Ideas on Europe Blog

One year ago, I sent an email to the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye (@davidkaye), in reaction to a public consultation, not knowing whether it mattered. Now that his report on “Access to Information in International Organizations” is published, I realized that I was one of a few people who had sent in a submission.

As you can see on the website of the report, my name is listed as one of five submissions from civil society and academia. However, my submission is not published because it came via email.

To make this more transparent, I publish below the text that I sent on 18 October 2016 in reaction to the public consultation. It’s not a refined submission – indeed just an email – but maybe it’s useful for future work in the direction of making the United Nations system and other international organizations more transparent to have this published here:

Dear Mr. Kaye,

through the Centre for Law and Democracy and a person working for Access Info Europe I saw that you are currently consulting with UN organizations on their access to information policies.

I do not know whether a submission from a researcher in political science and international public administration is welcome, especially after the general deadline has passed three days ago. However, I thought my observations would still be useful as context and as a “user’s” perspective.

My ongoing research on UN budgeting is part of a publicly funded project (see http://ipa-research.com/time), which itself is part of a larger research unit in Germany studying the work of international bureaucracies (http://ipa-research.com). I have been in particular to the UN in New York, ILO, UNESCO and WHO, including each of their archives. We also do research on other UN organizations, but less detailed than in these four cases.

If you allow, I would like to share three observations that I have found through my research in the UN system in the past two years:

1. Besides the archives or libraries, there is often no contact person named on public websites through which (ad hoc) requests for access to documents can be made. This means that one is forwarded from archives to relevant units, while relevant units may refuse access right away or refer back to higher levels of the hierarchy, leaving it unclear how to even ask for access to documents. Some UN organizations also have dedicated public document registers, some including main categories of administrative documents (even those that are not public), which allows to reduce the “unknown unknowns”, while other UN organizations publish their documents in unstructured ways or, if they have structured document repositories, they are not easily accessible for the public or documents are dispersed across several systems with different levels of (full-text) searchability.

2. The 20-year archival policy in the UN combined with the lack of access to documents policies makes well-reasoned academic research on UN organizations very difficult at worst and sketchy at best. There are two reasons for this:

First, the decision whether to actually archive documents is often taken years before the 20-year period is over. Going through archive documents 20 years and older (e.g. in UNESCO), I found that important parts of the budgeting decision-making documentation I was interested in had not been archived, while I had also no right to request more recent documents that were still in the hands of the secretariats. This left me without any documents not just for periods of 20 years but even well beyond that.

Second, the 20 year period seems to apply to documents with quite different degrees of political importance. In some cases, I was just looking for basic administrative guidelines describing a process inside the organization, but these documents, past and present, are treated similarly to internal letters in which detailed views and opinions of member states and UN administrative leaders are documented. The latter seem to have quite a different potential for creating diplomatic misunderstandings if published too early, while the former do not threaten diplomatic relations but rather reveal just basic systems of governance that are useful for our academic understand of how the respective UN organization works.

3. There is a lack of coherence in the application of the rules and practices, both within UN organizations and across the UN system. I happened to get documents in UN archives that were much younger than 20 years while the same type of documents from previous years were not accessible. Similarly, some of the documents I would get in one UN organization are difficult to impossible to get in another organization.

I make these three points since our research project started with a similar analysis for the EU-level, where there is Regulation 1049/2001 on access to documents. I can say that getting access to administrative documents on EU budgeting of the past ten years relevant to our research was much more easy than any similar attempt to get access to UN documents.

Altogether, I think that all UN organizations should have a dedicated access to information policy, with clear guidelines for the outside world and a separation between archival documents and documents that are accessible outside the archives, either directly online or through requests.

Please do not hesitate to contact me in case you have any questions.

Ronny Patz

PS (Disclaimer): I have worked, in the past, for the EU Office of Transparency International (2010-12 as a volunteer, 2012-14 as a full time staff). I am in no work or other formal relationship with the office since June 2014, so the points made above reflect my personal views as a researcher.

 I really hope for future researchers, activists, and citizens that access to information from international organizations becomes easier in the future. The historic record of what IOs such as the United Nations have contributed to shaping our present world should be accessible, and today’s and future generations should be able to hold global institutions to account.

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A couple of months ago I wrote about the latest Flash Eurobarometer survey on perceptions of EU regional policy. One of the interesting results was the apparent increase in awareness of EU regional policy in the UK after the referendum.

Having now had a chance to access the raw data as part of a wider project I’m doing on EU regional policy and the EU referendum, I’ve been able to look a bit more closely at this. This allows us to get a longer-term picture of how awareness of EU regional policy has changed in the UK over the last seven years.

Here are the results to the question “Have you heard about any EU co-financed projects to improve the area where you live?” for the last four waves of the Flash Eurobarometer survey on perceptions of EU regional policy.

A couple of observations: Firstly, between June 2010 and June 2015 the level of awareness has remained relatively static (and low). There is a slight downward trend, but nothing conclusive. However between June 2015 and March 2017 there was a notable increase in awareness of EU funded projects. Secondly, this increase exceeds the margins of error, so we can be fairly confident it’s not a random blip. In other words the result of the latest survey seems to buck the trend.

Now, the conclusions and caveats of my earlier post still stand. While the timing of the EU referendum might offer one potential explanation for the sudden increase in regional policy awareness, we can’t say for certain it was the cause based on this survey. And despite the recent increase, the overall level of awareness is still low. But it does speak to the wider debate going on at the moment about communicating cohesion policy to citizens, and that incorporating it into national political discourses may hold one answer to raise awareness.

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The European Council today and tomorrow is an important staging post for the Article 50 process. It marks the point at which the EU27 had decided they would review the negotiations and take stock.

More particularly, the original mandate for the Commission suggested that this was the point at which the European Council would take a view on whether ‘sufficient progress’ had been made on the Phase I topics; the immediate issues that needed settling of citizens’ rights, financial liabilities and the Irish border. Only with that sufficiency would there be a movement on to Phase II, the transition talks to set up a new relationship.

Already we know that the European Council will not give the green light to this, with the Commission, the General Affairs Council and the European Parliament all having already weighed in to say that there has been progress, but not enough to suffice. The drafts of the European Council conclusions take the same line.

So far, so unsurprising: ever since the summer break there has been a growing feeling that the negotiations had run into difficulties, not least because of the on-going inability of the British government to settle on a preferred outcome: there is a good understanding of the points to be discussed and agreed, but a lack of political direction from the UK on how to resolve them.

As such, the non-progression this week has already been largely priced into the process.

However, this comes with some significant costs. The most obvious is that it will not now be until December that any move to Phase II takes place, leaving very little time to reach a full deal by October 2018 (which is when one is needed, if ratification is to take place by March 2019).

Moreover, a blockage now will rob Article 50 of whatever momentum it might have picked up from May’s Florence speech, which sought to advance the financial side of things.

So, that’s the context. But what does it suggest everyone wants or needs to get from the European Council?

For the EU27, Brexit remains a side-show to all the other things that they are dealing with at the moment. With only a handful of states deeply involved in the process, most will be happy to know that the Commission is on the case and that there remains collective buy-in to the mandate for Phase I: no-one wants to get rolled over on the finances and citizens’ rights are a concern for many. As long as they can go back with a message that the EU is still fighting for those things, then they will be happy.

Likewise, for those member states most closely involved, upholding the mandate is also the best course of action. For Ireland, it keeps their priorities front-and-centre, while for Germany it keeps everyone on-board for a process to find a deal with the UK. However, the blockages seen suggest that they will be working with the European Council President and the Commission.

And the Commission itself is in a more tricky position. It has a very strong interest in making Article 50 work, both because it wants to keep the UK in a functioning relationship with the EU, and also because it wants to demonstrate its problem-solving abilities. At the same time, it needs to protect the core values and benefits of the EU for its members, which limits what it can give way on to help the UK.

The compromise that seems to be emerging is that while there will be insufficient progress, the Commission will push for the EU27 to start preparing a Phase II mandate, so that as-and-when approval is given, both sides can hit the ground running, rather than lose another month or so to Phase II prep. Moreover, since that prep will be in public, it will also allow the Commission to provide some additional signalling to the UK of its intentions, which might in turn help with outstanding Phase I problems.

Which leaves the UK.

If the EU side seems to be pointing towards a tough-but-accommodating position, then the British government is in more of a bind. The strength of feeling from hard-brexiteers makes it hard for any concessions, especially with the calls to simply walk away from the talks altogether. That such calls are self-evidently self-defeating just points out how limited May’s position is, with little agency in either Brussels or London.

Since May does not intend to – or, indeed, is able to – make any new offers at the European Council itself, much will rest on the presentation of matters. In that, she might obviously go for the lines taken in the Barnier-Davis press conferences in previous rounds of negotiations: the EU says ‘insufficient progress’, the UK says ‘progress’.

But the big danger is the one that has lurked ever since June, namely a further compromise to May’s position. If tempers flare and EU leaders come out with doom-laden messages, then May risks finding herself with her cornerstone policy priority looking even worse than before, and MPs might increasingly feel there’s little to be lost by changing horses mid-stream.

The EU might ask itself whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, both given where we are and what might follow.

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Within the known as the “procés”, or the “Catalan question”, on 10th October 2017 the President of the Catalan Government participated in a regular session of the Catalan Parliament in order to give an balance of the political situation in the region.

