Ideas on Europe Blog

Britain’s been negotiating to leave the EU, just so we can negotiate another arrangement to get back as much as possible of what we’ve already got as an EU member, but on considerably inferior terms.

If we don’t get what we want (i.e. the EU benefits we desperately want back after we’ve left), the government will crash Britain out of the EU in a year’s time, without any agreement, plunging the country into deep economic crisis.

Does it make any sense? No, it doesn’t.

The EU is the world’s largest free trade area. As a member, we receive huge benefits worth enormously more than the small net annual membership fee of just £7.1 billion a year.

As a member, we enjoy free, frictionless trade with our biggest trading partner by far, right on our doorstep, where almost half of our exports go to and over half of our imports come from.

Nowhere else in the world comes close to that.

Both the Tories and Labour are pretending to the electorate that it’s possible to negotiate a Brexit deal after we’ve left that will give us key benefits of EU membership, but:

 WITHOUT being part of the EU Single Market.  WITHOUT agreeing to the rules of the EU and its market.  WITHOUT being subject to the European Court of Justice to oversee those rules.  WITHOUT paying anything to the EU for access.

It’s not going to happen.

What’s the point of a club if you’re going to allow non-members to enjoy the same or better benefits as members? What club allows that?

So, here’s the bottom line:

 We need free AND frictionless trade with the EU.  We need free movement of goods, services, capital AND PEOPLE for our country not just to survive, but to thrive.  We need to continue with the status quo: the arrangement we have now, as a FULL MEMBER of the EU.

Has this sunk in yet?

We’re leaving all the benefits of the EU, only to desperately try and get back as many of those benefits as we can after we’ve left.

This is complete and utter madness. It will be much better just to keep the current arrangement we’ve enjoyed for over four decades as an EU member.

As an EU member:

① We have a say and votes in the running, rules and future direction of our continent.

② We have full and free access to the world’s largest free marketplace.

③ We enjoy the right to live, work, study or retire across a huge expanse of our continent.

④ We enjoy state healthcare and education when living and working in any other EU country.

⑤ We enjoy free or low-cost health care when visiting any EU nation.

⑥ We are protected by continent-wide rights that protect us at work, when shopping and travelling.

⑦ We benefit from laws that protect our environment (and have, for example, directly resulted in Britain’s beaches being cleaned up).

⑧ We enjoy excellent EU free trade agreements covering over 70 countries, with more on the way, on advantageous terms that Britain is unlikely ever to replicate.

So, we’re going to throw that all away, just so we can get an inferior arrangement with the EU, in which we’d still have to agree to the rules of EU trade (over which we’d have no say) and we’d have less access to our most vital customers and suppliers outside of our home market.

And what are we gaining? Surely something?

NO.

ALL the reasons given to leave the EU are based on lies and false promises. Yes, ALL OF THEM.

There are no good reasons to leave.

 MORE SOVEREIGNTY? Nonsense. We’ll get less. In the EU, we gain a share of sovereignty of our continent. Outside the EU, we’ll still live on a planet and have to obey thousands of international laws and treaties. We share sovereignty with NATO, for example. Is that a reason to leave it?

 FEWER MIGRANTS? Really? Just think about it. Most EU migrants in Britain are in gainful employment, doing jobs that we simply don’t have enough Britons to do. So if they all left, we’d have to replace them with about the same numbers of migrants as we have now to get all those jobs done. What’s the bloody point of that?

 MORE HOUSES, SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS? Think again. Without EU migrants, we’ll have fewer builders, teachers, doctors and nurses. Migrants are not the cause of our problems. Blaming them just excuses successive UK governments from investing sufficiently in our country.

 GET OUR COUNTRY BACK? We never lost it. If being in the EU means losing your country, why aren’t the 27 other EU member states planning to leave? (Really, none of them are: support for the EU is the highest it’s been in 35 years).

 OUR OWN LAWS? The vast majority of laws in the UK are our laws and passed by our Parliament in Westminster. But in the EU, we benefit from laws for our continent that no single country alone could ever achieve. Could our UK government have got mobile phone companies to scrap mobile roaming charges across the entire EU? Of course not. It took the might of 28 EU countries working together to achieve that, and so much more.

 THE EU IS RUN BY FACELESS BUREAUCRATS? Another lie. The EU is run and ruled by its members, the 28 countries of the EU, along with its democratically elected European Parliament. The European Commission is the servant of the EU, not its master, and the European Parliament has the power to choose, and dismiss, the entire Commission.

We are leaving for no good reason, not one. We will pay up to £40 billion (money the UK has agreed we owe) to settle our debts with the EU, to enable us to have an inferior deal.

We will be poorer, and with less sovereignty, fewer rights and protections, restricted trade, and diminished power after we’ve left.

What’s the point? There’s no point. The country really has lost its bottle.

We should have the courage to admit that Brexit is nuts and toss it away.

The general election on 12 December gives the electorate a key opportunity – maybe the ONLY opportunity – to bring an end to Brexit and Remain in the EU.

Please, vote wisely. Don’t bottle out.

 

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The post We should have the courage to admit that Brexit is nuts appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The Atomium, one of the symbols of Brussels. View from the Mini-Europe, a miniature park, showing famous European monuments on a scale 1 to 25. Photo by Tatyana Bajenova

Tatyana Bajenova

In the recent article Rescaling expertise in EU policy-making: European think tanks and their reliance on symbolic, political and network capital (Bajenova 2019) that appeared in the Globalisation, Societies and Education Journal, Tatyana Bajenova has examined the strategies which think tanks (TTs) employ to influence EU decision-making. Unlike some recent studies of European TTs, this paper analyses both Brussels-based and member-state TTs through the examples of the symbolic value of the ‘TT’ label, their ‘expert’ role, as well as their locational and networking strategies.

 

The Label Which Speaks for Itself

The ‘TT’ label itself possesses symbolic capital which is related to three dimensions of their public image. The first is the ‘TT’ generic name, which attaches to the organisations, using it in their self-description or associated with it in the public discourse. It helps to explain their mission abroad: in positioning themselves in transnational TT networks or international TT rankings. The second dimension is the function of research, which is one of the elements of their academic capital. TTs regardless their particular organisational structure or legal form are seen as groups of experts that produce ideas and recommendations for policy-makers. This ‘scientific’ approach differentiates them from lobby groups or NGOs aiming to influence policy decisions which promote values or special interests.

 

The third dimension consists in their simultaneous location in different social fields involving use of academic, publicity and political forms of capital, which distinguishes them from other types of knowledge providers. As distinct from universities, TT is perceived as a research group, engaged in networking with policy-makers and popularising their research among general public and the media. Although this activity is quite similar to advocacy, TTs successfully elude to be seen as ‘lobbyists’.

              

The Expertise which Meets the Selection Criteria

TTs provide expertise to the EU institutions on both ad hoc and contractual basis. Regardless the character of cooperation providers of expertise should meet certain criteria of credibility. Although TT credibility can be strengthened thanks to the quality of their research products, the academic background of their researchers, the soundness of their research methodology, and reputation in the academic realm, many TTs claim a higher level of policy-relevance of their research products in comparison to those produced in universities. However, the representatives of the EU institutions consider that universities can also produce policy relevant research without pursuing a particular policy agenda, while underscoring well-timeliness and practicality of TT reports and frequent exchange of research staff between TTs and universities.

 

Nevertheless, the quality of expertise for EU institutions assumes not only the quality of research team and research capabilities of its providers, but also their understanding of the EU policy-making process. This leads to increasing collaboration between the two types of organisation which aim to make use of their complementary skills, often encouraged by EU evaluation criteria that require academic excellence, policy impact and public outreach. At the same time, independence valued by TTs as guarantee of their credibility and public legitimacy is often sceptically perceived by EU officials, who consider transparency of TTs, which obviously have some kind of affiliation and certain sources of funding, a more important credibility factor in the selection of expertise providers.

 

Location in Brussels: to be, or not to be?

A physical presence in Brussels increases the visibility of Euro-oriented TTs and their access to EU policy-making. A Brussels location allows TTs to facilitate their collaboration with both EU and national officials through effective networking at various events. The leading positions of Brussels-based TTs in different lobbying channels prove successfulness of this strategy in approaching EU institutions.

 

However, the EU decision-making system offers national TTs opportunities for different locational strategies. TTs which are located outside Brussels try to achieve influence at a distance through occasional visits and e-mail contacts. In certain policy areas European policy can be shaped through influencing member-states rather than EU institutions. With increasing movement of the EU policy space online a strong social media presence can be also seen as an alternative strategy for those located in national capitals. Although high social media visibility gives more access to decision-makers, maintaining personal contacts with current or former EU officials is regarded as the most important element of political capital by European TTs regardless of their ‘presence’ strategies. A location in Brussels and European policy experience of their partners provide TTs with ‘insider’ status in the EU policy space.

 

The Multiplier Effect of Networks

The strategy of joining TT networks is widely employed by European TTs and is encouraged by the EU institutions. These networks involving both Brussels-based and national TTs can raise the research ‘quality’ in large comparative studies at EU level, adding both European and national perspectives in the policy recommendations for EU policy-makers. TT networks with their numerous members, including from new member states, can potentially deal with the exclusivity of the EU consultation process. Network coordinators frequently established in Brussels can facilitate dialogue between network members and EU institutions, undertaking for the administrative component of this cooperation. Networks also help to disseminate widely research through joint publications and events, using communication channels of both networks and their members.

 

The official EU documents regard the European NGO networks as furthering European integration and global integration of the EU. Considering these perceived benefits of European networks, the EU fund many of them through competition-based projects and institutional grants. This seeming mutually beneficial cooperation is however subject to the challenges of internal and external exclusivity where ‘weaker’ network members, seen as “amateurs’ in the EU policy space can be content with their ‘dormant’ role, while the most visible ‘insider’ Brussels-based network coordinators and the EU institutions seeking to reinforce their political legitimacy profit by the social capital accumulated due to the formal network representativeness.

 

Overall, this paper determines the EU-specific features of TTs as boundary organisations showing how they strategically use different forms of capital accumulated at European level to increase their legitimacy, credibility, visibility and influence in the Brussels policy-making scene.

 

This study was funded by the European Commission FP7 People programme: Marie Curie Initial Training Network UNIKE (Universities in Knowledge Economies) under the Grant Agreement number 317452.

 

Dr. Tatyana Bajenova (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tatyana_Bajenova) is Lecturer at the Westminster International University in Tashkent. She was previously Marie Curie Fellow in the EU-funded project Universities in the Knowledge Economy (UNIKE). She holds a Doctoral Degree in Political Sciences from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), a Master’s Degree in Law and Management from the Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University (France) and a Master’s Degree “The EU and Central Asia in the International System” from the Institut für Europäische Politik and the Centre international de formation européenne, Berlin (Germany).

 

Reference:

Tatyana Bajenova (2019) Rescaling expertise in EU policy-making: European think tanks and their reliance on symbolic, political and network capital, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17:1, 61-77, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2018.1540926

The post Rescaling a Think Tank Model at European Level appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Regulation (EU) No. 2016/1624 and the recently adopted Regulation (EU) No. 2019/1896 represent the third and fourthlegislative revision of FRONTEX’ mandate and functions since the Agency was established. The adoption of Regulation (EU) No. 2016/1624 was extraordinarily fast since it did not take a year between its proposal by the Commission on 15 December 2015 and its publication in the Official Journal on 16 September 2016. Less than two years after the adoption of Regulation 2016/1624, the president of the European Commission announced in his speech on the 2018 State of the Union made on 12 September, the Commission’s intention to “to further strengthen the European Border and Coast Guard to better protect our external borders with an additional 10,000 European border guards by 2020”. On the same day, the Commission put forward an updated version of the recently adopted EBCG. Again, in record-time, Regulation 2019/1896 was published in the Official Journal of the EU on 14 November 2019.

Regulations 2016/1624 and 2019/1896 aim to develop a EU integrated management of the external borders by addressing both the existing deficiencies at the national level and responding effectively to exceptional and sudden migratory flows. This blog post centres on comparatively analysing the new operational powers conferred by Regulations 2016/1624 and 2019/1896 to the new EBCG when supporting the Members States.

 

1.     The EBCG’s Supervisory Role

Art. 3 para. 2 Regulation 2016/1624 conferred a monitoring role to the EBCG in order to guarantee a common strategy for the management of the European external borders. While FRONTEX also conducted supervisory activities to a certain extent, the EBCG may now deploy its own liaison officers in the Member States with the aim of fostering cooperation and dialogue between the Agency and the competent national authorities (art. 12 para. 3 Regulation 2016/1624). These responsibilities have been further detailed in art. 31 para 3 Regulation 2019/1896.

The information that the liaison officers gather contributes and facilitates the preparation of the EBCG’s vulnerability assessments. At least once every three years, the Agency shall monitor and assess the availability of the technical equipment, systems, capabilities, resources, infrastructure, and adequately skilled and trained staff of Member States for border control (art. 32 para. 2 Regulation 2019/1896). In turn, Member States are required to collaborate with the EBCG in elaborating the vulnerability assessment.

Source: Frontex

The recommendatory powers conferred to the EBCG are reflected in art. 32 para. 10 Regulation 2019/1896, which signals that if the recommended measures are not implemented in a timely fashion and in an appropriate manner by the concerned Member State, the EBCG’s Executive Director shall refer the matter to the Management Board and inform the European Commission. The Management Board shall then make a decision, based on the original proposal of the Executive Director, describing the necessary measures to be taken by the Member State and the time limit within which such measures shall be implemented. Importantly, art. 32 para. 10 Regulation 2019/1896 explicitly declares that the decision of the Management Board is binding on the Member State.

While it is still early to assess to what extent Regulation 2019/1896 improves the functioning of the vulnerability assessment and the swift deployment of liaison officers, a novel mechanism of impact levels to external border sections has been designed. Arts. 34 and 35 Regulation 2019/1896 state that the EBCG, in agreement with the Member State concerned, may declare three different impact levels and reactions with the aim of swiftly addressing at a given border section a crisis situation.

