Ideas on Europe Blog

The corona recovery fund, now formally known as Next Generation EU, has been the European Union’s (EU) most important response to the economic and social damages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unprecedently, the 27 member states entrusted the European Commission to borrow €750 billion and to allocate the money – in large parts in the form of grants – to the European countries hardest hit. Given member states’ opposing attitudes towards common debt and their different immediate reactions to the pandemic, the establishment of the Union’s corona recovery fund was remarkable. What explains the creation, timing, and scope of the recovery fund? Why was the Union able to agree on such comprehensive measures in a very short time?

Our article stresses the decisiveness of France and Germany – the Union’s “big two” – their tight bilateral political cooperation, and their crucial role in EU politics. We show why and how France and Germany, starting from different poles, came together and established joint positions on the corona crisis, paving the way for an overall European agreement. Applying and further advancing the “embedded bilateralism” approach, we find instances of crucial Franco-German leadership including agenda-setting, comprise-building, and coalition-building.

 

Franco-German leadership in the corona crisis

Agenda-setting: When the new coronavirus started spreading rapidly across Europe from late February 2020, member states, including France and Germany, initially took national measures for its containment. Deep divisions on the adequate European measures crystallized when France joined a group of other countries calling for the introduction of “corona bonds” while Germany advocated the use of existing instruments and credits only. In light of a dramatic downturn of the European economy, the pandemic would soon pose a major threat to the stability and cohesion of the EU.

French and German civil servants and policymakers – at first largely behind the scenes – started intensifying their bilateral consultations, seeking to overcome differences and find common ground. On 18 May 2020, President Macron and Chancellor Merkel proposed an EU recovery fund totalling €500billion, financed through common debt. The interviews we conducted for this research revealed that only a small number of people were involved in the preparations, with Macron and Merkel having had at least two direct exchanges per week since early April. France and Germany thus gave important political spin and weight to the upcoming “official” Commission proposal on a recovery instrument, released only nine days later.

Compromise-building: The Franco-German initiative most of all was a bilateral compromise in that both countries had developed joint positions and had deviated from previously held national positions. Germany, for its part, accepted the notion of common EU debt and direct financial transfers between member states. France, in turn, backed away from corona bonds and joint liability and agreed on tying the recovery fund to the EU’s regular budget with the respective political and economic conditions attached.

Beyond that, France and Germany represented larger camps of member states, taking their concerns and “red lines” into account. While France pushed for a rapid crisis response targeted at the particularly hit Southern countries, Germany – in line with other Northern countries – insisted the recovery fund to be a one-off instrument. When national leaders at their European Council meeting in mid-July signed off the recovery package proposed by the Commission, individual camps of member states – due to the unanimity required – obtained some concessions. The “Frugals” secured rebates on their contributions to the EU budget, while the Visegráds watered down provisions on a rule-of-law clause. Yet, the overall size and financing of the recovery package, as France and Germany had jointly advocated, remained.

Coalition-building: When Hungary and Poland in December 2020 still threatened to veto the package due to the planned conditionality clause, France-Germany signalled that they were willing, if needed, to move ahead with only 25 member states and establish the recovery fund on an intergovernmental basis. This threat of exclusion during political gridlock has had a prominent precedent from the time of the Eurozone crisis: When the British government vetoed the French-German proposal for new debt rules and a fiscal compact, the latter two moved ahead with a coalition of like-minded member states outside the EU’s regular framework.

 

Advancing European integration theory

France and Germany during the corona pandemic thus provided important leadership services. They gave guidance and orientation for an EU in deep crisis and enabled swift and collective action. Scrutinizing the two countries’ leadership role, our article advances the theoretical debate, especially about EU crisis politics. Scholars seeking to explain how the EU managed to find answers to pressing challenges or, by contrast, struggled to overcome joint-decision problems, usually invoke the grand theories of European integration: Supranationalists hold that Community institutions like the Commission enjoy great autonomy and, independently from member states, pursue policies leading to more integration. Intergovernmentalists, by contrast, claim that deliberation and consensus-seeking among all member states best address common problems.

However, these accounts often cannot explain why certain positions are established and how exactly moments of crisis can be overcome. The missing variable, we contend, is political leadership. Stressing the political dynamics between the national and European levels, the embedded bilateralism approach holds that France and Germany play a particularly important role in EU politics. As founding and the Union’s largest member states, they share a special responsibility for the European project. Embedded bilateralism shows why and how France and Germany, beyond their respective national preferences, at times develop common or even joint preferences, themselves being the result of their unique bilateral political relationship and role in Europe. Moreover, due to their overall size and joint resources – not least in economic and financial terms – these two countries can lay the groundwork for larger European compromises.

Other more recent EU crises show how difficult common solutions are if France and Germany themselves do not find together. The ongoing crisis in the EU’s migration and asylum system, for example, to date has led to little Franco-German leadership. Instead, we have seen instances of unilateral German action and half-hearted French support for a revision of the Schengen regime. Other than during the corona crisis, the two pivotal countries in the case of migration and asylum so far could not agree on joint political objectives and the adequate means to achieve them. As the corona crisis reminds us once again, without a prior Franco-German agreement the pre-structuring and shaping of larger European bargains and outcomes are difficult or unlikely.

 

This blog post draws on JCMS article, “Embedded Bilateralism, Integration Theory, and European Crisis Politics: France, Germany, and the Birth of the EU Corona Recovery Fund.”

 

 

 

Ulrich Krotz is Alfred Grosser Professor at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris. He is the author of, among others, “Shaping Europe: France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics” (2013, with Joachim Schild), “History and Foreign Policy in France and Germany” (2015), and contributing co-editor of “Europe’s Cold War Relations: the EC Towards a Global Role (2020, with Kiran Klaus Patel and Federico Romero).

 

Lucas Schramm is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute. In his dissertation, he analyses past and more recent political crises in the process of European integration, seeking to explain the variation in crisis outcomes. His recent publication includes the co-authored article “An Old Couple in a New Setting: Franco-German Leadership in the Post-Brexit EU” in Politics and Governance.

The post How France and Germany created the EU corona recovery fund appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Who sets the European Union’s policy agenda? The complex nature of the EU’s legislative process, combined with the lack of a clear hierarchy among the core EU institutions, means that it is hard to disentangle the policy contributions of different institutions and determine which one is ultimately responsible for the legislative priorities of the Union.

The ever-increasing criticism of the “Euro-bureaucrats” and the democratic deficit in the EU, along with the policy influence wielded by the European Council during recent crises, complicated this picture even further, leading to competition between the EU institutions and their Presidents. This inter-institutional power struggle recently culminated in the infamous “Sofagate” incident in Turkey, exposing the tensions between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel on the world stage.

 

Which institution sets the European Union’s policy agenda?

Even though the European Commission has the right of initiative, whether this ‘power of the pen’ gives the Commission a monopoly over the agenda-setting process has long been debated. This is because the Commission, despite its formal status, has often found itself competing with other actors and institutions to determine the legislative priorities of the European Union. In the meantime, the changes introduced in successive treaty revisions between the Maastricht Treaty (1993) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) have fundamentally altered institutional dynamics and inter-institutional relationships. While the Commission has retained its formal powers to introduce legislation, it has increasingly lacked the ability to shape the proposal once the process began. On the other hand, both the European Parliament (EP) and the European Council (EUCO) have gained new powers, in addition to the informal opportunities for agenda influence that they already enjoyed. While the EP works with the Council of the European Union (Council) to delay, amend, veto, or adopt legislation as the EU’s only directly elected body, EUCO identifies broad interests and sets general guidelines for the entire Union without any initiative from the Commission or any involvement by the Parliament.

The Commission’s resources, technical expertise, and status as an honest broker in European affairs still enhance its agenda-setting powers, making it possible for the Commission to correctly identify the policy preferences of the EP and the Council and strategically devise policy initiatives that both reflect its own priorities and have a high probability of success. This, however, creates an interesting puzzle: if the Commission must tailor its policy proposals to fit the preference configurations of the other core EU institutions to be successful, can we still talk about the Commission’s autonomous policy influence? Or should we interpret this strategic move as a sign that its independent influence is in decline? If the latter, should the Commission be seen more as a technical agenda-setter than a political one?

Indeed,  recent research suggests that the legislative priorities of the Commission are more and more frequently failing to be translated into EU polices by the other legislative actors, and this is especially when these priorities do not reflect the publicly announced priorities of the other core institutions. In fact, the likelihood of Commission priority initiatives being successful drops by more than 30 percent when it acts on its own. This decline is even steeper when the Commission attempts to propose initiatives aimed at introducing new policy arenas into the EU legal sphere, highlighting its strength as a provider of technical expertise, rather than its political agenda-setting capacity.

 

How much agenda-setting power does the Commission have?

This is not to say that the Commission is entirely dependent on other core EU institutions, however. Nearly sixty percent of the initiatives highlighted in the Commission’s Annual Work Programmes were translated into legislative outcomes between the years 2000 and 2014, which is substantial, though well below that of most EU member state executives to which the Commission is sometimes compared. Perhaps more importantly, almost forty percent of these lacked explicit congruence with the legislative priorities of the other core institutions.  Moreover, despite the clear impact of the changes wrought by the Lisbon treaty’s increase in the policy roles of the European Parliament and European Council, the relationship between the Commission and the Council remains the most critical one.

Having substantially more access to policy expertise than the other institutions, the Commission continues to hold a unique position within the EU institutional structure that’s helps it to chart the tumultuous political waters of inter-institutional policymaking within the Union. Nevertheless, because it lacks a direct role in the decision-making aspects of the policy process, is often unable to ensure its priority legislation is adopted.

Together these trends suggest that interpretations of the EU political system that ascribe the role of political executive to the Commission fundamentally misunderstand the Commission’s current role. The combination of an increasingly powerful and independent EP, and the formalization of the European Council, have combined to reduce the need for the unelected, often technocratic Commission to serve this function. While those who hope for a clear parliamentary-style EU with the Commission at its head may find this result dispiriting, perhaps the fact that the Commission is most successful in pursuing its policy objectives when these reflect the public priorities of the democratically elected EU institutions may reassure others hoping for a more democratic and electorally linked political executive.

 

This blog draws on the JCMS article “Power or Luck? The Limitations of the European Commission’s Agenda Setting Power and Autonomous Policy Influence”

 

 

Buket Oztas an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Furman University. Her research focuses on the changing institutional dynamics in predominantly Muslim countries, with particular interest in post-Islamism and transnational identities, and includes an ongoing research initiative on the agenda-setting powers of the European Commission.

 

 

Amie Kreppel is a Jean Monnet Chair (ad personam), Director of the Center for European Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has served as President of the EUSA and has been both a Braudel Fellow at EUI and a Fulbright-Schuman Chair at the College of Europe.

Twitter handle: @akreppel

The post European Commission’s Agenda-setting Influence appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Theresa May and the shaping of the Brexit process

With the provisional entry into force of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the dust is far from settled on the Brexit process. And yet the culmination of the formal stages of talks on the terms of withdrawal and the future relationship – however ‘thin’ and contested – offers an opportunity to reflect on the key moments that shaped the negotiations over the years.

While Boris Johnson’s bombastic approach and set-piece parliamentary stunts have attracted more attention recently, it was under his predecessor, Theresa May, that the contours of the Brexit process were decisively shaped.

May’s interpretation of the Brexit mandate as binding, her resolve to keep the Conservatives united and her corresponding failure to reach out to the opposition, her secretive and centralised decision-making style, and her push for a ‘bespoke’ deal through a ‘hard bargaining’ strategy – all of these left indelible marks on the Brexit process.

In the end, May’s catastrophic defeat in the UK Parliament, on three separate occasions in 2019 (15 January, 12 and 29 March) not only highlighted the difficulties of Brexit, but also exposed to many the flaws in May’s negotiating strategy and the pitfalls in her closeted and uncommunicative approach to the mammoth task of EU withdrawal. The prime minister’s defeat also set the stage for Johnson’s usurpation of her role, and the ensuing efforts to drive and harder bargain and ensure greater autonomy from EU rules after withdrawal.

May’s failure to pass the Withdrawal Agreement in early 2019 did not surprise some – least of all her critics – but it is puzzling that a prime minister would undertake to secure an agreement without the requisite support at home. ‘Involuntary defection’, as the literature on negotiations terms such occasions, happens rarely, precisely because leaders have little incentive to sign up to terms which their domestic support base might reject.