In his speech Mr. Puigdemont reported the positive results of the alleged referendum of 1st October 2017. However the words he used were full of confusion about whether or not the declaration of independence took place at the Catalan Parliament

In any case, Mr. Puigdemont stated:

“Arrived to this historical moment, as President of the Generalitat, I assume to present the results of the referendum to the Parliament and our citizens: the mandate that Catalonia becomes an independent State in the form of a republic.

That is what I have to do today. For responsibility and respect.

And with the same solemnity, the Government and me too propose the Parliament to suspend the effects of the independence declaration in order to start a dialogue in the following weeks without which is not possible to reach an agreed solution”[i]

These words have created some confusion regarding the existence or not of an implicit declaration of independence since, although such a declaration didn’t properly take place, the Government and the President proposed to the Parliament “to suspend the effects of the declaration of independence”.

Certainly, the independence declaration corresponds to the Parliament of Catalonia, according to art. 4.4. of Law 19/2017, of 6 September, on the referendum of self-determination, law suspended by the Spanish Constitutional Court:

“If in the count of valid votes there are more affirmative than negative votes, the result implies the independence of Catalonia. To this end, the Parliament of Catalonia, within two days following the proclamation of the official results by the Electoral Syndicate, will hold a regular session to carry out the formal declaration of the independence of Catalonia, specify its effects and initiate the constituent process.“

It is important, from the Catalan secessionist legal perspective to comply with the provisions of this article because, although suspended by the Spanish Constitutional Court, it is the one that determines – from the perspective of the alleged legality of the new Republic – the entry into force of Law 20/2017, of 8 September, on Legal Transitoriness and on the Foundation of the Republic, third final provision, also suspended by the Spanish Constitutional Court.

Thus, from the perspective of the alleged legality of the Catalan Republic, this is born – materially – with the positive result of the vote of the Referendum on October 1st  (“the result implies the independence of Catalonia”), although “to this end” , within two days of the proclamation of the results, the Parliament must hold a regular session to carry out the formal declaration of independence, specify its effects and initiate the constituent process.

However, although the session of the Catalan Parliament took place on October 10th, there was no formal declaration by the Catalan Parliament, nor the concretization of its effects and the beginning of the constituent process.

In fact, what happened was that Mr Puigdemont reported the positive results of the Referendum and immediately requested to the Parliament to suspend the effects of a declaration which had not yet taken place. Moreover there was not any answer or agreement of the Parliament in this sense.

However, after the Parliament session, the deputies of the secessionist groups proceeded to sign a document in another room containing a declaration of independence[ii]:

“… We, democratic representatives of the people of Catalonia, in the free exercise of the right of self-determination, and in accordance with the mandate received from the citizens of Catalonia,

WE CONSTITUTE the Catalan Republic, as an independent and sovereign State, State of right, democratic and social.

WE MAKE AVAILABLE the entry into force of the Law of Legal Transitoriness and on the Foundation of the Republic.

WE INITIATE the constituent, democratic, citizen-based, transverse, participatory and binding process ”

Now, has there been a declaration of independence? If we understand that from the point of view of the alleged legality of the Catalan Republic the independence started with the positive results of the referendum, they don’t need a declaration for it. However article 4.4 of Law 19/2017, key to interpret this, is clear requiring a formal statement from Parliament that has not been adopted.

This document is a clear commitment to independence, and in itself can be considered as the intended statement whose effects are requested to be suspended.

Moreover, declarations are regulated in the article 166 of the Catalan Parliament Regulation, establishing three types of declarations: declarations of the Parliament of Catalonia (which require the unanimity vote of the Board of Spokespersons), declarations of the Board of Spokespersons (which require a majority vote of the Board of Spokespersons) and Declarations of the Presidency of the Parliament[iii].

It is true that art. 4.4 of Law 19/2017 does not state what kind of declaration should be made. We can think on a statement of the Board of Spokespersons by majority, and a Presidential Statement or a Declaration by Parliament itself. However it would be logical to think, due to its relevance, that the best way is to vote Declaration of the Parliament; therefore a unanimous consent of the Board of Spokesmen would be required. Or in a non legal way -breaking the Catalonian Parliament Regulation- a vote of the Parliament itself.

Therefore, it can be understood that, from the point of view of the alleged legality of the Catalan Republic, there was no declaration of independence, nor suspension of the effects of it. And in this sense what took place from the legal point of view – of that supposed legality – is rather an independence – born ex art. 4.4 of Law 19/2017 with the positive result of the referendum – whose formal statement by the Parliament was omitted or suspended, even though that a declaration was signed in document by some Members of the Parliament, but outside the session and therefore without legal value.

In reaction to this situation, the Government of Spain activated the possible application of art. 155 of the Spanish Constitution (EC) sending a request to the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, dated on October 11, to clarify the situation and to confirm whether or not the independence of Catalonia has been declared, awaiting an answer tomorrow 16 October; stating that an affirmative or ambiguous answer will imply the application of art. 155 EC, which can be use to intervene and obligate the Autonomous Community to return to the Spanish Constitutional Order[iv].

Although I am not able to anticipate the answer of President Puigdemont, I understand -from my point of view- that there was no declaration of independence of Catalonia, although the process of independence has begun and is actually in suspense, which undoubtedly also affects and breaks the Spanish Constitutional Order.

[i] Compareixença del president Puigdemont davant del ple del Parlament, Barcelona, 10 d’octubre de 2017, Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de la Presdiència, Oficina del President, Gabinet de Comunicació del President.

[ii]Declaració dels Representants de Catalunya, available at:  https://es.scribd.com/document/361241376/Declaracio-Independe-ncia#from_embed

[iii] Reglament del Parlament de Catalunya, available at: https://www.parlament.cat/document/cataleg/165484.pdf

[iv]Requerimiento de 11 de octubre de 2017, accesible en http://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/consejodeministros/Documents/11102017-requerimiento.pdf

The post CATALONIA: A SUSPENDED INDEPENDENCE WITHOUT DECLARATION. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Elections in Austria? Again?

Most non-Austrian react with bewilderment when they take note of the forthcoming Austrian elections on 15 October: elections, now? Have they not just voted?

Indeed. On 4 December 2016 Austria had to re-run its presidential elections, with the quasi-Green candidate Alexander van der Bellen winning by a really small margin of 50.3% against Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the (very) right-wing FPÖ. Even though presidents play a marginal role in everyday Austrian politics, this battle of ideas attracted much international attention.

What is happening next Sunday, 15 October 2017, is actually more important. Early elections for parliament have been scheduled, and they are very likely to follow the trend towards the right, which was visible in the recent German elections.

Why early elections?

Sebastian Kurz

In May 2017, the governmental coalition of Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the Conservative Party (ÖVP) decided to support the request submitted by the opposition in parliament and call for early elections. At this point, not much love was left between the two coalition partners, after months of conflict and open disagreement. The resignation of the ÖVP party chair and Vice-Chancellor Reinhard Mitterlehner gave the last push for the break-up of the coalition, undermined by internal fights within both parties. The ÖVP begged their young and successful foreign minister Sebastian Kurz, boosted by incredible approval rates in opinion polls, to take over the role as party chair. Kurz gracefully accepted, but only under his own conditions, such as full autonomy in staff matters and running under the label ‘List of Sebastian Kurz – the new ÖVP’ (instead of simply “ÖVP”).

No more grand coalition!

Results of Austrian parliamentary elections.

That is the main tenor of the current political discourse. Citizens are fed up with the idea of yet another boring, fighting, stagnating Grand Coalition of the two major traditional parties. What in September 2013 had seemed like the lesser evil – as compared to another FPÖ participation in government after the one in 1999 which had raised so many eyebrows and even sanctions within the EU), turned into a permanent bickering between two government parties openly fighting each other’s policies over the past year. Not ideal for realizing the objective of winning back citizens’ trust, after the 2013 results had already been the worst ever for both SPÖ and ÖVP in the Second Republic.

Not to mention the scandals!

The dirtiest election campaign in Austrian history!

Scandals are the second main issue currently associated with the election campaign. To everybody’s surprise, it is not the usual suspect (the far-right FPÖ) that breaches with acceptable practices, but the big coalition parties SPÖ and ÖVP! All throughout the campaign, they have been navigating from one scandalous ‘Breaking News’ to the next. The tip of the iceberg is the ‘facebook scandal’ that transpired within the SPÖ last week: a few weeks ago the SPÖ campaign advisor Tal Silberstein (an Israeli consultant) was fired due to allegations of money laundering. When journalists started investigating Silberstein´s practices, they discovered dirty campaigning on social media on an unimagined scale. Silberstein had set-up a whole office (interestingly enough staffed with collaborators close to the conservative party) that ran two facebook groups apparently in support of the ÖVP rival Kurz, but then discrediting the ÖVP party leader with disdainful, personal attacks. The SPÖ election campaign manager resigned immediately, although the SPÖ leadership is still claiming that they were not informed about those practices. The question remains how much SPÖ party leader and Chancellor Kern knew about these practices. And the general conclusion is that even if he did not know, it was his job to know (especially if he wants to lead this country).

Other, smaller scandals shake the political establishment on a daily basis: how come the ÖVP has been using campaign slogans that had been initially developed but not publicized by the SPÖ? At the same time, the Greens’ prospects have been damaged by internal quarrels, which had one of their longest-serving members, Peter Pilz, leave the party to create his own list in opposition to Green party leaders.

