Ideas on Europe Blog

By Caroline McEvoy (University College Dublin)

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What influences public support for or trust of the European Union (EU)?

Political scholars continue to grapple with this precise question, which is especially relevant for our contemporary politics. The change in public attitudes towards the EU over the past two decades is striking. In 2013 only 31 per cent of Europeans reported trust for the EU compared to 50 per cent, nine years previously.  As of 2017 trust levels sit at 41 per cent.

In the last ten years, the public image of the EU has been of an institution fighting multiple fires including an economic recession, a refugee crisis, an increase in support for Eurosceptic populism in several member states, and a contentious ‘divorce’ process with the United Kingdom.

One way to view the UK’s decision to leave the EU is to see it as a consequence of low levels of support. While many have already argued that the vote to leave was driven by concerns over immigration and the cost of membership to the economy, I go further to argue that there is an underlying logic to these drivers.

This logic was encapsulated in the simple message promoted by the Leave campaign – take back control. The Leave campaign capitalised on the low levels of trust among the British public to convince enough voters that the EU does not listen to the voice of the British public and that policy is effectively made without their input.

This discourse is of course not new. Those who have long argued that the EU has a democratic deficit argue that policy-making is too distant from the citizens and Brussels politics is perceived as removed from everyday democratic processes. Yet, the majority of studies that have examined the public’s perception of the EU tend to focus on material gains from membership rather than perceptions of substantive representation.

Such research argues that the public lacks a collective “European” identity which prevents them from trusting the EU’s democratic processes over the long term, particularly during times of political and economic crises. According to this narrative, a person who does not feel European will have little reason to trust and support the EU if it does not create material benefits for them. As a consequence, researchers argue, support for the EU largely comes from short-term economic gains. If the EU stops delivering economically, public support is withdrawn.

My article challenges this dominant thread in the literature. In it, I focus explicitly on the importance of voice on public support for the EU. While there is evidence that material gains related to economic conditions are an important feature of support for the EU, I argue that a belief that one’s voice is heard in the EU – a concept known as external political efficacy – is, at least, as influential in explaining public attitudes.

In bringing the role of political efficacy back into the debate, I show that when a citizen feels that their expressed interests are taken into consideration in the EU’s decision-making processes they are more likely to support it. Importantly, they are likely to continue to support it even when their attitudes towards the economy are pessimistic. Put another way, citizens are less inclined to withdraw their support for the EU during periods of economic downturn provided they feel that the system is, at the very least, listening to their interests. Understood in this way, public attitudes toward the EU are reflective of David Easton’s classic typology of political support. Effectively, citizens must have their policy needs met some of the time within a political system; however, since it is impossible to satisfy all individual preferences all of the time, the public must also hold a ‘reservoir of favourable attitudes’ towards the system which allows them to tolerate unfavourable outcomes. This allows for them to continue offering long-term legitimacy to democratic institutions.

Using a standard Eurobarometer survey from November 2013, I test propositions derived of Easton’s typology.

The below graph (Figure 1) shows the results for individuals with both high and low levels of political efficacy. People with high efficacy believe their voice counts in the EU while those with low efficacy believe it doesn’t.

Figure 1:  Public Support for the EU at Varying Levels of Economic Expectations.

The results are clear. When a person believes that their voice counts in the EU, their belief that economic conditions are declining (or improving) has little impact their support for the EU (a difference of about 6 per cent).

The top line in Figure 1 is almost flat, showing that people who feel heard by the EU are likely to support it regardless of how they feel about the state of the economy. By contrast, when people feel that their voice is ignored by the EU they are much more likely to rely on their perceptions of the economy when considering how much (or how little) they support the EU.

The lower line in Figure 1 shows how the likelihood of supporting the EU is lower, in general, for such individuals but is particularly pronounced when they believe economic conditions are worsening (a decline of about 31 per cent compared with those who believe the economy is getting better).

Ultimately, these findings highlight the importance of voice among the European electorate and show how feeling that one’s voice counts in the EU can bolster support for the system, even at times when the economic outlook is poor. The results of the article speak to the wider debate of declining support and the EU’s so called democratic deficit particularly after economic austerity.

Citizens need to feel that their interests are heard and articulated in the decision-making process if the EU is to thrive in the long run as a democratic system.  This is something that the EU has struggled with in the past, but it has become clear that the EU can no longer ignore it, particularly when faced with successive crises.

This blog draws on the research originally published in JCMS Volume 54, Issue 5. It won the best article prize for 2016.

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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Caroline McEvoy | @carolineamcevoy

Caroline McEvoy is Lecturer / Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin.

Her research interests are in the areas of political behaviour and public opinion with a particular focus on political representation in Europe. Previously, Caroline was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral fellow at UCD (2015-2017) and Teaching Fellow/Adjunct Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin (2013-2016).

The post The Key to Public Support for the EU is Efficacy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Almost a year into our editorship of JCMS, we are very proud to launch our official blog. The purpose of the blog is to facilitate the space for debate on issues of academic importance and policy relevance in European and comparative regionalism studies.

As we stated in our editorial note a couple of months ago, we intend for JCMS to remain the place for original and exciting research. Moreover, we seek to actively promote the diversity inherent within this field and thus undertake to support new approaches and multidisciplinary stances.

In this sense, we acknowledge the inequalities in our field, and will work with others to decrease the gender citation gap while supporting the work of early career researchers towards publication. Moreover, we aspire to increase representation especially for scholars in the global South.

Already, we believe that the global nature of our team, a change to the previous editorial model, is a great start to attaining many of the objectives of our term as editors. Within our team, we have attained gender parity and have a mix of expertise within European and regionalism studies.

Looking to the future, we believe our ambitions have practical implications. With more scholars and readers accessing online-only content, we will be moving to an electronic format in the medium.

The 2020 JCMS Special Issue will be our first to appear online only. The online only format allows us to provide the benefits of rapid publication, while still offering the thematic and topical grouping of content for readers. We are grateful for the support of our professional association, UACES and our publishers John Wiley & Sons in facilitating this move.

This blog will support the work of our authors, by giving visibility to the articles published in the main journal and the JCMS Annual Review by communicating key themes of published articles. This will also be the space for scholars in the discipline to communicate new ideas, pedagogical innovation and support other authors, especially early career researchers.

The blog will also communicate news and additional content on the JCMS. The use of alternative forums, including this blog and other modes of social media, is essential to promoting new research, strengthen dissemination and generally enhance the visibility of newly published research.

Through our new journal website, designed and supported by Wiley, we hope that you will see our commitment to ensuring easy access to forthcoming articles, see the journal’s most cited and most downloaded pieces and allow for the editors to promote details on citations and the journal’s Twitter account.

We hope that through the of social media, and especially through the JCMS blog, we will be able to reach our contributors and reviewers in manner that allows for greater interaction with the journal and creating a space for communicating the cutting edge ideas and research that is the hallmark of the journal.

The Editors in Chief
Toni Haastrup and Richard G Whitman (University of Kent)

 

JCMS Editorial Board

Editors in Chief
Toni Haastrup, University of Kent, UK
Richard G Whitman, University of Kent, UK

Co-Editors
Heather MacRae, York University, Canada
Annick Masselot, University of Christchurch, New Zealand
Alasdair Young, Georgia Tech University, USA

Book Review Editors
Ruby Gropas, European University Institute, Italy
Gaby Umbach, European University Institute, Italy
JCMSBookReviews@EUI.eu

Annual Review Editors
Theofanis Exadaktylos, University of Surrey, UK
Roberta Guerrina, University of Surrey, UK
Emanuele Massetti, University of Surrey, UK

The post Welcome from the Editors appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

After being busy getting elected in May 2017, Emmanuel Macron used the traditionel French ‘Bridges of May‘ in 2018 to take a trip to Aachen in order to accept the so-called ‘Charlemagne Prize’ that the city bestows each year on a prominent individual ‘for work done in the service of European unification’.

Some might argue that Macron has actually not yet had the time to do much for European integration, but it seems that in the troublesome period we are currently going through, winning an election with a distinctly pro-European agenda  already qualifies.

Macron interviewed (in French!) by Tagesthemen.

For Macron the trip was an opportunity to hammer some messages home to his German audience in the largest sense. And he seized it in his typical manner: not only in his acceptance speech – broadcast live, then quoted and commented upon by the entire media spectrum – but also in a television interview for the renowned evening news show ‘Tagesthemen’. And, of course, in a friendly meeting with the crowd at a street festival in the city centre, and a more focused visit to the (reputed) University to meet and exchange with students.

But since his visit coincided with the first anniversary of his coming to office, it was also an occasion for the Germans to take stock of his first year in the Elysée. For instance, the prime-time geopolitical TV magazine ‘Weltspiegel’ dedicated an entire (well-balanced) special issue of 45 minutes to the French citizens’ perception of their new President.

As Voltaire’s Professor Pangloss would have concluded, everything was fine ‘in the best of all possible worlds’. There are still some TV journalists around who do high-quality work and have an international mindset – how many of the Parisian know-all pundits would have been able to interview Angela Merkel in German? Just asking. And the ease with which Macron adapts to different settings and interlocutors without reducing the quality of his spoken language remains amazing. Add to this the tangible sincerity of Franco-German friendship that can be felt on such occasions among all audiences, and you have a perfect little spring break.

And yet, even though Macron himself seems to be appreciated by the Germans (including Mrs Merkel), despite his very frank messages about the need to stop procrastinating and clinging to budgetary ‘fetishism’ at a historical moment of European integration, there is a strange atmosphere in Germany these days, as if the new government was paralysed under a lead blanket.

True, quite a few quality media acclaim the European plans of this both ‘uncomfortable and praiseworthy’ friend. But this does not really come as a surprise: rather than being populated by the losers of globalisation and European integration, these editorial offices are staffed with enlightened liberals, who would have massively voted for Macron if only the German political system allowed for the emergence of such a Maverick.

And now – surprise, surprise! – the Chancellor has gone so far as to formulate a prudent response to Macron in a Sunday paper interview. It is unclear, however, whether her proposals are simply politely put red lines disguised as constructive compromises, or pseudo-offers that she expects to be diluted anyway in the domestic and European debate. Perhaps she simply wants to recover leadership on the domestic debate again, after the publication last week, in the same newspaper, of a manifesto against the deepening of monetary union signed by 154 professors of economics (whose predictions are, as we all know, always right on target).

Overall, the political class seems to be well in line with the professors and responds with a wall of silence. They listen politely to what Macron has to say about their ‘taboo on financial transfers’ and their lack of will and capacity ‘to project themselves’ towards a common future, ‘like our founding fathers were capable of doing’, but it’s evident they don’t hear a word. At the same time, they are forced to recognise that Macron’s domestic reforms robs them of their good old pretext of sending the French back to their own failings and request they ‘do their homework’.

Their attitude was summed up recently by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who diagnosed a flagrant ‘intellectual laziness in Germany that blocks them from addressing Macron’s proposals’.

It might be even more appropriate to quote Bob Dylan, according to whom ‘we live in a political world, where courage is a thing of the past.’ In GroKo Germany this definitely seems to be the case. The political élite, is not only ‘slumped on the sofa of complacency’ (Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian), but actually afraid of the electorate that renewed their mandate. They cannot imagine that the public would be ready to accept the simple truth that Germany has been and still is the biggest beneficiary of the monetary union and the single market altogether. Some of them may realise that it’s about time this truth is spoken out – and some of them, once out of office like Sigmar Gabriel, actually say it out loud – but they all know it is utterly incompatible with the traditional home-grown narrative of Germany as Europe’s ‘cash cow’. And they are convinced it would provide the AfD with even more momentum.

This is no longer ‘intellectual laziness’ but ‘intellectual panic’.

And it is deeply dishonest, after having published a solemn coalition agreement that starts with the very commitment to ‘A new awakening for Europe’. I would be glad to be told wrong by a sudden ‘new awakening’ in German politics, but for the time being, this is nothing short of hypocrisy.

The only encouraging variable in this strange configuration is that the German political class, after having successively dealt with Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande, totally underestimate Macron’s capacity of opposing them with a rare mix of compelling intellectual persuasiveness and pig-headed obstinacy. Remember my football metaphor of Gegenpressing !

Macron may be imbued with his own brilliance and so much convinced by his own ideas that it borders on arrogance. But his character is a glimpse of hope for Europe.

The post Mr Macron goes to Germany appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This post first appeared at the EU Law Enforcement Blog

 

The “refugee crisis” has led to the establishment of the European Border and Coast Guard (EBCG) (the successor of Frontex) in 2016 and the transformation(still under negotiation) of the European Asylum Support Office (Easo) into a European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA). The expansion of the operational tasks of the EBCG and the future EUAA in comparison to Frontex and Easo is clear. While Frontex and Easo have traditionally been characterized by their operational role and assistance to the frontline Member States on the ground, Europol under the recently adopted Regulation 2016/794 has also started to assist those national authorities subject to the extraordinary and sudden arrival of mixed migratory flows.

Europol is a hub of information and intelligence that is starting to develop a significant presence on the ground by providing operational support to the national migrant smuggling and human trafficking investigations. Nonetheless, the extent of Europol’s involvement and assistance to the Member States remains unclear. The recently adopted Regulation 2016/794 neither refers to the operational tasks of the agency, nor the deployment of staff of Europol in the hotspots. Hence, in this blog post the emerging operational role of the agency in migrant smuggling matters is examined. In particular, the participation of Europol in Joint Investigation Teams (JITs), the establishment of the European Migrant Smuggling Center (EMSC), and the tasks that the agency undertakes in the Greek and Italian hotspots is analyzed.

Firstly, according to article 6 Regulation 2016/794, Europol is authorized to request the competent authorities of the Member States to initiate, conduct or coordinate a criminal investigation. Interestingly, in the case that the concerned Member State decides not to accede to such a request, the competent national authority is required to inform Europol of the reasons for their decision within one month of receipt of the request (article 6(3) Regulation 2016/794). Regulation 2016/794 vests a nascent operational role to Europol by determining that the agency may coordinate, organize and implement investigative and operational actions to support the Member States. Europol is, however, not authorized to apply coercive measures to conduct any of its operational tasks (article 4(5) Regulation 2016/794), which would ultimately contravene article 88(3) TFEU (“the application of coercive measures shall be the exclusive responsibility of the competent national authorities”).

In particular, Europol may participate in JITs and coordinate, organize and implement investigative and operational actions in order to support the national enforcement authorities (article 4(1)(c) and (d) Regulation 2016/794). According to article 5(1) Regulation 2016/794, “Europol staff may participate in the activities of joint investigation teams dealing with crime falling within Europol’s objectives”. Although the agency no longer needs the authorization of the concerned Member States to take part in a JIT, Europol remains unable to independently initiate a JIT, and may only propose such a measure to the Member States and take actions to assist the competent national authorities in setting up the team (article 5(5) Regulation 2016/794) (see, Council Resolution on a Model Agreement for setting up a JIT and the JITs Practical Guide).

Since Regulation 2016/794 entered into force on 1 May 2017, Europol participated in several JITs (see here or here). For instance, Europol coordinated an investigation regarding an organized criminal group that was illegally transporting migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria to the EU through the Balkan route. Europol also took part in a JIT that dismantled a migrant smuggling network operating across Europe. Specifically, the agency facilitated the investigation’s information exchange, provided extensive analytical support, deployed its mobile offices to Belgium and the UK, and analyzed, exchanged in real-time and immediately cross-checked against Europol’s databases the information gathered.

Moreover, article 4(1)(l) Regulation 2016/794 states that Europol shall “develop Union centers of specialized expertise for combating certain types of crime falling within the scope of Europol’s objectives (…)”. These centers aim to coordinate, organize and implement investigative and operational actions to assist the Member States in combating transnational crime and terrorism. On22 February 2016, Europol launched the EMSC. This center aims to proactively support EU Member States in dismantling criminal networks involved in organized migrant smuggling, and to be a single entry point for inter-agency cooperation on smuggling.

Since February 2016, the EMSCassists the competent national enforcement authorities by providing secure-information, sharing opportunities and strategic and operational analysis, gathering evidence, and undertaking investigations against the smuggling networks facilitating illegal entry, onward secondary movement, and the residence of migrants in the EU. The assistance of the EMSC is divided into five main areas for action: 1) Operational support, coordination and expertise; 2) Strategic support to EU Member States and partners; 3) Platform for EU Member States and partners; 4) Support to the European Union Regional Task Force (EURTF) and Hotspots; 5) Deployments on-the-spot via Europol Mobile Investigation Teams (EMIST) and Europol Mobile Analysis Teams (EMAST).

According to the first EMSC Activity Report, the leading role of the Center is assisting and coordinating cross-border, anti-smuggling operations, which requires close coordination with partner agencies (namely, Eurojust and the EBCG). The second activity report of the EMSC further details that the Center assists the competent national enforcement authorities in cases related to migrant smuggling and document fraud through forensic support in relation to questioned documents and materials used to produce suspicious documents, on-the-spot support to provide technical assistance and expertise in investigating forged documents and dismantling illegal print shops, and permanent deployments in the hotspots. As of September 2017, the EMSC had supported 68 investigations against criminal networks in 2017 and 93 in 2016, 3 JITS in 2017 and 2 in 2016, and identified and monitored 830 vessels that may be involved in illegal migrant smuggling (Commission, “Communication on the Delivery of the European Agenda on Migration”, COM(2017) 558 final, 27.09.2017, p. 7).

The key operational novelty of the EMSC consists in deploying investigative and analytical support teams (EMIST and EMAST) and guest officers to undertake systematic secondary security checks and support frontline Member States in the hotspots. Europol’s Review 2016-2017highlights the strong operational capacity provided by the agency in the hotspots and specially the secondary security checks undertaken by the deployed officials: “Europol experts worked side-by-side with national authorities at the EU’s external borders to strengthen security checks on the inward flows of migrants, to disrupt migrant smuggling networks and identify suspected terrorists and criminals”.

Europol’s core mission at the hotspots consists in reinforcing the exchange of information, verifying such intelligence within the relevant databases, improving the national investigations, conducting operational and strategic analysis through the deployment of teams of experts on the ground, being present at the screening of the arrived migrants and, providing forensic support. The officials of Europol that are deployed in the hotspots thus offer expertise, coordinate operational meetings, provide analytical support and cross-check against the databases of the agency (see here, here and here). They aim to ensure a comprehensive EU law enforcement approach and operationally assist the concerned frontline Member States in averting and combating migrant smuggling, human trafficking and terrorist networks. As of March 2018, 19 Europol’s guest officers and 2 Europol staff were deployed in the Greek hotspots,and 16 guest officers and 2 Europol staff were deployed in the Italian hotspots to conduct secondary security checks (Commission, “Communication on Progress report on the Implementation of the European Agenda on Migration”, COM(2018) 250 final, 14.03.2018, pp. 5 and 9).

Not only is the EMSC active in supporting the national authorities in exchanging intelligence and investigating existing criminal networks operating in the Mediterranean, but Europol’s officials, jointly with the EBCG and the concerned Member State, also debrief the arrived migrants at the hotspots and assess the data gathered from the interviews and investigations. However, while Regulation 2016/794 of Europol explicitly indicates that the agency may establish centers of specialized expertise like the EMSC, it does not further clarify the specific and significant operational tasks that Europol may conduct through these centers. Furthermore, unlike the EBCG and EUAA Regulations that expressly cover the support of the agencies to the Member States in the hotspots, Regulation 2016/794 on Europol does not mention the operational role that the agency plays in the hotspots.

To conclude, while it is true that Europol still plays a secondary operational role in comparison to the EBCG or the future EUAA, the agency conducts tasks on the ground that may affect the individuals’ fundamental rights. In fact, only during October 2016, the guest officers deployed by Europol in Greece checked 1,490 persons. Currently, there is a lack of transparency regarding the specific operational support of Europol to the national enforcement authorities in their illegal migrant smuggling and trafficking of human beings investigations, which makes it almost impossible to effectively monitor the activities undertaken by the agency. If the operational role of Europol keeps expanding, the appropriateness of creating a Consultative Forum, a Fundamental Rights Officer and an individual complaint mechanism within Europol should be examined. These fundamental rights structures, which are already established within the EBCG, might be a useful way of mainstreaming fundamental rights and adding transparency to Europol’s operational tasks.

 

The post An Enforcement Role for EUROPOL in the Aftermath of the “Refugee Crisis”? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Both the Prime Minister, Theresa May​, and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn​, are offering the people the same thing. Cake.

They both think that it’s possible for us to have a cake and eat it. That’s their answer to Brexit, and it just shows how little they understand about cake… or how the EU functions.

Theresa May expects us to keep most of the benefits of EU membership – what she calls ‘frictionless access’ – without being an EU member, or staying in the Single Market or the EU’s custom union.

Of course, that’s impossible.

Even before the referendum, Mrs May said that the EU was unlikely to give Britain a better deal than their own members enjoy.

Even though she’s constantly reminded by EU leaders that it’s simply not possible to have her cake and eat it, she keeps expecting just that.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is also expecting cake after Brexit.

He says that Labour wants to keep the benefits of EU membership “with no new impediments to trade and no reduction in rights, standards and protections.”

And, just like Mrs May, he also does not want Britain to be a member of the EU, or the Single Market, or the EU’s custom union.

The only slight difference is that Mr Corbyn says that Britain would be in ‘a’ customs union with the EU, but not ‘the’ customs union. Again, it just won’t work. It’s classic ‘cake and eat it’ fantasy.

As Sean O’Grady, deputy managing editor at The Independent, commented:

‘Jeremy Corbyn’s plan is just as fantastical as Theresa May’s’.

In a speech earlier this year, Mr Corbyn’s said:

“Labour would seek a final deal that gives full access to European markets and maintains the benefits of the Single Market and the customs union… with no new impediments to trade and no reduction in rights, standards and protections.”

And last year Labour’s manifesto stated:

‘We will scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that have a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the customs union – which are essential for maintaining industries, jobs and businesses in Britain.’

But Mr Corbyn also confirmed that the UK would not be subject to the rules of the EU and its Single Market, such as Free Movement of People, and would be free to negotiate its own independent trade agreements with other countries.

Labour is playing as dangerous a game as the Tories, pretending to us that we can enjoy the benefits of the EU and its Single Market, without having to be in it, or having to accept its rules such as Free Movement of People.

Labour is trying to fob us off with cake, just like the Tories.

No country in the world enjoys the benefits of the Single Market without being signed up to it. The EU has already rejected Britain’s cake fantasies, but we keep being told we can have the cake, and we can eat it.

Theresa May said that whilst our relationship with Europe will be different after Brexit, “I think it can have the same benefits in terms of that free access to trade.”

Brexit Secretary, David Davis, said that his aim was to achieve, “a comprehensive free trade agreement and a comprehensive customs agreement that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have.”

It’s not going to happen.

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

Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn need to be honest with the nation and explain clearly what Brexit means.

It means loss of jobs and industry. It means the country suffering economically. It means losing comradeship with our allies in Europe.

After all, that’s what Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn told the nation before the referendum.

This is the bottom line: We can have Brexit, or we can have EU benefits, but we cannot have both.

And if we lose EU benefits, the country will suffer.

For Mrs May and Mr Corbyn to pretend otherwise is a shocking betrayal of the country. And it’s daft, because sooner or later the country will find out the truth.

Then, the Tories and Labour will have to own up to their dishonesty.

Wouldn’t it be better to own up now, before it’s too late, and for the sake of the country?

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Europe and Colonial Guilt in the Age of Apology

by Mike Ungersma

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

In philosophy, there is a concept known as ‘infinite regression,’ a helpful notion in trying to establish causation.  It involves determining what caused whatever one is examining, and then looking at the cause of that event, and the one before that, and so on. Or, as the website Conservapedia puts it: “An infinite regression is a proposed chain of causation in which each purported cause itself requires another event of exactly the same type to cause it.” According to one contemporary philosopher however, there is an important qualification before infinite regression can be accurately employed in examining any cause back to its origin.  Steve Patterson writes:

. . . each proposition in the chain – without exception – is contingent on its preceding premises. Each proposition is like an empty vessel, dependent on the truth-value of the premise before it. If there’s a falsehood anywhere in the chain, it poisons every conclusion which follows.

In the complex world of history, where trying to figure out why events took the turn they did, such reasoning may be problematic.  But it nonetheless seems to form the basis for countless arguments currently raging around colonialism.  Occupying someone else’s land for profit and exploitation is bad, hence all of the bad events that followed that initial action must also be bad, unlawful and immoral. As an example, take Owen Jones, columnist for Britain’s Guardian, and earlier, The Independent.  It was in the latter that Jones attempted ‘exposing’ the evils of especially British colonialism. In one column, after citing instances of colonial cruelty in British India, South Africa and the Sudan, he goes on to argue that while colonialism might have technically ended decades ago, its legacy lives on:

Hundreds of millions still suffer from the consequences of colonialism. As the then-South Africa President Thabo Mbeki put it in 2005, colonialism left a “common and terrible legacy of countries deeply divided on the basis of race, colour, culture and religion”. Across Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, conflicts and divisions created or exacerbated by colonialism remain.

Jones, and countless other commentators, are now part of a growing cottage industry condemning colonisation.  They are joined by thousands of students and their professors, action groups and charities, and even many politicians.  Their collective viewpoint is the accepted canon in academia and elsewhere.  To question them or their reasoning can be a perilous business.  Ask Bruce Gilley.  A professor of political science at Portland State University in Oregon, Gilley questioned the long-established orthodoxy in an article last year for the academic journal, Third World Quarterly, entitled “The Case for Colonialism.”

“Western colonialism,” he claimed, “was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found.”

Gilley went further: “The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it.”  And, “It is hard to overstate the pernicious effects of global anti-colonialism on domestic and international affairs since the end of World War II.”

The Third World Review, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, is published by Taylor and Francis.  Within weeks of airing Gilley’s article, it was withdrawn “at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author.”  Taylor and Francis claimed to have been threatened with violence, as did Galley himself.

The London-based Independent, covered the incident extensively:

An online petition calling for an apology and retraction from Third World Quarterly, attracted 6,936 signatures and accused Prof Gilley of “pseudo-scholarship” and arguments that “reek of colonial disdain for indigenous peoples … with the predictably racist conclusion.”

The lead drafter of the petition, Jenny Heijun Wills, associate professor of English and Director of the Critical Race Network at the University of Winnipeg added: “In our current political context, the lives and safety of refugees, and allies are being threatened by radicalised white supremacist groups.

“These kinds of ideas are not simply abstract provocations, but have real, material consequences for those who Prof Gilley seeks to dominate and objectify.”

The Independent, 12 October 2017

The rage about colonialism feeds into so many contemporaneous disputes: immigration, nationalism, populism, racism itself, issues surrounding multiculturalism, overseas aid, ‘state-building’, and on and on.  As long ago as 1971, in his T. S. Elliot Lecture Series at the University of Kent, cultural historian George Steiner identified the trend: “Seeking to placate the furies of the present, we demean the past.” He went on:

We soil that legacy of eminence which, whatever our personal limitations, we are invited to take part in, by our history, our Western languages, by the carapace and, if you will, burden of our skins. The evasions, moreover, the self-denials and arbitrary restructurings of historical remembrance which guilt forces on us, are usually spurious.  The number of human beings endowed with sufficient empathy to penetrate genuinely into another ethnic guise, to take on world-views, the rules of consciousness of a coloured or ‘third-world’ culture, is inevitably very small.  Nearly all of the Western gurus and publicists who proclaim the new penitential ecumenism, who profess to be brothers under the skin with the roused, vengeful soul of Asia or Africa, are living a rhetorical lie.

It is what another academic, Professor Amikam Nachmani, of Bar Ilan University, Israel, has called ‘the haunted present,’ the title of his 2017 book.  He notes:

This European colonial debt is prevalent particularly among the Left and liberals of the continent’s political map and is a paralysing drug.  These circles feel guilty because of their countries’ imperialism, slavery, ethnocentrism, racism and oppression of minorities in Europe and suppression of national aspirations in the colonial world.  They consequently reveal their understanding and even express sympathy with the Muslim migrant who reacts violently against the ‘white’ majority. The paralysing result is manifested in calls for European authorities not to insist on the assimilation of the newcomer, not to expatriate immigrants already on the continent.

“The essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common”, and “they must also have forgotten many things.” A remark attributed to the 19th century French philosopher, Ernest Renan.  In other words, part of being a nation can involve getting its history wrong, and most do.  Moreover, most are highly selective about their history, understandably so since a country’s collective memory is its collective identity.  Self-evidently, Britain’s heavy involvement in the slave trade – a hugely profitable ‘business’ – was morally wrong.  And remarkably, it went on for half a millennia.  Can it be judged in terms of today’s morality?  Of course, just as future generations will condemn and chastise the present generation for its failure to stop war, halt the spread of disease and famine, and tolerate inequality.

So, in the ‘Age of Apology’ what is to be done about the sins of our fathers?

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, “my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault” – lines from the Confiteor that are part of the Roman Catholic Mass.  In an echo of that ritual, the colonial nations of Europe approach the ‘altar of history,’ acknowledging their forefathers were wrong and behaved badly, pushing the very topic into the mainstream of public awareness almost to a level of self-loathing.  This is unique in human history.  George Steiner:

What other races have turned in penitence to those whom they once enslaved, what other civilizations have morally indicted the brilliance of their own past?  The reflex of self-scrutiny in the name of ethical absolutes is, once more, a characteristically Western, post-Voltairian act.

On bended  knee and prostrate before their God, Catholics strike their breasts with each utterance of this passage from the ancient Latin mass, praying for forgiveness of their sins.   Is Europe now sharing in a similar rite of mea culpa?  Self-flagellation is meaningless to those who were harmed over the centuries of colonial oppression.  And on a practical level, what meaning can it have to their descendants?  Would it not be better to employ the energies expended in this bitter debate dealing with the sins of our own age which future generations will hold the us responsible?  In the words of the priest at the end of another Catholic rite, the confession, “Go forth and sin no more.”

Mike Ungersma, Cardiff, Wales, May 2018

 

 

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All major politicians sooner or later find themselves in a hole of their own making. Even if they don’t make mistakes, they will fall into an elephant trap dug by their opponents. There are three laws to follow when in a hole: stop digging; keep afloat; and watch out for someone pulling the plug and sending you down the drain.

First law

The first law, stop digging, means first check the facts. After all, maybe you are in a hole for good reason. Amber Rudd failed to do so and had to resign after issuing a denial that was buried by evidence. Peter Mandelson’s first cabinet resignation is another classic example.

Another error is trying to climb out of the hole with a rope ladder made of cover-ups. That tactic was famously adopted by both John Profumo and Richard Nixon but couldn’t take the weight of facts. Donald Trump’s modification is: When you are in a hole, throw mud, false facts or abusive terms which the media will publicise and your friends will cheer.

The Brexit negotiations make it difficult for Theresa May to do nothing, as Brussels briefings regularly pour barrowfuls of mud down her hole. If her words don’t begin to make sense in ‘Eurospeak’ as well as in British parliamentary language, the Brussels calendar-clock will keep ticking until she is out of her hole and over the cliff of Brexit without a deal in March next year.

Second law

The second law of holes is exemplified by Theresa May’s concentration on keeping afloat. This is consistent with Michael Oakeshott’s old Tory philosophy that politics is not about sailing toward goals, but instead about keeping afloat in a boundless sea. It is matched by Harold Wilson’s dictum that keeping afloat for a week is ‘a long time in politics’.

Theresa May cannot take survival to the end of a week for granted. Last week she avoided the Cabinet’s Brexit sub-committee breaking up by offering home-made fudge. This is the political equivalent of the Emperor’s clothes, a compromise statement about a customs union that is palatable to her divided party but contains ingredients unacceptable under EU regulations. The EU is offering British negotiators the choice of real Belgian chocolate or nothing.

A small but strategically important number of pro-EU Tory MPs would like to serve fudge cooked in the House of Lords according to Walter Bagehot’s recipe. It would be wrapped in symbols of tradition such as the Union Jack.

Inside would be a fudge full of ingredients familiar in Brussels, such as the rights and obligations of participating in a customs union and single market. It is certain that this would be rejected by most Tory MPs as making Britain a vassal of Brussels. It is uncertain whether this would meet the diverse tastes of Labour MPs to be favoured by a cross-party majority in the House of Commons.