• Firstly, when the EBCG declares a low impact level, the competent national authorities shall “organise regular control (…) and ensure that sufficient personnel and resources are being kept available for that border section” (art. 35 para. 1 cl. a).
• Secondly, if a medium impact level is established, the concerned Member State shall “ensure that appropriate control measures are being taken at that border section” (art. 35 para. 1 cl. b).
• Thirdly, where a high impact level is declared the national authorities are encouraged to request operational assistance from the EBCG (art. 35 para. 1 cl. c).
• The EBCG may temporarily determine at a given border section a critical impact level, which shall be communicated to the European Commission. Under this scenario, the EBCG’s Executive Director will recommend the Member State concerned to request the EBCG’s operational assistance through the initiation of a joint operation or a rapid border intervention (art. 41 para. 1 Regulation 2019/1896).

While the obligations for the national border authorities under the low, medium and high impact levels are quite vague, under the critical scenario the Member State concerned shall respond, providing justifications for its decision, to the recommendation of the Executive Director within six working days (art. 41 para. 2). According to art. 42 Regulation 2019/1896, should the Member State ignore the EBCG Executive Director’s recommendation, the Council, on the basis of a proposal from the European Commission, may adopt a decision by means of an implementing act, identifying measures to mitigate those risks and requiring the Member State concerned to cooperate with the Agency in the implementation of those measures.

 

2.     The EBCG’s Expanded Operational Tasks

The EBCG continues to provide operational assistance to the Member States, as did FRONTEX, through the coordination of joint operations and rapid border interventions and through the deployment of teams on the ground (art. 37 Regulation 2019/1896). For the first time, Regulation 2016/1624 regulated the technical and operational capacity of the EBCG in the hotspots, where the national authorities face a sudden and disproportionate migratory pressure according to the 2015 Migration Agenda. In particular, pursuant art. 18 para. 2 Regulation 2016/1624, “the executive director, in coordination with other relevant Union agencies, shall assess a Member State’s request for reinforcement and the assessment of its needs for the purpose of defining a comprehensive reinforcement package consisting of various activities coordinated by the relevant Union agencies to be agreed upon by the Member State concerned”.

In this regard, art. 40 para. 1 Regulation 2019/1896 now details that in the hotspot areas migration management support teams, composed of experts from the relevant Union Agencies, will be deployed upon request of a Member State subject to large inward mixed migratory flows. The EBCG’s teams deployed in the hotspots are in charge of reinforcing the technical and operational assistance by “screening of third-country nationals arriving at the external borders, including the identification, registration, and debriefing (…) and, where requested by the Member State, the fingerprinting (…)” (art. 40 para. 4 Regulation 2019/1896). Notwithstanding that the hotspot approach has been incorporated in Regulation 2016/1624 and 2019/1896, which in turn reveals that the approach constitutes a EU long term measure to tackle extraordinary migratory pressures, there is to date no specific legal framework clarifying the functioning, powers and responsibility of the EBCG in the hotspots.

Furthermore, with the objective of reducing the dependence of the EBCG on the Member States’ technical equipment, art. 38 Regulation 2016/1624 stipulated that the Agency may acquire its own technical equipment to be deployed during joint operations, pilot projects, rapid border interventions and return operations. In this regard, art. 63 para. 4 Regulation 2019/1896 points out that where the EBCG acquires or co-owns equipment such as aircrafts, helicopters, service vehicles or vessels, the Agency shall agree with a Member State the registration of the equipment as being on government service. Regulation 2019/1896 aims to provide the EBCG with technical and human resources that are immediately and flexibly available to be deployed, with the goal of filling in the operational gaps that continuously afflicted FRONTEX. However, Regulation 2019/1896 does not design a clear framework of the EBCG’s responsibility, and continues to be highly questionable whether the Member States will authorise the registration of equipment that is beyond their control.

Lastly, a key operational power introduced by Regulation 2016/1624 was the establishment of a Rapid Reaction Equipment Pool, consisting of technical equipment to be deployed in rapid border interventions within 10 working days from the date that the Operational Plan is agreed upon by the Executive Director and the host Member State. In accordance with art. 20 para. 5 Regulation 2016/1624, the competent national authorities shall make available a minimum of 1,500 border guards to the EBCG for their immediate deployment in joint operations and/or rapid border interventions.

While the establishment of a Rapid Reaction Pool of 1,500 was a positive measure for emergency situations at the external borders, Regulation 2016/1624 did not manage to overcome the insufficient pooling of Member States’ border guards for concrete locations and concrete periods in regular joint operations. For this reason, Regulation 2019/1896 centres on designing a permanent, fully trained and operational Standing Corps of 5,000 Border Guards by 2021 and 10,000 by 2027 based on the distribution key set out in Annex I to Regulation 2019/1896.

Pursuant art. 54 para. 1 Regulation 2019/1896, the Standing Corps is composed of four categories of border guards:

• 1) operational staff members of the Agency (art. 55)
• 2) operational staff seconded from Member States to the Agency for a long-term deployment (art. 56)
• 3) operational staff from Member States ready to be provided to the Agency for a short term deployment (art. 57)
• 4) operational staff from the Member States ready to be deployed for the purpose of rapid border interventions (art. 58).

The main novelty is not so much the establishment of the Standing Corps, but rather the fact that the Standing Corps deployed as team members (category 1) are conferred executive powers (art. 54 para. 3 Regulation 2019/1896) such as verifying the identity and nationality of persons, authorising or refusing of entry upon border check, stamping of travel documents, issuing or refusing of visas, patrolling or, registering fingerprints (art. 55 para. 5 Regulation 2019/1896). Importantly, art. 82 para. 2 Regulation 2019/1896 states that the performance of executive powers by the EBCG’s operational staff members shall be subject to the authorisation of the Member State that is hosting the operation.

As the Meijers Committee and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles rightly noted, conferring executive powers to the EBCG’s operational staff members may breach the primary law provisions that regard the Member States as ultimately responsible for their own internal security and external border management. While the European Commission considers that art. 77 para. 2 cl. d TFEU provides the legal basis to bestow upon the EBCG’s staff members executive tasks if they are clearly defined to match the objective of the establishment of an integrated management system for external borders, art. 77 para. 2 cl. d TFEU shall also be read in light of arts. 72 and 73 TFEU.

 

3.     The EBCG’s Operational Power to “Intervene”

The new EBCG’s capacity to intervene led to considerable rejection by the Member States during the negotiations of Regulation 2016/1624. Currently, art. 8 para. 2 Regulation 2019/1896 specifies that “the multiannual strategic policy for the European integrated border management shall set out how the challenges in the area of border management and returns are to be addressed in a coherent, integrated and systematic manner (…)”. That is, the national authorities in charge of border management shall conform to the strategy adopted by the EBCG (art. 3 para. 3 Regulation 2016/1624 and 8 para. 6 Regulation 2019/1896).

The EBCG is thus conferred a supervisory and intervention role, which allows the Agency to adopt quasi-binding measures for the Member States and to directly intervene in the territory of the Member State if such measures are not effectively implemented (art. 18 Regulation 2016/1624 and 42 Regulation 2019/1896). In the event that a Member State neither adopts the measures recommended in its vulnerability assessment, nor requests/takes necessary actions in the face of disproportionate and sudden migratory pressure, the EBCG shall ensure a unified, rapid, and effective EU response so as not to jeopardise the functioning of the Schengen area. In this situation and according to art. 42 para. 1 Regulation 2019/1896, “the Council, on the basis of a proposal from the Commission, may adopt without delay a decision by means of an implementing act to identify measures to mitigate those risks to be implemented by the Agency and requiring the Member State concerned to cooperate with the Agency in the implementation of those measures”.

Since the Council decision is adopted, the EBCG’s Executive Director shall, within two working days, draft an operational plan and submit it to the Member State concerned (art. 42 para. 4 Regulation 2019/1896). Once the operational plan is submitted, the Agency’s Director and the Member State concerned shall agree on concrete actions to be adopted, including the deployment the necessary operational staff from the European Border and Coast Guard standing corps, for the practical execution of the measures identified in the Council’s decision.

Art. 42 para. 8 Regulation 2019/1896 requires the Member State concerned to comply with the Council decision by cooperating with the EBCG and taking the necessary actions to facilitate the implementation of the Council’s decision and the Agency’s operational plan. However, these obligations are tempered when art. 42 para. 10 Regulation 2019/1896 indicates that the European Commission may authorise the reestablishment of border controls in the Schengen area, provided that the concerned Member State neither executes the decision adopted by the Council, nor agrees with the EBCG’s Operational Plan within 30 days. Ultimately, the Member State concerned subject to the EBCG’s “intervention” shall expressly consent and agree with the Agency in regards to the operational support that will be provided in its external borders as to ensure the functioning the Schengen area (art. 42 para. 5 Regulation 2019/1896).

 

CONCLUSION

In the aftermath of the “refugee crisis”, the transformation of FRONTEX into the EBCG, as well as the need to promote a shared management of the European external borders emerged as a top political priority for both the EU and the Member States. Regulations 2016/1624 and 2019/1896 introduce the new EBCG as a guarantor of an integrated management of the European borders. In the European Commission own words, “by setting new standards and imbuing a European culture within border guards, the European Border and Coast Guard will also become a blueprint on how EU border management should be implemented”.

Both Regulations 2016/1624 and 2019/1896 clearly strengthen the EBCG’s autonomy since the Agency will depend to a much lesser extent on the specific operational secondments and support of the Member States. The EBCG should finally have its own equipment and operational personnel for its immediate deployment in joint and rapid operations. However, the most controversial, significant and novel operational powers included in Regulations 2016/1624 and 2019/1896 consist in introducing the Agency’s capacity to “intervene” and granting executive powers to the Agency’s staff members respectively.

Regulation 2019/1896 confers executive powers to the EBCG’s standing corps deployed as team members. While these executive powers may ensure a more effective, integrated and supranational administration of the European external borders, these activities also entail a significant, and difficult to control, degree of discretion that excessively stretches the Treaty provisions establishing the Member States as ultimately responsible for their own internal security and external border management.

However, it is still early to conclude whether we are only facing another revision of FRONTEX’ initial mandate as a reaction to an unprecedented migratory pressure or, on the contrary, Regulations 2016/1624 and 2019/1896 constitute the definitive step that will facilitate in the future the establishment of a European Corps of Border Guards with full executive, implementation and decision-making powers in the management of the European external borders.

The post Regulation 2019/1896 on the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

 Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

 

This blog entry is a follow-up to the research agenda published last month. It presents further details of the research project. It captures the evolving complexity of the research project since the most recent reflections on Bourdieusian influences in the EU studies have encouraged embracing not just one of the overall three taxonomies of science diplomacy, but two of them. More importantly, this blog entry further clarifies the conceptual modalities via a display of two schematic visualisations of the overall theoretical model and interrelations of the selected components.

In general, science diplomacy comprises three taxonomies: diplomacy for science, science for diplomacy and diplomacy in science. First selected taxonomy ‘diplomacy for science’ for the research project “is mainly about the facilitation of international scientific collaboration. Here, classical tools of diplomacy are put in use to support the scientific and technological community. It is about using diplomacy to establish cooperation agreements at the government and institutional level. The goal of diplomacy for science actions is to benefit from foreign science and technology capacity to improve the national capacity.” (Berton et al., 2016, p. 27) In line with one of the three suggestions made by Luk Van Langenhove, this research project examines the EU “science and technology contributions towards enhancing regional security in its neighbourhood” (Berton et al., 2016, p. 29). Namely, as it was argued in the first outline of the research project (Šime, 2019), in the EU Southern Neighbourhood it is pursued via efforts directed towards stabilising an area affected by volatilities.

Earlier it has been identified that the key documents governing the overall EU Southern Neighbourhood Policy do not explicitly prioritise cooperation in higher education, research, science and innovation as the key defining thematic strands (Šime, 2019). Thus, the research project is presented with full acknowledgement that the examined phenomenon is implicit science diplomacy – collaborative ties which correspond to the selected taxonomy of science diplomacy but are not defined as such by the policy-makers and are not positioned in the key policy documents as having a pivotal role. However, as elaborated earlier (Šime, 2019), such positioning does not mean that cooperative ties in higher education, research, science and innovation have a limited role in contributing to the overall goals of the EU vis-à-vis its southern neighbours. One of the leading EU science diplomacy thinkers – Luk Van Langenhove – concisely describes this less visible but no less important role of scientists and researchers in shaping the international ties or being encouraged to engage in collaborations with their foreign colleagues to attract more minds to “the EU’s own scientific world” (Berton et al., 2016, p. 29):

“First, it is often said that the ‘invisible colleges’ of scientists across state-borders can contribute to building trust between nations or cultures. Secondly, it is also argued that the language of science can contribute to pointing to technical solutions for political problems. One can thus distinguish between science and technology relations that occur without government intervention and science diplomacy when governmental officials try to shape and stimulate relations to advance national interests.” (Berton et al., 2016, p. 27)

This quote guides to the second selected taxonomy ‘science for diplomacy’ which is understood as “science used as a tool to build and improve relations between states” (Van Langenhove, 2017, p. 8). These are good basic conceptual grounds for an examination of the EU relations with Southern Neighbourhood due to the interdependence factor which Luk Van Langenhove raises when explaining this particular taxonomy of science diplomacy in certain situations “where there are tensions in relations between certain states or when states are faced with common problems that they cannot solve on their own” (Van Langenhove, 2017, p. 8). This taxonomy was neglected in the initial scoping of the theoretical framework of the research project (Šime, 2019). However, while dwelling in more detail in the classical works of Pierre Bourdieu and its inspired more recent scholarly reflections on the evolving diplomatic practices in the EU setting, it became clear that the empirical examination of the field via interviews with EU funded project managers based in the EU mirrors this dimension of science diplomacy.

 

Graph no. 1: Hierarchical Relations of Science Diplomacy Inspired by the Practice Theory

‘Diplomacy for science’ is the upper hierarchical dimension which is defined and its policies maintained by the selected EU institutions – European External Action Service (EEAS) responsible for the EU Global Strategy, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) steering the EU Framework Programme “Horizon 2020”, Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) responsible for the Erasmus+ Programme, Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR), former DG ELARG (until the end of 2014) (Schumacher et al., 2017, p. 129),  managing the EU-Morocco (MA) and EU-Tunisia (TN) Annual Action Programmes as integral parts of the European Neighbourhood Instrument 2014-2017 (Šime, 2019). One of the reasons for such a comprehensive approach in the selection of the EU instruments for further examination is the absence of a clear-cut definition of what science diplomacy is. Earlier approximations of science diplomacy entail “support to academic exchange, networking and international cooperation, the exploitation of scientific networks for non-research purposes, the provision of scientific advice to foreign policy, etc.” (Rungius, 2018, p. 3). Since all of the identified institutions offer support for activities which can have a direct influence on the shaping and development of science, all of them are treated as relevant to a broad understanding of the implicit science diplomacy dynamics.

