Ideas on Europe Blog

By Vytautas Kuokštis and Ringailė Kuokštytė

 

How can we explain the very uneven economic outcomes in EU member countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially considering that the shock was largely symmetric?

In our article for the Journal of Common Market Studies, we analyse quarterly data on economic growth and show that institutional quality, measured using the World Bank Governance Indicators and the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index, helped to moderate the economic shock, thus contributing to the divergence among EU countries.

Theoretically, the role of institutions may be expected to matter through a few important channels. Higher-quality institutions are likely to contribute to better policy decisions and their superior implementation. In the case of the pandemic, one would expect such institutions to be associated with more appropriate responses regarding the timing of both healthcare and economic measures, as well as the scale and efficacy of these measures. Besides, higher-quality institutions are more trustworthy, which may have encouraged businesses not to curb their investment during the pandemic; similarly, they may have led citizens to more fully comply with regulations, as a consequence of which less stringent measures may have been needed. Uncertainty was less of an issue in this institutional scenario.

Furthermore, institutional quality in terms of economic freedom facilitates a faster and more effective reallocation of resources in the realm of activity by economic actors. The mechanism of market prices, with its inherent ‘profit and loss signals’, in lieu of information distributed by a centralised authority, provides better guidance as to viable economic options in a given disaster-like context.

Taking advantage of an extended period of the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore its several waves, our analysis employs these theoretical expectations by focusing on the possibility that institutions mattered more when the shock of the pandemic was more severe.

We find that the importance of institutional quality waned over time as the pandemic shock became less severe. In 2020, the shock was more substantial, given the newness of the virus. Extreme uncertainty that ensued and the lack of vaccines only exacerbated this shock. As revealed in Figure 1, the influence of higher-quality institutions was substantial and significant in 2020, but not in 2021.

 

Figure 1. Marginal Effects of Institutional Quality (World Bank and Economic Freedom) on Quarterly Economic Growth in 2020 and 2021 (with 95% confidence intervals)
Note: The models adjust for forecast GDP growth, tourism share, virus deaths, and time fixed effects.

 

Furthermore, the role of institutional quality was particularly significant when the virus spread reached its highest levels. Figure 2 shows that, at low levels of institutional quality measured, here, in terms of the Economic Freedom Index, increasing deaths had a statistically significant and substantially important negative effect on economic growth. However, this effect weakened at higher levels of institutional quality. In fact, at the highest institutional quality levels, increasing deaths had no statistically significant adverse effect on growth. We observe the same patterns using the World Bank governance predictor.

 

Figure 2. Marginal Effects of 10 Per Cent Increase in Deaths on Quarterly Economic Growth at Different Levels of Economic Freedom (with 95% confidence intervals)
Note: The model adjusts for forecast GDP growth, tourism share, the interaction between years and institutional quality, and time fixed effects.

 

Furthermore, the institutional perspective helps to shed some light on EU countries’ individual experiences. Figure 3 shows country-based average residuals (unexplained positive and negative deviations) in economic growth for EU members in 2020. The dark-shaded bars depict the unexplained growth estimated based on the regression model that only adjusts for the extent of the virus spread, economic structure, and forecast GDP growth. The light-shaded bars are based on the model that additionally adjusts for institutional quality.

The institutional perspective is helpful in better explaining the growth experience of both the largest over- and under-performers. In particular, a relatively bad performance of countries such as Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Greece is less surprising given their low level of institutional quality, whereas the opposite is true for countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. That is, their good economic results during the pandemic are not as startling when one considers the quality of their institutions.

 

Figure 3. Unexplained Economic Growth of Individual EU Member States
Notes: The dark-shaded bars represent the average of residuals for each EU country over the quarters of 2020, based on the model that includes cases, deaths, growth forecast, and tourism share in the economy. The light-shaded bars represent average residuals based on the model that additionally takes into account institutional quality. The x-axis represents GDP growth (in percentage).

 

The article contributes to offering additional evidence that institutional quality matters in dealing with shocks. Practically speaking, the COVID-19 pandemic yet again exposed the underlying institutional heterogeneity within the euro area and the EU more generally. Without closing gaps in institutional quality, it is hard to expect substantial convergence among EU members in the future. This should also inform EU financial assistance, as a special emphasis should be placed on improving institutional quality, especially given that aid effects are also likely to be conditional on the institutional environment. The potential of the EU’s most recent financial instrument, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, to transform EU economies and narrow down developmental gaps is also contingent on the institutional quality of particular member states. Institutional reforms would not only enhance member states’ long-run growth prospects but also help bolster their resilience to shocks.

 

 

Authors:

Vytautas Kuokštis

Vytautas is an associate professor at Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science. His research interests focus on comparative and international political economy.

Contact: Twitter, Department Twitter, Personal Website

 

 

Ringailė Kuokštytė

Ringailė is a researcher at General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania. Her research interests include EU politics, international cooperation, and defence policy.

Link to academic profile.

The post High-quality Institutions Insulated EU Economies during the Pandemic appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This blog entry is a repost from The Progressive Post‘s article ‘What role for health promotion in the European Health Union?’ by Charlotte Godziewski, published on the 26 October 2022 as part of the Dossier entitled ‘Moving towards a Healthier Union‘. 

 

So far, the European Health Union is largely focused on the necessary task of improving health security. A more comprehensive Health Union also needs to consider health promotion. But what does health promotion mean? Is it merely an instrument to nudge individual behaviours, or can it be more than that? A truly health-promoting Union requires a more social Union.

Health has become a classic example of the EU cooperating and furthering integration in response to crises. The bovine spongiform encephalopathy (‘mad cow disease’) crisis was pivotal in strengthening food safety standards. The 2003 SARS outbreak propelled the creation of the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC). Now, with Covid-19, we are witnessing the development of a broad and ambitious – if somewhat vague – vision of EU health: the European Health Union.

While giving more attention to health is seen by most as a welcomed improvement, it is also important to look at the kind of further EU integration in health: What are the underlying rationales and avenues currently explored under the proposed European Health Union, and what are the potential opportunity costs of neglected options?

So far, the European Health Union’s aim is to ‘[protect] the health of Europeans and collectively [respond] to cross-border health crises‘. Its action plan focuses on health security, industrial strategy for medical countermeasures, and digital innovation. However, very little is said about the importance of health promotion. Health promotion has been reduced to exhorting and nudging people to take responsibility and make healthy choices. If health promotion is understood in these narrow terms, it is understandable that the EU does not concentrate its Health Union efforts on it, especially considering its limited formal competences in that area.

But health promotion can and should be so much more. Factors that shape population health are numerous and far-reaching. In the early 2000s the World Health Organization produced a body of work focused on the so-called ‘social determinants of health’. These are the social conditions under which people live, and they include, for example, access to decent housing, education, health care, active transport, safe urban spaces etc. Now research is increasingly interested in understanding macro-social determinants of health. These are the socioeconomic and political conditions, processes and power dynamics that affect population health directly and/or indirectly via complex and multileveled causalities.

Austerity is a good example of a macro-social determinant of (ill-)health. The austerity measures taken in response to the Eurozone crisis have been disastrous for health: Greece, Spain, and Portugal saw a rise in suicide rates and infectious disease outbreaks, while access to healthcare services became restricted. Research has demonstrated that, more than the crisis itself, it was the type of fiscal response and the strength of social protection mechanisms, that decisively shaped health outcomes. As such, the EU’s economic governance and fiscal coordination activities contribute to shaping public health, not only because they impact healthcare systems, but also because they prescribe the general direction of member state’s public spending.

Compared to the Eurozone crisis, the EU’s Covid-19 response was a clear improvement. The EU fiscal rules have been suspended by the triggering of the General Escape Clause within the Stability and Growth Pact. This means that member states have more freedom to spend and borrow as they see fit to rebuild their economies. The EU also made a €806 billion stimulus package (NextGenerationEU) available. This differs considerably from the austerity imposed a decade ago. The question is whether this reflects a lasting shift in how policymakers view public spending, and whether they recognise the importance of well-resourced public and social services for promoting health beyond exceptional crisis times. 

To develop a long-term vision for a healthier EU, we need to understand health promotion not merely as disease prevention at an earlier stage, limited to nudging individual behaviours. Rather, health promotion can be a transformative endeavour to create conditions of life that are conducive to good health at a population level. This has been referred to as a ‘salutogenic’ approach to public health – one concerned with the origins of good health, rather than focusing only on preventing disease.

What does this mean for a European Union? Article 168 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) states that “a high level of human health protection shall be ensured in the definition and implementation of all Union policies and activities”. This does not need to translate into more health and healthcare competence conferral. Instead, taking Article 168 seriously means creating sustainable, health-promoting conditions of life through the EU’s own, already existing competences. If understood in those terms, a European Health Union that promotes health should be a transformative project, one that creates a more social Europe.

In short, a progressive Health Union should not just build resilience to face a crisis-ridden future, it should mainly work to heal those crises. Doing the latter is more complicated. It requires more fundamental rethinking of taken-for-granted ways of working. It is likely to face more institutional obstacles and does not depend on the EU alone. Meanwhile, securitising the supply chains of medical countermeasures and improving the use of artificial intelligence to prepare for future pandemics is certainly useful and it is more easily compatible with existing EU competencies and an orthodox view of the EU as a market-creating project. However, this alone does not address the root causes of vulnerability to future pandemic outbreaks, which include rising inequalities, but also climate change. In addition to new and improved health security mechanisms, the European Health Union needs to translate into a more social, environmentally sustainable, and global justice-oriented Union. All this is also central to promoting health.

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Brexit used to sit on the far side lines of politics.

Indeed, the word ‘Brexit’ was only invented in 2012, and until the referendum, most people didn’t know what it meant. (Now it’s in the Oxford English dictionary.)

An in-depth study by the Migration Observatory showed that:

• The volume of press coverage mentioning ‘immigration’ or ‘migration’ declined from 2006 to 2011 before rising each year from 2011 to mid-2015

Furthermore, when the press explicitly described immigrants and migrants during 2006-2015, 3 out of 10 times it was with the word ‘illegal’.

In 2004, when the Labour government permitted migrants to come here from new EU member states (formerly hidden behind the ‘Iron Curtain’) they were welcome. The British economy was doing well, and businesses were desperate for more workers. EU migrants coming here filled a chronic labour and skills gap.

It wasn’t until after the Tories won the 2010 general election, and severe austerity measures were imposed, that some tabloid newspapers, and some politicians, started to heavily scapegoat migrants as the cause. But even then, Britain’s membership of the EU was not a majority interest subject.

Some on the fringes of the Conservative and Labour Parties thought Britain should leave the EU, but they were small in number.

• Most MPs and members of the House of Lords strongly supported Britain’s membership of the EU (and indeed, most of them voted for Britain to Remain in the European Union.)
• Most people in Britain also didn’t want Britain to leave the EU.

We’d been members for around 40 years, and it was not a big deal. Polling consistently showed that most people in the UK supported our continued membership, even in the year before the referendum.

So, how did Brexit become mainstream?

It started when leading politicians, who should have known better, got scared of a little Eurosceptic party called UKIP, which promoted a fear and dislike of migrants, and blamed the EU. UKIP was considered a threat to the mainstream of politics and so everybody started talking their language of fear.

Slowly and surely, the new language allowed migrants and foreigners to be blamed for our problems, with leaving the EU presented as the solution. It was the start of the rot. It led us directly to Brexit.

There was no rational reason to fear migrants. But senior politicians in both the Conservative and Labour Parties began to be fearful of UKIP. Instead of bucking the UKIP trend, they fell for it; they unwisely helped to promote and prolong it, along with most British newspapers, also guilty of inciting UKIP’s message of xenophobia.

Reported the BBC on the rise of UKIP in 2014:

‘David Cameron’s historic pledge to hold an in/out referendum on UK membership of the EU if the Conservatives won the next election was interpreted by some as an attempt to halt the rise of UKIP, which senior Tories feared could prevent them from winning an overall majority in 2015.’

(Repeat: Previously hardly anyone in Britain was concerned about Britain’s EU membership – it was a minority issue on the far fringes of politics.)

In the same year, Nigel Farage, the then leader of UKIP, told The Telegraph,

“Parts of the country have been taken over by foreigners and mass immigration has left Britain as unrecognisable.”

It was nonsense of course. Britons didn’t have a serious problem of migration before the likes of Nigel Farage told them they did. If you look at a 2014 map of where UKIP had the highest support, it was mostly in the areas of Britain with the least migration.

And conversely, in the areas with lots of migrants, UKIP mostly had the least support.

The foreign-born of Britain only represent around 12% of the population – that’s a normal proportion for most modern, thriving western democracies. Even among those 12% of foreign-born are many considered to be British, such as Boris Johnson, born in New York, and Joanna Lumley, born in India.

And citizens from the rest of the EU living in the UK represented only 5% of the population – that’s small and hardly ‘mass migration.’

A few weeks after the 2016 referendum result, the then Tory MP, Oliver Letwin, said that British politicians “made a terrible mistake” in failing to take on the argument about immigration, the argument spread by UKIP.

He told The Times:

“We all, the Labour party and the Conservative Party alike … made a terrible mistake, which was not to take on the argument about migration.” He added that UKIP exploited the failure of mainstream politicians to “put the counter-argument” that “migration enriches the country in every way.”

Gandhi got it right when he said:

‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is really fear.’

Our main political parties and national newspapers could have saved us from an irrational fear of migrants that led directly to Brexit. Instead, they pandered to UKIP and promoted the fear. And now the fear has won, and it is still being encouraged by politicians and papers.

But:

• Migrants are a boon, not a burden for Britain.
• EU membership has helped our country and did not hinder it.

Somehow, facts need to win over fear. And until that happens, Britain is on a dangerous and debilitating path.

 

• Watch my 13-minute video: How newspaper lies led to Brexit

 DAILY EXPRESS FRONT PAGES: The 2011 headline that millions of families were benefit cheats was entirely incorrect. See Full Fact report. And the 2015 headline that illegal immigrants were pouring into Britain was also false. See Full Fact response.

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Another month, another Prime Minister.

The ructions in Westminster might well have launched a thousand memes about lettuce, but have also clearly put any policy work on hold.

This holds true for British EU policy, where the only clear shift since Boris Johnson’s time in office has been a shift in discourse and framing: both Truss and Sunak have gone down the path of warm words and conciliatory statements, instead of a reflexive rejection of anything ‘European’.

Obviously, at this stage in proceedings, it is hard to make any firm judgements about Sunak’s intentions, but the early indications are that he will follow Truss in talking up the possibilities of working better with the EU, but without much scope for moving on policy substance.

This was already evident during Truss’ brief stint:

So earlier this week I was dubious about the substance behind Truss' European charm offensive

Spoiler: still dubious, albeit for different reasons

1/ https://t.co/D56hsI1Vxa

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) October 7, 2022

And it’s where I am now on Sunak:

Let's have a first crack at Sunak's EU policy

best guess for far: continuity Truss, for better or worse

1/

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) October 27, 2022

As a reminder, EU policy matters, whether or not a Prime Minister has it as a priority item (which neither Truss nor Sunak do): it touches on multiple fundamentals of British polity, politics and policy, which both requires attention and imposes constraints on the ability to flex positions:

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic111

It’s also useful to consider how that plays out in the Northern Irish context across the post-referendum PMs: Sunak seems set to follow Truss rather than either Johnson or May.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic110

The basic challenge remains one of a lack of strategic direction for European policy, something that a new PM will not change by itself. While the new tone will welcome, that cannot be a long-term solution for the problems that exist.

The post Have you tried turning it off and on again? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent war that followed, the idea of Europe is once again in question argued Gerard Delanty in his speech at the 15th Ecumenical Social Week organized in Lviv.

 

Demonstration against Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in Ljubljana, Slovenia held in February 2022. Credit: European Commission Audiovisual Centre. 

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent war that followed, the idea of Europe is once again in question. The formation and identity of Europe throughout history has been very much bound up with the aftermath of war and the attempt to establish peace. Since 1945, there is general agreement that if Europe stands for anything it is peace. It is now widely accepted that the identity of Europe is not based on an underlying substance that guarantees unity in face of its diversity and there is nothing particularly unique or singular about its culture. Its identity is necessarily contested and a product of whatever meaning Europeans have given it. One such meaning is the normative value of peace. But what does that mean? What does it mean to invoke the notion of peace as the core value of European integration.

It is certainly the case that the period since 1945 has been one of extraordinary peace in Europe as a whole. The project of European integration from its early beginning in the 1950s to the present European Union can be seen as built on the belief in the necessity to establish lasting peace in Europe. This was an elite driven project that was the product of visionary leaders who sought to create the conditions for lasting peace between Germany and France, countries that had been at war with each other three times since 1870. There can be no doubt, too, that the relative success of this desire for peace was connected to the advancement of democracy and prosperity. Now, while I do not think that this needs to be called into question, the notion of Europe as a peace project needs to be re-assessed. This is because the presuppositions upon which it was built no longer exist.

It could be argued that the current situation in which the largest country in Europe has been invaded by an expansionist superpower is an exception, much like the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I believe this is the wrong approach to take. It would be to exclude too much, as well as European failure to intervene to stop the genocide in Srebrenica in 1992 and its later inadequate response to the Kosovo war in 1999. The narrative that has become a legitimating myth of European integration of progressive peace needs to be re-written to take into account not just the current situation but the structural conditions of the very possibility of peace, which after 1945 were very much based on economic and political cooperation.

Looking back over the past 70 years or so, we can see that the relative peace that was established in Europe was made possible by a framework of economic and political stability that no longer exists, having come to a slow demise over the past two decades. In many ways the fundamental aspirations of the post-war project of European integration have been realised. The current geopolitical crisis is a crisis of stability. So, hence the title of my talk.

The post-1945 period was indeed a period of peace, but it was more so a period of stability. We should not mistake stability for peace. The conditions of the post-war peace was made possible by a new kind of war, namely the Cold War and the possession of nuclear weapons by the two superpowers. The peace that was established was a phoney peace, as argued by many critics such as E.P. Thompson and Herbert Marcuse, who also pointed out that the peace the Cold War established made possible the struggle to control the ‘Third World’, where the real war took place. In this period, when the USA and the USSR scrambled to control the Third World, many of the European nations were actively conducting wars to retain their colonial possessions, and several of them were dictatorships in this period. The Treaty of Rome was signed in the middle of the Algerian War. It makes little sense calling Spain under the Franco dictatorship peaceful. The absence of war was often tyranny and terror. Peace must also be just.

Peace in Europe was secured at the price of major restrictions on democracy, leading to a pervasive crisis in legitimation in the 1970s. This peace was possible only through the balance of capitalism and democracy, a balance that has now broken down amidst the crisis of neoliberalism and the rise almost everywhere of radical right-wing nationalism. I think this situation can be seen as a crisis of stability, which now also extends to a questioning of the EU itself, as reflected in the monumental catastrophe of Brexit. But the current instability goes beyond these movements to encompass the ecological crisis and let us not forget the Covid pandemic. The Ukraine war is entwined in an energy and food crisis.

For these reasons, I think we need to rethink the idea of Europe as a peace project, not to reject this idea but to give it a different foundation. The reconciliation achieved between France and Germany and between Poland and Germany was one of the great achievements of the previous century, as was the project of European integration. But as the memory of the war recedes and the improbability of a war again between the founding nations of the EU, a new rationale has to be found. We cannot assume the existence of an endogenous permanence of a ‘peaceful Europe’.

Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace in 1795 argued that peace needs to be perpetual, that is eternal. Treaties between states secure a kind of peace that is conditional on a treaty. What needs to be created, he argued, it a perpetual peace that does not depend on the highly conditional nature of treaties. Creating a lasting peace requires a fundamental transformation in political community. Now, some of the answers Kant found are not very helpful for us today (he regarded democracy as despotic) but his argument for what he called the right of hospitality and a new cosmopolitan law that goes beyond international treaties continues to be relevant.

In many ways the war in Ukraine challenges the viability of cosmopolitanism. Russia is in the grips of a pathological ultranationalism that has been a rallying call for white supremacist nationalism in the USA; Europe has failed to solve some of its most pressing problems, which have also been exacerbated by the revival of xenophobic nationalism. But, as I see it, cosmopolitanism is not a zero-sum condition, either present or absent; it is not just an ideal and nor is it a reality that is negated by anti-cosmopolitanism; it is rather a condition that is to varying degrees present and has been a product of a learning process in Europe since 1945 when a pacific orientation did take place coupled with democratization. This learning process is incomplete, but it did begin, despite the limitations imposed on it by the structural conditions that I mentioned. In Russia, too, under Gorbachev it had a brief moment but was abated and, sadly, probably failed entirely. But there is much evidence that elsewhere such a learning process has taken place, as for example the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland in 1998; the dissolution of armed struggle by secessionist nationalist movements, such as ETA; the peaceful resolution of the Cyprus conflict etc.

While I believe that peace in Ukraine will triumph in the end, it is not guaranteed. It needs to be defended. This is also why the political situation in Ukraine is important to understand for Europe as a whole. War and tyranny have been a major part of European history, but so too have been resistance to tyranny and war. The uprising in Kyiv in November 2013, the so-called ‘EuroMaiden Uprising’ against the suppression of the Association Agreement with the EU, must be placed in the wider context of the uprising in 1989/90 in central and eastern Europe and other ones, for example the protests in European cities against the disastrous war in Iraq in February 2003. Some of these protests did not succeed: in 2014 Russia invaded and seized the Crimea; the war in Iraq went ahead despite massive opposition by European publics. But the lesson of history is that resistance to tyranny in the end delivers results even if those results are not available to those who fought for them. The uprisings that led to the end of Soviet dominance in central and eastern Europe did succeed in at least some of their aims and, so far, Ukrainian resilience against a formidable enemy is showing startling results.

An unfortunate paradox of peace is that it sometimes needs military action to defend it. That is the predicament that we have today. NATO has acquired a new relevance, but in my view, it has a role to play only if, first, it is entirely a defensive organization (and I think was well demonstrated in its successful intervention in the Kosovo War). There is no appetite today for a war against Russia. Second, Europe must assert its own identity rather than being subservient to the USA. The widespread support that has been expressed for Ukraine in Europe is at least one expression of a new kind of European identity that is nurtured by the awareness of the interconnected nature of the European nations. This accords with an important characteristic of cosmopolitanism, namely empathy with those who suffer.

I have argued in various publications that Europe today is ‘post-western’, in the sense that it is no longer defined by the context of the Cold War when it was largely shaped by the western core states allied to the USA. Since 1989, Europe has been redefined in a way that encompasses the wider diversity of civilizations that have constituted its history. This, what I have referred to as an ‘inter-civilizational constellation’ includes the relation to Russia, as it does the Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim heritages. The term captures the sense of multiple and entangling civilizations, as opposed to a singular and now discredited notion of ‘Western Civilization’ and its modern successor ‘The West’. Inspired by T.W. Adorno’s use of the term, the concept of a constellation suggests a pattern that is not underpinned by a fixed or objective structure.

With the widening of the civilizational diversity of Europe since the end of the Cold War and the widening the EU, there is inevitably less certainty as to the unity of Europe. The absence of certainty should not in itself be a source of insecurity and the consequent fear that uncertainty nurtures. But, when combined with a crisis of stability the conditions are created for a sense of insecurity that is easily expressed in hostility and not, as Kant said, hospitality.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my thanks to the conference organizers for their kind invitation to speak at this conference and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for organizing my trip to Lviv.

 

This post is a transcript from Gerard Delanty’s speech at the 15th Ecumenical Social Week Conference: “Wandering Identity: Considering meanings and Values” organized in Lviv. It has been previously published by the Ecumenical Social Week website.

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For most of the UK’s five decades as a member of the European Union, Britain didn’t want to leave. On the contrary, most Brits wanted us to stay.

What’s the proof of that? Well, apart from polling over the years, look at governments and general elections.

• From 1959 to 2016, every UK government and every UK Prime Minister strongly wanted Britain to be a member of the European Community.

Since we joined the European Community in 1973 right up to 2016, at every general election, all the main parties wanted us to stay in the EU, with just one exception.

• What was the exception?

It was the general election of 1983, when Labour’s manifesto – described then as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – pledged to get Britain out of the European Community.

Labour lost that election by a huge landslide. Arch Eurosceptic, Tony Benn, lost his Bristol seat.

• Since then, Leaving was a minority call on the far side lines of British politics for most of our decades of membership.

Just two years before the referendum, in 2014,  Ipsos UK polling showed that Britain’s support for wanting to remain in the EU was the highest it had been in 23 years – 56% in favour of remain, just 36% for leave, as reported at the time by The Guardian.

• This, despite the apparent rise of UKIP, that the Tories and Labour seemed so scared about.

A year later, in 2015, the Ipsos poll showed that support for continued EU membership was even higher – a staggering 61% in support of remaining, with just 27% supporting leave, as reported by The Independent.

What does this all mean?

• It means that many, if not most, of those who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum would have voted Remain just a year or two earlier.

Somehow, in the months, weeks and days leading up to the referendum, many of those who previously would have supported Remain were cajoled and convinced to switch to Leave.

• Of course, many of them now realise that they were conned with lies and false promises in what was a fundamentally flawed referendum.

Eventually, truth will prevail. It usually does.

It’s becoming increasingly, painfully, and shockingly obvious that Brexit cannot deliver its promised land, and that Britain – and Britons – were better off being in the EU.

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So, Rishi Sunak has today been crowned the second ‘unelected’ Tory Prime Minister in as many months. 

Is the country ‘Ready for Rishi’? Well, the country has no choice. The new Prime Minister has been anointed by just 194 Conservative MPs. We don’t get a say. Although in the UK we don’t directly elect a Prime Minister, Mr Sunak will head yet another new Conservative administration, with a new manifesto, without a mandate from the country.

