Nosemonkey's EUtopia

April 21, 2009
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

European Young Journalist Award

I’ve been asked to give this a plug – the deadline’s 31st May, the age limit is 17-35, and the prize (of which there is one for every EU member state) is a trip to Berlin in August/September (just in time for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall). Over to the PR guy:

Applicants can write an article with their views on EU Enlargement and submit it on our website – it does not have to be long, it can be much less than the maximum 2,000 words. It can also be about Europhobia, we don’t mind! I am hoping that some of your members/writers might be able to share their views! Would it be possible to contact some of your writers or friends to let them know about the event? All national winners will be given an all expenses paid trip to Berlin where they can partake in an exciting conference with EU officials and the other international winners.

I’m not sure that there has ever been such a thing as an “exciting” conference with EU officials, but still. Berlin’s meant to be fun (I’ve still never been – perhaps I should enter…), so why not, eh?

April 7, 2009
by Nosemonkey
4 Comments

Moldova reaching crisis point?

It seems that another ex-Soviet state on the European fringe is on the brink of revolution following the weekend’s elections in Moldova as students storm the Parliament building and face off against riot police and the military.

On Twitter, Moscovici, Kosmopolit and Julien Frisch are providing regular updates (in fact this is already being dubbed “The Twitter Revolution”), while on the blogs Maladets! is doing likewise. Videos of the increasingly violent situation in the capital can be found at Videonews.ro, including these:In English, Russia Today has this report up on YouTube:

But with both internet and phone networks down in Moldova itself, reliable information is hard to come by. The major Western television news networks are – so far – silent on events in this small, largely ignored country, and so (as so often) Google News is your best source for press reports. It’s all strangely reminiscent of the early stages of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution four and a half years ago, where the attention of the Western press was similarly slow to turn to the East, and information was similarly confused and confusing. All that is certain is that this is already turning nasty – and could yet turn nastier.

Update: Blogging live from Moldova

Update 2 (9:45pm BST): Scraps of Moscow has a fairly comprehensive roundup of news and rumours, including a link to a local English-language news portal with regular updates and several photo galleries and videos.

Update 3 (10:30pm BST): Another good roundup from Julien Frisch, with a bunch of other videos, pics and blog sources.

April 7, 2009
by Nosemonkey
71 Comments

Models for an EU superstate?

The United States of Europe? For those coming in late, the superstate series so far:
– The danger of Jean Monnet
– Why EU superstate conspiracy theories are nonsense
– Four points and a question for eurosceptics who believe in the advancing EU superstate
– EU competence creep, the spectre of the superstate, and how governments actually work

As I’ve set out several times, I don’t see an EU superstate as a realistic possibility at any point in the next hundred years – not even the next three hundred years. For me, this isn’t a problem. Our grandchilren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren are unlikely to have any of the same concerns that we do today – and as the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 has proven nicely, national/cultural identities are more than capable of surviving political union (hell, in Scotland’s case the national identity has arguably got even stronger since the Acts of Union). As such, if – over the course of the next few centuries – it proves to be in the best economic interest of the peoples of Europe for a “superstate” of some description to emerge from the present EU, so what? We’ll all be long dead.

But if such a superstate were to emerge, what would it look like? On one of those previous superstate posts (all of which have got healthy discussions in the comments – despite various sidetracks into insane detail about trucking and jam), helpful contributor French Derek argues that

“a federal state of 27 nations, each with their own languages, cultures, economic models, etc would be impossible to govern”

However, there are two cases where something similar to this has come about – Russia and India. Could these provide us with a vision of a future European superstate and clues about a model to follow?

Where the EU is made up of 27 member states with 23 official languages (and a bunch of other, less widely-used ones ranging from Cornish in the UK and Frisian in Denmark/Germany through more widely-used unofficial languages like Russian, Ukrainian and Romani), the Russian Federation is made up of 21 semi-autonomous republics (plus various self-governing cities, oblasts, okrugs, etc. making up a total of 83 federal subjects) and has 27 official languages), while India is made up of 28 states (and a few additional semi-autonomous regions) with 29 languages spoken by more than a million people (and 122 spoken by more than 100,000). Neither country – much like the EU – could be considered to be ethnically or religiously homogenous.

But the fact remains that both federal states continue to function, despite insanely complex internal demographics (far more so than the United States of America – the federal model most often used as a point of comparison with any future EU superstate). Naturally, the size of their populations are not entirely comparable – Russia’s population is c.145 million (about a third of the EU’s 500 million) and India’s c.1.17 billion (about twice the EU’s population), while the US’ population of c.300 million is about two thirds that of the EU. But still – India’s size is similar at 1.3 million square miles as opposed to the EU’s 1.6 million (compared the the USA’s 3.6 million and Russia’s 6.7 million) – so who’s to say that either population or geographical area is a factor in the functioning of an effective federal state?

Of course, in the case of both Russia and India (as well as, arguably, that of the US), their current situation came about after centuries of war and conquest – unlike the EU’s entirely peaceful formation – and whether either Russia or India can be considered to be effectively governed is another matter entirely. But Russia, India and the US nonetheless are all examples of large federal states that manage to work – in India and the US with more or less effective democracies that have both seen minorities elected to the highest office in the land (Obama in the US, obviously, but also Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh). In both India and Russia (and arguably some parts of the US as well, with the various secessionist movements), the various federal states and regions have often retained a strong sense of identity and autonomy – just as have Scotland and Wales (among others) in the much smaller federal state that is the United Kingdom. Both India and Russia also retain some violent paramilitary nationalist/minority elements that occasionally cause trouble (much like in the federal state of Spain with ETA, or the UK with the various Irish republican groups of the last few decades).

So large federal states with complex demographics can exist and function with the constituent parts retaining their own national/cultural identites.

But can they hold together? India was far larger than it now is when under British rule – once the Raj left 60 years ago, Partition tore the country in three in a bloody horror the tensions of which remain to this day. With the end of the Cold War and fall of the Communist Party, various parts of the old USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. etc.) broke away from Russia – and other regions, most notably Chechnya, have continued as part of the federation only under threat of force. The United States was torn apart by civil war less than a century after its formation.

Indeed, it’s arguable that Russia and India continue to hold together largely due to fear of “the other” – the perceived threat of the West in Russia (hence the rampant popularity of the nationalistic Putin and co), and the genuine threat of Pakistan in India (the threat of India in turn acting as a unifying device for the fragile federation of Pakistan). The United States originally came together thanks to the threat of Britain, while England emerged from the Heptarchy under the threat of the Vikings, France from the threat of England, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, modern federal Germany from a series of unifying wars with various neighbours under Bismark – and so on and so on.

In all cases, the sense of identity – “I am Russian”, “I am Indian”, “I am American”, “I am English”, “I am French”, “I am German” and all the rest – emerged due to a growing sense that another group of people were both somehow different and a threat. (Welsh national identity is a prime case in point – such a thing didn’t even exist until England started to invade what is now Wales, with the entire region made up of little more than warring tribes and principalities until they were given a unifying force, and existed as one kingdom only once – and then for just seven years – until the English conquest was completed and Wales in its current form was created. The same unifying, nationalising effect can also be seen in Scotland, where medieval English invasions likewise fostered a sense of Scottish national identity that helped bring the warring clans together.)

But what is the European Union’s threat? Who is “the other” for the EU that can foster a sense of European identity? With the current ongoing arguments over Turkish EU entry – not to mention the rise in tensions between Islam and the West of the last decade, the Islamist terror attacks in Madrid and London, and the perennial Europe-wide tensions over immigration – is “the other” for the EU going to be Islam? With the increasingly frequent stand-offs between the EU and Moscow over energy supplies and the autonomy of states on the European fringe, could it be Russia? For a while under the Bush administration and in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, it even looked like it might be America.

But whatever the “threat” – real or simply perceived – might turn out to be, it is hard to see a truly European identity begin to emerge without a greater sense of what being European is *not*. “We are American because we are not British”, “We are English because we are not Viking”, “We are Welsh/Scottish because we are not English” – this is how national identity has always begun.

So, while I disagree that the EU is too big and complex to form a superstate, I do maintain that such a thing remains unlikely. You can legislate to create political and economic integration, you can forge agreements between different territories and different cultures – but you cannot legislate or negotiate to build a sense of identity. Without that sense of identity – “I am American”, “I am Indian”, “I am Russian” – none of those three existing sprawling federations would be able to hold together. Of the EU’s 500 million citizens, how many really feel “European” to the extent that an American feels American, a Russian Russian or an Indian Indian? Hell – we can’t even agree on what Europe is – how can we know what it is to be European?

April 1, 2009
by Nosemonkey
34 Comments

EU competence creep, the spectre of the superstate, and how governments actually work

In our last little discussion of the likelihood of an EU superstate (in amongst and partially as an offshoot of the rather silly sidetrack about jam), Josef noted that

there is a concern that this is how the EU will form itself into a “superstate.” Not through a series of demi-democratic treaties, but through a sort of slow, suffocating creep of boring, incomprehensible, impenetrable legislation. If you write a follow up post, Nosemonkey/J Clive, then I’d be interested to hear your take on this.

This is always a danger with any democratic system which relies largely on a more or less bureaucratic civil service to get things done. We like to think that all new legislation is debated and scrutinised by our elected representatives, dissected in minute detail and put to a vote considering only the best interests of the people – but it rarely happens like that.

In the UK, the vast majority of primary legislation is passed in the form of statutory instruments – new laws drawn up by civil servants and government ministers and put onto the statute books without (most of the time) parliament so much as being informed. In the UK in 2008 alone, there were 3,399 statutory instruments passed – that’s more than nine new laws a day that have come into existence without so much as a by your leave from an elected official. (That’s about average for the last 20 years, by the by – the number of statutory instruments began to creep up under Major, but have remained relatively constant since the mid-1990s, despite various claims that Blair used them more than any previous Prime Minister as another way of bypassing parliament.)

The vast majority of these statutory instruments are amendments to existing Acts of Parliament, fiddling with the details (most of them minor). Our last little debate got sidetracked on the use of apple geranium in jams other than those made with quince. Hardly the sort of thing – the logic goes – that it’s worth wasting parliament’s time with, and so precisely the sort of thing that would be sorted out in a statutory instrument. If the approval of British MEPs was needed for each of the law changes that statutory instruments bring in, then every one of the British parliament’s 646 MPs would have to go through more than five of the things every single day of the year – as well as all the major legislation, dealing with constituency concerns, being part of the government, holding the government to account and so on. (Remove those MPs who hold government office, it’d be more like 7 statutory instruments each to scrutinise and research the utility of per day – that’s a full-time job…)

In the EU, we have much the same problem. Having accepted the general principle that area X is best dealt with at EU level, it is impractical for MEPs to then scrutinise every subsequent tiny bit of legislation to ensure that it meets their high standards, and vote on every tiny clause about different types of fruit preserve in full session at the European Parliament. Because just as we, the people, delegate our powers of decision to our representatives at Westminster and Brussels/Strasbourg, so our representatives then delegate powers of drafting new laws to the various civil servants, be they in national civil services or the European Commission.

(At which point it’s worth noting that most EU legislation is not actually drawn up by the Commission – the EC only has a staff of c.38,000 – less than a third of that of the UK Department of Work and Pensions alone, and nowhere near enough to do everything that the Commission is accused of doing. Instead, pretty much all EU legislation is drawn up by the civil servants of the various member states, checked by civil servants in other member states, and then rubber-stamped by the Commission once it’s been looked at my enough bureaucrats in enough member states.)

And so in the normal course of events, yes – dozens of new laws will likely come into force every week without having been so much as glanced at by an elected official. But such developed social systems as ours could not possibly function any other way – unless you think that the civil service should be elected, and that it’s a practical possibility to find several hundred thousand people willing to campaign for such a thankless job (not to mention several hundred thousand people willing to turn out and vote on what would prove to be an almost daily basis as retirement and transfers necessitate by-elections to fill vacant posts…) And in any case, the general principles are already always voted on by elected representatives at both national and EU level – as long as they are doing their jobs properly, they shouldn’t vote through sweeping new powers that would allow unelected bodies or people to suddenly advance major changed without anyone checking them first. (Though that’s not to say that there isn’t always a danger that this could happen, as we found out in the UK only recently with the – thankfully defeated – Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which would effectively have made parliament obsolete and allowed any government minister to make any law they liked, when they liked.)

When it comes to the EU, the real fear of competence creep was epitomised by this glorious clause (Article 308 EC):

If action by the Community should prove necessary to attain, in the course of the operation of the common market, one of the objectives of the Community, and this Treaty has not provided the necessary powers, the Council shall, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, take the appropriate measures.

In other words, the EU could grant itself whatever powers it liked. Or, at least, it could after unanimous agreement from the governments of the member states in the Council, and after being passed by the elected representatives of the European Parliament – but most anti-EU types conflate Council, Parliament and Commission into one monolithic-sounding “EU” to make these things sound more scary.

So, for more powers to pass to the EU, even with the existence of the “competence clause”, you’d still need unanimous agreement between the governments of all 27 member states, plus a majority in the European Parliament. Hardly that scary – but even so, the Lisbon Treaty amended that same article (now Article 352) to clearly delineate (in line with the subsidiarity principle introduced with Maastricht back in 1992) just where competences lie between the EU and member states, as well as explicitly excluding common foreign and security policy as an area where the competence clause could be used to grant the EU more powers.

Oh yes, and Article 352 also introduced a new clause obliging the Commission to involve national parliaments in any moves to grant the EU more powers. So that’s unanimous agreement by all 27 member state governments, passing a vote in the European Parliament, and passing votes in the parliaments of all 27 member states before the EU can claim any major new powers for itself. Hardly a major worry.

In the meantime, life will continue as normal, with dozens upon dozens of minor changes to minor laws being brought into force merely by civil servants via statutory instruments and their equivalents across Europe – and then (despite some of the claims made in our last comment thread that alterations to jam legislation would require ratification by the Council, Parliament, and so on) amended just as easily if they turn out not to be workable.

Is there a danger that some of these laws will be bad ones? Of course there is. But at least they are generally being drawn up by civil servants who are experts in their field (rather than members of parliament who tend to be generalists), and at least they can be corrected with ease.

Is there a danger that such civil servant-drafted laws could slowly grant more power to institutions that we aren’t willing to give them? Well, a poorly-worded new law always has the potential to be misinterpreted. That’s what we have judges and courts for – if such poorly-worded laws are found, they can be challenged and struck down, if a simple amendment isn’t enough. After all, both the existing Article 308 and the proposed new Article 352 explicitly state that both the Council and the Parliament have to approve any new EU power-grab – and treaty law will always take precedence in such cases.

In short: Modern western liberal democracies are very complex systems, packed full of checks and balances that have been worked out over the course of many centuries. The EU is not a true liberal democracy, but shares many of its forms and functions. As such, I remain confident that there are enough checks and balances in place to ensure that the only way the EU will gain more powers is if the member states of the EU want to delegate more powers to it. It will not -can not – happen by accident. Unlike in the British system, where bad laws like the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill can easily slip through parliament if the government has a sufficient majority and MPs are sufficiently cowed, the EU has 27 additional chances of spotting them before they get anywhere near the statute books – something that the Lisbon Treaty would only have underscored by bringing national parliaments into the equation as well. Once again, it’s hardly the stuff of an impending superstate.

March 28, 2009
by Nosemonkey
43 Comments

Four points and a question for eurosceptics who believe in the advancing EU superstate

This little debate seems to be running on and on – and it’s a fun one, so let’s keep at it. Some very good discussion is still raging away in the comments to my Jean Monnet and EU superstate posts, and Ken’s come back with a new post at EU Realist, at which I’ve just left the following.

(Other eurosceptic types who see the EU as heading towards a superstate: I’d be genuinely intrigued to hear your take to my sincere question – in bold – in the final paragraph. I just don’t get it, and truly want to understand your reasoning on this one – it’s just about the only eurosceptic anti-EU argument that I’ve never understood, even when I was a eurosceptic myself…)

Anyway, on with the argument…

1) I’m not accusing you of being a nutty conspiracy theorist at all (though there are a few of those knocking around the anti-EU camp, you can’t deny it…) – I just genuinely don’t understand how you can think that the EU is still heading down the superstate route after the repeated failures of the last decade.

2) Just because a few hardcore europhiles like Verhofstadt seem to want a superstate, and just because a few people identify some of the recent treaties as being stepping-stones on that path, doesn’t mean that this is what is happening. I could also find a number of quotes from other sources arguing exactly the opposite (quite a few hardcore pro-EU types have referred to the Lisbon Treaty as a step backwards, with a number of europhile superstatists bemoaning the lack of progress and entrenchment of national power, among other complaints).

3) You [Ken] quote the preamble to the Lisbon Treaty as an example of how we’re heading to a superstate. You do realise that the Lisbon Treaty hasn’t come into force yet, right? And not just because of the Irish referendum result – there’s also the challenge in the German constitutional court. Lisbon itself is a prime example of the lack of progress of those EU types in favour of a superstate – it’s the (in my view) failed bodged compromise rehash of the failed and unpopular Constitution, which was itself necessary thanks to the failure of the bodged compromise that was the Treaty of Nice – Lisbon is still trying to fix the same problems that Nice was attempting to solve when its descussions kicked off in the late 1990s. That’s a good ten years or more of stalemate. Hardly the stuff of an advancing superstate, surely?

4) There’s also the question of interpretation of terminology. You seem to see “federal” as being the same as “superstate” (a common assumption among British eurosceptics in particular). “Federal”, however, can mean any number of things; key to the idea, however, is the *lack* of overwhelming central control – precisely the opposite of the superstate bogeyman. You also identify “integration” and “co-operation” with being steps on a path to such a superstate – as I’ve said, I accept that that is a possibility, but I see it as being highly unlikely. Even if Lisbon DOES come into force, national vetoes will remain in pretty much every substantive area – as long as less enthusiastic countries like Britain, Denmark, the Czech Republic (and increasing numbers of eastern European member states) remain part of the EU, their vetoes ensure that a superstate remains an impossibility, no matter how many europhile superstatists there may be in other member states.

So come on: rather than pick a few quotes from individuals with limited influence while (seemingly deliberately) misinterpreting what I’m actually arguing, please just answer me this one, simple question – how can you look at the failure of every attempted EU treaty since the late 1990s and say that we’re marching down the path towards a superstate? I simply don’t get it. There has been no significant progress in European integration (that I can see) since Maastricht – and that was 17 years ago.

March 26, 2009
by Nosemonkey
23 Comments

Why EU superstate conspiracy theories are nonsense

My jokey post on the “danger” of EU founding father Jean Monnet prompted a response from the usually well-intentioned and often thought-provoking eurosceptic Ken of EU Realist (on whom I don’t mean to pick, but he’s provided me with most of the standard anti-EU lines in one handy package).

We’ve started having at it in the comments there, where he has again restated the classic anti-EU conspiracy theory:

“the basic plan [is] to unite Europe under one government… there is nothing else on the table and… each succeeding treaty follows that exact plan”

As such, a response to this, the classic EU superstate conspiracy theory, originally posted as a couple of comments there:

It all starts with Ken’s claim that “Monnet`s misquote [‘Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation’] …Epitomises the aims and the methods to be employed in order to bring about a united Europe”

Continue Reading →

March 20, 2009
by Nosemonkey
23 Comments

Exclusive: The danger of Jean Monnet

Jean Monnet For as long as there have been eurosceptics, there have been arguments that the EEC/EU is part of a grand plan to create a United States of Europe. Why? Well, largely thanks to the dreams of some of the organisation’s founding fathers (from a generation, it should be noted, which had mostly lived through two world wars – but still…)

The founding father most often brought up in this context is Jean Monnet, the first Deputy Secretary General of the interwar League of Nations, and one of the key figures in organising Allied supply-lines in both world wars (not to mention the Chinese railway system, bizarrely). Now, however, he is most often remembered as a key eurosceptic bogeyman for his postwar efforts to bring Europe together – and most notably mentioned in tandem with his 1943 statement of belief:

“There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty… The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation.”

Ah, the F-word… Federalism to a eurosceptic is like the proverbial red rag to a bull (despite the key attribute of a federation being, erm… the self-governing nature of the component states, with the central federal government’s powers often being highly limited – but sssh!)

The other favourite Monnet quote, of course, is that about “the superstate”:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Ah! See the devious nature of the European elites, trying to guide us without our knowledge down a path we haven’t been consulted on! How dare they! (The fact that this quote is an entirely made-up load of old bollocks that Monnet never actually said or wrote is neither here nor there… If you repeat something often enough then it becomes true – or at least true enough to enable a justification of the ongoing belief in the veracity of the idea behind the belief…)

Perhaps because many British eurosceptics take a decidedly whiggish view of history – a teleological approach to the world that often also tends towards great man theory, in which providence and inevitability are seen in just about everything (and the Norman Conquest somehow marked the start of 1,000 years of English independence – despite it only being 944 years, despite the royal family being French Vikings from 1066, becoming Welsh in 1485, Scottish in 1603, despite the successful Dutch invasion of 1688, and despite our royal family having been German since 1714) – the fact that Monnet helped set up what was to become the EU more than half a century ago means, of course, that the EU is still headed down the path that he envisaged for it. Despite the fact that he died 30 years ago this week, and the EU is an entirely different beast to anything he had planned for the thing. (Hell – Monnet was a highly effective and efficient organiser, for starters. There’s no way he’d have come up with something as chaotic and inefficient as the current EU system…)

Anyway, even though the “Jean Monnet said it so it must be true” line of argument of the eurosceptic types convinced that the superstate is the EU’s final destination is utterly thwarted by the fact that a) Monnet didn’t actually say most of the things they attribute to him, and b) the fact that if a week is a long time in politics then half a century is an eon… Even though all these assumptions and beliefs about the much-misunderstood and mis-remembered Monnet can be shown to be based on nothing more than personal political prejudice, I can now exclusively reveal that we now have proof that Monnet is indeed a danger.

March 12, 2009
by Nosemonkey
17 Comments

This blog is six years old

And I missed its birthday thanks to, well, being in a bit of a blogging lull at the moment.

Anyway, 5th March 2003: that’s when I started this place – on a basic Blogspot account with a standard template, long before such wonders as Wordpress existed and handy tools like RSS feeds and trackbacks had become widespread, and at a time when I wasn’t aware of a single other political blog (though I must have been aware that they existed, as I remember feeling that 2003 was far too late to get into this blogging game to hope to have any kind of impact).

The first post (with most of the links now broken, as that was in the days when few sites gave their articles permanent URLs) can be found here. The first paragraph ever written on this blog – surprisingly – still largely stands:

This blog will contain the musings of a one-time Eurosceptic turned pro-European. Turned largely by the inanity of the innumerable Eurosceptic rantings. However, there will be few cases of rampant Europhilia – the zeal of the convert has not overwhelmed me. The arguments will be mostly balanced, and stupid claims from both sides will be equally vilified.

And now for the next six years – hopefully full of the long-promised increase of articles providing historical context to current debates, as well as some of the same old stuff.

The trouble is, you see, that the EU hasn’t progressed AT ALL in the six years I’ve been writing about it. I’ve been over all the arguments countless times, and they’re all still the same. Take this post from November 2004, for example. It covers all the bases: the EU’s identity crisis post-Cold War and enlargement and Europe’s role in the world, eurosceptics sniping from the sidelines, the fall-out from the Iraq war’s impact on EU-US relations, Britain’s relationship with both, the EU Constitution (that (d)evolved into the Lisbon Treaty) and the need for major EU reform. Go through the archives, there’s scores of similar posts, many of which could have been written last week – or at any point in the last decade, so little has the EU progressed since the run-up to the Treaty of Nice back in the late 1990s.

Little wonder, then, that I’m finding it hard to drum up much enthusiasm at the moment – but genuine wonder that I’ve managed to stick it out for so long. After all, as I’ve repeatedly noted over the years, if the EU could be summed up with one handy phrase it would be this: incomprehensible and boring as hell.

“A week is a long time in politics”, they say. Not when it comes to the EU, it’s not. Hell, the last decade has seen so little progress, ten years may as well have been a week.

March 5, 2009
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

A bit of weekend reading

I’m off to for a few days to stroll about Geneva, throw snowballs at skiers in the French Alps, wander round vineyards (well, their cellars at least) and eat lots of melted cheese while moaning about the exchange rate. So this time I’ve got an excuse other than laziness for lack of posts – dilettantism.

In the meantime, I’ve updated the Nosemonkey’s EUtopia Netvibes Universe with some new feeds of blogs that aren’t currently in the EU Blog Directory (but will be soon, honest!) – so check out the new additions, and let me know if I’m missing any. That should keep you going.

March 3, 2009
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

On the upcoming EU elections

Interest in and turnout for elections is in pretty much direct proportion to how important and likely to have an impact the public perceive them to be. So European election campaigners should be discussing why the elections matter – and come up with some convincing arguments along those lines, because I haven’t heard any yet.

The majority of people don’t know what MEPs actually do, or what influence they can actually have. For most people, the answer to the latter (and probably the former, thanks to all those stories about MEPs turning up to sign the register and then buggering off again) is “very little”.

In return, EU citizens should be demanding that the EP has more power to influence legislation – and to propose it.

In any case, let’s face it, the shape of the next Commission is going to have a far larger impact on the way the EU is going to work over the next few years… Once the machinations around those appointments start kicking off, then I start getting interested again. (Unless it’s Barroso again, in which case I start screaming in frustration…)

My complaint’s primarily with the process and institutions. I don’t feel that the European Parliament has enough influence, but my major gripe is the UK’s system for electing MEPs (multi-member constituencies on a party list system, meaning you can only vote for a party, not a candidate).

To be honest, because of that I couldn’t care less about the policies of the various parties/groups. Their policies don’t matter – they’re only MEPs. The real decisions are taken by the national governments in Council and elsewhere, and the real policies drawn up by the civil servants of national governments before being passed to the Commission.

The EP has only a small part to play in the way the EU impacts on our lives – a more important one than many believe, but still not important enough to get overly excited about, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m quite happy to be convinced otherwise, if anyone wants to try.

This post is made up of parts of a comment I left at the bottom of this post, if it seems familiar…

March 1, 2009
by Nosemonkey
10 Comments

Dear “Raivo Pommer”

FUCK OFF ALREADY.

Seriously. This is getting really annoying. I’ve already blacklisted several IP addresses from you but you somehow keep getting through. I don’t know what you’re trying to say, nor do I care. No comments you leave on this site will stay in place for more than an hour or two anyway, so what’s the point?

Grrr…

Dear everyone else – apologies. Annoying German spam problems… (At least, I assume it’s spam – I don’t read German. Bloody annoying, at any rate.)

February 28, 2009
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

The EU’s weekend emergency

One of my other reasons for pondering a change in direction here (beyond boredom with party politics in the run up to the summer’s EU elections) is that the other big story in the EU – hell, everywhere – is the ongoing economic crisis. What I know about economics could be written on the back of a postage stamp, so comment is best avoided. (Of course, even the supposed experts have been shown to know precisely tit all about what’s going on with the global economy over the last year, so perhaps economic illiteracy isn’t such a handicap after all?)

However, people who know infinitely more about economics than I do reckon that this weekend could be the economic crunch point for the EU – the moment when the sheer extent of the current crisis becomes insurmountable. The Economist is even suggesting that this weekend’s emergency EU summit could mark the start of the breakup of the Eurozone, and perhaps even of the EU itself. The Guardian’s David Gow has more along similar lines.

That Economist article and leader have been followed up by a couple of posts at Fistful that are well worth a gander – the first containing proposals to get the EU out of this mess, the second looking at the wider, global context.

It’s also worth having a look at this piece at Eurozone Watch from last week (rather heavy-going in places, mind) looking at the theoretical/legal arguments for bailing-out a collapsing Eurozone member, and an overview of the case for relaxing Eurozone entry criteria to provide a way out of the current crisis from Central Europe Activ (with considerably more detail about how this approach might work from Edward Hugh here). And for those who still haven’t had their fill of EU economics, Alphasources has a very useful look at why it has got so urgent to have a unified European response after what seems like months of prevarication.

February 26, 2009
by Nosemonkey
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A brief explanation of absence and (re)statement of principles

I’ve come to a conclusion over the last couple of weeks. It’s something I’ve known for a while, but never quite expressed so succinctly as I’m about to:

I’m interested in politics, but I don’t CARE about politics.

Unlike most political bloggers (at least, it seems like this much of the time), politics is not my life. There are countless things that I’m more interested in and that I actually care about. Film, art, literature, history, beer, whisky. I could have started a blog on any of these, but I happened to pick EU politics because it would present a challenge. An academic challenge.

Yes, I’ve had political jobs in both Westminster and Brussels. Yes, I think the EU is more good than bad, and that European political/economic integration is a nice idea.

But if the EU were to end tomorrow, would I care? No.

If I were to be allowed no more beer, whisky, history books or films from tomorrow, however? Damn straight – I’d be distraught.

The longer, rather more coherently-argued version of this summary of my political outlook, for those who missed it a couple of years back, can be found here. It all still applies (bar parts of point 8, written before the current recession), and it remains the most coherent statement of my political outlook I’ve come up with. If you haven’t, I’d urge you to have a read.

And no, this isn’t an “I’m quitting blogging” post, in case you were wondering – I’ve done several of those before. It’s just that this blog’s approaching its 6th anniversary, and I’m starting to think about priorities and possible changes of direction again.

With so many new EU blogs recently arisen, the need for me to comment on everything (not that I ever did) is diminishing rapidly – if there was ever a need in the first place. With the EU entering a pre-election period in which party politics is set to dominate (something in which I have no interest), the question is where to direct my limited time, effort and interest to put it to its best use.

Suggestions welcome.

February 19, 2009
by Nosemonkey
9 Comments

A headline is a powerful thing

The European Court of Human Rights is not an EU body. You’re reading a blog that focusses on European poltics, so you almost certainly already know this. But, it seems, the vast majority of people do not. More importantly, far too many journalists and editors do not. This, from this morning, for example:

Press Association, 19th February 2009

News headlines are powerful things. They are, after all, the only part of the story that the vast majority of people will read – sometimes read without even realising it while passing news-stands (Ken Livingstone’s team, notably, complained about the subliminal impact of pro-Boris Johnson headlines in the Evening Standard during last year’s London mayoral elections) or, in this age of the internet, while skimming through a website.

Headlines exist for three reasons: a) (obviously) to act as markers for where new items begin, b) to convince people to read a story (increasingly important in the current age of page views and web advertising), and c) to pander to the audience’s prejudices (thus reaffirming the connection the audience feels with their publication of choice). This is why the Sun’s headline writers are notoriously paid such vast sums of money – no matter how much you may dislike that paper’s approach, they excel at the snappy headline that sells papers and builds reader loyalty. That’s why it’s the most popular newspaper in the UK.

But the vast majority of headline-writers are not well-paid Sun subs. They’re underpaid and – increasingly – overworked hacks. Along with writing headlines and checking the spelling, grammar and punctuation of lazy writers*, subs have also long been responsible for both fact-checking. When a sub cocks something up, that’s usually it. They are the last defence against error.

And yet more and more newspapers are dumping their sub-editors. More and more errors are starting to creep in. And more and more newspapers and websites are relying on agency copy rather than their own, original content.

This is why the above example of confusion about the status of the European Court of Human Rights is worth flagging. This originated from a Press Association newsfeed this morning. A Press Association newsfeed that is automatically reproduced on hundreds of websites, which in turn receive millions of page views.

“EU judges to rule on Qatada case”, it says – referencing the attempts of the suspected al Qaida organiser to avoid being deported from the UK to face possible torture in Jordan, a possibility thanks to breaching his bail conditions, even though he previously won an appeal against deportation under the terms of the UK Human Rights Act in April last year.

But, of course, with headlines the details are unimportant. Headlines are all about inspiring an initial, gut reaction from the audience to draw them in to read more. And for a certain section of the population, seeing that “the EU” is going to have final say over whether a man dubbed “the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe” gets to stay in the UK is likely to inspire one gut reaction above all others: anger.

Yet the EU has nothing to do with this. The Council of Europe, certainly; but not the EU. And yet for the casual browser of news sites, the impression will have been left that the EU somehow has control over the UK’s immigration and security policy; that the EU has powers that it does not possess.

Or, at least, they would have done had I not been on news duty this morning for one of those sites that relies on PA copy, and asked them to change the headline to remove any misleading references to the EU.

It is ignorance and misunderstandings like this as much as any deliberate effort to twist stories for political ends that is distorting the debate about the EU in the UK. If even the news agencies are making such errors, what hope for the increasingly under-staffed newspapers (the few staff that remain increasingly being young, inexperienced and cheap), or the websites that replicate agency copy – often via entirely automated systems?

If I hadn’t been on news duty for one of the sites that carried PA copy this morning, would anyone else have spotted the mistake? Would any other hack online news editor have known that it is the European Court of Justice that is the EU body? Would they even have bothered to check the body copy of the story? I doubt it. Because one of the other joys of this new age of agency copy is that if you alter it, it becomes yours*; if, however, you leave it as it is to publish through your automatic systems, you are immune from prosecution should that copy contain a libel. Editors are, in other words, actively discouraged from editing agency copy.

And so the power of the likes of the Press Association and Reuters begins to increase exponentially – and their ability to shape political debate grows with it. But while the public’s scrutiny of the press has grown massively in recent years with the advent of the likes of blogging and comments on articles, allowing readers to hold the press to account almost instantly, the press’ own scrutiny of its content is diminishing to its lowest ever level.

If an agency can get wrong something as basic as the international body a court belongs to, what else are they getting wrong? What other mistakes are slipping through the journalistic net now that the subs and experienced, subject-specialist editors are being jettisoned? And how are these mistakes going to shape our political discourse?

A headline is a powerful thing. A misleading headline can be a dangerous one.

* I’ve worked (and continue to work) as both writer and sub, so I can say this with confidence: subs are always necessary – and it’s impossible to sub your own copy.

** As an irrelevant aside, one of the joys of this is that I’ve read some of my own film reviews (done for an agency over the last several years) published in newspapers under other people’s names, with only one or two words altered.