‘Science for diplomacy’ is embodied by the EU-based project managers who following the EU guidance and funding regulations are responsible for a successful implementation of the projects. ‘Science in diplomacy’ as the third taxonomy of science diplomacy is displayed in graph no. 1 without a bold outline because it is not covered by the research project. ‘Science in diplomacy’ stands for the use of “scientific knowledge in foreign policy decisions. The goal is to improve foreign policy actions through the use of scientific knowledge.” (Van Langenhove, 2017, p. 8) This taxonomy has a more pronounced relation to the science advisory services, which is a whole field subject to the intricacies of the multi-level governance system (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 179). Since the research project is not aimed at examining EU science advisory systems and whether or in what form the EU funded projects serve as sources of science advice for EU policies, the theoretical scope is limited to a two-dimensional approach to science diplomacy analysis focusing solely on the ‘diplomacy of science’ and ‘science for diplomacy’ taxonomies.

Overall, a study dedicated to the EU’s evolving science diplomacy is a fresh perspective looking beyond the EU’s unfolding novel diplomatic practices focused on the intergovernmental dynamics captured by Adler-Nissen’s ‘late sovereign diplomacy’ – “the intense integration of national representatives who adhere to an ever closer union, producing legislation that challenges the sovereignty of their own nations” (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 175). Likewise, the research project bears in mind but is not preoccupied with the EU intergovernmental dynamics of certain countries aiming at using “the EU as a power multiplier” and “a clear vehicle for uploading national interests” (Spence et al., 2015, p. 261)  such as the acclaimed decades’ long Spain’s foreign policy aspirations (Bremberg, 2010a, p. 132) to promote a “shared Mediterranean sensibility” and country’s efforts to upload the Southern Neighbourhood-related matters to the supranational (EU) level (Schumacher, Bouris, & Olszewska, 2016, pp. 266-267). Instead, the research project is tailored to offer more room for examination of the role of higher education and science cooperation managers as a component shaping the overall EU’s external relations in an intermestic setting.

Reproduction of a certain repertoire stemming from the basic conditions shaped by the expert-level project-driven science and higher education domain as a habitus (Bigo, 2011, p. 242) is placed in the limelight. The ‘regulated improvisations’ (Bigo, 2011, p. 242) facilitated by the higher education and research-oriented projects and project Coordinators and Lead Partners as their most informed witnesses hold a potential to show the formal or substantial role science plays in reaching the EU’s overarching goals towards the EU Southern Neighbourhood.  Bourdieu’s logic is as follows: “Official relationships which do not receive continuous maintenance tend to become what they are for genealogist: theoretical relationships, like abandoned roads on an old map.” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 38, 1990, p. 35) Slightly paraphrasing, the research project is aimed at dissecting whether the engagement of MA&TN institutions in the EU funded projects results in ad-hoc or fragmented formal interactions resembling Bourdieu’s “theoretical relationships” or these projects spark “continuous maintenance” and substantial improvement of higher education and science potential in both selected countries.

 

Graph no. 2: The patterns of (potential) interaction

The theoretical underpinnings elaborated in the earlier sections and remarks on the EU focus published earlier (Šime, 2019), clarify that the research project is crafted to explore the EU framework positions, offered tools and cooperation opportunities to institutions in two selected Southern Neighbourhood countries. In such a manner the EU institutions and EU actors – represented by the Lead Partners or Coordinators of the projects funded by one of the earlier indicated EU programmes – are viewed as the objects offering insight into the subjects (graph no. 2) which shape the overall landscape of the science and higher education domains in the EU Southern Neighbourhood in general and two selected countries in particular.

The author of the research project does not ignore that there might be a multiplicity of additional interaction patterns. Such awareness is mirrored in the diversity of communication arrows indicated in graph no. 2. Likewise, the research project is crafted keeping at the back of the author’s mind the other consultative processes which potentially bear an imprint on those interactions which are selected for a more scrutinised analysis in the scope of the research project. Among such influencing factors might be the dominating perspective of the EU Member States, especially the so-called ‘patron’ Member States (Schumacher et al., 2017, pp. 119, 125) with a keen interest in shaping the EU’s approach adopted towards the EU Southern Neighbourhood. Instead, it primarily explores the key policies and their supporting funding measures EU institutions have established to structure their relations with the MA and/or TN in particular or the EU Southern Neighbourhood as a whole. Furthermore, the assessment of the EU project Lead Partners and Coordinators about their cooperation with the MA and/or TN institutions are prioritised to acquire an expert-level assessment what benefits do the European higher education and research initiatives provide to the capacity building and internationalisation efforts of the MA&TN higher education and research institutions. Overall, the arrows directed horizontally from EU side towards the MA&TN side describe the prevailing perspective and selected interactions to be examined during the research project to find out how content-rich or formally plain is the EU science diplomacy in the Southern Neighbourhood.

All in all, this blog entry is not a comprehensive update on the overall earlier outlined research project. Instead, it offers further nuances about one theoretical strand – science diplomacy. It is prepared to place so-to-say more meat on one sector of the bones in a manner which renders the latest thinking on the EU science diplomacy easily accessible to all interested thinkers.

 

 

Bibliography

Adler-Nissen, R. (2014). Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty and European Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337916

Berton, B., Ekman, A., Schmidt, J., Selleslaghs, J., Stang, G., & Langenhove, L. Van. (2016). The EU Global Strategy: Going Beyond Effective Multilateralism? (B. Ujvari, Ed.). Brussels: Egmont/European Policy Centre. Retrieved from http://www.egmontinstitute.be/eu-global-strategy-beyond-effective-multilateralism/

Bigo, D. (2011). Pierre Bourdieu and international relations: Power of practices, practices of power. International Political Sociology, 5(3), 225–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00132.x

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/news-and-events/events/phd/2017/reading-list-power-and-authority-Bourdieu.pdf

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00680104

Bremberg, N. (2010). La política exterior española hacia el Magreb: Actores e intereses. The Journal of North African Studies, 15(1), 132–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629380903310217

Rungius, C. (2018). State-of-the-Art Report: Summarizing Literature on Science Diplomacy Cases and Concepts. Retrieved from https://www.s4d4c.eu/s4d4cs-state-of-the-art-report-on-science-diplomacy/

Schumacher, T., Bouris, D., & Olszewska, M. (2016). Of policy entrepreneurship, bandwagoning and free-riding: EU member states and multilateral cooperation frameworks for Europe’s southern neighbourhood. Global Affairs, 2(3), 259–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2016.1216230

Schumacher, T., Exadaktylos, T., Cebeci, M., Haukkala, H., Elsuwege, P., Kostanyan, H., … Delcour, L. (2017). The Revised European Neighbourhood Policy : Continuity and Change in EU Foreign Policy. (D. Bouris & T. Schumacher, Eds.). London: Macmillan Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47182-6

Šime, Z. (2019). The EU’s Diplomacy for Science in the Southern Neighbourhood: Setting a Research Agenda. Retrieved October 16, 2019, from https://europeangovernance.ideasoneurope.eu/2019/10/15/the-eus-diplomacy-for-science-in-the-southern-neighbourhood-setting-a-research-agenda/

Spence, D., Bátora, J., Adler-Nissen, R., Onestini, C., Helwig, N., Murdoch, Z., … Duke, S. (2015). The European External Action Service: European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia. (D. Spence & J. Bátora, Eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Van Langenhove, L. (2017). Tools for an EU science diplomacy. Luxembourg. Retrieved from https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/e668f8cf-e395-11e6-ad7c-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

 

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This article is set to be published in the Hertie School’s student magazine, The Governance Post.  Teaser

The European Central Bank’s (ECB) policy meeting in September was strained by dissent over the decision to launch another monetary easing package. Governing council members disagreed on the economic outlook, interest rates, and, most notably, new bond purchases. The spate of dissent over the institution’s latest monetary stimulus highlights the conflict between monetary doves and hawks at the ECB and reflects some deeper tensions between Member States as core Eurozone countries resisted Draghi’s bid.  More than that, it also points to the fact that monetary policy is approaching its economic and political limits in bolstering Eurozone economic growth.

Introduction

In Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Miss Prism prompts her student, Cecily, to do her readings in Political Economy while she is away. The patroness advises her young student to omit the chapter on the Fall of the Rupee as it is somewhat too sensational, remarking that “even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side”. How right Miss Prism was. Last month’s contentious meeting of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Governing Council was nothing short of melodramatic. The ECB became engulfed in its biggest public spat in years. It seems people in Europe are not only divided by weather, religion and cuisine, but also by monetary policy. The current economic slowdown has prompted a larger debate about the reorientation of economic activity across the Eurozone, causing disagreements between policy makers and Member States over the right course of action and pitting conflicting interests against each other. 

Last month the ECB pushed interest rates further into negative territory and revived its €2.6tn bond-buying programme. This was followed by a fierce backlash from members of the ECB’s Governing Council, with Germany’s representative on the institution’s Executive Board, Sabine Lautenschläger, quitting in protest. Dissent is coming Austria, the Netherlands, Estonia, and other usual suspects that oppose quantitative easing (QE) when it was launched back in 2015 as well. Nowhere is opposition towards the ECB’s monetary stimulus package stronger than in Germany where senior figures have been accusing the bank of expropriating money from the country’s savers in order to bailout profligate southern states. 

Bundesbank president, Jens Weidmann, has been the leading opponent of the ECB’s bond-buying programme since it was launched back in 2015. While recent tensions stem from the personal preferences of those who make up the Governing Council, they also highlight the fact that the ECB is not a normal  bank. It is the only central bank to serve a confederation of countries and we can expect their conflicting interests to be embedded in its decision-making processes. We then assume that, at least to a certain degree, central bank presidents also vote for monetary policies that correspond with their respective countries’ national preferences.

Hawks and Doves

First of all, the rift at the ECB reflects the long-standing conflict between monetary hawks and doves. In general, hawks are members who want a tighter monetary policy in order to temper inflation and growth, while doves encourage a looser monetary policy to support growth and inflation. Historically there has been no shortage of dissent in the ECB’s Governing Council between the two sides, but the intensity of the ongoing rift has prompted Carsten Brzeski, Chief Economist at ING Germany, to dub the latest spat a “War of the Roses”.  

A notable difference right now is that members who have previously taken a more dovish stance, such as Benoit Coeuré, have shifted to a more hawkish position in response to restarting ECB bond purchases reasoning that the timing is unwarranted. Similarly, members who have taken a more hawkish position in the past, such as Yves Mersch, have shifted to a more dovish stance now. 

The map below depicts where central bank governors and Executive Board members stand on the issue of the ECB’s monetary loosening measures as per last month’s meeting of the Governing Council based on country of origin. Full support refers to those who unequivocally support the measures. Partial Support refers to those who expressed doubts but ultimately agreed to back the package, such as Yves Mersch and Luis de Guindos. Partial Disagreement refers to those who do not oppose the stimulus on principle, but disagree on timing or technicalities. Full Disagreement refers to those who oppose it on principle, such as Jens Weidemann and Sabine Lautenschläger, both hailing from Germany. It is worth noting, however, that members of the ECB’s Governing Council sit as individuals and not as national representatives, and formal votes are rare.

Opponents of the ECB’s monetary stimulus say the measures are disproportionate given the already low bond yields and negative interest rates. Others warn about the adverse effects the stimulus has on financial markets, all while downplaying the risk of deflationary pressures. ECB doves support last month’s measures by pointing towards the surprisingly prolonged low inflation in the Euro area and the need to ward off the threat of deflation and economic slowdown.

The Economic Divide in Europe

However, these arguments go beyond mere technicalities. The ECB is also driven by conflicting national interests that are embedded in its decision-making processes.  More so, the strife at the ECB reflects wider Eurozone conflicts between the fiscally conservative member states and those which are opposed to fiscal retrenchment. The conflict also presents elements of the North-South divide and Core-Periphery dynamics. More than a decade after the the financial crisis, conflicts within the bloc reflect the divergence of interests between the northern “core” and the southern “periphery”. 

It’s already well established that there’s a North-South divide in the interest rate preferences of Member States, which is mirrored by the relative strength of their economies, as well as their specific growth models, employment, and inflation. Different economic contexts reflect, to a certain degree, the clash of interests among Eurozone Members States. Until fairly recently, the threat of deflation in Germany was low, with core inflation (excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) at almost 1.5% per year. Countries like the Netherlands and Estonia are nowhere near deflation either, with core inflation over 2%. On the other hand, the Eurozone as a whole is experiencing an excessively low rate of inflation and there’s little prospect of it picking up anytime soon. Member States such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland and France hover around or below the Euro area average. A more severe downward shock could push these countries into deflation.  

Since inflation rates differ, real interest rates (inflation-adjusted) are also different across countries in the monetary union. Lower real interest rates encourage consumption and investment because they greatly help borrowers, while high real interest rates tend to slow economic growth and inflationary pressures because they tend to favour savers. This can have an effect on national preferences for euro area interest rates. For example, expected inflation in Germany is higher than in southern Europe, thereby driving a large gap in real interest rates. Countries with low inflation and higher real interest rates should, in theory, show stronger support for monetary stimulus. The opposite should be true for countries with higher inflation and lower real interest rates. 

This can explain the position of some frugal countries that stand by their savers. After cutting rates further into negative territory, Germany’s Bild accused ECB president Mario Draghi of “sucking dry” the accounts of Germany’s savers, while the Dutch government has spoken out against the latest stimulus measures arguing that negative interest rates are disproportionately affecting Dutch pension funds.

There have been numerous claims, emanating from the financial and political circles of the Eurozone’s surplus-based, export-led economies – such as Germany and the Netherlands – that the ECB makes policies in favour of southern member states.  Just last week, a group of former senior European central bankers, most of them known for having a hawkish view on monetary policy, have accused the ECB of the monetary financing of government spending. They also hold that the intent of these measures is to “to protect heavily indebted governments from a rise in interest rates…” The graph below shows the level of public debt of individual countries based on the level of support for the ECB’s stimulus.

Accusing the ECB of catering to the bloc’s debt-ridden southern states may be a bit of a stretch. While the bloc’s most indebted members have been generally supportive of the resumption of QE, they are certainly not alone in this. It is true that highly indebted countries have benefited a lot from the ECB’s loose monetary policy due to their large stock of eligible bonds. However, lower debt-service costs have been beneficial to countries with lower levels of public debt as well, including Germany. 

Not long ago, excess savings in the North were matched by excess spending in the bloc’s southern and peripheral members. However, fiscal and structural reforms after the European debt crisis have turned them into savers as well. Yet, it’s hard to imagine those countries have a strong appetite for another round of austerity measures and structural reforms anymore. 

The only area in which the ECB’s Governing Council found agreement was fiscal policy. All members agreed that monetary policy is not the only game in town anymore and governments with fiscal space should do more to pull their weight and loosen their purse strings. The current rift at the ECB highlights the fact that monetary policy is approaching its economic and political limits in dealing with sluggish growth in the Eurozone. Mario Draghi said the ECB could still do more to boost inflation, but the current stimulus will last a long time and be less effective in the absence of fiscal policy efforts to stimulate growth in the Eurozone. Countries like France, Italy and Spain don’t have much room to spend, but the pressure is mounting on Germany and the Netherlands, both from institutions and other Member States.

With the ECB divided over the merits of further monetary stimulus, the key question is if Draghi’s successor, Christine Lagarde, will be able to manage the vested interests involved in the ECB’s decision-making processes. Besides this, she will also have to convince governments with fiscal space to spend more. Hopefully that will happen before Europe is caught up in the midst of another crisis.

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By Michael Breen, Dermot Hodson, Manuela Moschella

Scholars often look at international organizations, such as the European Union (EU), in splendid isolation. Over the last decade, however, researchers have paid more attention to how international organizations interact and what this means for international cooperation.

The regime complexity approach is a pioneering attempt to understand the multiple, overlapping institutions and rules that often govern different issue areas. Originally applied to the governance of plant genetic resources, this approach has been used to understand a wide range of policy areas, including human rights, migration and democratization.

Incoherence matters in regime complexes, this literature tells us, because it complicates and potentially weakens the credibility and effectiveness of cooperation. It becomes easier for a state to challenge one international organization when another asks something different of it. In spite of much theoretical and empirical work on this subject, there remains a basic lack of understanding of how to measure incoherence in regime complexes and what drives it.

We explore the drivers of incoherence in regime complexes by looking at the specific case of international economic surveillance. In particular, our analysis seeks to understand whether and why two key organizations in this regime complex  – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU – impose conflicting obligations on the same states.

The EU and IMF offer a laboratory for studying regime complexity not only because of their overlapping membership and central role in international economic surveillance but also because they have frequently clashed over the euro crisis.

Empirically, our article is the first study of regime complexity to use sentiment analysis to measure incoherence in a regime complex. One of several methods of quantitative text analysis but one with hitherto underexploited potential for students of international relations, sentiment analysis is used to analyse the coherence of over 400 IMF and EU surveillance documents between 1997 and 2014. Analyzing these documents as a whole rather than the recommendations within them, we treat differences in the tone of the language used within as a proxy for measuring policy coherence.

Figure 1. Median Pessimism in Surveillance Assessments

Our results show that EU member states were pulled in different directions by the EU and IMF before and after the global financial crisis. Before the crisis, a typical IMF assessment contained 34 per cent more pessimistic language than an EU assessment. Since the crisis, EU assessments have contained 53 per cent more pessimistic language. Although the EU has moderated its language since 2010, it remains more pessimistic than the IMF.

Using linear and panel regression analysis, we explain such incoherence not by differences in the distribution of power within the EU and IMF but by differences in the discretionary authority that the two organizations enjoy in performing surveillance.

When the rules underpinning EU and IMF fiscal surveillance bite and reduce these organizations’ room for discretion, each institution tends to be more pessimistic. But the two organizations are responding to different rules with differing degrees of intensity and from different starting points, leading to incoherent assessments of member states’ economic policies. EU surveillance is influenced, in particular, by compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact.

Our analysis is also relevant for wider debates in EU studies and international relations. The methodology and findings of our article respond to calls for a deeper study of regime complexity and institutional interaction, particularly as it relates to the role of non-European actors in European integration and governance. Within the wider international relations literature, our findings may help to refine explanations of why some regime complexes enhance the effectiveness of international cooperation while others do not.

This piece draws on the article Incoherence in Regime Complexes: A Sentiment Analysis of EU-IMF Surveillance in the Journal of Common Market Studies.

Please note that this article represents the views of the authors and not those of Ideas on Europe, JCMS or UACES.

Comments and Site Policy

Dr. Michael Breen @mbreen3

Associate Professor of International Political Economy

Dublin City University, Ireland.

 

 

Prof. Dermot Hodson @dermot_hodson

Professor of Political Economy

Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Manuela Moschella @ManuMoschella

Associate Professor of International Political Economy

Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy.

 

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The tenets of Derrida’s deconstruction has been considered as a viable ground for feminism by majority writers like Nancy Holland, Gayatri Spivak etc. but there has been not so feminist instances in Derrida and one is the case when he talks about Europe.
The binaries created in Western Metaphysics like male/female, present/absent, self/other also has an underlying politics of the other. Presence is preferred over absence, self over other and maleness is privileged over feminine. The western metaphysics gives precedence to maleness, female is taken as complete other of male.
To indicate Freud’s obsession with phallus Ernest Jones coined the term phallocentrism, Derrida used logocentrism (fixation of Western Metaphysics with word or origin) and phallocentrism and created neologism phallogocentrism: the privileging the phallus over female and logocentrism, the hierarchy of logos as the untouchable. Through this Derrida showed that phallus had always been the key signifier in the western discourse.
Phallogocentrism: An Attitude
Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang writing their treatise on Derrida, elucidate how Derrida saw the European authority as having masculine strength. He perceived the Imperial epoch of Europe as exemplifying that masculinity. He asserted that the reason Europe has had leverage was because Europe has been gifted by a geographical space that is on the margins of continent, with a jutting headland and phallic promontory. Additionally, Europe has always captained the journey of mankind with an ordered style, which is often done by the man in charge. Derrida talked about Europe in gendered terms, seeing it as male entity dominant over his past colonial subordinates.
In The Other Heading, commenting on the text of “Congress of European Cultures,” Derrida mentioned that there was a quote that France must guard its “avant-garde” stature. Derrida said that alongside being quite attractive this word depicted to have symbolism with the figure of projectile, prow or of phallic, quill which is advanced forward and portray guard or memory. Derrida interpreted that quote as France has to look for itself like a man.
He scribbled that Europe always reach towards other, as it has been its practice, mostly towards America (West), while towards East, Europe makes advances, “and promotes itself as an advance, and it will have never ceased to make advances on the other: to induce, seduce, produce, and conduce, to spread out, to cultivate, to love or to violate, to love to violate, to colonize, and to colonize itself.”
Also, Jacques Derrida in the Other Heading took Paul Valery as the scholar who might be considered as a prophet for European Integration. He mentioned that how Valery saw Europe as submissive to United States of America. Valery warned that it is quite evident that Europe wants US to rule and dictate terms, and as a consequence Europe will be punished. Valery furthered that Europe is so much enthusiastic of getting rid of its past memories that it will gladly let the “happy people” rule over them. Valery sarcastically used the term happy people for the Americans who don’t have any past memory of their own and will gladly let Europe forget its own.
Margaret Heller commenting on the above quoted phrases of Valery in Derrida’s The Other Heading emphasized that Derrida does not dichotomize the relation of US and Europe as such explicitly. But still she mentions that Valery is working on the notion of ‘rape of Europa’. Several Books and pieces have come out in this accord. Slavoj Zizek pointed out how Europe has been abducted now and again. He wrote how culture of Europe was ruined by Romans and Christianity was done the same by barbarians. He evoked that does not again recently Europe has been abducted by US who are setting standard for Europe and acting as if Europe is its province. Zizek also dichotomized the relation of US and Europe on the basis of masculine and feminine respectively. Despite Derrida’s phallogocentric references and his desire that Europe should increase its military might against hegemonic act of US, Europe does not yet seem to able to dictate its terms to US.
Politically speaking Derrida himself has outlined others for Europe, the orient or its past colonies as lesser other and US as the wholly other. And we will also evaluate its relationship with US on gendered terms, although Derrida never himself used such explicit jargon for Europe’s relation with US but he disliked Europe being used by US in its war on terror endeavors and sees US acting as a dominant male over Europe.
The Gendered Relations of Europe
Derrida has mentioned how politics have eradicated the figure of female from its discourse. Politics, Derrida reminded us, is male centric. In Politics of Friendship Derrida emphasized that politics by virtue of it is conjoined with masculine virility and consequently politics seems incapable of justly dealing with the concept of women and their equality and alterity at the same time.
Additionally, Derrida has always emphasized that western metaphysics has always been phallogocentric. Making Derrida’s own arguments as basis, for the phallogocentric politics, there has been a lot of works on gendered descriptions of nations like that of Rada Ivekovic, Yasmeen Abu Laban, and Tamar Mayer etc. on the question of gendered identity of Europe there has been a lecture series conducted by EU, among others. A sex-gender system is universal, while nations and nationalism are politically always masculine. Ernest Gellner asserted that the dominant rhetoric of nations defines their gender. Today, to establish dominance; gender is often used in the political dialogue. Gender-discourse basically affects our habit of evaluation and study of every facet of life. Gender thus becomes an important tool in our study of Europe.
Even Derrida’s works shows orient as subordinate of Europe, Europe the masculine figure who is responsible for orient; while he knew that US is “hegemonic” indicating the authoritativeness of US over Europe like a male figure.
In the colonial rhetoric, Edward Said asserts, the Europeans have always described Orient/East as passive, seminal, feminine and even silent.
Europe’s relation with the Orient
Engin F. Isin, in We, the non-Europeans asked us to evaluate Derrida’s problem of Europe through Edward Said’s works which described Europe through Europe’s wholly other –Derrida’s own term for the orient.
According to Isin for both Derrida and Said the main problem of Europe is its incapability to fully acknowledge the non-Europeans, it’s other. Although the debate on other might have been initiated by Freud but Said saw Freud’s interpretations were only informed by a European critique which was majorly Greco-Roman and Hebrew.
Analyzing Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which establishes a European identity, Said wrote that this work lack the most important fact that the founder of Jewish (supposedly European) history was actually a non-European Egyptian. Said emphasized that identity cannot be simply taken stock on its own, it needs to be evaluated through its “radical originary break or flaw”.
The identity of orient is created through the western discourse; orient is seen as a feminine figure. Although Derrida is himself adamant of the fact how politics ostracize and belittle women, he himself is guilty of the same error while talking about Europe and its relation to the orient. In the other heading when he asked Europe to be responsible for its past colonies –his tone created a European (male) figure looking over its dependent (female) orient. Derrida is thus culpable of same habit Said showed is present in European writers. That is a feminine portrayal of east. Textually there have been various portrayals of orient one as a female submissive orient, others, E. Said adds as, “linguistic orient, a Freudian orient, a Spenglerian orient, a Darwinian orient and a racist orient” but never as a true Orient.
As Said has shown, orient is an extension of European identity; Derrida also has pictured orient as dependent on Europe. But there is another side of European identity which mostly claims can only be argued in the context of American identity. Likewise Derrida saw US a dominant figure in the politics and shaping of EU and aspired for an independent Europe not taking orders from US
Europe’s relation with US
Iver B. Neumann traced the anthropological field of study on the question of European identity. He said that he only found one work by Stacia Zabusky an American who articulated that only in relation to herself (an American) her employees labeled themselves as Europeans, which she phrased as “making Europe over Lunch.” While Chris Shore and Annabel Black, cite one of their employee during their anthropological field work as claiming that there is no cultural basis for Europeanism. The Europeans feel like Europeans only when they are confronted with an American or go to USA.
Hannah Arendt in 1950’s also saw the figure of America as creating a ‘European’ sense in the Europe’s inhabitants in response to US’s presence. The notion of European identity Iver believe is created by excluding US and not taking it in.
This can be seen from Derrida and Habermas coalition too there works are miles apart from each other. But when US initiated war on terror, they both wanted Europe to get away from influence of US. They wanted to combine all European countries and stand against hegemonic authority of US. Derrida hoped for Europe to be able to be an authoritative power.
The authoritative power and decision-making capability of Europe, Derrida dreamt of, was tested at the initiation of Iraq War in 2003. On March 19, 2003, American president George Bush announced that they are declared the fight against ‘the axis of evil’ and asked the world to support them. Germany and France wanted to give more time to UN inspectors, if war was avoidable and Iraq could be cleaned up with International pressure and under UN auspices it would have been better.
Dominique de Villepin, who was the French foreign minister at that time, addressed UNSC, on 5 February 2003 and dubbed war as acceptance that the world has failed (Guardia). It was the same meeting that Collin Powel US Secretary of Defense informed that Iraq is developing WMD’s.
Former German foreign minister Hans Dietich Genscher, in an interview to Deutschlandfunk radio in August of 2002 aired Europe’s concern in its neighbor, because what happens in Middle East will have more effect on Europe than US (Rippert and Schwarz).
But they were only two countries, vocally against US’ invasion. Other Europeans countries favored US on the very first instance. Soon an open letter was published by the leaders from Czech Republic, Denmark, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain which stated that they were all in to support US in the war, and the reason they stated was that they did not wanted Europe’s and US’ relation to turn bad due to Iraq war. Due to France and Germany’s stance against the war, these countries were not invited by the European countries to endorse the letter and Greece was kept out deliberately. Similarly German president Jacques Chirac flippantly stated those countries as ‘Villainous 10’ and said that those nations have shown that they were badly brought up. France and Germany were trying to be man enough to counter US but other countries quick attempt to please US was evident of the fact that they knew what they have to look up to.
It was the time the European Unity learned a lesson, that co-operation in Europe cannot be achieved by going against US policies. Donald Rumsfeld actually showed who the boss is, by his remarks that Germany and France was a little nuisance but others countries complied with US without delay. Such a remark by Rumsfeld showed superiority of US over Europe.
This entire event showed a lack of that authoritative decision-making that Derrida envisioned for Europe. Writing at that time with Jurgen Habermas, Derrida also hinted that what Europe lacked a collective stance at that moment of decision. Although Derrida complimented the stance of France and Germany of trying to stop or lest slow U.S. down but he said that the cohesiveness of Europe needs to be addressed. Despite any claims made the unity of Europe is not there.
Derrida wanted Europe to take stand and increase its military might so that it will be able to negotiate matters of strategy with the “technological, economic and military bully, the United States of America.” Derrida wanted Europe to take a masculine stand against the US because in political terms nations with military power are taken as masculine.
But the narrative of newspapers and media that was to follow took Europe as a feminine, who the masculine US has to tag alone. Derrida demanded Europe to get away from hegemonic acts of US and don’t jump into the war. The French and German authorities tried to sneak away from vicious cycle of initiating war. But in US media it was portrayed as anti-masculine to go against war, and one pro-war American declared on National Public Radio (NPR) on 21 April 2002 that ‘the EU is a bunch of worthless wimps—they’re not good for anything, you can’t take them seriously; they’re not valuable partners. Likewise the reason why Europeans tend to back away from initiating military ordeal is explained as Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. Frequently opinions like “Venus–Mars disconnect over Iraq” made their way in New York Times.
The articles and news items were laden with descriptions of gendered supremacy of US over Europe. But Derrida also wished that Europe becomes a military might and stop its dependency on NATO. He flirted with an idea that Europe needs to make a common defense system and foreign policy. In this way Europe would be at position to dictate its own terms, other than being told so by “military bully” US. A need for a security policy by a combined Europe was not only felt by Derrida but also EU. The member countries already have an agreement which states that all signatories must support EU’s security policies in cohesion, and must not act individually that might hamper any possibility of making EU a unified authority in world politics. And in December 2003 EU came together to work on a security strategy.
The purpose of this strategy was to create a space for EU to discuss their collective strategies, to work out differences among the EU nations and between EU and US, and an act to show equal military status of EU with US.
The strategy was accepted by all the members and the readiness of everyone to sign it was probably result of a desire to write a comparable document with 2002 National Security Strategy of the US.
Getting back on the main thesis of this section, Europe always tends to create its own identity when its sees US presence and the military strategy was also a hasty step just to act like US.
The strategy read “a secure Europe in better world”, specifying that Europe is not threatened by its own members and have turned Balkans a peaceful place but has threat from places other than Europe. ESS discussed proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist threats and Al-Qaeda. But to be up to the criteria of strategy paper, it has to fulfill some standards.
Looking at this piece of paper called ESS, strategically, it can hardly be called a strategy. A strategic paper has to draw its policy about every possible event, like use of military, what circumstances can allow a military intervention in neighboring country. It has to write down the purpose and the ethical means it can use).
For critics, ESS can only be called a hazy sketch. And with the difference present among the member countries, it is evident that EU would not be able to bring out a combined force for battles so these references have been avoided.
Toje asserted that these European countries lack a strategic culture, though France and UK want to use defense force, Germany sides with UN resolutions, and with 27 the probability for a consensus on a military effort drops down. While NATO was created by one hegemonic power US which defines strategy and tag other members along. ESS 2003 was unable to fulfill standards of strategy.
Looking at NSS and ESS at a deeper level, there is a clear difference. NSS says that it will keep in check the “rogue states” and if there is a possibility that they might attack US and its friends, US will use force before these rogue states are able to. While ESS also talks about rogue states and their threat, it asserts that it will look into various factors present there like presence of terrorism leading to high violence, if they have potent threatening weapons, a weakened country with coordinated violence and private militia. An even then the ESS states that “we could be confronted with a very radical threat indeed.” But there is no mention of clear cut strategy in what grounds EU will use force and when, like a strategy paper needs to do.
In 2003, EU could not create a strategy worthy of its name, in 2008 there were voices to work on ESS 2003 and update it, but because of the fear that Georgia-Russia war which was going on might separate the member states in two groups it never occurred. In 2011, a report was published asking member states for a revived strategy –that is need of time –for EU to survive. Again in 2012 a need for a common strategy for Europe was reinforced, but its actual implementation seems a distant idea.

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As an EU member, the UK currently participates in around 40 excellent free trade agreements with over 70 countries, with more on the way, on advantageous terms that Britain is unlikely ever to replicate after Brexit.

Because the EU is the world’s richest, biggest single trading bloc, and the world’s biggest exporter and importer of manufactured goods and services, it can negotiate the best trade agreements with other countries.

In negotiations, the bigger party usually gets the best deals.

The EU has the power, the reach, the expertise and the muscle to achieve first-rate trade agreements on behalf of its members.

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Could Britain, being much smaller than the EU, achieve trade agreements with other countries as good as, let alone better than, the agreements we already have through our EU membership?

It’s unlikely.

After Brexit, Britain will have to tear up all our trade agreements with other countries and start over from scratch. It will take years, maybe decades, to re-negotiate those trade agreements. And what for?

After all, it took the EU over seven years to negotiate the EU-Canada deal (CETA).

In October 2017, Liam Fox, the former international trade secretary, said,

“I hear people saying, ‘Oh, we won’t have any [free trade agreements] before we leave’. Well, believe me we’ll have up to 40 ready for one second after midnight in March 2019.”

Of course, he had to eat his words.

Dr Fox also famously claimed that concluding a trade deal with the European Union after Brexit would be the “easiest in human history”.

He also had to eat those words too.

With only around 80 days until Brexit happens, no trade deal with the EU has been ‘concluded’ let alone trade deals with any major economies outside the EU.

It is now highly probable that Britain is going to crash out of the EU on 31 October without any deal in place, causing catastrophe.

And yet, we already have the best deal in place: full membership of the EU.

We don’t have to leave the EU and inflict catastrophe on ourselves in the stupidest act of voluntary self-harm by any country in modern times.

The courts have confirmed that Britain can revoke the Article 50 notice right now, and stay in the EU on the same excellent membership terms we’ve enjoyed for decades.

Can anyone give any valid reason for leaving? No, they can’t. All the reasons given to leave – every single one of them – have transpired to be bogus nonsense.

Regarding doing our own trade deals, what would be the advantage?

Can any Brexiter refer to any clause in any of our existing EU trade agreements that they don’t like or that hurts Britain’s interests?

After all, as a full member of the EU, the UK has fully and democratically participated in all the EU’s negotiated trade agreements.

EU trade agreements have to be democratically approved by the European Parliament, in which we are represented by our MEPs.

Our Parliament in Westminster has also democratically agreed to all EU trade deals.

Since the EU is run by its members for the benefit of its members, why would any EU member agree to any trade agreements that were not in our best interests?

The new unelected Tory government is now desperately trying to get a trade agreement with Trump’s USA, that could involve the import from America of chlorinated chicken, together with hormone-fed beef and genetically modified food that the EU has banned to protect EU citizens.

Not to mention the NHS, that President Trump said on his visit to the UK in June would be ‘on the table’ in any trade negotiations.

Does Boris Johnson’s cavalier government have the same concerns as the EU to protect its citizens? Or are they only driven by the lure of easy profits for their pals in the City?

On current form, there is every indication that Brexit-driven trade agreements with other countries will not protect British citizens as much as EU-negotiated trade agreements.

That’s especially the case as the UK government is desperate to negotiate trade agreements in a hurry after Brexit.

This week, the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers said he does not believe that a “desperate” UK would manage to secure a post-Brexit trade deal with the USA.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday:

“Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.”

Even if the two countries could come to an agreement, said Mr Summers, the UK is in a weak negotiating position.

He added:

“Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions. You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man.”

The EU has negotiated over 40 trade agreements over many decades, with care, attention to detail, and with the best interests of the EU and its people at heart.

Can the same be said of the intentions of our Brexit government?

The EU and Japan recently signed an unprecedented free trade agreement which will create one of the world’s largest trading blocs.

The EU-Japan “Economic Partnership Agreement” (EPA) is the largest trade deal ever negotiated by the EU. It will create a trade zone covering 600 million people and nearly a third of global GDP.

The EU-Japan economic agreement will ultimately remove 97% of the tariffs that Japan applies to European goods and 99% of those applied by the EU.

It is estimated that EU companies will save €1 billion a year in duties which they currently pay when exporting to Japan.

It is of course good news for the EU and Japan, but not for Britain. Brexit means we won’t benefit from the EU-Japan trade agreement, or any other existing EU trade deals or new ones in the pipeline.

And the UK is never likely to get a free trade agreement with Japan anywhere near as good as the one just achieved by the EU.

For Japan, the real importance of the UK lies in its access to the EU market. Without free, frictionless and open trade between the UK and the rest of the EU, Japanese companies will not be impressed by any UK-Japan trade deal.

So, what are the benefits of Britain doing its own trade deals with other countries after Brext?

I can’t find one. Not even one.

The bottom line is that we get the best trade deals in the EU. We’re better off together… as part of the Union.

 

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We thought that Prime Minister, Theresa May, was dictatorial. But her replacement, Boris Johnson, has taken the word to new depths.

Mrs May tried her best – but failed – to pass Brexit by bypassing Parliament.

But Mr Johnson is determined to ride roughshod over Parliament, if he must, to ensure Brexit happens on 31 October, deal or no deal, come what may, do or die.

Today’s front page of The Times announced:

‘Boris Johnson would refuse to resign even after losing a confidence vote so he could force through a no-deal Brexit on October 31, under plans being considered by Downing Street.’

The Times reported that Mr Johnson would ignore the result of a confidence vote and stay on as Prime Minister.

Could he do that? Apparently, yes.

Constitutional experts have confirmed that Mr Johnson would not be under any legal obligation to quit if he lost a confidence vote.

Catherine Haddon, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, said that technically, under the Fixed-Term Parliament Act, the Prime Minister was not required to resign upon losing a vote of confidence.

“In terms of a strict reading of the legislation, Boris is not required to resign. It is completely silent on all of this,” she told The Times.

“The onus is on the incumbent Prime Minister – they get to choose whether they resign. If they do not it is hard for a new government to be formed without dragging the Queen into politics.”

The Times reported:

‘Experts say that it is only convention that dictates that a Prime Minister losing a vote of no confidence has to resign.’

Conservative MP, Dominic Grieve, former Attorney-General, commentated that it would be absolutely extraordinary if Mr Johnson refused to quit if his government lost a vote of no confidence.

“The Prime Minister who has been defeated on a confidence motion has a duty to facilitate that process not to obstruct it,” he said.

“It would be utterly extraordinary for a Prime Minister to refuse to leave office when he has lost a vote of confidence and there is an alternative individual available [and] able to form an administration.”

Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s senior advisor and now regarded as the (unelected) de facto deputy Prime Minister, asserted last week that Britain would leave the EU with or without a deal on 31 October.

He told colleagues that, “nothing will stand in the way of that” and that the Prime Minister, even after losing a vote of confidence, has the power to set the date for the next general election after Brexit has been delivered.

Mr Cummings, who was the Campaign Director for Vote Leave in the referendum, said it was now “too late” for Parliament to stop a no-deal Brexit. He made clear he would do “whatever is necessary” to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October.

Mr Johnson’s official spokesman told the press yesterday that:

“The UK will be leaving the European Union on October 31 whatever the circumstances, no ifs or buts. We must restore trust in our democracy and fulfil the repeated promises of Parliament to the people by coming out of the EU on 31 October.

“Politicians cannot choose which votes to respect. They promised to respect the referendum result. We must do so.”

But asked if Mr Johnson was committed to “respecting” a no-confidence vote against him, the spokesman would not specifically answer.

Today, a cross-party group of MPs mounted a legal challenge to the Prime Minister’s ability to prorogue (i.e. close) Parliament in order to force a no-deal Brexit.

The group, which includes Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson, Labour’s Lord Peter Hain, independent MP Heidi Allen and SNP’s Joana Cherry, have lodged legal papers in the court of session in Edinburgh to rule on whether Boris Johnson has the right to suspend Parliament in order to force through no-deal Brexit.

The crowdfunded challenge, led by the Good Law Project, the same team that won a victory at the European Court of Justice last year over whether the UK could unilaterally cancel Brexit by revoking Article 50.

It’s clear that we are now heading for one almighty constitutional crisis, and nobody can be clear what will be the outcome.

The country has now been taken over by a completely new government, unelected by the electorate, and with a manifesto entirely at odds with the Tory manifesto that got the party into power at the last general election in June 2017.

That 2017 manifesto promised to ‘deliver the best possible deal for Britain as we leave the European Union delivered by a smooth, orderly Brexit.’

But it is now almost a certainty that, instead, Mr Johnson’s new government will not achieve any deal, let alone ‘the best possible deal’, and contrary to what his party promised, he will deliver a rough and disorderly Brexit.

Just how rough and disorderly is starting to become clear.

Writing in the medical journal, The Lancet, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the UK would face unprecedented levels of disruption to food supplies.

He added that the public so far had been kept “largely in the dark” by the government about the gravity of the situation.

Some fresh food prices could rise by 10%, he said, hitting the poorest hardest. This could become worse by November, as the UK is heavily dependent on fruit and vegetables from the Mediterranean in the winter months.

Professor Lang said on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the public health advice to eat five portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day would have to be abandoned.

Add to that the shortage of vital medicines in the event of no-deal.

Earlier this year, a government minister announced that he was the world’s biggest buyer of fridges to stock-pile medicines in the event of a no-deal Brexit. This is costing hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s money.

Senior managers in the NHS have told me that patients will needlessly die as a result of shortage of medicines.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) Chief Executive Mike Thompson said this week:

“Pharmaceutical companies have been doing everything in their power to prepare for the UK’s exit from the EU, including increasing stocks and planning alternative supply routes where possible. But some things are outside of their control.”

How ironic that the leading slogan of Brexiters in the referendum was, ‘Take back control’.

The bottom line? Britain would not have voted for Brexit in 2016 if they had known this would be the outcome.

Now, our new unelected government is planning to impose on us a terrible, harsh and catastrophic Brexit in which the country will suffer, with the poor and vulnerable suffering most of all.

This government does not care. They are determined to jump over the cliff edge, taking all of us with them, as if this was a fantastical, cult religion that demanded such a dreadful sacrifice.

Somehow, the likes of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Dominic Raab have seized the reins of power, with no intention of letting go, even if Parliament votes for them to do so.

And hard-nosed Brexiters have the barefaced cheek to call the European Union undemocratic. None of the shockingly undemocratic plans now being cooked up by Cummings and Co could happen in the EU, which has a much more robust democracy than ours.

After all, to get elected as the new President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen required the votes of an ‘absolute majority’ of MEPs – over 50%.

If the same rules had applied to our EU referendum, Leave could not have won, as they only got the votes of 37% of the electorate – an absolute minority.

It’s now time for all good parties to come to the aid of the people. We urgently need a new ‘national government’, an emergency coalition of mature states people, to steer the country back to normality and safety.

 

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With the pound dramatically lower as a direct result of Brexit, many more Britons are now holidaying at Britain’s seaside resorts. And it’s thanks to the EU that 95% of our beaches are now clean enough to wade out into the sea.

It wasn’t always like that.

Back in the 1970s, we used to pump our untreated sewage straight into the sea. It’s only because of EU laws that the UK was forced to clean up its act.

As reported by Friends of the Earth, who campaigned during the referendum for the UK to stay in the EU for the sake of our environment:

“The EU’s 1976 Bathing Water Directive – and successful legal action by the European Commission – has made our beaches as clean, clear and swimmable as they are today.

“But it wasn’t easy going…The UK fought hard to maintain the right to continue polluting.

“Successive UK governments exploited whatever loophole they could find. They pumped untreated sewage into our ocean until 1998 – longer than any other European country.

“Now, water quality at beaches is better than at any time in living memory, according to the Environment Agency.

“Some of the UK’s most beautiful and loved beaches are protected in this way: Watergate Bay in Cornwall, Druridge Bay in Northumberland, Croyde Beach in Devon and hundreds more which have reached good and excellent water-rating standards.”

Added the environmental pressure group:

“Staying in the EU delivers a win-win scenario of cleaner beaches and economic gain for sea-side economies.”

But, warns Friends of the Earth, not all of Britain’s beaches reach the crystal-clear standards that we have now come to expect. Only around 60% of UK bathing waters meet the new “Excellent” standard of the revised 2006 EU Bathing Water Directive.

WILL OUR BEACHES AND WATERWAYS BE CLEAN AFTER BREXIT?

It does not look hopeful.

After Brexit, the UK will no longer be subject to the EU’s Bathing Water Directive and Water Framework Directive.

With Brexit now on the immediate horizon, standards are already seriously slipping.

According to a major investigation by The Times this weekend, the government in recent years has allowed 86% of our rivers to fall short of the EU’s strict ecological standards.

The Times reported that dangerous pollutants in England’s waterways have reached their highest levels since modern testing began. The newspaper revealed that, “no river in the country is now certified as safe for swimmers.”

Last month, Southern Water was fined a record £127 million for “shocking” breaches that allowed raw sewage to be released into rivers and on to beaches.

England’s rivers are now among the most polluted in Europe.

Under EU rules, the government is supposed to ensure that all rivers are of good ecological standard by 2027. But according to the World Wildlife Fund, ministers are “not remotely on course” to achieve this target.

And if Britain is not in the EU, what incentive or legal duty will the government have to keep our waterways and beaches clean, especially if their past record is anything to go by?

Commented Friends of the Earth:

“Without external EU pressure it seems likely that standards will slip.”

Leaked documents during Theresa May’s premiership suggested that the Conservative government planned to “scale down” climate and environmental protection laws to secure post-Brexit trade deals. Does anyone think that under Boris Johnson our protection laws will be safe?

The bottom line? Brexit is a filthy business. It’s not too late to stop it, if that’s now what Britain wants.

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In light of the current political tensions in the Persian Gulf, Tom Sauer asks whether the Europeans can save the Joint Common Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the 2015 nuclear deal. 

© Vlad / Adobe Stock

Political tensions are once again rising in the Persian Gulf. Iran has been accused of attacking six tankers over the last weeks. It has confiscated a British tanker (after the United Kingdom confiscated an Iranian ship), and shot down an American drone (after which the US shot down an Iranian one).  Iran’s policy of strategic patience with Trump’s maximum pressure approach is over. Worst of all, Iran has started violating the Joint Common Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the 2015 nuclear deal. The latter was initiated by the E3 (being France, the UK, and Germany) in 2003 and concluded by the EU3+3 (the EU3, plus the US, Russia and China). Today’s question is: can the Europeans save the JCPOA?

In May of this year, exactly one year after President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal, President Rohani announced that Iran will start crossing some of the limitations (like the amount of low enriched uranium, the percentage of enrichment, and in the future probably also the number of gas centrifuges that are needed for enrichment, etc) agreed upon in the deal, be it in a limited and reversible way. Tehran claims that it cannot continue fulfilling its part of the obligations without seeing any of the (economic) benefits of the deal.

The diplomatic signal by Teheran to the rest of the world, and especially the Europeans, is twofold: first, “rescue the deal!”. If not, Iran is planning to cross other limitations every two months. As a result, the Iranian break-out time (which is the time needed for Iran to build atomic bombs in secret, which was significantly lengthened thanks to the deal) will start shortening again, which brings Iran closer to the Bomb. The latter may provoke another war by the US in the Middle East, something that the Europeans absolutely want to prevent as the wars in Iraq, Syria and Libya led to migration streams to Europe (not to the US) and a boost for nationalist and populist parties in all EU member states. A second reason for Iran to put up the pressure is to position itself better for potential new negotiations with the US.

Unfortunately, the EU seems either incapable or unwilling to save the deal. The problem is not only that the most important actor – the US – withdrew from the deal. President Trump made matters worse by announcing that also any non-American (e.g. European) firms that continue doing business with Iran (and the US) would be sanctioned by the US through the so-called extraterritorial sanctions. As a consequence, all major European firms (like Total, Siemens, Peugeot, Citroën) left Iran again after flocking back to Iran in 2015. The result is an Iranian economy in shatters with high inflation (40-60%) and the rise of the conservative faction and the Revolutionary Guards.

The EU4 – the EU3 plus Italy – announced immediately after the US withdrawal in 2018 that it would set up a Special Trading Vehicle Mechanism (called INSTEX) that would help European firms to circumvent the American sanctions. Again, the future of the nuclear deal depends on the extent that Iran can enjoy its economic benefits. Setting INSTEX up has taken approximately one year, and it is still not running and so not bringing a lot of foreign capital towards Iran. Why does it take so long? Is it because the Europeans have never set up such a mechanism, or is it due to lack of political will? Or both? According to some observers, lack of political will, certainly on the side of the UK (because its close ties to the US, especially in uncertain times of Brexit), is definitely part of the answer.

More fundamentally, the whole episode shows the weakness of the EU4. Just like the period before the Iran deal, ad hoc informal international organizations (IOs) – in this case the E3, EU3, EU3+3, EU4 – are helpful and may be necessary, but are certainly not sufficient to resolve intricate international problems. There are however also advantages to these ad hoc groupings. First, they encounter less bureaucratic obstacles for cooperation than formal IOs, including flexibility with respect to membership. Second, they can decide faster than formal IOs due to less veto-players (at least if the political will exists). Third, and finally, these ad hoc groups are able to buy time to bring in more important diplomatic actors (like formal IOs – such as the UN and the EU – and major powers like the US) into the game in order to resolve the conflict. That’s what the EU3 rather successfully did before the deal, and what the EU4 is trying to do now with INSTEX. At the same time, the major limitation of these ad hoc informal IOs is that they need other actors – in this case the UN and especially the US – to finalize a (new) deal.

The recent tensions in the Persian Gulf has made it clear that the Rohani government cannot wait until the next US presidential elections to resolve their issues with the US and the international community. Iran needs money now. If it won’t be able to sell oil in the coming months, it will gradually up the ante by contravening other parts of the deal. This will bring us closer to an Iranian atomic bomb, and in all likelihood followed by a nuclear arms race in the Middle East or a new war in the region.

If the EU wants to be perceived in the rest of the world of being a strategic actor, independent from the US, it should act now by making that INSTEX works and that the Iranian economy can substantially benefit from it, and at the same time put pressure on the US to either re-enter the previous nuclear deal or (if that is impossible) to negotiate a slightly better agreement, so that President Trump can show his base that he has negotiated a better deal than Obama. If the US sanctions are then lifted again, the Iranians and the rest of the world (except maybe Israel and Saudi Arabia) can certainly live with that.

This piece draws on the article ‘The Role of Informal International Organizations in Resolving the Iranian Nuclear Crisis (2003–15)’ published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS). 

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of  Ideas on Europe, JCMS or UACES.

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Tom Sauer is Associate Professor in International Politics at the Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium). He has published six academic books, and numerous journal articles, mostly on nuclear proliferation and disarmament. He is a former BCSIA Fellow at Harvard University. Sauer is also an active member of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and received the 2019 Rotary International Global Service Award.

 

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Martina Vukasovic

The fourth edition of the International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP) took place 26-28 June 2019, in Montreal (Canada), on the premises of the University of Concordia (following the 1st ICPP in Grenoble in 2013, the 2nd ICPP in Milan in 2015, and the 3rd ICPP in Singapore in 2017). The conference  included more than 150 thematic panels organized into 22 larger thematic groups, covering conceptual themes related to e.g. policy process theories, governance, comparative policy analysis, implementation, policy design etc., as well as sessions dedicated to specific policy domains (e.g. health and environment).

 

Apart from this, two roundtables and one keynote speech were organised. The opening roundtable focused on populism, right-wing parties and immigration policy in North America and Europe, while the topic of the closing one was governing in turbulent times, in particular in relation to how public policy can address the “climate disorder”. On the second day of the conference, Frank Baumgartner gave a keynote speech on the infrastructures necessary for comparative policy analysis, in particular highlighting the Comparative Agendas Project. The conference was preceded by a set of courses focusing on various theoretical and methodological approaches.

 

Higher education, research & innovation

When it comes to higher education, research and innovation, there were three interesting panels with active participation of members from the ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies. First, “Knowledge Policy Dynamics in the Global Context”, comprising two sessions, included papers on role of consultants in academia, politics of higher education in general and internationalization in particular, governance capacity of stakeholder organizations, pull and push factors of academic mobility, Bologna Process through international regimes lens, and institutionalization of applied research. Second, the “Bridging Science and Diplomacy in Global Policy Making” panel, comprising three sessions, focused on comparisons between EU, US, China and former USSR scientific diplomacy, discussions on differences and similarities between cultural and education diplomacy, use of science diplomacy on broader diplomatic efforts, and exploring tools of science diplomacy (including branding). Finally, the third panel focused on theorizing internationalization of higher education from a policy perspective.

The conference also included panels on educational policies, comparative policy analysis, interest groups, complexity in public policy, policy transfer, policy design, policy advise, expertise and evidence, accountability and legitimation, etc. 

At present, it is not yet clear where the fifth ICPP conference will take place in 2021. In the meantime, the International Public Policy Association (IPPA) will be organizing a number of events, including several public policy schools.

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Image: BBC

There’s much to consider from Boris Johnson’s first half-day in office, but let’s focus on a central question: what is his Brexit policy?

At one level, this is perfectly clear: the UK must leave the EU on 31 October, “no ifs, no buts”, ideally with a deal, but without one if necessary.

But this is not nearly as simple as it appears.

Dates

Let’s start with the deadline itself: 31 October.

Johnson advanced no particular logic for this date in his first speech at Number 10, noting only that: “…we are going to fulfil the repeated promises of parliament to the people and come out of the EU on October 31.”

But that date wasn’t a promise made by Parliament, since it’s the result of a government request to extend Article 50 to that date, to which the EU agreed.

Moreover, Parliament has repeated rejected the option of not leaving the EU, so it can’t be that either.

Presumably, Johnson means that this has all taken too long, “because the British people have had enough of waiting.”

Fair enough, but then still his approach doesn’t stand up.

Plan A

Johnson suggests that his Plan A is to secure a revised Withdrawal Agreement (WA) – “without that anti-democratic backstop” – by this deadline.

But as the Institute for Government has been pointing out, the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) that would be necessary to translate the provisions of the WA itself into British law would take at least 10 sitting days to pass Parliament. Factor in that this would not be an uncontentious piece of legislation – more Maastricht than Nice – and the government’s lack of majority in the Lords, and could easily find that all the remaining sitting days before 31 October would be needed.

And that’s even before whatever time is needed to renegotiate the WA’s contents, something that now looks set only to begin in September.

Since Johnson says that no-deal is not the desired outcome, then renegotiation is a serious intention, but in a situation where he secures a new text, there is no indication of how he would deal with finding himself half-way through WAB approval on 31 October. Does he ditch it because of the “no ifs, no buts” deadline, or does he push it back, because a deal is what he wants?

Plan B

So maybe the intention to renegotiate isn’t sincere. Certainly, there is still to be an suggestion of what an alternative WA model, without backstop, would involve, and it’s hard to imagine what that might be, given how picked-over this ground has been for the past 18 months.

In that case, maybe the time to 31 October is really about no-deal preparation.

But the government has long claimed it is ready for no-deal, so why delay until 31 October?

If people have had enough of waiting and there’s no realistic chance of renegotiation on the terms set out, why not just cut loose now and tell the EU it’s not going to happen: the sooner, the better for taking back control, no?

Two issues arise here.

The first is that the UK is evidently not ready for no-deal. Johnson himself promised a ramping-up of preparations thereon in his speech. The NAO still doesn’t report operational systems on critical border infrastructure.

The second is Parliament. As much as it’s not in favour of no Brexit, so it’s not in favour of no-deal Brexit.

Plan C?

And this is maybe the crux of the matter.

Packing the Cabinet with the Leave true-believers certainly sends a signal about determination, but it doesn’t change the Parliamentary arithmetic at all. Indeed, piling 17 rather annoyed ex-ministers onto the backbench at this time looks bold.

As it stands, Johnson doesn’t have a plan for Brexit renegotiations that will be acceptable to the EU. Thus the wheels move to a no-deal scenario, which in turn makes Parliament have to decide if it will let that pass.

This gets us either to Parliament forcing the government to seek an extension, or to a general election, be that through a vote of no confidence or through Johnson’s belief that he can flip voters during a campaign.

Of course, a general election gets us into the muddy waters of what happens should that election occur after 31 October (something that’d be the case with any election called after the start of October), given the effective absence of a Commons during that period.

Which brings us back to the initial question: what is the objective of Johnson’s policy?

Given that the nominal approach appears to have no chance of success, perhaps this is just the latest in a long line of efforts to avoid blame: we wanted to renegotiate, but they didn’t; we wanted to leave on 31 October, but they stopped us.

That makes some sense, when faced with a set of poor choices, but it doesn’t address the underlying issues.

It may well be that “No one in the last few centuries has succeeded in betting against the pluck and nerve and ambition of this country”, but those things do not solve problems by themselves.

The post A deadline is not a policy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

A sobering article in today’s Financial Times by Camilla Cavendish, who assertively claims that, ‘Remainers have lost and must now accept defeat’.

Her article opens:

‘Britain’s downhill slope towards leaving the EU is getting steeper; the slide into liberation-oblivion is coming closer.’

She claims, ‘A second referendum is vanishingly unlikely. Moderates who don’t want the UK to leave the EU are still going through the motions, but that battle has already been lost.

‘The only question now is what kind of Brexit we will get.’

She goes on:

‘A second referendum looks increasingly like fantasy, since neither main party leader wants it.’

She adds, ‘MPs who oppose a no-deal exit are running out of procedural devices. On Thursday, the Commons voted by a majority of 41 to prevent the next administration from suspending parliament for more than two weeks.

‘That guarantees slightly more time for the moderates to try to force the prime minister to request an extension. But it would still be a tall order.’

She says of Mr Johnson becoming Prime Minister next week, ‘In the honeymoon period, Tory rebels will come under extreme pressure not to be “turncoats” who vote with Labour. Few will be willing to trigger the ultimate sanction: bringing down their own government in a no-confidence vote.’

The key for Boris Johnson and his team would be to postpone any general election until after 1 November, by which time, Britain would have left the EU.

And she concludes:

‘The forces of political gravity mean there is no point in wishing away the referendum result.

‘The best we can hope for is that both sides will strike a better deal than no deal, and avoid leaving the country in limbo.

‘Tories who say they want to “finish the job” will soon find out that the real job will only start when we leave.

‘You can’t climb up a slippery slope — you can only go forward into the unknown.’

Is she right? Depressingly, quite possibly.

Where is the potent, effective, determined, professional counter attack by the Remain movement?

I can’t see it.

Where is the national, brilliant awareness campaign to explain to the nation how almost everything they’ve been told about the EU these past 40 years has been grotesquely wrong?

The intense drive to properly explain the positive benefits of EU membership; how the EU is democratically run by its members for the benefit of members?

I can’t see that either. We’ve never had such a campaign in the UK.

Labour is in disarray, with the worst polling ratings in its history. They still cannot say if they would support their version of Brexit, or Remain, in a new snap general election.

The LibDems don’t even have a leader yet, and precious little time for any new leader to be known, let alone loved, by the nation at large.

The Tories are about to confirm Boris Johnson as Prime Minister of the UK, with a promise by him that we will leave the EU ‘deal or no deal, come what may, do or die’ by 31 October.

Yes, there is an anti-Brexit march in London today – hopefully a huge march – with the message, ‘Say no to Boris and yes to Europe.’

The demand of the march is to call on Mr Johnson to ‘stop hurtling us towards the cliff edge’.

It’s an urgently vital message, and it needs to be heard. But it is not enough.

100 days until Brexit is due to happen, ‘do or die’, according to our next Prime Minister.

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Petitions, protests, marches, motions – they have all been tried, and for sure, Brexit has been delayed, but now its looming large. It’s in our face.

We can now peer over the perilous cliff edge, feel giddy at the sight, with our knees weakening at all the ominous predictions of economic calamity, but even that has not been enough to stop Britain now hurtling towards its Brexit destination.

What can the Remain side do in 100 days to put a legitimate halt to Brexit? Something it’s never done before?

You tell me.

 

• My video on what I believe Remain must do to win:

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• Follow my Stop Brexit campaign on Facebook: Reasons2Remain

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The torpor of summer is crawling across Europe: the siren call of that holiday you’ve promised yourself all year grows ever louder, even as your workplace empties.

So what better time of year to be kicking off what prove to be a decisive stage in the Brexit process?

Next Tuesday, we’ll find out who has won the Tory leadership contest (Boris Johnson) and which of his plans is actually going to happen. Or perhaps we’ll see the springing of a Parliamentary revolt before his feet even get under the table at Number 10. Maybe the Queen will want proof he has a majority before accepting him as the new PM.

Or maybe we’ll just roll into summer, desperate for a break and eager for the hope that someone else will sort it out before September comes round.

This is only partly about summertime: it’s much more about the pain of politics at the moment.

As we’ve seen endlessly rehearsed, none of the options on the table are pleasant, happy ones, which would make everyone – or even, many – content. Instead, they all involve substantial costs; to economies, to politics, to reputations. The incentive here is to avoid those costs, to push them on to someone else to deal with, rather than to seek out consensual solutions.

This has been the theme of Brexit, ever since June 2016 and there’s no good reason to think that will change.

With that in mind, perhaps it’s useful to think about what other indicators there might be to the coming weeks/months, based on what we’ve seen so far in the UK.

The most obvious candidate so far has been the strong tendency to delay what cannot be easily addressed. All of the steps to date have been very much weighted to the back, from the protracted wait to get to Art.50 notification, through the backstop package, to the saga of UK ratification. There has not been a single point where the earliest possible opportunity was taken to tackle an issue.

As I tell my students in negotiation, delay is a valid tactic, but only if you have a constructive plan to make use of that time. The vague hope that something will pop up is not such a plan.

The second offering is the observation that the overall direction of travel has been consistent with the expected process: the UK votes to leave; it notifies its intention to leave; it negotiates a Withdrawal Agreement; it tries to ratify that. The calls to either stop that process or to exit it into a no-deal have failed to gain wide support, broadly speaking, with the implication that there is some weight behind continuing down this path.

For all the Johnson talk about no-deal, it’s more striking to me that there remains a presumption that a deal is preferable (and achievable), when it is self-evident that such a thing cannot happen in the terms being suggested. Since I never resort to the notion of stupidity to explain behaviour, either the rhetoric or the approach is wrong.

Which brings us to the final thought: actions have been a better indicator than words.

A lot of people have talked an awful lot about Brexit – yes, including me (BTW check out the podcast: it’s got some great interviews) – in such a contested political space, the capacity to separate the signal from the noise is limited. That’s especially true when so many political actors are trying to power-stance their way to the front of the debate.

Much more valuable has been looking at material actions taken, be that in organisation, or in negotiations or in votes.

As I’ve argued in this thread, that’s where we’ll learn more about Johnson’s next steps:

I've not tweeted much about #ConservativeLeadershipRace, mainly because I'm placing a high discount on their Brexit remarks prior to actually entering office.

However, it's useful to think about what we should look for in those opening days

1/

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) July 8, 2019

All of which might just be a long way of saying that you might better use this weekend to do something else.

The post Deeds, not words: getting ready for the next stage of Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Andrew Cottey argues that the existing literature on EU foreign, security and defence strategy has paid insufficient attention to two basic prior questions: what is strategy? And what constitutes good strategy? Answers to these questions help us to understand why the EU struggles with strategy.

The 2003 European Security Strategy and the 2016 EU Global Strategy are generally viewed as landmark documents in the development of EU foreign, security and defence policy and have triggered much debate on the character of EU external strategy. We should, however, be sceptical of official strategy documents. Strategy has become de rigueur. States, government departments, international organisations, businesses, non-governmental organisations and universities all adopt official strategy documents. Such strategy documents, however, are often long lists of aspirational goals and even longer lists of existing policies and activities – plus some new ones that, in reality, may or may not be implemented. Strategy risks becoming a synonym for policy or even for everything that an organisation does or aspires to do.

In assessing EU foreign policy strategy – and documents like the European Security Strategy and the EU Global Strategy – we should go back to basics and ask what is strategy and what defines good strategy? If one examines the writings of key military and business/management thinkers on strategy, there is a consensus that strategy is – or perhaps ought to be – about the integration of ends, ways and means. Strategy is thus about the identification of objectives or goals, the development of concrete policies or actions to achieve those goals and the allocation of the necessary resources. According to Echevarria, this ends-ways-means formula ‘is as recognizable to modern strategists as Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is to physicists.’

A second question is what constitutes good or successful strategy? According to Eliot Cohen strategy is a ‘theory of victory.’ Strategy is thus an approach – a choice amongst others that might be pursued – that makes a decisive impact, that enables one to achieve one’s objective or, at least, brings one closer to that goal. Critics such as Richard Rumelt argue that bad strategy is the inverse of this: it avoids choice and it incorporates long lists of objectives and actions, rather than identifying a small number of key objectives where one may hope to have a real impact and allocating political attention and resources accordingly.

How does the EU measure up against these definitions? The EU’s central problem is its character as polity. Notwithstanding the creation of institutions such as the foreign policy High Representative post and the European External Action Service (EEAS), EU foreign policy-making remains heavily inter-governmental. Consequently, EU foreign, security and defence policy still depends to a large degree on consensus amongst the member states. In terms of strategy, this pushes the EU and documents such as the European Security Strategy and the EU Global Strategy towards a lowest common denominator and shopping list approach. Rather than identifying a few core objectives where the EU might hope to have the greatest impact, the EU retains a long-list of global objectives. If one was being was being critical, for example, one could argue that the foreign policy goals identified in the European Security Strategy and the EU Global Strategy are the strategic equivalent of motherhood and apple pie: they are perfectly reasonable and (almost) no one could object to them, but they reflect an inability to prioritise.

The EU’s strategy problem is highlighted by the Union’s relations with the world’s three most important great powers, Russia, China and the United States. Many Eastern Europe EU members (especially Poland and the Baltic states) view Russia as a strategic threat that essentially needs to be contained; whereas Western and Southern European states view Russia either as partner to be engaged or a power driven by its own defensive insecurities (- although this has changed to a degree since the 2014 Ukraine conflict). At the same time, in recent years countries such as Italy, Hungary and Greece have pursued their own bilateral side-deals with Moscow. EU strategy towards Russia – to the extent that there can be said to be one – involves constantly balancing the competing perspectives of member states.

With China, the EU has for more than twenty years pursued a strategy of engagement and bilateral institution-building through what the two term their comprehensive strategic partnership. The aim has been to encourage China to play by the rules internationally, further reform its economy and liberalise politically. Since the 2010s, however, China has become more assertive internationally (for example, in its disputes with South East Asian states and Japan in the South and East China Seas), more repressive politically and has done little to open its economy foreign companies. In strategy terms, the EU has lacked the means – policies, leverage, concrete actions – to persuade China to moderate its behaviour. EU member states, again, are divided over how to respond to the new China. France and the UK are now joining the US and other Asian states in undertaking freedom of navigation operations in the South and East China Seas. Many other EU member states, however, would rather benefit from trade and investment ties with China and avoid contentious geo-political issues. The EU lacks the means to shape Chinese behaviour in the way it hopes, but is unable – or unwilling – to develop an alternative strategy.

With regard to the United States, the EU is torn between an Atlanticist strategy of maintaining the closest possible relations with the US and a Europeanist strategy of developing the EU as an actor more independent of the US. Amongst EU members, France leads the Europeanist wing, the UK (currently in the exit door) and Poland lead the Atlanticist wing, and Germany is in the middle. The EU Global Strategy included the objective of strategic autonomy, but there is no consensus about what this means – or even whether it is desirable.

Some observers believe – or hope – that US President Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ policy or Brexit may be the moments that forces the EU to get its act together strategically. Such hopes are likely to be disappointed. EU member states remain divided in their assessments of the external environment they face, the relative priority of different international challenges, the appropriate approaches for addressing these challenges and the extent to which they are willing to pool sovereignty in the interest of developing a common approach. Neither the Trump presidency, nor the removal of the British awkward partner are likely to alter these realities.

If one takes the perspective of emergent strategy, the EU can be viewed as in the process of developing a foreign and security policy strategy through learning and trial and error – but this process can only be viewed as painfully slow. So long as member states remain divided on key questions of strategy and foreign policy decision-making is primarily inter-governmental, the EU is likely to remain an astrategic actor: a Union that struggles to prioritise amongst competing foreign policy goals, to identify the situations where it may have a decisive impact and to focus attention and resources on those situations, that avoids difficult foreign policy choices and that is unable to fully translate its potential into impact.

This piece draws on the article ‘Astrategic Europe‘ published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS). 

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of  Ideas on Europe, JCMS or UACES.

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Andrew Cottey | @andrewcottey

Andrew Cottey is Senior Lecturer and Jean Monnet Chair in European Political Integration, Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork. His publications include Security in 21st Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan), Reshaping Defence Diplomacy: New Roles for Military Cooperation and Assistance (with Anthony Forster, Oxford University Press/IISS).

 

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Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis meets with Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s defence minister, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 2017. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jette Carr)

Yesterday saw the first public statements from Ursula von der Leyen since her nomination as Commission President.

She swept around Brussels, meeting and greeting various groups in the European Parliament, generally trying to help them accept a deal that appeared – mainly because it actually did – to pull the rug from the Spitzenkandidaten model.

If most of the Brussels bubble attention was on her credentials to take up the role, the UK press has focused more on her lines on Brexit (here and here). On this subject, she various said that she’d like the UK to remain a member, and that she didn’t want to reopen the Article 50 negotiations.

So far, so mundane, but this hasn’t stopped some wondering if new leadership on both sides of the Channel might be a moment to change things more radically, as if the presence of Anne Widdecombe in the new Parliament is going to tip it all over the edge.

To keep that in perspective, we should keep in mind a number of salient points, which Helene von Bismarck beat me to this morning.

Firstly, von der Leyen is not Commission President: she is only the nominee for the job.

We’re still unclear as to whether the European Parliament will give her the necessary support, with the Green group already saying she’s not strong enough on environmental commitments. The S&D effectively hold the balance of power on this one, since there’s no great desire to have to rely on the support of groups beyond the 4-way centrist coalition (EPP-S&D-RE-Green). If the centre-left doesn’t go along with the deal, then we’re back into very uncertain waters for any of the top jobs.

Secondly, even successful in her appointment, von der Leyen won’t take office until the start of November, i.e. just after the current extension.

