Ideas on Europe Blog

Seeing as we’re nearly at the second phase of Brexit – the negotiations for departure – it’s an opportune moment to tell you that I’ve started podcasting again, with a guide to the Article 50 timeline.

Quite apart from the underlining that ‘two years’ isn’t really two years – maybe one and a bit years, once you take away the faffing at the start and the ratifications at the end – recording this has made me think some more about what to look for in the process.

This matters if one understands that there are essentially two phases in Article 50, in negotiating terms: actors deciding what they want, followed by them trying to achieve what they want. Importantly, while there has been an extended period since 23 June to do the first part of this, in practice all sides have kept their positions only poorly defined.

The reason for that is two-fold. Firstly, they don’t want to give too much away before they have to, in case someone else uses it to throw them a curve-ball. But secondly, there is a collective action problem: if the others won’t say, then there’s even less reason for you to say. The last months have been marked by the UK’s unwillingness to set out clear objectives, because they don’t want to get boxed in or to set unrealistic expectations, and by the EU27′s reticence to make any ‘concessions’ (real or imagined) prior to Article 50, wherein they will hold a lot more structural power, especially when the UK isn’t clear about what it wants.

However, the looming notification should collapse this stand-off between the parties, for the simple reason that interaction is required and thus aims have to be stated.

This should become manifest at three key points, all coming in the next month or so.

The first is the UK’s letter of notification, due on 29 March. At the point that the government makes its declaration, it is likely to set out its broad aims for the process. However, given that it has had ample opportunity before now to do this, we might expect that this will be not much different from a re-statement of the White Paper.

What might be more telling is the wording (or the absence of wording) on certain key issues. In particular, does the letter continue to push the previous demand of Theresa May that the CJEU has no jurisdiction over the UK, or will this soften to accommodate the necessary role of the court in overseeing the Article 50 agreement itself? Will there be any language about the financial liabilities, on which the UK will have to balance legal obligations with political costs? And will there be an early offer of reciprocal rights for EU nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EU, a particular rallying-cry of those fighting Brexit in the UK?

In short, does May double-down on sounding tough, does she leave things vague, or does shoe offer some olive branches?

The second is the European Parliament’s statement of positions, due in late April. This is the wildcard in the pack.

Article 50 requires that the EP gives its approval to the final agreement, which the institution has read as meaning it should play a part in the negotiations: not by accident is Guy Verhofstadt ‘chief negotiator’. The EU27 have resisted this, seeming it as the thin end of a very big wedge, given all the other negotiations with third parties either in train or planned.

Thus the EP’s statement is likely to matter as much for its process demands as any substantive points. In the hardest form, that might mean declaring a refusal to approve any deal that doesn’t include Verhofstadt in the negotiating room. The risk is, clearly, that in a process that is already looking very stretched and at danger of failure, is the EP willing to risk pushing things over the edge?

By contrast, the substantive points are probably less problematic: rights for EU nations, preservation of the benefits of membership for members and the integrity of the single market. But Verhofstadt’s plan for UK nationals to opt-in to continuing EU citizenship might also make another appearance.

The third – and most important – is the European Council’s guideline on negotiation, which should be agreed at the 29 April meeting. Assuming that the French don’t hold up matters too much – the summit sits between the two rounds of the presidential election – then this is the document that will frame much of what follows.

In particular, it will set out a process for the negotiations and indicate the broad parameters of the Commission’s negotiating mandate. This latter will still need to be agreed in the month or so that follows, but this is touchstone, despite Michel Barnier’s efforts to set out elements at this stage.

Since the EU is the master of the Article 50 process, what it offers to the UK matters a lot more – in structural terms – than what the UK might have asked for. This will manifest itself in a number of basic issues:

• Will Article 50 talks be limited to the housekeeping of leaving, or will it step into work on the new relationship? Current indications lean towards the former, not least because it will ensure that the financial liability question is not swept to one side. However, the desire to resolve reciprocal rights early on might open the door to a broader agreement;
• How accommodating of the UK’s position with the EU27 be? The latter has already said it doesn’t wish to be part of the core EU activity of the single market, so does this preclude participation in the side policies? Could the UK remain part of CDSP or police cooperation? Will the EU try to find the ‘creative solution’ to May’s desire to be in the customs union, but outside the common external tariff? In short, will the EU help the UK, or leave it to work out resolutions by itself?;
• What is the tone of the document? In the absence of substantive developments, one of the key queries has been whether there is a positive and constructive environment in which to work. In this, the UK has not been conspicuous in being friendly, at least at the ministerial level (especially with regards to the ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ rhetoric), but the EU27 have been more cautious about noises off. The European Council will be an important marker of how they actually feel about an issue that remains largely a distraction in a time of many more pressing matters.

If there one point to take from all of this, then it is that the process remains remarkably open, despite the long prelude. How quickly, and successfully, that is closed down to an agreement remains very unclear.

The post What to look for in Article 50 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

As if things were not already complicated enough in Northern Ireland, recent events have even added to the general feeling of instability and uncertainty. Both the assembly elections and the unfolding of Brexit – with increasing disagreements between London and Edinburgh – have not been particularly encouraging.

The Assembly elections

Northern Ireland at election time: understandably haunted by the ‘hard border’ issue.

The 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election was, in some ways, a predictable affair. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) maintained their position as the largest party with the nationalist Sinn Féin movement in second place. However, this outcome masks some very interesting shifts in voting preferences and patterns. Not only do these developments further complicate Northern Ireland politics, but they also point to the growing politicisation of the Brexit debate.

The most striking outcome is the increase in support for Sinn Féin. The party secured 27 seats, its largest ever share of Assembly seats, just one seat less than their DUP rivals. When combined with the 12 seats won by the smaller nationalist party – the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) – nationalists now control 39 of the Assembly’s 90 seats. They were helped by an increased turnout, particularly among non-unionist voters.

While the DUP remains the largest political party in Northern Ireland, it has shed 10 seats since the last Assembly election. The combined total seat tally for all unionist parties is 40, just one seat more than their nationalist counterparts. Perhaps more significantly, however, this is the first time that the Unionist outright majority has been undermined. Unionist political parties no longer dominate in Northern Ireland.

Middle ground political parties did relatively well. Despite a reduction in the overall number of Assembly seats from 108 to 90, the centrist Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) and the Green Party retained all of their seats. There was some evidence too of cross-community voting. Some successful nationalist SDLP candidates owe their victories to vote transfers from the smaller, moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

The politicisation of Brexit

The election campaign was little different to previous campaigns. ‘Bread and butter’ policy issues did receive some limited airing, but traditional political rivalries tended to dominate electoral discourse. Sinn Fein’s campaign centred on calls for equality, whilst the DUP cautioned against supporting a ‘radical republican agenda’. Although Brexit did not command significant attention during the campaign, Sinn Féin has been quick to conflate the election result with strong Northern Ireland opposition to Brexit.

56% of Northern Ireland voters voted Remain in the June 2016 EU referendum. This time, less than a year later, about 70% of Northern Ireland voters supported parties opposed to Brexit. This outcome emboldened Sinn Féin to suggest that the result represented a mandate for Northern Ireland to receive ‘designated special status within the EU’. Following the call by the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, for a second independence referendum in Scotland, Sinn Féin has further upped the ante and is calling for a referendum on Irish unity.

Unionists adamantly reject the Sinn Féin view that Brexit has strengthened the logic for Irish unification. In the Republic of Ireland, however, there may be some tacit support among political parties for Sinn Féin’s position. Taoiseach Enda Kenny is keen that the EU’s Brexit deal includes a clause allowing Northern Ireland to re-join the EU in the event of Irish unification. Fianna Fáil, the second largest political party in Ireland, is working on a 12-point plan aimed at reinforcing economic, political and educational links between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland which could help to prepare the way for a united Ireland.

All of this comes at a time when the UK is facing into a period of uncertainty and possible instability with the imminent triggering of Article 50 and the risk of a divisive Scottish referendum. Northern Ireland is subject to these destabilising forces, but the region is also dealing with its own internal difficulties. Agreement on the creation of a Northern Ireland Executive following the Assembly elections has been slow to emerge. Relations between the two key parties – Sinn Féin and the DUP – were already poor, but are being complicated further by Brexit and by related political and constitutional issues.

Dangers ahead

This dubious political environment is unsettling and the upshot is that the issue of Brexit is becoming politicised in Northern Ireland as unionists and nationalists exhibit divergent views about how to confront the Brexit challenge. The dangers of this situation are two fold.

Firstly, there is a real possibility that Northern Ireland interests may not be adequately communicated and considered during the Brexit negotiations. Deteriorating relations between the DUP and Sinn Féin undermine the prospects of an agreed (and strong) Northern Ireland position on Brexit emerging.

Secondly, and perhaps more worryingly, the politicisation of Brexit antagonises the sense of animosity, mistrust and insecurity which currently characterises community relations. All of this further impedes agreement on the creation of a Northern Ireland Executive, which in turn may lead to a troublesome political vacuum.

The post election political arithmetic, deteriorating political relations, and Scottish agitation are compounding the complexity of the Brexit issue in Northern Ireland. This is a rather poisonous mix. As the UK withdrawal process proceeds, it is important that UK, Irish and EU negotiators are attuned to the sensitivities of the Northern Ireland situation. Otherwise Brexit may unleash damaging and negative consequences which undermine years of hard-won economic, political and social progress. In this context, Northern Ireland has the potential to become a serious casualty of Brexit.

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Angers, April 2017: the first time ever that the term ‘Frexit’ appears on a campaign poster.

Why do they do it? Just for four precious weeks of fame? For seeing their faces on billboards and being invited to Parisian television studios? For walking into the polling station on election day and finding their names printed on the ballots in the same font and size as the big political celebrities? For fulfilling their divine mission of disseminating conspiracy theories or Trotskyite axioms to the widest possible public? Or simply for saving democratic pluralism?

One of the many flaws of the Fifth Republic is the encouragement it gives to fringe candidates to go for the famous 500 signatures of endorsement by elected representatives and enjoy the limelight of the most glamourous of political theatres. Since Saturday, 11h30, we now know there will be eleven aspirants for the French throne. Does French democracy really need an entire football squad line-up in order to choose one captain? Could it be that there is something wrong with the captain’s role and attributes in the first place?

Sarcasm comes easy when referring to the incredibly stubborn Nathalie Arthaud, François Asselineau, Jacques Cheminade, Jean Lassalle, and Philippe Poutou. None of these so-called ‘petits candidats’ is likely to reach a score that with a figure before the comma. Still, they managed to obtain their 500+ endorsements from whoever wanted to sponsor them among the members of the departmental and regional councils, MPs and Senators, MEPs and, of course, an entire army of mayors. Of the latter category France boasts 35,416 representatives, many of whom are ‘sans etiquette’, i.e. without any link of obedience to a party, and only too happy to tell the big parties – ‘those Parisians who couldn’t care less for us rurals and all of a sudden remember us every five years’ – where to stick their sponsorship form.

As a result, those who wanted to limit the number by making things more complicated in fixing additional thresholds – the signatures need to come from thirty different départements, with a maximum of 10% from any single département – or in deciding to publish each individual sponsorship signature online, have utterly failed in their dissuasive intention.

