European Union

Environmental lawyers have called for "tobacco-style" health warnings on fossil fuel ads, after an analysis showing how energy giants use advertising to "greenwash" their contribution to climate change.

Greece formally re-opens on May 14, but from Monday (19 April), tourists from the EU, US, UK, Serbia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates will not have to quarantine if vaccinated or testing negative for Covid-19, Reuters reports. Tourism, which generates a fifth of Greece's GDP and one-in-five jobs, is vital for an economy which had climbed out of a decade-long slump only to slip back into recession last year.

Palestine is holding its first general legislative election in 15 years on 22 May. Its president has requested an EU mission to observe the elections but Israel has yet to respond - meaning the mission may not happen.

The co-leader of Germany's Greens, Annalena Baerbock, announced Monday she would run for chancellor in September's elections, the first time the party has sought the top job in its 40-year history, Reuters reports. Baerbock said she would offer a "new start" and focus on investing in education, digital and green technologies. A poll last week put support for the Greens on 23 percent, behind 27 percent for Angela Merkel's conservatives.

Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was transferred to a prison hospital, his lawyer said on Monday, 20 days into a hunger strike that has brought international warnings of consequences should he die in jail, Reuters writes. Allies of Navalny, who have had no access to him since last week, said they were braced for bad news about his health. They are planning countrywide demonstrations later this week.

Between June 2020 and February 2021, 22 consecutive opinion polls indicated majorities in favour of Scottish independence. That kind of sustained support for statehood is unprecedented in modern Scottish history.

In 2004 Joseph Jupille published a book explaining why European Union (EU) institutions contest procedural rules governing how legislation is made. He identified jurisdictional ambiguity – the degree to which the contested bill falls under several procedural rules – and procedural incentives – what institutions stand to gain from conflict – as the main causes of what he termed procedural politics. In procedural politics, actors clash not over the substance of policy (at least not directly), but rather over which procedure should apply. The EU is known even outside academic circles to maintain a myriad of seemingly arcane legislative procedures.

In my article, I revisit the key theoretical claims made by Jupille in his seminal book. What I am chiefly interested in is to find out whether his ideas still hold water in the 21st century, or whether political scientists should discard them as out of date. To achieve this goal, I put together a new dataset of court cases in which EU institutions fight over what the legislative procedure should be in a given file. For example, the European Parliament has recently challenged the Council of the EU for choosing the seat of a new European agency without involving it in the decision. We expect such conflicts to arise when there is ambiguity about the applicable procedural rule and when the challenging EU institution has something to gain from changing the procedure. In this case, the main incentive is that of the Parliament to have a say on where EU agencies should reside, while the Council wants to continue making these decisions alone.

If we pored over each individual case, we would see that in some cases EU institutions do not clash over legislative procedures despite the theoretical conditions being fulfilled. This is not surprising. Few theories of social behaviour are only ever true or false. What I want to find out is whether the theorised conditions – the presence of ambiguity and incentives – help us explain the pattern of competence conflicts in aggregate. As a result, I look at the problem through statistical lens: what is the probability of legislation being challenged given its attributes? Does ambiguity and/or procedural incentives increase this probability and if so, by how much?

Statistical methods typically require quantified input. I measure procedural incentives by ranking all EU legislative procedures according to how much power they confer on the European Commission and the European Parliament, respectively. I then take the difference between the proposed and actually used procedure to quantify institutional incentives to challenge legislation. Measuring ambiguity is more complicated, but in a nutshell it involves comparing legislative texts against competence provisions (so called legal bases in EU jargon) to determine the extent to which there is overlap and therefore ambiguity regarding the applicable rule.

