On Friday, June 17th at 1:15pm EST, IPI together with the Government of the Republic of Estonia are cohosting a policy forum on women, peace, and diplomacy. Speakers at the event will share their insights on the impact of more female voices at the United Nations and beyond—including in peace and security decision making around the world.
IPI Live Event Feed
The positive impact of women’s leadership on peace, security, and development is widely recognized in policymaking at the United Nations. There is mounting evidence that women’s participation is not only a right but a necessity to sustain peace and political solutions after conflict. Women’s presence in foreign policy decision making is increasing, and despite their continued under-representation, experienced and outspoken women leaders are active in every region of the world.
This event will feature a panel of experienced female officials and experts to reflect on the impact of more female voices at the United Nations—from the Security Council, to senior leadership, to peacekeeping operations. The speakers will reflect on the gender dynamics of their work in diplomacy, mediation, and foreign policy at large. Panelists will also be asked to share their thoughts on the UN’s senior appointment process and how long-standing commitments to appoint more women could be realized.
Keynote presentation:
H.E. Ms. Marina Kaljurand, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Estonia
Discussants:
H.E. Ms. Lana Nusseibeh, Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates to the United Nations
H.E. Ms. Raimonda Murmokaitė, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Lithuania to the United Nations
Ms. Elmira Bayrasli, Co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, visiting Fellow at the New America Foundation, and lecturer at New York University
Ms. Marie O’Reilly, Head of Research, Institute for Inclusive Security
Moderator:
Ms. Andrea Ó Súilleabháin, Senior Policy Analyst, IPI
You can read here the article on Greece and the European normalisation, which was written by Professor Emeritus and Member of the Board of Trustees of ELIAMEP Theodore Couloumbis. This commentary was published on 12 June 2016 in the Sunday edition of Kathimerini. It is available in Greek.
The new book of Loukas Tsoukalis: In Defense of Europe. Can the European project be saved? is published by Oxford University Press. Europe has not been so weak and divided for a long time. Buffeted by a succession of crises, it has shown a strong collective survival instinct but a poor capacity to deliver. Loukas Tsoukalis is critical of the way Europe has handled its multiple crises in recent years. He addresses the key issues and difficult choices facing Europe today.
In particular:
- Can Europe hold together? Under what terms? And for what purpose?
- A look at the key choices facing Europe today, by a leading political economist and former special adviser to the President of the European Commission
- Explains how the international financial crisis has become an existential crisis of European integration
- Asks whether Europe can ovecome the basic contradiction of a currency without a state
- Looks at how the European Union can accommodate greater internal diversity – and thereby hope to avoid a Brexit or a Grexit
- Examines whether there is an irreconcilable contradiction between Europe’s yearning for soft power and the hard realities of the world outside
Book Reviews
‘An inexorable analysis. An eye opener, a heart cry from a true European’ - Herman van Rompuy, former President of the European Council
‘A deeply insightful book that illuminates how only a combination of skill and passion can save Europe’ – Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy
‘The European project has traditionally been driven by the region’s political, business and technocratic elites, with ordinary people indifferent and often hostile to it, even as benficiaries. This clear-sighted, non-idelogical book shows how this has to change for the project to survive. Tsoukalis argues Europe needs a wide range of reforms that deepens integration in some areas, while allowing for greater differentiation and democratic decision-making in others. He eschews simple solutions and magic pills. It is the book’s great virtue that is clarifies both the scale of the problem and some of the ways forward’ – Dani Rodrik, Harvard Kennedy School
‘This is an important and enlightening book in which one of the most knowledgeable scholars of European integration takes a hard look at what has has gone wrong over the last quarter century. Though deeply committed to the success of the European project, the author’s account of present European crises is characterized not only by an unflinching realism but also by the masterly integration of economic and political analyses – and by the perceptive reconstruction of the conflicting interests and (mis-) perceptions that explain German, British and Greek contributions to present policy failures. Remarkably, nevertheless, the book ends neither in a counsel of despair nor in idealistic precepts but in a series of pragmatic proposals whose usefulness is not obviously in conflict with political feasibility’ – Fritz W. Scharpf, Max Planck Institute
‘As ever thoughtful and thought-provoking, Loukas Tsoukalis prompts us to re-examine the fundamentals of contemporary European integration. His deep analysis is timely, nuanced and challenging’ - Dame Helen Wallace FBA, British Academy
In the eyes of Greeks the meaning of Social Europe has changed over time, spanning the range from funds to promote social cohesion to externally enforced welfare state reforms in an austerity context. To the extent Greeks became familiar with Social Europe, they never took it to heart but would admit that they have periodically benefited from Social Europe’s tangible outlays, such as the European Structural Funds. Nowadays the Greek experience of a protracted economic crisis and a sudden refugee crisis can contribute towards rethinking Social Europe.
