European Union

It might not be the first question on your mind when you think about Brexit, but should French SMEs be better prepared for a no deal scenario?

Pierre Séjourné

Pierre Séjourné certainly thinks so. As the head of the international mission at DIRECCTE, a French trans-ministerial agency for economic development, he politely but very firmly has been pressing business leaders across the country to start realising that ‘no deal’ has become the most likely option, and that there is an urgent need to prepare for the unpleasant consequences that the UK’s messy departure will inevitably have for their activities.

No public comment he makes lacks a reference to the government’s virtual helpdesk brexit.gouv.fr which provides assistance to smaller firms with the necessary risk assessment and mitigation.

As a recent public event held on 7 February at ESSCA School of Management in Angers – dedicated to the impact Brexit on Western France’s Pays-de-la-Loire region – showed, Monsieur Séjourné is not alone in having growing concerns with the relative ‘unpreparedness’ of French business.

The public authorities, regional councils or larger conurbations known as ‘métropoles’ in the French provinces are also increasingly worried, as every single regional policy maker pointed out in the various round-tables of the event

The key word is, of course, uncertainty. Since nobody is capable of providing any clarity on what scenario will prevail at the end of March, SMEs are caught like rabbits in the Brexit headlights.

Brexit is destabilising in many ways: this is the first time in most business leaders’ lifetime that intra-European trade has not led to fewer barriers, and it turns back the clock in order to reinstall long-forgotten ones. It is also deeply unsettling on a cultural level.

In France, with its long-standing tradition of high principles often thwarted by practical earthly details and regularly resulting in collective frustration, there has always been a strong belief that pragmatism and phlegmatic down-to-earth problems-solving were the very essence of Britishness.

Giving priority to concrete business interests rather than indulge in grandstanding philosophical dogma was a collective aptitude attributed to the British, despised and envied at the same time.

And now France and the rest of Europe are witnessing how pragmatism is drowned in a sea of collective hysteria, and how clear business interests have been sacrificed on the altar of irrational politics.

This irrationality, to which Hervé Jouanjean, former DG at the European Commission, pointed in his keynote, simply does not fit century-old cultural patterns. There are many business leaders who are convinced that reason will prevail in the very last minute and a sensible solution will be found that will keep consequences down to a perfectly manageable minimum.

As Gérald Darmanin, the French budget minister, recently pointed out, this was the first time in his political career where the public authorities seemed to be better prepared than the corporate world.

At the Angers conference his assessment was indirectly corroborated by the panel dedicated to the transport sector.

Pierre Rideau, director of the customs office for Western France, explained very clearly how they had already been preparing for the worst case for several months and what resources (both human and material) were being mobilised to mitigate the forthcoming problems of cross-border trade.

What they would be unable to avoid, though, was the expected increase in transport costs, which he had no doubt would drive many French SMEs out of the British market.

On each of the round-tables, experts from The UK in a Changing Europe (Raquel Ortega-Argilés, Carmen Hubbard, Christopher Huggins, John-Paul Salter, Ignazio Cabras, and Simon Usherwood) shared their own understandings about the likely disruptions in the different sectors that were addressed by the panels composed of policy-makers, business representatives and researchers.

The agrifood round-table, with Fabrice Sciumbata (Brioches Pasquier), Lydie Bernard (Regional Council Pays-de-la-Loire), Joao Pacheco (Farm Europe), and Carmen Hubbard (UK in a Changing Europe).

One of the major takeaways of the event was the perceived need to give more consideration to regional perspectives.

Just as Scotland feels – understandably – left out of a debate that circles around Westminster issues, so too the French regions, across which the impact of Brexit will vary considerably, have not been helped by a national approach either.

As one the regional councillors, Lydie Bernard, complained, even in a sector as essential to the French economy as the agrifood business, the available data is hardly ever broken down on a regional level.

Beyond the business data and economic prospects, however, the event concluded in a surprisingly humanistic profession of faith in transnational cooperation.

The Pays-de-la-Loire, as provincial as they may seem on a map, have their Brussels representation right on Rond-Point Schuman. Their policy makers and high civil servants are embedded in European networks, the British counterparts they regularly meet with are highly appreciated.

Vanessa Charbonneau

As Vanessa Charbonneau, Vice-President of the Regional Council, repeatedly insisted, they would – ‘of course!’ – be willing to continue to work together with their British neighbours in order to make the best of whatever would be going to happen.

Rather than shoulder-shrugging at the unforced self-destruction of a former premium nation, the overall attitude that seems to prevail in this part of France is one of compassion with a trusted partner whom you would like to help out of an impasse, but are unable to.

 

This post was initially published
on “The UK in a Changing Europe”

The post Business interests and cultural perception patterns. A French region’s view on Brexit. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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So here we are. In little more than one month, Britain is due to crash out of the EU without an agreement as the single outcome a strong majority MPs abhor because of the damage it would do to jobs, tax receipts and relations to European and international partners. The agreement actually negotiated by the government was strongly rejected by two thirds. Instead, a fragile majority of MPs demand ill-defined ‘alternative arrangements’ to the Irish backstop, or want it gone completely. Labour insists on a permanent customs union that is a matter for the future relationship and is perfectly compatible with the withdrawal agreement, while the party’s ‘six tests’ can realistically only be met by staying in the single market with all the obligations this brings or remaining.

Those who know how the EU works such as the former UK permanent representative in Brussels, Ivan Rogers, are tearing their hair out over the level of ignorance and his sense of frustration is widely shared among the community of people who study the EU professionally. I don’t wish to rehash the critique of the government approach to the negotiations, but want to explore why so many MPs, both Tories and Labour, misjudged the degree of the EU’s unity, what the core interests of EU member states are, the asymmetry of power in the negotiation, and how to best influence it. If we consider insights from research into foreign policy and intelligence failures, four main reasons stand out:

Firstly, the EU-related knowledge basis and professional connections have been eroding over years, because of declining priority and associated career incentives of being successful in Brussels. During the Blair years the government was keen to and proud of setting the policy agenda in the EU in economic strategy, counter-terrorism and security and defence policy. This started to change already under Gordon Brown who showed little interest in or appreciation of Brussels politics.

Labour’s loss of knowledge continued the longer it stayed out of power, but also because those MPs with experience of governing under Blair were being side-lined by the new front-bench under Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn himself, a lifelong Eurosceptic as well as his key advisors and some on the front bench, tend to see the EU as an unreformable neoliberal project and, erroneously, think that delivering the 2017 Labour manifesto requires freedom from EU state-aid rules. From this perspective, there is no need for coalition building with the socialist parties in Europe who called to stay and reform.

The Conservatives’ understanding of the EU suffered from Cameron’s early decision to withdraw his party from the conservative grouping in the European parliament in exchange for Brexiteer support for his leadership. This cut off the Conservatives from the European mainstream, damaged relations to sister parties such as the German CDU, and disrupted information flow and influence. As a result, British MPs overestimated both Germany’s capacity as well as its willingness to help accommodate British demands, which were increasingly about stopping things rather than setting the agenda for new policies. The 2011 watershed failure of the government to block the Fiscal Compact designed to save the Eurozone was the first sign of misreading EU partners, closely followed in 2015 by futile efforts to block Jean-Claude Juncker becoming Commission President after his party grouping won the European Parliament elections.

The second explanation for the misjudgement is confirmation bias. This is a problem affecting not just MPs but many commentators and members of the public with the most passionately held political beliefs. Confirmation bias involves seeking and accepting information, because it supports actions that are in line with ones’ beliefs and disregard evidence that contradicts them, regardless of reliability, relevance or track-record of the source. One can always find some “expert opinion” from an ideologically compatible “think-tank” that supports ones’ view and avoid or discard those that jar or contradict it.

One of the benefits of confirmation bias for true believers is that you can never be disproven by real world events. If the EU did not blink and yield as David Davis and other Brexiteers argue it must have been because it was intransigent, arrogant and out to “punish” Britain – not because the UK harboured unrealistic ideas. If the deal was somehow approved at the last second and negotiations about a post-Brexit trade-deal turned out not to be “the easiest in history” it was because the Commons had lost its nerve to fight for a better deal. If the EU did not respond positively to a new approach from a potential Corbyn-led government it was because the Tories had destroyed trust through the negotiating tactics, rather than Labour engaging in wishful thinking.

The third problem is mirror-imaging whereby uncertainty about the intentions of the other side is filled by imagining what is rational from ones’ own point of view. From the perspective of many British MPs the EU insisting on the backstop even if it risks a no deal is an irrational strategy given the economic damage a no-deal would incur. Many also do not understand why Britain could not enjoy the same kind of access to the Single Market as before as it creates new barriers to European businesses. This reflects a strong tendency in British political discourse to see evaluate policies and the EU in particular from a narrow “bottom-line”, cost-benefits perspective.

In contrast, EU institutions and the overwhelming majority of its members see Brexit not just on its own terms, but as precedence creating and future credibility-defining. Cutting an economically favourable deal with a country wanting to be politically more distant would come at an unacceptable price of weakening the Union at a time when populist parties in government attempt hard-ball tactics. The integrity of the Single Market is at stake if Northern Ireland was outside the customs union without border controls or by allowing Britain to undercut standards to gain competitive advantage whilst enjoyed good access to the Single Market. The EU is determined to defend the Treaties as its quasi constitution, which is something difficult to understand in a country without a written constitution. The difficulty of arriving at a legally-binding text among 27 member states also helps to explain why such texts, once agreed, become very difficult to change and why the EU says it will not reopen the withdrawal agreement shaped around and agreed by the British government and the EU 27 at the end of last year.

Beyond the immediate issue of the Brexit negotiations, many British MPs struggle to understand the compromise-nature of EU politics. They see Brussels through the lens of their own confrontational system with strongly whipped parties and underpinned by first past the post elections. Many continental European countries are run by coalition governments and problem-solving-focused parliaments, making it easier for them understand the give and take in Brussels. The EU is a compromise-making machine geared towards building the broadest possible support even when majority votes are allowed. This works only because members agree on informal rules on how to act and share a minimum level of trust not abuse their rights. Casting vetoes, going into battle with publicly announced red-lines and reneging on agreements made has lost the UK trust and good-will even among the most Anglophile countries. The lack of trust has now become a major obstacle for negotiation success.

Finally, assumption drag helps to explain why many MPs still do not realise that their perceived understanding of how Brussels works does no longer apply. Not just MPs, but also many journalists remember long EU summit negotiations and the late-night compromises that typically enable a deal to made. Indeed, in the now distant past, Britain won some special concessions at these negotiations over new Treaty texts. However, this is not a normal EU summit over a new treaty or a major agreement where everyone needs to have prizes to sell at home. By voicing its intention to leave Britain has placed itself in a fundamentally different position of a prospective “third country” against which the remaining EU members defend their interests. While the EU is keen to get Brexit over with and passed and will show flexibility, particularly on the political declaration, it is not going to let either Ireland or its mandated negotiator, the European Commission, stand in the rain on such a high-stakes issue. Smaller member states in particular will watch this closely as a test-case.

The need to address these misunderstandings rises whatever the outcome of Brexit. It will be central to making a success of the coming negotiations about future relations if May’s deal passed. Remain will require a change of attitude. And even if Britain crashed out, it will still remain strongly connected to and impacted by the European Union by virtue of geography, economic links, law, security cooperation and, indeed people. As long as the EU exists and confounds Brexiteers predictions of its imminent demise, Britain without a seat at the table and voting rights will have an even greater need to understand how the EU works in order to influence it from the outside.

 

*Christoph Meyer is Professor of European and International Politics at King’s College London. An abbreviated version of this text was published under the title ‘Brexit turmoil: five ways British MPs misunderstand the European Union’, in The Conservation and Uk in a Changing Europe, on 7 February 2019.

The post Why do so many British Politicians get the EU so wrong? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

What is Communicating Europe?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License, created by Niaz.

Communicating Europe really started as an idea, or rather a reflection, after watching the BBC Great Debate in June 2016 between representatives of different UK-based political parties regarding whether to leave the EU, or to stay inside and make it stronger.  The reflection I had at the time was that, for all the importance of the issues being discussed and indeed the importance of EU membership more generally, here were several politicians speaking past each other on these issues, all with very different understandings of what the EU is, how it functions, what it does, and why it does it.  What is the EU?  What are its values?  Is it an oppressive, distant bureaucracy, crushing the sovereignty of its composite members?  Is it a neoliberal economic project, seeking instead to extract whatever financial value there may be from its workers, to the detriment of their welfare, quality of life and happiness?  Is it instead a compromise between states, flawed or otherwise, that nevertheless stands for certain fundamental principles such as the rule of law, equality, human rights and social democracy?  Is it none of these things?  Or perhaps is it a complex amalgamation of all these things?

