Ideas on Europe Blog

Foolishly, I always took Groundhog Day to be a work of fiction, rather than an instruction manual. Every morning we wake up to the same debates between the same people, who still haven’t listened to (or, more accurately, haven’t heard) those who point out obstacles in the path: we just have to become better, through force of character, and it’ll be fine.

This is rather tiresome, especially I appear to lack the virtues needed for such Nietzschean Will to Power.

Yesterday brought a classic of the genre, which I caught while preparing tea: The EU is being difficult over the negotiations because it wants to keep the UK in the organisation. The desire not to make a mess in the kitchen meant I was neither able to catch the name of the man making that statement, nor to response there and then on social media (not that it would have made much difference).

Instead, I’m going to work through it here. Because it’s still annoying and still completely illogical a view to hold.

The argument being advanced runs something like this. The EU was shocked that anyone would ever want to leave, and can’t understand that the UK actually wants to do that, so now wants to throw many obstructions in our path, to demonstrate that we can never leave, not that we should want to anyway. Sort of Stockholm Syndrome at a continental level.

This sounds plausible because it fits with a more general model about the dubious motives behind European integration and the shadowy cabal that actually runs things: Faceless eurocrats sought to co-opt our own elites with promises of power and influence, out of the public gaze, but when our establishment failed to get through the referendum, the system had to preserve itself by any means necessary.

Several basic problems with this narrative present themselves.

Firstly, if the EU is so determined to stop states leaving, why allow a provision in the treaty that provides for exactly that possibility? The Article 50 clause was introduced in the Lisbon treaty as part of a more general overhaul of the basic framework of the organisation, not least to underline that membership is voluntary and contingent upon the on-going willingness of states to participate. To use the local analogy, just because you chose in the past to join, it doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind.

There’s not even an limitation on how a state decides it’s changed its mind: it does whatever it considers is needed to satisfy local constitutional requirements and the EU can’t do anything about that decision.

And this is the second problem. Once Article 50 is triggered, there is absolutely nothing the EU can do to stop a state leaving. A clock is started and if at the end of the period there’s no agreement on terms, then that doesn’t stop the state’s departure. It’s a pretty rubbish cabal that puts in place rules that deprive it of any power to stymie the loss of a member, especially when you consider that it’s one of the few International Organisations to have a specific exit clause, so they’ve obviously thought about the matter.

The only ways that the UK’s exit can be delayed past the current date of 31 October are either an extension to Article 50 – which needs the UK’s approval – or a revocation of Article 50 – which only the UK can do. There’s no delaying mechanism that the EU control alone, and none that doesn’t give power to the UK.

Ah, comes the response. The EU might not control the timeline, but it’s trying to scare the UK with talk of the problems of no-deal.

Well, maybe, but only up to a point. Not only does the EU worry about the impact of a no-deal outcome, but the vast majority of independent analysis also suggests this would be the most damaging economic and political outcome, for both sides. It places the EU-UK relationship into a very uncertain position and with some very bad mood music too.

But, importantly, it’s bad for both sides. The EU will suffer like the UK, albeit to a lesser extent. Failure to secure a negotiated outcome to Article 50 will reflect badly on all involved. given the fine words spoken since 24 June 2016. But that’s very different from not wanting Brexit to occur at all.

Consider a scenario where the UK doesn’t leave the EU. Either that’s because a government has made that decision, or because a referendum has made it for them: again, the choice has to be internal. Now think about the British political debate around this. Is everyone going to be happy with that? Will everyone accept this new decision?

Almost certainly not.

At present there’s no good reason to believe that the divisions that the 2016 vote exposed and reinforced will weaken, let alone disappear. Moreover, it’s not as if the years since 2015 will be forgotten.

And that’s a problem for the EU, because its most important decisions remain ones taken by unanimity: finances, planning, enlargement. Even on those matters decided by majority voting, having an unhappy and disruptive UK at the table is not the path to a more functional organisation.

The EU lives through and because of its member states: if those states can’t accept the compromises and constraints that membership brings, then this poisons the entire functioning of the Union, because membership also brings power and consequence to those states. The value of having another member always has to be balanced against the costs that brings.

To return to the this trope of an overly-possessive EU, it simply doesn’t stand up to any inspection, either in letting this situation arise in the first place, nor in a basic analysis of how the EU works as a body.

Not that this is likely to stop it getting repeated soon.

The post The illogic of the EU trying to keep the UK from leaving appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

So desperate is Boris Johnson for the keys to number 10, that he has conceded all the demands of the far-right of his Tory party, who have said they will withdraw their support for him if he doesn’t do what they say.

The Guardian reported today, ‘Eurosceptics in the party were increasingly turning the screws on Johnson by warning they would withdraw support for his government if he fails to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October.’

Bojo the Prime Minister wannabe – or ‘mini Trump’ as they call him in the rest of the EU – has now made clear that that if he is in charge:

• The UK will leave the EU on 31 October 2019 “come what may; do or die”
• Theresa May’s Brexit deal will be torn up and a new deal negotiated. “We need a new withdrawal agreement,” said Mr Johnson, who added that Mrs May’s deal was “dead”.
• In the event of no deal, Mr Johnson said he would threaten not to pay the £39 billion debt that Theresa May’s government had already agreed was owed to the EU (whether we leave or remain).
• He could “ignore” any Parliamentary objection to a no-deal Brexit. (That’s according to the advice of former Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, who is backing Mr Johnson to be our next Prime Minister. Any motion from MPs against a no-deal Brexit would have “zero legal effect” and could be overridden, Mr Raab said today on the Radio 4 Today programme.)

It’s all nonsense of course. The UK is not ready for Brexit, let alone a no-deal Brexit, and let alone by 31 October.

Renegotiating the deal is simply a no-no. The EU27 are absolutely resolved: there will no renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told reporters today:

“I can confirm, as has been repeated several times, we will not be renegotiating the withdrawal agreement, full stop”. 

Even if the EU was prepared to renegotiate Theresa May’s deal – which took almost two years to conclude – there is now no time to do it.

In real terms, there are only a few weeks left of Parliamentary time before 31 October.

Our Parliament will shortly be packing up shop for the summer. Then, our lawmakers will be trotting off to for the September party conference season.

By the time Parliamentarians return for “normal” business in October, leaving the EU – deal or no-deal – will be just a few weeks away.

No time for a new deal. Under Bojo, the only option would be no-deal.

So, here’s the bottom line:

• Under a Jeremy Hunt prime ministership, Brexit will be a longer, drawn out affair, as he has accepted the possible need for a further extension to allow for new negotiations. Under Hunt, Brexit delays will go on and on and…
• But under a Boris Johnson prime ministership, Brexit will be shocking and sharp, a sudden and sheer drop over the cliff edge at the stroke of midnight on Halloween, with the strongest, highest possibility of Britain leaving without any deal, which would be catastrophic.

So, Remainers, chins up for a Boris Johnson premiership.

Bojo’s Bonkers Brexit offers the best chance for a rapid and seismic end to the Brexit madness.

Any plan by Boris Johnson to leave the EU without a deal would result in Parliament passing a vote of no confidence in his government, with a high chance of success.

That would almost certainly precipitate a General Election, in which it’s hoped that a new mandate would be offered to ‘the people’, either to revoke Article 50, or to offer the nation a new referendum on Brexit.

Boris Johnson’s Brexit bungle could save the day for Remain. It could bring in a new Labour government, possibly sharing power with the LibDems, agreeing to offer the nation a way out of the never-ending Brexit impasse.

But only if Labour now seizes its moment and unequivocally becomes a Remain party, and does so without delay.

And only if the Remain side now urgently gets its act together, and presents the best, most powerful, persuasive, professional and compelling case for the nation to abandon Brexit and Remain in the EU.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
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The post Bojo’s bonkers Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

I have not commented on Turkish politics for a while now for I thought not much is changing in Turkey since 2013, except there has been a constant and continuous democratic backsliding and the reign of the Justice and Development Party for almost two decades.

What today’s Istanbul Mayoral election result represents is a critical juncture in Turkish politics, which will probably be followed by some significant changes, but I cannot predict yet what will be the nature of these changes. Only time will tell.

The newly elected Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who was the opposition’s candidate, adopted an inclusive, constructive and, if not too simplistic to say, a friendly and a kind approach during both election campaigns and his narrative was a true reflection of this style. The style that won him votes from every corner of Istanbul.

However let’s not forget when the President Tayyip Erdogan was first elected as the Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, he represented a new beginning for Turkey, thus garnered supports from different segments of the society, from Republicans and Nationalists to Kurds and Islamists.

The common denominator, which had brought people together behind Erdogan in mid 1990s, is also what brings people of different backgrounds together behind Ekremoglu: people’ desire to live in a country where democracy is the only game in town.

Whether Imamoglu, his team and his political party have the vision to take on Turkey as a project and work hard to heal it, I don’t know.

Whether they can deliver on such a big project, I cannot say.

And whether they will maintain their friendly politics style, we have to wait and see.

I think who or which political party wins the elections are not that important under the current circumstances in Turkey.

What is vital is whether these politicians and their political parties or the alliances they formed will keep their loyalty to the principles of liberal democracy.

Or whether once they gain more political power in the coming elections, their Kemalist origins would awaken and strengthen their nationalist demons.

The post New Beginnings in Turkey post-Istanbul Mayoral elections or Not appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

So today we find out who will be the final two candidates to become the new leader of the Conservative party.

It’s also the day that we find out whether the EU has made any progress on selecting individuals to fill the top jobs at the Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council.

Both sets of decisions will matter for Brexit, but neither will matter that much.

Individuals clearly have a role and a weight in politics: whether it’s their charismatic leadership, their technocratic expertise or their oligarchic connections, they can make a difference to a situation.

In this case, it’s possible that a new Prime Minister will be able to cajole fellow MPs to vote in support of a plan in a way that Theresa May wasn’t. If nothing else, none of the remaining candidates has a similar political decision-making style to May, of an exceptionally small circle of advisors, with whom choices are made and then stuck to with scant regard for others’ views.

If one assumes that part of the blockage on withdrawal from the EU was the failure of May to keep her party on-board with the evolving negotiations with the Commission, then here is an obvious opportunity.

Likewise, new leadership in the Commission and European Council might open up more scope to jiggle the EU27 along to make some accommodations on the other side of the table. That might be both because they have a less antagonist relationship with the new Prime Minister and because they are not beholden to previous discussions and commitments.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But equally: maybe not, maybe not, maybe not.

Reading through those opening paragraphs looks like an exercise in wishful thinking, in many ways.

As the EU has made clear, the issue was never May per se, but the situation she was operating within. In particular, her inability to command a robust majority in Parliament raised concerns about her capacity to deliver on commitments made.

