Ideas on Europe Blog

 

An event report by Rosa Fernandez, Jonas Schoenefeld and Thomas Hoerber

 

The third event of the Research Network ‘The role of Europe in global challenges: Climate change and Sustainable Development’ took place on June 13th and 14th, hosted by Prof. Thomas Hoerber at the EU-Asia Institute of ESSCA School of Management in Angers. The conference was organised as a hybrid event, giving the opportunity for some researchers to network in person for the first time since the pandemic began, though a good number of participants joined online. The title of the event was ‘Sustainability in Contemporary Europe – A Changing Agenda?’ and there was variety in the topics covered, with some common areas emerging for discussion: the energy and cost of living crisis created by the invasion of Ukraine, looking into alternative sources of energy and for instance, the role of hydrogen; but also the changes in the understanding and use of the sustainable development concept (and its three pillars: economic, social and environmental) by European institutions and member State governments alike.

All the events of the Research Network have a dedicated space for PhD students and early career researchers. While in the first two events the focus was on different career paths and advice, organised as Q & A sessions between participants with different profiles and stages of professional career, in the last event the focus was put on grants capture, with really helpful insights from successful recipients of large grants and professionals dedicated to help in with the bidding process. The rationale behind this was to consider possible steps beyond the life of the Research Network, so that the expertise and common interests can be put to work towards something productive and with real impact, beyond academic publications, which of course, we will continue working on.

 

 

We hope to continue with the growing number of members of the network and see more friends attending our panel at the UACES Annual Conference in Lille. Watch the space for more events next year.

Rosa & Thomas & Jonas

 

 

The post The Role of Europe in Global Challenges: Climate Change and Sustainable Development appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Angela Wigger

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 did not mention industrial policy as a designated Community competence but its preambles declared a high degree of competitiveness an overarching goal, which indirectly laid the basis for a supranational intervention. Industrial policy has been a key pillar in the gradual reconfiguration of several national markets into one giant single market at the outset but it vanished in name during the decades of neoliberal restructuring.

 

Only with the attempts to end sluggish economic growth after the 2008 crisis, industrial policy has been on a major comeback, rising like a Phoenix from its ashes. Alongside a worldwide revival of industrial policy, including ‘America First’, Made in China 2025 or Make in India, the European Commission launched various initiatives and programmes to induce a European Industrial Renaissance. Bolstered by a rhetoric of competitiveness and the need to create an attractive business climate, industrial policy had to reverse the process of deindustrialization, backshore manufacturing capacity from emerging markets to the EU and foster European value chains, so that manufacturing products could be exported with the label Made in Europe.

 

Smart Specialisation: a new industrial policy?

One of the flagship industrial policies is Smart Specialisation, a place-based, differentiated regional development policy adopted in 2014 that aims at upscaling regional manufacturing clusters to Industry 4.0-type technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data and data analytics, 3D printing and the internet of things. Importantly, Smart Specialisation has been blended into the EU cohesion policy and subordinated to the goal of ‘economic, social and territorial cohesion, balanced economic growth and upward economic convergence’, as enshrined in the Single European Act of 1987.

 

As balancing out intra-EU manufacturing growth patterns is particularly pertinent in a context of the longstanding asymmetries in economic structures revolving around a north-south and west-east axis, the Journal of Common Market Studies article The New EU Industrial Policy and Deepening Structural Asymmetries: Smart Specialisation Not So Smart interrogates whether Smart Specialisation is indeed an appropriate strategy for alleviating structural disparities. Drawing on a critical political economy perspective rooted in historical materialism, Smart Specialisation is understood in dialectical interplay with the inherent contradictions of the broader capitalist dynamics of uneven and combined development – a structural and recurring feature of capitalism, which in theory, can temporarily be mitigated by state regulation. The article demonstrates that Smart Specialisation is neither smart nor does it induce upward economic convergence.

 

Smart Specialisation has been designed as a neoliberal supply-side strategy that builds on new public management, private-public governance structures, or what has been referred to as the entrepreneurial discovery process: rather than national and regional governments picking winners or breeding champions, a collective intelligentsia of regional businesses, national and regional governments, universities, research institutes and knowledge centres, and the wider civil society, should jointly identify comparative advantages of regional industries, set R&D investment priorities and formulate research and innovation proposals that compete for public and private funding. The European Commission aims at complementing the bottom-up process with a top-down strategic drive through facilitating cross-regional synergies, spill-overs and production complementarities, and thereby induce a value chain industrialisation so that manufacturers pull components from various regional industrial clusters and close the gap in economic development within the EU.

 

A competitive logic undermining cohesion policy

Climbing the stairway to excellence, moving ahead in transnational value chains and exploiting new cross-regional synergies is not confined to lagging regions. Smart Specialisation has been declared a policy for all regions – with no region left behind. While it is questionable whether ‘specialising smart’ in a competitive niche rather than diffusing investments into multiple domains is a viable and also sustainable catching up strategy for all regions, Smart Specialisation is not a voluntary or non-committal policy.

 

Smart Specialisation cross-cuts multiple EU funding streams, all of which subjugate the access to funding to a competitive selection process. Developing Smart Specialisation strategies has become an ex-ante conditionality to access funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) – funding that increasingly relies on debt instruments meant to trigger a multiplier effect and leverage ever more private (venture) capital in the selected manufacturing agglomerations. In addition, an ex-post conditionality was added: access to funding was made conditional upon compliance with the new EU public deficit and debt rules, and the macroeconomic adjustment measures of the European semester.

 

The competitive race for research and innovation funding dilutes the original raison d’être of cohesion policy and its transfer of payment logic. Not everyone who plays can win, and competition within the regions does not take place on an equal footing. Clusters in lagging regions that exhibit low growth, or that are confronted with rapid deindustrialization or low value-added, low knowledge- and low technology-intensive industries face multiple obstacles that put them at a comparative disadvantage.

 

Notably clusters from regions in Europe’s south tend to identify the expansion of tourism services with spin-offs to the local agri-food production, gastronomy or the cultural and creative industries as trailblazing areas for industrial upscaling and investment (see also this recent article in JCMS). Smart agri-food-tourism strategies certainly may succeed in incremental technological upgrades and integrating various regional sectors, which renders them more competitive and improves the visitor’s tourism experience; however, these are also low technology intensive, low skill and low value-added sectors that render the possibility of catching up with the advanced regions unlikely. Smart Specialization strategies adopted in medium and high technology-intensive export-led EU economies of the EU’s North host corporations that are innovation leaders or frontrunners with higher R&D activities and a higher readiness to make the transition to Industry 4.0 production. Not only are Smart Specialization projects larger and better funded, they are more likely to crowd in private equity.

 

Industrial clusters in less developed and poorer regions also face greater difficulties coping with the administrative workload that comes with the sheer complexity of submitting competitive funding applications, co-operating with the European Commission and complying with progress reports and evaluations. Furthermore, due to the far-reaching austerity programmes, regional budgets have shrunk in crisis-hit countries. Notably, regions in member states under excessive deficit and macroeconomic imbalance procedures are structurally disadvantaged in ‘specialising smart’: not only are similar stimulus programmes, such as those found in wealthier member states, out of reach, but borrowing money on financial markets or the European Investment Bank is also not a viable option as such borrowings count as public debt subject to EU deficit rules.

 

The European Commission is well aware that not every region can become the next Silicon Valley; however, with advanced regions simultaneously upgrading regional industrial structures, Smart Specialisation, as an industrial policy within cohesion policy corroborates the status quo of structural asymmetries.

 

Smart Specialisation: favouring capital

Smart Specialisation does not amount to the creation of common goods accessible to society at large but entails an in-built hierarchy in favour of industrial and financial capital. Regional or national government representatives act as facilitators and universities and research institutes are subordinated to private profit motives, while civil society, the so-called fourth helix in the multiple stakeholder engagement, is not only vaguely defined, or depicted in terms of innovation users and consumers, but also marginally involved. Most importantly, ‘labour’ is not even considered a separate collaborative agent, neither in the formulation, implementation or evaluation of Smart Specialisation strategies. The success of the project of an ever-closer union depends not only on economic convergence but also on citizens, including labour, having ownership of policies that affect their lives.

 

 

Author:

 

Angela Wigger is Associate Professor Global Political Economy at the Radboud University. She researches capitalist crises and crises responses from a historical materialist perspective. Focal points are the geopolitics of industrial and antitrust policy, industrial reshoring attempts, the “competitiveness” fetish, internal devaluation and debt-led accumulation in the age of rentier capitalism.

Twitter: @AngelaWigger @ RadboudPol @RadboudNSM @Radboud_Uni

Academic profile

 

 

The post The New EU Industrial Policy: Smart Specialisation Fortifying Capitalist Unevenness appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

 

By Maryna Rabinovych and Oleksandra Egert

 

On 23 June 2022, the European Union granted Ukraine and Moldova the coveted status of EU Candidate countries. For both countries, the acquisition of an EU Candidate status amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is of high geopolitical but also symbolic importance. Nevertheless, Ukraine’s and Moldova’s path to EU membership is likely to be thorny, as they have much “homework” to do.

 

Political conditions to membership

This concerns, in the first place, fulfilling an array of political conditions, immediately attached to the decision about the Candidate status. Formulated in the Commission’s Opinions on Ukraine’s and Moldova’s membership applications, these conditions predominantly concern the rule of law domain. Both countries are required to continue reforms concerning the judiciary, anticorruption and fighting vested interests and organized crime. For Ukraine, additional conditions concern harmonizing its legislation with EU audiovisual legislation and improving the legislation on national minorities – which may be tricky, given Russia’s narratives about Russian-speakers’ discrimination in Ukraine that underly its aggression. The Commission’s Opinion on Moldova puts an extra emphasis on the domains of public administration reform, the protection of vulnerable groups, as well as gender equality and fighting violence against women.

Not least, moving towards the EU membership will require Ukraine and Moldova to proceed with the implementation of their ambitious Association Agreements (AAs) with the EU, signed in 2014. The AAs contain the parties’ commitments related to political dialogue, profound liberalization of trade with the EU and cooperation in various sectors, ranging from education to transport. Moving forward with the implementation of these commitments requires nuanced understanding of factors that have been causing uneven partner countries’ compliance rates across sectors.

 

Transport and infrastructure: a case of non-compliance

Our article in the Journal of Common Market Studies offers a nuanced insight into the reasons for Ukraine’s non-compliance with its AA obligations for the single case of transport and infrastructure. The main reason why we chose this case are Ukraine’s chronically low compliance rates in this sector. Over the period from 2015 to 2021, Ukraine’s official aggregate compliance rate was only 44 percent. Even though by mid-2022 this figure grew by 3 percent, and the EU liberalized road transport movement with Ukraine amid the war and export challenges, this domain remains highly problematic by comparison with others, such as public procurement or sanitary and phytosanitary standards.

To explore the reasons why Ukraine lags behind with its transport and infrastructure commitments, the article uses an integrated approach that brings together the enforcement and management compliance schools. The enforcement school understands non-compliance as a willful deliberate decision of a state, based on a cost-benefit analysis. It therefore stresses external incentives and sanctions for non-compliance as key mechanisms the EU can use to externalize its rules. In contrast, the management school argues that non-compliance can be unintentional. It can be caused, for instance, by ambiguous treaty formulations or insufficient institutional, administrative and technical capacity. The management school also suggests considering the complexity of contemporary international agreements and the time span a third country may require to change its laws and practices.

 

A complex array of factors

Document analysis and interviews with Ukrainian officials, civil society and business actors, and the representatives of the EU Delegation in Kyiv helped us illustrate the complexity of factors that lie behind Ukraine’s low scores in the selected sector. Attributable to the enforcement school, it is the lack of the EU’s formalized pressure on Ukrainian stakeholders that results in delayed laws’ adoption and slow change of practices. Insufficient external pressure aggravates the central compliance issue in the sector, namely the impact of vested interests. Ukraine’s commitments under the Association Agreement strongly influence big businesses and require considerable investment. Instead of making such investment, businesses were reported to oppose the implementation of AA commitments by Ukraine, using their channels of influence at the ministerial and the parliamentary level. Deficiencies in authorities’ coordination, insufficient financial capacity, and chronic shortages of staff at the agencies responsible for European integration create additional obstacles to compliance.

The analysis demonstrated that a third country’s non-compliance with its obligations under an AA results from “interrelated and mutually reinforcing factors that shall in no case be viewed in isolation from one another”. For instance, institutional deficiencies enable domestic interest groups to oppose compliance and, vice versa, inter-institutional cleavages may reinforce capacity challenges. Moreover, we learnt that understanding compliance challenges in the AAs’ implementation context requires an in-depth qualitative approach. “The devil is in the detail”, and the loopholes for non-compliance may deal with small, procedural issues, which cannot be revealed without in-depth interviews. Quantitative approaches may be applied to rate the impact various challenges have on compliance.

Insights offered by this study can be of use both for the EU, and for Ukrainian and Moldovan officials who will now work more actively on implementing the AAs as a step towards membership. Understanding the factors behind non-compliance will enable them to address at least some obstacles to smoother AA implementation, for instance, improving inter-institutional coordination and addressing businesses’ concerns.