He says he’ll abide by his party’s 2019 manifesto prepared by his predecessor (bar one), Boris Johnson. But how can he?

Everything has changed since 2019. Covid. War in Ukraine. Energy crisis. Cost of living crisis. Inflation crisis. Bank interest crisis. Increased taxes. Swingeing austerity cuts. And a half-baked Brexit. 

None of that was covered in the Conservatives 2019 manifesto.

Back in June, Lord Heseltine, former Tory deputy Prime Minister, asserted:

“If Boris goes, Brexit goes”

At the time, I wrote that this was nothing more than grandstanding, wishing thinking. And so, it’s turned out to be. Boris has gone. But Brexit is staying. With a new Prime Minister who’s a much bigger Brexiter than Johnson ever was.

No wonder that far right Brexiters of the Tory party support Sunak. In the referendum, Sunak argued for Brexit and supported Boris Johnson’s bus lie. He wrote for his website in February 2016:

“If we leave the EU, we will immediately save £20 billion [a year].”

Not so hot on maths then, is our ex-Chancellor.The UK never sent the EU £20 billion a year, and in any event, in real terms EU membership cost us nothing – on the contrary, it was hugely profitable for UK.

Mr Sunak also told the Yorkshire Post:

“I believe that appropriate immigration can benefit our country. But we must have control of our borders and we can only do that outside of the EU. 

“As an EU member, every one of Europe’s 500 million citizens has a legal right to move here and there is nothing the UK government can do to limit those numbers.”

Oh dear. Doesn’t Mr Sunak know that Britain ALWAYS had control of our borders when an EU member? And all 500 million citizens of the EU would never move to the UK, because Britain would never have 500 million job vacancies – the primary reason for EU citizens coming here.

(Now we have a record number of job vacancies because EU citizens are NOT coming here.)

And Mr Sunak also said: “It can’t be right that unelected officials in Brussels have more say over who can come into our country than you.” Again, complete nonsense. The EU is run by elected politicians. And the UK Parliament democratically agreed to EU’s free movement of people.

Mr Sunak told the Conservatives Party annual conference last year:

“I was proud to back Brexit. Proud to back Leave.

“And that’s because despite the challenges in the long term, I believed the agility, flexibility and freedom provided by Brexit would be more valuable in a 21st century global economy than just proximity to a market.”

But erecting Brexit barriers to trade with our biggest, closest, and most lucrative export and import market (Europe) is directly damaging Britain’s growth and wealth.

In any event, it never had to be either/or. In the EU, we had both – trade with our neighbours, AND trade across the world.

So, here’s the bottom line. Boris Johnson has gone. But Brexit is staying. 

And the new Brexiter in charge of Britain isn’t budging. Sunak won’t call for a new general election.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

– the more things change, the more they stay the same.

• Watch this video showing how Boris Johnson’s bus claim was untrue:



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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome again Dr Simona Guerra, from the University of Surrey, in the UK.

 

Listen on eu!radio.

 

 

Simona, I remember very well how last May you spoke to us about the “early women of European integration”. But it seems, you’re far from finished on this topic!

Actually, the more I read and research about the life and work of these women in the early years of European integration, the more I wonder how our politics and history textbooks could miss them. It is true: they were not many. But these are amazing lives and contributions to Europe that I am discovering!

 

That sounds like a really enjoyable field of study!

It is! The women of the early years of the European integration process were the trailblazers of the EU we know today. As the Parliament was not yet directly elected, these women had to be first elected in their national parliament, and then assigned to the European chamber by their national government, creating a possible bottleneck towards their representation on the European level.

In fact, unsurprisingly, and as research would suggest, the initial pace of progress, in terms of representation of women, was rather slow, and never reached 10% before the direct elections starting in 1979.

 

And today, you want to put one of these women into the spotlight.

Yes, have you ever heard the sentence: “Politics is too important a business to be left to men”? Käte Strobel said that, in the 1960s already! So let me introduce to Frau Strobel, Member of the German Parliament for the SPD, the Social-Democratic Party, right from the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949. She was in office in the European Parliament of the Six between 1958 and January 1967. She was, logically, a member of the Socialist group, and later became its Chair, between 1964 and 1967.

Of course, political groups in the 1950s and 1960s were not the groups that we know today, but in June 1953, the Common Assembly (as it was called at the time) passed a resolution, unanimously, that established the rules to form a political group, helped to institutionalise them, and saw the emergence of the first three of them, the Christian Democratic Group, the Liberal Group, and the Socialist Group.

Interestingly, Strobel has remained the only female leader for the Socialists up to 1994, when Pauline Green from the UK was appointed as Chairwoman. Currently, the now called Socialists and Democrats are under the leadership of their third female leader, only, with Iratxe García from Spain. It shows how institutions can be resilient and hostile to women, via unwritten rules, and practices that simply not favour them.

 

Back to Käte Strobel: tell us who she was.

Strobel has quite an interesting profile. She stands out across these early women, as she has a lower level of education compared to the average of her colleagues at the time, having attended primary and technical school at Nuremberg, her birthplace. It was her personal experience of the war and its aftermath that affected her view of Europe and politics. In her work she sought to secure peace in a united Europe. She left the European Parliament to later become a Federal Minister in Germany, first of Health, later of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (from 1969 to 1972, under Willy Brandt as Chancellor), and she is well known for her work at the domestic level. Myself, however, I am quite impressed by her work at the European level.

Sicco Mansholt, the Dutch Commissioner for Agriculture, considered the father of the Plan that renovated agricultural policy, took office in 1958, and the debates in the Committee for Agriculture between Strobel and Mansholt offer an excellent example of the battle of the young Parliament for transparency and accountability, already in these early years.

Strobel was sceptical of the acceleration of integration and asked for more information, requesting an agriculture that was closer to both producers and consumers. In quite a few occasions, she asked Mansholt for clarifications, in particular on the data he was presenting and asked to ensure that the Commission would have consulted the Parliament about the negotiation process with the member states. Strobel proposed cutting down taxes between 1959 and 1960 and asked for more harmonization across member states before moving forward with an accelerated integration that required radical changes and would give priority to negative integration, which mainly consists of removing barriers to trade rather than deepening integration.

 

Definitely a very lucid actress of the early integration process. Thanks for sharing her story with us. And keep on doing your research in the archives!

I will ! It is clear that women were active actors of the early stages of the European integration process, and I keep asking myself: how have we missed them?

The post Käte Strobel Pionnière de la Construction Européenne – Simona Guerra appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome again Rebecca Dobson Philips, from the University of Sussex, in the UK.

 

 

Listen on eu!radio.

 

Bonjour, Rebecca. You are a specialist in “governmental ethics”, a very particular field of research. And I presume the mandate of Boris Johnson as Prime minister is a particularly interesting period in this respect.

Yes, it is! Boris Johnson led the UK during a time of turmoil, shaken by the COVID pandemic and emergency procedures. At the same time, Britain was embroiled in the ongoing struggle for control over the country’s direction as it embarked on its exit from the European Union.

It’s important to note this context because it makes it all the more difficult to make clear-cut judgements about many of the so-called scandals of Johnson’s premiership. It also makes it difficult to assess the long-term impact of this time. For example, was Johnson’s premiership merely a blip or does it signal a longer-term decline in standards in public life?

 

But didn’t Johnson, and members of his Cabinet, break the conventions and rules associated with ethics and expected standards in public life?

There is little doubt about that. One of the peculiarities of the UK ethics system is that much of it relies upon convention rather than rule; and the accountability mechanisms in place for breaching these have been particularly challenged.

In terms of Ministerial Conduct, sovereignty resides in Parliament, but the control of parliament is in the hands of the Executive. This means that mechanisms for holding Ministers to account ultimately rely on the cooperation of the Prime Minister.

 

What exactly are these rules and conventions?

They are set within an overall framework called the “Seven Principles of Public Life”. These include selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.

The view of many political observers is that these principles have been repeatedly flouted. Ministers are also governed by the Ministerial code, which refers to these principles and a set of rules that Ministers are expected to abide by. The Prime Minister is the ultimate authority over the Code, which means that he or she decides on any penalties for breaching the Code. The PM is assisted in this decision-making by an Independent Ethics Advisor, who is responsible for providing impartial advice and investigating any concerns.

In an unprecedented situation, Johnson lost two of his Ethics Advisors within two years for failing to follow their advice. Sir Alex Allen resigned in November 2020, when Johnson overruled his advice on whether or not Priti Patel, the then Home Secretary, had breached the Code over bullying allegations. And in June 2022, Lord Geidt resigned in relation to Johnson’s parties held at Downing Street while the entire country was in COVID lockdown.

 

Were there any further consequences?

There was an investigation into the matter by senior civil servant Sue Grey, which while ostensibly independent, suffered from allegations of political meddling.

There was also a police investigation into the alleged parties, and both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak were issued with fixed penalty notices by the Metropolitan police for breaching lockdown rules.

Johnson became the first PM in history to have been found to have broken the law while in office.

 

But that’s not what finally brought down Johnson and his administration, is it?

No, you’re right. Johnson’s administration was ultimately brought down politically by his handling of the Chris Pincher Affair, which involved an MP who was subject to sexual harassment claims, and led to mass resignations of Ministers from government. It was therefore political rather than bureaucratic accountability mechanisms that ultimately took their toll on his leadership.

In terms of ethics and standards in public life, Johnson’s long-term legacy is yet unknown. Much will depend on the willingness of his successors to reinvigorate the system of ethics and support the development of more effective accountability.

They have the tools necessary at their disposal including a Committee on Standards in Public Life with more than 25 years’ experience advising the Prime Minister on ethical and standards matters. A strong stance on these issues is yet to be forthcoming from the current Prime Minister Liz Truss, but failure to address the fraying of standards over the last few years risks further erosion of trust in and the integrity of the UK’s democratic system.

 

Many thanks, Rebecca, for sharing your insight on these complex issues that are always difficult to understand from the outside. Ideas on Europe will be back next week, and we will welcome Simona Guerra again, from the University of Surrey.

The post The Legacy of Boris Johnson in Governmental Ethics appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies at the ECPR General Conference 2022 in Innsbruck

It was particular joy to meet again in person at the General Conference of the European Consortium of Politics Research (ECPR) last week 22-26 August. After two years of virtual conferences due to Covid, this time the ECPR General Conference took place in the beautiful city of Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. It brought together more than 1500 participants in more than 500 panels as well as roundtables on some of the troubling current topics such as the war in Ukraine and equality, diversity and inclusion policies.

 

This was the 11th time that a section dedicated to knowledge politics and policies was organized at this conference. The section endorsed by the ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and Policies included eight panels on topics such as knowledge governance, higher education and research policies, scientific advice and politics of Artificial Intelligence. We were happy to see good attendance and engagement at our panels. Below are insights in some of the panels, provided by the panel chairs.

 

Neonationalism & Higher Education

The Panel on the Rise of Neonationalism and its Impact on European Higher Education explored the different ways in which rising new nationalisms in Europe are affecting higher education policy. Papers highlighted different domains around which higher education and nationalisms interact including challenges to institutional autonomy, academic freedom, minority language rights and international education policy efforts. Katja Brøgger introduced the panel by outlining the complex zones of contestations between universities, the state and international polities such as the EU and considering implications for the university. Neema Noori and Mikhail Beznosov presented their paper (co-authored with Artem Lytovchenko) on the distinct trajectories of post-soviet language policies in higher education in Uzbekistan and Ukraine, against the backdrop of competing nationalisms and minority language policy. Rasmus Harsbo then presented his work on the relations between the state and the university in Poland, underlining how recent changes are characterized by political efforts towards counter-elite populism. Next, Ester Zangrandi presented her study on France, outlining the different ways recent higher education policies and political discourse are affecting the freedom of academics and the autonomy of their institutions. Finally, Hannah Moscovitz presented her study on the government rationales behind education nation branding in the UK and Scotland, highlighting implications for how economy and nationalism intersect in multinational states.

 

Scientific Advice

The panel Scientific and Technical Advice for Global Governance (re)considered characteristics of knowledge-policy interfaces in global environmental governance and explored struggles in such interfaces. The first paper “Intergovernmental Expert Organizations as Pre-Negotiation sites: The Case of the IPCC” by Kari de Pryck (University of Geneva) looked at the construction of controversial tables and boxes in the approval of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the IPCC. The second paper “The Role of Expertise in Shaping Politics of Nuclear Knowledge: A Case Study of Think Tanks” by Marzhan Nurzhan (University of Basel) proposed a comparative study to research the role of expertise on nuclear knowledge production. The third paper “Savant, Nomadic and Rooted Experts: A Career Typology of the United Nations’ Environmental Programme (UNEP) Professionals” by Krystel Wanneau (University of Vienna) analyzed the career and networks experts in UNEP. The final paper “Pathways of Scientific Input into Intergovernmental Negotiations for a new Agreement on Marine Biodiversity” by Ina Tessnow-von Wysocki and Alice Vadrot (University of Vienna) researched the ways in which science feeds the negotiations for a new treaty to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity in the high seas.

