European Union

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Ministers of the Eurozone meet on 7 July in Brussels to discuss the consequences of the 5 July referendum in Greece.

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EU Ministers responsibles of Sport meet on 6 July in Luxembourg.

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This study provides an overview of China’s current approach to foreign policy and external relations. It focuses more particularly on the role and actions of China in global governance, its territorial claims and relations with countries in Asia, and its emergence as an important actor in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood. It assesses the implications for the EU and makes recommendations on how the EU should deepen its strategic partnership with China. The study argues that China has not made a unilateral and exclusive turn towards assertiveness in its foreign policy. China’s foreign policy assertiveness represents a policy choice that should be understood in the broader context of its external relations, which is one of uncertainty. Both the impact of China’s emergence in international affairs and the use China intends to make of its power and influence remain uncertain. This uncertainty is explained by the interdependence between a number of international and domestic factors as well as by the absence of a grand strategy. The uncertainty in China’s foreign policy opens avenues for the EU to influence China and further deepen the scope of the EU-China Strategic Partnership.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

This study provides an overview of China’s current approach to foreign policy and external relations. It focuses more particularly on the role and actions of China in global governance, its territorial claims and relations with countries in Asia, and its emergence as an important actor in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood. It assesses the implications for the EU and makes recommendations on how the EU should deepen its strategic partnership with China. The study argues that China has not made a unilateral and exclusive turn towards assertiveness in its foreign policy. China’s foreign policy assertiveness represents a policy choice that should be understood in the broader context of its external relations, which is one of uncertainty. Both the impact of China’s emergence in international affairs and the use China intends to make of its power and influence remain uncertain. This uncertainty is explained by the interdependence between a number of international and domestic factors as well as by the absence of a grand strategy. The uncertainty in China’s foreign policy opens avenues for the EU to influence China and further deepen the scope of the EU-China Strategic Partnership.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

DRAFT REPORT containing a motion for a non-legislative resolution on the draft Council decision on the conclusion of the Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Partnership and Cooperation between the European Union and its Member States, of the one part, and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, of the other part
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Barbara Lochbihler

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

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Eurojust is a judicial cooperation body created to help provide safety within an area of freedom, security and justice set up in 2002 to improve the fight against serious crime by facilitating the optimal co-ordination of action for investigations and prosecutions.

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Greece’s recently-departed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis repeatedly argued that Greece could never leave the eurozone because there is nothing in the EU treaties that permits exit from the bloc’s common currency. But that hasn’t stopped EU lawyers from looking.

According to eurozone officials, EU legal scholars have been combing through the treaties to find provisions that would allow for Grexit – not because it is something they’re pushing for, but rather because they’re worried the country could be soon entering a legal limbo that could prevent it from getting the financial aid it desperately needs.

If Greece begins printing its own money – which could happen in a matter of weeks if the European Central Bank decides to cut off emergency loans to Greek financial institutions – it may no longer be eligible for aid from the eurozone’s €500bn rescue fund, since it is using a different currency.

But because Greece would still be legally part of the eurozone, it wouldn’t be eligible for the aid scheme reserved for non-EU countries, known as a “balance of payments assistance” programme. Hungary, Romania and pre-euro Latvia all received so-called “BPA” programmes during the crisis.

The traditional assumption is that because there is no explicit way to leave the eurozone, the only clause that comes into play is Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which allows for withdrawal from the entire EU. This would require Greece to request a departure, however, which is unlikely, and while there are an increasing number of leaders willing to let Greece leave the eurozone, none want it to leave the EU.

Officials say lawyers are instead looking at Article 7, which was adopted for a very different reason: In the wake of the Austrian government’s decision to include the far-right Freedom Party of nationalist Jörg Haider in a coalition, EU leaders wanted a way to punish countries that did not live up to European values.

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Dovilė Rimkutė

As Majone (1999) has observed, the approval of EU authority – as a predominantly regulatory political system – is based on the perception that supranational regulation corrects market failures by relying on a technical exercise and scientific knowledge managed by independent regulators, e.g. the European Commission and European independent agencies. Experts and scientific knowledge has played a key role in EU politics and its significance is increasing as well as takes on new shapes (Gornitzka and Holst, 2015). However, against this backdrop, an increasing body of literature has observed that scientific experts’ involvement in regulatory processes is rather contested (Gornitzka and Holst, 2015; Schrefler, 2010; Radaelli, 2009; Boswell, 2008). Scholars argue that even though regulatory duties are deemed to be a highly scientific pursuit predominantly focused on the technical-instrumental use of scientific knowledge, expertise can actually have many functions in policy/decision-making. That is, alongside the technical-instrumental (or problem-solving) use of knowledge, European regulators can also employ strategic or symbolic uses of scientific expertise.

To that end, the recent publications of Rimkutė and Haverland (2015) and Rimkutė (2015) contribute to this scholarship focusing on the role and functions of scientific knowledge by empirically examining how expertise is used by European regulators and by providing theoretical explanations regarding the variance in scientific knowledge use by supranational regulators.

 

How do scientists perceive their role in EU policy-making?

The article entitled “How does the European Commission use scientific expertise? Results from a survey of scientific members of the Commission’s expert committees” builds on the recent scholarship introducing a typology of knowledge use (Schrefler, 2010; Radaelli, 2009; Boswell, 2008) and suggests further improvements in its conceptualisation and operationalization, however, in particular it aims at empirical contribution. The article informs the debates on the role of scientific expertise in European Union policy-making, a query that is particularly relevant in the case of the Commission’s exclusive responsibility and duty to initiate proposals. In this article, we sought to go beyond the existing case studies by systematically tapping into the use of scientific knowledge across various policy issues and Directorates General (DG) of the Commission. We contribute to the literature with a large-N study in which we surveyed more than a 100 scientists who had participated in the Commission expert groups. In particular, we focused on how scientists’ advice was used by the Commission, and asked: what attitudes do scientists providing scientific advice to the European Commission hold regarding their contribution to policies shaped and adapted at the EU level? How do scientists perceive their role in EU policy-making?

 

When and under what conditions different uses of scientific expertise prevail

The article “Explaining Differences in Scientific Expertise Use: The Politics of Pesticides” further explores how European regulator – European regulatory agencies – actually contend with their core tasks of providing scientific advice to EU institutions. In this contribution, I go one step further and contribute to the theoretical explanation of when and under what conditions different uses of scientific knowledge prevail. I draw upon the theoretical insights of sociological institutionalism and resource dependence theory. The core argument of the article is that whether the regulatory policy process can yield efficient and credible problem-solving solutions is contingent upon both (1) the external environment in which a certain scientific output production process takes place, i.e. the level of formal and informal pressure and (2) the internal agency’s capacity to produce science-based outputs (Rimkutė, 2015: 116).

 

Risk assessments by the European Food Safety Authority

In empirical analysis, I focus on one type of knowledge use – strategic substantiating – that refers to those practices in which an agency seeks to promote and justify its own or external actors’ predetermined preferences, which are based on certain values, political or economic interests. The strategic substantiating use of scientific knowledge is expected to occur under the conditions of high external pressure and high scientific capacity.  To test this theoretical expectation, the case of the neonicotinoid pesticides risk assessment for bees has been selected. The risk assessment has been produced by the key European risk assessor in food safety regulation – European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The empirical analysis combines a variety of data sources including official documents, press releases, scientific outputs, and 10 semi-structured interviews with the academic and industry experts involved in the process.

Specifically, the case of neonicotinoid pesticides has been selected as EFSA in this particular case possessed a high capacity to produce scientific expertise because it successfully mobilised internal human resources: the largest EFSA’s unit—the Pesticides Unit— was in charge of drafting scientific outputs. In addition, EFSA had much sound external research evidence at its disposal when drafting scientific conclusions: extensive sources of expertise, data, knowledge, and understanding of honeybees and the neonicotinoid pesticides. However, the organisational field in which EFSA had to deliver its scientific opinion consisted of defined opposing positions (laboratory research vs. field research) and the conflicting configurations of inter-organisational structures competing with each other (industry vs. beekeeping associations and NGOs). The biggest chemical manufacturers in Europe, Bayer CropScience, Syngenta AG, have been actively involved in the process and in due course have filed legal actions challenging the Commission’s restrictions and accused the Commission of not relying on the entire scientific evidence available and, in so doing, they challenged the EU pesticide regulation.

The article empirically illustrated that such conditions paved the way for the strategic substantiating use of expertise. It concludes that the interaction between high external pressure and high internal capacity leads to the strategic substantiating use of expertise, in which scientific evidence is used to promote the inclinations of actors upon which the agency depends most.

This study develops starting points for further research as it introduced a general theory explaining the differences in scientific expertise use, which have been tested only partly and in one particular context, i.e. one issue within one EU regulatory agency. However, the theoretical argument of the article could be said to be relevant to all expertise bodies acting on the basis of scientific knowledge, including the Commission, comitology committees, national agencies, international organisations, or other executive, regulatory or information bodies whose expertise feeds into various policy-making stages. To that end, I suggest that testing the theoretical explanations outlined in the article in different contexts would clearly be a requisite for further research.

 

Dovilė Rimkutė has been a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, Germany since March 2014. Before joining LMU she held a Marie Curie scholarship for Early Stage Researchers and worked as a Research Associate at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. Her research interests cover a range of European Union policy/decision-making topics, however, risk regulation and evidence-based governance in EU regulatory processes and factors affecting it take a central role. In her PhD research, Dovilė examines regulatory science practices employed by EU (quasi-) risk regulators – European regulatory agencies – by drawing upon the theoretical insights of sociological institutionalism and resource dependence theory. Contact: Dovile.rimke@gmail.com

 

References:

Boswell, C. (2008). The political functions of expert knowledge: Knowledge and legitimation in European Union immigration policy. Journal of European Public Policy, 15(4), 471-488.

Gornitzka, Å. and Holst, C. (2015). The Expert-Executive Nexus in the EU: An Introduction. Politics and Governance, 3 (1): 1-21

Majone, G. (1999). ‘The regulatory state and its legitimacy problems’, West European Politics, 22 (1): 1-13.

Radaelli, C.M. (2009). Measuring policy learning across Europe: regulatory impact assessment in comparative perspective, Journal of European Public Policy, 16 (8): 1145–1164.

Rimkute, D. (2015). Explaining differences in scientific expertise use: The politics of pesticides. Politics and Governance, 3 (1): 114-127.

Rimkute, D. and Haverland, M. (2015). How does the European Commission use scientific expertise? Results from a survey of scientific members of the Commission’s expert committees. Comparative European Politics, 13 (4): 430–449.

Schrefler, L. (2010). The usage of scientific knowledge by independent regulatory agencies. Governance, 23(2): 309-330.

The post How do European institutions use scientific expertise? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The Monthly Highlights publication provides an overview, at a glance, of the on-going work of the policy departments, including a selection of the latest and forthcoming publications, and a list of future events.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

The Monthly Highlights publication provides an overview, at a glance, of the on-going work of the policy departments, including a selection of the latest and forthcoming publications, and a list of future events.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

DRAFT RECOMMENDATION on the proposal for a Council decision on the conclusion of the Protocol to the Euro-Mediterranean Agreement establishing an association between the European Communities and their Member States, of the one part, and the Republic of Tunisia, of the other part, on a Framework Agreement between the European Union and the Republic of Tunisia on the general principles for the participation of the Republic of Tunisia in Union programmes
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Pier Antonio Panzeri

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

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The Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union takes over on 1 July 2015.

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DRAFT RECOMMENDATION on the draft Council and Commission decision on the conclusion by the European Union of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement establishing a Partnership between the European Union and its Member States, of the one part, and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, of the other part
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Barbara Lochbihler

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP