By: Brittany Hobson,
on 9/21/2015
Europe is currently scrambling to cope with the arrival of over one million asylum seekers. Responses have ranged from building walls to opening doors. European Union countries have varied widely in their offers to resettle refugees.
The post Time to reform the international refugee regime appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Lizzie Furey,
on 8/24/2015
Just as some thought it was over, the Greek crisis has entered into a new and dramatic stage. The Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, has declared snap elections to be held on the 20th September. This comes just as the European Stability Mechanism had transferred 13 billion Euros to Athens, out of which 3.2 billion was immediately sent to the European Central Bank to repay a bond of that amount due on the 20th August.
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By: ErinF,
on 4/20/2015
When within the European Union the Lisbon Treaty was elaborated, the negotiators easily reached agreement on subjecting the EU to the constraints of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It seemed to be an anomaly that all the Member States should be subject to the review power of the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) while the EU itself was exempt from that control procedure.
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By: Alice,
on 4/10/2015
As the general election rolls around into its final phase it’s worth observing one of the great paradoxes of British political life. On the one hand, everyone says that ‘Europe’ is an important issue and that we must debate it, but on the other, nobody ever seems to actually have that debate.
The post Why do British politicians find it so hard to talk about the EU? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Clare Hanson,
on 3/16/2015
As we approach the annual St Patrick’s Day celebration, the story of the Irish economy in the last five years is worthy of reflection. In late 2010, the Irish Government, following in the footsteps of Greece, was forced to request a deeply humiliating emergency financial bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU). Against the background of the recent controversy over the latest “Greek crisis”, what can be said about Ireland’s experience? Here are five relevant issues
The post Ireland is on the way back appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Clare Hanson,
on 3/15/2015
The European Union’s legal system was created, so the story goes, by two astonishing decisions of the European Court of Justice (the ‘ECJ’) in the early 1960s. In the Van Gend en Loos decision of 1963, the European Court declared the ‘direct effect’ of European law [...]
The post The achievements of the European Court of Justice in post-war Europe appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kate Guenther,
on 3/11/2015
Differences in regulatory norms are increasingly seen as the key barriers to the growth of regional and global markets, and regulatory disputes make up some of the most contentious issues in world politics. Negotiations among the most developed economies of the world about regulatory synchronization have made little progress in the last decade, and nearly all harmonization attempts failed when they had involved economies at lower levels of development.
The post How to make regulations a common good? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Jerry Beck,
on 3/5/2015
By: Caitie-Jane Cook,
on 10/6/2014
In the second of our posts focusing on the Conservative’s proposed European Union ‘In/Out’ referendum, key legal figures and political commentators share their views on why Britain should stay in the European Union. Once finished, why not read the previous post on Why Britain should leave the European Union and decide which side has the more convincing argument?
* * * * *
What is best for Britain? That is the only question which both sides have been addressing in the “In/Out” debate in this country and to which they give different answers. Certainly that is a relevant question but it is not the only question which should be addressed. … We should also ask “what is best for Europe as a whole and also what is best for the world?”
One of the great achievements of the UK over the centuries has been the universalising, in part by example [and] in part by means of the European Convention on Human Rights, of its generally admired conceptions of human rights. … In consequence, the EU has these human rights as one of its foundation stones. … The steady increase of Member States of the EU and of candidate member states shows that many others value the EU and its commitment to human rights.
Systems of governance and substantive laws are not immutable and need changing from time to time. The UK should contribute in a positive fashion to these changes and to the continuing health of the EU.
– Sir Konrad Schiemann, former Judge, Court of Justice of the European Union
* * * * *
“One of the strongest reasons for staying in the EU is that quitting would be bad for our economy, as we would lose full access to the single market. Eurosceptics have tried to counter this argument by saying we could copy Norway, Switzerland, or Turkey. The snag is that none of these is a good model: Norway has access to the single market but has to follow its rules without a vote on them; Switzerland’s banks don’t enjoy access to the single market unless they relocate to places inside the EU like London; and Turkey doesn’t have access for services, which account for 80% of our economy.
“As Eurosceptics have come to realise the weaknesses of these models, they have employed a new argument: Britain is a special case. We are bigger than Norway and Switzerland, and richer than Turkey. We are, therefore, in a position to cut a better deal with the EU than any of them. Clout is important – and we certainly have more of it than Norway, Switzerland, or Turkey. But the problem with this argument is that the EU has more clout than us. Its economy would be six times our size.”
– Hugo Dixon, Editor-at-large, Reuters News, and author of The In/Out Question: Why Britain should stay in the EU and fight to make it better.
* * * * *
Before we run for the European exit we need to properly weigh up the alternatives. Those who want to do a ‘runner’ claim that the world is about to open their doors to our goods and services and that our influence will increase. I would love to see evidence of how easy it will be to swap our “disastrous” relationship with Europe for such a harmonious set of alliances with every other country around the world – as long as they are not European!
For my part I am greedy for the UK, not cautious – I want EU PLUS. I want the 500 million customers that the EU offers PLUS new trading partners and new export opportunities from across the globe.
We need have no identity crisis about our membership of Europe or feel that we are in any way diminished by sitting at the top table of the largest trading bloc in the world. We just have a lot of work ahead to help shape a new and ambitious Europe that shares our optimistic, confident, and outward-looking attitude and delivers true benefits to the British people.
– Laura Sandys, MP for South Thanet and founder, European Mainstream
* * * * *
I believe that all the most serious issues facing the world today are essentially international problems, and that none of these problems can be solved unless we continue to develop the international legal order at every possible level.
In my own field, one can refer to the problem of climate change or global warming, and the pressing need for more effective methods of control of greenhouse gas emissions. … Problems [such as these] are inherently transnational in nature, and all present insuperable challenges to individual national governments.
It is indisputable that in the European Union we have the single most advanced and successful example of an international legal order which has yet been established. … Unless we are ostentatiously to turn our backs on the world’s most serious problems, it is absolutely essential that we continue to participate in and to support this outstanding international development. Only in this way can the long-term interests of our country and our people be protected.
– Stephen Hockman QC, 6 Pump Court Chambers
* * * * *
It is unsurprising that the financial crisis should have brought back to the fore concerns about the very design of the EU’s institutional structure and issues of democracy deficit, on which there is already an extensive literature.
