MountEUlympus

Happy Europe Day!

2012-05-09T09:41:00.000+02:00

Who would have thought that Europe would come this far, when Robert Schuman gave the Schuman Declaration.

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Is Martin Schulz emerging as a new leftist leader in Europe?

2012-05-08T16:39:00.000+02:00

On the morning after François Hollande was elected president of France, Martin Schulz sat in his office at 7h50 and gave an interview to Deutschlandradio. Then his press team sat down to write an opinion peace for Project Syndicate. Not only François Hollande wants to move away from austerity, Schulz said. The European Commission under Barroso is also convinced that more growth cannot come about by austerity alone. And the European Parliament, with Schulz, an (albeit impartial) social democrat at the top, is also coming out in favor of less austerity.

As a German commentator observed on Sunday, the word "super election day" several years ago meant elections in two or three large German states. Today, it means elections in France, Greece and Serbia (and Schleswig-Holstein). In an integrated European economy, national policies can no longer be shaped in isolation; policy-making has to shift from the national to the European level to remain efficient. Mathew suggested that we have seen the emergence of a truly European debate on economic policy in the last few months - more austerity against more growth programs instead of more Europe against less Europe. I think he is right. And now that Hollande's rise to power shifts European policy-making from austerity to growth, the president of the European Parliament appears well-placed to broker and negotiate this transition within the European institutions. He could emerge as new leftist leader in European policy-making, if not in front of the cameras then at least in the hallways of the institutions.

The next European Council will have growth programs on its agenda. And Martin Schulz has been fighting for the inclusion of the EP president in the negotiations of the fiscal pact. It will be interesting to see how much he will use his position and his intra-party networks to help broker a growth program in Europe.

And then? National elections in Germany are next year and if the European mood, inspired by Hollande's election, turns toward growth programs, then the German elections might sweep the former social democrat finance minister Peer Steinbrück, an efficient pro-European, to power. Might be a very interesting constellation for social democrat governance in Europe: Hollande - Steinbrück - Schulz.

What must be said

2012-04-07T14:17:00.003+02:00

With his poem "What must be said", to be found here [DE], German nobel prize laureat Günter Grass stirred up a heated discussion in Germany. At the core of it: Can Germany, the country that bears responsibility for the Holocaust, criticize Israel?

Public opinion in Germany seems to answer this question with a yes. Although I cannot find the figures, the majority of Germans looks at Israel's aggressive foreign policy with unease (and shows empathy with Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and the Gaza strip). When Günter Grass now writes that the "atomic power Israel endangers a world peace that is already crumbling" and criticizes the German shipment of a nuclear submarine to Israel, he speaks out what many German citizens have thought for a long time.

In other countries, this would not be a problem. But in Germany, where chancellor Merkel has declared Israel's security a piece of Germany's raison d'état and where a recent study has found "a banalization of antisemitist practices and rants that reaches far into the middle of the society", such a piece of criticism cannot be uttered without being called an antisemitist. German criticism of the state of Israel and of its government is always understood as criticism of the Israeli electorate, the Jewish nation.

And yet, the state of Israel is evidently in breach of several UN resolutions that deal with Israeli settlements in the West Bank and has repeatedly expressed its desire for a preemptive strike on Iran which would defy the intentions of the UN Charter. You could conveniently argue that every world citizen with an interest in peace should have the right to criticize Israel for its policy, regardless of their nationality.

What Günter Grass therefore advocates in his capacity as a global citizen is to put both the Iranian and the Israeli nuclear programs under the scrutiny of an international authority. If you look at the situation without a Western bias, the question is justified: Why subject the Irani nuclear program to external control and make an exception for Israel, although its attack could endanger Iranian citizens just as much as an Iranian attack would endanger Israelis?

As a German or non-German, what do you think of the question?

EU-China summit: Advance on Market Economy Status, retreat on Economic Partnership

2012-02-16T16:05:00.003+01:00

At the EU-China summit in Tianjin, José Manuel Barroso, Herman van Rompuy and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao agreed

that a rich in substance EU-China investment agreement would promote and facilitate investment in both directions. Negotiations towards this agreement would include all issues of interest to either side, without prejudice to the final outcome. [Both sides] agreed to work towards the start of the negotiation as soon as possible.

One the one hand, this is an interesting development. In the past, bilateral investment agreements have allowed European enterprises additional security in their overseas investments, given that they could directly seek arbitration with an international tribunal.

One the other hand, opening new investment negotiations suggests that the 2007 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) talks are all but dead. At the time, the EU wanted to update the 1985 agreement that governs Sino-European economic relations, and adapt the partnership to the changed trade patterns of the 21st century (increased trade in services, increased volume of foreign direct investment, questions of intellectual property, China's entry into the WTO in 2001 etc.). The 2010 EU-China summit still referred to the PCA, but this year it was not mentioned a single time. Are economic relations between the EU and China running smoothly if a comprehensive economic agreement is silently scrapped and replaced with the promise of a potential investment agreement? I don't think so.

Another import point at the summit was Market Economy Status (MES) for China. Despite China's WTO membership since 2001 (analysis: here), the EU has long withheld MES for China and used it as a bargaining chip. Now, it appears that Van Rompuy and Barroso are ready to scrap their opposition if China steps up its help in the Eurozone crisis in return. Granting MES to China would inter alia strengthen Chinese enterprises in anti-dumping cases. The ALDE group is particularly unhappy to see the EU's bargaining chip vanish, but it would soon disappear anyway, given that under China's WTO accession agreement, the EU agreed to grant MES automatically in 2016 (even though this is contested).

