Rights – itself a historic departure from any system of government in the past – the Amendment comprised a mere 28 words:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The fundamental premise of a new federal government had now been agreed.

§

In the first half of the nineteenth century, arguments over states’ rights arose in the context of slavery. From the 1870s to the 1930s, economic issues shaped the debate. In the 1950s racial segregation and the civil rights movement renewed the issue of state power.  Were the fears of the signers of that new constitution justified?  Almost certainly, few would today recognise the structure of the government they fashioned or had in mind, one in which in Lincoln’s memorable words was to be “for the people, by the people and of the people.”

When an American President can threaten lawsuits and withdrawal of federal aid to local schools that refuse to let transgender pupils use toilets matching their gender identity; when the FBI can steadily expand its jurisdiction over a wider and wider range of crimes, all at the expense of local law enforcement agencies; when the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Congress exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce when it extended federal minimum wage and overtime standards to state and local governments; when Presidents and Republican and Democrat lawmakers in Washington  push for even more federal regulations, laws that would pre-empt state statutes, especially state laws that attempt to regulate financial corporations and other types of business – then it is clear that the 250 year old battle by state governors, state legislatures, local mayors, city and county councils to cling to their ‘reserved powers’, has lost ground, a continues to do so.   Even the effort to reverse the trend by one of America’s most popular presidents, former California governor, Ronald Reagan, failed, prompting him to remark: “The most alarming words in our language are: ‘I’m from your federal government and I am here to help.’”

Americans wrestled then, and continue to this very day, with the ‘dual sovereignty’ concept behind the thinking of the framers of the country’s constitution.  Remarkably, much of the heated language in the recent debate in Britain about the future course of the European Union would be recognised by those early American statesmen.   Substitute ‘Brussels’ for Washington and ‘State’s Rights’ for national sovereignty, ‘federal government’ for the European Commission, and you have an uncanny yet almost identical echo of the phrases any historian of the American experience would immediately recognise. Moreover, the vote to leave by more than half of the participating British electorate gives real meaning to Professor Walzer’s observation that “Politics follows nationality wherever politics is free.” Walzer’s prescient views are contemporary and clearly have relevance today.  But he comes as the latest in a long line of scholars and political philosophers who have tried to unravel the complex knot we know as ‘nationality.’  Many of them were European, for whom understanding nationality essentially meant fathoming the reasons behind the most puzzling conundrum in Europe’s long history – why so many wars?

Indeed, it largely goes unremarked that Europe has been a uniquely dangerous place in modern times.  The conflicts that have involved European nations over the last two centuries alone total nearly 150, from the hideous World Wars which began in Europe and then engulfed the entire planet, to countless smaller and forgotten civil confrontations and uprisings. The unmistakeable conclusion? Europeans have often resorted to violence to resolve many of their differences, behaviour that contrasts sharply with their self-image as the seat of modern civilisation and culture.  Sadly, they continue into our own day.

§

“We were not allowed to go into this room.” Marie-Helene Von Mach is showing the BBC’s Allan Little the Belgian country house where she had a modest role in the founding of the European Union. “I was only twenty, and a typist for all of these important people.”  The building is Chateau de Val Duchesse, which in the summer of 1956 was where Marie-Helene reported at eight o’clock each morning.  She was sworn to secrecy about the goings-on inside this former priory, built in 1780.

The “important people” can be compared to those American patriots who gathered in Philadelphia in the 18th century.  And the Chateau was the equivalent of Independence Hall, except for one fact: only a handful of selected government officials and senior civil servants knew what was happening within the walls of Val Duchesse.  Allan Little takes up the story:

This is where they wrote the Treaty of Rome.  Its driving force was Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian foreign minister who would go on to become secretary general of Nato. Like most Europeans of his generation, Spaak had lived his entire life in the shadow of war: twice in 30 years, conflict between France and Germany had led to a global conflagration that had now left Europe in ruins. The six nations (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) that gathered at Val Duchesse that summer had something in common: they had seen democracy and individual liberty swept away by dictatorship; national sovereignty swept away by invasion, military defeat and foreign occupation. The leaders of all six had lost faith in national sovereignty; they wanted to build a new kind of political Europe.

Intent on creating a United States of Europe, Spaak and his dedicated colleagues worked almost entirely behind the walls of the Chateau.  Only a handful of high-ranking politicians in the participating countries had any idea what was going on.  Allan Little again:

Marie-Helene and the others had to sign contracts which banned them from talking about their work, even to their families.  There was little reference to public opinion; the political elites laboured on in splendid isolation.

What Marie-Helene was typing, and re-typing, were drafts of the Treaty of Rome, Europe’s equivalent of the American Constitution.  But there was no public debate, and certainly no media coverage, meaning that the European Community we know today, and that Britain has just voted to leave, could be seen as an elitist, ‘top-down’ endeavour that, once agreed by the six nations, would be presented to their people as a fait accompli, suggesting a kind of intellectual arrogance that Americans find baffling.  Why?  As Little notes: “From the beginning they struck a tone that dogs the European project to this day: they worked largely in secret…”

In contrast, the fifty-five delegates from the thirteen colonies who began their work in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787, were very well informed about the voters’ views on their assignment.  When the early and soon-to-be replaced Congress resolved to set up the constitutional convention in the February of that year, the act became a major news story.

In his Selling of the Constitutional Convention, American historian John K. Alexander closely follows the news coverage the Congressional resolution provoked.  More than half of the young nation’s nearly sixty newspapers quoted the entire resolution, and soon their readers and columnists took up what was to become a heated debate.  Rivalries and fears were played out, and the shortcomings where one state accused another became front page news.  Rhode Island, for example, was seen as a hotbed of anti-federalist intrigue. But overwhelmingly, the press supported a stronger central government, with one writer arguing that without robust federal institutions, tyranny, anarchy or worse – the complete failure of the American experiment – would result. The delegates at Philadelphia were listening.

§

Political legitimacy derives from openness, surely a truism in the affairs of a nation, or, in this case, a group of nations, whether American or European.  In creating any supra national institution, from the United Nations to the World Bank to the International Court of Justice, there is much to overcome.  Above all is nationalism, the almost unexplainable feeling of loyalty we have to the place where we were born, simply because we were born there.  But it is far from that simple.  Long before Paul-Henri Spaak and his colleagues began their mission, determined to unify Europe for all time, a distinguished 19th century French philosopher made it clear that neither race, religion, geography, nor even a community of interests were sufficient to create a nation.

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received. Man does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate: our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past with great men and glory (I mean true glory) is the social capital upon which the national idea rests. These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered.

Ernest Renan, writing in 1882.  From Brittany, Renan was one of France’s leading scholars and historians.  In the same treatise, he prophetically added: “Nations are not eternal. They have a beginning and they will have an end. A European confederation will probably replace them.”

Indeed, now a ‘confederation’ is building, much of its foundation in place, the edifice climbs higher and higher.  The architects of a united Europe seem confident of success, as confident as those medieval artisans of Beauvais.  The stunted Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais remains today a reminder of what can go wrong with the best of plans.  Indeed, it might be visible from the top floor of the Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels, even from the offices of Jean-Claude Junker, the President. He’s on the 13th floor.

The post Europe’s Halting Struggle Towards Federation appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Look! A distraction!

Another day, another upheaval in British politics. In the 21 days since the EU referendum, we’ve had more changes of more consequence than in any time since the second world war.

All very grand to say that, but where are we going with all this?

Until yesterday, it was very hard to say, precisely because so much was up in the air. However, with Theresa May’s installation as Prime Minister and his first round of senior appointments to her Cabinet we now have a bit more of a clue.

The starting point is that there is no Tory split, and there is little chance of one any time soon. With the speedy and painless removal of Cameron and Osborne, May has led the pragmatists that make up the bulk of the parliamentary party over to a Brexiting position and brought in the more genuinely sceptic into some positions of consequence. We can take the comparison with Labour as the most instructive one here.

May is also trying to not be overly-defined by Brexit – to listen to her speech outside Number 10 last night, it was only a part of her bigger project to tackle social injustices – and so she has taken several steps to try and achieve this.

The first is to ensure Leavers got the Brexit briefs. David Davis will head up the new department running the negotiations with the EU27, while Liam Fox takes on the establishment of new trading links with the rest of the world. This makes it much harder for critics to say May is backsliding in her approach, but it also ring-fences Brexit so that other ministers have half a chance to get on with their own projects. That’s a sensible move, if an optimistic one: as Brexit proceeds, it’s clear that it will touch (or, more accurately, go to the heart of) many areas of public policy, so May will find herself arbitrating more and more between competing dynamics.

Secondly, she’s played the distraction card, early and hard.

It would be fair to say that in the round ofi nterviews I’ve done since last night, the main topic has been Boris Johnson. I’ve been asked why he got appointed, was he any good, and was it true he ruffles his hair to make it look even more dishevelled than it seems. Let’s tackle the first two elements of this.

Johnson has been brought in close to May by his selection as Foreign Secretary. He was clearly as shocked as everyone else by the decision, because he’d worked out the consequences.

Cast out by his failure to contend the Tory leadership, he looked like toast, destined for a career on TV chat shows. But May has taken the emblematic Brexiteer and stuck him in a position that plays to his strengths, while also limiting his capacity to cause trouble, either for the UK or for May.

It’s fair to say that the past couple of decades have seen a considerable down-grading of the status of foreign ministers, especially in Europe. Prime Ministers and Presidents have become much more engaged in international diplomacy (think of the EU, but also the G7 or G20): at the same time, the intrusion of international cooperation into the full spectrum of public policy has meant other ministers also are taking more of a role. Consequently, foreign ministers’ traditional gate-keeping role has shrunk considerably. They now do some coordination, manage a centre of diplomatic expertise and sell their country around the world.

Seen in that light, Johnson is ideal as Foreign Secretary: charismatic, charming, intelligent, multilingual. Yes, he’s got some apologies to make, but as the UK’s salesman, he’ll do a stand-up job.

Moreover, recall that he’ll be a Foreign Secretary deprived of the two key tasks he might have done: re-forming the UK’s relationship with the EU, and setting up new trading arrangements with everyone else. A man who’ll be spending much of his time on a plane to press the flesh is also a man with less energy and less opportunity for plotting. And ultimately, if he’s no good at his job, he’ll not be able to blame anyone else: it’s not a push to imagine May say, more in sorrow than anger, that Johnson is simply not up to the job and she’ll have to move him on (and out).

So far, then, so clever. Unite the party, sell potential opponents a dummy [sic], contain Brexit and generally make a good fist of things. What could go wrong?

Plenty.

Firstly, we still lack a clear timetable on Article 50 notification. Logically, this will still be in the autumn, when the new government is a bit clearer about things. The EU27 will wait until then too, because they have process and substance debates to settle themselves. But if we get to October without a firm date for notification, then things get much harder for May. The EU27 will be very unhappy (but will have to wait), markets will start making waves, and Brexiteers will start wondering what’s going on.

This said, it’s hard to see this being an issue, as May looks to be very firmly pursuing Brexit, albeit on her timetable and terms. It’d be surprising if we don’t have some indication in the next week on this.

Secondly, there’s the containment issue mentioned above. Brexit is almost inevitably going to eat up much government time and effort, both on the big questions and the fine print. Even if Article 50 is essentially a process of the UK deciding whether to accept the EU27′s offer – rather than a negotiation of equals – there’s still lots of scope for disagreement and surprise.

And this leads to the third element. As decisions and choices are made, some people are going to be unhappy. The Brexit coalition was always far too broad to be satisfied by any given deal, so May has to decide who she’s going to annoy. Right now, that looks like being the harder end of the spectrum, who reject the EEA/Norwegian style model that May seems to favour.

That’s not only an issue with the public, but also within the party. Recall that there is a very small majority, so it only takes a small number of rebels to make May’s life very hard, especially because she doesn’t look like someone going for a snap election.

This is the final paradox. An autumn election would be a distraction, but it would strengthen May’s personal mandate and muzzle Tory critics much more (both through the manifesto commitments and the likely increase in Tory majority). Unfortunately, this is a card she can best play now: if she waits until things look more tricky, then the benefit is likely to be much smaller.

If the past three weeks have been unsettled, then you shouldn’t hold out for a quiet summer.

The post May’s foreign policy gambit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Long-time readers of this blog will remember my (past) obsession with the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) thanks to my PhD research on information flows in EU policy-making during the recent CFP reform.

In a new paper posted on arxiv.org by titled “Exploring the Political Agenda of the European Parliament Using a Dynamic Topic Modeling Approach“, Derek Greene and James P. Cross look into the question what topics are discussed in MEPs’ speeches from 1999-2014 and how to detect this with text mining.

On page 23 of the paper, they show a chart with the number of MEP speeches relating to EU fisheries policy, with a visible spike in the 2009-13 period (my PhD looked in particular at 2009-11), i.e. during the time of the recent CFP reform, with additional spikes at key events.

[Chart from p. 23 about here, will ask the authors whether I can use it]

The authors argue on the following page that:

“As can be seen, MEPs pay a reasonably stable level of attention to fisheries between 2000 and 2010. This trend is interrupted in 2010, when MEP attention to fisheries increases.”

What is ignored in this interpretation is that there had already been a  CFP reform in the early 2000s, including with a 2001 Green Paper on CFP reform. However, different to the 2009 Green Paper, there was no spike in 2001 and also no spike after the 2002 reform proposal was published in late May 2002. I suppose that MEPs’ attention where probably as high back than as it was in the 2010s, but the competencies of the EP to deal with this topic was lower.

Assuming that the data is correct, it shows that making the EU Parliament a co-legislator in core CFP matters under the Lisbon Treaty has made a big difference between 2001-02 and 2009-13. I didn’t study the 2002 reform for my PhD, but one could also assume that the difference in public attention by MEPs in the 2000s and 2010s may also have had different effects on media and general public attention to the topic of EU fisheries policy in both periods.

These observations don’t change the overall argument of the paper by Greene and Cross (where CFP is anyway just one of several topics and by far not the focus). Strictly speaking, it could also be put in line with a more complex view of the punctuated equilibrium theory that they refer to to explain the 2010s spike. But since the paper is just on arxiv.org, I still thought to point this out for the CFP, supposing there is time to reflect this in a version that might go into peer review.

What the data for EU fisheries policy shows in any case is that the agenda dynamics observed by the authors through their data also have to do with the overall competencies of the European Parliament. These have changed over time, not least through the Lisbon Treaty, bringing new topics at the centre stage of the plenary, something that probably will come up quite frequently in the analysis on other policies, too. 

The post What a difference a Treaty makes: CFP reform debates in the 2000s and 2010s appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Drove back from Germany with enough Dylan CDs to cover the ten-hour drive. And had a revelation! This unequalled expert in messy break-ups sounded like he was commenting Brexit in every second song! It’s even possible to put together a full heart-breaking post-referendum dialogue only using Dylan quotes:

UK:

I’ll make my stand and remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn.[1]

EU:

What was it you wanted? Tell me again so I’ll know.
We can start it all over, get it back on the track… [2]

UK:

Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb,
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from.[3]

EU:

I know you haven’t made your mind up yet, but I would never do you wrong,
I’ve known it from the moment that we met, no doubt in my mind where you belong![4]

UK:

The walls of pride are high and wide, can’t see over to the other side.[5]
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone.[6]

EU:

That’s how it is when things disintegrate.[7]
One more cup of coffee for the road?[8]

UK:

Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay…[9]

EU:

You must leave now, take what you need you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.[10]

Conclusion to the whole drama:

We live in a political world, where courage is a thing of the past.[11]

Albrecht Sonntag,
@albrechtsonntag

[1]              Restless farewell (from The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964)

[2]              What Was It You Wanted? (from Oh Mercy, 1989)

[3]              Not Dark Yet (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)

[4]              Make You Feel My Love (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)

[5]              Cold Irons Bound (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)

[6]              Dirt Road Blues (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)

[7]              Can’t Wait (from Time Out of Mind, 1997)

[8]              One More Cup of Coffee (from Desire, 1975)

[9]              Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1962)

[10]             It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue ( from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

[11]             Political World (from Oh Mercy, 1989)

The post A slow train coming up around the bend appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The Paris Agreement opens a whole new chapter in the history of climate change governance, which will also require a paradigm shift in research. What are the main challenges in bringing about this shift?

A remarkable feature of the 2015 Paris Agreement is that it allows countries to draw on a vast array of governance options to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change. And yet, knowledge about these governance options remains scarce. Even more complex is the issue of how to address climate change more effectively. How can well performing policies be diffused more rapidly and effectively? How can their effectiveness in reaching different types of climate-related goals be better assessed? Will citizens accept future costs and/or change their behaviour? Providing answers to these questions challenges researchers to clearly identify and devise potential remedies.

Fifteen early career researchers based at several European universities met in February 2016 to discuss these very issues. The two-day workshop “Understanding data frontiers in climate governance research” was hosted by the Department of Political Science of the University of Zurich. While aspiring to respond to the questions posed earlier goes beyond our scope, in this post, we want to draw on the discussions around them that took place during the workshop.

Workshop participants in discussion

The Paris Agreement represents a paradigm shift for climate policy and challenges regarding its implementation and evaluation have been mentioned elsewhere already. Little attention has however been paid to the data-related obstacles to governing climate change after Paris. This is what we focused on during the workshop and would like to briefly outline here.

Firstly, it is clear that no one policy can address the complex task of mitigating climate change alone. This means that we need to consider policy mixes – the interactions between all policies – and also other governance arrangements, including private ones – that may impact climate-related goals in a specific jurisdiction, even if these policies are not specifically meant to address climate change. But, what are relevant policies and how do we assess them? How can their effects be assessed and weighted against each other? Crucially, what data and information do we need to successfully identify and evaluate these policy mixes? From this, it becomes evident that there is an overwhelming need to employ existing – and built new – indices and databases in innovative ways building on bottom-up contributions coming from state and non-state actors. One needs to keep in mind too that for the first time in history Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) have been prepared by 189 countries (latest being Guyana’s submission on 20th May 2016), so that information will be needed for a much larger set of countries than ever before.

With regards to climate change adaptation, the picture is especially unclear. A topic that has been heatedly debated since the early 2000, many scientific discussions still focus on establishing what adaptation measures really comprise. In a research field where many different ideas and concepts exist but data is scarce and often contested, efforts to track adaptation in a systematic manner are not only welcomed but greatly needed. The fact that nation states are now formally yet not bindingly requested by the UNFCCC to report their strategies and measures for adaptation, is a useful tool for comparative climate change research. However, particularly for the case of adaptation this comes with a range of challenges. Adaptation policies have implications for an array of different sectors and often, policy choices are constrained by decisions taken at the national level while benefits of adaptation measures are predominantly expected at the local level.

Finally, the change of paradigm requires a better understanding of drivers of policy change, because states will be expected to improve their climate-related policies and commitments in five-year cycles. They will thus need to know how to best encourage those policies that work better. This aspect is probably the most political of the ones featured. However, so far we do not have sufficient systematic information about, for example, the positions that political parties have on issues closely related to climate change mitigation or adaptation. Some recent experimental research has provided insights into citizens’ needs and motivations regarding climate policy.

Beyond the traditional role of states in climate governance, the Paris Agreement highlights the role of non-state actors and how they can cooperate with states in a way that catalyses efforts to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action. Also in this area there is substantial room for improvement. Given the myriad of non-state initiatives that seem to emerge, and how they are strongly interlinked, having comprehensive and accurate information regarding their goals, scope, membership and actual implementation is extremely challenging. Many datasets are emerging that seek to address this goal. However, the available information particularly on effects and effectiveness remains very limited.

The workshop proposal has been jointly written by the Early Career Investigators Network of the COST-funded action INOGOV. The participants owe special thanks to Paula Castro and Jonas Schoenefeld, who dedicated a lot of time and effort to organize this event. The workshop would not have happened without the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The authors wanted to thank Paula Castro, Sebastian Sewerin and Jonas Schoenefeld for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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What have Brexit and England in the 2016 UEFA Euro Cup in common? Defeat for some, happiness for others. What have David Cameron and Roy Hodgson in common? A sad resignation for some, the beginning of a new era for others.

Having a crucial referendum and an important football match within just a few days can have massive impacts on their outcomes. The overall assumption, that if England got kicked out the Euro Cup before the UK’s EU referendum more people would have voted forleave,is thankfully not relevant as it was not the case. There are nevertheless some interesting parallels of the EU referendum and England’s performance in the Euro Cup.

The last couple of days have been very eventful, yet also tempestuous and chaotic. Towards the end of the campaigns around the UK’s EU referendum, which took place on 23 June 2016, tensions between the Remain camp and the Leave side heated up. The tone of campaigning on both sides became as ugly as the behaviour of supporters of the English national football team. Politicians and many others involved in the Brexit/Bremain campaigns made unattainable goals and promises, and triggered a high number of xenophobic comments around the country which have seen significant increase since the announcement of the win for the Brexit camp.

On the other hand, English football fans have done a great job in receiving more attention than their football team. Even before the kick-off, English football fans clashed with the counter-parts on the Russian sides on 11 June in Lille. With the elimination of the English team as well as others who had troubles with their supporters, hopes are high that the upcoming matches will focus rather on football than on clashes among hooligans.

Interestingly, both the EU referendum and England’s participation in the Euro Cup have resulted in what was against the odds, at least if you believe the Evening Standard, Politico and alike.

So, what has been happening since the outcome of the EU referendum and England’s elimination from the Euro Cup? The Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned, hence the UK is in need of a new Prime Minister, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party have entered a state of internal fragmentation, and the country’s economy and society have stepped into a stage of uncertainty. Similarly, Roy Hodgson has also resigned as manager of the English football team and thus it is looking for a new manager to replace him, England has yet to wait for a victory in a major football competition since it became world champion in 1966, and English football has soon to deal with the consequences of Brexit, i.e., with the future of its numerous players from the European mainland.

A week after the UK’s EU referendum and just a few days after England’s departure from the 2016 Euro Cup, some lessons can be learned. First, being a partial England football supporter watching the Euros has not been much fun, especially thanks to the ‘humiliation’ about which the media is talking about. Now some are putting their hopes on Wales. Second, the contributions in the media about British politics has increasingly become monotonous — actually, this was already the case before the referendum was held. It is now time to focus the attention back to other issues, such as the current migration and refugee crisis, ongoing outbreaks of armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq, as well as the desperate need of people in South Sudan. Third, it is also time for the European Union to rethink its origins and its founding ideas. The UK is not the only country with fragmented perceptions and similar referendums might be expected in the future in any of the other 27 member states. Lastly, a final lesson learned is that referendums of such importance should not be held again during a major sports event — winning and loosing can have impacts on political elections and referendums.

By Nele Marianne Ewers-Peters, PhD Candidate, University of Kent, Canterbury

The post Brexit and the Football Euro Cup – Chaos in the Making? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

• THEY SAID that outside the EU, Britain could control migration. This would relieve on public services.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying that leaving the EU can’t radically reduce migration and that fears about immigration didn’t influence the way people voted.
• THEY SAID that we send £350m a week to the EU, which could be spent on the NHS instead.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying that the claim was a mistake. It was never promised. They’re not able to spend that much extra on the NHS.
• THEY SAID Britain doesn’t need preferential access to the EU Single Market.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying that we should have preferential access to the Single Market.
• THEY SAID there will be an end to ‘free movement of people’.
  - BUT NOW they’re talking about ‘free movement of labour’.
• THEY SAID Britain has a great future outside the EU; that we’d get out country back and ‘take control’.
  - BUT NOW they’re saying they don’t have a plan for Brexit. They never did. The government should have had a plan.

• Sources:
• BBC News​: ‘Reality Check’
• The Mirror​: What will happen to immigration into the UK after vote to leave the EU? 
• The Guardian​: ‘Leave campaign rows back on key immigration and NHS pledges’ 
• Metro​: ‘Operation Backtrack begins over THAT £350million NHS claim 
• New Statesman​: ‘Tory Brexiter Daniel Hannan: Leave campaign never promised “radical decline” in immigration’

• Click to read

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• First 7 days after Referendum shock
• Blame the politicians, not the voters
• Leave campaign is relying on lying to win
• List of the latest articles by Jon Danzig

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The #Brexit bodge: what #Leave campaigners said then, and what they say now. Share my blog: https://t.co/m2547xjJzD pic.twitter.com/UlxBu9s81D

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The post The Brexit Bodge: What they said appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola & Tamson Pietsch

Across the world, higher education is rapidly changing. Universities are increasingly seen as key engines of a ‘knowledge economy’, producing the innovation and the workers crucial to new industries. Driven by rankings that claim to measure ‘world-class’ status, and by the incentives and liberalised regulations of national governments, many universities are promoting themselves as ‘global’ institutions and competing to attract renowned researchers, international students, and grant income. These changes are profound—they reshape the long-standing relationship between universities and the nation-state, and reconstitute opportunities for social mobility, and the way millions of individuals see, understand and navigate the world. They are changes that, put simply, are deeply political.

These shifts often go under the adopted narrative of the ‘globalisation of higher education’—a discourse which tends to treat this new terrain as largely a smooth space through which people, money, and knowledge travel seamlessly, a-politically, and for the mutual benefit of all involved. Such analyses, however, tend to under-estimate the competing interests involved in these changes, and the asymmetrical power relations and political contestation at local, national and regional levels that are configuring and reconfiguring contemporary higher education in ways that go well beyond the initial expectations and imaginations of the actors involved.

To understand the ways universities are engaged in these processes we need to think in terms of a transnational politics of higher education. Higher education institutions do pull (and push) people, money, and knowledge across borders, but they do so in highly uneven ways. National, regional, and local boundaries are not simply transcended by these connections, but continually work to condition the nature of movement, and to direct and shape it. Higher education institutions find themselves operating within a transnationally striated space marked as much by difference, competition, and particularity as by the convergence around a ‘global’ model or market.

While there are common pressures that force universities to act in similar ways, these pressures are not uniform, impersonal or universal. The transnational forces of neoliberalism, global ranking systems, American hegemony, and the functional exigencies of economic integration often play out differently in different locations. And they are, moreover, continually being made and re-made by actors with a variety of objectives. Within the worlds of higher education there exists significant variation across institutions—variation that, in some cases, seems to be growing rather than diminishing. It is not apparent that developments in Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America are necessarily aiming to achieve the same ends, or even using the same methods.

Understanding the profound transformations we have seen in higher education during recent decades means attending to this variation, as well as to its causes and consequences. As argued in our recent book, it means attending to the transnational politics of higher education, and to three core attributes that help to fashion it.

The legacy of history

First, those interested in the politics of higher education in the present need to take seriously the history of the university and the ways in which its relationship with empire, nation and class is being refashioned in the era of market capitalism. It is no surprise that wealthier institutions are well placed to navigate the changing winds of local and ‘global’ imperatives. It is they who have taken the lead in offering online courses, leading big collaborative and high investment projects; they who tend to rank highly on research measures and have the ability to negotiate to their advantage with governments at home and abroad. European empires and the languages and religions that travelled with them, sit at the heart of these temporal legacies. They created deep cultural and economic infrastructures that continue to determine routes of travel and shape the global landscapes of knowledge and expertise.

Tensions in reform enactment

Second, we need to consider the way university reforms are enacted at national and institutional levels, leading to radically different outcomes in different contexts. For example, the wishes of international financial organisations or norms around academic freedom often find themselves in conflict with the wishes of national governments, local citizens or institutional administrations.

This was the case for post-apartheid higher education in South Africa where the language of the university as a site within a ‘global knowledge economy’ quickly replaced the arguments promoted by anti-apartheid activists who envisioned higher education as emphasising democratic citizenship, de-racialisation, and economic redistribution. This outcome stemmed from the interventions of international institutions, funding agencies, and philanthropic organisations, as well as domestic political actors, who favoured the language that conceptualised the university as strictly an institution of economic development. The ability of South Africans to produce their own, potentially fairly radical, understandings of higher education was thus foreclosed.

By contrast, while the so-called ‘American model’ of higher education has travelled to the Middle East in the form of branch campuses, these campuses have been required to incorporate the unique kefala system, which rigidly controls all foreign labour. As a consequence, the notion of ‘academic freedom’ supposedly embedded in the American model of higher education continually comes into conflict with very real frictions on the grounds. In these moments of tension we can begin to understand and identify the various national and international actors who have a stake in ‘globalisation’, and how they advance and protect their claims through and within it.

The rise of the regional dimension

Third, we need to develop a more careful consideration of the importance of geographic regions and the ways in which they are emerging as new players in the governance of tertiary education. As regional organisations become increasingly involved in the business of higher education, we see political processes driven by supranational forces that both work through and bypass national agencies. Yet even these regional processes are inflected by distinctive local and national pressures and ambitions.

Regional influences, for example, have been extremely powerful in ushering in reforms in Europe. Policymakers in newly emerging democracies such as Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia accepted that restructuring their national higher education system was part of the strategy to ‘return to Europe’ after the fall of Communism. University actors there also saw the opportunity provided by Europe’s Bologna Process as a way to reform university governance according to their visions of faculty independence vis-à-vis university administration, and university autonomy vis-à-vis state control. But the purposeful activation of constitutional and legal provisions, and the different national policy formulation procedures involved, has generated variations of higher education reforms in these three countries. EU efforts directed towards standardising the recruitment of researchers to higher education and research institutions have also proven to be incredibly challenging.

Similarly, governments in Asia have invested huge sums to upgrade their national flagship universities from teaching-oriented to research-intensive institution – a process that has involved alliances with foreign institutions, international staff recruitment, and attracting overseas students. But in practice the reports of scientists and scholars reveal there are still many on the ground implementation challenges especially in the realm of new ideas, critical questioning, transparent decision-making, academic independence and basic research. It is thus essential to attend to the various vested political and institutional interests during implementation to see how they translate external reforms for domestic and institutional purposes.

Navigating the contemporary higher education landscape

Universities and the individuals who work in them are both local and global actors. They are rooted in specific social, political and economic communities, yet their authority comes from their claim to be representatives of a culture and learning that is apparently ‘universal’ in that it is recognisable and even tradable beyond the boundaries of particular localities. To maintain their status and power, universities need to maintain their relevance on both fronts: they need to meet the political, economic and social needs of particular regional and national contexts, and they need to sustain their connection to changing culture and knowledge.

Far from converging around an imagined ‘American model’ or fragmenting as a consequence of ‘crisis’, across the world universities are operating as savvy political actors, working within complex, changing, and multi-scalar processes, and producing and reproducing the social world of higher education in highly heterodox ways. Seeing them in this way helps us understand the unequal geographies or ‘worlds’ that characterise contemporary ‘global higher education’, the parties who stand to lose and gain by its new alignments, and the transnational politics that helps to fashion them.

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola and Tamson Pietsch and contributors, address these questions in The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global / Transforming the Local (Routledge, 2016). You can read more at the book’s Website.

The post Towards a transnational politics of higher education appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Following the vote for the UK to leave the European Union, some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the future of UK-EU relations in the referendum aftermath:

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.

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

The post Brexit: reactions in Central and Eastern Europe appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In those circumstances, said Mr Farage, pressure would grow for a re-run of the 23 June ballot, and he would fight for a second referendum.