De Gaulle, the inventor of the presidential election ‘padlock’, didn’t mind the fringe candidates. To him, they were folkloric cannon fodder. Each additional freak candidate added to his own aura of towering above the mortals and took away attention from the few serious rivals (like the centrist Jean Lecanuet who took blasphemy so far as to gnaw away 15% the votes in the first round of 1965, forcing de Gaulle – who had ‘only’ obtained 44.65% – to fall as low as to campaign in a second round against Mitterrand).

From the beginning, the first round of the presidential election was more than it was intended to be. In a country where proportional representation is ruled out in all national elections – sacrificing legitimacy on the altar of stability – the first round is the only moment where minority opinions can not only enjoy massive public exposure and enter a competition that is less biased by strategic voting, but also benefit, over the last fortnight of the campaign, from absolute equality in media coverage.

Needless to say television does not like the ‘petits candidats’. They spoil the drama, diluting the showdown effect that television adores. This is probably the reason why TF1 organises the first TV debate as early as this Monday, 20 March, before the equality requirement can be enforced. It allows them to stage a ‘Big-5’ debate excluding the other six candidates – a bit like the Champions League quarter finals. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan – the faithful preacher of the true Gaullist gospel with a potential of 3 to 4 percent of the vote – who complained about his non-invitation, was debunked last week by the Conseil d’Etat, which stated that at this stage of the campaign the non-invitation ‘is not in itself characteristic of an unfair treatment’ and can be compensated by an individual interview on TF1’s main evening news, given the relative representative weight of this candidate. In response, the excluded candidates have now decided to stage an alternative debate, just before the TF1 event, cleverly organised by the new pure player Explicite and streamed on Facebook Live.

Angers, April 2002: sixteen candidates for one throne.

Beyond this polemic, the most important question is of course whether the small candidates have an impact or not on the competition for the first two places. There is a widely held belief – for which it was impossible to provide undisputable evidence – that the almost ridiculous record number of sixteen (!) candidates in 2002 contributed to eliminating Lionel Jospin and allowing Jean-Marie Le Pen to accede to the second round face-off. It is true that with three Trotskyites, two ecologists, one communist and one representative of the ‘Gauche radicale’, the space on the left was rather crowded. Quite a few of the Socialist sympathisers took the seemingly risk-free opportunity of the first round to ‘teach Jospin a lesson’ for not having been leftist enough during the five years of his (actually highly successful) PM mandate in cohabitation with a paralysed and almost side-lined Jacques Chirac.

This time around, they will not have the same problems. Fifteen years ago they thought there was no risk of NOT seeing the Socialist candidate in the second round. Now they will have to think about what right-wing or centrist candidate they give more chances to defeat the Le Pen daughter. Speak about social and political change.

For the small candidates this is bad news. For many voters, the stakes are too high this time to waste ballots, even in the first round. Some argue that in the ‘anti-system’ rhetoric they have in common they contribute to undermine the French political system. But the system does not need them to undermine itself very efficiently. If their mere presence on all the billboards in all the 35,416 communes makes some more voters realise that something’s intrinsically wrong with the presidential election, they will have rendered a good service to French democracy.

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 14 on the French 2017 election marathon.
All previous posts can be found here.

The post France 2017: And then there were eleven appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Que Anh Dang

The Bologna Process (BP) and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Education Process – each brings together some 50 member countries and a handful of international organisations – have become major regional and inter-regional higher education projects and generated many research papers. However, both the Bologna and ASEM Education Secretariat that have been contributing to the development of the two political processes in the past decade, have received little scholarly attention.

Having opportunities to know the secretariats over the last seven years, I became fascinated by the ways they operate and the influence, albeit in a subtle manner, they exert through their secretarial duties. On paper, or even if you ask them, the secretariats like to perceive themselves merely as neutral administrative assistants to the Bologna Follow-Up Group (BFUG) or to the ASEM Senior Officials Meetings (SOM). A former head of the Bologna Secretariat said to me in an interview in May 2015:

‘…when I took the post, I had two major goals, but I did not see the Secretariat as a political actor. I tried to avoid that’.

In practice, the secretariats performed important roles in all Ministerial Meetings and milestones of the two processes.  Thus, my paper presented at ECPR 2016 examines their workings and authority, and argues that they are policy actors in their own right. Despite their different approaches, they both have become indispensable in regional cooperation processes, particularly the creation and expansion of regional regulatory spaces for the development, implementation and monitoring/evaluation of higher education policies.

How do they operate in multi-level governance structures?

Since 2005 there have been six Bologna Secretariats rotating every 2 years, whereas there have been only two ASEM secretariats since 2009, each with 4-year services. While they are both hosted/financed by voluntary member countries, the Bologna Secretariat is often part of the package of hosting the Ministerial Meeting, the ASEM Secretariat does not rotate with the cycle of the ASEM Ministers’ Meeting but moves to a host country in Asia or Europe alternately.

In both contexts, it is necessary to explore the relationship between the secretariats and states in order to understand the roles of the secretariats. The classical principal-agent theory explains this relationship by asking why states (principals) creates agents (international secretariats) and delegate tasks to them, and how states keep the agents in check. Scholars working with the mainstream international relations theory tends to emphasise the principal side and view agents as instruments of states, designed to reflect state preference, further state interests and solve problems for states. International secretariats are often described as facilitators helping overcome obstacles to collaboration, lower transactions costs of cooperation, provide information and boost the members’ commitment.  Thus, agents are treated as ‘empty shells’ or ‘impersonal policy machinery’ to be manipulated by states.

However, viewing agents in such a functionalist and statist fashion may not accord with reality. For instance, the secretariats may seem to operate in the shades of the BFUG or SOM, but in practice, they both occupy an illuminating corner in all regional cooperation activities, and even ‘develop a life of their own’, as described by a former Bologna Secretariat’s staff. Stated differently, the secretariats possess a special authority that is socially constructed and legitimated. Such kind of authority enables them to effectively implement their will and shape the behaviours of other actors without the use of coercion.

Where do they derive their authority?

The sociological institutionalism approach suggests that they draw their substantive authority from three broad sources: delegation, morality and expertise. The secretariats possess delegated authority because states delegate the tasks that they cannot perform themselves. The moral authority of international secretariats often derives from their status as representative of the common interests or defender of the shared values (e.g. democracy, academic freedom, institutional autonomy). Expertise creates authority because knowledge and experience persuade people to confer on experts. Also, states want important tasks to be carried out by experts with specialised knowledge as they believe such knowledge could benefit society.

The secretariats also perceive themselves to be acting in the name of the public good and advancing the common goals. But in exercising their authority, the secretariats must present themselves as embodying the shared values and as serving the interests of member states in a neutral and technocratic way. A former Bologna Secretariat staff stated her view:

‘In the Bologna Process, if you have the information you have power.[…] I have two major goals. One is to give voice to the ones who were not active. That is meant having a neutral secretariat and trying to be as open and transparent as possible. Two, making the process known. That’s why I wanted to have the archive of documents and a permanent website’[i]

Going beyond a kind of public statement, a former ASEM secretariat’s staff pointed out the dilemma faced by his team:

‘We only facilitate the organisation of events and help the host countries, and we have to remain neutral. This is the rule of the secretariat. Paradoxically, if communication and activities are only available in a few active countries, the neutrality and impartiality of the secretariat may look different’[ii]

Furthermore, the level of expertise and the kind of knowledge also shape the ways the secretariats behave and induce policy changes, as another former staff shared her experience:

‘I personally tried to act [at meetings] in the capacity of the secretariat, but of course, as you know, your knowledge and experience influence the way you speak, and I am not free of that either. With time I also got to know the audience, know who will react in what ways. Working at the secretariat, it was not difficult to know that’[iii]

Evidently, the secretariats possess not only technical knowledge, but also normative and diplomatic, often tacit, knowledge to deal with the complex web of connections and actors in the international contexts.

New insights added to the theoretical debate?

The Bologna and ASEM secretariats operate with their own particularities that substantially affect their authority and the ways they exercise it.

-       First, they operate in the education sector that deems very important to the national sovereignty, therefore external authority is often unwelcome and resisted by states.

-       Second, the secretariat’s staff are not international civil servants, they are mainly national experts employed by the host countries or seconded by the sponsoring countries. Their authority may depend not only on the level of their expertise but also on the national interests and political context of the host countries.

-       Third, both secretariats are small operations financed primarily by one country and organised in rotation with relatively short cycle. Consequently, their knowledge and authority over the flow of information and institutional memory may be constrained by the rotation.

-       Finally, the different governance structures and political aims of ASEM and the Bologna Processes also have profound impacts on how the secretariats perform their tasks and exercise their authority.

In sum, the delegated authority may be constrained by states, but the moral and expert authority still enable the secretariats to act as transnational policy actors on the regional policy making arenas. The full paper analyses the micro processes that each secretariat utilises to create and legitimise their authority.

This blog post is based on the paper presented at the ECPR 2016 General Conference in Prague. The paper won the 2016 Excellent Paper from an Emerging Scholar competition of the ECPR Standing Group ‘The Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’. The 2017 Excellent Paper competition will be announced soon.

Dr. Que Anh Dang has recently completed her PhD project ‘Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM): Processes of Higher Education Sectoral Regionalism’ at the University of Bristol, UK.  Her research interests include higher education in the knowledge economy, higher education and regionalism, mobility and mutation of education policies, the role of international organisations in policy making. She is a co-editor and an author of the book ‘Global Regionalisms and Higher Education’ (2016).

[i] Interview with a former Bologna Secretariat representative on 14.05.15

[ii] Interview with former ASEM Secretariat representative 8.11.14

[iii] Interview with former Bologna Secretariat staff on 15.5.15

The post Out of the Shades: The Bologna and ASEM Education Secretariats as Transnational Policy Actors in their own Right appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Today, the scale of the budget cuts of the Trump administration to the United Nations system has been officially announced; and this could be massive. According to various reports – Foreign Policy, Washington Post, IRIN News (great visuals!), CBS News, UN Dispatch, PassBlue, Al Jazeera  – up to 37% of the current US contributions to the UN cut be cut. This will hit in particular where the US makes voluntary contributions, but there is also the announcement to reduce the US’ assessed share on UN peacekeeping from 28% to 25%.

After having spent my last two years researching UN budgeting, I can only begin to estimate the repercussions that this will have for the UN system. But, in view of what we know about the past and about the present, this does not look very good for the UN system.

Erin R. Graham, probably the single most important academic expert on the financing  of the UN system, especially the role of voluntary contributions, has recently provided a detailed analysis on this questions over at the Monkey Cage Blog of the Washington Post.  Among other things, she predicts that cutting funding to the UN system would seriously undermine the US’ influence on global policy-making. But that’s just one (quite realistic) perspective on the upcoming cuts.

Looking at the figures that Ben Parker over at IRIN News has put out there, the cuts must come from those UN organizations who receive significant US funding through voluntary contributions such as the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) or the World Food Programme (WFP) to which the US is a major contributor and which are, in essence, financed from Voluntary Contributions. This means that many citizens in the most difficult of situations around the world will be affected by the cuts. This is not just about some unknown international bureaucrats in New York and Geneva.