 

Explaining the fate of the Withdrawal Agreement

The conventional wisdom has it that May’s early approach to the Brexit negotiations – her unsuccessful hard bargaining, her failure to reach out to the opposition, and her numerous strategic errors – cost her the support of Parliament.

But this view makes a number of assumptions which – with no desire to exonerate May – we might find questionable.

It assumes a “better” deal might have been available, which is at odds with the EU’s clear and unchanging offer of the terms of withdrawal and with the imbalance of power between both sides. It assumes soft bargaining might have worked better than hard bargaining, when it is more likely a conciliatory approach would have landed May in a similar situation, not least vis-à-vis her Conservative compatriots.

It also assumes that MPs were voting on the basis of a deal they wanted to see, when in reality there was very little chance the UK could negotiate a deal that would fully satisfy the outlandish aims of the hard Brexiteers or the bespoke goals of softer Brexit supporters, let alone those who wished for the UK to remain in the EU. The reality is that MPs would always be voting for a least-worst outcome, and that they had their eyes on the alternatives to an agreement as much as the agreement itself.

 

Take-it-or-leave-it

Acknowledging this, I argue in a recent article, provides the key to understanding the failure of May’s Withdrawal Agreement: It would always have to have been passed under some form of duress, given the inequalities in the EU-UK relationship and the divergence between domestic and external ‘win-sets’ – that is, between Brussels and the Tories.

And the requisite pressure could be easily supplied by a combination of the Article 50 process and the executive’s traditional dominance under the UK constitution.

Article 50 established that a damaging ‘no deal’ cliff-edge would become the default outcome in the event both sides failed to negotiate an agreement within two years, and locked this commitment in through the unanimity requirement for the granting of any extension.

The UK constitution, meanwhile, afforded the government considerable leeway in determining the timing and the nature of any vote on the terms of withdrawal, effectively allowing the government to run the clock down with impunity until a final vote, which the government indicated might be offered after the UK had left the EU.

Combined with fortuitous political circumstances – namely, the extremely low proportion of pro-Brexit MPs and a widely held belief that the mainstay of opposition would come from Remain supporters, for whom a ‘no deal’ scenario was unconscionable – these factors, when taken together, offered the prospect of presenting the negotiated agreement to parliamentarians with no effective choice of an alternative.

Under conditions so propitious to passing any agreement better than ‘no deal’, it is perhaps no wonder May took liberties with her demands and decided against any overtures to the political opposition.

 

The changing circumstances of the vote

But the circumstances of the final Brexit vote – and indeed the government’s advantageous position – was greatly altered by the political and constitutional upheavals wrought about as the negotiations got underway.

Support for ‘no deal’ Brexit increased precipitously within the Conservative party, as political entrepreneurs sought to highlight the deficiencies in the deal May was negotiating. While not all Conservative no deal supporters were likely to support going over the cliff, the shift in position made them less vulnerable, on the face of it, to May’s threatened outcome were they not to support her deal.

Not only did Conservative support for no deal shift the parliamentary calculus, it also influenced the government’s signalling strategy, making it far more complex. Instead of claiming that ‘no deal was better than a bad deal’, May changed tack, and by late 2018 was offering a more confusing choice between ‘no deal’, her deal, and ‘no Brexit’.

Although the ‘no Brexit’ threat was aimed at pro-Brexit Conservatives, its emergence proved a game-changer for Remain supporters, giving them more reason to reject May’s deal. The possibility of Brexit not happening at all was reinforced, in

Most important, perhaps, the circumstances of the vote itself shifted, as parliamentary activists – mainly Conservatives but with cross-party support and the tacit backing of Commons Speaker John Bercow – sought to take advantage of May’s non-existent majority to wring concessions out of the government on the circumstances of the vote.

Parliamentarians succeeded in obtaining a commitment to a ‘meaningful vote’ from the government in late 2017 by holding hostage the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, thereby ensuring the government would not leave the vote until the last minute. As the vote approached, in January 2019, they also tied the government into presenting new proposals to Parliament in the event the deal was rejected, and over the subsequent weeks Conservative rebels – acting in unison with the Labour opposition – would succeed in committing Parliament against ‘no deal’.

Taken together, what these developments amounted to, over the course of 2017-2019, was to remove the beneficial combination of political, constitutional, and discursive factors that enabled the government to present its naturally unpopular Withdrawal Agreement to legislators as the only palatable option against the damaging (and inevitable) no deal backdrop.

 

Why it matters?

Re-assessing the reasons for May’s dramatic defeat in early 2019 are important, not least because of the consequences it came to have for the Brexit process, and thus the subsequent direction of the UK also. Accounting for the change in the vote’s circumstances not only helps us understand the reasons why May was unsuccessful in her efforts to deliver Brexit, but also why she made key decisions which – coupled with these altered circumstances – would seal her fate as prime minister, and that of her preferred Brexit outcome.

And there are good theoretical reasons to play closer attention to this period, not least given the relative obscurity of examples of involuntary defection. May’s experience with the Withdrawal Agreement helps us to understand how the ‘rules of the game’ – so often treated as exogenously defined by existing theories – can change during the course of negotiations. Moreover, it shows that change can come from below, not just from above, as domestic actors in weakened circumstances find innovative legal and political ways to shift the balance of fortunes in their favour.

 

This blog post draws on JCMS article, “Deal or No Deal: Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement and the Politics of (Non-)Ratification”

 

 

Benjamin Martill is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, where he conducts teaching and research on Brexit, European security, and the politics of foreign policy. Benjamin is co-editor (with Uta Staiger) of Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (UCL Press).

 

Twitter: @EdinburghPIR

The post Deal or No Deal: Revisiting Theresa May’s Brexit Defeat appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

After several systemic crises in a decade, emergency politics has taken hold in Europe. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and later the Covid-19 pandemic, governments have responded with exceptional measures. Along the way, they have accumulated extraordinary powers. We might be tempted to think that this form of politics is the natural consequence of crisis-fighting. Yet the rise of exceptionalism is only a symptom of a more enduring crisis of party democracy. Simply put, partisan politics has become more difficult to deliver in contemporary democracies. As a result, less conventional forms of politics are gaining ground.

In the wake of several systemic crises, emergency politics has become a common feature in European politics.

The world is short of many things these days, from cars and petrol to microchips and building materials. But it has had no shortage of crises lately. In 2008, the global financial crisis shook the world economy with catastrophic consequences in terms of economic damage and job destruction. Barely a decade later, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought entire countries to a standstill. Its devastating effects are still being felt across the globe and threaten a new wave of infections.

In Europe and elsewhere, governments have responded to these crises with exceptional measures, thanks in part to the extraordinary powers they have claimed for themselves. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, for example, governments bailed out ailing banks and implemented massive austerity policies amid popular protests. Recently, national executives have adopted other extraordinary measures to fight the pandemic, from paying workers’ wages to rolling out mass vaccination programs at short notice.

Exceptional measures for exceptional times?

These “exceptional measures for exceptional times”, as former European Commission President Barroso once put it, have had a lasting effect on contemporary democratic politics. Actions departing from conventional practice are presented as necessary responses to exceptional threats. Sovereign rescue packages and constitutional reforms have been rushed through parliaments and justified on survival grounds. Unprecedented policy measures are being passed by executive order. Emergency politics has become a persistent feature of European politics.

As part of my doctoral research, I have studied some relevant implications of this exceptionalism. This form of politics has both institutional and discursive manifestations. Institutionally, exceptionalism expresses itself in the abuse of extraordinary executive powers. Often, governments use these powers to pass far-reaching measures through emergency procedures, circumventing debate and negotiations in parliaments. As a political discourse, exceptionalism relies on hyperbolic and alarmist language. It appeals to emergencies and exceptions to justify political action. It presents urgent decisions that go beyond the usual as inevitable. Typically, exceptionalism takes the form of “decide now, act immediately, explain quickly, and validate later”, as scholar Julia Black expresses it.

Investigating the governments’ responses to the Great Recession, I found that governing parties extensively appealed to exceptionalism to justify many of their economic responses. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Labour government relied on exceptionalist appeals to justify the nationalisation of four banks. Similarly, the Conservative-led Coalition invoked a fiscal emergency and a Greek-style scenario to pass the 2010 ‘Emergency Budget’, which sanctioned the most ambitious fiscal austerity programme of the G7.

In Spain, another country that had left- and right-wing governments during the crisis, emergency politics also gained momentum. From the abrupt turn to austerity by the social democratic government (PSOE) in May 2010 to the bank nationalisation carried out by the conservative cabinet (PP) in 2012, both governments justified controversial choices on exceptionalist grounds. But the Spanish case is particularly revealing in another respect. The extensive use of decree laws to pass far-reaching measures has become a major institutional manifestation of exceptionalism. Originally conceived in the Spanish Constitution as an exceptional instrument for extraordinary situations, the decree law has become a common legislative tool in recent years.

Between 2008 and 2014, the two Spanish governments passed 121 decree laws, 60 per cent of which were directly related to their economic crisis responses. Figure 1 shows the relative percentage of decree laws over the total number of laws in each legislature, a good indicator of ruling parties’ reliance on this legislative tool. The two legislatures with the highest relative use of decree laws coincide with the crisis period (the two rightmost bars in the graph): approximately one third of all legislation was passed using this extraordinary mechanism.

Ruling by decree: Relative use of decree-laws by Spanish governments (1979-2015). Source: author’s own elaboration from data compiled in Martín Rebollo (2015). Note: The indicator measures the relative percentage of decree laws for each parliamentary term since Spain’s transition to democracy. The bars are arranged in ascending order, starting with the legislature displaying the lowest relative use of decree laws and ending with the legislature with the highest relative percentage. Colour shows details about the party in government.

The endurance of emergency politics

But was this exceptionalism an exception? Fast forward a few years, and identical outcomes have been observed in the UK, Spain and elsewhere during the Covid crisis. Thus, following the initial outbreak of infections in March 2020, the British government announced an “unprecedented [economic intervention] in the history of the British state”. These were “unprecedented measures, for unprecedented times”, as the Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak insisted during the public announcement. Quite unprecedented, too, is the number of decrees that the Spanish coalition government has approved during the pandemic. By the end of 2020, the coalition between the centre-left PSOE and the far-left Unidas Podemos had approved all kinds of measures by decree, breaking every historical record.

This exceptionalist rhetoric and the over-production of decrees have gone hand in hand with the accumulation of extraordinary powers. In Spain, several states of alarm have been declared and later challenged by the Spanish Constitutional Court. In the UK, the government has used the pre-existing Public Health (Control of Disease Act) 1984 and new fast-tracked legislation, the Coronavirus Act 2020, to claim sweeping emergency powers to manage the pandemic. The Spanish and British governments could not be more ideologically opposed, yet they have ended up governing the pandemic alike.

In a way, this is unsurprising. In the face of an unprecedented crisis, unprecedented measures follow, regardless of which party is in office. And living through several crises in a decade might explain the persistence of politics in the emergency register. Yet this form of politics has had lasting consequences on the quality of democracy and on the identity of political parties.

The outlasting effects of exceptionalism

In countries such as Spain, legislative constraints on the executive have weakened and government accountability has suffered as a result, as shown by the Varieties of Democracies (V-Dem) indicators. Across Europe, many exceptional measures have outlived the emergency that initially justified them. From the way banks are supervised to fiscal constraints, these reforms have reshaped entire regulatory systems with little public scrutiny.

More significantly, many of these measures are at odds with the political identity of the parties that adopted them. In the last decade alone, we have seen conservative parties nationalising private banks with public funds and paying workers’ wages; liberal parties, once committed to “tax-cuts-always-work”, raising taxes across the board and creating new ones; and social democratic parties slashing public spending and cutting public pensions.

Understandably, parties’ choices are no longer self-evident to their supporters and voters. As exceptionalism takes hold, government action ceases to reflect distinctive ideological commitments. For in the emergency register, different parties act and sound increasingly alike.

The post In Europe, emergency politics has become unexceptional appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

What is resilience and how do different disciplines and fields approach it? What does resilience mean in different sectors? And what does resilience involve in times of global pandemic? These are some of the questions addressed in a new open access book Towards resilient organizations and societies. A cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary perspective, edited by Rómulo Pinheiro, Maria Laura Frigotto and Mitchell Young. In this Q&A, they tell about origins of the book as well as their findings and lessons for future research and practice.

 

Q1: What have been the rationales and origins of this book?

The book originates from a 2018 EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) panel on the topic. It became apparent in the discussions that there is a need to connect different streams of research alongside multiple theoretical and methodological traditions to both take stock of developments in the field as well as move forward in the context of a more integrative research agenda. This aim has become even more apparent following the COVID-19 health pandemic, where considerable policy attention has been paid to resilience at multiple levels; individuals, communities, territories, nations, world regions, organizations, and institutions, including political and economic ones. The book represents a first step in the rather ambitious effort to further develop and integrate novel conceptual as well as empirical insights on the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of resilience.

 

Q2: What is resilience and what does your book contribute to the studies of resilience?

Simply stated, resilience is the ability of an individual, entity or system to adapt to emerging circumstances whilst retaining both function and identity. In the introductory chapter for the volume, and after having systematically reviewed the existing literature and perspectives on the topic, we, the editors, refer to three basic principles at the heart of resilience as a property, process, and/or outcome.

First, the interplay between stability and change, with resilience being located at the intersection between the two.  Second, the relationship between resilience antecedents or triggers, what we term ‘adversity’, versus the degrees of change or ‘novelty’ that result from the adaptation to such internal or external adversities. In this context, we refer to three types of resilience per the degree of novelty, namely: absorptive (low novelty/a return to the old normal); adaptive (medium novelty/change within limits or threshold); and transformative (high novelty/renewal, including the delineation of new limits or threshold). Third, temporality, taking into account process-related aspects that occur before (foresight), during (mechanism) and following (outcome) a disruptive event or adversity. Finally, we note that resilience not only is a multifaceted phenomenon but also a multi-scaled one (macro-meso-micro levels), and thus there is a need to unpack how these levels co-evolve and influence one another over time.

As for the book’s unique contribution, it: a) advances a new conceptual framework (as described above), b) sheds light on a set of empirical cases from various sectors and levels, and (c) sketches out, in the conclusive section, a novel methodological framework for future inquiries involving scholars from various social science traditions and perspectives.

 

Q3: Your book looks at resilience across a number of sectors from a fire brigade and shipyard to universities. What commonalities and differences do you find across the sectors?

The empirical cases provide new evidence of the challenges facing individuals, organizations and systems while attempting to adapt to changing, often disruptive circumstances. They go about this process in very different ways depending on contextual circumstances, both local and global, of which historical path-dependencies, resource-dependencies as well as formal and informal rules were found to play a critical role. Whether an organization is either public or private seems to be less significant for resilience when compared to the extent to which their operations/functions are affected by the confluence of political constraints and economic events, what Barry Bozeman famously termed ‘publicness’. High levels of publicness, as is the case of transportation providers, universities, or the military, to name a few, result in growing complexity in processes of adaptation due to the multiple, often contradictory demands posed by stakeholders such as governmental agencies, funders and surrounding communities. Similarly, internal diversity – in terms of technology, values (sub-cultures) and functions – results in increasing complexity as regards adaptation to external events. Following systems theory, we found that ‘pre-requisite diversity’ is a necessary condition for adaptation under situations of considerable environmental complexity and turbulence. Likewise, in many instances leaders, both formal and informal, as well as the social capital (trust) they help nurture throughout the organization (and beyond) were also found to play an important role.

Turning back to our typology, most of the empirical cases in the book (6 out of 10) were characterized as pertaining to high levels of change or novelty, with the remaining four cases evenly distributed across the minor and medium novelty dimensions. As far as procedural aspects are concerned, 6 out of the 10 cases encompass more than one temporal dimension, with 4 cases illustrating resilience at all the three stages: from foresight to mechanisms to outcomes. What is more, in several situations, the authors provide critical evidence of the interplay between levels of analysis or resilience scales. Each cluster (total of 4), comprising different types of organizations (for a visualization, see Fig. 12.1, p. 316), is discussed in detail in the last section of the book, which is freely available as open access.

 

Q4: What is a post-entrepreneurial university?

We coined the phrase ‘post-entrepreneurial university’ as a way of expressing a university model that encompasses elements of the entrepreneurial university but in a way that supersedes the strong inflections of New Public Management (NPM). This is similar to how public policy has in many sectors (though less so in higher education) moved to a post-NPM discourse.  In order to do this, we trace the entrepreneurial university discourse back to its roots in the works of two major scholars – Burton Clark and Henry Etzkowitz and their respective schools of thought over the concept – one sociologically and the other economically based. We show how the alignment with NPM co-opted and overrode many of Burton Clark’s original ideas, but contend that applying a post NPM understanding to the concept would resolve some of the inherent tensions (we identify three related to actorhood, efficiency, and diversity) to its implementation that have arisen largely due to the economic interpretation of the concept.

In short, we suggest embracing a resilient actor model of the university (as opposed to a strategic actor one), as we had originally proposed in a 2017 chapter (Pinheiro and Mitchell 2017) in Theory and Method in Higher Education Research, could re-engage and energize the entrepreneurial university concept by allowing it to embrace a more biological systems oriented strategy and positioning model; one in which slack, requisite variety, and loose coupling are engaged in an attempt to create a university that ‘thrives’ rather than ‘wins’.

 

Q5: Your book takes a multidisciplinary approach to resilience. Which scientific disciplines contributed to the book? What did each of them bring to the studies of resilience? Did you also see any tensions in how different disciplines approach resilience?

Resilience is a multidisciplinary concept in nature: first raised within the physical sciences, it has been subsequently adopted across a wide range of disciplinary fields and their respective epistemological, methodological and theoretical traditions. This has led to challenges when it comes to definitions and approaches, most notably as regards comparisons across disciplinary domains. Overall, resilience might appear as a concept that is in danger of concept stretching: as a buzzword that is not clearly analytically defined and poorly empirically studied. Even considering only resilience as a social phenomenon, each subfield has contributed to a progressive blurring of the definition, especially by relating resilience to different complementary concepts such as adaptation, fragility, flexibility, resistance, inertia, etc. Thus, while resilience has become specialized in each subfield, it has evolved within disciplinary boundaries along parallel paths with little cross-fertilization.

The chapters composing the bulk of this volume attest to this eclecticism: there are 11 different fields and sub-fields (organization studies, emergency management, high reliability organizations, sociology of professions, public management, human resource management, complex systems, higher education studies, organizational culture, performing arts management, regional studies) approaching resilience from perspectives of management, sociology, political science, economics and decision making. In the last chapter, we identified the limited overlap of references among the empirical chapters, signaling the low cross-fertilization of resilience studies across research areas, as well as a high specialization of studies in their respective fields: only 9 of the 114 references on resilience are shared between more than one chapter. This supports the claim that a stronger interdisciplinary approach to resilience is needed, beginning with the recognition of a common problem at the intersection of disciplines. Then, building on MacMynowski (2007), what is needed for a truly interdisciplinarity approach is to transcend the tendency to approach research questions from the standpoint of a single analytical framework associated with a specific disciplinary tradition, and rather to develop an integrative approach that takes into consideration synergies across the various traditions in a co-production and co-creation exercise. This did begin to happen at the meetings among the authors of this volume in the different stages of writing and preparation.

 

Q6: What are the main lessons from your book for practitioners and policy-makers?

The endorsement at the front of the book from Enrico Giovannini, currently Italian Minister of Sustainable Infrastructure and Mobility, captures very well the usefulness of this book for a practitioner audience, which is that it provides a framework and examples for designing policies, organizations, and systems that enable resilience. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, but especially now, resilience has become something of a buzzword, and we need to be careful about what we mean by it. Hopefully, we don’t want to simply go back to exactly how things were in 2019, but rather, to learn and change, while retaining the essence of living in a world where we could meet and move about freely without concern that our health was at stake. The European Union has referred to this as ‘bouncing forward’. The society we will live in post-Covid-19 has the potential to be safer, healthier and more sustainable than before, but we must understand in that case that resilience involves both stability and change.

The book provides a model for understanding resilience that can be applied practically by considering the three elements of resilience – time, adversity, and essence— when setting forth policy and organizational changes. Readers can refer to the chart in Chapter 12 to help guide them to chapters that address the types of organizations or systems and other key dimensions of resilience that they are interested in. The chapter further analyzes lessons learned from the other chapters, grouping them according to the dimensions of novelty and temporality. As practitioners attempt to build resilience into their own areas of responsibility, clarifying these dimensions should be helpful. The dimension of novelty refers to the question of knowledge and the extent to which the adversity or the triggers for resilience are known or unknown. The dimension of temporality asks about when and how we can build for and recognize resilience: resilience foresight attempts to address resilience before the adversity, mechanisms are about how it works in the midst of the adversity, while outcomes refer to the state of things after the adversity has passed. Finally, the book shows the value of working across boundaries, and the importance of a partnership between outsiders (researchers from multiple disciplines) and insiders (practitioners). Many of the chapters reveal that resilience is perhaps most effectively designed for in co-creation environments.

 

Q7: What would be interesting avenues for future research?

We argue that the most interesting and challenging avenue for future research is in the elaboration of an interdisciplinary perspective on resilience. This requires great openness towards different perspectives, approaches and traditions that might easily clash especially under typical publish-or-perish time constraints. Our experience working on this book for more than two years, shows that the process of discussing openly about the epistemological premises of our fields and our chapter contributions built awareness and co-operation for each-other’s work, and enabled us as editors to highlight the holistic understanding of resilience that emerges from the various chapters in the book. It is an eclectic representation, but not an inconsistent one.

Additionally, we proposed four possible directions for future studies. First, where collective actors are concerned, this volume focused on those characterized as having a high degree of publicness, and future studies encompassing a broader range of organizational types (public, private, hybrid, etc.) and degrees of novelty (low, medium and high levels) could shed light on the extent to which resilience antecedents and mechanisms affect and play out differently across a broader population. Second, the volume’s empirical findings lend support to the claim that resilient organizations are, in essence, learning entities—even if they resort to different strategies to learn about themselves and/or their surrounding environments. Future inquiries could, for example, shed light on the key actors, structures and processes associated with different types of learning (and their interactions) at different temporal scales—before, during and after the unfolding of major events triggering resilience behaviours. Third, following systems thinking, there is a need to continue to open the black box associated with nestedness between the micro (agents), meso (organizations) and macro (society) levels of analysis, both within organizations and across organizational fields. Most notably, it is imperative to understand how these levels emerge, coevolve and interact with one another in non-linear ways. Finally, methodologically speaking, future studies should seriously consider adopting both mixed methods and longitudinal design approaches as a means of capturing the complex and dynamic essence of resilience as a property, process and outcome.

 

Information about the book editors:

Rómulo Pinheiro is a Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Agder (UiA), Norway, where he is also Deputy Head of Department of Political Science and Management and member of the Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT) and for Advanced Studies in Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) based at UiA. Rómulo’s research interests are located at the intersection of public policy and administration, organizational theory, economic geography, innovation and higher education studies.

Maria Laura Frigotto is an Associate Professor in Organization Theory and Management at the University of Trento (Italy) where she is a member of the Department of Economics and Management, of the Institute for Safety and Security (ISSTN) of the School of Innovation and of the Ph.D. Program in Economics and Management. Her research focuses on novelty, especially in its unexpected and emergent form, in relation to resilience and innovation. She has studied emergency management organizations such as civil protection agencies and paradigmatic events such as the 911 terrorist attack in New York, but also very different contexts such as the operatic sector.

Mitchell Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European Studies at Charles University, Czech Republic. His research focuses on knowledge governance and science policy in the EU and Member States both internally through science diplomacy as a tool in foreign policy. He is chair of the ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and Policies. He teaches courses on EU policies, comparative political economy and European economic integration.

 

References:

MacMynowski, D. P. (2007). Pausing at the brink of interdisciplinarity: Power and knowledge at the meeting of social and biophysical science. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 1–14.