This is however matched by an equal dearth of literature concerning constitutional responsibility of Member States for the status quo. … It is noteworthy that the discourse concerning democracy deficit is normally presented as a critique of the EU. The EU is of course not blameless in this respect, but nor are the Member States, viewed collectively and individually. The present disposition of EU institutional power is the result of successive Treaties in which the principal players have been the Member States.
Member States bear responsibility for the choices that they have made, individually and collectively, in shaping EU decision-making. Thus insofar as there is a democratic deficit of the kind considered above responsibility cannot simply be ‘offloaded’ by the Member States to the EU. Member States cannot carp about deficiencies of EU decision-making as if they were unconnected with the architecture thus created.
– Paul Craig, Professor of Law, University of Oxford, and author of The Lisbon Treaty, EU Law: Texts, Cases, and Materials, and EU Administrative Law.
“Europe today is under threat from all sides”
* * * * *
Europe today is under threat from all sides. … To want to leave the European Union at such a time seems perverse. And to what end do the Europhobes – I use the word advisedly for we are all Eurosceptics to a degree – demand Britain’s exit? To wrest back national sovereignty from Brussels. Yet sovereignty is a chimera, a mirage, a will o’ the wisp. It is like a man lost in the desert: he has total control over what he does, complete freedom of action – yet he is powerless.
When he was European Commissioner, Leon Brittan said in 1989: “The concept of total sovereignty is, frankly, a dangerous delusion. Instead you have to ask on a pragmatic basis: how can I most effectively achieve what I want for my country? Sometimes the answer will be to take action at the national level. At other times it may be best to reach multilateral agreements. But there will be occasions when the right, long-term answer is to pool sovereignty with others, in order paradoxically, to achieve an objective which may be of paramount national (ital.) importance.” He was right then and his argument holds good today.
– Sue Cameron, columnist, The Daily Telegraph
* * * * *
Continued membership of the EU for Scotland (as part of the United Kingdom) remains a critical issue. Indeed, anecdotally at least, there appears to be the sort of broad consensus amongst Scottish businesses, the public sector, and civil society which has been so markedly absent from the Scottish independence debate. That consensus is firmly pro-European.
The real world considerations of a smaller economic entity such as Scotland, which is geographically remote from many of its key markets and exports proportionately more than its larger neighbour, revolve around reducing, not creating, barriers to trade.
Direct engagement with the EU operates alongside a dynamic relationship with Westminster which has seen almost annual alteration of the boundary between those areas reserved to London and those devolved to Edinburgh. … What becomes clear is not that the European Union is an unalloyed good, or that the Westminster Parliament is an unalloyed bad. The question is whether, in sum, membership of the European Union is a ‘good’ to be preserved despite its imperfections. I’ve no doubt it is.
– Christine O’Neill, Chairman, Brodies LLP
The post Why Britain should stay in the European Union appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Caitie-Jane Cook,
on 9/29/2014
With the next General Election on the horizon, the Conservative’s proposed European Union ‘In/Out’ referendum, slated for 2017, has become a central issue. Scotland chose to stay part of a larger union – would the same decision be taken by the United Kingdom?
In the first of a pair of posts, some key legal figures share their views on why Britain should leave the European Union.
* * * * *
“[The] EU as I see it is an anti-democratic system of governance that steadily drains decision-making power from the people and their elected national and sub-national representatives and re-allocates it to a virtually non-accountable Euro-elite. In many ways, this is its purpose. … Important policy decisions in sensitive areas of civil liberties … [are] taken by government officials and ministers with minimal input from parliaments and virtually unremarked by the media and general public.
“The European Commission started life as a regulatory agency attached to a trade bloc, which rapidly turned its regulatory powers on the Member States that had put it in place. Much the same can be said of the centralising Court of Justice, a significant policy-maker in the EU system.
“Democracy, in Robert Dahl’s sense of popular control over governmental policies and decisions or as a broad array of the rights, freedoms and – most important – the opportunities that tend to develop among people who govern themselves democratically, is out of the reach of the EU system of regulatory governance.”
– Carol Harlow, Emeritus Professor of Law, London School of Economics, and author of Accountability in the European Union and State Liability: Tort Law and Beyond
* * * * *
“There is little if any direct trade advantage for remaining a member of the EU on the present terms. The direct financial burden of EU membership is some £17bn gross (£11bn net) and rising. … 170 countries in the world now operate in a global market based on trade according to “rules of origin”, and the UK now trades mostly with them, not with the EU.
“Advocates of the EU always present the “single market” as indispensable to the UK. Is this really so? The EU Single Market is the never ending pretext for the EU’s harmonisation of standards and laws across the EU. EU Single Market rules now extend well beyond what was the Single European Act 1986, and far beyond what is necessary to enable borderless trading within the EU.
“As the sixth largest trading nation in the world, were the UK to leave the EU Single Market, we would be joining the 170 other nations who trade freely in the global single market. We would regain control of our own markets and over our trade with the rest of the globe.”
– Bernard Jenkin, MP for Harwich and North Essex and Chair of the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee
* * * * *
“The single currency is the crux. We did opt out of the Euro, but we can’t escape the Euro. The deflationary bias in the Eurozone, the catastrophic effects of a single monetary policy across such disparate economies and societies, culminating in banking and government debt crises, all continue to bear down on our exports and our overall economic performance.
“As the eighteen Eurozone countries meet apart from the non-Euro members of the EU to determine major issues of financial and fiscal policy, so we are increasingly marginalized within the EU, while having to live with the consequences of decisions in which we’ve had no part. … The EU will continue to be dominated by the Eurozone countries. They will do their best to salvage the single currency and will probably succeed, at least for some years to come. If British policy is to be characterized by more than passivity and fatalism, we will either have to establish new terms of membership of the EU (well-nigh impossible to achieve on a meaningful basis when the unanimous agreement of the EU is required), or find a way to split the existing EU into two unions of different kinds, or leave altogether.”
– Alan Howarth, Baron Howarth of Newport, former Member of Parliament
* * * * *
“Whatever the merits of the European Union from an economic or political perspective, its legal system is unfit for purpose. In the United Kingdom we expect our statutory laws to be clear and the means by which these laws are made to be transparent. We equally expect our court processes to be efficient and to deliver unambiguous judgments delineating clear legal principles. We expect there to be a clear demarcation between those who make the laws and those who interpret them. … All [matters] are quite absent within the legal institutions of the EU.