Now, for those of you who do not follow UN affairs on a daily basis, it is important to understand the scale of voluntary member state contributions in the UN system. According to a recent report by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, only about 29% of the whole UN system revenue came from what is called “assessed contributions“, basically mandatory membership fees countries pay according to a complicated scale that roughly corresponds to the economic power of member states. In other words, the majority of UN funding comes in some form of (unspecified or earmarked) voluntary contributions. States can easily withhold or stop paying these, and most of this funding goes into operational activities “on the ground”.

In a 2015 paper on UN budgeting we presented to discuss our ongoing research on UN budgeting with colleagues at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), we showed how important voluntary contributions are for most of the UN system organizations (see below). All bodies with close to 100% voluntary funding are mainly operational agencies, not UN bodies that develop and monitor international treaties. They are, as far as one can make this comparison, the equivalent to social service agencies at national level.

Cutting voluntary funds is relatively easy, but it is also possible to cut assessed funding. The US has already demonstrated, for example in the case of UNESCO, that it is  ready to stop paying its assessed contributions together with all voluntary contributions if it wants to. The fact that the US already announces to cut its share in assessed contributions to peacekeeping operations of the UN from 28% to 25% is a clear sign that they are read to go this route. Other member states of the UN will not be happy.

What are the expected consequences from all this?

A conference paper on UNESCO’s budget crises we presented  at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) conference last year outlines the devastating consequences of major budget cuts as a reaction to the US stopping to provide all funding to the organization. To extrapolate some of the lessons from that research on UNESCO:

In each UN organization where this type of massive cut happens (in the UN case this was about a quarter of the overall budget) , the chances are high that this will leave the organization in limbo for several years.

Massive budget cuts will force  directors-general and other leaders of UN organizations to spend a lot of their precious time to fundraise for new voluntary resources to cover immediate costs. While the leadership is busy doing this, the rest of the organization – member states and international officials – have to waste months in reprioritizing the global work of their organization in line with available funding, implement staff  and operational activity cuts, and in reorganizing internal structures to make them workable under the new financial situation. This means insecurity, internal fights over resources, and a lot of internal and external consultation, little of which has any positive external effects.

In other words, significant cuts by the US will not only affect what UNHCR can give to refugees or what the WFP can provide in food for those in need, it will also affect the work of these organizations overall. These cuts could potentially disrupt key operations for years, divert attention for months. They will require endless useless meetings between member states and international officials to discuss how to adapt the organizations to the cuts instead of spending this time for the actual mission of these organizations.

This will distract many UN organizations’ attention from supporting peace, from providing food and shelter, from supporting development operations, or from ensuring research on and mitigation of climate change.

Given that UN member states can hardly agree on major changes in good times (due to complex principal constellations), it will depend on good leadership by the heads of the UN agencies and bodies to manage this situation to the best of interest of the global community and of affected citizens around the world. In the best of cases, other countries will step in to fill some of the gaps left by the US, but this will still take time and lead to many new discussion.

My guess is that, should the budget cuts be implemented as announced, this could be the beginning of a major shakeup of the UN system – and not in a good way. The rest of the world and the leaders of UN organizations better get ready for this, and learn from situations like we have seen in UNESCO.

Some editorial changes have been made to this post, including additional links to news articles about the cuts.

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I was going to write about hubris and nemesis, but to be in keeping with the spirit of the age in these parts, let’s work on a more local formulation the same ideas. Pride comes before a fall.

Looking around Westminster, there’s plenty of pride. Pride from a government that has a commanding lead in the opinion polls, that lacks an meaningful opposition, that talks the talk of making Britain a global player. That no one can gainsay all of this must mean that the government is right, right?

But there’s a reason that the ancient Greeks – and many others – have proverbs about pride. It blinds one to the problems that might ultimately undo you; it gives false confidence and makes you forget the struggles you had to make to get to where you are. Even if you don’t go the full-Damocles on it, it still pays to keep reminding yourself that there are limits and dangers. We do not transcend our situations, we only forget them for a while, until they come to bite us on the backside.

This week has been particularly rich for hubris. Firstly, Philip Hammond backtracking on NICS contributions, having failed to prepare the ground properly with his party and media supporters. Secondly, Philip Hammond announcing his change of policy shortly before Prime Minister’s Questions – going against years of practice – because the frontbench felt so confident about the weakness of Jeremy Corbyn to make use of it (correctly, as it turned out).

But most importantly, David Davis gave evidence to the Exiting the EU Select Committee yesterday.

In this evidence, Davis seemed to take a most cavalier of approaches, repeatedly indicating that his Department didn’t know or hadn’t go around to doing various impact assessments or writing of policy objectives, from EHIC to an overall plan. Given that DExEU is to be a coordinating department for government for Article 50 - according to its DG - this looks highly problematic.

To be clear, this isn’t a let’s-stop-Brexit argument, but a Brexit-is-complex-so-let’s-try-our-best-to-work-through-that-complexity argument. As any negotiator will tell you, if you fail to prepare, then you should prepare to fail (and it’s not just American negotiators who’d say that).

The persistence of the ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ line of argument might resonate with a public that looks to government to provide clear leadership. But if you don’t know what either a bad deal or no deal look like, then you can’t actually defend the line. That there is no indication of what constitutes a ‘bad deal’ from government suggests that this is rhetoric rather than substance: certainly, that the EU27 argue that no deal is obviously worse than a bad deal suggests that – at the very least – there is uncertainty about the matter.

I’ve written before about negotiating theory and Brexit and I don’t wish to rehash all those points again here, but I will note that there is a persistent error in the government’s approach to Brexit. This error is a simple one, of confusing toughness with preparation. In their defence, it’s the oldest negotiating mistake in the book: it’s about winning, rather than finding optimal solutions.

If you like, it’s an extension of the habitual British problem in the EU, of thinking that everything is zero-sum and non-connected. If you see the world as a series of battles, then you fight them as they turn up: you don’t lift your head to consider the bigger picture, and you certainly don’t think about why these points of tension have arisen in the first place. Likewise, one the reasons Theresa May is getting a tough time of things is that she suffers the damage inflicted by her predecessors as PM over the decades: ‘here come the Brits again’. Even a more obviously pro-EU figure like Tony Blair found it very hard to demonstrate his good faith (no sniggering at the back) on matters European.

The reasons for the government’s confidence are not too hard to find. Number 10 is driving forward an agenda very successfully, as no other part of government seems to offer – or want to offer – an alternative; Cabinet is largely supine in the face of a daunting project; Parliament is in oppositional disarray; and, importantly, negotiations haven’t begun, so there is no need to concede anything.

This cannot – will not – last. As May well knows, once Article 50 is triggered, the crucible of debate is no longer in London, but in Brussels. Moreover, it will be between the EU27, with the UK as a bit player: it’s hard to defend your interests if you’re not in the room.

Again, it might be that there is a cunning plan behind all this, one that will be unrolled at notification. But there is nothing to really support that view from what has happened so far.

If pride does come before a fall, the question is going to be how hard, how fast and how far will that fall be.

The post Hubris on the road to Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Ever since the rise of the Christian Democrats (CDA) in the beginning of the 2000′s, the issue of ‘Normen en Waarden’ has been a topic in the elections. Jan Peter Balkenende was the first to frame the problems in Dutch society as the result of individualistic attitudes propagated by the preceding cabinets. As with a lot of electoral rhetoric, there was no precise definition of what the problem was, but to be sure the answer was a return to ‘Dutch Values’ (Normen en Waarden). A standard question in interviews and election debates has since been: ‘Dear party leader, what do you see as Dutch Values?’ And today, it is not Geert Wilders, but the current leader of the same party who brought up the idea of having Dutch children  stand to attention and sing the national anthem with hand to heart.

Normen en Waarden is identity politics in its most embryonic form. At the same time, it’s more complicated than that. Let’s take a few minutes to explore the Dutch identity.

Proud to be Dutch? In football, perhaps.

No Dutch national in my department at the University of Groningen would even think about describing himself or herself as ‘Dutch’. There is, outside of football, no such thing as ‘proudly Dutch’. My favourite description remains: ‘Being Dutch means that your practical approach to life and politics leads you to dismiss idiotic questions such as “What does it mean to be Dutch?” ‘ But why is it so difficult to discuss Dutch identity? As a legal scholar, I would like to leave the issue of shared language and history to those better equipped to discuss that point, and content myself to propose a constitutionalist view on this.

Let us accept that most national identities are merely social constructs. A way to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’. There are many ways in which this can be done. One of the most prominent ways in which identity is formed is through an (implicit) social contract. The Jewish people are probably one of the oldest examples. They have a contract with God, giving laws and binding them as a (his) people. The American Constitution is a similar contract, between the people and itself. ‘We, the people {…}’. Although history has made it problematic for Germans to approach national identity in the same way, the contractual character of the ‘Grundgesetz’, the freedoms it protects and the position of the Constitutional Court strongly contribute to form the social bond across the nation.

Conversely, when identity becomes problematic, we see a reliance on these contracts in an attempt to secure unity. For the time being, the Catalans are kept within greater Spain through reliance on clauses in the Constitution. In the ‘Better Together’ campaign in the UK, the history of the ‘Act of Union’ surfaced multiple times.

Constitutions are, amont all the other things that they can be, the testament of one singular moment in which a people have declared that they are one. They do so by declaring what values they share. (To put it a bit more honestly, constitutions tell the story of why you are better than all your neighbours, who can therefore NOT be part of your club.) Strangely, the Netherlands, despite plenty of suitable moments in their history, never explicitly put into writing ‘who we are’.

The ‘Plakkaat van Verlatinghe’ – not really a constitution.

Recently, the leader of the Christian Democrats referred to the ‘Plakkaat van Verlatinghe’, our Declaration of Independence of 1581. Fair enough, but the Plakkaat is actually a very pragmatic declaration listing the reasons to secede from the Spanish crown. Later, when the end of the Napoleonic era brought a fear in the Dutch well-to-do and nobility that we needed to have a monarchy to secure stability, there no ‘national moment’ either behind the introduction of the monarchy. If anything that identity was forged after Willem I (to whose patronym, by the way, we owe the orange jerseys of our football team) was put into place. The constitutions from 1815 until 1848 reflect this practical approach. They deal with organising the state, the relationship between King and Parliament, and a very short rights catalogue. Where the other nations of Europe were in the throws of revolution, identity shaping events, we were going the other way.

The value of the constitution remains ambiguous to this day. It is not a social contract amongst the Dutch. The values that lie therein are of a practical nature, all can be moderated and limited as it suits the situation. Dutch children are rarely taught what constitutional values mean. And why should they? The Dutch courts are prohibited from testing laws against the constitution. There is no possibility for constitutional review. All discussions on this point are, in a very Dutch and practical manner, waved away. Dutch courts can make use of international treaties to test acts by government, thereby securing rights. But that means that courts are implementing outside values, not Dutch ones. Nor is there a Constitutional Court which can pronounce on what Dutch constitutional values are. From the perspective of the constitutionalist, it isn’t possible to say what it means to be Dutch, because the Dutch have never taken the time to write it down.