I feed my measures of ambiguity and incentives, along with other relevant information, into a statistical model designed to predict the probability of legislation being challenged before the European Court of Justice by one of the EU institutions or Member States. The main results are visualised in Figure 1. The less satisfied the Parliament and the Commission are with a procedural change – the higher the incentive – the more likely the legislation ends up before the Court of Justice. The higher the jurisdictional ambiguity of the legislation, the more likely it is procedurally disputed. We can see that when the Commission and the Parliament are very dissatisfied, and thus face strong incentives to enter into a dispute, the law is very likely to be challenged. On the contrary, the probability of a dispute is nearly zero at the opposite end of the scale. These results support the theory of procedural politics.

Figure 1: Effects of procedural incentives and jurisdictional ambiguity on the probability of a procedural dispute.

 

In addition to the main findings, I explored how the incidence of procedural disputes varies over time. Of particular interest is the question whether disputes are more likely to occur in the wake of changes to the EU’s constitutional framework. As competence and procedural rules change, it is more likely they will produce new sources of ambiguity. It turns out that the periods following Treaty amendments have been, with the exception of the Amsterdam Treaty, associated with more procedural disputes. With no new Treaty revision on the horizon, we should anticipate disputes to remain relatively sporadic in the years to come.

Frequently, theories in political science are formulated and tested once at their outset. As time passes, doubt about the ongoing validity of the model grows. For numerous reasons, theories are liable to become obsolete over time and there are no guarantees against loss of relevance or explanatory power. Subjecting existing theories to tests against new data is the only scientifically acceptable way of maintaining and renewing confidence in our stock of knowledge about the social world. Arguably, there are many theoretical candidates in the political science canon whose re-testing is overdue. It was with this goal in mind that I revisited Jupille’s theory of procedural politics with new data. After appraising the key tenets of the theory, I conclude that it continues to provide both a valid explanation for a part of EU politics and a falsifiable prediction about the prevalence – or, rather, absence – of procedural contestation at the current stage of European integration.

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “Procedural Politics Revisited: Institutional Incentives and Jurisdictional Ambiguity in EU Competence Disputes”

 

 

Michal Ovádek is a political advisor in the European Parliament and an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Empirical Jurisprudence at KU Leuven. His research focuses on the interplay between law and politics in the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Twitter handle: @michal_ovadek (https://twitter.com/michal_ovadek)

 

 

The post Fights over European Union competences are dominated by ambiguity and self-interest appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Michal Onderco & Reinout A van der Veer

Last week, the European Union agreed to impose new sanctions on Russia in response to the attempt to poison the opposition activist Alexei Navalny and his jailing upon return to Russia. Immediately afterwards, Russia threatened to respond in kind.

This development is not new. In recent years, the European Union, just like many other actors in global politics, increased the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool.  This is even likely to increase in the future. The current European Commission, calling itself “the geopolitical commission”, announced plans to prepare “a  reinforced  sanctions  mechanism  […]  to ensure that Europe is more resilient to extraterritorial sanctions by third countries and that sanctions imposed by the EU are properly enforced.”

Increasingly, Europeans are becoming sensitive to the domestic costs of imposed sanctions. Nowhere was this argument clearer than in case of European sanctions against Russia, particularly after Russia instituted its own counter-sanctions designed to hurt European countries back. Now Russia threatens to do the same.

In our recent article in JCMS, we look at the costs that these sanctions bring to the firms in EU countries. We look at the Russian counter-sanctions for two reasons: they are widely understood to have been imposed in reaction to EU sanctions, and they are often conflated in popular discourse. Because they are Russia’s reaction to EU’s sanctions, their impact on European businesses tells us a lot about EU’s ability to weather the domestic costs of economic sanctions.

We utilize a unique data source: a database covering all Dutch exports, supplied by Statistics Netherlands. We use a quasi-experimental research design, which allows us to compare firms that were hit by the sanctions (our ‘treatment’) to firms that are comparable on all aspects except that they did not face the Russian sanctions. We look at the Netherlands, because it is a relatively large, open, and export-driven European economy which primarily exports food to Russia, and the Russian ban was aimed at these products especially.

We were mainly interested in two questions: whether the companies hit by the sanctions have a higher chance of (1) losing revenue and (2) ceasing exports altogether to Russia or elsewhere (which we refer to as firm failure), and (3) whether they were more likely to start exporting to countries near Russia, perhaps in an attempt to bypass the sanctions.

Our results indicate that firms that were hit by Russian sanctions were between 86% and 96% more likely to cease operations by 2015 and 2016 (respectively) compared to the firms that were not hit by the sanctions. However, we also find that the effect on revenue is negligible – in other words, if the firms survive, their exports do tend to recover fairly quickly and they do not suffer from the sanctions imposition afterwards.

We also see that the bigger the share of the firm’s revenue going to Russia, the more likely the firm was to stop exporting. At the same time, the big exporters that export only a small share of their products to Russia faced little impact. This is not entirely surprising – because these firms are much bigger, they also are much more likely to have the expertise and resources to implement sanctions. The higher risk of failing was especially visible for smaller firms in the chemicals and minerals industry, which exported between a quarter and half of their goods to Russia. Two-thirds of these firms failed in 2015 and 2016. Our research corroborates the earlier findings that highlighted that some sectors of Dutch economy were much more vulnerable than others. Agriculture is often listed as such sector, observation also recently confirmed by the Dutch agricultural diplomat in Moscow.

We also find that Dutch exporters that were hit with sanctions were more likely to divert their exports (i.e. whether they began exporting without precedent) to Belarus, Moldova, the Caucasus, Mongolia and China, but also Israel. We do not find evidence of such export diversion to other EU countries, where Dutch firms might already have an easy access. Neither did Dutch companies divert exports to Central Asia or Turkey, which offer less attractive options for diversion. Similarly, Ukraine’s conflict with Ukraine may explain why the Dutch businesses did not divert there.

Our results suggest that policy-makers who wish to help businesses to overcome the economic hardship caused by the sanctions (or retaliatory sanctions) should focus primarily on helping companies to survive in the short term, and focus on smaller companies that are more exposed to the sanctions. After this initial period, companies are able to bypass the sanctions by diverting their exports to other countries. Importantly, by now, the Russian counter-sanctions no longer hurt European businesses. Economic arguments based on their impact on firms should therefore not aminate the policy thinking about whether to keep sanctions on Russia or not.

 

This blog post draws on the JCMS article “No More Gouda in Moscow? Distributive Effects of the Imposition of Sanctions”

 

 

Michal Onderco is Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on politics of international security, with particular attention to the role of domestic actors in foreign and security policy.

 

 

Reinout van der Veer is an Assistant Professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research interests include EU and EMU politics, the role of experts and expertise in liberal democracy, and the politicization and legitimacy of international organizations.

The post How do imposed sanctions impact firms? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Share your views on the EU, organise events across Europe and discuss with others through the new digital platform on the Conference on the Future of Europe.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Share your views on the EU, organise events across Europe and discuss with others through the new digital platform on the Conference on the Future of Europe.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

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 meeting of the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) will take place on 25 and 31 May 2021 (online).
The meeting agenda and documents will be published here.

SEDE meetings' calendar 2021
EP calendar 2021
Press release: Sahel: Security situation from the African perspective - 12 April 2021
Press release: MEPs quizzed the head of the IAEA about nuclear non-proliferation - 16 March 2021
Press release: Exchange of views with the NATO Secretary General - 15 March 2021
Press release: Instability in the Central African Republic - 24 February 2021
Press release: Chair of the Security and Defence Subcommittee welcomes extension of the New START Treaty - 5 February 2021
Press release: MEPs to discuss security and defence priorities with Minister Gomes Cravinho - 28 January 2021
Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The Conference’s central hub, unveiled today by the Co-Chairs of the Executive Board, will allow citizens to help shape the Union’s future.
Committee on Constitutional Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The Conference’s central hub, unveiled today by the Co-Chairs of the Executive Board, will allow citizens to help shape the Union’s future.
Committee on Constitutional Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Swiss firm Moderna has said it will miss second-quarter delivery deadlines for the UK and Canada, but not the EU or Switzerland, Reuters reports. "Vaccine manufacturing is a highly complex process and a number of elements, including human and material resources have factored into this volatility," Patricia Gauthier, a Moderna Canada executive said. The announcement comes amid an ongoing row between the UK and Europe on vaccine shortfalls and exports.

Thierry Breton, the EU's internal markets commissioner, said Sunday that "nothing is decided" concerning the bloc's plans to open further contracts with vaccine-maker AstraZeneca, Deutsche Welle writes. AstraZeneca has delivered fewer than a quarter of the doses it initially promised to the EU. "We're pragmatic. My priority, as far as the vaccines are concerned, is to ensure that the firms we have contracts with deliver them punctually," Breton said.

Spanish officers raided an illegal 3D-printing weapons workshop in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in Spain's Canary Islands and arrested the owner, who has been charged with illegal possession of weapons and explosives, Reuters writes. A replica assault rifle, small arms, several gun barrels, two tasers and a machete were among the arsenal seized from a Spanish factory discovered to be producing 3D-printed weapons, police said on Sunday.

Russia has ordered 20 Czech diplomats to leave the country by the end of Monday following a similar move by Prague, the foreign ministry in Moscow announced, Deutsche Welle reports. The Czech ambassador was summoned to the ministry on Sunday evening and told that 20 employees of the Czech embassy had been declared "persona non grata." Czech authorities expelled 18 Russian diplomats on Saturday, accusing them of being secret agents.

Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša reportedly told a senior Bosnian politician, Šefik Džaferović, on Friday that "there was no non-paper that could be linked to the government of Slovenia, which would include redrawing [Bosnia's] borders", according to Džaferović's readout of their call. The informal paper, allegedly sent to EU officials by Slovenia in February, has caused a diplomatic storm, with Germany joining the US in saying that partition was unacceptable.

Italy could overshoot an EU deadline on 30 April for member states to say how they plan to spend their share of the bloc's €750bn post-pandemic loan and grant scheme, according to sources quoted by Reuters Sunday. "The plan will be presented on April 30," the Italian economy ministry said, denying the report. Italy is eligible for €200bn, the largest chunk, with a delay potentially embarrassing its new government.

 

Dear Correspondent,

On 18 April 2021 Europe should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris that brought the Continent lasting peace and prosperity. Europe’s Founding Fathers thus created the European Community and the Community method as well as achieving its major success to make war between Member States ‘not only unthinkable but materially impossible’ — the European Coal and Steel Community.

Many politicians have forgotten the founding principles or never knew them. Have schools taught how this changed Europe for good, from a Continent where war occurred in the lifetime of every generation for more than 2000 years? Does the public know the facts?

What is more astounding is that the other major document signed on that day described how Europe’s democracy should be built up using both the Community system and the Human Rights system of the Council of Europe working in conjunction. They have never been published on the Commission’s website.

These democratic foundation stones of Europe, laid by the initial Six Member States, should be at the forefront of the Conference on the Future of Europe, announced for the 9 May 2021.

This is therefore a topic of major importance for every European citizen as well as UK citizens who should have been informed about how the ‘European Union’ should be reformed before the Brexit debate.

I am enclosing my open letter to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen which includes these major documents and explains their significance. More information can be found on my websites: schuman.info and eurDemocracy.com (where the text can also be found)

Best regards,

David Heilbron Price

 

 

 

 

Schuman Project

Schuman.info

David H Price

Editor

9 April 2021

Dear President von der Leyen,

It is 70 years since the signature on 18 April 1951 of Europe’s founding document for peace, the Treaty of Paris. This created the European Community. It changed the destiny of Europeans who had gone to war every generation for more than two thousand years.

