Ideas on Europe Blog

Jon Danzig next to a cut-out of Winston Churchill at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, which has an entire building named after the great war leader in recognition of him being one of the founders of the EU.

Britain’s greatest war leader, Sir Winston Churchill, was one of the first to call for the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’. He is recognised as one of the 11 founders of today’s European Union.

In the immediate years following the Second World War, Churchill was convinced that only a ‘united Europe’ could guarantee peace. His passionate aim was to eliminate the European ills of nationalism and warmongering once and for all.

Even before the war, back in 1930, in an article for America’s ‘Saturday Evening Post’, Churchill concluded that:

‘The concept of a United States of Europe is right.’

In that prescient article, which today reads like an early blueprint for the European Union, Churchill imagined:

A Europe without internal barriers or tariffs, or passports, or multiple currencies, which would enable ‘the free interchange of goods and services’ and ‘the free travel of people’ across the continent.

The idea of ‘European unity’ was not new, he asserted. Reminding his American readers of the Roman Empire, Churchill wrote:

‘Europe has known the days when Rumanians lived on the Tyne and Spaniards on the Danube as equal citizens of a single state.’

He added:

‘Everywhere, in every age, in every area however wide, our every grouping of peoples however diverse, unity has made for strength and prosperity for all within its circle.

‘Why should Europe fear unity?’

It was clear from this article, however, that at that time Churchill did not envisage Britain – which then headed a huge Empire and Commonwealth straddling the world – needing or wanting to be part of a ‘United States of Europe’.

He wrote:

‘We are bound to further every honest and practical step to which the nations of Europe may make to reduce barriers which divide them and to nourish their common interests and their common welfare.

‘We rejoice at every diminution of the internal tariffs and the martial armaments of Europe. We see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonality.

‘But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.’

However, Churchill’s view in 1930 would be bound to change after 1945, by which time Europe had suffered two world wars and was desperate to avoid another.

Churchill was never a ‘little Englander’. He supported an ambitious union of governments, and even called for a “world super-government” without which, he said, the prospects for peace and human progress were “dark and doubtful.”

During the Second World War, it was Prime Minister Churchill who announced in June 1940 the ‘Declaration of Union’ between Great Britain and France.

With the full backing of his Cabinet, Churchill stated:

‘The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union…

‘Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain; every British subject will become a citizen of France.’

An Anglo-French stamp was even designed to commemorate the proposed Anglo-Franco union, but the Nazi invasion of France scuppered those plans.

The proposals did demonstrate, however, that Churchill was in favour of political union between European countries.

After the first British victory of the Second World War at El Alamein, Churchill wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, on 21 October 1942:

‘Hard as it is to say now.. I look forward to a United States of Europe, in which the barriers between the nations will be greatly minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible.’

In a lecture about this in December 2011, Oxford Professor of Government, Vernon Bogdanor, described Churchill’s letter as, “remarkably prescient” adding that he thought the comment, “would get him expelled from the Conservative Party today”.

After the Second World War, Churchill strongly believed that a united Europe was the only way to avoid future conflicts and wars on our continent.

In his famous Zurich speech of 1946, Churchill said:

“We must build a kind of United States of Europe..

“The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important..

“If at first all the states of Europe are not willing or able to join the union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.”

In May 1948 Churchill said in the opening speech to the Congress of Europe in Holland, that the drive towards a United Europe, “should be a movement of the people, not parties”.

Churchill, who also proposed a European ‘Charter’ and ‘Court’ of Human Rights, continued:

“We aim at the eventual participation of all the peoples throughout the continent whose society and way of life are in accord with the Charter of Human Rights.”

During this momentous speech, Churchill proclaimed:

“We cannot aim at anything less than the union of Europe as a whole, and we look forward with confidence to the day when that union will be achieved.”

And Churchill went much further than the idea of the immediate and urgent creation of a United States of Europe. Looking boldly to the future he stated,

“We must endeavour by patience and faithful service to prepare for the day when there will be an effective world government resting on the main groupings of mankind.”

In August 1949, at the first meeting of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Churchill delivered his speech in French, and said:

“There is no reason for us not to succeed in achieving our goal and laying the foundation of a United Europe.

“A Europe whose moral design will win the respect and acknowledgement of all humanity, and whose physical strength will be such that no person will dare to disturb it as it marches peacefully towards the future.”

The following year, in 1950, Churchill called for the creation of a European Army ‘..under a unified command, and in which we should all bear a worthy and honourable part.’ (France objected to this plan).

In an article for The Independent newspaper in 1996 by former UK prime minister, Edward Heath – who I interviewed when I was a teenager – he wrote:

‘I knew Winston Churchill, I worked with him, I stayed with him at his home, and I have read his speeches many times. I can assure you that Winston Churchill was no Eurosceptic.’

On Churchill’s call in 1946 for a ‘United States of Europe’, Edward Heath clarified:

‘I readily accept that at that time Churchill did not envisage Britain being a full member of this united Europe, but in gleefully seizing upon this point, Eurosceptics have misunderstood or misrepresented the nature of Churchill’s attitude to full British participation in Europe.

‘This reluctance was based on circumstance; it was not opposition based on principle. And the circumstances have changed in such a way that I am sure Churchill would now favour a policy that enabled Britain to be at the heart of the European Union.’

He added:

‘Churchill would be the first to realise that in the world today, where an isolated Britain would be dwarfed by five great powers, the United States, Russia, China, Japan and the European Union, Britain’s full participation in the European Union is vital, both for Britain and the rest of the world.’

 MY OPINION? When read fully and in context, my view is that Churchill not only enthusiastically believed in the ever-closer union of Europe, in which the UK would play a leading role, but also eventually a world government.

He was, at the least, a confederalist, but I would also argue, even ‘a kind of’ federalist too. He had great vision for a political ‘union of nations’ which it seems few today fully recognise or acknowledge.

And although it seems that Churchill didn’t at first envisage Britain being a full member of ‘a kind of’ United States of Europe, it’s clear that Churchill’s views later changed, as the British Empire and Commonwealth diminished, and Britain’s world influence shifted.

(Churchill was renowned for changing his views according to circumstances: he started his political life as a Conservative MP; then resigned to become a Liberal MP; then resigned from the Liberals to become a Conservative MP again).

Churchill made his last speech about Europe at London’s Central Hall, Westminster in July 1957, some four months after six founding nations – France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – established the European Economic Community by signing the Treaty of Rome.

Churchill welcomed the formation of a ‘common market’ by the six, provided that ‘the whole of free Europe will have access’. Churchill added:

“We genuinely wish to join a European free trade area.”

But Churchill also warned:

“If, on the other hand, the European trade community were to be permanently restricted to the six nations, the results might be worse than if nothing were done at all – worse for them as well as for us.

“It would tend not to unite Europe but to divide it – and not only in the economic field.”

 (Source: Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches Vol. 8 page 8681)

During the 1960s Churchill’s health rapidly declined, but his support for a united Europe didn’t. According to Churchill’s last Private Secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Brown, in August 1961, Churchill wrote to his constituency Chairman:

‘I think that the Government are right to apply to join the European Economic Community..’

In this letter, Churchill supported the ‘welding’ of West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg into ‘an organic whole’, which he described as a ‘happy outcome’ of the European Economic Community.

Churchill added:

‘We might well play a great part in these developments to the profit of not only ourselves, but of our European friends also.’

Sir Anthony also confirmed that in 1963, just two years before Churchill died, he wrote in a private letter:

‘The future of Europe if Britain were to be excluded is black indeed.’

• Watch my video, ‘Why the EU was started and why Britain joined’:

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During #WorldWar2 #Churchill wrote, 'Hard as it is to say now.. I look forward to a United States of Europe, in which the barriers between the nations will be greatly minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible.’ Churchill wasn't a #Brexiter! Share: https://t.co/zcLvOmoSIv

— Jon Danzig (@Jon_Danzig) March 1, 2020

 

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Philipp Lutz, David Kaufmann & Anna Stünzi

Following a surge of refugee arrivals in Europe in 2015, the numbers of new arrivals have significantly declined and the issue of asylum has ceased to dominate the political agenda. Nevertheless, the European Union remains deeply divided on how to establish responsibility-sharing among its member states and how to reform the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Despite intense political debates, no effective cooperation among European states for the common provision of humanitarian protection has been established. The existing academic literature explains this cooperation failure mainly by examining the willingness and capacities of European countries to engage in an effective cooperation in the protection of refugees. We, however, argue that the understanding of responsibility-sharing in the provision of humanitarian protection requires going beyond the state-centric view, and to take account of the strategic role of refugees, too. Policy-makers and academics should perceive refugees as actors with own rational strategies, motivations and aspirations to improve their life prospects. In our article, we bring together public good theory with public policy literature and formal modelling to develop a more comprehensive model on the provision of humanitarian protection.

©Ajdin Kamber, Adobe Stock

Refugee protection is an obligation under international law but it leaves open which states should bear what share of that responsibility. Following the logic of public good theory when some countries do not admit refugees, they increase the responsibility for the other countries to protect refugees. The admission of refugees, on the other hand, provides benefits to all countries such as a stable political order, public safety and the securing of human rights. Due to these public good characteristics, countries have incentives to free-ride on the protection efforts of other states. Accordingly, the provision of humanitarian protection is a common European public good: protecting refugees contributes to the normative power of the EU as a stronghold of human rights and liberal democracy and it ensures the functional requirements for the free movement of people and the border-free travel area,, as main institutional pillars of the EU.

The common perspective is that the provision of international public goods could be achieved if there was effective responsibility-sharing between states. Thus, the provision of humanitarian protection depends solely on the willingness of states to contribute. How refugees behave is largely absent from the analysis. Following the public policy literature, we argue that policies can only achieve their objectives if the relevant target groups comply with those policies or behave in ways that are consistent with the enunciated objectives of the policy. Empirical research shows that refugees have rational preferences about the country where they want to seek protection and that they are willing to accept substantial risks and costs to submit an asylum request in their preferred destination country. Only in exceptional cases do refugees want to stay in the country of first entry, as assigned by the existing Dublin Regulation. Thus, the current asylum system sets disincentives to comply for their main target group and is therefore designed to fail: refugees are people with credible motivations to comply or not comply with European asylum policies. The persistent non-compliance by refugees is a result of strategic behaviour of individuals maximizing their life prospects. It is therefore not sufficient when states establish cooperation in order to provide humanitarian protection. Only mutual compliance between states and refugees results in the provision of the public good.

Our findings have important implications for policymaking in the European Union. The very idea that refugees should be able to exert any choice is a central blind spot in the current political and policy debates. Our research suggests that the agency and preferences of refugees should be incorporated into the analysis and design of international asylum regimes. We demonstrate that efforts to increase the enforcement of state compliance (i.e. through sanctions) or the enforcement of refugee compliance (i.e. through securitisation) are unlikely to overcome the current problems of the CEAS. As long as the responsibility allocation opposes the fundamental interests of the refugees seeking protection, the perspectives for an effective provision of humanitarian protection remain bleak.

This piece draws on the article Humanitarian Protection as a European Public Good: The Strategic Role of States and Refugees published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS).

Philipp Lutz

Philipp Lutz is a  post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a Fellow of the Swiss national science program nccr on the move. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from University of Bern in 2019. His main research interest is in understanding the political consequences of international migration and covers comparative politics as well as international governance.

@LutzPhilipp

 

David Kaufmann

 David Kaufmann is Assistant Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy at ETH Zürich. He is a policy scholar with an interest in urban studies, planning and migration studies.

@kaufmada

 

 

 

 

 

Anna Stünzi

Anna Stünzi is a doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich at the Center for Economic Research. She studied psychology and economics at the universities of Zurich and Copenhagen. Anna Stünzi’s thesis covers different topics of climate change mitigation policy, mainly focusing on the empirical analysis of feedback effects from policy announcements. Besides academic research, Anna Stünzi is president of foraus, a Swiss think tank on foreign politics.

 

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By constraining the powers of executives and developing a political culture of accountability, national parliaments play a key role in the fight against corruption. However, their normative powers may be marginalized in the process of democratic consolidation. Based on original research from three European states, Emilija Tudzarovska-Gjorgjievska argues that weak parliaments contribute to the vicious cycle of corruption when they give a pretence of legitimation but do not act as democratic institutions proper.

Illustration: colourbox.com

Liberal democracy, which rests on democratic institutions as well as citizens sharing democratic values, is under stress. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), democracy has deteriorated, the quality of democracy is backsliding and weak law enforcement fails to deliver effective rule of law. This weak point in the systems of checks and balances is not conducive to regime change towards full functional democracy. When European states fall short of delivering democratic standards and principles, the EU’s democratic legitimacy is also threatened. Why is this the case?

The problem of weak law enforcement in corrupt systems

Weak law enforcement is not only an indicator of ineffective rule of law. It is also an important indicator of ineffective control of corruption and a major obstacle for the successful implementation of anti-corruption strategies. Moreover, corrupt systems and weak rule of law stimulate social traps whereby citizens choose either to resist the corrupt system, or to comply with the system, leading to clientelism, patronage or other informal practices.

Both types of social traps are informally institutionalized when the rule of law is biased and the exercise of power is manipulated for private interest. On both occasions, weak law enforcement rests on citizens’ mistrust in the system’s legality and equality, or in its ability to offer equal access to justice. What is more, when actors fail to offer justifications for the exercise of power as part of a legitimation process involving public scrutiny and public forums, the citizens’ trust in the ability of the political system to solve problems is further undermined. This jeopardizes democratic legitimacy both on national and supranational levels.

The role of national parliaments

My research confirms that national parliaments, which are public forums for scrutiny and key to securing democratic legitimacy, have a key role to play in breaking the patterns of social traps and the vicious cycle of corruption. My findings also indicate that the weak role of national parliaments in constraining the powers of executives has provided a breeding ground for law manipulation, and elites’ influence on the ‘rules of the game’. As a result, parliaments, which are supposed to hold governments to account, have acted as façades of legitimation, rather than as democratic institutions proper serving the citizens. The latter become detached from the systemic chain of account-giving when parliaments fail to engage them and develop a political culture of accountability. Under these conditions, taking control of corruption becomes a very difficult task – in some cases even an impossible task.

In my PhD project, I look into the cases of Slovenia, Croatia and North Macedonia, as all three states have experienced challenges in law enforcement and in providing equal access to justice. This has made it difficult to root out corruption from their political systems. Based on a qualitative comparative data analysis, drawn from interviews, legal documents and other secondary literature, I find that the marginalization of the oversight role of national parliaments in the process of democratic consolidation has created a pretence of legitimation, through a technical exercise of democratic accountability and deviations of norms. Moreover, the detachment of citizens from their elected representatives creates a political culture where parliaments are ‘accountable to no one’, adding to the vicious cycle of corruption and creating situations of social traps.

Shortcomings in the democratic consolidation

Yet, the EU’s acknowledgment of this risk to democratic legitimacy remains incremental and partial. On the one hand, the process of Europeanization as an instrument of democratization in CEE countries introduced new weight on the legal and institutional aspects of their political systems. On the other, this instrument proves to be necessary for exercising soft power pressure for countries to pursue political and economic reforms in line with the EU’s democratic values. Yet, even after becoming EU members CEE countries share similar challenges of law enforcement and difficulties in consolidating democracies.

Indeed, the post-communist political systems have been unfamiliar with the concept of democratic oversight or public scrutiny over processes and results. The process of democratic consolidation should have addressed these institutional gaps and shortcomings in democratic accountability. However, on the one hand, the EU has taken a top-down, technical approach in addressing corruption. On the other, the characteristics of the institutional matrix at national level and its ability to prevent corruptive practices have not been sufficiently acknowledged. As a result, citizens remain entrapped in a broken chain of democratic accountability between electoral cycles.

New EU strategy needed

Against these risks, the EU’s approach to address the problems of corruption remains inadequate, and it fails to take a decisive role. The European Commission’s first EU Anti-Corruption report in 2014 offered an overview of the corruptive risks in all EU member states. However, in 2017, the European Commission took a much-disputed decision to drop this instrument. The process of monitoring corruption was transferred to the European Semester, which is an economic governance tool. As such, it is not designed to address key, country-specific challenges nor to address shortcomings in law delivery. The EU also lacks a strategy for repairing the citizens’ detachment from supposedly democratic institutions.

The direct link between the quality of democracy at nation-state level and the citizens’ trust in that political order requires us to revisit the EU’s legitimacy. Corrupt political systems and ineffective rule of law present imminent risks for representative democracies. Abuse of power occurs for real and the EU and its member states rely on each other in addressing these challenges. Acknowledging a joint responsibility will be the first step towards a new approach, where safeguarding the interests of the citizens and repairing the frailty of democratic legitimacy must take centre stage.

This research is forthcoming in a volume which collects case studies from the PLATO project, edited by Dirk de Bièvre, Peter Bursens, Chris Lord and Ramses Wessel.

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The Truman Doctrine Redux:

21st Century American Foreign Policy and Eastern Mediterranean Sea

and the Middle East

By

 Vassilios Damiras, Ph.D.

International Relations Expert

 

The Genesis of the Doctrine

The geostrategic role of the Truman Doctrine in helping prevent the fall of the then Greek kingdom to communism during the late 1940s created a great design for American diplomatic and strategic planners that they then utilized throughout the Cold War. Its critical precepts continue in the current war against global terror under the Bush administration. This article analyzes the geostrategic and geopolitical significance of the Truman Doctrine and its 21st-century application to ongoing American involvement in the Middle East. Moreover, since this specific policy combined the theoretical principals of realism and idealism, it is argued that Harry S. Truman created the foundations of American liberal imperialism in his readiness to fight Soviet/Slavic communism as an ideological menace in the Balkans and Greece’s immediate geographic vicinity. Parallels will be drawn between the Truman Doctrine’s resistance toward communism of the late 1940s, and the present Bush administration’s focus on counter-terrorism.

Finally, the implementation and execution of strategies founded on the Truman Doctrine established a robust military presence in the southeastern Mediterranean area and the Middle East, which appearance, with its strategic implications, prevails today. In a “Truman Doctrine redux,” the Trumanesque Bush foreign policy strategy has expanded the American presence in the Middle Eastern region in the war on terror.

President Truman, influenced by his classical education, believed that in protecting Greece from communism, American military advisers defended the cradle of Western civilization, indeed of their American culture. Furthermore, Greece founded the glorious Byzantine Empire and the Greek Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. Without a doubt, Truman recognized that the modern Greek socio-political system was not as pure in democratic and cultural values as during the ancient times; nevertheless, the United States, in Truman’s interpretation, had an obligation to assist the country that provided the tenets of the American democracy. Also, he realized that through Greece, American military power would significantly shape the region.

The Truman Doctrine opened a new page in American foreign policy. President Truman’s reaction to the Korean military crisis in 1950 relied on his firm conviction that “this is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now,” he declaimed, “there won’t be another step.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower perceived the ongoing military crises in Indochina and the Middle East through the geopolitical/geostrategic lessons of the Greek Civil War (1947-1949), warning that if these strategic regions fell to Soviet communist influence, Europe and other areas could likewise collapse under Soviet totalitarian pressures. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson argued forcibly that the Greek case provided an example for American military action in Vietnam.

Moreover, Walt Rostow, chair of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning council, assured U.S. Secretary Dean Rusk that “there is no reason we cannot win as clear a victory in South Vietnam as in Greece, Malaysia, and the Philippines.” Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who had strongly supported the Truman doctrine in its infancy, declared in a 1964 speech that “We, of the Free World, won in Greece…. And we can win in Vietnam.” In 1965, immediately after the first U.S. combat troops were dispatched to South Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson alluded to the Truman Doctrine in reassuring the American public that the U.S. armed forces would win the war against communist aggression in the Southeast Asian region as they had won in Greece in the 1940s. The following year, Rusk quoted Truman’s 1947 address to U.S. Congress in justifying American military involvement in South Vietnam.

In the current war on terror, George W. Bush has used the basic foundations of the Truman Doctrine to combat Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The Bush Doctrine uses liberal imperialism to both fight terrorism and promote American democratic values globally, particularly in the Middle East. The Truman Doctrine indelibly influenced both past and present American foreign and defense policies.

An Analysis of the Truman Doctrine in a Historical-Political Perspective

There have been disparate interpretations of the Truman Doctrine since its inception and implementation. The Doctrine has been the focus of serious debate since its promulgation. Critics have called it the “first shot of the Cold War”; an American global license for liberal imperialism; an exaggerated response to an imagined communist threat that led to the monster of McCarthyism; a reactionary foreign policy placing the American government on the side opposite freedom, political and social reform; strong proof of an “arrogance of power” that continuously forced United States into other countries’ domestic political quarrels.

Defenders of the Truman Doctrine argue that this specific policy illustrated American determination and ingenuity in the fight against communism. The Doctrine was representative of the American commitment to free world ideals and beliefs. When the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were combined, magnanimous financial aid assisted first Greece and Turkey and later, other nation-states threatened by communism. Yet, in focusing on these important issues, historians have failed to credit the Truman administration with creating a foreign policy designed to protect freedom by helping embattled countries help themselves.

The tenets of the Truman Doctrine left their imprint on the seminal stages of an American foreign policy that was adaptable, restrained, and not necessarily based on military power. Later, when President Kennedy introduced “flexible response,” Truman and his advisers (some advisers later joining Kennedy) adopted a foreign policy intended to fight the ever-growing political and strategic challenges to democracy with a broad-ranging arsenal of responses corresponding to the socio-political danger at hand.

Moreover, President Truman’s Doctrine arguably anticipated to the Nixon Doctrine of the 1970s, which called for partnerships based on the nation at risk sharing the burden of safeguarding itself by essentially providing the bulk of the manpower needed for its security. The Truman administration’s approach to the Greek problem proved idealistic in purpose, but realistic in application. Its composite thrust was political, economic, and military, allowing for adjustments and fine-tuning as the nature of the threat changed. The political facet included creation of a stable democracy in Greece; economic emphasis supported viable economic opportunities in the Greek population.  The military focus was upon capable defense of Greek national interests by modern Greek armed forces, assisted by their American counterparts. The policy constituted a viable response to multifaceted threats against which real victory lay in convincing democracy’s enemies that they could not win.

Although various historians have long debated the political and strategic reasons for the Greek government’s victory, one observation has been especially stressed: American military aid was solely responsible. The Greek communists could have gone on indefinitely if they had not switched from guerrilla tactics to conventional warfare, and if they had continued to receive refuge and outside military assistance. Tito’s defection from the Soviet bloc broke the guerrillas’ resistance was considered crucial, enabling American firepower to forge a victory. Although these ingredients surely proved vital to the final outcome of the Greek civil war, the full explanation does not lie either in the Balkans or in American military assistance.

The Truman administration achieved its objectives in Greece because of a flexible American foreign policy that was global in theory but constrained by reality. White House advisers at that time had defined the nation’s interests in Greece in relation to the rest of the world, developed a strategy with manageable goals, and operationalized it within the limitations of America’s capacity to influence events and people. Most significantly, they cultivated a Greek populace rich in democratic values and traditions, staunchly nationalistic, who opposed communism and welcomed U.S. aid. America’s foreign policymakers kept the struggle within the technical confines of a civil war, repeatedly refusing to permit the conflict to grow into larger war. After achieving the financial aid bill’s passage, the administration toned down its rhetoric to avoid military confrontation with the communists, quietly persuaded the British to remain in Greece as part of a bilateral security effort, and thus gained time for the American strategy to reach fruition.

The Truman Doctrine provided the rationale for a global strategy that rested on equivalent and limited responses to carefully defined and continually changing levels of danger. During the Greek involvement, the Truman administration considered every option from outright withdrawal to direct military intervention. In 1947, the communist emergency in Greece necessitated strong military aid and operational advice; once that specific threat subsided in late 1949, the American focus shifted to long-range economic rehabilitation. Decisions resulted from recommendations and proposals presented not only by specialists in Greek and Turkish affairs, and others.

Vital information came from British and Greek analysts, the U.S. State and Defense departments, U.S. National Security Council, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other intelligence organizations, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. Army Intelligence. The new foreign and defense policies emerged from serious considerations regarding their impact on Greece and neighboring nation-states, on America’s allies and the nonaligned countries, and on Americans at home. Averting a unilateral and more dangerous involvement was crucial; the possibility of graceful de-escalation or even total withdrawal was debated, as were the effects of events in Greece on global strategy. During all this time, the Truman White House sustained continual assessments of the Greek dispute to keep the American commitment flexible and under control.

On the economic level, United States did the following:

• assisted in the creation, for the time in Greek history, of a national electric power system, designed by American engineers, modeled on the TVA, with a quasi-independent, public corporate entity interlinking new hydroelectric generating stations at various sites, with Athens Piraeus Electric Company (APECO) and a new thermal generating station based on the mining of lignite at Aliveri;
• supported the expansion and modernization of Greece’s traditional industries (cement, textiles, fertilizers) while promoting new ones;
• helped re-open and re-equip the chromite, bauxite and pyrite mines, and to clear and re-equip the nation’s ports and harbors, and the Corinth Canal;
• re-equipped the fishing fleet and agricultural processing and storage plants;
• helped develop village potable water supplies, completing an anti-malarial program;
• contributed to modernization of hospitals and clinics;
• provided for re-building and improving of highway and railway networks from Kalamata to Alexandroupolis;
• facilitated building and repair of museums, archeological sites and hotels to support the goals of future tourism.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture provided the following financial support:

• to create and train a Greek force roughly equivalent to America’s county agents for Greek villages, including instruction in fertilizer and pesticide use, general land management and animal husbandry;
• to undertake large-scale land reclamation works;
• to supply the government’s mechanical cultivation service and its well-drilling service with heavy equipment
• to construct farm-to-market roads and to link formerly isolated villages with trunk and highway systems and to market towns.

In military affairs, the American government created special programs to arm and train the Greek armed forces. Eventually, Greece and Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan helped create a self-sustaining and self-reliant Greek nation-state, ready to negotiate future military, political, or economic threats. The United States became a guardian of Greek democracy; without American military aid, it was likely, or at least plausible, that Greece would have succumbed to the Soviet communist expansion. If the Soviets had managed to control the Greek countryside, the survival of the free world would have been at risk.

Control of the Bosporus Passage and the Dardanelles Straits was the raison d’etre underlying the American posture and strategic actions within the region, due to ongoing Soviet aspirations and intentions for direct access to the Aegean. In 1945, during the Potsdam Summit meeting, Stalin openly claimed the right to create military bases in the Thessaloniki or Alexandoupolis harbors as alternatives to bypass the Turkish Straits. Simultaneously, the Soviet regime exerted acute political pressure on the Turkish government to revise the Montreaux Convention to gain joint control of the Straits with the Turkish Republic (Proposals of June 22, 1946).

The Truman precepts buttressed the policy of containment and organized resistance against Soviet communist expansionism, and were the foundation of a long-lasting American foreign policy with global dimensions and implications. NATO, the American Joint Task Forces in the Mediterranean, and Atlantic and Pacific communication/surveillance installations and facility/military bases became and remain pillars of American global policy promulgated in the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan.

The American engagement in World War II (1939-1945) incurred a total loss of $341 billion with 460,000 personnel casualties. It was the greatest investment in peace and military security any American administration had ever made. It demanded an everlasting guarantee. Containment doctrine was the appropriate answer to those concerns at that time, in locations distant from the American continent. Greece’s and Turkey’s military roles in the Marshall Plan and later in NATO would be key factors in the balance of power in the geostrategic system, along with other European nation-states strengthened by the American military presence on the Continent.

A full network of military bases and related facilities in Greece and Turkey was organized within the framework of various bilateral accords with the American government to support integrated security functions in the Eastern Mediterranean. (The current Bush administration has used these facilities to pursue the war in Iraq.) The Aegean islands area and the island of Crete are crucial to the necessary strategic breadth and depth to defend the straits and thereby, access to the Mediterranean Sea, and are under Greek operational responsibility as part of NATO’s command structure. Greece also committed to American such as the critical Suda Bay naval base for the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet. Currently, the U.S. Defense Department is in the process of upgrading the Suda Bay naval base in order to accommodate more naval and Special Forces assets in the fight against Al Qaeda and another terrorist/insurgent operatives.

The Truman Doctrine positioned the United States as the protector of Greece and its respective regions and continues to play a vital role even in the current global situation. During the twentieth century, Greece offered much and lost many in the battles for freedom and democratic values. In no other period of its long history has Hellenism suffered such great upheaval and destruction. For years, the Truman Doctrine tenets have safeguarded the Greek culture and nation from a variety of exogenous threats.

The Contemporary Implications of the Truman Doctrine

The Truman Doctrine was born out of the American geostrategic and geopolitical perception of Greece as a key nation-state regarding security in the Middle East, crucial to the protection of American national interests in the Mediterranean region. Greek and Turkish territory is a unified strategic area in the American view, with both of the countries operating as supplementary security elements. The consequence of this strategic outlook was the contemporaneous entry and integration of both nation-states into the NATO civil-military alliance.

During the Greek civil strife, the Truman Doctrine put into realistic practice what Alexander the Great said in the town of Opi in 324 B.C., “For me any good foreigner is a Greek, any bad Greek is worse than a barbarian.” In 1947, the “good foreigners” were the Americans. The “bad” Greeks were the Greek communists who attempted to destroy the values of the Greek culture. The implementation of Truman’s doctrinal concepts aborted this process.

Although history indicates that the most convincing argument in international relations is inextricably tied to power, the greatest achievement of political human beings is the building of universal peace based on mutual confidence and the consolidation of human rights and liberties. In recognition of the value of universal peace, the wall of bipolarity was demolished, and the world set on the road to peace. It is not only national and military power that has made the United States a global hegemon; it is rooted in the trust of people and human expectations for freedom and political and economic prosperity. The Truman Doctrine incorporated these realistic and idealistic norms and values.

Moreover, the Bush administration continues to deal with current geopolitical challenges based on the complex formulations so well developed by Truman. Present security threats include instability in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, due to local independence and irredentist conflicts, nationalism, terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism. In addition, the illicit proliferation of nuclear weapons and guided missile systems are serious dangers to U.S.-European, not to mention global, security.

Furthermore, the expansion of NATO and its inclusion of operational areas outside its traditional borders are important innovations emerging from the Truman Doctrine in support of the pursuit of freedom around the globe. Today’s NATO comprises a unique, organized multinational force, largely responsible for pan-European security. NATO continues to evolve in its capabilities relevant to the new geostrategic challenges of the 21st century.

The military execution of the Truman doctrine was based on realistic perceptions of how to apply hegemonic military power in times of crisis (much as Bush has done presently). Protecting democracy was based on the idealism of expanding and promoting democracy across the globe. The Truman principles coherently fused realism and idealism; this is the main rationale for their continued applicability in today’s increasingly complex geopolitical and geostrategic environment. Truman based his foreign policy on ideas from his classical education and precepts of classical liberalism. This eclectic and sophisticated educational/philosophical background assisted him in creating a cogent and cohesive foreign policy with an enduring effect on American decision-making processes, policies, and outcomes. The Bush administration follows the tenets of classical liberalism regarding post 9/11 American foreign and defense policies. Finally, the Bush Doctrine, similar to the Truman Doctrine, has introduced a political, economic, and military evolution to Afghanistan and Iraq, for the purpose of stabilizing and establishing democratic values and beliefs. In the current war on terror and in the promotion of democracy, the Bush Doctrine clearly parallels the Trumanesque concepts for global security and democratic development.

President Barack Obama’s foreign policy was a two-part process in two parts: first, his goals and decision-making mechanism and, second, his plans and implementation. His foreign policy-making team, which centered on the White House, is headed by the President, who relies on Vice President Joe Biden and his National Security Adviser General James Jones. His National Security Council is over 200 people in stuff is almost four times large that NSC staff of Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush and nearly ten times as large a President John F. Kennedy. Also, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton play an essential role in the President’s foreign policy decision. Moreover, Rahm Emmanuel, his chief of staff, and David Axelrod, his senior adviser, are part of the foreign policy decision-making machine. Finally, the President relies on various special foreign policy envoys such as Richard Holbrooke regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of course, President Obama himself is the primary source of strategic direction. The new U.S. strategic direction indicates a very vague and idealistic approach to U.S. national security interests.

President Donald Trump has developed a transactional/realist approach to foreign policy. Lately, he focuses on enlarging the American presence in Greece and Cyprus to protect the American national interest in the region and to monitor and stop the Russian expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea region and the anti-NATO behavior of Turkey. Moreover, to collaborate with Italy, France, Greece, Cyprus, and Israel to explore the natural gas resources. Also, the Souda bay U.S. naval base in Crete has been used for the various attacks against Syria and to fight jihadist terrorism in the Middle East. Greece is the fourth large recipient of U.S. military assistance. The current American administration wants to turn Greece as the bastion of the American national interest in the region. Both countries have a common enemy radical jihad. Last but not least, currently in the northern city of Alexandroupolis, the American military installed a state of the art radar to operate jointly by American and Greek personnel. This radar can monitor the region as far as the Black Sea. President Trump vividly tries to recreate parts of the Truman Doctrine.

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Criticisms directed at the European Union (EU) and its institutions over the past decade have often been interpreted as a sign of fundamental weakness. However, using the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) as an example, Claire Godet argues that contestation should not be seen as a sign of failure, but rather as an opportunity for justification.

The case of the EU ETS

In the last decade, the European Union (EU) has faced many backlashes and criticisms. This turmoil has led some scholars to declare the EU’s legitimacy crisis. It is popular to assume that if citizens are dissatisfied, the EU must be facing legitimacy challenges that could eventually lead to the withdrawal of support, and therefore systemic troubles. However, negative claims and critiques might not be as threatening as these studies imply. Critiques also provide a valuable opportunity for the EU to justify itself, and can test, rather than threaten the system, which can wither or thrive according to its reaction.

Analysing the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is particularly enlightening on the matter. The ETS is the policy that establishes an ’emissions market’ to limit polluting emissions and encourage climate friendly economy. European industries receive allocations that define how much polluting emissions they are allowed to produce. If they exceed their quota, they must buy more allocations. If they reduce their emissions, they can sell their surplus of allocations.

The ETS is quite recent (it was designed in the early 2000s), and has suffered many objections from all sides since its creation. Green activists denounced the commodification of climate protection; energy-intensive industry complained about the burden on their competitiveness; think tanks decry the Commission’s overly optimistic projections.

From its very first days, the ETS has been questioned; and since then, criticisms have reappeared with each round of reforms. Despite the challenges, the ETS has survived and developed; and the next phase, starting in 2021, will integrate the emissions market further than ever before.

The ETS and its critics

How is it that the ETS has continued to grow – in leaps and bounds – while stakeholders continue to disparage it? The answer is that the Commission has managed to transform complaints into opportunities to justify the system.

When establishing the ETS, the Commission justified it by affirming that a market-based instrument was the most cost-effective solution to mitigate climate change. This has defined the EU’s climate policy for the following 20 years: it focuses primarily on emission reductions (rather than, for example, changing the mode of production); and it is constructed around market mechanisms (rather than imposing environmental standards, for instance).

Critiques of the ETS usually fall into two categories: on one hand, actors can criticise the technical aspects of the ETS, i.e. they believe that the ETS is the best solution, but still suggest measures to make its realisation more efficient. On the other hand, actors can argue that the ETS is based on fundamentally flawed premises and that market mechanisms are not the best option available.

The first type of critiques does not represent a threat for a system’s legitimacy since it does not attack the system’s normative justifications. The actors who point out technical shortcomings do not ask for better or new moral grounds; they simply attempt to make the system work better (whether this means having greater climate ambitions or lowering the burden on industries). The Commission has taken advantages of these criticisms to foster the development of the ETS and the emissions market integration. Cleverly, the Commission does not deny any of the shortcomings of the ETS: it acknowledges its deficiencies and recommends deeper integration to achieve both steeper emissions reduction and fewer market distortions.

However, the second type of critiques does jeopardise the system, as it asserts that the system cannot be legitimised while its justifications rest on biased assumptions. These critiques attempt to delegitimise the system in order to replace it. They do not believe that market mechanisms and/or emissions reduction should be the guiding principles of EU’s climate policy: according to them, market-based instruments are not the best solution to mitigate climate change. These ‘anti-system’ critiques are harder to convey because the actors involved in the current system, even when unhappy, fear changes that could, in the end, be more detrimental to them.

Critique as an opportunity for legitimation

The Commission has managed to deflect these critiques. For instance, NGOs who advocate for the scrapping of the ETS are castigated, on one hand, by industries that dread an ecotax, and on the other hand, by green actors who apprehend a return to zero. Nevertheless, by urging for controversial changes, these NGOs have given a valuable opportunity to the Commission to reassert its justification that the ETS is the most cost-effective solution to provide both climate mitigation and economic development.

Criticisms do not necessarily represent a threat to a system’s legitimacy. Firstly, not all negative claims target the system’s justifications. They might intent to better the system rather than challenging its normative grounds. Secondly, criticisms that question a system’s legitimation are merely a test that the system can overcome by reaffirming its normative justifications.

This does not mean, however, that criticisms are inconsequential in political systems: negative claims, as any discourse, can affect a system in many ways depending on their intensity, popularity, etc. Nevertheless, the relation between critique and legitimacy is more complex than expected and should be explored carefully before making any assumptions about a legitimacy crisis.

The EU is currently facing criticisms from all parties: rather than seeing this as a challenge, this could be a valuable opportunity for the EU to justify itself to its citizens. By criticising the EU, citizens also express what they want and expect from the Union. It is now time for the EU to listen.

This article was originally published on the UACES Graduate Forum blog, ‘Crossroads Europe’.

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In the wake of the financial crisis, EU governments spent taxpayers’ money to rescue European banks. That displaced a financial crisis into political systems by straining public finances and social protections in all EU member states. Some states were brought to the point of insolvency, and the survival of the EU’s single currency, perhaps even of the EU itself, was threatened. But is the EU experiencing a legitimacy crisis?

Three types of legitimacy crisis

Legitimacy is at the core of ‘good government’. It means the justified or rightful exercise of political power. Since a right to exercise political power implies that people have an obligation to comply also with laws they do not like, legitimate political orders are more likely to enjoy the unforced compliance of citizens. Political systems that can concentrate on satisfying the needs and values of citizens, rather than coercing them, are more likely to deliver high levels of economic performance and to score well on indicators of human development.

Whilst the EU has experienced serial crises since the financial crisis, spanning from geopolitics and Brexit to dealing with refugee flows, it remains to be investigated whether it has experienced a legitimacy crisis. We lack the knowledge, concepts, theories and methods needed to investigate scientifically just how far, if at all, the Union’s ability to make legitimate use of political power corresponds to what it needs to do in crises.

We might say that legitimacy crises occur where a political order is unable to satisfy all necessary conditions for the justification of its powers. That is an intentionally abstract and generic definition, designed to avoid assuming any one form of political order; any one set of necessary conditions for legitimacy; any one set of standards of justification; and any one form of crisis. If we want to understand if a particular political order is subject to a legitimacy crisis, we must ‘fill in’ the generic definition by specifying standards and necessary conditions for the justification of powers specific to that order. Against this background, I argue that the European Union may experience three types of legitimacy crisis.

Failed direct legitimacy

The first type of legitimacy crisis occurs where the EU cannot satisfy all conditions to be directly democratically legitimate with citizens. The Union defines rights, makes law and allocates values. However, in democracies, citizens must be able to control as equals their own rights, laws and allocations of values.  Consider, though, the conditions that are needed for democratic institutions and politics. These include freedoms and rights, political competition that offers voters relevant choices, a civil society in which all groups have equal opportunity for organised influence, a public sphere in which all have equal access to public debate, and a defined people, a demos, or at least agreement on who should have votes and voice in the making of decisions that are binding on all.

Achieving all those conditions simultaneously may be hard for the EU, given that it is a multi-state, non-state political system that operates from beyond the state. The capacity of the state to concentrate power, resources and legal enforcement has historically been useful in ensuring that the decisions of democratic majorities are carried out; in providing universal and equal systems of representation; in guaranteeing rights needed for democracy; in drawing the boundaries of defined political communities; and in motivating voters and elites to participate in democratic political competition for the control of an entity which manifestly affects their needs and values.

Failed indirect legitimacy

So, what of the alternative where the EU somehow derives or borrows democratic legitimacy from that of its member state democracies? That might be more than a second-best where it is difficult for the European Union to develop its own democratic politics and institutions in full. There may also be important justifications for a form of European Union in which individuals are citizens of national democratic political communities of states that are member states of a Union that is itself an association of both national democracies and their citizens.

However, member state democracies could make contradictory demands on the Union’s legitimacy. Attempts to legitimate the EU via its member state democracies could produce democracy-on-democracy domination. Either suggests a second form of legitimacy crisis where the EU cannot be indirectly legitimated by all its member states simultaneously.

Failed input, output or throughput legitimacy

However, cutting across any need to be directly or indirectly legitimated by publics, the EU may also need to be input, output and throughput legitimate. Imagine a political system that was procedurally perfect in its voting and deliberations. Yet it had no outputs. Would we consider it legitimate? Perhaps not, if we think that political power is justified only where it has outcomes important to securing rights, justice and the most basic of public goods needed for personal security and economic and social welfare. So democratic legitimacy needs inputs from votes and voices, outcomes that are valued by citizens and throughputs, or procedures, that convert inputs from votes and voices into outcomes that deliver value, rights and public goods. A political system may also need to be able to make legitimate trade-offs between optimal outcomes and ideal procedures.

Hence, in a third form of legitimacy crisis, the Union might struggle to provide essential inputs, outputs and throughputs simultaneously. As a Union of democracies, a high level of agreement between member states may be a procedural condition for input and throughput legitimacy. However, multiple veto points may make it harder to secure the outputs that are thought to justify collective action at the European level.

The research project Post-crisis Democracy in the European Union (PLATO) explores these tensions. It aims to build new theory through multiple, connected PhD projects that investigate different actors with whom the EU needs to be legitimate, and different standards of democratic legitimacy. I invite you to explore findings from the individual studies on this blog and to engage in conversations on the EU’s struggle for legitimacy.

The post From financial crisis to legitimacy crisis? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Ceriana by Roberto Martini

The weeks and months following Brexit are taking those of us who would have preferred the UK to stay in the EU into strange new territory. While politicians and technocrats get on with working out the practicalities, the question for us ordinary Europhiles is: how to remain European?

On this new terrain is the underlying stuff, the issues that (from the Remainer point of view) the referendum was really about – relationships with other countries, curiosity about different cultures and participation in other ways of life. They’re expressed in various ways, through learning languages, taking trips or spending periods abroad: most Europhiles have one continental country they’re particularly attached to. Eyes lighting up at the thought of French cuisine, the Italian language, a Spanish village or a German city – all these are signs and elements of a European identity and set of affinities that will endure regardless of what happens at the institutional and multilateral level.

But, as with all relationships, Britain’s connections with its continental neighbours will need care and cultivation if they are to thrive – more so than ever, since the UK’s political decision to leave the EU has left many in Europe with a sense of hurt and bemusement.

Crucially, strong connections require a mood beyond the anger that characterised much of the Remain campaign, a constructive and creative set of emotions and attitudes that foster an outward focus rather than the tendency to stay locked into an insular battle with the ‘other side’.

So here, in no particular order, are some ideas about How To Be A New Remainer.

Be Consciously Continental

Cultivate continental habits and interests. As a practising glutton, I’ve long brought back favourite foods from places I’ve spent time in and integrated them into my everyday life, with the result that I consume Arabic coffee, drink tea like a Palestinian and put chorizo in everything. Having a periodic ‘Table for Europe’ – one of the ideas for marking the day of the UK’s departure from the EU – in which you share a continental meal with at least one fellow Europhile, is a simple but powerful way of giving an ordinary act cultural and political significance.

In a consumer society, we all have a degree of economic power which we can use to make our preferences matter. As K L McGhee points out on Facebook, another easy act of post-Brexit activism is Euro-consumerism, supporting cafes, delis and other continental businesses wherever possible.

But, as my Austrian great-aunt never actually said, there’s more to life than eating. There’s a vast pool of European culture to dip into, diverse enough to suit all tastes and deep enough to last a lifetime (or several). Jonny Watson, also on Facebook, suggests reading 27 books, each one written by an author from a different member of the EU: ‘Balzac for France, Cervantes for Spain, Goethe for Germany,’ he suggests, adding, ‘not sure what to suggest for Slovakia.’ Or confine yourself to one country and set yourself the task of reading some of its greatest classics, picking the sauciest one for your book group.

Following European news is a way of countering both the declining levels of foreign news coverage in the British media and the national self-absorption that has taken hold since the referendum. Learning Spanish in the run-up to Brexit, I found solace and a sense of perspective in El Pais, often discussing the latest developments with my incredulous Spanish conversation exchange partner. Many of the major outlets in European countries publish in English, such as the German public broadcaster Deutschewelle and the pan-European news channel Euronews.

Forge Partnerships and Connections

This article from The Spectator is a timely reminder of the lost innocence of the 1970s, when all things continental held a certain glamour. Back then, a ‘continental breakfast’ was a rare treat rather than just a couple of croissants that leave you hungry, and a continental quilt was an exotic feature of only the most sophisticated bedrooms.

New Remainers, of course, don’t believe in pointless nostalgia. But perhaps there’s a useful truth in this backward glance, one that has to do with recovering the romance and excitement of discovering how differently others organise their lives. In recent decades, this sense of discovery has largely been an individual, pleasure-seeking affair, pursued through regular holidays to the continent. But the post-Brexit world creates the need – and opportunity – to promote more formal links for cultural exchange.

Some potential partnerships will flow naturally out of the gaps left by a pro-Brexit government, generating the need to create and maintain pan-European links in academia, for example. Lobbying for the continuation of the Erasmus scheme is vital for future generations of Europe, as Timothy Garton Ash argues in this wide-ranging piece. In short, a kind of continental third sector could emerge out of the mess to provide a counterweight to the anti-Europeanism at the top.

Meanwhile there’s scope for developing connections at the municipal and local level with a revival of the twin town movement. This article, published before the EU referendum was even a twinkle in David Cameron’s eye, shows that there is untapped potential for links between towns within the framework already in place. Some councils are already seeing the potential. In a display of solidarity after the referendum, the mayor of Bromley visited the borough’s twin town in Germany. Neuwied’s mayor Jan Einig responded in kind: ‘We can look forward resolutely together despite Brexit, because what connects us is our friendship and our friendship cannot be destroyed by Brexit.’

Travel to the Continent

When it comes to understanding the Other, even in the digital age nothing can replace the in-body, analogue experience of travelling to another country.

Marcel Proust had it in this more nuanced formulations of the adage ‘travel broadens the mind’: ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ And since the evidence suggests that twenty-first century humans still have a problem with difference, Mark Twain’s claim that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts’ remains apposite.

The benefits of continental travel have been recognised in British society since the Grand Tour became an essential part of a gentleman’s education, a civilising post-study tour which survives in the democratised form of inter railing. In these climate-anxious days, such trips can circumvent the objections to flying because the continent to which the UK still belongs, having physically detached from mainland Europe a mere eight thousand years ago, is accessible by boat and train.

There are signs that long-haul train travel is becoming increasingly popular. The Austrian state railway has recently relaunched part of its overnight train service, while the Independent’s Europe correspondent Jon Stone has been sharing his experiences of a train journey from Brussels to Prague on Twitter, highlighting fares to rival those of budget airlines.

All of which calls to mind another adage-in-the-making: true remainers never leave, they just find new ways of staying European.

Alex Klaushofer is writing a book about the state of Europe by way of three lesser-known continental cities.

 

The post The New Remainers: How To Stay European After Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

“Islam or a certain kind of Islam,” might show resistance to the idea of democracy. While surveying the texts of Islamic political thought specifically of thinkers like Al Farabi and Ibn Ruchd, Derrida found a certain pattern. He saw that although these two thinkers incorporated the Greek philosophy of Philosopher King from Plato’s Republic and Nicomachean Ethics in their oeuvre of Islamic political thought, they entirely skipped the ideals of democracy.

He also added that a reference to democracy in a Muslim State never comes without bringing a certain amount of turmoil.

Although Derrida stated this possible incoherence in Islam and democracy, he believed otherwise. Democracy and Islam are perceived to be in opposition with each other, for Derrida a dialogue can be ensued to use Islam for betterment of a democracy to come.

He assigned a political duty to anyone who wants to see democracy flourish to help people of the Islamic world who are trying to bring a secular in the political for the re-emergence of laic subjectivity. And especially help to bring forth and re-establish the “democratic virtualities” inherent in Quran.

But the relationship of Islam and Democracy is a difficult one, to make a point; Derrida mentioned the elections of 1992 Algeria.

As happened in Algeria in 1992 the elected party leader (Islamic Front) had to step down by intervention of army because army wanted a better democratic process and their victory was deemed hazardous for democracy by army. Earlier President Chadli of Algeria had started democratic processes and through 1989 constitution enabled a free press, power to constitute political parties and education of masses for a democratic pole. In this consequence the Front Islamique Salut party won in the first round of elections in 1991 “taking 47.54% of 59% turnout.” This was also a precursor that Algeria might get rid of the ruling elite which were the Army and Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) party. These two had the authority soon after Algeria’s Independence from France. But Army overthrew Chadli’s government and put a state of emergency for a better development of democracy. Although that was all in the name of democracy what was to follow in Algeria was extreme fear, abductions, abuse and crackdown not only on the Islamists but common people.

Derrida opined that democracy suffered through the slogan of better democracy. The authority sabotages the electoral system in the name of democracy itself. This according to Derrida is the auto-destructive quality democracy is inherent with.

The example of Algerian elections shows this confrontation of Islam against democracy but also show how democratic powers are adamant of anything Islamic. It signals to the aporia related to democracy itself, it is when non-democratic forces suspend the democratic process in the name of democracy. Secondly it is the supposed tension between Islam and democracy, commonly perceived that that each entity is bad for another.

The dilemma of the elections of Algeria was that although the electoral process was fair but as the result an Islamic party gained majority, and that faction that took away their authority claimed that the Islamists might eliminate the very democratic system they came from. But the result of taking away Islamists electoral right came as a tumultuous blow on the people of Algeria.

Derrida mentioned that some of the people he was in contact with in Algeria were of the opinion that Army takeover was the right choice as democratically elected Islamic government might have been bad for democracy. Here is the example of biased Derrida, that certain people think that Islamist might have been bad for democracy. And this is also a negative point we can attribute to Derrida because despite of his claims of alterity and knowing that by clear democratic process FIS would have won he acknowledged some of his friend’s opinion that ousting of Islamic government was right.

But Derrida compensated his bias by asking for a dialogue between Islam and democracy. He emphasized that if we plainly assume Islamist will be bad for democracy, it will obscure the picture of the other side. If Islam is resistant to certain kind democracy on the outset, it also shows that westernized sections claiming to be democratic are adamant to assimilate Muslims in democracy.

Jacques Derrida also highlighted that it is not that simple matter of right and wrong and the two parties in Algeria simply do not stand against one concrete opponent. The westernized sections are afraid or against a certain kind of Islamists and Islamists only loathe democracy because they know a certain version of it. These two have to be receptive to the diversity of the other side.

The events of January 1992 Algeria show a suicidal quality of democracy; that it can democratically throw democracy out of itself, or it is not hospitable to other even though other was elected democratically. On one hand Derrida mentioned that a certain kind of Islam is hostile to democracy and on the other hand he demanded openness from the part of democracy to other kinds of Islam. Deconstruction should be able to extend democracy to the horizon of unfamiliar.

Here we have to see that Algeria had been in the influence of FLN and Army which was seen as the extension of westernization while as Algeria has been a Muslim country the FIS marketed itself as the Islamic alternative. So both of these viewpoints of FIS as Islamic revival and Army/FLN as savior of democracy/westernization were merely political tools and creating binaries of Islam/democracy, Arab world/Europe or East/West would be a naïve step.

The case of Egypt is completely similar to what happened in Algeria, in the relation between Islam and Democracy. The revolution of Tahrir Square ousted Hosni Mubarak and later electoral system was established to elect a ruling party democratically. Muslim Brotherhood won the elections of 2011 with a clear margin and its leader became the country’s premiere. But soon the Algerian history was repeated on Egyptian soil; army took over for the sake of democracy, crackdown on all the elected leaders and executed most of them. The persecution and torture and abductions of civilians, journalists and anyone not considered their own is still going on. Here again democracy was done badly in the name of democracy with the help of western powers.

For these matters, Derrida’s project for a dialogue with Islam is important. Although Derrida showed a little bias that Algeria was better off without that democratically elected Islamist party, he nevertheless emphasized that Democracy should be open to other religions. Derrida encouraged a dialogue with Islam and within Islam.

It is noteworthy to point out here that there are scores of Muslim thinkers who have worked on an Islamic reasoning of the concept of democracy. The same Muslims Derrida urged the philosophers of time to assist.  Syed Abul’ala Maudodi, an Islamic thinker of the South Asia believed that democracy is not in any contradiction from Islamic rule only if we accept that religion and worldly affairs should go hand in hand. He dubbed such rule as Theo-democracy but adds that only Muslims should be able to elect a ruler, have a say in legislature and consultation in government matters. He emphasized on consultation and authority should be in hands of ordinary Muslims which is indeed democratic.

Fetuhullah Gulen, an influential figure of Turkey and Central Asia, believed very much like Derrida that democracy has been going through changes and it will evolve and improve in the future. But to attain its perfection Islam is the political system that can help it. He stressed that Quran assigns similar duties to its citizen as has been entrusted by modern democratic entities.

Sadek Jawad Suleiman, thought democracy and Islamic Shura to be similar in essence. Ali Abdul Raziq, an Egyptian scholar, emphasized that democracy in relation to Caliphate “can not only be conciliated with Islam but is the one most according to its dogma.”

Derrida as mentioned earlier urged the scholars of the West to help those in the Islamic world who are trying to unmask the virtualities of Quran that has been shadowed by layers of traditions and interpretations. And there are scores of such Muslim thinkers who have been working on such a level. Derrida’s project for democracy can be beneficial for both democracy’s revival and political Islam’s survival.

On Derrida’s proposed idea of cohesion of Islam and democracy; Alex Thomson said that if Islam according to Derrida has political importance for future democracy and their collision can result in something different, then we should acknowledge these facts seriously.

On the course democracy might take, it might not be identifiable as democracy. The marriage of Islam and democracy might lead to something new and different.

On the discussion of openness towards Islam, Slavoj Zizek also converges with Derrida, although his theoretical and political aspirations are very much different from Derrida. Zizek said that despite seeing Islam resilient towards modernization and lamenting about it we should see Islam as an undecidable, open for a socialist project. The reason on focus of Islam is that although it retains the most severe possibility to turn into fascist project it also can be the site for the best. Islam is unlike other religions it has more powerful social linkages, it can counter any possibility to be assimilated into the world capitalism, so Zizek outlined the duty to use the equivocal qualities of Islam politically.

Derrida, aware of the importance Islam and its followers might be able to assert, wanted to use it for democracy’s own good. Scholars like Zizek also took Islam as a site for betterment and development.

Europe needs to peacefully engage in a dialogue with Islam and Muslims. With the ongoing terrorist situations engulfing Europe it might seem as a strategic mistake to not to react and keep negotiating a possibility for common ground between the other (Islam particularly) and democracy (the European ideal); but it may be perhaps a good option for Europe’s future.

Derrida did not simply wanted democracy taken as it is present and neither wanted Islam to be taken as is. What he envisioned will be a new horizon for both democracy and political Islam. For such unison, Derrida’s persistence for overcoming patriarchy that is found both in western democracy and Islamic political system will be of great help.

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So, Brexit got done. The UK is no longer a member of the European Union. What happens in the next 11 months will dictate the UK’s economic landscape for decades to come, explains Maria Demertzis, Deputy Director of Bruegel.

Pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain, October 28, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay

Now negotiators must move on to harder things. To quote a famous British Europhile, ‘…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

The UK has lost all its representation in EU institutions but, at least till the end of December 2020, it must comply with all EU regulations. For a little while then, everything continues as is, except the UK has no say, including in what decisions the EU takes between 1 February and the end of the year. Compromises hammered out in the next 11 months, by both British and European negotiators, will dictate the UK’s economic landscape for decades to come.

The UK would, understandably, want to limit this period as a pure rule-taker. But this depends on whether there will be an agreed relationship by the end of this year.

The UK has lost all its representation in EU institutions but, at least till the end of December 2020, it must comply with all EU regulations.

Can it be done? If this deal refers to just trade issues then any agreement made will have to be ratified by the Council and European Parliament only. And yet, if it is more than just a bare-bones trade deal, but refers to any other issues, national parliaments will in all likelihood need to be consulted. This is a much more complicated and time-consuming process.

So, what can the UK achieve in what is arguably a tight schedule?

The UK will be driven in its demands by the Brexit rationale for regulatory divergence. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank England, argues in these terms for financial services. As one of the world’s major financial centres, the argument goes, the City of London should aim to go its own way. Given that the UK is leaving the EU, it should aim to maintain and expand the relative advantage it has in the financial sector, the way it sees fit.

But why should the EU agree to this? The City has served as the financial centre of the EU and the euro. Even if Brexit itself diminishes the City’s allure, there is no obvious substitute in continental Europe. This is true for banking services but is more so for access to capital markets. For as long as capital markets union is not a reality, London can still provide access to capital markets the European economy needs.

So, perhaps an agreement on financial services is within the realm of what is possible.

But what about trade? The UK will be looking to stay as close to the EU’s single market as it possibly can. The EU will want to accommodate that provided the UK accepts its rules. Here incentives are not as aligned however. The EU is unlikely to budge as it has the upper hand in the negotiations. By leaving the EU, the UK risks losing 27 markets. This reflects about half of its trade. The EU just risks losing one market, has less to lose and is not prepared to risk the integrity of the single market.  Can then the UK accept regulatory alignment in return for seamless trade?

By leaving the EU, the UK risks losing 27 markets. This reflects about half of its trade.

The chances are that it won’t. But nor can it afford to have no deal by the end of the year that would require prolonging its rule-taker status. That would mean that the only way forward is aiming to have a narrow deal on very specific sectors within the year, but then pursue regulatory divergence for the rest.

The only way forward is aiming to have a narrow deal on very specific sectors within the year, but then pursue regulatory divergence for the rest.

Together with some agreement on financial services this might suffice to declare a political victory. But it will be economically poor as it will not have avoided trade disruptions. This will have consequences for British industries and eventually the economy. But also, it could exacerbate the divergence between London, that will have been allowed to continue to thrive, and the rest of the country that will lose the benefits of frictionless trade. Ironically, this was one of the arguments that fed the Brexit cause to begin with.

The post The realpolitik of the day after Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

If Boris Johnson can negotiate agreements that are better than the EU system, it would be a serious challenge for the 27. 

Boris Johnson ‘got Brexit done’. The United Kingdom will, however, remain subject to EU rules until the end of the year (Photo: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor)

He was believed to be an entertainer, he turned out to be a political strategist. Thanks to a crushing victory last December, where he managed to remove the Labour party from its working-class strongholds, Boris Johnson ‘got Brexit done’. The United Kingdom will, however, remain subject to EU rules until the end of the year. On 1st January 2021, its privileged access to the EU internal market will end in the absence of a new partnership agreement which is yet to be negotiated or an extension of the transition period (which Johnson does not even want to hear the word of).

For the past three years, the various options available to London have repeatedly been assessed, notably the so-called Canadian option (a free trade agreement for goods, a partial opening of service markets) and the Norwegian option (a full participation in the European market, in exchange for regulatory alignment and a contribution to the budget). But Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has recently put it bluntly: the UK will have its own trade and regulatory policies. It will not be a follower.

A new conflict with the 27 is thus around the corner. On January 8, in London, Ursula von der Leyen warned that the condition for a free trade agreement without tariffs or quotas is broad regulatory alignment. The more the UK diverges from the EU, the more its market access will be restricted.

The British position is unsurprising: it would be paradoxical, after having decided to ‘take back control’, as the Brexiteers proclaimed, not to make use of this freedom. But Johnson faces a triple contradiction.

The more the UK diverges from the EU, the more its market access will be restricted.

The first is geopolitical. If London could have hoped to negotiate a host of free trade agreements in the pre-2016 multilateral world, it will be much more difficult in the new Trumpian transactional world. Today, the most important thing is strength. A market of 66 million inhabitants (against 450 for the 27 EU countries) does not translate to much muscle.

The second contradiction is economic. The British economy’s best asset is not the production of goods, for which the UK records a heavy deficit vis-à-vis the Union, but services, for which it posts a surplus. The exchange of services requires a harmonised regulatory framework. A combination of free trade in goods and segmentation of the service markets would cost to British consulting or financial engineering firms far more than to German machine tool builders.

The third contradiction is social. By raising the minimum wage 6% and by declaring a preference for skills, Johnson rejected deregulation of the labour market. To do otherwise would be to compromise his political victories. And it is hard to imagine the UK undercutting the EU’s environmental or health standards, for which the preferences of British consumers are very close to those of their continental neighbours.

London’s room for manoeuvre is narrow. Johnson can bet on regulatory competition in finance, artificial intelligence or biotech, and rely on subsidies to reach his industrial policy goals. But this will not be without cost. The greater the divergence with the 27, the longer and more difficult it will be to negotiate an agreement and the more restrictive the EU will be in terms of access to its market.

This does not necessarily put Johnson in a corner. The weakness of the EU lies in its cumbersome procedures and the inertia of its legislation, which results from multiple compromises between competing interests. Take the EU budget, it has priorities that have little to do with those of the EU, which gets perpetuated from one cycle to the next because everyone is fighting to preserve its cherished spending items. Or consider the inability of the European Commission to present a financing plan commensurate to its climate ambitions. Both examples illustrate a sad logic of entitlement.

So where can Johnson go now? Certainly not ‘Singapore on Thames’, the illusion of a free-market paradise for which there is no political basis. He can, however, build an agile regulatory system able to foster innovation and steer it more efficiently than his counterparts in Brussels. Johnson could create a system that, far from contradicting that of the EU, is actually ahead of it.

The bet is far from won. Both on the British and on the EU side, Brexit will end up as just another chapter in the story of Europe’s decline.

If he succeeds, it would present a serious challenge for the 27. But it will also ultimately be beneficial because what the EU needs is not a Britain that drifts away, or isolates itself and fails. The EU needs a partner whose competition wakes up the continent. It’s a challenge that forces the EU to tackle the problem of differentiated integration head-on, instead of cementing a sometimes artificial unity built around the defence of the status quo.

The bet is far from won. Both on the British and on the EU side, Brexit will end up as just another chapter in the story of Europe’s decline. But let’s not stop dreaming. Since the EU and the UK are now condemned to cohabit, let’s try to do it productively. An intelligent partner and competitor is the best thing that can happen to the continent.

This opinion piece was originally published in Le Monde.

The post Britain faces a triple contradiction appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Just as the UK government is making its final preparations for the fast-approaching Brexit Day, I am just wondering who is looking forward to the Transition Period, and all the drama that might follow it.

My super cautious and alarmed older brother, who is a British Passport holder, has already made his final visit to Germany in the weekend, just before the 31st of January, just in case rules change and it becomes a hassle for him to make a swift appearance to his mates. He never ceases to amaze me, and I am sure he is not the only one feeling this way in the UK.

Illustration: Chris Riddell

There is a lot one could say about the UK’s imminent departure from the EU. I am not mentioning the clumsiness of the 50p coin, which was introduced by the government to commemorate the Brexit, as well as the amusement I feel for the extravagant parties planned by the Brexiteers for Friday night.

The thrill of being an independent country again without any ties to the EU is worth of glass champagne, which must be a product of the UK.

The morning after Friday will make some wonder about the Transition Period, and the benefits of being an independent country will also be questioned, but there is no going back from this locked-in trajectory. The UK’s Brexit path was set in by the results of the UK’s in-and-out Referendum in 2016.

The remaining EU-27

Though some EU member states (MS) may be feeling relieved that the UK is finally leaving, after years of political turmoil caused by uncompromising positions of all the parties involved. The Financial Times of 27th of  January reported that Dacian Cioloas, a former Romanian prime minister and leader of Renew Europe, the liberal, centrist political group

Francisco Seco/Associated Press

in the European Parliament, said: “For me, Brexit is a mistake of history and shows why the European project must never be taken for granted”.  Whereas some of the EU’s older members are less regretful about Brexit, for France London stood for excessive economic liberalism and kept blocking initiative that would have improved the EU’s cohesion and efficiency. ‘Bon débarras’ the French authorities may think.

The remaining 27 MSs, however, have more urgent problems to worry about, now that yesterday’s troublemaker is making its way out. The question is not about whether member states want more unity or less cooperation at the EU level. It is more about whether the core values of the EU, outlined in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union, are under threat. What ultimately thought to be threatening the survival of the EU, as we know it.

With the departure of the UK, the EU is beginning to close a chapter on a Eurosceptic member state, but its grip in keeping the remaining Eurosceptic MSs in line with the EU standards is proving difficult and critical. Poland and Hungary, who are the meddlers of the present and perhaps of the future too, are the first member states that come to my mind.

The Rule of Law debate

Yes, it is right that the governing political parties of Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS) and the Hungarian Civic Alliance Party (Fidesz) do not campaign against their country’s membership of the EU. Nevertheless, their policy choices put them at disputes with the EU institutions; let us not forget Poland and Hungary are suspected of having undermined the rule of law, and the Article 7 mechanisms were triggered against them in December 2017 and in September 2018, respectively.

The crisis of Rule of Law is a significant issue for the EU. Currently, there two developments underpinning the debate on the Rule of Law in the EU: (i) approval of a draft bill which allows judges who question the government’s reforms to be disciplined by the PiS controlled lower house (Sejm) of the Polish Parliament and (ii) the European People’s Party’s inaction on the suspension of Fidesz.

However Ian Bond and Agata Gostynska-Jakubowska’s ‘Democracy and the Rule of Law: Failing Partnership’ report, published by the Centre for European Reform (CER), attempts to pull in other EU countries, including France, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, into the debate on the rule of law.