Communicating about the EU

The EU fundamentally changes, depending on who you speak to, and what they say.  The same individuals may even speak differently about the EU depending on their audience.  We are all familiar with the political actors who support the EU and its project in Brussels, taking full part in its activities and policy-making, who then decry it in domestic politics.  The trade unionist who talks of making stands against the onslaught on workers’ rights by a removed technocracy in public speeches to delegates, who realises the importance of compromise and shared responsibilities when attending closed stakeholder meetings.  We know of traditional media, becoming increasingly balkanized in their communications to their target audience, dividing themselves into camps that could almost be considered ‘EUrophiles’ and ‘EUrophobes’.  So too are we aware of new ways of communicating about Europe, far from the language and rules traditional media.  Online citizen campaigning about Europe, academics engaging in ‘public intellectualism’ through short YouTube videos or symposiums, and somewhat more shady, unknown entities going beyond expressing views or opinions on the EU based on the facts as they see them, instead seeking to deliberately mislead through the creation of extreme narratives and ‘false facts’.  The various ways and means of talking about the EU and its actions, policies, values and value are becoming increasingly complex, emotive, and yet, incorporating a greater number of actors than ever before.  How can we understand what is happening?

About the Research Group

Communicating Europe is the attempt to explore these fascinating interactions between different actors and audiences in far more detail.  Coordinated by Dr Benjamin Farrand at Newcastle University, Dr Isabel Camisão at the University of Coimbra, Dr Katjana Gattermann at the University of Amsterdam, and Professor Catherine de Vries at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, this UACES Research Network seeks to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to bear on the questions of who talks about the EU; how; why; and with what effect, bringing insights from international relations, law, sociology, politics and communication.  Through its activities in workshops and panels at international conferences, Communicating Europe will create a larger network of researchers considering how the EU is communicated, what influences the mode and content of communications, how it relates to broader trends, and how, if at all, these communications should be regulated by legal systems.  This first blog post, as the reader is no doubt aware, does not shed any particular light on any of the issues raised – it instead constitutes a statement of intent, a beginning of a conversation, and perhaps, a call to action.  Communicating Europe welcomes any and all academics, whether established Professors or Early Career Researchers just beginning a PhD to become involved.  We will be publishing information shortly regarding our initial UACES conference panels on these topics, and a call for papers for an opening event to take place in late May or early June 2019.  We look forward to working with all of you.  If you are interested in finding out more, do not hesitate to contact uacescommunicatingeurope@gmail.com to be added to our mailing list.

Benjamin Farrand, on behalf of Communicating Europe.

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University of Tartu. Photo from www.ut.ee

Teele Tõnismann

In my paper “Paths of Baltic States’ public research funding 1989–2010: Between institutional heritage and internationalization” (Tõnismann, 2018) I analyse transformations in public research funding of the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The paper is part of my PhD thesis where the topic is further explored with the example of research funding practices in the discipline of sociology.

 

Divergent impact of European Union politics in the Baltics

The paper focuses on the international competition in research funding policy. In research policy literature, competition is mostly seen to accompany “project-based” funding systems, which spread in the Western world since 1960 as a counter to so-called “institutional” or “basic” funding models. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, project-based funding systems were also established in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As with the other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, the EU accession is considered to have played significant roles in actualising these developments (Radosevic, Lepori, 2009). The overall transformation in these three countries encompassed the establishment of independent funding bodies, the introduction of project-based funding instruments, and the linking of institutional evaluation with research funding as was taking place in Western European countries.

 

However, against theoretical assumptions developed by neo-institutionalist authors (see below), these changes entailed significant differences. First, all three countries ended up with different shares of funding instruments. In a fashion similar to the ‘US system’, Estonia and Latvia rely mostly on project-based funding instruments while Lithuania’s public funding is built on a combination of core and project funding; this is typical of the ‘continental European funding systems’. Secondly, international dimensions of competitiveness in these systems occurred at various times: In Estonia before, in Latvia during, and in Lithuania after EU accession. Finally, policy changes gave different outputs, meaning that the research performances of the three Baltic States differ, with one country of the three—Estonia—surpassing the others. Consequently, the aim of this article was to better understand the factors that influenced the divergence in these three countries.

 

Limits of historical neo-institutionalism in explaining the impact of internationalisation

The Baltic case allows the discussion of works that have addressed similar questions using neo-institutional approaches. Although traditionally the external context is seen to have an impact on national institutional arrangements only through major ruptures or changes in an institutional environment, some recent historical neo-institutional authors have claimed this view. They claim that besides external factors, such as the restoration of national independence or accession to the EU, endogenous factors such as local political context and actors’ ability to interpret institutional rules play a crucial explanatory role in delineating the different change trajectories (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010).

 

In the article, I have applied the approach to the Baltics case and found that it raises at least two questions. First, if the political veto power could indeed explain the differences between the late Lithuanian reforms and those of its two northern neighbours, then how can we explain the Estonian reformers’ decision to move towards criteria favouring international competitiveness in a project-based funding system, while Latvian reformers did not? Secondly, if Latvian reform could be explained by political pressure coming from the EU, then how can we explain Lithuanian change agents’ motivation to delay change until 2009 even when political context would have allowed the change in the early 2000s? And although Latvia’s first changes were implemented in 2005, why has no substantial change occurred since?

 

These questions are showing the limits of the historical neo-institutionalism approach for understanding change in the Baltics. Instead, for a better understanding of the Baltic case, we drew on the works of recent historical neo-institutionalist authors and supplemented them with an analysis of change actors’ knowledge resources acquired from different international contexts.

 

Internationalisation as an endogenous factor of change?

In sum, the paper proposes the following hypothesis: to better understand the Baltic States’ divergent policy trajectories, internationalisation should be conceptualised as an endogenous factor of change, instead of perceiving it as an exogenous factor, as is theorised by historical institutionalist authors. The “endogenous” factor of change denotes here the “resource”  that change actors might engage for undertaking national policy reforms (Knoepfel et al. 2007) and that they have collected through their educational, professional, administrative, associative and political life trajectories.

 

Indeed, we found that the higher level of Western international knowledge resources with Estonian reform actors, compared to their Latvian counterparts at the beginning of the 1990s, and coupled with the political and institutional context, could explain the Estonian reformers’ decision to move towards integrating criteria favouring international competitiveness in a project-based funding system while Latvian reformers did not introduce these criteria. Similarly, a higher level of Western international knowledge resources with Lithuanian reformers compared to their Latvian counterparts can explain Lithuanian change actors’ motivation to undertake substantial changes in 2009 at the moment of national political change. At the same time, in Latvia, the changes were implemented incrementally and in a top-down method since 2005, as there has not been the emergence of a strong group of reformers with relevant knowledge resources.

 

It seems that actors’ knowledge resources gathered from different international contexts influence their intervention capacities in political processes and hence allow them to shape the institutional paths in given national contexts. Also, political and institutional contexts offer opportunities for change actors to use their resources to enact these changes. Hence, both the knowledge resources that actors have gathered from international environments and the motivation for their utilisation in national contexts need to be analysed in the context of the historical neo-institutionalism framework.

 

The results provide further understanding about the factors that have had a role in forming the differences in the Baltics’ research funding policy systems, and the given analysis can also contribute to better understanding the more general transformation in CEE innovation policies. The focus on the groups of reforms actors’ trajectories and their coalitions could better explain why some strongly pushed EU R&D policy objectives (such as private sector R&D specialisation or a socio-economically relevant public R&D system) are not fully implemented in the Baltics. Lastly, relative to long-term transformation in CEE policies, the Baltic cases expose the need to shift the focus from “eurocentrism” and to take multiple international change factors into account when explaining international impacts on local policy trajectories. The utilisation of different international contexts by change actors can explain the repertoire of solutions that are within the actors’ grasp.

 

Teele Tõnismann is, since 2014, a PhD student under the joint supervision of Sciences-Po Toulouse LaSSP and Tallinn University of Technology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance. She currently holds a prominent Estonian Government research scholarship: Kristjan Jaak.

 

References

Knoepfel, P., Corinne, L., Varone, F. et al. (2007) Public Policy Analysis. Bristol: Policy Press.

Mahoney, J. and Kathleen, T. (2010) Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge: CUP.

Radosevic, S., Lepori B. (2009) “Public research funding systems in Central and Eastern Europe: between excellence and relevance: Introduction to special section”, Science and Public Policy, 36/9: 659-666.

Tõnismann, T. (2018) “Paths of Baltic States public research funding 1989–2010: Between institutional heritage and internationalisation”, Science and Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scy066

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