European Union

Davutoglu, left, and Tusk embrace after last month's EU-Turkey summit in Brussels

During the height of the Donbass crisis, Ukrainian diplomats repeatedly managed to get President Petro Poroshenko into EU summit meetings even when he wasn’t explicitly invited – something that drove Herman Van Rompuy, then the European Council president, to distraction.

Are Turkish diplomats now trying to repeat the Ukrainian model?

Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister, is now scheduled to be in Brussels on Thursday – the same day the final two-day EU summit of the year kicks off – as part of a mini-summit of EU leaders hosted by Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

The gathering, which is to be held at the Austrian embassy, will include leaders of several countries who back an upcoming “resettlement” proposal by the European Commission, which would push EU countries to take anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 Syrian asylum seekers currently in Turkey.

Thus far, the attendees include Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission president, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leaders of Sweden, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. And now Davutoglu as well.

Donald Tusk, Van Rompuy’s successor as summit chairman, has made it clear that Davutoglu will not attend the summit itself, particularly since the Turkish prime minister was already feted at a summit of his very own just two weeks ago. Tusk’s displeasure is shared by several other countries who don’t think it is proper for other foreign leaders to gatecrash the EU party.

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EU Ministers of Foreign and European Affairs meet in Brussels on 15 December to conclude preparations for the European Council on 17 and 18 December, examining draft conclusions and the five Presidents report on completing the Economic and Monetary Union.

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Benedict Anderson most certainly did not think of football when he published his compact masterpiece Imagined Communities in the early 1980s. Yet I cannot think of another book that has been quoted or referred to as often by football researchers from all over Europe and beyond.

For me Imagined Communities certainly was a major eye-opener, and I remain grateful for the thought-provoking thesis the book develops. When I started to want to have a better understanding of why football does to us what it does, I felt I needed to learn as much as I could about the sociological and psychological mechanisms of nationalism. And when thanks to works like Imagined Communities I began to understand what nationalism does with us what it does and how difficult it is for 21st-century humans to emancipate from its emotional stronghold, I came to the conclusion that doing research on European integration from this angle was actually a stimulating perspective.

The book owns a lot to its incredibly catchy and precise title. Nationalism’s main strength lies precisely in the fact that it’s not an ‘imaginary’ – i.e. entirely unreal or made-up community – but an ‘imagined’ one : actively conjured up by the masses at regular intervals and passively taken for granted. Strangely enough, the concept, which made a fantastic career in academia, did not translate easily into French or German. ‘L’imaginaire national’ or ‘Die Erfindung der Nation’ do not have the same appeal, although they actually describe very pertinently what the book is about. I had first come across the French version, and although I had appreciated it a lot, soon bought the English original, too, and preferred, unsurprisingly, to quote the English title like everybody else.

Benedict Anderson has died, aged 79, in Indonesia. It seems very appropriate to me that his name and the title of his great book will be cited at a moment when nationalism is raising its head again even in regions of the world where it was supposed to be half-asleep, and when – simultaneously – the nations of the world are starting to find out that they better think beyond national borders in the fight against climate change and the ensuing ecological catastrophe. Imagine all the people imagining a global community, living life in peace. It isn’t hard to do, but if you want to understand why we’re still not there yet, I can recommend you some good reading.

Albrecht Sonntag, EU-Asia Institute
at ESSCA School of Management.
Follow us on Twitter: @Essca_Eu_Asia 

The post Imagine all the people appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This summer’s press was once again abuzz with headlines and images of the exodus of thousands of migrants, knocking at Europe’s door. The scenario of a massive number of vessels overflowing with people fleeing from their countries towards southern European shores is no news to Europe. Although the state of alarm has long been declared, the escalation of this summer’s dramatic occurrences forced Brussels and the Member States to raise their level of attention towards the Mediterranean Sea.

New measures were drafted and the on-going debate regarding their implementation is one of the hot topics jeopardizing the stability of the European Union to the core. The States more decidedly issuing for a direct intervention were those located on the southern shore, held responsible for the rescue of the migrants in their territorial waters. Italy declared the costs of “Mare Nostrum” operations unsustainable and thus disconfirmed their renewal for 2015, entrusting the management of the migrants’ emergency to the new EU-flag operation, “Triton”. The state of emergency was declared both from a humanitarian and a logistical perspective, and the key-role of Italy in the happenings is well known. Nonetheless, there is a chapter of the story that has not yet found its representation in the media. Everybody knows about those rescued, but has anyone ever wondered about the rescuers?

