European Union

General : Although few of them were allowed to vote during the referendum, the millions of EU citizens living in the UK will be among those affected the most by Brexit. The EU wants to reach a deal to protect their rights as soon as possible during the upcoming negotiations with the UK. This week Parliament is holding a hearing on the situation and rights of EU citizens in the UK. Watch the meeting live online and check out our infographic for the facts.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : Globalisation offers great potential to create wealth and jobs, but it also has the capacity to disrupt. The EU has always tried to make the most of it, while mitigating its negative effects by setting rules and working together with other countries. As the European Commission publishes on 10 May a reflection paper on how the EU should deal with globalisation in the future, we take a look at what Parliament has already done recently.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : Globalisation offers great potential to create wealth and jobs, but it also has the capacity to disrupt. The EU has always tried to make the most of it, while mitigating its negative effects by setting rules and working together with other countries. As the European Commission publishes on 10 May a reflection paper on how the EU should deal with globalisation in the future, we take a look at what Parliament has already done recently.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : Europe Day, celebrated on 9 May, is all about our common journey from war to peace and cooperation. It was on 9 May 1950 that then French foreign minister Robert Schuman put in words a dream of a different Europe working together to overcome conflicts and growing stronger step by step. In 1958, this dream took shape in the Rome Treaties that set the basis for the European Union. Francesco Fresi was present in Rome at the signing and shared with us his thoughts on Europe’s extraordinary journey.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : Europe Day, celebrated on 9 May, is all about our common journey from war to peace and cooperation. It was on 9 May 1950 that then French foreign minister Robert Schuman put in words a dream of a different Europe working together to overcome conflicts and growing stronger step by step. In 1958, this dream took shape in the Rome Treaties that set the basis for the European Union. Francesco Fresi was present in Rome at the signing and shared with us his thoughts on Europe’s extraordinary journey.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

The European Union is finished: long live Europe! Not only can we move towards a new and completely redesigned European utopia, we must do this to save the European project from ending in a dystopia of populism and nationalism. We have forgotten that without a utopia – an ideal society – there is no chance of achieving a better future. As German philosopher Ernst Bloch once said, society needs a permanent stream of utopian thinking. The ebb of utopian energy is therefore Europe’s most serious problem.

It is high time to overcome the idea of the nation state, and rediscover what Europe once wanted to be: a true transnational democracy. Democracy is not necessarily secure when left in the hands of a single nation, as Europe experienced in the 1920s, and as we are seeing today. This was precisely the motivation for Europe: to disentangle democracy from nation states and avoid nationalism. Europe needs to return to the roots of its own idea.

The utopia is simple: a single market, a single currency, a single democracy. And two of them – the market and the currency – have already been achieved, thanks to the EU. Yet now – if we do not want to sacrifice them – we need to press on and put in place the final, most difficult piece: one democracy. For that to happen, we need to wake up from the dream that nation states will ever deliver ‘Europe’.

As much as national elites were willing to Europeanise the market and currency, they were unwilling to do the same in the political arena as it would have undermined their own power bases. In recent years they have administered their national democracies through largely neutralised grand coalitions that lack political contours, leading to a perfect erosion of state functions at a national level. It suited them to cling to fictional national power while accepting economic governance at a European level. Therein lays the reason for today’s populism.

National elites have fiercely resisted every attempt to build channels of communication, processes of mutual recognition or transnational voting and party systems – all of which would allow peoples of different nations to merge their interests. Such moves would have challenged the monopoly of representation by the national ruling classes, both internally and at the supranational level, and diminished their position as the inevitable conduits between ‘their’ people and the European institutions. In other words: the desired ‘politicisation’ of Europe, where political decision-making would be organised beyond nation-state sovereignty, never took place.

“It is time to discover the place of citizens in the European project”

The political system of the EU, with the Council at its heart, inherently mirrors this pattern: projects in the collective interest of all European citizens, whether a common refugee policy or a European unemployment scheme, are systematically torpedoed by ‘national cards’. If Europe wants to become a democracy, politics must trump national affiliation: the Council must go.

It is also time to let go of the EU and to move away from the idea of a United States of Europe. It is time to discover the place of citizens in the European project and to remember that citizens – not states – are sovereign. As French sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon put it, the EU was built on a lie. The lie is that the EU is equally a union of states and a union of citizens, as promised in the Treaty of Maastricht. But the union of citizens does not exist. Brexit is the best example: if European citizenship really existed, the United Kingdom as a country could leave the EU while Brits could remain citizens of the union. In reality, they will not. Here is the betrayal.

Upgrading citizens within the European political project ultimately means striving for a European Republic. When citizens embark together upon a political project, they don’t go for ‘united states’; they create a republic. A republic is created by people who decide to be equal before the law. Nationality is not in the definition. A republic does not have ethnic contours or prerequisites; rather it has, in the definition of Cicero, ius aequum – equal law – for all citizens.

The EU is far from offering that. European citizens remain compartmentalised by national law, and a political project can never function like this. If we want to realise one European democracy, we need to strive for the principle of political equality. If the French revolution brought legal equality beyond social class, the European revolution of the 21st century must bring legal equality beyond nations. That would be a compelling offer behind which Europeans citizens, from south to north, from east to west, could unite. This is probably the only way to heal the wounds of the cumulated European crises. And there is no reason why this should remain a utopia.

“We have forgotten that without a utopia there is no chance of achieving a better future”

The principle of political equality means voting equality, tax equality and, over time, equal access to social welfare. Europe cannot succeed if, within the same political project, the nation state is used as tool for competition, whether on taxes or on welfare. The entire reshuffling of the political system of Europe stems from the principle of political equality: this is the essential condition for a fully-fledged transnational, representative parliamentary democracy in Europe, corresponding to the principle of division of powers. The principles of political equality and division of power are two things that are never questioned in national democracies. It is time to give European democracy the same treatment.

Putting aside the myth of state sovereignty and leaping from the United States of Europe to a European Republic would just achieve what the EU’s founding fathers once aspired to. “We do not form a coalition of states, we unite people,” wrote Jean Monnet, who envisioned a radically denationalised European society.

This comes very close to what political theorist Hannah Arendt described as ‘integral federalism’. Arendt’s essay ‘What is freedom?’ could be the compass towards a European Republic – a network democracy of autonomous European regions and towns, something made easier in a digital era that offers citizens new forms of direct interaction and political participation. Arendt was in search of the hidden tradition of freedom, and in favour of spontaneous forms of political organisation, among citizens, in towns or small entities, which form republican bodies. She distinguishes between state sovereignty and freedom, because, if sovereignty is the right of non-interference, it contradicts the principle of pluralism:

“The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instrument of violence, that is, with essentially non-political means…if men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce”.

Arendt’s ‘integral federalism’ is in line with the thinking of contemporaries such as Swiss cultural theorist Denis de Rougement and French philosopher and author Albert Camus, who at the genesis of European political and economic integration in the 1950s advocated strongly against state-based, intergovernmental federalism. That would end, as Arendt predicted, in the hollowing out of European democracy, or in what German sociologist Jürgen Habermas recently has called “executive federalism”: the capture of people’s freedom by nation states.

As the EU marks its 60th birthday, this is the Union we live in. If we really want European democracy, it’s time to move out of it and to head for the utopia of a European Republic in which sovereign European citizens manage their democracy free from nation states.

IMAGE CREDIT: Jorisvo/Bigstock

The post Vive la République européenne! appeared first on Europe’s World.

Written by Enrico D’Ambrogio,

© Rawf8 / Fotolia

South Korea has been shaken by a succession of corruption scandals involving politicians, judges, senior officials, businessmen and even academics. Impeachment of the country’s first female president, the conservative Park Guen-hye, was confirmed by the Constitutional Court, and snap Presidential elections take place on 9 May 2017.

Moon Jae-in, a liberal politician and a leading Minjoo (Democratic Party) personality, leads the polls and is the prospective next President of South Korea. Whoever will run the country is expected to launch an era of political and constitutional reform, as well as reducing the power of the chaebol, business conglomerates which enjoy outsize influence and impunity. Moon and the Minjoo are critical

of deployment of the US-developed anti-missile shield, Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). A new direction to relations with North Korea is also expected, with a shift from military deterrence to an engagement attitude.

This new course could favour stability in the region, paving the way for a new role for the European Union, which could offer its experience in dialogue and integration to engage in a possible future denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

Read the complete briefing on ‘South Korea’s presidential election: Potential for a new EU role in the Korean Peninsula’.