A new PM might well be more commanding of his own party, but that party still doesn’t have a majority by itself and even with its partner, the DUP, there is now only a working majority of about 4. Recall that figure includes a number of backbenchers who are profoundly unhappy with the prospect of (in some cases) a no-deal scenario or (in others) anything other than a no-deal, and the scene is set for the new occupier of Number 10 to discover that they are not the individual who counts in all this.

Importantly, none of the candidates is offering a fundamental shift from May’s decision to go down the party-political route: reaching across the aisle to build a wider coalition is neither likely to be offered, nor to be accepted by an opposition who feel ever more confident that an early election is in the offing.

Likewise, connective as Jean-Claude Juncker or Donald Tusk have been, they have still been just that: connective. Their authority and locus has been built on the high level of support from the member states, which itself has come from the robust defence of their interests in the central institutions of the EU. At its most prosaic, any new European Council President who sells out Irish interests to try and close the Withdrawal Agreement is likely to find their position deeply troubled. EU unity to this point has been built on deep recognition and respect of members’ interests, not on coercive leadership from above.

And this is even before we consider that the current EU leadership group has been very well-disposed to the UK, most obviously in helping to make adjustments to the Agreement to improve its chances of approval by the UK Parliament (or so they were told).

Taken together, the most substantial danger right now is buying into the view that we just need to shake things up with a new Prime Minister and we’ll be good to go: Theresa had a jolly good go at things, but now someone else needs to take the reins of power and bring them a good old tug. Tugging might make that person feel better, but it doesn’t necessarily address the underlying issue.

All of which is to take us to a situation where we are going to use more of the (limited) time available focusing on elements that do not resolve the Brexit blockage.

Even with a new Prime Minister in place during July, the EU side will take some time yet to get its house in order, even without factoring in the summer break. That means September is likely to be rather frantic in London, Brussels and various EU27 capitals, as everyone tries to take stock of what has (and hasn’t) changed.

Even force of character isn’t suddenly going to give a new Prime Minister a robust majority, so the question will become one of whether you have to go down the path of building such a position by the more conventional means of an election. As the British political vernacular would put it, that might be very courageous.

The post New faces, old problems appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This is a post on Spitzenkandidaten by Dr Katjana Gattermann. The text was originally published in the edited volume Euroflections. Leading academics on the European elections 2019, a free downloadable report with results, analyses and reflections on the election to the European Parliament 2019. More than 70 researchers from all over Europe participate in the project led by the editors Niklas Bolin, Kajsa Falasca, Marie Grusell and Lars Nord. Download the report and read more about the project here.

The Spitzenkandidaten

One distinct feature of the 2019 European Parliament elections were the campaigns of the pan-European lead candidates of several European party groups. These so-called “Spitzenkandidaten” were first introduced in the previous elections of 2014. Back then, it was hoped that – by personalizing the campaigns – European citizens would become more aware of the elections and ultimately more mobilized to take part in the polls. In 2014, there was no clear evidence that the Spitzenkandidaten indeed fulfilled this function. In fact, only few citizens could recognize any of the Spitzenkandidaten during the campaigns. Nonetheless, one of the past Spitzenkandidaten, namely Jean-Claude Juncker, was later nominated by the European Council and ultimately elected as Commission President by the Parliament.

That is why the European Parliament urged European party groups to again nominate pan-European Spitzenkandidaten for the 2019 elections. This time, there were seven Spitzenkandidaten: the European People’s Party nominated the German Manfred Weber, the Social Democrats Dutchman Frans Timmermans, the Conservatives the Czech Jan Zahradil, and the Greens and the Left each chose a duo of a male and a female candidate. The Liberals put forward a team of candidates, comprising among others Guy Verhofstadt from Belgium and Margrethe Vestager from Denmark.

The importance of media visibility

In order for European citizens to take note of the Spitzenkandidaten, there has to be sufficient media visibility. So, how visible were the candidates? Did the media pay more attention to them than in 2014? Seeing that the outcome of the Spitzenkandidaten procedure was still unknown during the 2014 election campaigns, but eventually led to the selection of Jean-Claude Juncker as Commission President, journalists may have taken the procedure more seriously in 2019 and hence may have more frequently reported about the Spitzenkandidaten.

Back in 2014, I conducted a content analysis of each two French, Dutch, German, Irish and Italian newspapers over a period of ten weeks prior to Election Day. I repeated this content analysis for the same newspapers and time-span for the 2019 elections. On the whole, news coverage of the Spitzenkandidaten was not significantly more comprehensive in 2019 compared to 2014. German newspapers paid most attention to all Spitzenkandidaten in 2019, followed by the Dutch press, which is not surprising because the candidates of the two biggest party groups are German and Dutch, respectively. French newspapers reported most extensively about the Spitzenkandidaten in 2014.

This year however, they devoted significantly less attention to the Spitzenkandidaten than before. In 2014, the German Spitzenkandidat Martin Schulz (Social Democrats) received most attention in all newspapers under study, while in 2019, the German Manfred Weber was most reported only in Germany, Italy and France. Margrethe Vestager was the most visible candidate in the Irish press; Frans Timmermans unsurprisingly received most attention at home. In short, the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten varied across country and there was no significant increase in attention paid to them by European newspapers between 2014 and 2019.

 

Moreover, three pan-European television debates between the Spitzenkandidaten were held in both 2014 and 2019. Two of them were livestreamed on the internet; and only the debate organised by the European Broadcast Union (EBU) was also broadcasted via national television stations. According to the EBU, the 2019 debate was broadcasted live in 19 EU countries, but not in nine other EU countries (Austria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia). However, one problem with pan-European debates is language: often, candidate statements have to be translated by an interpreter which hinders the audience to get a vivid impression of the candidates. Likewise, candidates may come across differently – for example, as less confident or less eloquent – if they debate in a language that is not their mother tongue. Still, these debates provide an important forum for citizens to learn about different candidates and their positions – if not directly, then at least through further media coverage about these debates (provided the media report about them, of course).

Does the visbility of Spitzenkandidaten improve turnout?

It is still too early to say whether the Spitzenkandidaten were able to mobilize European citizens this time round; we need to systematically analyse data for that. Indeed, turnout figures have gone up in many countries compared to the previous European elections. But there could be several reasons for this which are not necessarily linked to the Spitzenkandidaten. Then again, provisional election results of the Dutch Labour party of Frans Timmermans and the Bavarian Christian Democrats, for which Manfred Weber was standing, indicate that both parties have gained more seats in the European Parliament compared to last time. Even if these outcomes could be attributed to the Spitzenkandidaten, this impact remains limited to the country or region in which they had actually been listed on the ballot. Moreover, national parties tend not to campaign extensively with candidates from other countries, for example, on election campaign posters.

Overall, it is unlikely that the Spitzenkandidaten were the driving force behind voter turnout and votes for specific party groups across Europe. Given that media attention differed across country and there was not significantly more news coverage about the Spitzenkandidaten compared to 2014, it remains to be seen whether European citizens have actually become more aware of the candidates during the 2019 election campaigns.

The post The “Spitzenkandidaten” in the media: did they make a difference this time? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

I don’t usually read the Nation.Cymru newspaper, but their analysis of how the Remain side lost in the EU election is spot on.

Writing for the paper, described as, ‘A news service by the people of Wales, for the people of Wales’, Ifan Morgan Jones commented:

‘It was Remain that needed to use this election to signal that there had been a sea-change in public opinion, and that the people were turning their backs on Brexit.

‘That didn’t happen. This was a poor election campaign by Remain and raises real questions about whether they would actually win a second referendum if one was ever held.’

Ifan added:

‘After all the talk of lessons being learnt from the EU Referendum and the slick and well-organised campaigning for a People’s Vote, I had expected that the Remain electoral machine would be ready to go.

‘However, unlike Nigel Farage who had seen the election coming from a mile away, and had understood that it would be a de facto second referendum and set up a new Brexit Party, they were caught on the hop.

‘The most obvious first step would have been to set up a cross-party Remain coalition.

‘But not even Plaid Cymru and the Greens, who represent the same party in the EU Parliament, did so.

‘That’s madness (and another consequence, it seems, of a lack of planning for an election that was always likely to happen).

‘And there was no sign that Remain had learnt the lessons of why their message didn’t appeal in 2016, either – in fact, little or no effort was made to actually convince anyone who voted Brexit to change their minds at all.’

My thoughts exactly, and those here who have been following my work, will know I have been saying the same for years.

The EU election on 23 May was the one democratic event in which Remainers could have decisively demonstrated that the country doesn’t want Brexit.

Indeed, this may be the only democratic opportunity that Remainers have on Brexit before we actually leave the EU.

Remain blew it.

If polling is correct (and it looks more than likely) a very low turnout yesterday will have given Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party a landslide victory.

It seems to me that too many Remain supporters regard the anti-Brexit campaign as a spectator sport.

Brexiters want Brexit to happen more than Remainers don’t want Brexit to happen.

That might seem harsh, but the reality speaks louder than words: not enough Remain supporters voted in the 2016 referendum, just as not enough Remain supporters voted yesterday.

I have been campaigning against Brexit since the word was invented back in 2012. It’s been a lonely, debilitating and unrewarding task.

None of the main anti-Brexit groups and parties have been able to work together, let alone to properly embrace, encourage and use the many skills of grassroots Remain campaigners (including mine, as an investigative journalist, campaigner and film maker).

Everyone – People’s Vote, Best for Britain, the five anti-Brexit parties, even Gina Miller and Chuka Umunna, and many other prominent Remainers – all seem to want to go it alone, and not to unite the Remain movement as a powerful, cohesive, single force.

All my efforts to reach out to them to work together miserably failed.

There have been no effective or realistic efforts by the Remain side to raise awareness about the EU; all the efforts were put into getting another vote, rather than winning it.

Well, we had another vote. It was yesterday.

And if the polls were right, not enough Remainers bothered to take part.

(If the polls were wrong, and Remain parties rather than the Brexit Party won yesterday, then I will be happy on Sunday evening – when the results are revealed – to eat my words as well as humble pie. However, my commentary about the state of the Remain movement applies regardless of the results).

On LBC radio, LibDem MEP, Catherine Bearder, was asked to respond with one word what was the answer to resolving Brexit.

She answered, “Education”. That’s true.

But there has been no educational campaign in the UK about how the EU functions as a democracy, democratically run by its members for the benefit of its members.

Worse, millions across Britain believe the exact opposite.

The general level of ignorance about the EU in our country is breathtaking.

Yes, “education” could have fixed it – but that would have taken years, not just the months we have left before we are scheduled to leave the EU.

We had years. It’s been three years since the EU referendum. We also knew for some years before the referendum that there would likely be a referendum.

But there was no ‘education’; no national awareness campaign by the Remain side (and, again, those following my work, will know I have been calling for an EU awareness campaign for many years).

So, if the Brexit Party won the anticipated landslide in yesterday’s EU election, thereby sending a pack of unwanted, trouble-making, recalcitrant British MEPs to represent us in the European Parliament, the message from the UK to the rest of Europe and the world will be clear:

Britain wants Brexit; we deserve Brexit.

Of course, the reality isn’t true. Over 60 polls since the 2017 general election clearly demonstrate that Britain doesn’t want Brexit at all.

But unless Remainers are prepared to unequivocally show that in a democratic event – like the one we had yesterday – then it will make no difference.

Marches make no difference. Petitions make no difference. Only the ballot box makes a difference.

Votes count. Not voting doesn’t.

There seems little point continuing to campaign for the Remain side unless something very dramatic now happens.

Remain must get its act together.

All the Remain parties, politicians and groups should properly and formally unite; cleverly commandeer all the skills and passions between us, and vigorously and professionally campaign, with one lucid and convincing voice, to steer Britain towards a democratic reversal of Brexit.

To be frank, I’m not willing to carry on with my campaign work against Brexit unless this now happens.

Here’s the reality.

• Theresa May resigned today (good).
• Vince Cable resigned today (bad – he should have stayed on, just as his profile and likeability were on the rise across the country. There is no potential LibDem leader with the same gravitas and high profile).
• Boris Johnson is predicted to be the Tory’s new leader and our next Prime Minister. He will undoubtedly immediately call for a general election, because no party can effectively rule with no majority (as Theresa May discovered to her cost).
• There is a high chance that Johnson will win that general election, especially if he comes to an agreement with the Brexit Party.
• The EU has made clear that they will not make any changes to the Withdrawal Agreement. Johnson could not accept that deal, especially as May has just resigned because she couldn’t get that deal passed, and Johnson resigned last year as Foreign Secretary because he opposed that deal.
• Johnson has made clear that he is willing to take the country out of the EU without any deal. A new Parliament, with a different composition of MPs, might well agree with him.

This is an emergency. If this doesn’t now galvanise the country’s Remainers to put aside all egos and urgently re-organise, then our cause is lost.

If Remain cannot now unite in a way it’s never done before, then it may that (something I have never wanted to write), only a dose of Brexit will bring Britain back to its senses.

• Related video: Change UK MP, Chuka Umunna, calls for Remain unity

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• Follow my Stop Brexit campaign on Facebook: Reasons2Remain

The post The EU election: Remain blew it appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is dedicated to Dave. He’s a good guy, but he told me this week that he doesn’t vote, he can’t see the point, he doesn’t think it makes any difference.

Dave – and all others who have the same view (and sadly, there are many of them) – need to be reminded of the wise and powerful maxim:

BAD POLITICIANS ARE ELECTED BY GOOD PEOPLE WHO DON’T VOTE

That couldn’t be more true than in today’s European Parliament election, in which it’s anticipated that Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’ will win by a landslide.

That’s not because most voters in Britain support the Brexit Party – whose only policy is for the UK to leave the EU without any deal, and whose leader, Nigel Farage, has for many years promoted a nasty hatred of foreigners.

No.

On the contrary, most people in Britain don’t want the UK to leave the EU, let alone to leave without any deal, that will cause harm and suffering, most of all to the country’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Proof?

→ Over 60 consecutive polls since the 2017 general election all say the same: most voters don’t want Brexit. (They never did – only a minority of voters voted for Brexit in the first place, just 37% of the electorate).

→ All the government’s economic assessments – and those of most economists – comprehensively conclude that all versions of Brexit will make us worse off, and that a no-deal Brexit will be catastrophic.

A low turnout in today’s European election will favour Nigel Farage’s party, just as it did in the last European election back in 2014.

In the UK’s 2014 EU election, Mr Farage’s previous party, UKIP, won 24 seats in the European Parliament – more than any other British party.

Yet less than 10% of the UK electorate voted for Mr Farage’s party in 2014, because only 34% of the electorate voted at all.

That’s the problem with low turn-outs in elections: the results are fair only for the minority who vote, but not necessarily reflective of the true feelings of the majority who don’t.

The smaller the turnout at elections, the less chance we get the governments and politicians that the majority want.

A small turnout will favour a greater win for Mr Farage.

It will be mostly those who don’t vote, rather than those who do, that today will give Mr Farage and his party power.

• Those who say that voting doesn’t make a difference are hiding their heads in the sand.

Remain would have won the 2016 referendum if those who could vote but didn’t had voted.

Around 13 million people registered to vote in the EU referendum didn’t vote. But polls indicate that most of them would have voted for Remain.

What’s more, about 7 million people entitled to register to vote didn’t do so.

That makes a total of around 20 million people who could vote but didn’t in the 2016 referendum, and about the same numbers that didn’t vote but could have done in the 2017 general election.

Those missing voters represent a huge dent in our democracy. If all those who don’t vote all voted for the same party, that party would win the biggest landslide in history.

The right to vote was hard won, and took many centuries.

• Those who don’t vote, but can, are lazily riding on the backs of those who fought hard for our right to vote, and to have a say in who governs us and the lives we will lead.

Despite our moans, in the United Kingdom – and across Europe – many of us enjoy among the best lives on the planet, with those on just an average wage belonging to the world’s top 1% of earners.

Just look at all the rights we’ve won through the power of voting:

• The right to a childhood;
• to universal education;
• to healthcare;
• to clean air and water;
• the right to free movement;
• to use the roads and pavements and parks;
• to leave and return to the country;
• to be protected at home, in the street and at work and in times of need;
• to call for help in an emergency;
• to go about and enjoy our lives in relative freedom.;
• to resolve disputes in courts, and even to take the government to court if they overreach their power.

Here we have a better life than most others on the planet because, and ONLY BECAUSE, of our right to vote.

Without the power to choose or discard politicians and governments, we would not have any of the freedoms and the better lives we have won through the ballot box.

• By not voting you diminish and weaken us all.

• You reduce and ridicule our power of emancipation.

• You are lessening by one vote, your discarded vote, all our powers of choice.

The fewer people who vote, the more politicians and governments know they have more control over us to do as they want and not as we want.

The message of the non-voter to politicians is: “We don’t care; do as you please; you choose how you want to run my life.”

When people don’t vote, who can vote – in local, national and European elections – governments and politicians know they have less eyes watching them.

They realise they can get away with passing laws that many voters will not protest or care about or even bother to find out about.

• Those who can vote but don’t are taking advantage of all of us who can vote and do.

Non-voters benefit from all the hard-won democratic rights of the people, but feel disdainfully above any obligation to help to win and retain those rights.

When things go wrong; when there’s a fight to make things better; they absent themselves from any need to become involved, even though the effort to enter a cross in a box on a piece of paper is miniscule.

• Those who can vote but don’t dishonour those who lost blood to give us the ballot. The power of persuasion, the participation in democracy, the right to vote, seem to mean little or nothing to them.

In countries where there is no vote, dictatorship governments can rule for decades and decades with no opportunity for the people to get rid of them.

Instead of the ballot, the peoples’ only chance is to resort to the bullet, at huge personal risk, with no guarantee of success, and mostly with the greatest chance that they will fail and be mercilessly crushed.

How much those people envy our right to hire or fire politicians with the simple, easy use of a vote.

Maybe our nation’s voluntary non-voters, would be convinced of the beauty and brilliance of the ballot if they lived in a country where people don’t vote because they can’t vote; where the brute force of unelected rulers control and subjugate them.

But then, it would be too late, wouldn’t it?

Please don’t reduce the power of democracy by not taking part in it.

Democracy is not perfect, but it’s the best form of governance that we know.

It gives the population the right to choose who rules.

Politicians need to know that we are their masters, and that can only come through the ballot.

And those who don’t yet have democracy need to know that we cherish it, that it’s worth fighting for, and that it’s a right we never, ever want to lose.

Dave, today, please vote.

 

Every Remain vote will count on this Thursday, 23 May, in the European Elections. It’s essential that Remain voters take this democratic opportunity to say that they want to #StopBrexit.

There are five anti-Brexit parties in the European elections.

Yes, it would have been better if they had agreed to collaborate, rather than compete against each other. But we are where we are, and a vote for an anti-Brexit party – any one of them – will count as a vote against Brexit.

Many Remain supporters will want to consider voting tactically, to ensure the greatest chance of Remain candidates winning in their region.

Please take a look at my 15-minute compilation video that sets out the case for each of the five anti-Brexit parties. These parties are:

Liberal Democrats
Green Party of England and Wales
Change UK – The Independent Group
Scottish National Party (SNP)
Plaid Cymru in Wales

Take your pick. But please, pick one. Make the pro-Remain, anti-Brexit vote count, with your vote.

• Follow my journalism page on Facebook: Jon Danzig writes
• Follow my Stop Brexit campaign on Facebook: Reasons2Remain

________________________________________________________

• Join and share the discussion about these articles on Facebook:

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We at JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies are deeply saddened by the news of the untimely death of Professor John Peterson, a former editor of the Journal. John was a dedicated scholar, supervisor, mentor and friend to many in the academic community in the UK, across the Atlantic and beyond. John had a significant impact on the current JCMS editorial team who had the privilege to work alongside him.

John was one of the most insightful observers of the transatlantic relationship and engaged extensively with the media to explain the country of his birth to those in his adopted country and the European Union to those in America.  The range of his scholarship included important contributions to understanding the EU’s role as a global actor and, particularly, on decision-making in the European Union.

Beyond his own work, John was a generous mentor to his students, including one of our Lead Co-Editors, Toni Haastrup. John supervised Toni’s doctoral thesis on the EU’s relationship with the African Union (2007-2010). From John, Toni learned the importance of criticality in engaging with and analysis the EU’s foreign and security policy and practices. John also mentored other junior scholars he adopted along the way, including one of our Co-Editors, Alasdair Young.  When Alasdair got his first job at Glasgow, John demonstrated by example and through advice how to be an excellent academic professional.  After John moved to Edinburgh, he and Alasdair enjoyed a fruitful and enriching partnership as co-authors.

Our other Lead Co-Editor, Richard Whitman, as a UACES Trustee, had the opportunity to work with John during editorial tenure with JCMS as well as enjoying his research and writing. His passion for advancing the study of the EU and his determination the highest standards for scholarship in JCMS was inspirational. John’s clarity of insight was also ever-present in his writing and, as importantly, he maintained a strong commitment to collaboration and co-wrote and co-published with a large number of his colleagues.

