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Summary: Discussing the emergence of the EU in the field of vaccination using a reputational approach, with Dr Thibaud Deruelle

lun, 02/05/2022 - 16:16

On Wednesday 27 April 2022 EUHealthGov hosted the fourth event in its quarterly seminar series. We were delighted to be joined by Dr Thibaud Deruelle (University of Lausanne) to discuss the EU’s role in vaccine policy, and how a reputational approach can help to explain the growing relevance and involvement of the EU in this field. 

Dr Deruelle introduced the theoretical approach taken in his work. A reputation is a set of beliefs that observers hold, or judgments that observers make, about an individual or an organisation. A strong reputation can enable an actor to have influence in the absence of coercive power; for instance, it can enable the EU, in the absence of a formal mandate, to have influence in the field of vaccine policy. 

The EU has engaged in reputation-building activities – developing scientific networks, building functions within the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), supporting the adoption of Council conclusions – to strengthen its reputation, particularly in the aftermath of the H1N1 outbreak. Dr Deruelle explained how these activities put the EU in a strong position in January 2020, when COVID-19 emerged. He outlined the role played by the Commission and the ECDC, in particular, in the early weeks and months of the crisis, as well as the institutionalisation of some of these roles in the subsequent European Health Union initiatives. Addressing the particular issue of vaccine procurement, Dr Deruelle noted the potential for reputational risk, and the possibility of ‘backlash’ from member states which might have undermined further strengthening of the EU’s influence. 

The Q&A explored the wider value of a reputational approach for understanding the EU’s evolving role in health policy, touching on its value in explaining the gradual integration of public health, alongside theories of neofunctionalism and networked governance. Dr Deruelle ended by discussing the potential for the EU’s strengthened reputation in vaccine policy to support the formal expansion of competence, via treaty change. 

A recording of the event will shortly be available via the EUHealthGov website.

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Catégories: European Union

Artificial Intelligence and Europe: New tech & old vibes

lun, 02/05/2022 - 09:07

Alina Constantin / Better Images of AI / Handmade A.I / CC-BY 4.0

Inga Ulnicane

‘… Europe is a unique aspiration. […] It is an aspiration of a world full of new technologies and age-old values’, Ursula von der Leyen, then incoming President of the European Commission, wrote in her political guidelines in 2019. Since then questions of new technologies and European values have been at the forefront of political discussions in Brussels and member states regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI), including preparations for the forthcoming AI Act and recently adopted Digital Services Act. These discussions have not only addressed technocratic questions of economic indicators and legal instruments but also involved soul-searching and reflections on European identity: What is Europe? What does Europe stand for? And how does Europe want to project its identity and power to the rest of the world?

Policy frames and discourses surrounding AI are at the core of an ongoing research programme which I have been leading over the past few years and which had led to a number of publications on AI governance, politics and policy (Ulnicane et al 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Ulnicane 2022a, 2022b).

 

Europe’s power: Single Market based on values?

In my recent publication on AI in the European Union (Ulnicane 2022a), I examine an emerging EU policy on AI, drawing on Europe as a power debate in the European Studies literature. I analyse recent EU documents on AI, asking how the EU is projecting its power in the field of AI vis-à-vis other countries and regions, especially the United States and China. Is it a Normative Power Europe relying on attractiveness of its values, as defined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, namely, human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities? Or do we rather see elements of a Market Power Europe exerting its global influence by regulating access to its Single Market?

Close reading of AI policy documents launched by the EU institutions since 2017 reveals elements of both – Normative as well as Market Power. In line with an idea of Normative Power Europe, a lot of emphasis is put on developing human-centric AI that serves human needs and aligns with European values and fundamental rights. A major step in this direction has been an adoption of Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in 2019. At the same time, EU policy intentions also include elements of Market Power Europe calling for binding regulation, which are followed up by ongoing preparations for the forthcoming AI Act. Moreover, elements of Normative Power and Market Power in AI policy are interconnected, where binding regulation is presented as a way to enforce European values.

However, the EU’s activities in this field have also received criticism. For example, Ethics guidelines for Trustworthy AI have been portrayed as a potential ethics washing where talk about ethics serves as a way to delay binding regulation (Ulnicane et al 2021b). Moreover, critics have pointed out strong presence of business interests in the EU AI initiatives and questioned if EU funding for new technologies always lives up to its own values. Furthermore, some of the key EU policy documents on AI omit addressing issues of defence AI, which the EU itself is funding. While the implementation of EU political intentions to support human-centric AI remains an important issue to be followed-up in the years to come, recent cases of the General Data Protection Regulation and Digital Services Act can serve as examples how the EU’s focus on protection of its values is advanced through binding legislation.

 

Europe & global AI race: racing for what?

Emerging EU policy for AI draws not only on well-know values but also on some well-known political discourses such as transformation, revolution, and global competition (Ulnicane et al 2022). In particular, the discourse of global competitiveness is well-known in European integration. Already since the 1950s and 1960s concerns about the technological gap and Europe lagging behind the US have been a powerful driving force for the emergence and expansion of EU research policy. While this discourse of global competitiveness has received important criticisms over the years about depicting technological development globally as a zero-sum game where one country/ region wins and others lose, its persistence is remarkable. A new version of it can be seen in AI policy. EU policy documents for AI mention how AI development takes place ‘amid fierce global competition’ and how the investments in AI in the EU are lagging behind the US and China.

While admitting a strong global competition in AI among the US, China and Europe, the EU tries to position itself as a Normative Power, emphasising its values-based, human-centric and ethical approach to AI. In addition to global competitiveness and ‘new space race’ discourse in AI (Ulnicane 2022), there is also interest in global cooperation initiatives. The EU policy demonstrates a strong interest in global cooperation initiatives, in particular when they can help to promote the EU’s trustworthy and human-centric approach to AI. The EU has contributed to a number of international initiatives, such as the development of the OECD ethical principles for trustworthy AI, the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, and EU-US Trade and Technology Council.

The main ideas from this research have been discussed in a number of invited talks. You can watch a recording of my recent talk ‘Can Artificial Intelligence be governed? Multiple challenges and some opportunities’ on YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

EU policy for AI remains a moving target. Ongoing policy and technological developments are co-shaping each other with new initiatives and capabilities to be expected in the short and long term. More research is under preparation to examine these ongoing developments. Some of it will be discussed at the panel ‘Power, Politics, and Policy of Artificial Intelligence’ at the ECPR conference this summer. We look forward to discussing new insights on this topic then and on other occasions.

 

Dr. Inga Ulnicane is Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort University, UK. Her research focusses on science, technology, and innovation governance, politics and policy. She has published on topics such as AI governance and policy, dual use, European integration in research and innovation, Grand societal challenges, and international research collaboration.

 

References:

Ulnicane, I., W. Knight, T. Leach, B. C. Stahl and W.G. Wanjiku (2021a) Framing governance for a contested emerging technology: insights from AI policy, Policy and Society 40(2): 158-177 https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2020.1855800

Ulnicane, I., D. O. Eke, W. Knight, G. Ogoh and B. C. Stahl (2021b) Good governance as a response to discontents? Déjà vu, or lessons for AI from other emerging technologies. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46 (1-2): 71-93  https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840220

Ulnicane, I. (2022a) ‘Artificial Intelligence in the European Union: policy, ethics and regulation’, in T. Hoerber, I. Cabras and G. Weber (Eds) Routledge Handbook of European Integrations, Routledge, pp.254-269. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429262081-19

Ulnicane, I. (2022b) Against the new space race: global AI competition and cooperation for people. AI & Society https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01423-0

Ulnicane, I., W.Knight, T.Leach, B.C.Stahl and W.G. Wanjiku (2022) ‘Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Emerging international trends and policy frames’, in M.Tinnirello (Ed.) The Global Politics of Artificial Intelligence. CRC Press, pp.29-55. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429446726-2

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Catégories: European Union

WA/TCA meeting tracker: April 2022

jeu, 28/04/2022 - 08:50

A short post this week, to update the trackers for meetings of the assorted committees of the EU-UK’s Withdrawal Agreement and Trade & Cooperation Agreement.

As you can see, things have been quiet so far this year. WA activity has been winding down (although that might change should the UK follow through on its reported plans for disapplying parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol).

Likewise, the TCA seems to be heading for annual meetings of most bodies, with a few exceptions. The Parliamentary Partnership Assembly has still to meet at all, suggesting that its scope for building more links between the parties is going to be – at best – a long-term prospect.

As always, you can click through the PDF links below to get a version with clickable links to minutes, agendas and reports.

 PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic78

 

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic85

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Catégories: European Union

Ukrainian accession to the EU: run now, walk later?

jeu, 21/04/2022 - 08:39

The question of whether and how Ukraine joins the EU ranks relatively low on the list of priority topics right now, for reasons that are both too obvious and too horrific to discuss right now.

However, it is still a question that demands attention. The rapid return of the Commission’s preliminary questionnaire by the Ukrainian government – 11 days after receiving it – sets the stage for a rapid publication of the Commission’s opinion, to then allow the June European Council to declare the country an official candidate.

For comparison, Bosnia & Herzegovina took over three years to get that status. Even Finland – the all-time record-holder for speediest accession – took eight months. Ukraine is on track for half that time.

So it’s all good. Right?

Not really.

As I set out in the thread below, speed now has come by avoiding some difficult questions (data here):

Some more comparative data on speed of EU accession

tl;dr speed now for UKR probably means delays later

Data: https://t.co/yrfS96O7ZF

1/ pic.twitter.com/IpQMM5C4Me

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) April 20, 2022

Crucially, the EU has side-stepped the Copenhagen criteria, which is has used for the past 30 years to gatekeep accession. Whether you accept the official line that the criteria are for everyone’s benefit, or see them just as another barrier that member states use to brush off awkward applicants, they still speak to the crucial question of what the EU stands for.

Remove the current war from the equation and the Commission would likely have spent an age on screening and scrutinising Ukraine over the robustness of its political system, the effectiveness of its anti-corruption work and the capacity of its economy to cope with being dropped into a huge and much-richer single market. The war adds another huge challenge on top of all that (not least because of the Art.42 TEU obligations to mutual defence).

However, the war has undoubtedly also thrown all that over.

The geopolitical – maybe even civilisational – imperative to support and protect Ukraine has already engendered huge shifts in the EU, both politically and in policy terms. The hard push to get to candidate status is reflection of that, and rightly so.

But the EU is also well-aware of the limits to its powers. In particular, securing internal reforms is much more effective when you can dangle membership as a reward, as compared to the limited tools available for sanctioning those inside. Take your pick of contemporary examples.

So does the EU continue to push that to one side and work out the problems once Ukraine is inside? Or does it press for changes beforehand?

In either case, Ukraine might well lack the capacity to make the requested reforms, especially in the context of the on-going conflict. Plus any concessions on reforms you make for Ukraine will be taken up by other states as a demonstration that the EU doesn’t really need to be quite so difficult and intrusive.

