Ideas on Europe Blog

Hannah Moscovitz and Emma Sabzalieva

How are shifting geopolitics affecting higher education institutions and systems? What are the power dynamics at play when geopolitics comes into conflict with higher education policy and practice? What is different about today’s higher education and global geopolitical trends from their interactions in the past? These questions are at the heart of our inquiry in the special issue on The New Geopolitics of Higher Education in Globalisation, Societies and Education. In recent years, higher education institutions have found themselves caught up in various geopolitical crises and events, including a global pandemic, new territorial conflicts and military invasions, and a spread of grassroots movements calling for climate justice and a redressing of structural racism, among others. Bringing together a collection of ten articles, the Special Issue roots the study of higher education in prevailing geopolitical currents to explore how higher education policies and actions are imbricated in the changing geopolitical landscape.

 

What is “new” about the “new geopolitics”?

By qualifying the current geopolitics as new, the special issue emphasizes that we are currently witnessing a different set of geopolitical patterns requiring new ways of thinking about their intersections with higher education.  This “new geopolitics” also signals a need for a renewed and refined understanding of geopolitics as it pertains to higher education. Indeed, the literature linking higher education to geopolitics remains scant and scattered, opening opportunities to bring these together into a new sub-field. At the same time, we acknowledge that geopolitics are constantly in flux, and that those witnessed today will not always be “new”. Indeed, since we started to develop this novel conceptual approach, we have seen the new geopolitics continue to unfold before our eyes, with recent examples including Russia’s war on Ukraine, the incursion of armed forces into universities in Perú, and global solidarity with academic communities affected by earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria.

While the articles making up the special issue are concerned with issues and events of contemporary relevance, they also promote deeper conceptual questions on how to study the intersection between geopolitics and higher education. The special issue thus aims to offer flexible frameworks for future inquiries.

 

Conceptualising the New Geopolitics of Higher Education: a proposed framework

In our full-length opening article for the special issue, Conceptualising the new geopolitics of higher education, we introduce a new conceptual framework for investigating the new geopolitics of higher education. By interconnecting multiple scales, agents, interests and opportunity structures, the SAIOS framework offers a way to connect to broader geopolitical contexts and tensions at play in the higher education domain.

SAIOS framework developed by Moscovitz and Sabzalieva

The framework draws from previous studies investigating the global dimension of higher education, in particular Marginson and Rhoades’ ‘glonacal’ framework and its subsequent development. Theoretically, the framework has its roots in relevant concepts including multi-scalar dynamics in higher education and the agent-structure connection. The SAIOS framework accounts for the multifaceted and complex ways in which geopolitical forces interact with higher education policy decisions and actions and aims to offer a flexible heuristic to analyse and critique the intersections of the new geopolitics with higher education, which can adapt to ongoing shifts in the geopolitical environment.

 

Advancing a Critical Geopolitics Approach to Higher Education

The SAIOS framework is also an important development in promoting a critical geopolitics approach to higher education. Concerned with making explicit the discursive and manifest interactions between space and power, and recognizing that politics, space and territory are contested notions, a critical geopolitics framing of higher education leads us to the identification of four themes where we see intersections between critical geopolitics and higher education studies. As we discuss in the paper, each theme represents a form of rupture away from dominant understandings of power and organisation in relation to geopolitics and higher education. The ruptures are from i) hegemonic notions of world power, politics, and knowledge production, ii) the fixation on the national scale to understand territorial sovereignty and power, iii) the strict domestic-foreign binary and iv) the emphasis on macro perspectives and a need for scaling down to the micro.

The themes and inquiries advanced in the articles of the special issue advance one or more of these ruptures, promoting rich and timely insights into the new geopolitics of higher education.

 

Towards Context-Sensitive Approaches to the New Geopolitics of Higher Education

The articles making up the special issue approach the notion of geopolitics of higher education from a specific geographical scale or context, from the perspective of specific agents and their distinct interests and motivations and underscore different ways in which geopolitics collide with higher education policy and practice. Taken together, the ten articles make the case for examining both empirically and theoretically the new geopolitics of higher education. Each contribution points to critical transformations occurring in the higher education policy domain as a result of shifting geopolitics. Yet, while widespread, these transformations are in no way fixed. The special issue therefore aims to shed light on the context-specific ways in which higher education is evolving in the current global landscape, with articles highlighting the new geopolitics between and across borders. They also offer a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to inquire into this connection, providing worked examples of the variety of entry points into our SAIOS framework.

Through the SAIOS framework, the call to engage in critical geopolitics, and through the combination of the ten articles in the special issue, we set forward an ambitious agenda for a new subfield of higher education studies, one concerned with geopolitics as a main reference point.

The entry is based on the special issue “The New Geopolitics of Higher Education” and its opening article “Conceptualising the New Geopolitics of Higher Education”.

 

Dr. Hannah Moscovitz is postdoctoral research fellow at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Dr. Emma Sabzalieva is Head of Research and Foresight at UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education (UNESCO IESALC).

 

Reference:

Moscovitz, Hannah & Emma Sabzalieva (2023) Conceptualising the new geopolitics of higher education, Globalisation, Societies and Education 21(2): 149-165 https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2023.2166465

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By Mihail Chiru

Committee group coordinators are some of the most influential Members of the European Parliament (MEPs): they manage committees’ broad policy agendas, ensure the positions of their European Party Group are coherent across different policy initiatives and maintain high levels of voting discipline at plenary votes. When coordinators achieve consensus among party MEPs in the committee (i.e., the party group’s experts on the topic), a very powerful signal is sent to the non-specialist MEPs that they can support the party group line in the plenary without reservations. They also matter greatly through their role in bidding for and acquiring reports for their party and selecting the rapporteur, the person who shapes the position of the European Parliament on a legislative file, from their own committee contingent. Last but not least, successful spells as group coordinators have proved steppingstones in the careers of very successful MEPs, such as Manfred Weber, Martin Schulz and Elmar Brok. How then are these powerful MEPs chosen?

With the EP’s empowerment to the status of co-legislator in the European Union, committees can increasingly shape EU legislation and the stakes of selecting competent group coordinators have also increased significantly. The appointment of group coordinators is not only highly relevant for substantive policy-making, but also opens up a very interesting question for students of legislative politics beyond the EP. Notably: when given total freedom, what qualities and types of expertise do legislators prioritise when deciding whom to make their coordinator in a committee? Group coordinators are elected by their peers, the European Party Group committee contingent, not the leadership, as happens with most other positions in the European Parliament. Moreover, the proportionality criteria that apply to virtually all other EP offices do not affect this selection process.

In this article recently published by JCMS, I analyse the selection of group coordinators in the two largest parties in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party (EPP), from terms 2 to 8, and the Socialists & Democrats (S&D), from terms 6-8. The analyses indicate that coordinator seniority and committee incumbency are the most important factors that predict which MEPs become group coordinators. Probing further, it seems that while coordinator seniority matters greatly irrespective of committee type, committee incumbency is an extra argument for nomination as coordinator in the more powerful committees, i.e., those with higher levels of legislative activity and influence over the EU budget.

These findings corroborate the argument that legislative organisation in the European Parliament is mostly driven by an informational logic, which favours further specialization of MEPs by continuous membership in the same committee and re-appointment to committee leadership positions. Nevertheless, and similarly to the selection of committee chairs in the European Parliament, I find no evidence that the empowerment of the supranational legislatures has changed the patterns of group-coordinator selection.

Somewhat surprising given the policy-seeking orientation of MEPs, the absence of leadership influence and proportionality constraints does not automatically lead to the election of group coordinators who are more congruent ideologically with their committee contingent than other aspirants. One would expect such congruence to matter given the discretion that the coordinators have in selecting rapporteurs and the assumption that committee members would want to minimize the likelihood that the coordinator chooses rapporteurs who are not aligned with their preferences. Corroborating the latter, there is evidence that coordinators allocate more reports to MEPs who are closer ideologically to the coordinators’ national party position on EU integration. Our own analyses show that ideological proximity influences who becomes group coordinator only for the S&D sample, while it does not play a role for EPP coordinators.

Ties with interest groups active in the sectors covered by the committee’s portfolio increase the likelihood of becoming a group coordinator, according to initial analyses run on a sub-sample, but this finding would need to be further tested. It is also worth noting that in the case of the EPP, German and to a smaller extent Spanish MEPs are over-represented among committee group coordinators even when accounting for the large size of their national delegations. One possible explanation is the similarity in terms of legislative organization in two of these national parliaments compared to the EP: the coordinator position resembles that of Obleute in the German Bundestag and the committee spokesperson in the Spanish Congress.

It is reasonable to assume that the patterns of selection of EPP and S&D group coordinators uncovered by this research would be mirrored by similar processes in other European Party Groups interested in shaping EU policies. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile exploring the extent to which the selection of group coordinators in smaller and less transnational groups is dominated by those groups’ largest national delegations. The apparent positive role for group coordinator selection of having a functionally equivalent position in the national parliament highlights how elements of national legislative organisation contribute to preparing MEPs for their work in the supra-national legislature and warrants further comparative research.

Overall, our results indicate that committee members are not primarily concerned with choosing the most ideologically congruent MEP as a group coordinator, but that they value experience in overcoming coordination problems among group members. Thus, a good boss is one who has already proven able to facilitate the committee members’ collaboration and the efficient usage of the group’s human resources.

Dr. Mihail Chiru is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford. He previously taught at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) and conducted postdoctoral research at UCLouvain. His work focuses on legislative behaviour, legislative organisation and party politics in the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe.

Twitter: @MihailChiru, at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) @Politics_Oxford. Find Mihail Chiru’s academic profile here.

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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 Nick Startin, from John Cabot University, in Rome. Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

Over the last decade, there has been much media debate about the rise of right-wing populism and its potential threat to liberal democracy.

That’s right: from Trump to Bolsonaro, from Orbán to Erdoğan, the notion that an era of ‘illiberal democracy’ is gaining momentum has become a dominant media narrative.

And over the last twelve months the debate has intensified in Europe with Marine Le Pen’s strong performance in the 2022 French elections, followed by Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Fratelli d’Italia and first female Prime Minister of Italy.

In France, on the back of the protests over President Macron’s pension reform and his controversial decision to trigger article 49.3 to pass his legislation, we have even seen in recent days a further rise in support for the Rassemblement National. According to an IFOP poll conducted for the Journal du Dimanche, support for the RN would rise by 7% if there were fresh parliamentary elections in France.

 

So, it sounds as if that media speculation about the onward electoral trajectory of the Radical Right in Europe is right?

Certainly, what with the cost-of-living crisis and tensions around migration across the West, the demand side conditions remain favourable for Radical Right Parties. But we shouldn’t necessarily be as pessimistic as some media channels and experts would lead us to believe.

The reality is that Radical Right Parties, in spite of their potential to exploit the ‘echo chamber’ of social media and to spin ‘fake news’, are not in control of the shifting demographic, generational cycle. Some of the regressive policies of the Radical Right simply do not chime with the evolution of public opinion among the younger generation in some key attitudinal areas. And this is problematic for the Radical Right.

 

What kind of issues are we talking about?

Let’s take ‘climate change’. Traditionally, European Radical Right Parties have tended to be in ‘denial’ or ‘sceptical’ about climate change but as the issue has taken on more salience – particularly among younger voters – this has led to a scramble among the Radical Right to appear credible on the ‘climate crisis’.

In France, there is no doubt that Marine Le Pen’s commitment not only to stop new wind farm projects, but also to dismantle existing ones, was a reality check for many younger, undecided voters at the last Presidential elections France.

 

What other issues are there beyond climate change?

On value issues, like abortion and same-sex marriage, the demographic sands are also shifting away from the Radical Right. In the U.S, it was apparent how some Republican candidates were unable to exploit the Roe versus Wade debate to their advantage in some key contests at the November midterm elections.

In Italy, the Meloni government, despite its strong emphasis on traditional family values, will have to tread carefully if it does not want to appear out of touch with younger voters. For instance, it is unlikely to instigate any national legislation on the reform of abortion law, for fear of it being overturned by a constitutional referendum.

It’s true, the Italian senate did vote against a measure introduced by the European Commission to make the recognition of same-sex parents mandatory. But we have also recently seen demonstrations in Milan after the Minister for the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, advised the centre-left Mayor of Milan, Beppe Sala, to stop registering the children of same sex couples. This has alienated many voters, particular younger ones.

 

So, are you implying the long-term electoral prospects of the Radical Right in Europe may not be so clear-cut after all?

In the long term, this might well be the case.

As the wheel of demography continues to turn, so progressive social attitudes are likely to become more entrenched. No amount of regressive framing by Populist news channels or social media is likely to reverse this. The simple truth is that the ‘generational genie’ is out of the bottle, and it can’t be put back in!

Such demographic changes are likely to put Radical Right Parties on the back foot as they seek to widen their support. In truth, despite much talk of ‘culture wars’, these demographic shifts are probably more likely to strengthen liberal democracy in a global context rather than ‘illiberal democracy’ in a national one!

 

Thank you for this cautious note of optimism in a long-term perspective. I recall that you are currently teaching at John Cabot University, in Rome.

 

Interview by Rune Mahieu.

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Between January and March 2023, I had the opportunity to join the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internationals (IBEI) as a visiting researcher on a RENPET bursary. As I embarked on the last semester of my PhD, I counted on my research stay at IBEI to receive additional feedback on my PhD thesis, as well as other research projects, and strengthen my professional relations with the academic community at IBEI. I am delighted to say, my stay at IBEI delivered on all counts.

My PhD project revolves around the role of informality in EU foreign policy negotiations. Specifically, I develop scope conditions for the rise of informality in CFSP/CSDP negotiations and examine the informal venues, practices, and roles that member states navigate to make formal institutions work (for them). This original framework is applied to the study of three EU foreign policy negotiations of the last decade: the 2014 Russian sanctions negotiations, the PESCO negotiations, and the negotiations over the establishment of Operation EUNAVFORMED Irini. I can hardly think of someone better placed to provide feedback on my thesis than Charlie Roger, assistant professor at IBEI and author of the book The Origins of Informality: Why the Legal Foundations of Global Governance are Shifting, and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2020). While at IBEI, I also completed the write-up of the final few chapters of my manuscript, getting all that much closer to the final submission in June.

During my stay, I also had the opportunity to present a draft version of a co-authored paper I am working on with Ana Juncos (Bristol University) and Karolina Pomorska (Leiden University), titled ‘Coordinative Europeanisation and Russia’s war of aggression: how crises shape Europeanisation dynamics in EU foreign policy’. The paper explores the distinctive Europeanisation dynamics triggered by Russia’s war of aggression. The members of the IBEI research cluster Norms and Rules in International Politics provided us with insightful comments, taking time to engage in a substantive discussion on the paper. The article will appear in a Special Issue of Contemporary European Politics.

Lastly, my research stay provided a fantastic opportunity to get to know in greater detail the outstanding work of various members of the IBEI community, from the predoctoral fellows to several members of the faculty (including Esther Barbé, Oriol Costa, and Eva Michaels). The stay thus provided a great networking opportunity – and, more importantly, just some lovely exchanges among colleagues.

I am very grateful to RENPET and UACES for making my residency possible. I am especially indebted to Robert Kissack, for welcoming me at IBEI, Charlie Roger, who took time to provide feedback on my PhD thesis, and the members of the Norms and Rules in International Politics research cluster for their feedback. A special thank you to Carlos Sanchez, Helena Arregui, and the rest of the administrative staff at IBEI, for always being kind, professional, and ready to help. Most of all, I wish to thank the wonderful predoctoral candidates and research assistants at IBEI, who made the days at the office fun and enjoyable.

 

 

RENPET is an Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Network of ten major universities across Europe and a leading pan-European professional academic association. RENPET builds on the strong cooperation established through the 2014-2017 ANTERO Network and the 2017-2020 NORTIA Network. RENPET fosters cutting edge research, translates that research into innovative teaching and professional development and actively engages in policy debates among our powerful powerful epistemic community.

 

Apply for a RENPET Network Residency.

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Culture encompasses symbols, language, beliefs, values, and artefacts found in human societies. The components of culture could be categorised under “ideas and symbols” on the one hand and “artefacts” (material objects) on the other hand. Artefacts in the form of “statues,” for example, possess a strong cultural language that can represent the identity of a group of people. However, reflecting on the #RhodesMustFall campaign in South Africa, which was directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT), one would realise how artefacts can bring cultural entanglement to remembrance, and the consequences thereof.  For example, in the context of the #RhodesMustFall campaign, it was a revolt against culture, not artefacts. This is because culture can serve as an instrument of dominance. The #RhodesMustFall campaign was, therefore, a negative response to cultural entanglement. Notwithstanding, the problem with cultural entanglement is that cultures do not meet but people of different cultural backgrounds do.

Consequently, when we talk about cultural entanglement and the violent confrontation that often takes place, we are referring to the friction that takes place when people with different cultural identities negotiate about belonging within the same geographic spaces. The issue of “who is in and who is out” is relevant during the process because it is linked to “otherness” (the fact of being different) and other complexities that are involved when negotiating collective belonging. The #RhodesMustFall campaign in South Africa was, therefore, indicative of the memory of entanglement between Europeans and native Africans in South Africa. Geographic spaces belong to everyone because people arrive in different geographic spaces at different times.

No human being is supposed to be perceived as a foreigner anywhere in the world. Concerning African-European cultural entanglement in South Africa, it should be noted that Europeans who arrived in South Africa/Africa did not understand/learn African culture, languages, and spirituality. As a result, African languages and spiritualities were relegated to an inferior position below European languages and spirituality. Objectively speaking, the relegation of African languages below European languages, for example, was a result of the complex linguistic landscape of Africa. There are African countries with more than 200 native languages. This made interaction difficult. Hence, the use of European languages helps people of varied native languages to easily interact. We should, therefore, avoid the temptation to perceive the use of European languages in Africa as a mechanism of oppression. African societies pre- and post-colonisation did not have a single language. If that were the case, it would suffice to argue that the relegation of African languages was an act of oppression.

Therefore, as Africans in the present dispensation, we should refrain from perceiving European languages as “the languages of the oppressor.” We are obliged to be objective in our views. Ngugi Wa Thiongo’o advises us (Africans) “… to use European languages, but not to allow European languages to use us.” It is also our responsibility to create a language that can be used across the continent.
Certainly, human encounters do not exclude violent conflicts from occurring at the micro and macro levels. Sometimes it is a matter of time before a violent conflict takes place.

The memory of African and European cultural encounters is, however, not so much about truth, but about the experience. This is because truth in this context is a lived experience of peoples’ pain that must be acknowledged. Some early clashes between African and European encounters happened because of “difference – otherness”. If you are not like us, we must make you look like us – “culturalization.” This affected Africans the most, as envisaged in the dominance and dispossession of African societies by Europeans in South Africa. The traumatic memory of dispossession has been haunting native South Africans hitherto. It is, therefore, imperative to consider how African and European entanglement in South Africa can be reimagined. This issue is salient because there is a need to create a collective memory in South Africa that would work for Africans and Europeans equally. One way to do that is to leverage the South African cultural philosophical concept of Ubuntu (meaning I am, because you are). Ubuntu is important in South Africa in the present political time because of socio-economic agitations. Ubuntu would allow native South Africans and Europeans to look at the “land question” for the benefit of all.

However, if that is not possible, Africans and Europeans must learn to be tolerant and accommodating of each other to create a stable environment. This is what cultural encounters should do when perceived in a positive light. Africa and Europe are two allies with deep historical encounters. There is no need to propagate resentment and anti-European sentiments across South Africa/Africa. The negative effect of African and European encounters should, therefore, be noted by both parties. And the time to do that is now.

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Photo credits: Alex Blajan unsplash

Justinas Lingevicius

The emerging AI policy of the European Union (EU), new financial instruments and institutional entities dedicated to boosting emerging technologies including AI, suggest that the EU approaches technological developments strategically and aims to play a role in their international development and regulation. However, the EU position on military AI – the wide-ranging issue of future security with multiple potential effects and forms of application – appears diluted in the emerging EU AI policy due to different institutional priorities. This mixed position thus raises the question of what the discussion on military AI suggests about EU actorness.

I analyse this question in my new article ‘Military Artificial Intelligence as Power: Consideration for the European Union’s Actorness’ (Lingevicius, 2023) released in the special issue ‘Responsible AI of Military Applications’ of the Ethics and Information Technology journal.

 

Military Power Europe and Military AI

Discussion of EU actorness focuses heavily on the ‘Europe as a power’ debate and the different definitions proposed: what are the leading characteristics of the EU and its external positioning and action. Despite a number of variations, my article puts forward three definitions: Normative Power Europe, Market Power Europe, and Military Power Europe. Interestingly, the overview of these definitions in the context of the ‘Europe as a power’ debate reveals that Military Power Europe, seemingly associated with standing armies and coercive interference, is not specifically introduced but rather mentioned in contrast to the others. Therefore, my article introduces the definition of Military Power Europe based on discussions of military AI in the EU. To do that, four categories are formulated as being at the core of the definition: ways of action, self-definition, preferred international engagement, and the role of the military.

The combination of discursive elements within these categories shows that the definition of Military Power Europe involves a normative model of governance, preferred multilateral international engagement, and the perceived EU role of norm-promoter. At the same time, military AI is associated with future power referring to advanced defence capabilities, readiness, and preparedness to address security challenges, including the possibility of the battlefield. The article therefore argues that, alongside normative proposals, there are evident desires for militarisation and a considerable role for the military in the EU. In this way, despite its initial exclusion from the emerging AI policy and diverging institutional positions, military AI is a part of the discussion and thus a part of the EU’s emerging AI policy.

 

Normative and military EU actorness

Over and above the ‘Europe as a power’ debate with its conceptual considerations, the introduced Military Power Europe definition also provides additional insights into (re)discussing EU actorness itself. For example, what is the relationship between technology, security, power and different policies or even political concepts such as digital autonomy? What is the security environment, what actions does it require and what new trends does it set?

The article shows that the discussion on military AI brings different characteristics to EU actorness: normativity in terms of governance and the desire for international influence as well as competition and military advancement as a response to perceived security concerns. In other words, the EU has been positioned as a military power concerned about its capabilities and readiness for the future effects of military AI. Therefore, the article joins those (for example, Hoijtink, Muehlenhoff, 2020) challenging the understanding of EU actorness based merely on civil/normative definitions. This dive into the EU’s inter-institutional discussion on military AI suggests that the military appears to be not only a matter of security (for example, the Common Security and Defence Policy) but also part of the EU’s ambitious digital agenda. Having clarified this complexity, both the Military Power Europe definition and EU actorness in the context of military AI could be further elaborated and investigated through other digital policy initiatives (data, cybersecurity, robotics), and their relation to the military or security, particularly in the light of the EU’s ambitions on autonomy and sovereignty.

Finally, the analysis focused on military AI reveals a sense of urgency where the mix of long-term future scenarios and currently existing challenges such as cyber-attacks are interlinked. For interpretative research, this brings additional characteristics to the way the discussion is constructed – searching to define itself in the context of technological uncertainty and (re)producing inter-institutional disagreements on how the EU is expected to perform and respond to emerging global challenges.

 

Justinas Lingevicius is a PhD candidate at Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Lithuania. This article is the result of a one-year fellowship at the Charlemagne Prize Academy (Aachen, Germany), mentored by Dr. Inga Ulnicane (De Montfort University, UK).

 

References:

Lingevicius, J. (2023). Military artificial intelligence as power: consideration for European Union actorness. Ethics and Information Technology, 25(19). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-023-09684-z

Hoijtink, M., Muehlenhof, H. L. (2020). The European Union as a masculine military power: European Union security and defence policy in ‘Times of Crisis´. Political Studies Review, 18(3), 362-377. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919884876

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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 Carmen Pérez González, from the University Carlos Tercero, in Madrid. Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

You are the holder of an UNESCO Chair for ‘Education Linkage through International Sports’ and an expert on Sport Diplomacy. As a sports lawyer, how do you analyse the current debate about Russian athletes at the Paris Olympics?

It is true that the IOC – the International Olympic Committee, which was created in Paris by the way – is facing criticism over its intention of exploring the possibilities for allowing Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete at the Paris Olympics. The voices against welcoming them, even if they participate under a white neutral flag or in refugee teams, multiply.

Recently, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has clarified her opposition to the participation of these athletes as long as the war in Ukraine continues. In addition, up to 35 countries seem willing to call for Russian and Belarusian athletes to be banned from the Olympics. The United States, Germany, Australia, the UK and Japan are among them.

 

These are very important sporting nations!

And it will be no easy debate.

Their position is understandable: it can be argued that there is a profound contradiction between the Olympic values and the participation in mega sporting events of athletes and teams from a country that is so seriously violating international law.

On the other hand, a boycott could be seen as discriminatory. Recently, two UN Human Rights Council Rapporteurs have expressed concerns in this regard, asking the IOC to ensure non-discrimination of any athlete based on their nationality, emphasizing that no athlete should be required to take sides in the conflict.

 

And what exactly does the IOC say themselves?

The arguments used by the IOC are well-known. In a letter sent at the end of January to the Ukrainian Olympic Committee, IOC president Thomas Bach criticized Ukraine’s threat to boycott the Games, saying it would violate the Olympic charter. No athlete, he added in his letter, should be prevented from competing just because of his/her passport. As I said, these are not new arguments. In fact, the sport movement has always strongly advocated for political neutrality as a fundamental ethical principle.

In reality, what was really surprising, and to some extent contradictory to this position, was that almost immediately after the invasion of Ukraine was launched, the IOC and a growing number of sports associations took measures aimed not only at preventing the organization of international sports competitions in Russian or Belarusian territories but also affecting the participation of athletes of both countries in sporting competitions held worldwide. In the same vein, the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed in July 2022 Russian appeals against being banned from FIFA and UEFA competitions.

 

How can public international law help us solve this issue?

We can start by saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seriously violates ‘peremptory international law obligations’. These are rules that protect the most essential interests of the international community as a whole. This is by no means a minor violation of international law. It therefore seems legitimate to call for a reaction from such powerful international actors as the IOC. Let me remind you that in 1985, under the auspices of the United Nations, an international convention against apartheid in sports was adopted, effectively banning South Africa.

 

So it’s not a new debate.

No, there are precedents. For instance, German and Japanese athletes were banned from the Olympics in 1948 due to their nations’ acts during the 2nd World War. At the same time, on many other occasions the IOC has stayed out of situations involving serious human rights violations by invoking the hackneyed argument of the political neutrality of sport.

In my opinion, the 21st century seems to call for a more decisive response from all actors, public and private, against the most serious violations of international legality. Without underestimating the approach of non-discrimination against athletes, it seems innocent not to take into account that their participation in the Paris Olympics will be exploited by Russia in terms of propaganda. Maybe the time has come to stop playing Putin’s games.

 

Thank you very much for sharing your analysis with us. I recall you are the UNESCO Chair for Education Linkage through International Sports at the University Carlos Tercero, in Madrid.

 

Interview by Laurence Aubron.

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When conducting empirical research in EU law and governance, researchers might often feel like they’re taking on the role of a detective or an investigative journalist. It all starts with an idea that becomes a workable puzzle, you gather data and compose it to tell a story, with the overall aim to uncover information and create knowledge about something. Oftentimes, unexpected information reveals itself along the way that might challenge the initial assumptions of the research. Some odd times, one starts from a surprising observation or a snippet of knowledge that hints towards a larger issue. Other times, the researcher will discover a new source of data while conducting an analysis. In studying the EU, a ‘creature’ that is already complex and sometimes unpredictable in its own ways, these twists-and-turns of the research process can unearth new insights that were often not part of the plan. How can we use these unforeseen developments along the research process to enrich our approach?

One potential answer to this question is quite straightforward: embrace them. Generally, research designs in this field, particularly stemming from the discipline of political science, follow a deductive approach – i.e., begin with a concept or theory that is used as a guiding point to investigate a given phenomenon. Embracing the unexpected in research, or even depending on it, calls for somewhat of a different approach. Specifically, this post proposes the introduction of investigative methods, in the methodological toolbox of studying political and legal (dis)integration in the Union.

Investigative methods, generally speaking, belong to the family of exploratory research methods and carry a number of unique characteristics. These mainly revolve around the presence of flexibility and adaptability at different stages of the research process. For instance, this approach proposes a structured starting point for the research process which, though informed by previous research, remains malleable and open to adaptation based on new ideas or new data. In practice, this can look like finding a ‘clue’ about the phenomenon at hand and using it as an ‘opening move’ or impetus for research.

For instance, in my own research on the process of creating EU soft law by the European Commission, a first clue was the fact that nobody seems to know how these instruments are made. Now this initial observation kicks off a myriad of other questions: why is that the case? Can this be attributed to the informal character of the instruments? Is it because it is difficult to find out? Is this a sign of fragmentation in the Commission’s internal procedures? This can then be used as separate avenues of investigation, all of which can inform our initial observation. Certainly, some will be more informative than others, but  that cannot be known in advance.

One of the more central aspects of this approach relates to its unique strategy of data collection. When using investigative methods, sources of data – data sets, data samples, interviewee lists, etc. – are not fixed for the duration of a given project. Instead, the researcher starts with the most promising avenue of data collection and acts as a detective; changing the composition and ordering of their data in accordance to new evidence or analytical ideas. This allows the researcher to ‘follow the trail’ and find answers to the central puzzle by exploring new angles, employing different perspectives from different disciplines or fields of study, and adapting their research strategy without being constrained by rigid conceptual frameworks and without forfeiting methodological rigour.

This is not entirely unfamiliar in the EU studies field. Elements of this approach are often used in empirical data collection, usually taking the form of ‘snowballing’ relating to, for example, the recruitment of interview participants or survey respondents. Still, the incorporation of investigative methods in the study of EU law goes much further and deeper, and primarily speaks to the overall design and epistemological approach of the research. It is the unique modelling and mapping of processes – e.g. administrative or policy processes – that investigative methods propose that enable us to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of processes which would otherwise be inaccessible. That being said, so far investigative methods are primarily used in disciplines as psychology or sociology and have not been utilised in the study of the EU as a holistic approach.

Still, for legal scholars who work with empirical research, this approach and this process might sound familiar. It is very often the case that, when embarking on empirical legal research in EU matters, researchers find themselves in front of a sea of information with a simple question: where do I even start? This question is often followed up with trying to identify what is and isn’t there – are there relevant cases to my research problem? Have the concerned institutions made any statements about it? Is there someone I can talk to to find out more? This very exploration of what is and what is not available is part of the research and can be a finding within itself. Most importantly, this initial process of ‘figuring out’ potential avenues of data collection and inquiry sets the ‘investigation’ in motion. The flip side of this accidental familiarity of empirical legal scholars with investigative methods is that, by and large, legal studies are considered to be – sometimes unfairly – lacking in methodological rigour, primarily because it does not follow the stricter political science models of ‘theory-testing’ deductive models. Are these models the be-all and end-all of credible EU studies research? That is a discussion far more nuanced than the scope of this blog post. Still, I argue that there is significant merit in stepping away from predefined models and opening up the process of creating knowledge through research.

The point of this reflection is to propose investigative methods as an exceptionally useful tool in studying administrative and policy processes in the Union, both from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Such an approach is particularly useful in areas of regulation that are characterised by high informality, high techno-scientific complexity, or are generally high-paced – which are notoriously difficult to study due, partly, to the large quantity of data sources and research avenues, or research blind-spots. In this sense, this methodological approach, when applied in the study of EU law and governance can help empirical scholarship ‘keep up’ with legal and administrative developments or uncover complex formal or informal mechanisms that make EU law work in practice.

Still, with all that in mind, there is an important point to be made here regarding the limitations to creativity and exploration in research imposed by the very structures of academia – surely, tight deadlines, funding, and output expectations do hinder the process. This is the reality of the field in broader EU studies and every other discipline. Perhaps, this is an issue for further reflection.

In short, by placing a specific emphasis on exploration, description, adaptation, and explanation, investigative methods can open up an avenue of understanding the more ‘nitty-gritty’ aspects of EU law and governance in a way that other research methods cannot. This post offers a methodological reflection on how investigative methods can enhance the methodological toolbox of studying EU law and help us better understand the ever-changing nature of law in the Union. The point here is simple: embrace creativity in research and embrace the unforeseen.

An example of the application of this method can be found in Petropoulou Ionescu, D., & Eliantonio, M. (2022). Soft Law Behind the Scenes: Transparency, Participation and the European Union’s Soft Law Making Process in the Field of Climate Change. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 1-21. doi:10.1017/err.2022.31 available here.

The post ‘Following the Trail’: Reflections on Investigative Methods in the Study of EU Law appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Nilde Iotti

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. Bonjour, Simona! Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

Every once in a while, you tell us the untold story of ‘the early women of European integration’. And today, you are back with another fascinating profile, after the portrait of Käte Strobel you gave us last November.

Glad to be back! And guess what: I have recently won a research grant, named CAROLINE, which stands for ‘Creating A netwoRk On femaLe pIoNEers’ of European integration.

 

Congratulations!

Thank you! For my second profile, I am choosing Nilde Iotti. Nilde is actually short for ’Leonilde’. She is a well-known political figure in Italian political history and she left an imprint on Europe, too.

She’s impressive! She lost her father as a young woman but won a scholarship and graduated in philosophy when she was just 23. Two years later, in 1945, she was appointed regional secretary of the Union of Italian Women, after having joined this labour movement since she was 18.

When women gained the right to vote, in 1946, she was elected municipal councilor, and was appointed member of the Italian Communist Party assembly. In the same year, still only 26 years old, she entered the Italian Parliament among 21 women deputies, who presented themselves holding each other’s hands. It is in 1969 that she joined the still very young European Parliament.

 

Tell us about the initiatives she engaged in.

She was a member of the Working Group on European Parliament Direct Elections, but also of the Conference of Presidents, where she promoted the creation of an annual Conference of Parliamentary Commissions, dealing with European affairs, now recognized as the COSAC by the European Treaties.

Research tends to stress the role of women on promoting EU’s women policies. But the case of Nilde Iotti shows the active political agency of those ‘early women’ for European democracy. As Mechthild Roos has explained – I think you know her well – it is in the everyday policymaking and in the formal and informal procedures that we can better understand the work of individual deputies, emerging party groups, committees, and the European Parliament as a whole.

 

Where do you find all your historical data?

The European Parliament Research Archive offers online access to about 850,000 documents. I have consulted the ones relevant to my research, 43,516 documents, with a focus on the 1950s and 1960s, published in French, and the documents of the committee meetings allowed me to appreciate in detail the role of Nilde Iotti, who worked hard for the Parliament to gain influence, representation, and transparency.

In October 1969, she considered ‘absurd’ that the Parliament was not devoting any debate ‘on the proposed conference on security in Europe.’ To her, it was necessary to bridge ‘the gap which divides today’s Europe and prepare one of the essential acts of a policy of coexistence in Europe and worldwide.’ She wanted the Parliament to leave its ‘spectator’ dimension. Let me quote her again:

‘Do we want to accept forever that Europe is divided into two opposing opposed military blocks, and that, within these two, we see the persisting fatal consequences of the implacable logic of the bloc regime?’

And she added:

‘Dear Colleagues, if we want to be Europeans, we must take part in the events of history and European culture, we cannot continue to be absent; the place we occupy and the authority we are exercising are as strong as the measure of our participation in the major European political debates.’

That’s very pro-European for a woman from the radical left!

That’s right. Nilde Iotti pursued an idea of a Europe that was more international, and coherent with her idea of democracy. She was supporting integration beyond the economic solidarity and cooperation, towards civic and social integration.

In 1971, at a meeting of her party, she presented a work on ‘National sovereignty and European institutions’, explaining how to develop cultural, institutional, and political integration. In her 1979 inaugural speech as President of the Lower House in Italy, she stressed the ‘exceptional’ qualitative advancement of democracy at the European level with the first direct elections of the Parliament. And throughout her career, in Brussels and in Rome, she promoted a special Committee on European policies and democracy, until she left politics in 1992, after a political career of fifty years.

 

What a life! And I am sure you could not even cover everything. Thank you so much, Simona, for sharing your findings with us. I recall you are Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey, in England. A slightly extended version of the text was simultaneously published on the LSE blog: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2023/03/08/nilde-iotti-and-european-democracy/ Interview by Rune Mahieu.

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By Elena Zacharenko

 

In April 2022, the European Commission (EC) declared that it plans to attract more labour migrants to the European Union (EU). This is a response to the challenges posed by the demographic ageing of the EU, as people are living longer and having fewer children. Those who had traditionally taken care of the elderly – their female relatives – are increasingly unable to do so due to employment obligations. Labour migration is thus seen as a solution to address the care needs of the growing numbers of elderly people – one which is already heavily relied upon by several Western European states. Countries such as Germany, Austria and Italy are popular destinations for female migrant care workers, benefitting from migrants’ willingness to work in this demanding and often underpaid sector due to the relative weakness of the economy in their countries of origin (usually to the East and South of the EU or outside of it). While the European Care Strategy, launched in September 2022, makes high level declarations on the importance of care, dedicated and adequate funding for its greater provision and the decent remuneration of care workers is still missing. As such, the solution proposed by the EC risks deepening existing patterns of care drain from poorer to richer countries in the EU and in its neighbourhood.

 

From personal issue to policy concern

In September 2022, the European Commission released the European Care Strategy, which for the first time contains direct policy provisions on long-term care, the type of care required by many elderly or disabled individuals. Until then, the most explicit mentions to the right to receive and provide care were made under the 2017 European Pillar of Social Rights and the 2019 Work-Life Balance Directive. The adoption of the European Care Strategy and the prominence of long-term care within it is the result of a rapidly rising awareness among EU policy makers on the policy implications of the aging of European societies, the shrinking of the workforce, and the rising numbers of individuals in need of care. The demographic ageing of the EU’s population, coupled with the deepening crisis of care as more women are joining the labour market and unable to look after their elderly relatives as they once had, have become impossible to ignore in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ageing and demographic change emerged on the EU policy agenda as a standalone topic in 1999, when the European Commission published a Communication ‘Towards a Europe for all ages’. At that point, providing care to the elderly was seen as the responsibility of families, with the state expected to step in only as a last resort. With the introduction of the Social Investment Package (2013) came the recognition that care provision, including that which is unpaid or performed by family members, comes at a cost to state budgets in the shape of lost tax revenue and social security payments. EU policy began to call on states to support individuals in taking up caring obligations and waged work simultaneously. Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic prompted the release of the European Care Strategy which presents care as important to the economy and urges states to make it available to all who need it. However, this increased attention has not translated into binding policy or financial commitments.

 

Women responsibility, migrants’ work?

The increased attention to demographic ageing on the EU policy agenda does not unequivocally resolve one of the central challenges related to the socially necessary labour of care: who should provide it? As mentioned above, initially, this was not considered an issue for debate by EU policy makers but rather a personal or family decision. In practice, this meant that the responsibility for care of elderly family members usually fell to women. However, as EU employment policy increasingly encouraged women to enter the labour market, their care responsibilities began to be seen as an obstacle to labour market participation. To on the one hand ‘liberate’ women from care and domestic tasks and thus facilitate their take up of waged work, and on the other, to provide employment to low-skilled women and other under-employed groups, EU policy began to promote the development of a personal and household services sector.

This policy promoted the commercialisation of care provision. As women were expected to take up waged work, often moving away from their elderly relatives to do so, and as state services were curtailed as a result of austerity measures, markets became increasingly relied upon for elder care. The resulting competition in the field led to demands for cost reduction which in turn drove up a demand for migrant care workers. Many of these labour migrants came from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and became indispensable to the operations of elder care systems in Western Europe. This was possible due to the CEE region’s geographic proximity, the lower wages, worse working and living conditions present within it as well as its inclusion into the EU’s single market, with its central principle of the freedom of movement. While migrant care labour plugs the gap in care present in wealthier countries, with cheap labour effectively subsidising underfunded social systems, it creates a care, youth and brain drain in the migrants’ countries of origin and can amount to social dumping.

Awareness of a growing dependence on the labour of CEE and other migrants existed in policy-making circles in Brussels thanks to the work of trade unions and activists. This resulted in a debate within EU policy-making circles in the 2000s and 2010s. Initially, the European Commission portrayed using migrant care labour to meet the growing demand for long-term care as a cost-efficient way to address care needs, while the European Parliament stressed the inherent inequalities in wealth between origin and destination countries and highlighted the risks of social dumping. As time went on, however, and the gap between the needs of care recipients and availability of care grew wider, the European Parliament aligned its position with that of the Commission. This has led to the current utilitarian approach to migrant care labour in EU policy, which presents labour migration as simply one of a repertoire of measures to boost the EU’s elder care workforce. Indeed, the European Commission’s 2022 communication on migration, ‘Attracting skills and talent to the EU’ states that increasing labour migration from outside of the EU will be crucial to meeting labour demands within the long-term care sector. Effectively, the discussion on the negative consequences of relying on migrant care labour has been silenced in EU policy.

 

What does the future hold for elder care in the EU?

Concerns over demographic ageing and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic have turned EU policy makers’ attention towards the growing demand for long-term care. However, overarching concerns focusing on productivity and GDP growth continue to prevail. In view of demographic ageing, increasing elder care needs, the continuing push for women to enter the formal labour market, as well as the forward-looking nature of both the European Care Strategy and the communication on migration, it seems likely that the reliance on migrant care labour in the EU will steadily increase. The outcome of this utilitarian approach to migrant care labour is likely to be the displacement of the Western European care deficit to poorer EU member states, as well as beyond the bloc’s borders.

 

 

Elena Zacharenko is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Gender Studies of Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on the framing of care and social reproduction in EU economic, social and gender equality policy, and how this shapes the political economy of and core-periphery relations within the EU.

Twitter: Author @elenazzzz; Department of Gender Studies, Tampere University @UTAGender; Tampere University @TampereUni

Academic profile.

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LONDON, MARCH 2019: Hundreds of thousands marched in favour of EU membership.

For all the UK’s five decades in the EU, most Britons were happy for us to stay in. They didn’t want us to leave.

The issue was settled in the 1975 referendum when, by a massive 2-to-1 landslide, the electorate voted to remain in the European Community.

In the years that followed, calls to leave were on the far side lines of politics.

Yes, Brexiters will argue that the 2016 referendum settled the issue for Brexit. But it didn’t really.

Unlike in the 1975 referendum, when all the four countries of the UK positively voted to stay in the European Community, in 2016 half of them didn’t.

And whilst the margin win for Remain in the 1975 referendum was a stonking 35%, in 2016, the margin win for Leave was an abysmal 4%.

A mere 37% of the UK electorate gave their support for Brexit in 2016. A minority, which did not reflect the true feelings of most of the country, and certainly not all the countries of the UK.

Today, poll after poll show that a significant majority of British voters think Brexit is a mistake, and they would now vote to rejoin.

If the 2016 referendum had been held just a year or two earlier, polls indicate that Remain would have won by a landslide, just like in 1975.

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.

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

One year before the referendum, 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.

The 2016 referendum now looks like an aberration, a statistical quirk that didn’t, and now certainly doesn’t, represent the nation’s feelings as a whole.

Every year since the EU referendum, hundreds of thousands of pro-EU supporters have marched in London and other cities.

In March 2019, it’s estimated that the People’s Vote march in London attracted over a million marchers demanding a new vote on Brexit.

Brexiters, be honest: your side never could, and never did, attract such numbers for a pro-Brexit demonstration; not even a small fraction of such numbers.

Why? Because Brexit only ever had minority support, and today, that support has collapsed.

Of course, Britain now needs a new vote on Brexit.

In a democracy, no decision is permanent, and any decision can be changed if that has the support of the electorate.

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer: Are you interested to know today’s ‘will of the people’? Then ask us.

• Video: Every British Prime Minister from 1957 to 2016 wanted the UK in the European Community.

• We miss EU – short video



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The unveiling of the Windsor Framework this week was important in many ways.

Not only did it provide a set of solutions to the most pushing and tricky problems facing the Northern Ireland Protocol, but it also marked a return to more conventional modes of British diplomacy towards the EU.

To watch Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen at their press conference on Monday speaking in not only warm tones but also in very coordinated language, as they sought to generate (successfully) buy-in for a package of measures that had been put together under close secrecy.

As someone observed in my presence this week, no more of the leaking and briefing of the Johnson period, when everyone had an agenda and was just using the issue to get ahead.

Even if we still await a final confirmation of acceptance from both Tory backbenchers and the DUP, the signs are that this is the only game in town: evolving the Protocol into the Framework and (hopefully) letting everyone focus on further refinements to its operation and on other points of UK-EU cooperation.

So it matters.

But it’s also fair to say that the drafters of the Framework have decided to go for the ‘let’s make life not easy for the casual reader” approach.

Partly that’s because of the necessary mix of political statements and legal work, but it also conveniently makes it much harder for critics to point to obviously unacceptable language.

With that in mind, I’ve been working on trying to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.

My first graphic today organises the 21 documents by their status and effects: as you’ll see, much of this is about political clarifications and unilateral actions to resolve points.

There is one Joint Committee Decision that is crucial, and we’ll come back to that in coming weeks, not least to explore the new mechanisms of the Stormont Brake and the question of whether the CJEU’s role has actually changed at all (spoiler: not obviously).

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic117

Secondly, I took a quick go at the most significant obstacle to the Framework’s successful agreement and implementation: DUP approval for it.

Note that even if the DUP accepts the Framework, that does not necessarily mean it will either return to the Assembly or form an Executive under a Sinn Fein First Minister, even if the Stormont Brake is designed to get them to do exactly that.

Given that a functioning Executive is at least as important to Downing Street as making the Protocol work, the DUP’s decision matters.

Their seven tests from 2021 are still their baseline and as you’ll see while the Framework has indeed made progress on all points, none of them are unambiguously resolved to narrow readings of the DUP’s demands.

So still things to be played for and debates to be had.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic116

If you have some aspect of the Framework you’ll like me to work on, just drop me a line and I’ll be happy to give it a go.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Daniele Saracino, from the Department of Government at the University of Essex, in Britain. Bonjour, Daniele!

 

Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

Your research focuses on the concept of solidarity, one of these ideas or principles that we use every day, but that deserve to be questioned on their meaning.

Solidarity is everywhere in our lives. Solidarity among workers or social movements; solidarity among family and friends; solidarity with your football club or political party; solidarity with a whistle-blower or with refugees; solidarity between states or peoples; solidarity as a core principle of the welfare state or solidarity as the social glue that holds societies together.

This is the vast, multidimensional semantic field in which solidarity meanders as a colorful, but blurry, and seemingly ubiquitous concept. While it seems to maintain a positive connotation throughout, making it so appealing in the political sphere, at the same time it comes across as arbitrary and watered-down. From an analytical research perspective, the fact that there does not seem the slightest agreement on what solidarity actually means is problematic. Even more so on the level of the European Union, where solidarity has been a key concept since the very beginnings of the European project. Just listen:

« L’Europe ne se fera pas d’un coup, ni dans une construction d’ensemble : elle se fera par des réalisations concrètes, créant d’abord une solidarité de fait. »

 

Ah, that’s the voice of Robert Schuman delivering his famous speech of what is commonly considered the founding act of European integration!

That’s right! He called for true, effective solidarity to build a peaceful and unified post-war Europe. Ever since, solidarity has incrementally gained significance over the course of European integration, cumulating in the Lisbon Treaty where it has been settled as one of the central precepts of the EU. It is constantly invoked on the EU level, especially in times of crisis. Nonetheless, there is no agreement in the European legal or political sphere on what the concept entails. It can therefore be assumed that there is an underlying understanding of solidarity in the EU that is embedded in the specific historical context of the concept.

 

So where does it actually come from?

Counterintuitively, the concept of solidarity does not originate in the labour movement or in the classics of political or philosophical thinking. It has its roots in Roman law. The principle obligatio in solidum meant the debt or obligation that every debtor had vis-à-vis the joint community of debtors they are part of. This created a joint liability in which the debtors vouch for a common debt. This principle has survived in several legal systems that are strongly influenced by the Roman law tradition, like France, where solidarity, for the first time, gains further layers of meaning, specifically during the French Revolution where it develops in contrast to and as the political discharge of fraternity.

To cut the conceptual history short, it turns out that the concept of solidarity contains overlapping elements from legal, sociological, political, philosophical, theological, economical, and linguistic spheres.

 

That’s a very complex etymology. How can we use your studies for the European Union today?

Applying these findings to the setup and functioning of the European Union, we find that solidarity is non-universal. It is limited to particular groups wherein actors commit themselves voluntarily to a bond and develop interdependencies to achieve common objectives.

The European Union is such a reference group, and solidarity is the means to achieve its commonly agreed political objectives. Solidarity creates a mutual connectedness between the involved actors who vouch for each other in terms of the common objectives. Ultimately, solidarity creates a reciprocal commitment and mutual responsibility that is expressed by the expectation and discharge of support and assistance.

This is how common goals can be pursued and achieved. Since the common political will of the involved actors in the European Union is cast into law, so is solidarity. Consequently, the European Court of Justice has repeatedly confirmed the fundamental significance of the solidarity principle for the European Union. There are procedural duties that regulate the support and assistance demanded by the solidarity principle.

In short, the readiness to act in solidarity and to honour the outcomes of EU policymaking are necessary conditions for the EU to function effectively. States join the European Union on their own will and accept its precepts and objectives upon accession. If the rule of law to safeguard the outcomes of the political process is not adhered to anymore, the EU loses its purpose. In short: without solidarity, the European Union just wouldn’t make sense. This is why European integration as a whole is shaken to its core when member states decide to stop honouring the rule of law, renouncing European solidarity. And this is why the Union must find ways to remind them of their commitment to solidarity.

 

Many thanks, for this semantic exploration of one of Europe’s key concepts. I recall you work at the Department of Government at the University of Essex, in Britain.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dario Mazzola, from the University of Bergen, in Norway. Bonjour, Dario! Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

 

In the year since the Russian aggression of Ukraine, many Ukrainians have found refuge in European countries. Dario, you have written your PhD about the border crisis of 2015, before analysing, as a post-doc researcher in the PROTECT project, contemporary crises in the provision of refuge.

When I started my postdoc in 2020, many researchers thought that refuge and migration would no longer be high on the agenda, not least because of the COVID crisis. I argued for the opposite, for a number of long-term reasons, and unfortunately, Ukraine proved I was right.

Seen from the humanitarian prospect of displacement, Ukraine is among the largest crises of all times, and its geographical proximity and political implication with the European Union make it particularly salient for us. We speak of 8 million refugees and asylum seekers, mostly women and children, but actual figures could be higher.

If I had to single out one feature of my research, I would say it consists in putting migration and refuge in context. Even with the exceptionality of the situation of Ukraine, there is a clear pattern: the background of the critically inadequate response by the European Union and other countries to previous waves of refugees, and the systemic degradation of the international community, from economic crises to COVID to the breakdown of international relations in a system of block confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War.

 

So how does Ukraine stand out when compared to previous crises?

There are both continuities and differences. The sudden peak in inflow is not dissimilar from the Syrian refugee crisis. We can also notice that some of the conflicting actors are the same.

And yet the reaction has been very different. Both between and within European countries, controversies over solidarity with refugees from Ukraine have been low or non-existent: unprecedented mechanisms such as the Temporary Protection Directive have been swiftly activated. If we were to look for analogues, we should perhaps look at Kosovo in the 1990s, but comparison has its limits.

 

What are the major differences between the two situations?

To start with, Ukraine is 20 times more populous than Kosovo. And times have changed since then!

At the moment of the Kosovo crisis, European countries were undergoing a period of economic growth and greater historical optimism, both in terms of the European integration process and of the pacification of global relations. Today, economic resources have been strained between the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic. Even more important, neither Kosovo nor Syria involved a relevant military effort with an uncertain outcome, contrary to what we have in Ukraine. Finally, I would stress once again that Syria is further away, and Kosovo is much smaller: we should not think about politics and humanitarianism in the abstract, but in concrete numerical and geographical terms.

 

And how do these differences impact the response to refugees?

The implications of these differences are that while we see a commitment to solidarity that reminds us of Kosovo, the magnitude of the crisis recalls Syria. I hope European politicians are doing their math in planning responses for the short and, potentially, for the long term.

 

You sound like you fear this is not the case.

In 2015, the Italian researcher Giandomenico Majone denounced the collapse of the EU’s culture of ‘total optimism’, and his Swiss colleague Sandra Lavenex has aptly applied this concept to the failure that has been the response to the 2015 border crisis.

Wishful thinking is devastating in politics. When we plan and execute solidarity with refugees from Ukraine, which is our duty, we should have all scenarios in mind: a Ukrainian victory, a Russian victory, a stalemate. Refugees may return or may not. Between humanitarian and military support and the cost of sanctions, EU countries are sacrificing 1, 2% of their GDP, or more. Also, solidarity may be tested if fatigue is perceived in the public. When we pledge to support refugees, we do so amidst all these factors.

Europe needs to work on systematizing its Union-level response to refugees, and on developing a united and consistent foreign and global policy stance, with a strategic vision and not merely in response to crises. The EU can no longer afford to be self-centred or short-sighted: it has to articulate a doctrine and adhere to it consistently. But perhaps here I’m trespassing my programmatic realism into utopian thinking.

 

Maybe a bit more of utopian thinking is what we need. Many thanks, Dario, for sharing your research with us. I recall you work at University of Bergen, in Norway.

The post At Europe’s Heart appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The content of this post was presented at the launch workshop of the EUFutures Research Network held at City, University of London on 4 November 2022. This is an amended version of a post originally commissioned by City, University of London, published here.

When the UK went to the polls on 23 June 2016 and voted to leave the European Union, the millions of EU citizens who were resident in the UK but unable to take part in the referendum were suddenly faced with a life-changing loss of rights. The end of freedom of movement threatened their livelihoods and their very status as UK residents in the post-Brexit world.

After several years of uncertainty, many of those EU citizens and their family members were able to secure their UK immigration status following the launch in March 2019 of the Government’s EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), which sought to protect the rights that EU citizens and their families had previously enjoyed in the UK. By the time the scheme closed in 2021, some 5.75 million individuals had submitted applications and 5.3 million grants of status had been issued – either settled or pre-settled status. The Government lauded the high numbers, describing the process as “hugely successful.”

Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people still managed to fall through the legal cracks and failed in their applications, raising questions about whether certain types of applicants were more disadvantaged by the EUSS process than others.

The research that I carried out focused on immigrant women in this process, and I concluded that they were disproportionately represented in the group of unsuccessful applicants and that women who were the most vulnerable fell outside the legal protection that the EUSS was meant to provide. This was my first publication that went beyond just the traditional doctrinal analysis of the law, and instead adopted a critical socio-legal approach.

I applied a theoretical intersectional feminist lens to the plight of two groups of vulnerable immigrant women who were required to apply through the EUSS to remain in the UK after withdrawal – those at risk of or experiencing violence against women and girls (VAWG) and those who were a non-EU family member (NEFM) of an EU citizen. This was to highlight their unique experiences of the law under the EUSS, noting that it was their identities as immigrant women in a post-Brexit Britain which brought about greater vulnerabilities, attributed to the way the law itself applied to them.

The EUSS operated as a fully digital system to make the application process as smooth as possible for those who fulfilled the three main criteria – proof of identity (ID and biometrics), eligibility (residency in the UK) and suitability (proof of good character).

In certain exceptional circumstances, paper-based applications were required – for example, if the applicant did not have digital access, did not have an ID document or whose rights were based on a dependency on an EU citizen (as in NEFMs). By noticing that vulnerabilities arose out of the intersection between one’s immigrant status and gender in this context, I argued that the criteria discriminated against vulnerable women from the VAWG and NEFM groups because they were more likely to have to apply on paper.

I argued that simply extending the criteria under the EUSS did not necessarily achieve the desired take-up of applications because many women would not have understood or even known about the new criteria applicable to them in light of Brexit. By adopting a critical approach that takes into account the fact that vulnerable women are being made more vulnerable by the very reason of their identities, this brought to the fore how intersectional qualities had not been considered by the Government in their design and implementation of the EUSS.

One of the key methodological challenges in analysing the outcomes of applications by women was the absence of any gender breakdown in the quarterly EUSS statistics, while paper applications were not included in the data until more than a year after the EUSS launch, without detailing the success of paper versus online applications. Whilst a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Professor Catherine Barnard and Fiona Costello revealed that paper applications were significantly less likely to be successful than the online route, my central thesis that vulnerable immigrant women were disadvantaged by the EUSS process was also reinforced through critically assessing how the criteria would apply to the two groups in question. Highlighting their intersectional identities and the vulnerabilities associated with them was a primary part of the central thesis.

I also faced challenges in deciding where to publish this paper, given my decision to adopt a non-doctrinal approach to an area where law and its technical doctrine dominated, and to an extent, still dominates. The area of EU law is largely saturated by scholars engaging in technically precise doctrinal work, and sometimes to the absence of situating the law in its societal context. This is also notable by the dominance of journals privileging doctrinal approaches to matters of EU law, something that proved a challenge in publishing this paper. This led me to a non-EU specialist journal, and instead to a top journal in socio-legal approach to law – Social & Legal Studies.

The area of free movement and associated field of EU citizenship can be more critically analysed with the adoption of methodologies beyond just those which dominate the field of EU law. My paper contributes to uncovering the gendered aspects of free movement, in the context of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and its associated governance and policies. Given the human aspect of Brexit in regards to its visceral and very real effects on the lives of EU citizens in the UK, I felt it was necessary and important to adopt a critical approach, particularly one looking at intersectionality to highlight the difficulties of the most vulnerable and often overlooked.

To read Dr Yong’s published journal article entitled ‘A Gendered EUSS: Intersectional Oppression of Immigrant Women in a Post-Brexit Britain’ in Social & Legal Studies, please see here.

 

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The following piece is written by Ambassador Erwan Fouéré – Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy

The flags of the European Union and North Macedonia. Credit: Влада на Република Северна Македонија, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Over the past months, Ireland has been marking the centenary of landmark events in the nation’s struggle for independence and the turbulence surrounding the civil war. It has been suggested by some commentators that not enough has been done to acknowledge the wrongs committed during that period. The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in his acceptance speech in the Dáil last month referred to the “need to acknowledge and atone for the wrongs that were done on all sides, so we can finally heal the wounds and scars from that time”. The presence of both the leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael at the ceremony marking one hundred years since the assassination of Michael Collins has shown that, even if differences over historical narratives remain, the commemorations can be an occasion for unity and reconciliation rather than division.

To use the words of President Michael D. Higgins, the emphasis should be on the need both to “remember ethically”, and to “respect a pluralism of narratives of shared events”.

History according to President Putin

In the Central and Eastern parts of Europe however, a “pluralism of narratives” when referring to historical events is singularly absent, and often replaced by a re-writing of history to suit mostly nationalist political agendas. Probably the worst offender in this respect is President Putin. His distorted vision of Russia’s imperial past and his almost messianic mission to restore the Russian empire to justify his brutal invasion of Ukraine has had lethal and devastating consequences for the neighbouring country. By invoking the memory of Peter the Great and defining the threats facing Russia as a civilisational struggle, he has sought to rally the Russian people in support of his policy of denying the existence of Ukraine as a nation in its own right and obliterating its culture, history and identity.

Re-writing history in the Western Balkans

This weaponising of history is unfortunately not confined to Russia. In the Western Balkans there are many examples of attempts by political leaders to re-interpret historical events to justify and pursue ethno-nationalist and populist agendas. Whether it is glorifying war criminals convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or denying massacres that took place during the early and mid 1990s following the break-up of Yugoslavia, or even re-interpreting events before and after the Second World War, they underline the terrible weight of history and the deep divisions within and between the countries of the region.

These trends highlight the enormous work required to promote reconciliation and overcome the prejudices still prevalent throughout the Western Balkans. One would have hoped that since all the countries of the region are destined for accession to the EU at some point in the future, the EU would put forward its own experience of European integration in overcoming the legacy of war and creating a process based on the rule of law. The recent stand off between Bulgaria and North Macedonia does not inspire confidence in this respect. The behaviour of Bulgaria towards its neighbour has shown that it has learned nothing from its fifteen year membership of the EU, and has only deepened the animosity and bitterness between both countries.

Background to the Bulgarian veto against North Macedonia

In March of 2020, the European Council gave the green light for the opening of accession negotiations with both Albania and North Macedonia. To get to this point, North Macedonia already had to overcome many hurdles not least that of reaching an agreement with neighbouring Greece over its constitutional name which Greece objected to. A protracted decades long dispute was finally resolved by the so-called Prespa Agreement of 2018, whereby the Republic of Macedonia would become the Republic of North Macedonia, to distinguish it from the provinces of Macedonia in the northern part of Greece. The agreement was supposed to signal the opening of accession negotiations with the EU. But France put a spanner in the works by insisting on a new methodology for the accession process before the EU’s enlargement agenda could proceed. This was duly put forward by the European Commission and agreed in March 2020.

However, no doubt taking a leaf out of the Greek and French playbooks, Bulgaria decided to impose its own veto by insisting that North Macedonia would have to accept a list of demands relating to the history, identity and language of the country before accession negotiations could start, ignoring the fact that such issues have never been part of the criteria for membership of the EU.

These demands included an insistence that North Macedonia accept that its language has Bulgarian roots and that a ‘Macedonian language’ or ethnicity did not exist before 1944. There was also an insistence that it endorse a Bulgarian version of the region’s past history, despite the fact that both countries had negotiated a Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighbourliness, and Cooperation in 2017 which established a Joint Multidisciplinary Expert Commission for Historical and Education Issues.

By agreeing to this Treaty, the Macedonian government had hoped it would create a framework for building trust between both countries and help to overcome lingering bilateral disputes. It did not bargain for the hardline attitude adopted by Bulgaria in the work of this Commission which has now dominated the Treaty’s implementation.

By insisting on its own version of the turbulent events during and after the two World Wars in the Western Balkan region, and demanding that Macedonian history textbooks remove any reference to Bulgaria as the ‘fascist occupier’ during the Second World War, the Bulgarian negotiators are reflecting a reluctance by the political establishment in Bulgaria to confront its own troubled history, in particular its role during the Second World War. ( Bulgaria supported the Axis powers and conquered Macedonia it had lost during the First World War. During its occupation, it deported all 7,000 Jews living there and handed them over to the Nazi regime, where they virtually all perished in the Treblinka concentration camp. At the same time however, most of the Jews living in Bulgaria itself were spared such a fate. In October 1944, Bulgaria switched sides and declared war on Germany. It was forced to withdraw from Macedonia following the end of the war ).

Other demands imposed by Bulgaria included North Macedonia renouncing any claim to the existence of a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria, despite the repeated judgements by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg calling on Bulgaria to recognise the existence of Macedonian minority groups in Bulgaria, which the country has studiously ignored.( The number of ethnic Macedonians living in Bulgaria is a matter of controversy with, according to the Minority Rights Group International, evidence of these citizens being subject to harassment and intimidation. The 1992 census showed there were over 10,000; from the latest census in 2021, that figure has gone down to just over 1,000 ).

The so-called ‘French Proposal’

During the final days of the French Presidency of the European Council in June 2022, President Macron put forward a proposal for the negotiating framework which would lift the Bulgarian veto and guide the accession process with North Macedonia. The proposal basically endorsed all of Bulgaria’s demands, which caused fury among the Macedonian citizens who saw it as another insult to their nationhood and a betrayal of the EU’s repeated promises to the country.

As part of the proposal, North Macedonia would have to amend its constitution so as to include a reference to the existence of a Bulgarian community in the country. There was no mention of any reciprocity. The judgements of the European Court of Human Rights on the existence of a Macedonian community in Bulgaria were completely ignored.

This left the Macedonian government with a terrible choice – ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’. In the end, the proposal, endorsed by the EU, was accepted, and Bulgaria lifted its veto. The first Intergovernmental Conference marking the formal opening of accession negotiations with both Albania ( blocked since 2020 because of the Bulgarian veto against North Macedonia ) and North Macedonia took place in July 2022. However the actual negotiations with North Macedonia can only start once the amendment to its constitution has been adopted by the Macedonian Parliament. For the moment there is no majority in the Parliament to support this.

Furthermore, because of the unanimity rule over enlargement issues within the EU, Bulgaria will be able to exercise its veto power at any time to block any advance in the negotiations if it feels that the bilateral issues under the Friendship Treaty are not dealt with to its satisfaction by North Macedonia. The Bulgarian Government got a taste of its own medicine when Austria recently vetoed the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to Schengen, which caused Bulgaria to complain of Austrian obstruction. The fact that it was at the same time obstructing North Macedonia’s prospects of EU accession did not seem to register.

As if to underline it is the stronger party in these disputes by virtue of its EU membership, the Bulgarian government proceeded to openly support the setting-up of so-called cultural clubs in North Macedonia named after controversial figures from the Second World War who supported the Nazi regime. Three have already been established during 2022. Some of the Bulgarian MPs present at these events have used language similar to that used by President Putin against Ukraine, thus fuelling the deep insult and animosity felt by Macedonian citizens. While the EU has remained largely silent, nationalist elements on both sides have used the controversy to whip up ethno-populist sentiments with the burning of flags and frequent incidents of hate speech. True to form, there is evidence that Russia’s malign influence is never far behind these events, with supporters of Russia within the current Bulgarian government itself.

This outcome has set a dangerous precedent which will certainly come back to haunt the EU in the pursuit of its enlargement agenda with the Western Balkans, a region replete with similar bilateral disputes. It has shown once again the the EU’s lack of understanding of the sensitivity linked to minority issues and its underestimation of the dark shadow of history over a region where the past is ever present

The EU needs to change its approach

The EU will need to radically change its approach to the Western Balkans to take account of these deep rooted societal issues. Failure to do so will allow the many fault lines within and between the countries of the region become more entrenched with any hope of reconciliation being lost. By taking sides in the Bulgaria/North Macedonia dispute, the EU has already forsaken many hearts and minds in the region.

Greater focus on supporting reconciliation projects such as people to people contacts and history teaching could help to avoid the distortions and revisionism promoted by nationalist agendas. The Thessaloniki Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe had achieved significant success in this respect with the development of joint history teaching programmes, but had to close down due to lack of funding. There are, however, a number of other mechanisms that could be used, such as the History Observatory for Peace in Europe, established by the Council of Europe ( of which North Macedonia, Ireland and other EU countries are members, but Bulgaria is not ), and the European Association of History Educators ( EUROClio ) established in 1992.

The experience of the EU’s Peace Fund for Northern Ireland, established by Commission President Jacques Delors in 1995 to support the peace process offers valuable inspiration for the Western Balkans, in particular projects on shared education and fostering a greater role for civil society in post conflict nation building and reconciliation. The EU funded Cross Border Cooperation Programmes within the Western Balkan region could also ensure greater focus on joint history teaching projects and more programmes promoting reconciliation.

Above all what is required is to convince countries in the region, in particular EU member states such as Bulgaria, that debates over centuries of history between neighbouring countries, cannot be resolved over one or two years or even decades or by imposing artificial deadlines to reach agreement. As with the EU, divergent views of past events and differences will remain, but they should not block the accession prospects of Western Balkan countries from advancing.

It is only by pursuing a “pluralism of narratives” that reconciliation can begin in a region that it has often been said has produced more history than it can absorb.

Ambassador Erwan Fouéré is Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). Prior to joining CEPS in 2013, he was Special Representative for the Transdniestrian settlement process during the Irish 2012 Chairmanship of the OSCE. During his 38 year career with the European institutions, he was the first to assume joint responsibilities of EU Special Representative and Head of Delegation in the EU External Service when he was appointed in this double capacity in North Macedonia ( 2005-2011 ), the first Head of Delegation in South Africa ( 1994-1998 ) and the first Head of Delegation in Mexico and Cuba ( 1989-1992 ). He was awarded the Order of Good Hope, Grand Officer, by President Nelson Mandela in 1998.

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I am participating in the University of Tartu Course “Digitaalse sisuloome alused” (Foundations of digital content creation) from 2 January to 26 February 2023. The participating students received the task to post a link to a website with their uploaded content.

I was thinking of posting the link to my blog on Ideas of Europe because my content is research-based. I also thought that maybe someone could find it useful to see how the European human rights protection systems were introduced to the students of the University of Tartu from 2004 to 2011.

The task was creating or revising a study material – a video, a presentation, a study guide, a test, a simulation, a textbook, an assessment model, a syllabus, a draft project, etc., and uploading it.

I picked the syllabus of the course that I had worked out and was reading at the Faculty of Law of the University of Tartu from 2004 to 2011 “Protection of Human Rights under EU Law”.

The course based on my M.A. Dissertation “Põhiõiguste ja -vabaduste areng ning kohtulik kaitse Euroopa Liidus” (Development of fundamental rights and their judicial protection in the European Union) that I defended in the University of Tartu in the year of 2004.

I read the course for the last time in spring semester 2011. When I revised my old syllabus, I interestingly found out that although I have not read the course since 2011, all the topics discussed then are still actual. Therefore, I have shared the syllabus with the other ESIL members at the ESIL Teaching Corner at https://esil-sedi.eu/teaching-corner/ 

I think that the structure of the course could remain the same. I should only add some recent articles and remove some of the compulsory articles (to the optional literature).Protection of Human Rights under EU Law

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Last week’s third anniversary of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU also means it’s the third anniversary of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

The TCA is the oddly overlooked counterpart of the Withdrawal Agreement (with its troublesome Protocol), oddly because it is the much more substantial treaty, structuring the full breadth of current relations and containing space to include pretty much all the future relations too.

Of course, such a significant text comes with a degree of complexity, which we’ve looked at before on the OUatEU blog (here and here, for example).

One part of that complexity comes from the changing situation over time: we still have a number of transitional arrangements in place (both by mutual agreement and by unilateral proclamation) and a raft of reviews and sunset clauses to come in the next years.

The graphics below set out all of this, together with references to relevant information. Sadly, there’s nowhere that has a definitive resource for TCA matters (unlike Queen’s excellent Protocol tracker); both the EU and UK have rather dispersed bits and no simple way to pick up all the non-hard law decisions. Maybe if there’s a clamour from you, the readers, I might get to making such a thing myself.

In the meantime, take in the notion that we already know some things that will be happening in 2035.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic77

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic65

This post was brought to you via a request from someone who uses these for teaching: I’m always happy to take requests like this, so just pop me a line or put a comment below and I’ll see what I can do.

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EUHealthGov started 2023 with its seventh quarterly seminar on 25th January – a roundtable on EU pharmaceutical activity which encompassed challenges from the much-awaited revisions to the EU pharmaceutical strategy and beyond. We were delighted to be joined by a range of experts to consider different aspects, notably solidarity and vulnerability in access to pharmaceuticals; how the EU regards pharmaceuticals through the lens of competition policy; and global access to medicines through EU action. 

Dr Mary Guy (LJMU) introduced the discussions with an overview of the development of EU activity regarding the pharmaceutical sector – from responding to the Thalidomide crisis in the mid-1960s to the revision of the EU pharmaceutical strategy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to health and healthcare more generally, the pharmaceutical sector has highlighted specific tensions, being located between public health and the internal market.  

Dr Éloïse Gennet (Aix-Marseille) and Dr Aurélie Mahalatchimy (Aix-Marseille) discussed their experience of working with the European Association for Health Law and the European Health Policy Platform (DGSANTE) to establish a 2021 Thematic Network (now permanent) on an inclusive and equitable pharmaceutical strategy. This network produced webinars and a Joint Statement against the backdrop of pre-existing health inequalities highlighted since COVID-19, and unprecedented EU solidarity and renewed efforts to promote equitable access to medical supplies and vaccines. The main recommendations of the Joint Statement include targeting unmet medical needs by identifying vulnerability situations, increasing institutional dialogue and cooperation beyond emergency situations, and promoting affordability throughout the pharmaceutical lifecycle. 

Professor Wolf Sauter (VU Amsterdam) outlined how competition works in the pharmaceutical sector across four stages: monopoly, oligopoly, generic/biosimilar competition and multi-source competition. This set the scene for a review of EU competition policy in pharma, from DGCOMP’s 2008/9 sector inquiry and the 2012 AstraZeneca case, via pay-for-delay cases at EU level, to more recent interactions between the Commission and national competition authorities. What emerges is a particular focus on excessive pricing, which has seen an evolving approach in cases from United Brands to AKKA/LAA, with cases at both EU and national levels, leading to the identification of trends of price hikes, consumer lock-ins and an emphasis on niche generics (and one orphan drug). Overall there is scope for both competition and non-competition remedies which may be explored beyond wider considerations of EU competition law and pharmaceuticals. 

Dr Katrina Perehudoff (University of Amsterdam) focused on the EU Pharmaceutical Strategy to draw attention to challenges ahead for the EU’s role in global health. These challenges fall into three categories. Firstly, the conceptual challenge of why the EU should have a strong voice globally, which can relate, inter alia, to investment (in the EU), as well as health security and social justice (for EU citizens). The second challenge is theoretical, framed around the question of how the EU will achieve its aims globally. This sees the identification of three pathways of EU influence: unilateral EU action influencing third countries; bilateral trade, accession and aid agendas, and multilateral influence. A final challenge is empirical: what will the EU do? Here considerations encompass regulatory standard-setting and technology transfer.  

We look forward to developing this discussion in the future! 

A recording of the event is available here.

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For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Vanja Smokvina, Jean Monnet Chair for EU Sports Law, Policy & Diplomacy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Rijeka, in Croatia. Listen to the podcast on eu!radio.

 

 

 

Six weeks after the final, the dust has settled on the football world cup in Qatar. That’s a good moment to take stock of what will remain from this event.

Yes, I agree. During the World Cup itself, the focus was on lots of things going on before or even during the tournament. The feeling is that it was definitely one of the most unusual World Cups, if only for the calendar. From the beginning, the event certainly raised a lot of discussions, and it ended with Argentina’s captain Lionel Messi lifting the trophy in a black bisht.

 

As a researcher in sport diplomacy, would you say this World Cup was a diplomatic success?

Well, that’s the million-dollar question! I would say it was a great opportunity for FIFA and the Arab world. Has that opportunity been taken? Probably yes, but not fully.

For instance, if we take the example of Budweiser, the beer company, one of the main long-standing partners of FIFA. Denying Budweiser the right to sell their products in areas that were previously contractually agreed is a bad message. I am not saying that the policy should be to sell alcoholic drinks at sports venues, but if it was planned to be like that, you cannot simply change it during the tournament. The impression is that such an outcome would not have been possible in other countries. In this sense, it is evidence for the ‘diplomatic power’ of Qatar.

The same goes for the iconic and highly symbolic picture of Messi in a bisht. It’s a picture that will remain. FIFA here made an extreme exception for the host country, which probably would not have been allowed anywhere else.

 

It sounds like Qatar got everything they wanted out of this World Cup. Did they really?

The truth is we do not know with absolute certainty what they wanted from the event. What is sure is that it is impossible that such a small country, which does not even have an important sporting footprint, will organise such an important event in the future again. I mean, together with the Olympics, it’s the most important sports mega event on this planet, which means a lot to many people, and the message was: if you are rich enough, you can buy it. I am not sure this is a good message, neither for FIFA nor for Qatar. It was just a demonstration of diplomatic muscle, based on economic power.

 

Do you think FIFA will have learnt something from the event?

I think they would be well advised at FIFA to press the ‘restart button’ and I really hope that we will not have to focus anymore on the breach of human rights, on wrongdoings and criminal offences of sports governing bodies top officials, and disregard for players health etc. We can only hope everybody learnt a lesson.

 

How powerful, as a transnational diplomatic player, is FIFA actually?

FIFA is a sports governing body with important ‘diplomatic’ and organizational powers. And it should be more active in promoting basic human rights and fundamental freedoms.

We must never forget that FIFA and also UEFA are more powerful than some countries, sometimes more influential than the United Nations. When FIFA suspends a member – one national football federation due to the breach of some rules – the politicians of that country are keener to settle the problem than if they received a ‘slap on the wrist’ by the UN, the International Labour Organization or whatever other international organization. This is the tremendous power of FIFA.

But we must also acknowledge FIFA or UEFA for imposing positive developments. Only because of the football power’s system, we have seen women attending football matches in Iran and campaigns against ‘hate speech, xenophobia and racial insults’ at football matches! Sports governing bodies are extremely powerful, and they know that. All we can do is hope they will continue to use their powers for the development of their sports but also of the good of humanity.

 

Many thanks, for sharing your thoughts on the fallout of this event. I recall you are the holder of a Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Rijeka, in Croatia. And you are about to publish the very first issue of a new scientific journal, the Sports Law, Policy and Diplomacy Journal, in collaboration with the already long-standing Association for the Study of Sport and the European Union.

 

 

Entretien réalisé par Rune Mahiee.

 

 

 

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