John was also a consummate provider of public goods and served as Head of Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh (2007-10).  We remain grateful to John’s editorship of JCMS with Iain Begg, a period that established JCMS as the premier journal for European Integration studies and saw the publications of ground breaking work in this area. At the time of his death, John was still bitten by the editorial bug and was Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

John will be greatly missed.

JCMS Editors

 

We’ve had very sad news about the death of our own Professor John Peterson at the weekend. John was a wonderful colleague, a very fine academic & a huge support to his students. Thoughts of all at the School are with his family, friends and colleagues. https://t.co/ecL1196x1n pic.twitter.com/G03DSW1xgh

— School of Social & Political Science Edinburgh (@uoessps) May 14, 2019

The post JCMS Editors’ Tribute to Professor John Peterson appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Fellow Euroblogger and friend EuroPasionaria started a blog chain to discuss what has happened in EU blogging and social media in the past decade, especially since the 2009 European Parliament elections until the 2019 European Parliament elections. After La Oreja de Europa has posted her views – in Spanish – here are my five cents in English.

If you ask me what has changed since 2009, I can clearly say that the European Parliament elections of 2009, 2014 and 2019 feel fundamentally different. And they are fundamentally different when it comes to my own use of social media, my interests and focus, and the way in which myself and others use blogs, Twitter or Youtube.

Here’s the short summary:

• In 2009, I was just a citizen blogger, following EU politics through the digital lens of my blog while living in Chisinau (Moldova) and in Potsdam (Germany). Everything was new about these elections, most of it was exciting (especially online), and some of it was disappointing. But blogging was at the heart of social media, and so I lived European politics through a medium that back then was the centre of digital discussions.

• In 2014, I was a professional activist with Transparency International in Brussels, following the pre-electoral process from a watchdog and advocacy perspective. I did so both online and offline, because I was in Brussels and could meet people, but I knew the strength of social media. I travelled through seven EU countries for a European project to discuss with students, voters and activists; I used Twitter, blogging (incl. on Tumblr), Facebook, Youtube and traditional media work to cover our work and get our message out “to Europe”. Social media was mainly work.

• And this year, in 2019, I’m an academic in Munich with a focus on the United Nations and on European Union politics. I’m following the EU elections process mainly via social media (mostly Twitter, some Facebook and some Youtube) and online media. I watch all this as a citizen and voter, and to some degree an academic. As an academic, I’m invited to speak at local events and media outlets about the EU. I share my expertise and my 10-year perspective and profit from watching all of this online for the past decade, but I’m far, far less involved than in the previous two elections.

Notably, however, we are also very far from where we were in 2009:

Earlier today, I sent a WhatsApp message to my grandmother to tell her to listen to a radio show tonight in which I discuss about Europe and the EU elections. I sent an email to the rest of my family with the podcast link. And I’m discussing with people on Facebook and Twitter about the show, before the recording and after. In 2009, this would have been unthinkable, both technologically but also when it comes to discussing with so many people about EU politics.

With this in mind, let me answer Europasionaria’s question about how the last 10 years have changed EU social media and how this has changed us:

Did (some of) our dreams for the EU online sphere come true? Did reality exceed expectations? Or are we old(er), bitter & disappointed?

Honestly speaking, I’m quite happy with where we are today in terms of social media and in terms of how I look at the EU.

I’m clearly not 25 anymore, but I’m definitely not bitter. Social media is light years from where it was in 2009, and only my EU enthusiasm has changed into a more realistic view of EU life and life in general. But knowing the past 10 years also makes me more optimistic about what I see (despite the multitude of crises).

Thanks – or due – to the Eurocrisis, thanks or due to the humanitarian crisis that made migration the most salient topic of the last years, and after three years of Brexit discussions, European topics are everywhere. They are online and offline, and we discuss them across borders on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube – and wherever else others are discussing them (like in WhatsApp groups, in the comments below news media articles…).

If you think back at 2009, this is way beyond what we tried to build as young – mostly idealistic – social-media savvy (or so we thought) online citizens.

Youtube videos that everyone had seen did not exist (outside the Youtuber bubble); Netflix shows that everyone would watch were not yet there, so there were no memes we could play around with; and the Eurosceptic trolls spent most of their time on EU-focused blogs in the UK, so life was mostly peaceful, but confined to a small euroblogger bubble.

At that time, we just started to become the very first truly transnational digital EU politics community. Some of us had already been around a few years (see reports by Nosemonkey, Jon Worth, A Fistful of Europe, Blogactiv/Mathew; or see Grahnlaw), some like myself had just started using blogs in the year before the 2009 EP elections. Twitter was gaining in traction in 2009, and so did the hashtags #eu09, #ep09 or #ue09, but this was not the large transnational community that it is now.

For myself, the road to the European Parliament elections 2009 was the main reason to start Euroblogging. My alter ego published 120 blog posts between July  2008 until June 2009 about the process leading up to the European Parliament elections, including a failed Spitzenkandidaten process that would only come to life in 2014 (and is rather unimportant this time around again).

It was the period in which I got to know many of my later fellow Bloggingportal.eu editors, most of them just online, but some like Jon Worth and Kosmopolit also offline. This was thanks to the Th!nk About It blogging competition organised by the European Journalism Centre, that brought together European bloggers from around the EU who blogged about the elections. I wasn’t in the competition, but I got invited and for the first time in my life did see what it meant when a community that had formed only online materialised in real life.

This online-goes-offline seems so normal today in a world where people communicate for months and years on Youtube or Twitter or Instagram before they might ever meet in real life. 10 years ago this was still a novelty (at least for me and for an EU-focused sphere), and I felt privileged to be part of this.

Thanks to us Eurobloggers speaking at re:publica 2010, I got in touch with the EU transparency and open data scene. (I would return to re:publica in 2012 to talk about the “Euroblogsphere”, which by then had already passed its peak.)

Thanks to these contacts, I became a volunteer activist with Transparency International in Brussels in mid-2010. I helped set up their blogging activities and I started their Twitter account. The account @TI_EU today has almost 19k followers – so my early experience in the digital EU sphere was useful in helping to spread the ideas of a more transparent and ethical EU.

What this means is that being part of this early community of EU bloggers was helpful beyond myself. I hope.

Thanks to my blogging, I became part of the group of people who started to bring European civil society online. From 2012 to 2014, I would do this professionally while working in the EU office of Transparency International.

This did not feel the same as blogging and tweeting in private about the EU, but it was nonetheless important and necessary. In a world where the EU institutions and politicians also started to become more professional online, they needed the counterbalance of an active civil society online! So while I still used social media “in private” (outside my professional activism) – as the hundreds of posts on this blog demonstrate – I started to see EU social media through professional glasses. But EU glasses nonetheless.

Fast forward to today: Social media is so much more for me than the EU bubble that I used to be part of between 2008-2014.

Today, I’m using social media to talk about my work as an academic (mainly on Twitter and this blog). I listen to what’s happening around the world (on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter). I communicate with UN and EU officials, I discuss with people here in Munich about what’s going on in Bavaria. I argue with others in Australia or Poland or Mexico about recent developments, in changing communities depending on the topic. Most of these people do neither care about the EU nor about the UN, so using social media today feels much less bubbly than I felt as a Euroblogger.

In this way I agree with La Oreja de Europa:

Nuestro resumen sobre lo que ha cambiado desde las elecciones de 2009 a 2019 es que quizás ya no hay ese sentimiento de orgullo que nos hacía escribir sobre la Unión Europea para poder mostrar a los ciudadanos europeos lo que está hacía por nosotros.

*machine translated* [this also did not exist 10 years ago!]

Like her, I don’t feel the urge anymore to write about EU issues just because nobody writes about them. Everything is written about today, EU-related or not, so mostly it’s enough to just share what others are writing (or vlogging), you don’t have to write about it just for the sake of it.

And despite all of this, I still do feel connected to the community of fellow EU bloggers that we were back in 2009.

Ten years after the first digital European elections – at a time when we were part of a small group of early social media users focused on EU affairs – I still appreciate what we did when EU social media was still comparatively small and nerdy.

Some of you fellow bloggers have become and stayed friends, even if we meet less frequently today. Some of us have died way too early, but are not forgotten!

So thank you, European Parliament elections 2019, as dull as you may be (in some ways like 2009, in others totally different), for bringing us together again, and do what nobody does anymore: a European blog chain!

The post has been slightly edited after the first version.

The post #EU09vs19 – What has changed in the EU social media sphere since 2009? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Nope

I spent most of the day yesterday hanging around* a big bunch of procurement managers: I was very well-behaved and even at the point of speaking to a trio of Chief Procurement Officers I didn’t make a Star Wars droid joke.

This was an annual world congress for such individuals and it was very instructive to get a different take on Brexit from them, while enjoying the superior catering afforded by corporate sponsorship.

The first big message was that Brexit has become ever more normalised into their practice. It was a shock, it required attention (very substantial in many cases), but now it’s just hanging there and there’s no much to be done.

Most obviously, the contingencies for no-deal were put in place for 29 March, so the big leg-work on that front has been done. There was a recognition that those plans would need on-going attention, especially as a short-term contracts for stockpiling come to an end, but the procedural side was taken as being more permanent.

The second message was that Brexit sits within a much wider context of change. Sustainability got a lot of discussion as a factor that would be shaping every aspect of the business cycle in profound ways, from production to packaging to consumption patterns. To listen to the CPO of a large brewer talk about moving from mega-breweries to micro-breweries where customers will bring their own glass to one around the corner was to be struck be a shift that is much more disruptive to practice than what happens to UK membership of the EU.

But the third message was that the ideal posture on all this was agility: being willing and able to jump into new modes and exploit the opportunities that come with change.

I’ll admit that this is where I part company with the procurement crowd, mainly because politics isn’t like business.

One of the great strengths of capitalism has been its willingness to turn over what there is and offer something new, be that a product or a process. If it produces outputs that are more attractive to consumers then it wins out, propagating out and pushing the old to the side, to atrophy and die.

But representative democracy offers a different approach. It allows (indeed, promotes) the competition of ideas, but within a closely-bounded market. Changing the rules of the game requires the buy-in of all involved, because the rules are there to protect everyone’s interests.

All of which explains better why business seems to have moved on when politics hasn’t on Brexit.

The former sees uncertainty and costs and seeks to minimise both: initially that meant generally being pro-Remain, but then switching post-referendum to the likely course of leaving, and more recently talking more about simply making a decision, so that the contingency plans can either be used or rolled up.

Politics also wants to minimise costs, but here the costs are multi-directional: it’s not simply (or even primarily) an economic calculation. The choice itself on whether to leave with a deal, leave without one or no leave at all was follow success in political decision-making: you can’t have all three and then see which is working out best.

If business (or these procurement managers, at least) talk of agility, I’d talk of resilience: how to make political decisions that permit the rules of the game to endure?

This isn’t to criticise business, but to note that it’s all too easy to draw across learning points that don’t really work in a new context.

That said, there is one commonality that informs both worlds: you have to work with what you have. It’s great to dream of a different world where the problems you face don’t exist, but that doesn’t make them go away.

Instead you have take things as they come and build from there. the best path to the world-as-we-want-it-to-be is from the world-as-it-is, not the world-as-we-hoped-it-would-be.

* – To be clear, they’d invited me.

The post A business view of Brexit appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The 2015 European Agenda on Migration envisaged a significant role for FRONTEX, EASO, and EUROPOL, the function to operationally implement the Agenda and closely cooperate in the management of the hotspots established in Italy and Greece. Due to the extraordinary migratory pressure at the external borders of these frontline Member States, FRONTEX, EASO, and EUROPOL were called to support the competent national authorities “on the spot”.

EUROPOL is present in the hotspots and actively participates with FRONTEX and EASO. EUROPOL’s core mission in the hotspots is threefold: to reinforce the exchange of information, verify such intelligence within the relevant databases, and deploy teams of experts on the ground. The objective is to ensure a comprehensive European law enforcement approach and operationally assist the concerned frontline Member States in averting and combating migrant smuggling, human trafficking, and terrorist networks.

To achieve such an objective, EUROPOL is namely responsible for fast-tracking information, improving the national investigations, conducting operational and strategic analysis, being present at the screening of the arrived migrants, and providing forensic support in the hotspots. However, Regulation 2016/794 on EUROPOL does not mention the operational role that the agency plays in the hotspots.

The main tool employed by EUROPOL to assist the concerned Member States in the hotspots was the JOT-MARE, followed by the EMSC. Since February 2016, the EMSC has assisted the competent national enforcement authorities by providing secure-information, sharing opportunities and strategic and operational analysis, gathering evidence, and undertaking investigations against the smuggling networks facilitating the illegal entries, onward secondary movements, and residence of migrants in the EU. Not only is the EMSC active in supporting the national authorities in exchanging intelligence and investigating existing criminal networks operating in the Mediterranean, but EUROPOL’s officials, jointly with FRONTEX and the concerned Member State, also debrief on the migrants at the hotspots and assess the data gathered from the interviews and investigations.

The second activity report of the EMSC details that the Center has assisted the competent national enforcement authorities in cases related to migrant smuggling and document fraud through: forensic support in relation to questioned documents and materials used to produce suspicious documents, on-the-spot technical support to provide assistance and expertise in investigating forged documents and dismantling illegal print shops, and permanent deployments in the hotspots. The officials of EUROPOL deployed in the hotspots offer expertise, coordinate operational meetings, provide analytical support, and perform cross-checks against the databases of the agency (see here).

The key operational novelty of the EMSC, which is not established in Regulation 2016/794 on EUROPOL, consists in deploying investigative and analytical support teams (EMIST and EMAST) on the ground, as well as guest officers to undertake systematic secondary security checks and support Greece in the hotspots. The presence of EUROPOL in the hotspots is permanent and the EMIST and EMAST are responsible for delivering regional operational support and serving as a platform to ensure trustworthy relationships with national authorities.

EUROPOL’s Review 2016-2017 highlights the strong operational capacity provided by the agency in the hotspots and particularly in the secondary security checks undertaken by the deployed officials. Specifically, it is pointed out that “EUROPOL experts worked side-by-side with national authorities at the EU’s external borders to strengthen security checks on the inward flows of migrants, to disrupt migrant smuggling networks and identify suspected terrorists and criminals”.

In the hotspots, EUROPOL advises and operationally assists the competent national enforcement authorities in effectively implementing their executive measures, to both dismantle the smuggling and trafficking networks and to combat other serious criminal activities (i.e. organized crime and terrorism). Despite EUROPOL’s operational role, in the recently adopted Regulation of EUROPOL there is not a single mention of this agency’s operational powers in the hotspots, unlike in the EBCG and the future EUAA Regulations. Hence, the total secrecy surrounding the operational support of EUROPOL in the hotspots and the lack of any legal reference to the activities of the agency on the ground prevent the general public from assessing the actual implications, meaning, and extent of EUROPOL’s operational support.

This lack of transparency was brought to the European Ombudsman in 2017 as part of my PhD research. Unfortunately, on 10 May 2019, the Ombudsman agreed with Europol’s explanation that the disclosure (full and partial) of documents regarding the agency’s operational activities in the Greek and Italian hotspots “would risk prejudicing the effectiveness and the outcome of the ongoing, but also future, operations in the hotspots”.That is, while Europol is undertaking operational activities in the hotspots, citizens cannot have access to what the agency does in practice and to what extent it operationally assists the national authorities in illegal migrant smuggling investigations. This lack of transparency is clearly problematic in order to effectively hold the agency accountable.

The post The Lack of Transparency Surrounding EUROPOL and the Hotspots appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

As Poland is heading for a General Elections in the Autumn this year, both the governing and opposition political parties are treating the European Parliament election, that is only weeks away, as secondary to the General Elections.

Yes, both sides are running a campaign to mobilise their activists and supporters to increase their share of the seat in the EP.

However, as far as I can observe, the primary concern for both sides is whether the EP election results can tell them anything about how well they will do in the autumn elections and if the EP election could be used to galvanise their support bases to attract more votes.

Plus while the governing political party the Law and Justice Party (PiS) escapes from offering any concrete policy proposals to the real issues of Poland in the EU during this election campaign. The opposition political parties are not any better; generally, they miss their focus by paying unnecessary attention to PiS and its shortcomings and somewhat exaggerating their criticisms, instead of putting forward their agenda.

The PiS, which has been in power since 2015, is in constant search of bogeyman in shaping its campaign narrative. Rather than concentrating on the real issues the EU and the Polish government is clashing over.

For instance on the top of the list is the effective application of EU law, from the protection of investments to the mutual recognition of decisions in areas as diverse as child custody disputes or the execution of European Arrest Warrants. The Polish government does also clash with Brussels over environmental protection and migration.

Only in April this year, the European Commission has launched an infringement procedure against Poland regarding the new disciplinary regime for judges. While the government has two months to respond, so far the PiS turned a blind on this.

Instead, Jarosław Kaczyński gave an alarming speech about Euro. He said Poland is not going to join the Euro before its economy is as big as of Germany and demanded that the opposition political parties take a similar stance of his.

As far as his past Eurosceptic policy positions are concerned, this was not a surprise; having made this speech during the EP elections campaign period, however, was not a coincidence.

Since he is not able to campaign on the real issues concerning the future of Poland in the EU, he worked out a way out of this predicament by creating an issue that was not part of the public debate.

At the EU level, it is well known to everyone that there is not an appetite in the EU for the expansion of the Eurozone, but for someone in Poland who is not following daily EU related news might think that joining the Euro can be severe and potentially could jeopardise his or her living standards. Hence Kaczyński would win their vote.

One other issue, which the PiS has lately been vehemently campaigning on, do concern the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities in Poland. Kaczyński’s response to a question about a movie called Kler (The Clergy), a 2018 film, which depicts fictional clerics as drunken child abusers, sparked a debate about the PiS’s position on the LGBT in Poland and how in line it is with the EU’s expected standards.

He said:

“We are dealing with a direct attack on the family and children – the sexualisation of children, that entire LBGT movement, gender. This is imported, but they today threaten our identity, our nation, its continuation and therefore the Polish state.”

Additionally, Rafal Trzaskowski’s, Mayor of Warsaw, approval of the declaration in favour of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights raised the tension.

While politicians are expected to bring people of different backgrounds, sexual orientations, races and religions together, Kaczyński chose to appeal to the religious and conservative sentiments of the Polish voters. In contrast, Kaczyński not only disregarded the real issue, which is the rights of the LGBT communities in Poland but also has thrown the blame on to another agent, in this case, it is the Western countries.

Moving on to the opposition political parties; five of the most prominent opposition political parties including the Civic Platform (PO) as well as the Modern party (Nowoczesna), Polish People’s Party (PSL), Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), and Greens have joined forces in order to challenge the PiS at the EP election, which is called European Coalition.

Either the campaigning tactics used by the opposition alliance group or due to the lack of vision on the opposition’ side, the only campaign slogan that is coming through is “Polexit”, which is ironic because I live on Brexitland, which makes me and my sources of information more susceptible to any talks of having another member states living the EU.

Broadside at the PiS leadership was launched as quick as at the European Coalition’s election campaign takeoff, claiming that the PiS’s policy choices are making Poland close to exit the EU.

For instance, Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of the PO, said: “there is a great choice ahead: either strong, rich, democratic Poland in a strong Europe or what we see today — party state, on its way to leave the EU”.

I believe that the opposition political parties do usually give a good kick to the governing political parties when they utilise their campaign time in explaining to the electorate what they are proposing to do if and when they are elected, instead of attacking the opposition political party head-on.

One reason for this is that the governing political parties are in a better place in being familiar to the electorate since they are in power and they are the decision makers.

Thus either for good or bad, the electorate knows the policy choices of the governing political parties while being vaguely informed of what the opposition political parties are standing for.

Consequently, it would have been in the interest of the Coalition Europe, had they explained to the electorate what they see as the real issues facing Poland, what they propose to do about these problems and how they plan to deliver on these proposals.

Of course, it does not make me an EU legal expert, but in the past few months, I have been researching about the evolution of the EU’s the Rule of Law framework and the new and the existing rule of law governing mechanisms, used by the EU.

So as far as I can understand that there is not a single mechanism that connects the membership of the EU to Rule of Law practice in a member state, which makes the Coalition Europe’s argument about Polexit baseless, ingenious and careless, to say least.

Politics at this level and of this seriousness should be well rehearsed and addressing the real issues, instead of creating one of their own. Only then elections can be won.

The post #EP2019—Insights from Poland: the PiS vs the Coalition Europe (IV) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The Financial Times has published an article which provides the raw truth for the Remain movement: Britain’s Remainers are too divided.

It’s something I have been complaining about for some years. My disappointment in the inability of Remainers to work effectively together has moved to frustration, to anger, and now to resigned despair. Truly, deep, despair.

By not working together, we are giving a bigger chance of a crushing victory to the direct enemy of Remain, Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’, which we should be under no illusion, has enormous and unbridled ambitions to turn our country into an isolated, nasty, right-wing state.

Three years before the referendum, I asked Dirk Hazell, leader of the strongly pro-Remain European People’s Party in the UK (UK EPP) what he thought would be the likely scenario if there was a referendum in which Brexit won. He replied:

“England would get more like Spain under the dictator Franco, but with worse weather.”

At the time, I thought this was ridiculously far-fetched. Now, I am not so sure. The threat of the far-right in the UK is serious, but I fear that it is not being taken seriously enough.

The Remain parties and groups, being splintered, ego-driven, brand-orientated and power-hungry, have hopelessly underestimated the threat of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

Remainers lack a true realisation that only by working together, with a common cause, can there be the greatest chance of decisively defeating both Farage and Brexit.

Credit needs to be given to the LibDems for reaching out to the other pro-Remain parties to try and achieve some sort of collaboration, but their overtures were rebuffed.

It was Nigel Farage that caused the referendum to happen in the first place.

He promised “an earthquake” before the previous European elections in 2014, and he delivered. His UKIP party won that election with more MEP seats than any other UK party.

Consequently, the Tories, terrified that UKIP would steal their power base, responded by promising an in/out EU referendum in their manifesto for the general election in the following year, 2015 (which David Cameron never expected to win outright).

Labour and the LibDems did not offer a referendum, and if Labour had won the 2015 election, we would not now be on the road to Brexit.

Brexit was never previously a mainstream call in the years and decades leading up to the referendum. Leavers were always only in a minority, on the far extremes and side-lines of the Tory and Labour Parties.

Now, they are in charge.

Most people in Britain don’t want Brexit, they never did. Only a minority of registered voters voted for Leave (just 37%).

In most democracies across the world that hold referendums, such a minority vote could never have resulted in Leave winning, as a minimum threshold, or ‘super majority’, would have been required for a Brexit victory.

Now, all polls show that more people in Britain want us to Remain in the EU than leave.
That’s been the case in over 60 consecutive polls from different organisations since the 2017 general election: Britain doesn’t want Brexit. It’s most unlikely that all those polls could be wrong.

Yet, a low turnout in the European elections, combined with a divided, splintered front by the Remain movement, could give an unnecessary win to the Brexit Party.

Yes, the European elections are run on a form of proportional representation in the UK, but not a very good version of it.

You don’t get a second or third choice. You can only vote for one party. With several Remain parties represented on your ballot paper, it means that some Remain parties may not even reach the minimum threshold needed to get a seat.

Hugo Dixon, editor of Infacts, argues that a key test will be the total number of votes cast for all five Remain parties taken together. That will give a good indication of how strong the popular momentum is behind staying in the EU, he says.

But it will be seats that truly count, more than the number of votes, and if the five Remain parties had agreed to work together in the European elections, they could have got many more seats for the same number of votes.

It’s a truly lost opportunity.

The polling company, YouGov, has calculated that if an anti-Brexit pact had been formed between the LibDems, the Greens and Change UK for the European election, in say a notional 6-seat constituency, the pro-Remain alliance would have won two seats, the same as the Brexit party.

Instead, YouGov argues, without an anti-Brexit alliance, the Brexit party will take three seats in such a constituency, Labour two and the Conservatives one.

As the Financial Times reported:

‘The forthcoming European elections ought to be a golden opportunity for British politicians who want a second referendum and, ultimately, a reversal of the Brexit process.

‘But unfortunately for the Remain side, it’s an opportunity that is not being fully grasped.

‘With a little under two weeks to polling day, most of the campaigning momentum lies with Nigel Farage and his slick Brexit party.

‘His movement is united around his image; it is focused on an unrelenting message about a hard Brexit; and it is attracting large numbers of disillusioned Conservatives to big rallies.’

The newspaper added:

‘By contrast, there are no fewer than five parties across the UK advocating Remain and a second referendum. These are the Liberal Democrats, Change UK, the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru. And thus far they are making a lot less noise.’

Of course, the pro-Remain ‘noise’ could be much louder and more effective if allies worked together.

A serious example of ‘not-working-together’ is the failure of pro-Remain parties to coalesce around a single candidate in the forthcoming Peterborough by-election on 6 June.

It was thought that pro-Remain parties would all support Femi Oluwole, a young and dynamic Remainer activist. But the accord fell through.

Remainers need to practice the ideology of the European Union: working together.

Why have Remainers learnt so little since the catastrophic loss of the referendum in 2016, that frankly, Remain should have won, if only they had been better organised, and united?

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The truth is out: the EU does not exist. It’s a hoax, made up by a vast conspiracy. I have evidence. You can look it up on my Facebook page.

I always believed that the story of a French foreign affairs minister proposing a coal and steel community under a yet-to-be defined supranational high authority (a what?) lacked all credibility.

What I suspected is now revealed to be true: I can finally confirm the Schuman Declaration is fake news. It never took place. Turns out Mister Schuman had well planned to read out his text, based on the draft by Jean Monnet, but he was prevented from doing so in the last minute.

It all started with a tweet by the leader of the ‘National Alliance’, the country’s main opposition party, which revealed what the government had plotted in all secrecy: ‘HOW SCHUMAN THE TRAITOR FOOLS THE PEOPLE – MINERS AND STEELWORKERS SOLD TO THE GERMANS!!!’. It went viral in no time.

Simultaneously, a video was anonymously uploaded on YouTube, a short edited clip showing Jean Monnet in government circles in London, Washington, and Bonn. The pictures were accompanied by a voice-over describing the conspiracy instigated by this ‘citizen of nowhere’ portrayed as ‘lobbyist on the payroll of the global business élites’. Shared by a multitude of Facebook feeds and WhatsApp groups, it accumulated hundreds of thousands of hits in a few days only.

On the news channels and late-night shows, the polemic went wild. Experts, politicians and the usual talking heads came together in rightful indignation about the government’s dangerous initiative. One of the country’s best-known TV pundits shook his head in disbelief: ‘A supranational coal and steel community! They really have lost all sense of reality. Tomorrow they’ll come up with a single market, then they’ll propose open borders, and why not a common currency while we’re at it?’

In the surveys, Mister Schuman’s popularity reached unprecedented lows. The pollsters provided robust evidence of the French public’s growing distrust towards their political leaders, who were about to sell out the French social model and its entire industrial culture.

The final blow was dealt by one the most influential editorialists, for whom this ‘so-called proposition by Mister Schuman’ was nothing short of ‘the ultimate triumph of the ultra-liberalist ideology promoted by unelected technocrats like Mister Monnet’.

Facing spontaneous demonstrations in several cities calling for the immediate resignation of the government, as well as an online petition launched by the ‘France souveraine’ movement and signed by tens of thousands of angry citizens, Robert Schuman finally gave in and cancelled the conference initially scheduled for 9 May 1950.

This is the naked truth, whatever the #FakeNews want us to believe.

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The people of the United Kingdom are lucky that they have a chance to vote in the Euopean parliamentary elections of 2019. If Theresa May and the Brexit wing of her party had had their way, then the United Kingdom would have left the EU on 29th March this year, excluding the British people from the opportunity to participate in European democracy. However the debate during the European election campaign must go beyond whether the UK leaves or stays in the EU, because the threat of climate change is even more dangerous than Brexit.

British participation in the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCHJU) is essential if the United Kingdom wants to fight climate change and build a post carbon economic future for itself. If the UK leaves the EU, then it is difficult to see how the country could continue being involved with the FCHJU, which is a European partnership. The purpose of the FCHJU is to make clean energy a reality, improve air quality, and reduce CO2 emissions by implementing hydrogen technologies coupled to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, tidal, and wave power, while at the same time developing a new industry which will create employment.

The key to this new industry is “green hydrogen” produced by electrolysis using electricity from renewable sorces. Today modern PEM electrolysers allow electricity to be stored as hydrogen, so the energy source can be used when the supply from renewables does not meet demand. Research projects funded by the FCHJU have allowed electrolysers to become more powerful and efficient. According to a brochure produced by the FCHJU: “The second strand relates to FCHJU projects that have demonstrated the increasing power of electrolysers. This has risen from 100 KW, with project Don Quichote in 2011, to 6MW in the 2016 H2Future project.”

We are living through a hydrogen technology revolution, which is going to make diesel and petrol burning internal combustion engines obsolete, as more and more cars are built in the form of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). If the United Kingdom is not a partner in the process, it will be left behind. When a Japanese car manufacturer is looking for a location to build FCEVs for the European market, it will choose a country involved in the FCHJU, because the FCHJU is a collaborative partnership of the European Commission, industry, and research, which is developing hydrogen transport and refuelling infrastructure.

The United Kingdom’s involvement with the FCHJU is essential in order for the country to meet its net-zero-emissions targets by 2050. Several important projects in the UK have already benefitted from FCHJU finding such as the BIG HIT project on Orkney. BIG HIT works in partnership with the European Marine Energy Centre Ltd (EMEC) in Orkney. The Orkney Islands are already self sufficient in electricity produced by tidal and wave power. BIG HIT follows on from the Orkney Surf n’ Turf initiative, producing hydrogen from wind and tidal energy using a 1MW capacity electrolyser on Shapinsay and a 0.5MW electrolyser on Eday. The hydrogen is then stored as a high pressure gas in tube-trailers which are transported by ferry to Kirkwell, where the gas is used to heat and power buildings and as fuel for a fleet of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles used by Orkney Islands Council.

Only political parties that are committed to the UK remaining within the EU could make a positive contribution to politicies that will help Europe fight climate change. The policy of the Eurpean Parliament should be to phase out all fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas across Europe before 2050. This can only be achieved if new green industies are created in the former coal and steel industrial regions of Europe to create employment and save the environment. The first policy of the newly elected European Parliament should be to ban shale gas fracking in Europe, and allow the green hydrogen industry to grow as part of the energy transition process.

Sources

https://www.fch.europa.eu/publications/fch-ju-success-stories

http://www.emec.org.uk/research/hydrogen-projects/

https://www.bighit.eu/about“>

https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/net-zero-the-uks-contribution-to-stopping-global-warming/

https://h2revive.eu/

http://www.itm-power.com/

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2019

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Those who don’t think 16-year-olds should have a vote, should listen to the powerful and awe inspiring speech by the 16-year-old climate change activist, Greta Thunberg.

Then, you might consider, that not only are 16-year-olds capable of voting; they are more capable of leading the world than many of our current leaders.

In a rousing speech to MEPs and officials at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week, the teenage campaigner berated EU leaders for holding three emergency summits on Brexit and none on the threat posed by climate change.

Greta, the founder of the climate change school strike movement that’s gone global, said if politicians were serious about tackling climate change, they would not spend all their time “talking about taxes or Brexit”.

She added that politicians were failing to take enough action on climate change and the threats to the natural world, which could mean our way of life being destroyed by 2030.

“Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly because at the moment they are not,” the 16-year old schoolgirl from Sweden told the standing room-only meeting.

“If our house was falling apart our leaders wouldn’t go on like we do today,” she said.

“If our house was falling apart, you wouldn’t hold three emergency Brexit summits and no emergency summit regarding the breakdown of the climate and the environment.”

She said politicians told her that they could not do anything too dramatic on climate change because it would be “unpopular” with voters.

“They are right of course,” said Greta, “because most people are not even aware why those changes are required.”

She added:

“That’s why I keep telling you to unite behind the science; make the best available science at the heart of politics and democracy.”

Now, if only grown-up politicians would act like that, what a better world we’d have.

It’s unlikely that we would now even be on the road to Brexit, because there’s no science or evidence to support it.

Instead, we would be putting massive resources behind a serious, co-odinated, world-wide effort to tackle climate change before it really is too late.

Just as this 16-year-old has urgently demanded.

Greta continued:

“The EU elections are coming up soon, and many of us who would be affected the most by this crisis, people like me, are not allowed to vote.”

She added:

“You need to listen to us, those who cannot vote. You need to vote for us, for your children and grandchildren.”

And in her concluding comments, that inspired a 30-second standing ovation, Greta said with a trembling voice:

“It’s ok if you refuse to listen to me, I am after all just a 16-year-old school girl from Sweden.

“But you cannot ignore the scientists, or the science, or the millions of school striking children, who are striking for the right to a future.

“I beg you, please do not fail on this.”

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Power to gas technology could go further to save the environment from fossil fuel emmissions, by increasing the use of clean fuel from sources of wind, solar and tidal power in rural areas. Companies such as ITM Power in the United Kingdom are already manufacturing electrolyser systems used for power to gas storage and hydrogen refuelling stations, but there are still many new opportunities for how this technology could be used in agriculture.

If the hydrogen fuel station could be brought to the farm yard or the village, then it could serve both the needs of local transport as well as agricultural vehicles and equipment. At the moment few manufacturers of tractors are aware of the full potential of hydrogen fuel cell technology for their industry, but it is worth looking at how hydrogen to electric power is being used in other heavy vehicle applications.

The REVIVE (Refuse Vehicle Innovation and Validation in Europe) project has developed 15 hydrogen fuel cell refuse trucks in 8 different cities across Europe. The cities involved in the project are Breda; Helmond; Amsterdam; Groningen; Antwerp; South Tyrol (Bolzano and Merano); and Freiburg. The trucks built for this project are useful, because they carry out their tasks of waste disposal, as well as being zero emission heavy duty vehicles, which means they do not run on diesel or any other fossil fuel, so they can meet the challenges of climate change and air polution. This project is funded by the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 Joint Undertaking (FCH2JU), a public private partnership supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the New European Research Grouping on Fuel Cells and Hydrogen (N. ERGHY), and Hydrogen Europe.

According to the project’s website h2revive.eu: “Most refuse trucks operate from a single depot, allowing them to be incorporated into captive fleets. This improves the utilisation of local hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, and thus the infrastructure’s economics.”

If heavy duty vehicles can operate from a single depot, then likewise a farm yard that has a hydrogen refuelling facility on site – powered by a wind turbine, solar panels or biomass plant – could easily provide the fuel needs of the farm’s hydrogen fuel cell powered tractors. The storage of hydrogen energy from renewable energy sources is ideal for decentralized infrastructure, which could provide the electricty supply to a rural community.

Sources

https://h2revive.eu/

http://www.itm-power.com/

©Jolyon Gumbrell 2019

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Esta entrada resume el capítulo publicado por la Fundación Alternativas el 1 de abril de 2019

 

La “crisis de los refugiados” ha expuesto las divergencias existentes entre los Estados miembros en la aplicación efectiva y uniforme de las leyes y políticas de la UE adoptadas en materia de migración, asilo y gestión de fronteras. Entre las medidas presentadas por la UE para hacer frente a este déficit de implementación nacional se encuentra la transformación de la Agencia Europea para la Gestión de la Cooperación Operativa en las Fronteras Exteriores de los Estados miembros de la Unión (FRONTEX) en la Guardia Europea de Fronteras y Costas (GEFC), el refuerzo del mandato de la Oficina Europea de Policía (EUROPOL), la promoción de la cooperación interinstitucional operativa de estas agencias descentralizadas sobre el terreno a través del enfoque de los hotspots y el desarrollo de una operación militar naval (EUNAVFOR MED SOPHIA) con el fin de desarticular las redes de trata y tráfico ilícito de migrantes que operan en el Mediterráneo.

La “crisis de los refugiados” a su vez revela el creciente nexo entre el Espacio de Libertad, Seguridad y Justicia (ELSJ) y la Política Común de Seguridad y Defensa (PCSD), así como la necesidad de establecer una coordinación reforzada entre la dimensión interna y externa de seguridad a nivel europeo. Esto es, se precisa de una PCSD capaz de hacer frente a las amenazas externas para garantizar la efectiva seguridad interna de la UE y un sistema de seguridad interno que promueva el desarrollo de políticas externas de seguridad. Si bien la PCSD fue en sus orígenes diseñada como una herramienta centrada en gestionar aquellas crisis que aconteciesen fuera del territorio de la UE, lo que excluía cualquier cuestión de seguridad interna, la seguridad está actualmente experimentando una significativa volatilidad e hibridación tal y como el terrorismo, la inestabilidad en los territorios vecinos de la UE, el tráfico ilícito de migrantes o la “crisis de los refugiados” ejemplifican. El carácter transfronterizo de estos desafíos acentúa la actual inseparabilidad entre la seguridad interna y externa y la necesidad de promover una mayor coherencia entre el ELSJ y la PCSD.

La “crisis de los refugiados” ha revelado que la garantización de la seguridad en las fronteras de la UE exige una mayor coordinación y coherencia de actuación entre todos los actores implicados. Estamos ante desafíos híbridos o esencialmente transfronterizos que no solo exigen el desarrollo de vínculos reforzados entre la dimensión interna y externa de seguridad, sino que también suponen un cambio en la concepción clásica de soberanía nacional pues la gestión efectiva de las fronteras y de los flujos migratorios exige la promoción de la solidaridad y una respuesta coordinada a nivel europeo. Así, el papel operativo de estas agencias se ha visto reforzado, presentan un mayor peso en la asistencia operativa a los Estados miembros, así como en su capacidad de actuación fuera del territorio de la UE y colaboración con misiones militares de la UE como EUNAVFOR MED SOPHIA.

EUNAVFOR MED SOPHIA es la primera misión militar naval de la UE centrada en el fenómeno migratorio. Si bien la operación ha sido criticada por su falta de transparencia, por no abordar las verdaderas causas del tráfico ilícito de migrantes y la trata y por la discutible consecución de sus ambiciosos objetivos, es previsible que nuevas operaciones militares de la PCSD se diseñen y desarrollen en el ámbito de la migración, la gestión de fronteras exteriores y el desmantelamiento de las redes de tráfico y la trata. Asimismo, si bien la cooperación entre las agencias del ELSJ y las misiones de la PCSD es aún incipiente, esta se desarrollará con mayor peso en el futuro bien mediante una mayor “militarización” de estas agencias descentralizadas de la UE, o bien mediante la difuminación de los tradicionales contornos entre la seguridad interna o externa ante desafíos que ya no pueden responderse desde una concepción clásica de soberanía nacional sino desde una cooperación reforzada ante retos transnacionales.

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This post first appeared at the Open Migration Project

 

The so-called “refugee crisis” prompted the urge to ensure the functioning of the Schengen area and the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the need to operationally assist those Member States most affected by the sudden and extraordinary arrival of mixed migratory flows, and the convenience to effectively and uniformly implement the European Union (EU) measures adopted in regards to migration, asylum and border management matters. Among the foremost measures put forward at the EU level to cope with this implementation deficit was the creation of the European Border and Coast Guard (EBCG) and the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), the reinforcement of EUROPOL’s mandate, and the promotion of their operational inter-agency cooperation on the ground through the “hotspot approach”.

In 2016 EUROPOL’s mandate was strengthened, FRONTEX was transformed into the EBCG, and the European Commission put forward the creation of the EUAA. Although a partial agreement on the future EUAA has already been reached between the Council and the European Parliament, the Regulation repealing EASO has not yet been adopted. The new legal frameworks shift the reasoning of these agencies’ powers and move from a reactive to a proactive approach. That is, their operational tasks shall not only center on assisting the Member States and enhancing their coordination, but also preventing potential national vulnerabilities that may subsequently lead to an untenable scenario for the competent national authorities. Regulation 2016/794 vests a nascent operational role to EUROPOL by determining that the agency may facilitate the investigation’s information exchange, provide extensive analytical support, deploy its mobile offices, and exchange in real-time and immediately cross-check against EUROPOL’s databases the information gathered. In addition, on 22 February 2016, EUROPOL launched the European Migrant Smuggling Center (EMSC). This center aims to proactively support EU Member States in dismantling criminal networks involved in organized migrant smuggling.

The recently established EBCG and the future EUAA may require the competent national border and asylum authorities to effectively implement EU law and to take immediate action under emergency situations. The EBCG and the EUAA may even intervene in the territory of the Member States to ensure that the EU border management and asylum measures are applied, and that the Schengen area and the CEAS are not ultimately jeopardized. In particular, Regulation 2016/1624 delegates the EBCG greater technical and operational competences. The EBCG may acquire its own technical equipment and have a Rapid Reaction Pool of at least 1,500 border guards to be deployed immediately in joint operations or rapid border interventions. Significantly, the EBCG is also empowered to monitor the effective functioning of the external borders of the Member States, carry out vulnerability assessments, verify whether a Member State is able to effectively enforce EU law and detect deficiencies in the management of its borders.

The future EUAA will be in charge of organizing and coordinating the appropriate operational support in cases where the national asylum and reception systems are subject to exceptional pressure. An asylum reserve pool of a minimum of 500 persons should be made available by the Member States for their immediate deployment and should assist those national authorities subject to extraordinary migratory pressure. Another significant novelty in comparison to the EASO will be the involvement of the future EUAA in the examination of international protection applications. This means that, while decisions on individual applications for asylum remain the Member States’ sole responsibility, the future EUAA, upon the request of a Member State, will be able to draft decisions on asylum applications.

Moreover, as a result of the “refugee crisis” of unprecedented dimensions, the European Commission adopted on 13 May 2015 the European Agenda on Migration. The Agenda aimed to design a common strategy in which the Member States, the EU institutions, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) agencies, international organizations, civil society, local authorities and third countries are all involved in a coordinated manner. Among all these actors, FRONTEX, EASO and EUROPOL were mandated to play a key inter-agency operational role at the hotspots.

In the hotspots, EUROPOL’s guest officers are in charge of identifying risk profiles, performing second-line security checks, and providing analytical and investigation support to dismantle smuggling and trafficking in human beings networks. EUROPOL’s officials, jointly with the EBCG and the concerned Member State, also debrief the arrived migrants at the hotspots. EASO assists the national asylum authorities by informing the arriving migrants, as well as identifying, registering and relocating applicants for international protection. The experts and technical equipment deployed by the EBCG in the hotspots facilitate national sea border surveillance and search and rescue operations. The EBCG also assists the national authorities in disembarking, screening, registering, identifying, fingerprinting, debriefing and assessing the nationality of the arriving migrants, as well as facilitating and coordinating the return operations of those migrants with no right to remain in the EU. Despite the secrecy surrounding the specific functions and the extent of the hands-on support that FRONTEX, EASO, and EUROPOL develop de facto in the hotspots, these agencies notably strain their vague legal mandates, and their operational tasks go well beyond the pure technical assistance and promotion of coordination.

Firstly, article 5 Regulation 2016/1624 on the EBCG states that Member States “retain primary responsibility for the management of their sections of the external borders” and that “the Agency shall support the application of Union measures relating to the management of the external borders by reinforcing, assessing and coordinating the actions of Member States in the implementation of those measures and in return”. However, FRONTEX, in practice, aids in determining the nationality of the disembarked or rescued migrants, and exerts a crucial influence over the Greek officials, who, due to the extraordinary migratory pressure they are subject to, may in practice base their final decision entirely on FRONTEX’ assessment. FRONTEX’ strong recommendatory powers may have a very significant effect on a potential incorrect registration regarding the nationality of an irregular migrant, since a nationality screening largely determines and directly impacts the subsequent procedures of relocation, asylum, and return of the irregular migrants in the hotspots.

Secondly, according to article 4(1)(c) Regulation 2016/794 on EUROPOL, the agency shall “coordinate, organize and implement investigative and operational actions to support and strengthen actions by the competent authorities of the Member States”. Whereas EUROPOL’s primary mission shall center on exchanging information and generating criminal intelligence, under the hotspot approach the agency also deploys guest officers on the ground, conducts second-line security checks, participates in debriefing the arriving migrants, and through the EMSC, operationally supports the competent national enforcement authorities in their investigations. Despite EUROPOL’s operational role, in the recently adopted Regulation of EUROPOL there is not a single mention of this agency’s operational powers in the hotspots. Hence, the total secrecy surrounding the operational support of EUROPOL in the hotspots and the lack of any legal reference to the activities of the agency on the ground prevent the general public from assessing the actual implications, meaning, and extent of EUROPOL’s operational support.

Lastly, Regulation 439/2010 of EASO indicates that the agency “should have no direct or indirect powers in relation to the taking of decisions by Member States’ asylum authorities on individual applications for international protection” (recital 14). Nonetheless, EASO primarily focuses on informing the irregular migrants of asylum and relocation procedures and facilitating the analysis of asylum applications to the national authorities in the Italian hotspots. However, since the adoption of the EU-Turkey statement and the Greek Law 4375/2016, the agency is also in charge of registering and conducting the interviews of the applicants for international protection in the Greek hotspots.

In addition, while EASO is conducting asylum interviews, it also identifies vulnerable cases and forwards them to the Greek asylum office, which ultimately confirms the existence of such vulnerability. EASO’s assessment of vulnerability is not trivial, but rather carries significant consequences for the applicant of international protection. If a deployed expert of EASO, who is undertaking an asylum interview, does not identify or wrongly classifies an applicant as non-vulnerable, the case will follow the fast-track border procedure, which provides fewer guarantees.In other words, until the future Regulation on the EUAA enters into force, the agency’s power to autonomously conduct the asylum interviews and draft an admissibility recommendation to the Greek Asylum Service will openly exceed the initial mandate of Regulation 439/2010, establishing EASO. The experts deployed by EASO in the Greek hotspots are operating in a legal limbo, in which it is unclear as to the extent of their specific operational responsibility and as to whether the procedural safeguards of the Greek legislation apply to them when examining the admissibility of asylum applications.

Therefore, while the Regulations of these AFSJ agencies continue to stress that their operational role is limited to providing the competent national authorities with the technical assistance they may require, the tasks of the EBCG, EASO, and to a more limited extent, EUROPOL, have a clear operational nature on the ground. These agencies gradually steer and shape the effective and uniform implementation of EU migration, asylum, and border management laws and policies at the national and local level. The reinforcement of the operational tasks and implementation role of the EBCG, EASO, and EUROPOL is not in itself an issue. What is problematic, however, is the broad formulation of these AFSJ agencies’ legal bases and the lack of transparency surrounding their operational activities and cooperation, rendering the task of determining the degree of discretion that they enjoy difficult. It thus remains to be seen to what extent EUROPOL, the EBCG and the future EUAA will openly interpret their supervisory and intervention capacity, and whether the EU rules and policies on border management and asylum will ultimately be more effectively and uniformly implemented.

The post Frontex, Easo and Europol: From a Secondary to a Pivotal Operational Role in the Aftermath of the “Refugee Crisis” appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

On Tuesday 9 April, Brussels will host the 21st EU-China summit. This time around, the underlying tone of the meetings may be slightly different than before, following the recent “Strategic Vision” submitted by the Commission to the Council.

In its relations with the People’s Republic of China the EU is said to be unable to speak with one voice. It’s true that the recent decision of the Italian government to officially join the Belt and Road Initiative, or the eagerness with which several Central and Eastern European member-states have embraced China’s offer in an association known as the ‘16+1’, do not exactly point in the direction of a joint European position.

This makes the ‘strategic vision’ published by the Commission on 12 March all the more interesting. The document has been widely commented upon, which is no surprise, given that it clearly takes no precautions to avoid hurting Chinese sensitivities. Identifying the PRC as a ‘systemic rival’ and openly reminding the extent to which its commitment to multilateralism is very ‘selective’ comes close to a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in attitude and tone, as François Godemont put it in a recent post.

The rather dense document of eleven pages seems to spell the end of a certain European naïveté in its dealings with a major power that is simultaneously referred to as ‘cooperation partner’ and ‘economic competitor’. It lists a whole series of usual demands, for more reciprocity and fair-play, which at last should ‘demonstrate China’s commitment to a mutually beneficial economic relationship’. A sentence that certainly sounds almost aggressive to Chinese ears.

Where does this spectacular turnaround come from? Tracing back the origin of some wordings in the Commission’s paper, we are tempted to link this change of strategy to a change of awareness and, consequently, doctrine in Germany.

To put it bluntly, Germany is scared.

Scared to lose its position as major global industrial player, to be overtaken in tomorrow’s most important economic sectors, and to lose its prosperity on the way.

A policy paper published in January by the German Industrial Federation (BDI), bears the very term ‘systemic competitor’ already in its title. Asking ‘How Do We Deal with China’s State-Controlled Economy?’, the entire 23-page document is a call to Europe, punctuated by a list of 54 demands and propositions, to formulate a genuine European industrial policy in face of a ‘partner’ that is increasingly depicted as an ‘adversary’.

As early as February, this policy paper was followed by the publication of ‘Strategic guidelines for a German and European industrial policy’ for 2030 by the Federal Ministry of Economics headed by Peter Altmaier. This text, too, is very explicit about the efficiency of the PRC’s ‘Made in China 2025’ agenda and the threat it poses to ‘the industrial and technological sovereignty of our economy’. And it breaks with the traditional liberal doctrine by calling for massive public interventions in protecting German and European economic interests against China’s state capitalism. It also makes it clear that ‘German industrial policy must always be European industrial policy’, and that ‘the European Union needs a Council of Industrial Ministers’ in the near future.

All this is rather new and might be interpreted as a “Mitterrand U-turn Moment”, though in reversal, and coming from Berlin. Nonetheless, it is perfectly in line with what leading voices in Germany have been requesting for some years now, especially after the purchase of the robotics firm Kuka by the Chinese company Midea in 2016. Economic leaders like Jörg Wuttke, for instance, the former president of the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, have repeatedly asked for a change in attitude among German policy-makers (see here or here). The same can be said about a new generation of researchers on contemporary China, who, according to a recent article by the GPPI’s Thorsten Benner, cast an increasingly critical and disillusioned eye on Xi Jinping’s neo-Maoist China rather than apply old perspectives of exotism and exceptionalism.

It is possible that Germany has been cradled until a few years ago in the certainty of systemic superiority, like in the good old times of the Cold War when « Wandel durch Annäherung » – change through rapprochement – was based on the firm conviction that its Social Market Economy, anchored in a liberal, pluralistic democracy, would simply win in the long run.

Not any more.

There seems to be a growing awareness in Germany today that what worked with its small Eastern German neighbours, will not be successful with the huge Chinese steamroller. Quite the contrary: it seems to be dawning on German policy-makers that in this new systemic competition, China might be the winner, by its sheer force and the ruthlessness of its governance. As Peter Altmaier has it in the above-mentioned paper: “this would have dramatic consequences for our way of life”.

Visibly inspired by a change of mind in Berlin, the new ‘strategic vision’ from Brussels suggests that, more than ever, the German political class, across the ‘Grand Coalition’, sees the European Union as an indispensable multiplier of its own power resources on the global stage. In a world of increased great power competition and big data, scale is again paramount. Germany cannot make it alone, it needs the full weight of Europe behind.

It also shows that in the quest for a ‘Europe that protects’, especially against external threats to its free-market model, the Merkel government is more aligned with Emmanuel Macron’s vision than it used to be (the words ‘protect’ or ‘protection’ appear thirteen times in the French president’s recent letter to all European citizens).

In this perspective, the unprecedented staging of Xi Jinping’s recent state visit to Paris, to which Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker were invited, definitely makes sense. And so does the new Treaty of Aachen (officially ‘Treaty on Franco-German Cooperation and Integration’) signed in January, and which may well turn out to be a new joint leadership impetus rather than a ‘weak’ and ‘exclusive’ symbol as some commentators wanted to have it).

It remains more than doubtful whether Germany and France will be able to get a significant majority of other member-states on board in their new China strategy. But while the UK is absorbed in its self-mutilation and the Italian government overbids itself in provocations for reasons of internal power struggles, the Franco-German tandem at least offers a tentative road map.

Having said that, Franco-German impetus is indispensable, but certainly not sufficient. If a European industrial policy is to work, it needs to be inclusive. The centres of decision making of the future European champions and innovation hubs cannot only be concentrated in Paris, Berlin, Stuttgart and Munich. The European “G2” needs to work with other key partners in the north and the south, starting with The Netherlands and Spain, and make sure it remains open to other countries who want to join in this more strategic endeavour. If it fails to be convincing, many will be tempted to abandon the EU core and drift towards Beijing and/or Washington.

Albrecht Sonntag is Professor at ESSCA School of Management
and Miguel Otero-Iglesias is Senior Analyst at Elcano Royal Institute

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