Well, the result yesterday was exactly 52%-48%. But of course, Mr Farage isn’t fighting for a second referendum, because it was his side that narrowly won.

But as the nation is so evenly split in two, there are now many calling for a second referendum, just as Mr Farage said he would with the same split.

Although the country as a whole voted 52-48 in favour of Leave, there are regional and national differences in that vote.

For example, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the UK’s capital, London, voted strongly in favour of remaining in the EU.

In Scotland a large majority of 62% voted for Remain, in Northern Ireland 55% and in London 60%, with some London boroughs as high as 70%.

It is now possible that Scotland will seek another referendum on their independence from the UK, no doubt so they can reapply to join the EU. That might be something Northern Ireland could also consider.

In many cities of Britain, the referendum result was practically a tie. Such as in Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham, where the voters were evenly divided 50% – 50%.

But some other towns were strongly in favour of Leave, with for example 70% of the voters in Hartlepool opting for Leave.

A split of 52-48 in favour of Leave across the country as a whole has caused deep despair and frustration for many Remain voters, just as it would have done for Leave voters if the situation had been reversed (as clearly Mr Farage thought it might be).

A more decisive referendum result, with a much larger margin, would have seemed more convincing, and possibly less bruising for almost half of the country.

In other nations, changes to a constitution – which could be considered to be akin to leaving the EU – require somewhat more than a simple majority.

In Australia, for example, a referendum is only passed if it is approved by a majority of voters in a majority of states, and by a majority of voters across the nation. This is known as a ‘double majority’.

Since Brexiteers are now wanting to import an Australian style points-system for all migrants, how would yesterday’s referendum have fared if we had imported Australia’s ‘double majority’ system?

Of course, we cannot back-date the procedure adopted for yesterday’s referendum. And it was a democratic decision of the electorate, even though wafer thin, and so no doubt it has to be accepted in good grace.

However, nothing is set in stone. Unlike most modern states, Britain doesn’t have a codified constitution. It’s up to Parliament to lead the way.

As the country is painfully split right down the middle on this issue, there could be a strong argument to hold a second referendum on whether Britain agrees with the terms of the eventual EU divorce.

There is nothing stopping Parliament offering this option if it is the will of our lawmakers.

Commented EU law expert, Professor Steve Peers of Essex University, “The government could offer people a choice between staying in the EU and accepting the terms of departure, once we know what those are.”

And since Nigel Farage said he would himself call for a second referendum if the result was 52-48, he can hardly have any grounds for complaint if this is actually what happens. We should keep reminding him of this.

• Today’s Metro​ article

• EU Referendum result: Disunion
• You won’t get your country back if you vote for a Brexit
• Leave campaign is relying on lying to win
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The post EU Referendum: Unfinished business? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

After years of speculation, months of campaigning and weeks of intense focus, the UK’s referendum on EU membership has finally arrived. As voters cast their ballots across the UK and Gibraltar, here are the key things to watch for as the results come in:

Turkey is not going to join the European Union any time soon; then what is this noise about Turkey acceding into the EU and Turkish people coming into the United Kingdom?  And so what if Turks come to the United Kingdom, there are already more than 100,000 people of Turkey live in the UK. Plus why would Turks want to come to the UK; the sun is not shining in the grey and wet UK and the Turkish economy growing better than the UK’s. Yes it is right to say that significant section of people in Turkey look up to the European culture and life style, but the rest of the Turkish population see EU as a threat to their Islamic traditions and conservatism.

Furthermore, Turkey is backsliding on democracy and drifting towards authoritarianism, so how can it meet the EU conditionality to join the EU. Having countries like Hungary and Poland in the EU as member states, which have been bluntly veering further and further towards illiberal democracies and the EU’s migration deal with Turkey– when there are critical questions about democracy, rule of law and the free press about this country– it becomes genuine worry for the Leave and Remain camps whether the EU may bend its principles as it has been doing so with Hungary, and admit Turkey into the EU regardless. Brussels must stand up to the EU’s principles if it wants maintain the EU’s credibility and unity.

The UK state policy seemed to have been to favor Turkey’s membership of the EU club since the late 1980s. There is a common agreement in the academia that the underlying reason for the UK state’s policy on Turkey’s EU membership is the UK’s fear of the EU’s deepening policies and move towards a federal club with supranational institutions. Admitting countries like Turkey, with a population of 74 million and with its endemic domestic problems and weaknesses, into the EU, the UK government believed they could to hinder and problematise Brussels’s aspirations for an ever-closer union. Since Prime Minister David Cameron have been promised by the heads of the 27 members states that the UK would able to opt out from the ever closer union clause of the EU, provided the country votes to Remain today, I believe the UK would change its attitudes towards not only on the admission of Turkey, but also on further enlargements of the EU. The British voters should not worry about further enlargements of the EU or should not vote on the basis of the EU’s possible further enlargements, because change is on the way.

That said Prime Minister David Cameron was right to say that Turkey is unlikely to join the EU until year 3000.  He was right in the sense that Turkey’s relations with the EU have been slow progressing. Neither the development of Turkey–EU relations (1959-2005) nor Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU (2005-2016) have been uninterruptedly smooth. Turkey’s first application for the Associative Membership of the EU was made in 1959, however the Turkish army’s coups of 1960, 1971 and 19 80 meant that the EU had to put on hold on all the political dialogue with Turkish authorities during these periods. Thus the EU did not sign the Customs Union with Turkey until 1995. The economic crisis of mid-1970s, inconsistent coalition governments, and the government’s handling of the Kurdish issue meant that democracy never became the only game in the town and civil liberties were barely protected in Turkey. Thus Turkey’s application for full membership was partly refused in 1989.

Furthermore to date, eleven years on Turkey began accession negotiations with the European Union on 3 October 2005, and there has not been noticeable progress in the accession process. Only fourteen negotiation Chapters had been opened to negotiations; one of these (Science and Research) was provisionally closed; and Chapter 22 (Regional Policy and Coordination of Structural Instruments) was only officially opened in November 2013. At the same time eight Chapters have been blocked by the EU Council decision over Turkey’s non-implementation of the Additional Ankara protocol since December 2006; five Chapters blocked by France since June 2007; and six Chapters were blocked by Cyprus since December 2009.

This proves the point that Turkey-EU relations have been a fluctuating one, resulting in a slow progressing relationship. Plus at the moment the future of Turkey-EU relations looks bleak than ever as Turkey slides to authoritarianism and illiberal democracy. Thus the British voters should not worry about Turkey now. The British voters should pay attention to what the benefits of the EU have been for the Europe: ‘Peace to the Western Europe’ and ‘Democracy to the Eastern Europe’.  And the EU should hold tight on to its principles, if the EU looses its credibility, it is very likely that there would be further alike referendums that could risk not only the peace and stability in Europe, but also could speed up the disintegration of the EU. This is pertinent in the light of the electoral success of the far-right political parties and rise of Euroscepticism and illiberal democracy across Europe.  I suggest the British voters should listen to arguments coming from sane voices from the remain camp clearly outlining the benefits of the preserving status of the UK within the EU rather than listening to Nigel Farage’s xenophobic comments on Turkey and immigration.

The post Why the Brits should calm down about Turkey’s possible EU membership appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Who Fishes Far recently announced the availability of new information through their pioneering database, which represents an unprecedented achievement in affording visibility to information that is rarely accessible to the public. The announcement, which can be accessed here, warns that there are some concerning gaps in the information. Amongst these, the ongoing lack of availability of a unique vessel identification number is highlighted as being of concern, despite the fact that European vessels have an authorisation number. The reason for this is that there is a recognised need for a global tool for the identification of vessels across all registries and ports. This deficiency has been of widespread concern in the sector, and has been discussed extensively in the global forum of the FAO.

