European Union

In a spectacular operation the Ukrainian Security Service SBU has by its own account thwarted a murder attempt against Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko. Ukrainian authorities reported on Tuesday that Babchenko had been killed, then on Wednesday it emerged that the Ukraine-based Putin critic was alive. Europe's commentators ask whether anyone can be trusted anymore after this hoax.

A solution is emerging in the 27-year-old dispute between Athens and Skopje over the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). According to media reports the country could soon bear the name "Republic of North Macedonia" if its population agrees to this in a referendum slated for the autumn. Within the country opinions on the proposed compromise differ widely, however.

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, a joint extraordinary meeting of the 3 committees (Foreign Affairs, Development and Human Rights) will take place on Monday 4 June from 15.30- 18.30 in meeting room JAN 6Q2.
No less than 20 former Laureates will gather for a two day event in the European Parliament. The three Committees will host them for a debate in the presence of UN Deputy High commissioner for human rights Ms Kate Gilmore, the EU Special representative Mr Stavros Lambrinidis and many other distinguished guests.
Further information
Draft programme
List of Sakharov laureates participating in the conference
Watch the conference live
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

The next AFET meetings are scheduled to take place on:

Wednesday, 20 June 2018, 09:00-12:30 and 15:30-18:30, room JAN 2Q2
Wednesday, 20 June 2018, 14:30-15:30, jointly with the LIBE and DEVE Committees, room PHS 3C50
Thursday, 21 June 2018, 09:00-12:30, room JAN 2Q2

Further information
Information for visitors
Draft agendas
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Solemn undertaking before the Court of Justice of the European Union of four new Members of the European Court of Auditors

Valcheva
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
The notion of ‘rights of access’ includes the rights of access of grandparents to their grandchildren

Wegener
Environment and consumers
The right to compensation for long delays of flights applies to connecting flights to third States with stopovers outside the EU

Hassan
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
When a person travels to a Member State after making a request for international protection in another Member State, the first Member State cannot decide to transfer that person to the second Member State before that second State has agreed to the request to take that person back

Both the Prime Minister, Theresa May​, and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn​, are offering the people the same thing. Cake.

They both think that it’s possible for us to have a cake and eat it. That’s their answer to Brexit, and it just shows how little they understand about cake… or how the EU functions.

Theresa May expects us to keep most of the benefits of EU membership – what she calls ‘frictionless access’ – without being an EU member, or staying in the Single Market or the EU’s custom union.

Of course, that’s impossible.

Even before the referendum, Mrs May said that the EU was unlikely to give Britain a better deal than their own members enjoy.

Even though she’s constantly reminded by EU leaders that it’s simply not possible to have her cake and eat it, she keeps expecting just that.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is also expecting cake after Brexit.

He says that Labour wants to keep the benefits of EU membership “with no new impediments to trade and no reduction in rights, standards and protections.”

And, just like Mrs May, he also does not want Britain to be a member of the EU, or the Single Market, or the EU’s custom union.

The only slight difference is that Mr Corbyn says that Britain would be in ‘a’ customs union with the EU, but not ‘the’ customs union. Again, it just won’t work. It’s classic ‘cake and eat it’ fantasy.

As Sean O’Grady, deputy managing editor at The Independent, commented:

‘Jeremy Corbyn’s plan is just as fantastical as Theresa May’s’.

In a speech earlier this year, Mr Corbyn’s said:

“Labour would seek a final deal that gives full access to European markets and maintains the benefits of the Single Market and the customs union… with no new impediments to trade and no reduction in rights, standards and protections.”

And last year Labour’s manifesto stated:

‘We will scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that have a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the customs union – which are essential for maintaining industries, jobs and businesses in Britain.’

But Mr Corbyn also confirmed that the UK would not be subject to the rules of the EU and its Single Market, such as Free Movement of People, and would be free to negotiate its own independent trade agreements with other countries.

Labour is playing as dangerous a game as the Tories, pretending to us that we can enjoy the benefits of the EU and its Single Market, without having to be in it, or having to accept its rules such as Free Movement of People.

Labour is trying to fob us off with cake, just like the Tories.

No country in the world enjoys the benefits of the Single Market without being signed up to it. The EU has already rejected Britain’s cake fantasies, but we keep being told we can have the cake, and we can eat it.

Theresa May said that whilst our relationship with Europe will be different after Brexit, “I think it can have the same benefits in terms of that free access to trade.”

Brexit Secretary, David Davis, said that his aim was to achieve, “a comprehensive free trade agreement and a comprehensive customs agreement that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have.”

It’s not going to happen.

What’s the point of a club if you are going to allow non-members to enjoy the same or better benefits as members? What club allows that?

Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn need to be honest with the nation and explain clearly what Brexit means.

It means loss of jobs and industry. It means the country suffering economically. It means losing comradeship with our allies in Europe.

After all, that’s what Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn told the nation before the referendum.

This is the bottom line: We can have Brexit, or we can have EU benefits, but we cannot have both.

And if we lose EU benefits, the country will suffer.

For Mrs May and Mr Corbyn to pretend otherwise is a shocking betrayal of the country. And it’s daft, because sooner or later the country will find out the truth.

Then, the Tories and Labour will have to own up to their dishonesty.

Wouldn’t it be better to own up now, before it’s too late, and for the sake of the country?

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The post May and Corbyn both say we can have cake and eat it appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Europe and Colonial Guilt in the Age of Apology

by Mike Ungersma

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

In philosophy, there is a concept known as ‘infinite regression,’ a helpful notion in trying to establish causation.  It involves determining what caused whatever one is examining, and then looking at the cause of that event, and the one before that, and so on. Or, as the website Conservapedia puts it: “An infinite regression is a proposed chain of causation in which each purported cause itself requires another event of exactly the same type to cause it.” According to one contemporary philosopher however, there is an important qualification before infinite regression can be accurately employed in examining any cause back to its origin.  Steve Patterson writes:

. . . each proposition in the chain – without exception – is contingent on its preceding premises. Each proposition is like an empty vessel, dependent on the truth-value of the premise before it. If there’s a falsehood anywhere in the chain, it poisons every conclusion which follows.

In the complex world of history, where trying to figure out why events took the turn they did, such reasoning may be problematic.  But it nonetheless seems to form the basis for countless arguments currently raging around colonialism.  Occupying someone else’s land for profit and exploitation is bad, hence all of the bad events that followed that initial action must also be bad, unlawful and immoral. As an example, take Owen Jones, columnist for Britain’s Guardian, and earlier, The Independent.  It was in the latter that Jones attempted ‘exposing’ the evils of especially British colonialism. In one column, after citing instances of colonial cruelty in British India, South Africa and the Sudan, he goes on to argue that while colonialism might have technically ended decades ago, its legacy lives on:

Hundreds of millions still suffer from the consequences of colonialism. As the then-South Africa President Thabo Mbeki put it in 2005, colonialism left a “common and terrible legacy of countries deeply divided on the basis of race, colour, culture and religion”. Across Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, conflicts and divisions created or exacerbated by colonialism remain.

Jones, and countless other commentators, are now part of a growing cottage industry condemning colonisation.  They are joined by thousands of students and their professors, action groups and charities, and even many politicians.  Their collective viewpoint is the accepted canon in academia and elsewhere.  To question them or their reasoning can be a perilous business.  Ask Bruce Gilley.  A professor of political science at Portland State University in Oregon, Gilley questioned the long-established orthodoxy in an article last year for the academic journal, Third World Quarterly, entitled “The Case for Colonialism.”

“Western colonialism,” he claimed, “was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found.”

Gilley went further: “The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it.”  And, “It is hard to overstate the pernicious effects of global anti-colonialism on domestic and international affairs since the end of World War II.”

The Third World Review, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, is published by Taylor and Francis.  Within weeks of airing Gilley’s article, it was withdrawn “at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author.”  Taylor and Francis claimed to have been threatened with violence, as did Galley himself.

The London-based Independent, covered the incident extensively:

An online petition calling for an apology and retraction from Third World Quarterly, attracted 6,936 signatures and accused Prof Gilley of “pseudo-scholarship” and arguments that “reek of colonial disdain for indigenous peoples … with the predictably racist conclusion.”

The lead drafter of the petition, Jenny Heijun Wills, associate professor of English and Director of the Critical Race Network at the University of Winnipeg added: “In our current political context, the lives and safety of refugees, and allies are being threatened by radicalised white supremacist groups.

“These kinds of ideas are not simply abstract provocations, but have real, material consequences for those who Prof Gilley seeks to dominate and objectify.”

The Independent, 12 October 2017

The rage about colonialism feeds into so many contemporaneous disputes: immigration, nationalism, populism, racism itself, issues surrounding multiculturalism, overseas aid, ‘state-building’, and on and on.  As long ago as 1971, in his T. S. Elliot Lecture Series at the University of Kent, cultural historian George Steiner identified the trend: “Seeking to placate the furies of the present, we demean the past.” He went on:

We soil that legacy of eminence which, whatever our personal limitations, we are invited to take part in, by our history, our Western languages, by the carapace and, if you will, burden of our skins. The evasions, moreover, the self-denials and arbitrary restructurings of historical remembrance which guilt forces on us, are usually spurious.  The number of human beings endowed with sufficient empathy to penetrate genuinely into another ethnic guise, to take on world-views, the rules of consciousness of a coloured or ‘third-world’ culture, is inevitably very small.  Nearly all of the Western gurus and publicists who proclaim the new penitential ecumenism, who profess to be brothers under the skin with the roused, vengeful soul of Asia or Africa, are living a rhetorical lie.

It is what another academic, Professor Amikam Nachmani, of Bar Ilan University, Israel, has called ‘the haunted present,’ the title of his 2017 book.  He notes:

This European colonial debt is prevalent particularly among the Left and liberals of the continent’s political map and is a paralysing drug.  These circles feel guilty because of their countries’ imperialism, slavery, ethnocentrism, racism and oppression of minorities in Europe and suppression of national aspirations in the colonial world.  They consequently reveal their understanding and even express sympathy with the Muslim migrant who reacts violently against the ‘white’ majority. The paralysing result is manifested in calls for European authorities not to insist on the assimilation of the newcomer, not to expatriate immigrants already on the continent.

“The essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common”, and “they must also have forgotten many things.” A remark attributed to the 19th century French philosopher, Ernest Renan.  In other words, part of being a nation can involve getting its history wrong, and most do.  Moreover, most are highly selective about their history, understandably so since a country’s collective memory is its collective identity.  Self-evidently, Britain’s heavy involvement in the slave trade – a hugely profitable ‘business’ – was morally wrong.  And remarkably, it went on for half a millennia.  Can it be judged in terms of today’s morality?  Of course, just as future generations will condemn and chastise the present generation for its failure to stop war, halt the spread of disease and famine, and tolerate inequality.

So, in the ‘Age of Apology’ what is to be done about the sins of our fathers?

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, “my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault” – lines from the Confiteor that are part of the Roman Catholic Mass.  In an echo of that ritual, the colonial nations of Europe approach the ‘altar of history,’ acknowledging their forefathers were wrong and behaved badly, pushing the very topic into the mainstream of public awareness almost to a level of self-loathing.  This is unique in human history.  George Steiner:

What other races have turned in penitence to those whom they once enslaved, what other civilizations have morally indicted the brilliance of their own past?  The reflex of self-scrutiny in the name of ethical absolutes is, once more, a characteristically Western, post-Voltairian act.

On bended  knee and prostrate before their God, Catholics strike their breasts with each utterance of this passage from the ancient Latin mass, praying for forgiveness of their sins.   Is Europe now sharing in a similar rite of mea culpa?  Self-flagellation is meaningless to those who were harmed over the centuries of colonial oppression.  And on a practical level, what meaning can it have to their descendants?  Would it not be better to employ the energies expended in this bitter debate dealing with the sins of our own age which future generations will hold the us responsible?  In the words of the priest at the end of another Catholic rite, the confession, “Go forth and sin no more.”

Mike Ungersma, Cardiff, Wales, May 2018

 

 

The post Deliver us from evil appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Solemn undertaking before the Court of Justice of the European Union of four new Members of the European Court of Auditors

All major politicians sooner or later find themselves in a hole of their own making. Even if they don’t make mistakes, they will fall into an elephant trap dug by their opponents. There are three laws to follow when in a hole: stop digging; keep afloat; and watch out for someone pulling the plug and sending you down the drain.

First law

The first law, stop digging, means first check the facts. After all, maybe you are in a hole for good reason. Amber Rudd failed to do so and had to resign after issuing a denial that was buried by evidence. Peter Mandelson’s first cabinet resignation is another classic example.

Another error is trying to climb out of the hole with a rope ladder made of cover-ups. That tactic was famously adopted by both John Profumo and Richard Nixon but couldn’t take the weight of facts. Donald Trump’s modification is: When you are in a hole, throw mud, false facts or abusive terms which the media will publicise and your friends will cheer.

The Brexit negotiations make it difficult for Theresa May to do nothing, as Brussels briefings regularly pour barrowfuls of mud down her hole. If her words don’t begin to make sense in ‘Eurospeak’ as well as in British parliamentary language, the Brussels calendar-clock will keep ticking until she is out of her hole and over the cliff of Brexit without a deal in March next year.

Second law

The second law of holes is exemplified by Theresa May’s concentration on keeping afloat. This is consistent with Michael Oakeshott’s old Tory philosophy that politics is not about sailing toward goals, but instead about keeping afloat in a boundless sea. It is matched by Harold Wilson’s dictum that keeping afloat for a week is ‘a long time in politics’.

Theresa May cannot take survival to the end of a week for granted. Last week she avoided the Cabinet’s Brexit sub-committee breaking up by offering home-made fudge. This is the political equivalent of the Emperor’s clothes, a compromise statement about a customs union that is palatable to her divided party but contains ingredients unacceptable under EU regulations. The EU is offering British negotiators the choice of real Belgian chocolate or nothing.

A small but strategically important number of pro-EU Tory MPs would like to serve fudge cooked in the House of Lords according to Walter Bagehot’s recipe. It would be wrapped in symbols of tradition such as the Union Jack.

Inside would be a fudge full of ingredients familiar in Brussels, such as the rights and obligations of participating in a customs union and single market. It is certain that this would be rejected by most Tory MPs as making Britain a vassal of Brussels. It is uncertain whether this would meet the diverse tastes of Labour MPs to be favoured by a cross-party majority in the House of Commons.

Third law

For anti-Brexit campaigners such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and members of the Eurosceptic European Research Group, the key question is: when to pull the plug and see their opponent disappear down the drain of history?

Under Conservative Party rules only 48 Tory MPs need to sign a letter requesting a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister by Tory MPs. This is less than the number of Tory MPs who would like to remove the ‘stain’ of Brussels blue from the UK and repaint the map of the world imperial pink.

A letter can be handed to the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee any week when the Commons is in session and a draft letter can be scribbled during a Cabinet meeting or parliamentary debate when the time appears right to do so. The only safe time for Theresa May before the summer holidays is the two-week recess at the time of the late May Whitsun holiday.

For a theoretical economist, the answer is easy: Pull the plug when you are sure to win. For the most ideological Brexiteers, victory would take the form of a new Conservative prime minister insisting that the European Union accept uncompromising British terms for Brexit.

If this is refused, then Britain would turn its back on Europe and sail off to explore a global future as it did in days of old. This policy could also be delivered by Theresa May if, in order to stay afloat, she accepts what Brexit means to hardline Tories.

For many pragmatic Tory MPs important issues in a vote of confidence are: How likely is it that a new Conservative prime minister would offer me a post in government? Would a new Conservative prime minister improve my chances of re-election?

For all MPs, the big question is: who will come forward with a new spade after Theresa May is buried politically? A cross-party majority vote in the Commons for a soft Brexit motion would not produce a Tory prime minister. Nor can such a majority favour terms that would be acceptable to Brussels.

A general election vote giving Labour the most MPs would put the spade in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn. He would only dig a hole for an EU flag that was purple turning red. However, this risks burying the British economy.

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Korwin-Mikke v Parliament
Law governing the institutions
The General Court annuls the decisions of the Bureau of the European Parliament to impose penalties on the European MEP Korwin-Mikke due to comments made on the floor of the Parliament