As the European Commission and the other institutions ponder the Future of post-‘Brexit’ Europe in the Conference to be opened on 9 May, I have one request to the leaders, the media and the public.

It is necessary to recall the founding principles of that peace and prosperity. This is not hidden. It is not something that can be changed by our generation. It was written in a document, signed by the plenipotentiary representatives of the Six founding States: France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

What seems shocking to me is that the European Commission and the other institutions have not published this document. Schuman, a life-long student of democracy, called this the ‘Charter of the Community’ (Pour l’Europe, p146). It describes the Community method and the democratic principles that Europe must build on, in the same way as the United States applied the same eternal laws of human nature and worldly politics.

Schuman’s use of the term ‘Charter’ reflects that of the Magna Carta as a foundational document for British democracy. It distinguishes democratic Europe from the fraudulent ‘People’s Democracies’ of the Soviet eastern bloc. It is the litmus test of true democracy.

About a decade ago I spoke to the French Minister for Europe about publishing this ‘Charter’. He kindly supplied me with a copy from the French Archives. It was published on my website, schuman.info in 2012.

Although I pointed out this remarkable and important document to the Commission President at the time, the full text of the Schuman Declaration and the Charter of the Community has still not been published on the Commission’s own website. The lack of full information about the beginnings of European democracy is a disservice both to the general public, academics, the press and political leaders.

Secondly, while the European Commission has published the ‘full text’ of the Schuman Proposal, a governmental instrument, it has not published the text of his oral Declaration. The Commission website confuses the two: the governmental Proposal is aimed at other governments. The Schuman Declaration includes the explanation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Declaration includes far-reaching clarification of the original proposal agreed by the French Cabinet and signalled simultaneously to other European States via French diplomats or Schuman’s meetings with ambassadors and parliament in Paris on 9 May 1950.

It would be fitting that the foundational documents should be fully published on official websites and recorded in the Official Journal.

Madame President, I am therefore requesting that these historic texts about the Future of Europe be published before the opening of the Conference on Europe on 9 May this year.

Thanking you in advance for your attention to this matter, I remain,

Yours sincerely,

David Heilbron Price

 

Annexes.

 

 

1. Charter of the Community

Declaration of Inter-dependence                           Charter of the Community

Déclaration de l’Europe   Paris le 18 avril 1951

CHARTE DE LA COMMUNAUTE (Pour l’Europe, p146)

Statue Foundatrice de l’ Europe basant sa construction sur les Principes Supranationaux et le libre choix de ses citoyens

Déclaration commune des Ministres 

représentant les Gouvernements signataires du Traité

Le gouvernement de la République fédérale d’Allemagne, le gouvernement belge, le gouvernement français, le gouvernement italien, le gouvernement luxembourgeois et le gouvernement des Pays-Bas :

Considérant que la paix mondiale ne peut être sauvegardée que par des efforts créateurs à la mesure des dangers qui la menacent;

Convaincus que la contribution qu’une Europe organisée et vivante peut apporter à la civilisation est indispensable au maintien de relations pacifiques;

Conscients que l’Europe ne se construira que par des réalisations concrètes créant d’abord une solidarité de fait et par l’établissement de bases communes de développement économique;

Soucieux de concourir par l’expansion de leurs productions fondamentales au relèvement du niveau de vie et au progrès des oeuvres de paix;

Résolus à substituer aux rivalités séculaires une fusion de leurs intérêts essentiels, à fonder par l’instauration d’une communauté économique les premières assises d’une communauté plus large et plus profonde entre des peuples longtemps opposés par des divisions sanglantes, et à jeter les bases d’institutions capables d’orienter un destin désormais partagé,

Ont décidé de créer une Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier.

L’œuvre que nous venons de consacrer par notre signature est due à l’intelligence et à la ténacité de nos délégations et de nos experts; nous leur disons notre très grande gratitude.

Avant même d’être entrée en action, cette oeuvre a déjà, par la vertu de l’idée qui l’inspire, créé dans nos pays et au-delà de leurs frontières des espérances et une confiance tout-à-fait exceptionnelles.

En signant le traité qui institue la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier, communauté de cent soixante millions d’habitants européens, les parties contractantes ont marqué leur résolution de créer la première institution supranationale et de fonder ainsi les assises réelles d’une Europe organisée.

Cette Europe est ouverte à tous les pays européens libres de leur choix. Nous espérons fermement que d’autres pays s’associeront à notre effort.

Pleinement conscients de la nécessité de donner tout son sens à ce premier pas par une action continue et du même ordre dans d’autres domaines, nous avons l’espoir et la volonté de mener à bien, dans l’esprit qui a présidé à l’élaboration de ce traité, les projets qui sont actuellement en préparation. Les travaux se poursuivront en liaison avec les organismes européens existants.

Ces initiatives, dont chacune est limitée dans son objet, devront rapidement s’inscrire dans le cadre d’une communauté politique, dont l’idée s’élabore au Conseil de l’Europe. II devra en résulter une coordination et une simplification de l’ensemble des institutions européennes.

Tous ces efforts sont guidés par la conviction croissante que les pays de l’Europe libre sont solidaires les uns des autres, participent à une destinée commune. Nous consoliderons ce sentiment en associant nos énergies et nos volontés, en harmonisant notre action par des consultations fréquentes et des contacts toujours plus confiants.

Telle est la signification de cette journée. Elle sera comprise, nous n’en doutions pas, par nos opinions publiques et par les Parlements qui seront appelés à se prononcer sur le traité. Les gouvernements ici représentés seront auprès d’eux les interprètes de notre volonté commune de construire et de servir ensemble une Europe pacifique et prospère. »

 

 

2. Schuman Declaration – What Schuman declared

This is followed by the Schuman Proposal agreed by the French Government of Georges Bidault.

It starts “World peace cannot be safeguarded if constructive efforts are not made commensurate with the dangers that threaten it. …”

Full text at https://schuman.info/9May1950.htm

 

NOTE: What distinguishes Democracies — Free Choice (nations libres de leur choix)

The articulation of the ‘Free Choice’ of the Member States distinguishes them from fraudulent ‘People’s Democracies’ and dictatorships. Free societies decide their Community governance according to the most democratic procedures. A Community is created by the will of free people. It is not imposed like the constitutions of the Communist bloc by a party or parties. The Community, as manager of common resources and guardian against war between members, must be more democratic, fairer and more honest than its Member States. It should be a model of democracy for Europe and the world.

The Charter of the Community declares that all Member States

• must safeguard the rights of their citizens before the Council of Europe according to the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
• No national State that does not adhere to these Fundamental Rights may be admitted to ‘Europe’ whose very definition depends on this Convention of Freedom of Speech, Assembly etc
• The voice of the nation must be respected. For example, Lisbon Treaty and its earlier redaction as the Constitutional Treaty were rejected in national referendums.
• The free will of the people has not been given to the designation of the Commission President or the Commissioners who by law should be independent of political parties, lobbies and outside interests. The original fair system has been replaced by a closed-door horse-trading meeting of politicians.
• Elections have not been held for the Consultative Committees (Economic and Social Committee and Committee of Regions) as assemblies of organised civil society,
• Europe-wide election to the European Parliament (not 27 national elections) under a single statute as repeatedly included in all treaties since 1951 must be held,
• The Court system should be fully independent of governments and outside interests.

 

 

 

 

 

Schuman speaks on Europe’s democratic principles for political union at the signing of the Treaty of Paris 18 April 195 

 

 

Signatories of Europe’s founding treaty, 18 April 1951

 

The post Open Letter to President von der Leyen on Europe’s Democratic Future appeared first on Ideas on Europe.