Overall, I do not have the impression that this summit was a great advance in EU-China relations. But then, good relations across different cultures are not created overnight. Instead, many small initiatives such as dialogues in climate change, energy, urbanization etc. continue to bring the two partners closer together. In the long run, I would hope that the EU and China, two of the biggest trading blocks in the world, can use the summits to give their voice to global trade and global sustainable development. But in the short run, I believe that bilateral cooperation will continue to take place on the micro-level.

Here are the Eurobloggers

2012-01-25T12:08:00.004+01:00

Bloggingportal.eu is celebrating its third anniversary tomorrow, 26 January 2012. The website brings together 904 blogs in the different languages of the EU, written by individuals, journalists, Members of the European Parliament, European Commissioners and many more. They are looking at the European Union from different angles, giving themselves a sectional, party-political, cultural or regional focus when they translate the mass of communication that comes out of the European institutions every day.

But why would you bother to write about this stuff if you don't even get paid for it? Here are some of the blogger profiles I have come across.

Blogger A

I am a journalist working for a national newspaper or an audiovisual media. I am caught between the political discussion in my member state and the discussions in the hallways of the European institutions in Brussels. My media asks me to translate what I hear in Brussels so that my home audience will understand it. But many of the ideas and solutions that I hear about in Brussels are not relevant for my home audience. I put them on my blog.

Blogger B

I am a professional working in the European institutions or a lobby group. In my daily life, I have a lot of meetings behind closed doors in which European politics is decided day by day. This strikes me as utterly undemocratic and I feel like I should do something about it. So I gave myself a pseudonym and am writing down some of my daily experiences and thoughts on my blog - in the hope that it will make these European institutions a little bit more transparent.

Blogger C

I study the European Union. My day involves reading scientific articles about the number of votes that are necessary in the Council of Ministers to get a piece of legislation adopted. My desire is to switch the side of the desk and become a part of this European world myself in the future. I feel fervently pro-European and take a lot of pain in the way that reality differs from my ideal model of a harmonic European Union. On my blog, I can say what I think about all this. Maybe someone will read it one day. Maybe they will offer me a job.

Blogger D

I don't care about the European Union. All this institutional bla bla bla bores the crap out of me. I have my own agenda, what I care about is my personal freedom, freedom to travel, freedom to say what I think on the web, freedom to obtain the information that I want to get. But this freedom is in danger from a few grey hats in Brussels and some more grey hats in America, and that's why I am raising my voice. My voice is a mixture of well-placed needle pinches and indignant rioting. If one of those grey hats that I am talking to actually reads me blog, that's even the better. But quite frankly, I don't care.

Blogger E

My media team is handling my blog for me. They also handle my Twitter. Our media analysts told us that European citizens all start going online. We have tried press conference for a long time and even set up our own TV station, but we only get coverage when the EU is in trouble (granted, that happens a lot lately). My blog allows me to reach the citizens directly. I am providing my own voice, and I know that citizens appreciate this. I know that I could do more to interact with them, but I have business leaders and national politicians to meet as well. I am faithful that my media team is doing a good job, and they collect a good load of valuable feedback from the readers of my blog that I can use in my daily work.

MountEUlmypus post no. 100

2012-01-03T23:47:00.004+01:00

I just realized that my previous post was MountEUlympus post no. 100. After two and a half years of writing about the EU, this blog is still here, and it is here to stay for a while. Just a few musings about EU blogging before I turn back to proper content in my next post.

It is a rewarding experience to blog about European affairs. The last 30 months in blogging have seen me challenged by Prof. Andrew Moravcsik, reprinted in the newspaper New Europe (New Europe pdf unavailable), responded to by development economist Ha Joon Chang, participate in the Th!nk about it 2 blogging competition on climate change, publish a bachelor thesis on the European blogosphere, become a co-editor of Bloggingportal.eu, discover the workings of the Council of Ministers, cover the EPP Summit and many other experiences. Most of all, however, blogging has put me into an international community in which new ideas are put forward and debated every day and thereby significantly increased my knowledge of European affairs.

As I said, it is a rewarding experience to be a blogger and I can only encourage every citizen reading this post to think about starting his or her own blog. Given that European politics are rarely debated in national public spheres, European debates frequently develop in the blogosphere from where they are sometimes upscaled to national media. Even though the European blogosphere might sometimes appear a little like the electronic version of the Brussel bubble, participation is open to everybody and new entrants are welcomed and listened to. Maybe you will be next?

A cultural war between China and the West?

2012-01-03T15:16:00.004+01:00

The Chinese word for coffee - 咖啡, pronounced kafei - is a good example for the way in which Western culture has slowly crept into Chinese society. While the idea of drinking tea ("cha") has developed through centuries of Chinese history, coffee came from outside the Middle Kingdom. In phonetic terms, it has always remained on the outskirts of Chinese culture.

But when you walk through any bigger city in Eastern China, you will see Western coffee chains and fast food restaurants invite young Chinese into what is essentially a space of Western culture. With English being the international lingua franca, many Chinese people working in the export industry come into contact with Western values, send their children abroad for college and start celebrating Christmas (albeit as a largely secular holiday). Consumerism, Western entertainment and Western dating mentality have long reached Eastern China. Without doubt, they are a powerful force tugging at the foundation of a family-based society with a high degree of discipline and sacrifice.

When Chinese president Hu Jintao now speaks of a Western desire to divide Chinese society through ideology and culture (see here and here), one could of course respond with a shrug. Western influence comes to China as a result of market exchange in a globalizing economy. One could say that China pays the price for its participation in the WTO and its export-led development with cultural influx from its trade partners (while truly Chinese products have simply not incited Western demand yet).

But then, the story is more complex than that. Globalization has a significant influence on the structure of the Chinese economy, an economy that has for some time devoted all its resources to the demands of the rest of the world while neglecting domestic demand. Globalization has led to enormous migratory flows from the Western plains into the Eastern metropoles which are connected to the global markets. To put it a little plain, China has in some regards neglected its own culture in the interest of export-led economic growth.

It therefore appears legitimate to raise the question how a country can brace itself against cultural influence from other countries. France, for example, has established a law that requires its radios to play 40% French music titles. In my view, Hu Jintao is correct to worry about the erosion of Chinese culture through Western influence. But it does not appear very helpful to speak about "international hostile forces [that] are stepping up the implementation of China's Westernization" (Google Translated). A cultural war between China and the West would really not be a smart thing, but then I don't really see it happen either.

As a final remark, the concept "the West" which is often used in China (closely associated to the idea of a Westerner, or laowai), is by no means culturally homogeneous. The US and Europe show immense cultural differences, in the way in which they consume information, in the way in which they view leadership and in way in which they view the ideal state, to name but a few aspects. And to return to kafei mentioned above: While coffee might be considered a Western product in the Middle Kingdom, its production is crucially important to guarantee the livelihood of many smallholder farmers - in Africa and Latin America.

I have focused on the economic aspect of Westernization; maybe my Chinese friends would like to comment on the cultural aspect of Western influence?

European Quality Charter on Internships presented in Paris

2011-12-19T01:45:00.003+01:00

European interns working outside or after formal education should earn at least 60% of the median income or the national minimum wage of a European country, say the European Youth Forum, MEP Emilie Turunen and a range of other stakeholders in the new European Quality Charter on Internships that was presented at a Youth Employment conference in Paris last week.

The signatories stress the fact that internships and apprenticeships should be a learning experience to integrate young people into the labor market, not a means for companies to replace a full-time position with an unpaid internship. Therefore, they should normally take place within an educational programme and be appropriately remunerated.

At the Youth Employment conference organized in partnership with the OECD, panelists from the European Commission, the European Parliament, Trade Unions and youth organizations also debated the fate of Europe’s young population in the economic crisis. With youth unemployment rates between 45% in Spain and 7% in the Netherlands (September 2011 figures), young Europeans are disproportionately hit by the crisis. Reasons for this are the fact that the crisis first eliminated new job vacancies that could have put youths into employment, and that an employer’s need for particularly skilled personnel increases in a crisis, thus making it difficult for young people without prior work experience to meet the requirements.

To improve the situation for young unemployed, the European Commission is set to come out with a Youth Opportunities Initiative tomorrow, 20 December (update: now online here) working towards a “Youth Guarantee”, and a Youth Strategy in the spring of 2012. “Young people should be either in education, or in work,” said Jean-Louis De Brouwer, Director of the Division “Employment, Lisbon Strategy, International Affairs” in DG Employment of the European Commission, adding that they may be offered a qualification measure if they have not found a job after four months of unemployment.

At the conference, I interviewed the Member of the European Parliament Emilie Turunen, European Youth Forum Secretary General Giuseppe Porcaro, Santa Ozolina, in charge of the Quality Charter for Internships on the part of Youth Forum as well as Ben Lyons, Co-Director of InternAware. You can watch a round-up about the Quality Charter here and the individual interviews below.

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See the individual video interviews here:

Emilie Turunen, Member of the European Parliament
Giuseppe Porcaro, Secretary General of the European Youth Forum
Santa Ozolina, Policy Officer Employment and Social Affairs at the European Youth Forum
Ben Lyons, Co-Director of InternAware (will be available on Monday)

Youth urge leaders at Durban conference: GET IT DONE!

2011-12-11T01:01:00.002+01:00

As the Durban climate conference is going into its last negotiations (follow them at the tag #COP17 on Twitter or via Google News), young people have been given the floor to speak on behalf of global youths, representing half of the world's population.

Global Youth's message to Durban is perfectly clear: Failing in climate negotiations is the "most stark betrayal" that a generation can commit against following generations. And its message is perfectly simple: GET IT DONE!

Durban summit: Is China becoming a climate leader?

2011-12-07T01:17:00.000+01:00

Three more days of climate negotiations in Durban and the EU's hopes for a binding agreement are vanishing into the distance. Climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard already told the European Parliament in November that she did not insist on a binding agreement but was prepared to make concessions, if other countries agreed to a binding commitment from 2020 and a clear roadmap until then.

After no ratification of Kyoto and no progress in Copenhagen and Cancún, I am by now downright resentful of the United States that shot down the Green Climate Fund upon arrival in Durban and that now prefers to nag China before committing itself to any binding accord. I have laid out before my view that emission reduction cannot wait and that developed countries should lower their emissions irrespective of what developing countries do.

Now, the US has waited for so long that it seems China might not only outgrow its economy but also become a leader in emission reductions. On Monday, China stunned the world by announcing that it supported a binding agreement by 2020 (albeit in return for five conditions such as common but differentiated responsibilities and a continuation of developed country subsidies for developing countries).

The Chinese volte-face leaves the US and India in a cold shower, and it makes the US and Canada as developed economies look particularly isolated. As it currently stands, the US refuses a binding agreement, at this point as well as for the year 2020. It pledges to reduce emissions by 17% until 2020 given 2005 levels while China says it "achieved a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions between 2005 and 2010 per unit of gross domestic product and planned to cut another 17 percent by 2015" (given that GDP is still growing at around 8%/year, absolute figures continue to be on the rise).

Even though Chinese emissions are still rising in the short term, signs are multiplying that citizens are becoming increasingly unwilling to put up with air and water pollution. Millions of Chinese citizens protested online yesterday after several days of severe pollution in Beijing that caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights across China. The government heavily subsidizes the installation of solar panels on rooftops in parts of the country and China recently became the world's biggest investor in renewable energy.

These developments indicate that something is changing in China. With capacity-building and technology from the EU, China is moving onto the path of sustainable environmental development. It might be on the way to becoming a climate leader within in the next decade. The US, meanwhile, continues to pretend that life will always go on as it has before. It thereby not only endangers its own citizens but also citizens of the rest of the world.

European Financial Transaction Tax – the story of a broken dream

2011-11-08T08:44:00.005+01:00

The G20 summit last week made significant advances in the introduction of a global financial transaction tax (FTT). Not only France, Spain and Germany but also Argentina, Brazil, Ethiopia and South Africa have declared themselves in favor of an FTT, or Robin Hood tax, which is set to take money from the traders and distribute it to the world’s poor. International NGOs like Oxfam, CIDSE and ActionAid build momentum around this tax that could for example be used to finance climate change mitigation in the global South. The European Parliament has long supported the introduction of an FTT. And even the European Commission has recently declared itself in favor of an FTT, albeit claiming its benefits for the European budget rather than for developing countries.

A pan-European financial transaction tax, however, always seemed unlikely because of the UK’s defiant veto in the Council of Ministers. The city, British politicians fear, would take a heavy blow if every transaction lost 0,05% of its value to the state. And this despite the fact that, according to Sony Kapoor, a trader who takes a 10-minute coffee break comes back to a far higher change in stock prices than just 0,05%.

If a European financial transaction tax cannot be established, German and French politicians recently suggested that the Eurozone should simply go ahead and introduce the tax on its own. Other parts of the world would certainly fall in line behind the biggest economy in the world once the tax had been introduced. However, not only does the EU's impact assessment show that the Eurozone would lose 80% of its financial transactions to London and other stock exchanges according to Dr. Bart Van Vooren, Assistant Professor of EU law at Copenhagen University. The introduction of a universally applicable FTT would also heavily conflict with the freedom of capital mobility enshrined in the European treaties: “(A)ll restrictions on the movement of capital between Member States and between Member States and third countries shall be prohibited” (Article 63 TFEU). Countries may discriminate between inner-European transactions and foreign direct investment, but within the common market, an FTT would not stand before the European Court of Justice, says Dr. Bart Van Vooren.

The only means of introducing a Financial Transaction Tax therefore seems to be a global agreement. But would elected governments ever trust an international organization to enforce the first global tax in history? Realism seems to win this battle in a second.

See below my video interview with Dr. Bart Van Vooren:

Update 08-11-2011: The Economic and Financial Affairs Council today debates the Commission's proposal for an FTT. But according to Sony Kapoor and Dr. Bart Van Vooren, the FTT is a welcome object of political talk. Public opinion is in favor of it, and its implementation reaches beyond the political life of most heads of government and ministers. Talk about a European FTT without the UK's consent is therefore not much more than cosmetics.

Youths challenge European leaders on EU foreign policy

2011-10-27T22:07:00.001+02:00

Fed up with widespread political apathy of the young generation, the editors of the European blog Europe & Me dared a bet: If they could mobilize 10,000 young Europeans to fill out a 4-minute survey on European Foreign Policy, its results will be presented at the Berlin Forum on Foreign Policy organized by the German foreign ministry, and discussed with European foreign ministers.

The survey not only asks young people to state their perception of current EU Foreign Policy ("who do you perceive to be the most prominent actor?", "is EU foreign policy easy to follow?") but also asks what young people perceive to be the most important challenges for the EU in the future.

At the time of writing this blogpost, there are just about seven days left to complete the survey. Might I invite you to give your opinion as well?

Some young Europeans, by the way, are not idle and politically apathetic at all: The European Youth Forum, together with MEP Emilie Turunen, the Young European Federalists (JEF) and other partners, are drafting a Quality charter for internships at the request of the European Parliament. Once this charter is established, every intern will be able to hold up a document to his future employer and demand his rights as they are written down.

EPP heads of govt retreat to Belgian castle to discuss European Council

2011-10-23T13:35:00.003+02:00

It’s a busy weekend in Brussels. Yesterday’s Economic and Financial Affairs Council cleared the path for today’s European Council/Eurozone Summit, while the General Affairs yesterday discussed (PDF) economic policy and finalized the EU positions for the G20 summit in Cannes in November and the COP17 climate conference in Durban in December.


Angela Merkel's badge is waiting for her Source Flickr CC BY-NC-SA mounteulympus

Somewhere in between, 13 heads of state and government belonging to the European People’s Party (EPP), reinforced by José Manuel Barroso, Herman van Rompuy and Jerzy Buzek, took a retreat to a beautiful castle outside of Brussels to save the Euro over a decent dinner.

Journalists were waiting in front of the castle nervously as the first shaded limousines pulled into the driveway. One by one, heads of state and government got out of their cars and walked past the journalists to the castle entrance. Angela Merkel, Finland’s Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen and Austria’s Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger stopped to explain their expectancy of the summit, while Silvio Berlusconi put on a grin and ignored the journalists as his bodyguards walked him to the door. MEP Elmar Brok opened his passenger door alone and walked up to the castle by himself. By the time of his arrival, the journalists’ interest had waned and they were comparing their notes of the Merkel interview.

Your blogger had access to the advisors’ chamber, so over dinner I plugged into some interesting conversations. The advisors themselves were not fully aware of what was going on behind the closed doors of the meeting room, either. “Sometimes, very important progress is made in between the negotiations, in bilateral conversations in the hallway,” said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert. And after heads of government have negotiated a compromise among themselves, each of them returns home to win the approval of their Parliaments. “For those governments with a narrow majority, that can be quite a struggle,” Seibert said. Indeed, one reason for the postponement of the European Council to Wednesday is that Angela Merkel has not secured the approval of the German budget committee yet.

Throughout the dinner, buzz was high about the tête-à-tête between Sarkozy and Merkel after the EPP summit. Sarkozy did not participate in the summit but was due to arrive in Brussels later in the evening. According to media reports, however, the meeting only achieved little progress.

It seems that a lot of work remains as heads of government meet for the European Council today. And if the leaked conclusions prove to be true, there will not be an agreement on the recapitalization of the banks today.

MountEUlympus at the EPP Summit

2011-10-21T08:01:00.006+02:00

In the footsteps of Julien Frisch, Joe Litobarski and Andrew Burgess, your humble blogger will cover the summit of the European People's Party (EPP), held this Saturday evening in preparation for the European Council on Sunday (and Wednesday).


Angela Merkel at the EPP Summit in June 2011 Source: Flickr CC BY europeanpeoplesparty

The EPP currently brings together 17 of the 27 European heads of state or government, among others Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Donald Tusk and Silvio Berlusconi. Discussions at the summit will mainly center around the Eurocrisis, which already brought one EPP government down last week (Iveta Radicová's liberal-conservative coalition in Slovakia). Will EU leaders, Merkel and Sarkozy most of all, be able to come to a sustainable agreement? Will they be able to produce a consistent solution that appeases the markets and brings back politicians' credibility? These are the questions that this blog will address at the EPP summit.

I will be live-tweeting directly from the summit (follow my account @mounteulympus or the hashtags #epp and #euco) and provide you with a round-up in the aftermath of the summit on this blog. You can send me your questions, comments and remarks by comment function, via Twitter or through the contact form, and I will try to address them at the summit.

Macroeconomic convergence in the EU - ok, but what about structural funds?

2011-10-08T23:06:00.005+02:00

The macroeconomic stability regulations that the European Parliament passed in late September, better known as "sixpack", lay down severe penalties for countries whose economies exceed the European average by too much. This could hit overachieving Germany just as much as underperforming Greece.

Two of the six pieces of legislation are relevant for this, the Ferreira regulation and the Haglund regulation. The Ferreira regulation allows for the establishment of "an alert mechanism for early detection of emerging macroeconomic imbalances" within the European Commission, but under consultation of the European Systemic Risk Board. This mechanism "should be based on use of an indicative and transparent scoreboard comprising indicative thresholds, combined with economic judgment" (see the exact rules for the scoreboard in the regulation).

If a Eurozone economy exceeds the European average by too much, and for too long (meaning that it ignores several warnings from the Commission), it will be heavily fined. Within the Euro area, "the yearly fine [...] shall be 0.1% of the GDP of the Member State concerned", according to the Haglund regulation.

The aim of the two regulations is among others to bring the macroeconomic policies of the 17 different Eurozone economies closer together. While one country lowers taxes, establishes a minimum wage and gives out subsidies to make people spend more, it should be safeguarded that its neighbor doesn't raise taxes to keep its purchasing power at home (Germany has been pretty good at that over the last decade, and France was rather angry about it).

While the structural funds of the EU (European Regional Development Fund, European Social Fund, Cohesion Fund and two others) are not directly related to macroeconomic policy of the member state governments, they also have an important role in bringing European economies closer together. The Commission has just published its proposal for the structural funds 2014-20, which are expected to have a volume of 336 billion EUR. Three different types of regions are to profit from the funds, namely

less developed regions, whose GDP is below 75% of the Union average (this will continue to be the top priority for the policy)
transition regions, whose GDP is between 75% and 90% of the EU 27 average
more developed regions, whose GDP per capita is above 90% of the average.

This is probably not fair, and I am not an expert on structural funds, but on a polemic note it strikes me as funny that Germany's North-Rhine Westphalia (whose Brussels representation you see below, next to the Latvian embassy) has already been promised funding of some sort for the period of 2014-20...

Latvian embassy in Brussels.
Source: The embassy's Flickr page

North-Rhine Westphalian Representation
in Brussels. Source: derwesten.de

Update (10/10/11): The Commission's 6 October proposal does incorporate a suspension of cohesion funds if macroeconomic criteria are not met. Read more here.

Finally - a debate about the future of the European Union in Germany

2011-10-02T10:28:00.006+02:00

For one and a half years, debates on the European Union in Germany could be largely summed up as "we always pay, we never get anything back". Not only is this wrong, the pure limitation to financial aspects also obstructed the view upon a more important question: In a world where the European Union "will account for only 18% of world GDP in 2020, signifying a decline of 28%" compared with 2000 levels, are citizens prepared to give the EU strong multilateral institutions? This question has long been left unanswered in Germany. The Lisbon treaty was nodded off without debate.

Thanks to finance minister Schäuble, the debate now seems to take a new turn. Schäuble has always been one of the most fervent supporters of more European integration. After his initiatives for a European Monetary Fund (more or less granted), a European rating agency (still negotiated) and an economic government for the Eurozone (granted), the German finance minister yesterday pursued that the answer to the European debt crisis can only be more Europe. For once, I've got the feeling that the debate is not directed against fellow European countries but towards the degree of competence to be given to Brussels.

Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a one-hour televised live interview last week in which she explained the reasons behind the EFSF. This doesn't happen very often, and it may have given many people a new view upon the EU and Germany's role in. People begin to understand that the country profits a lot from European integration and stronger institutions do not necessarily mean less democracy.

The time is right to pursue this debate and to wonder what Europe will look like in the future. Bavaria's CSU, in dire need of voter support, warns against a "European superstate", but it was apparent from the EFSF vote last week that there is room for more Europe in large parts of CDU, Social Democrats and Greens.

Unnoticed by many, chief German constitutional lawyer Andreas Voßkuhle recently gave an interview in which he predicted (14min30) that Germany may pave the way for stronger European institutions (within the next 10-20 years, roundabout), and give itself a new constitution to accommodate these changes. The time hasn't come for such a quantum leap, but I've got the feeling politicians start laying out the cobble stones to get there.

I hope that there will be an honest debate about the future of the EU, not only in the Parliament but also in the public sphere. After Schäuble started the debate, the next few days will show if other parties are prepared to exchange some serious arguments on this.

It's good to live in a shared European Union

2011-09-25T23:24:00.000+02:00

Verdun, 24 September 2011
CC BY-NC-ND André Feldhof

much better than to live in a Europe of hostile nation-states

75% of European interns are unpaid or insufficiently paid

2011-09-21T08:35:00.004+02:00

A new survey by the European Youth Forum reveals that three out of four young Europeans are either unpaid or do not receive sufficient compensation to pay for their living expenses. Only about 25% of all respondents were able to pay all of their living expenses with their internship allowance. The European Youth Forum conducted a 4-month survey and obtained slightly over 3000 responses.

According to the survey, a large majority of employers did not give a particular reason of why they could not pay their interns, prompting 64,7% of the respondents to rely on funding from their parents. From the survey results, it becomes clear what employers are banking on. Taking out a loan of 4000 EUR for a 6-month unpaid internship deters those applicants whose parents cannot finance them. Employers thereby ensure that applicants will come from a wealthy background and preferably received a high degree of informal education via their personal environment.

From a recent Twitter exchange with the World Development Movement, a small development NGO based in the UK, I gathered two things:

WDM refuses to pay its interns despite +£139,217 in last year's accounts
When I confronted them, they pointed to the small size of their organization and more importantly to the fact that "we only recruit internally, thus giving interns a much stronger chance of employment with WDM" and that "if we had to pay wages to interns, it would be unlikely that we could offer an internship programme".

In other words, this NGO asks its interns to pay their way in. On the other hand, where would they get highly-qualified personnel if they didn't have the luxury of a 6-month scrutiny of the intern's capabilities, paid by the intern him or herself?

WDM is only one of the examples for insufficient treatment of interns and for bleak inconsiderateness about the world's future qualified labor pool. There are many more.

In cooperation with MEP Emilie Turunen and other partners, the Youth Forum is elaborating a Quality Charter for Internships at the request of the European Parliament. It will be non-binding, but if there is a clear measuring rod, interns have a document to which they can point when they demand their rights in future.

II Youth Convention on Volunteering

2011-09-07T23:36:00.001+02:00

On 8 September, the II Youth Convention on Volunteering kicks off. More than 1500 registered participants are expected in the European Parliament in Brussels and on the Esplanade in front of it from 8 to 11 September. Many more young people from Brussels and its surroundings will visit workshops, events, discussions and free concerts on the Parliament Esplanade from Thursday afternoon to Saturday evening.

For those based in Brussels, the Convention offers a great opportunity to find information about volunteering and volunteers' rights, to join workshops, events, discussions and free concerts and to meet young people from all over Europe.

Those outside of Brussels may be interested in following the live blog of the event. Over three days, a young blogger team (disclaimer: I am one of them) will follow events, discussions, workshops and concerts for online readers.

Hope to see you online or offline - at the II Youth Convention on Volunteering.

48 hours of blogging action against East Africa food crisis

2011-08-06T16:25:00.011+02:00

This blogpost is part of the 48 Hours of Action against the famine in the Horn of Africa. It currently has a value of five working hours and 40 EUR of donations. Please let me know via the contact form if it influenced you to donate; I will adapt the figures.

In the 1980s, towards the end of the Cold War, Somalia was heavily dependent on food aid. After the Soviet Union stopped supporting the dictator Siad Barre, the United States saw their chance. The US and other Western countries planned to make Somalia a hub to increase their influence into the Indian Ocean; in particular, they tried to buy influence through food aid.

UK Secretary of State for Development,
Andrew Mitchell, in Dadaab refugee camp
in Kenya CC BY DFID

In consequence, the "value of foreign aid to Somalia soared to $80 per person, equivalent to half the gross domestic product," Martin Meredith observes in his book The State of Africa. "Leading loyalists [of the ruling clans] made fortunes from food aid, appropriating it then selling it on the market. A World Bank study, published in 1988, estimated that the growth of food aid was fourteen times higher than the growth of food consumption. From being a country self-sufficient in food grains, Somalia became dependent on imported food, all to the advantage of the ruling elite."

Until today, it has been difficult for common people in Somalia to access healthy, nutritious food. The country remains ruled by various clans and torn apart by civil war. What is new in the current crisis is that climate change has aggravated the situation. It means that consumption behavior and mobility preferences in industrial states are now directly related to food insecurity in developing countries.

A mother with her children
in Dadaab refugee camp
CC BY Oxfam

Our immediate humanitarian impulse should be to wire the equivalent of a night out in the pubs to the donor agency of your choice – please see the buttons – to provide food to the starving population of Somalia (plus Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda). But in the long term we have to urgently stop climate change. This year will hopefully see commitments to significantly reduce emissions at the COP17 Conference in Durban. The EU and China are progressing in emission reductions (the EU rather cautiously, China at an impressive pace), while the US has relegated climate change mitigation to the back row.

Farm animals in Somaliland died
from undernutrition -
CC BY-NC-ND Oxfam

Reduction of GHG emissions are not a luxury but a security question. With every additional day that companies and airlines are allowed to pollute the environment, we are more likely to see droughts, rising temperatures, freshwater scarcity, unpredictable rain and monsoon, a rising sea level and more. In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has mapped out the consequences of 100 million climate refugees. The EU is already overburdened with 25,000 migrants.

It is time that the highest polluters per capita (2008) such as Qatar, Trinidad & Tobago and the United Arab Emirates, but also the US, Canada, Australia and several EU countries, realize the urgent necessity of fighting climate change. Otherwise, climate refugees may come and occupy their farmlands.

Update 08/08/2011: See the Guardian's take here: Is climate change to blame for famine in the Horn of Africa?

This blogpost is part of the 48 Hours of Action against the famine in the Horn of Africa. It currently has a value of five working hours and 40 EUR of donations. Please let me know via the contact form if it influenced you to donate; I will adapt the figures.

Monitoring and web communications toolkit

2011-07-26T22:30:00.004+02:00

Due to requests from some friends, in this post I put together a toolkit for monitoring EU affairs and communicating via the web. Using Google, Delicious, Twitter and some intelligent research commands can cut your research time in half.

Beside subscribing to newsletters, the first thing you could do is to use RSS feeds. Jon Worth's post over here tells you why. RSS feeds are common for most news websites; once you've subscribed, you receive the latest news automatically. To read them, though, you will need a feed reader. There are a few out there, such as the Google Reader; see Jon's post for details. Tell me more

Second, create Google Alerts. This little program will crawl the web and send you emails as soon as a new item with your search terms goes online. If you created a daily alert for 'EU agriculture', for example, you will comfortably receive your search results pertaining to EU agriculture in your inbox, structured in news results, blog results and web results. Tell me more

Third, to save time during your research, you can use intelligent search commands (for Alerts or regular searches). Among the more interesting ones are searches within a particular website. The search command Obama site:nytimes.com will show you every mention of Barack (or Michelle) Obama on the New York Times. You can also look for "Barack Obama" site:nytimes.com and will only find mentions of the President himself. Tell me more

Fourth, to keep track of all that you read online, you could use delicious.com, a tool that allows you to create bookmarks. You can access these bookmarks from any computer, allowing you to quickly find online articles that you read before.

With your monitoring tools thus set up, there are also many means to publish and publicize content. The easiest form to publish content is a blog, while the easiest way to spread it is via Twitter. The EU is now very active on Twitter; you can find a list of EU twitter contacts over at La Communication Européenne.

When you have produced content on your blog, programs like Twitterfeed, Hoot Suite or RSS Graffiti allow you to publish it to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (could be very useful for those MEPs who stopped tweeting after the 2009 elections but who still maintain their websites). If you feel like it, create your own daily newspaper through paper.li. Google Analytics and other programs allow you to keep track of how many people visit your website. Be help of Feedburner, you can let readers subscribe to your website by email. Yahoo Pipes allows you to aggregate news feeds from several blogs or websites and even to translate them into other languages. I recently started using If this then that to combine different online tasks. I greatly love it, but it's still in beta phase and will evolve over time. To manage your Twitter account professionally and to quickly target new followers, you could use on of these programs, unfortunately none of them is free. Finally, to measure your online influence, have a look at klout.com.

While you're defining your target audience, don't forget to sign your website/blog up to several blog aggregators such as technorati.com or bloggingportal.eu. See more

In the end, however, getting readership is mainly about interaction. Reacting to blogposts and comments, retweeting other people's messages - this will draw a wider audience than if you only resort to automated publishing tools.

If you have other programs, blogpost links or ideas, please share them in the comments.

How the EU quietly empties African waters

2011-07-19T00:25:00.006+02:00

Making European fisheries more sustainable, stop overfishing and ban fish discards - those are the centerpieces of the new European fisheries policy. Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki presented it to the media and the European Parliament last week; now it will go through the institutions and the European lobbies. While fisheries lobbies, NGOs and the European Parliament are starting to haggle about new fisheries quotas (set to be auctioned in much the same way as CO2 emission allowances are now), little attention goes to the fact that the EU currently subsidizes European fisheries in third-country waters with 65€ per ton.

The Commission regularly negotiates fisheries protocols with third countries, which are subsequently agreed between the EP's Fisheries and Development Committee (curtailed by the assent procedure, see Art. 218(6)(a) TFEU) and nodded off by the Council. In these protocols, lawmakers specify an upper limit of catches (e.g. 52000 tons per year in Seychelles). Up to this limit, the EU guarantees payment to the third country government, regardless of the number of total catches (fishermen add another 35€/ton). For every catch beyond the limit, the EU doubles its contribution to 130€/ton.

In effect, this not only encourages fishermen to rid the Seychelles of a full 52000 tons per year until 2014 (if they catch less, you and me provide free money to the Seychelles government), but also encourages the Seychelles government to neglect their fish stocks and to pocket a full 165€ for every ton exceeding the limit of 52000 tons/year. The agreement with São Tomé and Príncipe is based on the same terms, while new agreements with Cape Verde and Gabon are currently in the making. Overall, 15 agreements with developing countries are in force today. The consequences of the EU's policies are disastrous: No more fish by 2030.

In its new proposal, the Commission acknowledges that until now it had no information about other fisheries agreements concluded by the partner country, so that it was "often impossible to [...] determine the share of the surplus to be sustainably fished by the EU fleet". The new Common Fisheries Policy will subject EU vessels in foreign waters to the quota trading system, but the current agreements are valid until 2014 and the CFP reform is expected to take a few years until it is adopted. Therefore, in the short term, the EU will continue exploiting foreign waters and depleting African countries of the fish stocks.

3 July was the day of the year on which we started eating non-EU fish. If we want to save fish stocks in Africa, we should get selective about the fish we eat.

Update 16/09/2011: In a video interview, influential Development MEP Charles Goerens from Luxembourg told me that the fisheries agreements between the EU and African countries should in effect be phased out.

MEPs should have the democratic right to decide where they meet

2011-07-18T15:08:00.001+02:00

For those who haven't had a chance to read it over at PlaceLux.EU, here is the open letter that MEPs have sent to the new French secretary of State, Jean Leonetti (taken from MEP Raül Romeva i Rueda's blog).

CM. Jean Leonetti
Secrétaire d'Etat aux affaires européennes
Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes
37, Quai d'Orsay
75351 Paris
France

Brussels, 14 July 2011

Dear Secretary of State,

MEPs should have the democratic right to decide where they meet

Please accept our congratulations on your appointment as France's new Minister for Europe. We wish you success.

There is now an Absolute Majority in the European Parliament in favour of a Single Seat. Following the vote on June 8 on the Multiannual Financial Framework, enough MEPs have now adjusted their record to achieve an absolute majority (373-285) on the paragraph pointing to "the significant savings that could be made if the European Parliament were to have a Single Seat". This Absolute Majority -as well as the 2012/2013 calendar vote in March- fundamentally shifts the debate.

As you know, the EU Treaty requires the European Parliament to hold 12 monthly plenary sessions in Strasbourg. As a result, we meet in Strasbourg 48 days every year. From next year, this will be 45 days, following our vote to hold the two October plenary sessions during the same week to save money, time and the environment. This democratic decision of the Parliament is being contested by France before the European Court of Justice in closed proceedings.

All of the Parliament's other activities take place in Brussels (with the exception of a part of the administration, which is based in Luxembourg). Brussels is where committee and political group meetings are held. It is where most of our staff are based. It is where the other two institutions that form the EU decision-making triangle (the Council and the Commission) are located. Over the last 50 years, Brussels has evolved into the EU's democratic capital. It is where companies, NGOs, national, regional and local governments, industry associations and trade unions all have their offices. It is where the EU press corps has its hub, including technical facilities.

When the European Parliament started meeting in Strasbourg over 50 years ago, it was a consultative assembly with part-time Members who were not directly elected, it was purely advisory and had no powers. Today, it is on a par with the Council of Ministers when it comes to making laws and its Members are full-time legislators, directly elected by the peoples of Europe. Yet unlike national parliaments, it cannot decide when and where it wishes to meet.

Recent votes in the European Parliament as well as several surveys have shown that a majority of MEPs believe the European Parliament should have a Single Seat, in Brussels. The Dutch and UK governments have publicly backed this view. More than 1,25 million European citizens have signed an online petition to this effect.

Over time a number of parliaments have moved to reflect political reality: the US Congress moved from Philadelphia to Washington; the French Parliament moved from Versailles to Paris; and more recently, the German Parliament moved from Bonn to Berlin. We believe that in a modern Europe, the European Parliament must be able to do the same. We call on the French government to stop the political and legal posturing on this issue, and to enter into a real debate.

All we ask is that MEPs should be able to exercise their democratic rights and decide when and where to meet. In return, we are ready to help identify alternatives for the city of Strasbourg, both in institutional and in economic terms.

For Strasbourg, a better and brighter future lies ahead. The European Parliament has now far outgrown it. It would be better to find an alternative that matches its facilities and can be a more grateful guest.

Yours sincerely,

(MEPs)

Respect. Responsibility. Representation.

2011-07-08T22:06:00.003+02:00

CC BY-NC heraldpost

CC BY badkleinkirchheim

CC BY ME-Arbeitgeber

CC BY-NC-SA dolarz

CC BY-NC hockeyshooter

CC BY-NC-ND European Parliament

MEP Robert Goebbels: We don't move if others don't move

2011-07-05T23:34:00.002+02:00

Center-right MEPs today tore apart a report by Green MEP Bas Eickhout that would have asked the Commission to establish a 30% GHG emission reduction by 2020. The Greens ended up voting against their own report. Gulf Stream Blues has an interesting take on the vote and I have written about the 30% target last year.

I came across this post by Robert Goebbels, Luxembourgish S&D MEP, who proudly notes that he voted against the Eickhout report. I would have liked to comment on his blog but the captcha didn't let me. So here is my answer to his idea that the EU shouldn't move on GHG emissions before other global actors don't move.

Monsieur,

votre position montre le fait que vous êtes prêt a envoyer les générations suivantes vers un monde rechauffé.
Jouer des jeux de pouvoir avec la Chine et les Etats Unis dans le développement durable, cela n'a pas de sens. Une fois la planète rechauffée, il ne sert plus à rien d'avancer vers les 30%. Pour arrêter le changement climatique, il faut agir maintenant.

Sir,

your position shows that you are ready to send future generations into a warmer planet.
Playing power games with China and the United States doesn't make any sense in sustainable development. Once the planet is heated up, it won't help any more to fix a 30% target. To stop climate change, action is needed right now.

As a side remark, you may note that China is actually quite progressive (update: extremely progressive) in its sustainable development policies. The US remain the prime polluter in the world, failing to adopt an emission trading scheme in 2010 and now attacking the EU's emission trading scheme.

Update (23/07/2011): Over at La Treizième Etoile, Andrew J. Burgess shows what happens to citizens who demand ambitious climate commitments from the EP.