Pinheiro, R. and Young, M. (2017). The University as an Adaptive Resilient Organization: A Complex Systems Perspective, J. Huisman and M. Tight (eds.) Theory and Method in Higher Education Research, Volume 3, Emerald Publishing, pp. 119-136

 

The post Towards resilient organizations and societies. A cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary perspective appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Introduction

Supposing that most member states of the current European Union have found a way forward to a political union on the right ideological basis as described previously (see Enlightened Europism), the last act of reformation remaining is to redefine Europe’s role in the world. The Republic of the United Europe (or RUE) must realise the direct as well as the indirect challenges that threatens Europeans and non-Europeans alike, and rise to the task of shaping a new scheme of international co-operation; leading by example as the beacon of reason in the world. Once the global challenges are comprehended and conclusions are drawn, the RUE needs to establish itself as a real global power in order to preserve and pro-actively promote its enlightened ideas.

 

Crisis Era

As every period in history had its own unique challenges, our era has also plenty of difficult tasks waiting to be solved. In order to tackle them successfully, the leaders of the united Europe must understand the times we live in. Different eras, such as the Imperial Era (dominated by the colonial empires of Britain and France), the Versailles Era (defined by the consequences of the highly controversial Versailles Treaty), the Cold War Era (termed by the global rivalry of the Soviet Union and the US), and the Western Era (ruled by the Anglo-Saxon Five Eyes and West Europe), preceded our era, which I call the Crisis Era.

Characterised by numerous global crises, our era has seen a financial crisis, an economic crisis, an immigration crisis, and a health care crisis; not to mention the underlying ideological and social crises ticking towards explosion – all of them are still ongoing in Europe. Perhaps, the most vicious of all crises is the global climate crisis, which threatens not only human well-being and prosperity, but the very survival of our natural habitat (including mankind). Scientists forecast a massive extinction of plant and animal species – collapsing ecosystems –, which is going to hit the human population directly and severely. Uncontrollable global economic recession, mass migration, amplifying and escalating geopolitical conflicts, and new diseases are all the future’s certainties, unless the nations and civilisations of our world commit to an unprecedented and legitimate co-operation.

Regrettably, some powerful figures of national leadership and private entrepreneurs are either ignorant or uninterested, sacrificing the long-term wellness of humanity for temporary political and financial gains. It is shameful and infuriating to remember the enormous funds raised by wealthy individuals in a matter of days for the reconstruction of Paris’s Notre-Dame, whilst the demolition and desolation of the Amazon Rainforest, New South Wales, and Siberia attracted far less attraction from the rich in comparison. The Paris Accords and the European Green Deal are far less ambitious than what would be necessary and actually doable to prevent irreversible destruction. Science and technology could already bring a radical change in our means of production, but the lack of political will blocks scientists to invent the best methods of utilising the Earth’s resources, and re-engineering our industrial production, creating and maintaining a comfortable and safe life for all.

 

Major theatres of international conflicts

Another crisis potentially unfolding before our eyes is the overheating of international affairs, which – in worst case – could result in a Third World War. Even though many symptoms are already visible, climate crisis is rather considered to be a long-term threat, whereas the outbreak of a large scale war in a world that is more populated and spends more on armament than ever before in history is very much a risk on short-term. The two theatres of extreme tension are the South China Sea and the Middle East, where various regional actors backed by global superpowers are challenging each other in a competition for more resources, security, and political influence.

The origin of the South China Sea conflict is to be found in China’s transformation into a global superpower, which wants to break out of a potential encirclement of hostile powers (e.g. South Korea, Japan, and India backed by the US) and expand its influence in Asia Pacific. China has border disputes (both on land and sea) with almost all of its neighbours, which Beijing would like to settle in its favour. The range of claims is scaling from serious to less serious (e.g. Bhutan, Nepal) or even to informal (e.g. Laos, North Korea). The main disputes are involving India, the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Senkaku, Myanmar, Russia (Vladivostok), and Tajikistan. Beijing considers the entirety of Mongolia and Taiwan to be his. However, the strongest claim of Beijing (and other actors in the region) is related to the South China Sea.

The South China Sea is the hotspot of disputes and potentially escalating conflicts in Asia Pacific. The reason of contest is not only the rich hydrocarbon resources and fishing grounds beneath, but also the fact that third of the world’s maritime trade is passing through this area. It does not strike as a surprise that Brunei, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam all have claims against each other. The grandest claim is China’s, which demands control over the entire South China Sea based on China’s Nine-dash line. That is the reason why China is building artificial islands (areas of Paracel, Scarborough, Spratly), which act as aircraft carriers and thus have military use and purposes in the region. Despite opposition from the US, China is slowly achieving its goals. As 40% of China’s trade and most of its imports pass through the South China Sea, the giant of Asia is going to remain determined to push through its claims – one way or another.

Other sources of conflict are the dispute regarding Taiwan’s status and the unpredictability of the Korean Peninsula, where Beijing and Washington could directly back a large-scale armed conflict to preserve their interests in the region.

In the other theatre, the permanent battles for seizing control over oil production, the inextricable web of religious, ethnic, and historical conflicts, and the competition of various global and regional powers are creating a very insecure atmosphere. The face of the Middle East is formed by the relationship between the Arab countries, the Arab countries and Israel, the Arab countries and Iran, and Israel and Iran. Turkey, which is under Erdogan’s change of political course speeding towards Islamisation – deliberately erasing the traditions of Atatürk –, is also the part of this liquid medium. These countries and their web of diplomatic connections, including the support of global powers behind them (the US and Russia), are the defining factors of the Middle East’s tangled politics.

The Middle East’s power constellation is shaped either along religious affiliation or by the production and reserves of oil – namely wealth. The Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey are Muslim, whilst Israel is mainly Jewish. There is a Shia majority living in Iran, Bahrain, Iraq, and Lebanon, whilst there is a significant minority to be found in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The number of Sunnis in Saudi Arabia is the double of Shias, but the latter live mainly in the territories known for their high oil production. There is a Sunni majority living in Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Kuwait, Syria (however, the Assad regime is Shia), Yemen, Saudi-Arabia, UAE, and Qatar, whilst there is a significant Sunni minority to be found in Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain.

The Sunni countries seem to be the stronger of the two poles, due to their superiority in population, wealth, and military strength. This fact is underlined by Turkey’s NATO membership and by the pro-Sunni policy of the US and Israel. The leader of the Sunni world is Saudi Arabia (tied to the US), whereas the leader of the Shia pole is Iran (tied to Russia).

Besides the permanent Shia-Sunni (Iran-Saudi Arabia) battle, there is another dimension in the conflicts of the Middle East, namely the Arab-Israeli hostility. From the Zionist movement, through the violent seizure of lands, to the occupations of territories in the various Arab-Israeli wars, there are numerous events, which provoke the Arab countries. It is not my place to judge, which one of these was Israeli provocation, self-defence or Arab provocation. However, it is a fact that both parties are equally responsible for the current situation, beginning with the aggressive resettlement of the Jews in Palestine – supported by the Zionist movement – and continuing through a series of atrocities from both the Israeli state and the Arab countries (e.g. misplacement of Palestinians, wars, terror attacks). Even though symbolic steps were made towards normalisation (e.g. Camp David Accords, Wadi Araba Treaty, Abraham Accords), stability is still far out of reach. The instability of the Middle East could not be solidified until today – and will not be in the foreseeable future –, because the countries involved cannot and do not want to find a compromise in the most important issues (e.g. distribution of water, status of Jerusalem, situation of Palestinian refugees, borders of a legitimate Palestinian state).

The insecurity and unpredictability of the Middle East poses a direct threat to European security. Failed Arab countries, such as Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria are a hotbed for extreme Islamist terrorism and a source of mass illegal immigration. The collapse of Jordan and a not unlikely war between Algeria and Morocco could add to the flames of troubles of the Middle East and North Africa – not to mention the worrying moves in Tunisia and Turkey.

 

Conclusion

Therefore, the Republic of the United Europe must comprehend the era we live in and rise to act. Today, the member states of the European Union are watching the disintegration of Ukraine (and possibly eventually of Belarus), Erdogan’s aggression, the British government’s arrogance, and the collapse of the Middle East helplessly. Tomorrow, we may have to face a growing instability on the Balkans as well, where the ethnic and religious characteristics could redraw the borders through potentially violent conflicts. The result could be the disintegration of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the rise of Greater Albania (formed by Albania, Kosovo, and the north-western parts of North Macedonia), Greater Croatia, and Greater Serbia. The disintegration of Ukraine, the de facto annexation of Belarus by Russia, the Islamisation of Turkey, and the creation of Greater Albania are posing potential threats to European security in the backyard of Europe.

The reformed and united Europe must pro-actively preserve and protect its enlightened values, stabilise its neighbourhood, and enforce global agreements that guarantee sustainable development, climate protection, nuclear disarmament, and peace. We can achieve these goals only, if we pursue our own regional and global interests on our own terms, maintaining a good relationship with all of the global powers, without picking a side and sticking to it inflexibly – as we do it now. European decision-makers should no longer be chess figures on the global powers’ grand chessboard. In order to succeed in this quest, the radical change of our diplomatic mindset in accordance with the realities of our era is inevitable.

The post Reform #6: Foreign affairs (vol. 1) – Comprehending our era appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

As we’ve noted previously in this blog, Brexit is a process, not an event. With the drawing in of the year, we might usefully revisit this notion, since there’s more of the process heading our way.

You’ll recall that one side-effect of the very speedy conclusion of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was that the UK decided it would have a progressive introduction of the controls required, given the need for infrastructure and personnel to make it all happen.

The original plans for this were rather swift, with the intention being to have everything up and running by mid-2021. That this was somewhat ambitious was highlighted by two subsequent announcements of further delays, some to 1 January 2021 and others to the middle of next year.

These deferrals of controls stand apart from those relating to the Northern Ireland Protocol, which required joint agreement with the EU and which are currently on a rolling extension due to the talks that have trundled on in the past weeks. Precisely because they have implications for the operation of the EU’s single market (via Northern Ireland’s alignment to it) these cannot be solely in the hands of London.

But the TCA deals with the general EU-UK relationship, and the reintroduction of controls is a function of the weakening of ties between the two parties, which means the UK is bound to enact measures to satisfy other legal instruments, of which the World Trade Organisation is predominant.

Technically, the UK is in breach of its WTO commitments with these deferrals, but in practice no-one seems minded to challenge that. The UK is on a path towards enforcement, it has lacked the means to enforce until now, plus the EU doesn’t need another point of contention to add to the pile, plus WTO arbitration takes a very long time. So it’s been alright to slide back the timeline.

However, this still matters.

The National Audit Office has been producing very useful reports for the past three years on UK readiness, including on these systems. The most recent came out last month and is worth a read as a balanced view of where things are at.

On these elements, the picture has gradually improved, with much of the work now in place to make 2022 enforcement a viable option. At the same time, the NAO rightly points up the considerable uncertainty about demand management and the impact on trade flows, plus the wider impact of the changing nature of the UK border.

While Northern Ireland has (rightly) been more visible, it will be cross-Channel business that will have a bigger economic impact in the long run. Until the UK has settled its systems and procedures for this, it will be hard to know more properly how Brexit is reshaping the economies on both sides of those waters.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic77

The post More Brexit, part. 648 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Although the new Norwegian government appears more willing to discuss EU-related issues than previous ones, the question of Norway’s EU policy remains ambiguous, argues John Erik Fossum in this blog post. 

Gag rule on the EU affiliation: The new Norwegian government reiterates the ‘gag rules’ that each government has instituted to maintain the status quo of Norway’s EU affiliation pretty much since the EEA agreement entered into force in 1994, writes John Erik Fossum. 
(Photo: Mission of Norway to the EU, CC BY 2.0)

On September 13, 2021 Norway held its parliamentary elections. In Norway, parliamentary elections take place at fixed dates, at a four-year interval. The total number of eligible voters was 3,876,200 persons, and the election turnout was 77.2 percent.

The election result represents a certain turn to the left, as the ruling minority centre-right coalition went down from 61 seats in 2017 to 47 seats in 2021, out of a total of 169 parliamentary seats. The right-wing populist Progress Party (FrP) also lost 6 seats, down from 27 seats in the 2017 parliamentary election. Thus, whereas the centre-right had a majority of seats in the outgoing parliament (88 out of 169), they now have only 68 seats.

If we look at the overall pattern of change for the party system, the most obvious conclusion is that the main result was political fragmentation.

The main election winner was the centrist Center Party (SP) which increased its number of seats from 19 to 28. A similar gain was had to the far left Red (Rødt) (a former Marxist-Leninist party), which increased its number of seats from 1 to 8 in the present parliament. These effects are related to the nature of the election system which provides compensatory seats to those parties that pass the 4 percent threshold.

If we look at the overall pattern of change for the party system (see table 1), the most obvious conclusion is that the main result was political fragmentation. Both of the two largest parties lost seats. Labour (AP) lost 1 seat, whereas the Conservatives (Høyre) lost 9 seats.

The revolt of the periphery

The main issues that marked the election campaign were domestic, and there was very little focus on foreign policy. There were glimpses of attention to Norway’s relationship to the EU, the main issue being whether the expected change in government would lead to changes in Norway’s EU affiliation, given that the Centre Party is a deeply Eurosceptic party. The early stages of the election campaign were marked by a ‘revolt of the periphery’, which was not only directed against Oslo the capital but also other cities and gave a major boost in support to the Centre Party as a rurally based agrarian party. The Centre Party could draw on popular opposition to a regional reform which had amalgamated regions and created the region Viken (which geographically speaking is a very awkward construct, stretching way Northwards from the Southern Eastern border with Sweden). A similar upset was seen in the North, where the two Northernmost regions had been amalgamated against the majority’s will in Finnmark (there was a popular referendum in Finnmark where the no side won by a clear margin). There was also opposition to the closure of local police stations and hospitals.

With the revolt of the periphery as a major impetus, in early January 2021 it looked like the Centre Party could overtake Labour in the polls, and the Centre Party leader Trygve Slagsvold Vedum declared himself as a Prime Minister candidate. Thus, there were three Prime Minister candidates going into the final stages of the election campaign: Erna Solberg (incumbent, Conservative); Jonas Gahr Støre (Labour); and Trygve Slagsvold Vedum (Centre Party). As the election campaign unfolded, the centre-periphery and urban-rural conflict subsided somewhat whilst inequality and green transition entered centre stage. All parties to the left spoke against the rising socio-economic inequality, and the Centre Party linked that to a claim to rural-urban inequality. There are thus competing accounts as to the forms of inequality that should be addressed among the centre-left parties, and Labour is torn between socio-economic inequality in terms of class and socio-economic inequality in terms of regional location. The green transition issue gave the Greens (MDG) a boost in the polls, but in the election, it fell just short of the four percent threshold and therefore only obtained 3 seats. The other main environmental advocates, the Liberal Party (Venstre, which was part of the governing coalition) managed to hold onto its 8 seats. The Socialist Left Party (SV), which both spoke up against socio-economic inequality and the need for a green transition gained 2 seats and ended up with 13 seats. Labour is somewhat divided on how committed to the green transition it should be, and the Centre Party for a while even prevaricated over whether it thought that Norway should be committed to the Paris Agreement, although it came down in support of it eventually. Conversely the Progress Party has long been a Petro-Populist Party and is a staunch supporter of the oil industry.

It is difficult to attribute the result – the government’s loss of seats – to the COVID-19 pandemic. Norway’s fatality numbers during the COVID-19 period were lower than in a regular influenza year, and the Norwegian government has launched a range of policy programs to buffer people from the pandemic. The negative effects have been far from equally distributed, but it is difficult to attribute the responsibility squarely to the coalition government which as a minority government has depended on parliamentary support from the opposition parties that at times have dictated government policy.

Status quo of Norway’s EU affiliation

The election result paved the way for a change in government. Labour as the largest party held talks with the incoming Prime Minister Støre’s preferred coalition partners, the Centre Party, and the Socialist Left Party. The Socialist Left Party pulled out of the talks before the serious negotiations started. Thus, the new government has ended up as a minority coalition between Labour and the Centre Party, with a total of 76 seats (out of 169). Had they managed to persuade the Socialist Left they would have had a total of 89 seats and a majority in the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. The two governing parties signed a governing agreement. This 86-page declaration lists the government’s objectives, in considerable detail.

In the following, I will only focus on what the government declaration says about Norway’s EU affiliation. The declaration explicitly states that

‘(t)he government will develop and deepen Nordic cooperation in a wide range of areas. Nordic and European countries are Norway’s most important political and economic partners. The government will stand up clearly for the value of an open and cooperative Europe at a time when authoritarian forces, nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise. The EEA Agreement will form the basis for Norway’s relationship to Europe. The government will work more actively to promote Norwegian interests within the framework of the agreement, and the wiggle-room in the agreement will be used with particular emphasis on ensuring national control in such areas as labour relations, energy and rail traffic.’ (Hurdalsplattformen 2021, author’s translation)

This statement is an amalgam of the two coalition parties’ statements on Europe. The Centre Party underlines the Nordic dimension, whereas Labour places more direct emphasis on Europe. The sentence to the effect that ‘(t)he government will stand up …’ is taken verbatim from the Labour Party’s program for the period 2021-2025.

With regard to Norway’s relations with the EU, the new government thus reiterates the ‘gag rules’ that each government has instituted to maintain the status quo of Norway’s EU affiliation pretty much since the EEA agreement entered into force in 1994. The gag rules are meant to keep a lid on the EU membership issue. The governing coalition thus binds itself to govern on the basis of the present EEA affiliation. It is then also stated in the coalition government declaration that ‘the EEA Agreement shall form the basis for Norway’s relationship to Europe'(Author’s translation). The tacit understanding is that if one party actively starts working towards changing the status quo the coalition will unravel. The present governing configuration therefore falls into an established pattern of governing coalitions ‘freezing’ the status quo. The new coalition government consists of one broadly speaking pro-EU party, Labour, that sees itself as a guarantor of the EEA Agreement (while declaring in its party program that it is internally divided on the issue of EU membership) and one very Eurosceptic party, the Centre Party, that is against the EEA Agreement. In its party program it states that it wants to examine alternatives to the EEA Agreement that strengthen Norwegian sovereignty and ensure access to the EU’s internal market for Norwegian exports.

The political arithmetic explains why despite a new election and a change in government, there is likely to be no change in Norway’s EU affiliation:  the continued presence of gag rules prevents a change in the status quo. In today’s Storting, the parties that support the status quo would have 98 out of 169 seats (down from 111 in the previous Storting). Some parties are divided in both directions, so how firm this specific number is can be questioned. The main point however is that the Eurosceptic parties do not have a basis for renegotiating Norway’s current EU affiliation. Some minor concessions have been granted to the Eurosceptics in that there is a commitment to ‘carry out an assessment of the experiences of the EEA cooperation during the last 10 years. In that connection the experiences that proximate countries outside the EU have with regard to their EU agreements will be examined’ (Hurdalsplattformen 2021, author’s translation). The Centre Party wants Norway to reject the EU’s fourth railway package. The government platform states that it will ‘as soon as possible enter into a dialogue with the EU with the goal of ensuring Norway exceptions from portions of the EU’s fourth railway package.’

The political arithmetic explains why despite a new election and a change in government, there is likely to be no change in Norway’s EU affiliation:  the continued presence of gag rules prevents a change in the status quo.

Incidentally, this focus on specific issues or policy measures is entirely in line with the logic of gag rules which ensures that specific concerns can be dislocated from the constitutionally salient EU membership issue. I have argued elsewhere that the gag rules facilitate further integration by taking attention away from the question of Norway’s EU affiliation and instead focusing on specific issues such as the EU’s third postal directive, which generated a lot of controversy. Whether the railway initiative falls into that pattern is too early to tell. The statement in the government declaration is fairly open: It could mean that the government wants to initiate a process where Norway gets some sort of opt-out, in which case it will be interesting to see if the EU is willing to grant any such concessions to a non-member. Or the statement could mean that the government approaches the EU and finds that there is no real leverage to alter the regulations. What then will be done is not clear from the new government’s platform.

The new minority coalition government has pledged to cooperate with the parties to the left. This illustrates the squeeze that Labour finds itself in: between a strengthened Centre Party to its right side and a strengthened left flank with the Left Socialists and Red. This can be quite a precarious position, with the prospect of hemorrhaging voters either to the right or to the left, depending where it sets its foot. The Labour party has clearly ended in a spot which requires a fine-tuned balancing of issues and concerns. To what extent European issues will be entered into such a process of balancing is not entirely clear. This government appears more willing to discuss EU-related issues than the previous one. Nevertheless, the government platform would seem to indicate that the overarching question of Norway’s EU affiliation appears to be locked in.

Table 1: Party seats, 2021 election Name Number U Change Arbeiderpartiet 48 0 -1 Høyre 36 1 -9 Senterpartiet 28 0 +9 Fremskrittspartiet 21 4 -6 Sosialistisk Venstreparti 13 5 +2 Rødt 8 4 +7 Venstre 8 5 0 Kristelig Folkeparti 3 0 -5 Miljøpartiet De Grønne 3 0 +2 Pasientfokus 1 0 +1 Total 169 19 0

1. Party has gotten a compensatory seat (Valgresultat.no)

This blog post was originally published on DCU Brexit Institute Blog on 29 October 2021 and has been republished here with permission.

The post Why a change in government won’t change Norway’s ambiguous EU policy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Learning to blah, blah, blah (Source)

A while back I wrote about the UK’s approach to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA), arguing that this was driven by a lack of strategic intent, resulting in constant efforts to keep things up in the air.

In so doing, the UK aims to avoid falling into any settled pattern of interaction with the EU that would – by the simple facts of its existence and stability – provide a template for future relations.

Put simply, the UK doesn’t seem to want to find itself stuck in a rut, with all the path dependency and sunk cost issues that come with that.

At the time, the way the UK was pursuing this objective of intentional instability was through a high-stress holding model.

This involved an active campaign of raising problems with the treaties (both on what they contain and what they don’t contain) plus non-implementation (or at least very slow implementation).

Hence the seemingly endless list of problems that could be drawn upon, from the role of the CJEU to VAT rules. The spring’s challenges of chilled meats in Northern Ireland might have been met by the Commission’s proposals this autumn, but the UK had already run on ahead to the next thing.

This coupled up with very strong language about using provisions such as Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, to attempt to create an image of being ready to walk away from it all, for the noble intent of protecting peace.

A review of this model suggests that while it might have nudged the Commission to offer more than it might have on the Protocol implementation problems, it has largely not worked and has little prospect of working.

At the root of this failure has been a lack of conviction on the EU’s part that the UK would make good on its promises/threats. Yes, the WA/TCA combo has its problems, but these are as nothing to the costs of pursuing any other route. The UK can’t unilaterally change the terms of the treaties, and the economic and political damage of collapsing them both (and the EU has been very clear that they are a linked pair) should be evident to even the most die-hard Brexiteer.

If the UK doesn’t have a credible alternative (and also doesn’t have a hard consensus that it thinks it has one), then the threats look empty and the main effect is simply to weaken trust. Which is a problem if you’re aiming to get buy-in to any new system you might propose.

Hence the apparent shift in the past couple of weeks to what we might term a low-stress model.

Instead of the active antagonism, there is instead engagement in negotiations, covered by a rhetorical frame of trying to solve problems together.

However, given the very slow pace of those discussions, it looks more like a move to kick things into the very long grass of endless debate.

Yes, there’s interaction, but it also allows for a ‘temporary’ suspension of punitive measures and of full implementation of treaty provisions. In short, it creates its own version of the stable situation trap: the UK gets to say in 6 months that obviously these temporary arrangements work.

Of course, the EU is well aware of this, and is looking to move negotiations to some conclusion in short order. But the ability to combat this low-stress approach is rather less. The Commission might have its spectrum of responses in place for an Article 16 notification, but it’s much harder to avoid looking ungenerous when faced with a counterparty that wants to talk.

But it’s not impossible, and at some point it becomes difficult to mask that you’re stringing out talks for their own sake. Even if that means a less fraught outcome than a collapse of the high-stress model, it still leaves the UK having to make a decision about what it wants. And there’s still no sign that it has any sense of achieving that under this government.

The post High- and low-stress holding models appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Brexit used to sit on the far side lines of politics.

Indeed, the word ‘Brexit’ was only invented in 2012, and until the referendum, most people didn’t know what it meant.

(Now it’s in the Oxford English dictionary.)

Prior to 2011, tabloids such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express were more fixated on false claims about benefit cheats than false claims about immigrants.

But that all changed.

An in-depth study by the Migration Observatory showed that:

The volume of press coverage mentioning ‘immigration’ or ‘migration’ declined from 2006 to 2011 before rising each year from 2011 to mid-2015

Furthermore, when the press explicitly described immigrants and migrants during 2006-2015, 3 out of 10 times it was with the word ‘illegal’.

In 2004, when the Labour government permitted migrants to come here from new EU member states (formerly hidden behind the ‘Iron Curtain’) they were welcome.

The British economy was doing well, and businesses were desperate for more workers. EU migrants coming here filled a chronic labour and skills gap.

It wasn’t until after the Tories won the 2010 general election, and severe austerity measures were imposed, that some tabloid newspapers, and some politicians, started to heavily scapegoat migrants as the cause.

But even then, Britain’s membership of the EU was not a majority interest subject.

Some on the fringes of the Conservative and Labour Parties thought Britain should leave the EU, but they were small in number.

• Most MPs and members of the House of Lords strongly supported Britain’s membership of the EU (and indeed, most of them voted for Britain to Remain in the European Union.)
• Most people in Britain also didn’t want Britain to leave the EU.

We’d been members for around 40 years, and it was not a big deal.

Polling consistently showed that most people in the UK supported our continued membership, even in the year before the referendum.

Yes, 17 million voters voted for Brexit. But 17 million votes out of 46.5 million registered voters did not represent majority support.

Since 2016, however, Brexit is on the news every day. The word has become mainstream, not just in Britain, but across the world.

How did it happen?

It started when leading politicians, who should have known better, got scared of a little Eurosceptic party called UKIP, which promoted a fear and dislike of migrants, and blamed the EU.

UKIP was considered a threat to the mainstream of politics and so everybody started talking their language of fear.

Slowly and surely, the new language allowed migrants and foreigners to be blamed for our problems, with leaving the EU presented as the solution.

It was the start of the rot. It led us directly to Brexit.

There was no rational reason to fear migrants. But senior politicians in both the Conservative and Labour Parties began to be fearful of UKIP.

Instead of bucking the UKIP trend, they fell for it; they unwisely helped to promote and prolong it, along with most British newspapers, also guilty of inciting UKIP’s message of xenophobia.

So, when in 2014 the then Shadow Home Secretary, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, said in a speech in London:

“It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration or to call for immigration reform.”

What I think she really meant was:

“We’re not really worried about immigration; we’re worried about UKIP.”

When also in 2014, Rachel Reeves, Labour’s then shadow works and pensions secretary, wrote in an article for the Daily Mail:

“We have to listen to the real concerns that people have about how immigration is being managed.”

What I think she really meant was:

“We’re not really listening to people’s real concerns; we’re listening to UKIP.”

When Kelly Tolhurst, the Conservative MP, who won the 2014 by-election in the Rochester and Strood, wrote in her campaign literature:

“I wanted to bring the Prime Minister to this constituency to show him that uncontrolled immigration has hurt this area.”

What I think she really meant was:

“I want to show the Prime Minister that although there isn’t a problem of uncontrolled immigration in this area, uncontrolled UKIP could hurt us.”

(Because how could there be a problem of ‘uncontrolled migration’ in Rochester and Strood? It has a lower-than-average immigrant population than the national, and even regional, level. Its population is 87 per cent white British.)

The then Prime Minister, David Cameron (remember him?) also followed the same line. He said to the electorate:

“I know you are worried about immigration.”

What I think he really meant was:

“You know I am worried about UKIP.”

So worried, that he called for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU that he didn’t have to call.

It was all because of an irrational fear of UKIP and their irrational language of fear.

Reported the BBC on the rise of UKIP in 2014:

‘David Cameron’s historic pledge to hold an in/out referendum on UK membership of the EU if the Conservatives won the next election was interpreted by some as an attempt to halt the rise of UKIP, which senior Tories feared could prevent them from winning an overall majority in 2015.’

(Repeat: Previously hardly anyone in Britain was concerned about Britain’s EU membership – it was a minority issue on the far fringes of politics.)

In the same year, Nigel Farage, the then leader of UKIP, told The Telegraph:

“Parts of the country have been taken over by foreigners and mass immigration has left Britain as unrecognisable.”

It was nonsense of course.

Britons didn’t have a serious problem of migration before the likes of Nigel Farage told them they did.

If you look at a 2014 map of where UKIP had the highest support, it was mostly in the areas of Britain with the least migration.

And conversely, in the areas with lots of migrants, UKIP mostly had the least support.

The foreign-born of Britain only represent around 12% of the population – that’s a normal proportion for most modern, thriving western democracies.

Even among those 12% of foreign-born are many considered to be British, such as Boris Johnson, born in New York, and Joanna Lumley, born in India.

And citizens from the rest of the EU living in the UK represented only 5% of the population – that’s small and hardly ‘mass migration.’

A few weeks after the 2016 referendum result, the then Tory MP, Oliver Letwin, said that British politicians “made a terrible mistake” in failing to take on the argument about immigration, the argument spread by UKIP.

He told The Times:

“We all, the Labour party and the Conservative Party alike … made a terrible mistake, which was not to take on the argument about migration.”

He added that UKIP exploited the failure of mainstream politicians to “put the counter-argument” that “migration enriches the country in every way.”

Gandhi got it right when he said:

‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is really fear.’

Our main political parties and national newspapers could have saved us from an irrational fear of migrants that led directly to Brexit.

Instead, they pandered to UKIP and promoted the fear.

And now the fear has won, and it is still being encouraged by politicians and papers.

But:

• Migrants are a boon, not a burden for Britain.
• EU membership has helped our country and did not hinder it.

Somehow, facts need to win over fear. And until that happens, Britain is on a dangerous and debilitating path.

DAILY EXPRESS HEADLINES: The 2011 headline that millions of families were benefit cheats was entirely incorrect. See Full Fact report. And the 2015 headline that illegal immigrants were pouring into Britain was also false. See Full Fact response.

• Watch my 1-minute video about so-called ‘illegal’ migrants.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

________________________________________________________

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook



The post The news changed and we got Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

As part of this blog’s ongoing monitoring of the two treaties, we regularly produce a tracker of meetings of the various bodies that they have set up.

These trackers are useful at a number of levels.

Firstly, the level of overall activity provides an indication of the vibrancy of the treaty and the extent to which the parties see it as the appropriate forum for handling issues: witness the volume of activity in the Withdrawal Agreement committees in the wake of its entry into force, to try to iron out the numerous implementation issues, most obviously on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Secondly, the speed of setting up specific bodies points to relative priorities within the treaty framework. Thus the Trade & Cooperation Agreement – with its numerous organisational structures – has only one body that’s meet more than once: fisheries.

Finally, over time, it helps us to see how the pattern of moving from initial implementation issues to more regular operation works in practice. If the WA appears to have started to move towards the latter phase, with minimal activity this autumn, then the TCA is still very early on in its life-cycle, with much still to come into operation.

In the context of the wider EU-UK relationship, this matters, especially given the on-going uncertainty about the Protocol – and thus the entire WA/TCA architecture. If the UK were to unravel the Protocol with an Art.16 notification then the two treaties lack deep institutional roots that might help to contain the ensuing crisis. Even the WA hangs somewhat in the balance given the integral nature of the Protocol.

Of course, Art.16 would make these trackers a trailing indicator for the period of the crisis, but if the treaties were to stand, then they might also eventually come to be leading indicators of a rebuilding of relations.

Something to keep in mind in the coming months.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic78

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic85

The post WA/TCA Committee Tracker, November 2021 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

As we reach the end of the COP26 hiatus on Brexit the signs are not good. Reports from the talks on the Protocol are that progress isn’t occurring, even with the Commission’s striking opening offer.

This is all less than unexpected: the UK’s ask on ending the role of the CJEU in the Protocol never looking remotely viable and there has been no interest in using the Commission’s proposals to climb down from the flashpoint either.

COP26 might well have given a bit of breathing space, but only to something that looks heavily timetabled.

With that in mind, the moves on the EU side have mostly been about signalling intent to hit back hard should the UK follow through on Art.16. As Rahman has suggested, that might include both short- and long-term elements.

We’ve covered Art.16 itself enough for the issues to be relatively clear. As Howse points out in his new commentary on the provision, there’s rather more constraint than might first be apparent, but this also limits the direct response too.

As a result, it serves the EU to keep things broad-based, to make the matter less contained and to be less dependent upon the single provision.

There is plenty of flexibility about the implementation practice for both treaties, as the French had already identified in the Jersey impasse (also still not resolved, it should be noted), but the TCA also allows for some additional actions.

The graphic below sets out the suspension and general termination clauses for that treaty.

As you’ll see, suspension is more complex and requires a rather tough case to be made for justifying its use, based on a failure by the UK to apply rule of law. Art.772 doesn’t simply need some evidence of this – e.g. should the UK try to effectively remove the CJEU from the NIP – but also needs this to be a ‘serious and substantial failure’. That the CJEU hasn’t been used at all so far in the NIP’s operation becomes here a problem for the EU, as impairment of rule of law becomes that much harder to demonstrate.

Even if you can overcome these thresholds, there’s still a problem of proportionality requirements, which stop the EU from going wild with their response.

By contrast, Art.779 termination is a doddle: just put in your letter of notice and that’s that. There are even options to just terminate Goods or Judicial Cooperation, so there’s a bit more flexibility.

The process in this case would be entirely political, with the option to end the termination by joint consent.

I’ll admit to a degree of discomfort about all this. If the UK play chicken on this, then we end up with at least a partial non-application of the WA/TCA framework, which will make it harder to defend what remains. Trust will be even thinner on the ground than it has been, and the willingness to even start to consider new options will be vanishingly small.

Which makes the key question next week one of whether the UK really wants to go down this road. It will be one that offers minimal prospects of the EU moving off its lines on the Protocol, while definitely bringing a pile of economic and political pain. Yes, that pain will hit both sides, but much more on the UK.

Is the domestic political gain that might accrue really worth it?

Ironically, the continuing absence of a UK plan makes it seem more likely so: if you don’t have an end-point to defend, then you can wallow in the pain that much more easier.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic95

The post Crisis measures appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

They want to see the end of the EU altogether. That’s been the aim of prominent Brexiters from the start.

And it’s certainly the aim of the guy who started Brexit: former UKIP leader and MEP, and now President of the Reform Party, previously the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.

In September 2017, Mr Farage received a standing ovation at a far-right rally in Berlin when he addressed Germany’s anti-EU party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Mr Farage was applauded after urging the AfD to fight for German independence from the EU.

This is nothing new. On the morning after the EU referendum, on 24 June 2016, with his and his party’s dreams realised, Mr Farage made clear that there was unfinished business with the EU.

He said in his 4am victory speech:

“I hope this victory brings down this failed project … let’s get rid of the flag, the anthem, Brussels, and all that has gone wrong.”

On Talk Radio in Spain in 2014, Mr Farage said that he not only wanted Britain to leave the European Union, he also wanted to see “Europe out of the European Union” – in other words, the complete disintegration of the European Single Market.

Some ardent Tory Brexiters also share Mr Farage’s goal to see the end of the European Union altogether.

 STEVE BAKER

Conservative Steve Baker MP, Wycombe, a prominent member of the hard-Brexit Tory ERG group and a former Brexit negotiator, said in 2010 that he wanted to see the European Union “wholly torn down.”

In a speech to a right-wing think-tank he branded the EU as an “obstacle” to world peace and “incompatible” with a free society.

In his 2010 speech Mr Baker also told the cheering audience:

“I think UKIP and the ‘Better Off Out’ campaign lack ambition. I think the European Union needs to be wholly torn down.”

 MICHAEL GOVE

In a keynote speech for Vote Leave during the referendum campaign in 2016, Michael Gove, MP, then Justice Secretary and now ‘Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’, made similar comments about bringing down the EU.

Mr Gove said:

“Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting – the democratic liberation of a whole continent.”

He described Britain’s departure from the EU as “a contagion” that could spread across Europe.

Reporting on Mr Gove’s speech, the BBC stated:

“Leaving the EU could also encourage others to follow suit, said Mr Gove.”

Commenting after the speech, a senior aide for the Leave campaign indicated to HeraldScotland that Mr Gove would be, “happy if Britain’s in-out referendum sparked similar polls across Europe.”

The Herald Scotland reporter asked if Brexit would lead to the break-up of the EU as we knew it and the aide replied, “Yes.”

When asked if the Out campaign hoped that it would trigger “the end of the Brussels block” the aide replied, “Certainly.”