Does it at all matter? On the one hand, the debate on Dutch identity has never really bothered citizens to a great extent, the ambiguity seems to suit them well. To most voters, the discussion will therefore remain a purely hypothetical one. I would dare say that even if the CDA forces the point of mandatory anthem singing, most people will just not do it. On the other hand, the rise of populism has made it clear that there are some problems with the Dutch system. We say that we hold certain values dear, but there is no way in which to enforce them. A populist majority can implement discriminatory laws without engaging with the constitution. If judges oppose them, they may be blamed as ‘enemies of the people’, as the UK and the US are now teaching us. It has been said that since the ‘Golden Age’ the Netherlands have benefited from borders that were open to people, ideas and money, but this isn’t reflected in any (judicially enforceable) system. Dutch children are told that racism and discrimination are prohibited, but if we need to tell them why, there isn’t an easy document to which we can point: “Yes it is also in the constitution, but that doesn’t really matter. However, please have a look at these bylaws that implement international agreements.”

The hilarious ‘Netherlands Second!’ clip (click on the picture). Is self-mocking irony typically Dutch?

If the Dutch really want to know what it means to be Dutch, they should try and write it down. Without a text of reference, the political debate about the identity question is as vague as it is useless. This being said, in the current climate writing this text would certainly not be a walk in the park, and I would not recommend opening such a debate right now. Until today, the ambiguity and flexibility of our national identity has served us rather well.

The post What makes the Dutch Dutch? A constitutional perspective. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The substantial progress made in the Cyprus peace negotiations over the past 20 months risks falling short of success, as politics and grievances resurface, writes Fadıl Ersözer. He argues that true political leadership is required from both sides to achieve a lasting solution, and that the European Union as a framework can still be an incentive in facilitating a workable federated Cyprus.

The Green Line in Nicosia, CC-BY-NC-2.0

Cyprus is home to one of the longest-running unresolved conflicts in the world. The conflict has been ‘frozen’ by a ceasefire since the division of the island in 1974, but without resolution of the political and territorial contestations. The UN-supported peace talks aimed at establishing a two-state federation since late 1970s have repeatedly failed, as Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sides have interpreted concepts such as ‘federalism’ and ‘political equality’ very differently.

With the efforts of consecutive Secretaries-General and countless diplomats down the drain, George Mikes once famously stated that ‘The Cypriots know that they cannot become a World Power; but they have succeeded in becoming a World Problem, which is almost as good’.

A potential game-changer could be the European Union. The Greek Cypriot-run Republic of Cyprus applied for membership in 1990 and got the answer ‘conflict resolution before membership’. However, after a decade, this approach changed from a condition of EU accession to mere rhetoric, principally over the risk that Greece might have vetoed the entire eastern enlargement.

Nevertheless, the Turkish Cypriot side, whose Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is not recognised by any county except Turkey, was attracted to the prospect of EU membership. The talks gained noteworthy momentum in early 2000s. However, the Greek Cypriot government’s reassurances that it would do everything possible to support the UN-sponsored reunification plan before EU accession did not materialise.

Having secured EU membership without the need to cooperate with the Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots were not inclined to share power. Instead they played for time, waiting for a future deal on more beneficial terms. As a result, while Greek Cypriots celebrated EU accession in the South a week after the overwhelming ‘No’ vote (76 per cent) in the 2004 Annan Plan referendum on a peace deal, Turkish Cypriots, who voted in favour of the plan (65 per cent) were plunged into disappointment and continuing uncertainty.

While the EU’s influence in pushing for a resolution was severely limited after accession, the Union still has a useful role in play in achieving a united Cyprus. In particular, the EU’s supranational level adds a third level of governance to the two levels of a potential federation (federal and state). Such a multilayered architecture would offer institutional flexibilities in striking a balance between the competing needs for unity and autonomy.

For example, a federal Cyprus would be a sovereign state, but it component sub-states could represent themselves at the EU level on matters on which they have competence, such as regional issues. Additionally, the EU provides a promising environment to consolidate peace after reunification, where notions of sovereignty and power-sharing can be redefined.

Sociological institutionalism suggests that that identity politics and interests are subject to change in the long run through social learning and norm diffusion. This might be the answer to an unexpected crisis in the current phase of the peace talks. The Greek Cypriot parliament recently passed a law that an unofficial Greek Cypriot plebiscite from 1950 seeking union with Greece (called enosis) will be commemorated in schools. Turkish Cypriots were extremely critical, as they see enosis idea as an ‘existential threat’ and as the ‘root cause’ of the conflict.

Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akıncı, who has said that honouring such old ideals is entirely against the ‘mentality of peace-making’, has refused to negotiate until the decision is overturned. Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades, who initially said that Turkish Cypriots were ‘exaggerating’ a ten-minute commemoration, later admitted the decision was wrong but has not sought to repeal it.

Both insist that the talks should continue, but neither is willing to step back. The current climate is not ideal, but nobody sees the process as over, yet. Perhaps the UN can find a formula to resume dialogue, as it did in December 2016 during another crisis point during the talks.

I share Akıncı’s criticisms on the commemoration law. The mentality behind the commemoration vote is against peace-making and the decision is entirely wrong. It has only fed Turkish Cypriots’ insecurities. After all, the law was proposed by ELAM, a far-right neo-Nazi party, which got enough support to pass it. It is also discouraging that Anastasiades has not tried to make up for opening wounds with Turkish Cypriots.

However, Akıncı’s response – refusal to negotiate – is also unacceptable. This matter is neither directly related to the talks, nor the chances of agreement in the short run. If the concern is on the longer-term peace, again, I share the concern, but things get more puzzling there. It was in fact Akıncı who earlier abandoned the peace-promoting mechanisms for preparing Cypriots to live together that he championed during his electoral campaign. Instead, he focused on quickly achieving a ‘(comprehensive) solution in months, not in years’. The contradiction is not too different from the ‘mentality’ that he criticises.

Perhaps Anastasiades and his party have changed tack, with an eye to the next Greek Cypriot presidential elections set for early 2018, by – not objecting to the commemoration vote. Similarly, Akıncı might be playing for time. A breakthrough on the Cyprus issue now is against the interests of Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who wants to secure nationalist votes for Turkey’s upcoming referendum on a new constitution.

It is saddening that what started as ‘the best chance for reunification’ (and is said to be the last) has nearly come to an end. It was only in January that UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that ‘We are very close to an arrangement’. The leaders seemed not only willing to achieve a solution, but determined to do so. Progress over the 20 months of negotiations has been remarkable, and described as ‘unprecedented’ by the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Cyprus Espen Barth Eide.

In Geneva, the two sides presented their respective maps for territorial readjustment within a united Cyprus. The international dimension of the Cyprus problem, particularly security and guarantees, has also been under discussion between Cyprus’ guarantor powers – the UK, Turkey, and Greece – and the two Cypriot sides. While these big advances have reached a new high, currently that optimism now bogged down by toxic blame-games.

Currently, we are not sleepwalking to collapse of the talks, but running towards it. There is still a chance that the leaders will resume and carry the talks the last mile. However, a ‘business-as-usual’ optimism will not be enough. Many contentious issues remain in the talks, among them Turkey’s future military presence on the island, the possibility of a rotating presidency and final territorial readjustments.

Additionally, Greek Cypriots will conduct further hydrocarbon exploration studies this year. Turkey and Turkish Cypriots are expected to follow suit. In 2014, this issue brought peace talks to a standstill.

In view of these challenges, we need a big leap forward with truly responsible and willing leaders working for a united Cyprus. If they fail, we will need to wait for ‘true leaders’ who are able to make peace. Perhaps the peace talks will shift away from the ‘undoable’ objective of a two-state federation. However, success would not only mean resolution of a decades-old frozen conflict, but also that Cyprus would become a true example of peace-making and power-sharing in a problem-ridden part of the world.

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

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Shortlink for this article: bit.ly/2nitUR2

Fadıl Ersözer | @FadilErsozer
University of Manchester

Fadıl Ersözer is a doctoral researcher in politics at the University of Manchester. His main research focus is the limits of Europeanisation and liberal peace in conflict resolution focusing on the EU’s post-accession involvement in Cyprus

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Speaking at another Brexit-themed talk in Antwerp this week, I found myself once again noting the matter of issue discovery.

Despite being over 8 months after the referendum, which itself was confirmed as happening in May 2015, and with years of debate beforehand, we still find ourselves in a position where new elements keep on being discovered.

Sometimes, that’s something really mundane – like Marmite price-hikes – or it’s something surprisingly big – like Gibraltar. Equally, we still find that things we thought were clear, are not: WTO schedules springs to mind as a recent example or a thing that was originally seen as very easy, then very complex and now a bit complex.

What we need is a nice big list of all the things that need to be considered in Brexit.

Of course, such a list is not an easy task to undertake, for several reasons.

Firstly, there is an issue of determining what is an impact of Brexit and what is an impact of something else. Probably one has to differentiate between first- and second-order effects.

First-order effects would be those that are directly and unambiguously the result of leaving the EU. Examples here would be any part of public policy where legislation is at the EU-level (agriculture, for example), or where there is a reliance on EU principles (e.g. free movement across the Irish-Northern Irish border).

Second-order effects occur where the first-order effects change related situations. The Marmite thing is a handy example: the shift in the exchange rate following the referendum has led to higher import prices, which causes price inflation for a variety of goods and, ultimately, impacts on consumer spending and confidence, as well as patterns of industrial production. Kind-of Brexit-y, but also clearly informed by other factors of economic activity.

If the first-order effects are hard enough to pin down, then the second-order stuff is harder still. At some point, everything is Brexit.

The second big issue is that effects don’t just land on the UK government. Clearly there are effects on other EU member states, but also on British society, in ways that are beyond the control of Whitehall or Westminster. To pick a non-random example, the changes in public attitudes towards immigrants since the referendum is something that many EU nationals have noted, but the extent to which the government is willing or able to articulate a reaffirmation of the value of immigrants in society is highly debatable.

Likewise, that Brexit will have major repercussions on Ireland is seemingly beyond the scope of London’s direct concerns, even as there is a realisation that it does have a direct impact on the conduct of Article 50 negotiations.

Finally, to list is to prioritise and the British government appears congenitally unwilling to express anything prior to Article 50 notification that might denote a set of priorities. The White Paper is a list of things that strike Number 10 as important parts of Britain’s future, rather than a comprehensive list of what needs to be dealt with.

Of course, there are lists out there.

The UK government did conduct its Review of the Balance of Competences under the coalition government, completing in 2014. This sought to understand where and how the EU impacted on areas of public policy. Ultimately, that concluded that things were generally pretty good and the balance generally appropriate. However, the Review was driven by this notion of balance, rather than impact, so its utility as a checklist is limited.

The Commission has also worked through its list of points to discuss under Article 50, but this too is limited – by necessity – to matters of EU acquis, which is not as all-encompassing as one might think.

All of this matters for very obvious reasons.

As we all know, Article 50 negotiations are limited to two years, so discovering another pile of things to discuss isn’t a good way to reach an agreement within that timeframe. For a British government that hasn’t yet demonstrated that it is in control of the issues, further surprises cannot help its image and standing.