Third law

For anti-Brexit campaigners such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and members of the Eurosceptic European Research Group, the key question is: when to pull the plug and see their opponent disappear down the drain of history?

Under Conservative Party rules only 48 Tory MPs need to sign a letter requesting a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister by Tory MPs. This is less than the number of Tory MPs who would like to remove the ‘stain’ of Brussels blue from the UK and repaint the map of the world imperial pink.

A letter can be handed to the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee any week when the Commons is in session and a draft letter can be scribbled during a Cabinet meeting or parliamentary debate when the time appears right to do so. The only safe time for Theresa May before the summer holidays is the two-week recess at the time of the late May Whitsun holiday.

For a theoretical economist, the answer is easy: Pull the plug when you are sure to win. For the most ideological Brexiteers, victory would take the form of a new Conservative prime minister insisting that the European Union accept uncompromising British terms for Brexit.

If this is refused, then Britain would turn its back on Europe and sail off to explore a global future as it did in days of old. This policy could also be delivered by Theresa May if, in order to stay afloat, she accepts what Brexit means to hardline Tories.

For many pragmatic Tory MPs important issues in a vote of confidence are: How likely is it that a new Conservative prime minister would offer me a post in government? Would a new Conservative prime minister improve my chances of re-election?

For all MPs, the big question is: who will come forward with a new spade after Theresa May is buried politically? A cross-party majority vote in the Commons for a soft Brexit motion would not produce a Tory prime minister. Nor can such a majority favour terms that would be acceptable to Brussels.

A general election vote giving Labour the most MPs would put the spade in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn. He would only dig a hole for an EU flag that was purple turning red. However, this risks burying the British economy.

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A fundament of negotiation – and indeed of politics – is the notion of interaction. They are necessarily relational constructs: us and them, me fighting the system, let’s work it out together.

If politics can be about an agent’s interaction with a set of societal values rather than any one individual or group, the negotiation is more limited in that it requires two agents.

Of course, the necessity of two agents isn’t the same as saying that both will be willing participants. I might try to negotiate a pay rise, but I can get stonewalled by my employer, just as you can try to get 50p off some biscuits in the Tesco (where I like to imagine you shop).

What is much less common is a situation where one agent creates a situation where a negotiation is a logical next step, then fails to engage substantively with that negotiation, even as they continue to talk about the importance and necessity of the negotiation.

Imagine you smashed up the fancy flatscreen on purpose during your house party, then standing around saying something has to be done, not least because your parents are coming back home any time now. And they loved that TV.

It’s not the best look.

And here are, again, back at the Article 50 process.

The absence – and it really is an absence – of progress since the March draft of the Withdrawal Agreement poses a very similar problem, albeit one that probably doesn’t involve people but planes getting grounded.

Put differently, it’s not enough to say something must be done: something actually has to be done.

Quite apart from the impact on the UK, there is also an impact on the EU: while you might think an absence of ideas from the other side means they can get to just think about themselves when drawing up documents, it’s not that simple.

The root of the dilemma is that the UK isn’t completely powerless, even if it is unhelpful. In particular, the structure of Article 50 requires that the EU and the UK both approve any final Withdrawal Agreement: the EU can’t simply impose that on the UK.

Thus the EU necessarily has to take account of the UK’s preferences, because at some point the British government will have to sign off the deal, a process which now requires a vote in Parliament.

But those preferences aren’t clear at all.

Often, it’s possible to work on the basis of ‘revealed preferences’: the actions that betray what someone actually wants. Like the child who says they don’t know what they want in the candy store, but keeps looking at the gobstoppers.

Unfortunately, the only consistent revealed preference to date from London is that they would like this all just to go away and not be a problem any more. In that, it’s been a consistent policy since the end of the Second World War, but consistency doesn’t equal substance.

It’s a mark of how far things have gone that there’s a sense that any preference would be better than no preference – Nick Gutteridge had a thread on just this yesterday – because it would give everyone something to work with/around.

Of course, the added urgency behind all this is that there’s the tick-tock of the Article 50 clock: we don’t have until 29 March 2019 to do this, because we have to have got the deal ratified by then.

Arguably, that has actually complicated matters, so the model of a big all-nighter European Council seems to hang in the air of Westminster: this situation is all just posturing, so we only have to get the key players in a room with some more severe time pressure and it’ll be sorted in no time.

However, because ratification has to be fitted in too, that extra time pressure isn’t so easily created: you can always just lop off another day given to pushing this through the two parliaments.

Moreover, the European Council itself has not been a site for debating Brexit very much, but rather for confirming the work of technical talks in and around Task Force 50’s work.

This isn’t a situation that offers any easy solutions. There’s limited time, but not limited in a way that’s conducive to getting to a deal; there’s a default outcome that no-one wants; and there’s one party that is apparently incapable of deciding what it wants, but whose wishes cannot be ignored.

Expect a very hot autumn.

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This final post in the series on group project work looks at the oral group exam, which is a traditional Danish type of exam. Oral exams are integral to the Danish educational system from primary school through to university and can take different forms. This post explains the oral group exam based on a project, where it highlights some of the benefits and challenges.

The exam is structured as follows; there are two examiners (the supervisor and either an internal or an external examiner depending on the project level), who discuss the written project before the group enters the room. Each student has a right to 30 minutes examination, including assessment. Consequently, a project exam lasts between 30 minutes and three hours depending on the size of the group (1-6 persons). The students leave the room after the exam, and the examiners discuss the individual student’s performance and the written project, then each student comes into the room to receive their individual grade and feedback on their exam performance and the project. Sometimes groups decide to receive the grades together.

Colleagues who have never tried oral group exam often ask ‘how can you distinguish between the different students and their performance?’ Firstly, I always ask the students to make a nametag, so the other examiner (and me) knows who is who in the group. Secondly, it is important to take notes during the exam, so that you afterwards can assess if the individual student answered all the questions and thereby assess the level of the answers. Thirdly, some students are very nervous during exams and do not say much, whereas other students talk a lot, here it is important for the examiners to ensure the quiet students are given the opportunity to talk, this might involve asking a talkative student to be quiet. Often, the students are good at giving space to each other to allow everyone to answer the questions.

The exam starts with a short presentation by each student, before the examiners begin asking questions about all aspects of the project in relation to the formal requirements outlined in the degree programme. The dialogue between the students and the examiners sometimes leads to interesting discussions and reflections relating to methodological and theoretical choices or further implications of the empirical findings. These exams are interesting and fun, whereas other exams can be painful, for both students and examiners, because the project is not very good and the students struggle to answer basic questions. Here, it is important to give constructive and instructive feedback to the students, at the end of the exam, so that they know how to improve their research skills the following semester.

The individual grade is based on the written project and the oral examination, where the student’s performance can either drag the grade down or pull it up. Colleagues sometimes discuss the extent to which we differentiate grades between the students in a project group. Whilst it is important to differentiate between students’ grades when appropriate, there are often good reason for giving the students the same grade. Often students choose to work with peers who have the same interests and get the same grade, so there is a natural selection bias in project formation especially as the students get to know each other (see blog post on group formation and group dynamics).

Overall, the oral group exam based on a project is time and resource intensive, but they provide a good opportunity for the students and examiners to discuss the research project in details, thereby helping the students to develop their presentation skills and ability to discuss different aspects of research, including reflecting on the research process.

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It seems that the Eurozone is now moving towards a true OCA. But caution needs to be exercised as to the pace of this process as well as its detailed institutional set-up, especially in relation to democratic procedures which have been, so far, somewhat inefficient in ensuring true legitimacy and oversight.

It is no secret that the Eurozone is not a complete Optimum Currency Area (OCA). Chief among its shortcomings is the uneven level of integration between its monetary and economic aspects. When the Eurozone was created, capital restrictions were eliminated but inflation was slow to converge between the core/Northern low-inflation and the periphery/Southern high-inflation Member States (Walters critique).

Economic booms in the periphery/South, financed by excessive and cheap capital inflows from core/North, led to a loss of competitiveness that could not be restored through monetary policy. This resulted in severe trade imbalances, further weakening the import-led, deficit-expanding economies of the periphery vis-à-vis the export-led, highly competitive economy of the core Eurozone Member States. Meanwhile, the absence of a banking union and of a proper Eurozone-wide framework for resolution of problematic banking and finance institutions created moral hazard issues related to predatory lending and unsustainable borrowing, (bailouts became the only alternative for problematic banks).

A rain-check is not an option anymore for the Eurozone’s set-up. In order for EMU to function properly, avoiding crises or at least addressing them effectively, additional steps have to be taken towards a full OCA. The relevant theory, developed by Robert Mundell in the 1960s, identifies three primary characteristics: factor (mainly labor) mobility (in the event of a potential asymmetric shock, workers could move easily to low unemployment areas), convergence (similarity in economic structures of members), and fiscal integration (system of budgetary transfers that enable temporary assistance to members affected by recessions). Developments in finance after the 1960s have also raised the need for a single Central Bank that is also the lender of last resort, a backstop function for bank resolution, and for a banking union.

Have these been achieved within the Eurozone?  First, labor mobility. Improving its rather disappointing outcome has been a permanent aim for the EU. It has been calculated that US labor mobility is approximately ten times higher. The EU has accordingly  proposed, inter alia, reforming the European Employment Services Network, boosting rights of posted workers through better enforcement of EU rules, etc.

Second, economic convergence. The most advanced of the Eurozone’s post-crisis proposals here is  creating the post of European Minister of Economy and Finance, who would also assume represent the Eurozone as a whole externally. A Vice-President of the European Commission would be chosen and the same individual would also serve as the Eurogroup President. The other principal proposals here include:

• the introduction of the Capital Markets Union, which was first advanced in an EC Green Paper and which is suggested as a way of strengthening EMU by “supporting economic and social convergence … in the euro area;”
• the establishment of a financial instrument for structural reform support, monitored through the European Semester process and focusing “on those reforms that can contribute most to the resilience of domestic economies…” (e.g. product or labor market reforms, tax reforms, etc.):
• the introduction of National Competitiveness Authorities coordinated by the Commission;
• the creation of a European Fiscal Board to assist national fiscal councils;
• and the utilization of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure to formalize the convergence process.

There is also the proposal for a form of Eurobonds called European Safe Bonds (ESBies); this, however, remains at a very early stage.

Third, fiscal integration. There are two key EU policy initiatives here. The first is the creation of an EU-wide Stabilization function to be activated in the event of asymmetric shocks and to complement any relevant corresponding measures within national budgets. To be effective, this function should “allow for overall net payments of at least 1%” of GDP for the Eurozone alone, to be channeled through some type of borrowing capacity (e.g. increasing EU co-financing, ESIF pre-financing, etc.), without leading, however, to permanent transfers between Member States. The second is the upgrade of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to a European Monetary Fund (EMF) and its incorporation within the EU legal framework, with greater involvement in the financial assistance process (the ‘Troika’ have so far dominated the negotiation and monitoring of bail-outs with little ESM involvement).

