Anyway, with perhaps a little stutter, while I attempt to get everything settled (dealing with Belgian bureaucrats is not fun), the Thursday Briefing is back. I did have a chance to think about the content of the site though, and I plan to change the focus. This started out as an attempt at a hybrid Scottish-European-Green politics blog, but since I haven’t lived in Scotland for more than a year, I think it is time to change the focus to being a much more of a EU/Green blog. Not that I won’t ever write about Scotland or Scottish politics, but it only makes sense to focus on what I know, and that is the EU.

So, what started as a little experiment in CSS3 has now entered its second year of existence. Lets hope it can last to its third birthday.

“… and enhances further the democratic functioning of the Union by providing inter alia that every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union and that not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.”

Extract from the proposal for a Regulation on the citizens’ initiative.

A bit of background first: the Lisbon Treaty included a provision for a citizens initiative, essentially being a petition by individual citizens to get whatever the issue at stake might be, considered by the Commission. Lisbon however, left most of the detail for later. Now is later, and the details are here.

With the current Council proposals, a minimum number of citizens (in proportion to the number of MEPs from a state), in at least one third of member states, will need to sign the initiative for it to be accepted. I don’t know about you, but I certainly would struggle as an ordinary European Citizen to pull off something like that. Even with a movement of some form behind the issue being dealt with, it’d take a lot of international coordination (I’d say more than Twitter could achieve) to get the initiative off the ground, let alone successfully submit it to the Commission. There’s also a slightly sinister provision that, “the Commission should reject the registration of proposals which would be manifestly against the values of the Union.” From a legal perspective, that’s not too controversial a statement. It means that initiatives which contradict the positive and sunny opening articles of the treaties—where all the good things the EU wants to do and thinks are important are laid down—would be dismissed without the Commission having to publish the initiative on its website, or give it any serious thought at all. From a non legalese point of view though, the language is unfortunate. Politically, it could be thrown back at the EU, for it reserving the right to dismiss things based on values that it, not the people, decides. And to citizens thinking of organising an initiative, it is as clear as mud in its meaning.

The citizens initiative, as it is being proposed now, needs someone with a fairly well developed knowledge of how the EU works. Most people don’t have that sort of knowledge about their own political systems, but they aren’t barred at the door for that ignorance. In Scotland, ordinary people (am I using that term too much now?) can start or participate in a petitions system which triggers discussion on the topics in a committee of the Scottish Parliament. Knowledge of the intricacies of this system, and a reading of the Scotland Act to determine the details of reserved and devolved powers. or the ‘values’ of Scotland, isn’t needed. An interest in a political issue (and isn’t everything political?) and an understanding of how to get people to sign a petition means that any person in Scotland can “participate in the democratic life of the” country, to borrow a few words from the Council’s suggestions.

The Citizens’ Initiative will be pretty good for some though. Lobbying groups, NGOs, and campaigning networks will love this. It offers a way to get the EU to, at the very least, think about something. This is good to some extent, but it means that it is wrong to go about thinking that having this wonderful Citizens’ Initiative helps to lessen the democratic deficit of the EU. I still support the idea of the initiative, but it is not something that many ordinary citizens will ever have a chance of using to further a cause dear to their hearts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9NsqO9YkYs

“The Union shall establish an internal market … It shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States. It shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced.”

To me, these provisions suggest that a copyright licensing system that reinforces national borders and locks some truly fantastic content (naturally not just TV, but also music &c.) into the member states would be contrary to the principles on which the EU is built. I have a feeling it’ll take a tad more than an EBU workshop with Tom Dice and his guitar to make cross-border copyright work.

First off, isn’t it a bit odd to see at least one member of the European Movement as a Secretary of State in a Tory dominated cabinet? Perhaps I’m just putting too much emphasis on the European side of things. Anyway, my initial reaction to the BBC News footage of Cameron was, “could’ve been worse”, followed by noting that he’d opted for a plain microphone with no lectern (call me cynical, but was this his first theatrical step as PM?).

Policy-wise though, all I can say is that this government will be bad for Britain, and bad for Europe. Like the Irish Green’s coalition with Fianna Fáil, I think the Lib Dems will end up tarnished by their senior partner, hurting their chances in future elections, and thus removing any chance for them to show that, contrary to all evidence, they have some back-bone. The proposals for a referendum on AV are pointless; AV is pointless as an alternative, because it doesn’t do what an alternative electoral system needs to do, which is make Parliament more representative of the citizens. So, well done to the Liberals for capitulating on the one thing I wanted Liberals in government to do.

More in my sphere of concern is the impact of the new government on Britain’s place in Europe, and the effect that a Eurosceptic government in one of the big states will have. The Conservative’s insistance on calling for powers to be repatriated in some areas, and trying to put a brake on other areas will probably not hurt the EU too much. It’s a big thing, and it can comfortably withstand an uncooperative government or two. It will however hurt Britain. Enough Europeans (by which I mean people involved in Euro-politics) already complain about our intransigence, and that ill will towards the UK will probably only increase. It’ll be interesting, though perhaps uncomfortable, to watch how this affects the real world.

Being a sort of immigrant myself, and being from a family that moves around a lot, this pointless scaremongering with statistics annoys me. Right now, I’m taking advantage of the right to live in another country that is granted by the EU. I’m restricted, as is anyone working in another EU state, Polish plumbers, Greek grouters, and Romanian researchers included, from being a burden on the Dutch state. Soon, I hope to work in Brussels, paying tax to the Belgian state, and ultimately my dream is to settle in the Netherlands and take part in Dutch society, contributing my fair share, and receiving my fair share. Amongst itinerant Europeans and migrants in general, I don’t think this desire to be a contributing member of society is unusual. So why don’t we cut the repetitive statistical nonsense aimed to massage the fears of people. There are many things that immigrants do that contribute to British society, and there are many thing that British emigrants do to contribute to other countries. This isn’t where the big challenges facing society today are.

It’s been a funny couple of decades. The first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical unbalancing of the world’s balance of power were a bit like that feeling you get when the lights are suddenly switched on after watching a film in the dark; a brief moment of bewilderment, scaled to international politics and spread over a decade. And then in 2001, we realised where we were and what was happening. People said 9/11 changed everything, it didn’t, but it did let us know that everything was changing.

The old and comfortable wisdom that international politics consisted solely of states and a few of their instruments such as the UN or the EU, with multi-national companies lurking somewhere nearby, vanished; along with it went the notion of a world with two carefully balanced superpowers. Ours is now the age of the ‘non-state actor’ and the stage these particular actors tread on is a multi-polar world.

More concerning for Europe is not the actors or the stage, but the play being performed. The challenges which determine this script are rather large: climate change, energy security, economic crisis, and development of the poorest states.

We used to be able to say that the West would use its globally dominant position to ensure that any moves to deal with these problems would be to our favour in some way. Multi-polarity has done away with this. If we take a poor and corrupt developing state with lashings of oil and other valuable natural resources, and put it in the global marketplace that it funds itself in every day, who is it going to sell its stuff to: a country demanding assurances on human rights and other popular liberal concerns, or a country which will pay the same or more and not ask any awkward questions about the sanctity of ballot boxes at the last election, or the destination of the money being paid? The very same goes for development aid and assistance.

I’m not a pessimist on this; the influence of the EU and the US won’t decline too much, but it will be joined by a competing model of international policy. There is something to like in this competing model: it uses trade in a way which has the capacity to make a lasting difference. Of course the mode of its application by the likes of China is abhorrent to liberal democracies—or at least, it should be. I suppose we have to look on the bright side of things and make the best of the new order of the world. Adapting our overseas aid (by which I mean Europe’s aid in totality) and investment policy to offer more incentives to developing states to swallow the poll of reforms to reduce corruption and further human rights. Focussing on our close neighbours and making sure that we ‘do’ development properly will go a long way to securing a safe position for Europe in the diverse world we now live in.

This post is already a tad too long, so I’ll leave the energy security and climate change problems to some future posts in this theme.

I blame the sheer number of presentations, essays, and exams which have thrust themselves upon me over the past few weeks for the absence of any updates to this blog, but with the final line of a dramatic interpretation of the Stability and Growth Pact, I have (briefly) been freed from all that, so I’ll have a go at keeping things a little more updated. What an awful lot has happened since my last post! Lisbon is ratified, a President of the European Council chosen, and a foreign mi…High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy appointed. But my question is, does anyone recognise the man in the photo above?

Obviously, those of us following politics right now know that he is President van Rompuy, but if a more nondescript character who stands for nothing could be thought of, I’d be very impressed. We now have a EU with what will probably amount to a visionless President, more of the same (ie. nothing of any note) from Barosso in the Commission, and a foreign minister who has little foreign policy experience. I know that the consensus way of filling these posts inevitably means that the most bland will rise, but this isn’t what Europe needs! It will ensure that no one outwith the group of politics geeks like myself, and others with EurActiv on our RSS feeds, will really care what is happening in Brussels, and the same old legitimacy arguments can carry on being wheeled out by all the Union’s detractors.

P.S. The title of this post should mean (if my Dutch is up to scratch) “the boring president”.

Klaus cannot be serious! After the struggle to get every member state to ratify Lisbon, with just Poland (though it seems like it is soon to ratify) and the Czech Republic still to do so, and with his own Parliament supporting ratification, he has the gall to suggest an amendment that might require another ratification round!

This can be nothing but obstruction for obstruction’s sake; even if there was some substance to his request for a footnote, it’s unlikely to be compatible with the spirit of the Treaty. All I can see from the European Voice and BBC articles on this is that Klaus wants something vague on the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which in his political context likely means a weakening of it—and yes, I know the UK has an opt-out on the Charter, which I disagree with, but at least we negotiated it at the right time, and in the right way.

So, what are the chances of full ratification before the Tories figure out a way to withdraw the British ratification?

Image by Bertelsmann Stiftung on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence.

Seriously though, if you move somewhere because of a desire to live in that particular place, then it’s likely that you’ll try to integrate a bit, but moving somewhere because it is the place you have to be to do what you do, especially when what you do is international politics, is never going to encourage you to integrate. Brussels just happens to be where the EU is.

As an aside, this post may, or may not be the first in a series of ‘useless X of the week’ posts. It depends how much I can be bothered.

“I am the only candidate. I am the only one who presented before the elections”

Is it just me, or does that just sound like someone with a total lack of vision for what Europe should be, and what the Commission should do for the next four years? He gives the impression that he’s interested in power for power’s sake, and feels entitled to the office. Hardly what is needed to take the EU forward, and tackle the significant things it should be tackling.