European Union

Well it did not disappoint. There were dull moments and missed opportunities of course, and they could have spared us the policy lists. But when the French Five met they brought some biting put-downs, animated debate and flashes of passion. It was a worthy debate for a remarkable presidential race. The FT’s topline:

Finger pointing, innuendos and sarcastic remarks made for a lively first French presidential debate on Monday as the main candidates for France’s highest office clashed over Islam, the economy and the money scandals that have shaken the contest.

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

The Assembly elections

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

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

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

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

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

The politicisation of Brexit

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

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

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

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

Dangers ahead

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

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

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

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

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EU Finance ministers meet on 21 March 2017 in Brussels to discuss the 2017 Economic Semester and the outcome of a G20 meeting.

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The Informal Meeting of EU Health Ministers takes place on 20 March 2017 in Valletta.

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The Brexit negotiation draws ever closer and, with it, the prospect of a battle royal over money and the new trading relationship between Britain and the EU. But don’t expect particularly sharp divisions over defence.

Stefan Wagstyl reports in the FT today that London and Berlin are planning a new defence cooperation deal soon after Theresa May launches Brexit, in a bid to reinforce the UK prime minister’s claim that she is not turning her back on Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angers, April 2002: sixteen candidates for one throne.

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

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

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

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

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

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Two grand frameworks govern EU relations with African countries. The most long-standing one is the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), updated in 2000 by the Cotonou Agreement. More recently, the Joint-EU Africa Strategy (JAES) conceived in the 2007 EU-Africa summit.

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Donald TUSK, President of the European Council, participates in the Conference of Speakers of EU Parliaments on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaties.

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AMENDMENTS 5 - 203 - Draft opinion Establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the Member States by a third-country national or a stateless person (recast)
Committee on Foreign Affairs

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EU Finance Ministers of the eurozone meet on 20 March 2017 in Brussels to discuss implementation of euro area member states' draft budgetary plans for 2017 and the budgetary situation in the euro area as a whole. Ministers are also discussing the euro area member states' pension systems, and developments regarding the second review of Greece's macroeconomic adjustment programme since the last Eurogroup meeting in February.

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Que Anh Dang

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

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

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

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

 

How do they operate in multi-level governance structures?

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

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

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

 

Where do they derive their authority?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

New insights added to the theoretical debate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

[ii] Interview with former ASEM Secretariat representative 8.11.14

[iii] Interview with former Bologna Secretariat staff on 15.5.15

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

The snow storm that forced Angela Merkel to postpone her visit to see Donald Trump in Washington may prove a blessing for the German chancellor.

Instead of seeing the new US president on Tuesday, when the result of the widely-watched Dutch election was still uncertain, she will meet him today – safe in the knowledge that prime minister Mark Rutte, her conservative ally, has retained power and fought off the populist Geert Wilders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the expected consequences from all this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In this section you will find footage of the meetings of Donald TUSK, President of the European Council.

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On 23 March, the study “Challenges to freedom of the seas and maritime rivalry in Asia" and the study "Cybersecurity in the CSDP - Challenges and risks for the EU" will be presented at SEDE committee.
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I was going to write about hubris and nemesis, but to be in keeping with the spirit of the age in these parts, let’s work on a more local formulation the same ideas. Pride comes before a fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The result sent the euro to a five-week high of $1.0746, after surging 1.2 per cent overnight. The Dutch vote on Wednesday was the first in a trio of European elections this year in which populist politicians have emerged as significant contenders. Analysts had predicted that a strong showing for Mr Wilders would bolster Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right, and the insurgent Alternative for Germany party.

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Federica MOGHERINI, EU HR for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, chairs the Informal Development Minister's meeting, on 16 March 2017, in Brussels.

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