Moreover, once negotiations begin, the introduction of new elements is likely to make matters more difficult to resolve. Even on a minimal Article 50 package, there are a lot of elements, each pulling in different directions, resulting in what is likely to be a fairly small win-set. Structurally, there needs to be good sight of all the elements from the beginning if that win-set is to be realised.

Brexit is important. It matters in a way that not many other public policy decisions have mattered. To then find that we don’t even have a good sense of the range of issues that Brexit – even in the narrow sense of Article 50 negotiations – might cover should be something of concern to us all, whatever our political standpoint. Public policy works best when it is informed and considered, not when it is being made on the run.

As the clock ticks down to notification, the opportunity to get a firm footing grows ever smaller.

The post Issue discovery and Brexit: How will we know what all the points of impact might be? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The fightback against Brexit should not only be about saving the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, it should also be about the country being more involved in Europe to get the most out of its membership. Two ways that the UK could get more from its membership of the EU would be joining the euro and Schengen.

Tony Blair was correct to criticize Brexit in a recent speech, but unfinished business from his own time in office as Prime Minister may have contributed to the leave result in the referendum of 23rd June 2016. This unfinished business was the United Kingdom’s failure to join the euro, and failure to bring the country into the Schengen area. In 2003 Mr Blair committed the UK to fighting a war in Iraq, which distracted him and the country from making real progress with the European project. Without the Iraq war it is very likely the British public would have voted to join the euro in a referendum if it had taken place, which would have strengthened Britain’s links with the Continent: not only economically but also culturally and socially.

If the UK had joined the euro, the country could have increased its local trade in coastal regions, as more visitors from other EU countries were encouraged to come to the UK for weekend visits, because they no longer needed to change their currency. If the UK had joined the Schengen area: it would have made journeys between Britain and the Continent quicker, because passport controls would have been removed for people entering the UK from another EU member state, rather like within the UK there is no passport control on the Isle of Wight for people arriving there from Portsmouth, Southampton and Lymington. Also passport controls would have been removed for people travelling from the UK to another EU member state. Travelling by Eurostar from London to Paris would have been no different to travelling by train from London to Birmingham. However, Schengen can only work if it is protected by border forces that protect the EU’s external borders.

Removing internal borders within the Schengen area, but protecting the external borders of the area would have allowed for EU citizens and those who had entered Europe by legal means to move around the Continent freely, while keeping out illegal immigrants. The problem of recent mass influx of migrants into Europe, has not been because there is too much Europe, but rather not enough Europe. Europe can only coordinate the protection of its external borders: if it becomes a big country or one nation made up of its member states. Therefore a European Union which is a european federal superstate should be welcomed as a natural progression of history, just as there is a United States of America.

In his speech to Open Britain, Tony Blair mentioned the hostility of parts of the media towards Europe when he said: “There is an effective cartel of media on the right, which built the ramp for pro-Brexit propaganda during the campaign; is now equally savage in its efforts to say it is all going to be ‘great’ and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor or moaner; and who make it very clear to the PM that she has their adulation for exactly as long as she delivers Brexit.”

That hostility from the media “cartel” made it so difficult for Tony Blair to commit Britain to Europe during his own time in office. If there had been better coverage of Europe in the media in 2002 and 2003, which had shown the British public how the EU could improve the lives of ordinary hard working men and women in the UK: then Tony Blair could have focused on the euro, Schengen and the european constitution, rather than getting involved in the Iraq war.

Sources

http://www.open-britain.co.uk/full_tony_blair_speech_17th_february_2017

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/will-say-leaving-inevitable-isnt-tony-blairs-brexit-speech-full/

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2017

The post Full membership of EU, the euro and Schengen: Britain’s alternative to Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Third post in our series on the Dutch general elections.

Pillarisation in the Netherlands

Questions on the vital statistics of ‘The Left’ are rising everywhere in the Western World. At least in the Netherlands, it is too early to organise a wake. We may be well known for our liberal and permissive attitude to society (which is not the same as being tolerant, and is more marketing than truth), but the Netherlands has never truly had a left wing revolution, silent or otherwise. In part due to verzuiling (a Dutch form of mild sectarianism along religious and class lines, sometimes called ‘pillarisation’) and the closely related poldermodel (a system of highly proceduralised consensus-building in government), the welfare state and the economy have always been pragmatically constructed.

Although it has been a long time now since the days of verzuiling, the political spectrum never meandered far from that structure. Any changes that occurred since the 1980′s have by-and-large been within the well-known system. New parties would form, but they would adhere to the left-right spectrum (and until the 80′s, the famous ‘pillars’). In fact, the most significant upstart that advocated system-change, D66, has quickly been encapsulated into the spectrum as the epitome of the middle-of-the-road party. D66 is perhaps the most vivid example of the stolid Dutch political establishment that is reluctant to accept change it cannot qualify.

Pim Fortuyn: enjoying an almost saint-like status nowadays.

That ended with Pim Fortuyn. A politician that now has an almost saint-like status in Dutch culture as the man who dared to speak out against the ‘The Hague apparatchiks’. The governments before him had been very successful in fostering economic, social, environmental and cultural progress. The so-called ‘Purple Cabinets‘ (Paars I and II) were a mix of liberal and socialist parties, coming together to form progressive-centrist policies. None of the opposition parties offered any real resistance. How could they? Purple policies were progressive enough for the liberals, social enough for the reds and in the time of secular liberalism, the Christian parties were out anyway.

Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002, was the first person to find the cracks in this structure. The complicated and not very successful integration of immigrants into society (mainly guest workers brought in over the post-war decades) played into his hands, as did the fact that the political elite that was enjoying its success too much. Fortuyn formed a perfect storm and created a platform for the angry. His party (the LPF) couldn’t be qualified along the lines of Dutch politics. It was right-wing in foreign and migration policies, but with redistributive policies only seen in the most socialist of programmes. Combined with the promise to let ‘people who had business experience’ run the government, it was the first successful anti-establishment party. For ‘The People’, not just a pillar as with the socialist movement.

From 2001 onward, the traditional left-right divide no longer worked as an analytical tool or even a useful form of political expression. Yet, the system has never recovered from the new idea that parties could actually exist outside of the status quo. In the wake of the rise and fall of the LPF, a number of contenders have emerged, each with a mix of left-wing and right-wing policies. This is best exemplified by the successor of Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV). With an agenda based on xenophobic screed and anti-elite discourse, the well-spoken former liberal (a scion of former VVD deputy and EU Commissioner Bolkestein) torments both the liberal VVD, and the socialist SP and PvdA. These traditional parties are trying to adapt, incorporating stances heretofore unacceptable to them. The VVD becoming more repressive on law and order, the SP going back to its reactionary socialist roots, and the PvdA still searching for a response.

So what has happened to ‘The Left’?

The truth is that before Fortuyn the old system had led to the adoption of norms in all political parties that would be called ‘Left Wing’ in other countries. The large losses of the Socialist parties is largely due to the fact that they have not been able to find a new cause after most of their policies had been enacted by the 80′s. Even the Christian Democrats advocate a highly organised welfare state, and with ChristenUnie there is even a (moderate) progressive faction. When the old system of Left-Right politics worked, coalitions would be created along familiar lines, even though that sometimes appeared arbitrary. With the crash of that old system of politics, there is no logical flag to rally round for opposition to Wilders and other populists, even though more values are shared. But in effect, almost all other parties condemn the PVV. And although the PVV is ahead in the polls, so are GroenLinks (a Green Party with a liberal streak) and D66 (Progressive Liberals), polar opposites of Wilders.

The Left isn’t dead. In the Netherlands, without ever really coming into power a lot of the traditionally left-wing policies have become an integral part of the political culture. Even with the dissolution of the traditional demarcations by Fortuyn and Wilders, progressive and socialist thought and culture is everywhere in varying degrees. It just can’t be pinned down in the old taxonomy. The current anger at the so-called ‘Progressive Left-Wing Elite’ is therefore mostly a construct of the populists with the objective of giving people something to rage against, based on the old convention of the well-to-do city dwellers that would vote Social Democrats, rather than on something that actually exists. The real questions which the post-election Netherlands will need to ask are therefore: How do we organise our system after the death of the Left-Right spectrum? Will verzuiling eventually be replaced by sectarianism and identity politics?

The post Whatever happened to the Dutch Left? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Second post on our series on the Dutch general elections.

On Wednesday 15 March, Dutch voters will head to the polls to elect a new parliament and prime minister. And for once, the rest of Europe is very interested, as the question looms whether the leader of the far-right populist Party for Freedom (PVV) Geert Wilders may become head of government after these elections.

In good company in the European Parliament.

Although the Freedom Party’s election programme only consists of one single page with eleven bullet points, it does not fail to shock many. Geert Wilders promises a Dutch exit from the EU, the closure of all mosques, a ban on the Koran, and closed borders for refugees and immigrants from Islamic countries. Just a few months ago, Wilders was convicted by a Dutch court for group defamation and incitement of discrimination after he had stirred up an audience to chant ‘fewer, fewer, fewer Moroccans’. Yet Wilders has headed the election polls for well over a year and is now in a neck-and-neck race with the incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte from the Liberal Conservative Party (VVD).

Wilders’ popularity is not new, but has seen some high peaks recently. Indeed, the court conviction seems to have been ‘grist to Wilders’ mill’. It has fuelled the image that he is the only politician with the courage to say what is going ‘wrong’ in the Netherlands. Another important rise in popular support occurred in fall 2015, when the refugee crisis led to heated debates about immigrants taking advantage of the Dutch state and protests about the location of asylum centres. Wilders spoke in parliament about a ‘tsunami’ of asylum seekers, and said that the IS was smuggling thousands of terrorists into Europe.

Broadly speaking, it seems that a large group of Dutch voters feel that their quality of life is threatened by pressure from outside. Such pressures include the presence of Muslims, who are seen as a menace to the culture of gender equality, tolerance and freedom, perceived as ‘typically Dutch’. Moreover, the budget cuts over the course of the economic crisis are seen to have disproportionally hit the ‘hard-working’ Dutch citizen and the pensioners, and thereby threatened their social security. And finally, many do not only see the European Union and ‘Brussels’ as a threat to national culture and sovereignty, but share a widespread perception that the Dutch have paid billions of euros to Eastern and Southern member states in the wake of enlargement and the economic crisis. In this context, Wilders puts the blame on elitist politicians and promises to give ‘our money’ and the Netherlands back to ‘us’.

So the question is: can Wilders ‘win’?

In good company at the German carnival.

Current polls indicate his chances to become the largest party are good. But there are bumps in his road ahead. First, Wilders is a supporter of the presidency of Donald Trump (politico even claims he has ‘invented Trumpism’), but Dutch media have been overwhelmingly negative about Trump’s personality, behaviour and policies ever since he took office. Second, Wilders has caused some fuss in the run-up to the first election debates. He tweeted a fake picture in which the leader of the Liberal Democrats (D66) appeared to stand in a group of protesters demanding ‘sharia for the Netherlands’. He also cancelled two out of four initially scheduled debates, after a television channel adjusted the number of parties invited to participate in the debate and published an interview in which Wilders’ own (estranged) brother severely critiques his ideas. Both Wilders’ support for Trump and his absence from most major debates may diminish potential voters’ sympathy for him personally, which may lead to a shift away from his Party for Freedom, as previous occasions have shown.

But even if the Party for Freedom were to become the biggest group in the Parliament, Wilders’ chances of becoming Prime minister seem very slim. In the Netherlands, the 150 members of the House of Representatives are elected from party lists through proportional representation. The threshold for a party to enter the House is one seat – 0.67% of the votes – so that the percentage of votes roughly determines the percentage of seats won by a party. Moreover, political preferences of Dutch voters have become highly fragmented (as elsewhere in Europe). Altogether, it is likely that almost 15 parties will enter parliament after the elections, and that even even the biggest party in parliament will only assume around 30 seats. In this scenario, Wilders would need to find at least three partners to form a coalition government with a stable majority, but potential coalition partners have already announced that they are unwilling to cooperate with Wilders. This seems to leave him in an isolated position.

The election debates will really take off in the final three weeks before the election. It remains to be seen what the decisive issues will be – likely contenders are the costs and quality of health care and care for the elderly, pensions, defence, European integration (or disintegration), or immigration and asylum. Whether the bumps in Wilders’ road will turn out to be roadblocks remains to be seen.

The post Can the populist far-right win the elections in the Netherlands? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The year 2017 is widely seen as hugely important for European politics, with general elections in key European Union member states Germany and the Netherlands – and perhaps even in Italy – and presidential elections in France. Following the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote and the election of President Donald Trump in the United States, populist parties have a real chance of dominating the campaigns in all the aforementioned countries.

The country to kick of this string of elections is the Netherlands. General elections will take place on 15 March of this year and by the looks of it they may result in further fragmentation of the Dutch political landscape. Citizens can choose between no less than 28 parties, from established parties such as the Christian Democratic CDA, the Social Democratic PvdA, and the Liberal VVD, to relative newcomers such as the Party for the Animals, Jesus Lives and, of course, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom.

The Netherlands is one of the key examples of what political scientist Arend Lijphart has called a “consensus democracy”. Consensus democracies are characterised by multi-party systems and proportionate representation, with power being shared between different societal groups. The Dutch political process is shaped by broad agreements, consensus and coalitions, which should accommodate the wishes of political minorities. The period of pillarisation, lasting from approximately 1917 until halfway through the 1960s, represented the apex of Dutch consensus politics. During this period society was divided in four pillars (Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and Liberals) which had an impact on almost every aspect of life. Yet, even during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of de-pillarisation and increased polarisation, and later phases of more manifest political competition, a consensual approach has been at the centre of Dutch politics.

To this day, cabinet-formation as well as day-to-day politics requires coalitions. Collegial cabinets are responsible to and dependent on parliament. As a result, Dutch politicians have also been reluctant to consider the option of minority governments. One of the most prominent exceptions to this rule has been the CDA-VVD government, headed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which was dependent on support by Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom. The outgoing government is a coalition of PvdA and VVD, once again with Mark Rutte. This government has had a majority in the main chamber of parliament, the House of Representatives, but required support from other parties to reach a majority in the Senate which needs to approve legislation agreed upon in the House.

Voter turnout has always been quite high in the Netherlands: above 70% since the abolition of compulsory voting in 1970. Yet, as has been the case on other countries, electoral volatility has increased as ideology, class and religion have become less important and party membership decreased. The dominance of the traditional parties has declined since the 1960s and smaller parties, such as D66 (Social Liberals) and GroenLinks (Greens), have come to play a lasting role in Dutch politics. On top of this, new parties have entered the political scene since the early-2000s, typically characterised by more radical views and populist tactics that appeal to dissatisfied voters. Some newcomers, such as Pim Fortuyn’s populist-conservative LPF party, only managed to last a short time. Yet, Geert Wilders has enjoyed more or less continuous success since the mid-2000s.

Dutch coalition and consensus building – no piece of cake!

An extremely low electoral threshold of approximately 0.7% and a system of proportional representation in a single, nation-wide constituency explain why so many parties can achieve parliamentary representation. In addition, party splits and mergers have been numerous due to internal differences – since the 2012 elections, eight Members of Parliament left their party to form six new parliamentary groups, quite a few of which are now standing for election. The high number of parties with parliamentary representation is one of the main disadvantages of proportional representation, as it complicates political decision-making. Coalition governments are based on often very detailed coalition agreements. These agreements are often the result of lengthy negotiations, the longest having taken 208 days – nowhere near the Belgian record of 541 days, but still. The last one took 54 days.

This seems to make it more difficult for opposition parties to influence policymaking. Yet, they do actually have a say, for example in the drafting of legislation in parliamentary committees. Consequently, opposition parties regularly support government legislation. And even while the influence of some new parties has been modest, they may have a more lasting impact on the programmes of established political parties and on political discourse in general. This is due to the fact that throughout Dutch political history established parties often adopted the ideas of new parties. This then is the main draw of a system of proportional representation: it accommodates the views of a variety of groupings in a country that has always been one of relative minorities.

The latest polls suggest that 14 out of 28 parties may actually make it into parliament on 15 March. Polls also suggest a close race between PVV and VVD for the title of biggest party, with each now polling at approximately 17%. CDA, D66 and the Greens are all at 10-11%, followed by PvdA at approximately 8%. As nearly all parties have ruled out a coalition with Geert Wilders, it seems quite likely that the next government will be based on a coalition between 4 or more parties. So, expect to see a lengthy negotiation process in which parties with rather different programmes will have to come to an agreement. In the past Dutch politicians have proven to be able to tackle this challenge. And unless some parties withdraw on their pledges not to work with Geert Wilders, they have to.

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The French take delight in pointing out that they are World Champions in producing political opinion polls (only to shake their heads in disbelief and despair about their own addiction). While the claim to this honorary title may not be corroborated by empirical data, it confirms the impression of saturation that a politically interested individual living in this country is inevitably bound to have at one point. There are not many democracies where you have, in addition to mainstream radio and TV, four full-fledged nation-wide 24/7 news channels, all available on free TV in all households, and all guilty of the deadly sin of poll gluttony.

These days, the avid consumption of all kinds of percentages and rates, figures and trends churned out by large variety of professional survey providers who virtually sit on each other within the small world of the Parisian media-microcosm, has something even more paradoxical than before. For having failed to predict several political results in the past, the polls are viewed with increasing distrust by the public, while in fact they have become more reliable than ever. As Gaël Sliman, long-standing pollster and founder-president of the dynamic newcomer Odoxa, pointed out to me recently, the whole industry has made tremendous progress not only in terms of methodology, but also with regard to sampling: ‘The samples have become much more representative of the population ; not only is there a lot less lying or holding back on the side of respondents, but in addition online paneling reaches the previously hidden groups’. So how does he explain the bad reputation of the surveys and the pollsters behind them? For him, it’s all a question of expectations:

Gaël Sliman, president and co-founder of ODOXA.

‘The French are extraordinarily interested in politics, more than other European populations. And they have extremely high expectations towards all things political. Which necessarily produces excessive disappointment at one point. In an ever more fragmented and unstable political landscape, they want to consult the polls as forecasts. But polls have never predicted the future! And they do so even less today, since the volatility of people’s opinion has increased dramatically’.

He is probably right. Take the presidential election, always held in April/May. The period of crystallization of the vote used to be around early February, when the campaign dynamics started to be clearly visible. This was the case for Hollande in 2012, Sarkozy in 2007, and even Chirac in 2002. Some may argue that in 2002 no one had seen Le Pen coming, but that’s only partly true: one of the pollsters had informed Jospin’s campaign staff about the danger of a perceptible movement, only to be willingly ignored…)

This being said, the reliability/distrust paradox is only one of the French polling paradoxes. Another one is that precisely at the moment where all candidates exhort the public not to trust the polls – which will never be able to capture the mood and the swelling dynamics ‘on-the-ground’, like Fillon repeated over and over again during the primaries campaign, before getting completely out of touch himself with the ‘on-the-ground mood’ once convicted of flagrant nepotism – the survey results are likely to have more influence on the elections than ever.

This paradox is due to both the electoral system and the emergence of the extreme right. Traditionally, as the saying went, the French voted, in accordance with their political ideas, in favour of a candidate at the first round of the presidential election, before voting against the bigger evil in the second round. Today, if three quarters of the population wish to avoid ‘La Présidente’ Marine Le Pen, citizens cannot help but think ‘strategically’ and give their vote to the candidate best placed to be sure to beat her.

Gaël Sliman has doubts about this theory. He believes that polls are ‘just one parameter in the decision-making among many’, though they may have a ‘stronger impact on those who hesitate between two candidates and cannot make up their mind’. One way or another, even those who use the polls to orient their own choice are likely to end up disappointed by the ‘false predictions’ they interpreted into the figures despite better knowledge.

But disappointment on every level is in the genes of the Fifth Republic. The hopelessly binary, antagonistic election campaign induces candidates to engage in promises both they and their electorate know they will be unable to keep. But given the aura of excessive power and prestige of the President, both the candidates and the electorate push each other invariably towards gross exaggeration in both promises and expectations. Once the inebriation with grand schemes is over and hangover sets in, both are set for five years of coexistence between a naked king and, as Gaël Sliman puts it very nicely, ‘a people of frustrated regicides’ (a formula I would have loved to invent myself…).

And as soon as the frustration sets in – at the latest in the autumn of election year – the only thing that brings comfort is the steadily decreasing popularity rates in these damned, beloved polls!

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 13 on the French 2017 election marathon.
All previous posts can be found here.

The post France 2017: Polling paradoxes appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Jens Jungblut, Pauline Ravinet, and Martina Vukasovic

In this thematic issue of Policy and Society (all contributions are openly accessible), we highlight the multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue (the ‘multi-s’) nature of public policy using the case of higher education policies.

We begin with an overview of how the global shift towards knowledge-based economies and societies has placed ‘knowledge’ at the core of contemporary public policy and policymaking. The governance of knowledge, however, is not a neatly contained policy coordination exercise: it requires collaboration across multiple policy sectors that may have previously experienced very little or less interaction. For example, we can think of a (non-exhaustive) list of relevant policy areas to include, such as higher education, research, trade, foreign policy, development, or migration. In our view, higher education policy coordination is thus permeated with respective sectoral concerns, with discussions taking place across distinct policy arenas, sometimes in silos, both inside and outside of formal government channels.

While the above characterization brings forth the multi-issue aspect competing for attention in higher education policy coordination, we suggest that it also points to the presence of multiple actors: state actors from different ministries or agencies, representatives from universities and businesses, other non-state actors (interest groups, stakeholder organizations), as well as users of such coordinative outputs (concerned parents, students, as well as employers). As regular readers of this blog would recognize: the multi-issue and multi-actor features of higher education policy coordination often result in duplication, competition, inconsistencies, clashing priorities, and even potential bureaucratic and political conflict (Braun, 2008; Peters, 2015)—all symptoms of horizontal policy coordination challenges (Gornitzka, 2010).