As I conclude in my thread, none of this should stop the EU and Ukraine working together hard to get to the latter’s accession: morally, strategically and politically it is the right thing to do. But that will also require frank and deeply engaged discussions about how to square the circle that both sides face. Ukraine needs membership, but membership of an organisation that is still worth joining: the EU needs to protect its interests, but not if the price is the collapse of a democratic state.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic100

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Catégories: European Union

The Future of Peace on Our Continent

mar, 19/04/2022 - 09:45
For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome Dr Dorina Baltag, from Loughborough University, in London. Bonjour, Dorina!

 

 

 

 

euradio · The Future of Peace on Our Continent – Ideas on Europe

 

 

The Russian war in Ukraine questions some of the basic principles on which peace on the European continent has been constructed since the end of the Second World War. Dorina, you are a researcher at the Institute of Diplomacy and International Governance at Loughborough University London, which recently organised an event on this topic. What came out of it?

It sounds counter-intuitive to talk about peace when there is a war happening on the European continent, but Russian military aggression, invasion and war in Ukraine is a turning point for politics, economics, society, and, of course, the world order. The legacy of this war will be long-lasting.

What we are witnessing now is a European Union that has responded with exceptional unity, resolve and speed. At the same time this war reveals the sensibilities of the different countries and highlights the need to account for global interdependencies. So, any consideration of a sustainable future of peace must consider the way in which the interconnectedness between geopolitics and geoeconomics will be addressed.

 

Let’s start with the geopolitical dimension.

In geopolitical terms, we can say that the European Union had an ‘awakening’.

For the first time EU leaders did not hesitate but acted immediately by sending military equipment to a third country. A few days only after Russia’s invasion, the EU agreed on spending €450 million in arms for Ukraine and an additional €50 million in non-lethal aid. We even witnessed a stimulation of the EU military drive and a U-turn in German’s foreign and security policy. Putin managed to produce what was unimaginable in the post-Cold war era: Germany stepped up its own defence capabilities by setting up a special fund for the modernisation of its armed forces.

 

It is clear that the war in Ukraine has radically changed the EU’s position on Russia.

And it has pushed member states to commit to support the future membership of Ukraine. On the fourth day of the war already, we watched the Ukrainian president Zelensky applying for EU membership!

At first, it looked like there was a positive response – the resolution from the European Parliament and the statement from the European Council were confirming that ‘Ukraine is one of us’. But, there is also an intra-EU divide: Central and Eastern European countries who are pushing for fast-tracking Ukraine’s candidate status versus Germany, the Netherlands or France who are more reluctant, emphasizing the long process of deep internal transformations and scaling full integration back to the “Association Agreement” which does not automatically offer membership perspective.

That’s the situation. The question is: how will it be possible to ensure peace in the future?

It is up to the EU to decide where it wants to stand in the new world order. An awakened EU as a regional security actor is long overdue and, in this role, the EU needs to balance-out geopolitics with geoeconomics. This means it can no longer embrace a politics of double standards. To ensure peace, the EU’s ambiguous approach in external relations – where the democracy promotion agenda is often overtaken by member-states’ national economic interests – needs to stop.

In the long-term, peace on the European continent depends on the EU’s political will of providing security guarantees to its neighbours. And in the EU’s normative vein, this means nothing else than membership perspective. Probably, the best way forward in giving Ukraine a message regarding its own perspective is to no longer slow down the association process in Western Balkans!

 

Many thanks, Dorina, for sharing the insight from your event with us. “Ideas on Europe” will be back next week, and we will welcome Mechthild Roos again, from the University of Augsburg, in Germany.

 

First published on eu!radio.

 

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Catégories: European Union

A problem for 2024? Consent in the Northern Ireland Protocol

jeu, 14/04/2022 - 08:39

Given the amount of political anguish caused already by the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) since its conception during the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) talks, it might seem odd to write today about one provision that can’t be used until late 2024 at the earliest.

However, the Art.18 provisions on consent represent a key safeguard for the Protocol’s long-term survival, whatever comes of the endless debate about what should happen.

As a reminder, the NIP can only be amended or revoked by the joint agreement of the signatories – the EU and the UK – something that appears deeply unlikely, either now or for the foreseeable future. Likewise, the Art.16 provision on safeguards only allows for a temporary and limited suspension of some parts of the NIP while the signatories find a solution: as discussed elsewhere, it’s not a unilateral (or long-term) solution.

So the only mechanism available to just one party to make a lasting change to the Protocol is Art.18.

As the graphic below sets out, the Northern Ireland Assembly gets to vote in late 2024 on whether to continue the main substantive elements of the NIP (excluding citizens’ rights) for another four years (eight if majorities of both unionist and nationalist designated MLAs can be found).

This not only accords with the intention of the Good Friday Agreement to make the Northern Irish the deciders of their situation, but also provides a way for both the EU and London [sic] to distance themselves from any repudiation of the Protocol

The coming Assembly elections will be a test of this, both in the campaigning approach of unionists (who seem very determined to push for the NIP’s collapse) and in the likely shifts in MLA numbers.

This latter point is not only about the likely rise in the number of Sinn Fein MLAs (which will help with the basic overall majority requirement), but also the potential growth of ‘other’ designated MLAs. Under Art.18(6), these do not count in the ‘cross community support’ calculations, possibly making it yet harder to achieve the necessary threshold for an eight year continuation.

However, to return to the present, consent isn’t the main topic of debate around the Protocol right now. The EU’s easement on medicine supply this week points to the on-going efforts to demonstrate how the NIP can be made to work better through engagement, but this will not be the rhetoric of the DUP and other unionists in coming weeks.

At the same time, if the current Art.16 ‘shall we, shan’t we’ argument is outridden, then Art.18 will come much more sharply into view and the way voters split this May might turn out to be crucial in deciding the outcome.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic102

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Catégories: European Union

The contested but upheld legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union

lun, 21/02/2022 - 16:58

The Court of Justice of the European Union is one of the most contested transnational institutions in Europe. It nonetheless cemented its authority over nearly 7 decades of integration and remains a cornerstone of the EU.

Despite severe contestation, the Court of Justice of the European Union has managed to retain its legitimacy

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) wielded extensive power for most of the second half of the 20th century. When the community was paralyzed by a political gridlock with states having difficulties achieving a necessary consensus on policies, the CJEU became the motor of integration by declaring the direct effect and supremacy of the treaties over national law. It cemented the path towards the interior market by forging the mutual recognition of standards, and even found member states in breach of their obligations when not applying EU law correctly. These bold decisions never met strong opposition, with only a few isolated criticisms that were mostly ignored by the rest of actors of EU governance, including governments.

While the turning point remains difficult to identify, the CJEU does not anymore benefit from this “benign neglect” that allowed judges to exercise their craft without opposition. The end of the permissive consensus put all EU institutions in the spotlight, including the Court. Judges are now involved in the general contestation of the EU’s authority. This trend came at its outburst with the recent rule of law debate that pits EU institutions against the governing bodies of Poland. The CJEU is a power-wielding institution under scrutiny and facing more contestation than ever. The question of its legitimacy today is more relevant than ever.

But how to make sense of/capture the legitimacy of the Court? Such a theoretical framework must account for two broad trends. Since the CJEU is a constituting ruling organ of the EU, it must adhere to a set of standards that are applied across the entire polity, including by other institutions. However, the use of common legitimacy standards must be crafted to the specificities of the judicial branch of the EU. The Court does not draft laws; it theoretically interprets them. Its members are not directly controlled by the people through elections; these are appointed.

The use of canonical legitimacy theories of the EU such as Scharpf’s or Schmidt’s – namely the division of legitimacy between ‘input’, ‘throughput’ and ‘output’ – is relevant, but must be tailor-made to judges. Input refers to shared values between powerholders and subordinates, leading the latter to accept with ease the decisions of the former. The CJEU would be deprived of input since it is a transnational body that is not submitted to popular will (unlike rulers directly elected by citizens). The statement should however be nuanced. The Court does possess indirect input legitimacy since governments (endowed with direct democratic legitimacy) appoint judges to the bench, and retain the prerogative to remove them from office at the end of their term. The treaties signed by these governments expressly delegated to the CJEU the power to interpret the treaties and secondary law. And judges themselves embody a core principle shared across member states judiciaries: they are appointed according to a meritocratic logic, i.e. governments must provide the best candidates whose suitability is thoroughly assessed by an expert committee.

Throughput refers to the respect of good processes of governance. This is the most important factor in adjudication. Due process and well-argued judgements may compensate for shortcomings at the input or output levels. If judges are dialoguing with the parties, are transparent about their reasoning – a common criticism made against CJEU rulings – and are responsive to challenges raised in doctrine or by national courts about previous rulings, the Court will mitigate contention and even have adverse rulings accepted by governments (such as Kadi).

Output refers to sound results of a governing institution. The Court must adjudicate cases within a reasonable amount of time, settling disputes of the parties in a case while providing guidance to the broader legal profession, and elicit compliance with EU law. The Court’s output legitimacy remains significant, especially considering that national courts – premier interlocutors of the CJEU – comply almost always with preliminary rulings.

This analysis seems at odds with current debates surrounding judicialization in the EU. “Ending the jurisdiction of the ECJ” was a red line in the Brexit negotiations for the UK, and various national constitutional courts declared various rulings of the Court ultra vires (out of the Court’s reach and therefore inapplicable in the territory of the member state concerned) during the last decade. The authority of the Court is highly contested and probably more questioned than ever.

That does not mean however that the Court has lost its legitimacy. The ultra vires rulings are the most visible reactions in a European judicial sphere whose activities remain obscure to most citizens. But these decisions remain statistically marginal in a population of thousands of uncontested cases issued by the CJEU every year. The Weiss ruling issued by the German constitutional court was the only ultra vires decision declared against the original decision of the CJEU of 2018, meaning that the other 848 decisions handed down by the Court during the same year (CJEU’s annual report) did not trigger this reaction.

Moreover, the concept of legitimacy crisis must not be confused with political crisis. The former refers to the absolute rejection of the Court’s authority in the EU, while the latter refers to temporary tensions and problems caused by the weakening of previous institutional arrangements. Some rulings of the Court were not applied in some member states or saw their application delayed by a few weeks. But none raised the idea that the Court should be stripped of some of its powers or be replaced by another (quasi) judicial body such as an arbitration panel, despite the recurring accusation of judicial activism and even of a “gouvernement des juges”.

In 2015, the Court convinced the Member states to double the number of judges at the General Court (from 28 to 56) and obtained a budget increase of at least 13,5 million euros at a time when every other public authority was asked to adopt a strict austere approach to spending. This commitment showed that the Court could generate the trust of national governments even when the EU is under stress. The current Polish crisis even displays that the CJEU is not suffering a legitimacy crisis: lower judges disapply orders from the (politically captured) judicial hierarchy to disapply EU law and stop sending preliminary references to the CJEU. Despite strong coercive measures employed by national authorities (such as suspensions and pay cuts), some judges keep faith in the Court and the EU’s judicial system.

Overall, the CJEU’s legitimacy has not faded away. The Court is a systemic actor in the EU and its role remained steady despite the numerous constitutional changes adopted since Maastricht. Contestation is sharper than ever, however. The Court is taken in the midst of all the socio-economic distress suffered by the entire EU since the late 2000s. Rulings involving core state powers are at times contested and compliance may be delayed, but the ship is still sailing, although in uncharted and increasingly troubled waters.

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Catégories: European Union

France 2022: The credibility gap

lun, 21/02/2022 - 12:32

There is no doubt that French politics have been ever strongly tilting to the right for months now. It’s not even exaggerated to claim that the political discourse is dominated, if not polluted, by far-right vocabulary and semantics. Want to study first-hand the mechanisms of the Overton window? This is the place.

Paradoxically, at the same time, all three right-wing pretenders that are currently jockeying for position in the race to win the second spot for the second round of the presidential election are battling with serious credibility issues.

The primary curse

In November 2016, the great comeback of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) was ended before it had even started. With no more than 20% of the votes he was eliminated in the first round of the primaries organised by the party he had himself rebranded as Les Républicains.

Nicolas Sarkozy at the Sens Commun rally in 2014.

His credibility had already been severely tarnished two years before, when he set out to reconquer the party’s presidency in order to have the necessary resources at hand for a successful presidential bid in 2017. Shortly before the party’s conference in November 2014, he was filmed addressing a rally of the reactionary movement of the traditional catholic movement Sens Commun. He promised them to reformulate, once elected again in 2017, some aspects of same-sex marriage law (officially named “marriage for all”) of 2013. But when the audience started to chant “Repeal! Repeal!”, he caved in immediately: “If you prefer (…), if that makes you happy, frankly, it doesn’t cost me much!”

Just an anecdote. But one that illustrates two of the major weaknesses of the Républicains, who claim to be the heirs of true Gaullist faith and want to position themselves as the grand old party of the moderate right.

On the one hand it highlights that the system of party primaries has revealed itself to be an unintentionally radicalising force, both for the party chair in in 2014 and for the presidential nomination in 2016 and 2021. Each time, the intended moderate, conservative no-nonsense discourse has massively hardened under the pressure of a radical, vocal and highly mobilised minority among party members, pushing candidates to adopt extreme right-wing issues and vocabulary.

On the other hand, the anecdote points to the Gaullist’s fundamental dilemma: even in an increasingly polarised France, the presidential race is still won in the centre. Right there, where local and regional conservatives were perfectly able to impose themselves, as could be observed both during the municipal elections of 2020 and the regional elections of 2021. But that’s local politics. On the national level, the rightward tilt intentionally launched by Sarkozy has left the liberal-humanist centre up for grabs. It was immediately seized by Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche. With the consequence that the formerly Republican right now shamelessly adopts far-right discourses while wanting to sell themselves as moderate.

It’s a paradoxical situation: half of the French electorate will give their vote in April to a candidate explicitly labelled as right-wing. And that’s without even counting Macron’s voter base (stable at 25%), despite the obvious overlaps with moderate Républicains in terms of policy preferences and human resources.

Even more disturbing is that more than a third of the vote will in all likelihood go to candidates who unambiguously belong to the far right. That’s three times more than what the infamous Alternative für Deutschland obtained at the German parliamentary elections last autumn.

And despite this discursive hegemony, the right will have serious difficulties in its conquest of the Elysée palace. All three candidates who may reasonably hope to enter the second round are caught in the credibility trap.

Valérie Pécresse between a rock and hard place

Before she entered the primaries of Les Républicains, Valérie Pécresse had gained a strong profile since 2015 as the respected leader of the Ile-de-France, one of Europe’s most economically powerful, most densely populated regions, which hosts both France’s richest municipalities and poorest suburban ghettos. Her main accomplishment was a successful budget consolidation, for which she even received praise from the court of auditors (very rare in France, for good reasons!). Her self-description as “a mix of two thirds Angela Merkel and one third Margaret Thatcher” was deemed pretty accurate and she was comfortably re-elected in 2021.

Campaign poster of Valérie Pécresse, inspired by the traditional postal stamps with the effigy of the Republican allegory “Marianne”.

Considering her bourgeois-catholic origins and her political career following graduation as top student in two elite schools (HEC and ENA), you would expect her to be firmly rooted in the liberal wing of Gaullism, as embodied for instance by Jacques Chirac. To no surprise, Sarkozy picked her for a ministerial post in 2007.

Yet, all of a sudden, in order to have the slightest chance in the 2021 primaries, she felt obliged to change in tone and style. All of a sudden, it was all about seemingly exploding crime, presumably uncontrolled immigration, and apparently threatened national identity. Issues that were imposed on her by the nationalist and xenophobic hardliner Eric Ciotti, who had come first in the first round of the primaries.

That sounded all strangely inauthentic, and even now, in the hottest phase of the election campaign, it simply does not sound convincing. Since her nomination in December, she has been stagnating in the breathlessly published, but generally rather reliable polls, at around 15% of voting intentions. And her big rally on 13 February, in front of 7,500 supporters in the Parisian Zénith concert hall, hyped as the kick-off for the decisive campaign weeks, was an oddly embarrassing, pathetic performance.

What are you supposed to think of a speaker who very obviously does not believe herself in half of what she thinks she needs to say? How trustworthy is a conservative party that on the one hand hardens its discourse by the minute and on the other hand has been aggressively bashing a president who launched so many of the reforms that Chirac and Sarkozy always kept announcing but never had the courage to tackle in all their years in power?

Valérie Pécresse has fallen into the credibility trap. The politics she could have represented with competence and authenticity, are entirely covered by Emmanuel Macron. The politics he has been forced to embody by the party and the circumstances are very obviously not hers. In the tectonic upheaval of the national French political landscape, there’s not enough room left any more for herself and the Républicains. 

Marine Le Pen’s risky business of normalisation

At her third run for the presidency, Marine Le Pen faces a positioning conundrum of a different type. It’s been more than ten years since she took over the nationalist-populist party called the Front National from her dad. Since then she has been unwavering in her attempt to clean the party from its disreputable, unsavoury, shady aspects and turn it into an eligible alternative for all parts of French society.

The key word in this process is “de-demonizing” (French: “dédiabolisation”). In order to bestow on her party a new gentrified respectability, she purged the leadership committees of the numerous “crazy catholics” and “extreme idiots” (according to a leaked confession) and broke with all those who were unwilling to follow her path. These included her long-standing lieutenant Florian Philippot, who had been highly successful in giving the Front National a solid social appeal, and her niece Marion Maréchal, who was already considered as a future star (and competitor of her aunt) by the old hardliners.

Her disastrous, almost surrealistic performance in the television debate with Emmanuel Macron in early May 2017 certainly made many of her supporters doubt she had the necessary clout and gravitas to climb that last step in the ladder. Rather surprisingly, though, it did hardly impact her authority within the party. In 2018, she successfully imposed its re-branding to Rassemblement National (RN), a symbolic act that took the de-demonization process one step further, towards full-fledged mainstreaming.

Campaign poster of Marine Le Pen. The “M” is pronouced “aime”, as in “The France one loves”.

This consistent normalisation strategy, reflected in a still aggressive but much less verbally abusive opposition to the Macron government as well as a calm and controlled pre-campaign, seemed to work out just fine. A no-go like “Frexit” or, at the least, withdrawal from the Eurozone – both impossible to sell to the average voter and perceived by many as evidence of amateurism – was discreetly deleted from the official party programme. Until November 2021, there was no doubt that Marine Le Pen would qualify for the second round of the election like she had done in 2017, and why not with a stronger share of the vote than the incumbent President.

That was when Eric Zemmour officially announced his presidential bid. The outspokenly Islamophobic pandit/polemicist/populist suddenly offered a self-confident far-right alternative to all those who disapproved of Marine Le Pen’s rebranding. All those Vichy patriots and nostalgic colonialists, racists and homophobes, Europe-haters and authoritarians who did no longer feel at home in the mollified, assuaged Rassemblement National.

It turns out there are more of them around than previously suspected. Immediately, Marine Le Pen’s voting intentions collapsed from 25 to 17 percent. Clearly, her gentrification strategy was much less accepted among her long-standing followers than was thought. While her base seems to have consolidated since – she’s still the favourite for the second place – there is no week without a prominent party member leaving her for Zemmour. Heavyweights like Stéphane Ravier (the RN’s only Senator) or MEPs Gilbert Collard and Jérôme Rivière simply slammed the door in anger. More embarrassingly, campaign spokesman Nicolas Bay (another MEP) had to be fired for having leaked relevant internal information to the Zemmour team.

If one is to believe the latest polls, Marine Le Pen does not seem to suffer from the “rotten fruit falling from the tree”, as she poetically called the renegades. But that does not change the one big question at the heart of her rebranding as the new mainstream: how trustworthy is a candidate, who owes her political standing and popularity to anti-establishment positions and who decides, at the most important moment of her career, to adopt the behaviour codes and verbal norms of the despised “system”, the very system she vociferously (and successfully) decried all those years?

Even if she is still well placed to qualify for the second round, it remains unclear how she could possibly manage, within only two weeks, to reconquer all those disenchanted voters who left for Zemmour and simultaneously gain several million new votes in the mainstream.

Eric Zemmour and the limits of the reactionary protest potential

In the genuinely brilliant television series Baron Noir (three seasons between 2016 and 2020) the French party spectrum is all shaken up by a totally unknown populist newcomer boosted by the social networks. It’s a scenario whose plausibility was vindicated by the yellow jackets movement and feared by the governmental majority.

In real life, the meteoric maverick finally does not stem from the hardcore anticapitalistic left, but from a right wing that unmistakably deserves the adjective “extreme”. And he was not put on orbit by a diffuse protest movement on the internet, but from old-fashioned traditional media. For thirteen years Eric Zemmour wrote for Le Figaro, the formerly venerable conservative daily that has been trying hard for years now to reach the level of British tabloids. But his current name recognition is due to television exposure. More precise: to the very specifically French constellation of four competing 24/7 news channels, all available to French citizens within the basic TV offer. All four of them are under existential pressure to reach a market share beyond 1.5 or 2 percent.

In this crammed ecosystem, the only way to differentiate yourself from the competition is to engage in an uninterrupted hysterization of political life, spiced up with regular purposeful verbal transgressions that will be picked to pieces (and tweeted!) by the entire Parisian media landscape for days. On one of these four channels, CNews – an originally harmless branch of Canal+, now systematically foxified by the reactionary industrial industrialist and multi-millionaire media czar Vincent Bolloré – Eric Zemmour managed to reach, by deliberately breaking taboos, ratings of 5 percent (roughly one million viewers) in his access prime time talk show.

Campaign poster of Eric Zemmour. The slogan is a quote attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte.

In doing so, he shifted the limits of what could be said in public to a spectacular degree. Inspired by the success of the transgressive, inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump, with whom he has frequently been compared and who recently apparently even supported him in a phone call. The fact that he has repeatedly stood trial for inciting racial hatred only seemed to play in his favour with his supporters, who claim he merely says out loud what the “silent majority” (populism’s favourite fantasy) thinks.

Attempts to denounce the rhetorical mechanisms of his hatemongering – as exemplified in a strong little pamphlet by the renowned linguist Cécile Alduy – or debunk his grotesque falsifications of history – picked apart by an army of indignant French historians – also don’t have much of an impact.

What Zemmour feeds on is the deep distrust of citizens towards parties and politicians, media and experts, democratic institutions and procedures. As the yearly “Trust Barometer” of the CEVIPOF institute at Sciences Po regularly confirms, distrust and wariness are much deeper engrained in French society than in other comparable European countries (check out slides 31 and 44 here).

Eric Zemmour’s qualification for the second round of the presidential election would be a political earthquake. It would raise very fundamental questions about the causes of so much resentment, sullen offendedness, and outright hatred. It would, however, have next to no impact on the result of the election. True, Zemmour was able to conquer 15% of the electorate in one strike, just by announcing his bid. But since then, he has stagnated at exactly the same level, despite the recruitment of numerous well-known renegades both from the Républicains and the Rassemblement National, and despite a permanent media buzz.

And he remains by far the most despised political actor in France: 67% of the French declare having a bad opinion of him (Le Pen 59%); 61% refuse him explicitly (Le Pen 49%, source: recent Odoxa polls, here und here). He has a massive credibility deficit: only 23% of the French grant him the necessary competence for the job (Le Pen 35%, Pécresse 38%, source: current IPSOS survey).

Zemmour has exhausted his reactionary potential. He may serve as useful and worrying indicator for the irritability of a distraught nation whose nerves are on edge. But even in an insecure, destabilised France that is not sufficient for capturing the mainstream of society.

Parallel worlds

France’s tilt to the right is real. The “self-dwarfed left” – kudos to Nadia Pantel from the Süddeutsche Zeitung for this pertinent adjective – is close to inaudible. The presidential election campaign clearly suggests that the radical, reactionary discourse has become hegemonic. But this impression is misleading. The centre of society, the oft-invoked middle classes (which always come in the plural in colloquial French), certainly want to be taken seriously in their existential unease and anxiety, but have no wish to be governed by marginal ideologists.

As the pandemic has kindly recalled, France does not have the monopoly on disenchanted citizens and enraged conspiracy theorists caught in their filter bubbles. The same goes for the slow and painful decline of previously hegemonic popular parties in an increasingly fragmented political landscape. But what distinguishes France from other comparable democracies is the astonishing, striking discrepancy between the political spectrum on the national and the local level.

While Socialists of all shades of pink, moderate down-to-earth Conservatives and more and more pragmatic Greens are entrusted with the government of all regions and the overwhelming majority of cities and small towns, the national level is almost entirely dominated by a kind of cultural struggle between political movements that play next to no role in local affairs.

This spectacular gap between political realities may perhaps serve as an approach to explaining why a rather well-functioning daily life in a profoundly liveable country is permanently overshadowed by a shrill siren of decline and civilizational despair.

Fortunately, with regard to the forthcoming elections, it is possible to predict with a good deal of probability that while the hardened discourse of the right may reflect certain non-negligible tendencies, the political actors that are pushing it are not perceived as credible leaders by society at large. Emmanuel Macron is likely to benefit from the credibility deficit of his opponents. He is certainly not everybody’s darling, yet when it comes to competence and what the French call “embodiment of the presidential function”, he is clearly identified as number one.

Macron’s probable re-election will first and foremost be based on his credibility edge. It will, however, not change anything to the toxic discursive and mediatic environment that continues to poison French political life and public debate.

This is post no. 4 of the ‘France 2022’ series.
The previous ones can be found here.
All ‘France 2017’ posts can be accessed here.

The post France 2022: The credibility gap appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Catégories: European Union

Don’t blame voters for Brexit

dim, 20/02/2022 - 12:41

Just 24-hours after the EU referendum on 23 June 2016, I posted this on my blog:

‘Just over half of those who voted bought manky lies dressed up as a better life after Brexit. They were told they’d get their country back. Their lives would be transformed. 

‘More jobs, homes, schools and hospitals. Less migrants. No more rule from Brussels. We’d be British, and Great Britain again.

‘They were duped. They were deceived. They were sold a dodgy time share by cowboy politicians, who made claims and promises they can never deliver because it was all a delusion.

‘Those conned voters, when they realise they’ve paid dearly for faulty merchandise, will need support and direction. The rogue politicians will need to be kicked out.

‘We can do without those politicians. We cannot do without voters.’

James O’Brien on LBC has consistently agreed with this line; blame politicians, not voters, he implores.

In a broadcast two years ago he said:

“Blame the people who sold it, please, not the people who bought it. That’s going to be my most important message for the next couple of years.”

It’s the same message I posted just a few hours after the referendum result, but now of course, it’s almost six years later.

Today, we are all rapidly realising that politicians must own and take full responsibility for the horrific, catastrophic mess that Britain has got into as a direct result of Brexit.

DAVID CAMERON – the Prime Minister who called for an unnecessary referendum not for his country, but as he confided in Donald Tusk, “only for his party”.

He then led an inept, lacklustre referendum campaign that was so appalling that anyone would think he wanted to lose.

BORIS JOHNSON – the Prime-Minister-wannabe who used to be a Remainer, but then at the last minute, switched sides to be the Brexit poster-boy, as he thought that would be his best route into 10 Downing Street (he was right).

To win, he lied on a colossal scale – the biggest deceit being his claim that Britain sends £350m a week to the EU, that could instead be spent on the NHS.

MICHAEL GOVE – another PM-wannabe, who also lied to win, telling the nation that EU migration in the decade following the referendum could be as high as 5 million.

But it was based on another lie – that Turkey would be joining the EU soon, which Gove must have known was impossible.

NIGEL FARAGE – the on-off-on-off UKIP leader who introduced the nation to raw racism, turning Britons against EU citizens living here who were actually helping our country to thrive.

He called for racial discrimination laws to be scrapped, and said he wanted not just Brexit, but the end of the entire EU.

He also conveniently forgot his pre-referendum announcement that if the result was 52%-48% he’d want another vote (but only if the result was 52% for Remain).

THERESA MAY – another former Remainer who changed sides so she could put her career before country. In other words, she wanted to be PM more than she didn’t want Brexit.

She over-interpreted the referendum result, ignoring that almost half of those who voted didn’t want Brexit.

Instead, she acted as if Brexit had won 100%; did her best to demean and bypass Parliament to get her way, and used vile, Nazi-type terminology such as, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

JACOB REES-MOGG – the upper-class MP with the honed posh-voice who promoted Brexit pretending it would benefit the poor, whereas in reality, it’s only some of the rich who are prospering from it.

On the one hand he claimed Britain had no real power in the EU, then called for Britain to be “as difficult as possible” if there was a long extension to our membership.

“We could veto any increase in the EU budget,” he claimed and “obstruct” an EU army and “block” Mr Macron’s “integrationist schemes”.

‘Shurely shome mishtake’ as Private Eye would say. How is it possible for a country that has no power in the EU to wield such power in the EU?

Rees-Mogg did, however, say that it could take “50 years” to reap the benefits of Brexit. What a useful get-out clause…

DOMINIC CUMMINGS – the unelected Svengali-style string-puller who masterminded the Leave victory all based on lies, mistruths and false promises.

He is the man who gave Britain Brexit.

His primary insight was to weaponise unregulated social media. 

Of course, in their day, the Nazis were ahead of the curve in their use of broadcast media, but Cummings didn’t add anything that Goebbels didn’t know.

………………

There are many other politicians who must take full responsibility for Brexit.

Remember this: most voters in Britain didn’t vote for Brexit – Leave was only supported by 37% of the electorate. 

That would not be enough for Leave to have won in most democracies across the world that hold referendums, where at least 50%, and often at least 60%, of all registered voters would be required before such a big change could happen.

It wouldn’t even be enough, under Tory legislation, for a trade union to call a strike, which requires the support of at least 50% of all its members before a walk-out can go ahead.

What’s more, in the general election of 2019, most voters did not vote for the Tories; most voters voted for parties that wanted another referendum on Brexit. 

The Tories only won their landslide 80-seat majority with just 1% more votes than they got in the 2017 general election, in which the Tories lost their majority entirely.

Johnson got his 80-seat majority with the votes of less than 30% of those eligible to vote.

Our system of politics and voting is broken and unfit. It’s allowed a result that the country at large didn’t, and doesn’t, want.

What a cunning, clever, coup this has been.

The bottom line: Blame politicians, not voters, for Brexit. We can do without lying politicians. We can’t win without voters.
  • Watch this 2-minute video of James O’Brien on LBC explaining why we must not blame voters.

________________________________________________________

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Catégories: European Union

Broken Britain

dim, 20/02/2022 - 12:19

I need some work done at home and invited firms to quote.

“That’s a smart van,” I said in passing to the managing director of a limited company that visited last week.

“Oh, we’ve got six of those,” he replied.

We went through the project.

In the past, companies had sent me quotes with the words “plus VAT”. That’s annoying as well as unlawful. I’m not a business and need to know the final price I’m to pay.

So, I said, “When you do your quote, please clearly show the full price, including VAT.”

“Oh,” the young man looked surprised. “So, you WANT to pay the VAT?”

“If you’re VAT registered, it’s a legal requirement,” I replied.

“Oh, not really,” came the response. “If you pay me cash, you won’t have to pay any VAT, at least not on the labour!”

“That would be unlawful,” I said.

“Up to you,” he said, without batting an eyelid; without even knowing who I was. 

After all, I could have been a tax inspector for all he knew.

It got me thinking. 

Loss of VAT to the government.

Loss of income tax too, as the cash paid obviously wouldn’t go on the books.

If anything went wrong with the work, no come back. This was quite a large project, and if the firm messed up, there’d be no receipt, no proof, no going to court, no redress.

But actually, worse than that: loss of revenue for the NHS, for schools, for roads, for sewers, etc.

This was cheating and fraudulent.

CHEATING AND FRAUD

But then I got thinking some more.

The government does cheating and fraud.

Its ministers hand out multi-million contracts to mates without going through the proper procedures. The courts have ruled that’s unlawful.

What’s more, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the government will be ‘writing off’ over £4 billion in fraudulent claims for programmes such as the furlough scheme, pandemic support for freelance workers and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’.

Most of those who made unlawful claims will just get away with it. They won’t be pursued.

Last year, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that taxpayers will lose tens of billions of pounds to Covid-19 support schemes because the government dropped basic fraud checks and rolled out the programmes in haste.

Last month, Theodore Agnew, UK minister for efficiency and transformation, resigned his post.

Why? Because of the government’s ‘failure to tackle fraud’.

In an article for the Financial Times he wrote:

‘Fraud in government is rampant. Public estimates sit at just under £30bn a year. There is a complete lack of focus on the cost to society, or indeed the taxpayer.’

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said Agnew’s resignation was “a damning indictment of the chancellor and the government’s failures on fraud”.

  • Billions of pounds lost because of the government handing out unlawful contracts to their mates.
  • Billions of pounds lost because of the government turning a blind eye to those taking government money fraudulently and who won’t have to pay it back.

Billions. Billions. Our money. Public money.

Billions. Heaven knows how many hospitals, doctors, nurses, medicines that would pay for. Or schools. Or roads. 

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

So, is it any wonder that if the government can get away with it, many businesses and individuals think they can too?

Not charging VAT and not paying tax is a fraud. But as the government also does fraud or doesn’t care if others do fraud, what does it matter?