Map – Central eastern Asia

 

Filed under: International Relations, PUBLICATIONS Tagged: Asia and Pacific, briefings, Enrico D'Ambrogio, EPRS briefings, EU relations, national elections, political situation, South Korea

Emmanuel Macron had no chance of winning the presidential election. Every textbook on French politics or contemporary history will tell you so. He had no chance, and he seized it.

After his first large-scale rallies, in Strasbourg in October 2016 or in Paris in December, all serious commentators indulged in gentle mockery. Partly because his voice went shrieking like a radio football reporter at the 1998 World Cup final, partly because of his vocabulary. At that time, he tended to describe his ideas as ‘disruptive’, an adjective borrowed from the current Silicon Valley discourse.

It turns out that now that he does no longer use the word, he has indeed become a major ‘disruption’ in the long history of French democracy. So many rules that seemed graved in stone need to be erased from the textbooks.

1. A French president can only be hard-boiled veteran politician toughened by numerous election campaigns, having earned his ‘presidentiability’ over a long period of time in major functions. Persons under 40 who never stood for any election on any level should refrain for fear of being ridiculed.

2. Within the framework of the electoral system of the presidential election under the Fifth Republic and the resources that are required for a successful election campaign, it is only possible to envisage a candidacy in earnest with the backing of an established party, firmly rooted in constituencies across the nation. ‘Exotic’ candidates from outside the party spectrum may be tolerated to amuse the audience in the first round before being ejected when serious things start.

3. The left-right dichotomy – which he French invented in the first place – is so fundamental to French political culture that even smart, sympathetic and widely appreciated centrists like Jean Lecanuet or François Bayrou may only create an ephemeral illusion, but are condemned to fail eventually.

4. Because of a massive and irreversible semantic shift over a significant period of time, a candidate wishing to build a presidential majority shall by no means use the adjective ‘liberal’ to describe his or her fundamental beliefs or economic orientations. In case the label is conferred by the media, he or she shall consistently deny it. There is no majority for liberal values.

5. Due to the Gaullist dogma of national sovereignty, the tendency of each and every successive French government to blame economic failure on ‘la Commission de Bruxelles’, and the refusal of French mainstream media to engage with Europe, this most boring of all possible topics, there is no way to lead a successful nation-wide election campaign with and explicit and ostensible commitment to the European Union, European symbols and underlying European values.

Of course, as all the French papers I had the opportunity to consult today at Charles Gaulle airport (of all places!) pointed out in their rather well-balanced and pertinent analysis of yesterday’s disruption, Emmanuel Macron benefitted tremendously from unforeseeable, unprecedented circumstances.

Of course, the entire squad of his major rivals all were either ousted before even being able to run – Juppé, Sarkozy and Valls in their respective primaries – or kind enough to sabotage themselves irremediably – Hollande with his stupid revelations book in the crucial phase last autumn, Fillon through the Penelope affair and even more through his handling of it, and Marine Le Pen in a surrealistic television debate.

And of course, many of the votes he obtained were only given to him with the aim of barring Le Pen. Not to mention the incredibly high number of ‘active abstentions’ in the form of 4 million so-called ‘blank votes’, which indicates that his programme and the reforms he envisages are not very likely to have the support of 66% of the French citizens.

All this is true. Still, he did it. As Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet frankly acknowledged on television last night: ‘it is impossible to remain insensitive to his achievement’.

There is, however, no time for admiration, since the historical feat will not be worth much if Macron does not succeed in repeating the same accomplishment over again. He does not have any real power so far, and the legislative elections, as argued earlier in this blog, may well turn him into a ‘fake president’, eclipsed by a more or less hostile parliamentary majority. The latter will be formed after a highly intensive five-week campaign during which he will face staunch resistance from all established parties who are eager to put him back in his place.

Let’s face it: it is not possible to win 289 seats in the parliament from zero, with a bunch of mostly unexperienced candidates. It would be a major disruption. He has no chance whatsoever to obtain a majority. Every textbook will tell you so!

Albrecht Sonntag
@albrechtsonntag

This is post # 21 on the French 2017 election marathon.
All previous posts can be found here.

The post France 2017: Disruptive appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Written by Angelos Delivarios (1st edition),

© Rawf8 / Fotolia

In the context of the work of reviewing the fitness of current regulations (REFIT), the Commission has decided to amend Regulation (EC) No 184/2005 and repeal 10 legal acts in the field of business statistics. The aim is to reduce the administrative burden for businesses, especially SMEs, and to put an end to legal fragmentation in the field of European business statistics. The Commission is proposing to establish a common legal framework for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics related to business structure, economic activities and performance, as well as on international transactions and research and development activities in the EU economy; and for the European network of national statistical business registers and the EuroGroups Register. The regulation includes provisions covering business registers, the data sources to be used, and the exchange of confidential data for the purpose of intra-Union trade in goods statistics. It is expected to reduce red tape for businesses by at least 13.5 % annually.

Versions

• May 2017: European business statistics (1st edition)

Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on European business statistics, amending Regulation (EC) no 184/2005 and repealing 10 legal acts in the field of business statistics)
Committee responsible: Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) COM(2017) 114
6.3.2017
2017/0048(COD)

Ordinary legislative procedure (COD) (Parliament and Council on equal footing – formerly ‘co-decision’)

Rapporteur: Not yet appointed Shadow rapporteurs: Not yet appointed Next steps expected: First exchange of views

Filed under: Economic and Social Policies, PUBLICATIONS Tagged: Angelos Delivorias, briefings, EPRS briefings, EU Legislation in Progress, EU statistics

Written by Angelos Delivorias (1st edition),

© Maxim_Kazmin / Fotolia

The ESP 2013-2017 is ‘the legal framework for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics’. The European Commission is of the view that the current statistical infrastructure is not flexible enough and that the European Statistical System partnership does not yet deliver sufficient cost savings because of lack of investment. That is why, in line with the ten priorities of the Juncker agenda, it proposed an extension of the current programme, additional funding, and modifications to the main text of Regulation (EU) No 99/2013 and its annex. The European Parliament and the Council also inserted amendments – mainly to the annex of the regulation, which sets out the statistical infrastructure and objectives of the ESP – to enrich the statistics used for the implementation of the programme with statistics capturing employment, quality of life, gender inequality, the situation of migrants, education and healthcare.

Versions

• May 2017: Extension of the European statistical programme (ESP) to 2018-2020 (1st edition)

Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulation (EU) No 99/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the European statistical programme 2013-17, by extending it to 2018-2020
Committee responsible: Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) COM(2016) 557
7.9.2016
2016/0265(COD)

Ordinary legislative procedure (COD) (Parliament and Council on equal footing – formerly ‘co-decision’)

Rapporteur: Roberto Gualtieri (S&D, Italy) Shadow rapporteurs: Gabriel Mato (EPP, Spain)

Bernd Lucke (ECR, Germany)

Enrique Calvet Chambon (ALDE, Spain)

Miguel Viegas (GUE/NGL, Portugal)

Sven Giegold (Greens/EFA, Germany) Next steps expected: Vote in plenary

Filed under: Economic and Social Policies, PUBLICATIONS Tagged: Angelos Delivorias, briefings, EPRS briefings, EU Legislation in Progress, EU statistics

General : The European Parliament’s official Twitter accounts have hit the one million follower milestone. Parliament first dipped its toes into Twitter back in April 2009, launching accounts in 22 EU languages. Eight years later, it boasts more than a million followers for its 26 accounts, including Europarl_photo, where you can find the best images of the Parliament and the people in it.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : The European Parliament’s official Twitter accounts have hit the one million follower milestone. Parliament first dipped its toes into Twitter back in April 2009, launching accounts in 22 EU languages. Eight years later, it boasts more than a million followers for its 26 accounts, including Europarl_photo, where you can find the best images of the Parliament and the people in it.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Committee and political group meetings, Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : The rights of EU citizens living in the UK and how they will be affected by Brexit is the focus of a hearing organised by three parliamentary committees this week. In addition the inquiry committee investigating the Panama papers holds a meeting with representatives from the Channel Islands, Gibraltar and Madeira to discuss their tax regimes.Political groups also prepare for next week's plenary session.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

General : The rights of EU citizens living in the UK and how they will be affected by Brexit is the focus of a hearing organised by three parliamentary committees this week. In addition the inquiry committee investigating the Panama papers holds a meeting with representatives from the Channel Islands, Gibraltar and Madeira to discuss their tax regimes.Political groups also prepare for next week's plenary session.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

It was back in 1956 when Philip K. Dick wrote the science fiction short story ‘Minority Report’, later adapted for the cinema. The story is about a future society where three mutants attached to a machine can foresee crimes before they occur, allowing the ‘Precrime Division’ to arrest suspects before any offence is actually committed.

As it happens, science fiction sometimes becomes reality. But instead of using mutants ‒ they are as unreliable as they are imaginary ‒ today’s security solution providers rely on complex algorithms to predict the future. The principle is relatively simple; the practice way less.

In today’s world, we consume information as much as we produce it: news websites publish millions of articles daily, while billions of posts appear on social media each day. Twitter alone has an average of around 500 million tweets every day. The ‘internet of things’ revolution – devices connected to the internet – is also producing a huge amount of data.

Companies in different sectors have found ways to leverage this gold mine of information to increase sales (think Amazon, Walmart), to suggest to us what to read, watch or do (Google, Netflix), or indeed to predict the outcome of future events.

“Science fiction sometimes becomes reality: instead of mutants, today’s security solution providers rely on complex algorithms”

Predictive algorithms are all around us, although we do not fully realise it. A very simple application can be found in our smartphones: when we type a word, the phone suggests the next word or corrects a typo. This process is possible thanks to millions of sentences and corrections done previously by other users who have ‘trained’ the algorithm with their repetitive actions. The algorithm is capable of guessing what you are about write ‒ or wanted to write.

Security solution providers have been using similar, big data-related technologies for a while now. Media and social media monitoring platforms are not only capable of harvesting information and alerting us in real time when a disaster ‒ man-made or natural ‒ occurs, but can also alert us if an event is likely to happen in the future.

The Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago police departments, among others, are using software that allow them to perform so-called ‘predictive policing’. The system uses historical data on location, time, place and type of crime to identify patterns and give law enforcement agents clear indications on where and when criminal offences are most likely to happen. By adopting predictive policing software, the Los Angeles Police Department registered a 20% drop in crimes in the period from January 2013 to January 2014.

But crime is not the only social phenomenon that monitoring platforms can predict. By using a large set of open sources, such as tweets, news, blogs, food prices, currency rates and so on, software called EMBERS (‘Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates’) is capable of forecasting civil unrest days or weeks in advance.

“Crime is not the only social phenomenon that monitoring platforms can predict”

It is important to remember that this new revolution in data-driven security intelligence is not meant to replace the role played by humans. The human factor in intelligence and policymaking will still play a major role, as no machine is currently capable of replacing human intuition and qualitative judgment.

Despite this technology still being at an initial stage of development and exploitation, monitoring solutions can provide security practitioners and decision-makers with state-of-the-art technology and help them to perform their tasks with a higher degree of efficiency. In fact, the intelligence provided by monitoring applications could be extremely useful to monitor extremism and counter online radicalisation, to prepare and respond to natural and man-made disasters, and, for the private sector, to avoid supply chain disruption and to protect facilities and employees. Monitoring applications can strongly improve the performance of budget-constrained agencies and reduce waste of human and financial resources by allocating them exactly where they are needed the most.

For this technology to reach its full potential, small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups will need to play a key role. But Europe is still lagging behind in terms of academic research and commercial exploitation of big data technologies for the security sector, when compared to the United States.

The European Union’s framework programme for research and innovation, Horizon 2020, could be the perfect platform to foster the capabilities of European start-ups in research and development. The platform could allow them to come out with the next generation of data-driven security intelligence applications. It is also of paramount importance to foster collaboration between academia, such as data and social scientists, and the private sector.

If successful, Europe will not become trouble-free. But such steps will certainly contribute to reducing uncertainties and making our continent safer.

IMAGE CREDIT: iunewind/Bigstock

The post How ‘Minority Report’ technology can help keep Europe safe appeared first on Europe’s World.

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And breathe. The relief in Brussels after Emmanuel Macron romped to victory in the French election was palpable.

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Relations between the European Union and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) States are a particularly important aspect of the EU development cooperation policy.

Download this video here.

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Open Day 2016 takes place on 6 May 2017 in the Justus Lipsius and Europa buildings.

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