European Union

The European Council has not kept any text messages or another type of instant messaging from its president to heads of state. It says nothing qualified to have them registered for public access. Transparency campaigners disagree.

Today the temperature is rising 20 percent faster in the Mediterranean region than the rest of the world. This is one of challenges to be discussed by the Interreg MED conference on Friday (6 November).

An outcry from major European city governments - including Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Budapest - has helped shelve an EU Commission power grab over municipalities' services industries, such as in affordable housing, energy supply and waste management.

As if dealing with a pandemic wasn’t enough, from the very outbreak of Covid-19, institutions, political leaders, social and traditional media alike seem to have used the pandemic to pit one generation against the other. Young people are being depicted...

Northern Ireland will not be ready to conduct checks on certain goods moving between Britain and the province from January as required by the Brexit divorce deal and is exploring contingency plans, an official report warned on Friday. The National...

The head of the OSCE observer mission to the US elections accused Donald Trump on Thursday (5 November) of a "gross abuse of office" after the president alleged he was being cheated and demanded that vote counting be halted.

As compromises go, the deal brokered between MEPs on linking the disbursement of EU funds to the rule of law back is a classic of the kind that Brussels specializes in.

Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi resigned Thursday following confirmation he was being charged with war crimes by an EU-sponsored special tribunal in The Hague, the AP news agency reports. He did it to protect the "integrity" of the presidential office, he said. "Kosovo was the victim and Serbia was the aggressor," he added, referring to Kosovo's war of independence from Serbia in the late 1990s, when he was a guerrilla leader.

Covid-19 has once again put EU solidarity to the test. While much of the focus has been on the pandemic’s impact on healthcare and the European economy, it has also pushed states further apart on the issue of irregular migration.

Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, the issue of irregular migration had been at the top of the EU’s political agenda for over a decade. At the same time, the governance of migration proved to be the most complex and problematic area of governance in the EU due to the multiplicity of interests within the Union which are in constant flux.

Disagreement between EU leaders was brought to the fore during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015-17 when the EU received the largest influx of irregular migrants since the end of the Second World War. Consequently, EU institutions and member states were unable to forge a common approach to deal with the crisis. Indeed, rather than developing a long-term strategy, a series of short-term ad hoc measures were implemented, which ultimately failed to alleviate pressure on those member states facing high migration pressures.

The EU’s inability to develop a coherent response to the crisis resulted in political cleavages both between and within the national and supranational levels. This was primarily reflected in the deadlocked inter-institutional negotiations on the reform of the Dublin Regulation revolving around the question of whether to replace the ‘state of first entry’ rule with a mandatory relocation mechanism to distribute asylum seekers across EU member states. These cleavages were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic which further exposed serious flaws in EU migration governance as well as the EU’s limitations in the face of crisis.

EU institutions and member states have similarly failed to overcome their differences and pull together in the spirit of solidarity during the pandemic. Even though, unlike the asymmetrical impact of the ‘refugee crisis’, the pandemic has affected all states bar none. Still, following the outbreak of Covid-19, divisions have grown deeper within the EU in terms of its approach to irregular migration, stemming from the fact that policymaking in this field continues to be dominated by national concerns. Accordingly, the pandemic has further strained intergovernmental relations in the EU. Against this backdrop, the EU remains as divided as ever in terms of its response to irregular migration, despite irregular arrivals to Europe decreasing in the aftermath of the 2015-17 crisis.

While the governance of migration in the EU is becoming increasingly fragmented, it is also becoming increasingly restrictive towards irregular migrants. In this regard, the pandemic has augmented the perceived threat of irregular migrants as they are being increasingly viewed as spreaders, resulting in the implementation of more restrictive migration measures in most EU member states. For instance, Italy and Malta have closed their ports to persons rescued at sea for the duration of the health emergency. Both governments later stated that migrants rescued in the Mediterranean would be quarantined at sea in order to prevent the spread of the virus, sparking criticism from NGOs advocating migrants’ rights.

Restrictive measures taken by other member states included reintroducing internal border controls within the Schengen Area to prevent irregular secondary movements of migrants from neighbouring states under the guise of protecting public health. Certain states, such as Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden, have had border checks in place since the outbreak of the previous crisis in 2015.

