European Union

Spain's beleaguered top anti-corruption prosecutor Manuel Moix has admitted that he co-owns an offshore company in tax haven Panama but says he sees no reason for this to have any repercussions. Spanish commentators describe his behaviour as impudent and call for his resignation.

When new elections were announced in the UK it looked like Prime Minister Theresa May's victory was a sure thing. But the Tories' 23-point lead against Labour has melted away, and a week before voting day tensions are running high. Commentators point to weaknesses in May's campaign in particular.

Emmanuel Macron received Vladimir Putin at the start of the week against the magnificent backdrop of Versailles Palace. In the fight against terrorism and the Ukraine conflict the French and Russian presidents saw potential for cooperation. But Paris will not let any more chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians go unanswered, Macron stressed.

Most people remember the first news reports on the political unrest in Syria in 2011. After the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, it was merely a matter of time before Syrians would take to the streets and demand the resignation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Within weeks, the uprisings escalated into a fully-fledged civil conflict. Fighting broke out between the Syrian government, opposition forces, Sunni Arab rebel groups, the Kurds, al-Nusra and Daesh (Islamic State). To date, more than 465,000 people have died; more than ten million civilians have had to leave their homes.

Not many people know that extreme droughts and bad agricultural planning in Syria between 2006 and 2010 led to the collapse of the agricultural sector in the north-east of the country. It forced 1.5 million unskilled farmers to migrate to the cities, and it is broadly seen as a contributing factor to the civil unrest. Six years since the conflict began, policymakers in the region and in the West urgently need to give the issue of climate-induced migration the attention it deserves.

Traditionally, the agricultural system in north-eastern Syria produces more than 65% of the country’s crop yield. The region is heavily dependent on rain: more than two-thirds of water for agriculture comes from a six-month rain period each year. The rest of the water comes from irrigation and groundwater. The variability of year-to-year rainfall adds to the importance of groundwater reserves.

“More research is needed on the climatic drivers of civil unrest”

During the presidency of Hafiz Assad (Bashar Assad’s father) from 1971 to 2000, the country increased its dependence on agricultural production and started to exploit land and water resources. This led to depletion of the groundwater and made agricultural success even more reliant on weather conditions. When the country was hit by extreme drought in 2006, it had a huge impact on agriculture. The lack of rainfall and high temperatures caused the soil to dry out, and there was no groundwater to compensate this.

This was not the first time drought had occurred in Syria. Since 1931 the Fertile Crescent (a band of territory stretching across the top of the Arabian peninsula, from the Nile Valley to the Persian Gulf) has witnessed a 13% drop in winter rainfall, and droughts have occurred occasionally. But the 2006 drought came relatively quickly after the 1998-2001 drought, from which the agricultural sector had only just recovered. The 2006 drought also lasted longer than previous dry spells, causing the harvest to fail year-on-year.

The effects of the drought were not limited to agriculture. Vegetation for grazing became scarcer, causing herders to lose large parts of their livestock and forcing them to sell some of the remaining animals to pay for feed. As market prices were heavily influenced by the drought, prices for livestock were low while prices for food and seed increased. This happened at a time when food subsidies for farmers were abolished due to a fall in Syria’s oil revenue and as part of Assad’s new liberal market policy.

In 2009, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) published a Syria Drought Response Plan, following remarks by the Syrian agriculture minister that the economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with’. Unfortunately, to date only 33.4% of the plan has been funded ‒ not enough to assist the herders and farmers and prevent a mass migration to the cities, as some 1.5 million Syrians from the north-eastern region migrated to Damascus, Aleppo and other urban areas.

These cities had already had to absorb more than one million refugees from Iraq in 2006, and so the new wave of refugees settled on the edges of the cities, where living conditions were poor and access to employment limited. The new influx of people also placed a huge strain on urban water supplies, which added to existing political unrest.

“The Syrian drought is one example of climate change as a threat multiplier”

In March 2015 climate scientist Colin Kelley published an article in which he compared models of greenhouse gas emissions from human interference with rising temperatures in the Fertile Crescent. He concluded that the increase in greenhouse gases due to human activity had an impact on the duration and severity of the drought. This is worrying. But what is more disturbing is that Kelley’s study and climate models by the International Panel on Climate Change suggest that this region will become drier in the future, as greenhouse gas concentrations continue. In fact, some studies suggest that the entire Fertile Crescent is likely to disappear by the end of the 21st century because of human-induced climate change.

This terrifying prospect requires that the phenomenon of climate refugees is taken seriously. The Syrian case demonstrates how dangerous climate change can be when it affects vulnerable populations in countries that are not resilient to changing weather conditions and mass migration. High vulnerability to rainfall and temperatures due to unsustainable agricultural policies led to the migration of unskilled labour to cities that lacked urban and infrastructural planning, adding to political instabilities.

The Syrian drought is one example of climate change as a threat multiplier. Droughts, limited natural resources and mass migration will be extra burdens on existing difficulties. Accommodating refugees regionally is only possible if resources are available to house and feed them. As temperatures continue to rise, more parts of the Middle East will become uninhabitable.

More research is needed on the climatic drivers of civil unrest. But for now, it is crucial that countries most affected by climate change, as well as nations in the global North, take the phenomenon of climate refugees seriously and develop effective emergency plans for the migration of climate refugees.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – Joel Bombardier

The post Syria shows it’s time to take climate migration seriously appeared first on Europe’s World.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

On 8 June, SEDE will consider the draft report by Bodil Valero (Greens-EFA, Sweden) on "Arms export: the implementation of Common Position 2008/944/CFSP". The EU collectively is the second largest arms supplier in the world (with 26% of all sales) and the Common Position is a set of rules, guidelines and principles that govern the exports of arms, military technology and equipment and intends to enable EU Member States to make socially responsible decisions concerning those exports.
In her draft report Ms Valero makes a series of recommendations in order to improve the implementation of the Common Position with the aim of avoiding that military technologies are exported to non-eligible countries and un-authorised end users. She also makes proposals to boost information exchange among Member States, to make their reporting more standardised and timely and to increase the role of parliaments and public opinion in scrutinising the arms trade.
Further information
Draft report
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

If EU policy papers on the single currency had much bearing on reality, all of the governance arrangements for the euro would have been transformed long ago. Not so. Many of the euro zone’s institutions are widely seen as half built — and coordination of economic policies remains very much a work in progress.

Yet one area in which Brussels has been hyperactive is in publishing detailed ideas on what exactly should be done to shore up the currency. The latest in this long line of creative efforts came on Wednesday in the form of a European Commission’s “reflection paper on the deepening of the economic and monetary union.”

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Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Emmanuel Macron’s entry on the diplomatic scene – from the NATO and G7 summits last week to the meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday – may already be regarded as a positive and very encouraging achievement, but everybody, in France and elsewhere, agrees that the new President’s real and primordial challenge is the capacity to carry out the domestic reforms. In a country that has the hard-earned reputation to be unreformable, the realisation of his economic and social agenda is what Macron will ultimately be judged upon. He has one unsuspected ally: a large part of the French public has fully understood that the retirement age needs to be adapted, that fiscal policy needs a serious overhaul, and that a stronger influence on the EU comes only with respect of the deficit rules and evidence of new growth potential. And many of them have also realised that French labour law and labour relations result in a kind of societal contract that serves everybody well, except the unemployed and job-creators. Some have named the determination with which different stakeholders protect the status quo of manifold vested interests, ‘the collective choice for unemployment’. The result is a mixture of extreme reluctance by small and medium-sized enterprises, even at times of entrepreneurial success, to hire new employees on a permanent basis (the highly protected Contrat à durée indéterminée), and the simultaneous incapacity of the system, to avoid large layoffs and social plans in the wake of the country’s continuing de-industrialisation. If all attempts at reforms aiming at making the labour market more fluid have failed over decades, the reason has been a strong popular resistance fueled by the logic of class struggle. Each time the trade unions have managed to reactivate the fear of the dismantling of the ‘French social model’ – the French emotional knee-jerk equivalent of the ‘NHS’ – and each time the government in place has been unable to overcome the discrepancy between radical ideological principles and practical economic constraints, between the desirable (in the absolute) and the feasible (within the social-democratic, but capitalistic default setting of contemporary Europe). This time around, the key will lie once again with the trade unions. Unlike their German counterparts, the French unions have always been characterised by ideological pluralism rather than unitary organisation according to industrial sectors. This automatically results in fierce competition for membership among them, which in turn leads to rhetoric grandstanding in negotiations and over-bidding each other in drwaing ‘red lines’. Trade unionism has always been a minority movement in France, but it has successfully claimed the moral right and duty to speak for the ‘unenlightened’ majority (and take the entire country hostage in their fight).

Class struggle staged by ‘Force Ouvrière’ at the time of the ‘Amiens Charter’

The ideological roadmap of French trade unionism was graved in stone in 1906 in the so-called ‘Charter of Amiens’ (the capital of Picardy which, in a nice coincidence, happens to be Macron’s birthplace and the theatre of one of weirdest moments of the recent election campaign around the aptly named Whirlpool factory). This manifesto whose radical anti-capitalism has never really been put into question has deeply impregnated the language of French social relations. Its major semantic component is distrust. Managers and even self-made entrepreneurs are by definition class enemies. A company’s overarching goal can only be profit maximisation by ruthless exploitation of workers. Compromise is treason. Accordingly, German style co-determination practices are looked upon with defiance. Which is understandable, given all the negative connotations conveyed by the vocabulary in vigour. Unlike the German ‘Arbeitgeber’ (= ‘providers of work’), the French term ‘patronat’ reduces this specific social group to its purely hierarchical dimension of domination. The etymology of ‘patron’ reveals of course its religious, medieval roots, inevitably smelling of pre-industrial authority structures and inducing neo-feudal perception and behaviour patterns. Not exactly what you would call ‘social partnership’.

‘Hang all the bosses under the Avignon Bridge.’ French semantics with charming smiles.

These are no doubt the reasons why in 1998 the French employers’ federation changed its name from CNPF (where ‘P’ stands for ‘Patronat’) to MEDEF (where it is replaced by ‘Entreprises’). Unfortunately, its representatives have had trouble changing their own rhetoric accordingly, and their internal power struggles often lead to the same kind of stupid over-bidding as on the trade union’s side. Their current president, Pierre Gattaz, is no exception to this rule, regularly missing excellent opportunities to just shut up for a while. In a lovely compendium on French-German stereotypes and contrasts published twenty years ago, Ingo Kolboom very rightly recalled in his contribution about labour relations in both countries that ‘words are more than just designations; they are complex interpretations of reality, transformations, repressions, and projections, the support of desires and social strategies’ (R. Picht et al., Fremde Freunde, Munich, 1997, p. 268). France offers a linguistic and cultural environment in which trade unions simply have no choice but systematically base their actions on an unwavering presumption of contempt (‘mépris’) with regard to employers’ attitudes towards employees. Which in turn explains that strikes or similar radical actions, rather than being the ultimate means of struggle once negotiations have failed or justified requests have remained unanswered, are in fact a pre-condition of negotiation. They are called with the aim of increasing bargaining power and they inevitably raise the face-saving stakes on all sides by lifting discussions from pragmatic deal making to the level of moral indignation. Such is the minefield that Emmanuel Macron has chosen as his first area of reform. The speed with which he and his new Prime Minister Edouard Philippe have already invited each single trade union leader for long, individual dialogues to both the Elysée and Matignon give evidence to their determination, whatever the outcome of the legislative elections.

Holding out a hand to the trade unions: Emmanuel Macron and Philippe Martinez from the CGT.

Surprisingly, what clearly has been a suicide mission for any government of the last twenty years, all of a sudden does not even seem out of reach any more. Listening to the very careful wording of the trade unionists these days, one cannot help but find they are somehow aware that the new President has managed to install a ‘now-or-never feeling’ in the country over the last weeks. They seem to feel that ‘the times they are a-changin’ and for the time being, they don’t want to be the ones that ‘stand in the doorways’ and ‘block up the halls’. Macron’s tightrope walk is the most passionate political endeavour this country has seen for a long time. It’s more than a reform. It’s full-size cultural change in the making. If he manages to shift the semantics of labour relations from the lexical field of class struggle to a Monnet-inspired new vocabulary of common interest and joint effort, he will have achieved more in a few months than others over their entire mandates.

Albrecht Sonntag @albrechtsonntag

This is post # 23 on the French 2017 election marathon. All previous posts can be found here.

The post France 2017: It’s the semantics, stupid! appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

REPORT on statelessness in South and South East Asia
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Amjad Bashir

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Opinion on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council setting up a Union regime for the control of exports, transfer, brokering, technical assistance and transit of dual-use items (recast)
Opinion on a Space Strategy for Europe
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

On 21 June 2017 from 14:30 to 19:30, the European Parliament will organise a high-level conference on migration management in the European Parliament in Brussels. The conference will bring together political leaders, policymakers and practitioners to contribute to a reflection on a strategy to manage migration flows, and ensure a stable and prosperous environment at our borders. It will be organised in cooperation with the relevant parliamentary committees. Speakers will notably include:

Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission

Federica Mogherini, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the European Commission

Werner Hoyer, President of the European Investment Bank

Markku Markkula, President of the Committee of the Regions

Dimitris Avramopoulos, Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship

Neven Mimica, Commissioner for International Development

Julian King, Commissioner for Security Union

Louise Arbour, United Nations Special Representative for International Migration

William Lacy Swing, Director General of the International Organisation for Migration

Claude Moraes, Chair of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee

Linda McAvan, Chair of the Committee on Development

Further information
Registration
Programme
Poster
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP