European Union

This week I found myself in one of the leafier parts of the stock-broker belt, giving an after-lunch talk on the Brexit process. As we pushed the meat-and-two-veg around the plates of the clubhouse, I listened to tales of how the Germans were trying to do what they didn’t manage in the world wars, and of how Whitehall was trying to spike the whole thing.

Tragically, for the bathos of this tale, cake wasn’t on the menu, but a rather good summer-fruit pudding instead.

This experience, plus the continued agonies of the government this week, invite me to consider the role of trust.

Trust is a central part of politics: indeed, one might argue it’s fundamental, given the need to work with others to achieve any political process or outcome.

At the same time, it’s also necessary to recognise that trust is sometimes in short supply, as in the case of Brexit: a lot of participants – both principals and the wider public – don’t trust any one, including those on ‘their own’ side.

Once again, I’ll take you back to some negotiation theory, because this isn’t an uncommon issue. The principled negotiation model that I’ve discussed before offers a number of strategies for dealing with those you don’t really trust: indeed, one of the motivations for using this approach is that it is grounded in always taking your relations with others with a pinch of salt.

The first key concept is that you’re trying to solve a problem, not a person. That means focusing your efforts on the matter in hand, but it also implies that you can be sympathetic to the other needs they might have, albeit without making it part of the negotiation. Indeed, being able to empathise with their situation might help you understand better how to address the problem you both face. Acknowledgement of how they feel doesn’t have to mean acceptance or concession, but rather opens up new ways to tackle and resolve the issue.

Secondly, and related to this, is the need to recognise and manage one’s emotions. Often there are problems of vicious circles of emotion, as each side becomes frustrated or annoyed by the other side’s frustration or annoyance. Being able to step out of one’s own self and see how you come across is a vital step in this: a useful rule of thumb is that if you don’t think you need to do this, then you need to do it. If you don’t want to dress it up in quite such grand terms, then it’s largely about being self-aware. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s not what you say that matters, but what people hear.

Linked to this is the notion of getting away from tit-for-tat. Old Testament-style an-eye-for-an-eye approaches might feel satisfying, but they tend to produce the kind of downward spirals just mentioned: retribution usually only begets more retribution. Instead, there has to be a willingness to step back from the brink of kicking back. This links to the first idea, inasmuch as if you can appreciate that they have emotions too, then you’re more likely to let them vent, so you can then get on with the core work of solving the problem. Sure, this can make you somewhat annoying, as you wait for them to finish, but if it produces results then that might be a price worth paying.

Incidentally, the Commission is doing a lot of this right now: letting the various factions in the UK put out their desires and vent their furies, before working through the issues of whatever document comes out of it all.

There’s a final idea here too, that takes me back to my Surrey lunch: the question of alternatives.

Usually in a negotiation, failure to agree leaves things as they were: you don’t buy the car, or sign the trade deal. But it’s also essential that you understand what the best alternative to an agreement might be, because if that’s not as good as what’s on offer in the negotiation, then you should take the negotiated outcome.

In the case of Brexit, the alternative to an agreed deal is departure from the EU in March 2019 with no deal. There is nothing either the Germans, or Whitehall, or anyone else can do to stop that happening, now that Article 50 has been invoked.

Moreover, the decision to invoke was the UK’s, with Parliament following the decision in the referendum, so it’s not an unforced error, but an outcome of democratic politics. Ultimately, that means that the outcome of all of this rests with the government laying a deal that it has agreed with the EU before Parliament to be approved: that too will be a democratic process.

Parliament thus already holds the power to frustrate the supposed will of others: what it has to decide is whether rejecting any final deal is better than accepting what is offered. That power can, and does translate into the ability to encourage the government to pursue certain objectives that it, Parliament, deem important, but that can only happen in a short window between new and the autumn.

Whether everyone can hold their emotions in check in the coming weeks remains to be seen.

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Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been criticised for rejecting a House of Lords amendment for Britain to remain a member of the EEA (European Economic Area) after Brexit.

Instead, Mr Corbyn said Labour would push for a ‘new Single Market’ deal with the EU, giving Britain full access but without accepting all the rules, such as free movement of people.

But newspapers reported that his proposal had ‘split the party’ amid accusations that he was making a ‘fudge’ of Brexit and offering ‘weak leadership’.

The EU has already said the UK cannot have a bespoke arrangement that retains all the benefits of the Single Market without the obligations that membership entails.

But that’s exactly what both the Tory government and the Labour opposition are proposing. They are both spending energy pretending we can keep EU benefits without being a member of the EU or its Single Market.

The EU has flatly said no to such an idea.

Even before the referendum Theresa May said:

“It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.”

And before the referendum, Jeremy Corbyn said:

“Labour is convinced that a vote to Remain is in the best interests of the people of this country.”

He added,

“The Labour Party is overwhelmingly for staying in.”

But whatever their positions were before 23 June 2016, they both now support Brexit, in one form or another.

Neither are willing to give Britain another chance to consider the issue.

Jeremy Corbyn has said that, “we have to respect” the referendum decision. Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell agreed, adding that, “We must not try to re-fight the referendum or push for a second vote.”

Theresa May has also agreed, saying it wouldn’t be right to give people another vote, adding that, “people voted and politicians should respect that.”

Even though a YouGov survey published this week found that a significant majority of voters now think that the decision to leave the EU was wrong.

According to the poll, Remain now commands a lead over Leave of 47% to 40%. It’s the biggest margin for Remain since the regular survey began two years ago.

Commented our polling expert, Professor Adrian Low of Staffordshire University, “This translates into a 10.7% lead for Remain.”

And a recent poll of over 200,000 local newspaper readers showed that most Britons would now vote to remain in the European Union if there was another referendum.

But like a broken record, both May and Corbyn are stuck in a time warp, repeating their mantra of having to ‘accept the will of the people’ as expressed two years ago.

On this, both of Britain’s two main parties seem to be locked hand-in-hand with each other. Brexit has been decided, so we must stick with it, regardless, they say.

It seems so odd, since before the referendum, both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition were in complete agreement with each other: Britain should remain in the EU, because Brexit would be damaging to our country’s best interests.

How on earth did we get stuck with Brexit?

After all, Brexit used to sit on the far side-lines of politics. Indeed, the word ‘Brexit’ was only invented in 2012, and until the lead up to the 2016 referendum, most people didn’t even know what it meant. (Now it’s in the Oxford English dictionary.)

For over 40 years Britain didn’t want to leave the EU.

Britain’s membership of the EU was never previously a majority interest subject. Some on the fringes of the Conservative and Labour Parties thought Britain should leave the EU, but they were small in number.

The vast majority of MPs and members of the House of Lords strongly supported Britain’s membership of the EU, and most of them voted for Britain to remain in the European Union.

With the notable exception of the current Tory government, every single UK government and Prime Minister since we applied to join the European Community back in 1961 has supported our membership of the EEC/EU.

And for most of our membership, the vast majority of people in Britain also didn’t want Britain to leave the EU. We’d been members for around 40 years and it was not a big deal. There was not a groundswell of opinion for Britain to leave.

Even one year before the EU referendum, polling showed that support for our continued membership was running at three-to-one in favour.

Nevertheless, Britain – to the shock of everyone – voted for Brexit two years ago, and we are now on the road to leaving the EU in March next year.

Now Brexit is on the news every single day, most often the lead news item.

Parliament, politics, the news, discussions at work, in the pub and in living rooms across the country, are often dominated with talk of Brexit.

How did it happen?

It started when politicians, who should have known better, got scared of a little Eurosceptic party called UKIP. A party so fractured, small and splintered that they have now sunk into oblivion.

But senior politicians in both the Conservative and Labour Parties were fearful of UKIP.

Instead of bucking the UKIP trend, they fell for it; they unwisely helped to promote and prolong it, along with the majority of British newspapers, also guilty of inciting UKIP’s message of xenophobia.

Just before the 2015 general election, the BBC reported on the rise of UKIP:

‘David Cameron’s historic pledge to hold an in/out referendum on UK membership of the EU if the Conservatives won the next election was interpreted by some as an attempt to halt the rise of UKIP, which senior Tories feared could prevent them from winning an overall majority in 2015.’

(Repeat: Previously hardly anyone in Britain was concerned about Britain’s EU membership – it was a minority issue on the side-lines of politics.)

In 2014 Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP told The Telegraph:

“Parts of the country have been taken over by foreigners and mass immigration has left Britain as unrecognisable.”

It was complete nonsense of course. Most Britons didn’t have a serious problem with migration before the likes of Nigel Farage, UKIP’s on-off-on-off leader, told them they did.

If you look at a map of where UKIP had the highest support, it was mostly in the areas of Britain where there was the least migration. And conversely, in the areas with lots of migrants, UKIP mostly had the least support.

The foreign-born of Britain only represent about 12% of the population – that’s a normal proportion for most modern, thriving western democracies. Even among those 12% of foreign-born are many considered to be British, such as Boris Johnson, born in New York, and Joanna Lumley, born in India.

And citizens from the rest of the EU living in the UK represent only 5% of the population – that’s small and hardly ‘mass immigration.’

Tory MP, Sir Oliver Letwin, agreed. He said that British politicians “made a terrible mistake” in failing to take on the argument about immigration, the argument spread by UKIP.

He told The Sunday Times just after the referendum result:

“We all, the Labour party and the Conservative Party alike … made a terrible mistake, which was not to take on the argument about migration.”

He added that UKIP exploited the failure of mainstream politicians to “put the counter-argument” that “migration enriches the country in every way.”

But even Mr Farage, who married a German and has a foreign name, probably doesn’t believe most of what he says. What he really means behind his Ukipish words are:

“Scaring people and the other political parties about immigration has spectacularly worked for us.”

Gandhi got it right when he said:

“The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is fear.”

It’s time to stop being fearful. Brexit came about because of unfounded fear.

Now our leading politicians are too fearful to challenge Brexit; scared that they would be going against the ‘will of the people’ as expressed on one summer’s day two years ago, without any interest in finding out what that will is today.

We need to let the politicians know, clearly, loudly and boldly, that Brexit is not our will.

Our political leaders should have the courage to state what they already know in their hearts and heads to be true: it’s in our country’s best interests to #STOPBREXIT.

Especially now that polling confirms that the country agrees: Brexit is a big mistake.

• Related interview with Jon Danzig: The tide is turning on Brexit:

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The post How did we get stuck with Brexit? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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On Tuesday 5 June 2018, the Informal Meeting of Agriculture and Fisheries Ministers takes place in Sofia. The main discussion topic of the meeting is the Common Agricultural Policy in the new programming period after 2020 and attracting a new generation of agricultural workers in the agricultural sector.

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By Caroline McEvoy (University College Dublin)

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What influences public support for or trust of the European Union (EU)?

Political scholars continue to grapple with this precise question, which is especially relevant for our contemporary politics. The change in public attitudes towards the EU over the past two decades is striking. In 2013 only 31 per cent of Europeans reported trust for the EU compared to 50 per cent, nine years previously.  As of 2017 trust levels sit at 41 per cent.

In the last ten years, the public image of the EU has been of an institution fighting multiple fires including an economic recession, a refugee crisis, an increase in support for Eurosceptic populism in several member states, and a contentious ‘divorce’ process with the United Kingdom.

One way to view the UK’s decision to leave the EU is to see it as a consequence of low levels of support. While many have already argued that the vote to leave was driven by concerns over immigration and the cost of membership to the economy, I go further to argue that there is an underlying logic to these drivers.

This logic was encapsulated in the simple message promoted by the Leave campaign – take back control. The Leave campaign capitalised on the low levels of trust among the British public to convince enough voters that the EU does not listen to the voice of the British public and that policy is effectively made without their input.

This discourse is of course not new. Those who have long argued that the EU has a democratic deficit argue that policy-making is too distant from the citizens and Brussels politics is perceived as removed from everyday democratic processes. Yet, the majority of studies that have examined the public’s perception of the EU tend to focus on material gains from membership rather than perceptions of substantive representation.

Such research argues that the public lacks a collective “European” identity which prevents them from trusting the EU’s democratic processes over the long term, particularly during times of political and economic crises. According to this narrative, a person who does not feel European will have little reason to trust and support the EU if it does not create material benefits for them. As a consequence, researchers argue, support for the EU largely comes from short-term economic gains. If the EU stops delivering economically, public support is withdrawn.

My article challenges this dominant thread in the literature. In it, I focus explicitly on the importance of voice on public support for the EU. While there is evidence that material gains related to economic conditions are an important feature of support for the EU, I argue that a belief that one’s voice is heard in the EU – a concept known as external political efficacy – is, at least, as influential in explaining public attitudes.

In bringing the role of political efficacy back into the debate, I show that when a citizen feels that their expressed interests are taken into consideration in the EU’s decision-making processes they are more likely to support it. Importantly, they are likely to continue to support it even when their attitudes towards the economy are pessimistic. Put another way, citizens are less inclined to withdraw their support for the EU during periods of economic downturn provided they feel that the system is, at the very least, listening to their interests. Understood in this way, public attitudes toward the EU are reflective of David Easton’s classic typology of political support. Effectively, citizens must have their policy needs met some of the time within a political system; however, since it is impossible to satisfy all individual preferences all of the time, the public must also hold a ‘reservoir of favourable attitudes’ towards the system which allows them to tolerate unfavourable outcomes. This allows for them to continue offering long-term legitimacy to democratic institutions.

Using a standard Eurobarometer survey from November 2013, I test propositions derived of Easton’s typology.

The below graph (Figure 1) shows the results for individuals with both high and low levels of political efficacy. People with high efficacy believe their voice counts in the EU while those with low efficacy believe it doesn’t.

Figure 1:  Public Support for the EU at Varying Levels of Economic Expectations.

The results are clear. When a person believes that their voice counts in the EU, their belief that economic conditions are declining (or improving) has little impact their support for the EU (a difference of about 6 per cent).

The top line in Figure 1 is almost flat, showing that people who feel heard by the EU are likely to support it regardless of how they feel about the state of the economy. By contrast, when people feel that their voice is ignored by the EU they are much more likely to rely on their perceptions of the economy when considering how much (or how little) they support the EU.

