European Union

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Hill's new proposal on asset-backed securities is his first major piece of legislation

Having faced a flood of EU rules over the last six years intended to regulate “every corner” of the financial system, banks are in for something unusual next month when the European Commission will explicitly propose to dial back on one of the primary obligations they now face.

Jonathan Hill, the EU’s financial services chief, is set to propose a substantial reduction of capital requirements on banks’ holdings of securitised debt, in an effort to spur lending and growth. Similar plans are in the pipelines for insurers. We at Brussels Blog got our hands on the plans and have posted them here and here.

While his predecessor, France’s Michel Barnier, pledged during his mandate to tackle what he said were both structural and moral weaknesses in the financial system, Britain’s Hill has said that “today the biggest threat to financial stability is the lack of growth and jobs.”

The proposal on asset-backed securities (ABS) is the first major piece of legislation Hill has proposed since taking office in November. If approved by governments and the European Parliament, the new securitisation rules would amend one of Barnier’s signature legislative achievements: the EU’s new bank capital rulebook adopted in 2013.

But the change of approach from Barnier to Hill is not as neat (regulation-minded Frenchman to lax Anglo-Saxon) as it first appears. In his last year in office, Barnier had already steered the agenda towards how regulation can support long term financing of the economy, saying that the job of post-crisis re-regulation was largely complete. In addition, key parts of the current commission’s plans for a “capital markets union” draw on a Barnier-era policy paper.

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I have been crossing the river Rhine north of Strasbourg between Iffezheim (Germany) and Roppenheim (France) for as long as my driving licence can remember. In the late 70s and early 80s, passport control and the usual question whether there was anything to declare were part of the ritual (although in a much more relaxed manner than on the checkpoints on the border to Eastern Germany…).

Some years later the border guards were still there but they did not control anybody any more, except some suspect lorries. There were no barriers any more either. What remained, though, was the habit, on the way back, to get rid of your last French Francs in small shops in unlikely places like Soufflenheim, Roeschwoog or Bischwiller. It was only logical that at the beginning of the 1990s, when the guards had left, their post was temporarily turned into a small money exchange house.

Former border post near Roppenheim, August 2015.

Obviously, once the Euro had come, even the exchange house had no reason of being any more. Since then, the building has been waiting, shutters down, in a kind of wasteland nearby a roundabout where mother nature has taken over.

For more than a decade it did not seem to have a future. But who knows? Now that daily news from the refugee drama that is taking place between Lampedusa and Calais are putting the border issue centre stage again, it has become fashionable among politicians across Europe to put the Schengen agreement into question again and ask for tougher border controls. Clearly the tide has turned since the 1980s when the abolition of borders was celebrated as a civilizational progress and a logical step in the process of European integration.

This is not surprising. The control of territorial borders is a central component of the legitimacy of the classical nation-state. Losing this control – even if on a voluntary basis – is by definition a wound to sovereignty, a phantom pain that fear mongers of all political colours may reactivate any time. It is most likely that in the current circumstances speaking out publicly against Schengen will become (of it has not already) a compulsory rhetorical figure in electoral campaigns in many member states.

While unlikely for the time being, it cannot be totally ruled out that in my driving licence’s lifetime systematic border controls may be reintroduced along the Rhine. If Schengen was to be dismantled, why should Roppenheim be different from Calais?

‘The Style Outlets’ Roppenheim: clearly ‘designed to provide you with a unique and unforgettable shopping experience’. Postal address: 1, route de l’Europe.

A nightmare vision for many, especially for all the commuters and travellers between Iffezheim and Roppenheim. If they have recently started to slow down again on the border, it is not (yet) in order to show their passports, but rather their credit cards in the posh factory outlet village that was built right next to the abandoned border post (where ‘more than 100 must-have brands offer you a minimum of -30% off’).

Might as well benefit from the single market as long as it lasts.

Albrecht Sonntag, EU-Asia Institute, ESSCA School of Management.
A French version of this blog can be found here.

The post Border Blues appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Meng-Hsuan Chou

In July 2015, UACES’s (The Academic association for contemporary European studies) European Research Area collaborative research network (CRN) held its second workshop at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) in Cambridge. Knowledge policies continue to be at the forefront of contemporary global politics. There is an accepted belief among policymakers that knowledge is the foundation on which societies coalesce and economies thrive. Indeed, the competition for knowledge can be said to be driving the global race for talent. Building on the theme of the CRN’s first workshop, which explored the diverse roles of the ‘four I’s’ – ideas, interests, instruments and institutions in the ‘knowledge area building exercise’, this workshop invited contributions to examine the politics of knowledge policies in Europe and beyond.

 

ERA CRN workshop participants (From left: Hannes Hansen-Magnusson, Julie Smith, Inga Ulnicane, Mari Elken, Luis Sanz-Menendez, Laura Cruz-Castro, Pauline Ravinet, Peter Erdelyi, Hannah Moscovitz; Seated: Meng-Hsuan Chou and Mitchell Young) (Photo credit: Mari Elken)

Opening the session on ‘International policies, norms and knowledge policies’, Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (University of Hamburg) proposed a way to account for knowledge in practices of responsibility. In this co-authored paper (with Antje Wiener and Antje Vetterlein), he argued that researchers should uncover meso-level norms in order to ‘increase long-term sustainable normativity under conditions of globalisation’.

 

Is education policy an ‘internal consolidator or foreign policy vehicle? Amelia Hadfield (Canterbury Christ Church University) and Robert Summerby-Murray (Saint Mary’s University) asked. Using the EU and Canada as their examples, they highlighted how education policy has been co-opted to serve multiple purposes—as the modus operandi for cultivating notions of statehood and belonging, and as an extension to others of prevailing national cultural norms and understanding.

 

Turning to the session on ‘Regions and the re-configuration of knowledge policy areas: Examples from Canada, Europe and South East Asia’, Hannah Moscovitz (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) compared how Quebec and Wallonia used higher education as a tool for identity promotion. She found that their approaches were distinct: whereas Quebec used knowledge policies to consolidate and foster its distinct identity, Wallonia used higher education policies as a promotional tool (the image of ‘Wallonia-Brussels’) to place itself on the global higher education map.

 

Pauline Ravinet (Photo credit: Mari Elken)

Offering another comparative perspective, Meng-Hsuan Chou (NTU Singapore) and Pauline Ravinet (Université Lille 2) discussed the rise of what they called ‘higher education regionalisms’ around the world. They showed how the supranational and national policy actors in Europe and South East Asia articulated their ambitions to establish common higher education areas in similar ways, but ultimately they adopt very different institutional arrangements for achieving their goals. Chou and Ravinet argued that there are varieties of ‘higher education regionalisms’ around the world and encouraged researchers to examine them empirically.

 

In the session ‘Studying Europe’s open labour market for researchers’, Inga Ulnicane (University of Vienna) presented the research design for a study for on the European Research Area. Her study will combine academic research and published studies to identify the shortcomings and gaps in priority areas of the ERA such as effective national research systems and transnational cooperation and competition.

 

Peter Erdelyi (Photo credit: Mari Elken)

In the penultimate session—‘Knowledge policy instrumentation: from failure to reform?’—Péter Erdélyi (Bournemouth University) discussed the rise and fall of UK’s Business Link, a policy instrument the government adopted for furthering its knowledge economy. In this co-authored paper (with Edgar Whitley), he showed the implementation challenges associated with Business Link the UK government faced in its attempts to address market failures impeding the growth of SMEs.

 

Examining the relationship between ideas and instruments, Mitchell Young (Charles University in Prague) argued that policy instruments embed politics. Using the cases of the new Swedish and Czech performance-based funding tools, along with EU’s framework programmes, he showed how studying policy instruments reveal the ideas and narratives steering politics.

 

Is there standardisation in higher education? Mari Elken (NIFU and University of Oslo) asked. Taking the case of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) and its subsequent translation through National Qualifications Framework (NQF), she showed how the EQF has generated standardisation pressures across Europe. The most surprising element, Elken revealed, has been the voluntary nature of the instrument.

 

Closing the workshop with the session ‘The institutional design and implementation for excellence’, Thomas König (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna) presented three aspects concerning peer reviewing: (1) how it is defined; (2) when it entered the world of research funding; and (3) how the notion is applied in academia and research funding. He showed that peer review plays a very different role in research funding than in academia. In research funding, peer review is used to legitimise funding decisions and is greatly valued for its procedural flexibility.

 

Finally, in a co-authored paper (with Alberto Benitez-Amado), Luis Sanz-Menendez and Laura Cruz-Castro (both CSIC Institute of Public Goods and Policies) analysed the participation of Spanish universities in the European Research Council (ERC) funding calls. Studying a representative sample of eighteen universities across Spain, they found that Spanish higher education institutions did not respond to the calls in the same way. Put simply, there is no homogeneity in how Spanish universities approach ERC funding calls.

 

The European Research Area CRN would like to thank UACES and POLIS (University of Cambridge) for their generous support in the hosting of this workshop.

 

For further information: http://eracrn.wordpress.com

The post The politics of knowledge: a summary of the second ERA CRN Cambridge workshop appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

General : Reporting on the European Parliament has never been easier, thanks to our blog listing the latest digital resources that are free to use. Updated around the clock, this page informs you what images, infographics, videos and photos are available for you to download as soon as they become available. Not only are these materials free to use, they are also often available in all of the EU’s 24 official languages, from Bulgarian to Swedish.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : Reporting on the European Parliament has never been easier, thanks to our blog listing the latest digital resources that are free to use. Updated around the clock, this page informs you what images, infographics, videos and photos are available for you to download as soon as they become available. Not only are these materials free to use, they are also often available in all of the EU’s 24 official languages, from Bulgarian to Swedish.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP