Archive for the ‘European Union’ Category

The Scary Reality of the European Union’s Demise – Slate Magazine

Natalie Matthews-Ramo

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the European Union has been falling apart. Creditor countries in northern Europe forced austerity on Mediterranean nations, polarizing the continent between center and periphery. Then, an unprecedented refugee crisis hit, endangering the foundational goal of borderless Europe promised by the Schengen Agreement. Last year, Britain left. Although the U.K. was always the least connected segment, separated by the English Channel and an imperial history that made federation distasteful, this bode badly for the mission of European integration. Stir terrorism and ethno-nationalist populism into the mix and the EU currently looks less like a laboratory for democratic innovation and more like a meth lab ready to blow.

Now, the EU is also being measured by an older and more sinister barometer for concern: anti-Semitism. In the new book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, James Kirchick sounds the alarm over the fate of Europe for some 280 pages. The focus moves from East to West but finds its center of gravity in a chapter called France without Jews. He analyzes the rebirth of anti-Semitism in Europe, adding it to his broader argument that the 1945 political consensuses of pax europaea is in jeopardy. The book plainly states its mission: to deliver 20th century European history to its readers lest they be forced to repeat it. The simplicity of this goal would seem underambitious if the EU was in better health. But with Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist with strong support from Putin, poised to take the reins of the French government, scrutinizing recent European history for answers is a critical task.

Kirchick, a journalist with experience working in Eastern Europe, comes to the role of doctor diagnosing the EUs malady from the center-right rather than the more familiar center-left. His primary interest is geopolitical alignments and statecraft rather than economics. Unlike the arguments of economists like Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz, Kirchick believes that the 2008 crisis and subsequent austerity are not to blame for the EUs current state of disarray. Rather, he defends the European Union against charges of mismanaging the crisis while insisting that both the left and the right have been too unforgiving with Brussels.

EU institutions, Kirchick argues, are struggling toward a complex and noble goal: federating 28 countries. The historical circumstances of WWII and the Cold War gave Western Europe few other options. Through historical necessity, the EU produced a laudable experiment in post-national government, free trade, and however weakly, cosmopolitan society. Despite two generations of planning and intricate institutional architecture, the Union is now caught off guard by crises of immigration, transnational finance, and resurgent nationalism. These problems outstrip the EUs worst-case scenarios by an order of magnitude but, at the same time, they are familiar. They are based on the political realities the EU faced when it came together with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Like the 1930s and 1940s, Russia is ruled by an autocrat with irredentist ambitions, and a weak economy fuels religious and ethnic tensions. Unlike the time period when the EU was born, European countries now have no internal consensus on what to do in a world in which political authority is coming apart.

For Kirchick, the alarm sounding Europes demise is most frightening in the grim new reality that is the life of French Jews. Attacked in acts of terrorism, harassed on the street when wearing yarmulkes, and constantly equated with Israel by virtue of their religion, many French Jews have chosen to make aliyah and resettle in Israel. Kirchick sees French anti-Semitism as a sign of its existential failure. It exhumes a specifically French struggle between communal identity and ethnic difference, kindled by the Dreyfus Affair a century ago. Yet it also pertains to all European countries that have backtracked on the Libert component of Libert, Egalit, and Fraternit.

Kirchick maintains that Jews have been singled out for particularly bad treatment despite their historical suffering and relative integration into French society:

The plight of French Jews should be a crucial sign of the destructiveness of ethno-nationalism. Kirchick argues that it has produced no such reaction: Not only have fleeing French Jews failed to elicit sympathy or action but many, including some members of the secular Jewish community, have excused animosity toward Jews as a natural response to Israeli land-grabbing and human rights abuses. Kirchick tells us that 20th century history has been willfully forgotten in Eastern Europe, where countries like Hungary have built WWII memorials that fail to mention the Holocaust at all. At the same time, Germany has become over-sensitive to both surveillance and, more problematically, humanitarian assistance to refugees. Historical guilt for the crimes of Nazism inspired an open-door refugee policy as ill considered as it was well intentioned, the negative consequences of which will be felt for generations, Kirchick writes.

But while he is an immigration realist who worries about mass integration, he is also troublingly sympathetic to political arguments in Europe that Muslim migration will irrevocably change European culture. He veers in the direction of pathologizing Muslims for gang rape: So prevalent is mass, participatory sexual assault in [the Arab world], Kirchick informs us, that there is a word for it, taharrush, one with which Europeans have become painfully acquainted as this distinctly Arabian pathology has been imported to their streets. He believes the European left prohibited frank discussion of the downside to immigration, leaving many citizens ill-prepared to find a suitable language to discuss the challenges of integration for fear of being labeled racists. Seeing this political chasm, he argues, groups such as the Greek Golden Dawn Party, Pegida in Germany, and the anti-Semitic nationalist party Jobbik in Hungary leapt into the void, providing a harsh and simplistic language to talk about immigrants and minorities.

The End of Europe is strongest in its analysis of Eastern European populism, the war in Ukraine, and the tug-of-war between the Russian and EU spheres of influence in countries like Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Kirchick corrects the proclivity of the general American public to dismiss Eastern Europe as the other Europe, forever destined to follow the charismatic authority of iron-fisted kleptocrats. He explains why much of the populist nationalism, previously seen as native only to the region, is spreading west. The days of tsk-tsking Macedonians for their treatment of Roma from the safety of NGO forums in London are over. Now, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen crib their talking points from ethno-nationalists who, a decade ago, would have been limited to an audience of young men with shaved heads and white shoelaces.

In general, though, while The End of Europe offers a detailed account of the recent past, its diagnostic powers are more limited. Kirchick rightly observes that the original EU was not only about utopian dreams of defeating petty nationalism or building a heterogeneous society: It was a trade bloc. The EU is, at heart, a utilitarian project, Kirchick writes. Countries ultimately join not out of a sense of war guilt or a belief that they owe something to poorer Europeans, but because membership brings quantifiable material benefits. Many countries also joined because they saw it as the lesser evil in the era of globalization. The sales pitch was one unified welfare state or 28 broken ones, yet Kirchick does not explore this social dimension of the economic compromise. He quickly labels the 2008 crisis as the result of the unsustainability of the old social welfare state model but does not give us any glimpse of peoples lives trapped in that socioeconomic arrangement and currently in grave danger.

Particularly in his treatment of Southern European countries, like Spain and Greece, that suffer 40 percent youth unemployment, unpayable debt, and an erosion of domestic political power, Kirchick takes up the prevalent line of cultural fecklessness. Rather than acknowledge that many loans were made to Mediterranean countries with full knowledge of their economic weaknesses, he exoticizes their politicians as stuck in a semi-European culture of bribes and nepotism that resembles the baksheesh practices of the Ottomans. Because of his lack of interest in the long-term effects of debt and austerity, he is not well positioned to explain social movements that grew out of this experience. He consigns SYRIZA and Jeremy Corbyn to the far-left fringe, despite both groups many political compromises and lack of violence or hateful language. He warns that left populism portends the rise of a European hard left exuding the same authoritarian populism of the extreme right, but beyond anarchists throwing a few rocks in Athens he never explains the source of this danger or its similarity to right-wing militias that prey on people of color.

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Despite the fact that much of The End of Europe was surely written before the rise of the TrumpBannon white nationalist White House, it does still feel like an urgent SOS from across the ocean about how worthy institutions can unravel with alarming speed. Kirchick lauds the spirit of compromise in the formation of the EU as well as in the deeds of a previous generation of European politicians, including Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel, and Francois Mitterrand. Indeed, the EU was a project that transcended political divisions: The right liked its free market potential and the left supported it as a means to transnationalize the protections of the welfare state. Today, it is held in contempt by both anti-austerity socialists as well as ethnic nationalists. Kirchick convincingly argues that anti-EU sentiment has been whipped up by jingoistic Kremlin internet trolls, opportunistic fringe racists, and charlatans like Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon who made a bundle of money as financiers before sounding off against globalism.

The EU was born out of a banal French-German deal to cooperate on steel production; the aspirations of the federation have always outpaced its capacities. Despite his own ideological blind spots, Kirchick recognizes that the most glaring gap between rhetoric and reality is in the EUs botched grappling with racial and ethnic tensions. He shows that the vainglorious promise of post-national society overshadowed small, but real, achievements. And he ultimately imparts the idea that the EU is worth fighting for. Those who want to leave are deluded by micro-issues and cynical manipulations, such as U.K. fishing regulations or sausage packaging. But those who truly understand the necessity of the European Union, Kirchick argues, are students of history who have not forgotten where the idea came from and what it was a reaction against.

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The Scary Reality of the European Union's Demise - Slate Magazine

Joining the European Union leads to less cross-border collaboration – Nature.com

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Malta was among the ten countries that joined the European Union in 2004.

When the European Union expanded in the 2000s, it had a negative impact on scientific collaborations between researchers in new member countries and elsewhere, a study has found.

Membership in the EU gives countries access to the blocs huge science-funding schemes and to the European Research Area (ERA), which strives for a border-free, well-funded, pan-European system of science. But according to a paper published on 12 April in Science Advances1, countries that joined in two waves of expansion ten new members in 2004 and two more in 2007, all but three of them part of the former Soviet bloc would have had more cross-border collaboration between scientists if they had not joined.

The findings challenge central tenets underlying ERA integration policies, write the authors.

In the paper, Alexander Petersen, a computational social scientist at the University of California, Merced, and his co-authors assess the collaboration rates of countries based on publication involving authors from more than one nation.

They found a much slower increase in Eastern European rates of collaboration per publication in the decade after 2004 than in previous ones (see Inter-EU brain drain). They also modelled what the cross-border publication rate might have been, had those 12 countries not joined the EU. According to the teams results, nations that joined in 2004 such as Poland and Lithuania saw 9% fewer cross-border publications than they might have expected given their scientific and economic metrics, such as spending on research and development.

When countries join the EU, their citizens generally also gain the automatic right to work in any other EU member state, which raises the risk of a brain drain. Petersen says that promising young academics who work in their home states often establish cross-border collaborations. But if those same researchers move west, their countries of origin lose not only their human capital, but also their bridges with the rest of the world. And this process naturally explains what we found in our paper Eastern European countries would have been more integrated within science had they never integrated within the EU, he says.

Petersen thinks that the ERA is great for multiple reasons, including that it brings together countries with different innovation systems. He also says that the EU is doing a good job of dealing with the problems identified in this paper, for instance through programmes that pair Eastern-European institutions with Western ones. The latest paper shows, however, that Eastern European countries should invest in collaboration with Western countries, but should also implement home-return conditions to make sure scientists come back at some point, he says.

The research comes at a crucial time for scientific collaboration in the EU, given that one of its major players the United Kingdom is about to leave the bloc. Several groups, including the League of European Research Universities (LERU) and the European University Association, called last month for new momentum to be given to the ERA, by setting more ambitious goals and expanding beyond Europe.

Of course there has been brain drain, says Kurt Deketelaere, secretary-general of LERU and a professor of law at the University of Leuven in Belgium. But it did not have to happen, he says. Deketelaere faults the new member states for not strengthening their own research systems in line with the ERA aims.

If they had done that, they would have experienced brain circulation, much less brain drain and have a much better-performing research system, he says.

Commenting on the paper, a European Commission spokesperson said in a statement, In recent years, transnational cooperation between member states has grown by 7.8% an encouraging sign that ERA is working. But it is now up to member states in particular to further improve the implementation of ERA.

The commission will assist with this by helping lower-performing countries improve their scientific efforts, the spokesperson added.

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Joining the European Union leads to less cross-border collaboration - Nature.com

European Union and the French presidential elections: Four reasons why the EU will struggle to survive beyond the … – City A.M.

The EU geopolitical outlook looks like the final round of a show jumping event.

Horse and rider stumbled at the first jump (Brexit), cleared the second fence (Dutch elections) and now face a very high bar (the French presidential election). Despite the pessimism, however, I dont believe the EU is in danger of unravelling and disintegrating, at least for the time being.

Eurobarometer polling shows two thirds of the EU population feel a citizen of the EU. Half the EU population thinks more decisions should be taken at the EU level, and half are optimistic about the future of the EU. Also, half of EU citizens feel very or fairly attached to the EU. Only 15 per cent say theyre not at all attached. Surprisingly, only 23 per cent of EU citizens have a negative perception of the EU. So things need to get a lot worse. But, unfortunately for the EU, they will.

EU integration versus disintegration is a battle between centripetal (moving towards the centre) and centrifugal (moving away from the centre) forces. While I dont believe the EU will disintegrate in the short term (over the next one to two years), thereafter all bets are off, with the strong possibility that the EU will face an existential crisis in the 2020s.

Read more: Its time to face facts: Pandoras Box is open and Europe is finished

The existential crisis is likely to be triggered by a combination of what I call the 4Ds, of the Sword of Damocles, hanging over the continent: the disconnect, demographics, default and digital effects. Lets look at each in turn.

Disconnect Eurobarometer polling shows the number one issue of concern for EU citizens is inward migration from outside the EU. The disconnect is between the views of the general population towards inward migration from outside the EU, and the EUs own assumptions regarding migration from beyond its border. European Commission projections show that between now and 2060 there will be 55m new migrants coming into the EU. This is a truly enormous figure, which is surely politically impossible. Going partially down the road towards 55m is likely to begin to unravel the EU.

Demographics The EU working age population declines every year between now and 2040 (around 0.4 per cent per annum). This is a huge economic challenge. The decline in working age population is not uniform, but it is severe in many countries. The demographic impact, according to the European Commission, is that in order to maintain pre financial crisis GDP growth rates, the EU will need to double its pre crisis productivity rate. A daunting challenge. The interaction between the disconnect and demographics means that the productivity challenge is even greater if migration is less.

Default This refers to the potential return of the euro crisis, with five contributing factors: one, a banking crisis almost certainly starting in Italy, due to a high proportion of non performing loans and the weakness in nominal GDP; two, continued austerity in peripheral economies; three, the scale of internal devaluation wage reductions required in the peripheral economies in order to regain competitiveness; four, the structural fault at the heart of the Eurozone, namely the lack of fiscal union; and five, a potential re-emergence of the sovereign-bank default link.

Read more: Italy is just three plausible steps away from crashing out of the Eurozone

Digital John Gillingham, Americas pre-eminent historian of the EU, has written that the very survival of the EU is now at stake. Gillingham argues that successful adjustment to the future technological and economic challenges the EU faces will require, as a first step, political devolution and the revival of national power. Gillingham sees moribund EU institutions as unable to cope with the twenty-first century challenges posed by technology.

But heres a really iconoclastic thought. Faced with an existential crisis, the EU could begin to disintegrate in the 2020s, but at the point of maximum danger a hard core of countries could trigger a big bang towards much deeper integration.

The old maxim that, whatever the problem, the solution is more Europe could ultimately come of age. Out of the ashes of disintegration could rise the phoenix of the United States of Europe (USE).

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European Union and the French presidential elections: Four reasons why the EU will struggle to survive beyond the ... - City A.M.

EU’s pressure on its own shows the extent of its cultural rot – Washington Times


Washington Times
EU's pressure on its own shows the extent of its cultural rot
Washington Times
This week the existential problems facing the European Union came into stark relief as Belgium threatened Poland and Hungary with legal action if they did not agree to commit cultural suicide by letting in hundreds of thousands of refugees from the ...

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EU's pressure on its own shows the extent of its cultural rot - Washington Times

Fox Fights EU Attempts to Limit U.K. Trade Powers Before Brexit – Bloomberg

Liam Fox.

The U.K. is battling to stop the European Union blocking Prime Minister Theresa Mays drive to forge new trade partnerships as the country prepares for Brexit.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox is challenging the attempt to lock the U.K. out of the blocs ongoing trade talks. Hes also opposing efforts to limit Britains power to negotiate commercial accords with other countries before Britain leaves the EU.

EU officials are reportedly pushing for the U.K. to be cut out of sensitive discussions because they are worried confidential information on trade deals would help Mays team negotiate favorable terms with the same countries after Brexit. At the same time, Britain has been warned it cant line up its own free-trade agreements with non-EU nations until it has formally left the bloc in 2019.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Fox hit back on both points. He insisted he has certainly got greater freedom to hold trade talks with other countries now May has formally triggered the Brexit process. And he declared Britain cannot be kept out of the EUs internal trade discussions while still a member of the bloc.

We are a full partner in the EU until we leave and intend to play our full role, Fox said. Clearly when the EU is discussing the U.K., thats a matter for the 27 and not the U.K. but we intend to exercise our full legal rights as one of the 28 members until such time as we stop being a member.

The question of third-country trade deals is a new flash point, with the EU and U.K. already at odds over the structure of the upcoming talks and the size of any exit bill. Such rows have sparked fears that the U.K. and EU wont reach an amicable divorce settlement and agree new terms for future trade in the tight, two-year window available for talks.

The European Commission warned last month there would need to be a discussion about the treatment of sensitive information in the context of certain trade negotiations, which the U.K. would continue to have access to while it remained a full member, the Financial Times reported.

EU officials are concerned that by participating in conversations about talks with countries such as Australia, the U.K. might glean confidential information it can use itself when it tries to win post-Brexit accords.

In the interview, Fox said Britain wanted its own deal with Australia and would not give up its right to see the EUs private trade plans. We think that the U.K. is a key liberalizing influence, and certainly from discussions Ive had other countries welcome us continuing to play that role right until we leave the EU itself, he said.

Now that Article 50 has been triggered, and Britain is clearly on the legal exit path, there is no reason not to start talks with other countries about future trade agreements, he added. Weve certainly got greater freedom now that we are in the process of leaving, he said.

Obviously we cant sign any agreements while we are still members legally of the European Union but we can certainly begin to talk about what we want.

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Fox Fights EU Attempts to Limit U.K. Trade Powers Before Brexit - Bloomberg