We can add to this observation the fact that actors involved in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of higher education policy (Gornitzka & Maassen, 2000; Olsen, 1988) often operate, and ‘shop’ for better policy solutions, across several governance levels. While the rise of the regions—both supranational and subnational—in the higher education policy domain has garnered some academic attention (Chou & Ravinet, 2015; Jayasuriya & Robertson, 2010), this multi-level dimension of policy coordination needs to be brought into sharper relief. Indeed, international knowledge policy coordination stretches across many levels, including the macro-regional (e.g. European Union—EU, Association of Southeast Asian Nations—ASEAN), the meso-regional (Nordics, Baltics—bilateral or multilateral cooperation among states sharing specific geographical features), sub-regional (also bilateral or multilateral cross-border cooperation between distinct territories of different states), as well as the state/national (in federal systems), sub-national, and organizational levels (see e.g. Piattoni, 2010 concerning multi-level governance in the European context).

In the introduction to this thematic issue, we present an analytical framework that would assist in identifying and studying the multi-issue, multi-actor, and multi-level features of contemporary policymaking and policy coordination. Specifically, we strongly argue that studying policy coordination in today’s higher education sector requires unpacking the three distinct characteristics of this very coordination and addressing them separately from one another as an independent perspective and recognizing their interaction as likely to be responsible for the outcomes observed. In so doing, we call for analysing how the ‘multi-s’ features affect the stability, changes, and evolution of individual and collective higher education policy coordination under observation. In academic practice (i.e. theory-building, research design, and empirical fieldwork), it means that it is essential to pay attention in the following ways when examining individual ‘multi-s’ characteristic:

1. Multi-level characteristic – focus on the antecedents and consequences of distribution or concentration of authority across governance levels;
2. Multi-actor characteristic – acknowledge both the heterogeneity of the ‘state’ and its many composite institutions as well as the involvement of non-state actors (e.g. stakeholder organizations, businesses, consumers) in this policy domain; and
3. Multi-issue characteristic – identify how clashes as well as complementarities between policy sectors and spill-overs move into and away from the policy domain of interest.

In our view, the ‘multi-s’ framework offers a solid first conceptual step to encapsulate and unravel the complexity observed within contemporary higher education policymaking and coordination. The thematic issue contains eight contributions that bring our observations to life with a range of cases (from higher education appropriations to work-based higher education programmes, stakeholder organizations, standardization, and higher education regionalisms) and developments across multiple countries and geographical areas (from the U.S. to China, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Europe and Southeast Asia).

We invite everyone interested in the increased complexity of governing, producing, and using knowledge in today’s policymaking to consider our framework as a more comprehensive way to gain a greater understanding of both historical and contemporary developments.

Braun, D. (2008). Organising the political coordination of knowledge and innovation policies. Science and Public Policy, 35(4), 227-239. doi:10.3152/030234208×287056

Chou, M.-H., & Ravinet, P. (2015). Governing higher education beyond the state: The rise of ‘Higher education regionalism’. In H. De Boer, D. D. Dill, J. Huisman, & M. Souto-Otero (Eds.), Handbook of Higher Education Policy and Governance (pp. 361-378). London: Palgrave.

Gornitzka, Å. (2010). Bologna in context: A horizontal perspective on the dynamics of governance sites for a Europe of Knowledge. European Journal of Education, 45(4), 535-548.

Gornitzka, Å., & Maassen, P. (2000). Hybrid steering approaches with respect to European higher education. Higher Education Policy, 13(3), 267-285.

Jayasuriya, K., & Robertson, S. L. (2010). Regulatory regionalism and the governance of higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 8(1), 1-6. doi:10.1080/14767720903573993

Olsen, J. P. (1988). Administrative reform and theories of organization. In C. Campbell & B. G. Peters (Eds.), Organizing governance, governing organizations (pp. 233-254). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Peters, B. G. (2015). Pursuing horizontal managment: the politics of public sector coordination. Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Piattoni, S. (2010). The theory of multi-level governance: conceptual, empirical, and normative challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Taking Tony Judt’s A Grand Illusion? out of the shelf again.

Revisiting a book on the general state and mid-term prospects of the European Union that was only written twenty years ago may turn out to be a very useful exercise. It puts into perspective the achievements and failures of what is a slow and long integration process. And it sheds an interesting, different, light on the present.

Tony Judt’s book A Grand Illusion?, published by Penguin, is a wonderful case in point. It’s a short, but dense essay of 130 pages, based on a series of lectures given in the mid-1990s by this renowned historian, a British citizen living and working in the United States.

Right at the beginning the author lists the three questions he wants to address in his book: ‘What are the prospects for the European Union? If they are not wholly rosy, why is that? And how much does it, in any event, matter whether a united Europe may or may not come about? (p. vii).

In his elaborate response to these questions, Tony Judt takes great care to draw the distinction between what may be considered the desirable outcome of the EU’s development and the possibility of it coming about. The least you can say is that there is a significant gap between the two. Judt remains more than doubtful with regard to the capacity of the Europe of 15 to realise its proclaimed objectives.

This book is written by a ‘Eurosceptic’ in the noblest sense of the word, before it was hi-jacked by the worst representatives of narrow-minded and populist nationalism. Judt sees no contradiction whatsoever in declaring himself at the same time ‘enthusiastically European’ and a ‘Euro-pessimist’. And the two are indeed not mutually exclusive: at the French referendum on the constitutional treaty in 2005, many citizens spoke about their deep disappointment when comparing their ideal of a united Europe with the prospects of the existing EU they were summoned to approve.

And like every self-respecting pessimist, Judt attributes the successes and achievements that European integration had nevertheless known simply to ‘good fortune’, an expression that is recurrent throughout the book and that translates a certain difficulty to explain why on earth Jean Monnet was so successful in his ground-breaking initiative, against all odds, and against the logic of ‘realism’. According to Judt, it is well ‘good fortune’, this ‘midwife of mid-twentieth-century Western European prosperity’ (p. 33), brought in by unique circumstances, that ‘fueled the vehicle of European unity’. Much more so in any case than ‘coal, labor, and dollars’ (p. 41).

As a result, to Judt, the ‘foundation myth of modern Europe  – that the European Community was and remains the kernel of a greater, pan-European prospect’ (p. 41), and the promise that this Europe would be ‘no mere neo-mercantilistic partnership of the rich and famous’ (p. 42) – is just that: a myth, and an empty promise. And he finds it difficult to have trust in this poorly identified object, born of a fortunate geopolitical configuration and both pushed and dominated by ‘separate and distinctive electoral concerns’ in the countries that made it up. (p. 23).

Tony Judt (1948-2010)

Tony Judt’s scepticism – which is always coloured with a good dose of melancholy perhaps due to his family roots in the heart of Mitteleuropa where he also drafted is book – does not allow him in 1995/96 to envisage that the European Union might actually be up to its historical task and overcome the old divisions of the continent. Quite the contrary: since ‘Western Europeans came to have a strong and growing interest in keeping Europe divided’ (p. 43), it seemed clear to him that they would perpetuate the exclusion of the poor cousins to the East. Not only for economic reasons, far from that: Judt sees an entire conceptual fault line running through the continent, when it comes to interpret what ‘Europe’ actually means, a ‘great gulf of uninterest and misunderstanding that separates east and west’ (p. 58).

On this point, as we know in hindsight, his profound scepticism misled him. The EU did integrate Central and Eastern Europe, sometimes even against the economic imperatives and despite serious shortcomings with regard to the rights of minorities or corruption. Where Judt is however more than clear-sighted is in his premonitions of the inevitable decline of the European Welfare State, which in his entire work he never ceased to praise as Europe’s greatest civilizational achievement. His concerns about the increased pressure he saw at work on social solidarity and cohesion all across the continent have been confirmed over the last two decades. And his analysis of both the predictable deepening of social inequality and the effects of demographic change and mass immigration, which he thought would inevitably lead to the resurgence of a reactionary and rancid nationalism, read today like an anticipation of populism triumphant in 2016.

At the end the author wonders whether the European Union had not better admit to itself that the famous ‘ever closer union’ simply is ‘impossible in practice, and (…) therefore perhaps imprudent to promise’ (p. 129). And he ends up a spokesman of neo-protectionist and sovereigntist voices when he concludes that it might well be possible that ‘the old-fashioned nation-state is a better form in which to secure collective loyalties, protect the disadvantaged, enforce a fairer distribution of resources, and compensate for disruptive transnational economic patterns’ (p. 130).

With such a conclusion, the reader is entitled to wonder why the title of the book actually carries a question mark. But even if Tony Judt’s elegant prose constitutes no doubt Europessimism’s finest clothes, it may not be as ‘realistic’ as it wants (and claims) to be.

To start with, it suffers, as Stanley Hoffman pointed out in his review in Foreign Affairs (No. 76, Janvier 1997, p. 139-145), of ‘exaggerations, contradictions and omissions’ that are characteristic to this type of Euroscepticism. According to him, Tony Judt’s book is certainly a remarkable essay, but at the same time a ‘jeremiad too fond of gloom and doom’.

I couldn’t agree more with this friendly criticism. The greatest shortcoming of A Grand Illusion? is no doubt the total lack of consideration for any kind of idealistic motivations in the setting up of the European community. These have, however, never been entirely absent in the difficult process of European integration. To reduce the historical miracle of genuine and deep-reaching reconciliation between France and Germany to a kind of pragmatic negotiation and bargaining, falls a little short of the truth. And reveals quite a bit about the perception the author has not only of international relations in general, but also of human nature. This perception is of course perfectly legitimate, but it only tells half the story.

A fascinating second reading for a book that, twenty years on, makes the reader aware that the coughing engine of the European bus actually still progresses on the bumpy road of integration (even if some passengers prefer to get off). A ride which is certainly never satisfying for Euro-enthusiasts, but a lot smoother than predicted by the Euro-pessimists.

The French version of this post kicked off
the ‘relecture’ series on the Alliance Europa blog.

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Last year, I spent some days in the UN archives in New York to find out more about the topic of my current research on budgeting in the United Nations.

As I am going through the material (hundreds of photos of archive documents), I stumbled over a document that is only incidentally relevant to my research: a summary of a meeting of then-US-President Bill Clinton with then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (who died while I was in New York last year). The meeting took place on 27 September 1993, so in the first year of Clinton’s first term, and the second year of Boutros-Ghalis single term.

This is how the 4-page meeting summary (written by the UN Secretariat and now archived) starts:

Well, starting a meeting that goes on afterwards with topics Somalia, Bosnia, UN reform and the Middle East – this sounds like a classic Bill Clinton, doesn’t it?

I guess today, it would rather be on the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, to make the “hopefully nobody shouts ‘Fire’” joke.

Today, the USA threatened to leave the UN Human Rights Council, which will probably not the last time the Trump administration will start laying actual fire.

But, to be fair to Trump: looking through the archive material on budget politics in the UN during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, this administration and the present Congress would not be the first who try to mess with the United Nations – it’s actually a pretty common patterns coming from the US.

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Tony Blair’s call to spirits to rise up from the deep to throw off Brexit was worthy of Owen Glendower’s faith in his magical powers. So too is the reply that Shakespeare gave Hotspur: ‘Why so can I or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?’ Blair’s cosmopolitan audience showed there are people in the City of London welcoming his call to remain in the European Union. But his talk gave no hint of how troops raised in the Square Mile could successfully capture Parliament.

The most straightforward way to repudiate the Brexit referendum result is to call a second referendum in which some who voted to leave would change their minds as signs emerge of the difficulties and uncertainties entailed in de-integrating the UK from the EU. It would require a swing of less than 2.0 percent to turn the minority vote for remaining in the EU into a majority.

For this to happen, Parliament would have to approve another referendum. Remainers could try to emulate the successful campaign of their opponents and seek an MP among the 20 qualified to introduce a Private Member’s bill in this session of Parliament. A mischievous Scottish National Party MP could speak from conviction of remaining in the EU. Defeat of the bill by an overwhelming mass of English MPs would add fuel to the party’s case for Scottish independence.

One stumbling block to a referendum is the wording of the question. Tony Blair’s call favours the proposition that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union; the Conservative majority favours the opposite. Like the historic Glendower, Blair is ignoring the strength of the troops massed against him in Parliament. In any event, the Government can claim that the courts have given MPs a voice. Earlier in February almost 500 MPs voted to go ahead with withdrawal, including a majority of Labour as well as Tory members.

In a sense, Blair is correct in stating that both the referendum and parliamentary votes have been taken ‘without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit’. These can only become known in autumn 2018, when UK and EU negotiators publish joint recommendations about the rules that should govern the post-Brexit relations between UK and the EU when it officially cases to be a member before Easter 2019. Once these terms are known, Remainers could promote a referendum about whether the terms should be accepted. The government would again reject such a demand on the grounds that a parliamentary vote is sufficient to authorise acceptance.

Theresa May has left open whether the government would recommend accepting a deal with the EU or endorse its rejection if its terms were a bad deal. Conservative MPs critical of the only deal on offer would want to hold the Prime Minister to her pledge that exit with no deal is better than accepting a bad deal. At present, a majority of MPs would prefer to vote for whatever deal was available rather than no deal. In the House of Lords, where the government lacks a majority, a majority of peers would undoubtedly endorse whatever an elected government negotiated and the Commons approved.

Blairite MPs could offer an amendment asking the government to return to Brussels to withdraw its notification of withdrawal. Such a strategy assumes that the EU would allow the UK to rescind its notification of withdrawal. The EU has made it clear that, like pro-Brexit Tory MPs, it wants an end to years of uncertainty about whether Britain is in or out of Europe. Labour MPs would face the awkward choice of voting for the government’s deal as a lesser evil or casting a negative vote that would not lead to better terms but to a complete break with the EU.

In practice, the only way to undo the referendum vote is to have a House of Commons with a majority of MPs in favour of British membership in the EU. If Blair issued a call for a general election before withdrawal is a fact, he would need the votes of 433 MPs for a ballot, or dozens of Conservative and SNP MPs to combine with Labour to form a new government with Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. If Hotspur were a bookmarker, he would offer odds of more than a million to one against this. Once a new House of Commons is elected in 2020, there will be five years for MPs to review the consequences of what Parliament and people have voted for and decide to apply to become an EU member state.

Instead of issuing a call which is  certain to get a parliamentary response only from Lord Mandelson, Tony Blair could achieve more if he tried to work his magic on the devils that are in the details of Brexit and will affect the state of Britain in the world once it no longer belongs to the European Union. For example, he could return to a cause he once advocated when shadow minister for employment a quarter century ago: the need to improve state education and vocational training so that British workers and enterprises can compete better in an increasingly competitive world.

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Ask not whether the European Union is a federation or not, ask what Europe can teach us about the very concept of federation!

In a nutshell, this is one of my major take-homes from a particularly enriching seminar held in Nantes on 17 February at the Chair of European Philosophy of Alliance Europa. Olivier Beaud, constitutional lawyer at the University of Paris (Panthéon-Assas) and one of France’s best-known theorists of the State, discussed his ‘Theory of Federation’ with Julien Barroche from Inalco and Sciences Po Paris.

Olivier Beaud declared himself absolutely not convinced by the eternal ‘sui generis’ categorisation of the European Union. The widespread use of this comfortable conceptual no man’s land is no doubt due to a certain intellectual laziness (and the desire to keep the poisonous ‘F’-word out of the debate). It keeps the researcher from thinking the idea of federation to the end. Julien Barroche agreed: he called the ‘sui generis’ model a ‘conceptual imprisonment by retroactive rationalisation’.

Oliver Beaud took things even further: for him, the well-known dichotomy between ‘federal state’ and ‘confederation of states’ is yet another ‘obstacle to thought’. The real antagonism lies between ‘federation’ and ‘state’, the former standing for a dualism of structures, the latter for unicity (almost like the difference between stereo and mono :-).

If a federation is a ‘union between states that decide to unify in order to become something else’, a state that enters a federation ceases to be a state strictu sensu. The entities formely known as states do not disappear – they are the creators of a new judicial being, an association in which they remain present and on whose development they maintain an influence.

According to Olivier Beaud, our vision has been blurred by the nomenclature of international law, which has imposed the exclusive domination of the (nation-)state as actor. But this vision is nothing short of an ‘excessive simplification’, because it keeps federations and their specificities out of the radar.

Julien Barroche and Olivier Beaud, welcomed by Arnauld Leclerc from the Chair of European Philosophy.

Of course, the European Union is, despite a series of federative elements, an incomplete federation. Its most striking paradox is that, as federation, it was created on the basis of concerns for security and prosperity with regard to the exterior – Julien Barroche quoted Raymond Aron for whom a federation is ‘resolutely decided to defend its identity towards the exterior’ – while it is exactly this unicity towards exterior threats that is both needed and lacking on the European level.

Taking the historical evolution of the United States of America as a benchmark for how federations behave, Olivier Beaud noted that Europe has not known the same centralising shift from federation to State that the US underwent under the pressure of successive wars. Neither is it capable and willing to ensure, especially with regard to current dramatic infringements on democracy in Hungary and Poland, the minimum homogeneity of political regimes within its federation.

He finished  – of course! – with a thought on Brexit.

In a federation, unilateral secession is by definition illicit. And until the introduction of article 50 in the Treaty of Lisbonne, it was not foreseen in the EU either. Article 50, however, was conceived as an element of compensation during negotiations, as an option permanently available to member state, thus bringing the incomplete European federation one step further back, in the direction of becoming merely an international organisation.

There was another lovely conceptual take-away in waiting at the end of this dense and inspiring seminar. It was offered by Jean-Marc Ferry, who holds the chair in European philosophy in Nantes. In his concluding reflection, he suggested to think about the incompatibility between federation and sovereignty in a different, differentiated light. In reference to the concepts of negative and positive liberty developed by several philosophers from Friedrich Wilhelm to Isaiah Berlin, he proposed the concepts of negative and positive sovereignty, the former being exemplified in Brexit as the kind of (fake) sovereignty that is still available to member-states, while the latter, as capacity to act and take control of one’s destiny, is the one which a member-state has definitely lost when entering the federation and which can only be recovered and enacted collectively.

Given the sheer quality of the debate, I was not surprised to see that among the public no one was looking at their computer screens or smartphone displays (a welcome change from what has become the norm of academic events). A refreshing, good old 20th-century colloquium with an audience of two dozen people actually listening with concentration and attention, and no doubt walking out with the feeling of being more intelligent than when they entered the room two hours earlier. If in addition you can take away thoughts on your TGV home that you know will enrich your teaching and research, you have a brief, satisfying glimpse of what academic life might be.

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Conventional wisdom is that opposition parties perform well and gain ground in by-elections while governing parties don’t. In Stoke Central, Labour managed to retain their seat, albeit with a reduced majority. The Conservative’s win in Copeland, however, was nothing short of a disaster for Labour in a constituency they have consistently held since the 1980s. It is the first by-election gain by a governing party since 1982.

There has been a temptation since the EU referendum to view subsequent electoral contests primarily through the lens of Brexit. Brexit, it is argued, is the new divide in British politics. Voters are aligned to remain or leave. There are remain constituencies and there are leave constituencies. This narrative was present in coverage in the run up to yesterday’s by-elections – to some extent in Copeland and to a large extent in Stoke. Media coverage was keen to highlight that both constituencies voted leave in the referendum. With around 70% voting for ‘leave’ in June’s EU referendum, Stoke attained the status of “the Brexit capital of Britain”, making it a prime target for the new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall, keen to reach out to disaffected Labour voters. Candidates were initially assessed not on their broader appeal to the local electorate, but whether they supported remain or leave in the referendum, whether they would respect the result of the referendum and so on. It’s a narrative that worked well with the Richmond by-election in December 2016, but cannot be applied so readily to yesterday’s by-elections.

Brexit no doubt played a role yesterday, but the result in Stoke in particular challenges the simplistic narrative that constituencies and voters can be neatly divided into “remain” and “leave”. Instead, questions can be raised about a range of other possible factors which have played a role.

For example, what impact has the popularity of party leaders had? Labour’s problems arguably run much deeper than its current leadership, but Jeremy Corbyn is by no means a popular leader. In the latest YouGov poll only 15% think he is best for Prime Minister, compared to 49% for Theresa May. Following her election last night, the Conservative victor Trudy Harrison was explicitly clear in attributing her success in what had been a long-term Labour seat to the fact that voters in Copeland simply felt that “Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t represent them”. This was despite the future of the local NHS hospital being one of the key issues locally, something Labour traditionally should have been able to capitalize on.

What about the quality of the candidates themselves? In Stoke, both Snell and Nuttall were the focus of significant media attention. Snell received significant criticism following the revelation of his less than squeaky clean social media history. And Nuttall too for his claims about Hillsborough and his potential breach of electoral law by failing to list his actual address on the nomination forms. Snell was able to draw on his local connections to Stoke, while Nuttall was never going to be able to shift his status as an opportunistic parachute candidate.

What about the local campaigns? The Conservatives put a lot of effort into the on-the-ground campaign to win Copeland, and it clearly paid off. Labour similarly had a heavy presence on the ground in Stoke, while UKIP’s efforts there were hardly a model for an efficient party campaign machinery in action. Again, Nuttall’s failure to list his correct address on his nomination form, along with his absence from some local hustings events are illustrations of this.

And what about the issues that resonate with local people (all politics is local after all)? Much has been made of the importance of the nuclear industry as a major employer in Copeland. To what extent did the current Labour leadership’s perceived ambivalence and lack of commitment to nuclear play on voters’ minds there? In Stoke, despite the high leave vote in June’s referendum, Brexit barely got a mention in the local campaign. Rather the performance of the local hospital, the future of other local public services and a general dissatisfaction with Westminster politics were key issues on the doorstep. This was even recognized by UKIP, and Nuttall was keen to point out in hustings (those that he attended) that Brexit wasn’t the most important issue at stake in the by-election.

Yes, certain areas voted predominately to leave, and others to remain. But yesterday’s by-elections show us the picture is far more complex than this simple characterization would have us believe. Leave vs. remain becomes rather more murky when you throw in the dynamics of party competition, for example. For those of us that study politics, this reaffirms the complexity of electoral contests, and the need to consider a range of local and national factors that have the potential to influence voter behaviour and the outcome of elections. Brexit and the proportion of leave/remain voters in any given area may be one of a number of explanatory factors explaining electoral outcomes, but it is important not to lose sight of local context.

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