Welcome and unwelcome aspects of Social Europe
In pre-crisis Greece, Social Europe used to mean a welcome invitation to make Greece’s living standards converge with those of the rest of the EU. It also meant a less welcome push to introduce into Greece labour market and pension reforms, which would alter a patronage-based divide between insiders and outsiders.
European social policies, including active labor market policies and flexicurity, were alien in Greek society. Social Europe was not received well in a society in which many thought that they were entitled to a stable job and welfare benefits, dispensed by the state, by virtue of belonging to a group treated differently from other groups.
Examples of insider groups included civil servants, bank employees, journalists and the liberal professions. The majority of the rest were outsiders. An insider-outsider division has been the result of a particular historical legacy of state-society relations.
Social equity Greek style
Greeks hold complicated views on social equity. On the one hand they entertain egalitarian ideas as, in contrast to other European societies, there has never been an influential landed aristocracy in the Greece, while heavy industrialization was mostly absent from the country’s path to development.
On the other hand, Greeks often show more social solidarity with the narrow occupational group to which they belong rather than with the weaker social strata in general. While most Greeks reject any kind of social privilege, they simultaneously adhere to tailor-made, occupation-based privileges, such as rights to early retirement available to selected groups or preferential access to public sector jobs through political party patronage.
Social Europe after the crisis: from entitlement to austerity
After the crisis struck, the EU-imposed fiscal consolidation of the Greek economy led to the expansion of poverty, soaring unemployment and a deeper insider-outsider division between Greeks who have been relatively untouched by the crisis and their co-patriots who have been economically destroyed by it.
The economic crisis was very quickly transformed into a social crisis. Social Europe was flushed out of Greece along with the bathwater of relatively generous pensions, incommensurate to past insurance contributions, and wages standing higher than productivity levels.
Meanwhile, successive Greek governments fought to support their political clienteles by preventing substantive reforms in the aforementioned highly discriminatory welfare system, which pits insiders against outsiders. This is a fight that continues to this day. Thus, in crisis-ridden Greece, Social Europe has been associated, not so much with the rationalization of the welfare state, as with deep social spending cuts.
Rethinking Social Europe
However, as soon as the refugee crisis broke out in 2015 and hundreds of thousands of desperate people landed on Greek islands, Greeks rushed to offer help. Noticing the glaring absence of central state authorities, Greeks started pouring clothes, shoes, food and medicines on to incoming waves of refugees. Suddenly for Greeks, who during the crisis had taken Social Europe to mean indiscriminate austerity measures, being a European now meant sharing one’s own reduced resources with non-Europeans emerging from the sea.
Seeing a real humanitarian crisis from close by, Greeks have started putting Greek and European politics in perspective. In 2015 populist promises that other Europeans would rally around an anti-austerity Greek and South European vision to reshape Social Europe have evaporated. Pre-electoral claims that all that was necessary for Greeks to enjoy pre-crisis living conditions was to banish the EU-imposed austerity packages have contributed to the government turnover of 2015, but have soon proven futile. Almost every Greek has realized that a patronage-based system of welfare is normatively indefensible and financially unsustainable.
Distrust and dissatisfaction with the EU
But the fact that unfettered and one-size-fits-all austerity can rapidly lead an once relatively prosperous EU Member-State, such as Greece, to acute social crisis, has indicated how fragile Social Europe has become as well.
On this issue, the governing coalition of Syriza party with the right-wing Independent Greeks party, which has been in power since January 2015, believes that in the past Social Europe spelled the undermining, rather than the protection, of workers’ rights, for example, through introducing unacceptable flexibility in labour relations.
Finally, the coalition of Syriza would like to see more flexibility in the Stability and Growth Pact’s rules and the abandonment of Fiscal Compact, so as to allow national governments in Member States to follow expansionist economic policies. Simultaneously the radical left/right coalition distrusts the strengthening of decision-making powers of EU’core, including a stronger EU budget. Yet Syriza does call for an EU-wide increase in public investment.
Source: Clingendael
Author: Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos
On Thursday, June 16th at 1:15pm EST, IPI is hosting a Global Leaders Series presentation featuring H.E. Dr. Srgjan Kerim, candidate for the position of United Nations secretary-general.
IPI Live Event Feed
At the event, Dr. Kerim will discuss his experience and how it informs his vision of the future of global politics and the United Nations. He will address questions including how he would shape the job of UN secretary-general and define his priorities in office.
In December 2015, the government of the Republic of Macedonia formally nominated Dr. Kerim as a candidate for the position of UN secretary-general. Dr. Kerim is Foreign Affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Macedonia and a member of the Council of Presidents of the UN General Assembly.
Dr. Kerim has more than 30 years of international political experience, as Foreign Minister, Ambassador of the Republic of Macedonia, and President of the 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly in New York.