Ideas on Europe Blog

Multinationals have taken advantage of tax benefits for a long time. Leading the fight against multinationals, Margrethe Vestager, Vice-President of the European Commission and DG-Competition Commissioner, has been referred to as “Silicon Valley’s dragon slayer”. The idea that large companies can finally be held accountable by Vestager has gained her a worldwide reputation as a “watchdog” for tech giants. However, both Vestager and the European Commission have suffered serious backlash as their tax related decisions were at times negatively received by member states and multinationals alike. Now, with US president Joe Biden’s arrival into politics, Vestager might have gained an ally in her fight against multinationals in Europe.

With Joe Biden’s arrival into politics, Vestager might have gained an ally in her fight against tax evasion in Europe. Photo: EC-Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, Jennifer Jacquemart, 2017

Large multinationals have used numerous schemes to avoid paying taxes in various EU countries. This was made possible by EU Member states having differing legislation and national policies for dealing with taxation. Countries like The Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Cyprus are among the world’s 15 worst corporate tax havens. Ireland, for instance has a tax arrangement coined the “Double Irish”. This arrangement allows companies to shift taxable income from within Ireland to another Irish-registered firm in an offshore tax haven. In turn, these practices harm fair competition in the European Union.

The Commission’s quest against tax ruling malpractices

The Commission, or more specifically, The Directorate General for Competition (DG-Comp) is in charge of establishing and implementing competition policy for the European Union. Since 2013, DG-Comp has made tax-ruling practices of member states involving the investment of large multinationals an important part of their investigations. The Commission set up tax measures aimed to assess public allegations on member states giving favourable tax treatments to certain companies. Since 2014, the Commission’s new tax force has made decisions on several cases: UK Tax scheme for multinationals (Controlled Foreign Company rules), alleged aid by Luxembourg to McDonald’s, ENGIE, Amazon and Fiat, state aid implemented by Ireland to Apple, Excess Profit exemption in Belgium, and aid in favour of Starbucks in the Netherlands. There are also other ongoing investigations against Ikea and Nike in the Netherlands and Huhtamäki in Luxembourg.

Margrethe Vestager’s fight against tax malpractices as Vice-President of the Commission and as DG-Competition Commissioner has gained her the reputation of “dragon slayer” or “giant killer”. While many might see her as a champion against large multinationals, the pursuit against these multinationals has also caused awkward tensions between the Commission and certain member states.

Indeed, as my doctoral research has shown, appeals brought by member states against tax rulings tend to be accompanied by claims seeking to delegitimise the Commission’s decision and authority. For example, the appeal by the Irish government against the Commission’s decision with respect to Apple was accompanied by claims disregarding the tax rulings as “politically motivated.” Irish governmental officials, Apple representatives, and some competition experts blamed the Commission for making Ireland an example on its new quest against tax practices.

 It is clear the approach [towards Apple] is politically motivated and the huge headline-grabbing number and endless rounds of interviews are designed to maximise PR impact for the commission at a time when some member states are losing faith in EU institutions – Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen, Competition Law Researcher,  Irish Times February 2017

 Members of the Irish government justified their appeal by suggesting the Commission’s decision was purely politically motivated as well as going against their country’s sovereignty. However, this perception that the Commission is politically motivated could become harder to sell in the future for both Ireland and multinationals involved in state aid cases. This comes as newly elected US president Joe Biden might be a promising ally in the battle against large multinationals.

Biden’s arrival and push for a global minimum tax rate

In June 2020, Vestager had already pushed for a global consensus on digital tax. However, former President Trump threatened to put tariffs on champagne, Roquefort cheese and other products if the digital tax proposal went ahead. This caused France’s President Macron to postpone talks for a year. Now, under the current Biden administration, a push for taxing the biggest 100 companies that have benefited from globalisation has begun.

The Biden administration has recently made mentions of leading a major change to global tax rules. US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen stated that the US wants to pursue a 21% minimum tax rate to US multinationals abroad. This is part of a global minimum corporate tax rate that according to Yellen “can stop the race to the bottom”.

However, this might eliminate the tax advantage that certain EU member states such as Ireland have. Currently, Ireland attracts multinationals and US investments by having a 12.5% corporate tax rate, compared to rates over 30% for other countries such as France or Germany. In 2020, this allowed the country to earn 11.8 billion euros from corporate taxes (most of which are coming from US firms), representing one-fifth of total revenues for the country. A global taxation rate that potentially makes Ireland less attractive to foreign investors would thus have a substantial impact on the Irish economy. Indeed, Irish officials are already aware of the potential impact that a globally enforced tax rate could have on their nation.

Team Vestager-Biden is highly likely to stand united against international tax avoidance.  As the US government has changed its position on international tax policy, it seems that a consensus for a global minimum corporate tax rate is finally underway. This would make it more difficult for multinationals to take advantage of existing loopholes in the international system, making their hunger for obtaining tax benefits harder to prevail in the future. This would be a necessary and welcomed shift towards stopping tax evasion practices across Europe and the world.

 

 

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As I mentioned last week, the focus so far on the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (and, to a lesser extent, the Withdrawal Agreement) has been on the legal aspects.

Part of that has been driven by the growing realisation among non-legal scholars (like me) that there’s not merely a need to read the fine print of the treaties, but also to have a sense of wider legal frameworks and principles.

With that in mind, I’m found myself coming back to such questions at regular intervals in the past 18 months.

In this post, I’m going to pull them together for you (and for me), so you have quicker access and so we can start thinking about their interaction.

Pacta sunt servanda and force majeure

Tellingly, much of what I’ll cover relates to the extent of obligation that a party enters into by signing a treaty. In part, that’s a function of the apparent lack of understanding on the side of various ministers in their pronouncements on the TCA/WA, but also connects back to the fundamental failure of the UK to determine what it actually wants from Brexit.

I’ve explored the latter point at length in various other places (like here), but a consequence of not really knowing what you want to achieve is that once you have an agreement you may well discover down the line that it’s not what you wanted.

The central legal concept that applies here is that of pacta sunt servanda: if you sign up to it, you’re stuck with it (roughly speaking).

I cover the main points in this thread and these slides:

PDF version: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic40

The concept contains a lot (as you can see) across all the stages of international agreements, so it pays some time to unpack it all.

Indeed, it provides the basic framework for the current discussion about force majeure that we’ve been seeing around the Northern Ireland Protocol. While I did make a graphic about that too, in essence you have much of the idea from the stuff above:

PDF version: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic80
Thread: here

And as a final thing, I now have a mirror of this blog running at the OU.

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Today’s political reality of populist movements, geopolitical competition and disinformation has inspired an emerging scholarship on politicisation in EU external policy. Yet most of these recent contributions on EU external policy focus on politicisation processes within the EU. Comparatively, little research has been done on how actors based in and/or representing third countries contribute to politicising EU policy processes from the outside-in.

An exclusive focus on EU actors in studies on politicisation of EU external policies may unintentionally misrepresent third country actors as passive recipients of the EU’s policy whims rather than active shapers of these processes. Outside-in politicisation is understood as the process whereby the politicization of EU external policies in third countries influences (de-)politicisation dynamics in the EU. The pertinence of researching outside-in politicisation is underlined in recent scholarship questioning Eurocentric perspectives in European Studies and in post-development critiques of EU development policy.

Our recent article explores the empirical relevance of researching outside-in politicisation processes in European studies. We set out to increase our understanding of when and how third countries actors engage in these processes. We specifically explore the assumption that Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), i.e. stakeholders beyond the group of official actors, can play a key role in promoting outside-in politicisation, and contribute to better understanding the conditions under which they can do so. Our article focuses on the EU’s relationship with Western Africa for being its earliest external relationship and for its prominence on the EU’s political agenda in recent years. The EU’s engagement today mainly stems from its migration policy, as well as in relation to perceived trans-regional challenges such as terrorism in the Sahel region. Moreover, Western African states such as Nigeria constitute important emerging markets for EU exports.

In the field of development policy, CSOs face the challenge of reconciling their roles in influencing and monitoring policy with effective project implementation. As regards the first role, recent research assesses European CSOs’ various approaches to engaging in Brussels-based development policy discussions. The engagement of CSOs based in Europe and Africa in relation to EU-Western Africa relations more specifically remains underexplored, as are the ways in which they influence EU policy processes.

Against this backdrop, we looked into the following research question: to what extent and how have CSOs contributed to the politicisation of EU policies towards Western Africa? We analysed the involvement of CSOs in two specific cases: the negotiations of a European Partnership Agreement (EPA) between Western African states and the EU, and the EU´s Sahel engagement. Through our analysis of these two cases, we seek to inform future research on the outside-in politicisation of EU development policy and its nexuses.

Because the initial deadline of an expiring WTO waiver by the end of December 2007, the EPA negotiations between the EU and West-Africa can be separated into two distinct phases. CSOs played key intermediary roles during the first phase of negotiations (2003-2007) and contributed to the increasing politicised nature of the trade negotiations. Both European and Western African CSOs made important contributions to reframing the negotiations as part and parcel of the broader and historically motivated relations between the EU and Western Africa, in contrast to the EU negotiators who considered the EPAs as self-standing trade agreements.

In the case of the Sahel as major region of the EU´s external focus in the last years, CSOs had a much more limited role in shaping patterns of politicisation. Sahelian CSOs played a minor role and were not successful in persuading policy makers to be associated to the initiative. European CSOs in turn focused their engagement on human rights violations and migration standards, while only to a limited degree opposing the overall initiative.

Both case studies confirm the importance of authority transfer as a factor influencing CSOs’ possibilities for engaging in outside-in politicisation: while the transfer of policy competencies within the European Commission promoted polarisation and in turn facilitated CSO engagement in the EPA case, the opposite was shown in the Sahel case were imposing a European top-down structure effectively closed the space for CSOs to engage. In a similar manner, both cases also suggest the relevance of the domestic country context in the Western African states concerned as a factor influencing CSO involvement. In the Sahel case, Western African CSOs were constrained by control and repression exerted by the G5 Sahel public authorities. In contrast, the Western African CSO campaign against the EPA benefitted from an inclusive approach towards CSO engagement among decision-makers and little control and repression exerted by (key) countries.

These findings suggest that CSO engagement in outside-in politicisation can particularly be effective in case of prior polarisation among the official actors. In more crude terms, if official actors disagree about directions and outcomes in a given policy process, they may officially or unofficially invite CSOs to disagree with them. The critical stance towards the trade liberalisation in both Europe and Western Africa enabled CSO engagement in the EPA case, since the CSO campaigns and publications contributed to legitimising the dissenting official voices. In contrast, when there is consensus among official actors concerning a course of action, such as external intervention in the Sahel, CSOs may have limited room to engage. CSOs themselves may also refrain from engaging in politicisation in cases where they are ‘part of the solution’, in terms of being involved in implementing projects providing services in line with the overall policy aims concerned.

Further research could study CSO engagement in other cases and contexts, and that way help us to better understand when and how they contribute to politicising EU policies. This would enable us to learn about the conditions under which CSO involvement results in a change of EU preferences and/or approach. This could allow us to better understand when CSOs and other actors contribute to politicisation with, or against the grain of the official actors leading on policy processes.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “Outside-in Politicisation of EU-Western Africa relations: What Role for Civil Society Organisations?”

 

 

Friedrich Plank is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on EU external relations, Peace and Conflict Studies with a particular focus in Africa-EU relations and conflict resolution attempts.

Twitter: @FriedrichPlank

 

Niels Keijzer is a senior researcher in the research programme ‘Inter- and Transnational Cooperation’ at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). His research and advisory work focuses on European development cooperation, EU-Africa relations and development effectiveness.

Twitter: @keijzer_niels

 

 

Arne Niemann is Professor of International Politics and Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration Studies at the Department of Political Science of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on the European integration process and European Union politics and policies (particularly EU external policy).

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In the past four years the European Union has become an increasingly important actor in the field of defence. One key development, the establishment of a European Defence Fund (EDF) with a budget of 7.953 billion EUR for defence research and development for the period 2021–2027, has generated much interest in academic and policy circles. For some researchers like Tardy, this new actorness marks a welcome break with the past, as it shows that the EU is taking defence seriously and responding to a more threatening external environment. Others see the EDF as the outcome of supranational entrepreneurship by the European Commission over decades. Haroche for example considers it an example of neofunctionalism, while critics of the EDF like Goxho see the EDF mostly as the outcome of gradual lobby capture by the defence industry.

The core argument of our JCMS article Sociotechnical Imaginaries of EU Defence: The Past and the Future in the European Defence Fund is that the EDF is better understood as an outcome of a long process through which certain beliefs about defence technologies and industrial innovation became institutionalised in some EU networks, particularly within the European Commission. We trace the development of a particular narrative on security, innovation, research, and economic growth based on fears of technology gaps with, and dependence on, the US. We show how this narrative became deeply embedded in successive policy initiatives and research programmes, arguing that this sociotechnical vision or imaginary of the future, in existence since the late 1960s, is now materializing in the EDF.

Theoretically, we draw on Science and Technology Studies to deploy the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to analyse how political outcomes are shaped by collectively held visions of desired futures that are attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology. We build on the six elements of Jasanoff’s definition of the imaginary: 1) a vision of a desired future; 2) collectively held; 3) institutionally stabilized; 4) publicly performed; 5) animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order; 6) attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.

We show how the ideas about a desired, future EU defence emerged in the 1960s and how several initiatives tried to enact them, how these ideas were promoted for decades and stabilized in the early 2000s, and how the EDF constitutes the materialization of these ideas, through public performance and institutional anchoring in both industrial and defence bureaucracies. Using an historiographical methodology, we draw on these insights to argue that current EU innovation, industrial and defence policies are entwined in wider political and social understandings about the past, present and future.

Bringing the history back in allows us not just to provide a richer account of the emergence of the EDF than currently exists, but also to critically analyse the contemporary materialisation of the sociotechnical imaginary. By putting technology and innovation at the centre of our analysis, our theoretical and methodological options enable alternative understandings of key contemporary defence policies in the EU and expand our views on the growing role of the European Commission in defence matters. Centring the sociotechnical imaginary enables us to understand the EDF neither just as an industrial policy, as its legal basis suggests, nor just as an instrument at the service of Europe’s strategic autonomy in geopolitical issues, as some commentators highlight, but rather as a complex combination of both.

Our contention is that from the 1970s onwards a particular view emerged of how the EU should support defence technology. The view is deeply rooted in the beliefs of that time that investment in defence technology drove civilian technological innovation and thus economic growth, and that the EU needed to bridge the transatlantic technological gap. Yet, these dynamics are, in many ways, a story of the past. Understanding how ideas about the future have created a stable sociotechnical imaginary of EU defence is relevant to comprehend the past and the present of key EU defence initiatives. We would take this argument further and claim that the EU’s vision of its future sees technology and innovation as performing central roles, and that research into the EU’s tech-based political orders of the future would gain from critical engagements with the literature that puts the socio-politics of technology at the centre of the analysis.

In the context of current discussions on the need for the EU to increase its strategic autonomy, it is important to understand that this need has triggered a wide array of initiatives since the 1960s both in the domains of industry and innovation, on the one hand, and defence, on the other. The logic, has argued by Marcum already in 1986, has been to prevent ‘a deep political and technological dependence on the United States’ (Marcum, 1986: 35). In other words, the possibility of strategic autonomy being viewed as a desirable policy outcome in these policy areas is not a new idea, and our article sheds light on the roots of the geo-political and geo-economic visions of the current Commission.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “Sociotechnical Imaginaries of EU Defence: The Past and the Future in the European Defence Fund”

 

 

Jocelyn Mawdsley is a senior lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University UK.  Her research focuses on the political economy of defence and the interplay between defence, innovation and industrial policies. Twitter handle @JocelynMawdsley @nclpolitics

 

 

 

Bruno Oliveira Martins is senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where he coordinates its Security Research Group. He researches developments happening at the intersection of technological developments, security practices, and societal change. Twitter handle: @BrunoOMartins7 @PRIOUpdates

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Manipal Higher Education Meet in 2018

Priya Vijaykumar Poojary

The current political shifts in the form of increasing populism, the resurgence of nationalism, structural racism, and the pandemic are altering global political environments. These shifts are occurring in tangent with the internationalization of higher education as we witness new regional higher educational models (both intra- and inter) and increasing cross-border academic mobility. Thus, higher education institutions (HEIs) while situated in their national ecosystems are increasingly impacted by the political shifts (Smith & Freeman, 2014), creating (at times) newer borders or redefining the existing borders in what we term as cross-border education.

 

Just as universities constitute sites of producing and reproducing political, social, and economic (in)equalities, they also provide platforms for resistance. These and other such issues will be discussed at the India-EU Higher Education Meet titled Reimagining Borders in Cross-Border Education, October 7-8, 2021. India-EU relations in the past few decades have been increasingly strengthened through education – academic exchanges, mobility of students and staff, research collaborations especially through some of the recent initiatives such as Horizon 2020 and Erasmus programmes. Funding programmes such as Jean Monnet Chairs and projects, Centres of Excellence, Networks and Capacity Building in Higher Education (CBHE) projects have played crucial roles in strengthening academic association between India and Europe (Inamdar and Hegde, 2021). Since 2014, India has been the recipient of the highest number of grants under the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (EMJMD) programme. Under the Marie Sklowdowska-Curie programme, 1397 Indian researchers were funded while under the Research and Innovation staff Exchange (RISE) mobility, 28 researchers from the EU came to India. These numbers are clearly indicative of the visible imbalances in the flow of knowledge seekers between the regions where on the one hand a large number of Indian scholars go the EU, very few come to India. There is a definite necessity to introspect on the challenges that promulgate such imbalances.

 

These realities call for a reassessment of not only what constitutes knowledge, but also what encompasses the idea of borders. In this conference, we wish to address borders of different kinds – economic, political, racial, systemic, epistemic and institutional – and at different levels, while seeking sans-border education. These borders (varied in nature and form), have constrained higher education, necessitating us to introspect them and maybe in the future even overcome them, thus championing universality at the heart of university systems. We are interested in understanding whether the existing shifts can contribute to greater inclusivity in cross-border education. Our attempt is to foster a dialogue among scholars across borders on the inclusive role that education can play and how universities in particular can become significant political actors in the process. This will not only lead to a more robust understanding of the universities as critical actors but also enable us to debate and deliberate on the conceptual contours of what constitutes borders in cross-border education.

 

How can we generate knowledge that is of local relevance and inclusive of perspectives of people from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds? How do debates on indigenization of curriculum and knowledge production correspond to the role of universities in driving sustainable development? Fundamental questions concerning the nature of knowledge formation, its flows, and its consequences on social equality as it interacts with global issues of migration, modernization, and geopolitical changes will also be discussed at the Meet.

 

The emergence of newer regions of knowledge including the creation of an ‘Academic Silk Road’ (reference here to the development of an Asian higher education region led by China mainly through its Belt and Road Initiative) vis-à-vis an existing ‘Europe of Knowledge’ tempts us to re-examine the notions of cooperation and competition in cross-border education. This politics of knowledge brings to question the issues of power (intrinsic and ascribed) and legitimation of particular kinds of knowledge over others. These dynamics are increasingly challenging the knowledge production and dissemination in diverse contexts. India-EU Higher Education Meet intends to bring to discussion this politics of knowledge with a specific focus on cross-border education drawing experiences from India and Europe. We invite interested scholars to present papers addressing some of the themes presented above. Select papers will also be included in an edited volume published by Manipal Universal Press (MUP). Participants can also register and participate online. More information about the conference can be accessed here: http://coemces.manipal.edu/PublicPages/India-EU_Higher_Education_Meet2020.aspx

 

Priya Vijaykumar Poojary is a Lecturer and research scholar at Manipal Centre for European Studies – Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), India. Her doctoral thesis includes a comparative study of Higher Education Regionalism (HER) in Europe and Asia.

 

References:

Inamdar, N., & Hegde, M. (2021). Knowledge Diplomacy in Action: Delineating Educational Connect in India-EU Engagements. In N. Inamdar, P. V. Poojary, & P. Shetty, Contours of India-EU Engagements: Multiplicity of Experiences (pp. 165-198). Manipal: Manipal Universal Press.

 

Smith, K., & Freeman, R. (2014). A New Politics of Knowledge? Exploring the contested boundaries between science, knowledge and policy. Retrieved from LSE Impact Blog: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/05/27/politics-of-knowledge-book-series/

 

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Working in, researching, studying or interested to know more about EU health governance? We’re delighted to introduce a new network to connect, support and inform this vibrant, interdisciplinary field – welcome to EUHealthGov!

EUHealthGov aims to provide a hub for the exchange of ideas and information on all things EU health governance. It is open to anyone with an interest in the health law and policy of the EU, regardless of geographical location, career stage, academic discipline, methodological tradition or professional occupation.

Sounds good…but why now?!

Well, two main reasons:

1. Even before COVID-19 raised the stakes and prompted the biggest expansion in EU health funding to date, there was a whole range of exciting developments taking place in health law and policy in Brussels. The launch of a(nother) new programme to tackle cancer, the impact of competition law on how health services are provided, the shaping of health policies within wider frameworks of fiscal policy and trade…there’s a lot going on. Despite this, there aren’t too many opportunities to engage in regular discussion with colleagues across disciplines, professions, countries and career stages.

2. From an academic perspective, EUHealthGov is particularly keen to elevate health within the field of EU studies. Though it’s origins reach back to the founding years of the European Community and its scope is as wide as many other policy areas, health seems to remain a lesser-known sub-field of EU studies. It features rarely and briefly in EU textbooks and syllabi, and is often part of social policy or welfare panels at workshops and conferences. EUHealthGov seeks to establish an identity for the sub-field.

Got it. So what is EUHealthGov doing to help, exactly?

There are several plans! Firstly, let us introduce the network website, Twitter account and mailing list. These will help us disseminate news, publications and ideas, and facilitate the sharing of information between network members.

The network will host events – these might include roundtables, ‘practitioner perspectives’, work-in-progress sessions, ‘in conversation’ events, and other formats. We’ll be seeking to cover a wide range of topics and perspectives, and to organise these events quarterly.

We’ll also be organising panels at the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) annual conference and other relevant events. For UACES (which generously funds the network), we hope to establish a health ‘section’, with a consistent collection of linked panels covering health-related topics. These panels will be open to academic and non-academic presentations, from any discipline, across career stages and countries. Early career colleagues are also able to apply for subsidies to support their participation. Additional funds will be made available to support network members in attending other, non-UACES conferences, to bring EU health studies to other audiences.

I’m convinced. How do I get involved?

– You can follow the network on Twitter

– You can visit the website

– You can join the mailing list

Most importantly, we’d love to hear from those working, researching and studying in the field of EU health governance. If you’ve an idea for an event or collaboration, if you’d like to present work or discuss an idea, if you’ve a blog post to share or news to disseminate, or if you’d like to feed in more generally – get in touch! The EUHealthGov Twitter DMs are open or you can email euhealthgov@gmail.com.

We look forward to connecting with you soon!

The EUHealthGov coordinators

Dr Eleanor Brooks (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK), Dr Charlotte Godziewski (Department of Sociology and Policy, Aston University, UK) and Dr Mary Guy (Law School, Lancaster University, UK).

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Elinor Ostrom provides the ideal framework to understand the European Union. Jan P. Vogler explains why.

When the EU faced massive refugee inflows from Syria in 2015 and 2016, polycentric governance was maintained in the crisis response: On the one hand, individual states managed and coordinated the entry of a large number of refugees. On the other hand, only the combination of these individual efforts with a major agreement between the EU and Turkey ultimately resolved the crisis. Photo: NTB/AFP/Bulent Kilic

The EU is often subject to biting criticism by its opponents: political speechwriter Aram Bakshian contends that the EU has “a single giant bureaucracy and an imposed-from-above social model” and journalist Leo McKinstry suggests that it is “a federalist monster that will not stop until nations are abolished.”

Such negative portrayals of the EU as a highly centralised system of governance that relentlessly imposes its will on participating nations in a top-down fashion are widespread. They likely have amplified Euroscepticism and contributed to Brexit – the most dramatic setback of the European project thus far.

But are these criticisms justified? In a recent book chapter, I argue that they are not.

Instead, using Vincent and Elinor Ostrom’s theory of polycentrism, I suggest that the EU is the opposite of what many of its critics claim. Indeed, it is actually best understood as a “polycentric” system of governance characterised by:

• a high degree of vertical and horizontal dispersion of decision-making authority
• an efficient division of governance responsibilities among central, national and local political units
• the preservation (and sometimes expansion) of substantial influence by regional and local actors

What is polycentric governance?

The theory of polycentrism was originally developed by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent to analyse governance in metropolitan areas.

Their central argument was that these conglomerates of towns and cities are best governed in a “polycentric” fashion. By using this term, they referred to an organizational structure with substantial dispersion of political authority and with local governments providing the public goods and services that are most efficiently supplied and managed by them.

In line with this first argument, they suggested that a system that centralises all political power in a single institution would suffer from severe inefficiencies and low levels of responsiveness to citizens.

While units in a polycentric system do profit from working under a centralised set of rules, their interactions are mostly deliberative in style and system-wide governance decisions are mostly not just imposed from above.

Importantly, however, they also acknowledged that certain aspects of governance could and should be organized centrally – if central management represents the most efficient solution. For example, this is the case if centralised provision profits from high economies of scale, if there are cross-unit spillover effects in the underlying phenomena or if standardization significantly improves the functioning of markets.

How we can analyse the EU as a polycentric system of governance

Although the theory of polycentrism was originally developed for the analysis of metropolitan areas, it also is a perfect framework to investigate and understand the institutions and governance of the EU. This is so for several reasons:

First, the three areas in which the EU centralises most decision-making authority are economic exchange, environmental regulation and the agricultural sector.

Given (1) the substantial benefits from both market integration through standardisation and the removal of internal and external trade barriers as well as (2) high levels of cross-border environmental interdependence (which both indicate significant potential spillover effects), organizing these policy dimensions in a more centralised fashion likely represents the most efficient solution.

Second, the EU’s institutional framework is evidently designed in a way that avoids an omnipotent central authority.

EU’s institutional framework is evidently designed in a way that avoids an omnipotent central authority.

It does so through several mechanisms, including by distributing political power horizontally between the Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament and by fully integrating the political “subunits” (nation-states) into central decision-making processes.

Furthermore, the European Council in particular has a deliberative style of governance and it can therefore be seen as a carrier of polycentric principles.

Finally, the theory of polycentric governance places much emphasis on the importance of local governments.

Only if local and regional actors retain substantial authority over public goods and services most efficiently organised at their respective administrative levels, can the EU truly be classified as a polycentric system.

In this area, too, the EU meets the framework’s criteria: Local and regional governments retain substantial authority, often managing all sorts of public goods, from transportation and infrastructure to schooling and policing. They might also be able to expand their administrative capacities through EU funding. Indeed, prominent EU scholars argue that European integration has given local and regional governments more power than they would have in a Europe of nation-states.

Prominent EU scholars argue that European integration has given local and regional governments more power than they would have in a Europe of nation-states.

Will polycentric governance survive crises?

While all of these circumstances clearly show that the EU – in terms of its formal institutional arrangements – can be classified as a polycentric system, a key question remains:

Are polycentric governance processes maintained in system-wide crises?

Often, such crises lead to either full centralisation or systemic breakdown, making them crucial objects of analysis. In my book chapter, I analyse two crises that posed serious threats to the EU, namely (1) the sovereign debt crisis of 2010–12 and (2) the refugee crisis of 2015–16.

The debt crisis started because restrictions on the liquidity of financial markets in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–10) casted doubt on the ability of several European governments to refinance their debt. In the EU’s response to this crisis, polycentric governance was maintained:

While central institutions, especially the European Central Bank, played a key role in providing liquidity and stabilizing financial markets, it was only the combination with more decentralised policy initiatives by major subunits of the polycentric system  as well as with deliberations in the European Council that provided comprehensive institutional steps toward a permanent solution.

The two subunits that had the greatest influence on the process were Germany and France, who were also crucial to establishing the financial stabilisation facilities that represented more institutionalized solutions.

In the EU’s response to the 2015–16 refugee crisis, too, there was a complex mixture of initiatives by different actors, including national governments, the European Council and the European Commission. Individual states, both in southern and northern Europe, managed and coordinated the entry and allocation of refugees. Additionally, the Commission created a joint-action plan with Turkey to more comprehensively address repeated refugee waves.

Thus, similar to the sovereign debt crisis, only the combination of decentralised and centralised actions helped deal with the refugee crisis in a broader form, highlighting the system’s persistent polycentric character.

Only the combination of decentralised and centralised actions helped deal with the refugee crisis in a broader form, highlighting the system’s persistent polycentric character.

Why polycentric governance theory is relevant

As the analyses of the EU’s institutional structures and of two major crises show, the EU can be classified and analysed as a polycentric system of governance:

• It is characterised by significant horizontal and vertical dispersion of political power
• pools and diffuses decision-making authority over public goods based on the criteria of efficiency and responsiveness
• leaves substantial power in the hands of local and regional governments

These broader institutional principles were maintained throughout two major crises, highlighting the persistently polycentric character of European governance.

I hope that, in the future, more political economists specialised in the EU will consider applying this theoretical framework. Not only does it have a pertinent dual focus on the EU’s effectiveness of governance and the efficiency of public goods provision, but it is also inherently flexible in terms of accounting for a wide variety of different actors and contexts.

Given this openness and flexibility, a second key strength of polycentric governance theory is its wide applicability to contexts beyond the EU (and metropolitan areas). In this sense, I believe that its application will massively benefit not only scholars of the EU, but also scholars of governance more broadly.

This post is based on Jan P. Vogler’s book chapter, which can be accessed here.

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Introduction

As previously discussed, the reformation of the united Europe’s finance and economy must start with establishing a fiscal union within the political union of the member states (see Reform #3 vol. 1). After the financial and political preconditions are fulfilled, the leaders of the Republic of the United Europe (or RUE) are going to have to stimulate the economy, achieving growth, prosperity, and sustainability. In this volume, I am going to focus on the most essential components of economic success: full employment, trade, and resource utilisation.

 

Full employment

Employment is one of the most crucial elements of every economy, as the employed contribute to the public budget in more than one way. Their taxes paid, their work completed, and their wages spent, the employed generate state revenues in the forms of direct tax payment, GDP growth, and consumption. The employed are the economic engine of the society; therefore, reaching full employment is absolutely critical in order to operate a powerful and stable economy. Since the Great Recession, however, horrifyingly high unemployment rates have become the new normal in the European Union (especially in the Southern member states), whereas the economic crisis unfolding due to the restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to demolish the small, but hard-earned progress that has been achieved in the years before. Lagging behind the UK (5%), China (5.5%), Russia (5.7%), and the US (6%), the EU’s average unemployment rate is at 7.3%. The worst figures are to be found in Spain (16.1%) and Greece (15.8%), where the unemployment rate has decreased from the critical heights of 27-28% since 2013, but remained high nevertheless – even more troubling is the rate of youth unemployment (40% in Spain and 34% in Greece). The fact that Spain has the fourth largest population and economy in the EU makes its crisis more serious to the entire European economy – especially to the Euro Area. Still, high and permanent unemployment – especially amongst the youth – is a very common and worrying phenomenon in many EU member states.

Many individuals try to escape unemployment in their home countries by migrating to another member state with better prospects (the primary destinations are the Western and Northern member states). Due to the support of the flow of workforce in the European Union, the unemployed has the opportunity to work and live in another EU member state. It is not ideal to leave as being forced to leave, but it is still a good opportunity and a viable temporary solution for those, who speak a foreign language – especially English, French, or German. In addition to speaking the language, it is important to have a profession (or degree) and work experience. For instance, a German-speaking electrician is highly sought after in Austria or Germany in comparison to a philologist, who only speaks Greek. The former will definitely find a well-paid job, whilst the latter has no chance. Therefore, programmes that focus on attaining a profession and on learning European languages should be launched across Europe – fully sponsored by the European state.

Instead of supporting our own fellow European unemployed, however, Europe’s extreme liberal elite and their allies are desperate to import millions of illegal immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and spend fortunes on so-called integration (mainly the Western and Northern member states), ignoring the European unemployed, who should be supported by launching programmes and proper trainings financed by the public. The extreme liberal elite preach about solidarity as the interpretation of helping the ones in need, but they intentionally ignore the real needs of their very own citizens at the same time. Real solidarity is to help our own citizens, neighbours, countrymen, unemployed, homeless, etc., not strangers. Once we eradicated unemployment, poverty, homelessness, injustice, and deviance within Europe; then, and only then, we can start thinking of helping others in the world, bringing aid to where the trouble is, rather than importing the trouble to Europe. The shameful betrayal of Europe committed by the extreme liberal leadership is neither right nor in the interest of the Europeans.

From economic perspective, unemployment puts a massive strain on government budgets. Decreasing tax contributions, shrinking GDP, and lesser consumption make state revenues plunge, which combined with increasing state expenditures (e.g. unemployed benefits) lead to massive government budget deficits that can only be financed by government debts, causing a potential economic crisis and dependency on foreign powers. Besides the obvious economic reasons and the fact that unemployment is a huge waste of resources for the economy, the social aspect of unemployment is as important as the economic aspect. It is one of the fundamental rights and basic duties of a person to get engaged in a productive occupation: to work. Labour is a useful and constructive occupation both for the person itself and for the society too. Labour provides an income, which covers the expenses related to existence (e.g. housing, nourishment, clothing) and pleasure. The individual with a decent job has self-esteem and dignity, whereas the unemployed feels worthless and without dignity, as they are unable to provide for themselves and their families, relying on the rest of the society to provide for them.

This awful financial and mental state leads to depression, rage, or revolt, meaning that unemployment is a threat to national security as well, because the long-termed unemployed react impulsively to radical ideas (especially the youth), as they look at themselves as losers, who might have nothing left to lose. As proved by history (e.g. French Revolution, Bolshevist coup), high and long-term unemployment is a ticking bomb, which can be heard ticking in today’s Europe too (e.g. France, Greece, Italy, Spain). In order to avoid social upheaval and possess a powerful economy, the Republic of the United Europe must achieve full employment, to which previous reforms provide useful and powerful tools (e.g. benefiting from the fiscal union and common tax system, through tax reduction for businesses for new hires, via spending on public works).

 

Trade

The European Single Market guarantees the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people, enhancing internal trade between the member states of the European Union (and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland) by benefiting from the removal of tariffs and border control (and from the common currency in the Euro Area). Besides enjoying thriving internal trade, the EU is the largest exporter in the world. The bloc’s most important trading partners are China, the US, and the UK, but Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Norway, and South Korea are also amongst the largest contributors in terms of trade volume – in this order of significance. The EU has concluded many trade agreements on various levels across the globe, of which the two most important are the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (2017), and the Japan-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (2019).

The Republic of the United Europe is going to inherit these relations and agreements, but the new principles of external trade are going to be set by the European Government (or EG), excluding the member states from negotiating agreements with an external partner. The RUE should focus on four major directions: the US, the UK, China, and Russia – in this order of importance.

Europe’s most important trading partner is the US (555 billion euros of total trade in 2020), as the North American global power is the largest market for European exports (353 billion euros in 2020). There is a strong ambition on both sides of the Atlantic to intensify and deepen economic co-operation under the aegis of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP). The partnership intends to merge the European market into the American – including the member states and citizens –, meaning an absolute domination of American capital on the European market, thus the de facto conquest of European economic and financial sovereignty. The TTIP is an attempt of the American capital to seize the prestigious European market in the race for maintaining global supremacy over China. As such, the TTIP goes against European interests, thus harmful and wrong.

The relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom is yet to be defined, but whatever the outcome may be, London is going to remain an important trading partner of the united Europe. Therefore, a smooth and clear trade agreement is more than desirable. However, it is important not to let London picking cherries, making it explicit that any access to the European Single Market is not possible, as the precedent it would set to other member states could politically destabilise Europe.

The EU’s top trading partner is China (586 billion euros of total trade in 2020), which has already the largest market in the world, growing continuously. The facts that China is the future and Europe has an enormous trade deficit with Beijing (181 billion euros in 2020), make it all the more important for Europe to increase their volume of export. Serving this interest, the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (or CAI) deal aims to open up China’s internal market to European companies and to protect EU direct foreign investment in China (e.g. in manufacturing sector). It is imperative that neither the CAI nor China’s Belt and Road Initiative project is hindered by ideological differences, ensuring the return to pragmatism in the relations with Beijing.

Looking at the trade volume and at the difference between the sheer size of economies, Russia’s importance is far less than the above mentioned countries’; however, the symbiosis between Europe and the Eurasian giant is relatively tight, hiding enormous potentials for both parties. Besides the fact that both regions represent a huge market with hundreds of millions of people living in vast areas (from Lisbon to Vladivostok), Europe needs energy from Russia (especially the eastern member states are exposed to the desperate need of Russian natural gas). Significant projects similar to the Nord Stream would be beneficial both for Europe and Russia, but as long as the relationship between Moscow and Brussels is strained by political disagreements, hostility is going to dominate over co-operation, leaving the great potentials not only unexploited, but also further eroded.

The Republic of the United Europe is going to possess enormous capacities to increase their export, forging trade agreements on European terms and meeting European interests. It is crucial that every trade agreement includes a closure to enforce environment protection, which must present not only principles, but exact figures and deterrence in case of violation.

 

Resource utilisation

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, hydrocarbon resources are needed to fuel our economy. As hydrocarbon resources are effective only when they burn – destroying our environment in a fast pace –, reforming the use of them is impossible. Since the 1970s, nuclear power generation proved to be very effective and emission-free, but the rare examples of Chernobyl and Fukushima presented that it can be very unstable and dangerous, should something go wrong. In the last decades, renewable energy resources have become popular due to their abundance, cleanliness, and safety. Therefore, it is without doubt that we have to transform our fossil-fuel based economy into a clean one, in which the renewable energy resources become dominant, and ultimately monopolistic. However, on mid-term, it is inescapable to use nuclear energy to recover the potential loss in energy efficiency, due to the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable resources (Sun, wind, water, geothermal, etc.). Even though it is expensive to start with, thorium-based nuclear power and small modular nuclear reactors are clean and safe enough to provide a bridge in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables until the technology of solar panels, water and wind turbines, and harnessing geothermal energy is advanced enough to fully supply the economy.

Scientifically, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels with renewable resources would be the most desirable scenario. However, such a radical change in a short period of time would most likely lead to an imminent economic crisis, which would most certainly result in a social collapse. Therefore, the transition must be paved out cautiously, but without hesitation. Most countries have already begun to switch to renewable energy, but in a much slower pace than it would be required to solve the climate crisis. The leading examples are Costa Rica, Iceland, Finland, Nicaragua, Norway, and Sweden.

The Republic of the United Europe must act as a leader of a movement that aims to involve all countries to sign a pact of environment protection. The Paris Agreement on battling climate crisis and von der Leyen’s European Green Deal are good steps forward, but both are too little and too late to seriously address the raging climate crisis. In order to boost transition, immediate actions, such as provision of funds (related projects and IT), global agreement on environment protection, the reduction of taxes on renewable energy, and the introduction of carbon tax and plastic tax must be taken. The introduction of plastic and carbon tax in every member state of the RUE could be a significant and viable step. Plastic tax must be as high as possible to force industry to find another solution for packing and other purposes, abandoning the use of plastic overall on very short-term (glass, linen, wood, and other materials could be used instead). Carbon tax should be set relatively low at the beginning – giving time to industry to shift –, but increased gradually as fast as possible, considering its impact on the economy and everyday life. Simultaneously, tax reduction on renewable energy is imperative, whilst involving more solutions based on renewables at the same time (e.g. solar photovoltaic and wind-powered plants, advanced energy storage, green hydrogen, using electric vehicles in transportation, massive tax discounts and governmental support for clean solutions) is going to force fossil fuels out of market on mid-term. Although, the introduction of carbon tax and plastic tax could result in costliness on short-term, economic production is going to be cheaper, more sustainable, and safer on mid- and long-term. Both taxes should be introduced globally, for which the RUE must fight.

The transition does not only protect the environment, and brings us closer to a higher form of civilisation, but also completely ceases our dependency on resources from other countries. In the future, the RUE will not have to import natural gas from Russia or oil from the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries, which are interested in manipulating the prices, thus causing instability in our economies – purposefully. The permanent and ever-growing scarcity of fossil fuels leads to increasing prices, economic and humanitarian crises, and war. In order to prevent such catastrophes, countries that are not oil exporter – thus not interested in oil production – could form a global organisation, which refuses to import hydrocarbon resources, pledging to fully promote the use of renewable energy resources. Starting as a European initiative, the Union to Support Renewable Energy (USRE) could aim to develop an efficient energy strategy based exclusively on renewable resources, accessing a great abundance of energy, and achieving massive and sustainable economic growth and permanently low prices for all.

 

Conclusion

The political and fiscal union of the Republic of the United Europe is certainly going to provide the tools and expertise to the leaders of Europe to steer the European economy out of its current agony towards prosperity. The suicidal dogmas of neoliberal economic policies (e.g austerity) and the harmful effects of cyclical consumerism are going to be abolished by focusing on creating and protecting jobs, and on strategic production, setting longevity, accessibility, and compatibility as key priorities.

As the enlightened reformation of the political system is an essential precondition to a stable and thriving economy, a strong and sustainable economy is required to achieve general well-being and prosperity. In order to ensure that prosperity is distributed appropriately amongst the members of the society (i.e. the citizens of Europe), the reformation of the social system is inevitable and necessary.

The post Reform #3: Finance and economy (vol. 2) – Economy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Alina Felder

Education and research are at the fore of strategies to enhance competitiveness in the European Union. Higher education institutions thus appear as the nexus of the different knowledge related EU policies that aim at excellence in research, mobility in education or at cohesion through cross-border cooperation. In my research, I focus on the higher education institutions at this very nexus – the higher education institutions located in border regions. My objective is to determine the extent to which the ‘interplay between education and training and other policies of the EU’ is not only more visible than ever, but also has a tangible impact on higher education institutions and policies.

Europeanisation research has always argued that the EU influences domestic policy, while domestic actors shape the very structures the policies emanate from. Whereas previous research has consciously focused on the top-down direction of Europeanisation, Europeanisation researchers nowadays dedicate themselves to circular Europeanisation approaches. Since circular Europeanisation research is conceptually and methodologically difficult to conduct, I used the three tools of sequencing, comparison, and in-depth knowledge for researching the Europeanisation of cross-border cooperating universities.

Sequencing allows to not only consider actors as mediators of Europeanisation, but also to acknowledge them as active users of Europe. In this vein, EU policy is not only a constraint but also an instrument of empowerment for (sub)national actors. Applying sequential approach in my analysis, I first account for the effect of EU funding on (sub)national structures and subsequently the feedback of their implementation experiences towards the EU-level.

The (sub)national level of interest for my analysis, i.e. border regions, display a ‘privileged space to analyse how fluxes and exchanges of goods, peoples and capital have evolved in time and to what extent the process of integration is responsible for the increment of those transactions.’ Within these spaces, some variables or mechanisms of Europeanisation may be important, while they are not important in others so that a comparison is necessary.

While comparisons are at the core of Europeanisation research, the cases for comparison require careful selection. Since the objective of my research is to single out the effect of Europeanisation on the cross-border cooperation among higher education institutions, my ‘laboratories of European integration’ are thus cases of cross-border cooperation that made use of EU funding: the University of the Greater Region (UniGR) and the International University Lake Constance (IBH).

Higher education institutions that cooperate across the border and make use of EU funding instruments, i.e. Interreg, are not only expected to adapt towards the EU opportunity structure, but also attempt to alter it. In a first analysis I confirm these expectations and identify the two major factors guiding Europeanisation processes – rational decisions and socialisation. Higher education institutions cooperate with each other across borders not only due to strategic and rational decisions, but also due to an emerging cross-border identity that results from the joint experience.

When accounting for the concrete paths that the rationalist, as well as the ideational variant of Europeanisation takes in cross-border cooperation contexts, exchanging with the actors who are designing and implementing the EU’s knowledge policies is essential. To gain in-depth knowledge of ‘my laboratories’, I gathered primary data through semi-structured interviews with higher education institution representatives from the selected cases both at rector and administrative level, (sub)national political actors located in the respective region and in Brussels, and representatives from university interest organisations.

Overall, Europeanisation research does not only provide theoretical, but also methodological guidance for studying cross-border cooperation practices in Europe. The presented tools of sequencing, comparison and in-depth knowledge demonstrate that Europeanisation research when guided at establishing causality, requires detailed data and analysis, and thus time. While focusing on a small number of cases, my study provides insights into concrete Europeanisation processes. When clarifying the phenomenon in focus, the models of change and the theoretical challenges, Europeanization research does not necessarily run the risk of concept stretching. Instead, Europeanisation theory and methodology has helped me to reflect critically about ‘knowledge policies as transversal problem solvers’ and thus to unravel the overstretched responsibilities attached to higher education institutions.

 

 

Alina Felder is a doctoral fellow at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS). The central question of her dissertation is how EU regional policy instruments influence the cross-border cooperation among higher education institutions and their attempts to shape EU policies they (could) benefit from. Her research interests thus include Europeanization processes that are induced through network modes of governance the EU is establishing and encouraging public and private actors to participate in.

 

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Nach meinen vorherigen Versuchen, das Organigramm des Bundesamts für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (BfAA) aus öffentlichen Quellen zu rekonstruieren, ist jetzt eine offizielle Version online verfügbar.

Offizielles Organigramm des BfAA, Stand 12. April 2021 (laut Änderungsdatum des PDFs)

Zum Vergleich hier meine letzte Version, die ich aus offizielle Quellen zusammengestellt hatte. Ich denke, ich war nicht so weit weg:

Viele der Referats- und Abteilungsleiter-Namen sind im offiziellen Organigramm aktuell noch mit N.N. eingezeichnet, was sehr deutlich zeigt, dass das Amt noch mitten im Aufbau ist. Aber mit dem Organigramm wird jetzt deutlich, wie genau sich die zentralen Aufgaben der neuen Behörde verteilen.

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The first efforts to cooperate in matters of asylum and migration at the European level can be mainly attributed to the mass inflow of asylum seekers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. As an initial response to the unprecedented influx, EU member states began to implement and coordinate policies to prevent irregular arrivals. During this period, two major problems were identified. The first involved the risk of ‘asylum shopping’, i.e., a situation in which migrants apply for asylum in more than one member state or seek to apply in a state other than the first state of arrival. The second challenge related to the possibility that asylum seekers would gravitate towards member states with more generous asylum and welfare systems.

As a result, the 12 EC states found themselves in need of a common solution to solve what was perceived as a transnational challenge. This led to the development of the Dublin Convention in 1990 and initial steps in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, where issues of asylum and migration became ‘matters of common interest’ but were still dealt with on an intergovernmental basis. In 1997, the Treaty of Amsterdam, which amended Maastricht, included the objective to gradually establish an area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ) encompassing matters related to asylum and migration. Subsequently, at the Tampere European Council in 1999, member states agreed to harmonise their asylum systems based on binding legislation towards the creation of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS).

Nevertheless, despite EU efforts to harmonise asylum legislation, spanning two decades, significant differences persist in the recognition rates, provision of reception conditions and procedural guarantees for asylum seekers across EU member states.

In practice, these divergences are the result of the ambiguous provisions in the asylum directives, yet more importantly, they reflect the diversity in national preferences in terms of how to deal with irregular migration. This highlights the difficulty in developing policies in this field, but even more so, in harmonising common standards across the EU.

The post An Introduction to the development of EU cooperation in the field of asylum and migration appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Introduction

As previously discussed (see Reform #2), the reformation of the united Europe’s political system is the precondition of introducing further reforms related to Republic of the United Europe’s (or RUE) finance, economy, social system, armed forces, and foreign policy. In this volume, I am going to focus on the most critical topics related to finance, such as the creation of a fiscal union, the reformation of the European Central Bank, the introduction of a common tax system, and the handling of government debts on the European level. My aim is to propose principles and guidelines rather than exact policies.

 

Fiscal union

In the Great Recession, Europe learned it in the hard way that the common currency was introduced without an establishment of a competent European institution, which could have supervised and co-ordinated the economy and fiscal policy of each member state. Many experts and politicians blamed the euro for the outbreak of the financial crisis – wrongly –, failing to recognise that the primary reason of the Euro Area crisis was the utter failure of neoliberal management policy designed in Berlin and Brussels. The euro has plenty of obvious benefits, such as the elimination of currency exchange costs, removal of bank charges related to transactions, price parity, economic stability, and low inflation – boosting trade and investments, and creating a political union eventually. In my view, the euro is advantageous and necessary, but the lack of proper regulations and capable institutions is harmful.

Recognising the same fact, the member states of the European Union agreed to ratify the Stability and Growth Pact (or SGP), which has since been reformed in the packages of Sixpack and Fiscal Compact – latter being the fiscal chapter (Title III) of the Fiscal Stability Treaty, which contains regulations regarding fiscal discipline (e.g. balanced budget, debt brake), co-ordination, and governance. Even though, the treaty is an improvement, it is only patching up the rifts of a structural dysfunction instead of replacing it with a new functional system. Some of the solutions proposed by economists are the conduction of bank and fiscal union (via deposit insurance, common regulations, resolution procedures, etc.), the authorisation of a European finance minister (tasked to set and execute fiscal rules), the raising of resources, common supervision of banks, and common European representation in international organisations, but these ideas have many dissensions amongst the member states.

The current monetary union is vulnerable, unstable, and incomplete without a fiscal union, whereas the creation of a fiscal union is senseless without establishing a political union first. The legal and political framework of the Republic of the United Europe could provide the perfect base for a fiscal union, using multiple elements of the already existing financial regulations to develop a stable European financial system.

In the Republic of the United Europe, the European Government (or EG) – in co-operation with the national governments, the European Parliament, and the President of the RUE – is going to be responsible to determine the common fiscal policy (e.g. synchronisation of tax systems and rates, collection and expenditure of taxes), setting the cornerstones of the member states’ budget by prescribing frames and directives to ensure financial stability and economic prosperity. By doing so, the EG must review at least the figures of inflation, government budget deficit, and government debt. It is imperative that the ratio of the annual general government deficit to GDP does not exceed 3% (except deficit related to investments), whilst the ratio of government debt to GDP does not exceed 60%. Those member states burdened by a government debt of more than 60% relative to their GDP must set the reduction of that as a primary target in their budget. In order to ensure relatively low government debt and unemployment rates, generating sustainable economic growth is also going to be absolutely critical, when preparing the budget.

The results of a centralised fiscal union – under democratic control – are economic stabilisation through debt management (Eurobonds to finance collective euro debts), common risk sharing, active control of national budgets, stricter fiscal policy, and the avoidance of financial crises. The fiscal union also necessitates an independent and powerful European central bank.

 

The Central Bank of Europe

The European Central Bank (as it is called currently) is the central institution of the European Economic and Monetary Union, which’s purpose is the co-ordination of economic and fiscal policies (including a common monetary policy and the euro). The ECB’s primary task is to maintain price stability by keeping inflation under control (below 2%), but the Frankfurt-based bank is also responsible for setting and implementing monetary policy (Euro Area), for supervising national banks, and for conducting foreign exchange operations – amongst others. The ECB has an 11 billion euro stock capital held by the National Central Banks of the member states (or NCBs) as shareholders (shares in the ECB are not transferable and cannot be used as collateral). It is the ECB’s exclusive right to authorise the issue of euro banknotes (member states may issue euro coins after consulted with and approved by Frankfurt). The European Central Bank and the national central banks of all EU member states form the European System of Central Banks, which’s main objective is to maintain price stability. The Eurosystem constitutes the European Central Bank and those national central banks, whose currency is the euro.

The decisions of the European Central Bank are made by the Governing Council, the Executive Board, and the General Council. The Governing Council is formed by the members of the Executive Board and the governors of the Euro Area NCBs. Since 2015, the governors of NCBs take turns holding voting rights in the Governing Council. The ECB’s Executive Board comprises the President, the Vice-President, and four other members, who hold permanent voting rights. They are appointed by the European Council by qualified majority on a recommendation from the Council after it has consulted the European Parliament and the Governing Council. Their terms of office are eight years, which is not renewable. The Executive Board is responsible for implementing monetary policy in accordance with the guidelines and decisions laid down by the Governing Council. The General Council exists only until every member state adopted the euro as their currency.

The Central Bank of Europe (or CBE) should function as the national bank of the Republic of the United Europe, supervising the NCBs, whilst co-operating with them. In the RUE, the application of the euro as a common currency is going to be mandatory for every member state; therefore, operating a common fiscal policy is crucial. This will certainly reduce the national governments’ control over their national banks, but they will also gain financial stability and security in an era, when it can be confidentially stated that the global financial sector cannot be controlled merely in a national sphere.

The CBE is going to be accountable to the European Parliament and will be under the tight supervision of the European Government (Ministry of Finance). The Governing Council will include the governors of every NCB of the RUE – bringing the General Council to a natural dissolution –, whereas the Executive Board’s composition will remain the same, and its members (including the President of the CBE) are going to be appointed by the EPC. Also, the Eurogroup is going to cease to exist automatically, whilst the responsibilities of the Eurosystem is going to be transferred to the EG’s Minister of Finance and to the CBE.

The CBE’s role will not be reduced to the supervision of the national banks and of the euro, but it will focus on keeping inflation and unemployment as low as possible, influencing long-term interest rates, and providing loans to European enterprises, to member states, or even to foreign countries and enterprises. The member states’ government debts must be raised from national to European level, placing it into the responsibility of the Central Bank of Europe. Those member states above 60% of government debt to GDP will have to be given budgetary cornerstones and directives by the EG in order to reduce it. Common risk sharing will result in a de facto debt-restructuring, protection from foreign elements (e.g. foreign countries, private institutions, IMF, World Bank), and a monopoly of debt management (paying and taking) of the European institutions. Should it be still necessary to intervene financially, it is the CBE’s exclusive authority and duty to help out the member states.

This way, the member states’ debt burden would gradually decrease, whilst the appetite for investment would increase all over in Europe, which can be translated into sustainable economic growth, creation of jobs, and higher quality of life. The European Investment Bank and national development banks could enhance targeted investment in sectors and regions that are in need. Once Europe’s economy is significantly stronger and the European government debt decreased to a manageable level, the CBE could even provide loans to other countries, challenging the AIIB, the IMF, and the World Bank.

The CBE must find a way to challenge virtual currencies as well. There should not be any currency in circulation, which does not have a known and secure background. The simplification or abolishment of need for bank accounts, financial intermediaries, and clearing parties; and the introduction of electronic cash, directly deposited at the CBE, could be a viable response to successfully tackle the challenge of virtual currencies.

The Central Bank of Europe must be reformed in the context of the new enlightened political system of the Republic of the United Europe, meaning that it has to be the centre of a fiscal union, focusing on the general well-being of all member states and the ordinary people, not only on the interests of certain powerful ones and financiers – as the European Central Bank does.

 

Tax system

The introduction of a common tax system through the synchronisation of the member states’ tax systems and rates, and via the collection and expenditure of taxes on a European scale in the entirety of the Republic of the United Europe is imperative in order to achieve financial stability (via control and discipline), economic prosperity, and global competitiveness. The tax systems and rates vary in each member state. For instance, some apply progressive tax systems (e.g. France) and some operate with single-rate tax systems (e.g. Hungary). The national tax systems must be replaced by a common European scheme. As the reasons behind the different structures and measures are complex, thorough examination and careful analysis is crucial.

The EG’s Ministry of Finance could divide the RUE into specific tax districts, and set the frame of rates for each district. The borders of tax districts would not necessarily follow the national borders, as categorisation should be decided by factors, such as economic development, infrastructure, GDP per capita, etc. Europe could be divided into no more than five tax districts, ranging from most developed (e.g. Bavaria, Lombardy, Tyrol) to least developed (e.g. Croatia, Greece, Southern Italy). Enterprises operating in the more developed areas should pay more corporate tax than in the less developed areas. Both corporal and personal income tax rates would be the highest in the most developed and lowest in the least developed area, whereas the personal income tax system to be applied should be progressive (perhaps in three stages). Within the frames suggested, the member states would set the exact measures as it suits them the best. Applying the same principle to the citizens as well (personal income tax) is not only fair, but efficient to the economy. The implementation of such principles would result in a system, which gives the authority to the EG to set measures according to the interests of the greater good, whilst preserves the liberty of the member states to maximise the potentials of the framework.

The EG would propose different tax measures based on the aforesaid principles in the European budget. After the budget is approved by the EP and by the President, the tax rates would serve as frames, which would permit the member states to apply different rates as long as the frames are not exceeded, providing a wide range of liberty over taxation. The exact measures must be decided by experts, but looking at our main competitors’ (e.g. China, Russia, UK, US) average rate of corporate tax ours could be set somewhere around 19-25%.

Paying less tax would significantly reduce capital flight and labour migration from the less developed areas to the more developed ones – affecting Central and Southern Europe most negatively. Moreover, enterprises would be highly motivated and interested in investing and producing in the eastern and southern regions of Europe, which would definitely boost employment in those member states, in which the pressure of unemployment is the most urging already. Besides creating jobs and increasing net wages, a centralised tax system would help to close the gap between the less and more developed member states in a natural way, instead of using artificial funds (e.g. Cohesion Fund). The introduction of the new tax system would not only solve a series of issues (e.g. economic growth, employment, cohesion), but would also result in saving money.

 

Conclusion

By completing the political union, the desired and necessary fiscal union of the member states of the Republic of the United Europe is going to have the institutional tools to create a well-functioning mechanism via regulations, co-ordinating Europe’s finances in a disciplined, legitimate, and efficient manner. The European Government’s Ministry of Finance co-operating with the Central Bank of Europe is going to be responsible for synchronising the tax system (and rates) of the member states, which is one of the cornerstones of the European budget. The gained financial stability is the key to economic strength and general well-being in the Republic of the United Europe.

The post Reform #3: Finance and economy (vol. 1) – Finance appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In order to condemn the violence of the regime and to support the people opposing Lukashenko, the EU has put in place a two-level strategy which employs standard hard power instruments in regards to the leadership and a strategy inspired by the EUGS in regards to Belarussians. The approach toward Lukashenko is threefold, with different levels of political intensity: de-legitimation (non-recognition of electoral results), mediation (which has so far been entirely unsuccessful), and sanctions. Along with the US and other states and international organizations, the EU has also refused to recognise Lukashenko as the legitimate President, therefore de facto legitimizing the opposition, which is asking for renewed elections. The exiled Tsikhanouskaya is treated by the Western community as the legitimate representative of her country. Such recognition emerges through meetings she has had with institutional representatives (e.g. the President of the European Parliament), but also through invitations to ceremonies or the attribution of awards.

Both the US and the EU have also implemented sanctions on Lukashenko and other officials held responsible for voter fraud and post-election violent repression. For the EU, reaching a consensus on sanctions was somewhat problematic: Cyprus asked, in exchange for its approval, that EU members adopt a tougher approach to Turkey over its gas exploration in the waters off Cyprus. The sanctions dispute has therefore included apparently unrelated matters, proving once again the complexity of foreign policy decisions within the EU itself.

In regards to the people, meanwhile, Belarus opposition leader Tsikhanouskaya asserted that the Belarusian uprising is not a “geopolitical revolution (…) it is neither pro-Russian nor anti-Russian, not pro-EU nor anti-EU, (…) it is simply pro-Belarus and a democratic revolution” (European Parliament, 21 September 2020). Therefore, any EU action will have to carefully avoid suspicion of trying to bring Belarus into an enhanced partnership with the EU against Russia. Thus, in order to assist the people of Belarus, the EU can mainly rely on the concept of resilience, usually thought to be politically neutral, to replace the ambitious and increasingly contested goal of the promotion of democracy. The EU would likely act through selective and tailormade actions targeted at boosting the resilience of recipients (people, communities, groups, individuals). Resilience supports the need to rebrand the intervention of external actors, while at the same time legitimising their presence in their capacity of ‘tutoring’ communities. Endowing resilience therefore implies facilitating or developing the self-securing agency of those held to be most vulnerable, who need support in the development of a resilience capacity.

However, the circumstances in Belarus, where the autocratic regime can survive thanks to Russian economic support, partly hinder the enactment of resilience. The EUGS itself does not explicitly confront the question of how resilience can be supported in an autocratic regime that punishes any dissidents. Furthermore, it mentions that some of the factors that should endure resilience feature an inclusive definition of democracy (trust in institutions, sustainable development and growth, respect for human rights, and vibrant and inclusive societies), that can hardly be achieved in a long-lasting autocratic regime supported by a powerful external actor. Thus, the Belarusian situation points to two outcomes: an external intervention in favour of resilience could reinforce the autocratic regime in power, or, on the contrary, could undermine it, though likely causing tensions and possibly conflicts. Whereas the third progress report on the EUGS clarified that resilience “does not mean supporting stability by condoning authoritarianism”, it did not explain how to endorse resilience when those in power oppose any external action in its favour.

The EU has so far reacted rather pragmatically and has interpreted strengthening resilience as supporting resistance. Firstly, it has condemned the disproportionate violence against peaceful protesters and called for the release of those who have been prosecuted and detained. Journalists’ work in such a hostile environment has been praised, and attacks on and the detention of journalists, some of which are EU citizens, have been denounced. Also, in December 2020, the European Commission launched a programme called EU4Belarus: solidarity with the people of Belarus that focuses on four key areas of intervention: 1) civil society and independent media, in particular in regards to local communities and citizen groups’ initiatives; 2) support to youth, including scholarships for students and young professionals; 3) advisory support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in order to enhance resilience in the current economic slump; 4) reinforcement of health resilience by supporting Belarus’s response to the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Further support to SMEs, worth €6 million, is under preparation.

However, the most difficult task for the EU is to concretely deliver financial support for selected groups. The operation is politically very sensitive, because it could endanger local beneficiaries and the EU could be accused of meddling in a third country’ domestic affairs. Hence, the EU is obliged outsourcing resilience by relying on organizations based outside Belarus that are able to operate within the country. One of the key organizations involved is the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), which is financing activities on behalf of the EU, including small initiatives. The risk with supporting resilience in an autocratic regime is therefore the obfuscation of the question of accountability and responsibility, losing control of the whole process of enacting resilience.

On the side of the recipient groups, it is unclear to what an extent financing can enable them to impinge on the structure of power and reach their goals. In fact, it seems that while resilience recognises the agency of the people, it underestimates the obstacles posed by an hostile leadership. Then, even if resilience is not directly linked to regime change and democratization, the fact that it comes as part of a wider package of measures including sanctions directed to Lukashenko and his entourage scuppers the intention of de-politicising it. Furthermore, focusing on the resilience (resistance) of certain groups, especially within a single state, can bring to an underestimation of the complexity of politics. And moreover, as the issue of sanctions has shown, there are many ongoing crises in the EU’s neighbourhood and the solution to one has consequences in dealing with the others. Finally, the hazy nature of resilience and consequently its modest analytical value makes it difficult in this case to assess whether actions undertaken in its name achieve their objectives, which in truth remain unexpressed. It seems that resilience is a sort of floating concept that can at any time be interpreted according to current targets.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “The European Union Global Strategy and the EU’s Maieutic Role”

 

Author:

Serena Giusti is senior researcher and head of the Programme on Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. She is also Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute for International Studies (ISPI) in Milan. She holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence and a Master’s degree from the College of Europe (Natolin).

https://www.ispionline.it/it/bio/serena-giusti

Serena.giusti@sssup.it

ISPI:

Twitter: @ispionline

 Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies:

Twitter: @santannapisa

The post The European Union Global Strategy and the limits of resilience in the case of Belarus appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Es ist immer noch relativ still rund um das neue Bundesamt für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (BfAA), seit den letzten Updates hat sich nach außen hin nicht viel getan. Aber so langsam scheinen sich die neuen Strukturen zu etablieren, und selbst die deutsche Konsulin auf Mallorca tauscht jetzt ihre mediterrane Arbeitsumgebung gegen das Havel Valley.

[Update (27. April): Es gibt jetzt ein offizielles Organigramm des BfAA.]

Was sich so langsam herausstellt ist, wo und wie das Bundesamt räumlich zu finden sein wird. Auf der Karriere-Seite des Amtes heißt es aktuell:

“Zunächst arbeiten wir in Büros im Brennabor Gebäude, Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 10, voraussichtlich ab Sommer 2021 beziehen wir zusätzlich die Kirchhofstr. 1-2, 14776 Brandenburg.”

Das Foto vom Amtsschild in der Kirchhofstraße habe ich ja schon im Januar gepostet. Da soll jetzt also Richtung Sommer eingezogen werden. Aktuell sitzt man in einem Gebäudeteil, der früher zu den Brennabor-Werken gehörte. Das sieht man auch am Hintergrund des Videos von Amtsleiter Birgelen auf der Karriereseite.

Ich hab mal ein Foto geschossen, wo man links die Fenster der Arbeitsagentur sieht, die auch bei Birgelen im Hintergrund zu sehen sind.

Was gibt es sonst noch für Neuigkeiten? In einer aktuellen Stellenausschreibung sucht das Amt für das “schnell wachsende[] Team am Standort Bonn” Mitarbeitende für “Verwaltung”, im Bereich der Personalbezahlung sowie für die Leitung des Bereichs Logistik und Transport.

Heißt, diese Aufgaben verbleiben nicht nur in Bonn sondern werden dort auch vergrößert. Im aktuellen FAQ des BfAA heißt es dazu (meine Hervorhebung):

“Rund 110 Beschäftigte der Zentralstelle für Auslandsschulwesen und 68 im Bereich Personalbezahlung und Logistik werden […] weiterhin am Standort Bonn arbeiten.

Etwa 30 Beschäftigte verbleiben in den Arbeitsbereichen Veranstaltungsmanagement sowie Fortbildung in Berlin, weil diese Aufgaben an die Räumlichkeiten des AA gebunden sind.”

Dass ein Bereich Veranstaltungsmanagement auch ins BfAA ausgelagert wird, ist interessant. Man hätte denken können, dass das doch eher im politischen Kernbereich der Arbeit des Auswärtigen Amtes ist, aber vielleicht betrifft das nur bestimmte Veranstaltungsformate oder solche einer bestimmten Größe.

Und dann gibt es aktuell auch die Ausschreibung für die Leiterin der Zentralabteilung, mit Details zur Organisation und dem Aufgabenbereich dieser Abteilung. Zum Einen wird klar, dass es dort die Referate Personalmanagement, Haushalt, Organisation, Innerer Dienst und IT geben wird. Die Zentralabteilung wird rund 40 Mitarbeiter*innen haben.

Zu den Aufgaben der Zentralabteilung gehören demnach:

• Verwaltungsmodernisierung und Digitalisierung im BfAA
• Zusammenarbeit mit der Auslands-IT des AA
• Aufbau- und Ablauforganisation im BfAA
• Aufstellung und Ausführung des BfAA-Haushalts
• Gleichstellung, Diskriminierungsschutz, Korruptionsprävention, Geheimschutz, Brandschutz, Arbeits- und Gesundheitsschutz und betriebliches Gesundheitsmanagement
• kundenorientierter Innerer Dienst
• BfAA-Liegenschaftsfragen.

Dazu gab es Ausschreibungen für den Zentralen Einkauf. Aufgaben für den Zentralen Einkauf sind unter anderem:

• Wirtschaftlichkeitsuntersuchungen
• Vergabeverfahren
• Inhouse-Vergaben
• Leistungen aus bestehenden Rahmenvereinbarungen abrufen
• Verwaltungsvereinbarungen mit anderen Einkaufsbehörden des Bundes abschließen
• Auslandsvertretungen bei der Durchführung von Auftragsänderungen und Vergabeverfahren begleiten

Ich habe meinen Organigramm-Entwurf vom Februar mit den Informationen aus diesem Blogpost und den jeweiligen Quellen aktualisiert bzw. ergänzt.

Bei einzelnen Aufgaben ist noch nicht ganz klar, in welcher Abteilung sie im Organigramm angesiedelt ist. Ich hab die jetzt mal im überarbeiteteten inoffiziellen Organigramm-Entwurf  in die misteriöse Abteilung D eingebaut, die ich “Dienstleistungen” nenne. Dort habe ich auch spekulativ das Veranstaltungsmanagement und die Logistik einsortiert.

Das ist weiterhin Spekulation, es gibt nach meiner Kenntnis kein offizielles öffentliches Organigramm.

Vielleicht gibt es ja demnächst mal ein offizielles Update zur geplanten Struktur des Amtes. Soweit ich das sehe, gibt es keine Presse- oder Kommunikationsabteilung, die man fragen könnte. Bis dahin sammele ich hier die Informationen zusammen, die öffentlich zu finden sind.

PS: Vor einigen Wochen hat mich eine Person, die sich für das BfAA bewirbt, kontaktiert (immer gerne über meine Email, die ihr hier findet), um zu fragen, wie es sich denn so in Brandenburg leben lässt. Ich empfehle da neben den Seiten der Stadt die Webseite Finde das Leben (Design: Bureau Steffi Holz), wo man auch viele der städtischen Partner finden kann. Über diese Seite bin ich auch nach Brandenburg gekommen.

Es gibt auch viele tolle Instagramm-Kanäle, z.B. Luftbilder Brandenburg oder Entdecke Stadt Brandenburg, in denen man den Alltag hier in der Stadt im Havel Valley ganz gut nachvollziehen kann. Schaut mal, wer den beiden Accounts folgt oder wem diese folgen, um die vielen duzend anderen Kanäle zu finden.

The post Das BfAA in Brandenburg: Von Mallorca ins Havel Valley appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In the immediate aftermath of the election of Joe Biden the European Commission proposed ‘A new transatlantic agenda’. This ambitious plan emphasizes that together the EU and the US ‘have the reach to set regulations and standards that are replicated across the world’. This very much sounds like a revival of the major priority of the unfortunate Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) talks. Their failure in 2016 is mostly explained by the ‘Trump effect’, that is the protectionist agenda of the former US president. The Commission’s hope for a new transatlantic relation with the new US administration reflects this appreciation. In an article in JCMS I show that such optimism misses the fact that even before Trump, the EU and the USA did not manage to agree on the transatlantic harmonization of standards and regulations. Indeed, such technical harmonization is likely to undermine the functioning of the market on either side of the Atlantic.

Traditional free trade agreements aimed at removing so-called at-the-border obstacles such as tariffs and quotas. The latter are rather readily quantifiable and therefore offer a solid ground for reaching a clear compromise. Under such circumstances, liberalization can be expressed in straightforward numbers, referring for instance to a specific level of mutual tariff reductions. Despite a recent rise of tariffs, there is a clear downward tendency since the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947.

Consequently, contemporary free trade agreements intend to remove so-called behind-the-border obstacles to trade. Technical standards and regulations and conformity assessment procedures famously fall into this category. However, the actual impact on trade of this technical infrastructure is difficult to assess. This makes bargaining more complex. As if that were not enough, unlike tariffs, the technical infrastructure does not only divert trade flows. It actually also organizes the functioning of an integrated market: Goods are not exchangeable by nature; they need to become knowable and identifiable by the market participants. Technical standards and regulations perform this essential function by fixing the requirements a product or process needs to fulfil. Conformity assessment procedures test whether goods correspond to these requirements.

The institutions that set standards, regulations and conformity assessment procedures are bound together by a relation of institutional complementarity – defined as ‘a constellation in which the combination of two (or more) elements increases the benefits attained from any of them’. The technical infrastructure thus forms a coherent set of institutions and it is organized around a coordination principle, which can differ from market to market. My research illustrates that the US market follows the principle of competition while its European counterpart is characterized by the principle of order. Each principle organizes the complementary links between the three different elements of the technical infrastructure in a distinct manner.

What makes the convergence of different technical infrastructures so tricky is that bargaining generally means making compromises. More specifically, insofar as each technical infrastructure forms a coherent set of institutions any trade-off is likely to disorganize complementarity. In order to know whether the transatlantic technical infrastructure divergence really mattered for TTIP it needed to be tested against evidence from the negotiations. However, the TTIP talks took place behind closed doors. Fortunately for this research, in 2016 Wikileaks released a significant amount of secret TTIP documents that provided substantial evidence on the bargaining process. I matched these leaked documents with official publications from the stakeholders.

What strikingly stands out from the empirical evidence is that each party did not only try to extend parts of its technical infrastructure to the other side of the Atlantic. Most likely, such a partial approach would give rise to an incoherent transatlantic technical infrastructure, which eventually would suffer from operational deficiencies. Rather, the proposals on standards, regulations and conformity assessment show that each party consistently promoted the coordination principle of its own technical infrastructure.

 

Table 1: EU and US proposals for technical convergence

The EU negotiators advocated the use of international ISO-IEC standards. By contrast, the latter promoted the use of US standards or standard-developing organizations (SDO), and they argued for opening European standardization to US stakeholders. In the field of regulations, the EU suggested to generalise the use of international regulatory bodies, whose rules should apply on the federal and sub-federal scale in the USA. The USA more modestly aimed at maintaining the specificities of their existing regulatory scales and direct incorporation of standards into regulation. They claimed improved access for US stakeholders to drafting European regulations. Regarding conformity assessment, the EU argued for manufacturer self-certification, based on prior harmonization of standards and regulations. The USA were at most willing to accept the mutual recognition (MR) between US and EU conformity assessment bodies. All these requests were perfectly coherent with the technical infrastructure of the party proposing the measures. Yet, the other party was unlikely to satisfy such requests that would profoundly transform the institutions that technically frame the functioning of its domestic market.

The outlined difficulties of transatlantic technical convergence illustrate that behind-the-border liberalization faces a contradiction. On the one hand, its very meaning is to address and transform national institutions in an upfront manner. On the other hand, these institutions are embedded in a set of complementarities that ensure the functioning of an integrated market. Finding an agreement implies compromises on both sides, but in the case of technical infrastructure striking a balance is simultaneously likely to harm its coherence. This fact tends to reduce the leeway of negotiators, especially if they represent similarly powerful economies whose technical infrastructures rely on different coordination principles. Highlighting this shows that the failure of TTIP is not merely the result of temporary protectionist pressure. Rather this research pointed out an additional institutional challenge for policy makers involved in the governance of global trade. The currently available cooperation tools – harmonization, mutual recognition and early information exchange – seem unable to overcome the dead end, where one party would need to abandon (parts of) its technical infrastructure in order to conclude an agreement.

With the growing relevance of behind-the-border liberalization the diversity of national or regional institutions increasingly becomes a matter of trade. Research on international trade therefore needs to address diverging institutional complementarities. This is all the more important as recent research on the construction of the Single market shows that the formation of the European technical infrastructure was also expected to institutionally boost the competitiveness of European multinational firms.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “The Limits of Traditional Bargaining under Deep Integration: TTIP Stumbling over Technical Barriers to Trade”

 

 

Short bio

Benjamin Bürbaumer holds a Ph.D. in economics from Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and a master’s degree in international relations from Sciences Po Paris. He is working on international trade, with a special interest in standards and regulations, and international political economy.

Personal Twitter: @BurbaumerB

Department twitter: @CEPNP13

Link to academic profile: https://cepn.univ-paris13.fr/benjamin-burbaumer/

The post The stalemate of transatlantic liberalization: It started before Trump appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In 2004 Joseph Jupille published a book explaining why European Union (EU) institutions contest procedural rules governing how legislation is made. He identified jurisdictional ambiguity – the degree to which the contested bill falls under several procedural rules – and procedural incentives – what institutions stand to gain from conflict – as the main causes of what he termed procedural politics. In procedural politics, actors clash not over the substance of policy (at least not directly), but rather over which procedure should apply. The EU is known even outside academic circles to maintain a myriad of seemingly arcane legislative procedures.

In my article, I revisit the key theoretical claims made by Jupille in his seminal book. What I am chiefly interested in is to find out whether his ideas still hold water in the 21st century, or whether political scientists should discard them as out of date. To achieve this goal, I put together a new dataset of court cases in which EU institutions fight over what the legislative procedure should be in a given file. For example, the European Parliament has recently challenged the Council of the EU for choosing the seat of a new European agency without involving it in the decision. We expect such conflicts to arise when there is ambiguity about the applicable procedural rule and when the challenging EU institution has something to gain from changing the procedure. In this case, the main incentive is that of the Parliament to have a say on where EU agencies should reside, while the Council wants to continue making these decisions alone.

If we pored over each individual case, we would see that in some cases EU institutions do not clash over legislative procedures despite the theoretical conditions being fulfilled. This is not surprising. Few theories of social behaviour are only ever true or false. What I want to find out is whether the theorised conditions – the presence of ambiguity and incentives – help us explain the pattern of competence conflicts in aggregate. As a result, I look at the problem through statistical lens: what is the probability of legislation being challenged given its attributes? Does ambiguity and/or procedural incentives increase this probability and if so, by how much?

Statistical methods typically require quantified input. I measure procedural incentives by ranking all EU legislative procedures according to how much power they confer on the European Commission and the European Parliament, respectively. I then take the difference between the proposed and actually used procedure to quantify institutional incentives to challenge legislation. Measuring ambiguity is more complicated, but in a nutshell it involves comparing legislative texts against competence provisions (so called legal bases in EU jargon) to determine the extent to which there is overlap and therefore ambiguity regarding the applicable rule.

I feed my measures of ambiguity and incentives, along with other relevant information, into a statistical model designed to predict the probability of legislation being challenged before the European Court of Justice by one of the EU institutions or Member States. The main results are visualised in Figure 1. The less satisfied the Parliament and the Commission are with a procedural change – the higher the incentive – the more likely the legislation ends up before the Court of Justice. The higher the jurisdictional ambiguity of the legislation, the more likely it is procedurally disputed. We can see that when the Commission and the Parliament are very dissatisfied, and thus face strong incentives to enter into a dispute, the law is very likely to be challenged. On the contrary, the probability of a dispute is nearly zero at the opposite end of the scale. These results support the theory of procedural politics.

Figure 1: Effects of procedural incentives and jurisdictional ambiguity on the probability of a procedural dispute.

 

In addition to the main findings, I explored how the incidence of procedural disputes varies over time. Of particular interest is the question whether disputes are more likely to occur in the wake of changes to the EU’s constitutional framework. As competence and procedural rules change, it is more likely they will produce new sources of ambiguity. It turns out that the periods following Treaty amendments have been, with the exception of the Amsterdam Treaty, associated with more procedural disputes. With no new Treaty revision on the horizon, we should anticipate disputes to remain relatively sporadic in the years to come.

Frequently, theories in political science are formulated and tested once at their outset. As time passes, doubt about the ongoing validity of the model grows. For numerous reasons, theories are liable to become obsolete over time and there are no guarantees against loss of relevance or explanatory power. Subjecting existing theories to tests against new data is the only scientifically acceptable way of maintaining and renewing confidence in our stock of knowledge about the social world. Arguably, there are many theoretical candidates in the political science canon whose re-testing is overdue. It was with this goal in mind that I revisited Jupille’s theory of procedural politics with new data. After appraising the key tenets of the theory, I conclude that it continues to provide both a valid explanation for a part of EU politics and a falsifiable prediction about the prevalence – or, rather, absence – of procedural contestation at the current stage of European integration.

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “Procedural Politics Revisited: Institutional Incentives and Jurisdictional Ambiguity in EU Competence Disputes”

 

 

Michal Ovádek is a political advisor in the European Parliament and an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Empirical Jurisprudence at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the interplay between law and politics in the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Twitter handle: @michal_ovadek (https://twitter.com/michal_ovadek)

 

 

The post Fights over European Union competences are dominated by ambiguity and self-interest appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Michal Onderco & Reinout A van der Veer

Last week, the European Union agreed to impose new sanctions on Russia in response to the attempt to poison the opposition activist Alexei Navalny and his jailing upon return to Russia. Immediately afterwards, Russia threatened to respond in kind.

This development is not new. In recent years, the European Union, just like many other actors in global politics, increased the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool.  This is even likely to increase in the future. The current European Commission, calling itself “the geopolitical commission”, announced plans to prepare “a  reinforced  sanctions  mechanism  […]  to ensure that Europe is more resilient to extraterritorial sanctions by third countries and that sanctions imposed by the EU are properly enforced.”

Increasingly, Europeans are becoming sensitive to the domestic costs of imposed sanctions. Nowhere was this argument clearer than in case of European sanctions against Russia, particularly after Russia instituted its own counter-sanctions designed to hurt European countries back. Now Russia threatens to do the same.

In our recent article in JCMS, we look at the costs that these sanctions bring to the firms in EU countries. We look at the Russian counter-sanctions for two reasons: they are widely understood to have been imposed in reaction to EU sanctions, and they are often conflated in popular discourse. Because they are Russia’s reaction to EU’s sanctions, their impact on European businesses tells us a lot about EU’s ability to weather the domestic costs of economic sanctions.

We utilize a unique data source: a database covering all Dutch exports, supplied by Statistics Netherlands. We use a quasi-experimental research design, which allows us to compare firms that were hit by the sanctions (our ‘treatment’) to firms that are comparable on all aspects except that they did not face the Russian sanctions. We look at the Netherlands, because it is a relatively large, open, and export-driven European economy which primarily exports food to Russia, and the Russian ban was aimed at these products especially.

We were mainly interested in two questions: whether the companies hit by the sanctions have a higher chance of (1) losing revenue and (2) ceasing exports altogether to Russia or elsewhere (which we refer to as firm failure), and (3) whether they were more likely to start exporting to countries near Russia, perhaps in an attempt to bypass the sanctions.

Our results indicate that firms that were hit by Russian sanctions were between 86% and 96% more likely to cease operations by 2015 and 2016 (respectively) compared to the firms that were not hit by the sanctions. However, we also find that the effect on revenue is negligible – in other words, if the firms survive, their exports do tend to recover fairly quickly and they do not suffer from the sanctions imposition afterwards.

We also see that the bigger the share of the firm’s revenue going to Russia, the more likely the firm was to stop exporting. At the same time, the big exporters that export only a small share of their products to Russia faced little impact. This is not entirely surprising – because these firms are much bigger, they also are much more likely to have the expertise and resources to implement sanctions. The higher risk of failing was especially visible for smaller firms in the chemicals and minerals industry, which exported between a quarter and half of their goods to Russia. Two-thirds of these firms failed in 2015 and 2016. Our research corroborates the earlier findings that highlighted that some sectors of Dutch economy were much more vulnerable than others. Agriculture is often listed as such sector, observation also recently confirmed by the Dutch agricultural diplomat in Moscow.

We also find that Dutch exporters that were hit with sanctions were more likely to divert their exports (i.e. whether they began exporting without precedent) to Belarus, Moldova, the Caucasus, Mongolia and China, but also Israel. We do not find evidence of such export diversion to other EU countries, where Dutch firms might already have an easy access. Neither did Dutch companies divert exports to Central Asia or Turkey, which offer less attractive options for diversion. Similarly, Ukraine’s conflict with Ukraine may explain why the Dutch businesses did not divert there.

Our results suggest that policy-makers who wish to help businesses to overcome the economic hardship caused by the sanctions (or retaliatory sanctions) should focus primarily on helping companies to survive in the short term, and focus on smaller companies that are more exposed to the sanctions. After this initial period, companies are able to bypass the sanctions by diverting their exports to other countries. Importantly, by now, the Russian counter-sanctions no longer hurt European businesses. Economic arguments based on their impact on firms should therefore not aminate the policy thinking about whether to keep sanctions on Russia or not.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “No More Gouda in Moscow? Distributive Effects of the Imposition of Sanctions”

 

 

Michal Onderco is Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on politics of international security, with particular attention to the role of domestic actors in foreign and security policy.

 

 

Reinout van der Veer is an Assistant Professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research interests include EU and EMU politics, the role of experts and expertise in liberal democracy, and the politicization and legitimacy of international organizations.

The post How do imposed sanctions impact firms? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

 

Dear Correspondent,

On 18 April 2021 Europe should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris that brought the Continent lasting peace and prosperity. Europe’s Founding Fathers thus created the European Community and the Community method as well as achieving its major success to make war between Member States ‘not only unthinkable but materially impossible’ — the European Coal and Steel Community.

Many politicians have forgotten the founding principles or never knew them. Have schools taught how this changed Europe for good, from a Continent where war occurred in the lifetime of every generation for more than 2000 years? Does the public know the facts?

What is more astounding is that the other major document signed on that day described how Europe’s democracy should be built up using both the Community system and the Human Rights system of the Council of Europe working in conjunction. They have never been published on the Commission’s website.

These democratic foundation stones of Europe, laid by the initial Six Member States, should be at the forefront of the Conference on the Future of Europe, announced for the 9 May 2021.

This is therefore a topic of major importance for every European citizen as well as UK citizens who should have been informed about how the ‘European Union’ should be reformed before the Brexit debate.

I am enclosing my open letter to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen which includes these major documents and explains their significance. More information can be found on my websites: schuman.info and eurDemocracy.com (where the text can also be found)

Best regards,

David Heilbron Price

 

 

 

 

Schuman Project

Schuman.info

David H Price

Editor

9 April 2021

Dear President von der Leyen,

It is 70 years since the signature on 18 April 1951 of Europe’s founding document for peace, the Treaty of Paris. This created the European Community. It changed the destiny of Europeans who had gone to war every generation for more than two thousand years.

As the European Commission and the other institutions ponder the Future of post-‘Brexit’ Europe in the Conference to be opened on 9 May, I have one request to the leaders, the media and the public.

It is necessary to recall the founding principles of that peace and prosperity. This is not hidden. It is not something that can be changed by our generation. It was written in a document, signed by the plenipotentiary representatives of the Six founding States: France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

What seems shocking to me is that the European Commission and the other institutions have not published this document. Schuman, a life-long student of democracy, called this the ‘Charter of the Community’ (Pour l’Europe, p146). It describes the Community method and the democratic principles that Europe must build on, in the same way as the United States applied the same eternal laws of human nature and worldly politics.

Schuman’s use of the term ‘Charter’ reflects that of the Magna Carta as a foundational document for British democracy. It distinguishes democratic Europe from the fraudulent ‘People’s Democracies’ of the Soviet eastern bloc. It is the litmus test of true democracy.

About a decade ago I spoke to the French Minister for Europe about publishing this ‘Charter’. He kindly supplied me with a copy from the French Archives. It was published on my website, schuman.info in 2012.

Although I pointed out this remarkable and important document to the Commission President at the time, the full text of the Schuman Declaration and the Charter of the Community has still not been published on the Commission’s own website. The lack of full information about the beginnings of European democracy is a disservice both to the general public, academics, the press and political leaders.

Secondly, while the European Commission has published the ‘full text’ of the Schuman Proposal, a governmental instrument, it has not published the text of his oral Declaration. The Commission website confuses the two: the governmental Proposal is aimed at other governments. The Schuman Declaration includes the explanation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Declaration includes far-reaching clarification of the original proposal agreed by the French Cabinet and signalled simultaneously to other European States via French diplomats or Schuman’s meetings with ambassadors and parliament in Paris on 9 May 1950.

It would be fitting that the foundational documents should be fully published on official websites and recorded in the Official Journal.

Madame President, I am therefore requesting that these historic texts about the Future of Europe be published before the opening of the Conference on Europe on 9 May this year.

Thanking you in advance for your attention to this matter, I remain,

Yours sincerely,

David Heilbron Price

 

Annexes.

 

 

1. Charter of the Community

Declaration of Inter-dependence                           Charter of the Community

Déclaration de l’Europe   Paris le 18 avril 1951

CHARTE DE LA COMMUNAUTE (Pour l’Europe, p146)

Statue Foundatrice de l’ Europe basant sa construction sur les Principes Supranationaux et le libre choix de ses citoyens

Déclaration commune des Ministres 

représentant les Gouvernements signataires du Traité

Le gouvernement de la République fédérale d’Allemagne, le gouvernement belge, le gouvernement français, le gouvernement italien, le gouvernement luxembourgeois et le gouvernement des Pays-Bas :

Considérant que la paix mondiale ne peut être sauvegardée que par des efforts créateurs à la mesure des dangers qui la menacent;

Convaincus que la contribution qu’une Europe organisée et vivante peut apporter à la civilisation est indispensable au maintien de relations pacifiques;

Conscients que l’Europe ne se construira que par des réalisations concrètes créant d’abord une solidarité de fait et par l’établissement de bases communes de développement économique;

Soucieux de concourir par l’expansion de leurs productions fondamentales au relèvement du niveau de vie et au progrès des oeuvres de paix;

Résolus à substituer aux rivalités séculaires une fusion de leurs intérêts essentiels, à fonder par l’instauration d’une communauté économique les premières assises d’une communauté plus large et plus profonde entre des peuples longtemps opposés par des divisions sanglantes, et à jeter les bases d’institutions capables d’orienter un destin désormais partagé,

Ont décidé de créer une Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier.

L’œuvre que nous venons de consacrer par notre signature est due à l’intelligence et à la ténacité de nos délégations et de nos experts; nous leur disons notre très grande gratitude.

Avant même d’être entrée en action, cette oeuvre a déjà, par la vertu de l’idée qui l’inspire, créé dans nos pays et au-delà de leurs frontières des espérances et une confiance tout-à-fait exceptionnelles.

En signant le traité qui institue la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier, communauté de cent soixante millions d’habitants européens, les parties contractantes ont marqué leur résolution de créer la première institution supranationale et de fonder ainsi les assises réelles d’une Europe organisée.

Cette Europe est ouverte à tous les pays européens libres de leur choix. Nous espérons fermement que d’autres pays s’associeront à notre effort.

Pleinement conscients de la nécessité de donner tout son sens à ce premier pas par une action continue et du même ordre dans d’autres domaines, nous avons l’espoir et la volonté de mener à bien, dans l’esprit qui a présidé à l’élaboration de ce traité, les projets qui sont actuellement en préparation. Les travaux se poursuivront en liaison avec les organismes européens existants.

Ces initiatives, dont chacune est limitée dans son objet, devront rapidement s’inscrire dans le cadre d’une communauté politique, dont l’idée s’élabore au Conseil de l’Europe. II devra en résulter une coordination et une simplification de l’ensemble des institutions européennes.

Tous ces efforts sont guidés par la conviction croissante que les pays de l’Europe libre sont solidaires les uns des autres, participent à une destinée commune. Nous consoliderons ce sentiment en associant nos énergies et nos volontés, en harmonisant notre action par des consultations fréquentes et des contacts toujours plus confiants.

Telle est la signification de cette journée. Elle sera comprise, nous n’en doutions pas, par nos opinions publiques et par les Parlements qui seront appelés à se prononcer sur le traité. Les gouvernements ici représentés seront auprès d’eux les interprètes de notre volonté commune de construire et de servir ensemble une Europe pacifique et prospère. »

 

 

2. Schuman Declaration – What Schuman declared

This is followed by the Schuman Proposal agreed by the French Government of Georges Bidault.

It starts “World peace cannot be safeguarded if constructive efforts are not made commensurate with the dangers that threaten it. …”

Full text at https://schuman.info/9May1950.htm

 

NOTE: What distinguishes Democracies — Free Choice (nations libres de leur choix)

The articulation of the ‘Free Choice’ of the Member States distinguishes them from fraudulent ‘People’s Democracies’ and dictatorships. Free societies decide their Community governance according to the most democratic procedures. A Community is created by the will of free people. It is not imposed like the constitutions of the Communist bloc by a party or parties. The Community, as manager of common resources and guardian against war between members, must be more democratic, fairer and more honest than its Member States. It should be a model of democracy for Europe and the world.

The Charter of the Community declares that all Member States

• must safeguard the rights of their citizens before the Council of Europe according to the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
• No national State that does not adhere to these Fundamental Rights may be admitted to ‘Europe’ whose very definition depends on this Convention of Freedom of Speech, Assembly etc
• The voice of the nation must be respected. For example, Lisbon Treaty and its earlier redaction as the Constitutional Treaty were rejected in national referendums.
• The free will of the people has not been given to the designation of the Commission President or the Commissioners who by law should be independent of political parties, lobbies and outside interests. The original fair system has been replaced by a closed-door horse-trading meeting of politicians.
• Elections have not been held for the Consultative Committees (Economic and Social Committee and Committee of Regions) as assemblies of organised civil society,
• Europe-wide election to the European Parliament (not 27 national elections) under a single statute as repeatedly included in all treaties since 1951 must be held,
• The Court system should be fully independent of governments and outside interests.

 

 

 

 

 

Schuman speaks on Europe’s democratic principles for political union at the signing of the Treaty of Paris 18 April 195 

 

 

Signatories of Europe’s founding treaty, 18 April 1951

 

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Since its creation, the European Union has aimed to become a key international actor, promoting regional integration, democracy, the rule of law and human rights through its numerous international development programmes around the world. Yet, we should not forget a complementary dynamic that is as important as the EU attempts to diffuse its own institutional practices and values. This concerns how the EU learns from other actors, and adapts to practices proposed by other countries and international organizations. Therefore, we need to understand how and if the EU is an adaptive actor. Closely related to this, the European Union has been described as a complex system, due to its institutional structure, evolving nature and its inherent contradictions. The complexity of the EU system means that the European Union learns from its crises, successes and challenges, and adapts, evolves and improves its policy responses. Yet, this tends to happen in complex and unpredictable ways.

Thus, when analyzing the EU we deal with a complex adaptive actor which is also a learning entity. In my article, ‘The European Union: From a Complex Adaptive System to a Policy Interpreter’, I debate how the EU as an international actor opens to the outside environment and learns from it through feedback loops, while adapting as a result of changes that happen outside the EU system of actors. Taking international development as a case study, I show how the EU learns by sensing information and relevant changes in institutional practices and mechanisms of interaction between non-EU actors. Therefore, the EU actors interpret the nature of these changes and the urgency of institutional adaptation, and, subsequently, start to adapt their institutional practices. However, since the EU is a complex system, this adaptation process does not happen in a linear way, and involves reiteration, imperfect adaptation and imitation of institutional practices that contradict other existing EU policies.

I apply this approach in order to discuss the EU efforts for achieving international aid effectiveness. This has involved the EU participation in international forums such as the Paris Declaration (2005), the Accra Agenda (2008) and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (2011). In this context, the EU has aimed to adapt its policy practices and carry out development at the most appropriate level, being inclusive in terms of actors and encouraging ownership by the beneficiary country. While the EU was trying to figure out the best policy approaches in order to make the most effective use of its aid budget, non-EU actors started implementing programmes going beyond top‐down approaches and using new policy practices such as horizontal cooperation between peers. This change was due to important changes in international development, former recipients of aid programmes becoming donors on their own (for example, many Latin American and Asian countries). This was mainly through South-South cooperation, allowing middle‐income and developing countries to share ‘knowledge, skills, expertise and resources to meet their development goals through concerted efforts’ (UNOSSC).

The EU aid effectiveness journey included new policy instruments such as the use budget support, a policy instrument aimed to help beneficiary countries to directly finance their national development agendas. Thus, the EU aimed to start building international partnerships with these developing countries. Yet, going beyond these initial approaches, the EU manifested more recently its interest in incorporating horizontal cooperation in its own policies and programmes. This has happened in two main ways. First, this ambition was stated in key EU documents. For example, in its last European Consensus on Development (2017), the EU highlights the desire to build ‘innovative engagement with more advanced developing countries’ and ‘partnerships [which] will promote the exchange of best practices, technical assistance and knowledge sharing [… by working] with these countries to promote South-South and triangular cooperation consistent with development effectiveness principles’. Triangular cooperation, as defined by UNOSSC, ‘involves two or more developing countries in collaboration with a third party, typically a developed-country government or multilateral organization, contributing to the exchanges with its own knowledge and resources’. It offers the opportunity for actors such as the EU to get involved in horizontal cooperation, by partially financing programmes in which countries in the Global South exchange experiences on development lessons, challenges and successes. The second and more recent way in which the EU has showed its interest in incorporating horizontal cooperation between its institutional practices is by starting to finance concrete triangular cooperation programmes such as a regional facility for development in transition for Latin America and the Caribbean, building on best practices taken mainly from Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, Costa Rica and Argentina.

These EU attempts to adapt and start using institutional practices which have proved successful in programmes developed by new donors is a complex process in itself. It is complex because it still involves contradictions, and the EU is working in triangular settings based on the idea of horizontality between international actors, but at the same time many of the EU partners still complain about EU conditionality in their bilateral relation. Complexity and adaptability in the EU system are interconnected, and, while we can indeed talk about the EU as an adaptive actor, the complexity of its adaptation processes is a key feature of the EU learning journey. This enables and constrains changes within the EU institutional practices. However, the complexity of the EU as an adaptive actor should not prevent analysts and scholars from approaching this instance of EU actorness that is as relevant as the EU attempts to diffuse its own values and practices.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “The European Union: From a Complex Adaptive System to a Policy Interpreter”

 

 

Ileana Daniela Serban was a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Political Science at Waseda University, Tokyo, where she held a research grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. She is currently a Lecturer in Public Policy at King’s College, London. Her research interests include global governance, processes of policymaking, EU actorness and new forms of international development cooperation.

https://waseda.academia.edu/IleanaDanielaSerban

@danielaserban9

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University of Luxembourg, Photo taken by Alina Felder during her fieldwork in 2019

Alina Felder

European higher education institutions are receiving substantial attention in various areas of EU policy making. They are expected to foster excellence in research, mobility in education and cohesion through cross-border exchange. Yet, the interrelationship of these different governance sites for a Europe of Knowledge (Gornitzka 2010) appears under investigated. While higher education policy research scrutinizes the multi-level, multi-actor and multi-issue dimensions of governing the European Higher Education Area (Chou et al. 2017), research on European border regions is concerned with day-to-day cooperation practices in the so-called ‘laboratories’ of European integration (e.g. Lechevalier and Wielgohs 2013; Stokłosa 2015). Existing studies on such laboratories among higher education institutions remain at the respective cross-border cooperation level (e.g. Giband and Mary 2018).

 

Entering the laboratories of Europeanization in the area of higher education

In my work I depart from previous research by analyzing the relationship among higher education (policy) actors both at the level of cross-border cooperation and between the (sub)national and EU levels. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with cross-border cooperating higher education institution representatives at rector and administrative level, (sub)national political actors and higher education institution associations. The higher education (HE) institutions concerned by my research are those, which receive(d) funding through European Territorial Cooperation, better known as Interreg. Next to reasons of accessibility, the cases for comparative analysis were selected with different starting points in the support provided through EU funds. While the University of the Greater Region – involving six HE institutions from Belgium, Germany, France, and Luxemburg – was established due to Interreg funding in 2008, the International University of Lake Constance – a cooperation among 30 HE institutions from Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland – was already established in 1999, prior to receiving EU funding in 2009.

While in the first case, Interreg has favoured a cooperation, which would not have emerged otherwise, my analysis reveals that Europeanization also matters for the already existing cooperation structures and issues. If conceived of as an opportunity and resource, Interreg is thus used to establish new or facilitate existing cross-border cooperation. Analysing how Interreg affects the cross-border cooperation among higher education institutions, delivers insights into concrete Europeanization processes, i.e. ‘processes of a) construction, b) diffusion and c) institutionalisation of […] rules, procedures, policy paradigms, […] and shared beliefs and norms, which are […] consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic […] discourse, political structures and public policie’ (Radaelli 2004, p. 3).

Concerning the Europeanization of cross-border cooperating higher education institutions, such diffusion and institutionalisation manifests itself in the objectives guiding cross-border cooperation practices. Under Interreg IV (2007-2013), the University of the Greater Region was established as a project to ‘strengthen cooperation in the area of higher education’, whereas the International University of Lake Constance received Interreg funding to ‘foster knowledge transfer’ for regional competitiveness. Beyond these generic objectives, the gathered data suggests academic, economic, political, financial, and socio-cultural objectives for the cross-border cooperation among higher education institutions. Interreg serves to achieve these objectives and was thus used to establish and/ or facilitate cross-border cooperation. The required structural changes to implement the Interreg funding accordingly were moderate in both cases and the objectives stemming from the EU level could easily be accommodated.

 

Accounting for (Europeanized) objectives of cross-border cooperation

While higher education institution members more clearly distinguished between academic and economic objectives of cross-border cooperation, political actors referred to these as strongly intertwined by mentioning objectives such as the development of skilled labour force to prevent brain drain. At the same time, certain higher education institution representatives explained how the cross-border cooperation of their institutions is not only supposed to contribute to a specific economic area but also to a space to live, to study and to conduct research. Concerning the academic objectives of cross-border cooperation, proximity was mentioned as an asset for joint research projects, even though research is highly internationalised. Joint course offers were an initial goal in the beginning of both cases. Yet, organisational, legal and practical obstacles concerning different schedules, degree requirements and language barriers were unfavourable to increasing the regional mobility of students and staff. The comparatively smaller size of the University of the Greater Region and, thus, stronger administrative support has allowed maintaining the existing and establishing new joint study programs.

Regarding political objectives, higher education institution representatives point to the contribution of cross-border cooperation towards the internationalisation strategies of their institutions. This is especially valid for smaller higher education institutions. In this vein, political actors refer to how the cooperation across borders helps to increase the attention towards areas that are peripheral in the respective national contexts. Academic staff and political actors alike have outlined the cooperation framework as a role model, for example, for the effective implementation of innovation policies or for the successful cross-border cooperation (among higher education institutions).

In terms of financial drivers, higher education institution representatives relate to how cross-border cooperation is a means to increase access to national and/or EU funding, where pre-existing cooperation relationships are an asset to acquire funding. However, the administrative effort and high co-funding rates of EU funding weakens its role as a driver for cross-border cooperation. Finally, cultural and organisational differences appear as two sides of a coin in both cases, so that higher education institution representatives highlighted the benefits of learning from differences in the approaches to teaching, researching and providing students with advice on international and professional experiences.

 

A highly political endeavour to fulfil the increasing responsibilities of higher education

Common beliefs and interests have been essential not only in establishing, but also in maintaining cross-border cooperation. The identified objectives for cooperation suggest that these common interests are mainly of academic and political nature. Additionally, the idea to fulfil the perceived increasing responsibilities of HE institutions also played a significant role. This reflects the EU’s social investment narrative establishing a ‘linear relationship between knowledge […] and economic performance’ (Telling and Serapioni 2019, p. 401). Just as any cross-border cooperation endeavour (Scott 2014) the cross-border cooperation among higher education institutions is highly political, so that its stakeholders attempt to influence (supra)national policies for more favourable conditions and sustainable funding sources for cross-border cooperation.

 

This blog post is based on my paper published as part of the Eastern Journal of European Studies Special Issue ‘Cross border cooperation and peripheral areas in Europe’ edited by Tomás Lopes Cavalheiro Ponce Dentinho. Here you can access the article in full.

 

Alina Felder is a doctoral fellow at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS). In her PhD project she explores the under investigated cross-roads of EU regional policy with the area of higher education policy. The central question of her dissertation is how EU regional policy instruments influence the cross-border cooperation among higher education institutions and their attempts to shape EU knowledge policies. Her research interests thus include Europeanization processes that are induced through network modes of governance the EU is establishing and encouraging public and private actors to participate in. Next to her research, Alina regularly works in political education contexts.

 

References

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Jens Jungblut, Pauline Ravinet & Martina Vukasovic (2017) Higher education governance and policy: an introduction to multi-issue, multi-level and multi-actor dynamicy. In Policy and Society, 36:1, pp. 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/14494035.2017.1287999

Giband, David; Mary, Kevin (2018): Territorial cross-border cooperation in higher education. A case study of the eastern Pyrenean border. In Documents d’Anàlisi Geográfica 64 (3), pp. 587-601. DOI: 10.5565/rev/dag.516.

Gornitzka, Åse (2010): Bologna in Context. A horizontal perspective on the dynamics of governance sites for a Europe of Knowledge. In European Journal of Education 45 (4), pp. 535–548. DOI: 10.1111/j.1465-3435.2010.01452.x

Lechevalier, Arnaud; Wielgohs, Jan (Eds.) (2014): Borders and Border Regions in Europe. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Radaelli, Claudio M. (2004): Europeanisation: Solution or problem? In European Integration online Papers 8 (16), pp. 1-24.

Scott, James W. (2014): From Euphoria to Crisis. Cross-Border Cooperation, Euroregions and Cohesion. In: Luis Dominguez Castro und Iva Miranda Pires (Eds.): Cross-Border Cooperation Structures in Europe. Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future. Brussels: Peter Lang, pp. 81-94.

Stokłosa, Katarzyna (2015): Border Regions as Laboratories of European Integration. In: Elzbieta Opilowska and Jochen Roose (Ed.): Microcosm of European integration. The German-Polish border regions in transformation. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 16-31.

Telling, Kathryn; Serapioni, Martino (2019): The rise and change of the competence strategy: Reflections on twenty-five years of skills policies in the EU. In European Educational Research Journal 18 (4), pp. 387-406. DOI: 10.1177/1474904119840558.

 

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