Given that the main migratory routes into the EU are across the Mediterranean, the southern EU members have been at the forefront in dealing with the issue of irregular migration and hence have assumed a much higher degree of asylum responsibility. Furthermore, due to their geographical proximity to main departure points for irregular migrants, they are disadvantaged by the Dublin rules, which in most cases assign asylum responsibility to the first EU state in which an asylum seeker arrives. Nonetheless, as in previous years, appeals for solidarity by the southern member states have largely fallen on deaf ears.

One such case in point is the Malta Declaration agreed upon by Italy and Malta together with France and Germany in September 2019 under the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU, whereby the five states declared their intent to develop a new scheme for disembarkation and relocation of migrants rescued at sea to ease pressure on Italy and Malta. The proposal, however, was rejected the following month by EU interior ministers in the Justice and Home Affairs Council.

The Covid-19 crisis is giving rise to a similar response from EU member states and the pursuit of national interests rather than common ones. More concretely, the pandemic has revealed the lack of solidarity and unity in the EU response to irregular migration even in an unprecedented situation.

Current European responses to irregular migration thus illustrate that the governance of migration is giving rise to suboptimal policy outcomes. In other words, the tightening of national migration policies has resulted in a ‘race to the bottom’ in asylum standards and rights across Europe. Moreover, the pandemic has exposed the unwillingness of EU leaders to act cohesively in the face of a major crisis. All of this increases the likelihood of the EU developing into an ‘ever looser’ Union, which could ultimately lead to the fragmentation of the European project.

This article was first published on the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) blog on European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) on 23 September 2020.

The post Assessing the impact of Covid-19 on the EU’s response to irregular migration appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Relations between France and Turkey risked further deterioration after the Turkish foreign ministry vowed to retaliate against a French decision to ban the activities, on its territory, of the Grey Wolves, an ultra-nationalist group affiliated with Turkey's ruling AKP party. "We will respond in the firmest way possible to this decision," the Turkish ministry said Wednesday. The Grey Wolves "incites discrimination and hatred" French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said.

Four Italian regions are being put under a "red-zone" lockdown, with severe limitations on people leaving their homes, the country's prime minister Giuseppe Conte announced Wednesday night. Lombardy, Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta in the north, and Calabria in the south will see strict measures for two weeks, aimed at slowing down a surge in Covid-19 infections, AP reported.

Strict measures against the spread of Covid-19 will have to remain in force in Belgium until there is a vaccine available, the country's prime minister Alexander De Croo warned on Wednesday. De Croo said that "we will have to be a lot stricter with [the measures] than during the summer until there is a vaccine." He added that strict measures will have to remain in force "for months to come."

The pro-European candidate, Joe Biden, is on the cusp of victory in US elections, with Germany leading attacks on Donald Trump's "awful" claims of voting fraud.

Denmark has found a new strain of Covid-19 after an outbreak in the country's mink population led to a mutation of the virus that might hamper an effective vaccine, the country's prime minister Mette Frederiksen warned Wednesday. She said "there is a risk that the effect of a future vaccine will be weakened or, in a worst case scenario, be undermined." Denmark plans to cull its 15 million mink population.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube and TikTok were fined by Turkish authoirties for failing to appoint a representative able to address complaints, as required by a new law.

Maia Sandu, Moldova's pro-EU former prime minister, won the first round of voting in Sunday's election, setting the stage for a run-off against pro-Russian incumbent Igor Dodon.

Tomorrow, this blog celebrates its 10th anniversary. Much has happened in those ten years. Too much to write a summary, but the 305 posts published still document some of my work, my activism,  and my research over the years.

I published my first post on 5 November 2010, after I had just returned from living in Brussels for half a year. One of my earliest posts — “Reading a Japanese journal article with Google Translate” — still regularly brings readers to this blog, although I don’t know why.

2011 was an amazing year. I returned to Brussels and soon after became part of a series of blogger meetings with the Hungarian Council Presidency spokespersons. As a result, Europasionaria and I become the first eurobloggers ever to officially cover an EU Council meeting from the Council press room. In May 2011, we repeated this with the second bloggers’ coverage of a Council meeting.

When it comes to my academic life, my first participation in academic conference with my own research was the UACES conference in Cambridge in September 2011. A pre-conference blog post showed my worries about the paper I’d present, while my post-conference post sounds more optimistic.

The first half of 2012 was challenging as I was writing my PhD thesis in Berlin while still trying to blog and stay connected to Brussels politics (as I wanted to return). Participating at re:publica and advertising Euroblogging in Germany was definitely the blogger’s highlight of this year. My secret side project in that year—mainly a procrastination from my PhD writing— was authoring a fake Barroso blog for a few months. The blog even got a mention in a German news portal.

After the summer of 2012, my blog became quite quiet as I started working for the Transparency International EU Office and was also responsible for the social media communication. So from the 2nd half of 2012 my favourite post is this one on how the #EUCO hashtag was born in October 2010, i.e. quite exactly ten years ago.

2013 was a year with very little blogging as I was finishing writing my PhD thesis while also conducting a research project at Transparency International. So my post on how “The Matrix” inspired my doctoral research is probably the only text worth highlighting. Maybe alongside this post on Minecraft and the EU.

2014, the year of the European elections, started with a look at the emergence of a true European public sphere, foreshadowing the debates on migration that would follow a year later on a much larger scale. It was also the year when I moved from Brussels to Munich for my postdoc. Part of my research was on EU budgeting, so some of my blogging also moved in this direction while also watching how the new Juncker Commission emerged out of the “political” European elections.

In 2015, my blogging dried down even further, with this post on the network structure of European Parliament committees being maybe one of the more interesting things I did that year. I also did some blogging alongside my teaching on EU affairs in Munich.

In 2016, I managed to write only seven posts, only eight posts in 2017, and only one in 2018. 2019 continued to be a quiet year with only eight posts, and so was 2020 with only a few so far.

The only 2018, German-language post in defence of political science and large conferences against a critical essay in a German newspaper (‘FAZ’) became quite the debate in the German political science sphere. Sometimes writing one good post can replace a dozen boring posts, I guess.

This is clearly true for this year’s article that got a lot of attention when I announced that I’d leave university out of love for academia to create a new kind of research company. I’m still working on this while teaching Global Governance and EU Fiscal and Financial Governance at Hertie School in Berlin. Next year, the economic and overall situation permitting, this will be the focus of my attention.

What I realized over all these years of blogging is that long-form writing has its merits, but for most purposes Twitter (for text and links) or Instagram (for photos) are just the better medium to communicate ideas.

I like Polscieu because it has accompanied me for so long, but while 10 years ago blogging (still) felt like a worthwhile endeavour now few of the people who blogged back then are still doing it actively – Jon Worth being a notable exception (how do you do this, Jon?).

So I won’t put up a cake and candles to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Polscieu tomorrow, but this blog—just like my Twitter account but much less frequent in use—is still an outlet to share interesting insights that come across my way in a long form.

PS: Thanks to Ideas on Europe (by UACES) for hosting it all these years!

The post One decade of Polscieu appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In the context of the exponential growth of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the President of the European Parliament has announced a number of measures to contain the spread of epidemic and to safeguard Parliament's core activities.

The current precautionary measures adopted by the European Parliament to contain the spread of COVID-19 do not affect work on legislative priorities. Core activities are reduced, but maintained to ensure that the institution's legislative, budgetary, scrutiny functions are maintained.

The meetings will be with remote participation for Members (being able to view and listen to proceedings, ask for the floor and intervene in the meeting). Other participants are invited to follow the meeting through webstreaming.

Following these decisions, the next meeting of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) will take place on 16 November 2020 (online).

New EP calendar 2020
SEDE meetings' calendar 2020
Press release: Security and Defence Subcommittee MEPs will discuss continuing threat from Daesh - 27 October 2020
Press release: MEPs reiterate their support for Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons - 21 October 2020
Press release: - PESCO: MEPs call Member States to deepen defence cooperation at EU level - 21 October 2020
Press release: Implementation of the CSDP: MEPs to discuss the annual draft report 2019 - 15 October 2020
Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

On 9 November, the Committe on Foreign Affairs will hold an exchange of views with Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). This is the first time Mr Lazzarini will hold an exchange of views in AFET after his appointment as Commissioner General in March 2020.
The exchange will give MEPs the opportunity to discuss the assistance provided by UNRWA to Palestinian refugee Communities in the occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria as well as UNRWA's longer-term budgetary needs and UNRWA's process of reforms.
Webstreaming
Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

AMENDMENTS 285 - 454 - Draft report Implementation of the Common Security and Defence Policy - annual report 2019
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Sven Mikser

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP