Ideas on Europe Blog

The ideal Christmas gift! (For your French friends only).

In case you have friends or family in France and you don’t know what to offer them for Christmas, my suggestion is: buy them a set of jerrycans. They may come handy in 2017. Not at once, but once the summer is over, they might be more useful than ever.

This advice is based on the commonly held view that the French left has no chance whatsoever to weigh on the forthcoming presidential and legislative elections. In the former its main role will be to help block the ascent of the Front National; in the latter, it will serve as punching ball for massive dissatisfaction with the previous government and simply try to limit the damage with regard to the number of seats in the Assemblée nationale. Whatever the desperate posturing of ex-Prime minister Manuel Valls, it is difficult to see how he could beat either François Fillon or Marine Le Pen and make it to the second round.

And once Fillon will be elected and provided with a parliamentary majority, the configuration will be slightly reminiscent of 1995, when a popular President (Chirac) and a brilliant Premier (Juppé) were finally going to bring about the reforms this country so urgently needed.  The Juppé government (of which Fillon was a member, in charge of technology, information and La Poste) set out to make the redistributive retirement scheme and Social Security financially sustainable.

Photo can be used every five years. Just replace name of PM as appropriate.

The French, who expected to be delivered on Chirac’s promise to heal the ‘social divide’, felt betrayed and erupted with anger. The country was totally paralysed for weeks in a row by massive strikes including not only transport, but also health and electricity services, and when two million people took to the streets on 12 December, Chirac gave in, buried the largest part of the reforms and spent the rest of his eleven and a half years in office as ‘The idle king’ (as Sarkozy once called him).

In 2017 the left may appear hopelessly divided and exhausted by five years of governmental responsibility in truly exhausting times, but the disappointment with Hollande does not mean the founding values of the left have lost their power of mobilisation. And once the painful slap in the face of the spring and summer elections overcome by the end of August, the people of the left will be ready to make sure ‘la rentrée’ in early September will be ‘chaude’ (which does not mean ‘warm’, but ‘burning hot and ready for ignition’).

If Doctor Fillon is determined to administer only half of his bitter medicine, the trade unions will be offered the rallying cry they desperately need to exist. In a country where strikes are not the ultimate means when everything else fails in negotiation, but a prelude to talks that gauges the level of bargaining power, the public services – Fillon’s main target and the union’s major stronghold – may be stalled in no time. And the unions are not alone: they might well be joined by an improbable coalition of the ‘sleeping’ movement of ‘Nuit debout’ that is only waiting to wake up again and several other professional groups in defense of archaic privileges. The latter will have a wonderful opportunity to disguise their interest-driven motivations as rightful indignation and struggle for dignity.

Considering the amount of angry demonstrators brought to the streets in recent months by the relatively meek reform bills of the socialist government – including professional groups like notaries and policemen! – it will not take much to set to fire the explosive mix of accumulated anger and frustration.

In the worst-case scenario (which would not even come as a surprise) public transport would be the first sector to be massively impacted, and it might promptly be followed by numerous road blockades orchestrated by exasperated farmers, infuriated lorry drivers and maddened taxi drivers. And the most important thoroughfares to be blocked are of course the access roads to the huge refineries in Gonfreville/Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon (Le Havre), Donges (Nantes-Saint Nazaire) and Martigues (Marseille). After a few days, the petrol stations will have run dry and France come to a halt.

That will be the moment when your jerrycan Christmas gift will be fondly remembered.

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 7 on the French 2017 election marathon.
Post # 6 here. Post # 5 here. Post # 4 here.
Post # 3 here. Post # 2 here. Post # 1 here.

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So last night was the Politics Department Christmas meal. Suffice to say that I’m the only one in so far, possibly because I had my first Article 50-themed dream – Lord Pannick was doing donuts a la Boris, while David Davis was giving evidence to a Parliamentary Committee – and felt that sleep was no longer a good idea.

And yes, drinking was involved. And karaoke.

Anyhoo, I tell you this not simply to stress what a good bunch of colleagues I have but because my dream reminded me of a thought I’d had yesterday while watching the actual David Davis give actual evidence.

As various people have noted, there is a shift going on in government of late; namely that the campaigning mode of bright aspiration is now being tempered by some sense of what is actually possible/likely to happen. In Jolyon Maugham’s lovely phrase ”the bare swinging lightbulb of reality” has cast its unrelenting beam on Brexit, with all the uncomfortable consequences that I currently have no trouble imagining.

As I argued recently, this might be partly a matter of positioning, of politicians softening the effect of Brexit by progressive reshaping of debate and attitudes.

However, to read reports of Cabinet discussions, it’s also evident that there’s also a big pile of self-delusion and ignorance still going on and that any modification of rhetoric or objective is due to Maugham’s lightbulb.

Seen in this light, Davis’ comments that the UK’s plan won’t be ready until February must be read as that time being needed for everyone to come to a more informed understanding about such basics as access to the internal market, free movement, transition deals and budgetary contributions.

Part of this is also a growing understanding of the complexities of the EU27 side of the negotiation. At the event I co-organised on Monday with the CER, we had a great debate (that you can listen to here) about the view from Berlin, Paris, the Visegrad Four and beyond on Article 50.

Importantly, all the speakers stressed that while everyone is committed to maintaining the EU, all are also deeply interested in their domestic agendas and in making the most of the UK’s situation for their own benefit. That translates in some diverse priorities, be that keeping links with the UK (for Germany), preserving security cooperation (for France and the CEECs), defending market liberalisation (for the Dutch) or changing the EU’s future path (for everyone). Today’s European Council might resolve procedure on Article 50, but it’s unlikely to reach full agreement on what it contains.

In short, what we’re seeing here is the start of the more serious end of the shift from referendum to negotiation. To put it differently, there is more of a sense that this is not a movie so much as a big lever-arch file of detailed notes: there will not be Lord Pannick doing stunts, but rather long, complex and hard-to-resolve negotiations on many fine points of law and technicality.

This is the phase in which scrutiny will matter all the more, whatever one’s interest or view of Brexit. Where the government has been pretty consistent is in wanting to negotiate away from the prying eyes of Parliament and the media and as public interest drifts away the pressure to be open will likely drop off too. From a democratic perspective, and for anyone who’s worried about backsliding, this isn’t a good situation, but also suggests that the window of opportunity to open things up is closing down.

Christmas might traditionally be a time of rest, but this year it’s going to be very busy, as everyone tries to get their houses in order for the coming of Article 50 notification. As has been the case since 24 June, the sooner you get out there, the sooner you can set the agenda.

And now for a cup of something soothing.

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Andrea Gideon

The main activities of higher education institutions (HEIs), teaching and research, have in recent years started to be influenced by EU law. For example, Austria and Belgium had to make changes in the past to their free and open access to higher education policies,[1] the German study grant Bafög had been subject to various EU cases[2] and a Dutch university’s spin-off activities have been scrutinised under state aid law.[3] Yet, the EU has only limited competences in these policy areas. Indeed, the cases which partly required significant changes to national HEI policies did not arise from EU higher education or research policy, but from individuals relying on their rights in other, seemingly unrelated areas of law. What does this mean for HEIs in Europe? Will it pose a threat to the traditional European understanding of what a university is? Why is there not a coherent policy at EU level instead and would that be preferable? These are questions which are investigated in my forthcoming book ‘Higher Education Institutions in the EU: Between Competition and Public Service’ (TMC Asser / Springer, 2017).

The book aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of the impact that EU law and policy have on HEIs in EU Member States with a particular focus on the impact of EU competition law on research in universities. While the impact of other areas of EU law has received some attention in the past,[4] EU competition law is a largely unexplored area which made this a particularly interesting field for investigation. Furthermore, research on how EU law impacts on HEIs has thus far focused on higher education rather than on research activities of HEIs. In the book I try to redress this imbalance. On the following I will provide a short overview of the book.

The mission of European universities and why it may be influenced by EU law

The first chapter, after setting out the research questions and structure of the book, investigates what the mission (in the sense of an idea or goal rather than a mission statement) of European HEIs is. In a short historical analysis it will be seen that traditionally European HEIs were research intensive, national universities with a high degree of academic freedom and autonomy which taught and conducted research for knowledge’s sake rather than towards a particular, commercially exploitable aim and were funded mainly by the state. However, more recently, they have become more economic in nature.

Employing approaches from European integration theory, it will then be seen that this ‘commodification’ of HEIs can increase the likeliness that seemingly unrelated EU law can become applicable to HEIs/HEI policy. The law is then applied to cases by judges mainly when individuals attempt to rely on their rights arising from EU law. The ‘spill-over’ of EU law just happens in a piece meal approach rather than as a coherent policy. Furthermore, the application of economic law can lead to further commodification than may have been intended.

EU law and policy on HEIs

The second chapter investigates the competences the EU actually has to draft policies on higher education and research. It will be seen that these competences are rather limited, especially in the area of higher education. Yet, the Member States (and other countries in Europe) seem to have felt it was desirable to coordinate policies beyond what would have been (allegedly)[5] possible under the EU competences. They therefore opted for EU soft law mechanisms under the Open method of coordination as part of the Lisbon/ Europe 2020 Strategy as well as for the Bologna Process (which goes beyond the EU). However, as many have investigated these mechanisms are not entirely unproblematic.[6] More, importantly, for our purposes, they do not prevent ‘spill-over’ from other provisions of EU law. Therefore, the second part of chapter 2 provides an overview of potential impacts of EU Citizenship law, the free movement provisions (free movement of goods, workers, services, establishment and capital) and competition and state aid law on HEIs in the EU.

Competition law and HEIs

Chapter 3 continues in this vein by studying in more detail the area of EU competition law. EU competition law is only applicable to ‘undertakings’ and it provides an exemption for services of general economic interest (SGEIs). The two concepts are therefore, first, introduced and it is analysed in how far they apply to HEIs and thus in how far HEIs fall under EU competition law. It will be shown that this becomes increasing likely the more commercial elements an HEI system adopts. The second part of chapter 3 then conducts an in-depth legal-doctrinal analysis of potential constraints on HEIs arising from competition and state aid law. Here it is shown that competition law can occasionally help to vend of exploitative practices by HEIs (e.g. price fixing at a high level). However, it will also be shown that there can be a variety of situations where the application of the competition rules might have a detrimental social effect (e.g. when tuition fees are fixed at a low level to allow broader access and this is being challenged).

Competitition law and research universities in England, the Netherlands and Germany

Chapter 4 and 5 conduct an in-depth empirical study of potential competition law effects on research in universities in England, the Netherlands and Germany. These Member States have been chosen as they all started to experiment with more commercial elements in their HEI systems, but at a different pace with England being furthest on the path towards commodification, followed by the Netherlands and then Germany. Chapter 4 introduces the research systems of these three Member States and provides an initial competition law analysis. It will be seen that, if an activity does fall under competition law, potential tensions between competition law and national research policies may arise in all three systems. However, the more economically oriented the system, the more frequently this may happen.

Chapter 5 then contains the empirical study itself. After setting out the methodology employed, a subchapter on each country discusses the economic constraints in the relevant systems, the awareness of key officers in universities of and the potential constraints arising from EU competition law. In all three countries interviewees expected the commodification tendencies to continue and there was some criticism for this development. Yet, the more detailed sentiments about the research systems as well as the awareness of competition law of the interviewees differed between the countries in correspondence with the general character of the research systems. On the basis of the information received from the interviewees, a more in depth appreciation than in chapter 4 of the question in how far competition law becomes applicable and in how far it may lead to potential tensions is then provided in chapter 5. While some potential tensions with competition law discussed in previous chapters do not seem to materialise in the three Member States, some could indeed cause concerns and others have been detected. Of course, there may still be the possibility of the application of exemptions, but these might not capture every situation and, in any case, might make the conduct of HEIs increasingly complicated from a legal/administrative perspective. Given the current situation, HEIs are thus advised to pay increasing attention to EU competition law.

Conclusions

Chapter 6 connects the results of all chapters and contextualises them in the wider debate on commodification of HEIs and the concerns related to this development. In more recent Commission legislation it appears that the Commission has made some attempts to align EU research policy with competition and state aid. The chapter therefore discusses these attempts critically and concludes that this equally poses some concerns because they are partly overly complicated, are decided upon entirely by the Commission and do not appear to necessarily reflect the views of the general public or stakeholders in HEIs. Therefore, an outlook is given of potential alternative strategies, as unlikely as their realisation in the current Eurosceptic climate may be, for a more coherent EU level policy on HEIs which moves away from the current tendency towards commodification and truly clarifies the legal position of HEIs under EU law, though the details of such approaches will have to be left to future research.

Andrea Gideon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Law & Business (National University of Singapore) for which she has suspended her position as Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. In her current project she is investigating the application of competition law to public services in ASEAN. Her previous research concerned tensions between the economic and the social in the EU with a focus on EU competition law, in which research area she earned her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2014.

[1] C-147/03 Commission vs Austria, C-65/03 Commission vs Belgium.

[2] C-11-12/06 Morgan and Bucher, C-523-585/11 Prinz and Seeberger, C-220/12 Thiele and C-275/12 Elrick.

[3] T-488/11 Sarc.

[4] For example, Dougan M, ‘Cross-border educational mobility and the exportation of student financial assistance’ (2008) 5 European Law Review 723, Garben S, EU Higher Education Law – The Bologna Process and Harmonization by Stealth (Kluwer 2011), Damjanovic D, ‘“Reserved areas” of the Member States and the ECJ: The case of higher education’ in Micklitz H-W and De Witte B (eds), The European Court of Justice and the Autonomy of the Member States (Intersentia 2012).

[5] Garben (n 4) questions if that was really as impossible as commonly held. For a shortened version see also Garben S, ‘The Bologna Process: From a European Law Perspective’ (2010) 16 ELJ 186.

[6] See, for example, Nóvoa A, ‘Ways of thinking about education in Europe’ in Nóvoa A and Lawn M (eds), Fabricating Europe – The formation of an education space (Kluwer 2002), Neave G and Maassen P, ‘The Bologna Process: an intergovernmental policy perspective’ in Maassen P and Olsen J (eds), University dynamics and European integration (Springer 2007), Garben (n 5), Corbett A, ‘Education and the Lisbon Strategy’ in Copeland P and Papadimitriou D (eds), The EU’s Lisbon Strategy: evaluating success, understanding failure (Palgrave MacMillan 2012).

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The MSc International Public Administration & Politics programme (IPAP) at Roskilde University offers the students to come on a study tour to Brussels to visit the EU institutions and other organisations. This year the study tour took place 28-30 November, where 19 students and two lecturers – Sevasti Chatzopoulou and Helene Dyrhauge – visited NATO, EFTA, the European Parliament and the European Commission. During the three days the students met policy-makers, diplomats and politicians (MEPs), and they discussed a broad range of policy topics ranging from migration, BREXIT to railway and food safety.

The aim of the study tour was to give the students an opportunity to actively apply the knowledge they have gained from the courses and to give them an opportunity to talk to policy experts about topics we had covered in class, also to give the students ideas for future career directions.

The students had all taken three courses this autumn; Institutions & Actors, Civil Servants and International Public Economics. The courses are theoretical driven. The institutions and actors course discusses the role of actors and ideas within institutional structure where it focuses on different governance levels. The civil servant course focuses on the different roles civil servants have, especially in areas where policy problems often cross territorial, administrative and sectoral boundaries.  The International Public Economics courses explores the causes and consequences of differences governments’ alternative approaches to fundamental public policy issues. All the courses discuss the impact of the EU and globalization on national government policies. Some of the topics covered in the courses range from food safety, labour markets and climate change.

The students had to prepare for the study tour. The students had been given a reading list for each policy topic, which contained a journal article and a policy document. Two students were assigned one policy topic and had to prepare questions for the specific presentation. This aim was to ensure that at least two students asked questions to each presenter. In the end there were generally two to five students asking questions to each presenter. Overall, the students not only listened to the policy experts’ presentations they actively engaged in dialogues with the policy experts, thereby using their knowledge from their courses. Indeed one EU administrator left the meeting saying; “this is the most difficult group, I’ve met”. As two of the core lecturers on the IPAP programme both Sevasti and I were proud of our students for asking challenging questions to the policy experts.

During the three days, I had several conversations with the students about the policy presentations, especially about how the students could see the link between the courses  and the actual policies, but also how the students could use their knowledge after graduations in their future careers. Indeed one student got lots of new ideas for her MSc dissertation and another decided to change his flight so he could stay for the final presentation on ‘circular economy’ and a third student is thinking about doing an internship in one of the EU institutions.

Organising the tour was hard and took lots of time, but the reward of seeing how the students used their knowledge from the courses, how they actively engaged in discussions with policy experts and discovered the practical relevance of the MSc IPAP programme was a delight. The students have already asked when we are organising a new study tour … but I think I need a break and eat some of the lovely Belgian chocolate the students gave me before going on another study tour. However, we are visiting the European Environmental Agency tomorrow, Tuesday, which luckily only is a short train ride away from Roskilde University, and I look forward to the students once again asking challenging questions to two policy experts talking about climate change.

IPAP group photo from the visit to the European Commission

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The country has a chronic skills shortage and without migrants helping to fill that gap, Britain – and Britons – would be poorer.

Britain now has more people at work than ever before. We also have a record number of job openings – around 755,000 vacancies this autumn alone. It’s no wonder that in line with that, immigration from the rest of Europe is also at a record high.

Why? Because migrants mostly come to Britain for jobs, and if there were not so many jobs, there would be little reason to come here, and therefore, not so many migrants.

Of course, none of this is any consolation to the 1.6 million people currently unemployed. But unfortunately, many of the unemployed do not have the skills now needed by employers. Britain, of course, should be spending billions in upskilling our workers, and especially the unemployed.

Similarly, we shouldn’t blame migrants that parts of the country lack sufficient schools, hospitals, homes, or that many are struggling on zero-hour contracts. For that, we should blame our political masters.

It’s too easy for the government to scapegoat migrants for our problems, when the fact is that without migrants, the country would be poorer. If all migrants went home, we wouldn’t have more schools, hospitals and homes. We would simply have a bigger shortage of teachers, doctors, nurses and builders.

In the meantime, British businesses are hungry for more skilled workers. Without them, our economy would stagnate and die. That, actually, is one way to stem the flow of migration to Britain – to trash our economy. But who would seriously advocate such a policy?

Whilst still a member of the European Union, Britain has record numbers at work, record numbers of vacancies, and unemployment at an 11-year-low of 4.8%. Helping to propel that recovery are EU migrants, most of whom are in gainful employment, working hard, paying taxes and spending most of their earnings here, in Britain.

And yet, Britain still doesn’t have enough workers to fill the profound skills gap the country is facing.

Yes, of course, we should be training more people.

But in the meantime, the government has compiled a long list of skills the country needs – now, urgently. It’s called the UK Shortage Occupation List. We need, for example:

Scientists, such as geologists; nuclear medicine experts; mechanical engineers, such as for the oil and gas industries; electronic engineers for the motoring industry; software developers for 2D/3D animation; contaminated land specialists; medical practitioners, such as psychiatrists, anaesthetics and radiographers; specialist intensive care nurses; maths and science teachers; social workers; contemporary dancers; orchestral musicians; overhead lines workers; skilled chefs..

..And the list goes on and on. Skilled workers that the country needs now.

In addition, many farms, catering establishments, hotels, care homes and builders categorically state that they simply could not survive, let alone thrive, without EU migrants. Not because they are cheaper (can you really find a cheap Polish plumber these days?). No. It’s because these establishments have more vacancies to fill than British people either can or want to fill.

Eurosceptics say they are not against migration, but want the country to have fewer migrants, and to be able to choose who can come here, based on the skills needed. And they don’t want EU migrants to come here unless they have a job in advance.

But that just creates another bureaucratic barrier to EU migrants coming here at all. And in any event, the country already does choose which migrants to employ – the decision is made by British businesses, who want the right to choose their workforce from across our continent.

If an EU migrant can’t come here without having a job first, then chances are they will go to another country, and help their economy instead. That will be our loss.

EU regulations state that any EU citizen can move to another EU country to seek a job, so long as they have the means to look after themselves and don’t become a burden to the state. And what’s wrong with that? If they come here and don’t find a job, they usually go back home.

It’s a Daily Mail myth that migrants can simply come here and immediately start claiming benefits. It simply isn’t true.

The fact is that most migrants here have jobs; jobs that British businesses desperately need them to do. Britons shouldn’t complain – especially since more Britons are now in work than ever before. Migrants are not taking the jobs our unemployed could do. Migrants are coming here mostly to do the jobs that Britons can’t all do.

According to research published this week by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, as a result of Brexit, migration to the UK could fall by well over half from now to 2020. That would mean net EU migration falling by more than 100,000.

Such a drop in EU migration would also lead to a significant reduction in GDP per capita – up to 3.4% over the period to 2030, the NIESR has calculated. That would represent an economic downfall for Britain.

Britain needs EU migrants. They are not a threat; they are a boon. Our message to them should be, “Welcome, and thank you.”

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• Brexit Secretary, David Davis, gets 5 stars for double standards
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• List of the latest articles by Jon Danzig

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Yesterday’s Labour motion on Brexit marked an important step for the party. For the first time it had managed to push the government on the strategy for the Article 50 negotiations, leaving the government little option but to engage in some Parliamentary wrangling to try and deflect the on-coming threat of backseat rebellion. Keir Starmer looked to be in good control of his brief, after many months of Labour indifference/in-fighting on the subject.

That’s the positive reading, and not one that I totally buy.

The gaps remain glaringly obvious. Most importantly, the commitment to provide Parliament with plans is the vaguest of things: there was no specification of content or length. Moreover, David Davis’ observation that it was ‘inconceivable’ that Parliament wouldn’t get to vote on the outcome rightly left many feeling that this was itself no guarantee:

The last point I want to make to the Secretary of State concerns the question of a vote on the final deal. I heard him say today, “I expect there will be a vote”. Well, I expect that the District line will turn up within five minutes, but today there were longer delays. He said, as I understood it, that it was inconceivable that there would not be a vote. Well, some people would have said it was inconceivable that Donald Trump would be elected President of the United States. It does not fill me with a great deal of confidence. I gently say to him that the simple response to the question, “Will there be a vote when the deal comes before us after the negotiation?”, is to stand up, look the House direct in the eye, and say, “Yes, there will be a vote.

In addition, the government amendment on timing will certainly be used as leverage to push through any notification bill that might result from the Supreme Court case now underway, although given the weakness of the rebellion last night, there is no immediate danger of that bill being defeated.

In short, it was a bit of political theatre that essentially highlights the depths of the UK’s position overall.

Firstly, it demonstrates that Labour remains hamstrung on the EU. Starmer has a plan for Parliamentary scrutiny and oversight, but doesn’t have his party leadership behind him to make that work. Yesterday had the feel of a missed opportunity for both sides of the party: the Richmond Park by-election should underline that the government operates on a very small majority and that only concentrated action by Labour will enable that to succeed. Given the position of the SNP and LibDems, that suggests that common ground lies more to the Starmer end of options that the Corbyn one, but if 2016 has demonstrated anything, then it is that Corbyn holds his beliefs very strongly and will expect others to cleave to him.

Secondly, it also demonstrates that the government still lacks a plan. All the fuss around the motion might have obscured this basic fact, but it has ended up making matters worse. The line that one holds one’s cards close sounds good, but it also gives the impression that a) the UK will be a tricky negotiating partner, always pulling surprises, and b) that it has surprises to pull. that’s just bad negotiating strategy, especially when retaining the good-will of the other parties is a baseline requirement. Ultimately, the costs will fall on the government, as the EU27 take a more cautious approach and as the public realise that there is no secret prize-winning move to be pulled.

Theresa May has learnt much from her predecessor about not over-promising: this has been the bedrock of her strategy to date. But the under-promising also comes with dangers. Canniness quickly turns to looking like cluelessness. The Supreme Court case is a glaring demonstration of this. The government has fought the legal challenge repeatedly, but seems to find itself being backed into a corner where it not only has to pass a bill in Parliament, but potentially also involve the devolved assemblies too. As much as a referral to the CJEU looks unlikely, the outcome is based more on hope than conviction. Ungenerous souls might say that the government wants to be pushed like this, since it will offer more opportunities for delay and time to think about how to deal with this.

However, as the Brexit saga has repeatedly demonstrated, those who do not shape events are doomed to be shaped by them. That has been especially true post-referendum, where plans and strategy are in very short supply. Both Labour and the Tories might reflect on that.

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The 28 EU Commissioners met today to decide the fate of the EU’s Nature Directives (the 1979 Birds Directive and 1992 Habitats Directive). Would these two directives, the cornerstone of EU biodiversity legislation, be deemed ‘fit for purpose’ or would they be revised and potentially weakened? After years of internal debates within the European Commission, and the Nature Alert civil society campaign, the decision was clear: the Commissioners agreed that both directives are fit for purpose, and that the Commission should focus on better implementation and not deregulation.

Thanks all colleagues for full support on Birds & Habitats fitness check – now we focus on implementation- #NatureAlert

— Karmenu Vella (@KarmenuVella) December 7, 2016

This blog post reflects back on this two-year debate, raging since the beginning of the Juncker Commission in 2014, and what it tells us about the prospect for future EU-level environmental policy dismantling, that is, cutting, weakening or removing existing policy.

The Nature Alert Saga

The Nature Alert saga started with the Mission Letter sent by Juncker to his new Environment & Fisheries Commissioner Karmenu Vella in September 2014. In this document, Juncker made it a key priority for the Commission as a whole to “Respect […] the principles of subsidiarity, proportionality and better” and for the Environment Commissioner to focus on:

“Continuing to overhaul the existing environmental legislative framework to make it fit for purpose. In the first part of the mandate, I would ask you to carry out an in-depth evaluation of the Birds and Habitats directives and assess the potential for merging them into a more modern piece of legislation.”

This in-depth ex-post evaluation of directives in place for many decades was to be done through the EU Fitness Check or REFIT process. It had actually been planned before Juncker, with a mandate published in February 2014. But by listing it as Vella’s first priority, Juncker dramatically increased its importance. Additionally, increasing the importance of ‘modernising’ existing legislation over producing new legislation, raised alarm among civil society, afraid that the better regulation/modernisation agenda was in fact a way to pursue policy dismantling.

That Juncker made the ‘modernisation’ of these two directives a priority is, on the one hand, not very surprising. The Nature Directives had often been criticised in the past by key political groups in different member states (such as French hunters seeing shorter hunting seasons in the 1990s, or UK developers having to cope with great crested newts in the 2000s). For a Commission keen to reduce “meddlesome EU rules”, targeting such flagship legislation made sense. But while it made political sense, it was also risky because earlier attempts to expose the potentially high costs of these pieces of legislation had failed. For example, after former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne complained about the “ridiculous costs” of the Habitats directive in 2011, a review commissioned to support his point found the very opposite. This earlier attempt had pushed NGOs to find evidence in support for the two directives, which, together with growing international research on evaluating biodiversity legislation, meant that environmental NGOs were particularly well placed to contest the need for a fitness check.

Source: Alert, by Sam Carlquist, Flickr (Creative Commons)

Armed with this large evidence base, environmental NGOs led by BirdLife Europe, the EEB, Friends of the Earth Europe and the WWF Europe, started their Nature Alert campaign to raise the profile of the on-going REFIT evaluation and to gather as many public responses to the European Commission’s online consultation as possible. At the end of its 12-week consultation in July 2015 the Commission had received 552,472 replies “the largest response [ever] received by the Commission to an on-line consultation”, which overwhelmingly sided with the NGOs.

After the consultation, a group of leading environmental consultancies and think tanks (Milieu, IEEP, ICF International and Ecosystems Ltd) contracted by the European Commission produced the expert review to support the fitness check. Finalised in March 2016, this review largely found, again, that the directives were fit for purpose. But it was not published by the Commission. Indeed, until a previous draft was leaked in June 2016, no public discussions were made of its findings. This is particularly striking as in the meantime both the Council and the Parliament had made the case for the directives – even David Cameron used them as a good example of why the UK needed to remain in the EU. Finally, despite a 500 000+ consultation, a clear expert review and a continuing NGO campaign, it took the European Commission six more months to come to a decision and declare the directives fit for purpose.

What does this case tell us about policy dismantling in the EU?

The Commission’s decision has been heralded by NGOs as a ‘huge victory for nature conservation’, but it also has broader implications for the pursuit of better regulation or modernisation and attempts to dismantle policies at EU level.

First, the long delay in publishing the report and coming to a decision confirms that REFIT, like other ex-post evaluation processes, is a political and not solely technical endeavour. REFIT has been used by this Commission (and its predecessor) to bolster its credentials as an opponent of ‘red tape‘. But the politicisation of better regulation begs a number of questions. Whose support is the Commission trying to attract? The Nature Directives Fitness Check has managed to mobilise EU civil society against the Commission: hardly a PR success. Moreover, this could not have been done at a worse time, as the apparent backtracking of the Commission on environmental leadership was used to undermine an environmental case for ‘Remain’ during the Brexit referendum.

Second, Nature Alert contradicts central assumptions in academic research on the costs of environmental policy dismantling. Social policy is characterised by diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, whereas environmental policy tends to be characterised by diffuse benefits and concentrated costs. Thus while dismantling social policy is expected to be politically costly because policy beneficiaries can organise easily and challenge the government; the same cannot be said for environmental policy. According to Bauer et al. (2012: 8) politicians may even expect to gain “some very powerful votes in retrenching environmental policy”. The (debatable) possibility of gaining support through cutting policies may seem even more alluring when considering EU-level dismantling – there is after all less media coverage, a less active civil society and a consensual political system which makes it relatively easy to avoid blame. But the Nature Alert campaign showed that it was possible to mobilise opposition to suspected policy dismantling (even for environmental policy) and to apportion blame (even at the EU level).

It is uncertain whether the Nature Alert success will be easy to replicate: NGOs were well prepared due to earlier attempts to undermine these policies in the UK, and biodiversity may be an easier policy area to defend (especially in terms of public mobilisation) than, for example, waste or chemicals. Yet it may make this Commission think twice before picking ‘easy’ targets in the environmental acquis, and invites scholars of policy dismantling to rethink what is and what is not possible at EU level.

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Hollande and Sarkozy posing for Paris Match in order to defend the 2005 referendum on the EU constitutional treaty. At that time, they failed together.

After yet another eventful week marked by Hollande’s renouncement television address, French citizens can now be sure that neither of their two last presidents will be on their ballots for the presidential elections next spring. While the media would have loved to play a game of thrones, unfolding the ‘revenge’ narrative and ask Sam to play again his song about ‘hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate’, to many voters this comes as a relief.

Not so much really because of their relative failure with regard to the unrealistic pre-election promises and over-the-top reform announcements they were virtually forced to make by the highly antagonistic nature of French political culture. It is true that once in office, all French presidents since Mitterrand’s election in 1981 were caught in the pitfall of having to live up to the expectations they were obliged to raise with their electorate, while patently knowing that it was impossible to keep them. And none of them would have been re-elected, had it not been for the stupidity of the opposition (Mitterrand in 1988) or the need to fence off the Front National (Chirac in 2002). Which amounts, by the way, to a total of three decades of successive high hopes and disenchantments.

The real reason why Sarkozy and Hollande were considered unfit to run again by a large part of the population is in the concept of ‘embodiment’. Charles de Gaulle had a certain idea of France, and he also had a certain idea of its presidency and how to incarnate it.

For all the pompousness of protocol, the lovely oxymoron of the ‘Republican monarchy’ has become a famous and altogether fitting metaphor over the years. Both Sarkozy and Hollande were happy to use the extent of power granted to the Royal at the head of the French state. But they underestimated to what extent certain expectations with regard to conduct, behaviour and speech were inseparable from the function. Both can be said to have irremediably damaged the Gaullist ideal-type of the president. In fact, they have become the joint undertakers of French presidency.

Oh, they clearly enjoyed some of the privileges that come with the job. Like the incredibly stupid role play during press conferences in the Elysée, where follow-up questions are not permitted, which allows the president to answer totally beside the point or ridicule the defenceless journalist who spoke out an uncomfortable truth. Or the game of condescendingly putting cabinet members (including the Prime minister) in their place who implemented policies decided by the president but turning out to be unpopular or impracticable.

But neither of them understood that living up to the function would have required them to stay out of down-to-earth policy-making, delegate much more to their Prime minister, and make themselves rare. The presidential word is powerful only if it is scarce, solemn, and exceptional (and, ideally, slightly enigmatic). Sarkozy and Hollande were omnipresent, they simply talked too much. Sarkozy’s obsession with being in the limelight and show just how much he was in charge of everything, as well as his strategy of inundating the media with an uninterrupted flow of announcements to make sure they simply would not have the time and resources to follow up on them later, have earned him the nick-name of ‘hyper-president’, with all the connotation of ADHD this term implied. Towards the end of his term, he visibly tried, following the advice of his communication guru Patrick Buisson, to ‘represidentialise’ (believe me, the word exists in French) both his personality and his behaviour. To no avail, the harm was already done.

Hollande was just as effective as an undertaker. The very pre-electoral promise to be a ‘normal’ president was incompatible with the Fifth Republic’s design. A president who is normal, is useless. And a president who needs to juggle simultaneously with the hysterical (though justified) jealousy of his official partner, the presence of his ex-partner and mother of his four children in his own government, and the breakfast croissants he takes on a scooter to his second mistress is no longer an impressive womaniser (even for the permissive French who are rather tolerant in these matters), but comes closer to a clown. Even Sarkozy, who like a teenager before his parents stood before the press saying ‘with Carla, it’s serious’, looked less ridiculous in comparison.

When Hollande recently accepted the publication of the tell-all book written by two Le Monde reporters after hours and hours of interviews with the President, he probably thought that ‘A President Should Not Say That’ was a nice tongue-in-cheek title. As a matter of fact, the phrase turned out to be a 100% accurate summary of his entire misjudgement of expectations and mismanagement of his presidential function, annulling all efforts to react in a statesmanlike manner to the terrorist strikes against France.

What the ten years under Sarkozy and Hollande boil down to is the ‘desacralisation’ of the French presidency. It’s not entirely their fault. De Gaulle and Pompidou did not have to face up with a highly increased demand for transparency in decision-making, with the reactivity of social media, with fact checkers and fake news, and the overall acceleration and hysterically repetitive character of the political debate in the age of on non-stop news channels.

The next president will have to reconcile historically grown expectations, the damage done by his/her predecessors, and contemporary pressure on an office that seems increasingly out of sync with what 21st-century democracy would need. When Harris Interactive asked the French in a representative poll one month ago whether they considered ‘the capacity to embody the presidential function’ an important criterion in their choice next spring, 79% of them agreed. Unsurprisingly, younger voters seemed slightly less sensitive on this issue (still, they are 65% to agree among the 25-34 age-group). At the same time, only Alain Juppé was deemed to possess this capacity by more than half of the respondents. By over two thirds Sarkozy, Hollande and Le Pen were considered ‘poor’ embodiments of the presidency, while Fillon, Macron and Valls scored only slightly better, rated ‘poor embodiments’ for 57-59% of the respondents.

Whoever will be the successor of the two ‘undertakers’ Sarkozy and Hollande, her/she is likely to have a very hard time to live up to the legacy of de Gaulle and the tacit, but persistent expectations of the citizens.

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 6 on the French 2017 election marathon.
Post # 5 here.
Post # 4 here.
Post # 3 here.
Post # 2 here.
Post # 1 here.

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Air pollution and gridlocked traffic is part of the daily life for many people living or working in major cities around the world. Unsurprisingly, cities around the world have increasingly taken drastic measures to reduce both pollution and traffic. Many of these climate initiatives are miles ahead of national governments. The latest initiatives by four major cities (Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens) is to ban diesel vehicles by 2025[i]. Similar to the ban on diesel cars mentioned in my previous blog post[ii], the aim of this initiative is to push people to drive electrical cars or to bike round the cities.

Air pollution, noise and gridlocked traffic is daily life for many commuters around the world. Indeed the Guardian Newspaper[iii] recently published a series on the huge traffic problems in Jakarta, where traffic is gridlocked most of the day due to lack of public transport and increasing living standards leading to more car owners, which have increased air pollution. Several major European cities have already introduced measures to reduce traffic, such as congestion charges in London and Stockholm and investment in cycle paths have made Copenhagen and Amsterdam famous. These initiatives all aim to change mobility patterns within the cities.

Air pollution continue to be a major issue for many cities and the latest European Environmental Agency (EEA) report on air quality[iv] states that “emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOX) from road transport have not decreased sufficiently to meet air-quality standards in many urban areas.” According to the EEA, one of the reasons is due to diesel road vehicles polluting more than allowed (see figure below).  This impact public health especially in urban areas and city centres, where levels of NOx are higher than permitted by the EU Directive on air quality[v] and recommended daily limits by WHO. On a positive note, other pollutants from road transport have decreased (ibid). Thus progress is being made, but more is needed.

Leading climate cites have imposed stricter limits to road traffic than national governments and thus have achieved more than many national governments. Yet, Copenhagen[vi], which is often mentioned as a leader in sustainable transport, struggles with high levels of pollutions in certain areas in the city centre due to road traffic, which only demonstrates that cities on their own cannot tackle the problem of air pollution caused by road transport. Moreover, the initiatives taken by cities to change traffic behavior within their jurisdiction do not solve the general problem of increased traffic and its subsequent negative impact on the environment in other areas, instead some of the traffic problems have moved to the surrounding suburbs and commuter towns. As I have discussed in previous reflections in this blog, the negative environmental impact of increased traffic can only be solved through coordination between different levels of governance from the local through to international levels and by imposing stricter regulations on emissions from road vehicles to promote alternative fuels. Here the idea posed by the Swedish minister for climate Isabella Lövin to ban fossil fuel cars at EU level from 2030 is a good place to start addressing the problem with road transport pollution[vii].

Finally, cities are increasingly playing an important role in leading the way towards a new mobility paradigm and they can put pressure on governments to change national infrastructure and transport policies. Cities are actively participating in COP meetings and have set up various networks to share experiences and promote best practices. Together with Isabella Lövin’s idea to end sales of fossil fuel cars by 2030 on a European scale cites can put pressure on industry to create better and cleaner technologies to replace fossil fuel vehicles thereby simultaneously protecting free movements and the environment.

[i] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38170794

[ii] http://eutrack.ideasoneurope.eu/2016/10/31/challenges-ban-fossil-fuel-cars-2030/

[iii] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/23/world-worst-traffic-jakarta-alternative

[iv] http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/stronger-measures-needed

[v] http://ec.europa.eu/environment/air/legis.htm

[vi] http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE3342094/eu-kritiserer-danmark-i-goer-ikke-nok-mod-luftforurening/

[vii] http://eutrack.ideasoneurope.eu/2016/10/31/challenges-ban-fossil-fuel-cars-2030/

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“The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

                                                                                           President Harry S Truman

The Six-Day War, also known as the June War, 1967 Arab–Israeli War, or Third Arab–Israeli War, was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967 by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. At that time,Mike Ungersma was a news producer for WLW-T Television in Cincinnati. He wrote this feature for the Midwestern city’s leading newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer in September of that year.

 ∞

 ‘The Hidden Report That Could Have Changed History’

Sunday 27 September 1967 –

Most Americans are aware that the recent Mideast crisis was deeply rooted in the soil of history, both events of our own time and happenings 4,000 years old.  But few of them know of the crucial World War I mission of Henry Churchill King, the late president of Ohio’s Oberlin College who was chosen by President Wilson for one of the most important tasks ever assigned a distinguished scholar and educator.  King and the businessman who accepted the responsibility with him came with a hair’s breadth of drastically altering the course of history in the trouble-plagued Mideast.

For it was King who was selected to lead a Commission sent after the First War to gather facts needed to implement one of President Wilson’s most celebrated promises of the war: the pledge that subjected peoples would have for the first time in their history the chance to determine their own future.

One of the most important results of the war was the utter destruction of the ancient Ottoman Empire.  A 20th century misfit, the old kingdom was near collapse when the fighting began and was in shambles when the shooting stopped.  Its downfall touched off a behind-the-scenes scramble for the Empire’s abandoned sphere of influence.  Allied with Germany during the war, the Empire paid a bitter price for defeat: the victors carved up its territory, some of the most coveted land in the world.  The carcass included the Holy Land.

It was the myriad of claims and counterclaims for the Holy Land which provoked Wilson to give serious consideration to an idea advanced by a Mideast expert, the president of the American University of Beirut.  Close to the area and appreciating its critical importance to the Peace, he suggested that Wilson and the French and British peacemakers empanel a blue-ribbon commission of experts to visit the Mideast and gather facts on the wishes of the people involved.

The suggestion sat well with Wilson, himself a scholar and idealist who was to conceive the the notion of a League of Nations.  He pressed for the adoption of the proposal at the peace table, and managed to extract the reluctant support of the Anglo-French negotiators.  Their unwillingness stemmed from the secret agreements the French and British already had concluded concerning the Ottoman Empire and how is remnants were to be divided among the victors.

Wilson’s plan included having the peacemakers name two of their most respected citizens to the fact-finding commission.  It didn’t take him long to settle on the American participants.  First he chose businessman Charles R. Crane, afterwards to become Ambassador to China.  Then Wilson tapped President Henry Churchill King of Ohio’s Oberlin College.  As one of the nation’s most highly regarded scholars and educators, King was no newcomer to international affairs.  At the time Wilson called him, he was in Europe having put in a year’s wartime service with a special detachment of the YMCA.  In addition, King had studied in Europe.  President of Oberlin since 1902, he was head of the prestigious Association of American Colleges.

Off to anything but a good start, and plagued by the continuing lack of enthusiasm by the French and British, Crane and King nevertheless proceeded with their plans for the mission.  Unknown to them and President Wilson, it was doomed from its outset.

There was some hint of its fate initially when the British and French dragged their feet in naming appointees to the Commission.  But at the urging of Wilson, and prompted by a frantic telegram from General Allenby in Palestine, the British finally appointed a pair of commissioners. Unfortunately, they never got beyond Paris.

But Wilson persisted, and after a visit by Crane and King in Paris, the President assured them that the investigation he promised the people of the Mideast would be made, and at once. That was May.  Within three weeks, King and Crane has landed in Palestine and begun their work.  They vowed to meet in conference with individuals and groups to obtain the broadest possible sample of Mideast opinion.  And that they did.

For six weeks, Crane and King and their entourage of experts visited one city after another.  From town to town and village to village they patiently listened to the pleas of representatives from 1,500 communities.  They received 1,863 petitions signed by 19,000 people.  Some pre-conceived notions were shattered, others fortified.  Encouraged by the sincere response, they retired to Constantinople on July 21 to prepare their detailed and exhaustive report they assumed would be a guideline for international diplomacy in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Central to their report was the issue of Palestine.  As much of a problem in 1919 as it is in 1967, the venerable region was the home of three religions inclined to the bitterest kind of intolerance of one another.

Then part of Syria, Crane and King suggested Palestine be made a ‘mandatary’ or trustee territory under the new League of Nations.  This internationalization would be supervised by the United States.  If this had been the only question in the Mideast that required the attention of the Commission, it might have been accepted by the peacemakers since there is evidence to indicate France and England would have been content to yield Palestine to some other influence than their own.

But Crane and King had to deal with the Zionists. This international movement hoped to establish a national home for the Jews of the world in their ancient homeland, Israel.  Inspired by the opportunities presented in the War, the politically powerful Zionists obtained an important commitment from Lord Balfour, England’s Foreign Secretary.  Balfour sided with the objectives of the movement on the condition that the rights of existing non-Jewish population there be respected.

When Crane and King came to this crucial matter in their report they admitted they had changed their minds:

The Commission began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians, have driven them to the recommendations here made.

Their recommendations?  That the project of making Palestine a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.  Crane and King gave two reasons.  First, both said they felt that only the force of arms could maintain the Zionist program in Palestine so opposed to it were the Arab populations.  Secondly, Crane and King felt it would be a serious injustice to the Arabs, who had, after all, been in possession of the territory for 13 centuries and had at present an overwhelming preponderance of the population, even if Jews had a prior claim historically.

Their report and its controversial conclusions complete, King and Crane cabled President Wilson late in August outlining their essential recommendations.  It was this point where their product entered the political thicket.  It never emerged intact.

Wilson fell ill just days after having received the report, although there is nothing to indicate he would have been able to press for its conclusions in any case.  The ground had already been cut from beneath the idealistic Chief Executive.  His concept of the League of Nations torpedoed by opponents in the Senate, his political future dealt a fatal blow by his serious illness, Wilson could hardly muster the strength to live let alone energetically govern.

The King-Crane Commission’s Report?  It was unheard of until 1922 when a resourceful newspaperman convinced private citizen Woodrow Wilson that it should be published.  When it was made public, the report carried a sub-heading called, “A Suppressed Official Document of the United States Government.”

And President King?  He returned to Oberlin with a renewed image of a statesman and continued to serve as the school’s president until 1927 when he retired.

His report remains a monument to far-seeing and untiring scholarship and a constant reminder of one of King’s favorite maxims:  “One does one’s best and leaves he rest.”

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Can Europeans learn anything from America’s experience with immigrants?

Mike Ungersma argues there is much to be gained.

What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

While the American media theorist and cultural historian, Neil Postman, was talking here about the impact of television, he could just as easily been referring to the greatest sociological experiment in modern history: the mass migration of millions of Syrians, Afghans, Somalis, Nigerians and countless other nationalities into Europe. Moreover, it’s an experiment that is not happening in a laboratory, posed in a seminar room or offered up in a lecture hall, but actually taking place in an extraordinary short space of time on the streets and in the neighbourhoods of virtually every European city. No one knows what impact this remarkable event will have.  What we do know is – depending on your point of view – communities and their character are changing as a result, with their very essence under threat, or, they are being infinitely enriched by ethnic and cultural diversity while their economies benefit from low-cost workers and an injection of new, highly trained professionals.   Whatever the true effect, this is a wave of mass migration on a scale Europe previously saw only during two world wars.

There is no need to rehearse the amazing numbers, statistics from a variety of migration ‘watchers’ showing how London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens – never mind hundreds of smaller towns and even villages – are experiencing a rush of new arrivals who bring with them novel and even unknown religious, cultural, ethnic and linguistic differences and practices.  This societal change is tidal, unprecedented and challenging, causing many to wonder whether old, long established beliefs and familiar surroundings will be altered beyond recognition.

Europe’s economic ‘pull’ is magnetic and compelling.  There is the undeniable attraction of the welfare state and good jobs.  There is affordable housing in poorer areas in host communities away from the hostility of more affluent neighbourhoods.  Sympathetic support awaits migrants from countless voluntary agencies and charities, willing to not only assist in finding a place to live, learning the local language, locating schools and medical help, but also acting as a buffer from prying bureaucracy and rapacious landlords.

Historically, wherever people are free, they choose to live ‘among their own’, a truism that is even reflected among immigrants themselves.  Wherever they end up, they almost always elect to live with ‘their own’ – or – for a variety of reasons, are forced to do so.  Familiar faces that speak the same language are welcome indeed when one is faced with upheaval and displacement.  This is why Paris has its banilieues, London its Chinatown, Berlin its Turkish ghettos, and the the Roma are coerced into segregation in almost every host European country just as they were in their home nations.

Still another truism seems to be that this extraordinary state of population flux and historic movement in Europe shows no sign of ending.  As long as there are impoverished and desperate migrants and refugees who can find a way to prosperous Europe, they will come.

This phenomena is, however, not new.  Substitute the United States for every mention of Europe in the myriad of news stories about the ‘migration crisis’, and you have a more or less perfect fit, albeit a century or even 150 years earlier.  Remarkably, perhaps, substitute Roman Catholic for Muslim, and the parallel is striking.  Take, for example, this excerpt from one of many editorials in the Louisville Journal by its editor, George D Prentice, who was alarmed by the influence ‘foreign’ immigrants – especially Catholics – might exert in the upcoming election for Kentucky’s state governor:

Rally to put down an organization of Jesuit Bishops, Priests, and other Papists, who aim by secret oaths and horrid perjuries and midnight plotting to sap the foundation of our political edifices — state and national.

It was August, 1855.  Clearly not all of the ‘huddled masses’ – the inscription that was later to adorn the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour – were welcome in the ‘Land of the Free’.  Prentice was far from alone in his concern.  Charlie Hebo’s calculated irreverence toward France’s millions of Muslims was more than matched by the repeated insults hurled at the latest wave of 19th century immigrants to America by the ‘No Nothings’ – a offshoot of the early Republican Party.  While the movement disappeared as a political force, its anti-immigrant policies deeply infected the American body politic.

Irish immigrants were a favourite target.  Here is a cartoon from the satirical magazine Puck in 1889 showing the legendary American ‘melting pot’ working for everyone but one Irishman who stands aside holding a knife, waving the flag and demanding to be accepted.

 “The Mortar of Assimilation And The One Element That Just Won’t Mix”.

German Catholics were similarly regarded.

The Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi and African refugees streaming into Europe since 2015 have roiled its politics and tested its tolerance.  In 19th century America, the vast waves of immigrants pushed politics further and further to the right.  In every single decade from the 1870s to the present, the American Congress felt the need to respond with legislation, sometimes welcoming immigrants and but more frequently, restricting the flow.  The ‘crisis’ created a rollercoaster of action and reaction, what has subsequently been regarded by historians as a surge of populism.  When they were manifestly needed, the bar to immigrants was lowered.  When the need subsided, the welcome was suddenly withdrawn. The Civil War was an example. Some historians argue the outcome of that costly conflict might have  been very different were it not for the 500,000 German and Irish immigrants who served in the Union Army. Not all were volunteers however, and their forced conscription into ‘Lincoln’s Ranks’ touched off violent protests in New York in the summer of 1863.  Ironically, the Irish vented their frustration on the city’s blacks whom they felt threatened their jobs following the emancipation of southern slaves.  Unlike wealthier Americans who could literally buy a substitute when faced with draft, the Irish were swept up into the ranks in number which were far disproportionate to the Irish population.

Nearly a century later, with millions of young American men off fighting in Europe and the Pacific, the country welcomed Mexican ‘braceros’ to work the fields and farms.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of blacks fled from poorly paid agricultural employment in the South to work in wartime northern mills and factories, a mass internal migration of unprecedented levels.  Most resided in ghettoes, and to this day, American cities live with the consequences. Similarly, the Chinese were welcomed as ‘coolie’ labour during the 19th century’s rapid push to connect every major American city by rail.   But when the ‘Golden Spike’ was driven and the Trans-Continental Railroad complete, Congress expressed its gratitude to the thousands of Chinese workers upon whose backs the task was made possible by passing the 1882  ‘Chinese Exclusion Act’, which not only barred further Chinese immigration, but forbade those already there to apply for citizenship.  Most were left unemployed, to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile America. More recently, Hispanics, always present in America in numbers that continue to surprise Europeans, had arrived in the country by their thousands, and not just from Mexico.  Now their presence is altering the face of American politics and has pushed blacks down the ranking of ethnic minorities.

Europeans, representatives of an ancient culture that bequeathed so much to America, are not accustomed to thinking of the US as a role model, except perhaps in technology and enterprise.  But the experience of Americans dealing with wave after wave of immigration, of seeking to integrate disparate peoples into a still-expanding and developing democracy, may have lessons for Europe, and especially the European Union as it grapples with the influx of millions of invited and uninvited refugees and economic migrants.  What can be learned?

Some lessons are self-evident.  Given the mix enveloping Europe’s shores, count on disruption at virtually every level of society.  In the US, the country at least had the advantage of trying to accommodate people of a broadly similar background – largely expatriates of democracies with an historic Western Judaeo-Christian heritage.  Apart from a small injection of anarchists, communists and convinced socialists, immigrants to America were content to leave political ideologies behind.  Most were driven by the opportunities they perceived available. Much potentially divisive baggage was left behind.  While they may not have been uniformly and heartily welcomed, the US they encountered – at whatever period – was not alien and strange. Hence, a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ seems unlikely in any foreseeable American context, but Europe?

Secondly, America benefits from almost impenetrable natural borders.  With the exception of Mexico, migrants to America faced a very difficult and costly journey to Ellis Island’s immigrant reception centre in New York Bay, the gateway to 12 million immigrants to the United States for more than 60 years.  Europe’s borders are easily overcome, virtually impossible to patrol and a subject of fierce political disagreement.

Thirdly, if the American experience is a guide, expect even more unsettling turmoil.  Echoing the movement in 19th century America, the drift toward populism across Europe, as well as the discontent and discomfort many feel about their new neighbours, will be exploited and used by opportunists in every nation.  That certainly was the case in America.  The cost of ignoring rising public feeling in this regard has already been paid in Britain, where the precipitous and disastrous ending of the government of David Cameron is a alarming warning recognised in every chancellery in Europe.  As the Scottish-born historian Niall Ferguson argued recently:

Populists are not fascists.  They prefer trade wars to actual wars: border wars to military fortifications. The maladies they seek to cure are not imaginary: uncontrolled migration, widening  inequality, free trade with unfree countries and political cronyism are all things that millions of voters have good reason to dislike.  The problem with populism is that its remedies are in practice counterproductive.

Finally, the plaintive pleas of those who feel ‘We Can Do This,’ may be misjudging the magnitude of the task.  It is more than 150 years since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed three million black Americans from servitude.  In spite of decades of positive, energetic, forceful legislation and immense civic effort – not to mention the election of a black President – this thorny and difficult issue of integrating a minority remains unfinished.

Europe, like Sisyphus, has a mountain to climb and a very large boulder barring the path.

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On the face of it, Martin Schulz’s announcement that he is leaving his post as president of the European Parliament would appear to be good news for British policymakers hoping for a soft Brexit. This is because Schulz has been an outspoken opponent of making concessions to the British government to soften the impact of the UK’s departure.

Post-Brexit the British government would like to have the economic benefits of participation in the single Europe market while getting rid of such single market obligations as free movement of EU citizens and EU economic regulations. Doing so would give Britain what many MPs would regard as the best of both worlds. However, this soft Brexit could only be achieved if the European Union were prepared to depart from its principle that the free movement of labour and obedience to EU regulations are necessary conditions of participating in the single market.

In common with President of the European Commission Jean Claude Junker, Schulz views this as Britain wanting to have its cake and eat it too. They fear that any concession to the UK would start an avalanche of demands for exemption from EU rules by other member states. They also fear it would strengthen the hand of anti-EU parties challenging national governments to reduce their commitment to the EU and encourage them to follow the UK in opting for a soft exit.

The bad news for Britain is that Schulz is not leaving European politics but throwing his hat in the ring to be a leading member of the German government after its election next autumn. Even if Angela Merkel succeeds in maintaining her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as the largest group in the German Bundestag, she will need to form a coalition in order to retain office as Chancellor.

The Socialist Party of Germany (SPD), of which Schulz is a member, is currently the CDU’s coalition partner. Both parties are almost certain to lose seats in the Bundestag to the anti-immigration Alternative for Deutschland, but remain large enough to form another coalition government. In that case Schulz will be in line to receive the post of German Foreign Minister, which is normally reserved for the second partner in a coalition. The post will be vacant as the current SPD incumbent, Frank Walter Steinmeier, is set to become Germany’s next president.

If Schulz becomes Germany’s new Foreign Minister, his voice will be heard in Brussels in meetings where Boris Johnson will speak for Britain. He will also be a major voice in the German Bundestag and in discussions with Angela Merkel about how the European Council should respond to requests from Theresa May for concessions. The most likely alternative to a CDU-SPD coalition is a coalition between the SPD and the parties of the left.  Its current leader, Sigmar Gabriel, is just as outspoken as Schulz in opposing the British government’s desire to have an à la carte choice of EU benefits and obligations.

Schulz’s departure from the European Parliament will not change its long-standing commitment to the promotion of greater European integration. The new president is likely to be chosen by the European People’s Party, the parliamentary group from which David Cameron withdrew British Conservative MEPs on the grounds it was in favour of ever closer Union. Crucially, any agreement that the European Council struck with Britain will require ratification by the European Parliament.  If Britain were to gain substantial concessions from the European Council, it would invite hard opposition in the Parliament. The refusal of the European Parliament to approve a deal would result in Britain having a “cold turkey” exit without any benefits to cushion the transition and without any obligations. Only the hardest of backers of Brexit would welcome this.

Theresa May faces a hard choice to avoid being boxed in by opposition that Schulz might mobilize in Berlin and Brussels. In terms of British domestic politics, the softer choice is to retain few of the benefits of single market membership in order to bring back to Westminster control of EU immigration and economic regulations. The harder alternative is to accept the EU’s conditions for staying in the single market and facing a challenge to her hold on Downing Street from Conservative MPs and ministers to whom Brexit means a hard Brexit.

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As the nights have drawn in and the mercury has dropped, thoughts – in my neck of the woods at least – have turned to that important festivity of the six month-iversary of the referendum. Even though we’re little over five months on, we’re starting to see the wave of events asking us to reflect on the vote and on 2016 more generally.

From my perspective, the key paradox is the mix of radical rupture and apparent stasis in the British political scene. On the one hand, we have had a fundamental change of direction in the UK’s engagement with the international system and a shaking up of the party political system. On the other, we have many of the old hands still on deck and – most crucially – we still have little sense of how those old hands will pursue Brexit.

It is little exaggeration to say that we know about as much on this now as we did on the morning of 24 June, i.e. hardly anything. Whether it’s the totemic incantation of “Brexit means Brexit” or the “have cake and eat it” notes spotted this week, there is only the sense that the cunning plan gambit has failed to materialise. Of course, this is not surprising, because there is no cunning plan, no way out – in practical terms – of both limited free movement of people and not limiting free movement of goods, services and capital.

Earlier in the autumn I thought that there might be some flexibility on free movement of people from the EU27, who have other reasons to think about stepping back from a maximalist interpretation, but this has closed down of late. This is due to a more general hardening of the position that negotiations can only take place under Article 50 and mutual reassurance that the UK cannot be given a pick-and-mix deal as a reward for departure. That’s not unreasonable, especially given the growth of concern about populism post Trump (and pre-Le Pen), and the general air of messing about in London.

As David Allen Green rightly pointed out, the fight that May has to deal with is more about how she manages public opinion in the UK than it is about the EU27. It’s pretty clear that the UK can go low or high into Article 50, either retaining the four freedoms or binning them all (broadly speaking): the 27 might prefer the UK to keep them, but will cope either way. Thus it is the domestic audience that matters, because the UK government – and, to a less extent, the other member state governments – that have to get any deal approved, either formally (in parliament) or informally (in their party, the press and – eventually – elections).

If we assume that the deal side of things is broadly fixed into the high/low options, then we might usefully consider that what May is now doing is applying Lukes’ third face of power. Since she can’t impose her preferences on the public (first face) nor control the agenda (second face), she’s instead going to try and change what people want.

This really came home during this week’s exchange of letters with Donald Tusk, who rightly pointed out that the EU27 await the UK to get going with negotiations, so any uncertainty over the status of UK nationals in the EU rests firmly at the UK’s feet.

This has been part of a longer-running thread, of refusing to confirm rights for EU nationals in the UK without first getting confirmation of UK nationals’ rights in the EU. This is bar-room politics at its worst, since all sides have international treaty obligations to protect these individuals, while the alternative of forced removal is not credible, even in these febrile times: so reciprocal guarantees will be forthcoming. But May presents the situation as having an ace in her hand.

Language matter here. As the bots keep telling me on Twitter, ‘expats’ are just ‘our’ migrants. Much of the British public has a problem with immigrants, but hardly anyone has a problem with expats. Since I assume May is a well-informed and thoughtful individual, I also have to assume that she knows full well what she is doing here and the simplest explanation I can see is that she is seeking to kick up a mess about ‘expats’ so that there’s an outcry from the media and her party to act to save them. And the only way she can do that is by granting reciprocal rights to EU nationals, which might well include free movement (assuming the ‘expats’ want that too – which I’m guessing they do from my passage through Malaga airport last month).

In short, May is seeking to reframe the public debate, so that the weight of the ‘people discussion’ falls on ‘expats’ rather than ‘immigrants’. And if you couple that to the growing sense that people might be more open to the trade-off of market access in return for freedom of movement, then you have a basis for the high deal in Article 50.

Whether this will work, or can work, is a different issue. The fight over Parliamentary approval of Article 50 notification has distracted many in her party and the press, but at some point this effort will get noticed and attacked. Then it will be a question of how skillfully May can defend her position, which has not yet been seriously challenged. Someone did note to me the other day that the Tories won’t want to eject May because that would mean a second Prime Minister without an election: given how high temperatures have risen in the party, even that might not be enough to stop another regicide.

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The detention of irregular migrants in specialized centers to ensure their removal is a contentious precautionary measure. Although the Return Directive does not constitute the ultimate solution to this controversial issue, nor has the CJEU been very concrete and clear in the matter, both have had an important impact on the Spanish detention legislation (Organic Law 2/2009 and the recent Royal Decree that regulates the detention facilities). This blog post briefly addresses two contentious issues: the implications of the CJEU’s Zaizoune ruling and insufficient alternatives to detention.

In the Zaizoune case, the CJEU declared the Spanish measure of replacing expulsion with a fine to be incompatible with the Return Directive. Before the Zaizoune case, most of the irregular stay cases were handled in Spain by issuing a fine, jointly with a voluntary period of departure of 15 days, to the migrant. If the fine was not paid or the departure from the national territory did not occur, the migrant’s removal would take place through a preferential procedure as soon as the individual was re-identified by the law enforcement authorities. Following the Zaizoune case, the ordinary procedure of removal now must be applied, which grants the migrant a period of voluntary departure, in contrast to the preferential procedure. While the Spanish law used to broadly transpose the exceptions of the Return Directive regarding the granting of a period of voluntary departure, the current application of the ordinary procedure to most of the removal cases will require a restrictive interpretation by the national courts. Otherwise, the CJEU may also declare this broad transposition of the Return Directive incompatible with EU law.

On the other hand, the Return Directive establishes as a core objective that the detention of any irregular migrant should effectively lead to his or her expulsion, yet data shows that Spanish law enforcement authorities excessively resort to detention. Out of the 7,340 people detained in 2014, only 3,483 were finally expelled. Nevertheless, while the Return Directive grants the States the possibility to detain a migrant a maximum period of 18 months, in Spain the authorities only have 60 days to effectively remove the migrant. Given this dilemma, the solution lays in the Spanish courts, which should further resort to alternatives to detention.

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Floundering on a Sea of Cultures

Mike Ungersma argues that Europe can learn much

from 200 years of American immigration

What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

While the American media theorist and cultural historian, Neil Postman, was talking here about the impact of television, he could just as easily been referring to the greatest sociological experiment in modern history: the mass migration of millions of Syrians, Afghans, Somalis, Nigerians and countless other nationalities into Europe. Moreover, it’s an experiment that is not happening in a laboratory, posed in a seminar room or offered up in a lecture hall, but actually taking place in an extraordinary short space of time on the streets and in the neighbourhoods of virtually every European city. No one knows what impact this remarkable event will have.  What we do know is – depending on your point of view – communities and their character are changing as a result, with their very essence under threat, or, they are being infinitely enriched by ethnic and cultural diversity while their economies benefit from low-cost workers and an injection of new, highly trained professionals.   Whatever the true effect, this is a wave of mass migration on a scale Europe previously saw only during two world wars.

There is no need to rehearse the amazing numbers, statistics from a variety of migration ‘watchers’ showing how London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens – never mind hundreds of smaller towns and even villages – are experiencing a rush of new arrivals who bring with them novel and even unknown religious, cultural, ethnic and linguistic differences and practices.  This societal change is tidal, unprecedented and challenging, causing many to wonder whether old, long established beliefs and familiar surroundings will be altered beyond recognition.

Europe’s economic ‘pull’ is magnetic and compelling.  There is the undeniable attraction of the welfare state and good jobs.  There is affordable housing in poorer areas in host communities away from the hostility of more affluent neighbourhoods.  Sympathetic support awaits migrants from countless voluntary agencies and charities, willing to not only assist in finding a place to live, learning the local language, locating schools and medical help, but also acting as a buffer from prying bureaucracy and rapacious landlords.

Historically, wherever people are free, they choose to live ‘among their own’, a truism that is even reflected among immigrants themselves.  Wherever they end up, they almost always elect to live with ‘their own’ – or – for a variety of reasons, are forced to do so.  Familiar faces that speak the same language are welcome indeed when one is faced with upheaval and displacement.  This is why Paris has its banilieues, London its Chinatown, Berlin its Turkish ghettos, and the the Roma are coerced into segregation in almost every host European country just as they were in their home nations.

Still another truism seems to be that this extraordinary state of population flux and historic movement in Europe shows no sign of ending.  As long as there are impoverished and desperate migrants and refugees who can find a way to prosperous Europe, they will come.

This phenomena is, however, not new.  Substitute the United States for every mention of Europe in the myriad of news stories about the ‘migration crisis’, and you have a more or less perfect fit, albeit a century or even 150 years earlier.  Remarkably, perhaps, substitute Roman Catholic for Muslim, and the parallel is striking.  Take, for example, this excerpt from one of many editorials in the Louisville Journal by its editor, George D Prentice, who was alarmed by the influence ‘foreign’ immigrants – especially Catholics – might exert in the upcoming election for Kentucky’s state governor:

Rally to put down an organization of Jesuit Bishops, Priests, and other Papists, who aim by secret oaths and horrid perjuries and midnight plotting to sap the foundation of our political edifices — state and national.

It was August, 1855.  Clearly not all of the ‘huddled masses’ – the inscription that was later to adorn the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour – were welcome in the ‘Land of the Free’.  Prentice was far from alone in his concern.  Charlie Hebo’s calculated irreverence toward France’s millions of Muslims was more than matched by the repeated insults hurled at the latest wave of 19th century immigrants to America by the ‘No Nothings’ – a offshoot of the early Republican Party.  While the movement disappeared as a political force, its anti-immigrant policies deeply infected the American body politic.

Irish immigrants were a favourite target.  One cartoon from the satirical magazine Puck in 1889 shows the legendary American ‘melting pot’ working for everyone but one Irishman who stands aside holding a knife, waving the flag and demanding to be accepted. German Catholics were similarly regarded.

The Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi and African refugees streaming into Europe since 2015 have roiled its politics and tested its tolerance.  In 19th century America, the vast waves of immigrants pushed politics further and further to the right.  In every single decade from the 1870s to the present, the American Congress felt the need to respond with legislation, sometimes welcoming immigrants and but more frequently, restricting the flow.  The ‘crisis’ created a rollercoaster of action and reaction, what has subsequently been regarded by historians as a surge of populism.  When they were manifestly needed, the bar to immigrants was lowered.  When the need subsided, the welcome was suddenly withdrawn. The Civil War was an example. Some historians argue the outcome of that costly conflict might have  been very different were it not for the 500,000 German and Irish immigrants who served in the Union Army. Not all were volunteers however, and their forced conscription into ‘Lincoln’s Ranks’ touched off violent protests in New York in the summer of 1863.  Ironically, the Irish vented their frustration on the city’s blacks whom they felt threatened their jobs following the emancipation of southern slaves.  Unlike wealthier Americans who could literally buy a substitute when faced with draft, the Irish were swept up into the ranks in number which were far disproportionate to the Irish population.

Nearly a century later, with millions of young American men off fighting in Europe and the Pacific, the country welcomed Mexican ‘braceros’ to work the fields and farms.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of blacks fled from poorly paid agricultural employment in the South to work in wartime northern mills and factories, a mass internal migration of unprecedented levels.  Most resided in ghettoes, and to this day, American cities live with the consequences. Similarly, the Chinese were welcomed as ‘coolie’ labour during the 19th century’s rapid push to connect every major American city by rail.   But when the ‘Golden Spike’ was driven and the Trans-Continental Railroad complete, Congress expressed its gratitude to the thousands of Chinese workers upon whose backs the task was made possible by passing the 1882  ‘Chinese Exclusion Act’, which not only barred further Chinese immigration, but forbade those already there to apply for citizenship.  Most were left unemployed, to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile America. More recently, Hispanics, always present in America in numbers that continue to surprise Europeans, had arrived in the country by their thousands, and not just from Mexico.  Now their presence is altering the face of American politics and has pushed blacks down the ranking of ethnic minorities.

Europeans, representatives of a  venerable culture that bequeathed so much to America, are not accustomed to thinking of the US as a role model, except perhaps in technology and enterprise.  But the experience of Americans dealing with wave after wave of immigration, of seeking to integrate disparate peoples into a still-expanding and developing democracy, may have lessons for Europe, and especially the European Union as it grapples with the influx of millions of invited and uninvited refugees and economic migrants.  What can be learned?

Some lessons are self-evident.  Given the mix enveloping Europe’s shores, count on disruption at virtually every level of society.  In the US, the country at least had the advantage of trying to accommodate people of a broadly similar background – largely expatriates of democracies with an historic Western Judaeo-Christian heritage.  Apart from a small injection of anarchists, communists and convinced socialists, immigrants to America were content to leave political ideologies behind.  Most were driven by the opportunities they perceived available. Much potentially divisive baggage was left behind.  While they may not have been uniformly and heartily welcomed, the US they encountered – at whatever period – was not alien and strange. Hence, a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ seems unlikely in any foreseeable American context, but Europe?

Secondly, America benefits from almost impenetrable natural borders.  With the exception of Mexico, migrants to America faced a very difficult and costly journey to Ellis Island’s immigrant reception centre in New York Bay, the gateway to 12 million immigrants to the United States for more than 60 years.  Europe’s borders are easily overcome, virtually impossible to patrol and a subject of fierce political disagreement.

Thirdly, if the American experience is a guide, expect even more unsettling turmoil.  Echoing the movement in 19th century America, the drift toward populism across Europe, as well as the discontent and discomfort many feel about their new neighbours, will be exploited and used by opportunists in every nation.  That certainly was the case in America.  The cost of ignoring rising public feeling in this regard has already been paid in Britain, where the precipitous and disastrous ending of the government of David Cameron is a alarming warning recognised in every chancellery in Europe.  As the Scottish-born historian Niall Ferguson argued recently:

Populists are not fascists.  They prefer trade wars to actual wars: border wars to military fortifications. The maladies they seek to cure are not imaginary: uncontrolled migration, widening  inequality, free trade with unfree countries and political cronyism are all things that millions of voters have good reason to dislike.  The problem with populism is that its remedies are in practice counterproductive.

Finally, the plaintive pleas of those who feel ‘We Can Do This,’ may be misjudging the magnitude of the task.  It is more than 150 years since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed three million black Americans from servitude.  In spite of decades of positive, energetic, forceful legislation and immense civic effort – not to mention the election of a black President – this thorny and difficult issue of integrating a minority remains unfinished.

Europe, like Sisyphus, has a mountain to climb and a very large boulder barring the path.

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For as long as I have lived in this country – a quarter century, after all – the surest way for French politicians to put an end to their political career was to make a statement, however prudent, in favour of ‘liberalism’. Once labelled a ‘liberal’, you could be sure to be turned in no time into a ‘neo-liberal’ before being commonly and irremediably demonised as ‘ultra-liberal’ (whatever that means). Naming a party ‘lib-dem’ was either political satire or political suicide. Alain Madelin tried in 1998, but gave up in 2002 after having earned exactly 3.91% of the vote in the presidential election.

The primaries, however, seem to have changed things. With the right and centre virtually monopolising the political debate for several weeks, ‘liberalism’ is undergoing an unexpected semantic rehabilitation. The final TV debate between François Fillon and Alain Juppé on Thursday night – followed by an incredible 8.5 million audience – featured two candidates who advocated reforms for which the adjective ‘liberal’ appears perfectly appropriate. And they’re not alone!

Fillon, a Thatcherite liberal? Libération cover page, 22 Nov.

For the 2017 season, the liberalism fashion will actually come in three trends. There’s the daring yet sober design of Fillon’s self-proclaimed ‘radical’ costume, not without a certain reactionary chic. Then there’s the admittedly ‘less brutal’ Juppé outfit, which seems a little bit easier to wear and tries not to break too abruptly with traditional attire. And finally there is the stylish and trendy apparel designed by Emmanuel Macron, rather tasteful actually, but will it stand the test of the spring fashion shows?

‘Liberal’ is one of these key words that have a different meaning in different languages, shaped and draped with connotations by the local political culture. In a wonderful sketch by German humourist Loriot (yes, seriously: German humour!), a liberal-democrat politician keeps repeating in a TV debate that ‘in the liberal sense, liberal not only means liberal’. In the French Fifth Republic ‘liberal’ is traditionally perceived as a shortcut to ‘promotor of cynical laisser-faire capitalism’ and ‘strictly conservative in societal matters’ (not exactly what Fox News or breitbart.com would spontaneously associate).

Fillon, who obtained 2 903 564 votes on Sunday, fits this classical description remarkably well. What is new is that he is no longer ashamed of it. The reason is probably that he has felt that the discourse of the ugly, but simple and necessary truth is being received differently than ten or twenty years ago. Especially the electorate of Catholic obedience and heritage proves very sensitive to his logic of redemption: confession of decades of sinning is followed by punitive repentance and compensated with eternal salvation at the end of the tunnel.

Macron begs to differ. He regularly points out that ‘liberalism is a value of the left’. This would find the applause of the so-called ‘social democrats’, as embodied by former trade unionist, renowned editorialist and historian of the French left Jacques Julliard, who wrote after the 2005 referendum on the constitutional treaty that it was ‘extravagant that the socialist left has heaped opprobrium onto a doctrine that presided over its birth until the mid-19th century and has since then allowed Socialism to distinguish itself from its totalitarian twin’ (Le malheur français, Flammarion, 2005, p. 124). Liberalism was the French left’s ‘take-away’ from the Revolution, from Benjamin Constant to Alexis de Tocqueville (and no, I am not confusing ‘libérté’ et ‘libéralisme’).

For Macron, a true liberal is a politician who ‘attacks privilege and economic deadlock, while working for social mobility rather than favouring those who are already successful!’ According to him, the French confuse ‘liberal’ with ‘conservative’, simply ‘because we do not have a liberal tradition’, as he just recently explained again in an interview with Le Monde.

And there’s the rub. Since Mitterrand’s famous ‘turn to austerity’ in 1983, liberalism has always been equated with humiliating external disciplining, mostly imposed by Brussels and Bonn/Berlin, undermining the Welfare State and public services. Macron is already categorised as a ‘social-liberal’, which – you may have guessed – is a label bestowed only by the guardians of the true doctrine of the French left and comes very close to ‘evil’.

Macron’s clumsy catwalk.

In other words: the stage given to liberalist ideas by the fashion show of the right and the centre may be a very temporary one. Soon other fashion houses will stage their own parades and impose a different lexicon. Macron’s new garment of liberal economics and progressive social ideas does not correspond to traditional French taste. It is truly ‘disruptive’ (to quote one of his own favourite adjectives).

The renaissance and rehabilitation of the word ‘libéral’ is a remarkable feature of this early campaign phase. Whether it will be followed by a redefinition is another question.

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 4 on the French 2017 election marathon.
Post # 4 here.
Post # 3 here.
Post # 2 here.
Post # 1 here.

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Hannah Moscovitz

Around the world, the social role of higher education has garnered interest and generated important discussion. It is commonly agreed that alongside their research and teaching functions, academic institutions should also promote what has been termed their “third mission”. Important efforts have been made in recent years to further the understanding of the social role of the university. The Talloires network for instance, provides an international forum of institutions committed to strengthening their social responsibilities. In Europe specifically, the social contribution of higher education has gained ground through the elaboration of a ‘social dimension’ to accompany the Bologna Process reforms.

Social responsibility has become an important promotional feature for higher education institutions. University mission statements, websites and promotional materials regularly highlight an institution’s commitment to community engagement and public responsibility. Despite the growing importance of university social responsibility at a declarative level, its implementation in practice is not clear cut. The very notion of what constitutes social responsibility in the higher education realm remains ambiguous. Moreover, notwithstanding important efforts, a coherent and all-encompassing approach both within and between academic institutions, to strengthening social responsibility, is far from complete.

The European Commission funded, Tempus-ESPRIT (Enhancing the Social Characteristics and Public Responsibility of Israeli Teaching through an HEI-Student Alliance) project, coordinated by the Centre for the Study of European Politics and Society  - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was developed with the aim of delineating the social responsibility of higher education and clarifying its features, as well as to test models for its enhancement in Israeli universities. Academic institutions and organisations in Israel and Europe [i] as well as the European Students’ Union (ESU) and the National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) took part in the project, launched in 2012, and culminating this month.

The project’s overall goal is to analyze, map and strengthen the social and public roles of higher education institutions in Israel. To this end, three main pillars were pursued. At an initial phase a mapping exercise was conducted in order to shed light on the level of social engagement of Israeli students/faculty and their perceptions towards social responsibility. A second pillar involved the development of models and guidelines for the design of curriculum with a social engagement component. A digital platform was also produced to serve as a resource center and contact point to promote dialogue between faculty working on these types of courses.

Finally, the project saw the development and testing of a Social Benchmarking Tool (SBT) to assess and compare academic institutions according to their social missions. Together, these three pillars aimed to sharpen the understanding of social responsibility in academic institutions as well as enhance this feature in the partner institutions.

On November 21st, ESPRIT project partners and invited guests representing different higher education stakeholders, gathered at the ESU headquarters in Brussels, for a final roundtable to discuss the project’s outcomes and its relevance for Israel and Europe. A number of important themes emerged from this meeting shedding further light on the potential of academic social responsibility efforts in Israel, Europe and beyond.

The Social responsibility of universities – promoting a wide definition

Recognisant of the wide-ranging interpretations of social responsibility as it relates to higher education, one of the very first tasks of the ESPRIT consortium was to draft a working definition which would guide its activities and objectives.  The notion of social responsibility was given a wide interpretation – relating to the university’s external actions on the one hand, and its internal policy on the other. A university’s social responsibility is reflected in its community outreach programmes, ‘socially engaged’ courses, partnerships and actions benefiting their surrounding neighborhoods and society in general. It should also be apparent in the institution’s internal functioning; ethical codes, transparency, employment policies, sustainable development etc; and relating to student, staff and faculty wellbeing.

During the roundtable, the challenge of promoting social responsibility in the internal domain was considered. Participants highlighted the fact that the internal social policy is often more difficult to discuss and promote, while academic institutions more easily disseminate their ‘external’ actions of community engagement and public responsibility.  Yet, project partners emphasized the importance of seeing the internal and external domains as one common framework; a university’s degree of social responsibility is dependent on both its external and internal actions- they should be understood as intertwined, not as separate entities.

Benchmarking University Social Responsibility – An opportunity

Rankings and Benchmarking mechanisms have been gaining momentum in the field of higher education. These systems are primarily focused on the research and teaching functions of universities, generally overlooking their “third mission”. The ESPRIT project aims to add another dimension to benchmarking; one which recognizes that alongside research and teaching, institutions should also be measured by their social characteristics.

The Social Benchmarking Tool (SBT) was initiated by the National Union of Israeli Students against the backdrop of a growing social awareness and engagement amongst Israeli students. NUIS representatives understood that students and prospective students are increasingly interested in the degree of social engagement and responsibility in their current or potential academic institutions. The SBT was thus perceived as valuable to provide a transparent picture of the social responsibility feature of universities as well as for offering university management with a self-assessment tool to enhance their social policy.

The SBT proposes a data collection mechanism for academic institutions to assess their social policy and compare where they stand vis a vis other institutions. The self-administered questionnaire collects data from a variety of sources within the institution and relates to different features of social responsibility-equality, wellbeing, ethical conduct and environmental policy.

The value and innovative character of the SBT for both Israeli and European partner institutions was emphasized. From both a student and institutional perspective, the SBT was discussed as holding important potential for furthering the social functions of universities. Participants also considered the challenges involved in promoting such a mechanism, in particular considering the priority given to the research and teaching functions of higher education. A conceptual shift was proposed in which social responsibility should not be understood as a “third pillar”, rather as an inherent feature of all other functions of higher education.

Importance of the student voice in enhancing social responsibility

The importance of student involvement in the promotion of social responsibility was a common theme elaborated throughout the project. The ESPRIT project was founded upon the notion that both students and institutions will inevitably play a part in strengthening the social role of academia. As such, project activities were guided by a university-student alliance, reflected in the active involvement of both the National Union of Israeli Students and the European Students’ Union.

The importance of the student voice was re-iterated during the roundtable. Student Union representatives highlighted the fact that there is often a disconnect between student and faculty/staff perceptions on a wide variety of issues, including those related to social responsibility. Working together on these matters offers a valuable bridge to close the perception gap and provides a mutually beneficial and effective framework. The significance of this partnership was also evoked by university representatives at the meeting, who stressed the important breakthrough of the ESPRIT project in this regard, particularly in the Israeli context.

The questions raised in the Tempus-ESPRIT project are of international relevance and will undoubtedly continue to be debated and elaborated in the years to come. The project provided EU and Israeli partner institutions the benefit of mutual learning and discussion on crucial questions of social responsibility in the academic realm. While the university/student alliance is vital to promoting an effective social responsibility agenda, the cooperation between institutions, student unions and different countries is also valued. These collaborations deepen the discussion on important issues relevant to higher education stakeholders and to society as a whole.

Hannah Moscovitz is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel). Hannah works as part of the Tempus-ESPRIT coordinating team at the Centre for the Study of European Politics and Society, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

[i] Project partners include: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; Interdisciplinary Center Herzlyia; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Tel-Hai Academic College; University of Brighton; Center for Higher Education, Consult; Masaryk University; University of Santiago de Compostela.

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This is, of course, the big news from the past week. The whole Farage/Trump/ambassador thing is little more than a febrile combination of unwillingness to follow protocol, mutual back-scratching and intentional destablising, while the Autumn Statement simply underlines that no-one in government really knows what Brexit means.

But the resumption of legal contests – now in the Supreme Court – is arguably much more consequential.

As readers will recall, Miller and dos Santos saw a clear defeat of the government position in the High Court, with all judges strongly supporting the line that Parliament has to pass an Act to trigger Article 50 notification to leave the EU. The government has appealled, and now the case will be joined by the Northern Irish action that was defeated earlier in the month in Belfast, with additional representations from the Scottish executive.

As an appeal, the government is more or less bound to follow the same line of argumentation as before, which it appears to be doing, so there’s a priori not much chance they’ll win.

However, sources did indicate that the government has its fall-back in place, namely a “three-line bill” that would be almost impossible to amend: ‘bombproof‘, indeed.

One of the many things I’m not is a specialist on Parliamentary procedure, but I am very lucky that a couple of doors down from my office is Louise Thompson, who is such a specialist (and a very helpful colleague too). She pointed me to Griffith, the ‘seminal text’ apparently, who sets out the grounds for amendments. From this the following points are central.

Firstly, the key grounds of accepting amendments for debate (in this context) are, in rising order of seriousness, that: they don’t render all or part of the bill inoperative; they don’t delay the entry into force of the bill in England until a similar bill has passed in Scotland; they aren’t inconsistent with the bill as agreed by committee; and they aren’t relevant to the subject matter of the bill.

The first two grounds simply mean that an amendment to not invoke Article 50 wouldn’t be acceptable, any more than any effort to use Scotland to delay matters. This latter might come into play in the Supreme Court, if it decides that elements such as the Act of Union require Scottish approval and involvement (although this seems unlikely).

The inconsistency issue might matter more, although the government might be able to get to the committee stage with its text intact, especially if it’s as brief as indicated.

Thus the key test will be irrelevance. Assuming that the government draws the line as tightly as possible, then we’d expect the bill to be one with the title “to authorise the government to make notification under Article 50 TFEU”, ie nothing at all about the bigger process, only the very narrow triggering. The challenge to amenders would be whether they could add in any scrutiny powers for Parliament as part of that notification. At a first glance, the argument would have to run that the triggering power necessarily has to be linked to scrutiny, because of the wider consequences of notification, including the irreversibility of the process (which both the government and Miller have argued in their court submissions).

Which leads us to the second key point, namely that it is the chair of the committee who determines what is admissable, working on the advice of the clerk and the bill’s draftsman. Since we don’t know quite how this would be pitched, it’s not possible to be certain about who that chair would be, but the government would presumably want to have someone sympathetic to keeping the bill as proposed. Griffith does discuss at length the power of selection, but doesn’t provide a final answer on how definitive the chair’s power might be, beyond noting that “the chair is often wiser to yied” (p.82) to discontent in committee.

The picture that emerges from Griffith is that if there is careful drafting and a determined stance by the chair, then amendments will be very difficult to achieve. This, in turn, suggests that the government will have to be steely in this matter if it is to manage both remainers and hard brexiteers: it will be a key test of how much confidence the government commands in the house and (more importantly) in its party.

This matters because if amendments can’t happen, then the only active options open to remainers are to use the Lords (who are under warning about just this) to delay or amend, or to try and defeat the bill altogether.

Which brings us to Labour. Anyone reading All Out War, by Tim Shipman, will have been struck by the degree of indifference/incompetence/sabotage of the Remain campaign by the party leadership. Given the subsequent entrenchment of those same individuals – Corbyn, McDonnell, Milne – since the leadership contest, there is very little reason to suspect that Labour will put out any concerted effort to challenge – or even scrutinise – this bill. And without Labour, any Tory remain rebels will have a much weaker position.

UPDATE 1010:

Louise has now read this and came by to point out that this bill is likely to be heard by the House as a whole, rather than in one of the bill committees: as the Parliament page helpfully tells us, when this happens, it is the deputy speaker who chairs. This means that Paul Daly’s suggestion of PACAC chair Bernard Jenkin probably doesn’t fly, other issues notwithstanding, and that the selection process is out of government hands even more than otherwise, which might strengthen the hand of amenders.

UPDATE 1115:

Well, it’s nice to see people read this stuff, even if to point out my shortcomings. Uncivil Still notes that I’m using amendment rules for the third reading (i.e. after committee), when committee stage is more likely to see challenges. They also note here is the option in the second reading of a reasoned amendment, which allows for the denial of that second reading and the effective abandonment of the bill. Again, this brings us back to the final point, namely that without Labour playing ball with remain rebels, this doesn’t work.

BTW Louise is now checking with Parliament about which Deputy Speaker would chair the committee in the House, as no-one seems to know for sure.

The post Making an unamendable A50 bill – UPDATED appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

No longer needed.

I did it!

I participated in the primary of the right and the centre on Sunday around lunchtime. It didn’t even hurt. I paid my contribution of 2 Euros, took the 7 ballot papers, and signed, without any conflict of conscience, the ‘Charte de l’alternance’, confirming that I was in favour of political change (which I am), committed to respect the republican values of the centre and the right (which I am) as well as to the ‘redressement de la France’ whatever that means (‘recovery’? ‘improvement’? ‘rebound’? Fine with me, I consider all of these necessary).

It appears I was one of 600,000 participants who do not traditionally belong to the French right, but who seized the opportunity to cast a vote of Sarkozy avoidance, with the hope to have someone else confront Marine Le Pen in what is likely to be the 2nd round of the presidential elections next May. Sarkozy’s intense fishing for votes on the extreme right was going to make him, in comparison to Le Pen, the ‘Pepsi’ offering a weak alternative to the real ‘Coke’. Yesterday morning, France woke up without Sarkozy, who had declared, somewhat pathetically on Sunday night, that he would withdraw from politics. And it didn’t even hurt.

Surprise winner François Fillon will now face former frontrunner Alain Juppé in the runoff next Sunday. While it is doubtful that the support from the left and centre will be enough to enable Juppé to close yesterday’s 15%-gap within one week, pollsters and media would be well advised not to rule out yet another surprise.

They did it!

The parties of the right and the centre who organised the primaries deserve unanimous respect. The logistical challenge was remarkable, and it was handled professionally, with all lessons learnt from the calamitous experience exactly four years ago, when the internal election of the president of the UMP (now called Les Républicains) was wrought with fraud and incompetency. In other words: a very well-organised event of active citizenship, which mobilised over 4 million voters. Chapeau!

The seven candidates deserve the same respect. The entire campaign, marked by an unprecedented total of three television debates was an exercise in political discussion where everybody refrained from crossing red lines but actually exchanged about the issues they cared most for. What a welcome change from the mud-slinging of the US elections and the dishonesties of the Brexit referendum. France may be a has-been in many respects, and the constitution of the Fifth Republic, as this blog will not get tired of repeating, is the country’s greatest enemy on its road to renewal, but at least democracy still has a taste of democracy. Ouf!

The only persons involved who were clearly not up to the standards are the TV journalists. During the third debate their complacency and smugness was almost embarrassing and their eagerness to ‘spice up’ a seemingly boring debate was totally out of sync with what the 5 million audience was perfectly happy with over two hours and a half, i.e. a serious, boring exchange on serious, boring issues. The candidates even had to fight for the right to develop their thoughts about the European Union, a topic which the journalists were only too keen of brushing aside in order to focus on more ‘sexy’ issues. Nul!

He did it!

Yet, even the intense focus on the primaries was interrupted by political rivals, who carefully chose the same week to catch a part of the limelight and grab media attention for some precious minutes.

The first one was Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister and deputy general secretary of the Elysée, who announced his candidacy for the presidential elections on Wednesday. Macron, who had founded his own political movement En marche! after having left the government, chose a training centre in one of the Paris suburbs to make his announcement.

En marche! –which smartly reproduces the initials of its founder’s name – claims to have already over 100,000 followers and refuses to be categorised as ‘left’ or ‘right’, or even ‘centre’. It thus tries to replicate the Gaullist aspiration to become a political movement ‘above’ the party system rather than one party among others. Emmanuel Macron is popular – an Odoxa poll for France info revealed that the 57% of the French who spontaneously considered his candidacy ‘a good thing’ are spread across the entire party spectrum.

Macron should not be underestimated. Should François Fillon win the 2nd round of primaries of the right next Sunday, many moderate voters scared by his austerity and ‘putinophile’ attitude would be tempted to have a closer look at Macron’s programme at the presidential election. What remains perfectly uncertain, though, is how a President Macron, without the backing of a full-fledged political party, would be able to obtain a parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June/July.

She did it!

The champagne is already being served.

And then there was Marine Le Pen. Unusually discreet over the last months, she also chose Wednesday (one day before the primaries TV debate) to unveil her brand-new logo for the presidential campaign. What a feast for semiologists! No mention of the Front National at all! No reminder of the FN’s traditional tricolour ‘flame’ emblem, and not even a reference to her family name! Which not only happens to be the same as her father’s – recently excluded from the party – but also as her niece’s, a much more dangerous adversary in the modernisation of the FN. The logo simply says ‘Marine for president’, while the baseline slogan – ‘In the name of the people’ – is, in her words, ‘a code of conduct and a profession of faith’.

The attention focused mainly, however, on the fact that she dared choose a blue rose as new symbol. A rose! The symbol of the Socialists that Mitterrand put at the centre of his famous inauguration march to the Pantheon in 1981. First she took the Socialists’ working-class electorate, then their most-cherished symbol, next will be the presidency. According to her own explanations the rose is meant to be a symbol of femininity, which came upon her as ‘an evidence’.

What a week! Political battle cries and moments of high-flying symbolism on all channels! Fortunately this blog still has some months to go, which should enable it to digest November’s overdose.

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 4 on the French 2017 election marathon.
Post # 3 here.
Post # 2 here.
Post # 1 here.

The post France 2017: Just do it! appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

It looks as if Simon Usherwood was asked the same question I was: How to win at Brexit.

My answer would begin by taking a step back and loving the bomb.

Winning at Brexit is the wrong question. The goal is winning at life. Winning Brexit is simply the best way to do that, but by no means the only way.

Incidentally, this shows how singularly unsuited I am to frontline campaigning. That’s more of a job for people who think the next vote is the most important thing that’s ever happened.

I think the first step towards winning at life (Brexit-wise) is to think about abortion rights in America.

In the United States today, you couldn’t find a pro-choice conservative with two hands and a flashlight. But that hasn’t always been the case. Just look at Roe v. Wade itself. Among the seven Justices in the majority, surely Chief Justice Burger counts as a conservative, while fellow Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun actually wrote the opinion for the Court. Even 20 years later, when the currently controlling case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey came out, the plurality opion was a joint effort by centre-right Justices like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the one hand, and left-ish Bush appointee David Souter on the other hand. So where have all the pro-choice Republicans gone?

While I’m no expert in this field, my understanding is that the answer is broadly twofold: Some pro-choice Republicans, particularly the “Rockefeller Republicans“, have become Democrats during the (3rd way) Clinton era. Others have adjusted their views on abortion so that they fit better in the Republican herd. This is not just a matter of Republican politicians saying what they think their core constituency want to hear. As much as we don’t like to think of ourselves that way, people are sheep who like conformity. If all our peers, the people that we compare ourselves to, are pro-life, we will tend to copy that stance regardless of where we started out.

But of course, that works both ways. This “mirroring” only works to the extent that we have inherent affinity for these peers. (Otherwise they wouldn’t be peers.) There has to be a shared group identity for this to occur. And that’s exactly the purpose of using wedge issues: to manipulate the groups that people identify with, so that they will conform their views in one way rather than another.

So where have the pro-EU Tories gone? As far as anyone can tell, there’s Ken Clarke, and then no one. But surely all the others who stood with Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s to fight for the EU against the Eurosceptic socialists haven’t all joined the LibDems or Tony Blair’s Labour party? They must still be out there.

But how could we persuade them to speak up in favour of the EU? (Which may or may not mean against Brexit. It could simply mean against leaving the Single Market. Being picky in your choice of allies is not helpful.)

By the logic above, we would have to separate them from the Conservative herd. For example through appropriate use of wedge issues.

Conveniently, there is no shortage of those since Mrs. May has taken office. In her determination to compete with UKIP for votes, she has left herself exposed on her centrist flank. In terms of electoral politics, that is smart, because neither tovarich Corbyn nor Tim Farron – bless him – will take those voters away from her. But when it comes to wider politics, this presents an opportunity.

An obvious example is Nissan. What did the government promise them to persuade them to stay? Giving money to big businesses but not SMEs can’t possibly be popular among the centre-right. Andrew Tyrie, the powerful (and scary) chair of the Treasury Select Committee, is already asking questions, and he should be supported as much as possible.

More generally, every other word out of the Remain side’s mouth should be “crony capitalism”. (Yes, I know that that’s two words.) I cannot recommend enough the recent blog post by George Peretz and Kelyn Bacon on the blog of the UK State Aid Law Association, exploring state aid law post-Brexit. If the goal is to bring the pro-business, libertarian-leaning part of the Tory party over to a place where they can be sympathetic towards the EU, we need to push the narrative of the EU as the UK’s last best hope against a government that hands out billions of taxpayer money to whoever lobbies most effectively.

With Nissan as an example, that cannot be a difficult story to tell.

The second half of this same story is Mrs. May’s industrial strategy, which she has helpfully failed to define so far. As long as no one knows what it is, there is no reason why it should not be framed as another handout to British business, favouring jobs for the boys over genuine competition. Again, that cannot possibly be a hard sell.

None of this will stop Brexit. Because of the same mechanism discussed before, the sides will harden not soften. The more you talk to Leavers about how stupid Leave is, the more convinced they will be that you are an idiot/stooge/not-their-kind-of-person. There will not be a massive swing in popular opinion, no matter how bad the economy goes. (Conveniently, economic growth comes without a counterfactual. So it’s impossible to prove that someone [cough] Osborne [cough] ran the economy into the ground.) Tory MPs will vote Leave because they’re afraid of being deselected, Labour MPs will vote Leave if they represent Leave constituencies, as many of them do, and Peers will vote Leave because they’re afraid of the Strathclyde review.

The only way to win is to frame this as a conversation about something other than Brexit, and to accept that Brexit may be involved. Remember: if the UK Brexits, they can always come back in. (That’s in art. 50 too.) And even if they don’t, defeating the Trumps, Farages and LePens of this world is more important than Brexit.

The post How to win at Brexit (2) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.