The pope is right: Europe should be ashamed

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, 560,000 refugees (or about 9% of the Jordianian population) have crossed into Jordan and asked for asylum. The cost of providing shelter, food, water (Jordan is a desert state) and assistance for all these refugees has cost the government of this upper-middle income country 1.53 billion USD since the beginning of the refugee crisis. Commenting on the refugee situation, Jordan's interior minister said

Jordan is a safe haven; even if we have to share some of our livelihood we will not deprive anyone of the privilege to be here. This is the nature of Jordanians and their leadership, and I pray to God that we are never in a position where we would make a different decision. I want to emphasize Jordan’s moral, humanitarian and political commitment.

Meanwhile, 6,400 Syrian refugees have reached the European Union through Bulgaria. Others come into the EU through Greece or Italy. Two boats carrying African refugees capsized at Lampedusa this week, killing hundreds of them. At the Council meeting of Interior Ministers this week, some of these countries asked for help from their richer, northern European neighbours. They find that the 2003 Dublin II regulation – which obliges asylum seekers to file their asylum request in the EU country of arrival – does not respond to the challenges of today any more.

But the richer north European partners refused to move an inch away from the Dublin II regulation. A representative survey conducted in Germany last week revealed that a majority (52%) of the Germans believe the EU should accepted more refugees, but the same majority (51%) thinks that these refugees should go to a country other than Germany.

For a bloc of the most developed countries in the world, but especially for a union that prizes itself for being a value-community, this is completely unacceptable. The pope put it a bit more bluntly: This a shame.

The EU not only has the economic resources and cultural diversity to accept a far greater number of refugees, but it has also proclaimed to the world that it promotes humanitarian values and human rights.

But the picture that it gives of itself in the African and Syrian refugee crisis is a club of wealthy countries, busy with itself, ignoring the rest of the world.

Happy Europe Day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?