IUU fishing success depends upon opacity

The absence of this vessel identification number across the spectrum of ocean going fishing and support vessels is important, because vessels flagged not just to European member states, but to the majority of distant water fishing states, are not constrained to perpetually operate under the same flag. Owners are able  to re-register vessels to other flags in pursuit of commercial or practical preferences. Through this re-registration process, the traceability of a vessel’s identity can easily be lost, and a unique vessel identifier, such as the universally acknowledged IMO number, may be the only element of permanence in what may otherwise be an unrecognisable ship.

It is clear from Interpol’s purple notices amongst other sources that a recurrent modus operandi of vessels engaged in IUU fishing operations that the masking of a vessel’s identity, nationality and history by way of frequent re-flagging is a persistent strategy adopted by IUU operators. Yet states that ostensibly subscribe to all the major international treaties on fisheries conservation and management persistently decline to make essential information available to the public.

For instance, clear registration procedures, the identity of their vessels and the licences, permits or conditions that they hold, are rarely made available even though the release of this information is in principle cost-neutral. An unfortunate recent example is the case of Thunder, whose licence status and specific reasons for de-registration have not been fully disclosed by Nigeria.

Insufficient progress despite key importance of transparency

The potential and specifics of a global record of fishing and supply vessels and reefers has been repeatedly discussed by COFI, whose strategy document makes clear that a globally adopted system of vessel identification would form the lynchpin in the convergence of IUU fishing control data-sharing, and in the coordination of regional and global control regimes. This includes the much hoped for operational success of the 2009 Port State Measures Agreement, which came into force this month, and which relies for functionality on the disclosure and availability to port authorities of key data involving vessel identity and authorisations.

In addition to vessel identification numbers, the importance of minimum standards for vessel registration procedures and their public availability for vessel verification purposes cannot be overstated: vessel registration provides a mechanism for identity traceability that can easily be lost if minimum standards, such as those set out in the 2014 Voluntary Guidelines for Flag State Performance, are not followed with rigour. The accessibility of this information in order to verify vessel identity claims should be a key feature of any public vessel register, yet it is undermined by pervasive opacity.

Conclusion

Lack of transparency is the metaphorical Achilles heel of IUU fishing control, but it is in the power of flag, coastal and port States to ensure certain key disclosures, such as vessel identity and licensing data, are made and maintained. Given that the nature of this information is commercially non-sensitive, there seems to be little justification for refusing to disclose such data.

International legislation on IUU fishing control, from the 2001 International Plan of Action, to the IUU Regulation and the Port State Measures Agreement, gravitates around the central role of the vessel in activities that can be classed as illegal, unreported and unregulated. Yet, an unidentifiable vessel is just an additional shield protecting the perpetrators.

Clearly, leadership initiatives by civil society have an important role to play, but the leverage potential of international markets should also be articulated to promote transparency. There should be little patience with current hesitancy, given that the stakes have never been higher.

The post Lack of Transparency: the Achilles Heel in IUU Fishing Control appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Not necessarily bad news? (Illustration: Michel Gaillard)

Not that anyone in Britain cares what the French think. As a matter of fact, even the French themselves don’t care that much. They have other ‘cats to whip’ as they say around here: social unrest, terrorist murders, drunk hooligans. There have been surprisingly little surveys in this normally poll-obsessed country, and while the British polls are quoted and analysed by some media, Le Monde recently simply shrugged their shoulders and drily noted that ‘In France, the Brexit provokes neither debate nor consensus‘. Others, like the financial monthly Capital, summarised the shoulder-shrugging differently: ‘Brexit? Not necessarily bad news!’.

In this context it is interesting to have a closer look at some data tables kindly provided by Céline Bracq and Gaël Sliman from the Odoxa polling institute. A poll they conducted earlier this spring for the daily newspaper Le Parisien highlights that a majority of French citizens would rather like the UK to remain in the European Union. The poll was very quickly and rather superficially quoted upon in the Financial Times, but did not seem to raise any eyebrows on the other side of the Channel. But then again: who cares in Britain what anybody else might think on the continent?

As could be expected, the data on the French attitude towards a potential Brexit reveal more about the French themselves than about the UK’s role in Europe. To no surprise they are deeply split both on UK membership, as they are on most EU matters.

One of the questions simply asked whether the Brexit referendum was ‘an important event for Europe’. It appears that the event is indeed considered important across all age groups (around 65%), but most of all among the over 65 years-old (79%). As for almost all things European, the higher the CSP or the revenues per household, the stronger the concern among respondents. More interestingly, although not too surprising for those who follow French attitudes towards Europe since the 2005 referendum, is the divergence between voters of traditional mainstream parties (they are over 80%, no matter left or right, to consider the event important) and those who find themselves close to the Front national or the extreme left-wing parties, where the scores are significantly lower.

The comparison with other European countries is also of interest. It appears that the French are less opposed to a Brexit than people in Italy, German or Spain (where between 65% and 76% of respondents declared themselves ‘favourable’ to British membership. In France only 54% have this attitude. It also seems that their patience is wearing out: in a similar poll in 2013, 58% of them were displeased with the prospect of a Brexit, today only 42% declare themselves ‘opposed’.

Finally, independently from the Brexit question, the poll also enquired about current attitudes toward the Euro. Bad news for the Front National: 68% of the French seem to be determined to keep the Euro. That’s a score that the ‘Remainers’ in a for the time being hypothetical ‘Frexit’ referendum would hardly achieve. Contradictory? Not in the French mind, it seems.

Albrecht Sonntag, EU-Asia Institute
at ESSCA School of Management.
Follow us on Twitter: @Essca_Eu_Asia

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With last than a week to go until the EU referendum, the campaigns on both sides are now in overdrive. Since late January, we have been following the social media campaigns, particularly on Twitter, to understand better the messages that different groups are making, the way in which they frame and the extent to which their followers have been picking these up. In this post, we want to bring together our weekly analyses, to give the bigger picture. With almost 28,000 tweets from ten different groups, we have been able to draw a number of basic conclusions.

Leave dominate online

Throughout this campaign, Leave groups have been both more visible and more popular than their Remain opponents. In terms of followers, this is true whether we look at the two lead groups – Vote Leave and Stronger In – or the Conservative and Labour pairs, or indeed the camps as a whole. The reasons have been rehearsed in our earlier posts, but reflect the much longer establishment of eurosceptics online, plus the more visceral nature of their campaigning. Indicative of this is the dominance of Leave.EU, which even without securing the official designation, has maintained a clear lead over any other group, with 1.5 times as many Twitter followers as all the Remain groups in our sample. The pattern is also found on Facebook.

If we consider volumes of output, then the disparity is smaller, although in only two weeks in our sample period have the Remain camp tweeted more than Leave. While the last two weeks have seen a massive increase in tweeting by the two official groups, this has still seen Leave produce more content.

The campaign has not obviously caught the public’s attention

For several months now, we have been awaiting the break-through moment of this campaign, when the man or woman on the street really gets into the debate. This would be reflected in a number of markers, including increased numbers of followers and improved rates of retweeting groups’ content. However, this has not happened so far. While Twitter follower growth has strengthened in recent weeks, it has not approached the rates seen around the time of Cameron’s European Council deal. This suggests that the majority of those who are deeply engaged with the issue have been so for a long time and the it remains a marginal issue for the large majority of voters. Clearly, this has implications for turnout, which looks set to be a key consideration in the outcome of the referendum.

Likewise, when we consider our standardised measure for audience engagement – the average number of retweets per tweet per follower – then there is no clear movement either for groups as a whole or for individual groups. If there has been any pattern then it is that the more focused groups have a generally better rate of engagement than the broader ones. Of course, this measure masks the generally larger effect of engagement by Leave, driven by the much larger follower base.

Looking at the engagement measure over time, if we compare the period before the official campaign began in mid-April with that since, then we see that rates for different type of framing generally are lower, with the partial exception of negative arguments, although this is not a significant difference.

Campaigns have become less positive over time

A long-standing discussion on this blog has concerned whether negative campaigning is as successful as it has been suggested for other elections. We discuss this below, but a more general observation is that both sides have become more negative in their framing over time. This has also been true of the three main groups: Stronger In , Vote Leave and Leave.EU.

As we noted last week, the advent of the TV debates has contributed to this very substantially, given the scope for immediate critiquing of opponents, but the trend long predates these events. Our analysis does not yet offer up a convincing explanation for why this occurs, but it will one of the avenues that we will explore in more depth in the coming months. One possibility is that there has been a shift from generic arguments to more specific reaction to events, which produces a similar type of effect to that found with the TV debates.

This shift has also resulted in a clear growth in the use of negative comments about other groups. All of the big three have seen this, again with the TV debates providing rich pickings.

Negative campaigning might work

If there has been a growth in negative framing, then it has not been an unambiguous benefit to groups. Taking our sample as a whole, we do not find that negative framings clearly out-perform positive ones on our engagement measure. Positive arguments and negative comments about other groups are neck and neck, while negative arguments and positive mentions of one’s own group trail a bit behind. Even when we break this up by weeks, there is still not a clear pattern: of particular note would be the last fortnight, which contained the TV debates, but does not show any improvement for negative frames.

The campaigns have been (mostly) consistent in their approach to twitter

Our analysis shows that there has been some notable consistency in the way the groups have used twitter throughout the course of the campaign. This is demonstrated in the 7 days snapshots of tweets for key time periods during the campaign, shown below.

In terms of issues, Leave EU’s message has been dominated by tweets about: 1) politics; 2) criticism of the EU; and 3) business, trade and the economy. We also see a drop off in the number of tweets related to their own campaign after the announcement of the designated groups on the 15th April.

Stronger In’s twitter campaign has been built primarily around business, trade and the economy, with spikes in other issues at certain times. For example, at the beginning of June there is a significant jump in the number of tweets related to domestic issues. Overall, the campaign has builts its message around a core message on business and the economy and the actions of the other campaign.

Vote Leave has conducted a very different social media campaign to Stronger In. It has used twitter to promote its own campaign efforts, rather than engaging the opposing campaign, or to focus on specific issues. Rather, the campaign has focused consistently on a range of issues – politics; domestic issues; immigration; business, trade and the economy; security – but none of these have come to dominate the campaign’s message on twitter. This is a contrast to Stronger In’s predominate focus on business, trade and the economy over other issues.

For this most recent week we have seen a jump in tweets about the opposing campaign from both the designated campaign groups. With Stronger In dedicating almost 30% of their tweets to the leave campaign, and Vote Leave just over 20%. This is in part, likely to reflect the nature of the TV debates in the last week, which formed a significant proportion of the tweets from the campaigns this week and accounts, in part, for the significant increase in the number of tweets generated (see discussion above). In contrast, the number of tweets dedicated to the other campaigns by Leave EU has been significantly lower, at around 2.5%.

The post What the EU referendum campaigns say on social media appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

With the referendum on UK EU membership fast approaching, both the Leave and Remain campaigns have put forward their views on the future of environmental policy in the UK and its relationship with the EU. This political debate raises a number of questions:  how green is the European Union; how effective or in some cases cumbersome are its regulations; will the UK be more pro-environment, or more influential outside the block. These questions have informed academic debate on EU environmental politics and policies since the early 1990s.

Twenty-four years ago a special issue in the Journal of Environmental Politics brought together for the first time research studying the ‘green dimension’ of the European integration process: from the rise of green parties in national political systems to the role of key European institutions in ‘greening’ policies (making them more environmentally-friendly) and to key concepts such as environmental policy integration. Interestingly, this first stock-taking exercise took place in the shadow of what was then felt to be a great threat for EU environmental policies: British demands for repeal and repatriation of environmental legislation in the wake of the Danish ‘no’ to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

Back then, environmental policies were at the heart of the British ‘hit list’ of policies to be repatriated. Now, environmental issues are struggling to be heard in the EU referendum debate. Over the past twenty-four years or so, researchers on EU environmental policy and politics have ploughed the furrows delineated in the 1992 special issue – investigating how green the European Parliament really is, how successful environmental policy integration has been, and the role of Green political parties and environmental groups across the EU – as well as developing new agendas for research. In the early 1990s, slow progress stimulated concerns over the implementation of EU environmental policy, while from the run-up to the Kyoto Protocol (in the mid-1990s) onward, the EU’s climate policies and its role as an environmental leader gained traction. Finally, the 2000s saw a surge in research on the effects of the EU on its member states, and the effect of the three waves of enlargement to Central and Eastern European Countries on the functioning of the EU and on its green credentials.

Interestingly, the EU UK referendum debate appears to focus more on what could happen to environmental policies were the UK to leave. But what about a Remain vote? Is the EU as ‘green’ or pro-environment as it used to be? This question was at the heart of an academic workshop (ECPR Joint-Sessions) in April 2016. Bringing together twenty-one EU environmental policy scholars, the workshop discussed emerging new dynamics and directions in EU environmental policy and politics.

The ECPR ‘Whither the Environment in Europe?’ workshop participants

Where next for the environment in Europe?

We discussed three central issues. First, the changing role of central EU institutions in environmental policy, such as the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. The Commission has conventionally been depicted as an institution churning out new legislation at great speed. By contrast, the cutting-edge research shows that the European Commission is profoundly changing, both in its inner structure and in the activities it carries out. In two of its traditionally strong sectors of activity (policy-making and enforcement) the Commission appears to be stepping back by reducing the amount of new policy proposals, and indeed, in some cases, pursuing policy dismantling. It is also actively developing concepts for environmental governance and reinforcing retrospective (ex-post) evaluation of its policies. Concomitantly, the Commission appears to allow civil society to take a more active role in checking the application of EU law, effectively outsourcing parts of its enforcement duties to environmental groups.  This, in turn, links with the role of courts, where environmental groups have gained increasing legal standing, thus potentially shifting enforcement mechanisms in the EU. A recent example if this in the UK is the victory of the environmental law firm Client Earth against the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK Supreme Court on the UK implementation of EU clean air rules in 2015.

A second set of papers considered activities in parts of the EU that have so far received less attention, such as policy implementation in the new member states, as well as the role of the EU in regional environmental regimes in the Baltic. Developing a much deeper understanding of policy dynamics at the EU’s periphery is thus one of the areas that will likely draw future attention, and it also interlinks with the broader questions on EU leadership in environmental governance and the role of its newer members, who have at times been much more reluctant to endorse ambitious policy proposals, particularly on climate change. A focus on the latter appears to be driving current environmental policy research.

Third, a number of papers picked up a return of politics and the increasing contestation of the European Union project. Linked to ideas on policy dismantling, but also the current public debates on the future of the EU, there was a real sense among workshop participants that more integration and more ambitious environmental policy isn’t necessarily the only direction of travel within the EU. This necessitates an engagement with the broader ideas of European (dis)integration, the developments at its core, the borders of the European Union, and increasingly differentiated, or regional, forms of collaboration.

Curiously, the fact that academics have increasingly focused on the minutiae of European policy making and filling gaps in knowledge about governance processes stands somewhat at odds with the ongoing societal and political debates about the future of the European integration project more generally. It appears that these ultimately political questions are forcing their way back into a field that has increasingly focused on lower-level dynamics. Much like the EU itself, the future of environmental policy in it (and its study) remain in flux.

The post Is the EU as green as it used to be? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

But whilst North Korea has cast iron sovereignty over its nation and people, in the outside world it has very little power, authority or influence.

In the modern, rational, democratic world, countries recognise that sharing some sovereignty actually increases their power and strength.

NATO countries realise that in their promise to come to the immediate aid of another NATO country under attack. That’s a classic example of sharing power and sovereignty.

‘Leave’ campaigners say that Britain was misled into thinking that the European Community was only ever about free trade. That, of course, is nonsense – which any cursory study of history will reveal.

The European Economic Community (now called the European Union) was always about a Union of countries sharing some of their power, sovereignty and strength for the common good.

Back in 1962, when Britain first applied to join the European Community, there was much talk about what impact joining would have on Britain’s sovereignty.

The then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, explained to the British people:

“Accession to the Treaty of Rome would not involve a one-sided surrender of ‘sovereignty’ on our part, but a pooling of sovereignty by all concerned, mainly in economic and social fields.

“In renouncing some of our own sovereignty we would receive in return a share of the sovereignty renounced by other members.”

Mr Macmillan added:

“The talk about loss of sovereignty becomes all the more meaningless when one remembers that practically every nation, including our own, has already been forced by the pressures of the modern world to abandon large areas of sovereignty and to realise that we are now all inter-dependent.

“No country today, not even the giants of America or Russia, can pursue purely independent policies in defence, foreign affairs, or the economic sphere.

“Britain herself has freely made surrenders of sovereignty in NATO and in many other international fields on bigger issues than those involved in the pooling of sovereignty required under the Treaty of Rome.”

Over fifty years later, one might have thought these issues would have been settled and agreed by now.

But it seems some British people (actually, they most often call themselves ‘English’ rather than British) do not accept this idea of sharing some sovereignty for the common good.

They want England to have ‘supreme power’, meaning complete sovereign rule over its nation and its people, presumably just like in the ‘good old days’ when England had supreme power over its nation, its citizens and its Empire.

For those of us who belong to the modern world, we can see this makes no sense.

Britain is part of a planet that increasingly needs to work together with other nations, and working together, means sharing some power and agreeing some rules.

That’s our road to more civilisation, safely and prosperity.

That, of course, is the great strength of the European Union. 28 neighbouring countries coming together to share power and influence for the common good. It’s a huge success.

The EU is the world’s most successful economic, trade and political union of countries. No one can deny that the EU is the world’s biggest, richest economy, and that it has considerable influence in the world.

Let’s not throw that away by retreating into an island mentality. Having 100% sovereignty – like North Korea – will not make Britain Great. It will make us small.

Britain really is ‪’Stronger In’ the EU.

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• You won’t get your country back if you vote for a Brexit
• Leave campaign is relying on lying to win
• Michael Gove is wrong about 5 million more migrants
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‘We are inextricably part of Europe.
[No one] will ever be able to take us ‘out of Europe’,
for Europe is where we are and where we have always been.’

These words were pronounced by one of the UK’s most prominent PMs, Margaret Thatcher, on 16 April 1975. This was 2 years after the UK joined the EC: Britain consulted its population by referendum, as a fully sovereign country, seeking voters’ approval for what was a good deal.

In the 1970s when the UK joined the European Community, it was struggling economically Today, after 43 years of belonging to Europe, Britain has a dynamic economy and enjoys nearly full employment,and consults its population again, about the same issue, and again, as a fully sovereign country. The mere fact that this country is able to hold this referendum is a blatant demonstration of British sovereignty. National sovereignty is not incompatible with belonging to Europe. Any political grouping claiming in its acronym that the UK would not be an ‘independent’ country is talking nonsense. The UK expresses its sovereignty in many ways: through its international connections, through its defence, as well as within Europe, where it is in a position to encourage or to block joint decisions.

What does the UK mean for Europe? Some argue that there is incompatibility between the UK and the EU. I would argue that there is complementarity between the UK and the EU. And that each one needs the other.

Debates have focused too narrowly on benefits, from the UK’s point of view, of remaining or leaving. But there is far more at stake in the referendum. What is at stake is the Europe of tomorrow. What is at stake, is peace, democracy, and our common values. 46 million British voters will take a decision that will affect not only their country, but more than 500 million Europeans.

The British decision will occur at the worst possible time, in a context of rapid global geopolitical and technological change, affected by increased economic and financial uncertainty, rising social inequalities, an erosion of middle classes in developed economies, when we are confronted with the need to improve international cooperations in crucial areas such as currency stability, trade relations between blocs, fiscal rules, climate change, transition towards non-fossil energy sources, finance, migrations, the relative decline of Western economies, the shift of economic power towards the Asia-Pacific area. This is a unique combination of substantial challenges.

If you add to this mix the rise of anti-European nationalists, subsidised by Russia’s President Putin, and an arc of instability on Europe’s Eastern and Southern borders, stretching from Murmansk to Morocco… We are dancing on a vulcano. We are wasting time with issues of the past. The world out there is changing rapidly and is not waiting for us.

Britain has brought a lot to the European Union not just by being a net contributor to the modest EU budget. Britain has been a force for extending the Single Market, and for striking free trade agreements between the EU and other regions of the world. Britain encouraged the push for enlargement to the East and contributed to the democratic transition of these countries after the demise of soviet communism. The EU has been a springboard for the UK to promote important values which are as much British as European: parliamentary democracy; the rule of law; open markets. (Some of my fellow country citizens would even argue that the EU has become ‘too British’…’, that ‘too much English is spoken in Brussels!’) As Barack Obama put it: ‘The European Union does not moderate British influence – it magnifies it.’ In other words the UK has more impact and sovereignty as one of the three most important member states than it would on its own.

An EU without Britain would be likely to drift in a more protectionist direction. It would be a much smaller player in global affairs. It would lose one of the two countries that count in terms of defence policy. It would lose a positive force for liberalism. There is a serious risk that the European motto United in Diversity becomes Disunited in Adversity. Is this what we want at Britain’s doorstep? A fragmented mosaic of little nation-states which could so easily be bullied by Russia? Instead of having the EU as a soft power using its economic clout to put sanctions on Russia for aggressing Ukraine?

In the economic domain we have what Mario Monti calls a two-belief Europe: a group of European countries geared towards the market; and another group geared towards the consolidation of the euro area. Those believing in the market; and those believing in currency integration. Market, money. This is not incompatible: the volume of everyday transactions in euro at the City is higher than in any other international financial centre. I would daresay that the UK has the euro not as a single, but as a common currency, that de facto the euro is the second currency of the UK. This shows the extent to which we are interdependent. The challenge is to bring closer together those who believe in the market and those who believe in the currency project.

The European project, despite its shortcomings, remains the most advanced example of an economic community of countries. And it is regarded as a model in many parts of the world involved themselves in a process of regional integration. It is also envied all around the Globe by people striving for peace and democracy. Admittedly it is a ‘work in progress’ with many imperfections, but this is the best shelter that Europeans have, at a time when there is a multiplication of external and internal threats.

Who would have grounds to rejoice if, the Day After the referendum, the UK opted for a Brexit?

• A viscerally anti-European media mogul.
• A few sorcerer’s apprentices gambling on their country’s future to gain a personal political advantage.
• Unscrupulous populists.
• And Putin, who subsidises extremist parties across Europe to exacerbate its divisions.

If, however, the UK opted to remain a member of the European Union, this choice would send an unequivocal message to all the populists and new extreme-right parties across Europe - from France to Poland, from Germany to Sweden, from Hungary to the Netherlands, from Austria to Belgium – that despite disappointment about the way the Union works, and despite the UK’s relentlessly Europhobic press, even in the most Eurosceptic member state of the Union, there is no majority to abandon the acquis of the last six decades, which has become a matter of course for two generations.

One last word:

European integration is far from perfect, but it has been the indispensable cement between a huge diversity of nations and cultures which have been able to live in peace for six decades. If the gap between Europe and its citizens continues to be exacerbated by populists whose ultimate aim is the disintegration of Europe, our democracies will be threatened in their core. We take it for granted since 1945 that the ‘Never again’ of post-War times will always apply to Europe, that there will never be a war again in Europe. If the EU was disappearing tomorrow, what certainty would we have that a war between Europeans, between France and Germany, would still be unthinkable? Who would have imagined in the former Yugoslavian Federation of 1987-88, that its populations would endure ten years of civil wars, massacres and dreadful atrocities, on European soil, for absolutely nothing?

Let us not play with fire. We are in the same boat: let us not saw the boat into two!

Jean-Marc Trouille is Jean Monnet Chair
in European Economic Integration
at Bradford University School of Management, UK.

This is the text of a speech given at a public debate
held on 7 June in Ilkley.

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