 

Authors:

Maryna Rabinovych, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Norway

Maryna.rabinovych@uia.no

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oleksandra Egert, Agency for Legislative Initiatives, Kyiv, Ukraine

 

 

 

The post Why Does Ukraine not Adjust to EU Transport Rules? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

by Gilles Pittoors

 

Although an increasing number of political decisions are taken at the European Union (EU) level, national politics remains the prime arena for democratic debate. This deprives the EU of a key source of democratic legitimacy, while showing how national politics are increasingly ‘ruling the void‘. In my article for JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, I argue that national political parties can provide a solution to both challenges by organisationally linking the national and European levels.

 

The importance of national-European linkages

Without linkages with the European level in terms of communication and exchange, national political parties are blindly navigating a highly complex multilevel political system, and thus cannot hope to meaningfully impact EU decision-making. In turn, without party organisations providing the connection with citizens, uploading national preferences to the EU, and downloading the European dimension to national debates, the EU lacks a key source of democratic legitimacy.

Organisationally linking the national and European levels is thus a crucial part of national parties’ role in the EU. Research in this area traditionally focuses on the question of control of national parties over their EU-level agents. Yet, if one accepts that parties’ linkages with the European level, beyond varying in practical terms, can also serve much broader purposes, from exchanging information across levels to legislative coordination, it becomes clear that these linkages should be studied as part of a wider multilevel organisational strategy. The questions I answer are therefore twofold. On the one hand, what exactly are these practices and purposes? On the other hand, how can we capture a party’s broader organisational strategy?

 

Multilevel parties

To answer these questions, I develop a framework to capture and understand parties as multilevel organisations bridging the domestic and European levels. Designed with the specific of aim of tracing variation between parties, the framework integrates Hix and Lord’s organigram of the party in the EU with the federal concept of ‘vertical integration’ of political parties (Figure 1). As such, it focuses attention away from a general principal-agent approach , and towards the cross-level interactive dynamics within a party in the EU context.

 

 

Figure 1: Organigram of a party in the EU.

 

To test this framework, I conducted and compared qualitative case studies of fifteen different parties in Flanders (Belgium), the Netherlands and Denmark. Based on an analysis of party statutes and 64 semi-structured interviews with party elites, these case studies allowed me to put some empirical meat on the framework’s theoretical bones. Importantly, they showed how parties differentiate between an ‘internal’ dimension (linkages with parties’ own EU-level agents, such as MEPs) and an ‘external’ dimension (linkages with a transnational partisan network, such as European party federations). Concurrently, comparison uncovered a fundamental divide between parties regarding the institutionalisation of internal linkages (informal versus formal), and their commitment to external linkages (opt-in versus opt-out attitudes).

 

Four ideal types of multilevel party

Putting these patterns across parties together led to the inductive identification of four distinct ideal types of multilevel party organisation: Federation, Integration, Consolidation and Separation — or the ‘FICS’ model (Table 1).

Table 1: Ideal-typical categories — the ‘FICS’ model.

 

First, federated parties systematically invest in external linkages, firmly locking themselves in their transnational network, while maintaining light-touch contacts with their MEPs and other EU-level agents, whose activities are monitored on an ad hoc basis. These parties stress the importance of building broad European coalitions, and do not mind their ministers and MEPs having a high degree of autonomy to forge the necessary alliances and compromises. As such, a stratified situation is created where national and European activities are effectively decoupled: the party is pursuing domestic and European political goals simultaneously but independently. Linkages hence serve the purpose of cross-level socialisation and information exchange, but not of substantive coordination on concrete policies.

Second, integrated parties engage strongly with both internally and externally through (semi-)formal formats, with linkages aiming to ensure cross-level exchanges on a regular basis and in a systematic way, involving a wide range of actors. These parties not only pursue far-reaching collaboration within their broader transnational network, but also internally aim for frequent and structured interactions across levels. A striking pattern is their use of intermediaries, such as liaison officers and cross-level working groups, fostering synergy between domestic and European politics.

Third, consolidated parties are driven by an overriding concern with cross-level cohesion. They keep close track of what their people at the European level are doing, while largely disregarding their transnational network. At the core of this organisational strategy is a desire to pursue their domestic programme at all levels, for which it is considered crucial to maintain and consolidate cross-level unity as much as possible. Accordingly, while emphasising their independence from external (transnational) pressures, consolidated parties deem informal contacts insufficient. Linkages are meant to serve substantive coordination on policy positions across level, ensuring that MEPs and ministers toe the party line.

Finally, separated parties do not engage across levels either internally or externally, effectively separating their national and European activities. There are no formal structures in place to systematically follow up on what their agents are doing, and there are only weak organisational ties with transnational partisan networks. These parties are almost entirely directed at domestic politics and people dealing with European affairs constitute a semi-autonomous group within the party. Importantly, their approach is not about the dominance of the domestic over the European (as with consolidated parties) or about the decoupling of these two levels (as with federated parties), but about the irrelevance or even rejection of the EU as a genuine political level.

 

Conclusions

This ‘FICS’ model aptly captures individual parties’ organisational practices, as well as their strategic outlook on engaging with the EU, thereby providing researchers with an original and grounded ideal-typical benchmark for understanding national parties as multilevel partisan organisations in the EU’s political system. Its qualitative empirical foundation allows the model to be used to make sense of real-life party behaviour and the different ways in which interaction between the national and European levels of political parties is given shape. It hence provides researchers with useful new tools to study an otherwise highly complex and idiosyncratic topic, as well as an analytical foundation for new hypotheses. The study’s findings hint at ‘genetic’ and ‘territorial‘ effects, bringing a party’s history and national context into the analysis, although these are working hypotheses.

Still, given its exploratory and qualitative nature, the scope of this study was necessarily limited. Future researchers are invited to not only develop its working hypotheses and expand the number of case studies, but also to consider including temporal variation to confront these findings with new evidence. This could help fine-tune the model and framework, and further increase our understanding of (the evolution of) parties as multilevel organisations in the EU.

 

 

Author bio

Gilles is lecturer in European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, and postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. He holds a PhD in Political Science obtained at Ghent University in 2021. His research interests include the Europeanisation of politics, the democratisation of the EU, and transnational partisanship.

@gillespittoors

https://gillespittoors.eu

@Gaspar_UGent

@FacultyofArtsUG

The post National Parties in the EU — Identifying Four Ideal Types appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Daniele Archibugi, Rinaldo Evangelista and Antonio Vezzani

Since the release of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, fostering science, technology, innovation, and human capital have been considered key ingredients of all subsequent EU strategies aimed at achieving a cohesive and competitive European Union.

In recent years, regions have steadily increased their relevance as key spatial and socio-economic units as well as policy targets of both cohesion and Science and Technology (S&T) policies. Regional innovation strategies for smart specialisation, such as the RIS3, have become a key component of EU Cohesion Policy, supporting the thematic concentration of resources and reinforcing the strategic programming and orientation of policy action.

Although EU S&T policies might have an impact on the level of scientific and technological cohesion of EU, their role in influencing the dynamics of regional technological gaps or technological convergence in Europe has been largely neglected. In this blog post we discuss recent evidence of the potential role played by Horizon 2020 (H2020) research funds disbursed by the EU, highlighting how this may depend on its design and the allocation of resources across different funding schemes.

 

Technological asymmetries in the EU

Technological capacities in the EU are far from being evenly distributed across industries, firms and even less so at a spatial level. This is due to various factors, such as the cumulative nature of innovation and learning processes, the localised character of spillovers, and externalities in the generation and economic exploitation of technology. These features produce long-lasting spatial technological asymmetries that can produce non-reversible processes of polarization, agglomeration and clustering.

Figure 1 provides a visual representation of such asymmetries, comparing the patent per capita across EU NUTS2 regions in 2001-04 and 2013-16. The figure shows strong macro-regional differences in the patent intensity and a degree of technological heterogeneity within most EU countries. Moreover, a comparison of the two maps shows the persistence of very large gaps between the lowest and highest performing macro-regional areas of EU, with only a mild catching-up process by Eastern European regions and Portugal.

 

Figure 1. Patents per 10,000 habitants- 2001-2004 (left) and 2013-2016 (right)
Source: Authors’ computations on Regpat 2019a data.

 

H2020 and technological cohesion

Existing EU S&T policies can have a twofold effect on the regional gaps characterising the EU technological landscape. On one hand, competitive schemes may end up favouring areas of excellence and leading players and regions since they aim to strength the role of the EU innovation system in the global arena. But on the other hand, the explicit collaborative setting of part of such policies, supporting multi-country research groups with the aim to create an integrated European Research Area, may complement cohesion policies by reducing regional gaps. It is a typical example of where public policies may lead to (unintended) contrasting results. They can contribute to the cohesion target or, in contrast, exacerbate existing economic and technological gaps among regions.

Table 1 summarises the main features of four key funding schemes under H2020, which account for about 80% of the Total H2020 budget: the European Research Council (ERC), the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) the Research & innovation actions (RIA) and the Innovation actions (IA). They might have different effects on the level of technological cohesion in the EU depending on the specific science and technology activity supported, their policy design and the targeted beneficiaries. The results of our empirical analysis confirm that different schemes have different impacts.

The ERC, established in 2007 under the 7th Framework Programme (2007-2014 funding period), was the first scheme allowing the support of research projects by single researchers or teams with the idea of fostering scientific excellence. Under H2020 the ERC was entitled with a budget of 13€ billion (about 18.7% of the overall budget) to foster frontier research. Our analysis in the Journal of Common Market Studies suggests that ERC can potentially exacerbate the technological disparities among EU regions and is likely to benefit the most densely populated urban areas.

The MSCA also operates under the pillar of ‘Excellent Science’ to distribute highly competitive and prestigious research and innovation awards, allowing for: career development through mobility to a hosting institution; the support of research networks and the promotion of science to society. Our study suggests that the network orientation of the MSCA may limit its negative effect on technological cohesion.

 

The RIA and IA support basic and applied research to foster the development of new knowledge addressing so-called societal challenges. The former is slightly more oriented toward the earliest phases of the research and development process. The competitive logic characterising this policy scheme, which favours applications and projects involving both high and low innovative regions, is likely to facilitate technological cohesion.

 

Conclusion

Policies that result in opposing outcomes might still be valuable, provided they are informed by an overall strategy. This potential duality applies also to the Horizon 2020 Programme, the EU’s flagship instrument for science and technology policy.

Our econometric exercise confirms that, overall, the access to H2020 is consistent with the competitive logic of EU S&T policies. However, our work also reveals the presence of a rebalancing mechanism in the regional allocation of H2020: regions located in less developed countries tend to get an amount of funds that is higher to that implied by their technological capabilities.

This rebalancing mechanism has much to do with the collaborative-inclusive logic characterizing the policy design of RIA and IA that seem to prevail over the more ‘elite’ nature of the ERC and MSCA schemes, where access to funds increases more than proportionally with technological capabilities.

However, the actual contribution of H2020 to the EU cohesion target is likely to be rather limited, and unable to offset the stickiness of the technological gaps across EU regions. Despite H2020 being one of the world’s largest public schemes supporting research and innovation, its budget is not comparable to what top corporations spends in a year. While the yearly budget of H2020 was about 11 billion euros, in 2019 large corporations such as Alphabet (23€ billion), Microsoft (17.5), Huawei (16.7), Samsung (15.5), Apple (14.4) or Volkswagen (14.3) alone spent larger amounts on R&D.

In times of resource scarcity, a reallocation of part of the Cohesion Funds to those S&T schemes characterized by a collaborative-inclusive logic could be envisaged instead of trying to increase the share of Cohesion Funds dedicated to innovation. Relying upon top-down policy schemes such as H2020 might also bypass the lack of administrative capacity of less developed regions, which has prevented them from taking full advantage of the bottom-up logic of the EU Cohesion Funds.

 

 

Authors:

Daniele Archibugi is a research director at the Italian National Research Council, Irpps, in Rome and Professor of Innovation, Governance and Public Policy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He works on the economics of technological change, the dynamics of globalisation, EU integration and international political theory.

 

Twitter handle: @DanieleArchibu1

Department Twitter handle: @BirkbeckUoL

Academic profile

 

Rinaldo Evangelista is a Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Camerino (Italy). His research activity focuses on the areas of Economics of technological change and on the analysis of innovation in manufacturing and services.

 

Department Twitter handle: @UniCamerino

 

 

 

 

Antonio Vezzani is Associate Professor at the Roma Tre University and Research Associate at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). His research focuses on the economics of technological change, intangible assets and intellectual property rights, local and global knowledge dynamics, and innovation policies.

 

Twitter handle: @AntonioVezzani

Department Twitter handle: @EconomiaRomaTre

 

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As the attention of the European public opinion has turned to Ukraine, it is our duty and responsibility not to leave the accession plans for the Balkans fall into oblivion, writes Marilena Koppa.

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash.

Nineteen years after the Thessaloniki Summit that offered an accession perspective to the Western Balkans, the region is stuck and the process frozen. Enlargement has become a bureaucratic process for the relevant Directorate of the Commission where ‘business as usual’ is conducted — although nothing is as it was some years ago.

In fact, with the exception of Turkey, this is the longest process of negotiation leading nowhere, with devastating consequences for democracy, economic growth, the rise of nationalism and centrifugal tendencies. The case of Bosnia Herzegovina is the most prominent — and most dangerous — in that respect.

My country, Greece, is today in a position to work with consistency for the rapprochement of the region with the EU, after more than 25 years of conflict with North Macedonia over the name issue. But the EU does not seem to be interested anymore.

Since the end of the 20th century, the West has followed a “stabilization through integration” strategy in the region, meaning a stable and consistent strategy of keeping the Balkans close. The central assumption in the EU and NATO has been that the relatively small and weak Balkan states will eventually be incorporated into the twin-pillar Euro-Atlantic construct with full membership in both the EU and NATO.

The general framework has not changed. But the economic crisis in Europe, followed by Brexit, the migration crisis and then the pandemic, resulted in a period of introversion that by-passed the enlargement policy. The idea of deepening before enlargement reappeared with a renewed force.

The War in Ukraine that followed led to a further deterioration of the situation. We are dealing with small economies, scarce foreign investment, exodus of the youth, high unemployment and the perspective of accession deferred to an unknown future.

Still the region is struggling with the consequences of the Bulgarian veto in 2020 that halted the starting of negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania. Now things seem to move, but the situation in North Macedonia is problematic. Not to speak of the alarming situation in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Kosovo stalemate. At the same time Russian penetration is evident in different parts of the region.

The Prespes agreement has unleashed a positive dynamic creating the impression that regional problems, even the most difficult ones, can be overcome. What followed, however, showed that the region’s future is not in its own hands. The message from the French government, which was echoed by other member states was clear: no enlargement without deepening, meaning that the EU had to change in order to be able to accept new members. The region found itself in a ‘no man’s land’ waiting for something to happen.

And then the war erupted. The Russian aggression on Ukraine changed everything in Europe, at all levels. Ukraine applied for membership while Moldova and Georgia followed. It is noteworthy that Ukraine answered the Commission’s questionnaire in just a week, showing the will of Ukrainians to become part of the EU. Public opinion in the 27 member states was favorable to a swift accession process for Ukraine, while the six countries in the Western Balkans (WB6) were in a way forgotten. In a survey from March 2020, support for accession for the WB is below 36 per cent in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. As the leaders in Europe have their eyes on the polls before any decision, we cannot really be optimistic for the outcome.

What we witness is the breakdown not only of the Eastern Partnership, but also, in a way, of the Enlargement Policy. The reason is that, as things stand, the WB6 are hostage to the Eastern trio: there can be no move towards EU accession that does not involve Ukraine and Moldova (that are now candidates) and, eventually, Georgia.  The two countries that are negotiating, Serbia and Montenegro, are not moving and there is no clear perspective for membership.

In this ambivalent atmosphere, on 9 May 2022 President Macron, in his Strasbourg Speech, put forward the idea of a European Political Community as a wider circle of countries around the Union. He mentioned that for the Balkans the path is already mapped out. But in fact, nobody believed him. All this in a framework of clear-cut Russian presence in the Western Balkans through the orthodox church, anti-Americanism, misinformation and propaganda.

So, the idea of a staged accession gains ground. As long as it is not presented as an alternative to full membership, this idea must be seriously discussed. Balkan societies have suffered for too long. It is time to move οn.

A proposal that has been discussed for a while now is to let the WB6 and the trio participate immediately in the Single Market. This would permit the citizens of the countries concerned to enjoy the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. Let’s not forget that 66 per cent of the Balkan trade is already conducted with the EU. In addition, each step would give access to more funds and participation to various EU policies, as for example Common Security and Defence Policy.

As a Greek I was at first totally against such an approach. It was my firm belief that it would be presented as an alibi for not accepting the candidate countries as full members. Today I fear that it is Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia that will show the road to follow. I may be wrong but I cannot envisage a situation where there will be a development for the Western Balkans that does not involve the trio. What we must guarantee is not to move ahead with Ukraine leaving the WB6 behind.

This staged accession is not something new. It happened in 1993 with Austria, Sweden and Finland as a first step towards accession. If  countries are part of the Single Market, it will be easier to move to full membership.

Greece and other countries will not accept any EU solution for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia that does not take into consideration the Balkans. Because we know the risks and the challenges the region is facing and we are truly committed to full membership. However, we have to act together, so as the Balkans are not left behind during the enormous effort of reconstructing Ukraine.

Our common effort should focus on keeping the process open. For the moment, accession remains a moving target for the Balkan aspirants, where the goalposts are continuously moving, something that makes the people of the region increasingly impatient and frustrated. Under the current circumstances this becomes increasingly dangerous.

But, in essence, there is also need of a new narrative for the region’s strengths and advantages to give confidence to the region and change public opinion’s stereotypes in EU capitals. And this implies a huge information campaign for which we should all be responsible.

In my view, the staged approach together with development of regional cooperation efforts can be a realistic way out that could help the region navigate to safe waters.

Today more than ever there is a dire need for a renewed determination in Brussels and EU capitals concerning the Western Balkans. As the attention of the European public opinion is turned to Ukraine, it is our duty and responsibility not to leave the Balkans fall into oblivion. The stakes are high: high for the stability of the region and for the EU but also for peace and prosperity for the whole continent.

The post A Southern Perspective on EU Enlargement appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2022 (23-24 June, at FASoS, Maastricht).

 

1. Introduction

In most historiographic accounts of European integration, the Maastricht Treaty marks an important step forward on “the long road to unity”. It is described as heralding a new politics of European integration or marking a moment of transformation and refoundation. For example, in their recently published textbook, Dawson and De Witte describe the Maastricht Treaty as “the most significant Treaty revision of the EU to date” which changed the EU “from being an economic community that is focused on policy to being a political union, that is, a polity.” This transformation was particularly significant for the community of legal scholars because it overturned old assumptions about the role of law in the process of European integration.  

No one has better described the impact of Maastricht on EU legal studies than Deirdre Curtin in her article The Constitutional Structure of the Union: A Europe of Bits and Pieces. Providing a probing critique of the Maastricht Treaty, it is captivating both in the boldness of its argument and the rhetorical prowess at display. Most of all, it is fascinating for the insight it provides in the way in which the community of EU lawyers perceived the Treaty of Maastricht and the changes to the process of integration it heralded. Up to the Maastricht Treaty, legal scholarship had operated on the premise that Europe would integrate through law, but – as Curtin correctly identified – in the aftermath of Maastricht, such a view of integration was no longer tenable.  

In the first section, this blog post dissects Curtin’s article and identifies three main assumptions underlying her critique of the Maastricht Treaty. The second section conceptualises A Europe of Bits and Pieces as an example of legalism. The final sections suggest that 30 years after the Maastricht Treaty, EU legal scholarship is still haunted by the spectre of legalism.

 

2. Reading A Europe of Bits and Pieces 

In A Europe of Bits and Pieces, Curtin critiqued the lack of an “overriding and consistent constitutional philosophy” of Maastricht and the way in which the treaty negotiators had “tinkered” with “the constitutional character of a Community based on the rule of law”. The Member States had “behaved like almighty ‘Herren der Verträge’ ignoring, almost whimsically at times, the unique nature of the Community legal system”. The Maastricht treaty thereby signalled the beginning of the end of integration through law, as Curtin herself recognised, “[t]he result of the Maastricht summit is an umbrella Union threatening to lead to constitutional chaos; the potential victims are the cohesiveness and the unity and concomitant power of a legal system painstakingly constructed over the course of some 30 odd years.” Three key assumptions underly her critique, which will be shortly discussed below.  

 

1. The forward march of integration  

Curtin’s most visible – and rhetorical – critique of the Maastricht Treaty aimed at the way it put an end to a certain vision of how European integration was to unfold. She justified her critical examination of the Maastricht Treaty because it would be: “vital that those who believe in the overall imperative of the march towards closer and deeper European integration critically examine the many imperfections of the Union ‘Treaty’ (in part amendments of a ‘Constitution’) so as both to ensure that – badly needed – lessons are learnt for the future as to the negotiation process itself”. Maastricht thus broke with the implied progress narrative of EU legal studies, which had functioned on the assumption that the “principle of an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ [implies] that integration should only be one way.” 

 

2. Legal unity as a precondition for integration 

A second key theme in Curtin’s text is the way she envisaged legal unity as the precondition for European integration. She explicitly analyzed the Union Treaty “from the perspective of unity and coherence” and argued it did not live up to the self-proclaimed ideal of creating a single institutional framework. However, by introducing a pillar structure, the Maastricht Treaty had created a Europe of “bits and piece”. Whereas unity “implied a single institutional framework and uniform applicability and enforcement of Union law”, the Union Treaty merely brought “certain extra-Community activities under the general umbrella of European Union, but not within the law-making powers as such of the Union.”  Thus, the Treaty explicitly abandoned the Community method in favor of intergovernmental cooperation. Moreover, Curtin argued that the Member States had “hijacked” the acquis communautaire by adding protocols to the Maastricht Treaty. She was highly critical of the possibility for Member States to ringfence national constitutional provisions, locating these outside the reach of Community law, arguing “[t]he specter of a pandora’s box which has been opened is of course profoundly disintegrative and strikes at the heart of the very uniqueness of Community law.” 

 

3. The autonomy of EU law and the ECJ as a constitutional court  

Notwithstanding the ways in which the Maastricht Treaty had undermined the unity and cohesion of the Community legal order and the intentions of the treaty negotiators, Curtin still believed that “the Court of Justice’s general constitutional role will be enhanced if the Union’s treaty enters into force.” She argued that the complexity introduced by the different mechanisms and procedures would lead to a flurry of legal questions the Court would have to answer, which would provide the Court with plenty of opportunities to consolidate its authority. More importantly, she implied that the ECJ could challenge the legal validity of the protocols to uphold the uniform application of Community law. In her own words: the ECJ could take action against “the unlimited discretion of the ‘Herren der Verträge’ to change at whim and arbitrarily certain defining features of the Community legal system.” 

  

3. Bits and Pieces as Legalism 

In many ways, Curtin’s analysis of the Maastricht Treaty has proved very accurate. The flaws she pointed out in the institutional structure of the Maastricht Treaty were remedied in the decades following Maastricht. Institutional unity has been largely restored through abandoning the pillar structure and by bringing the policy areas of civil and criminal justice cooperation under the jurisdiction of the ECJ and within the legislative process of the Union. She also proved mostly right (as we will see below) in her assessment that the role of the Court would be enhanced post-Maastricht.  

What makes her analysis stand out, however, is the normative overcommitment to legality as a value. Curtin explicitly rejected the idea that the “only valid form of legitimacy in the context of the Communities is that of a democratic system”, listing the rule of law and fundamental rights as guaranteed by the independence of the judiciary as two related, and equally important, forms of legitimacy. Considering the secrecy in the way the intergovernmental conference was conducted, she argued that the guarantee of judicial control by the Court was justified – even essential – to fulfil the characterization of the EC Treaty as “a constitutional charter based on the rule of law” (Les Verts). Note the circularity of this argument: the intervention of the Court was warranted to protect a vision of European integration the ECJ itself had articulated. 

This commitment to legality can be defined, following Judith Skhlar, as legalism, which she defined as “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules.” Skhlar critiqued legal theorists for isolating law from both morality and politics, thereby presenting law as neutral and objective, instead of as a political project. For Skhlar, legalism was a form of ideology, a frame of reference which lawyers and legal theorists bring to their subject and that, inevitably, distorts reality. In a way, legalism points to the deformation professionelle of the legally trained mind: the assumptions and the resulting intellectual distortions that are inherent in the legal discipline. Skhlar tried to show how legalism limits “the analytical perspective of its adherents” because it keeps from sight that law does not always offer “an adequate response to every social need”. In this sense, legalism is an ideology which “is at its worst when it insists upon an uncompromising policy of judicialization.” Moreover, she brought into the open the political commitment of legal theory and questioned the tendency to treat “political preferences as the logical necessities of any valid theory of law.” 

A Europe of Bits and Pieces displays all the main tenets of legalism: faith in the role of law, a disdain for politics and a – deliberate – treatment of law in complete isolation from the social and political context it operates in. Most clearly, A Europe of Bits and Pieces displays a deep faith in the progress of law “moving step by step to its predetermined end in a predetermined pattern of progress.” In such a vision, “the only task ahead is that of legal craftsmanship – the formal perfection of the rules”. The utopian dream of a self-standing legal order functioning independently of political actors has deep roots in European legal thinking. In the 19th and early 20th century, many international legal scholars had postulated a stronger international law “would simply be the consequence of the historical process of growing international interdependence between states, economies and individuals.” It is thus not surprising that this way of thinking made its way into EU legal thought, but what is striking is that those legalistic tendencies still abound today.  

 

4. A revival of legalism post-Maastricht? 

In the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty, both the process of integration and EU legal scholarship have undergone significant change. Whereas initially integration through law seemed to be on the wane, in recent years, powerful voices claim “integration through the rule of law is the only way forward.” This is a peculiar development given that after Maastricht, the integration through law dynamic was complemented and superseded with various other methods of integrations, such as an Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and the rise of governance and soft-law, in particular in the context of European Monetary Union (EMU) which led to the increasing marganisaliation of law in the process of integration.  

 

It was in this context, that EU legal studies emphasized the constitutional character of the EU legal order and embraced the idea of a constitution for Europe. Vauchez has argued that the rise of a constitutional discourse can be seen as a “counter-mobilization on the part of EU law and lawyers in a context of rising intellectual and political challenges to their definitional power over the European project.” Only after the failed constitutional treaty, which was rejected by both the French and Dutch electorate, that the constitutional narrative could be seen as “a parenthesis in a longer and deeper process whereby EU law’s intellectual and political leadership over European integration has progressively dismantled.” So much was recognized by Curtin herself, who in later works wrote about the “lost paradise” of European legal integration, moving beyond the tendency of the legal community (and her earlier work):   

“Towards viewing the entire process as self-functioning and objective (a so-called ‘myth of legal objectivism’). It has framed European integration as fundamentally apolitical by creating an opposition between a realm of European ‘law’ as a rational force towards the inevitable and a realm of national ‘politics’ as the ‘articulation of the illogical, irrational and ideological.” 

Both the turn to governance and constitutionalism came to an end when Europe was hit by the financial crisis, which developed into the Eurozone-crisis. This crisis marked the beginning of a decade-long crisis atmosphere, in which legality was often placed on the backfoot. Crisis measures and emergency politics frequently pushed the boundaries of the EU legal framework – famous examples include the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism as an instrument of private international law or the EU-Turkey migration deal, which the ECJ defined as an instrument outside of the scope of EU law. In these instances, EU law has less functioned as a way to constrain the exercise of political power, but rather as an instrument to exercise power, even at the cost of the degradation of basic legal values. In these circumstances,  

Nonetheless, one crisis has seen a revival of legalism in the discourse of EU legal scholarship. The so-called “rule of law crisis” has led to a flurry of commentary that implores the Commission and the ECJ to tackle rule of law issues in several Member States of the EU, notably Poland and Hungary. It is in this literature that we see a return to legalism as an ideology, namely in the belief that legal measures are adequate to tackle rule of law problems. Rather than seeing the rule of law as the precondition for effective rule enforcement, it is now presented as the outcome of the effective enforcement of EU principles and values. However, there are clear limits to the legal enforcement of values and it remains a big question whether it is appropriate for legal institutions and instruments to solve an essentially political problem.  

What is clear, however, is that returning to pre-Maastricht paradigm of integration through law’ is unlikely to solve the contemporary problems facing EU law. As Vauchez has adequately put it: “any theoretical bid to re-connect Europe and the law should ‘forget nostalgia’ for EU Law golden years and start from a comprehensive assessment of the political and intellectual zeitgeist.”  

The post The Maastricht Treaty and the End of Integration Through Law: Bits and Pieces of a Legal Ideology appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Thomas Jacobs, Niels Gheyle, Ferdi De Ville, and Jan Orbie

 

As COVID-19 gripped the globe in March 2020, politicians suddenly started discussing the EU’s trade policies in a way that would have been deemed lunacy just a few months earlier. The French Finance Minister made the case for ‘European industrial independence’ and ‘legitimate protection’, and his Dutch colleagues admitted that ‘it is time to take a step back’ and ‘rethink our trade deals’. ‘Autonomy’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘self-sufficiency’, and ‘protection’ were the talk of the town, and politicians who had ended 2019 wanting to open markets found themselves promoting the ‘reshoring’ of production to safeguard ‘vulnerable’ supply chains. At least on a rhetorical level, the change that COVID provoked in EU Trade Policy was sudden and profound.

 

‘Open strategic autonomy’

Crucially, many of the discourses that sprung up at the start of the COVID crisis were a far cry from the (neo)liberal paradigm that usually dominates and informs EU’s commercial policy. Faced with a substantial dislocation of the status quo, the European Commission initially denounced this novel rhetoric as old-fashioned protectionism. But as the pandemic disturbed trade flows in an unprecedented fashion, and with the debate on vulnerabilities of globalization waging ever more intensively, the Commission changed tack, and suddenly recognized the need for a ‘strategic’ and ‘open’ form of ‘autonomy’. The vague, borderline paradoxical concept of ‘open strategic autonomy’ did not resolve the ongoing discussions, however. In what sense does Europe need to be autonomous? What is the strategy that informs this autonomy? How do we balance the seeming opposites of autonomy and openness?

Various interpretations of what open strategic autonomy meant; burst forward and competed in what can be conceptualized as a ‘hegemonic struggle’ among policymakers. Eventually, a lukewarm alliance saw the neoliberal and the geopolitical interpretation end up as provisional winners. The neoliberal approach to strategic autonomy via diversification of supply chains was combined with the geopolitical desire to ensure that trade dependence does not harm the pursuit of foreign policy goals. This interpretation heavily permeated the European Commission’s Trade Policy Review, released in February 2021.

 

Post-structuralist discourse theory

Crucially, the arc and outcome of this story were not set in stone. The EU’s institutional outlook, its ideological and party-political balance of power, the preferences of and relations between its member states, and its policy-making culture certainly made particular responses to the COVID crisis more likely to materialize than others. But which path EU policymakers were going to follow and what effects their choices would have, were ultimately open-ended questions in the Spring of 2020. Not even the mightiest power brokers in the Parliament, the Commission, or the Council could escape this inevitable uncertainty at that point in time.

It is often tricky for social scientists to do justice to the fundamentally undecided and open-ended nature of political questions. A scientific explanation after all makes the explained events lose their eventuality and appear to us as logical and self-evident. But telling political (hi)stories in such a teleological fashion omits a fundamental characteristic of the political enterprise. What renders a decision ‘political’ in nature is precisely the absence of predetermination. Unlike gravity, political power is unpredictable and fickle.

Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) furnishes an account of political events that appreciates their contingency and their openness. According to Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT), politics is essentially the act of social construction in a context defined by contingency, where the hegemony of one discourse over its alternatives brings one out of many possible social worlds into being.  PDT narrates how old norms lose or maintain their grip; how established structures are defended or challenged; how new ideas manifest themselves – and it combines these logics to develop an interpretation of events that explains how things came to be while simultaneously underlining how they could have been different. PDT maintains that social forms do not manifest themselves naturally or spontaneously, but sees their existence as dependent on their capacity to win and maintain hegemony. As such, any account of how political decisions came to be, must explain how they managed to become more legitimate, normal, appropriate, or persuasive than a myriad of (unspoken) alternatives.

This theoretical infrastructure facilitates analyses that offer a clear account of how power is omnipresent in politics and of how power plays out in and affects the course of political events. Power is more than merely an accumulation of political, institutional, social, economic, or cultural capital – it also operates on a less conscious, less intentional level: there is power in the way we talk, think, know. By capturing power’s discursive patterns, PDT can explain political events as the emergent outcome of open-ended hegemonic struggles, free from predetermination.

 

Competing discourses in EU trade policy

As such, regardless of whether they were aware of it, the politicians who talked about reshoring and thought about a major overhaul of the EU’s trade deals at the start of the COVID crisis were opening up a logic that could have completely reimagined what EU trade policies look like. By focusing the debate on the idea of ‘open’ but nevertheless ‘strategic’ forms of ‘autonomy’, the Commission partially contained these logics, and prevented them from branching all too far beyond the extant paradigm. But in doing so, it created a fertile ideological ground for the cross-pollination between liberal ideas about freeing markets on the one hand and geopolitical ideas about Europe’s global clout on the other hand. As evidenced in the 2021 Trade Policy Review, this common ground allowed the dominant neoliberal hegemony to endure – the EU’s trade policy post-COVID remains largely in line with its pre-COVID policies – albeit now infused with a distinct geopolitical twist.

The other major competitor for discursive hegemony over EU trade policy – the trade justice paradigm, which emerged in the wake of the movements against a new WTO round, EPAs, TTIP, and CETA – seems to have lost this struggle. Although ‘resilience’ and ‘autonomy’ are in theory perfectly compatible with an emancipatory approach to trade policy, it took quite a long time for progressive movements to involve the COVID crisis in ongoing attempts to politicize and reorient EU trade policy. And even as they did so, they barely referenced to ‘resilience’ and ‘strategic autonomy’, leaving the opportunity to give meaning to these terms largely up to neoliberal and geopolitical perspectives.

 

The wider relevance of post-structuralist discourse theory

A discourse-theoretical vantage point aims to disentangle the hegemonic dynamic effects that are playing out in episodes like these. It goes without saying that this makes PDT radically different from more conventional approaches in political-economic research. It refrains from constructing causal mechanisms and as such lacks access to their explanatory power. But it has tremendous potential to inform a non-essentialist and non-teleological interpretation of political events, that highlights the role that discourse and hegemony play in the construction of our social world. Such a perspective can create a unique account of why, in moments of crisis and dislocation, political events transpire the way they do – something we have tried to illustrate in our analysis of EU trade politics under COVID in JCMS.

 

 

Authors:

Thomas Jacobs is an assistant professor in communication science at Université Saint-Louis – Brussels. His main research interests include discourse analysis, hegemony, and political communication.

Niels Gheyle is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) working on the politicization of EU and global governance, with an emphasis on EU trade policy.

Ferdi De Ville is associate professor in European political economy at Ghent University. His main research interest is the political economy of the European Union’s external trade policies.

Jan Orbie is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Centre for EU Studies at Ghent University in Belgium. He researches the EU’s external relations, in particular trade and development policies

 

 

The post Discourse Theory and the EU’s Trade Response to COVID appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Sonja Priebus

Ever since Hungary and Poland started backsliding on democracy and the rule of law in 2010 and 2015 respectively, academics and practitioners alike have racked their brains over one central question: How can the European Union make noncompliant governments enforce European core values such as democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights? And more precisely: should the European Commission as Guardian of the Treaties only talk to the governments of Hungary and Poland or also sanction them?

The Commission has mainly chosen the former strategy, which is in line with its usual consensual approach towards noncompliance. Instead of using the few available “hard” instruments in its rule of law toolbox and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, the EU’s executive has mostly resorted to bilateral dialogues as its central problem-solving strategy. The most recent evidence of the Commission’s preference for problem-solving is its reluctance to activate the Rule of Law conditionality mechanism adopted in December 2020 against Poland and Hungary. It was only on 5 April 2022 – two days after the general elections in Hungary – that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen finally announced the activation of the mechanism against Hungary.

 

Enforcement versus management in case of noncompliance

According to the management approach in compliance research, problem-solving through dialogue, capacity building and preventive measures are part of the appropriate strategy when noncompliance with certain rules or norms happens accidentally. When, however, noncompliance is the deliberate choice of actors, the enforcement approach recommends extensive monitoring coupled with sanctions. Because noncompliance is voluntary, the appropriate strategy to make noncompliers comply is punishment, not trying to solve problems by engaging in long discussions.

By now it is uncontested that the Hungarian and Polish governments’ attacks on democratic institutions, the judiciary and political rights are not mistakes, but calculated policy choices. More recently, the Polish government’s continued open defiance of several European Court of Justice rulings and its refusal to pay the required fines for not abolishing the Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Chamber has just underlined this.

Because in both cases the respective governments commit violations of EU values deliberately, the adequate response according to the enforcement approach is to monitor these violations and punish the rule violators. In cases of deliberate non-compliance, only talking to the rule breakers to try to convince them of their wrongdoing seems a rather futile strategy.

 

Mismatch between the source of noncompliance and proposed remedies 

When we look at the Commission’s recently expanded rule of law toolbox, i.e., the instruments the Commission itself has developed in response to democratic backsliding in members states, we see, however, that these instruments mostly follow the logic of the management, not the enforcement, approach. While the Commission admits that the dismantling of the rule of law in some states is “the result of deliberate policy choices”, it has been reluctant to propose “hard” instruments with possible sanctions. Instead, it has almost exclusively developed “soft” instruments that rely on dialogue and prevention. As I argue in my Journal of Common Market Studies paper, this leads to a mismatch between the identified causes of the problem and the solutions chosen. Put differently: although the Commission has correctly identified the origins of noncompliance, it has not drawn the correct conclusions concerning the remedies to rule of law breaches.

 

Example: The Rule of Law Mechanism

Dialogue with rule violators and prevention, i.e. early identification of problems, are the dominant strategies of almost all of the rule of law tools created by the Commission since 2014. Thus, the Commission manages, instead of enforces EU values.

I will illustrate this point by using the example of the Rule of Law Mechanism announced in 2019.  According to the Commission’s communication, this mechanism is supposed to “act as a preventive tool, deepening dialogue and joint awareness of rule of law issues”. To achieve this objective, the mechanism, on the one hand, seeks to promote a rule of law culture among EU citizens through e.g., the dissemination of knowledge, new programmes for promoting values (e.g., the Rights and Values Programme) and exchanges between different groups. This is, on the other hand, complemented by an extensive monitoring of developments within each member state as well as exchanges with different domestic groups to prevent rule of law problems from emerging or deepening in one certain country.

In practice, this monitoring translates into a so-called Rule of Law Review Cycle. Over the period of one year the Commission conducts consultations with stakeholders at the national level – which include governments as well as different societal and administrative actors – and makes country visits. The findings afterwards feed back into an Annual Rule of Law Report. The Report, which was published  in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively, focuses on aspects central to the rule of law: justice systems, anti-corruption frameworks, media pluralism and media freedom as well as “other issues linked to checks-and-balances” such as constitutional reforms, the quality of law-making or civil society organizations. The objective of the specific country reports is to highlight deficiencies as well as problematic issues at the nation state level. The findings are not, however, binding and there are also no sanctions attached if governments choose not to take these findings into account.

 

Management instead of enforcement of values

From the perspective of the enforcement approach it seems, however, insufficient to counter deliberate breaches of the EU’s fundamental values with bilateral negotiations and preventive measures designed to raise awareness of rule of law issues among citizens. In cases such as Hungary and Poland, where democracy and the rule of law have been deliberately destroyed over years, talking to governments or summarizing findings in a nonbinding report is too little, too late. Overall, the Commission’s rule of law strategy is thus characterized by a mismatch between the strategies that should be and the strategies that are actually deployed in cases of deliberate rule violation.

The only exception so far is the so-called Rule of Law conditionality, which the Commission proposed in 2018 and which the European Council adopted in a diluted version in 2020. Regulation 2020/2092 on a general regime of conditionality for the protection of the Union budget links the payment of EU funds to respect for the rule of law. Even though the conditionality mechanism cannot be activated for general rule of law violations but only if these have a direct bearing on the implementation of the EU budget or the spending of EU money, it provides the Commission with a powerful instrument to sanction noncompliers.

 

Sanctions as the correct method to reverse backsliding?

The enforcement approach offers a theoretically convincing explanation for why the Commission’s new rule of law tools are both inadequate and ineffective. We need to be careful, however, in concluding that sanctions alone are the correct method to reverse backsliding. Research on candidate state Europeanization, for example, teaches us that we need to pay attention to the context where such measures are deployed. The more authoritarian the targeted state is, the less conditionality through sanctions is likely to work because reversing controversial reforms is far too costly for incumbents. While it is not easy to find the right response to backsliding, what seems to be clear is that dialogue with governments alone does not suffice. A combination of enforcement and management could thus be a more promising way.

 

 

Author:

Sonja Priebus is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at European-University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, Chair of European Studies. Her research focuses on democratic backsliding in the EU the EU’s rule of law toolbox and politics in Central and Eastern Europe.

Academic profile

 

 

 

The post Talking or Punishing? The European Commission’s Approach to Democratic Backsliding appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2022 (23-24 June, at FASoS, Maastricht).

 

EU-China relations are at a historical low and continue deteriorating. The EU’s skepticism towards China, which began in the mid 2010s, has been accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s stance over the war in Ukraine, both of which have fueled the perception that the EU had been naïve about Beijing. This has prompted a turn in the way the EU approaches its relations with China. The EU’s traditional cautiousness has given way to an increasingly worded narrative and a more confrontational approach towards Beijing.

This has materialized in Asia, where Brussels sees China’s policies as a challenge to regional security and to Brussel’s own economic and security interests in the region. China’s foreign policy assertiveness has been a “wakeup call” for the EU to pay more attention to regional security. The security dimension, previously negligible in EU-Asia relations, is now, in the words of former HR/VP Federica Mogherini, the “biggest area of growth” in the EU’s engagement with the region. Against this backdrop, the key question is: how does the EU, as a soft security actor, navigate regional geopolitics and pursue its foreign policy goals?

This article proposes that soft balancing is a helpful tool to interpret the EU’s approach towards Asia in the context of worsening EU-China relations. Soft balancing is a “calculated, focused and nonmilitary strategy” designed in order to “delay, frustrate, and undermine” the threatening behavior of the target state. Hence, it is targeted against a state whose behavior is perceived as challenging, but who is not yet considered as an imminent or existential threat. Soft balancing strategies can be pursued through normative, diplomatic, or economic mechanisms, all of which are present in the EU’s approach towards Asia.

Normative and diplomatic means of balancing are closely linked in the EU’s approach to China’s connectivity strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its growing military assertiveness in the South China Sea (SCS), both of which are considered a concern by the EU. Normative means of balancing include the promotion of alternative normative doctrines, or the use of international norms to undermine the legitimacy and/or delay threatening actions of the target state. Diplomatically, actors form formal or informal alignments to create a stronger front vis-à-vis the targeted state.

Regarding China’s military assertiveness in the SCS, the EU’s statements have responded to China’s moves by calling for adherence to international law and for strengthening the norms-based regional architecture. Similarly, the EU has delegitimated China’s actions by condemning them as “unilateral” and “endangering peace and stability.” On the other hand, the EU has sought to build cooperation with like-minded countries. The EU’s 2018 security strategy towards Asia identified maritime security as the top priority. Consequently, Brussels stepped up its efforts to build informal understandings, dialogues, and cooperation mechanisms on the matter, including setting up security dialogues with Japan and India. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is at the center of geopolitical tensions with China in the SCS, has also been at the front of the EU’s efforts. Brussels established new cooperation mechanisms with ASEAN and its member states, supported capacity building, stepped up its role at the ASEAN Regional Forum and even participated in a naval exercise hosted by Indonesia.

Regarding connectivity, the EU sees China’s BRI as a geopolitical tool through which Beijing aims at increasing its influence over developing countries and as a normative project to reshape the global governance architecture. Hence, on the one hand, the EU has tried to push China to adhere to international norms and made its engagement with the project conditional to its adherence to those standards. At the 2017 Belt and Road Form, the EU and its member states coordinated a series of common messages, emphasizing the need for the initiative to improve openness, transparency, and rules-based connectivity. In addition, it has sought to counterweight China’s BRI with its own vision of connectivity. The EU’s proposition echoes the normative criticism made to China, as it presents itself as a sustainable, rules-based, and comprehensive alternative. The implementation of EU’s connectivity strategy in Asia is grounded on close ties with Asian partners, including Japan, India, with whom the EU has concluded two connectivity partnerships, and ASEAN.

Finally, economic means of balancing include the use of economic tools to increase one’s own power and relative position vis-à-vis a threatening power. Recent studies unpack how the EU has sought to make use of its economic position in Asia to boost its role as a regional security actor. For instance, The EU’s FTAs with Singapore and Vietnam are part of its efforts to maintain a rules-based international order amid growing geo-economic competition between the US and China. The EU has also revitalized trade talks with India and has made efforts for relaunching trade talks with ASEAN in response to the “quickly changing international environment.” Finally, the EU upgraded its economic relations with Taiwan, which China considers a breakaway province, by holding their first ever ministerial-level trade talks.

This is not to say that the EU’s interest in Asia is only defined by China. Factors such as the US’ unilateralism during the Trump era and the consolidation of the EU’s foreign policy have all contributed to a more comprehensive approach towards Asian security. Yet, worsening perceptions of China have certainly played a role in driving the EU’s differentiated approach towards the region. Brussels has combined a strong reliance of international norms with the diversification of its regional partners and the promotion of its own initiatives in Asia.

This article has argued that soft balancing offers a useful framework to interpret the EU’s approach, as well as to reconcile its geopolitical narrative with its lack of hard security instruments, and its self-perception as a principled security actor.

The post Economic, Normative, and Diplomatic (Soft) Balancing: Making Sense of the EU’s Responses to China’s Rise in Asia appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2022 (23-24 June, at FASoS, Maastricht).

 

In recent years, political debate in many European countries and across the Atlantic has been characterised by the rise of populism, appeals to identity politics and frequent recourse to political myths. The political myths are here understood as the elements that enhance the strength of the narrative. Therefore, the critical reading of political debates should account for the examination of those elements in the official rhetoric. The unassessed and unscrutinised political myths introduce a system of symbols loaded with emotional messages and set paradigms and frameworks, which can hinder the perception and resilient policymaking in international affairs. The use of identity politics and political myths does not support the creation of truly resilient policies that ensure maximum flexibility, efficiency and the most adequate response to events occurring in international affairs. Examples of the establishment of the Three Seas Initiative (TSI) in Poland and the Brexit debate in the UK show how political myths and identity rhetoric can impact the creation of policy.  These brief case studies show that political myths have a significant impact on foreign and security policymaking. The appeal to emotions and frequent use of political myths in public political debate can simplify political reality. This type of rhetoric often promotes an instrumental but restricted view that does not allow for the appearance and formulation of alternative definitions.

In the last decade the use of the term “resilience” has increased in the context of foreign and security policy. The term gained great popularity as policymakers prefer its neutral character over the traditional term “stability” that does not fully portray the ever-changing nature of political and economic relations in the post-cold war world. Resilience in international relations and especially security policymaking will thus mean the form of governance that is characterised by flexibility, a bottom-up approach, and a quick ability to reform and adjust policies. To achieve resilience, governments need to incorporate a multi-stakeholder vision and perspective, so that the great variety of actors influences the policymaking process. In this sense, resilience in foreign and security policy implies the internal ability of the state to cope with the appearance of multiple and various types of crises. Thus, the term resilience in strategy and foreign policy means the shift in focus from avoiding the crisis to mitigating its effects. In essence, resilience concentrates on developing the crisis and disaster management rather than avoiding and preventing emergency. The perspective of post-September 11, the 2008 financial crisis and more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, is rooted in the conviction that in the contemporary unpredictability and era marked by insecurities, the risks and achievement of complete security are no longer possible. In contrast, resilience concentrates on the ability of a state, system, and society to adapt and recover quickly after experiencing any type of sudden shocks.

On the other hand, political myths have been recognised as elements that enhance the power of messages and narratives; therefore, making political communication more effective. Myths create the common, “mythical” ground that does not need to be backed by political debate or arguments.  Christopher Flood introduced a definition of a political myth as “an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present, or predicted political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group”. National political myths may appear in historically simplistic or selective accounts about the origins of state formation.  They are the legends, told around specific historical figures and events that were crucial in the nation-building processes, and they are part of the state ceremonies, celebrations and rituals. Through the use of political myths, governing elites can more effectively extract resources and mobilise domestic support to undertake ambitious foreign policy goals. Political myths embedded in historical narratives can be seen as a tool, communicated tactically to dominate the agenda. Once implemented in the debate, they serve as cultural lenses through which nation’s views about the outside world are shaped. This type of message sets the primary definition of international affairs and marginalise competing points of view. Identity politics and appeals to historical and mythical symbols may be highly effective domestically as it helps to mobilise society and to achieve the political aims. However, they can also obscure security assessment and formation of foreign policy. Here we can recall the use of the National Health Service (NHS) symbol and the myth of “immigration’’ in the Brexit debate. For the British public, the NHS is an important symbol of a fair and equal society which British people are proud of. We can find how the symbol of the (NHS) has been tactically used by different parties in the Brexit campaign to gain support for both the “Leave’’ or “Remain’’ argument. Similarly, the political myth of “immigration’’ has been significantly incorporated in the debate to enhance the power of political messages and argumentation. The issue of immigration eventually became the key aspect that the public and government wanted to address in the renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU and in the referendum campaign. The authors of Buying into Myths: Free Movement of People and Immigration had anticipated that the unscrutinised political myths functioning in the official rhetoric will eventually determine the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Similarly, another European example, the concept of Intermarium, portrays the ability of political myths to define paradigmatic direction of Polish foreign and security policy. The establishment of the Visegrád Group (V4) in February 1991 and more recently, the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009 and the Three Seas Initiative (TSI) in 2016, represent a subsequent implementation of the Intermarium ideals into the objectives of foreign policy in Poland. The roots of the Intermarium stem from the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th century. The Commonwealth became one of the strongest countries in the region and successively managed to hold its own against powerful neighbours such as Sweden, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Most political parties, irrespective of their ideological affiliations, gave their support for a strong and independent Ukraine and Belarus and the Europeanisation of the eastern neighbourhood as the primary direction of the foreign policy. Maintaining good relations and cooperation among their eastern neighbours remain an important element of Polish everyday diplomacy. They are condensed into the main objectives of the Visegrád Group (V4) Eastern Partnership and subsequent foreign policy project, the Three Seas Initiative (2016). Evidently, the Intermarium narrative with its directions for foreign and security policy functions as prevalent and dominant axioms for Polish security strategy.

One of the main objectives as stated on the Visegrád website declares: “The member states of the Visegrad Group also desire to cooperate with their closest neighbours, with the reforming countries in the broader region, and with other countries, regional formations or organisations which are interested and with which specific areas of cooperation are found in the common interest and in the spirit of all-European cooperation.” The Europeanisation of the eastern neighbourhood and the strategic importance of Eastern countries such as Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus remain the main goals and unchanging direction of foreign policy for successive governments. The main objectives remain unchanged, even in the face of serious difficulties in their implementation, as posed by events such as the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and more recently, the open invasion of Russian forces of Ukraine in February 2022.

The above examples portray the potential of political myths and associated systems of symbols to impact political debate and the policymaking process. Therefore, current security studies and foreign policy analysis need to develop a new research agenda that would critically assess and measure the presence of political myths in official rhetoric. This type of research would facilitate the creation of a more peaceful and inclusive security agenda and bring new insights into the foreign policy creation process. The debate enriched by the analysis of political myths will be more open to alternative interpretations and points of view.

Political myths are used to highlight specific aspects of policy while marginalising others and often leading to securitisation. The scholars of critical security studies are already well aware of the effects of farming on foreign and security policies. Securitisation effects as described by   in 1993 are considered as one of those phenomena where the specific use of language is directly affecting the formation of security and foreign policy strategies. The Copenhagen School is one of the first which introduced the critical approach to security studies. Securitisation describes the event where narratives, frames and discourses which function in security can make some actions appear more legitimate, credible, and realistic than others. Issues may not be threatening until it is described and referred to as a threat to national security. In this way, the political problem can be elevated to the matter of national security.  Securitisation processes promote some political issues to an extreme security concern. Those issues are then labelled as “dangerous”, “menacing”, “threatening”, and “alarming” for the one that needs to be addressed urgently. Through the process of securitisation, the actor has the power to force the problem beyond the realm of politics.  According to the Copenhagen School, security issues are not simply given. They may come into existence through the strategic implementation of political narration. As every problem needs to first be articulated, language plays an important function in threat perception and the interpretation of threats. Considering also that the national interests and countries’ priorities in foreign policy are shaped through the identities of the governing groups, we can see how important the function of language may play in the formulation and development of foreign strategies. Securitisation theory challenges more traditional security approaches. mainly because it asserts that security and foreign policy formation is also a discursive process. The examination of political myths in official rhetoric and political debate could then be seen as another form of study of securitisation and its effect on security policy.

The resilient political agenda and policy is the strategy exactly opposite to the one characterised by the securitisation effect. This is due to how securitisation concentrates and prioritises certain issues, themes and narrows the agenda. As per definition, the resilient policy is characterised by the multidimensional perspective that considers various aspects and gives equal attention to all elements. The proposed research methodology could be used to conduct an analysis of the domestic or international use of political myths and their influence on the formation of foreign and security policy strategies. This is a new venue of research initiated by Joanne Esch and Berit Bliesemann De Guevara.

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By Dominika Furtak

Air transport is one of the strategic sectors with broad socio-cultural and economic importance. Global in nature, the sector allows thousands of passengers and tons of products and mail to be transported daily between even the most remote corners of the world. The smooth functioning of such a complex network is not only the result of top technological achievements but also of an established broad legal and political framework. My research addresses the changes in the global aviation system from the perspective of the European Union as a new player in the arena. Part of the project touches on the issue of the extraterritorial effect embedded in the EU legislative framework on civil aviation and its consequences. Based on instruments adopted in various subject areas, I argue that applying EU law outside its territory may supplement the formal External EU Aviation Policy and, as such, provides an innovative mode of international engagement.

With support from the UACES Microgrant, I was able to cover the cost associated with participating in the Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA) 2022 Bratislava Convention held on 22-24 June at the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia. It enabled me to present my results before a group of international scholars and subject my conclusions to critical discussion. Lessons from this experience will feed into the final work on a scientific article based on this inquiry on the global reach of air Union rules of the air, as well as into further work on the doctoral project.

In addition, participation in the CEEISA Convention was an important step in my scientific career. Especially for young researchers like me, this is a great opportunity to interact with the academic community, learn about new trends in the field, and cultivate soft skills. All this translates into opportunities and improved quality of further scientific work. In addition, the Bratislava meeting led to the launch of a network of Ph.D. students in the field of IR from Central and Eastern Europe or those interested in this region. Therefore, I am very grateful to the Association for providing the funding opportunity to cover this type of cost.

 

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By Reini Schrama, Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen & Ellen Mastenbroek

COVID-19 put health policy in the European Union (EU) high up on the political agenda. Since the pandemic hit Europe, heads of states, health ministers and experts have increased their collaborative efforts to mitigate its effects. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen announced closer collaboration among EU countries to “work together to detect, prepare and respond collectively” and proposed a stronger European Health Union. To do so, the mandate of both the European Medicine Agency (EMA) and the European Centre for Disease prevention and Control (ECDC) have been strengthened and a new Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) has been established. These recent developments demonstrate how rapidly EU health cooperation surfaces at the face of a cross-border health crisis.

 

Expert networks in health cooperation

Under the surface, however, expert-driven health cooperation is already widespread. Civil servants and experts across Europe meet regularly in European Administrative Networks (EANs) to share information, develop common standards, and pool resources, ensuring a uniform approach to EU health policy. These networks are not well known to the public, but can be seen as a compromise of an increasing need for cross-border cooperation and a lack of willingness to delegate health care competences to the supranational level.

Through these networks, EU health care policy cooperation is substantial. Over time, a variety of EANs have developed, covering a wide range of issues such as such as orphan medicinal products, health security, human tissues and cells, adverse effects of medicines, medical devices and cross-border health care. A recent well-known example is EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC), which is a safety committee of national medicine agencies that monitors and reviews side effects of medicines in the general population and reached headlines as a result of its review of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In our study for the Journal of Common Market Studies, we focus on the rapidly developing field of Health Technology Assessment (HTA). The speed at which new pharmaceuticals and medical devices enter the market increases the need to assess their quality, effectiveness and ‘value for money’. HTAs provide health policy makers with scientific advice upon which they can decide on reimbursement and coverage of such drugs and technologies. With limited health budgets and growing demands, EU cooperation on HTA allows for the pooling of resources, joint assessments and the development of a collective evidence-based approach to deal with the pharmaceutical industry. Pooling of resources at a larger European scale can thus be crucial for the public provision of healthcare. For a large part, these collaborative exchanges take place in EUnetHTA, a voluntary network consisting of expert civil servants acting as representatives from national HTA authorities.

 

Assessing network structure

The implicit assumption is that such networks are horizontal. Formally, their interactions are on equal footing. However, that is not to say that they are free of hierarchy in practice. In our study we ask ourselves, are network members equally influential in defining the way forward or do some members control and influence the process more than others, and if so, why? Some network members may be more central to the network than others and use this position to push through their preferences and approaches in developing the methods, evidence and procedures for joint HTAs. This is a pressing issue in this case, as a common HTA approach is being developed and a permanent EU HTA network has been under negotiation up until recently.

To examine the network structure of the EUnetHTA, we investigate whether interactions to exchange information, best practices, prepare joint assessments and provide advice are horizontal or whether some member state representative occupy a central position in the network. In a next step, we inspect the factors that explain why some members are more central than others, being it their experience, capacity or external contact relations? To study the network structure and its driving forces, we collected survey data on their interactions and employed social network analysis.

 

Some are more equal than others

Our findings have several implications for both the study of EU health policy and the more general study of European administrative networks. First, with regard to EU health policy we find that EUnetHTA is considered a very important governance instrument for HTA by its members. The voluntary network for resource pooling can thus be seen as an important forerunner for the soon to be established permanent EU HTA network. Hence, EANs function as important building blocks for the building of a European Health Union.

Second, with regard to European administrative networks more generally, we find that such networks are not quite horizontal in their resource pooling and development of common practices. Instead, the structures in which interaction take place are rather hierarchical. They may not be subject to supranational steering, but some members are able to take on a more central role in the network due to their experience and advancement as regulators on the subject matter. As a result, experienced national regulators can steer the network and push for convergence with their regulatory tradition on a European level. It is not surprising that experienced HTA regulators such as Germany, France and Spain, insisted on maintaining a member-led governance structure for HTA, rather than an increased role for the European Commission in the new and permanent EU HTA network.

It is clear that sitting in the centre of a network is a position of power and that strong regulators may use the opportunity structures of these seemingly horizontal governance instruments to exercise their influence over policy-making and the way forward. While formally all network members are equal, in practice some members may be more equal than others.

 

 

 

About the authors

 

Reini Schrama is Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In her research she has advanced the use of social network analysis to study interaction in administrative networks and the functioning of such governance instruments in EU policy implementation.

Twitter: @ReiniSchrama

Academic profile

 

 

Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen is Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on EU welfare policies, investigating integration, national implementation of and compliance with EU social policies, including health care.

Twitter: @dm_martinsen

Academic profile

 

 

Ellen Mastenbroek is Professor of European Public Policy at Radboud University. Her main research interests are the Europeanisation of national governments and EU policy analysis, focusing on compliance, implementation and evaluation of EU legislation.

Twitter: @E_Mastenbroek

Academic profile

 

 

 

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By Eliška Ullrichová

The study of political agenda-setting analyses what issues political actors think and talk about. Alongside the descriptive analysis of issues on the policy agenda, the element of ‘how’, these problems are discussed, is no less important. The agenda-setting debate centrally focuses on the determination of the most important problem of a particular agenda at a specific time. What issue takes most of political representatives’ time and attention? Agenda-setting is important because there is no further political debate, policy formulation or decision over a particular issue without this stage of policymaking. Scholars attempt to identify the most important problem on the agenda because this issue has the highest probability of generating political activity.

In an article recently published in JCMS,  I propose the framework of issue hierarchization to identify not only the most important problem but also the position of all issues on the entire agenda. This enables us to follow the path of a particular item from a long-term perspective to identify how the issue gets on the top of the agenda and how the position of issues influences the entire agenda-setting dynamic. The concept of issue hierarchization allows us to tell apart primary and secondary issues. The former type encompasses problems that attract the most policy attention at a specific time. The latter category refers to less salient issues occupying less policy attention than primary ones. The salience of issues is measured by assessing place, space and framing. The earlier an issue is mentioned, the more space taken up in the minutes and the more urgent the framing, the more salient an issue is considered to be and, thus, to have a higher position on the agenda.

The differentiation between primary and secondary issues at a given time allows us to see the position of and general attitude towards a particular issue in a medium or long-term perspective. The article analyses issue hierarchization and dynamics in the case of the European Council agenda from December 2014 to December 2020, which covers the periods of two European Commission Presidents, Jean-Claude Juncker and Ursula von der Leyen. Even though six years period might offer a medium-term rather than a long-term perspective, it reveals an interesting tendency.

The findings indicate three categories of issues based on their dynamics on the agenda. First, some problems tend to occupy primary positions and rarely drop to the second position: these include migration or Brexit. Second, the European Council agenda is composed of regularly discussed secondary issues that only exceptionally move to the highest position. These ʻstable issuesʼ are prone to be excluded from the agenda in the event that a highly salient problem emerges. However, this elimination is only temporarily. Once a crisis or an emergency is fading, the stable issue is more than likely to rise on the agenda again. External relations and climate change are good examples of these kinds of issues. The third group refers to issues that constantly change their position from primary to secondary and the other way around. Jobs, growth, and competitiveness are, for example, classified as highly dynamic issues.

 

Figure: Dynamics of different categories of issues on the EC agenda

 

In addition, it is noteworthy to mention that if an issue drops out of the European Council agenda for a few meetings, this does not necessarily mean it will not appear on the agenda after a while. This is a very interesting finding because agenda-setting scholars widely assert that there are two types of competition among issues for policy attention – to get (1) onto an agenda and (2) to the top of an agenda. This research, however, indicates that there are different dynamics to the competition of getting onto an agenda among issues that have never been placed on the agenda before and those that have been featured before. This is believed to be a factor of inertia, in particular. In this context, inertia refers to historical trends of policy attention towards specific issues on a particular policy agenda. Inertia is the reason why new issues face difficulties in getting onto the agenda. Inertia is also why certain issues are privileged in getting onto the agenda after dropping out after they have already managed to get onto an agenda before.

In conclusion, my article on issue hierarchization has shown in the case of the European Council agenda that the identification of primary and secondary issues on the entire agenda is helpful to understand the medium and/or long-term performance of an issue on the policy agenda. Since agenda-setting is a litmus test for the policymaking process, a medium or long-term issue’s performance is of use to understand the correlation between an issue’s position on the agenda and potential policy or decision-making regarding it.

 

 

Eliška Ullrichová is PhD Candidate in Area Studies at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic)

Her research interests are in the area of EU agenda-setting, environmental policy, and diplomacy. During her PhD studies, Eliška was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Padua (2020) under the supervision of Professor Graziano.

 

Twitter handle: @EUllrichova

Academic profile:

https://ims.fsv.cuni.cz/en/contacts/people/79335963

https://fsv.cuni.cz/en/contacts/people/79335963

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WorldCould. Author’s illustration

Anna-Lena Rüland

The world has seen a fair share of democratic backsliding in recent years, for example in countries like Turkey, the Philippines and Russia. Science diplomacy is often seen as a means to continue some sort of engagement with such regimes. Although it sounds great in theory, we do not yet know how exactly science diplomacy can facilitate engagement with autocratic states. I address this blind spot in my recent article “Learning from Rivals”, which features an in-depth case study of a US-Iranian collaboration in public health. In the article, I use a policy transfer lens to trace how a group of US and Iranian public health experts brought Iran’s health house policy to the Mississippi Delta, and, in the process, fostered engagement between their respective countries. Bringing to light opportunities and challenges for science diplomacy between states with tense political relations, the findings of my article hopefully prove useful for both science diplomacy practitioners and scholars.

 

An Unlikely Partnership for Science Diplomacy

At first sight, it seems unlikely that public health experts from the US and Iran would partner up for a collaboration in public health. Yet, although few are aware of it, parts of the US, specifically the Mississippi Delta, face similar public health challenges as post-Revolution Iran.

 

Up until the early 1980s, rural residents in Iran were lacking access to basic healthcare services. Whenever they needed to see a doctor, rural residents had to walk long distances to reach the nearest hospital. Many people living in remote countries in the Mississippi Delta face a similar challenge today, as they struggle to find easily accessible primary health care. In contrast to the Mississippi Delta, Iran has successfully addressed its primary healthcare challenges and, in doing so, developed one of the least expensive and most effective primary healthcare systems in the world. The core of the Iranian healthcare system are “health houses”, which provide a variety of integrated primary and preventative healthcare services, including public health education, maternal care and family planning. Staffed with at least two community health workers, known as behvarz, each health house serves up to 1,500 rural residents and several satellite villages. Behvarz are trained to perform basic healthcare services and are allocated to communities that they match ethnically and linguistically. Sharing strong ethnic and linguistic ties with the local community is crucial because the behvarz need to understand local customs to collect sensitive health information for the community they are serving. Over time, Iran’s health houses have drastically improved health indicators across the country’s rural areas (Sajadi and Majdzadeh, 2019).

 

A public health expert from the Mississippi Delta, who later joined the US-Iranian collaboration, first learned about this success story during a meeting with a delegation of the Iranian Ministry of Health. A few years later, he was working as a consultant for several hospitals in the Mississippi Delta that were struggling financially due to an influx of uninsured patients from rural areas. The consultant realized that these patients were appearing in Emergency Rooms because they did not have access to primary health care. Remembering Iran’s success story, he decided to promote Iran’s health house policy as a potential solution for the Mississippi Delta’s healthcare challenges. Together with two other local public health experts, the consultant began reaching out to public health professionals in Iran who were familiar with the health house policy. The local US public health experts ended up travelling to Iran to experience first-hand the country’s health system and, while there, partnered up with some Iranian public health professionals to help transfer Iran’s health house policy to the Mississippi Delta. Ultimately, the efforts of the US and Iranian public health experts were partially successful. Although they managed to pilot test fifteen health houses in the Mississippi Delta, the health houses were not implemented throughout the entire state of Mississippi, as they had originally hoped.

 

Opportunities and Challenges for Science Diplomacy between Rival States

Although the experts were given several opportunities during their time working together, they also faced major challenges. Eventually, this is what brought the collaboration to an end.

 

Three factors were crucial for the initial success of science diplomacy in my case study:

First, high-ranking support. Several high-ranking incumbent and ex-policymakers supported the collaboration in both the US and Iran. In the US, then Vice President Biden was in favor of the project because it fit well with President Obama’s conciliatory “new beginning” strategy for the Middle East. In Iran, several incumbent and ex-policymakers backed the public health partnership because as former public health professionals, they were either interested in the project’s outcomes or saw the collaboration as a way to improve the image of Iran abroad.

 

Second, relevant political and cultural network. The collaboration involved experts who had contacts to policymakers in the US and Iran and a good understanding of their interests. Furthermore, the US experts brought in a public health researcher who – as a US-Iranian – was familiar with both countries and thus able to facilitate trust-building between Iranian and US colleagues.

 

Third, in-person meetings. Several in-person meetings were held in the US and Iran, which strengthened group cohesion. For a collaboration which has to withstand potential political interferences group cohesion is key.

 

Despite the initial success of the collaboration, three events eventually led to its downfall. First and most importantly, the collaboration was immediately halted when one of the Iranian partners ran as a hardline presidential candidate. This move led several US policymakers who had initially backed the project to withdraw their support. Second, after one of the US public health experts passed away, the remaining US team fell apart. Third, even before these two incisive events, the US experts experienced considerable opposition from local and regional policymakers towards their initiative and as a result had trouble securing sufficient funding.

 

Lessons Learned?

In theory, science diplomacy is a promising foreign policy tool for maintaining engagement between states with tense political relations. However, as my research shows, science diplomacy in practice can be an extremely challenging endeavor. In particular, my findings underline that top-level political support for science diplomacy between rival states is essential, but also easily withdrawn – even during peaceful times. What does this mean for science diplomacy efforts during times of war? More specifically, can and should we engage in science diplomacy with a rouge state like Russia? Drawing on my findings and given the current situation in Ukraine, I would argue that it is highly unlikely that Western powers will engage in science diplomacy with Russia anytime soon. However, once a military or political solution to the conflict is found, this may change. If and how science diplomacy will then be used, remains to be seen.

 

Anna-Lena Rüland is a PhD candidate at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She holds a master’s degree in International Relations from the Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Potsdam. Her current research focuses on topics such as science diplomacy, North-South research collaboration and Big Science.

 

References

Graticola I (2020) 8 Facts about Healthcare in Iran. Available at: https://borgenproject.org/facts-about-healthcare-in-iran/ (accessed 24 June).

Rüland A-L (2022) Learning from Rivals: The Role of Science Diplomats in Transferring Iran’s Health House Policy to the US. Globalizations Online First. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2022.2062845.

Sajadi HS and Majdzadeh R (2019) From Primary Health Care to Universal Health Coverage in the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Journey of Four Decades. Archives of Iranian Medicine 22(5): 262-268.

 

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Almost a decade after the last major reform of the European fiscal framework, Eurozone decision-makers have recently engaged in a discussion about the revision of fiscal rules. The pandemic is said to have changed the landscape of European economic policymaking. It has forced policymakers to embrace expansionary fiscal policies to address the diminished economic activity caused by the disruptions in supply and demand. Supporting the recovery of the European economy appeared to overshadow the consolidation of public finances as the predominant concern of the decision-makers. Recent scholarly work depicts the establishment of the Recovery and Resilience Facility as a watershed moment in European fiscal integration, signifying a major shift in the economic policy paradigm of the Eurozone.

The unexpected change of policy stance of many countries – particularly Germany – has made obvious the decline of ordoliberal ideas in the management of European fiscal policy. The ordoliberal tradition had been advocating indirect intervention in the economy via the establishment of an economic constitution. This framework prohibited discretionary fiscal intervention in the economy, endorsing rules-based fiscal discipline.

While there is little doubt that the proponents of Ordoliberalism have much less clout in the Eurozone nowadays, the attribution of the shift to the pandemic overlooks some important developments that had already emerged in the context of the latest European fiscal governance reform between 2010 and 2013. Arguably, the main element of that reform was the establishment of the European Semester, a system of integrated economic surveillance combining pre-existing fiscal and macroeconomic monitoring instruments and newly introduced procedures. Did the European Semester follow in the ordoliberal mold?

 

An ordoliberal European Semester?

Several important scholars embraced the so-called ordoliberalisation hypothesis: the strengthening of German ordoliberal ideas within EMU after the financial crisis shaped the direction of the 2010-2013 reform of EU economic governance. Different scholars highlighted different aspects of the process: the strategic use of ideas by the German government, the constraining effects of German ideas which reflected the reluctance of the German hegemon or the discursive abilities of the German Chancellor in her attempt to legitimise financial assistance arrangements. Nedergaard and Snaith undertook a thorough examination of the ordoliberal philosophy, pointing out the connections between institutional developments and two core ordoliberal principles: the predictability and constancy of economic policy.

In sharp contrast to the above academic discussion, the German Bundesbank’s harsh criticism of the fiscal framework, cast doubt on the ordoliberal direction of the reform. The rules appeared overly flexible, enabling discretionary fiscal policies.

 

Weakened fiscal discipline before the pandemic

A study of the underlying economic policy beliefs of Eurozone policymakers participating in the Economic and Financial Committee (EFC) reveals that Eurozone’s shift from Ordoliberalism preceded the pandemic. The findings show that the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2007-2009 weakened the rules-based approach to fiscal discipline. Countries embraced Keynesian anticyclical policy as a temporary measure to stimulate demand and stabilise the economy. But they faced considerable difficulties when they attempted to design their Fiscal Exit strategies. The rapidly deteriorating public finances in most member states damaged the intellectual grip of the fiscal rules in the eyes of policymakers. Instead of being the solution, fiscal rules appeared to be the problem. A new consensus emerged in the discussions of the EFC: fiscal discipline would have to be institution-based. The centralisation of decision-making on budgetary matters would enable the Commission and the EFC to combine long-term fiscal discipline with short-term fiscal discretion.

The above findings challenge the ordoliberalisation hypothesis. Ordoliberalism did not shape the direction of the 2010-2013 reform of the European economic governance. Contrary to the ordoliberal notion of the self-limited state, the reform increased the authority of the executive, allowing direct intervention in the economy by the state. Additionally, the reform opened the way to fiscal discretion effectively undermining the ordoliberal principle of consistent economic policymaking. These developments undermine the economic constitution as they transform the role of the state and impede the function of complete competition. The system of decentralized responsibility, which was favoured by ordoliberals, was turned on its head and was replaced by a system of centralised responsibility. The EMU had therefore abandoned the ordoliberal paradigm long before the outbreak of the pandemic.

 

An enduring shift?

This analysis offers a new perspective on the examination of the recent course of European fiscal integration. The waning influence of ordoliberalism in the EMU decision-making after the financial crisis highlights the existence of significant continuities between pre-pandemic institutional reforms and the post-pandemic policy response. In this light, the creation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility can be explained as a step in the path of creating a macroeconomic stabilisation function following relevant initiatives that had emerged between 2015 and 2019. What remains to be seen is whether the intellectual shift of EU policymakers to institutions-based discipline will endure, guiding the ongoing discussions regarding the revision of the fiscal framework. Or will the ordoliberal rules-based approach come back with a vengeance, prioritising fiscal consolidation over other policy goals?

This blog post draws on the JCMS article The European Semester: An Ordoliberal Construct?

 

Author:

 

Dimitrios Argyroulis is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. His research interests include the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact after the financial crisis and the pandemic and the independence of the ECB in light of the emerging democratic legitimacy challenges. Dimitrios holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield (2020).

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In his EU3D-funded master’s thesis, Simon Zemp analyses how Swiss newspapers have referred to Brexit as a benchmark when evaluating the recent attempts of the Swiss government to (re-)negotiate its bilateral relations with the EU. The results show that Brexit references were important in the public debate about the Swiss EU relationship and were often referred to as a ‘role model’.

Schwexit. Illustration by: Marcus Gottfried (toonpool.com).

Immediately after the British vote to leave the European Union, observers feared that Brexit might boost Euroscepticism in the rest of Europe. Since then, these fears have not been borne out. To the contrary, scholars have documented a reinforcement of support for EU integration in the aftermath of Brexit, indicating a deterrent effect of Brexit.

Benchmarking[1] Brexit: looking over the Channel matters for EU support

The British experience with Brexit constitutes a unique, highly informative precedent for disintegration. European citizens may take this information into account and adapt their opinion regarding their own country’s EU integration. Depending on how the own country’s performance is evaluated when benchmarked against Brexit, different changes in public opinion may result. For example, if Brexit is widely perceived as a success, citizens will consider a change in the status quo in a similar direction. On the contrary, benchmarking against a negatively evaluated Brexit experience will deter people from supporting disintegration steps and make them more appreciative of EU integration. Such benchmarking may play a crucial role for EU support among its member states (see de Vries 2017) as well as in externally integrated countries like Norway or Switzerland.

Do Europeans refer to Brexit as a ‘benchmark’? Novel evidence found in the analysis of Swiss media

Despite evidence strengthening the explanatory power of ‘Brexit benchmarks’, we lack observations from the real world that concretely show how people benchmark their own situation against Brexit. Since we can understand benchmarking as a thought process within people’s minds, it is obviously difficult to observe it. My study circumvented this difficulty with the help of a media framing analysis. The idea was to grasp the phenomenon of ‘benchmarking against Brexit’ in public discourses, as it is reflected in news media content.

The Swiss context presented itself for such an investigation as Swiss EU relations were high on the political agenda throughout the entire Brexit process. Foremost, the negotiation on an institutional framework agreement between 2014 and 2021 triggered intense public debates in Switzerland about the country’s future integration path.

By analysing articles from four Swiss newspapers of different political leanings, I found a total of 229 framings which evaluated Switzerland’s EU integration by referring explicitly to the Brexit process as a reference point. These frames reveal that ‘Brexit benchmarks’ played a prominent role in the Swiss public debate and that Brexit served as both a ‘deterrent’ and a ‘role model’ (see the box for two examples).

Evidence from Switzerland shows: Brexit is by no means just a deterrent!