One expects the navy and the coastguard ships to be the main rescuers of migrant vessels but data tell a different story. Of the 982 units employed in rescue operations in 2014, less than a half belonged to the military navy. The merchant navy ranks second for the number of rescue missions, actually outnumbering the coastguard. So far, 1,300 merchant ships were diverted to provide first aid to 42,000 people in 2014 and over 15,200 in 2015[1]. If we focus on the meaning of these numbers, we will not fail to realize that about 254 cargo ships, contract bound to delivery dates and crewed by men untrained for these kind of operations, were first in line to face the humanitarian emergencies.

This constitutes the biggest rescue work ever accomplished in the history of the merchant navy. Providing first aid to these people is certainly a duty for all seafarers in the fulfillment of the long established maritime tradition of recruiting those in danger, as well as under the obligations determined by the United Nations Convention on Law at Sea (UNCLAS) and the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR). Still, these obligations refer to ordinary circumstances in which rescue at sea is considered an exceptional event for civil vessels. However, in the past few years, the extraordinary has become ordinary and the involvement of merchant ships in rescuing migrant vessels has become systematic.

What’s wrong with that?

Consider a ship with dangerous cargo, for example inflammable goods (oil, petrol, gas), rescuing immigrants drowning from a sinking vessel and having to board 500 to 1,000 people who cannot speak English or Italian. How are 10 to 15 crew members supposed to handle such a crowd of men, women and children, all the while trying to prevent any accidents that such a situation may implicate? Additionally, restrooms and emergency kits on cargo ships are stocked in proportion to the crew and cannot sustain a massive load of passengers, which makes it difficult to provide help to the rescued in need of immediate medical assistance, such as women who are pregnant or in labor (as per reported circumstances). In 2014, even supply vessels deputed to the emergency escape service of the staff on oil platforms were employed in rescue missions. One of this vessels received no less than 62 calls for rescue missions during 2014 and 26 in 2015, boarding up to 1200 people in a single operation with a crew of 10 people[2].

From a strictly economical perspective the costs of rescue operations, sometimes requesting up to 2 additional days of travel, rest on the ship-owners and on the ports, frequently in Sicily or Calabria, where migrants are disembarked. This issue was emphasized by the Italian merchant navy, Italy being the country responsible for the broadest Search and Rescue zone in the Mediterranean. In this regard, the implementation of the operation, “Triton” partially mitigated the pressure on the merchant navy (around 160 interventions in 2015 against 254 in 2014), but the numbers are still high and the integration of the SAR operations with the commercial activities is unsustainable to the ship-owners.

To all seafarers, there is an unbreakable law, which constitutes a seaman’s code of honor since the beginning of times: when a ship is sinking, it has to be rescued, no matter the cost. The merchant navy has not missed a call and will keep rushing to help as long as someone will call.

But to preserve the safety of their crew and operability of their ships, merchant vessels cannot be viewed as vehicles for humanitarian rescue in large-scale operations.

In March 2015 the European Community Shipowner’s Association (ECSA) and the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), together with other labor organizations, issued a call for help, in order to better face what seems to be a migratory flux which is not going to decrease in the short run. In such conditions, the employment of UN vehicles for humanitarian assistance at sea, with UN designated ships and aircrafts to monitor and coordinate the SAR regional centers and the rescue operation could be an important contribution.

Another issue to be faced in the context of one of the biggest humanitarian crisis of the last decades.

[1]Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome – MRCC

[2]Report Confitarma 2015

The post EU Refugee Crisis: Who is Rescuing Migrants at Sea? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Filipa M.Ribeiro

What do subjects like personalized learning, curriculum reforms, research agendas and institutional frames have in common? Interdisciplinarity. Whether we discuss the duality of vocational versus general education or the impact of ideologies on research, interdisciplinarity is an in-between topic. Interestingly enough, it is often overlooked even if interdisciplinarity is one of the most hotly debated topics among academics and has spun a complex web of development strategies and theorizing. However, its lack of standardization continues to be an issue, namely in universities that have traditionally hermetic departments and a lack of communication embedded in the academic culture. The various definitions of  interdisciplinarity converge into two main axis: 1) powerfull insights found by applying intellectual resources of different disciplines to particular problems; or 2) rhetorical mechanisms that reinforce the discourses on productivity and competitiveness which, in turn, produce an ideological system that serves the economic regulation at universities, encouraging an overemphasis on research projects and courses (e.g., the proliferation of summer schools).

 

Favoring or disregarding interdisciplinarity?  

Interdisciplinarity is also at stake with regard to the practices put in place by the management bodies of research institutions, university departments or governing bodies to assist, seduce or repel the individual researchers. These practices include institutional restructuring, reorganisation of curricula, the implementation of information, communication technology, changing patterns in knowledge production, the changed role of education in societies, and new modes to manage and assess higher education and research. This is often explicitly phrased in prescriptive documents (e.g. strategic plans of universities and official documents that try to outline the  criteria and “good practices”, whose very title already implies a simplistic outreach to interdisciplinarity) that aim to assume a given role in civil society at large. Thus, the paradox arises: there is a conventional discourse in favor of interdisciplinary research and, at the same time, much indifference or even disregard for such research (Sperber, 2003).

Interdisciplinarity demands constant proactiveness, responsiveness and the ability to adapt to changing situations. As Sperber (2003) notes, often disciplinary boundaries and routines stand in the way of optimal research and that is why a common solution is to go ahead with new research programmes, which requires hasty institutional reshaping. In addition, research shows that constraints to interdisciplinarity are posed both in scientific terms (e.g.: Collinet et al.,2013) but also in institutional terms (e.g.: Su, 2014), especially concerning governance modes (Cooper and Farooq, 2013). As a matter of fact, the idea that interdisciplinarity in higher education is related to the framework of institutions, departments and courses is not new (e.g.: Carpenter, 1995; Pirrie et al, 1999; Becher, 2001; Wall and Shankar, 2008; Dykes et al., 2009). A less debated dimension of interdisciplinarity concerns the individual and social epistemology of knowledge and science. How and why interdisciplinarity emerges at the individual level? Andersen and Wagenknecht (2013) remind that interdisciplinarity involves epistemic dependence between researchers with different areas of expertise, the combination of complementary contributions from different researchers through shared mental models and conceptual structures, and shared cooperative activity with interlocking intentions, meshing sub-plans and mutual responsiveness.

 

Does belonging to a department increase interdisciplinarity?

My recent article “Interdisciplinarity in ferment: The role of knowledge networks and department affiliation”, published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, posits that social networks shape interdisciplinarity because universities are formed by networked actors whose relations are not only centred on place-based affiliation (though highly shaped by them), but also on niche knowledge and skills affiliations. However, we lack enough empirical data on the knowledge networks of researchers to better understand how these networks shape the influence between faculty structures and knowledge creation in terms of interdisciplinarity and what the optimal structure for interdisciplinarity is. In other words, the paper addresses interdisciplinarity forwards rather than backwards, exploring the relation between the present and the future through the conditions from which interdisciplinarity arises. The focus is not the processes of network structure emergence and tie formation, but rather how those networks and ties affect interdisciplinarity. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the personal knowledge networks of academics of higher education institutions from Catalonia (Spain), the study used a mixed methods approach combining the delineation of personal networks with the analysis of the ties’ content, proposing a conceptual model specifically developed for this study.

Findings suggest a strong correlation between the network members nominated in the influence generator and interdisciplinarity. In fact, a quite surprising finding is that collaborators are not the ones who most influence either interdisciplinarity or individual knowledge creation. On the other hand, stronger ties (the ones with whom respondents have more affinity, more time of interaction and higher frequency of contact) seem to be more conducive of interdisciplinary research than weaker ties (if those strong ties do not belong to the same department of the respondent). Belonging to a faculty department may increase tie strength but reduces interdisciplinarity.

This study shows that the concept of interdisciplinarity itself is changing on the emergence of new modes of knowledge creation, especially the rise of peer production, which presents a stark challenge to conventional thinking about interdisciplinarity. Indeed, interdisciplinarity should not be understood only as the traditional concatenation of different disciplines. This study offers corroboration for the claim that interdisciplinarity is more about epistemological commitments and exchanges rather than disciplinary training. It is important to see these phenomena not as exceptions or ephemeral fads, but as indications of a fundamental fact about transactional knowledge forms and their relationship to the institutional conditions of knowledge creation.

Therefore, this new way of looking on interdisciplinarity reinforces a third form of transaction in higher education institutions: social sharing and exchange. On the other hand, we produce and exchange knowledge, but we do not count this exchange in our institutional design. This, in turn, may be the reason why social knowledge creation and interdisciplinarity have been shunted to the peripheries of academic organization landscape.

 

Filipa M. Ribeiro is in the final year of her PhD at the University of Porto. She has a diverse background in science and medical journalism, digital media, innovation, project management  and science communication. She graduated in Communication Sciences and has a master degree on Sociology of Science. She has been doing research on Higher Education since 2009 and was  a member of the Portuguese team in the ESF funded project TRUE (Transforming universities in Europe). She is also one of the co-founders and executive members of ECHER – Early Career Higher Education researchers’ network. Her current research involves topics on ubiquitous knowledge, sociology of science, social networks, interdiciplinarity and diversity in higher education.

 

References

Andersen, H., Wagenknecht, S. (2013) Epistemic dependence in interdisciplinary groups.Synthese, 190: 1881–1898. Springer.

Becher, B. (1987). Disciplinary discourse. Studies in Higher Education, 12: 261-274.

Carpenter, J. (1995) Interprofessional education for medical and nursing students: Evaluation of a programme. Medical Education ,29: 265–72.

Collinet, C., P. Terral, P. Trabal (2013) Forms and Modes of Apprehending Interdisciplinarity: a Socio-Computer Analysis of Sports Sciences. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, 119(1): 61-78.

Cooper, A. F. and Farooq, A. B. (2013), BRICS and the Privileging of Informality in Global Governance. Global Policy, 4: 428–433.  doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12077

Dykes, T., Rodgers, P., Smyth, M., (2009).  Towards a new disciplinary framework for contemporary creative design practice. CoDesign, 5 (2) 99-116.

Pirrie, A., S. Hamilton, V. Wilson (1999) Multidisciplinary education: Some issues and concerns. Educational Research 41(3): 301–314.

Ribeiro, Filipa M. (2015) Interdisciplinarity in ferment: The role of knowledge networks and department affiliation. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2015.07.021

Sperber, D. (2003) “Why rethink interdisciplinarity?”. In Heintz, C. (ed.), Rethinking interdisciplinarity. Paris: C.N.R.S. and Institut Nicod.

Su, X. (2014) Academic scientists’ affiliation with university research centres: Selection dynamics. Research Policy 43: 382-390.

Wall, S., Shankar, I., (2008). Adventures in transdisciplinary learning. Studies in Higher Education, 33 (5): 551–65.

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EU Ministers for Foreign Affairs meet in Brussels on 14 December 2015 to focus on the implementation of existing strategies and commitments on counter-terrorism and address international financing of terror and trafficking of firearms. The Council is also examining current developments in Syria and how EU can best support the domestic reform agenda and national reconciliation in Iraq.

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EU Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries meet in Brussels on 14-15 December 2015 to reach political agreement on a proposal for a regulation fixing for 2016 the fishing opportunities for member states applicable in EU waters and, for EU vessels, in certain non-EU waters.

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Following the terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris, the 'mutual defence/assistance clause' of the Treaty of Lisbon (article 42.7 TEU) was invoked for the first time by an EU Member State. This tool is a 'reactive', intergovernmental instrument. Devoid of specific implementation arrangements, the text foresees no explicit role for EU institutions. As a result, any Member State invoking the clause maintains a wide margin of manoeuvre for pursuing bilateral discussions with partners, who are at once bound to assist and free to decide the type and scope of their assistance. Article 42.7 was not the only clause France could have invoked to ask for assistance, but it was the least constraining. At a time when the country's financial and military capabilities are increasingly stretched, the simpler clause was a logical choice Beyond the immediate consequences – Member States' unanimous political support and bilateral discussions on assistance – the act is likely to affect the wider debate about the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The Union's strategic thinking (including on the future 'EU global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy') and developments may be influenced by the inauguration, with a renewed focus on preparedness, pooling and sharing of capabilities, and the EU's 'comprehensive approach' to crises. The European Parliament has long supported mutual assistance in cases of crises. With its oversight role (in particular based on Article 36 TEU) and role in coordinating with national parliaments, the Parliament could stimulate and take part in debates on the EU's role in multidimensional and transnational crises. Such debates can contribute to an evaluation of Article 42.7 and potentially improve the EU’s security 'toolbox'.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

The Monthly Highlights publication provides an overview, at a glance, of the on-going work of the policy departments, including a selection of the latest and forthcoming publications, and a list of future events.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP