European Union

"In the context of the exponential growth of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the President of the European Parliament has announced a number of measures to contain the spread of epidemic and to safeguard Parliament's core activities.

The current precautionary measures adopted by the European Parliament to contain the spread of COVID-19 do not affect work on legislative priorities. Core activities are reduced, but maintained to ensure that the institution's legislative, budgetary, scrutiny functions are maintained.

The meetings will be with remote participation for Members (being able to view and listen to proceedings, ask for the floor and intervene in the meeting). Other participants are invited to follow the meeting through webstreaming.

Following these decisions, the next ordinary AFET Committee meetings will take place on 22 April (via videoconference).

EP Calendar 2021
AFET-SEDE-DROI meetings
Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

On 22 April, Members of the Foreign Affairs Committee will hold an exchange of views with Mohammad Shtayyeh, Prime Minister of Palestine. The debate comes ahead of the upcoming Palestinian legislative elections on 22 May and subsequent presidential elections on 31 July.
Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The absence of sport, and particularly football, Europe’s favourite game, made last year’s lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19 even harder to bear. Since last summer, we have had the eerie spectacle of football without supporters. Lockdown football is...

Russia will soon have more than 120,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, the country’s foreign minister warned on Tuesday (20 April), after the EU, US and NATO allies denounced the large build-up of Russian troops alongside Ukraine’s eastern borders. “The situation...

The French Strategic Contract for the Wood Sector known as CSF has been updated to be in line with the country's recovery plan and accelerate the wood and forestry sector's contribution to the low-carbon transition, France's agriculture, housing and industry ministers announced on Monday (19 April). EURACTIV France reports.  

Russia's foreign ministry on Tuesday (20 April) said it had expelled two Bulgarian diplomats in a tit-for-tat move after Sofia kicked out two Russian diplomats over a suspected spy network.

In the immediate aftermath of the election of Joe Biden the European Commission proposed ‘A new transatlantic agenda’. This ambitious plan emphasizes that together the EU and the US ‘have the reach to set regulations and standards that are replicated across the world’. This very much sounds like a revival of the major priority of the unfortunate Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) talks. Their failure in 2016 is mostly explained by the ‘Trump effect’, that is the protectionist agenda of the former US president. The Commission’s hope for a new transatlantic relation with the new US administration reflects this appreciation. In an article in JCMS I show that such optimism misses the fact that even before Trump, the EU and the USA did not manage to agree on the transatlantic harmonization of standards and regulations. Indeed, such technical harmonization is likely to undermine the functioning of the market on either side of the Atlantic.

Traditional free trade agreements aimed at removing so-called at-the-border obstacles such as tariffs and quotas. The latter are rather readily quantifiable and therefore offer a solid ground for reaching a clear compromise. Under such circumstances, liberalization can be expressed in straightforward numbers, referring for instance to a specific level of mutual tariff reductions. Despite a recent rise of tariffs, there is a clear downward tendency since the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947.

Consequently, contemporary free trade agreements intend to remove so-called behind-the-border obstacles to trade. Technical standards and regulations and conformity assessment procedures famously fall into this category. However, the actual impact on trade of this technical infrastructure is difficult to assess. This makes bargaining more complex. As if that were not enough, unlike tariffs, the technical infrastructure does not only divert trade flows. It actually also organizes the functioning of an integrated market: Goods are not exchangeable by nature; they need to become knowable and identifiable by the market participants. Technical standards and regulations perform this essential function by fixing the requirements a product or process needs to fulfil. Conformity assessment procedures test whether goods correspond to these requirements.

The institutions that set standards, regulations and conformity assessment procedures are bound together by a relation of institutional complementarity – defined as ‘a constellation in which the combination of two (or more) elements increases the benefits attained from any of them’. The technical infrastructure thus forms a coherent set of institutions and it is organized around a coordination principle, which can differ from market to market. My research illustrates that the US market follows the principle of competition while its European counterpart is characterized by the principle of order. Each principle organizes the complementary links between the three different elements of the technical infrastructure in a distinct manner.

What makes the convergence of different technical infrastructures so tricky is that bargaining generally means making compromises. More specifically, insofar as each technical infrastructure forms a coherent set of institutions any trade-off is likely to disorganize complementarity. In order to know whether the transatlantic technical infrastructure divergence really mattered for TTIP it needed to be tested against evidence from the negotiations. However, the TTIP talks took place behind closed doors. Fortunately for this research, in 2016 Wikileaks released a significant amount of secret TTIP documents that provided substantial evidence on the bargaining process. I matched these leaked documents with official publications from the stakeholders.

What strikingly stands out from the empirical evidence is that each party did not only try to extend parts of its technical infrastructure to the other side of the Atlantic. Most likely, such a partial approach would give rise to an incoherent transatlantic technical infrastructure, which eventually would suffer from operational deficiencies. Rather, the proposals on standards, regulations and conformity assessment show that each party consistently promoted the coordination principle of its own technical infrastructure.

 

Table 1: EU and US proposals for technical convergence

The EU negotiators advocated the use of international ISO-IEC standards. By contrast, the latter promoted the use of US standards or standard-developing organizations (SDO), and they argued for opening European standardization to US stakeholders. In the field of regulations, the EU suggested to generalise the use of international regulatory bodies, whose rules should apply on the federal and sub-federal scale in the USA. The USA more modestly aimed at maintaining the specificities of their existing regulatory scales and direct incorporation of standards into regulation. They claimed improved access for US stakeholders to drafting European regulations. Regarding conformity assessment, the EU argued for manufacturer self-certification, based on prior harmonization of standards and regulations. The USA were at most willing to accept the mutual recognition (MR) between US and EU conformity assessment bodies. All these requests were perfectly coherent with the technical infrastructure of the party proposing the measures. Yet, the other party was unlikely to satisfy such requests that would profoundly transform the institutions that technically frame the functioning of its domestic market.

The outlined difficulties of transatlantic technical convergence illustrate that behind-the-border liberalization faces a contradiction. On the one hand, its very meaning is to address and transform national institutions in an upfront manner. On the other hand, these institutions are embedded in a set of complementarities that ensure the functioning of an integrated market. Finding an agreement implies compromises on both sides, but in the case of technical infrastructure striking a balance is simultaneously likely to harm its coherence. This fact tends to reduce the leeway of negotiators, especially if they represent similarly powerful economies whose technical infrastructures rely on different coordination principles. Highlighting this shows that the failure of TTIP is not merely the result of temporary protectionist pressure. Rather this research pointed out an additional institutional challenge for policy makers involved in the governance of global trade. The currently available cooperation tools – harmonization, mutual recognition and early information exchange – seem unable to overcome the dead end, where one party would need to abandon (parts of) its technical infrastructure in order to conclude an agreement.

With the growing relevance of behind-the-border liberalization the diversity of national or regional institutions increasingly becomes a matter of trade. Research on international trade therefore needs to address diverging institutional complementarities. This is all the more important as recent research on the construction of the Single market shows that the formation of the European technical infrastructure was also expected to institutionally boost the competitiveness of European multinational firms.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “The Limits of Traditional Bargaining under Deep Integration: TTIP Stumbling over Technical Barriers to Trade”

 

 

Short bio

Benjamin Bürbaumer holds a Ph.D. in economics from Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and a master’s degree in international relations from Sciences Po Paris. He is working on international trade, with a special interest in standards and regulations, and international political economy.

Personal Twitter: @BurbaumerB

Department twitter: @CEPNP13

Link to academic profile: https://cepn.univ-paris13.fr/benjamin-burbaumer/

The post The stalemate of transatlantic liberalization: It started before Trump appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Demographic change can pose a major challenge for the EU. The European Parliament has examined the causes and possible solutions around this issue.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy concerning EU-India relations
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Alviina Alametsä

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The committee on Employment and Social Affairs will discuss the draft report on the proposal for a directive on Adequate minimum wages in the EU on Thursday from 16.45 – 17.30.
Committee on Employment and Social Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Repubblika
DFON
National provisions of a Member State which confer on the Prime Minister a decisive power in the appointment of members of the judiciary, while providing for the involvement of an independent body responsible for assessing candidates and providing an opinion, are not contrary to EU law

The Czech government has downplayed the significance of Russia's lethal attack on a weapons depot in 2014, but further retaliatory measures, including at EU or Nato level, could follow.

Leading officials for the German conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party voted to nominate Armin Laschet as chancellor candidate for this year's election, Deutsche Welle reports. A majority of 77.5 percent of the party board voted in favour of the party leader, while Bavarian leader Markus Söder received 9 votes. The vote is not an official decision, but Söder said he would respect the wishes of the CDU party board.

The European Commission announced on Monday it has activated the contractual option for member states to purchase 100 million more BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine doses - bringing the total number of doses supplied to the EU in 2021 to 600 million. The EU expects to receive 250 million doses of BioNTech/Pfizer in the second quarter (April to June). The EU is currently in talks with the company to purchase 1.8bn more doses.

EU states have imposed sanctions on two Myanmar conglomerates - Myanmar Economic Holdings Public Company and Myanmar Economic Corporation - said to provide income for the military junta responsible for killings hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in recent months. They also added 10 junta members to their earlier 25-strong travel ban and asset-freeze lists saying: "Sanctions are crafted in such a way to avoid undue harm to the people of Myanmar".

No new Russia sanctions were being prepared, despite its largest-ever deployment of 150,000 troops on Ukraine's borders and the risk a small "spark" could ignite a wider conflict, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said Monday. Some foreign ministers in Monday's meeting called for the EU to publicly threaten new economic measures as a prophylactic against escalation, diplomats said. "This is up to EU leaders to decide," one diplomat noted.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg slammed the "tragedy" of vaccine inequity on Monday as she donated €100,000 to the World Health Organization's COVAX scheme. "We have the means at our disposal to correct the great imbalance that exists around the world in the fight against Covid-19," she stressed. Thunberg said earlier she plans to skip COP26 because the uneven rollout of vaccines would not allow countries to participate on even terms.

The Conference on the Future of Europe, thrown off-track by the pandemic and then by an intra-institutional fight over its leadership, will officially kick off on 9 May, but EU citizens can already start the debate online.