Fourth, the banking union and a backstop for bank resolution. The banking union has already been set up during 2013-14, consisting of the Single Supervisory Mechanism, the Single Resolution Mechanism and the Single Rulebook (primarily  CRD IV, CRR and BRRD). However, it remains incomplete in two main aspects: a full-proof backstop for bank resolution and an EU-wide Deposit Guarantee Scheme (EDGS; other minor elements including proposals on business insolvency, reduction of non-performing loans, etc., also need to be addressed). Regarding the first, an international agreement between EU Member States was signed in 2014 establishing the Single Resolution Fund and, to complement this, the proposal that the EMF be activated when this Fund is insufficient has been suggested. Regarding the second, an EDGS has been proposed from November 2015 to develop from “a reinsurance scheme into a fully mutualized coinsurance scheme” and then into a full insurance scheme covering national schemes.

Final element of an OCA is a unified Central Bank that can also serve as the lender of last resort. The ECB is indeed a common Central Bank, except for its inability to be a lender of last resort. However, this has been indirectly addressed by several ECB initiatives such as the Securities Markets Program, the (Very) Long-Term Refinancing Operations, the Outright Monetary Transaction program and Quantitative Easing. In addition, the proposed EMF could step in as a lender of last resort within the Eurozone in a more direct manner.

Overall, it seems that the Eurozone is now moving towards a true OCA. But caution needs to be exercised as to the pace of this process as well as its detailed institutional set-up. The crisis was not only caused by structural inefficiencies, but also by a malfunctioning or overcomplicated institutional set-up (e.g. when France and Germany pushed for more relaxed SGP criteria in 2005). However, caution is necessary in the implementation of these new measures,  especially in relation to democratic procedures which have been, so far, somewhat inefficient in ensuring true legitimacy and oversight. These elements are important if the public is to believe and participate in the integration process moving forward .

First published in Social Europe on 28.05.2018.

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Somewhere in Whitehall, there’s a small office. In it, a bright young thing is working hard on Brexit. As the afternoon sun bounces down to the tiny window that provides the only fresh air, a spark flares up in the bright young thing’s mind. They dash down the corridor to their line manager, bursting through the door to breathlessly stutter: “I… I think I’ve solved how to do it.”

This, to a not inconsiderable extent, presents how many in government would have liked things to go over the past two years: a model to solve all the problems and leave everyone stunned by its beauty and creativity: Britain is GREAT at cunning plans, indeed.

Sadly, things haven’t quite worked out like this.

The breadth and depth of the issues involved, plus the rather arbitrary red lines that May set out upon her entry into Number 10, have made both simple and cunning solutions impossible. The best our imagined bright young thing might come up with is that something’s got to give.

In fairness to the government, this last point has been evident for quite some time: the difficulty has been in deciding what should give and how that’s going to be broken to all involved.

Neither of these are easy, even before we add in the obvious political and reputational costs that would be incurred. In the very worst case, the government might make a concession that leads to its demise as a viable political unit: leadership contests, party splits, general elections, ‘out of power for a generation’, etc., etc.

But at the same time there is also the ever-stronger conviction that to leave the EU without a deal would be an unnecessary and deeply counter-productive move: the ‘freedom’ it might generate would be lost in the miasma of uncertainty and damage to the UK’s standing in the international community. As the on-going discussion about an FTA with the US underlines, the UK is very much a demandeur: its need to show it can still get deals means everyone else can set a high price. Domestically, there’s also plenty to worry about as it is, even if things do run smoothly.

So let’s play the game for a bit: what does the UK have to give way on?

The big one is the balance between alignment, territorial integrity and the Irish border. If the ability to diverge matters more, then the backstop looks the least painful way to do that. The DUP won’t be happy, but if Labour get on board with the package, then it doesn’t matter (in Commons arithmetic terms, at least). If diverging isn’t so important – and remember there’s a difference between diverging and having the potential to diverge – then full UK alignment on backstop terms might work, And if neither of those work, then the UK government needs to get ready for a no deal outcome.

The smaller issue is the role of the Court: it matters, but less so, not least because technical work-arounds look more viable (mainly because they’ve already been tired out elsewhere). But essentially it requires the UK to give way on its very literal interpretation of this red line, which was never realistic in any case (as government lawyers doubtless pointed out at the time).

The cover for all this is some kind of ‘temporary‘ arrangement: witness the by-the-by noting that given the current inability to go either the customs partnership or maximum facilitation, we might just have to live with a decade or so of full alignment: lift your eyes from the mud to look at our bright, bold future.

At some level this makes sense: if people are willing to accept that this is a complex change and takes time to do properly, then the deferral might be worth it. However, if they consider it to be another step down the road of endless delay, then it’s not going to work.

Of course, much hangs on which ‘people’ we’re talking about.

In essence it’s the Tory backbench that matters here. Cabinet has its splits, but the agency of any faction to impress its preferences depends on the 1922 Committee and the ERG. Likewise, a determined backbench can stymie any attempt to reach across the aisle by prompting leadership challenges.

As I’ve noted before, the backbench isn’t minded to crash the Brexit bus, but that doesn’t mean it won’t exert a good deal of pressure on May and the Cabinet’s work over the coming months. Any putative challenger needs the cover of a conclusion of a deal before moving in, so might feel that concessions are acceptable, especially if it allows them to strengthen their case that they would have done a better job, if only they’d been in charge at the time.

However, as so often in this process, nothing is really certain. Individuals might prove inflexible, by design or by accident. Events might conspire to deny enough room for manoeuvre. The EU might succumb to hubris and overplay its hand.

Pretty much the only thing that’s clear is that the rest of 2018 are not going to be easy going for anyone involved in this. A bright young thing might decide to just keep their head down, rather than get stuck in: that might make sense for them, but not for the process as a whole.

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EHEA Ministerial conference in Yerevan in 2015. Photo credits: Fernando Miguel Galan Palomares

Martina Vukasovic

 

Embodying multi-level and multi-actor characteristics of governance

That governance of higher education and research takes place across several governance levels – institutional, national, European – is, arguably, common knowledge. The beginning of the Bologna Process and the launching of the Lisbon Strategy almost 20 years ago greatly intensified European integration and Europeanization in these two domains, as evident in European funded cooperation programmes, national reforms and institutional adaptations. While these developments are marked with various tensions between governance levels, as well as different policy domains, they are also characterized by strong involvement of stakeholder organizations, adding the ‘multi-actor’ aspect to the ‘multi-level’ description of governance arrangements.

 

What is interesting is that many of these ‘new’ actors are multi-level organizations themselves. For example, the European University Association (EUA), a consultative member of the Bologna Follow Up Group and contributor to public consultations organized by the European Commission, has national rectors’ conferences and individual universities as members, both of which are active in policy development in their own domestic policy arenas. The same goes for other university associations and alliances (e.g. EURASHE, LERU), European Students Union (ESU), professional and disciplinary organizations. Moreover, institutions, decision-making and advisory structures at the European level – such as the European Research Council or the Advisory Group on the European Qualifications Frameworks – are connected to national or institutional policy-making through their individual members and their own connections that span governance levels.

 

It is such collective non-state actors that operate across governance levels – i.e. transnational actors – that are the focus of the recently published special issue of the European Educational Research Journal, co-edited by Tatiana Fumasoli (Institute of Education, University College London), Bjørn Stensaker (Department of Education, University of Oslo) and Martina Vukasovic (Centre for Higher Education Governance, Ghent University).

 

Transnational actors as expert platforms, (latent) interest groups, meta-organizations, and linkages between governance levels

In the introduction to the special issue, the co-editors present various theoretical perspectives that have been employed thus far in analysis of transnational actors, including European integration, multi-level governance, comparative politics, policy analysis, organizational sociology and higher education research. These perspectives highlight different attributes of these transnational actors, e.g. their role in interest intermediation is particularly interesting for comparative politics, while the fact that many of them are meta-organizations – organizations of other organizations – is specifically visible through the lens of organizational sociology. The five contributions to the special issue each employ one or more of these perspectives, focusing on the shifting relationship between governance and knowledge, and on how new actors influence the processes and outcomes of decision-making within the field of higher education.

 

The European Qualifications Framework Advisory Group (EQFAG) is analysed by Mari Elken, who sheds light on the conditions conducive to organizational stability and legitimacy of a key organization in European knowledge governance. Elken’s study of how EQFAG was institutionalized shows that, while the EU constructs policy arenas to be filled up, actors profit from room to manoeuver and flexibility with regards to their new roles, suggesting that European level policy arenas can (also) act as opportunity structures for policy entrepreneurs.

 

Martina Vukasovic and Bjørn Stensaker compare two university alliances – EUA and LERU – focusing on how diverse membership bases (i.e. comprehensive vs selective) and diverse resources lead to somewhat differentiated roles and representation of interests in European policy-making. While both alliances have rather easy access to EU decision-makers, the bases for their legitimacy are different, affecting their positioning as well as the breadth and ambiguity of interests they advocate for.

 

Looking at three European student organizations (ESU, ESN, and AEGEE) Manja Klemenčič and Fernando Miguel Galan Palomares investigate the conditions determining insiders and outsiders in European knowledge policy processes. Their article shows how legitimacy plays a major role in accessing EU institutions and policy processes, even when organizational structures and resources are similar.

 

Tatiana Fumasoli and Marco Seeber provide a mapping of European academic associations, focusing on their missions, structures, and positioning. Their findings articulate a nuanced landscape where traditional scholarly associations coexist with socially orientated academic associations. Equally, their article offers an insight into the different patterns of centre–periphery structures from a geographical, political, and resource perspective and highlights the coexistence of traditional and innovative academic organizations with varied levels of access to European institutions.

 

Finally, Bo Persson investigates the role played by key Swedish science policy actors in the process of building the European Research Council (ERC) in the 2000s. The article shows how national policy actors have leveraged on their organizational capacity and legitimacy to contribute to European agenda-setting and policy formation. Importantly, the article shows how national policy actors are able to do this partly through bypassing their own state authorities, thus becoming embedded in the European policy arena.

 

Key ingredients for understanding governance of the Europe of knowledge

The in-depth analyses provided in this special issue show how European transnational actors can be conceptualized and compared according to their mandates and missions, organizational structures and decision-making processes, through their linkages to the EU institutions, the levels and types of influence in policy-making, and their position in the broader arena of European knowledge policies. These characteristics can be seen as the outcome of policy design, and of strategic intent, but also as the result of incremental and organic changes. Overall, while expertise and legitimacy could be considered requirements to access and influence policy processes, we suggest that organizational structures, resources, identities, and decision-making processes of these transnational actors need to be scrutinized further. The latter point implies that insights from comparative politics and organizational studies might be combined into a valuable framework for studying European governance in general, and that we need more studies in this area if we are to understand the governance of the Europe of Knowledge.

 

Martina Vukasovic is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG) at Ghent University. In her research she combines insights from comparative politics, policy analysis and organizational sociology in order to analyse multi-level multi-actor governance in knowledge intensive policy domains (e.g. higher education, research). More specifically, she focuses on the role of stakeholder organizations in policy processes, the interaction between European, national and organizational level changes, and the relationship between policy coordination and policy convergence. She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo and a joint MPhil (Erasmus Mundus) degree by the universities of Oslo, Tampere and Aveiro.

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Mike Ungersma argues the West may have made  

fundamental mistakes in confronting Putin’s Russia

“Russia is unlucky with timing. Everything that happened 150, 200 years ago in other countries is happening here as we speak.  You guys had your civil wars in long-ago centuries. The last murder of your king was in 1649.  We killed out Nicholas II 100 years ago.”

Russian industrialist Vladimir Potanin, Lunch with the FT

Imagine a country where your grandparents could speak of their land invaded twice in their lifetimes, two wars that saw tens of thousands of their homes destroyed, their factories looted, their cites wasted, and above all, millions of their young men killed in the worst combat in modern times. It is almost impossible, to think of any nation that has suffered more in terms of loss than Russia. But that was long ago, and while Russia has mostly recovered from the disaster, it did so along a different path than its European neighbours.

Sold on a perverted form of Maxism, led by a series of dictators starting with Stalin, the country’s post-war development stalled, stuttered from one achievement to another – all of them modest and comparatively insignificant – while the remainder of Europe moved forward, first haltingly and then spectacularly with its modified and tempered form of capitalism.  But in the East, dramatically and without warning, the “Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics” staggered and collapsed leaving behind a colossal and confused muddle of states.

The events that followed are sadly familiar.  Russia moved from a centrally planned economy to rampant oligarchy and the single-handed rule of Vladimir Putin.  By international standards the performance of its economy is mediocre at best, and almost totally reliant on the fluctuating demand for its gas and oil exports. And even they, especially oil, face an uncertain future as the world seeks more environmentally friendly alternatives.  As President Obama remarked in his last press conference, Russia “does not produce anything anybody wants to buy.”

The question that arises is why?  Why did this vast nation end up as it is today?  Given the same chances the nations of the rest of Europe had, what prompted Russians to choose the road toward continued tyranny – however disguised?  And importantly, what could the West have done to encourage Russians to steer a different course?

“The problem with the Soviet people is our country was like a cell.” It is the comment of one of those oligarchs – Vladimir Potanin, in his luncheon meeting with the Financial Times’ Henry Foy in Potanin’s private country club he built for himself and his friends an hour’s drive from Moscow.  “We were cut off,” Potanin tells Foy.  “And then we became suddenly open…those who had appetite for risks and understanding and skills of course had an advantage.”

What the “system” produced  – if corrupt and colluding government and private interests can be called a system – was a Russia where all of the state’s important assets were sold off in the infamous ‘loans for shares’ scheme.  The government callously used the country’s most valuable resources as security for loans that according to Foy, both bankers and politicians knew would never be repaid.  It resulted in a handful of oligarchs controlling 50 per cent of the entire Russian economy.

If individual nations have a certain dominant psychological characteristic, then Putin’s response to all of this was highly predictable.  Russia was like the person who fails in achieving anything important and then lashes out at others, seeking to draw attention away from his failures.  Putin flexes Russia’s military muscles to demonstrate that the country remains a powerful player on the world stage. Moreover he uses the internet’s social media to sabotage everything from Western elections to objective journalism because it is the only instrument short of open aggression available to him.  He struts and boasts, and like Donald Trump, tells the his countrymen he is determined to “make Russia great again.”

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of ordinary Russians, who for centuries have shown no real interest or understanding of representative government.  Russia, under czars or commissars, has produced no great political thinkers or philosophers – they are very thin on the ground.  Because they are not ‘citizens’ in any Western sense, Russians seem bored with the very idea of democracy with its tedious insistence on wide-spread public discussion and consultation, and its elaborate and complex electoral systems intended to insure the majority rules but only without trampling on the rights and wishes of those who disagree.  It’s easier to let Putin decide.

Could it all of this have been prevented?  Could Russia at a crucial turning point in its history – the fall of the Berlin Wall – have been steered and nudged toward democracy?  Does the West share any culpability for the present situation, what some are describing as a new “Cold War”?  The answer must almost certainly be – Yes.

Mikhail Gobachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika were bold moves that ultimately won him a Nobel prize in 1990, but they were met with indifference in the West – NATO continued to regard the now-prostrate Soviet Union as a threatening enemy.   His successor, Boris Yeltsin, continued with significant reforms.  They failed to work.  Confronted with sagging oil prices, corruption and the rise of the oligarchs, Russia’s economy not only stagnated but fell into deep recession.

In her book, The Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organised Crime, Johanna Granville writes: “Yeltsin’s policies led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market”.  Wall Street was busy, seeing a chance to profit from the decaying corpse.

Not only was the West indifferent to the democratizing opportunities that events in Russia threw up, in many ways it sought to exploit Russia’s weaknesses as its economy collapsed.  It is what historian Niall Ferguson has called “Western overreach.”  One by one, former Warsaw Pact allies of the Soviet Union were invited to join NATO.  Writing in the journal Foreign Policy earlier this year, Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said

Days after the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in March 1999, the alliance began a three-month bombing campaign against Serbia — which, like Russia, is a Slavic Orthodox state. These attacks on a brother country appalled ordinary Russians, especially since they were not carried out in defence of a NATO member, but to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo, then a Serbian province.

And the view from the Kremlin?  Steil writes: “Moscow knew that its former vassals, by joining the alliance, had now bound themselves to support Western policies that challenged Russian interests. The farther east NATO expanded, the more threatening it would become.”

And where NATO led, the European Union was not far behind.  By 2004, no less than eight former Warsaw Pact nations were offered accession to the organisation, the largest single enlargement in the Union’s history.  And in 2007, they were joined by two more former Communist countries, Romania and Bulgaria.  Russia’s historic buffer against another German invasion had disappeared.

In this context, Putin’s reaction – seen by Professor Ferguson as a “striking impersonation of Michael Corleone in The Godfather – the embodiment of implicit menace” – is hardly surprising.

Now, the West, faced with an increasingly hostile Russia, with its newly re-elected president, maybe it should consider the advice of Vladimir Potanin, the oligarch featured in the Financial Times interview:

 Maybe this is why it is so difficult for the western world to understand Russia.   I return to this word: tolerance.   You guys finished with certain issues many centuries ago.  We are living through them.  Mine is a generation born in the Soviet Union, and you do not understand what that means.  You are asking from us certain behaviour.  But we were born in a concentration camp.  Do you really expect from us behaviour of kids born in London?  When you guys are teaching us, be careful, be polite.

Mike Ungersma, Cardiff, Wales, May 2018

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The Tory government is still entirely split on what type of Brexit Britain should have.

And if the government can’t now agree on what Brexit means, how on earth could the electorate have known what Brexit meant on 23 June 2016?

This weekend the Tory-supporting Telegraph reported that:

‘At least a dozen members of Theresa May’s Cabinet are lining up to block her plans for a new “customs partnership” with the European Union.’

The Telegraph added that it had established that:

‘12 out of a total of 28 individuals who sit in Cabinet alongside Mrs May oppose her favoured plans for Britain’s post-Brexit customs relationship with the EU.’

But government sources, reported The Telegraph, believe that as many as 15 cabinet ministers now oppose Mrs May’s Brexit plans.

• On the one hand, Mrs May supports a “customs partnership” whereby the UK would collect tariffs on behalf of the EU – but without the need for new border checks.
• But hardline Brexiters prefer a different system called “maximum facilitation” – or ‘max fac’ – based on using technology to minimise the need for customs checks after Brexit.

Sixty Tory MPs from the pro-Leave European Research Group (ERG) have written to Mrs May warning that her proposal for a “customs partnership” is unworkable and could cause the “collapse” of the Government.

However, EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has called both options “unworkable”.

Commented Luke Lythgoe on InFacts this weekend,

‘This rather predictable mess wasn’t mentioned, let alone interrogated, during the referendum campaign.

‘If the public don’t like the interminable mess the government has gotten itself into, they should demand a people’s vote on whatever Brexit deal our dithering prime minister eventually manages to produce.’

I agree. Brexit has become a shambles. Who voted for that?

It’s time the government asked ‘the people’ what is their will today, rather than relying on what they think it was yesterday (i.e. two years ago).

 

• Video – Why Brexit makes no sense, explained in 15 seconds:

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It’s reported that police are investigating evidence that the chief executive of a key organisation that campaigned for Brexit allegedly committed criminal offences during the 2016 referendum.

This comes after the Electoral Commission fined Leave.EU the maximum £70,000 for multiple breaches of electoral rules.

The organisation is backed by Nigel Farage and funded by Arron Banks, and played a key role in campaigning for Brexit in the referendum.

The group failed to reveal “at least” £77,380 in its spending following the referendum vote, meaning it exceeded the legal spending limits for the referendum, as laid down by law.

The Electoral Commission has also referred a key figure in Leave.EU’s management team, Liz Bilney, to the Metropolitan Police due to “reasonable grounds to suspect” that criminal offences have occurred.

Mr Banks has refuted all the findings of the Electoral Commission.

The Electoral Commission’s director of political finance, Bob Posner, said:

“The rules we enforce were put in place by Parliament to ensure transparency and public confidence in our democratic processes.

“It is therefore disappointing that Leave.EU, a key player in the EU referendum, was unable to abide by these rules.

“Leave.EU exceeded its spending limit and failed to declare its funding and its spending correctly. These are serious offences. The level of fine we have imposed has been constrained by the cap on the Commission’s fines.”

The watchdog found the group had exceeded the spending limit for non-party registered campaigners by at least 10 per cent and said that the unlawful over-spend “may well have been considerably higher”.

A spokeswoman for Scotland Yard spokeswoman told The Independent:

“We can confirm that the Electoral Commission has referred a potential criminal offence under section 123(4) of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

“This matter will be subject to assessment by officers from the Special Enquiry Team.”

The Electoral Commission’s investigation also uncovered that Leave.EU did not properly report the receipt of three loans from Mr Banks, totalling £6m, with dates around the transaction and the related interest rate incorrectly reported.

According to ‘The Code of Good Practice on Referendums’ issued by the Venice Commission, if the cap on spending is exceeded in a referendum by a significant amount, “the vote must be annulled.”

The Code, which is a non-binding guideline, was adopted by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission in 2006/2007.

The Venice Commission is an advisory body of the Council of Europe, composed of independent experts in the field of constitutional law. It was created in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time of urgent need for constitutional assistance in Central and Eastern Europe.

The UK is a member of the Council of Europe and has signed up to the Venice Commission.

Members of the Commission are “senior academics, particularly in the fields of constitutional or international law, supreme or constitutional court judges or members of national parliaments”.

Representing the UK on the Commission is Jeffrey Jowell, Professor of Law and former Dean of University College London.

The work of the Commission in the field of elections, referendums and political parties is steered by the Council for Democratic Elections (CDE).

The CDE is made up of representatives of the Venice Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.

Their Code of Good Practice on Referendums states under clause 3.3. on referendum funding:

“National rules on both public and private funding of political parties and election campaigns must be applicable to referendum campaigns.

“As in the case of elections, funding must be transparent, particularly when it comes to campaign accounts.

“In the event of a failure to abide by the statutory requirements, for instance if the cap on spending is exceeded by a significant margin, the vote must be annulled.

“It should be pointed out that the principle of equality of opportunity applies to public funding; equality should be ensured between a proposal’s supporters and opponents.”

The Code, however, is a guide only, and not legally binding. It’s also not clear whether the referendum overspend by Leave.EU of “at least £77,380” would represent “a significant margin” to warrant the referendum vote being annulled.

However, it’s now becoming clearer that the referendum campaign was seriously flawed, with overspending by Leave.EU that broke election law, and allegations of criminality, on top of all the lies and mistruths that the Leave campaigns had to rely upon to win the referendum.

Anyone who believes in democracy, whether a Leave or Remain supporter, should now be seriously concerned about the validity of the result of the EU referendum of 23 June 2016.

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As we enter a period of heightened debate about customs arrangements, it’s useful to consider who holds what power in the Article 50 process.

As rational choice bods like to tell us, the more people who hold vetoes, the harder it is to please them all and more chance there is of non-agreement. However, in this case – and unlike most others – a non-agreement is not the same as the status quo ante.

Instead, Article 50 leads to the UK leaving on 29 March 2019 without a deal, unless something is agreed otherwise (either on the deal front or the date front, or both).

This matters, because it potentially changes the calculations within the UK about crashing the Brexit bus.

But first a quick word about why I’m going to focus on the UK.

The EU has always sought an orderly and speedy resolution of Brexit, both because it wants to maintain good relations and because this is the best way to get it off the table, to allow the EU to crack on with everything else it’s got to do. While it can live with a no-deal outcome, it has given no indication that it wants this and indeed been responsible for producing most of the detail that has been agreed so far. Even the stuff that hasn’t been agreed is largely framed by the EU – think of the Irish options – so bus-crashing is not going to come, in the first instance, from their side.

So back to the UK.

Let’s think about who holds veto powers over Theresa May, who we’ll take as the prime mover in advancing Article 50 on the British side. Clearly others are deeply involved, but as Prime Minister she holds the reins of power.

First port of call is Cabinet. If it presents a sufficiently unified front of opposition to May, then it leaves her with little scope to advance her agenda (whatever it might be). The Rudd-induced reshuffle last week has shown how this might work, with hard Brexiters gaining an upper hand. But likewise it also shows the limitations, with a Prime Minister and Chancellor willing to continue pushing a softer line. That suggests that removal of May would likely be necessary to effect a radical change of policy.

Which brings us to the Conservative party. MPs hold the power to remove May and cause a leadership election. However, some caveats apply here too. Most obviously, the parliamentary party has limited scope to control who replaces May: unless they can crown a unity candidate – unlikely, if they’ve kicked out May – they have to take their two preferred choices to the wider party. Secondly, replacing May means opening up a possibility of another general election, especially if Brexit policy changes clearly, and the farce of last year is still a bit too raw, even if Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t look quite as challenging as before. And thirdly, The only point of replacing May now would be to secure a different deal within Article 50, rather than killing it all off.

And that raises a different route for bus-crashing. If the party’s interest is in a hard Brexit, then it’s simpler just to try and frustrate the current leadership and play for time. As long as they can run it all out to next March, then the job’s done. Framed as May’s inability to lead/listen/reflect the will of the people/etc, that puts more of the blame on her and allows a new leader to come in and try to clear up the mess she’s made (sic).

However, all this depends on a third key actor: the Labour party.

If Labour decides to use the opportunity now or in the meaningful vote to wreck the Conservatives, then they make it much easier for hard Brexiters to secure a no-deal: there are more than enough of the latter to deprive the government of a majority to pass a package that the EU says it will not amend.

Of course, if Labour decide that an orderly – if imperfect – exit is more important than party politics (and their thoughts are very unclear on this right now), then the opposite applies: May can withstand hard Brexiter pressure much more effectively.

And in either case, Labour votes would swamp any effect of DUP ones, which would seem to render their role in supporting the Conservatives rather moot.

But, but, but.

Two thoughts occur here.

The first is simply that this arrangement of veto players has been in place for some long time now, certainly since the general election. And yet none of the bus-crashing options has taken place: everyone’s make lots of noise, but action has been short on the ground.

Given the time-bounded nature of Article 50, if hard Brexiters wanted a new leadership to negotiate a harder agreed deal, then sooner would have been better than latter. This suggests that either they didn’t feel confident they could remove May, or that she would succumb to pressure, or that they might better aim for the delay-to-cause-no-deal option.

All three of those still look possible, although as time passes the emphasis swings to the last one.

And this leads to the two thought, namely that May is well aware of the pressures and is seeking to play them off each other.

The prevarication over customs arrangements is very much a case in point. Neither the customs partnership nor the maximum facilitation option is currently acceptable to the EU, so this is much more about setting the tone for the future relationship. The former points towards staying in a customs union until the details can be worked out, while the latter suggests the UK leaves at the end of transition and then works to reduce the barriers that causes. In short, it’s the politics of the long transition once again, in different clothing.

For May, time is both a problem and a help. It’s a problem because she still needs to get to a deal by October – given the lack of movement on Ireland, that looks difficult – but it’s also a help in managing her domestic veto players.

The longer she can postpone a final reckoning, the less time is left for a new administration to change course, and the more costs any bus-crashers will carry: she can off-load more of the blame on to them, in effect. That can be seen in the likely timing of Parliament’s ‘meaningful vote’, which will come so late as to make it meaningless and allow May to ask opponents on both sides of the House whether they want to be the ones to wreck it all.

TINA will be the rallying cry: it’s not good, but it’s the only option on table.

That’s a risky game to play, precisely because Article 50’s default is exit with no deal. If this is May’s strategy, then she has to rely not only on a substantial section of her party not to eject her, but also on a Labour party that struggles to know how to proceed.

The bus is still on the road, but the hairpins are still to come.

The post Who can and will crash the Brexit bus? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Group work can be very fruitful and engaging but there can be conflicts, disagreements and disengagement. Roskilde University students have to write six group projects during their BA degree, and will most likely experience group conflicts. It is, therefore, important to give the students the tools to manage group work.

It can be difficult for a supervisor to identify problems with group dynamics, especially when the group is not replying to emails nor turning up to meetings or only part of the group turning up for supervision. Whilst lack of communication also happens with supervision of one person, it is much easier to see that the student is struggling, whereas it is more difficult to identify what is going on with a group of three to six students. Thus, we have workshops, which focus on project work and group dynamics, thereby giving the students the tools to overcome inter-personal differences.

The workshops are taught in collaboration with the student guidance office. The student guidance office helps students overcoming group conflicts and in general advises the students on their study options. Lecturers and supervisors are not trained in conflict mediation and often advice the students to contact the student guidance office for help. Thus, the collaboration with the student guidance office enables us to highlight both academic and inter-personal dilemmas that might exist when you do group work.

In the first semester, the workshop introduces Belbin’s nine team roles, which gives the students insights into the roles they can have in groups and how these might change from group to group. In the second semester, the students have a workshop on how to manage group conflicts, where we draw on Belbin’s team roles and the students’ own experiences from their first semester group project.  Both first and second semester workshops discuss group contracts, which are agreements between the group members on how to work together. Group contracts can be written, verbal and they are sometimes very detailed (include social time together). The overall aim of the group contract is to manage expectations.

Group conflicts often arise either due to academically disagreement about the direction of the project, which leads to group split, or personal conflict, where one person in the group is seen as not contributing towards the shared project. Academic disagreements tend to lead to amicable splits. The personal conflicts are more difficult.  Often, a person is ‘kicked out’ or excluded from because the other group members think the person has not contributed to the project. The lack of contribution to the group project can be due to personal issues, e.g. health or family problems, or because the person is not meeting academic expectations. Most groups will solve the issues themselves without asking for help from the supervisor or the student guidance office.

Sometimes the relations within a group is beyond repair, then, the group can ask for formal permission from the team coordinator or director of study to split up. As a team coordinator for the BA International Social Science programme, I cannot fix things, but I can try to make sure the students depart on good terms, so they can face each other again in class the next day. There have been cases in the past, where a group has ‘kicked a student out’ and subsequently told everyone in the class about how ‘stupid’ or ‘difficult’ the person is, which has prevented the student from finding a new group. Ultimately this backstabbing can affect the student’s reputation throughout his/her studies.

Over the past two years, I have focused on preventing ‘bad break ups’ by talking to the students about group work during fresher’s week, project group formation and the students have worked on group dynamics in the workshops. Here I have emphasised that throughout our career we will all experience good and bad working relations. We do not always decide whom to work with, yet we still have to deliver a project and it is, therefore, important to manage expectations and keep a professional working relation. Overall, I have seen an improvement in how the students work together, they have become more aware of managing their projects, managing expectations, understanding the different group roles and how you switch between the roles thereby creating a good working environment in their group research projects.

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Esta reseña aparece publicada en la Revista Actualidad Jurídica Aranzadi y se enmarca dentro del Programa Leyendo en Clave Jurídica 2017-2018 de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Deusto.

 

Europa vive tiempos convulsos. La crisis del euro, los refugiados, el terrorismo, el Brexit, la extrema derecha, el populismo, el euroescepticismo o el fracaso de una Europa social matraquean los oídos de aquellos que trabajan en Bruselas. Es necesario reexaminar la idea original de Europa y, concretamente, el proyecto de los Padres Fundadores que inspiraron la actual Unión Europea (UE). Uno de estos líderes fue Alcide de Gasperi y a quien descubrimos en la obra “Europa: escritos y discursos” editada por Encuentro en 2011. Gasperi nació en Trento el 3 de abril de 1881. Fue Primer Ministro italiano, Ministro de Asuntos Exteriores y el primer Presidente de la Comunidad Europea del Carbón y del Acero. Gasperi experimentó de cerca las guerras mundiales y el fascismo. En 1919, el Partido Popular Italiano que cofundó fue ilegalizado por las fuerzas fascistas lideradas por Mussolini y, en 1927, fue encarcelado hasta que dieciséis meses más tarde fue liberado. Tras el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial se comprometió con el proyecto europeo dada su convicción de que el futuro no se construiría “por la fuerza ni por el afán de conquista, sino por la paciente aplicación del método democrático, el espíritu de consenso constructivo y el respeto de la libertad” (p. 196).

Las terribles consecuencias de la guerra y el fascismo determinaron queGasperi fuera el principal precursor de una política común europea de defensa y el desarrollo de un ejército europeo que garantizase la paz. Si bien su propuesta destinada a establecer una Comunidad Europea de Defensa fracasó, desde el año 2016 la inestabilidad en las fronteras exteriores de la Unión y la volatilidad del entorno geopolítico ha reactivado el debate sobre si debe crearse una autoridad europea de defensa en la que se integren las fuerzas armadas de los Estados miembros. Asimismo, Gasperi trabajó por frenar el nacionalismo y promover el entendimiento entre naciones. En su opinión, el éxito de la unidad europea pasaba por la formación de una mentalidad común y supranacional. De lo contrario, “las instituciones supranacionales serían insuficientes y podrían convertirse en una palestra de competición de intereses particulares, si los hombres propuestos para ello no se sintiesen mandatarios de intereses superiores europeos” (p. 199).

La actual UE acusa la falta de un proyecto político propio, fuerte e independiente. Como señala el propio Gasperi, “Europa existe pero está encadenada, son estos hierros los que hay que romper” (p. 215). La UE está hoy encadenada a medidas cortoplacistas que deben satisfacer los intereses partidistas de cada Estado miembro. No existe un proyecto europeo que rompa con la apropiación a nivel estatal de los éxitos derivados de la integración e impida la descarga de los fracasos nacionales en la UE. La Unión del siglo XXI ha de reencontrarse con la Europa concebida por Gasperi que no es otra que la fundada en “el espíritu democrático de las instituciones libres y la aspiración de realizar una mayor justicia social” (p. 188).

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Nobody gave ‘informed consent’ for Brexit. That’s because, in the 2016 referendum, the electorate was not sufficiently informed.

There was no blueprint, plan, proposal or manifesto for Brexit.

And there still isn’t. The Tory Cabinet is entirely split on what type of Brexit Britain should have.

And if the government can’t now agree on what Brexit means, how on earth could the electorate have known what Brexit meant on 23 June 2016?

We now know more about Brexit than we knew before. And in a few months time, we will know much more, including details of the final Brexit deal.

That’s why there needs to be a new vote on Brexit – so that this time, ‘the people’ can give their informed response.

The #PeoplesVote.

Based on the facts about Brexit, and not the falsities and flannel we were told during the referendum.

After all, when Parliament considers a decision, it’s allowed numerous debates, and multiple votes, over many months, and it can make changes, or abandon the decision, at any stage.

To allow ‘the people’ only ONE vote, on ONE day, on a vague idea for Brexit, without another vote on the actual final proposal, is not democratic. It’s tyrannical.

If our political masters are truly interested in ‘the will of the people’ they should have no hesitation in asking us what is our will today, rather than to keep relying on what they thought our will was yesterday (i.e. two years ago).

If the final details of Brexit are so good, then what have Brexiters got to worry about?

But if Brexiters have so little confidence in Brexit that they dare not let ‘the people’ have any further say about it, we should all be suspicious.

• As suspicious as we’d be about a double-glazing salesman who won’t let us get out of the deal, even though the deal isn’t anywhere close to what was originally promised.
• As suspicious as we’d be about putting an offer on a house, but not being allowed to cancel the offer when the surveyor’s report details serious problem after problem.

Because when buying a house, or ordering double-glazing, it’s ‘Subject to Contract’.

And that’s how it should be with Brexit.

Brexit is not yet agreed. And nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. So nothing is agreed.

Brexit is not yet a done deal.

If the details of Brexit had been agreed, we’d have voted on those details on 23 June 2016. But we didn’t have any details then. When we have the details, we need a new vote.

We need to insist that Brexit is ‘Subject to Contract’ – and that we, ‘the people’, should be able to express our view on that contract when we know what it is.

Remember, not one of the government’s impact assessments give any good news about Brexit. The government’s own ‘surveyors’ reports on Brexit detail serious problem after problem, and not one validated benefit.

Of course, Parliament should have the final say on Brexit – because Parliament is sovereign, and we live in a Parliamentary democracy.

But to help them to reach a decision, they should first ask us, ‘the people’, for our opinion on whether we really want to go ahead with Brexit, based on new facts we didn’t know before.

In a democracy, as in our own personal lives, we are allowed to change our minds.

The government should now say to ‘the people’:

‘This is the Brexit Britain will get. Now tell us, are you sure this is what you want?’

Only those who are against democracy will disagree.

Because a new vote on Brexit means more democracy, not less.

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One year after the disastrous TV debate, where does the Front National stand in spring 2018?

One year ago, on 3 May 2017, I watched the final debate between the two remaining candidates for French presidency. It turned out to be the most curious ‘Surreality TV show’ ever on French television. It was almost as if Marine Le Pen had entered the studio with the firm intention to reveal to the eyes of the nation that she was utterly incompetent on economic matters, embarrassingly overstrained on the intellectual level, and blatantly unsuited for any higher public office.

In spring 2018 she is still there, re-elected at the helm of the Front National at its national congress in March, imposing the party’s rebranding through a controversial name change, and organising a rather lacklustre May Day celebration in Nice this week, to which she had invited colleagues from the European Parliament’s ‘Europe of Nations and Freedom’ group.

The simple fact that a party that reached its best result ever – a spectacular 7.6 million voters in the first round of the presidential elections – feels to be in need of a re-boot is due to the dramatic structure of the 2017 French campaign. What would you do with a football manager who leads his team to the final and, just before the ultimate triumph, gets everything wrong in the decisive match? Exactly. It is therefore hardly surprising that Marine Le Pen’s authority and leadership qualities, according to several polls (see here or here) are contested even within the FN’s own ranks. Above all, it’s the TV debate of 3 May that still hurts.

Their doubts notwithstanding, members are expected to confirm the proposed re-branding to ‘Rassemblement national’, whatever the discredit of this name by those who used it in the past. The political connotation of the term ‘rassemblement’ – literally ‘rally’ or ‘gathering’, but in this context probably best translated by ‘alliance’ or even ‘union’ – is the coming together of different people under one roof. It thus subliminally signals an opening towards potential coalition partners on the right, and a recognition that given the French electoral system, it seems out of reach for the party to access power on its own.

There is a ‘déjà vu’ in this approach to woo willing renegades from the so-called moderate right in order to become acceptable as coalition partner. Whoever knows the history of the Front National, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, is reminded of 1998, when the proportional system of the regional elections turned the FN into the kingmaker in five regions, where conservative candidates, contrary to all their previous promises to resist temptation, were crowned president of their respective Conseil Régional with the votes of the FN representatives.

For what was then called RPR and UDF, and is now known as Les Républicains, this incident remains an original sin that has never been expiated. Their new leader, Laurent Wauquiez, visibly pursues the opposite strategy: he hopes to undermine the Front National by appropriating its topics, tone, and vocabulary. The same tactics that Sarkozy already played around with under the guidance of his own Steven Bannon, a grey eminence in the Elysée named Patrick Buisson, only to get his fingers burnt.

Those were the days: Le Pen and Mégret in 1998.

And a second ‘déjà vu’ is already looming: the defection of key members and the launch of spin-offs that might develop into splinter parties of their own. The first time this happened to the FN was precisely in the wake of the 1998 regional elections, when the party’s number two Bruno Mégret fell out with Jean-Marie Le Pen on the latter’s refusal to enter coalitions and repetitive use of anti-Semitic provocations. Mégret founded the so-called Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) and obtained 2.34% of the votes in the 2002 presidential elections. He never managed, though, to establish the MNR as a viable alternative to the FN, and his only success was to install his wife as mayor of a provincial city near Marseille.

Today, Marine Le Pen is under a similar scission threat. At the March congress, she managed to rally party members behind her with her well-tested anger rhetoric, but prior to the event she had to deplore the departure of some relatively prominent party members. Among them, the FN’s previous number two, Florian Philippot, to whom she owes much of the success of what is called in France ‘the de-diabolisation process’ of the Front National, and who has now launched his own spin-off Les Patriotes.

Philippot, who has been an MEP since 2014, does of course not have the infrastructural and financial resources to set up a full-fledged competitive party in no time. But Le Pen would be well advised not to underestimate him. Contrary to herself, Philippot, a graduate of the ENA just like Macron and Wauquiez, possesses economic expertise. He is a representative of the ‘social’ wing of the nationalists, for whom leaving the European Union is the cornerstone for their entire programme of radical change in France. And while Le Pen was destabilised by the unwavering support of the Euro by public opinion and changed her line on the common currency in a totally unconvincing manner, Philippot has remained true to his ideas (and is due to publishing a book named Frexit). On long-distance runs, consistency may well turn out to be a major asset! When questioned about the current state of his splinter party, he refers to … UKIP, ‘who also began as a very small movement!‘

The current leadership woes notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to attest the FN a diminished mobilisation potential. It still has three trump cards in its sleeves:

First, on the political spectrum, the removal of the traditional reference points ‘left’ vs. ‘right’ – presumably pushed by Macron’s steamroller towards the landfill of history – also benefits the nationalists. All of a sudden, it becomes credible to reject the ‘extreme-right’ label as no longer relevant and to position oneself beyond old party lines as the sole defender of blood, soil, and identity, against the unpatriotic servants of globalisation. The latter, embodied of course by Macron and the European Commission, are despicable representatives of what Le Pen now systematically refers to as ‘nomadism’.

Candidate in 2017. And in 2022?

Secondly, the Front National still has a personality with high leadership potential in reserve: Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine’s niece, currently ‘in retreat from political life’, is considered the greatest hope for the party’s future by many members. The time of the 29-year-old figurehead of the FN’s ‘identitarian wing’ will come, and she has the potential to become a charismatic leader, with the ability to make the party an alternative beyond the core of traditional voters.

Thirdly, there is no reason to believe that the background noise of cultural pessimism that feeds French nationalism will fade away any time soon. Macron’s astonishing aura of optimism may well attenuate globalisation fears, but it will not be able to delete key issues like migration, Islam and security from the agenda. Moreover, given Macron’s personality and style, the remaining years of his mandate will inevitably fuel latent attitudes like anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism in a significant part of society. And his policies are not likely to reduce the gap in self-perception between the dynamic regional hubs and the rural and small-town periphery.

French nationalist populism under Marine Le Pen may currently experience a little slump. But as Jean-François Sirinelli summed up 20 years ago in his cultural history of the 20th century, every period of relative weakness was followed by a new strengthening, each time ‘when the ferments of destabilisation were at work: a persisting stagnation of the economy, social tensions resulting from it, and an increasingly gnawing doubt about liberal democracy.’ [1]

The success of the Macron presidency will not least be measured on his capacity of lastingly defusing such ‘pathogenic situations’ (Sirinelli), during which a not insignificant part of French society becomes prone to identity fears of all sorts.

[1] Jean-François Sirinelli: « L’extrême droite à répétition »,
in : Jean-Pierre Rioux & Jean-François Sirinelli, La France d’un siècle à l’autre 1914-2000, Paris: Hachette, 1999, p. 891-899.

This post was also published in German
by the Berlin-based think-tank Zentrum Liberale Moderne.

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