In his speech, Mr Gove suggested that far from being the exception if Britain left the EU, it would become the norm as most other EU member states would choose to govern themselves. It was membership of the EU that was the anomaly, argued Mr Gove.

• The Guardian headline was:

‘Brexit could spark democratic liberation of continent, says Gove’

• The Telegraph headline:

‘Michael Gove urges EU referendum voters to trigger ‘the democratic liberation of a whole continent’

• The Express headline:

‘BREXIT WILL BREAK-UP EU: Leave vote to spark domino effect across bloc, says Gove’

• The Bloomberg headline:

‘U.K. Brexit Vote Would Be End of EU as We Know It, Gove Says’

• The Irish Times headline:

‘Michael Gove says other EU states may leave EU’

Britain’s EU referendum was not just about whether Britain should remain in the European Union. For some leading Brexit campaigners, it was a referendum about whether the European Union itself should continue to exist.

Leading Brexit supporters hope that what happened in Britain on 23 June 2016 could result in the end of the EU. This is no doubt a wake-up call for pro-EU supporters across the continent.

Britain chose not to be one of the founding members of the Union back in 1957 but joined later, in 1973.

Now Britain is the bloc’s only member ever to leave the Union, with the open aspiration of at least some ‘Leave’ campaigners that other EU members will also follow Britain in exiting the EU.

As Denis MacShane a former Labour Minister of Europe, wrote in The Independent yesterday:

‘The English right assumed that, after Brexit, the EU would be fatally weakened and there would be a rise of Brexit-type politics across Europe.

‘They were delighted when Marine Le Pen hailed Brexit and put the union flag on her social media accounts in June 2016.’

English right = Tory Party/hard Brexiters.

However, it didn’t turn out as British Brexiters hoped. The opposite happened.
Explained Mr MacShane:

‘Emmanuel Macron comprehensively beat Le Pen in 2017.

‘Since then, to the disappointment of the Boris Johnson camp in England, she has given up calling for a referendum on “Frexit” or even leaving the Euro.

‘The same has happened in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands where anti-European, anti-immigrant populists like Matteo Salvini and Geert Wilders have faded and lost votes to pro-European politicians from the centre, liberals, greens and social democrats.’

But let’s not lose our guard. Don’t underestimate that leading Brexiters are the enemies of the European Union and want to see its end.

There is no love from Boris Johnson and the Tories in power towards the EU. There is no goodwill.

They hate the EU. Its collapse would prove that Brexit was the right decision.

After all, the government is currently engineering an entirely unnecessary trade war with the EU, which would result in a no-deal Brexit for real.

Constant conflicts with the EU are how the Tories hope to stay in power.

For all of us who cherish the European Union as one of the most successful post-war projects, this has never been a battle just about Brexit.

This needs to be a Europe-wide movement to ensure that Brexit politicians and their allies don’t succeed in inflicting grievous damage to the EU, with their stated aim to destroy the European Union entirely.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

________________________________________________________

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook:

The post What they want: The end of the EU appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

by Eva Saeva, Newcastle Law School This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2021 (17-18 June, online)

 

Cybersecurity has become the backbone of a global digital society, a key element for a variety of issues ranging from national security, data protection, the trustworthiness of AI and 5G technologies, digital sovereignty, to, last but not least, responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the many benefits of digitalisation, but also exposed its vulnerabilities. During the (ongoing) health crisis, and especially the first few months, there was a sharp rise in cyberattacks against various critical infrastructure (CI) sectors, particularly the health sector, which was heavily targeted in certain EU Member States. More specifically, a series of serious attacks in the spring of 2020 were directed against the Czech Republic. In September 2020, a woman died in a German hospital, which at the time was suffering a ransomware attack. In addition, in late 2020, even the European Medicines Agency was attacked and vaccine data was accessed.

Against this background, this blog will investigate the new EU Cybersecurity Strategy adopted in December 2020, by discussing the new legislative proposals, with a particular focus on the new measures under development within the cyber diplomacy area. The blog’s objective is to examine whether COVID-19 was a key factor in the Strategy’s development.

The 2020 EU Cybersecurity Strategy for the Digital Decade put forward two legislative proposals. Both these proposals were built on existing legislation: the review of the NIS Directive and the resilience of critical entities. From a legal standpoint, it did not bring forward anything new – the focus remained on cyber resilience and risk management, in line with the 2013 Strategy. In other words, the 2020 Strategy efforts were directed towards securing critical infrastructure from possible attacks rather than dealing with the attackers themselves.

The increased number of cyberattacks against the health sector during the pandemic does not seem to have been a crucial element in the development of these proposals. However, these attacks further demonstrated the extreme vulnerability of CI sectors and the consequences of not having implemented properly prior legislative measures, such as the NIS Directive 2016. The attacks on the Czech Republic clearly illustrate this.

The Strategy also focused on the development of the EU diplomatic approach to malicious state-sponsored cyber operations. The Cyber Diplomacy toolbox, the legal framework regulating the EU’s actions in the field of cyber diplomacy, was used twice in 2020, in July and October respectively. However, sanctions fell short from attributing attacks to state-actors, even for already attributed attacks such as the WannaCry ransomware and NotPetya malware in 2017 (conducted by North Korea and Russia respectively). In the meantime, attacks such as the ones against the health sector in the Czech Republic, were not publicly and explicitly attributed or even addressed.

The newly elaborated strategic approach to cyber diplomacy seems too vague and underdeveloped. With undecided applicability of the Solidarity and Mutual defence clauses (“the EU should reflect upon the interaction between the cyber diplomacy toolbox and the possible use of Article 42.7 TEU and Article 222 TFEU”), the Strategy not only fails to build upon previous legislative efforts; it actually contradicts the 2013 Strategy, according to which “[a] particularly serious incident or attack could constitute sufficient ground for a Member State to invoke the EU Solidarity Clause”. While this could simply be a change of strategy, the applicability of the two clauses should have been further explored and reinforced as a strategic approach. The 2020 document also does not set a timeline for when the EU “will present a proposal” to “further define its cyber deterrence posture” contributing to responsible state behaviour. It therefore appears that diplomacy in cyberspace at EU level is still a challenging topic to address. COVID’s exposure of the EU’s hesitant steps in the area has not served as a lesson learned. As Helena Carrapico and Benjamin Farrand have argued, COVID “does not appear to have served in itself as a critical juncture in the EU’s understanding of cybersecurity”.

The EU’s diplomatic approach in cyberspace also affects its attribution capacities, which so far have remained a “sovereign political decision” belonging to the Member States. The EU’s Strategy does not reflect the changing international (political and technological) environment, where attribution is no longer as challenging as before. The US – a like-minded and allied state – is accelerating in its position as a leader in setting norms on state accountability, having officially attributed various cyberattacks to different nation-states. The most recent example was the SolarWinds breach, discovered in December 2020 and attributed to the Russian Federation, leading the latter to be sanctioned in April 2021. Even though 6 out of 14 EU institutions, agencies and bodies which use the SolarWinds product also fell victim of the attack, the EU remained silent on possible attribution. The EU only issued a press release “expressing solidarity” with the US and stating that the “United States assesses” that the operation “has been conducted by the Russian Federation”. The EU is therefore lagging behind in a field where it could have taken the lead. Annegret Bendiek and Matthias Kettemann have evidenced both the importance of the “strategic capacity to act” and of the EU’s ability to assert its views on security internationally, concepts which were a missed target in the 2020 Strategy.

Covid-19 is not only a health crisis. It is also a cybersecurity one. Based on existing evidence, it appears that the impact of COVID-19 on the development of the EU strategic approach to cybersecurity was little to inexistent. Rather, because of its impact on cybersecurity, the pandemic should have been a driving factor in the drafting of the 2020 EU Cybersecurity Strategy. The legislative proposals put forward are indeed a step towards more resilient CI sectors, but they do not fill the existent gaps in terms of attribution and state accountability. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on cybersecurity – a key element for both international and national security – was therefore a missed opportunity for the EU to claim its role as a global leader in developing cybersecurity legislation. If the EU wants to lead the discussions on responsible state behaviour, it should be more assertive, have a unified voice, and act collectively when attributing attacks to state-actors. Moreover, all these concepts should be clearly spelled out and included in a legal framework.

 

 

Eva Saeva is a postgraduate researcher at Newcastle Law School where she researches the EU’s legal approach to cybersecurity. Her thesis examines the UK, Italy, Bulgaria and the US’ national approaches, providing for internal and external factors in the development of the EU’s cybersecurity legal framework.

The post The new EU Cybersecurity Strategy 2020: was COVID-19 a key factor? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Only the Tories can now save Britain from the Tories.

That may seem a strange thing to say, but even Tories know when things have gone too far.

The Conservatives have dominated the 19th, 20th and, so far, the 21st centuries.

Since the 1830s, the Conservatives have been in the business of winning. They are the world’s most successful political party.

The Tories are Teflon coated. They instinctively know how to cling onto power regardless of scandalous, corrupt, and sleazy behaviour that has blighted so many of their administrations.

And for sure, scandalous, corrupt, and sleazy behaviour is blighting their current reign in office under Boris Johnson.

Tories, however, instinctively know when enough is enough. And right now, the party knows that the country has had enough.

Even the Daily Mail has had enough. The paper, under the editorship of Paul Dacre, was strongly pro-Boris. He could do no wrong.

But Dacre has left the building, and the Mail is changing colours.

In December 2019 the paper ‘rejoiced’ at the landslide win of Mr Johnson. Today, the Daily Mail reports that the nation is ‘aghast at Boris’s misjudgement’.

Their front page yesterday referred to Tory ‘sleaze’. The paper today reports the Tory poll lead has plunged ‘FIVE POINTS in the wake of Owen Paterson shambles’.

The Mail points out in large print:

‘Senior Conservatives are saying the episode raised serious questions about the Prime Minister’s judgment.’

A Tory grandee is quoted in the paper commenting on Johnson’s governing style:

‘It’s a bit like his marital infidelity – it’s in the price. A lack of attention to detail is expected.

‘But I tell you this latest shambles is one of the worst.

‘If and when Boris’s popularity in the country goes – and it might – a few more episodes like this and he will be out.’

Of course, there will be more episodes like this. Boris Johnson is prone to them. Government by chaos, contempt and cronyism are his modus operandi.

But what follows Johnson?

Yes, more Tory rule, at least until the next general election, which is likely to be almost three years away and yes, likely to result in yet more Tory rule.

Even if The Labour Party gets their act together (and right now it hasn’t) it would be difficult (although not impossible) for an opposition to win against a government with an 80-seat majority.

A lot now depends on public reaction. And maybe more pertinently, the reaction of papers such as the Daily Mail.

If – and it is a big if – the public and press reaction more loudly recognises Brexit for the disaster that it is, maybe the Tories of today might start to remember the Tories of yesterday.

What do they have to remember? This:

• It’s because of the Conservatives that the UK applied to join the European Community in the first place.
• It’s because of the Conservatives that the UK eventually joined the European Community.
• It’s because of the Conservatives that support for Britain’s continued membership of the European Community was won by a landslide in the first referendum in 1975.
• It’s because of the Conservatives, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, that the Single Market of Europe came into existence.
• It was the Conservative government in the 2016 referendum that officially supported the UK’s continued membership of the European Union.
• Most Conservative MPs voted for Remain in the referendum.
• Since the European Community was founded in 1957, with just two exceptions, the passionate resolve of ALL past Conservative Prime Ministers was that Britain should join the European Community and remain in it.

Yes, the party’s over for the Tories. Now, watch another bout of blue-on-blue battles as the party tries to sort itself out.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

________________________________________________________

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook:

The post The party’s over appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Today sees a meeting between British and French ministers to discuss the vexed question of fishing licences for Jersey waters. This event is important for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it’s the pathway that got opened up earlier in the week by the French decision not to move to unilateral sanctions over the issue, so that’s a positive development for talking through problems rather than laying down more harsh rhetoric (as both countries have been doing of late).

Secondly, it’s a reflection of the outsized importance that this issue has acquired over the past weeks, compared to its economic (or even its symbolic) value. This is a reflection of the wider low-trust environment that the UK operates in with both France and the EU.

But finally, it’s also the first time that the UK will have secured a bilateral meeting with an EU member state to discuss provisions of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA). The rigour of keeping to the Commission as the interlocutor on such matters has been exceptional and even the very particular nature of the matter might give others some pause for thought, not least Ireland.

In this context, Jersey might turn out to be an important demonstrator of things to come, even if the practicalities involved are somewhat mundane. Given that this is all a sideshow to the looming return of Article 16 – which is a very much bigger problem – we might loose sight of this rather quickly, especially if a deal can be worked out.

However the entire episode has also underlined a number of issues with the TCA that are likely to be repeated down the line.

Most obviously, the situation seems to have stemmed from different interpretations of Art.502(1), which requires that historical access to Jersey waters ‘can be demonstrated’. The necessary level of proof is not specified and this appears not to be a practice that can draw on any significant international law: littoral states that break-up and that divide their waters between successors tend not to offer on-going access at all.

The UK government took a rather firm line on all this, asking for GSM traces and the like, something that smaller French boats couldn’t provide because they don’t carry that kind of equipment. As have been pointed out elsewhere, this was a technical issue that was allowed to escape into chancelleries, with all the additional costs that’s incurred.

The vagueness of the provision is only underlined by Art.502(4) which allows for the entire arrangement to be changed without a full ratification process, suggesting this was at best a stop-gap. Perhaps this also explains the noticeably more constrained and proportional range of remedial measures that can be applied in the event of alleged non-compliance (Art. 506(2)) which means that even if the French had been able to convince the Commission to start on this – already a very big uncertainty – then remedies wouldn’t have stacked up to much.

Again, given the more general reading of the TCA – with its multiple dispute settlement mechanisms, regular reviews and termination clauses – this argues that this set of provisions wasn’t fully nailed down, so minimising contagion made more sense.

We can rehearse the reasons for the hurried nature of the TCA’s negotiation, formulation and ratification and who’s at fault for what, but ultimately none of this changes the situation as the parties find it now.

Indeed, it is this aspect that more forcefully comes back to Northern Ireland and the Protocol.

The UK narrative of late has been one of negotiating the TCA during a period of ‘extreme weakness‘, a bold claim given that ratification only came after the landslide of the December 2019 general election. That aside, the Jersey issue has risked playing into that narrative framing, even if it is within the current text and very much smaller. France does have a presidential election on the way, but it also doesn’t want to be the one to crash the already-beleaguered relationship. Hence the Commission’s refusal to accede to French demands to launch measures under Art.506.

If there is a silver lining, then it was the British protestation that French actions would result in the UK bringing proceedings under the TCA’s dispute settlement mechanism. The rhetoric of the need to stick to the provisions of the treaty raised some hollow laughs elsewhere, after the Internal Market Bill and the suggested use of Art.16 to remove the CJEU from the Protocol, but it does show that there is a logic available to working with what you have.

Unfortunately, it has also underlined very clearly that there is a very long road to travel before relations across the Channel can get back to the level they more usually enjoy.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic94

 

The post What the Jersey fish tale tells us about the TCA appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Former Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan, has penned an article for The Telegraph with the headline: ‘Poland is learning, as Britain did, that the  EU will never let its members be sovereign’

What nonsense. The EU is not a foreign power lording over the members. The EU IS the members.

All EU laws and treaties are democratically decided. The EU Commission is not the master of the EU; it’s the servant of the EU, fulfilling the laws agreed by the members.

Daniel Hannan is more recently known as Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, after he was appointed last year to the House of Lords by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

He is also an advisor to the Board of Trade. Elected to the position? Don’t be silly. He’s an unelected bureaucrat.

He was one of the founder members of Vote Leave and described by The Guardian as

“the man who brought you Brexit”

In his Telegraph column, Mr, sorry Lord Hannan, claims that:

‘It was always about sovereignty. Who gives orders and who takes them. In Lenin’s pithy formulation, “who, whom?”’

And he makes clear that he supports Poland ‘calmly and politely’ repudiating EU sovereignty. He writes:

‘Its highest court, the Constitutional Tribunal, determined that, on Polish territory, national law had precedence over rulings by EU institutions.’

He explains:

‘What makes the EU’s treaties different from every other international accord is that they do not just apply to their signatories as states; rather, they create a new legal order that is directly binding on citizens with or without implementing legislation at national level.

‘If there is a conflict, decisions by EU institutions override national statutes and even national constitutions. The EU is, in the exact sense, sovereign over its member countries.’

Why did EU member states agree ‘to this surrender’ asks Lord Hannan.

He claims they didn’t, at least not until recently. The problem has come about because the final arbiter of EU law is the European Court of Justice.

Lord Hannan asserts:

‘The primacy of EU law is not to be found anywhere in the Treaty of Rome.’

But in the same article, Lord Hannan reminds readers that in 1999, in a declaration attached to the Lisbon Treaty, EU member governments acknowledged the supremacy of EU law “in accordance with well settled case law of the ECJ”.

So, supremacy of EU law (in certain areas*) was agreed by EU members. The Lisbon Treaty had the unanimous endorsement of every EU member state. It was not forced on any country.

Furthermore, Lord Hannan’s opinion piece refers to Articles 2 and 3 of the European Communities Bill 1972.

Those Articles, acknowledges Lord Hannan, ‘declared EU rules to be supreme over parliamentary statutes.’

The UK House of Commons voted 301–284 in favour of the Bill, and it was endorsed by the UK House of Lords.

So, any devolvement of sovereignty to the EU by the UK was democratically agreed by our Parliament as part of our membership terms.

As the Institute of Government has pointed out:

‘The European Communities Act [1972] gives EU law supremacy over UK national law.

‘Where the interpretation of EU law is in doubt, the Act requires UK courts to refer judgment to the European Court of Justice.’

So, supremacy of EU law over certain areas* of a member state’s laws is voluntary, democratic, and can come to an end when a member state leaves the EU – as all members are free to do, and the UK has now done.

It should be remembered that every EEC/EU treaty – upon which all EU laws must be compatible – was fully debated and democratically passed by our Parliament in Westminster.

Not once were changes to our membership imposed on us, and neither could they be, as the EU is a democracy, run by its members for the benefit of members.

Brexiters such as Lord Hannan claim that outside the EU the UK has gained sovereignty.

But with Brexit, we’ve lost a say, votes and vetoes on the running and future direction of our continent.

That in my mind does not represent a gain, but a loss of sovereignty.

* Legal note: EU does not have supremacy over every national law; ONLY areas for which the EU is responsible. See Full Fact’s excellent report about this. 

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

________________________________________________________

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook

The post Telegraph spreads nonsense about the EU appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Just a short post this week, since I already wrote about this in a Twitter thread earlier in the week:

Some thoughts on the UK's approach to the NI Protocol and what that might mean

Short version: UK wants to hold it in unstable situation, to avoid wearing costs of Brexit domestically, but this isn't a long-term strategy

1/

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) October 18, 2021

The thread was an attempt to make sense of what the UK is doing and whether it might work. As you’ll see, I’m not that confident that it will. Conversations with people on both sides this week haven’t changed my mind on that either.

Part of that is the low trust environment that exists. The number and quality of connections that the EU has with the UK are both relatively low, which means there are fewer opportunities for the kind of frank discussions that might find a way through the current impasse.

As a result, the weight of rhetoric (on both sides) increases in the calculation.

To take an obvious example, the unwillingness of the UK to publish its replacement text for the Protocol makes it impossible to work out a more dispassionate understanding of its needs, so we have to fall back on the words of Lord Frost or Boris Johnson, with all the additional complexities that brings.

Even if the Commission proposals last week do leave various points to be precised and elaborated, at least they work more transparently towards a new set of agreements (or implementations of existing agreements, to be more exact).

This shouldn’t be that surprising – I noted in evidence back at the start of the year, for example – but that doesn’t change the situation as we find it.

Rebuilding contacts and conversations is going to have to be a priority if things are to start to improve between the EU and UK, and it’s probably the UK that has to start that.

I’d not hold your breath right now.

The post Making sense of the UK’s approach to the Protocol appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On last week’s BBC Question Time (7 October) host Fiona Bruce announced:

“The majority of you voted FOR Brexit in this audience.”

She explained:

“We select this audience very carefully to be representative”.

Her response came after a comment from a member of the audience who said:

“We’ve got a lack of foreign workers which is why we’ve got these shortages.”

Assuming him to be a Remainer, Ms Bruce responded in a rather alarmed way. She tried to say that she wanted to hear from members of the audience who had voted for Brexit.

She then turned to the audience member to say:

“I’m assuming you didn’t vote for Brexit.”

Came the reply:

“I did actually.” 

Oh dear. Fiona could have fallen off her chair.

She exclaimed:

“You did!

“OK. And you’re still saying that? OK.”

It seemed an odd response. She didn’t even ask the Leave voter why he had apparently changed his mind.

You can watch and read about what happened by clicking a link:

• On this EU ROPE blog
• On Facebook 
• On LinkedIn 
• On YouTube 

I sent an email to BBC Question Time to query how they select their audiences “very carefully to be representative”.

I asked:

‘Can you please provide me with information on how the audience is selected insofar as the referendum result was concerned?

‘Does the audience selection vary according to the town being visited, or is it based on national statistics?’ 

I sent the BBC three questions specifically about audience selection insofar as it relates to Brexit.

1. A majority of the entire electorate in the UK did NOT vote for Brexit. So how come the majority in your audience are Brexiters? How can you say your audience is “representative”?
2. If your audience is supposed to be representative of the 2016 EU referendum, your audience members should comprise around a third Remain voters, just over a third Leave voters, and just under a third non-voters. Do you agree?
3. The referendum was over five years ago. Shouldn’t your audience be representative of the situation as it is today? Polls consistently show that a majority in Britain consider the Brexit decision to be wrong.

The BBC promised to send me their reply by my deadline, on Wednesday 13 October. When nothing came, I chased them.

Yesterday morning I got this reply from a ‘BBC spokesperson’:

“Question Time always selects its audiences to reflect recent voting trends and the current political picture of the nation it is broadcasting from.

“Those trends differ across the UK and we aim to reflect those differences.”

I immediately wrote back:

‘The quote does not answer the three specific questions I have asked or provide any detail as to how the BBC selects its audiences.

‘Can you offer a more detailed quote, or is that it?

‘I don’t think my readers will be impressed by such a short response to my detailed questions.’

But answer came there none.

They may be called BBC Question Time, but they don’t like to answer questions.

Even though, as licence payers, we do deserve answers, don’t you think?

If you are in a Question Time audience one day, maybe you can ask my questions for me.

But be sure to record what happens on your mobile phone, because the chances are that your questions would be edited out of programme.

• Watch the extract from BBC Question Time of 7 October 2021:

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• My campaign page on Facebook: Reasons2Rejoin
• And LinkedIn

________________________________________________________

• Join the discussion about this article on Facebook:

The post BBC Question Time fails to answer my questions appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On 7 October 2021, EUHealthGov held its second quarterly seminar. We were delighted to be joined by Professor Meri Koivusalo from Tampere University (Finland) for a discussion on how EU trade negotiations can impact health services. She highlighted a persistent discrepancy between the EU’s aspirations and the reality of health services safeguarding when so-called ‘new generation’ trade agreements are negotiated. Meri Koivusalo’s presentation was based on her recently published article co-authored with Drs Noora Heinonen and Liina-Kaisa Tynkkynen at Tampere University.

A key point of discussion was how new generation trade agreements, such as CETA and TTIP, are becoming increasingly comprehensive, which can have long-lasting implications on the regulatory landscape. We looked at how they can affect health in a variety of ways, including via the trade flows of unhealthy commodities; constraints put on national policy space, and the protection of corporate benefits (through intellectual property rights and investment protection among other mechanisms). Such trade agreements can shape ‘the new normal’ in a way that institutionalises liberalisation as the default path forward. Meanwhile, assurances like commitments to the right to regulate tend to be made outside of the legally binding negotiation text, thus bearing little concrete weight. 

Another angle explored was the multi-level governance aspect of EU trade agreement negotiations, and the extent to which Member States share a common position on how health services should be treated in the negotiations. 

Finally, we discussed the promising emergence of a ‘positive trade agenda’: can a positive trade agenda comply with other priorities like human rights, gender equality, and sustainability, or would it entrench the prioritisation of commercial policy?

A recording of the event is available here

The post Summary: In Conversation with Professor Meri Koivusalo – Trade and Health: When Actions do not match Aspirations appeared first on Ideas on Europe.