Swiss media coverage contained ‘benchmark framings’ foremost during episodes of Brexit characterised by a high issue salience and a good comparability with the Swiss situation. The relatively short period when the UK under PM Johnson negotiated and adopted the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU at the end of 2021 stands out in the data. After the long-winded exit phase, the UK situation at this stage was well comparable to the Swiss attempt of getting external access to ‘Europe’ and commentators in the news have frequently benchmarked the Swiss situation against the salient Brexit events (see Figure 1).

Also, it was in this final negotiation phase under Johnson that newspapers framed Brexit increasingly as a ‘role model’. Foremost the British negotiation style and the concrete outcome of the negotiations were presented as admirable benchmarks, which helped to point out alleged flaws in the Swiss-EU negotiation. A total of 97 framings presented Brexit as a ‘role model benchmark’ for Switzerland. This number is astonishing, especially given the evidence indicating effects of ‘Brexit deterrence’ in European countries.

Figure 1: How Swiss news media framed Brexit as a benchmark. Number of frames shown along the x-axis.

Besides the remarkable amount of ‘role model benchmarks’, Swiss news regularly referred to Brexit with a negative, deterrent framing (104 frames). Especially in tumultuous Brexit episodes, as in Spring 2019, benchmarking against Brexit tended to come with a negative framing; and the comparison with the UK made the Swiss situation appear more desirable. Here, Brexit references allowed to argue for the preservation of the Swiss status quo and against similar ‘experiments’ in the name of national sovereignty, which may endanger the relations with Europe.

Newspapers’ use of framing power when presenting Brexit as a benchmark

My data reveal that the political leaning of a newspaper is a decisive factor for understanding the way Brexit is framed as a benchmark in the media. For example, the Eurosceptic outlet ‘Weltwoche’ pointed extensively to the Brexit process as a benchmark and thereby used almost exclusively a ‘role model’ framing (in 60 out of 73 frames). More EU-friendly newspapers, like NZZ and Tages-Anzeiger, referred to Brexit with both ‘role model’ and ‘anti-role model’ framings, yet with a clear bias towards the latter. Interestingly, Eurosceptic commentators have (re)framed Brexit under PM Johnson as a success story by clearly separating his premiership from Theresa May’s, who was presented as the scapegoat for the negative experiences publicly associated with Brexit.

In conclusion, the findings from Switzerland indicate that the Brexit experience matters for public discussion and opinion formation on European (dis-)integration beyond the UK and that Europe is far from having ‘outlived’ the risk of ‘Brexit contagion’. After a tumultuous withdrawal process, the most fruitful years for framing Brexit as a role model for disintegration attempts may be yet to come. Certainly, the future performance of the UK outside the Union is key in this respect. Moreover, my study emphasises that we are also well-advised to keep a close eye on the hitherto neglected role of news media and political entrepreneurs: It is their ‘framing power’ that significantly influences whether Europeans perceive the British path as a role model or a deterrent.

 

 

[1] The verb to benchmark means to evaluate a situation by comparing it with a certain reference point⸺the benchmark.

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The title of this post feels insanely optimistic, given the events of the past weeks, but if we don’t try then we certainly won’t succeed.

Last month I submitted some evidence to the Follow-up inquiry on the impact of the Protocol, run by the Lord’s EU Committee’s sub-Committee on the Protocol. Being very aware of my limits, I only wrote about the dynamics of EU-UK interactions on the issue and how a possible restarting of constructive relations might look.

My unwritten conclusion was that the current UK government was really unlikely to make this work, or would even try to make it work, since its first step was to engage wholeheartedly with the current Protocol system, to show it was making best efforts. Only once that path is exhausted (and seen to be exhausted) would the UK get renegotiation on the table.

Of course, this has been overtaken by the publication last week of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.

Resting on a very dubious legal basis of a doctrine of necessity, the government argues that the Protocol’s effects are so terrible as to require urgent action, albeit through passing legislation that may need months to come into effect and while also arguing it is just ‘minor bureaucratic changes‘.

Even if we disregard the justification, then we can still say that the Bill proposes a fundamental reworking of the Protocol, as laid out in the graphic below.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic105

Even those (few) parts of the Protocol that appear to be protected from changes – notably Art.2 rights for individuals – are compromised immediately by the removal of the ECJ from any UK-based legal judgements (so people can’t access definitive ECJ rulings on relevant provisions) and have the shadow of Clause 18 powers hanging over them.

Clause 18 would allow UK ministers to take whatever they like on any aspect of the Protocol as they see fit, without Parliamentary control. To call this sweeping would be an understatement and sets up a much more antagonistic passage through the Lords (and probably with some Tory backbenchers).

As a whole, the Bill reads like a legal embodiment of 1980s Millwall supporters.

Legally, the Bill stands on the weakest of justifications, just as the chances of it forcing the EU to the negotiation table like vanishingly small. Given that both of these things was very evident beforehand,  the key question is ‘why carry on regardless?’

As I’ve long said, it reflects much more on the state of domestic debate than on real, existing international relations.

For more evidence of this, we might look to yesterday’s publication of the Centre for Brexit Policy’s report on Global Britain.

I only focused on the EU/Europe section in my thread below, but it suffers from the flawed assumption that just because you think the EU is rotten, so must everyone else.

So that much-trailed @CentreBrexit report has finally droppedhttps://t.co/zyNn8tryLN

Some observations

1/

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) June 22, 2022

And so we continue to go round the same old problems, again and again.

Even if the NIP Bill gets binned and even if the CBP’s ideas don’t become official policy, the issues still remain about how to find a mutually-acceptable and stable solution for Northern Ireland. Which seems rather lost in this debate.

The post Making the Northern Ireland Protocol work appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Billy Melo Araujo, from the Queen’s University, in Belfast.

 

 

 

 

euradio · What is the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill ? – Ideas on Europe

 

 

Billy, a few days ago the British government decided to introduce legislation unilaterally overriding key aspects of the Northern Ireland Protocol. You’re an expert in international trade law, what is your take on this new bill?

This Bill is the latest instalment in a long-running saga throughout which the UK has sought, on multiple occasions, to rewrite the terms of the Protocol.

As a reminder, the Northern Ireland Protocol is a legal instrument annexed to the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, which, amongst other things, creates a legal framework that ensures there is no hard border within the island of Ireland. It does so by requiring Northern Ireland to comply with EU customs and internal market rules in relation to goods. However, as the rest of the UK is subject to a separate customs and regulatory regimes this has meant that GB goods entering NI are subject to border checks.

 

But what’s wrong with that? Why exactly is the so-called Irish Sea Border at the centre of so much debate and controversy?

The application of border checks on British goods is seen by some as undermining the integrity of the internal UK market. More importantly, some people within the unionist community of Northern Ireland see these border checks as a threat to their identity as part of the UK. This is a very important point to bear in mind. The border issue is not really about goods, trade or economics. It is about complex issues of identity and belonging.

On the other side of the argument, it is argued that the Protocol’s focus is to avoid border checks within the island of Ireland. The checks being carried on GB goods entering NI are not a consequence of the Protocol itself but rather of the UK’s sovereign decision to leave the EU customs and regulatory sphere.

 

And what is now the effect of the famous new bill on the Northern Ireland Protocol?

The bill effectively empties the Protocol. As it currently stands, under the Protocol, goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain are subject to EU tariffs unless it can be shown that those goods are not at risk of being moved on to the EU. In other words, the default setting under the Protocol is that non-EU goods imported into NI are subject to EU tariffs and compliance checks to protect the integrity of the European Single Market.

The bill turns the system on its head by establishing a “dual regulatory system” that lets businesses choose whether to abide by UK or EU regulations when selling goods in Northern Ireland. It also creates a so-called “green channel” that would remove customs and regulatory checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, while keeping checks on goods that are moving through Northern Ireland to the rest of the EU.

And it does not stop there. The bill also does away with the direct effect of EU law in Northern Ireland and removes the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice on matters relating to the Protocol. It also gives significant powers to ministers to disapply other aspects of the Protocol as well as the surrounding regulatory framework.

 

Wow! But is that actually legally possible?

There is absolutely no doubt that the bill breaches the Protocol. It is an attempt to unilaterally re- write the Protocol in its entirety. Even the UK government accepts this. It simply contends that the bill can be justified by reference to a defence plea of necessity. However, this plea can only be invoked under very exceptional circumstances. It must be shown that a wrongful act is necessary toaddress a situation of extreme gravity. Not only that, the UK would have to show that it has not contributed to the situation and that there was no other lawful alternative available to it than to completely empty the Protocol.

Even the most creative of lawyers would struggle to reasonably argue that scrapping the entirety of the Protocol – a legal instrument that was negotiated by the UK and is backed by Northern Ireland businesses and the majority of parties sitting in the Northern Ireland Assembly – could be justified on such a weak legal basis.

 

One last question: this bill, will it pass?

To start with, it will have to go through the UK legislative process which could take up to a year. In the meantime, the EU has already stated that it will respond by initiating a number of legal challenges against the UK. The upshot is the further souring of EU-UK relationship. More damagingly, for Northern Ireland, it means further instability, division and uncertainty in an already polarised and fragile society.

Many thanks, Billy, for helping us understand this new initiative of the British government.
“Ideas on Europe” will be back next week, and we will welcome Amelia Hadfield, from the University of Surrey.

The post What is the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2022 (23-24 June, at FASoS, Maastricht).

 

The advancement of biotechnology has ignited both enthusiastic approval and fear, yet it has not left the public indifferent. The global COVID-19 pandemic has particularly focused public attention on this science-based sphere. An inherently interdisciplinary field, biotechnology is broadly defined as ‘the application of science and technology to living organisms, as well as parts, products, and models thereof, to alter living or non-living materials for the production of knowledge, goods, and services’. Rapid development pace, high initial investment, high development costs, significant educational and financial investments– is just a brief list of some key characteristics and needs of this dynamically developing sphere. It is also regarded as a ‘strategic’ technology with a diverse array of applications, ranging from traditional ones: medicine, agriculture, food products, to emerging industries, such as nanotechnology.

The importance of national biotechnology capabilities became especially evident during national border closures and a scarcity of certain medical supplies, which took place during the COVID pandemic. As production and supply chains were interrupted, government involvement was of decisive importance. For some, a reference to government involvement may bring to mind a formerly dominant techno-centric rationality, which narrowly focuses on inputs (research funding) and outputs (patents). However, views on how innovation should be understood and governed have already changed. A more holistic approach of National Innovation Systems (NIS) recognises innovation as a process, which takes place within a network of relationships and involves a variety of actors from both the public and private sectors. Yet, NIS have now been increasingly recast as National Innovation Ecosystems (NIE) because concerns about diversity, participation, and inclusivity of various types of actors have also come to the foreground. Furthermore, NIE brings particular awareness to the importance of an innovation-conducive environment.

My doctoral study explores the ways in which these theoretical reflections may help understand Bulgaria’s overall unsatisfactory innovation performance. The small Eastern European economy was ranked second to last, according to the Summary Innovation Index of the European Innovation Scoreboard’s ranking of 2021 (the last EU Member-State being Romania). The 2015-2020 National Innovation strategy admitted with concern that low-tech products hold a major share of the country’s exports, internationalisation of Bulgarian enterprises is low, there is a limited contribution of Foreign Direct Investments to technology transfers, production methods are energy intensive, and partially because of the above factors, labour productivity is low. This concern is also echoed by a more recent 2019 EBRD report, which warns that the country’s economic development is hindered by its low capacity to innovate and generate value. In 2018, the EU even took the drastic measure of withholding innovation funds after Bulgaria’s failure to identify enough sufficiently qualified scientists to evaluate research proposals.

Admittedly, Bulgarian technopolitical and development strategies are embedded in a pan-European ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship. Some of the issues faced by the small Eastern European country are recognised as wider pan-European challenges. For example, in comparison with the USA, EU start-ups have access to much less venture capital. Thus, even though the number of EU and US start-ups is comparable, far fewer European start-ups manage to scale up.

However, issues about Bulgaria’s innovation performance run deeper than what can be determined from assessments of purely economic factors or business analyses of economic actors. In 2021, researchers who were identified as ‘non-innovators without disposition to innovate’ were 54.1%, while the EU average was 31.3%. The Bulgarian Ministry of Education identified key weaknesses of Bulgaria’s NIS: institutional rigidities and a growing distrust amongst key stakeholders in the research and innovation system. Such concerns bring attention to the importance of fostering a culture of innovation, which helps nurture innovative behaviours and attitudes, new forms of communication and collaboration, as well as forms of rationality that inform these new forms and innovative behaviours.

Consequently, in addition to an analysis of broad national-level innovation policies and strategies, my doctoral research pays particular attention to Bulgarian science entrepreneurs, especially focusing on the biotechnology sphere. Science entrepreneurs are scientists who have been able to commercialise their own research and the nature of biotechnology research has been considered as particularly favourable to the emergence of this group. While most existing analyses have focused on the economy, my research argues for a need to understand the role of ideas, narrative, and discourses in the constitution of NIS/NIE. Special attention is given to these, which emerge at micro-sites of discourse production, such as individual biotechnology laboratories or research institutes. The doctoral project argues that such an understanding is just as important for understanding national innovation capacity as quantitative reports of relevant indices about the country’s innovation performance.

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