“It is perhaps understandable that an institution which is seeking to unite 28 divergent legal traditions, with multiple different languages, struggles to produce an effective legal system. However, the EU legal system sits above and is constitutionally superior to the domestic UK one. … The failures of the EU legal system are so fundamental that they constitute a flagrant violation of the rule of law. Regardless of the position of the UK within the EU, these institutions should be radically and urgently reformed.”
– Dan Tench, Partner, Olswang LLP and co-founder of UKSCblog – the Supreme Court blog
* * * * *
“The Euro has faced serious difficulties for the last five years. The economic crisis exposed flaws in the basic design, while the effort to save the currency union has led to recession and high unemployment, especially youth unemployment, in the weaker nations. This has moved the focus of the EU from the single market to the economically more important project of saving the Euro.
“The effect of this on the UK is that the direction of the EU has become more integrationist and has subordinated the interests of the non-Euro states. Currently this covers ten countries but only the UK and Denmark have a permanent opt out. The protocol being developed to ensure that the eighteen do not force their will on the ten will need revising when it becomes twenty-six versus two. The EU will not be willing to give the UK and Denmark a veto over all financial regulation. Inevitably, this will need some form of renegotiation as the UK has a disproportionately valuable banking sector which cannot be expected to accept rules designed entirely for the advancement of the Euro.”
– Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP, North East Somerset
* * * * *
“The reluctance of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to find violations of human rights in sensitive matters affecting States’ interests raises the question whether subscribing to the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’) should be a pre-requisite of European Union membership, as is now expected under the Treaty of Lisbon. … [T]he decisions of the ECtHR are accorded a special significance in the EU by the European Court of Justice because the ECHR is part of the EU’s legal system.
“This was recently demonstrated in S.A.S. v France, concerning an unnamed 24-year-old French woman of Pakistani origin who wore both the burqa and the niqab. In 2011, France introduced a ‘burqa ban’, arguin that facial coverings interfere with identification, communication, and women’s freedoms. … A British Judge has said, “I reject the view … that the niqab is somehow incompatible with participation in public life.” The ECtHR held [that] France’s burqa ban encouraged citizens to “live together” this being a “legitimate aim” of the French authorities. … Britain could leave the ECHR and make its own decisions but then, insofar as the EU continues to accord special significance to ECtHR decisions, still effectively be bound by them.”
– Satvinder Juss, Professor of Law, King’s College London and Barrister-at-Law, Gray’s Inn
The post Why Britain should leave the European Union appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Julia Callaway,
on 9/14/2014
The UK Government will no doubt be shocked if the referendum on 18 September results in a Yes vote. However, it has agreed to respect the outcome of the referendum and so we must assume that David Cameron will accept the Scottish Government’s invitation to open negotiations towards independence.
The first step will be the formation of two negotiating teams — Team Scotland and Team UK, as it were. These will be led by the governments of both Scotland and the UK, although the Scottish Government has indicated that it wants other political parties in Scotland to join with it in negotiating Scotland’s position. We would expect high level points to be set out by the governments, the detail to be negotiated by civil servants.
The Scottish Government anticipates a 19 month process between a Yes vote and a formal declaration of independence in March 2016.
What then would an independent Scotland look like?
The Scottish Government plan is for an interim constitution to be in place after March 2016 with a permanent constitution to be drafted by a constitutional convention composed of representatives of civil society after Scottish elections in May 2016.
The Scottish Government intends that the Queen will remain head of state. But this and other issues would presumably be up to the constitutional convention to determine in 2016.
Similarly the Scottish Parliament will continue to be a one chamber legislature, elected by proportional representation, a model rejected by UK voters for Westminster of course in a referendum in 2011.
The Scottish Government seeks to keep the pound sterling as the currency of an independent Scotland. The UK Government’s position is that Scotland can use the pound but that there will be no formal currency union. After a Yes vote this position could change but the unionist parties are united in denying any such possibility.
The UK has heavily integrated tax, pension, and welfare systems. It will certainly be possible to disentangle these but it may take longer than 19 months. In the course of such negotiations both sides may find that it makes sense to retain elements of close cooperation in the social security area, at least in the short to medium term.
The Scottish Government has put forward a vision of Scotland as a social democracy. It will be interesting if it follows through on plans to enshrine social rights in the constitution, such as entitlements to public services, healthcare, free higher education, and a minimum standard of living. The big question is: can Scotland afford this? It would seem that a new tax model would be needed to fund a significantly higher commitment to public spending.
A third area of great interest is Scotland’s position in the world. One issue is defense. The SNP promises a Scotland free of nuclear weapons, including the removal of Trident submarines from the Clyde. This could create difficulties, both for Scotland in seeking to join NATO, but also for the remainder UK, which would need to find another base for Trident. The Scottish Government rejects firmly that it will be open to a deal on Trident’s location in turn for a currency union with London, but this may not be out of the question.
Another issue is that the Scottish Government takes a much more positive approach to the European Convention on Human Rights, than does the current UK government. In fact, the proposal is that the European Convention will become supreme law in Scotland, which even the Scottish Parliament could not legislate against. This contrasts with the current approach of the Conservative Party, and to some extent the Labour Party, in London which are both proposing to rebalance powers towards the UK Parliament and away from the European Court in Strasbourg.
Turning to the European Union, it seems clear to me that Scotland will be admitted to the EU but that the EU could drive a hard bargain on the terms of membership. Compromises are possible. Scotland does not, at present, qualify for, and in any case there is no appetite to join, the Eurozone, so a general commitment to work towards adopting the Euro may satisfy the EU. The Scottish Government also does not intend to apply for membership of the Schengen Area but will seek to remain a part the Common Travel Area, which would mean no borders and a free right to travel across the British and Irish isles.
The EU issue is also complicated because the UK’s own position in Europe is uncertain. Will the UK stay in the EU? The prospect of an in/out referendum after the next UK general election is very real. Another issue is whether an independent Scotland would gradually develop a much more pro-European mentality than we see in London. Would Scotland become positive rather than reluctant Europeans, and would Scotland seek to adopt the Euro in the medium to longer term? We don’t know for now. But if the UK votes to leave the EU, then this may well be the only option open to an independent Scotland in Europe.
To conclude, a written constitution, a stronger commitment to European human rights standards, a more pro-European Union attitude, and an attempt to build a more social welfarist state could bring about an independent Scotland that looks very different from the current UK. However, the bonds of union run deep, and if Scotland does achieve a currency union with the UK it will be tied closely to London’s tax structure. In such a scenario the economies, and therefore the constitutions, of the two countries, will surely continue to bear very many similarities. Much also depends upon relationships with the European Union. If the UK stays in the EU then Scotland and the UK could co-exist with a sterling currency union and a free travel area. If the UK votes to leave then Scotland will need to choose whether to do likewise or whether to align much more closely with Europe.
The post What would an independent Scotland look like? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 6/4/2014
The earthquake has happened, the tremors have been felt, party leaders are dealing with the aftershocks and a number of fault-lines in contemporary British and European politics have been exposed. Or have they? Were last month’s European elections really as momentous as many social and political commentators seem to believe?
‘Failure’ is a glib and glum word. Its association with all things ‘political’ has become the dominant narrative of recent decades. Indeed, possibly the only surprising element of the success of the anti-European Union and protest parties last month was that they had not achieved success earlier. The share of the anti-EU and protest parties increased from 164 to 229 seats in the European Parliament (21.4% to 30.5%) and there is no doubt that European politics is set to become more fragile and unpredictable as a result. But surely this phenomenon represents not the failure of politics but the success of politics in the sense that widespread public frustration and concern has led to significant change. Put slightly differently, public opinion has changed the balance of power within the political architecture but without the shedding of blood.
Forgive me for daring to make such an unfashionable argument but there is a second issue relating to the subsequent post-earthquake political ‘settling’ – that is that the fallout needs to remember the turnout. This is a critical point. In many ways the people have not spoken as most of them stayed at home or simply had more interesting things to do with their time. Across Europe the average turnout was 43% and in the United Kingdom this figure was down to 34.2%. The highest was Belgium with 90% turnout with its non-enforced system of compulsory voting. Slovakia was at the bottom of the turnout charts with just 13%, but this fact is in itself critical when placed against the danger that mainstream political parties will over-react towards the vocal minority.
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. © European Union 2011 PE-EP/Pietro Naj-Oleari. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via European Parliament Flickr.
To make such an argument is not in any way undermine the need for the established political parties to listen and change. The rise of UKIP in the UK, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Front National in France, and the Freedom Party in Austria — not to mention the far-left wing parties in the form of SYRIZA in Greece or the Five Star Movement in Italy — signals strong social currants that need to be channeled. The fluidity and energy of this current is reflected in Spain’s new leftist party Podemos [We Can]. This party did not even exist eight weeks ago and yet it now has five seats in the European parliament. Change has undoubtedly occurred but the turnout was low and these parties do not represent a coherent political group, ranging from parties with experience of government through to fringe groups and neo-fascists. They are generally a collection of ‘None-of-the-above’ parties.
Enmity from the post-millennium global economic crisis has catapulted these ‘None-of-the-above’ parties into office. The failure of the economic system created its own political fallout and the reverberations were felt in the recent European elections. If democracy works then the mainstream groups in the European Parliament may well demonstrate that reform is possible and respond to voters; if democracy fails then we’ll be left with a terrible choice between more Europe or no Europe that populist and nationalistic parties will exploit in favor of the latter.
Such gloomy predictions lead me – almost inevitably – to a word about Nigel Farage: the King of the ‘none-of-the-above-party’. My holiday reading last week (Cromer, North Norfolk, very nice due to the town being trapped in a time warp) was Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). This is not a funny book but when reading it I could not help but think of King Nigel. He is a joker and for him ‘every pub is a parliament’ but this is both the asset and the problem. His jokes and banter are accessible to everyone and provide a sense of relief or release by opening-up issues that were previously off-limits. For Freud this is the social role and deeper meaning of jokes and humor but the problem for Farage is that he is generally regarded comically rather than seriously. He is a Spitting Image character that does not need a puppet. Although many people may vote for him and his party in what they mistakenly believe to be ‘secondary’ or ‘minor’ elections – they might even do so at the Newark By-election next week – they are far less likely to do so at next year’s General Election.
Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and also Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012).
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By: Kirsty,
on 5/22/2014
At the end of May, 400 million EU citizens will be called to participate in the second-largest direct election in the world (the first being held in India). Since they last went to the polls to elect their parliament, in 2009, Europe has gone through an acute crisis that precipitated several countries deeper into recession than any peacetime shock they had suffered for a century. In several of the continent’s regions, more than a fourth of the labour force is unemployed. Over the last five years, the crisis has exposed many weaknesses in the design of the euro area and there has been no shortage of heated policy debates about the nature of the systemic reforms that were required. In the same vein, both the European Central Bank’s response and the pace of fiscal consolidation have been matters for ongoing controversies.
Against this background, one could expect political parties to offer clearly defined alternative choices for the future of Europe and citizens to participate to the elections en masse – even more so because the next parliament will have a say in the selection of the coming European Commission, the EU’s executive body. Expectations, however, are uniformly grim. Last time the election was held, turnout was 43% only. It is anticipated that it will be low again and that fringe national parties will be significant winners in the election. Throughout Europe, mainstream politicians are preparing for a setback. Some foresee a disaster.
There are three reasons for this paradox. First, citizens do not grasp what the European parliament is about. It is, in fact, an active and thorough legislator. Over the last five years, it has for example been an energetic player in the elaboration of a regulatory response to the global financial crisis and a staunch protector of European consumer. Recently it has played a major role in the creation of a banking union in the EU. But it is rarely the place where the debates that define the political agenda and capture the citizens’ attention are held.
Second, dividing lines within parliament are often national rather than political. On industrial policy, trade and regulation, as well as far as relationships with neighbours are concerned, which country you belong to matters as much as which camp you are from. Consequently, issues are often settled with a compromise that blurs the separation between left and right. As in addition virtually all the media are national and generally pitch the debate as opposing the national capital and ‘Brussels’ or another capital, voters have no perception of the sometimes very real differences between left and right.
Third, the fundamental European debate is of a constitutional nature and for this reason it cannot be settled by the parliament. This is true of the key issues that arose during the euro crisis: whether to rescue countries in trouble, whether to mutualise public debt, whether to change the decision rule for sanctions against excessive budget deficits, whether to go for a banking union. Each time the big question was, what do Germany, France and other Eurozone countries think? It was not what does the European parliament think, because almost by definition the parliament has always been in favour of more Europe.
These three obstacles to a pan-European political debate explain why fringe anti-EU parties like the UK Independence Party (UKIP), or the French National Front generally do well in the European parliament elections. Their simple message is that European integration is the wrong way to go and that national governments should repatriate powers from Brussels. As the scope for disagreement between the two main centre-right and centre-left parties is much narrower than the range of views amongst voters, voters who have sympathy for the anti-EU know why and for whom they should vote while those who are in favour of European integration do not have many reasons to vote, because the mainstream parties’ platforms are largely interchangeable.
To overcome the obstacle, a recent reform has stipulated that when appointing the European Commission’s president, the heads of state and government should take into account the result of the elections to the European parliament. In principle therefore, the next European Commission president will belong to the party holding the (relative) majority in the European parliament. Furthermore, the main parties have already nominated their candidates to the European Commission. This politicisation is meant to flag to the citizens that their vote matters and will result in determining the roadmap for the next five years. Unfortunately however, it is not clear whether mainstream parties will be able to formulate policy platforms that are defined enough to attract voters.
Does it matter? After all Europe’s situation is not unique. In the US participation rates in the mid-term elections (when the presidency is not in the ballot) are generally well below 50%. They are also rather low in other federations like India or Switzerland. As Tip O’Neill, the former speaker of the US House, used to say, “all politics is local” and this affects the voters’ behaviour. Europe, in a way, is awkward, but normal: the EU does the legislation, but politics is national.
This is however a too complacent reading of the reality. At a time when countries participating in the euro are confronted with major choices, the risk for Europe is to emerge from the elections with a weak legitimacy (because of the turnout) and a politically distorted parliament (because of the strong showing of the fringe parties). This would make governments wary of bold choices and could result in an unhealthy stalemate. It is not yet time for the EU to become boringly normal.
Jean Pisani-Ferry currently serves as the Commissioner-General for Policy Planning to the Prime Minister of France. He is also Professor of Economics and Public Management at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Until May 2013 he was the director of Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank he contributed to founding in 2005. He is the author of The Euro Crisis and Its Aftermath.
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Image credit: The European Parliament, Brussels. Photo by Alina Zienowicz. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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By: Alice,
on 5/1/2014
European Union (EU) enlargement is both a policy and a process describing the expansion of the EU to neighbouring countries. The process of EU enlargement, first with the creation of the European Economic Community and, later, with that of the European Union, has resulted in today’s EU membership of 28 member states.
EU membership is open to any European country that will satisfy the conditions for accession as set out in Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The position in EU law of countries aspiring to become member states of the EU has been well covered in multiple publications throughout the years.
As a corollary to the ‘right of accession’ of states to the European Union, the EU Treaties have recently provided for the member states’ right to withdraw from the European Union. This right has been enshrined in Article 50 TEU, formally introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon. The formal recognition of the member states’ right to withdraw warrants, in itself, special attention as regards its scope and the concrete consequences of its exercise, all the more so since there are, today, signals that this newly attributed right could be exercised in the foreseeable future.
The newly attributed right of withdrawal opens up new lines of enquiry relevant to other distinct scenarios, with no less of an impact on the EU’s composition. One such scenario is that of the separation or ‘secession’ of part of the territory of an EU member state, motivated by a desire for national independence. Recent months have seen a flurry of activity and academic debate on the likely implications of secession of part of the territory of certain member states, followed by the creation of newly independent states.
While secession within the European Union may be within the realm of the possible, several questions spring to mind when reviewing such a scenario, starting with the future of a newly created independent state in the EU. Would this future lie ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the European Union? This would be up to the newly created state to determine, as a sovereign state in international law. In case the newly created state decides to tie up its future to the one of the other members of the European family, the next question would be ‘how’ this is to be achieved? As newly created states wishing to join the EU would originate in an existing (rump) member state they would be familiar with the various EU principles, rules and procedures. Taking into consideration the ‘roots’ of a newly created state within the European family and its previous compliance with EU policies and practices (albeit in a different legal form and capacity) could an ‘automatic’ right to EU accession for the newly created state be envisaged? And, even if there is no such right of automatic accession to the European Union, what would be the parameters for an eventual ‘internal’ enlargement of the EU? To what extent would this differ from the stated policy and process of EU enlargement as enshrined in Article 49 TEU? The debate is on-going in various member states, while views on the matter have also been expressed at the European level.
These are only a few of the very fundamental and valid points raised by a secession scenario within the European Union. Many more questions spring to mind regarding, in particular, the future of the people living in the newly created states. Their people would normally find themselves outside the territorial scope of the EU, even if for a limited period of time only, with all the implications that this will have with respect to their rights as EU citizens. It is clearly in the interest of such citizens that their rights deriving from EU citizenship are maintained and/or protected during any transitional period from independence to full EU membership, so that they do not end-up being treated as third country nationals would. Is it at all possible to ensure the continuing enjoyment of their rights as (former) EU citizens? But this is yet another story.
Phoebus Athanassiou and Stéphanie Laulhé Shaelou are the authors of “EU Accession from Within?—An Introduction” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the Yearbook of European Law. Phoebus Athanassiou is Senior Legal Counsel with the European Central Bank, specializing on EU financial law and issues of relevance to the ECB and EMU. He holds a PhD and an LLM from King’s College, London, and an LLB from Queen Mary, London. He is a Member of the Editorial Boards of the ECB Legal Working Papers Series and of the International In-house Counsel Journal. He is the author of Hedge Fund Regulation in the EU (Kluwer, 2009), and the editor of the Research Handbook on Hedge Funds, Private Equity and Alternative Investments (Edward Elgar, 2012). Stéphanie Laulhé Shaelou is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law of the University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, specialising in EU constitutional law and governance, EU integration and EU external relations. She holds a PhD and an LLM from the University of Leicester, a First Class LLB from the University of Paris and a BA in English and German for lawyers from the international language school I.S.I.T in Paris. Dr Shaelou has written extensively in internationally refereed publications on multiple aspects of EU law, including related to Cyprus. She is the author of The EU and Cyprus: principles and strategies of full integration (vol. 3, Studies in EU External Relations, Brill/Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden, 2010) and of ‘Market Freedoms, EU fundamental rights and public order: views from Cyprus’ (2011) 30(1) Yearbook of European Law 298.
The Yearbook of European Law seeks to promote the dissemination of ideas and provide a forum for legal discourse in the wider area of European law. It is committed to the highest academic standards and to providing informative and critical analysis of topical issues accessible to all those interested in legal studies. It reflects diverse theoretical approaches towards the study of law.
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By: Alice,
on 4/3/2014
Untangling recent and still-unfolding events in Ukraine is not a simple task. The western news media has been reasonably successful in acquainting its consumers with events, from the fall of Yanukovich on the back of intensive protests in Kiev, by those angry at his venality and signing a pact with Russia over one with the EU, to the very recent moves by Russia to annex Crimea.
However, as is perhaps inevitable where space is compressed, messages brief and time short, a habit of talking about Ukraine in binaries seems to be prevalent. Superficially helpful, it actually hinders a deeper understanding of the issues at hand – and any potential resolution. Those binaries, encouraged to some extent by the nature of the protests themselves (‘pro-Russian’ or ‘pro-EU/Western’), belie complex and important heterogeneities.
Ironically, the country’s name, taken by many to mean ‘borderland’, is one such index of underlying complexity. Commentators outside the mainstream news, including specialists like Andrew Wilson, have long been vocal in pointing out that the East-West divide is by no means a straightforward geographic or linguistic diglossia, drawn with a compass or ruler down the map somewhere east of Kiev, with pro-Western versus pro-Russian sentiment ‘mapped’ accordingly. Being a Russian-speaker is not automatically coterminous with following a pro-Russian course for Ukraine; and the reverse is also sometimes true. In a country with complex legacies of ethnic composition and ruling regime (western regions, before incorporation into the USSR, were ruled at different times in the modern period by Poland, Romania and Austria-Hungary), local vectors of identity also matter, beyond (or indeed, within) the binary ethnolinguistic definition of nationality.
The Bridge to the European Union from Ukraine to Romania. Photo by Madellina Bird. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via madellinabird Flickr.
Just as slippery is the binary used in Russian media, which portrays the old regime as legitimately elected and the new one as basically fascist, owing to its incorporation of Ukrainian nationalists of different stripes. First, this narrative supposes that being legitimately elected negates Yanukovich’s anti-democratic behaviours since that election, including the imprisonment of his main political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko (whatever the ambivalence of her own standing in the politics of Ukraine). Second, the warnings about Ukrainian fascism call to mind George Bernard Shaw’s comment about half-truths as being especially dangerous. As well-informed Ukraine watchers like Andreas Umland and others have noted, overstating the presence of more extreme elements sets up another false binary as a way of deligitimising the new regime in toto. This is certainly not to say that Ukraine’s nationalist elements should escape scrutiny, and here we have yet another warning against false binaries: EU countries themselves may be manifestly less immune to voting in the far right at the fringes, but they still may want to keep eyes and ears open as to exactly what some of Ukraine’s coalition partners think and say about its history and heroes, the Jews, and much more.
So much for seeing the bigger picture, but events may well still take turns that few historians could predict with detailed accuracy. What we can see, at least, from the perspective of a maturing historiographic canon in the west, is that Ukraine is a country that demands a more sophisticated take on identity politics than the standard nationalist discourse allows – a discourse that has been in existence since at least the late nineteenth Century, and yet one which the now precarious-seeming European idea itself was set up to moderate.
Robert Pyrah is author of the recent review article, “From ‘Borderland’ via ‘Bloodlands’ to Heartland? Recent Western Historiography of Ukraine” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the English Historical Review. Robert Pyrah is a Member of the History Faculty and a Research Associate at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford
First published in January 1886, The English Historical Review (EHR) is the oldest journal of historical scholarship in the English-speaking world. It deals not only with British history, but also with almost all aspects of European and world history since the classical era.
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By: Alice,
on 3/4/2014
During November 2012 hundreds of thousands of people across Europe took to the streets. The protesters were, by and large, complaining about government policies that increased taxes and lowered government spending. This initially sounds like a familiar story of popular protests against government austerity programmes, but there is a twist to the tale. Many of the people protesting were not aiming their ire at the national governments making the cuts in spending, but rather at the European Union. In Portugal, people carried effigies of their prime minister on strings and claimed he was a ‘puppet of the EU’; in Greece people burned the EU flag and shouted ‘EU out’; and in Italy people threw stones at the European Parliament offices. It was, at least for some people on the streets, not the incumbent national politicians in Lisbon, Athens, and Rome who were to blame for the problem of the day, but rather politicians and bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Brussels.
The economic crisis in Europe has illustrated that citizens are increasingly blaming not just their national governments, but also ‘Europe’ for their woes. This raises the question of whether citizens can hold European politicians to account for the outcomes for which they are thought to be responsible. The notion of democratic accountability relies on the critical assumption that voters are able to assign responsibility for policy decisions and outcomes, and sanction the government in elections if it is responsible for outcomes not seen to be ‘in their best interest’. This process, however, is clearly complicated in the multilevel system of the European Union where responsibility is not only dispersed across multiple levels of government, but there are also multiple mechanisms for sanctioning governments.
Democratic accountability in multilevel systems can be viewed as a two-step process, where specific requirements need to be met at each step to allow voters to hold governments to account. The first step is one where voters decide which level of government, if any, is responsible for specific policy outcomes and decisions. This depends on the clarity of institutional divisions of powers across levels of government, and the information available about the responsibilities of these divisions. The second step is one where voters should be able to sanction the government in an election on the basis of performance. This depends on government clarity: that is the ability of voters to identify a cohesive political actor that they can sanction accordingly.
Both of these steps are important. Assignment of responsibility to a particular level of government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to punish an incumbent at the polls. To do so, voters also need to know which party or individual to vote for or against. Yet, the EU lacks a clear and identifiable government. Executive power is shared between the European Council and the European Commission, and legislative power is shared between the Council of the EU and the European Parliament. The primary mechanism through which citizens can hold EU institutions to account is via elections to the European Parliament. Unlike in national parliamentary systems, the majority in the European Parliament does not ‘elect’ the EU executive, however. Despite the formal powers of the European Parliament over the approval and dismissal of the European Commission there is only a tenuous link between the political majority in the Parliament and the policies of the Commission, not least since there is no clear government-opposition division in the Parliament. Despite current attempts to present rival candidates for the post of Commission president prior to the European Parliament elections in May, there is still no competition between candidates with competing policy agendas and different records at the EU level. Without this kind of politicised contest it is simply not possible for voters to identify which parties are responsible for the current policy outcomes and which parties offer an alternative.
As a consequence, the classic model of electoral accountability cannot be applied to European Parliament elections. Even if citizens think the EU is responsible for poor policy performance in an area, they find it difficult to identify which parties are ‘governing’ and punish, or reward, them at the ballot box. This has broader implications for trust and legitimacy. When people hold the EU responsible for poor performance, but cannot hold it accountable for that performance, they become less trusting of the EU institutions as a whole. Thus the danger for the EU is that every time the system fails to deliver — such as during the Eurozone crisis — the result is declining levels of trust and a crisis of confidence in the regime as a whole, because voters lack the opportunity to punish an incumbent and elect an alternative. In other words, the lack of mechanisms to hold EU policymakers to account may lead to a more fundamental legitimacy crisis in the European Union.
Sara Hobolt and James Tilley are co-authors of Blaming Europe? Responsibility without accountability in the European Union. Sara Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. James Tilley is a university lecturer at the Department of Politics and International m Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.
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Image credit: Photo credit © European Union, 2014 via EC Audiovisual Service.
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By: ChloeF,
on 12/7/2012
Governance, governance everywhere – why has the word “governance” become so common? One reason is that many people believe that the state no longer matters, or at least the state matters far less than it used to. Even politicians often tell us that the state can’t do much. They say they have no choice about many policies. The global economy compels them to introduce austerity programs. The need for competitiveness requires them to contract-out public services, including some prisons in the US.
If the state isn’t ruling through government institutions, then presumably there is a more diffuse form of governance involving various actors. So, “governance” is a broader term than “state” or “government”. Governance refers to all processes of governing, whether undertaken by a government, market, or network, whether over a family, corporation, or territory, and whether by laws, norms, power, or language. Governance focuses not only on the state and its institutions but also on the creation of rule and order in social practices.
Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament
The rise of the word “governance” as an alternative to “government” reflects some of the most important social and political trends of recent times. Social scientists sometimes talk of the hollowing-out of the state. The state has been weakened from above by the rise of regional blocs like the European Union and by the global economy. The state has been weakened from below by the use of contracts and partnerships that involve other organizations in the delivery of public services. Globalization and the transformation of the public sector mean that the state cannot dictate or coordinate public policy. The state depends in part on global, transnational, private, and voluntary sector organizations to implement many of its policies. Further, the state is rarely able to control or command these other actors. The state has to negotiate with them as best it can, and often it has little bargaining power.
But, although the role of the state has changed, these changes do not necessarily mean that the state is less important. An alternative perspective might suggest that the state has simply changed the way it acts. From this viewpoint, the state has adopted more indirect tools of governing but these are just as effective – perhaps even more so – than the ones they replaced. Whereas the state used to govern directly through bureaucratic agencies, today it governs indirectly through, for example, contracts, regulations, and targets. Perhaps, therefore, the state has not been hollowed-out so much as come to focus on meta-governance, that is, the governance of the other organizations in the markets and networks that now seem to govern us.
The hollow state and meta-governance appear to be competing descriptions of today’s politics. If we say the state has been hollowed out, we seem to imply it no longer matters. If we say the state is the key to meta-governance, we seem to imply it retains the central role in deciding public policy. Perhaps, however, the two descriptions are compatible with one another. The real lesson of the rise of the word “governance” might be that there is something wrong with our very concept of the state.
All too often people evoke the state as if it were some kind of monolithic entity. They say that “the state did something” or that “state power lay behind something”. However, the state is not a person capable of acting; rather, the state consists of various people who do not always not act in a manner consistent with one another. “The state” contains a vast range of different people in various agencies, with various relationships acting in various ways for various purposes and in accord with various beliefs. Far from being a monolithic entity that acts with one mind, the state contains within it all kinds of contests and misunderstandings.
Descriptions of a hollow state tell us that policymakers have actively tried to replace bureaucracies with markets and networks. They evoke complex policy environments in which central government departments are not necessarily the most important actors let alone the only ones. Descriptions of meta-governance tell us that policymakers introduced markets and networks as tools by which they hoped to get certain ends. They evoke the ways central government departments act in complex policy environments.
When we see the word “governance”, it should remind us that the state is an abstraction based on diverse and contested patterns of concrete activity. State action and state power do not fit one neat pattern – neither that of hollowing-out or meta-governance. Presidents, prime ministers, legislators, civil servants, and street level bureaucrats can all sometimes make a difference, but the state is stateless, for it has no essence.
Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books including Governance: A Very Short Introduction (2012) and The State as Cultural Practice (2010). He is also the editor or co-editor of 10 books, including a two volume Encyclopaedia of Governance (2007). He founded the undergraduate course on ‘Theories of Governance’ at Berkeley and teaches a graduate course on ‘Strategies of Contemporary Governance’.
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Image Credit: Martin Schulz during the election camapign in 2009. Creative Commons Licence – Mettmann. (via Wikimedia Commons)
The post Does the state still matter? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kirsty,
on 6/11/2009
Last Thursday Britain - along with the rest of the European Union - went to the polls to elect our MEPs. Because of the number of votes across the EU, results were not announced until Sunday night, and there were plenty of upsets for the UK politicians. The EU provokes opinions from all shades of the political spectrum here, largely concerning whether Britain should still be in the EU at all, so I decided to find out how Britain joined the European Union. Below is an extract from The European Union: A Very Short Introduction by John Pinder and Simon Usherwood, which gives the low-down on when Britain, along with Ireland and Denmark, became a member.
President de Gaulle resigned in 1969 and was replaced by Georges Pompidou. Nationalist fundamentalism as a basis for French policy gave way to pragmatic intergovernmentalism. Britain, Denmark, Ireland, and Norway still sought entry; France’s partners supported it; and, instead of vetoing enlargement as de Gaulle had done, Pompidou consented, providing it was accompanied by conditions of interest to France: agreement on the financing of the CAP, as well as elements of ‘deepening’ such as monetary union and coordination of foreign policy. In addition to serving the French agricultural interest, these were intended to integrate Germany yet more firmly into the Community, as well as guard against the danger that widening the Community would weaken it.
France’s partners favoured both widening and deepening. Germany’s new Chancellor, the federalist Willy Brandt, played a leading part in a summit meeting of the six government heads in The Hague in December 1969. While he became famous for his Ostpolitik, relaxing tension with the Soviet bloc and with East Germany in particular, Brandt accompanied it with a Westpolitik for strengthening integration in the West. At The Hague he both promoted enlargement and proposed an economic and monetary union. This was agreed in principle, along with the other French conditions; and these projects were developed within the Community alongside the entry negotiations.
The principle of economic and monetary union was not, however, realized in practice until the 1990s. France, showing a preference for federal policy instruments rather than institutional reform, wanted a single currency. For Germany, this would have to be accompanied by coordination of economic policies, together with majority voting in the Council and powers for the European Parliament. But these were reforms too far for France in that early post-gaullist period. The result was a system for cooperation on exchange rates that was too weak to survive the international currency turbulence of that period. The system devised for foreign policy cooperation, kept separate from the Community owing to French insistence on sovereignty in this field, was strictly intergovernmental. Though quite useful, its impact was limited. It was the hard financial interest of French agriculture that secured a solid outcome, in a financial regulation that was to be highly disadvantageous for the British, whose small but efficient farm sector differed from those of the six member states.
The financing of the CAP again raised the question of powers for the European Parliament, on which the Dutch, supported by Belgium, Germany, and Italy, continued to insist. Pompidou’s reaction was to accept the principle that the European Parliament would share control of the budget with the Council, but to exclude as much as possible of the expenditure, including in particular that on agriculture. This was accepted, faute de mieux, by France’s partners in an amending treaty in 1970; and the Parliament’s role was enhanced in a second treaty in 1975, after Pompidou had been succeeded by the post-gaullist President Giscard d’Estaing. While this was just a foot in the door to budgetary powers for the Parliament, it was to grow into a major element in the Community’s institutional structure.
Though agriculture and Commonwealth trade still presented difficulties and the British public appeared unconvinced, Prime Minister Heath established good relations with President Pompidou and drove the entry negotiations through to a successful conclusion. Britain, together with Denmark and Ireland, joined the Community in January 1973, though the Norwegians rejected accession in a referendum. The British too were to vote in a referendum in 1975. Harold Wilson had replaced Edward Heath as Prime Minister in 1974 following an election victory by the Labour Party, which was turning more and more against the Community. After a somewhat cosmetic ‘renegotiation’, the Wilson government did recommend continued membership; and in 1975 the voters approved it by a two-to-one majority. But Labour became increasingly hostile, to the point of campaigning in the 1983 elections for British withdrawal. Meanwhile Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister as a result of the Conservative election victory in 1979. While French post-gaullist governments were moving back towards support for earlier concepts of the Community, she was developing a stormy relationship with it, fighting to assert the principle of intergovernmentalism. Until 1984 she also fought to ‘get our money back’, as she put it, by blocking much Community business until she secured agreement to reduce Britain’s high net contribution to the Community’s budget.
In 1974 President Pompidou died and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing succeeded him. Although Giscard had been de Gaulle’s Finance Minister, he was not of the gaullist tradition and wanted to mark his presidency with measures to develop the Community. Ambivalent about federalism, he acted to strengthen both the intergovernmental and the federal elements in the Community’s institutions, with initiatives to convert the summits into regular meetings, as the European Council of Heads of State and Government, as well as to launch direct elections to the European Parliament.
Following consultation with Monnet, who had remained active until then as President of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe in which he had brought together the leaders of the democratic political parties and trade unions of the member states, Giscard successfully proposed both the European Council and the direct elections. The European Council was soon to play a central part in taking Community decisions, settling conflicts that ministers in the Council were unable to resolve, and agreeing on major package deals. Provision had already been made for direct elections in the treaties of the 1950s, subject to unanimous agreement in the Council, which had been unattainable while gaullists ruled France. But the governments now agreed and the first elections were held in June 1979. This step towards representative democracy was to have a big impact on the Community’s future development.
That year of the first direct elections also saw a significant move towards monetary union. On becoming President of the Commission in 1977, Roy Jenkins, formerly a leading member of the Labour government, who without being explicitly federalist favoured steps in a federal direction, had looked for a way to ‘move Europe forward’ and concluded that the time was ripe to revive the idea of monetary union. This was taken up by the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who saw it as a way to spread the burden of a difficult relationship with the US that resulted from the weakness of the dollar and the strength of the mark, and who was also influenced by Monnet’s ideas. Schmidt and Giscard had forged a close relationship as Finance Ministers before becoming Chancellor and President in 1974; and they readily agreed on a proposal for a European Monetary System (EMS), with a strong mechanism for mutual exchange rate stability, and a European Currency Unit (ecu) to perform some technical functions. This was accepted by all save the British government, in the context of the Labour Party’s growing hostility to the Community. So all but one of the member states participated in the EMS when it was created in 1979, alongside the Community rather than within it: an example of a recurrent pattern, with a number of states proceeding together while Britain, sometimes with one or two others, stands aside – usually deciding eventually to participate.
By: EDonegan,
on 5/5/2009
While regular blogger, Gérard Prunier is off exploring Africa, I have rounded up a quick update on the Somali Pirates.
- Abduwali Abdukadir Muse is currently being tried in New York under a federal law that has not been used in decades. The law would require Muse to fulfill a mandatory life sentence in prison. Muse was the only survivor of the three men who boarded the American cargo ship, Maersk Alabama, off the coast of Africa on April 8th. The pirates held the ship’s captain hostage causing an international uproar.
- On Sunday, 11 Somali Pirates were captured by a French naval vessel when they mistook the ship for a commercial vessel. The pirates were captured in three small boats off the coast of Somalia. Rockets and guns were found aboard the ships. At this point it is unclear what the European Union plans to do about the capture, but it is clear that the Somali Pirate attacks have disrupted United Nation aid and led some companies to consider routing cargo between Europe and Asia a different way.
Check back next Tuesday for more Notes from Africa!