The report also mentioned the UK.  The tension between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and judges -during the prorogation of the Westminster Parliament in 2019- was highlighted as the Brexit-land’s moment of the problem with the rule of law.

What ultimately Bond and Gostynska-Jakubowska claimed is that apart from Poland and Hungary, there is a list of other countries undermining the rule of law in the EU. Thus they suggest that the European Commission should begin to treat member-states equally strictly rather than focussing exclusively on Central Europe, basing their arguments on the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators and The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Indexes.

Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/©Gulf News

I am not sure if I am convinced with Bond and Gostynska-Jakubowska’s reference to the East and West divide in how the European Commission treated the member states differently and not equally. While the core values of the EU are under threat, the European Commission or any other EU institutions’ main priority is, of course, the protection and defence of the rule of law. Suggesting otherwise is undermining the supranational nature of these institutions

However I agree with them on the following recommendation they made in the report, which read as: “that EU institutions should engage more with civil society organisations involved in raising public awareness of EU values and principles, and do more to promote respect for the rule of law throughout the Union”. I am too convinced that if we do take more actions on the ground, where the rule of law is systematically undermined, change is more likely to take deep root. This is something I will keep an eye on…

Last but not least, the UK is departing from the EU on Friday, maybe it will be a sense of relief for some, but what is waiting for the remaining 27 MSs is more complicated than the one awkward partner they had to deal with between 1973 and 2020. I think the increasing number of infringement cases of the rule of law is here to stay, and the tensions will get higher between MSs and the EU institutions. Thus the UK’s occasional arrogance might be missed by the remaining members.

The post Awkward partner is now out, the Rule of Law debate is here to stay appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Romana Oliveira Pinhal |

In the United Kingdom terrorism is presented, by the British government, as one of the most serious and dangerous threats to national security and justified the introduction of legislative, political and operational measures aimed at combating the terrorist threat.

The British securitizing narrative states the country is facing “a serious terrorist threat” and “as the nature of the threat we face becomes more complex, more fragmented, more hidden, especially online, the strategy needs to keep up”. The presentation of the terrorist threat as exceptional and creating a state of emergency that at any moment a terrorist attack could occur, favours the development of a climate of insecurity, instability, fear and suspicion that facilitates the introduction of preventive measures.

One of the most important duties of a State is to protect its citizens from security threats, but its duty to protect, on the other hand, should not compromise the respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms.

While action by States is necessary to prevent and effectively sanction terrorist acts, not all means are justifiable. As surveillance powers increase, giving the British government access to various aspects of the daily lives of its citizens, serious restrictions to the full enjoyment of the right to privacy emerge.

In the context of the fight against terrorism, surveillance is presented as a necessary evil that becomes justifiable in the name of national security. The increasing use of technology demonstrates that societies, fuelled by a “culture of fear“, are progressively evolving into States of overprotection and, as a consequence, we are witnessing the “silent erosion of privacy“.

The growing focus on technology is based on a model that promotes a trade-off between privacy and security, according to which a certain degree of privacy intrusion is necessary and indispensable to achieve higher levels of security. British citizens expect their government to protect them from security threats as well as safeguard their right to privacy.

The dominant political discourse states that citizens should accept and support the introduction of new surveillance measures, even if it results in intrusions to their privacy. What also happens is that, when describing terrorism as a new threat we are led to believe that only new counter-terrorism measures are appropriate and efficient to deal with this “newness“. Consequently, even if there is a lack of certainty and a minimum probability of attack, the potential severity of the attacks is considered enough to trigger preventive action.

The British counter-terrorism policy has changed to favour pre-emptive measures, deployed in accordance with knowledge produced about terrorism ‘risk’. Nowadays new measures are introduced based on risk assessment; they consider the potential of the threat and the possibility of a future terrorist attack. This is enough to justify and legitimize the introduction of new measures. Policy is based on a potential situation that may never happen, on a risk that may never become real.

In the British case, the securitizing narrative and the surveillance practices seem to value prevention and protection at the expense of the respect for the right to privacy. There is a major risk that it can be used for other reasons or purposes than security, giving the State the power to access to several aspects of citizens’ private life.

New counter-terrorism measures are presented as essential tools, as the only way to keep the country and its citizens safe from major security threats. It is said that is very import to give the police and the security forces all the powers they need to counter the terrorist threat in an efficient way.

The former Prime Minister Theresa May stated that “enough is enough” and “things need to change” to justify new online counter-terrorism measures. The effect on the right to privacy was not even taken into consideration. The fight against terrorism was an important challenge during her tenure as a Prime Minister, but in her last speech as the head of the Government the fight against this security threat was not contemplated. The same happened with Boris Johnson’s first speech as Prime Minister where he announced extra police and more powers to stop and search in order to keep the country safe, without having mentioned in detail how he proposes to deal with the terrorist threat. By granting new powers to the police and security forces the State claims to be more efficient in fighting security threats but in the long run this can prove to be a greater threat to our security than the threat posed by terrorism, since the police can exercise these powers based only on suspicion.

Recently, the new Home Secretary, Priti Patel, hosted the Five Eyes security summit where the opportunities and risks that new technologies pose were debated. The meetings were held in private with no agenda being made public but it was said that firms should not develop their systems and services in ways that empower criminals or put vulnerable people at risk. One of the main topics under debate concerned the increasingly effective encryption provided by technology companies who want to make their services more secure after a range of security breaches. This development was not seen as a positive step in the fight against terrorism as a clear intention to change the way data is encrypted (the process of encoding digital information) so governments can have access to data in a readable and usable format was expressed. This move was highly criticized as it could be a serious challenge to the right to privacy of users.

In 2016 the Investigatory Powers Act introduced new surveillance powers that were harshly criticized by the Court of Justice of the European Union that stated it “(…) exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society (…)”. As a consequence amendments were made with the government stating that the restrictions in place, so important to guarantee our right to privacy, were “severely limiting our agencies’ ability to stop terrorist attacks and bring criminals to justice”. When he was Home Secretary, Sajid Javid admitted that MI5 had breached surveillance safeguards in the way it handles information obtained under interception warrants. As a consequence, an independent review was established to consider and report back on what lessons could be learned.

The British securitizing narrative focuses too much on the exceptionality of the threat and on promoting the introduction of new legislative measures as a fundamental tool to deal with the terrorist threat, ignoring the potential effect of the surveillance practices on the disrespect of the right to privacy. It is often overlooked that the antiterrorist measures can have a negative impact on British citizens that accept them because they believe it is the only way to guarantee their safety, not considering its real danger concerning the restriction of their right to privacy. However, the disrespect of this basic freedom by the British government, which claims to be a committed supporter of liberal values, can be more than a necessity and turn out as an attempt to have access to several aspects of the lives of its citizens.

 

 

Romana Oliveira Pinhal

Bio
Romana Pinhal is a PhD researcher in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Minho in Portugal. Her main research interests concern International Security Studies, Surveillance Studies and Human Rights.

Summary
In the UK the presentation of terrorism as one of the biggest threats to security justified the introduction of new antiterrorist measures. The government asserts that keeping the country and its citizens safe is one of its most important duties. While action by states is necessary to prevent further terrorist attacks not all means are justifiable and the state duty to protect should not compromise the respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms.

The post Terrorism in the United Kingdom: Securitizing Narrative, Surveillance Practices and the Right to Privacy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Ending. Starting

Change is coming to Brexit.

At the end of next week, the UK will leave the European Union, having now completed the passage of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill through the Lords: EU ratification is a given.

But there is another, broader change coming too.

The constellation of politicians, commentators and journalists who were brought together by the 2016 vote is starting to break up.

That’s most obvious in the political sphere. The EU has new Presidents aplenty and the Johnson government seeks to present itself as somehow brand-new, despite being a party of power for the past decade.

We can see it elsewhere too: Peter Foster – one of the preeminent media analysts – is on the move to the FT; @BorderIrish is hanging up its boots on Friday (possibly having made a fortune with its excellent tome). And I notice plenty of others online who seem to be winding things down or looking to pastures new.

That’s logical. The act of withdrawing from the EU will be a fundamental change; one that is irreversible. From here on, there can be no pretence (or vain hope) that things can go back to how they were.

And in all this, we have to remember that Brexit is very much not ‘done’.

Brrrrr

Which prompts an odd (for me, at least) thought: maybe we might think of this in an analogous (if very imperfect) way to the Cold War.*

The convention is to bracket the Second World War into the 1939-45 period, already neglecting the conflicts either side that existed outside of Europe, but we can also place it into a much longer era of tensions, both explicit and implicit.

The war obviously connects to the First World War, with the narrative of betrayal being used to frame the changing power balance in the continent, a change that then runs (in a very different way) from the fall of Berlin to the fall of the Berlin Wall, four decades later.

And even then, it’s clear that balance continues to change to this day, with Russia’s (and America’s) uncertainty and the distant haze of a Chinese dawn.

History is a stream, into which we dip from time to time, and our efforts to contain and compartmentalise it are necessarily imperfect. Indeed, it is precisely such efforts that mark our present situation.

And so I come back to a representation of the Cold War that happens to serve a contemporary structure of politics.

In 1945, there were victors and losers. There were celebrations, but ones tempered by the cost of achieving dominance.

And even before that victory came, there were divisions and rivalries, as the victors found that having a common enemy didn’t mean having a common agenda. Indeed, some of the former enemies turned out to be the staunchest supporters of both the new rival camps.

The recontextualisation of politics, in the shadow of the Bomb and of the Holocaust, was profound and irreversible too.

Badoom

And this is the key point. Politics does not stop.

All of the issues and problems that have been raised in and around Brexit these past years are not now suddenly solved and put behind us. Instead, they are still present, still urgent, still (largely) unanswered.

As we move into this new – and much, much longer – phase of Brexit, we might do well to remember this. Practically, we might usefully try to gather the insight of those who have done their Brexit time, so that the numerous wheels do not have to be reinvented once again.

If this sounds downbeat, then it’s because I feel rather downbeat. Not for the decision to leave per se – although it’s not one I voted for – but for the manner of how it proceeds.

At the risk of sounding like a scratched record (kids, ask an old person), the singular failure to build a consensus around any positive national project that is made possible by Brexit ranks at the top of my list of “why this will not end well.”

So as we move towards another day in history when everything changes, and yet nothing changes, we might start to work on how we are going to deal with, and shape, this new world around us.

* – one very obvious way it’s imperfect is that there aren’t necessarily the same number or arrangement of actors; i.e. no one is a Nazi or a Communist (or an American or Brit for that matter) in this, before we all go silly.

The post The Brexit Cold War appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

[This post has been published in https://eulawenforcement.com/, and it is now reproduced here for informative purposes]

With this blog post, Michiel Luchtman & Miroslava Scholten would like to announce the creation of the Jean Monnet Network on EU law Enforcement (EULEN). We would like to sketch briefly the relevance of this topic, thematic scope, structure and plans for activities of the network.

Enforcement of EU law: latest trends and implications

The enforcement of EU law and policies – whether they deal with securing our societies against transnational crime, the stability and competitiveness of our markets or migration and border management – have increasingly become a shared concern and responsibility for the EU and its Member States. Three developments mark the growing influence of the EU on law enforcement, i.e. on the monitoring of compliance of substantive norms of EU law, the investigation of alleged breaches of law and sanctioning for non-compliance (Scholten and Luchtman 2017, Scholten 2017):

1. the increasing emphasis of the EU legislator on enforcement convergence and on how nation states organize their systems of public and/or private enforcement (indirect or decentralized enforcement);

2. the proliferation of new models of transnational enforcement cooperation, i.e. the shift from traditional international cooperation towards new, transnational forms of cooperation under a framework of common goals, rules and institutions (e.g. the European Arrest Warrant, joint investigation teams, operational enforcement networks);

3. the proliferation of EU authorities with direct enforcement powers vis-à-vis private actors, including the sanctioning of infringements of EU law by these actors (direct or centralized enforcement).

These three developments bring along a delicate interplay between the many different actors involved and confront the EU and its Member States with the challenges to:

– align models for effective law enforcement, predominantly still based on the model of the nation-state, with rule of law standards in the shared legal order of the EU,

– obtain a fair balance between the need to integrate the enforcement of EU policies in national systems, customs and practices and the need to accommodate a level playing field at the transnational and supranational levels, and

– address the challenges for law enforcement in the digital era.

EULEN’s thematic scope and structure

EULEN is an initiative of 9 Universities from 8 European countries. This network’s thematic focus is twofold. On the one hand, its activities will focus on a number of selected policy areas where the mentioned trends and implications have had a role to play:

• The University of Warsaw, Poland (dr. M. Bernatt and dr. L. Zoboli), and Bocconi University, Milan, Italy (prof. dr. F. Ghezzi and dr. M. Maggiolino) will coordinate the topic of the enforcement in the area of EU competition law;
• King’s College London, the United Kingdom (prof. dr. A. Turk and dr. O. Stefan) will coordinate the topic of enforcement of EU banking and financial services law;
• The University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg (prof. dr. K. Ligeti and Mr. F. Giuffrida) will coordinate the topic of protection of the EU’s financial interest;
• The University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain (prof. J. Abrisqueta Uriarte, dr. D. Fernández Rojo and dr. J. López Rodríguez) will coordinate the topic of migration, border management and asylum).

At the same time, three ‘horizontal themes’ will be addressed across these and other policy areas. These topics will be coordinated by Utrecht University, the Netherlands (prof. dr. M. Luchtman and dr. M. Scholten, also the main and contact coordinators of the network), in cooperation with the University of Bonn, Germany (prof. dr. M. Böse), and the University of Zurich, Switzerland (prof. dr. F. Meyer) (Ensuring effectiveness and the rule of law in a shared legal order) and the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (prof. dr. L. Arroyo Jiménez), (Technological innovations and EU law enforcement). The topic of finding balance between differentiated enforcement and a European level playing field will be coordinated by dr. S. Princen of Utrecht University.

The network also has an advisory board with internationally recognized experts in the field of enforcement – dr. F. Blanc (World Bank), prof. P. Craig (University of Oxford), prof. W. Kovacic (George Washington University, former US Federal Trade Commission), prof. A. Ottow (Utrecht University, University Board), prof. J. Vervaele (Utrecht University; President of the Association International de Droit Pénal). EULEN will also set up a platform of Young Researchers to promote their research projects and dissemination of findings via blog posts and EULEN’s online collections of papers and other publications.

EULEN’s plans of activities

EULEN comes at a timely moment. It bridges the existing fragmentations along the lines of national jurisdictions, policy areas and scientific disciplines. In order to address the challenges for law enforcement in a world without territorial borders, EULEN will offer an academic network, connecting academic research and teaching to clear societal needs, objectives and stakeholders, open to join for the interested persons all around the globe (please contact the main coordinators about possibilities and benefits of joining as a member).

EULEN aims to:

• promote academic cooperation and identify the common trends and best practices, as well as develop new insights and models to meet the identified challenges,
• commit today’s practitioners to the network’s approach and goals, as well as develop trainings to help them to adjust to the quickly changing enforcement landscape,
• educate tomorrow’s practitioners and academics to take up leading roles in EU law enforcement structures, and to
• inform societies on the tremendous importance of law enforcement in an increasingly borderless world.

Through its large variety of activities – including round tables, conferences, online lectures and papers, a staff mobility program, a summer school and other – EULEN targets students, academics, officials from national and EU institutions, organisations and agencies, practitioners and societies at large. It will offer an annual master thesis award for the best master thesis written on the topic of enforcement of EU law!

The post EULEN: Jean Monnet Network on Enforcement of EU Law appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The foundation, on 13 January 1980 in Karlsruhe, of a nation-wide ecological party in West Germany came as a surprise. Not the idea itself: the time was ripe for creating a strong political movement based on environmental concerns, frustration with representative democracy, and radically pacifist convictions in the middle of the Cold War arms race. The surprise lied in the fact that this utterly heterogeneous smorgasbord of local protest initiatives and splinter groups, represented by approximately 1000 delegates, managed to get their act together in the first place (albeit under “chaotic” circumstances).

Karlsruhe, 13 Jan 1980.

But there it was, and two months later, at the federal congress in Saarbrücken, the party even succeeded in formulating a detailed manifesto of 47 pages proudly called a “Bundesprogramm”. This denomination clearly indicated that the project was to compete in the federal elections, building on the experiences at local and regional polls since 1977.

The German Greens were not the first ecological party to emerge in Europe. In Switzerland, a “popular movement for the environment” had been created as early as 1972, and the UK had seen in 1975 the establishment of the first party bearing the term “ecology” in its very name. Even the hopelessly scattered ecologist groups in France had managed to nominate (rather: persuade) a candidate for the presidential election in 1974, the remarkable René Dumont.

What made “Die Grünen” special right away was their fantastic name. Their founders may have had strong anti-capitalistic convictions, they definitely had an instinct for clever marketing! Turning a colour, which in German culture traditionally stands for the concept of “hope”, into a political brand, was a stroke of genius. So was the unique and unmistakeable “sunflower” emblem. So was dropping any further qualifier, like “party” or “list”. True, foreign media have trouble applying the appropriate declination of this German noun, but the benefits of this spectacular branding success clearly outweigh the grammatical drawbacks.

1980 poster.

As an eighteen-year-old citizen, about to vote for the first time, I was intrigued. While the Greens were quickly labelled, both by traditional politicians and mainstream media, as “dangerous leftists” and “muesli-crunching eco-nerds”, I had serious doubts about this categorisation, despite the look of most of the delegates. I was also unable to see why putting the fight against the ever more visible and smellable pollution of our industrial environment on top of the agenda should be a bad idea. And what on earth was wrong with eating muesli?

Two years earlier, in summer 1978, I had, by pure chance (probably waiting for some football news), bumped into a television programme of which I still remember the clever alliterative title “Gruhls Grüne Gründung”. The Gruhl in question was no Tolkien creature, but Herbert Gruhl, a well-known conservative MP who quit the Christian-Democrats after a quarter century of membership, reading an open letter to their president, a certain Helmut Kohl, in which he accused him, among other mistakes, of stupidly clinging to the growth dogma of the 1960s.

In my readings I had come across Gruhl’s 1975 book entitled “A planet is being looted – the terrifying balance sheet of our politics”, which introduced me to the Meadows report “The Limits to Growth”. Clearly, this guy was the only member of the CDU who had read and understood it rather than repress the uncomfortable truths it spelt out and buy the latest Mercedes or BMW instead. Most of all, he showed that evidence-based environmental concerns and their inevitable ethical consequences were not intrinsically leftist, but perfectly capable of transcending the political spectrum.

The TV programme in 1978 also informed the audience about Gruhl’s new creation, an ecological party named “Grüne Aktion Zukunft” (“Green Action for the Future”), which sounds like a prequel to Greta Thunberg’s movement, but which was much less successful. Two years later, Herbert Gruhl joined the Greens at their founding congress in Karlsruhe (third from the left on the picture above), but he only stayed one year in the new party, in which he never really felt welcome, and created the Ecological-Democratic Party (ÖDP), which never made it beyond 0.2% of the votes in the federal elections (the ÖDP does hold a seat in the European Parliament, though, obtained with 0.99%!).

The 40 years of the Greens may be interpreted as a success story. Favoured by Germany’s proportional voting system, they managed to disrupt a hermetically closed party system. Opting, after long ideological battles, for a pragmatic rather than a radical approach, they managed to take root in the middle-class electorate (at least in the West). And by being faithful to their convictions, they accumulated a tremendous credibility capital, which is likely to bear fruit in the years to come.

Would Herbert Gruhl, who died in 1993, have imagined that forty years after the foundation of the Greens the CDU would be the junior partner in a government run by a green minister-president in Baden-Württemberg, the land of the automobile? Or that there would be serious talk about the possibility of a green chancellor in Berlin? Probably not.

But the glass can also be seen as half empty. The questioning of the growth dogma may have made its way into mainstream political debate, but the time for practising what is starting to be preached is running out. Herbert Gruhl’s 1988 campaign slogan “Less is more” was utterly unsuccessful at the time. The fact that all those decades later it is more pertinent than ever and that the ÖDP did not even need to update it painfully reveals how difficult it is to subvert capitalist doctrines.

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Transition remains the Cinderella of Brexit: unnoticed by the ugly sisters of Withdrawal and the New Relationship, but actually rather important.

This might have been understandable during the chaos of the past year, when most political efforts were being diverted into securing UK ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement, but it seems much less so now, when our progression to this next stage is all but guaranteed.

Debate about transition might now exist, but only with regard to when it might end.

While this is understandable, it is t

o miss much of what transition will be like and how that experience might condition what comes after.

Recall that this time will not only be for negotiating a future relationship, but also for continuing the UK’s participation in every current aspect of EU membership, bar voting.

We covered this ground back in September 2018 with the UK in a Changing Europe, in The Challenges of Transition, where we identified three challenges.

We put legitimacy ahead of negotiation and extension because the lived experience of non-representation is likely to be a powerful tool for various groups.

For those seeking the hardest of Brexits, the notion of BrINO (Brexit in name only) will be ideal for pointing the finger at any future relationship as being even more lopsided than membership was.

For the EU, the opportunity to foist decisions on a UK that cannot block anymore will be one that some might fail to resist,

 

precisely because of that same lopsidedness.

And for a public that still has to get a constructive and informed presentation of what’s happening, this year will be a source of further confusion and disillusionment.

Those tensions will undoubtedly suck up much attention during 2020, leaving less space for the discussion of what comes after, perpetuating the cycle.

All of which is to highlight the irony of taking back control. Control is all well and good, but without an objective for that control to work towards, it counts for very little. And no, ‘getting Brexit done’ isn’t that objective.

So as MEPs return from Brussels and Strasbourg, and improbably amounts of energy are spent on the clapper of Big Ben, perhaps we might all more profitably turn our attention to making the most of the situation that confronts us and laying our plans accordingly.

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A multi-speed or multi-tiered Europe has often been presented as a solution to Europe’s current challenges. But this kind of differentiation can generate democratic problems, argues EU3D Scientific Coordinator John Erik Fossum.

The EU that emerged from the crises has also become more differentiated, explains EU3D Coordinator John Erik Fossum.

In the last decade, the EU has faced a broad range of crises and challenges, such as the financial and Eurozone crises, the refugee crises, the rise of nationalist and Eurosceptic movements, disintegrative pressures associated with the possible fallouts from Brexit, and an increasingly unstable geopolitical scene.

Although the EU has shown quite a bit of resilience and unity when facing these challenges, there is broad recognition that the measures taken have not been adequate. The crises and the EU’s reactions to these have had negative democratic effects. The EU that emerged from the crises has also become more differentiated in that EU member states appear less willing to move in the same integrationist direction than before, and some members seek to down-scale, roll back, or re-negotiate their relations with the EU.

Although the EU has shown quite a bit of resilience and unity when facing these challenges, there is broad recognition that the measures taken have not been adequate.

Post-crises EU appears less capable of directing its energies in a clear and coherent direction. A more differentiated EU is therefore a more open-ended and underdetermined entity. Thus, whereas differentiation in the past has been an important means for managing conflict and containing disagreements, it can also generate problems for democratic governing. When is differentiation part of the problem and when is it a part of the solution to the EU’s current challenges? This is what EU3D seeks to find out. Through developing a sorting mechanism, researchers from 10 universities in 10 European countries seek to distinguish between those forms of differentiation that are democratically problematic and those that are not.

All modern political systems are differentiated

Differentiation is not a problem unto itself. All modern political systems are differentiated in territorial and functional terms. The nation-state was established through a distinct process of differentiation: establishing a system of hierarchically structured government for a given territory. That system of government was at the same time functionally differentiated, in the sense that there were different bodies in charge of executive, legislative and judicial functions. Functional differentiation is important to prevent overly strong concentrations of power, for instance in the executive. In a similar manner, multilevel systems like the EU need territorial differentiation to avoid an overly strong concentration of power at the central level. In other words, multilevel systems need governments at multiple levels with a division of powers and competences.

Multilevel systems like the EU need territorial differentiation to avoid an overly strong concentration of power at the central level.

In this context, differentiation was an intrinsic aspect of national integration, and differentiation is intrinsic to EU integration. In other words, the political system that has been established at the EU-level is functionally differentiated. In contrast to states, which are based on the principle of territorial-functional contiguity – which implies that the state is formally in charge of all functional realms within its territory – the EU’s territorial control is far weaker and there is far less territorial-functional overlap. Non-member states, especially the EEA states, are included in the EU’s internal market and are affiliated with Schengen with responsibility for EU external border controls, whereas some EU member states are not inside the Schengen area. Further, only 19 of the EU’s member states are fully incorporated in the euro area. Opt-outs and opt-ins are common.

Exacerbating divisions in Europe

Meanwhile, some forms of differentiation that have come as a result of the crises have been problematic. European governance now exhibits more arbitrariness than pre-crises, associated with a certain turn towards informality, a greater reliance on intergovernmental bargaining arrangements that are less predictable and less transparent, and arrangements that yield a measure of functionality, albeit are democratically deficient. One example is the European Stability Mechanism, which has its own intergovernmental decision-making body that is not subject to public or parliamentary control. The crises had serious distributive effects as well as adverse effects on some states and citizens’ status, rights and entitlements. Given this, we may need to think of crises not simply as uniform waves with uniform across-the-board effects, but rather as ‘differentiating shocks’ that hit unequally and have differentiating effects; and which may thus exacerbate divisions across Europe.

Further, after the crises, the European Parliament as well as national parliaments have found themselves facing an uphill battle in catching up with executives and experts. Some member states have turned illiberal, notably Hungary and Poland, actively chipping away substantial portions of constitutional democracy.

After the crises, the European Parliament as well as national parliaments have found themselves facing an uphill battle in catching up with executives and experts.

Some of the possible solutions such as a two-tiered Europe have also generated debate. Concerns are raised that second-tier EU member states would be excluded from EU decision-making while nevertheless being subject to EU decisions due to Europe’s states’ and societies’ high degree of interdependence and interweaving.

Differentiation, democracy and dominance

In assessing whether differentiation is part of the problem or part of the solution, EU3D will develop a ‘sorting mechanism’. The sorting mechanism will help distinguish which forms of differentiation could lead to dominance, and which forms could be conductive to democracy. Dominance is understood as arbitrary forms of rule and arrangements that are exclusive, in-transparent and/or have very negative distributive effects. Dominance may ensue from crises and shocks; it may therefor be an unintended by-product of processes of problem-solving and conflict resolution under conditions of contestation.

We need to look at EU reform proposals and consider to what extent these are tailored to grapple with the problematic forms of differentiation and/or to the promotion of democratizing processes.

In more concrete terms, we need to start by establishing the nature and scope of the forms of differentiation that are clearly problematic. We need to clarify how well-entrenched these are in the EU’s overall structure and makeup, and in addition look for countervailing democratizing processes and reforms, especially in parliaments and civil society and at the level of citizens. Finally, we need to look at EU reform proposals and consider to what extent these are tailored to grapple with the problematic forms of differentiation and/or to the promotion of democratizing processes.

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The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights recently delivered a judgment on a case concerning the murder of a Turkish Cypriot family. Nasia Hadjigeorgiou examines how this has broken new legal ground, while raising questions about the Court’s ability to address legal challenges in contexts of frozen conflict.

© Corgarashu / Adobe Stock

In January 2019, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in Güzelyurtlu and others v. Cyprus and Turkey (Güzelyurtlu). This case breaks new legal ground, while questioning the Court’s ability to address legal challenges in contexts of frozen conflict.

In order to understand the complexities of Güzelyurtlu, a brief explanation of the political situation on the island of Cyprus is necessary. The island is inhabited by Greek Cypriots, making up about 80%, and Turkish Cypriots, consisting of 18%, of the overall population. Since Turkey’s 1974 military invasion of Cyprus, it has been de facto divided in two: while the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) technically retains sovereignty over the whole of the island, it only exercises effective control over the south, which is inhabited mostly by Greek Cypriots. Turkish Cypriots primarily reside in the north of the island that remains under the military, economic and political control of Turkey, despite having declared itself as the independent ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (‘TRNC’). In compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 541 (1983) the ‘TRNC’ has not been recognised by any state, except Turkey.

Güzelyurtlu arose from the murder of a Turkish Cypriot family, which was (rather exceptionally) residing in the south of Cyprus. Following police investigations by the RoC, 6 Turkish Cypriots and 2 Turkish nationals were identified as being allegedly involved in the murder. However, by the time these investigations were completed, the suspects had returned to the north of the island and out of the RoC’s effective control.

At the same time, the ‘TRNC’ police started their own murder investigations and identified the same suspects. Problematically, Cyprus’s de facto division and the lack of recognition and cooperation between the RoC and the ‘TRNC’ meant that the suspects were in the north of the island, while the physical evidence linking them to the murder was in the south. There was no way of bringing the two together and beginning the prosecution process.

Consequently, the deceased persons’ relatives brought a case both against the RoC and Turkey (as the state that exercises effective control in the north of Cyprus). The accusation was of failure to carry out an effective investigation into their family members’ deaths, in violation of the right to life under Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

In an interesting development of the law, the Chamber held, and the Grand Chamber ultimately confirmed, that the two respondent states had an obligation to cooperate with each other in order to carry out an effective investigation into the victims’ deaths. The Court had already held that such an obligation to cooperate existed (notably, in another case against Cyprus). But, surprisingly, considering the longevity of the frozen conflict on the island, this was the first case in which it was held that cooperation between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot authorities was necessary.

Moreover, although this was a rather straightforward case legally speaking, it was politically very controversial, because cooperation between police forces of different states is inextricably connected with international recognition of these states. As expected, while the ‘TRNC’ tried to capitalise on the case and force the RoC to directly engage with it, the RoC was justifiably hesitant to act in any way that lent support to an illegal regime operating within its territory.

Although the Chamber and Grand Chamber agreed that there was an obligation to cooperate for the effective investigation of the death, there was disagreement as to what this obligation entailed. Initially, the Chamber found that the unwillingness of the RoC and the ‘TRNC’ to cooperate (the former by refusing to grant over evidence and the latter for not extraditing the suspects) resulted in a violation of Article 2 by both respondent states.

Arguably, this ruling asked too much from the RoC. Sharing evidence with the ‘TRNC’ so that the suspects could be tried in ‘TRNC’ courts would undermine its position – a position confirmed in numerous UN resolutions – that it is the only legitimate government on the island. This argument was taken more seriously by the Grand Chamber, which held that the RoC did not violate the procedural right to life, as it had done everything that was reasonably expected of it.

Conversely, Turkey was found to be in violation of Article 2. It had blatantly ignored all attempts at communication, and requests for the extradition of the suspects to the areas under the RoC’s control.

This outcome is undoubtedly more satisfying to the RoC. Yet, it potentially unduly lowers the bar of human rights protection, because all Turkey had to do to comply with its obligations was to respond to the extradition request. Even a negative response would have been sufficient for the Court, although it would not have actually resulted in a more effective investigation of the deaths.

Güzelyurtlu breaks new legal ground by expanding the obligation to cooperate in contexts of frozen conflicts. In light of the ECtHR’s tendency to transplant case law from Cyprus to other frozen conflict contexts, such as Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria, it is likely that we will see more such cases being adjudicated in the future.

Yet, if the Chamber judgment is criticised for being too interventionist, while the Grand Chamber judgment is criticised for not being interventionist enough, could any approach by the Court ever be truly satisfactory? And if not, perhaps it is worth considering whether the Court was right to intervene in the first place. Is it the judiciary’s place to adjudicate what are essentially political disagreements, especially in societies divided by frozen conflict?

A greater analysis of these questions, focusing on Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland and South Africa can be found in Nasia Hadjigeorgiou, Protecting Human Rights and Building Peace in Post-violence Societies: An Underexplored Relationship, to be published by Hart Publishing in January 2020. This monograph is part of the Human Rights Law in Perspective Series.

Nasia Hadjigeorgiou | @NHadjigeorgiou

Nasia Hadjigeorgiou is an Assistant Professor of Transitional Justice and Human Rights at the University of Central Lancashire Cyprus. She does research on the protection of human rights and the building of peace in post-violence societies.

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Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of the UACES Graduate Forum, UACES or JCER.

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Being a member of the EU costs on average only around 34p a day each. That’s a bargain, especially as the value of EU benefits far outweigh the cost.

The Confederation of British Industry has calculated that EU membership is worth around £3,000 a year to every British family — a return of nearly £10 for each £1 we pay in.

 So, in reality, EU membership costs NOTHING – it makes Britain, and Britons, BETTER OFF. EU membership is PROFITABLE.

(Source: CBI Report: Our Global Future, page 11)

The calculations for our annual EU membership fee have been published by the UK’s Office of National Statistics. (Source: The UK Contribution to the EU budget – Office for National Statistics)

When deducting from the EU membership fee all the money we get back from the EU, including our £5 billion rebate, the net cost of EU membership in 2016 was only £8.1 billion – or £156 million a week, or just 34p per person per day.

That’s far short of the claim made on Boris Johnson’s campaign bus that we send £350m a week to the EU. That was entirely incorrect.

But after the referendum, the Vote Leave campaign director, Dominic Cummings wrote:

“Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no.”

(Source: The Spectator ‘Dominic Cummings: How the Brexit referendum was won)

So, we are leaving the EU based on a whopper of a lie (actually, lots of whopping lies).

Ok, if Mr Johnson had instead put the accurate figure of ‘£156m a week’ on his bus, it would still have seemed a lot of money. But something Brexiters never like to do is reveal how much we get back in return for the membership fee.

Back in 2011, this was estimated by the government to be between £30 billion and £90 billion a year – a return of between 800% and 2370%.

(Source: UK government ‘The UK and the Single Market’ – Department for Business, Innovation and Business Skills)

Can anyone name any other government expenditure that gives a return of over 800%?

 Let’s put this in another context.

In 2016, the government spent £814.6 billion on all aspects of public spending. This means that the net annual EU membership fee represented only 1% of all UK government expenditure. (A minuscule amount.)

Furthermore, the EU funds many thousands of projects in the UK every year, that our national government would be unlikely to finance. Such as Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport, or superfast broadband in Cornwall.

(Source: EU Commission – Financial Transparency System)

In addition, across Europe, our annual membership fee helps to fund projects that benefit our continent and its people as a whole – such as Galileo, to give Europe its own satellite navigation system. (That Britain will miss out on if we leave).

And the Horizon 2020 project – the world’s biggest multinational research programme, funding leading-edge research in all aspects of science and innovation that will directly benefit all EU citizens. (That Britain will miss out on if we leave).

Individual European countries could not afford to take on the projects that the EU helps to fund for the welfare and prosperity of its half-a-billion citizens.

 The advantages of EU membership considerably outweigh the cost of membership. So, why leave?

There is not even one valid or validated benefit for Brexit. Not even one.

Indeed, by NOT paying the annual EU membership fee, we will all be POORER, according to the UK government’s own impact assessment reports.

(Source: The Guardian ‘UK significantly worse off under all Brexit scenarios’ – official forecast)

In the General Election on 12 December, vote for a democratic reversal of Brexit. We’ll all be better off by remaining in the EU.

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Brexit takes a low priority in Labour’s general election manifesto, as does Remain. That will be a disappointment to Labour Remainers, who represent a significant majority of the party’s members and voters.

Labour’s policy on Brexit is just three pages long and nestled deep in their manifesto on page 88.

That probably tells us as much as we need to know about how important Brexit is to Labour’s leaders – despite the fact that this snap general election was only called because of Parliament’s stalemate on Brexit.

But there is worse.

Labour’s manifesto panders to Labour Leavers – a minority – and has nothing good to say about Remaining in the EU.

Labour promises to “secure a new Brexit deal” with the EU.

“One that protects jobs, rights and the environment, avoids a hard border in Northern Ireland and protects the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process.”

This wonderful, sensible, credible version of Brexit will provide:

“..legal protection for citizens’ rights, meets our international obligations – particularly with regard to the Good Friday Agreement – and ensures an appropriate transition period to allow businesses and citizens to adapt to any new arrangements.”

And what’s more, Labour’s version of Leave will also:

“..secure robust and legally binding protections for workers’ rights, consumer standards and environmental protections, and ensure level-playingfield protections are maintained. Labour will never accept an outcome that puts rights and standards at risk.”

And then?

“Once we have secured this new deal we will put it to a legally binding referendum alongside the option of remaining in the EU.”

And the bottom line?

“Only Labour will offer the choice of remaining in the EU, or leaving with a sensible deal.”

So, it’s a choice between “remaining” or having a “sensible deal”.

Surely, there must be something good said in the Labour manifesto about the British people choosing to reject their “sensible” Brexit and opting instead to Remain in the EU?

Nope. I cannot find it anywhere. Quite the opposite.

The Labour manifesto almost dares people not to vote for Remain in their “legally binding” referendum, held sometime next summer (at the earliest).

The manifesto states:

“If in a referendum the British people decide to remain in the EU, this must not mean accepting the status quo.”

No, of course not. The authors of this Labour manifesto clearly don’t think much of the idea of the UK remaining in the EU, compared to the wonderful, beautiful, sensible, Brexit that Labour will offer instead.

If, heaven forbid, Britain does vote to Remain, then please be warned:

“The EU needs a new political direction and, if the people decide the UK should remain in the EU, Labour will lead the way to ensure that change.”

The manifesto continues with what’s wrong with the Remain option:

“For too long a politically inflicted wave of austerity has damaged communities across Britain and across Europe.

“The most vulnerable members in our society have suffered, while the super-rich continue to be rewarded by a system that allows them to thrive at the expense of the many.

“This must change. If the country decides to remain, a Labour government will take a different approach and strive to ensure that the EU works for people across our communities.”

Anyone reading this section of the manifesto cannot be in any doubt that Labour’s leadership thinks that Remain is not the way forward for Britain, and it’s the fault of the EU that we have austerity. (An entirely wrong analysis in my view).

A Labour government, clearly in my view, would urge the country instead to vote for their ‘sensible, credible Brexit.’

Yes, yes. Compared to the Tories, Labour offers the only way out of the Brexit mess. But any Remainer like me is going to feel deep disappointment and resentment by Labour’s policy on Brexit.

The party’s policy is aimed to appeal to Leavers, not Remainers, even though Labour is naturally made up of Remain supporters.

So, to me, none of this makes any sense.

But that has to be combined with the rest of Labour’s manifesto – the most radical we’ve known.

Of course, Britain needs radical change, but the plans Labour is now putting forward – many of them announced at the last minute without any pre-warning – are not going to win an election.

The proposals Labour is now proposing should have taken years in the planning, and years in the explaining and selling to the nation. Not three weeks before a vote.

The country at large would need to have such big plans sold to them carefully and convincingly over a long period of time, not over 21 days.

Labour’s hugely ambitious plans – probably too ambitious – would take at least three to four terms to achieve, even if they are achievable at all (and the costs involved are eye watering, with many respectable economists saying they are just not credible).

Yet by cramming everything into one manifesto, Labour will scare aware millions of moderate voters who are needed if Labour is to have any chance of winning.

In my view, far better for Labour to offer the nation a softer approach to change, with a better chance of winning power, than to present a manifesto so shockingly extreme that Labour is now likely to spend many more years in opposition.

Me writing this doesn’t make it true. I can’t affect the outcome. I am just expressing my view. So, if I am wrong when the results are announced on 13 December, I will eat my words, apologise, and admit I misjudged.

Come back after the general election and we will discuss it more then.

But I can tell you now: Labour’s ‘credible Brexit’ is not credible at all, and if they go ahead and implement any version of Brexit, Britain will be poorer, and there is no way that Labour would be able to fulfil even a small fraction of their remarkably radical plans.

 

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