 

Knowledge Governance

The panel Issues in national and transnational knowledge governance feature five papers. Adrienn Nyircsak presented her study on universities as epistemic actors in transnational policy learning. Focusing on European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (QA) in Higher Education as a case, and using the practice perspective, the study compares three peer learning activities. The findings suggest that the institutional set up of these activities is the key condition for facilitating (or impeding) peer learning, that direct interaction between governance levels is relatively limited, as well as that each activity has “blind spots” reflecting the composition of participants and the epistemic positions of hosts. This was followed by Marco Cavallaro’s study concerning competition in EU framework programmes (co-authored with Peter Edlund and Benedetto Lepori). The analysis specifically compares the individual curiosity driven bottom up ERC grants and consortia-led top-down Societal Challenges grants. While preliminary analysis shows that both types are constructed and perceived as scarce and desirable, there are also important differences related to the openness of topics, actors involved in competition, understanding of excellence and selection and profile of evaluators. EU research funding programmes were also in the focus of the third paper presented by Tatyana Bayenova, though in this case from a science diplomacy point of view. The study focuses on the tensions in the relationship between, on the one side, the EU and, on the other side, the UK and Switzerland, historically rather successful in attracting EU research funding. Two inter-related aspects of science diplomacy emerge: how both sides engage in diplomacy for science, as well as how, in particular when the overall relationship is contentious, scientific cooperation is used for diplomacy.

 

Relationship between interest intermediation at national and European level was the focus of the fourth paper by Martina Vukasovic, who analyses homogeneity / heterogeneity of organizational attributes of national level interest groups. Using the case of national unions of students, the analysis postulates policy positions as key organizational outputs and explores the extent to which similarity of issues the unions focus on and their preferences concerning these issues can be explained by isomorphic pressures stemming from structuration of national and European level policy arenas. The fifth study presented by Mari Elken zeroed in on collaborative governance processes, specifically analysing the case of multi-annual performance agreements introduced in Norway in 2016. Conditions such as the high level of trust between the actors involved, recognition of existing power, knowledge and resource asymmetries, framing of the process as open and inclusive, ambiguous and shifting purpose of the agreements, as well as implied linkage to funding are identified as crucial for the process. Moreover, the analysis highlights how aforementioned conditions, in interaction with concurrent reforms in Norwegian higher education, contributed to a rather varied set of approaches to developing and implementing performance agreements.

 

Higher education & research policies

The panel International policy dynamics and national filters – The global politics of higher education and research policies chaired by Jens Jungblut (University of Oslo) discussed the interplay between global dynamics and national policymaking with regard to higher education and research policies. Using a variety of empirical contexts, each presentation unpacked the complexities of policymaking in the knowledge policy domain. In the first presentation Elisabeth Lackner (University of Oslo) presented a study investigating the influence of organized interest on a White Paper regarding quality assurance in Norwegian higher education. Her study highlighted how different groups of actors where more or less successful in imprinting their preference into the new policy. The second presentation by Erlend Langørgen (University of Oslo) presented results of an exploratory study focusing on partisan politics with regard to research policy in Western Europe. With the help of election manifesto data, the study shows that there are partisan differences regarding research policy and that parties also assign differing levels of salience to this policy field.

 

The third presenter, Andrew Gunn (University of Manchester) presented a conceptual paper that combined several classical approaches from political science to disintegrate diffusions processes in higher education policy. His presentation highlighted the ongoing tension between global homogenization and national differentiation in this policy field using different conceptual approaches to explain why this tension persists. The fourth presentation by Anna Prisca Lohse (Hertie School) focused on the effect that Brexit and Covid19 had on English, German, and French student mobility policies. Using a mixture of historical and sociological institutionalist approaches, the paper highlights that both crises are created different types of policy responses in the different countries leading to a complex interaction between different institutional pillars. In the final presentation, Alina Felder (University of St. Gallen) presented a study of the European University Initiative using it as an example for projectified policymaking by the European Union. Using interview data, the analysis put a special emphasis on the role of the Covid19 crisis for fostering this type of policymaking approach and discussed the effectiveness that it can have in the long-term.

 

Politics of Artificial Intelligence

This was the third year that the section included a panel on Power, Politics and Policy of Artificial Intelligence. Some of the research presented in previous editions of this panel has already been published, while much more is under preparation. This year the panel discussed four contributions based on work in progress. Inga Ulnicane and Tero Erkkilä presented an emerging research agenda on politics and policy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) focusing on questions such as distribution of power and the role of ideas in AI politics. Regine Paul discussed insights from her very interesting research on risk-based AI regulation in the European Union (EU) competition state. Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson and Malin Rönnblom (drawing on work co-authored with Vanja Carlsson) shared their conceptual framework and plans to undertake empirical research to study implementation of AI in the Swedish public sector. Finally, Justinas Lingevicius gave an overview of the results of his research on framing military AI in the EU strategic discourse.

 

Business meeting of the ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies

Next steps

During the conference, we also held our traditional Standing Group meeting to discuss our activities such as the next edition of excellent paper award from an emerging scholar, our Europe of Knowledge blog, and future conference panels. If you are interested in our work, please join our Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies. We are already starting to prepare for our section at the next ECPR General Conference in Prague, 4-8 September 2023. See you there!

The post ECPR Knowledge Politics and Policies in 2022 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

 

An event report by Rosa Fernandez, Jonas Schoenefeld and Thomas Hoerber

 

The third event of the Research Network ‘The role of Europe in global challenges: Climate change and Sustainable Development’ took place on June 13th and 14th, hosted by Prof. Thomas Hoerber at the EU-Asia Institute of ESSCA School of Management in Angers. The conference was organised as a hybrid event, giving the opportunity for some researchers to network in person for the first time since the pandemic began, though a good number of participants joined online. The title of the event was ‘Sustainability in Contemporary Europe – A Changing Agenda?’ and there was variety in the topics covered, with some common areas emerging for discussion: the energy and cost of living crisis created by the invasion of Ukraine, looking into alternative sources of energy and for instance, the role of hydrogen; but also the changes in the understanding and use of the sustainable development concept (and its three pillars: economic, social and environmental) by European institutions and member State governments alike.

All the events of the Research Network have a dedicated space for PhD students and early career researchers. While in the first two events the focus was on different career paths and advice, organised as Q & A sessions between participants with different profiles and stages of professional career, in the last event the focus was put on grants capture, with really helpful insights from successful recipients of large grants and professionals dedicated to help in with the bidding process. The rationale behind this was to consider possible steps beyond the life of the Research Network, so that the expertise and common interests can be put to work towards something productive and with real impact, beyond academic publications, which of course, we will continue working on.

 

 

We hope to continue with the growing number of members of the network and see more friends attending our panel at the UACES Annual Conference in Lille. Watch the space for more events next year.

Rosa & Thomas & Jonas

 

 

The post The Role of Europe in Global Challenges: Climate Change and Sustainable Development appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Angela Wigger

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 did not mention industrial policy as a designated Community competence but its preambles declared a high degree of competitiveness an overarching goal, which indirectly laid the basis for a supranational intervention. Industrial policy has been a key pillar in the gradual reconfiguration of several national markets into one giant single market at the outset but it vanished in name during the decades of neoliberal restructuring.

 

Only with the attempts to end sluggish economic growth after the 2008 crisis, industrial policy has been on a major comeback, rising like a Phoenix from its ashes. Alongside a worldwide revival of industrial policy, including ‘America First’, Made in China 2025 or Make in India, the European Commission launched various initiatives and programmes to induce a European Industrial Renaissance. Bolstered by a rhetoric of competitiveness and the need to create an attractive business climate, industrial policy had to reverse the process of deindustrialization, backshore manufacturing capacity from emerging markets to the EU and foster European value chains, so that manufacturing products could be exported with the label Made in Europe.

 

Smart Specialisation: a new industrial policy?

One of the flagship industrial policies is Smart Specialisation, a place-based, differentiated regional development policy adopted in 2014 that aims at upscaling regional manufacturing clusters to Industry 4.0-type technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data and data analytics, 3D printing and the internet of things. Importantly, Smart Specialisation has been blended into the EU cohesion policy and subordinated to the goal of ‘economic, social and territorial cohesion, balanced economic growth and upward economic convergence’, as enshrined in the Single European Act of 1987.

 

As balancing out intra-EU manufacturing growth patterns is particularly pertinent in a context of the longstanding asymmetries in economic structures revolving around a north-south and west-east axis, the Journal of Common Market Studies article The New EU Industrial Policy and Deepening Structural Asymmetries: Smart Specialisation Not So Smart interrogates whether Smart Specialisation is indeed an appropriate strategy for alleviating structural disparities. Drawing on a critical political economy perspective rooted in historical materialism, Smart Specialisation is understood in dialectical interplay with the inherent contradictions of the broader capitalist dynamics of uneven and combined development – a structural and recurring feature of capitalism, which in theory, can temporarily be mitigated by state regulation. The article demonstrates that Smart Specialisation is neither smart nor does it induce upward economic convergence.

 

Smart Specialisation has been designed as a neoliberal supply-side strategy that builds on new public management, private-public governance structures, or what has been referred to as the entrepreneurial discovery process: rather than national and regional governments picking winners or breeding champions, a collective intelligentsia of regional businesses, national and regional governments, universities, research institutes and knowledge centres, and the wider civil society, should jointly identify comparative advantages of regional industries, set R&D investment priorities and formulate research and innovation proposals that compete for public and private funding. The European Commission aims at complementing the bottom-up process with a top-down strategic drive through facilitating cross-regional synergies, spill-overs and production complementarities, and thereby induce a value chain industrialisation so that manufacturers pull components from various regional industrial clusters and close the gap in economic development within the EU.

 

A competitive logic undermining cohesion policy

Climbing the stairway to excellence, moving ahead in transnational value chains and exploiting new cross-regional synergies is not confined to lagging regions. Smart Specialisation has been declared a policy for all regions – with no region left behind. While it is questionable whether ‘specialising smart’ in a competitive niche rather than diffusing investments into multiple domains is a viable and also sustainable catching up strategy for all regions, Smart Specialisation is not a voluntary or non-committal policy.

 

Smart Specialisation cross-cuts multiple EU funding streams, all of which subjugate the access to funding to a competitive selection process. Developing Smart Specialisation strategies has become an ex-ante conditionality to access funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) – funding that increasingly relies on debt instruments meant to trigger a multiplier effect and leverage ever more private (venture) capital in the selected manufacturing agglomerations. In addition, an ex-post conditionality was added: access to funding was made conditional upon compliance with the new EU public deficit and debt rules, and the macroeconomic adjustment measures of the European semester.

 

The competitive race for research and innovation funding dilutes the original raison d’être of cohesion policy and its transfer of payment logic. Not everyone who plays can win, and competition within the regions does not take place on an equal footing. Clusters in lagging regions that exhibit low growth, or that are confronted with rapid deindustrialization or low value-added, low knowledge- and low technology-intensive industries face multiple obstacles that put them at a comparative disadvantage.

 

Notably clusters from regions in Europe’s south tend to identify the expansion of tourism services with spin-offs to the local agri-food production, gastronomy or the cultural and creative industries as trailblazing areas for industrial upscaling and investment (see also this recent article in JCMS). Smart agri-food-tourism strategies certainly may succeed in incremental technological upgrades and integrating various regional sectors, which renders them more competitive and improves the visitor’s tourism experience; however, these are also low technology intensive, low skill and low value-added sectors that render the possibility of catching up with the advanced regions unlikely. Smart Specialization strategies adopted in medium and high technology-intensive export-led EU economies of the EU’s North host corporations that are innovation leaders or frontrunners with higher R&D activities and a higher readiness to make the transition to Industry 4.0 production. Not only are Smart Specialization projects larger and better funded, they are more likely to crowd in private equity.

 

Industrial clusters in less developed and poorer regions also face greater difficulties coping with the administrative workload that comes with the sheer complexity of submitting competitive funding applications, co-operating with the European Commission and complying with progress reports and evaluations. Furthermore, due to the far-reaching austerity programmes, regional budgets have shrunk in crisis-hit countries. Notably, regions in member states under excessive deficit and macroeconomic imbalance procedures are structurally disadvantaged in ‘specialising smart’: not only are similar stimulus programmes, such as those found in wealthier member states, out of reach, but borrowing money on financial markets or the European Investment Bank is also not a viable option as such borrowings count as public debt subject to EU deficit rules.

 

The European Commission is well aware that not every region can become the next Silicon Valley; however, with advanced regions simultaneously upgrading regional industrial structures, Smart Specialisation, as an industrial policy within cohesion policy corroborates the status quo of structural asymmetries.