Of course, we’ve always had a ‘black market’. But my subjective view is that it’s now much more prevalent.

In the old days, the government had schemes such as Business Links, that helped businesses to do things professionally, honestly, with a view to growing reliable and successful enterprises.

But the Business Links were all closed under David Cameron’s savage austerity cuts.

It was of course a false economy.

Because today, a culture of dishonest business, and dishonest government, will bring down Britain and result in an unreliable, unsuccessful country with unreliable and unsuccessful enterprises. 

It’s leading to a ‘Broken Britain’. A country that will rapidly go downhill, with the basic services that so many of us rely upon becoming increasingly decreased.

Does the government care? Of course not.

This week Steve Barclay, Number 10’s new Chief of Staff, pledged that Boris Johnson’s government would “step back” and favour a “smaller state.”

I’ve lived long enough to know what that means.

It means cuts to the services that are the glue that keep the country and its communities functioning and intact.

It means less money for hospitals, schools, roads and sewers, to name but a few.

RICH BASTARDS

Does the government care? Of course not.

They are mostly rich bastards. They don’t need the state. They don’t need government, even though they are the government.

  • Hospitals? They don’t need NHS hospitals. They have their own private hospitals they can access.
  • Schools? They don’t need state schools. Most of them went to private schools, as do most of their children.
  • Roads? Well, of course they need roads. But they’ll be pot-ridden roads, so government ministers can no doubt take private jets instead (at least Boris Johnson can – he’s got two of them in Union Jack colours).

Why else would the current government be so uncommitted to trying to get back billions lost to fraud?

Why else would the current government be so cavalier with public money, giving out unlawful contracts to their mates, who were often not at all qualified or even able to deliver for the public?

As I write this, the pavement immediately outside my house is gushing out thousands of gallons of water.

It’s a serious leak of a water pipe, splurging out drinking water from the pavement at a rate of knots, which is not sating anyone’s thirst, but instead overwhelming the nearby sewage system.

Of course, I reported this major leak to Affinity Water. But that was over three weeks ago.

They texted me to say that “emergency” works to repair the leak would take place outside my property on 9 February. They would be sure to let me know if they couldn’t attend.

But they didn’t attend and didn’t let me know.

I rang them and asked, “What’s going on?”

They replied they had to get the local council to put up traffic lights, and all that would take time.

But today, the water is still going to waste.

According to UNICEF, across the world, 2.2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water.

And right now, outside my house, thousands of gallons of safe drinking water are literally going down the drain.

Affinity Water had the temerity yesterday to ask for my feedback. Could I please score my “recent experience” from 0 (very dissatisfied) to 10 (very satisfied).

Of course, I gave them ‘0’ and explained:

‘I reported an emergency leak of water coming out of the pavement outside my house. I have not been kept informed and the leak has still not been repaired.

‘This is a disaster for the environment and a waste of thousands of gallons of good water.’

‘Thank you. Your feedback is important to us…’ was the texted reply.

GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CARE

Does the government care? Of course not.

They’ll allow good water to go to waste, or for raw waste to go into good water. After all, we’re no longer beholden to EU directives that aim to prevent this happening. 

The government will ‘urge’ private water companies to tackle the problem, without ensuring they do.

Then, when they’ve left government, ministers will no doubt have the chance to work for such companies on lucrative contracts.

It’s all part of ‘Broken Britain’.

Last month I drove a friend to Stansted Airport. On the way back, driving on the inside lane of the M11, my car went over a significant pothole, which I suspect damaged one of my wheels.

A sizeable pothole, in a motorway. All part of Broken Britain?

Of course.

And expect more of Britain to be broken in the years ahead.

We’ll have less government, that has less money, because so much will have been lost or wasted, and the government won’t care.

It might take a generation to undo the damage that is taking place to our country.

It starts and ends with the government.

If the government acts dishonestly, they cannot expect the country’s people, and the country’s businesses, to act honestly.

We so much need a different government, but if that’s to be Labour, then they have to be much clearer and much bolder in explaining their plans to fix Broken Britain.

________________________________________________________

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Catégories: European Union

Covid-19 policies: how does political trust make a difference in responding to a common crisis ?

ven, 18/02/2022 - 13:00
For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Dr Theofanis Exadaktylos from the University of Surrey, in England. Bonjour, Theofanis!

 

 

 

 

euradio · Covid-19 policies : how does political trust make a difference in responding to a common crisis ?

 

 

Theofanis, you are associate professor of European politics, and together with three colleagues you are about to publish a book on “Policy Styles and Trust in the Age of Pandemics”. Can you let us know more about it?

As we all know, since 2020, there has been a wide variety of policy responses by national governments. Some governments immediately and proactively took measures to stop the virus spread, some waited for clarity to decide their course of action and others downplayed the severity of the threat, continuing life as if nothing had happened.

 

So what how does your research explain these differences?

It’s explained by national ‘policy styles’. And in responding to crises, this policy styles are correlated with the political trust expressed by citizens.

Crises are moments of flux and extreme uncertainty. They expose vulnerabilities and frequently prompt political leaders to think outside the box to reassure citizens they are still in control. But the degree of freedom also depends on the administrative capacity their countries have, and the way problems and solutions are conceived in the national context. Effectively, policy makers inherit commitments, institutional arrangements, ways of doing things and norms that form a country’s policy style.

 

How does “trust” play into this?

Compliance to any public policy is linked to the levels of political trust within a country and, policy makers need to have a good estimation of how high or low that trust is. When governments are faced with new challenges they turn to “institutional memory”. Some governments are better in anticipating problems while others only react; in some countries consensus is required in decision-making whereas in others a top-down approach is the norm.

Citizens’ expectations are important. Pandemics require a public that makes conscious choices to comply to measures issued by a government. Lack of voluntary compliance will lead to more stringent measures, including fines and strict lockdowns. Compliance to measures also depends on whether they are perceived as ‘imposed’ or ‘organically developed’, especially in the context of democratic societies.

Countries like Denmark or Sweden have a more legitimate and efficient public administration system, and citizens tend to trust the bureaucracy of their country, compared to Greece or Italy for example. If trustworthiness and legitimacy are low, the capacity of a government to do its job is decreased, and implementing any measure is quite hard.

Legitimacy and political trust are even more important in the context of a pandemic when non-elected officials expand their decision-making roles. In Britain, Hungary and Poland, for example, experts have been at the receiving end of targeted blame.

 

How does it work in countries that have a high level of trust in their government?

In systems with more inclusive processes, like in Sweden, high trust magnifies the capacity of a government to act, leading to decentralised responses.

Conversely, in systems with lower policy capacity and lower inclusiveness, citizens lack faith in the system and expect central authority to take over. Greece is a good example for that. Lack of trust weakens the capacity of a government to act and the capacity of citizens to behave in a way they see fit.

 

These are the extremes. What happens in countries that are ‘in between’?

When high capacity coincides with low trust, the tendency is not to trust policymakers but put faith in the capacity of the state, for example, in the health system, to handle the crises. Hence policymakers will pursue more centrifugal responses to avoid taking the blame. This was the case in Britain, where policy makers tried to diffuse responsibility away from the central government in London.

When on the other hand, there is high trust but lower policy capacity (for geographic or demographic reasons), policymakers and citizens know that the health system may not cope if left without strong political direction. In this case, policymakers may choose a centripetal response because it allows more control over outcomes. This is the example of Norway where the government managed to acquire emergency powers to react, contrary to its inclusive policy style.

 

So what’s your conclusion after two years?

There is a vast variety of policy response across Europe , not only for the effectiveness of measures in containing spread, casualties and economic impact, but also in the timings and ways that measures were eased, dropped or re-introduced.

And we are not out of the woods yet. The pandemic is still evolving today with unknown outcomes. Therefore, whatever the national policy styles and levels of political trust, we should hope that national governments and citizens not only learn from past experiences but also from each other.

 

Thank you very much, Theofanis, for sharing your research with us. We’ll put a link to your book on the website. “Ideas on Europe” will be back next week. We will welcome Joanna Ciesielska-Klikowska, from the University of Lodz, in Poland.

 

First published on eu!radio.

 

 

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Catégories: European Union

Boris Johnson: A dangerous clown

mer, 16/02/2022 - 11:41

Boris Johnson is “not a complete clown”, his new communications director, Guto Harri, said this month adding, “he’s a very likeable character.”

Really?

I would say instead that Boris Johnson is a completely dangerous clown, and nothing he’s done for the country is at all likeable.

Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, questioned the seriousness of Mr Johnson and his new chief of communications. She said:

“Did I mention that there are no serious people left to serve? They think it’s all just one big joke, don’t they?” 

Was Boris Johnson ever Prime Minister material?

For sure, he likes to have – or more accurately, to get – a laugh.

But how appropriate is that when the country is reeling from the devastating consequences of Brexit, the impact of Covid, the danger of Climate Change, and on the imminent horizon, the possibility of war between Russia and Ukraine?

They say we get the politicians we deserve. But do we really deserve a Prime Minister like Boris Johnson, who tries to make fun of everything?

He and his party are having a good laugh at our expense.

People say that Boris Johnson reminds them of Benny Hill. He looks the part – especially when he can’t be bothered to dress properly.

But this is serious.

Our country is being commanded by a clown. Britain is now the laughing-stock of the world.

Behind the jokes, the laughter, the faux joie de vivre, however, is something truly sinister.

Britain is being led to ruin.

Brexit isn’t working. Trade with our neighbouring countries – our most important export and import market in the world – is severely disrupted.

The situation in Northern Ireland as a result of Brexit is close to collapse, with the Good Friday Agreement in danger of falling apart.

Sleaze and corruption abound.

Does Mr Johnson care?

For sure, business is suffering from both Brexit and Covid. “F*** business,” retorted the minstrel Prime Minister.

Beware. The jokes hide the lies and the real game.

The fiddlers – our political masters – are steeped in sleazy, corrupt, and nefarious activities.

Whilst the front man elicits guffaws from the electorate, those behind the scenes are furtively dismantling what was once Great Britain, taking what they can, increasing their power, reducing our democracy.

  • We didn’t get our country back. We threw it it away.
  • We didn’t take control. We lost it.

This year, we must up our fight to get back our country, to get back our continent, and to Get Brexit Undone.

Agreed?
  • Watch this 2-minute video demonstrating that Boris Johnson is a clown

________________________________________________________

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Catégories: European Union

EU referendum broke ‘rules’ set by former Brexit secretary

sam, 12/02/2022 - 17:12

The EU referendum was entirely flawed according to criteria set by former Brexit Secretary and ardent Brexiter, David Davis, on how referendums should be “done properly”.

In July 2016, Tory MP, Mr Davis, accepted the result of the EU referendum and the dual-role of Brexit Secretary and Chief Brexit Negotiator in Theresa May’s new government.

But back in 2002, when the Tories were in Opposition to the Labour government, Mr Davis spelt out what he considered to be the gold standard for good referendums.

On the basis of that speech, the 2016 EU referendum failed on every point.

Mr Davis was opposing Labour’s plans to hold referendums on regional assemblies, because he considered that the structure of the proposed referendums would be undemocratic.

In summary, Mr Davis said that:

“In a democracy, voters have to know what they’re voting for”

But in the EU referendum, voters couldn’t know what they were voting for. The Leave option was not defined.

(This was also a point made by Philip Hammond, then Foreign Secretary, six months before the referendum. Mr Hammond was sitting next to Mr Davis when he made his speech in 2002).

“The proposition has to come first, and the vote afterwards”

But that’s not what happened in the EU referendum. There was no clear proposition before the referendum on how the UK would leave the EU and on what terms.

“Referendums should be held when the electorate are in the best possible position to make a judgement”

But in the EU referendum, the electorate was not in any position, let alone the “best possible position”, to judge whether the UK should leave the EU, and nobody knew then what the terms of leaving would be.

Referendums should be held when the arguments, for and against, “have been rigorously tested”.

But in the EU referendum, the Leave arguments had not been tested, let alone “rigorously tested”.

Claims and promises made by the Leave side had not been debated or agreed in Parliament before the referendum took place.

“Referendums should be held when people know exactly what they’re getting”

But no one who voted for Leave knew what they were getting, let alone “exactly what they’re getting”.

“This means that legislation should be debated by Members of Parliament on the floor of the House of Commons and then put to the electorate for the voters to judge afterwards.”

But the legislation to leave the EU was debated after the referendum and not before.

“It does not mean that we ask people to vote on a blank piece of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards.”

But that’s exactly what happened with the EU referendum.

The Leave choice represented an entirely blank sheet of people with government filling in the details much later and without a second, confirmatory referendum on whether ‘the people’ supported those details.

A referendum should be “treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it.”

But the EU referendum WAS treated as a substitute for Parliamentary decision-making.

According to Mr Davis as Brexit Secretary, the final decision to leave the EU had been made by the referendum and was therefore a “point of no return”, even though the referendum was supposed to be an advisory poll only.

Parliament was denied any opportunity to specifically debate and vote on WHETHER the UK should leave the EU. The referendum was treated as a replacement for, and superior to, Parliamentary decision making.

Indeed, when Parliament debated the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, Mr Davis as the Brexit Secretary told Parliament in January 2017:

“It is not a Bill about whether the UK should leave the European Union or, indeed, about how it should do so; it is simply about Parliament empowering the Government to implement a decision already made—a point of no return already passed. 

“We asked the people of the UK whether they wanted to leave the European Union, and they decided they did.”

“It’s important that referenda are not used simply as a snapshot of volatile changes of opinion, perhaps as a result of pressure of government propaganda”

But the referendum ONLY represented a snapshot of “volatile changes of opinion” and certainly as a result of propaganda, much of which transpired to be untrue or incorrect or undeliverable.

“It’s because referenda are supposed to reflect the settled will of the people that we need to have thresholds below which they do not carry the day.”

But leaving the EU hardly reflected “the settled will of the people” let alone a stable or consistent will.

For most of the UK’s four decades as a member of the EU, most polls consistently showed that a majority supported membership.

Furthermore, the marginally close referendum result of 52%-48% could not reflect that “the settled will of the people” was to leave the EU.

As for a “need to have thresholds” for referendums, no threshold was set for the EU referendum, and only a minority of the electorate supported Leave, with the majority of registered voters either voting for Remain or not voting.

Although Mr Davis expressed varying views on what a threshold might be for a referendum, the EU referendum failed to have ANY threshold.

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I have written to Mr Davis to ask him why, in view of the criteria he set in 2002 on how a referendum should be “done properly”, he could ever have considered the 2016 EU referendum and Brexit win to be fair and democratic?
  • Watch: 2-minute video of speech by David Davis in 2002:

Click here to view the embedded video.

  • Watch: 40-second video of Philip Hammond, in 2016, confirming that the EU referendum was flawed

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Catégories: European Union

The EU foreign policy paradox

ven, 11/02/2022 - 12:53
For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Prof Ben Tonra from University College Dublin, in Ireland.

 

 

 

 

 

euradio · The EU foreign policy paradox – Ideas on Europe

 

 

Foreign policy challenges are high on the EU’s agenda, but the member states are still having trouble working in common in this field.

True. Whether we are talking about addressing China’s human rights violations, Russian threats towards Ukraine or indeed one of Europe’s signature successes, the agreement on Iranian nuclear weapons, too often we are witness to individual capitals going their own way and in some cases, even vetoing restatement of well-established EU policy as in the case of the Middle East peace process.

 

But, Ben, didn’t the Lisbon Treaty promise us the final chapter on the Europeanization of national foreign policies?

In truth, the Treaty of Lisbon delivered a lot: the creation of a strengthened post of High Representative for foreign and security policy, the establishment of the European External Action Service and – in recent years – a huge acceleration in the development of defence policy, including the creation of the new European Defence Fund, the establishment of DG DEFIS in the Commission and now 60 individual projects to strengthen European military cooperation through PESCO.

At the same time, we must acknowledge that the EU’s international capacity is almost entirely a function of what its member states will allow it to do. And each of the 27 comes to the common EU foreign policy table with its own national perspectives, geographies and histories – a whole national baggage that shapes its response to foreign policy events, threats and opportunities.

 

So how can that be overcome?

The Member States know what the problem is – indeed they are collectively at the root of the problem.

They are trapped in a paradox: most of them ardently desire that the Union would speak strongly on the major foreign policy challenges of our times and deploy the Union’s significant resources towards those ends.

At the same time, they are reluctant – deeply reluctant – to cede power to the EU institutions in such a way as would make that possible. Whether it is hubris, fear or ego – each national capital is determined to hold on to the reigns of its own power.

As a result, the member states continue to struggle to carve agreed positions from their multiple perspectives and to design processes – such as the new Strategic Compass – to guide member states along a path which will build upon shared foundations. The problem of course is that the rest of the world is not going to wait for the Union to get its act together. Moreover, for some actors – such as Russia – the EU’s weaknesses and its incoherence – actually represent an opportunity to exploit.

 

So, what is to be recommended?

It is difficult to tell.

Certainly, it is unwise for the Union to overpromise and underdeliver. Statements such as ‘the Union must learn to speak the language of power’ or to commit to providing a ‘geopolitical Commission’ are off the mark. Frankly, ‘power’ – in the sense of traditional military power – is a foreign language to the European Union – and will likely continue to be so for some time to come.

Furthermore, considering the nature of threats coming from some member states within the Union towards its values and principles, the Union cannot rely on unanimity to deliver a strong, coherent foreign policy. The member states may need to get creative and exploit the opportunities for differentiated action. This of course also opens Europe to the danger of fragmentation – so one has to choose such a course carefully and with maximum support.

 

Differentiated action – would that not the opposite of a common policy?

I don’t think so. It would acknowledge that a European foreign policy which was not anchored in European values is not worth the name – and it would free those participating from the dead weight of the laggards and the subversives. It would, potentially, build a European foreign, security and defence policy that was seen to work.

 

Thank you very much, Ben, for this insight. All hope is not lost! “Ideas on Europe” will be back next week, and we will welcome Theofanis Exadaktylos, from the University of Surrey, in England.

 

First published on eu!radio.

 

 

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Catégories: European Union

Why Do some Labour Alliances Succeed in Politicizing Europe across Borders?

ven, 11/02/2022 - 12:00

Many studies on the politicization of the EU see the main dividing line running between transnational EU elites on one side and nationalist leaders whipping up anti-EU sentiments on the other. But the politicization of Europe is not a one-way street, as transnational democratic counter-movements have also emerged in response to recent EU integration pressures. As we show in our new JCMS article, which compares European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs) of European trade union federations, popular counter-movements are not necessarily constrained by national silos and nationalist outlooks. But under what conditions are labour alliances succeeding or failing in politicizing EU policymaking across borders?

Pairing two campaigns that were organized by similar actors allowed us to focus on key differences that explain the different outcomes of the campaigns. Our comparison reveals that actor-centred factors matter, namely unions’ ability to create broad social movement coalitions. Successful transnational labour campaigns, however, also depend on structural conditions, namely the prevailing mode of EU integration pressures faced by unions at a given time. Whereas the successful Right2Water ECI of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), pre-emptively countered commodification attempts by the European Commission in water services, the unsuccessful Fair Transport ECI of the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF) attempted to ensure fair working conditions after most of the transport sector had already been liberalized. Vertical integration attempts by EU executives that aim to commodify public services are thus more likely to generate successful counter-movements than the horizontal market integration pressures on wages and working conditions that followed earlier successful EU liberalization drives.

 

Strong union-social movement alliances: EPSU and ETF share similar structures of small secretariats with little authority over national affiliates, as well as similar methods of influencing Brussels policymaking. In other respects, EPSU was even in a weaker position compared to the ETF. Being the first to launch an ECI, EPSU could not learn from earlier campaigns, also its Right2Water campaign had a much smaller budget. EPSU succeeded against these odds as it could rely on union-social movement alliances that spanned from the local-community to the global level. Trade union officials were working together with grassroots activists, as more than half of the organizations assisting the collection of signatures belonged to grassroot movements, including the global justice and environmental movements. Such a wide-spanning web of alliances was not present in the ETF campaign and consequently it had difficulties reaching a broader audience.

The two campaigns had different goals and framed them in different ways to the public. EPSU’s ECI combined its anti-privatization message with an agenda of human rights that was broad enough to unite actors with diverging views on the details of water sector management. By focusing on the threat of privatization, EPSU also identified precise targets of discontent: the European Commission and the two large water multinationals, Veolia and Suez, which had benefited most from water services privatization in the past. The other goal of the Right2Water campaign, to make water services a human right connected a set of positive goals, such as good drinking water and wastewater facilities. The framing of the Fair Transport initiative was built around the idea of fair competition between all transport operators. These demands side-lined the point that, no matter how fair competition is, it still creates inequalities and tensions. This alienated the ETF campaign from more radical unions who were against competition tout court and it had little currency among workers in the EU’s East and South. ETF also framed its Fair Transport ECI exclusively in industrial relations terms which made it difficult to find non-union allies. Social movement-union coalitions and framing around well-defined goals are actor-centred factors that can explain the different outcomes of the campaigns. At a deeper level, however, actors’ choices in the two cases were structured by the different modes of EU integration.

 

Horizontal vs. vertical EU integration. We distinguish between two modes of EU integration pressures: vertical integration advances through direct interventions by a ‘supranational political, legal or corporate authority’; horizontal integration refers to the increasing exposure to transnational market pressures. Horizontal integration reinforces the opacity of power relations and provides few tangible targets for mobilization, while vertical interventions are easier to politicize, albeit within a limited timeframe, as the impact of vertical intervention increases horizontal competition in the medium term.

After the earlier vertical EU laws liberalizing one transport modality after another, horizontal market pressures are prevalent in the transport sector. This hinders transnational action, as horizontal integration puts workers in competition with each other across different transport type (public versus private) modality (rail against road) and geographical areas. By contrast, the Commission’s more recent vertical liberalization attempts in the water sector, that started with the proposal of the Services in the Internal Market (Bolkestein) directive, provided crystallization points for successful transnational collective action.

Similarly, the more service providers are subject to horizontal market integration pressures, the more difficult it becomes to find a common platform with service users. Whereas vertical EU laws motivated unions, consumer groups, environmental NGOs, and even municipal water companies to support the Right2Water ECI, horizontal competitive pressures across modalities go a long way towards explaining the absence of such alliances in the Fair Transport case. Had the Fair Transport ECI focused on public rail transport, it would have been easier to attract support from environmental groups. This idea did not prevail however, given ETF’s aim to also represent workers from other modalities competing with rail.

Our findings have several implications for EU integration scholars and union activists alike. For activists we send the optimistic message that the lack of day-to-day cross-border contacts between workers (a characteristic of non-traded public services including water provision) does not have to be a hindrance on transnational action. Public service unions can create effective transnational links not only with unions in other countries, but also with social movements. For the theory of EU integration, we highlight the importance of interest politics at the meso-level, and show how vertical and horizontal integration pressures shape social actors’ ability to politicize the EU across borders, which is a precondition for its democratization.

The blog draws on the JCMS article Why Do some Labour Alliances Succeed in Politicizing Europe across Borders? A Comparison of the Right2Water and Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiatives

 

 

Imre G. Szabo and Darragh Golden are postdoctoral research fellows in the ERC project Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime at University College Dublin.

 

 

 

Roland Erne is professor of European integration and employment relations at University College Dublin and principal investigator of the ERC project Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime.

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Catégories: European Union

EU Competition Policy and Healthcare: starter questions for future directions

jeu, 10/02/2022 - 08:18

EUHealthGov started 2022 with its third quarterly seminar on 12th January – a roundtable on EU competition policy in healthcare which aimed to identify future directions in light of the 2020 CJEU Dôvera judgment regarding private and state health insurance in Slovakia, and the Casa Regina Apostolorum case (currently on appeal to the CJEU) concerning state subsidy of certain Italian hospitals. We were delighted to be joined by a range of experts from across Europe to consider how these challenges to the state aid rules may give the EU courts scope to clarify or reaffirm earlier approaches as private sector delivery of healthcare becomes more widespread in European healthcare systems.

Dr Mary Guy (Lancaster) introduced the discussions by setting out the approaches taken in previous cases and how the EU competition law framework in healthcare cases indicates a distinction between healthcare purchasing and providing activities. Conceptions of competition and solidarity have also characterised case law to date with distinctions which may prove less sustainable as more Member States experiment with expanding private sector delivery of healthcare. While responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have affected the application particularly of the state aid rules, the wider competition law framework in healthcare cases continues to develop along established lines.

Professor Johan van de Gronden (Radboud University Nijmegen) discussed the Commission and General Court’s findings in Casa Regina Apostolorum to outline distinctions between social insurance-based and taxation-funded healthcare systems. These seem to indicate that the latter has more room for manoeuvre under EU competition policy than the former, prompting the question of whether the trigger of an economic activity can be reconceptualised to be neutral to the design of Member State healthcare systems, or to refocus attention on the extent of public financing of healthcare.

Dr Bruno Nikolić (Ljubljana University) considered how Casa Regina Apostolorum fit with analyses in earlier case law, highlighting the inconsistency of referencing social health insurance cases when assessing the nature of health service providers under EU competition policy. This seems to prompt ongoing questions about the dividing line between economic and non-economic activities in health, and why we would (in general) exclude health services provided in public healthcare systems from EU competition policy.

Dr Marc Wiggers (Loyens Loeff Amsterdam) compared and contrasted approaches taken by the EU institutions Dôvera with the Dutch state aid case which accompanied the 2006 competition reforms in Dutch healthcare with the move from state sickness funds to private health insurance. By setting out an examination framework comprising social objectives, solidarity, the scope for profit-making and state supervision, it is possible to see how distinctions between profit and solidarity may emerge between the EU and national levels.

We look forward to developing this conversation in the future!

A recording of the event is available here.

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Catégories: European Union

The German ‘traffic light’ coalition: no commitment to stronger spending powers for the EU

ven, 14/01/2022 - 09:52

With the new ‘traffic light’ government in Germany, one could have expected a game changer in Germany’s approach to fiscal integration. Instead, the coalition agreement is a compromise between maintaining the old fiscal regulatory framework and showing some moderate opening towards new European spending powers.

The so-called ‘traffic light’ coalition in Germany is made up by the the Social Democrats (SDP), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP) (Photo: Francisco Welter-Schultes, CC0 1.0)

The coalition agreement of the new German government led by Olaf Scholz does not advocate for providing the EU with stronger spending powers after the pandemic – something often discussed and considered necessary for a better functioning of the EU. As a result, the agreement mirrors much more the position of the Liberals (FDP, in favour of the ‘old’ EU fiscal rules) rather than the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens (in favour of new spending powers). The approach to EU fiscal integration of the Scholz cabinet will thus probably be marked by much more continuity to the previous Merkel governments than expected.

SDP, Greens and FDP: different preferences on EU fiscal integration

Such continuity is surprising considering the party manifestos of SPD and Greens. SPD and Greens want to permanently provide the EU with a more autonomous spending capacity through new European taxes. Next Generation EU should become a permanent fund for investments, thus opening the doors to a fiscal union. The Stability and Growth Pact should be reformed to make it more flexible. Institutionally, both parties support more powers of the Commission and the European Parliament on EU fiscal policy. On the contrary, the FDP is against more spending powers for the EU. The party aims at strengthening the existing fiscal rules. For FDP, Next Generation EU and its ‘debt-oriented’ approach are to be temporary limited and one-off and should not lead to a debt union (Schuldenunion, a word much used by the Merkel governments).

Hence, whereas SPD and Greens wish to institutionalize a new EU fiscal capacity after the pandemic, the Liberals want as soon as possible to re-institutionalize the fiscal rules of the Stability and Growth Pact (currently suspended due to the pandemic). Against these divergences, what is the fiscal synthesis included in the ‘traffic light’ coalition agreement between the SPD (red), the Greens (green) and the FDP (yellow)?

The coalition agreement and EU fiscal integration: (almost) no big surprise

Given that SPD (25.7 %) and Greens (14.8 %) together obtained 40.5 % of the votes against the Liberal’s 11.5 %, we would have expected a game changer in Germany’s approach to fiscal integration. Instead, the coalition agreement is a light compromise on keeping in place the old fiscal regulatory framework and showing some moderate opening towards new European spending powers. As a matter of fact, the coalition agreement aims to strengthen and deepen Economic and Monetary Union but does not specify how to do so. The three parties want to secure growth, to preserve the sustainability of debt and to provide sustainable and climate-friendly investments. However, they plan to do so without substantially amending the Stability and Growth Pact. Crucially, Next Generation EU is defined as an instrument limited in time and amount whose conditionality must be effectively enforced. SPD, Greens and FDP commit to the agreement on the recovery fund and on the new own resources of the Multiannual Financial Framework, but the coalition agreement adds that ‘related proposals will be examined accordingly’. Germany should remain an anchor of stability (Stabilitätsanker) in Europe. The coalition agreement identifies solidity of public finances as tenet of the budgetary and finance policy of the new coalition – both at national and at European level.

We would have expected a game changer in Germany’s approach to fiscal integration. Instead, the coalition agreement is a light compromise on keeping in place the old fiscal regulatory framework and showing some moderate opening towards new European spending powers.

The future of EU fiscal integration after the COVID-19 pandemic: no paradigm change envisaged

In an article published in 1993, Peter A. Hall distinguished three types of policy change: the goals, the instruments and the settings. If a policy faces a re-definition of its goals and instruments, it will experience a radical, i.e. a paradigmatic change. On the contrary, if change affects the instruments and their settings only, change will be moderate, i.e. incremental: it adds new elements to the existing policy without subverting its core functioning. If we read the three party manifestos through the lenses of paradigmatic policy change, we see that SPD and Greens argue for the need of a paradigmatic change to EU fiscal integration, whereas the FDP would support some form of incremental change – making the pre-pandemic regulatory framework stricter.

Surprisingly enough, the fiscal synthesis of two parties in favour of paradigmatic change and one party supporting an incremental change results in a much less ambitious text than expected. There is no mention of increasing the EU’s spending capacity nor any other concrete measure on how to complete the Economic and Monetary Union. On the contrary, the Stability and Growth Pact should be more effectively enforced. No priority is granted to the introduction of new resources to the EU budget.

By stressing member states’ exclusive responsibility for their fiscal policy as a tenet of fiscal integration, the text closes the door on establishing a fiscal union. The need for increasing investments at EU level and in Germany has been recognized, but the preservative approach in favour of the status quo remains there. As a result, a significant deepening of integration after the pandemic will be difficult without having Germany on board. This seems true considering that the presidency of Emmanuel Macron – who had repeatedly advocated paradigmatic change to EU fiscal integration – is about to finish. Recent polls suggest he is the favourite for re-election but it is too early to predict the outcome of the French election of 10 April 2022. In Italy, the fate of the Draghi government depends on whether Draghi himself remains prime ministers or becomes president of the Republic. The lack of ‘propulsive force’ on the side of the new German government might result in losing the critical juncture of the COVID-19 pandemic to significantly advance on the road towards closer EU fiscal integration.

A traffic light strongly blinking yellow: the finance ministry led by the FDP

Crucially, the FDP seems to have influenced the fiscal policy of the new government more than its proportional weight in the coalition would have suggested – both at European and at national level. The leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, has become the new German finance minister. This ministry is given a particular importance in Germany. According to §26 of the procedural motion of the German government, if on a matter regarding public finances the government decides without or against the vote of the finance minister, the latter can veto such decision. The veto can only be overcome through unanimity among the ministers, otherwise the decision needs to be stopped. In addition to that, the finance minister clearly plays a key role on EU fiscal policy through his vote in the ECOFIN Council – which impacts both on issues pertaining to the enforcement of EU fiscal rules as part of the Stability and Growth Pact and also on decisions regarding new resources to the EU budget.

The FDP seems to have influenced the fiscal policy of the new government more than its proportional weight in the coalition would have suggested

The new German government will have to be judged based on what it concretely does. So far, we only have political plans on paper. What will then be possible in practice is another issue. However, on EU fiscal integration the new coalition agreement seems to blink more yellow than red or green. A traffic light blinking yellow might on some occasion be the moment immediately before proceeding forward. On some others, it might be the sign for stopping.

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Catégories: European Union

A new year of Brexiting

jeu, 13/01/2022 - 07:35

The arrival of 2022 has brought both continuity and change to the UK’s relationship with the EU.

The resignation of Lord Frost in December has precipitated a major reorganisation (possibly still on-going) of the government’s management of EU and Brexit affairs, but the new point on the relationship – Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – has very much stuck to the same talking notes on the Northern Ireland Protocol as her predecessor.

The reorganisation starts to break up the significant collection of roles that Frost had built up in the past couple of years, probably more because of his proximity to Boris Johnson than through any conscious project of coordinating the multiple aspects of the work.

The move of the bilateral relationship out to the FCDO fits with a more natural model of diplomacy, and normalises EU relations as just part of the furniture, but it comes with a number of real challenges for Truss and her junior minister, man of letters Chris Heaton-Harris (who is presumably going to be even more delayed with that book).

Firstly, WA and TCA implementation covers a wide range of departments’ activities, so lots of coordination will be needed. Secondly, Johnson will retain a big interest in the portfolio, so handling the FCDO-No.10 connection will also need much attention.

The work on borders and on ‘Brexit opportunities’ is still up in the air; as Jill Rutter well argues, each could be well snaffled up by other departments, either as an on-going whole or in parts. That this remains unaddressed in the near-month since the FCDO move suggests stasis is the more likely option, given the limited shelf life of each project.

The graphic below summarises the changes and we’ll come back to it as anything happens.

On the continuity front, the switch from Frost to Truss has also seen the continuing ambiguity about how hard the UK wants to push to close the Protocol negotiations with the Commission. The initial contacts with the latter seem to have been couched – again – in terms of getting things sorted ‘as soon as possible’, rather than to any fixed timeline.

One question that lingers is that of whether the continued threat of using Article 16 carries either any weight in Brussels or even any seriousness in London: certainly, it has the air of being ritualistically waved about, rather than being ready to go.

I’ve discussed this question in the newest episode of A Diet of Brussels, and didn’t really come to a clear conclusion, mainly because the increasingly wounded Johnson might still go either way on this. Invoking Article 16 might be a way to rally the party to his cause once more, but it also risks making the ‘doneness’ of Brexit even more open to question.

So all still to be settled then.

Just like last year. And the ones before that.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic97

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Catégories: European Union

France 2022: Back on the couch

lun, 10/01/2022 - 12:50

How fitting: this spring, ARTE, the brainy French-German TV channel, will broadcast a second season of ‘En thérapie’, the French version of ‘In Treatment’ (itself based on the Israeli TV hit “Be Tipul”). 35 new episodes of people on the psychiatrist’s couch, composing what Le Monde called ‘an immobile travel across French society in the wake of the 2015 terror attacks.’ The first season, broadcast in early 2021, had been a totally unexpected success, more than doubling the channel’s average audience.

The exact broadcasting slot is not yet communicated, but end of April would no doubt be the best timing. The election campaign France is likely to have over the next months will leave the entire nation ripe for an in-depth collective therapy, worn out by endlessly quoted hysterical tweets, tired of its own paradoxes, and no wiser than before in its painful post-election hangover.

The first days of the new year have given a taste of what is to come. The polemic around the European flag under the Arc de Triomphe – meant to announce the French Presidency of the European Council, but threatening to ‘erase French identity’ according to the supposedly moderate conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse – has been a good teaser for the manner in which the presidential campaign will unfold. Ridiculous in its fake indignation and yet worrying in its real obsession with polarising at all costs.

Not to mention Emmanuel Macron’s carefully calculated “piss off”-interview with Le Parisien – which not only resulted in yet another predictable bashing of the President’s presumed contempt for ordinary people, while causing serious translation headaches for news correspondents across the continent, but also in over 230,000 new first jabs in one week, bringing the French vaccination rate to 92.2% of eligible individuals.

Two inflamed polemics in less than a week, and that’s while the President has not even declared his own candidacy yet. The Fifth Republic’s implacable logic of full confrontation and permanent rhetorical overbidding has set in and will continue to take speed over the next weeks, fuelled by a very peculiar media landscape.

French election campaigns are a painful experience for any observer who follows them with a minimum of empathy for this country. De Gaulle’s introduction of the direct election of the President, through a referendum in 1962 following the dissolution of a parliament refusing to be bulldozed, has held the Fifth Republic in a terrible stranglehold. What I wrote at the outset of the campaign five years ago is just as valid today: rather than refer to ‘path-dependency’, we should speak of ‘path imprisonment’.

France has always been a highly complicated society that is extremely difficult to understand from outside. Even the most scrupulous, well-intended observers rely on a good dose of stereotypical knowledge and seemingly revealing key words. But the relative stability of political behaviour patterns at the surface of the Republic cannot conceal the dramatic changes French society has undergone over the last decades. After having spent the past thirty years in this idiosyncratic sociocultural, linguistic and political environment, I wonder if it has not become increasingly difficult to decipher.

One more reason to accompany the weeks and months ahead with a modest attempt at addressing some of the issues that will dominate the unfolding election campaign. A lot of different topics deserve to be scrutinised,

  • starting with the deep soul-searching across the entire political spectrum of what still holds the country together,
  • but also more technical aspects, like the planned and unintended consequences of primaries held (or painstakingly avoided) and the disturbing uncertainty surrounding the legislative elections in June,
  • the seemingly unstoppable decline of the left and the strange phenomenon of the huge gap between the national and local/regional level of politics, dominated by two totally different ideological forces and fault lines,
  • ongoing attempts at historical revisionism and forthcoming challenges to collective memory,
  • and even the good old proverbial French pessimism deserves a second look in the light of recent surveys.

Without any pretension to be able to explain everything, it’s a good moment to invite French politics to lie down on the couch again.

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Catégories: European Union

The Wider Europe: a time for experiments

ven, 07/01/2022 - 08:53

The next steps in the EU’s constitutional development must involve greater care for the wider Europe, Andrew Duff argues. He proposes the introduction of a new category of EU affiliate membership, allowing the EU’s western and eastern neighbours alike to become stable and reliable partners.

Enlargement must only proceed if it enhances the EU’s own security and that of the applicants. (Illustration: Dati Bendo/European Union)

One of the more diverting exercises in literary criticism during 2022 will be the simultaneous publication of NATO’s Strategic Concept and the EU’s Strategic Compass. Why do we need two documents to define the security interests of the West? The answer, like most things, lies in history. France feared that NATO would serve to expand American influence in Europe while Britain opposed the development of a security policy under EU auspices. Brexit has helpfully removed the British blockage on Europe’s common foreign and security policy. President Macron, meanwhile, advocates European sovereign autonomy not as a substitute for US engagement but as a supplement to it. The provocations of President Putin, not least in Ukraine, stimulate the coming together of the EU and NATO.

Security architecture

In my recent book Britain and the Puzzle of European Union (forthcoming 2022) I propose a reform of security architecture to underpin the new alignment. A European Security Council, chaired by an EU defence minister, would combine the efforts of the two Brussels based organisations — keeping the Americans alongside while encouraging Germany to upgrade its contribution to Europe’s defence against Russia. The purpose of the Security Council is to help NATO think strategically while enabling the EU to act militarily.

An early benefit of such a new configuration would be a common policy on enlargement. NATO’s open-door policy led to the glib promise in 2008 of NATO membership to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova as well as to the haphazard admission of Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia — none of which has added to Europe’s security (indeed, rather the contrary). In a similar and uncoordinated spasm, the European Union in 2003 offered the prospect of enlargement to all six countries of the Western Balkans. The EU also allowed its 2014 association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to be portrayed as being preparatory to candidacy for membership. This lax approach was, of course, encouraged by the UK which saw eastern enlargement as a way to blunt the federal tendency in Brussels.

Subsequent events suggest that those of us who expressed disquiet at these facile promises were correct. (Indeed, one may chastise oneself for not being more outspoken against them at the time.) As I have written recently in a European Policy Centre paper Dealing with the Neighbours, there is still a basic dishonesty at the heart of the EU’s enlargement policy. All potential candidate states suffer to a greater or lesser extent from an excess of nationalism, antisemitism, ethnic and religious tension, and unstable rule by corrupt judges and politicians. Most are quarrelling with their neighbours.

The prospect of further enlargement is viewed with alarm by most of the current member states. Although the Commission has introduced stricter verification of the accession process, Emmanuel Macron makes it clear that the Union will no longer continue to amiably ignore the Copenhagen enlargement criteria. Even were the technical accession requirements to be met, the EU’s rule of rigid unanimity (involving 27 national parliaments or referendums) poses an insuperable obstacle to actual enlargement (Art. 49 Treaty on European Union, TEU).

The problem, however, goes deeper. It is not only the case that the potential candidates are ineligible for membership, but also that the government of the EU itself is so muddled and inept that it cannot possibly shoulder the burden of running the Western Balkans or face Kremlin aggression with a united front. Failure to proceed with political reform of the Union since 2005 has rendered it incapable of enlarging. The time is over when the Union could pretend to welcome applicants when they pretended to be ready.

Affiliate membership?

I have proposed that at the next revision of the EU treaties a new category of affiliate membership is created (Art. 49a TEU). This would allow those European states which commit to the values of the EU and fall within its regulatory orbit but which do not espouse the goal of political, economic and monetary union to become stable and reliable partners.

For the EU’s western neighbours — Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and the UK — affiliate membership would imply an upgrading of their present, different, unsatisfactory association or free trade agreements. Partial official engagement of the affiliate states with the political, administrative and judicial institutions of the Union would enable the partnership to develop in a stable, legitimate and democratic fashion. Some attributes of EU citizenship could be shared with affiliates in a spirit of good neighbourliness (Art. 8 TEU). Full participation in EU spending programmes could be envisaged. Affiliate status should be regarded as a durable settlement rather than a springboard for full membership.

For the EU’s eastern neighbours, affiliate membership would encourage economic and political convergence on EU norms without the challenge of leaping improbable hurdles involving the ultimate sacrifice of national sovereignty. It should encourage regional collaboration between, for example, Albania and Serbia. It would allow for closer political cooperation with Brussels and the systematic joint management of EU funding. Affiliate EU membership underpinned by the European Security Council would provide eastern Europe with an unprecedented level of stability and security.

Affiliate membership would also offer, should it be needed, a parking place for any current EU member state that sought to dissociate itself from an EU on the path towards federal union. Relegation to affiliate status would avoid the humiliation of secession (Art. 50 TEU).

Intermediate accession?

Working on the same assumption that the EU’s present enlargement policy is bust, the Centre for European Policy Studies has published a comparable but alternative proposal to mine. Michael Emerson, Milena Lazarevic, Steven Blockmans and Strahinja Subotic suggest that the candidate states should be admitted in stages to full membership of the Union. They propose an ingenious template for gradual accession in phases, involving partial participation in EU institutions. In the final pre-accession phase, after meeting various tests, the ‘new member states’ would be admitted to the EU Council but deprived of their right of unilateral veto. It is hoped that their participation only in decisions of the Council taken by qualified majority vote (QMV) would act avant la lettre as an example for all member states to emulate. Emerson and his colleagues are more optimistic than me.

Our two papers agree on many things, however, including the necessity of treaty revision, the extension of QMV and the need for a smaller Commission. We insist that the EU should reflect more deeply than it has done on the implications of Brexit for the constitutional evolution of the Union. Enlargement is not an academic exercise: it must only proceed if it enhances the EU’s own security and that of the applicants. It can hardly be in Serbia’s interest to join a Union which is not working well.

The next steps in the Union’s constitutional development must involve greater care for the wider Europe. It’s surely time to experiment. Maybe the Conference on the Future of Europe can help. Addressing the problem of the EU’s neighbourhood — east and west — has to involve the neighbours directly in constitutional discussions. Differentiated integration does not stop at the borders of the EU 27. A European Union more confident about its own region will be in a better position to project its values and protect its interests worldwide.

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