The reason for this is that as well her own appointment, she also has to navigate member states and the European Parliament through the confirmation of the rest of the Commission, with hearings in October and then a final vote. On the basis of previous exercises, there will be some nominees who don’t pass muster, plus a pile of other considerations that have to be addressed. The current Commission, under Jean-Claude Juncker, remains in office – albeit in a more caretaker fashion – until the new team is set.

Thirdly, it’s not von der Leyen’s (or Juncker’s) job to set Brexit policy, but to enact the intentions of member states.

If you need a reminder of how this works, visit the Commission’s Brexit pages and check out the mandate. The Commission represents the EU and its member states in the negotiations, but it doesn’t make unilateral decisions therein. Instead, it agrees lines with member states, negotiates them and then recommends outcomes for member states’ approval.

At best, the Commission President can suggest a line of action to the member states, but is bound by their decisions – that’s what all those brief Article 50 versions of the European Council are for.

Put together, we might see how von der Leyen is not a central part of the Brexit process at this stage, even if her views will count for something as we move towards her installation in office.

Any new Prime Minister coming into Number 10 will need to keep that in mind this summer as they work out how to advance their cause.

The post Why von der Leyen isn’t the person to watch for Brexit policy (yet) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

A recent report published by Equal Measures 2030 revealed that the world is far from achieving gender equality as planned in the 2030 Agenda, despite recent momentum around the issue.

Indeed, in the past ten years, numerous efforts have marked progress in the advancement of gender and peacebuilding. In 2000 the UN adopted its UNSCR 1325 – the Women, Peace and Security Agenda – which was followed by eight other resolutions. Some Member states then adopted National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security, and regional organisations developed their own Women, Peace and Security Agenda, such as the European Union, NATO and the African Union. Both the 2000 Millenium Development Goals and the 2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development included a goal to achieve gender equality and empower women and girls.

The EU remains highly engaged on the issue as exemplified by the speech of Federica Mogherini during the Academic Roundtable on Women, Peace and Security on June 25th. (Her speech was read by Ambassador Mari Marinaki because of the absence of the HR/VP due to an emergency.) In her speech she recognises the importance of including women in peace processes notably because “war is always man-made, but peace lasts longer when it is woman-made”. She also acknowledged the work done by the EU with the Gaziantep Women’s Platform in Syria or with policewomen in Afghanistan. She ended by saying that “making women’s voices heard is not enough. If our voices are heard but nothing changes then it does not make such a big difference. It only increases the frustration” – highlighting the importance of acting seriously on gender equality.

However, with the recent rise of populism and far-right political parties in Europe, gender objectives such as those defined in the 2030 Agenda seem ever more difficult to achieve. Far right and populist parties have a negative impact on women’s rights and therefore inhibit current gender efforts, but also erode the gains already made. These parties can have discourses which throw existing rights into question, or even blatantly anti-feminist positions. For instance in 2018, following the #metoo movement, the European Parliament rejected a proposition that all new MEPs follow a mandatory sexual harassment training. The plan was struck down following a far right campaign. Last February, global leaders such as Irina Bokova and Susanna Malcorra launched the Group of Women for Change and Inclusion, where they highlighted the fact that populist parties have contributed to harming women’s rights. One example was the potential negative impact of Brexit on women, as the European laws which protect women’s rights won’t be automatically applicable in the UK after its departure.

There is equally a risk that a certain fatigue may occur, both from women who feel that institutions and countries are not evolving fast enough in their gender work as well as from others who feel they have heard enough about the topic. There is a growing feeling that the work on gender equality is “done” and that gender is not an issue anymore. Despite a sense of urgency to advance gender work it seems that the opposite may happen. While gender rights have become more mainstream in law, there remains a big gap in practice: policies have been adopted, conferences have been organised about gender but it is crucial that we now move beyond the symbolic surface level.

This fatigue was at the core of the annual conference of the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives, “Integrating Gender Perspective and Accountability, Top-Down versus Bottom-up Approach” (4-7 June 2019). During the conference, a lot of issues were tackled, from the importance of female role models and women in position of leadership, to the crucial role of education in changing attitudes and behaviours. It was very surprising to see women from the audience – including military representatives – who spoke about their feeling of impatience and fatigue concerning gender efforts and the need to move forward on the implementation of NATO policies on gender.

During the conference the book NATO, Gender and the Military: Women organising from within was launched. This book studies NATO’s engagement with gender issues and questions NATO as a hegemonic masculine institution. It highlights the fact that gender work is not new for NATO, and that the organisation has long been aware of the importance of including women and of the risks of ignoring them, but it takes quite a long time to see real action. The book reveals the hard work undertaken by women within NATO to advocate for change on gender, and the institutional resistance they encountered.

In order to prevent so-called fatigue from slowing the progress already made, creative initiatives need to take place. For instance, QCEA is currently launching a new project in partnership with the UACES-Gendering EU Studies Research Network. The global objective of this project is to address gender inclusiveness across peace and security institutions, looking in particular at leadership, strategies for overcoming institutional resistance and a lack of knowledge about the connections between gender and peacebuilding.

To that end, three short videos will be published, accompanied with concrete guidelines for people working in these institutions, on the ground as part of military operations and also those acting as gender advisors. The videos will explore three key topics:

• Why does gender matter?
• What does gender leadership look like in practice?
• Overcoming resistance to gender in an operational context

A dedicated webpage will also be created to showcase these resources and reach as many people as possible. This project is one of many initiatives trying to overcome “gender fatigue” and to advance the work of equality, in order to be the change we want to see in the world.

This post originally appeared on the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) blog and is cross-posted with their kind permission.

Clémence Buchet–Couzy is QCEA’s new Peace Programme Assistant

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Brexit supporters have claimed that European courts are out of touch and impose their will on an unwilling British public. Michael F. Harsch, Vladislav Maksimov, and Chris Wheeler argue that European courts are more accountable than these critics contend: when these courts defy the wishes of governments, judgements tend to align with public opinion. 

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One of the central claims pushed by Brexit supporters for “taking back control” from the European Union has been that European courts are out of touch and impose their will on an unwilling British public.

Ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum, then Secretary of State for Justice Michael Gove decried “an unaccountable European Court in Luxembourg, which is extending its reach every week.” During her tenure, Prime Minister Theresa May repeatedly vowed to end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the U.K.

However, in a new paper, we argue that European courts are more accountable than Gove and other critics contend. When these courts do defy the wishes of governments, judgements tend to be strategically aligned with public opinion in leading member states, as judges seek to protect themselves from political backlash.

Entities like the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg or the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (which is not part of the E.U.) often seem distant and impenetrable to voters and legislators alike. Even scholars studying these courts have difficulty agreeing on whether governments can effectively control them, for instance by selecting deferential judges or threatening non-compliance and legislative overrides of decisions.

Yet a number of recent European court decisions indicate that judges are responsive to a long overlooked force—public opinion. At a time when international rulings increasingly affect the mass public, the President of the European Court of Justice, Koen Lenaerts has even taken the unusual step to highlight that “judges live in the real world, not on the moon.” European courts might thus become more similar to the U.S. Supreme Court whose responsiveness to public opinion is well-documented.

A powerful example of European courts’ alignment with public opinion is the case of Yassin Kadi—a Saudi multi-millionaire who the U.N. Security Council blacklisted as a terror suspect in late 2001, reportedly at the request of the U.S. government. The E.U. immediately implemented this decision and froze Kadi’s assets.

Kadi challenged the E.U. sanctions in court, claiming that the E.U.’s actions presented a violation of his right to be heard, right to judicial review, and respect for his property. While a lower E.U. court dismissed Kadi’s challenge in 2005—arguing that it had no jurisdiction to review the implementation of U.N. Security Council resolutions—the European Court of Justice overruled this decision in 2008, sending shockwaves through European capitals and the U.N. headquarters in New York. The judges stated that cases like Kadi’s deserve full judicial review, and that governments need to be more explicit in explaining the reasons for imposing sanctions.

In response, the European Commission sent Kadi a scant, one-page explanation of why the Security Council had placed him on the sanctions lists, but kept his assets frozen. After Kadi again challenged this outcome in 2010 and 2013, the E.U. courts set even higher transparency standards for blacklisting decisions, despite protests by member states and E.U. institutions. How did the court become less malleable to pressure from European governments?

The answer to this puzzle may lie not in the smoke-filled rooms of Europe’s capitals or the private deliberation chambers of the E.U. courts but out in the open: through seismic shifts in European public opinion.

In the wake of 9/11, the Madrid train and London 7/7 bombings, European publics were highly supportive of strong counterterrorism measures. When Kadi’s claim was initially dismissed by the European courts, one in seven EU citizens found terrorism to be among the two most important policy issues facing their countries.

However, public opinion dramatically changed as the “War on Terror” became associated with a wider erosion of civil liberties, and European publics began to favor protecting the rights of suspects over authorizing increasingly invasive executive powers. Net support in France, Germany and the U.K. for U.S. anti-terrorism efforts dropped from an average of nearly 50% in 2002 to a net opposition of 11% in 2007.

By 2013, European publics’ concern about terrorism hit a low point and only one in fifty respondents considered terrorism to be an important issue. Other rulings by European courts during this period indicate that public opinion enabled the judges to check executive power on the issues of counter-terrorism and fundamental rights.

Yet in the aftermath of the 2015–16 terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Nice, and Berlin, terrorism has resurfaced as an issue of serious concern for Europeans, and the Court of Justice has since granted governments wider discretion in this policy area.

European courts can thus be agents of legal change and advance human rights against governments’ resistance. But this role is conditional on the presence of public support.

The case of Yassin Kadi suggests that when politicians accuse international courts of being distant and unaccountable, it may not be the judges in Luxembourg or Strasbourg who are the ones out of touch with public opinion, but the governments themselves.

This piece draws on the article International Courts and Public Opinion: Explaining the CJEU’s Role in Protecting Terror Suspects’ Rights published in JCMS.

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of  Ideas on Europe, JCMS or UACES.

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Michael F.Harsch

Michael F. Harsch is a Visiting Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.

 

 

Vladislav Maksimov

Vladislav Maksimov is a graduate student at Sciences Po’s Paris School of International Affairs.

 

 

Chris Weeler

Chris Wheeler is a recent graduate of New York University Abu Dhabi.

 

 

 

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Foolishly, I always took Groundhog Day to be a work of fiction, rather than an instruction manual. Every morning we wake up to the same debates between the same people, who still haven’t listened to (or, more accurately, haven’t heard) those who point out obstacles in the path: we just have to become better, through force of character, and it’ll be fine.

This is rather tiresome, especially I appear to lack the virtues needed for such Nietzschean Will to Power.

Yesterday brought a classic of the genre, which I caught while preparing tea: The EU is being difficult over the negotiations because it wants to keep the UK in the organisation. The desire not to make a mess in the kitchen meant I was neither able to catch the name of the man making that statement, nor to response there and then on social media (not that it would have made much difference).

Instead, I’m going to work through it here. Because it’s still annoying and still completely illogical a view to hold.

The argument being advanced runs something like this. The EU was shocked that anyone would ever want to leave, and can’t understand that the UK actually wants to do that, so now wants to throw many obstructions in our path, to demonstrate that we can never leave, not that we should want to anyway. Sort of Stockholm Syndrome at a continental level.

This sounds plausible because it fits with a more general model about the dubious motives behind European integration and the shadowy cabal that actually runs things: Faceless eurocrats sought to co-opt our own elites with promises of power and influence, out of the public gaze, but when our establishment failed to get through the referendum, the system had to preserve itself by any means necessary.

Several basic problems with this narrative present themselves.

Firstly, if the EU is so determined to stop states leaving, why allow a provision in the treaty that provides for exactly that possibility? The Article 50 clause was introduced in the Lisbon treaty as part of a more general overhaul of the basic framework of the organisation, not least to underline that membership is voluntary and contingent upon the on-going willingness of states to participate. To use the local analogy, just because you chose in the past to join, it doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind.

There’s not even an limitation on how a state decides it’s changed its mind: it does whatever it considers is needed to satisfy local constitutional requirements and the EU can’t do anything about that decision.

And this is the second problem. Once Article 50 is triggered, there is absolutely nothing the EU can do to stop a state leaving. A clock is started and if at the end of the period there’s no agreement on terms, then that doesn’t stop the state’s departure. It’s a pretty rubbish cabal that puts in place rules that deprive it of any power to stymie the loss of a member, especially when you consider that it’s one of the few International Organisations to have a specific exit clause, so they’ve obviously thought about the matter.

The only ways that the UK’s exit can be delayed past the current date of 31 October are either an extension to Article 50 – which needs the UK’s approval – or a revocation of Article 50 – which only the UK can do. There’s no delaying mechanism that the EU control alone, and none that doesn’t give power to the UK.

Ah, comes the response. The EU might not control the timeline, but it’s trying to scare the UK with talk of the problems of no-deal.

Well, maybe, but only up to a point. Not only does the EU worry about the impact of a no-deal outcome, but the vast majority of independent analysis also suggests this would be the most damaging economic and political outcome, for both sides. It places the EU-UK relationship into a very uncertain position and with some very bad mood music too.

But, importantly, it’s bad for both sides. The EU will suffer like the UK, albeit to a lesser extent. Failure to secure a negotiated outcome to Article 50 will reflect badly on all involved. given the fine words spoken since 24 June 2016. But that’s very different from not wanting Brexit to occur at all.

Consider a scenario where the UK doesn’t leave the EU. Either that’s because a government has made that decision, or because a referendum has made it for them: again, the choice has to be internal. Now think about the British political debate around this. Is everyone going to be happy with that? Will everyone accept this new decision?

Almost certainly not.

At present there’s no good reason to believe that the divisions that the 2016 vote exposed and reinforced will weaken, let alone disappear. Moreover, it’s not as if the years since 2015 will be forgotten.

And that’s a problem for the EU, because its most important decisions remain ones taken by unanimity: finances, planning, enlargement. Even on those matters decided by majority voting, having an unhappy and disruptive UK at the table is not the path to a more functional organisation.

The EU lives through and because of its member states: if those states can’t accept the compromises and constraints that membership brings, then this poisons the entire functioning of the Union, because membership also brings power and consequence to those states. The value of having another member always has to be balanced against the costs that brings.

To return to the this trope of an overly-possessive EU, it simply doesn’t stand up to any inspection, either in letting this situation arise in the first place, nor in a basic analysis of how the EU works as a body.

Not that this is likely to stop it getting repeated soon.

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