 

Smart Specialisation: favouring capital

Smart Specialisation does not amount to the creation of common goods accessible to society at large but entails an in-built hierarchy in favour of industrial and financial capital. Regional or national government representatives act as facilitators and universities and research institutes are subordinated to private profit motives, while civil society, the so-called fourth helix in the multiple stakeholder engagement, is not only vaguely defined, or depicted in terms of innovation users and consumers, but also marginally involved. Most importantly, ‘labour’ is not even considered a separate collaborative agent, neither in the formulation, implementation or evaluation of Smart Specialisation strategies. The success of the project of an ever-closer union depends not only on economic convergence but also on citizens, including labour, having ownership of policies that affect their lives.

 

 

Author:

 

Angela Wigger is Associate Professor Global Political Economy at the Radboud University. She researches capitalist crises and crises responses from a historical materialist perspective. Focal points are the geopolitics of industrial and antitrust policy, industrial reshoring attempts, the “competitiveness” fetish, internal devaluation and debt-led accumulation in the age of rentier capitalism.

Twitter: @AngelaWigger @ RadboudPol @RadboudNSM @Radboud_Uni

Academic profile

 

 

The post The New EU Industrial Policy: Smart Specialisation Fortifying Capitalist Unevenness appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

 

By Maryna Rabinovych and Oleksandra Egert

 

On 23 June 2022, the European Union granted Ukraine and Moldova the coveted status of EU Candidate countries. For both countries, the acquisition of an EU Candidate status amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is of high geopolitical but also symbolic importance. Nevertheless, Ukraine’s and Moldova’s path to EU membership is likely to be thorny, as they have much “homework” to do.

 

Political conditions to membership

This concerns, in the first place, fulfilling an array of political conditions, immediately attached to the decision about the Candidate status. Formulated in the Commission’s Opinions on Ukraine’s and Moldova’s membership applications, these conditions predominantly concern the rule of law domain. Both countries are required to continue reforms concerning the judiciary, anticorruption and fighting vested interests and organized crime. For Ukraine, additional conditions concern harmonizing its legislation with EU audiovisual legislation and improving the legislation on national minorities – which may be tricky, given Russia’s narratives about Russian-speakers’ discrimination in Ukraine that underly its aggression. The Commission’s Opinion on Moldova puts an extra emphasis on the domains of public administration reform, the protection of vulnerable groups, as well as gender equality and fighting violence against women.

Not least, moving towards the EU membership will require Ukraine and Moldova to proceed with the implementation of their ambitious Association Agreements (AAs) with the EU, signed in 2014. The AAs contain the parties’ commitments related to political dialogue, profound liberalization of trade with the EU and cooperation in various sectors, ranging from education to transport. Moving forward with the implementation of these commitments requires nuanced understanding of factors that have been causing uneven partner countries’ compliance rates across sectors.

 

Transport and infrastructure: a case of non-compliance

Our article in the Journal of Common Market Studies offers a nuanced insight into the reasons for Ukraine’s non-compliance with its AA obligations for the single case of transport and infrastructure. The main reason why we chose this case are Ukraine’s chronically low compliance rates in this sector. Over the period from 2015 to 2021, Ukraine’s official aggregate compliance rate was only 44 percent. Even though by mid-2022 this figure grew by 3 percent, and the EU liberalized road transport movement with Ukraine amid the war and export challenges, this domain remains highly problematic by comparison with others, such as public procurement or sanitary and phytosanitary standards.

To explore the reasons why Ukraine lags behind with its transport and infrastructure commitments, the article uses an integrated approach that brings together the enforcement and management compliance schools. The enforcement school understands non-compliance as a willful deliberate decision of a state, based on a cost-benefit analysis. It therefore stresses external incentives and sanctions for non-compliance as key mechanisms the EU can use to externalize its rules. In contrast, the management school argues that non-compliance can be unintentional. It can be caused, for instance, by ambiguous treaty formulations or insufficient institutional, administrative and technical capacity. The management school also suggests considering the complexity of contemporary international agreements and the time span a third country may require to change its laws and practices.

 

A complex array of factors

Document analysis and interviews with Ukrainian officials, civil society and business actors, and the representatives of the EU Delegation in Kyiv helped us illustrate the complexity of factors that lie behind Ukraine’s low scores in the selected sector. Attributable to the enforcement school, it is the lack of the EU’s formalized pressure on Ukrainian stakeholders that results in delayed laws’ adoption and slow change of practices. Insufficient external pressure aggravates the central compliance issue in the sector, namely the impact of vested interests. Ukraine’s commitments under the Association Agreement strongly influence big businesses and require considerable investment. Instead of making such investment, businesses were reported to oppose the implementation of AA commitments by Ukraine, using their channels of influence at the ministerial and the parliamentary level. Deficiencies in authorities’ coordination, insufficient financial capacity, and chronic shortages of staff at the agencies responsible for European integration create additional obstacles to compliance.

The analysis demonstrated that a third country’s non-compliance with its obligations under an AA results from “interrelated and mutually reinforcing factors that shall in no case be viewed in isolation from one another”. For instance, institutional deficiencies enable domestic interest groups to oppose compliance and, vice versa, inter-institutional cleavages may reinforce capacity challenges. Moreover, we learnt that understanding compliance challenges in the AAs’ implementation context requires an in-depth qualitative approach. “The devil is in the detail”, and the loopholes for non-compliance may deal with small, procedural issues, which cannot be revealed without in-depth interviews. Quantitative approaches may be applied to rate the impact various challenges have on compliance.

Insights offered by this study can be of use both for the EU, and for Ukrainian and Moldovan officials who will now work more actively on implementing the AAs as a step towards membership. Understanding the factors behind non-compliance will enable them to address at least some obstacles to smoother AA implementation, for instance, improving inter-institutional coordination and addressing businesses’ concerns.

 

Authors:

Maryna Rabinovych, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Norway

Maryna.rabinovych@uia.no

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oleksandra Egert, Agency for Legislative Initiatives, Kyiv, Ukraine

 

 

 

The post Why Does Ukraine not Adjust to EU Transport Rules? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

by Gilles Pittoors

 

Although an increasing number of political decisions are taken at the European Union (EU) level, national politics remains the prime arena for democratic debate. This deprives the EU of a key source of democratic legitimacy, while showing how national politics are increasingly ‘ruling the void‘. In my article for JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, I argue that national political parties can provide a solution to both challenges by organisationally linking the national and European levels.

 

The importance of national-European linkages

Without linkages with the European level in terms of communication and exchange, national political parties are blindly navigating a highly complex multilevel political system, and thus cannot hope to meaningfully impact EU decision-making. In turn, without party organisations providing the connection with citizens, uploading national preferences to the EU, and downloading the European dimension to national debates, the EU lacks a key source of democratic legitimacy.

Organisationally linking the national and European levels is thus a crucial part of national parties’ role in the EU. Research in this area traditionally focuses on the question of control of national parties over their EU-level agents. Yet, if one accepts that parties’ linkages with the European level, beyond varying in practical terms, can also serve much broader purposes, from exchanging information across levels to legislative coordination, it becomes clear that these linkages should be studied as part of a wider multilevel organisational strategy. The questions I answer are therefore twofold. On the one hand, what exactly are these practices and purposes? On the other hand, how can we capture a party’s broader organisational strategy?

 

Multilevel parties

To answer these questions, I develop a framework to capture and understand parties as multilevel organisations bridging the domestic and European levels. Designed with the specific of aim of tracing variation between parties, the framework integrates Hix and Lord’s organigram of the party in the EU with the federal concept of ‘vertical integration’ of political parties (Figure 1). As such, it focuses attention away from a general principal-agent approach , and towards the cross-level interactive dynamics within a party in the EU context.

 

 

Figure 1: Organigram of a party in the EU.

 

To test this framework, I conducted and compared qualitative case studies of fifteen different parties in Flanders (Belgium), the Netherlands and Denmark. Based on an analysis of party statutes and 64 semi-structured interviews with party elites, these case studies allowed me to put some empirical meat on the framework’s theoretical bones. Importantly, they showed how parties differentiate between an ‘internal’ dimension (linkages with parties’ own EU-level agents, such as MEPs) and an ‘external’ dimension (linkages with a transnational partisan network, such as European party federations). Concurrently, comparison uncovered a fundamental divide between parties regarding the institutionalisation of internal linkages (informal versus formal), and their commitment to external linkages (opt-in versus opt-out attitudes).

 

Four ideal types of multilevel party

Putting these patterns across parties together led to the inductive identification of four distinct ideal types of multilevel party organisation: Federation, Integration, Consolidation and Separation — or the ‘FICS’ model (Table 1).

Table 1: Ideal-typical categories — the ‘FICS’ model.

 

First, federated parties systematically invest in external linkages, firmly locking themselves in their transnational network, while maintaining light-touch contacts with their MEPs and other EU-level agents, whose activities are monitored on an ad hoc basis. These parties stress the importance of building broad European coalitions, and do not mind their ministers and MEPs having a high degree of autonomy to forge the necessary alliances and compromises. As such, a stratified situation is created where national and European activities are effectively decoupled: the party is pursuing domestic and European political goals simultaneously but independently. Linkages hence serve the purpose of cross-level socialisation and information exchange, but not of substantive coordination on concrete policies.

Second, integrated parties engage strongly with both internally and externally through (semi-)formal formats, with linkages aiming to ensure cross-level exchanges on a regular basis and in a systematic way, involving a wide range of actors. These parties not only pursue far-reaching collaboration within their broader transnational network, but also internally aim for frequent and structured interactions across levels. A striking pattern is their use of intermediaries, such as liaison officers and cross-level working groups, fostering synergy between domestic and European politics.

Third, consolidated parties are driven by an overriding concern with cross-level cohesion. They keep close track of what their people at the European level are doing, while largely disregarding their transnational network. At the core of this organisational strategy is a desire to pursue their domestic programme at all levels, for which it is considered crucial to maintain and consolidate cross-level unity as much as possible. Accordingly, while emphasising their independence from external (transnational) pressures, consolidated parties deem informal contacts insufficient. Linkages are meant to serve substantive coordination on policy positions across level, ensuring that MEPs and ministers toe the party line.

Finally, separated parties do not engage across levels either internally or externally, effectively separating their national and European activities. There are no formal structures in place to systematically follow up on what their agents are doing, and there are only weak organisational ties with transnational partisan networks. These parties are almost entirely directed at domestic politics and people dealing with European affairs constitute a semi-autonomous group within the party. Importantly, their approach is not about the dominance of the domestic over the European (as with consolidated parties) or about the decoupling of these two levels (as with federated parties), but about the irrelevance or even rejection of the EU as a genuine political level.

 

Conclusions

This ‘FICS’ model aptly captures individual parties’ organisational practices, as well as their strategic outlook on engaging with the EU, thereby providing researchers with an original and grounded ideal-typical benchmark for understanding national parties as multilevel partisan organisations in the EU’s political system. Its qualitative empirical foundation allows the model to be used to make sense of real-life party behaviour and the different ways in which interaction between the national and European levels of political parties is given shape. It hence provides researchers with useful new tools to study an otherwise highly complex and idiosyncratic topic, as well as an analytical foundation for new hypotheses. The study’s findings hint at ‘genetic’ and ‘territorial‘ effects, bringing a party’s history and national context into the analysis, although these are working hypotheses.

Still, given its exploratory and qualitative nature, the scope of this study was necessarily limited. Future researchers are invited to not only develop its working hypotheses and expand the number of case studies, but also to consider including temporal variation to confront these findings with new evidence. This could help fine-tune the model and framework, and further increase our understanding of (the evolution of) parties as multilevel organisations in the EU.

 

 

Author bio

Gilles is lecturer in European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, and postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. He holds a PhD in Political Science obtained at Ghent University in 2021. His research interests include the Europeanisation of politics, the democratisation of the EU, and transnational partisanship.

@gillespittoors

https://gillespittoors.eu

@Gaspar_UGent

@FacultyofArtsUG

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By Daniele Archibugi, Rinaldo Evangelista and Antonio Vezzani

Since the release of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, fostering science, technology, innovation, and human capital have been considered key ingredients of all subsequent EU strategies aimed at achieving a cohesive and competitive European Union.

In recent years, regions have steadily increased their relevance as key spatial and socio-economic units as well as policy targets of both cohesion and Science and Technology (S&T) policies. Regional innovation strategies for smart specialisation, such as the RIS3, have become a key component of EU Cohesion Policy, supporting the thematic concentration of resources and reinforcing the strategic programming and orientation of policy action.

Although EU S&T policies might have an impact on the level of scientific and technological cohesion of EU, their role in influencing the dynamics of regional technological gaps or technological convergence in Europe has been largely neglected. In this blog post we discuss recent evidence of the potential role played by Horizon 2020 (H2020) research funds disbursed by the EU, highlighting how this may depend on its design and the allocation of resources across different funding schemes.

 

Technological asymmetries in the EU

Technological capacities in the EU are far from being evenly distributed across industries, firms and even less so at a spatial level. This is due to various factors, such as the cumulative nature of innovation and learning processes, the localised character of spillovers, and externalities in the generation and economic exploitation of technology. These features produce long-lasting spatial technological asymmetries that can produce non-reversible processes of polarization, agglomeration and clustering.

Figure 1 provides a visual representation of such asymmetries, comparing the patent per capita across EU NUTS2 regions in 2001-04 and 2013-16. The figure shows strong macro-regional differences in the patent intensity and a degree of technological heterogeneity within most EU countries. Moreover, a comparison of the two maps shows the persistence of very large gaps between the lowest and highest performing macro-regional areas of EU, with only a mild catching-up process by Eastern European regions and Portugal.

 

Figure 1. Patents per 10,000 habitants- 2001-2004 (left) and 2013-2016 (right)
Source: Authors’ computations on Regpat 2019a data.

 

H2020 and technological cohesion

Existing EU S&T policies can have a twofold effect on the regional gaps characterising the EU technological landscape. On one hand, competitive schemes may end up favouring areas of excellence and leading players and regions since they aim to strength the role of the EU innovation system in the global arena. But on the other hand, the explicit collaborative setting of part of such policies, supporting multi-country research groups with the aim to create an integrated European Research Area, may complement cohesion policies by reducing regional gaps. It is a typical example of where public policies may lead to (unintended) contrasting results. They can contribute to the cohesion target or, in contrast, exacerbate existing economic and technological gaps among regions.

Table 1 summarises the main features of four key funding schemes under H2020, which account for about 80% of the Total H2020 budget: the European Research Council (ERC), the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) the Research & innovation actions (RIA) and the Innovation actions (IA). They might have different effects on the level of technological cohesion in the EU depending on the specific science and technology activity supported, their policy design and the targeted beneficiaries. The results of our empirical analysis confirm that different schemes have different impacts.

The ERC, established in 2007 under the 7th Framework Programme (2007-2014 funding period), was the first scheme allowing the support of research projects by single researchers or teams with the idea of fostering scientific excellence. Under H2020 the ERC was entitled with a budget of 13€ billion (about 18.7% of the overall budget) to foster frontier research. Our analysis in the Journal of Common Market Studies suggests that ERC can potentially exacerbate the technological disparities among EU regions and is likely to benefit the most densely populated urban areas.

The MSCA also operates under the pillar of ‘Excellent Science’ to distribute highly competitive and prestigious research and innovation awards, allowing for: career development through mobility to a hosting institution; the support of research networks and the promotion of science to society. Our study suggests that the network orientation of the MSCA may limit its negative effect on technological cohesion.

 

The RIA and IA support basic and applied research to foster the development of new knowledge addressing so-called societal challenges. The former is slightly more oriented toward the earliest phases of the research and development process. The competitive logic characterising this policy scheme, which favours applications and projects involving both high and low innovative regions, is likely to facilitate technological cohesion.

 

Conclusion

Policies that result in opposing outcomes might still be valuable, provided they are informed by an overall strategy. This potential duality applies also to the Horizon 2020 Programme, the EU’s flagship instrument for science and technology policy.

Our econometric exercise confirms that, overall, the access to H2020 is consistent with the competitive logic of EU S&T policies. However, our work also reveals the presence of a rebalancing mechanism in the regional allocation of H2020: regions located in less developed countries tend to get an amount of funds that is higher to that implied by their technological capabilities.

This rebalancing mechanism has much to do with the collaborative-inclusive logic characterizing the policy design of RIA and IA that seem to prevail over the more ‘elite’ nature of the ERC and MSCA schemes, where access to funds increases more than proportionally with technological capabilities.

However, the actual contribution of H2020 to the EU cohesion target is likely to be rather limited, and unable to offset the stickiness of the technological gaps across EU regions. Despite H2020 being one of the world’s largest public schemes supporting research and innovation, its budget is not comparable to what top corporations spends in a year. While the yearly budget of H2020 was about 11 billion euros, in 2019 large corporations such as Alphabet (23€ billion), Microsoft (17.5), Huawei (16.7), Samsung (15.5), Apple (14.4) or Volkswagen (14.3) alone spent larger amounts on R&D.

In times of resource scarcity, a reallocation of part of the Cohesion Funds to those S&T schemes characterized by a collaborative-inclusive logic could be envisaged instead of trying to increase the share of Cohesion Funds dedicated to innovation. Relying upon top-down policy schemes such as H2020 might also bypass the lack of administrative capacity of less developed regions, which has prevented them from taking full advantage of the bottom-up logic of the EU Cohesion Funds.

 

 

Authors:

Daniele Archibugi is a research director at the Italian National Research Council, Irpps, in Rome and Professor of Innovation, Governance and Public Policy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He works on the economics of technological change, the dynamics of globalisation, EU integration and international political theory.

 

Twitter handle: @DanieleArchibu1

Department Twitter handle: @BirkbeckUoL

Academic profile

 

Rinaldo Evangelista is a Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Camerino (Italy). His research activity focuses on the areas of Economics of technological change and on the analysis of innovation in manufacturing and services.

 

Department Twitter handle: @UniCamerino

 

 

 

 

Antonio Vezzani is Associate Professor at the Roma Tre University and Research Associate at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). His research focuses on the economics of technological change, intangible assets and intellectual property rights, local and global knowledge dynamics, and innovation policies.

 

Twitter handle: @AntonioVezzani

Department Twitter handle: @EconomiaRomaTre

 

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As the attention of the European public opinion has turned to Ukraine, it is our duty and responsibility not to leave the accession plans for the Balkans fall into oblivion, writes Marilena Koppa.

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash.

Nineteen years after the Thessaloniki Summit that offered an accession perspective to the Western Balkans, the region is stuck and the process frozen. Enlargement has become a bureaucratic process for the relevant Directorate of the Commission where ‘business as usual’ is conducted — although nothing is as it was some years ago.

In fact, with the exception of Turkey, this is the longest process of negotiation leading nowhere, with devastating consequences for democracy, economic growth, the rise of nationalism and centrifugal tendencies. The case of Bosnia Herzegovina is the most prominent — and most dangerous — in that respect.

My country, Greece, is today in a position to work with consistency for the rapprochement of the region with the EU, after more than 25 years of conflict with North Macedonia over the name issue. But the EU does not seem to be interested anymore.

Since the end of the 20th century, the West has followed a “stabilization through integration” strategy in the region, meaning a stable and consistent strategy of keeping the Balkans close. The central assumption in the EU and NATO has been that the relatively small and weak Balkan states will eventually be incorporated into the twin-pillar Euro-Atlantic construct with full membership in both the EU and NATO.

The general framework has not changed. But the economic crisis in Europe, followed by Brexit, the migration crisis and then the pandemic, resulted in a period of introversion that by-passed the enlargement policy. The idea of deepening before enlargement reappeared with a renewed force.

The War in Ukraine that followed led to a further deterioration of the situation. We are dealing with small economies, scarce foreign investment, exodus of the youth, high unemployment and the perspective of accession deferred to an unknown future.

Still the region is struggling with the consequences of the Bulgarian veto in 2020 that halted the starting of negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania. Now things seem to move, but the situation in North Macedonia is problematic. Not to speak of the alarming situation in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Kosovo stalemate. At the same time Russian penetration is evident in different parts of the region.

The Prespes agreement has unleashed a positive dynamic creating the impression that regional problems, even the most difficult ones, can be overcome. What followed, however, showed that the region’s future is not in its own hands. The message from the French government, which was echoed by other member states was clear: no enlargement without deepening, meaning that the EU had to change in order to be able to accept new members. The region found itself in a ‘no man’s land’ waiting for something to happen.

And then the war erupted. The Russian aggression on Ukraine changed everything in Europe, at all levels. Ukraine applied for membership while Moldova and Georgia followed. It is noteworthy that Ukraine answered the Commission’s questionnaire in just a week, showing the will of Ukrainians to become part of the EU. Public opinion in the 27 member states was favorable to a swift accession process for Ukraine, while the six countries in the Western Balkans (WB6) were in a way forgotten. In a survey from March 2020, support for accession for the WB is below 36 per cent in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. As the leaders in Europe have their eyes on the polls before any decision, we cannot really be optimistic for the outcome.

What we witness is the breakdown not only of the Eastern Partnership, but also, in a way, of the Enlargement Policy. The reason is that, as things stand, the WB6 are hostage to the Eastern trio: there can be no move towards EU accession that does not involve Ukraine and Moldova (that are now candidates) and, eventually, Georgia.  The two countries that are negotiating, Serbia and Montenegro, are not moving and there is no clear perspective for membership.

In this ambivalent atmosphere, on 9 May 2022 President Macron, in his Strasbourg Speech, put forward the idea of a European Political Community as a wider circle of countries around the Union. He mentioned that for the Balkans the path is already mapped out. But in fact, nobody believed him. All this in a framework of clear-cut Russian presence in the Western Balkans through the orthodox church, anti-Americanism, misinformation and propaganda.

So, the idea of a staged accession gains ground. As long as it is not presented as an alternative to full membership, this idea must be seriously discussed. Balkan societies have suffered for too long. It is time to move οn.

A proposal that has been discussed for a while now is to let the WB6 and the trio participate immediately in the Single Market. This would permit the citizens of the countries concerned to enjoy the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. Let’s not forget that 66 per cent of the Balkan trade is already conducted with the EU. In addition, each step would give access to more funds and participation to various EU policies, as for example Common Security and Defence Policy.

As a Greek I was at first totally against such an approach. It was my firm belief that it would be presented as an alibi for not accepting the candidate countries as full members. Today I fear that it is Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia that will show the road to follow. I may be wrong but I cannot envisage a situation where there will be a development for the Western Balkans that does not involve the trio. What we must guarantee is not to move ahead with Ukraine leaving the WB6 behind.

This staged accession is not something new. It happened in 1993 with Austria, Sweden and Finland as a first step towards accession. If  countries are part of the Single Market, it will be easier to move to full membership.

Greece and other countries will not accept any EU solution for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia that does not take into consideration the Balkans. Because we know the risks and the challenges the region is facing and we are truly committed to full membership. However, we have to act together, so as the Balkans are not left behind during the enormous effort of reconstructing Ukraine.

Our common effort should focus on keeping the process open. For the moment, accession remains a moving target for the Balkan aspirants, where the goalposts are continuously moving, something that makes the people of the region increasingly impatient and frustrated. Under the current circumstances this becomes increasingly dangerous.

But, in essence, there is also need of a new narrative for the region’s strengths and advantages to give confidence to the region and change public opinion’s stereotypes in EU capitals. And this implies a huge information campaign for which we should all be responsible.

In my view, the staged approach together with development of regional cooperation efforts can be a realistic way out that could help the region navigate to safe waters.

Today more than ever there is a dire need for a renewed determination in Brussels and EU capitals concerning the Western Balkans. As the attention of the European public opinion is turned to Ukraine, it is our duty and responsibility not to leave the Balkans fall into oblivion. The stakes are high: high for the stability of the region and for the EU but also for peace and prosperity for the whole continent.

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This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2022 (23-24 June, at FASoS, Maastricht).

 

1. Introduction

In most historiographic accounts of European integration, the Maastricht Treaty marks an important step forward on “the long road to unity”. It is described as heralding a new politics of European integration or marking a moment of transformation and refoundation. For example, in their recently published textbook, Dawson and De Witte describe the Maastricht Treaty as “the most significant Treaty revision of the EU to date” which changed the EU “from being an economic community that is focused on policy to being a political union, that is, a polity.” This transformation was particularly significant for the community of legal scholars because it overturned old assumptions about the role of law in the process of European integration.  

No one has better described the impact of Maastricht on EU legal studies than Deirdre Curtin in her article The Constitutional Structure of the Union: A Europe of Bits and Pieces. Providing a probing critique of the Maastricht Treaty, it is captivating both in the boldness of its argument and the rhetorical prowess at display. Most of all, it is fascinating for the insight it provides in the way in which the community of EU lawyers perceived the Treaty of Maastricht and the changes to the process of integration it heralded. Up to the Maastricht Treaty, legal scholarship had operated on the premise that Europe would integrate through law, but – as Curtin correctly identified – in the aftermath of Maastricht, such a view of integration was no longer tenable.  

In the first section, this blog post dissects Curtin’s article and identifies three main assumptions underlying her critique of the Maastricht Treaty. The second section conceptualises A Europe of Bits and Pieces as an example of legalism. The final sections suggest that 30 years after the Maastricht Treaty, EU legal scholarship is still haunted by the spectre of legalism.

 

2. Reading A Europe of Bits and Pieces 

In A Europe of Bits and Pieces, Curtin critiqued the lack of an “overriding and consistent constitutional philosophy” of Maastricht and the way in which the treaty negotiators had “tinkered” with “the constitutional character of a Community based on the rule of law”. The Member States had “behaved like almighty ‘Herren der Verträge’ ignoring, almost whimsically at times, the unique nature of the Community legal system”. The Maastricht treaty thereby signalled the beginning of the end of integration through law, as Curtin herself recognised, “[t]he result of the Maastricht summit is an umbrella Union threatening to lead to constitutional chaos; the potential victims are the cohesiveness and the unity and concomitant power of a legal system painstakingly constructed over the course of some 30 odd years.” Three key assumptions underly her critique, which will be shortly discussed below.  

 

1. The forward march of integration  

Curtin’s most visible – and rhetorical – critique of the Maastricht Treaty aimed at the way it put an end to a certain vision of how European integration was to unfold. She justified her critical examination of the Maastricht Treaty because it would be: “vital that those who believe in the overall imperative of the march towards closer and deeper European integration critically examine the many imperfections of the Union ‘Treaty’ (in part amendments of a ‘Constitution’) so as both to ensure that – badly needed – lessons are learnt for the future as to the negotiation process itself”. Maastricht thus broke with the implied progress narrative of EU legal studies, which had functioned on the assumption that the “principle of an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ [implies] that integration should only be one way.” 

 

2. Legal unity as a precondition for integration 

A second key theme in Curtin’s text is the way she envisaged legal unity as the precondition for European integration. She explicitly analyzed the Union Treaty “from the perspective of unity and coherence” and argued it did not live up to the self-proclaimed ideal of creating a single institutional framework. However, by introducing a pillar structure, the Maastricht Treaty had created a Europe of “bits and piece”. Whereas unity “implied a single institutional framework and uniform applicability and enforcement of Union law”, the Union Treaty merely brought “certain extra-Community activities under the general umbrella of European Union, but not within the law-making powers as such of the Union.”  Thus, the Treaty explicitly abandoned the Community method in favor of intergovernmental cooperation. Moreover, Curtin argued that the Member States had “hijacked” the acquis communautaire by adding protocols to the Maastricht Treaty. She was highly critical of the possibility for Member States to ringfence national constitutional provisions, locating these outside the reach of Community law, arguing “[t]he specter of a pandora’s box which has been opened is of course profoundly disintegrative and strikes at the heart of the very uniqueness of Community law.” 

 

3. The autonomy of EU law and the ECJ as a constitutional court  

Notwithstanding the ways in which the Maastricht Treaty had undermined the unity and cohesion of the Community legal order and the intentions of the treaty negotiators, Curtin still believed that “the Court of Justice’s general constitutional role will be enhanced if the Union’s treaty enters into force.” She argued that the complexity introduced by the different mechanisms and procedures would lead to a flurry of legal questions the Court would have to answer, which would provide the Court with plenty of opportunities to consolidate its authority. More importantly, she implied that the ECJ could challenge the legal validity of the protocols to uphold the uniform application of Community law. In her own words: the ECJ could take action against “the unlimited discretion of the ‘Herren der Verträge’ to change at whim and arbitrarily certain defining features of the Community legal system.” 

  

3. Bits and Pieces as Legalism 

In many ways, Curtin’s analysis of the Maastricht Treaty has proved very accurate. The flaws she pointed out in the institutional structure of the Maastricht Treaty were remedied in the decades following Maastricht. Institutional unity has been largely restored through abandoning the pillar structure and by bringing the policy areas of civil and criminal justice cooperation under the jurisdiction of the ECJ and within the legislative process of the Union. She also proved mostly right (as we will see below) in her assessment that the role of the Court would be enhanced post-Maastricht.  

What makes her analysis stand out, however, is the normative overcommitment to legality as a value. Curtin explicitly rejected the idea that the “only valid form of legitimacy in the context of the Communities is that of a democratic system”, listing the rule of law and fundamental rights as guaranteed by the independence of the judiciary as two related, and equally important, forms of legitimacy. Considering the secrecy in the way the intergovernmental conference was conducted, she argued that the guarantee of judicial control by the Court was justified – even essential – to fulfil the characterization of the EC Treaty as “a constitutional charter based on the rule of law” (Les Verts). Note the circularity of this argument: the intervention of the Court was warranted to protect a vision of European integration the ECJ itself had articulated. 

This commitment to legality can be defined, following Judith Skhlar, as legalism, which she defined as “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules.” Skhlar critiqued legal theorists for isolating law from both morality and politics, thereby presenting law as neutral and objective, instead of as a political project. For Skhlar, legalism was a form of ideology, a frame of reference which lawyers and legal theorists bring to their subject and that, inevitably, distorts reality. In a way, legalism points to the deformation professionelle of the legally trained mind: the assumptions and the resulting intellectual distortions that are inherent in the legal discipline. Skhlar tried to show how legalism limits “the analytical perspective of its adherents” because it keeps from sight that law does not always offer “an adequate response to every social need”. In this sense, legalism is an ideology which “is at its worst when it insists upon an uncompromising policy of judicialization.” Moreover, she brought into the open the political commitment of legal theory and questioned the tendency to treat “political preferences as the logical necessities of any valid theory of law.” 

A Europe of Bits and Pieces displays all the main tenets of legalism: faith in the role of law, a disdain for politics and a – deliberate – treatment of law in complete isolation from the social and political context it operates in. Most clearly, A Europe of Bits and Pieces displays a deep faith in the progress of law “moving step by step to its predetermined end in a predetermined pattern of progress.” In such a vision, “the only task ahead is that of legal craftsmanship – the formal perfection of the rules”. The utopian dream of a self-standing legal order functioning independently of political actors has deep roots in European legal thinking. In the 19th and early 20th century, many international legal scholars had postulated a stronger international law “would simply be the consequence of the historical process of growing international interdependence between states, economies and individuals.” It is thus not surprising that this way of thinking made its way into EU legal thought, but what is striking is that those legalistic tendencies still abound today.  

 

4. A revival of legalism post-Maastricht? 

In the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty, both the process of integration and EU legal scholarship have undergone significant change. Whereas initially integration through law seemed to be on the wane, in recent years, powerful voices claim “integration through the rule of law is the only way forward.” This is a peculiar development given that after Maastricht, the integration through law dynamic was complemented and superseded with various other methods of integrations, such as an Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and the rise of governance and soft-law, in particular in the context of European Monetary Union (EMU) which led to the increasing marganisaliation of law in the process of integration.  

 

It was in this context, that EU legal studies emphasized the constitutional character of the EU legal order and embraced the idea of a constitution for Europe. Vauchez has argued that the rise of a constitutional discourse can be seen as a “counter-mobilization on the part of EU law and lawyers in a context of rising intellectual and political challenges to their definitional power over the European project.” Only after the failed constitutional treaty, which was rejected by both the French and Dutch electorate, that the constitutional narrative could be seen as “a parenthesis in a longer and deeper process whereby EU law’s intellectual and political leadership over European integration has progressively dismantled.” So much was recognized by Curtin herself, who in later works wrote about the “lost paradise” of European legal integration, moving beyond the tendency of the legal community (and her earlier work):   

“Towards viewing the entire process as self-functioning and objective (a so-called ‘myth of legal objectivism’). It has framed European integration as fundamentally apolitical by creating an opposition between a realm of European ‘law’ as a rational force towards the inevitable and a realm of national ‘politics’ as the ‘articulation of the illogical, irrational and ideological.” 

Both the turn to governance and constitutionalism came to an end when Europe was hit by the financial crisis, which developed into the Eurozone-crisis. This crisis marked the beginning of a decade-long crisis atmosphere, in which legality was often placed on the backfoot. Crisis measures and emergency politics frequently pushed the boundaries of the EU legal framework – famous examples include the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism as an instrument of private international law or the EU-Turkey migration deal, which the ECJ defined as an instrument outside of the scope of EU law. In these instances, EU law has less functioned as a way to constrain the exercise of political power, but rather as an instrument to exercise power, even at the cost of the degradation of basic legal values. In these circumstances,  

Nonetheless, one crisis has seen a revival of legalism in the discourse of EU legal scholarship. The so-called “rule of law crisis” has led to a flurry of commentary that implores the Commission and the ECJ to tackle rule of law issues in several Member States of the EU, notably Poland and Hungary. It is in this literature that we see a return to legalism as an ideology, namely in the belief that legal measures are adequate to tackle rule of law problems. Rather than seeing the rule of law as the precondition for effective rule enforcement, it is now presented as the outcome of the effective enforcement of EU principles and values. However, there are clear limits to the legal enforcement of values and it remains a big question whether it is appropriate for legal institutions and instruments to solve an essentially political problem.  

What is clear, however, is that returning to pre-Maastricht paradigm of integration through law’ is unlikely to solve the contemporary problems facing EU law. As Vauchez has adequately put it: “any theoretical bid to re-connect Europe and the law should ‘forget nostalgia’ for EU Law golden years and start from a comprehensive assessment of the political and intellectual zeitgeist.”  

The post The Maastricht Treaty and the End of Integration Through Law: Bits and Pieces of a Legal Ideology appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Thomas Jacobs, Niels Gheyle, Ferdi De Ville, and Jan Orbie

 

As COVID-19 gripped the globe in March 2020, politicians suddenly started discussing the EU’s trade policies in a way that would have been deemed lunacy just a few months earlier. The French Finance Minister made the case for ‘European industrial independence’ and ‘legitimate protection’, and his Dutch colleagues admitted that ‘it is time to take a step back’ and ‘rethink our trade deals’. ‘Autonomy’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘self-sufficiency’, and ‘protection’ were the talk of the town, and politicians who had ended 2019 wanting to open markets found themselves promoting the ‘reshoring’ of production to safeguard ‘vulnerable’ supply chains. At least on a rhetorical level, the change that COVID provoked in EU Trade Policy was sudden and profound.

 

‘Open strategic autonomy’

Crucially, many of the discourses that sprung up at the start of the COVID crisis were a far cry from the (neo)liberal paradigm that usually dominates and informs EU’s commercial policy. Faced with a substantial dislocation of the status quo, the European Commission initially denounced this novel rhetoric as old-fashioned protectionism. But as the pandemic disturbed trade flows in an unprecedented fashion, and with the debate on vulnerabilities of globalization waging ever more intensively, the Commission changed tack, and suddenly recognized the need for a ‘strategic’ and ‘open’ form of ‘autonomy’. The vague, borderline paradoxical concept of ‘open strategic autonomy’ did not resolve the ongoing discussions, however. In what sense does Europe need to be autonomous? What is the strategy that informs this autonomy? How do we balance the seeming opposites of autonomy and openness?

Various interpretations of what open strategic autonomy meant; burst forward and competed in what can be conceptualized as a ‘hegemonic struggle’ among policymakers. Eventually, a lukewarm alliance saw the neoliberal and the geopolitical interpretation end up as provisional winners. The neoliberal approach to strategic autonomy via diversification of supply chains was combined with the geopolitical desire to ensure that trade dependence does not harm the pursuit of foreign policy goals. This interpretation heavily permeated the European Commission’s Trade Policy Review, released in February 2021.

 

Post-structuralist discourse theory

Crucially, the arc and outcome of this story were not set in stone. The EU’s institutional outlook, its ideological and party-political balance of power, the preferences of and relations between its member states, and its policy-making culture certainly made particular responses to the COVID crisis more likely to materialize than others. But which path EU policymakers were going to follow and what effects their choices would have, were ultimately open-ended questions in the Spring of 2020. Not even the mightiest power brokers in the Parliament, the Commission, or the Council could escape this inevitable uncertainty at that point in time.

It is often tricky for social scientists to do justice to the fundamentally undecided and open-ended nature of political questions. A scientific explanation after all makes the explained events lose their eventuality and appear to us as logical and self-evident. But telling political (hi)stories in such a teleological fashion omits a fundamental characteristic of the political enterprise. What renders a decision ‘political’ in nature is precisely the absence of predetermination. Unlike gravity, political power is unpredictable and fickle.

Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) furnishes an account of political events that appreciates their contingency and their openness. According to Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT), politics is essentially the act of social construction in a context defined by contingency, where the hegemony of one discourse over its alternatives brings one out of many possible social worlds into being.  PDT narrates how old norms lose or maintain their grip; how established structures are defended or challenged; how new ideas manifest themselves – and it combines these logics to develop an interpretation of events that explains how things came to be while simultaneously underlining how they could have been different. PDT maintains that social forms do not manifest themselves naturally or spontaneously, but sees their existence as dependent on their capacity to win and maintain hegemony. As such, any account of how political decisions came to be, must explain how they managed to become more legitimate, normal, appropriate, or persuasive than a myriad of (unspoken) alternatives.

This theoretical infrastructure facilitates analyses that offer a clear account of how power is omnipresent in politics and of how power plays out in and affects the course of political events. Power is more than merely an accumulation of political, institutional, social, economic, or cultural capital – it also operates on a less conscious, less intentional level: there is power in the way we talk, think, know. By capturing power’s discursive patterns, PDT can explain political events as the emergent outcome of open-ended hegemonic struggles, free from predetermination.

 

Competing discourses in EU trade policy

As such, regardless of whether they were aware of it, the politicians who talked about reshoring and thought about a major overhaul of the EU’s trade deals at the start of the COVID crisis were opening up a logic that could have completely reimagined what EU trade policies look like. By focusing the debate on the idea of ‘open’ but nevertheless ‘strategic’ forms of ‘autonomy’, the Commission partially contained these logics, and prevented them from branching all too far beyond the extant paradigm. But in doing so, it created a fertile ideological ground for the cross-pollination between liberal ideas about freeing markets on the one hand and geopolitical ideas about Europe’s global clout on the other hand. As evidenced in the 2021 Trade Policy Review, this common ground allowed the dominant neoliberal hegemony to endure – the EU’s trade policy post-COVID remains largely in line with its pre-COVID policies – albeit now infused with a distinct geopolitical twist.