The lower line in Figure 1 shows how the likelihood of supporting the EU is lower, in general, for such individuals but is particularly pronounced when they believe economic conditions are worsening (a decline of about 31 per cent compared with those who believe the economy is getting better).

Ultimately, these findings highlight the importance of voice among the European electorate and show how feeling that one’s voice counts in the EU can bolster support for the system, even at times when the economic outlook is poor. The results of the article speak to the wider debate of declining support and the EU’s so called democratic deficit particularly after economic austerity.

Citizens need to feel that their interests are heard and articulated in the decision-making process if the EU is to thrive in the long run as a democratic system.  This is something that the EU has struggled with in the past, but it has become clear that the EU can no longer ignore it, particularly when faced with successive crises.

This blog draws on the research originally published in JCMS Volume 54, Issue 5. It won the best article prize for 2016.

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of  Ideas on Europe, JCMS or UACES.

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Caroline McEvoy | @carolineamcevoy

Caroline McEvoy is Lecturer / Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin.

Her research interests are in the areas of political behaviour and public opinion with a particular focus on political representation in Europe. Previously, Caroline was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral fellow at UCD (2015-2017) and Teaching Fellow/Adjunct Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin (2013-2016).

The post The Key to Public Support for the EU is Efficacy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Almost a year into our editorship of JCMS, we are very proud to launch our official blog. The purpose of the blog is to facilitate the space for debate on issues of academic importance and policy relevance in European and comparative regionalism studies.

As we stated in our editorial note a couple of months ago, we intend for JCMS to remain the place for original and exciting research. Moreover, we seek to actively promote the diversity inherent within this field and thus undertake to support new approaches and multidisciplinary stances.

In this sense, we acknowledge the inequalities in our field, and will work with others to decrease the gender citation gap while supporting the work of early career researchers towards publication. Moreover, we aspire to increase representation especially for scholars in the global South.

Already, we believe that the global nature of our team, a change to the previous editorial model, is a great start to attaining many of the objectives of our term as editors. Within our team, we have attained gender parity and have a mix of expertise within European and regionalism studies.

Looking to the future, we believe our ambitions have practical implications. With more scholars and readers accessing online-only content, we will be moving to an electronic format in the medium.

The 2020 JCMS Special Issue will be our first to appear online only. The online only format allows us to provide the benefits of rapid publication, while still offering the thematic and topical grouping of content for readers. We are grateful for the support of our professional association, UACES and our publishers John Wiley & Sons in facilitating this move.

This blog will support the work of our authors, by giving visibility to the articles published in the main journal and the JCMS Annual Review by communicating key themes of published articles. This will also be the space for scholars in the discipline to communicate new ideas, pedagogical innovation and support other authors, especially early career researchers.

The blog will also communicate news and additional content on the JCMS. The use of alternative forums, including this blog and other modes of social media, is essential to promoting new research, strengthen dissemination and generally enhance the visibility of newly published research.

Through our new journal website, designed and supported by Wiley, we hope that you will see our commitment to ensuring easy access to forthcoming articles, see the journal’s most cited and most downloaded pieces and allow for the editors to promote details on citations and the journal’s Twitter account.

We hope that through the of social media, and especially through the JCMS blog, we will be able to reach our contributors and reviewers in manner that allows for greater interaction with the journal and creating a space for communicating the cutting edge ideas and research that is the hallmark of the journal.

The Editors in Chief
Toni Haastrup and Richard G Whitman (University of Kent)

 

JCMS Editorial Board

Editors in Chief
Toni Haastrup, University of Kent, UK
Richard G Whitman, University of Kent, UK

Co-Editors
Heather MacRae, York University, Canada
Annick Masselot, University of Christchurch, New Zealand
Alasdair Young, Georgia Tech University, USA

Book Review Editors
Ruby Gropas, European University Institute, Italy
Gaby Umbach, European University Institute, Italy
JCMSBookReviews@EUI.eu

Annual Review Editors
Theofanis Exadaktylos, University of Surrey, UK
Roberta Guerrina, University of Surrey, UK
Emanuele Massetti, University of Surrey, UK

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France v Parliament
Law governing the institutions
Advocate General Wathelet proposes that the Court should annul only the act by which the President of the Parliament declared in Brussels, and not in Strasbourg, that the general budget of the EU for 2017 was definitively adopted

Wirtschaftsakademie Schleswig-Holstein
Approximation of laws
The administrator of a fan page on Facebook is jointly responsible with Facebook for the processing of data of visitors to the page

Coman and Others
Citizenship of the Union
The term ‘spouse’ within the meaning of the provisions of EU law on freedom of residence for EU citizens and their family members includes spouses of the same sex

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