Clarification of positions

The one positive side effect of the 2017 election campaign is that parties are forced to be clear on their main policy priorities.

SPÖ Chancellor Kern, stemming from the business-section of the Social Democrats, is considered a calm, well-respected and experienced intellectual. During the last year, the SPÖ was tempted internally to consider a coalition with the FPÖ, but Kern and his team managed to re-focus it on its core topic: sustainable state institutions that ensure a just, fair and protective society through state intervention. Just how this is a shift from what the SPÖ government was supposed to be doing over the last years, is less clear, although some observers point out that the SPÖ became more edgy in pursuing social-democratic economic policies lately.

Sebastian Kurz and his ‘new’ ÖVP, on the other hand, are pushing the idea of breaking up old state and party structures to bring in a ‘new social justice’. The latter is defined by enabling hard-working Austrians to be able to make a living for themselves; by getting rid of too much regulation and state intervention; and mostly by cutting off ‘benefits parasites’ (and foreigners) from state support. Kurz is slightly less eloquent in providing details of how exactly he would achieve his declared goals. In the latest TV debates he resorted to bashing European politics and other European leaders´ decisions (read: Merkel´s refugee policy) for their negative impact on Austria, instead of providing clear policy strategies himself.

FPÖ campaign poster

The FPÖ and their party leader Heinz-Christian Strache have one clear priority: Austria for Austrians (translation: kick migrants out of Austria!). Strache keeps attacking Kurz for not having reacted more decisively in closing Austrian borders during the Syrian refugee crisis, while for the rest the two-party leaders showed so much unity in the TV debates that many observers already refer to the ‘Chancellor and his Vice-Chancellor to be’.

In the current political climate, marked by a clear shift of the main parties towards the right, the Greens are the last party on the left of the political spectrum. In economic, societal and European topics they stand for clear left-wing positions, and they are the only party that has climate change and environmental impact high on their agenda. The economic-liberal NEOS still confuse voters with the variety of their positions, but they earned some respect for having many experienced entrepreneurs in their ranks. And they got the presidential candidate and respected lawyer Irmgard Griess on their party list, which provided them with visibility.

So, what are the expectations?

Latest polls. Source : www.profil.at

The latest polls confirm the trends of the last years: the ÖVP is expected to get a boost by its charismatic young party leader. Sebastian Kurz is appreciated by many Austrians for his youth, his image as everybody’s perfect ‘son-in-law’, and his promise for change (even though most people do not seem to care or realize that the promised change is likely not to be in their favour). The ÖVP thus clearly leads the polls. What is unclear at the moment, is who will come second: will the FPÖ manage to overtake the SPÖ?

What the polls show quite clearly, though, is that there will be a very meager amount of coalition options available: the visible disdain that emerged between Kurz and Kern in the past months makes a revival of the Grand Coalition impossible. For the ÖVP, Kern would have to step down for the SPÖ to even being considered a potential partner. More likely is a coalition ÖVP-FPÖ, although this will also depend on whom the president (one of his rare powers!) will mandate with forming a government.

The expected center-right victory at these parliamentary elections will not come as a surprise. Like in Germany, the Social Democrats have lost profile by participating in the Grand Coalition. Like in Germany, the political discourse has been continuously shifting towards the right over recent years: the moderate right takes ever tougher positions on migration issues, and the Social Democrats sometimes follow suit in fear of alienating too many worried voters.

The SPÖ is only just starting to pull back to the left, but with the considerably weakened Greens left as only partners, a center-left coalition is simply not realistic this time around.

The post Following the German trend? Austria votes on Sunday. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Que Anh Dang 

• How might we understand the changing governance of scientific research at national, regional and supranational levels in Europe?
• What are the prevailing and conflicting political, economic, cultural and ideational discourses, discursive contexts and rationales for constituting and governing intermediary research executive agencies? How do they operate?
• What are the consequences/outcomes caused by the tensions and compromises between these supposedly independent agencies and the national governments or regional institutions?
• What are the implications for research policies and academic practices at higher education institutions?

Panel chair Sarah Glück

These are some overarching questions addressed by the panel ‘Research Executive Agencies – between Independent Organisations and Governments’ organised by Lisa Kressin and Sarah Glück in the Section on the Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation at the European Consortium for Political Research ECPR General Conference 6-9 September in Oslo. The papers in this panel examine the historical trajectories, discursive contexts in the institutionalisation processes and the actual workings of the research funding executive agencies in Germany, Austria, the Nordic region and the European Union.

National Contexts: Agencification and Autonomy

In some German-speaking national contexts, there is a practice of agencification in which the principals (ministries) play the role of defining political strategies, framework and rules, and let the agents (the executive agencies) be in charge of implementation processes and manage public research funds on the government’s behalf. Rupert Pichler and Sascha Ruhland, in their paper titled ‘The role of research funding agencies in policy discretion and coordination in Austria’, examined multiple funding agencies and focus on the case of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) – a merger of several fragmented funding organisations. FFG has a legal form of a limited company and has the mandates to serve many ministries, provincial governments and the EU. They argued that the very nature of multi-principal and multi-sector agency has put FFG in a position to propose strategic plans that are to be approved by the various ministries. Sometimes the inter-ministerial negotiations are outsourced to FFG. In essence, the principals are coordinated by the agent rather than being in the driver’s seat, thus blurring the boundaries between principal’s and agent’s tasks and roles. They concluded that although principals and agents are deeply entangled, there are always ‘lasting tensions’ oscillating between agency capture and government interference. Therefore, the principal-agent relationship is constantly adjusted.

Regional Contexts: Changing Governance Architecture

Que Anh Dang presented the paper ‘Nordic Umbrella Organisations for Higher Education and Research: Region-building and Market-making’ and highlighted the case of the Nordic research funding executive agency – NordForsk. Although NordForsk was established in 2005 in the aftermath of the Lisbon Strategy with a competitiveness boosting agenda, it was rooted in the long-standing Nordic regional cooperation in many sectors. NordForsk is ‘old wine in a new bottle’ and it represents a continuation of previous regional initiatives and the Nordic informal and pragmatic approach to cooperation. However, NordForsk has constituted new spaces for policy making which alter regional governance pattern. She argued that, in the Nordic case, these new spaces are not located above the state, rather, regional frontiers are created within the national policy-making apparatus including its political institutions. NordForsk is not about the emergence, consolidation or sustainability of the supranational authority but about the rescaling of governance and pubic authority to regional spaces – a politics of regionalism that is simultaneously regional and national. The legitimacy of intermediary agencies, like NordForsk, is secured through various forms of accountability. Such accountability is ensured by ‘accountability communities’- a complex ensemble of public and private organisations endowed with capacities to perform legislative, monitoring and compliance activities. Que Anh concluded that these communities also possess particular understandings of accountability (soft law of standards and codes) and provide the basis for new ways of region-building and market-making.

Que Anh Dang. Photo credits: Thomas König

Inga Ulnicane presented her research on Grand societal challenges asking if challenge-orientation represents a new policy paradigm in science, technology and innovation policy. She compared recent challenge-orientation with earlier mission-oriented science, technology and innovation policies and discussed a number of policy initiatives to address societal challenges launched by NordForsk, European Union and Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova.

Thomas König, one of the panellists, launched his new book ‘The European Research Council’ (ERC) during the conference. This book is a comprehensive research into the creation and development of the ERC. With an ethnographic method, Thomas gives a detailed account of how a group of strong-minded European scientists succeeded in establishing the ERC by pushing for a single goal: more money for scientific research with fewer strings attached. The book also critically analyses the achievements and challenges faced by the ERC and engages with a broader question concerning the relationships between politics, science and public money.

Some Reflections

Presentations in this panel prompted some reflections and ideas for further empirical studies:

-          The classical principal-agent theory is deficient in explaining the complex relationships between the research funding executive agencies and their founders and funders (be it national or regional bodies). We need new theories and novel ways of understanding the power relations between the principals (ministries, group of states, supranational union) and the agents (intermediary agencies);

-          Although the agents derive their authority from their expertise, they have to constantly negotiate and secure their legitimacy and autonomy in various ways and with a range of actors including the principals, academic communities, the society and the wider public (tax-payers);

-          Neoliberalism constitutes the hegemonic economic discourse within science and innovation which introduces a new mode of regulation premised on the belief that competition – in the name of ‘Excellence’– is the most efficient and a morally superior mechanism for allocating resources and opportunities. The workings of all these agencies are governed, albeit at varying degrees, by this economic discourse and its accompanied contractual relations;

-          The research funding executive agencies take on multiple identities depending on which actors they interact with. Despite their motto to uphold academic freedom and support investigator-driven research, they often act as translators and mediators between politics, science and administration.

In summary, the panel provides deep insights into concrete case studies and offers new ways of understanding intermediary agencies and the implications for research policies in the complex governance structures in Europe. We wish to exchange ideas and learn from more case studies in other national and regional contexts to broaden our scholarship.

Dr. Que Anh Dang is a researcher at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. Her research interests include higher education and regionalism, the role of international organisations in policy making, higher education in the knowledge economy, and education diplomacy. She is a co-editor and an author of the book ‘Global Regionalisms and Higher Education’ (2016).

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I’ve talked before about how negotiation theory might throw some light on the Article 50 process, but it seems useful to return to the subject, given the continuing difficulties that the sides are encountering: might the literature offer some insights?

Today, it’s Zartman who springs to mind. He writes on the conflict management side of negotiation, which might appear to be a bit heavy-handed for this situation, but his analysis of the basic mechanics is one that I (and my students) offer find helpful in more mundane situations.

Zartman argues that negotiation is about the resolution of structural differences between negotiating parties and his big thing is about reducing differences: the more you can close the gap between parties, the more likely you are to find space for a mutually-acceptable agreement.

He suggests there are four ways that differences get reduced; two softer options, and two harder ones, with each pair being the opposite of each other.

The soft pair is about making options look more or less attractive. You might suggest that taking a particular option will produce benefits, or that taking another will come with costs.

The hard pair finds parties arguing that they either have to take an option, or it is impossible to take it, because their hands are tied in some way.

The soft pair is ubiquitous in politics and in Brexit: everyone’s telling us how option X will lead to sunlight uplands or the end of civilisation as we know it, so I don’t care to revisit all of these.

But what we’re seeing in recent weeks is more of the hard option, on both sides.

For the EU, there has always been some element of this, from the insistence that Article 50 is the only legal framework for departure negotiations, to the Commission explaining that its mandate doesn’t let it talk about transition before sufficient progress has been made on Phase I issues.

For the UK, the original hard position – Brexit has to mean leaving the EU – has faded over time, but now it creeps back into discussion.

This was most vividly seen in this week’s mixed messages on a no-deal scenario. First, Philip Hammond told the Select Committee that there was no money yet for such a situation, before his boss popped up in PMQs to say that there was money already committed.

What seems to have passed most media comment on the spat of the day by is that both of them were essentially working towards a position of making no-deal ever less of an option, through incapacity.

Money is obviously important here, but more important is how that money is used. In a no-deal scenario, there will be an immediate requirement for substantial increases in border controls for customs, much regulatory uncertainty and a wealth of other impacts (see this for an overview).

None of those gaps can be closed immediately: to take the most obvious example, if customs controls are needed, then land has to be secured, built upon, and staffed by people you’ve trained.

As of the moment, none of the necessary procurement activity for this to happen has begun, and even on the most ambitious timetable that would take 18 months to do, which is about now.

Thus while May might seem to be taking a more conciliatory line with her party’s hardliners, she actually looks to be providing cover to a push on working towards a deal, since if the UK is simply incapable of policing a non-deal, then that might encourage domestic opinion to accept the need for a deal.

But this incident also raises another perspective that ties back to Zartman’s model, namely May’s seeming unwillingness to reduce alternatives at all.

May remains a very elusive figure, refusing to tie herself down to any one option; or, more accurately, tying herself to many, simultaneously-inconsistent options.

As has been widely discussed, her apparent lack of a desired end-state makes it almost impossible to reach any kind of agreement in Article 50: you can’t negotiate with someone who doesn’t know what they want.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see May’s position as one where she’s running two sets of negotiation at the same time: one with the EU and one with her party.

While Article 50 points to a need for a strategic objective from the UK, party management points to a need to keep options open (or at least fudged) so that she isn’t removed from office or defeated in the Commons.

Seen in this light, May’s actions make more sense, as she tries to engineer faits accomplis in Article 50 while arguing for much more back home.

Whether this is a viable long-term strategy is doubtful, especially as we move towards the European Council’s decision next week on ‘sufficient progress’, where rhetoric is going to become a big factor once more. Adding that to an already-deeply-suspicious Tory party and it’s not too hard to imagine someone pushing the leadership challenge button more firmly.

And at that point you can expect a whole lot more examples of why contender X is good/bad or must/mustn’t lead the country at this critical juncture.

The post More negotiation theory in Article 50 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Last year I was fortunate enough to take part in a masterclass for early career researchers on EU regional policy organised by the Regional Studies Association, the EU Committee of the Regions and the European Commission. The masterclass was part of the annual European Week of Regions and Cities, which last year it took place against the backdrop of the recent UK referendum on EU membership. During the opening plenary EU Regional Policy Commissioner, Corina Crețu, highlighted her disappointment that regions which have seen significant investment from the EU’s regional policy, such as Cornwall, Wales and the North East, voted to leave the EU. This, Commissioner Crețu argues, highlighted the need to look at how well EU spending in these regions was communicated.

This year’s European Week of Regions and Cities is happening at the moment. While I’m not fortunate enough to be there in person this year, I am trying to follow what’s going on. Again in this year’s opening plenary, Commissioner Crețu highlighted the need to improve how EU regional policy is communicated to citizens. This focus on the communication of regional policy has become increasingly important, not least because of the Brexit vote, but also because regional policy spending accounts for a third of the EU’s entire budget. The assumption is if citizens are aware of what EU regional policy does in their local area they’ll have a greater understanding of how the EU supports them and their local areas, and consequently have a more positive attitude towards the EU.

So, what effect will raising awareness of EU regional policy have? Given Commissioner Crețu’s disappointment at the result in certain UK regions, let’s have a look at EU regional policy awareness in those regions and the result of the UK’s referendum on EU membership.

The data here is aggregated here at the NUTS1 level. Data on the EU referendum result comes from the UK Electoral Commission, while awareness of EU regional policy is taken from Flash Eurobarometer 423 on EU citizen awareness and perceptions of EU regional policy. This was conducted one year prior to the referendum. The main question we’re interested in is: “Europe provides financial support to regions and cities. Have you heard about any EU co-financed projects to improve the area where you live?” The aggregate data I’ve used can be downloaded here.

Generally speaking, UK regions with higher levels of regional policy awareness appear to have lower levels of support for “Remain” in the referendum. Crucially, in the UK’s case at least, higher levels of regional policy awareness, didn’t translate into higher levels of EU support at the ballot box.

This comes with some rather large caveats, of course. The UK may be a unique case here. NUTS1 regions are rather large and diverse, so this isn’t going to account for large differences of awareness and EU spending within these regions. And regional policy spending had very little, if anything at all, to do with the referendum result (that’s for another blog post!). While there is a negative correlation (r = -0.43), it isn’t significant at the 0.05 level (p = 0.165).

These caveats aside, the key message to take away here is that merely raising awareness of EU regional policy spending isn’t going to be enough. If the EU wants to increase support among citizens it is going to have to do more than just show it spends money in a given area. There needs to be more of a focus on how that communication will work and how it will engage with citizens. Part of this will also come down to how regional policy is designed and how EU funding is invested in local areas. Does it meet local economic need and does it address the priorities citizens see as important?

There are grounds for optimism. Initiatives to improve the communication of EU regional spending are out there. During last year’s masterclass I witnessed Fireflies, a Lithuanian project led by local organisations aiming to increase transparency in EU regional policy by showing how EU funding is spent, win the 2016 RegioStars award. However the lessons from projects like this need to receive greater recognition by EU policy makers and be applied more widely beyond the confined of a single project.

So yes, communicating regional policy is important, but much more thought need to be put into how this will work rather than simply telling citizens how much EU cash is spent locally.

The post Communicating EU regional policy and the EU referendum appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

In ten days (October 19-20) Czech voters will go to the polling stations. After four years, they will decide once more about the future of Czechia – as the republic in the middle of the Europe is (unsuccessfully) trying to rebrand its name. And once more, these elections are portrayed as “important” or “path-breaking”, not only in the Czech press but also by more than few politicians.

I am saying “once more”, because it is not the first time. Quite the contrary: over the last seven years Czech politics have changed a lot. From stability to instability. From being predictable to being chaotic. And from being quite moderate to being populist. How could this happen?

Once upon a time, there was a small country called Czech Republic in the heart of Europe. Until around 2010, it had been a remarkably stable country since its establishment in January 1993, when a marriage of over eighty years broke up between the Czechs and the Slovaks. While in neighbouring countries like Poland or Slovakia new relevant parties emerged and died often during one term, the Czech party spectrum was pretty boring. With five or at worst six relevant parties, and standard governmental changes from centre left to centre right. Even newcomers – such as for example the Czech Greens in 2006 – were traditional parties in the sense that they represented a set of coherent ideas and goals.

Then everything changed in the 2010 elections and since then, Czech politics have become a different story. Unfortunately for the country, with consequences beyond the purely domestic level.

Well, as in many similar cases, one has to turn to history to find answers to “why” this happened. Even if 2010 may be considered the turning point, the causes explaining the “electoral earthquake” had appeared slowly from the mid-1990s. At this time, the Czech transition – particularly in its economic dimension – appeared to be a successful and achieved process. Already in 1996 electoral campaign, Václav Klaus, one of the symbols of Czech modern politics and at that time acting prime minister, claimed so under his slogan “We proved that we can manage”. However, voters did not seem to be convinced and massively supported the opposition in this election. The very tight result of these elections opened a path to a second coalition government led by Václav Klaus. It was a minority government, a weak one, and had to resign already after being in office for not more than one and a half years. First early elections then resulted in a similar draw as in 1996, but this time the government was formed by the Social Democrats, and Miloš Zeman, another key figure of Czech politics, became prime minister. That would not have been tragic, but his minority cabinet was backed by Klaus’ “Civic Democrats”, its main rival and enemy, in a so called “opposition agreement”. This pseudo-coalition and pseudo-opposition – for which Klaus and Zeman are not to be blamed along, since it was partly a result of the inability of other political parties to find a solution – deeply wounded the trust of Czech voters in traditional parties. These wounds never disappeared.

The second major mistake – decentralisation – can be tracked back to the 1990s as well. The idea to create regions and endow them with some competences – education, regional development, health care – is not bad per se and was supported at the time by the majority of political parties. However, big problems occurred when these regions obtained the power to manage the money from the EU structural funds. Particularly from 2006 on, almost every single Czech region – and its political representatives – faced to a huge corruption scandal. These were usually directly or indirectly linked to the structural funds projects, often connected with regional politicians either from the Civic Democratic Party or from the Social Democrats. The regionalisation of EU funds led to networks of strong regional leaders and their business allies, which were for the parties´ headquarters almost impossible to control. The existence of these people – for whom the term “godfathers” is widely used – and their scandals was another nail in the coffin of traditional Czech parties.

Although there were also international and contextual causes for change in Czech politics – as for example the tragicomic Czech EU Presidency of 2009 or the outbreak of the financial crisis – the main dynamics of the 2010 earthquake are to be found inside the system and explained by mistakes committed by its leading politicians. As a result, the 2010 elections introduced the first populists into the Czech parliament. A party called “Public Affairs” successfully campaigned under the motto “We will wipe out the political dinosaurs” and became a part of the new government. Even though “Public Affairs” performed very badly and broke up after 3 years, their initial success opened a Pandora box of populism as affective tool. In 2013, in the second Czech early elections, it was effectively used by other new parties –Andrej Babiš’s non-ideological “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” (known as ANO) and the right-wing populist “Dawn of Direct Democracy”. The first movement, led (and owned, one could add) by one of the country’s richest businessmen, used the slogan “We are not like politicians, we are hard workers”, whereas Dawn promoted direct democracy as a universal medicine for everything wrong in the Czech Republic.

Particularly the former appeal was successful, as ANO – following the footsteps of “Public Affairs” (but not repeating the same mistakes) – has been participating in the new government and became the strongest political force in the country. The major question in 2017 is not who will win, but by how much ANO will win and how many partners (if at all) it will need to get a majority in the lower house. According to the most recent polls, traditional parties as the Social Democrats or the Civic Democrats are tottering around 10-12% of votes. At the moment, they fight with other small parties and possible newcomers like the “Pirates” – an emerging star of the Czech party landscape – rather than with ANO.

The Czech electoral system is a proportional one with a 5% threshold for obtaining seats in the House of Deputies. However, as the seats are distributed in 13 plus Prague regions, it has also some majoritarian elements. These are even strengthened by using the d´Hondt formula for calculating mandates. Hence, a party with approximately 30% of the votes can have around 40% or even more of the seats in the House of Deputies depending also on how many votes will fall below the 5% threshold and will thus be distributed among the successful parties.

Apart from the ANO victory the overall result of the elections is hardly to predict. The electoral campaign is not that much intensive and lack strong themes and issues. Traditional parties try to picture Mr. Babiš as dangerous oligarch and possible wannabe dictator, but fail to offer any positive and interesting agenda on their own. There other problem is the lack of charismatic leaders, an obvious must-have in current politics.

Therefore, what is to be expected as main outcome of the 2017 Czech elections is further instability in Czech politics as well as the strengthening of populism within it.

The post The Czechs are going to vote. And strengthen the populists further. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Beverly Barrett

The internationalization of higher education is a response to the pressures of globalization. There are economic, political, and social explanations for the reforms that have taken place in Europe since the Bologna Process launched 18 years ago on June 19, 1999 in the historic university city of Bologna, Italy.

Correspondingly, these explanations for internationalization of higher education are globalization (economic), intergovernmentalism (political), and Europeanization (social). The progress of the Bologna Process to create the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) originated with the Sorbonne Declaration among the education ministers of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom on May 25, 1998.

My new book Globalization and Change in Higher Education: The Political Economy of Policy Reform in Europe (published by Palgrave Macmillan) explains the institutional change that has taken place as a response to these pressures.[1]  The 21st century’s increasing demands for knowledge reflect a knowledge society that is driven by a knowledge economy (David and Foray 2002).[2] This is defined as an economy in which growth is dependent on the quantity, quality, and accessibility of the information available. Universities and all types higher education institutions have experienced unprecedented institutional change in the knowledge society (Cantwell and Kauppinen 2014).[3] Educational sociologists have concurred that the international convergence of academic programs’ criteria that comes from the Bologna Process is unprecedented (Frank and Meyer 2007:299).[4]

History, Ideas, and Institutions

When the Bologna Process started, it had been less than a decade since the end of the Cold War. As a social explanation, the central and eastern European countries were eager to show solidarity with the leadership initiative from the countries in western Europe. The growth of the Bologna Process from 29 countries originally to 48 countries today reflects how it has complemented the expansion of the European Union’s  Single Market, as the EU has grown from 15 countries in 1999 to 28 countries today.

The history, ideas, and institutions that frame our understanding of higher education are set out in the initial Chapters of the book, which frame the analysis in a historical institutional theoretical perspective.  The three primary objectives of the Bologna Process are convergence of higher education policies in 1) academic degree structure, 2) quality assurance, and 3) automatic recognition of degrees within the EHEA. Chapter 4 explains the dual roles of higher education institutions, as recipients of policy change from the national and European levels and as agents of policy change in the knowledge economy. The Bologna Process intersects with the higher education attainment objective of the Europe 2020 economic growth strategy of the Europe Commission. Chapter 5 explains, in quantitative assessment, that the most statistically significant relationship for higher education attainment is with GDP per capita among other variables in the political economy including employment, trade, R&D investment, population, and education spending.

With similar histories of political governance and distinct structures of government, the Iberian countries, Portugal and Spain, provide qualitative assessment case studies for countries within the EU.  Chapters 6 to 9 explain that given the unitary government of Portugal, the process of reform has proceeded with more uniformity than in the quasi-federal government of Spain. In the country of 17 autonomous communities of sub-national regions, Spain has 11 higher education qualifications agencies as compared to most EHEA countries that have one, indicating the complexity of higher education in the country.  Portugal has made greater progress, from 11 to 31 percent, than Spain’s progress, from 29 to 42 percent, toward the Europe 2020 target objective for 40 percent (of 30-34 year-olds) for higher education attainment, though Spain has reached the target (Eurostat 2016).

Model for Regional Integration and Key Findings

Referencing back to my posting in 2013, the Bologna Process has been a model for the regionalization of higher education throughout the world. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has developed its own Qualifications Reference Framework.  In North America, the Canadian and U.S. structures are similar. The U.S. and Mexico, together with Canada, have opportunities to collaborate, once able to overcome uncertainties around security, funding, and availability of academic mobility programs.[5]  The next step following graduates’ mobility is mutual recognition of professional qualifications, for which the ASEAN region continues to make progress.[6]

Among the key findings in the book are that these aspects of domestic politics matter for higher education policy reforms:

1) Structure of government (unitary v. (quasi-)federal)

2) Leadership consistency providing support for the reforms

3) Funding available for education or national wealth (measured by GDP per capita)

Today the 48-country EHEA, with the European Commission as a partner, continues to develop a higher education space where academic qualifications become recognized across countries. Competitive external economic pressures are part of globalization, while domestic politics influencing international cooperation drive intergovernmentalism. Leadership from the supranational EU that socially engages stakeholders and constructs regional norms is Europeanization. Approaching the end of the second decade of the Bologna Process, the change in higher education finds economic, political, and social explanations.

Beverly Barrett has served as Lecturer at the Bauer College of Business in Global Studies and at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She served as Associate Editor of the Miami European Union Center of Excellence following her doctoral fellowship. Current research interests include international political economy, regional integration, and governance with particular emphasis on education and economic development.    

[1] Barrett, Beverly. 2017. Globalization and Change in Higher Education: The Political Economy of Policy Reform in Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

[2] David, Paul A. and Dominique Foray. 2002. “An introduction to the economy of the knowledge society.” International Social Science Journal, 54:171, 9-23. Paris: UNESCO.

[3] Cantwell, Brendan and Ilkka Kauppinen (Eds). 2014. Academic capitalism in the age of globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

[4] Frank, David J. and John W. Meyer. 2007. University expansion and the knowledge society. Theory and Society, 36(4), 287–311.

[5] Vassar, David and Beverly Barrett. 2014. “U.S.-Mexico academic mobility: Trends, challenges, and opportunities.” Mexico Center Issue Brief. Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

[6] Asian Development Bank. 2016. Open windows, closed doors: Mutual recognition agreements on professional services in the ASEAN region. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Asian Development Bank.

The post Globalization and Change in Higher Education: Economic, Political, and Social Explanations appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

A text I published elsewhere over two years ago.
Read it again against the backdrop of this week’s news, found it still valid.

It is not every day that a researcher has the opportunity to be the eye-witness of a nation in the making. Sunday evening 7 June 2015, at the intersection between Avinguda de Sarria and Avinguda Josep Taradellas in the centre of Barcelona, was such a moment. Bumping into a joyful crowd that was waiting for the victory parade of their Champions League heroes in an open-deck bus, we had over two hours to improvise an in-depth session of participant observation. From the reports in the following day’s newspapers, it appears that our ‘field work sample population’ was perfectly representative of the entire city, which for the occasion metamorphosed into a very, very long ‘Fanmeile’.

As is usual nowadays on such fan zones, the patiently waiting crowd was entertained with music from loudspeakers placed at regular intervals along the itinerary of the bus. Next to the DJ, a nice lady was handing out Barça flags to those (a minority) who were not already equipped with garment or objects in the club’s colours, while an equally nice security man was scratching his head somewhat anxiously given the impressive number of persons sitting and standing in the middle of the street.

The crowd had several distinctive features: it was fully trans-generational, encompassing every single age group of the city; it had a striking gender parity within each of these age groups; and it was very visibly ethnically inclusive, with a rather significant percentage of individuals from various migrant origins.

Every now and then the DJ played ‘El Cant del Barça’, the official anthem of FC Barcelona, the lyrics of which are not really on a higher level of poetic sophistication than what can be heard in other stadia, but which seems to be mandatory learning content in primary education, judging from the degree of familiarity shown by the schoolchildren.

The latter were easy to observe since the youngest among them had been placed on the garbage container in order to give them a good view on the bus (as shown by my little photo gallery). They were, of course, excited, and while not all of them were necessarily understanding what exactly was being celebrated, they were certainly all intuitively getting the point that this was an exceptional moment, a kind of cheerful, but solemn ritual allowing individual persons to publicly show their belonging and obedience to a larger social group.

In other words: this was socialisation at work. Right before our eyes, kids from various backgrounds were being turned into little Catalans. For life, probably. The composition of the public, the sheer size of the crowd, and the Catalan flags hanging from every second balcony clearly gave evidence to the fact that the clichéd Barça motto ‘Més que un club’ is not an usurpation. As a matter of fact, this is not a club at all. It’s a national team.

This impression is confirmed when you walk into the Barça museum, where you have to go past a poster that enumerates ‘Catalan Identity. Universality. Social Commitment. Democracy’ as the pillars of the Barça identity.  It sounds like a political platform.

The evening reminded me of two very good book chapters on FC Barcelona. The first one figures in Simon Kuper’s wonderful Football against the Enemy, written in the mid-1990s, at a moment when ‘every day shop signs in Spanish went down and were replaced by Catalan signs’. For Simon Kuper, Catalan nationalism was all about symbolic recognition, not concrete political independance: ‘The Catalans do not want a state of their own, but they want something vaguer than that, symbols to prove they are a separate people’, and Barça is ‘the symbol that this nation needs in lieu of a state’. Certainly not a wrong perception twenty years ago, but it would be difficult to write the same thing today, as it would no longer sound reasonable to qualify Barça as an ‘under-performing’ club.

Ten years later, Franklin Foer also dedicated a chapter to Barça nationalism in How Soccer Explains the World. For him Catalan nationalism is already much more tangible, but it appears to him as an open and inclusive nationalism, like the liberating idea introduced by the French Revolution before it was perverted (mainly by the German romantics) into what then become no doubt the most powerful ideology of the 19th and 20th century.

Foer’s enthusiastic vision of Catalan nationalism is not naive, but it is shortsighted: proto-nationalism that is based on an existing and practiced language and on strong cultural self-awareness, and that may at the same time credibly claim to have undergone a long period of oppression, almost naturally appears as a sympathetic cause. It’s when independence has been reached and a newly existing state is charged with protecting borders, redistributing resources, and defending so-called national interests when things have a tendency to turn nasty.

Producing new Catalans with the help of cultural symbols is not too complicated. Especially if you can use the powerful emotions that football is capable of providing. But maintaining openness, inclusiveness and ethnic diversity in a future independent state will be the real test. A slightly more demanding one than a Champions League final.

The post Nation-building. Participant observation, June 2015. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

There’s nothing very useful to be to added to the general cacophony around Theresa May’s speech to her party conference yesterday: the jokes have all been made, the judgments handed in.

But one aspect that’s been relatively overlooked is the impact on Brexit: as discussion continues to swirl about, could it improve things to have her out of office?

The case in support of this looks pretty solid. Her authority, her policy and her communication are all severely lacking.

Firstly, her position within the party is severely compromised, and has been since the general election this spring. The trashing of her reputation was as swift and brutal as any that has been seen in recent times. The Tories are an unsympathetic lot when it comes to power and May failed the most basic of tests.

The speech appears to have done nothing more than convert some of the contempt into pity, which is not really an improvement, but instead another stage in the party’s rejection. It opens up the line of argument that she is tired and needs a break, ‘for her own good’: the attempt to get the party to buckle down on Brexit can now be met with a ‘there, there’.

Secondly, May’s policy line on Brexit remains utterly unclear. To all intents and purposes, we are still at the ‘Brexit means Brexit’ phase: empty rhetoric and incomplete and contradictory positions. The speech contained nothing to change that, a strange omission even if one considers the Florence speech to have been the main place for this: the conference as a whole was full of Brexit-talk, but without the push from the leader that might have mattered.

And this runs into the communication gap. This isn’t a matter of having a cough, but of having a communication strategy that reaches those it needs to reach, with appropriate messages.  To take the obvious example, the stronger response to Boris Johnson’s sniping would have been to re-appropriate the narrative on Brexit and Article 50 and demonstrate leadership on the matter, rather than skulking in the sidelines.

So, case closed. Right?

Not really. For as much as May is now damaged goods, there are good reasons to think that she remains the preferable person to be in Number 10.

First and foremost is the time question. As I think I’ve mentioned before, time is very much of the essence now in Article 50: we are now only just over a year away from the time when a deal needs to be finalised with the EU. Having already lost two months to a general election, losing another one or two months to a leadership contest – plus maybe another two to a further general election – looks deeply irresponsible. While there are still some who would happily leave the EU on a ‘no-deal’ basis, they are ever fewer in number, so the desire – which has built up markedly in recent weeks – to get to an agreement points towards making done with the current personnel.

Secondly, there is no one in the Conservative party who looks to have a more settled position on how to handle negotiations. There is a choice between the various shades of softening, and the various shades of hardening, but neither direction is built on a rigorous model and vision. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson might have been the darlings of the conference, but neither had any more to offer than platitudes on the greatness of Britain and how it would all work out in the end.

Even if a new leader did take over, the Conservatives would still have no single-party majority in the Commons, plus a potentially more hostile Opposition, galvanized by the scent of blood in the water: any hardening would also make internal party rebellion more likely.

Finally, and in contrast to the negative reasons for keeping May, there is also a positive in her premiership: the very ambiguity on policy that has hurt her so far. Article 50 is a negotiation and one in the which the UK was always going to have to make some compromises. While it might not have been the optimal way to go about it, May’s rhetoric has at least allowed for adaptions of position over time: consider sequencing, finances, transitions and all the other points she has given way on.

The original May plan was to be bold, but vague, then win a huge majority against Labour, then negotiate whatever deal, and then say “that’s what Brexit meant, and there’s nothing you can do to gainsay it, since you gave me a huge mandate.”

That plan now lies in the dirt, but May probably remains the best person to pursue something similar. Her very weakness means that she can now shoulder the blame as she compromises further.

In short, May has been the author of her own, slow-burning disaster. But that doesn’t mean she is yet to meet her end.

The post Must May go, or might May stay? A Brexit balancesheet appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The impact of an EU membership perspective on the national parliament of potential candidate countries is an important yet underexplored subject, writes Blerim Vela. Outlining some of the elements of his research, he suggests that the executive-legislature relationship and strength of the media and civil society are connecting factors in parliamentary development.

The usage of the term ‘crisis’ when discussing the EU’s current challenges has become widespread in media reporting, writes Max Steuer. Drawing from his analysis of quality newspapers in several Visegrad countries, where calls for the EU to address problems have often been accompanied by opposition to EU-wide solutions, he calls for more careful referencing to crisis in wider public discourse.

The journey of connecting your research interests and questions as a PhD student with an effective means of exploring them can sometimes be challenging, writes Rachael Dickson Hillyard. Reflecting on her research critically analysing EU narratives on good governance and rights-based policies, she argues that it is important to recognise the different ways of studying the EU and to embrace more reflexive approaches.

Nicoline Frolich and Ivar Bleiklie chair panel on higher education policy

Hannah Moscovitz and Martina Vukasovic

This year’s ECPR (European Consortium of Political Research) General Conference took place at the University of Oslo between September 6-9. The conference included hundreds of panels on a wide array of topics and representation from close to 2,000 academics from around the world. The ECPR Standing Group on the Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, for the sixth time in a row (following Prague 2016, Montreal 2015, Glasgow 2014, Bordeaux 2013 and Reykjavik 2011) organised a section with a total of six panels covering various themes related to knowledge policy governance.

The section opened with the panel European Integration in the Knowledge Domain –
Taking Stock and Forward Outlook. The panel was based on the research agenda presented in Maassen and Olsen’s (2007) seminal book “University Dynamics and European Integration”. Peter Maassen began by reflecting on the book’s contribution to empirical and theoretical work on higher education research. Mari Elken presented a paper outlining ideas for further developing the research agenda on European higher education and emphasizing the importance of considering the complex ecology involved. Jens Jungblut followed with a discussion of the political contestations involved in the implementation of European policy ideas at the national level. Finally, Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet presented their research on higher education regionalism, discussing its potential for contemporary political research as well as the importance of comparing regions ‘beyond Europe’ to further develop this field.

The following panel – Policy translation, adaptation and complexity in higher education, research and innovation – explored the various conditions which shape knowledge policy design. Hila Zahavi presented her research assessing the manner in which the EU’s foreign policy interests are embedded in various EU funded higher education programs. Teresa Patricio’s paper explored the research and higher education policy implications involved in complex international collaborations through the example of Portuguese university partnerships. Davide Donina then presented his paper on the examination of New Public Management features in Portuguese and Italian higher education systems, through a comparative and multi-level analysis. Hannah Moscovitz’s paper addressed the role of territorial identity-related interests in the design of knowledge policy from a subnational perspective. Finally, Sandra Hasanefendic’s paper examined the different responses to a new research policy implemented in two Portuguese poly-technics, revealing that the heterogeneous responses can be attributed to unique organisational structures.

The third panel highlighted empirical and theoretical contributions to research on the Policy, Governance and Organisational Change in Higher Education. Martina Vukasovic opened the panel with a discussion of the term ‘loose coupling’ in higher education research – outlining how it has been used, discussing some lacunas in its empirical application and opening avenues for future use. Sara Diogo then presented her paper on the influence of the OECD on European higher education, highlighting the diffusion of educational trends in Portugal and Finland. Roland Bloch followed with a presentation on the role played by the German Excellence Initiative in the proliferation of doctoral programs and its impact on the overall structure of German higher education. Agnete Vabo’s paper assessed how university mergers affect institutional autonomy and strategic steering, shedding light on the diversification involved. The panel concluded with a presentation by Ivar Bleiklie on the potential for discussing a Scandanavian model for higher education through a consideration of the commonalities and differences between Scandinavian countries’ higher education models.

The panel on Research Executive Agencies – Independent Organizations or the Extension of Research Policymakers?, aimed to prompt a discussion on research executive agencies (REAs) and their implications for knowledge policy research. Sarah Glück introduced the panel by highlighting the importance of scrutinising REAs in order to understand the competing logics inherent in science policy systems. Rupert Pichler and Sascha Ruhland’s paper analysed the normative framework governing research funding agencies, focusing on a number of dynamics impacting Austrian government policies in this domain. Que Anh Dang’s presentation explored Nordic higher education regionalism revealing how regional research agencies have contributed to new forms of region-building and market making in the area. Thomas König and Tim Flink’s paper assessed the challenges of the ERC for European research policy which they attribute to both its organisational framework and discursive compromises it undertakes. Finally, Inga Ulnicane presented her work on the concept of ‘grand challenges’, assessing whether it represents a new paradigm in science, technology and innovation policy.

The panel Unbundling knowledge production and knowledge dissemination aimed to conceptualise the ‘unbundling’ of knowledge policy; examining the different actors involved, understanding the consequences of such processes and implications for the university’s perceived role in society. Farah Purwaningrum’s paper discussed the understanding of the university’s third mission in Malaysia, specifically asking how the idea of the third mission as perceived by the Malaysian Ministry of Education affects knowledge production in Malaysian universities? Joonha Jeon’s paper assessed how New Public Management has influenced the realization of universities’ ‘third mission’, highlighting university-industry links in South Korea. Finally, Janja Komljenovic presented her paper assessing the unbundling processes evident in university social media marketing strategies. Through the example of LinkedIn, the study shows an important connection between higher education, markets and digital platforms.

The topic of the last panel in the section was Quality and Effectiveness of Governance in Higher Education: Unpacking the Quality of Governance and Effects of Governance Changes in Higher Education Policies. The panel comprised five papers. First, Michael Dobbins presented a comparative study on German and Swiss higher education reforms which, in response to similar challenges such as globalization and competition pressures, took two distinct (and somewhat unexpected routes) – decentralization and centralization, respectively. Giliberto Capano presented the study he co-authored with Andrea Pritoni on whether increasing autonomy can account for changes in education performance in Western European higher education systems. Meng-Hsuan Chou presented the paper co-authored with Pauline Ravinet concerning effectiveness of inter-regional policy dialogues, in particular focusing on cooperation between EU and ASEAN in the form of EU-SHARE project. Beverly Barrett presented a paper on higher education in Latin America, Portugal and Spain. The panel concluded with a paper by Jens Jungblut and Peter Maassen focusing on quality of governance in sub-Saharan Africa, which, amongst other, provided also a conceptual contribution concerning two dimensions of quality of governance – autonomy and capacity.

Apart from the panels in this section, the members of the Standing Group also took part in other sessions, including:

-          Roundtable on the consequences of internationalization of political science education

-          Featured Panel: The European Research Council @ 10: What has it done to us?

-          Transformation of the Political Studies Profession: What does it mean to be an Active Academic in the Current Era?

Standing Group dinner at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education NIFU

As has become tradition, the Standing Group also had its annual meeting focused on planning future activities, including ECPR 2018 which will take place in Hamburg. The meeting was also marked by the Award for Excellent Paper from an Emerging Scholar to Que Anh Dang for her paper “The Bologna and ASEM Education Secretariats: Authority of Transnational Actor in Regional Higher Education Policy”. Standing Group members attended the keynote lecture by Johan P. Olsen “Democratic Accountability and the Changing European Political Order” and enjoyed the very generous hospitality of the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education NIFU, which hosted the traditional Standing Group dinner.

ECPR 2017 was another successful year for our Standing Group, gathering researchers from 20 different countries, currently based on three continents (Asia, Europe and North America). See you in the next ECPR General Conference in Hamburg in August 2018!

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Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech in Florence was intended to move forward stalled Brexit negotiations. But as I argue in this post that first appeared on the Dahrendorf Blog, Britain has found itself running into numerous problems with Brexit because its strategy for exiting the EU has been a textbook example of failed strategic thinking.

It’s said that in the First World War the Germans viewed the British troops and their generals as lions led by donkeys. One hundred years on, to much of the rest of Europe it is Britain’s national leaders, bereft of any coherent unified strategy for exiting the EU, who are donkeys misleading a great country.

If things continue as they have been, Britain’s approach to Brexit will be studied by generations of strategists as an example of flawed strategic thinking. The rest of Europe and Britain’s key allies such as the United States should lament this. As the Henry Jackson Society pointed out in a recent report, Britain remains a country of immense power and potential. It is not a dwarf and Brexit does not doom it to become one. The British people, like the troops of the First World War, will soldier on. But Brexit does pose the biggest political, administrative, and economic challenge Britain has faced in a long time. If it is handled badly, Britain will suffer unnecessary pain and losses. In facing such a challenge, the British people deserve to be led by leaders with a grasp of what it is they want to achieve and an ability to direct Britain towards it.

Strategy is a balanced combination of ends, ways, and means, which incorporates an assessment of risk and an opponent’s likely behaviour. Successful implementation and adaptation of strategy depends on having leaders who are able and willing to react and lead the struggle. Britain’s approach to Brexit has not lived up to this definition.

Before we open this up further let us be clear that Brexit is not a simple one-off event. It is a series of overlapping multifaceted, multi-levelled processes, negotiations, and debates involving multiple actors in Britain, the remaining EU, Europe, and the rest of the world. Its wide-ranging nature and complexity make it one of the most important and difficult political issues to define and analyse. Finding a way through it, for all involved, was never going to be easy. As I’ll touch on in a future blog post, the EU’s own approach has not been without problems. But Britain has so far gone about it in a particularly poor way.

Ends

Britain has made the fundamental strategic mistake of not knowing what end it seeks from Brexit. “Brexit means Brexit” said Theresa May. But Brexit is a process with no clearly defined destination. It’s like saying “War means war”. War, after all, is a means to an end. Britain’s leadership has been divided, unsure, and left shell-shocked by the Leave vote in a referendum in which most of them had campaigned for Remain. But in voting for Leave what the British people wanted Leave to mean – and therefore what end they want the UK government to deliver – has never been entirely settled. Its why British politics since 23 June 2016 has been defined by a battle to define the narrative of Brexit. It was the need for a mandate to define such a narrative that led Theresa May to trigger an unexpected general election. She hoped it would empower her to pursue the Brexit she outlined in January. Instead, the hung parliament that emerged has only confused things further.

That more than a year on from the vote British politicians are still arguing about the nature of a transition deal points to how far there is still to go before Britain knows what it wants from what Theresa May describes as a “deep and special partnership” with the EU. And it has not been just the governing Conservative party that has struggled. Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and other opposition parties have either fudged the issue or offered unrealistic ends as part of electoral manoeuvring rather than an assessment of what is possible or in the national interest. The inability of British politicians to know what they want and whether they can get it has led to calls for the EU to take the initiative by explaining to the UK what its options are.

Ways

With an unclear end, the UK has been in no position to assess or prepare the ways to get there. Given that no plan survives first contact, the need to constantly plan and adapt is one of the key requirements of any strategy. As Former U.S. President and U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “plans are worthless, but planning is everything”. It makes sense, therefore, to task the British civil service with planning for a range of possibilities, including a no-deal scenario. That sounds an ideal way towards a resilient strategy. But the planning only started a year ago, thanks to David Cameron’s refusal to contemplate a Leave vote in the run-up to the referendum. Since then, and as noticed by the EU’s negotiators, Britain’s negotiators have struggled to grasp the detail because there’s so much for them to do. This hasn’t stopped British Ministers from promising to achieve great things. They ignored that they lacked a way – and the time –to settle Brexit in the two-year timeframe provided by Article 50. They forgot that under-promising and over-delivering is a shining virtue; vice versa, a mortal sin.

Means

With no clear end and inadequate and confused ways, it should come as no surprise that Britain has been unable to prepare, configure, or effectively deploy the means it has available. The means are plentiful: staff, money (not least Britain’s budgetary contributions), legal positions, diplomatic support from allies, trade deals, military and security capabilities, the status of UK and EU citizens, Britain’s trade relationships with the rest of the EU, the power of the City of London, and so forth. One reason Britain has struggled is because its diplomatic means in Europe are not what they once were. Before the referendum, a great deal of EU business was conducted via Brussels. Large parts of Britain’s diplomatic resources throughout the rest of the EU were redirected towards areas of the world outside Europe, especially emerging powers. That now must be rebalanced.

Britain also needs replacements for EU regulators, additional civil servants to undertake new work, new facilities at ports, new IT systems to address changes in how trade is handled, and much more. None of this is impossible and work has begun, but it’s still in the early phases. The rest of the EU knows this. Those who compare Brexit negotiations to a poker game overlook how both sides know exactly what the others hand is. Threatening to walk away from the EU when you won’t have the means in place to deliver a ‘hard Brexit’ in a way that doesn’t inflict real and lasting damage is a bluff the other side sees straight through.

Assessment of Risk

Britain’s assessment of the risks involved in Brexit has been lacking. In triggering Article 50 when she did, Theresa May made time an ally of the EU and increased the risk of Britain not having a settlement in time for an exit it wanted. The British government forgot what the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu argued in the 5th century BC: ‘The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory’. Having jumped headlong into Article 50 negotiations, Britain has come to realise over the past year that it needs to look for a way to victory.

Assessment of the EU

Assessment and understanding of the EU, the UK’s opponent in Brexit, has been limited. May’s speech in Florence was billed as a ‘re-engagement with Europe’. That will have perked up the ears of the rest of the EU, because, as the outgoing French ambassador in London recently noted, the UK has spent the past year talking to itself about Brexit. Leaders and decision makers elsewhere in the EU have routinely denounced talk such as ‘having your cake and eating it’, and done so to the point of ridicule. Yet with donkey-like stubbornness, some British ministers have continued to repeat and, even worse, believe their own rhetoric. Mrs May and the rest of the UK’s leadership need to recognize that the EU is changing and that Britain’s place in Europe will be shaped by this dynamic, and not only by its own hopes and plans for Brexit. Brexit is but one of several challenges and opportunities confronting the EU, among them the pressures facing the eurozone, Schengen, Russian relations, the future of NATO and ties with the U.S. How the EU responds to these pressures will determine its place in the world and frame its future relationship with Britain.

Does this mean Britain is doomed to lurch from one Brexit crisis to the next, resulting in catastrophic humiliation for Britain? Not necessarily. Britain might have over-reached in the first phase of Brexit negotiations, but it’s still too early to evaluate the full significance of Brexit and whether the old phrase holds that you can lose a battle but win the war. That, of course, depends on where Britain and the EU end up in the 2020s in terms of their relations and relative power in the world and in Europe. The rest of the EU has its own weaknesses. Strategies for saving the euro have sometimes been nothing more than glorified exercises in muddling through, with EU decision-makers often making donkeys of themselves. The only strategy that can realistically work is one based on mutual self-interest, where losses are minimised for both sides. However, it remains unclear whether Britain, or the EU, can find ways towards this.

This post first appeared on the Dahrendorf Blog.

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Although little evidence supports the existence of welfare tourism, the EU’s Court of Justice has increasingly adopted this economic rationale in its rulings, writes Charles O’Sullivan. He argues that the court, having departed from its original legal test for social assistance claims in several decisions, is bowing to political pressure on access to welfare support.

The European Union (EU) referendum result has led to the unfolding of a domestic constitutional drama in the United Kingdom, which on its current trajectory could lead to its break-up. This is the first of two blog posts which maps the initial trajectory by considering the roles of the key institutional actors in the drama so far. The second post  will consider the impact of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, published in July 2017 and to be debated by the UK Parliament in Autumn 2017, on this constitutional drama.

Setting the scene

Within the framework of the current devolution settlement, the UK’s withdrawal from the EU will mean that Scotland also leaves, despite 62% of the Scottish electorate voting to ‘remain’. However, EU law is embedded within Scotland’s devolved constitutional landscape – the devolved administrations are required to honour the obligations of EU law – and a UK withdrawal from the EU will have direct and significant impacts on the devolution settlement as currently designed.

This sets the scene for a constitutional drama which has been slowly unfolding since 24 June 2016.

Act 1

Enter – the Scottish Government

The referendum result has prompted calls from Scotland’s First Minister to ‘take all possible steps and explore all options to give effect to how people in Scotland voted.’ Short of a second independence referendum which, if successful, would allow Scotland to become an EU Member State in its own right, consideration, as promised, has been given to whether Scotland could remain in the EU without seeking independence in two position papers: Scotland a European Nation and Scotland’s Place in Europe.

Although legally feasible, implementation of the plan set out in these papers would require a high level of political will and legal creativity at both the UK and the EU level. However, the UK Prime Minister has not so far shown any signs of willingness to permit Scotland to negotiate a differentiated position as part of the Brexit negotiations.

Act 2

Enter – The UK Government

The UK Government’s reaction to its counterpart’s calls from Holyrood to respect the decision of Scottish voters to remain in the EU has been muted. Aptly summarised under the title of the ‘May Doctrine’ the UK Government is said to be proceeding on the basis of two assumptions: first, that a certain course of action, namely Brexit – however vaguely defined in its specifics – is irresistible. Second, that the UK executive alone has direct responsibility for the implementation, delineation and definition of Brexit (Blick, 2016).

The ‘May Doctrine’ is clearly enunciated in Theresa May’s Brexit speech, given on 17 January 2017, in which the Prime Minister made it clear that there would be no accommodation of Scotland’s desire for a differentiated relationship with the EU. Doubts were also cast in this speech, and in the government’s subsequent White Paper, over the future remit of the Scottish Parliament. It is often assumed that those powers currently exercised by the EU which fall within devolved competence will be repatriated to the Scottish legislature. In her speech, Theresa May instead suggested instead that it would be left to the UK Parliament (with no mention of the devolved administrations) to decide on any future changes to the law. This position has been confirmed in the publication of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill; a preliminary overview of which can be found here (for more detail on the devolution aspect see blog post 2).

Despite much rhetoric to the contrary the UK government’s position on Brexit expounded to date appears to diminish rather than value the devolved constitutional landscape of the UK and the voices of the administrations within that. There is no legal means by which those voices can be taken into account and a flawed intergovernmental talking shop (the Joint Ministeral Committee) is apparently not providing a meaningful forum for genuine discussions based on mutual trust and respect. With the stakes so high, this is a sorry situation indeed, and in all likelihood, a constitutional collision course in the making.

Act 3

Enter – The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has taken the place of the third actor in this constitutional drama. In R (on the application of Miller and Dos Santos) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5 the Court was asked whether the UK Government had the power to give formal notice of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU (to ‘trigger article 50 TEU’) without prior parliamentary authorisation through a legislative Act. The outcome of the case in respect of this question is well known: namely that an Act of Parliament is required to authorise ministers to give notice of the decision of the UK to withdraw from the EU. However, the Court was also asked to examine the role of the Sewel Convention which provides that the UK Parliament will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament. Given that the decision to leave the EU directly impinges on a considerable part of the work of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish government on issues ranging from agriculture and fisheries, environmental protection to higher education and research, the argument was led that the UK Parliament required the consent of the Scottish Parliament before it could trigger Article 50 TEU.

The Supreme Court unanimously held that the Sewel Convention effectively restates a constitutional convention rather than a legally binding obligation. The Court did not reach a conclusive decision on whether consent was required as a matter of convention but did decide that the devolved legislatures lack the legal power to block the triggering of Article 50 TEU.

The decision of the Court in this respect may well contribute to the heightening of tensions within our current constitutional drama as the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill will be subject to approval by the Scottish Parliament through a legislative consent motion. Both the Welsh and Scottish governments have indicated their refusal of consent following the publication of the Bill (see blog post 2).

Act 4

Enter – The UK Parliament

The Supreme Court’s decision in Miller has been described as simply putting ‘the Brexit ball firmly back in the [UK] parliament’s court.’ Only it, through the adoption of a statute – and not the UK Government – could allow Article 50 TEU to be triggered and both the House of Commons and the House of Lords agreed to give the Prime Minister the power to trigger Article 50 TEU. The UK’s notification of withdrawal was sent on 29 March 2017. The UK Parliament will have a significant role to play in relation to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill and will be required to adopt a raft of additional legislation (yet to be drafted) within an extremely short timescale.

Final Curtain?

All eyes are now back on the Houses of Parliament as the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill makes its way through the legislative process. The disappointing outcome of June’s general election which returned a ‘hung’ parliament has seemingly emboldened some (government and opposition) MPs to question the government’s stance on Brexit. At the same time, the Scottish government’s position has been seriously weakened by the loss of many of its MPs in the election.

The Bill itself may result in fundamental changes being made to the devolution settlement and given that devolution has embedded itself increasingly into the fabric of the UK constitution over its almost 20 year history, it seems unconscionable that it might be at breaking point – but on the basis of performances given thus far in the drama, it is, at least when viewed from North of the Border.

This blog post is a shortened version of a longer piece
which appeared as M. Fletcher and R. Zahn,
‘Brexit, the UK and Scotland: the story so far:
A constitutional drama in four acts’
in G. Hassan and R. Gunson, Scotland, the UK and Brexit:
A Guide to the Future, Luath Publishing, Edinburgh, 2017

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