The other major competitor for discursive hegemony over EU trade policy – the trade justice paradigm, which emerged in the wake of the movements against a new WTO round, EPAs, TTIP, and CETA – seems to have lost this struggle. Although ‘resilience’ and ‘autonomy’ are in theory perfectly compatible with an emancipatory approach to trade policy, it took quite a long time for progressive movements to involve the COVID crisis in ongoing attempts to politicize and reorient EU trade policy. And even as they did so, they barely referenced to ‘resilience’ and ‘strategic autonomy’, leaving the opportunity to give meaning to these terms largely up to neoliberal and geopolitical perspectives.

 

The wider relevance of post-structuralist discourse theory

A discourse-theoretical vantage point aims to disentangle the hegemonic dynamic effects that are playing out in episodes like these. It goes without saying that this makes PDT radically different from more conventional approaches in political-economic research. It refrains from constructing causal mechanisms and as such lacks access to their explanatory power. But it has tremendous potential to inform a non-essentialist and non-teleological interpretation of political events, that highlights the role that discourse and hegemony play in the construction of our social world. Such a perspective can create a unique account of why, in moments of crisis and dislocation, political events transpire the way they do – something we have tried to illustrate in our analysis of EU trade politics under COVID in JCMS.

 

 

Authors:

Thomas Jacobs is an assistant professor in communication science at Université Saint-Louis – Brussels. His main research interests include discourse analysis, hegemony, and political communication.

Niels Gheyle is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) working on the politicization of EU and global governance, with an emphasis on EU trade policy.

Ferdi De Ville is associate professor in European political economy at Ghent University. His main research interest is the political economy of the European Union’s external trade policies.

Jan Orbie is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Centre for EU Studies at Ghent University in Belgium. He researches the EU’s external relations, in particular trade and development policies

 

 

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By Sonja Priebus

Ever since Hungary and Poland started backsliding on democracy and the rule of law in 2010 and 2015 respectively, academics and practitioners alike have racked their brains over one central question: How can the European Union make noncompliant governments enforce European core values such as democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights? And more precisely: should the European Commission as Guardian of the Treaties only talk to the governments of Hungary and Poland or also sanction them?

The Commission has mainly chosen the former strategy, which is in line with its usual consensual approach towards noncompliance. Instead of using the few available “hard” instruments in its rule of law toolbox and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, the EU’s executive has mostly resorted to bilateral dialogues as its central problem-solving strategy. The most recent evidence of the Commission’s preference for problem-solving is its reluctance to activate the Rule of Law conditionality mechanism adopted in December 2020 against Poland and Hungary. It was only on 5 April 2022 – two days after the general elections in Hungary – that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen finally announced the activation of the mechanism against Hungary.

 

Enforcement versus management in case of noncompliance

According to the management approach in compliance research, problem-solving through dialogue, capacity building and preventive measures are part of the appropriate strategy when noncompliance with certain rules or norms happens accidentally. When, however, noncompliance is the deliberate choice of actors, the enforcement approach recommends extensive monitoring coupled with sanctions. Because noncompliance is voluntary, the appropriate strategy to make noncompliers comply is punishment, not trying to solve problems by engaging in long discussions.

By now it is uncontested that the Hungarian and Polish governments’ attacks on democratic institutions, the judiciary and political rights are not mistakes, but calculated policy choices. More recently, the Polish government’s continued open defiance of several European Court of Justice rulings and its refusal to pay the required fines for not abolishing the Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Chamber has just underlined this.

Because in both cases the respective governments commit violations of EU values deliberately, the adequate response according to the enforcement approach is to monitor these violations and punish the rule violators. In cases of deliberate non-compliance, only talking to the rule breakers to try to convince them of their wrongdoing seems a rather futile strategy.

 

Mismatch between the source of noncompliance and proposed remedies 

When we look at the Commission’s recently expanded rule of law toolbox, i.e., the instruments the Commission itself has developed in response to democratic backsliding in members states, we see, however, that these instruments mostly follow the logic of the management, not the enforcement, approach. While the Commission admits that the dismantling of the rule of law in some states is “the result of deliberate policy choices”, it has been reluctant to propose “hard” instruments with possible sanctions. Instead, it has almost exclusively developed “soft” instruments that rely on dialogue and prevention. As I argue in my Journal of Common Market Studies paper, this leads to a mismatch between the identified causes of the problem and the solutions chosen. Put differently: although the Commission has correctly identified the origins of noncompliance, it has not drawn the correct conclusions concerning the remedies to rule of law breaches.

 

Example: The Rule of Law Mechanism

Dialogue with rule violators and prevention, i.e. early identification of problems, are the dominant strategies of almost all of the rule of law tools created by the Commission since 2014. Thus, the Commission manages, instead of enforces EU values.

I will illustrate this point by using the example of the Rule of Law Mechanism announced in 2019.  According to the Commission’s communication, this mechanism is supposed to “act as a preventive tool, deepening dialogue and joint awareness of rule of law issues”. To achieve this objective, the mechanism, on the one hand, seeks to promote a rule of law culture among EU citizens through e.g., the dissemination of knowledge, new programmes for promoting values (e.g., the Rights and Values Programme) and exchanges between different groups. This is, on the other hand, complemented by an extensive monitoring of developments within each member state as well as exchanges with different domestic groups to prevent rule of law problems from emerging or deepening in one certain country.

In practice, this monitoring translates into a so-called Rule of Law Review Cycle. Over the period of one year the Commission conducts consultations with stakeholders at the national level – which include governments as well as different societal and administrative actors – and makes country visits. The findings afterwards feed back into an Annual Rule of Law Report. The Report, which was published  in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively, focuses on aspects central to the rule of law: justice systems, anti-corruption frameworks, media pluralism and media freedom as well as “other issues linked to checks-and-balances” such as constitutional reforms, the quality of law-making or civil society organizations. The objective of the specific country reports is to highlight deficiencies as well as problematic issues at the nation state level. The findings are not, however, binding and there are also no sanctions attached if governments choose not to take these findings into account.

 

Management instead of enforcement of values

From the perspective of the enforcement approach it seems, however, insufficient to counter deliberate breaches of the EU’s fundamental values with bilateral negotiations and preventive measures designed to raise awareness of rule of law issues among citizens. In cases such as Hungary and Poland, where democracy and the rule of law have been deliberately destroyed over years, talking to governments or summarizing findings in a nonbinding report is too little, too late. Overall, the Commission’s rule of law strategy is thus characterized by a mismatch between the strategies that should be and the strategies that are actually deployed in cases of deliberate rule violation.

The only exception so far is the so-called Rule of Law conditionality, which the Commission proposed in 2018 and which the European Council adopted in a diluted version in 2020. Regulation 2020/2092 on a general regime of conditionality for the protection of the Union budget links the payment of EU funds to respect for the rule of law. Even though the conditionality mechanism cannot be activated for general rule of law violations but only if these have a direct bearing on the implementation of the EU budget or the spending of EU money, it provides the Commission with a powerful instrument to sanction noncompliers.

 

Sanctions as the correct method to reverse backsliding?

The enforcement approach offers a theoretically convincing explanation for why the Commission’s new rule of law tools are both inadequate and ineffective. We need to be careful, however, in concluding that sanctions alone are the correct method to reverse backsliding. Research on candidate state Europeanization, for example, teaches us that we need to pay attention to the context where such measures are deployed. The more authoritarian the targeted state is, the less conditionality through sanctions is likely to work because reversing controversial reforms is far too costly for incumbents. While it is not easy to find the right response to backsliding, what seems to be clear is that dialogue with governments alone does not suffice. A combination of enforcement and management could thus be a more promising way.

 

 

Author:

Sonja Priebus is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at European-University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, Chair of European Studies. Her research focuses on democratic backsliding in the EU the EU’s rule of law toolbox and politics in Central and Eastern Europe.

Academic profile

 

 

 

The post Talking or Punishing? The European Commission’s Approach to Democratic Backsliding appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2022 (23-24 June, at FASoS, Maastricht).

 

EU-China relations are at a historical low and continue deteriorating. The EU’s skepticism towards China, which began in the mid 2010s, has been accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s stance over the war in Ukraine, both of which have fueled the perception that the EU had been naïve about Beijing. This has prompted a turn in the way the EU approaches its relations with China. The EU’s traditional cautiousness has given way to an increasingly worded narrative and a more confrontational approach towards Beijing.

This has materialized in Asia, where Brussels sees China’s policies as a challenge to regional security and to Brussel’s own economic and security interests in the region. China’s foreign policy assertiveness has been a “wakeup call” for the EU to pay more attention to regional security. The security dimension, previously negligible in EU-Asia relations, is now, in the words of former HR/VP Federica Mogherini, the “biggest area of growth” in the EU’s engagement with the region. Against this backdrop, the key question is: how does the EU, as a soft security actor, navigate regional geopolitics and pursue its foreign policy goals?

This article proposes that soft balancing is a helpful tool to interpret the EU’s approach towards Asia in the context of worsening EU-China relations. Soft balancing is a “calculated, focused and nonmilitary strategy” designed in order to “delay, frustrate, and undermine” the threatening behavior of the target state. Hence, it is targeted against a state whose behavior is perceived as challenging, but who is not yet considered as an imminent or existential threat. Soft balancing strategies can be pursued through normative, diplomatic, or economic mechanisms, all of which are present in the EU’s approach towards Asia.

Normative and diplomatic means of balancing are closely linked in the EU’s approach to China’s connectivity strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its growing military assertiveness in the South China Sea (SCS), both of which are considered a concern by the EU. Normative means of balancing include the promotion of alternative normative doctrines, or the use of international norms to undermine the legitimacy and/or delay threatening actions of the target state. Diplomatically, actors form formal or informal alignments to create a stronger front vis-à-vis the targeted state.

Regarding China’s military assertiveness in the SCS, the EU’s statements have responded to China’s moves by calling for adherence to international law and for strengthening the norms-based regional architecture. Similarly, the EU has delegitimated China’s actions by condemning them as “unilateral” and “endangering peace and stability.” On the other hand, the EU has sought to build cooperation with like-minded countries. The EU’s 2018 security strategy towards Asia identified maritime security as the top priority. Consequently, Brussels stepped up its efforts to build informal understandings, dialogues, and cooperation mechanisms on the matter, including setting up security dialogues with Japan and India. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is at the center of geopolitical tensions with China in the SCS, has also been at the front of the EU’s efforts. Brussels established new cooperation mechanisms with ASEAN and its member states, supported capacity building, stepped up its role at the ASEAN Regional Forum and even participated in a naval exercise hosted by Indonesia.

Regarding connectivity, the EU sees China’s BRI as a geopolitical tool through which Beijing aims at increasing its influence over developing countries and as a normative project to reshape the global governance architecture. Hence, on the one hand, the EU has tried to push China to adhere to international norms and made its engagement with the project conditional to its adherence to those standards. At the 2017 Belt and Road Form, the EU and its member states coordinated a series of common messages, emphasizing the need for the initiative to improve openness, transparency, and rules-based connectivity. In addition, it has sought to counterweight China’s BRI with its own vision of connectivity. The EU’s proposition echoes the normative criticism made to China, as it presents itself as a sustainable, rules-based, and comprehensive alternative. The implementation of EU’s connectivity strategy in Asia is grounded on close ties with Asian partners, including Japan, India, with whom the EU has concluded two connectivity partnerships, and ASEAN.

Finally, economic means of balancing include the use of economic tools to increase one’s own power and relative position vis-à-vis a threatening power. Recent studies unpack how the EU has sought to make use of its economic position in Asia to boost its role as a regional security actor. For instance, The EU’s FTAs with Singapore and Vietnam are part of its efforts to maintain a rules-based international order amid growing geo-economic competition between the US and China. The EU has also revitalized trade talks with India and has made efforts for relaunching trade talks with ASEAN in response to the “quickly changing international environment.” Finally, the EU upgraded its economic relations with Taiwan, which China considers a breakaway province, by holding their first ever ministerial-level trade talks.

This is not to say that the EU’s interest in Asia is only defined by China. Factors such as the US’ unilateralism during the Trump era and the consolidation of the EU’s foreign policy have all contributed to a more comprehensive approach towards Asian security. Yet, worsening perceptions of China have certainly played a role in driving the EU’s differentiated approach towards the region. Brussels has combined a strong reliance of international norms with the diversification of its regional partners and the promotion of its own initiatives in Asia.

This article has argued that soft balancing offers a useful framework to interpret the EU’s approach, as well as to reconcile its geopolitical narrative with its lack of hard security instruments, and its self-perception as a principled security actor.

The post Economic, Normative, and Diplomatic (Soft) Balancing: Making Sense of the EU’s Responses to China’s Rise in Asia appeared first on Ideas on Europe.