European Politics

The European Parliament has just launched a fantastic new website that should be a model for any similar organisation. It has a snappy design, great navigability, and the breadth and depth to accommodate casual surfers and political hacks. The news page is particularly inviting and informative, and gives a sense of the sheer range and volume of vital issues going through parliament at any given moment. You can look up MEPs’ motions, resolutions and reports (a feature sorely missing from the old website), and also get a live video stream of the main parliamentary events of the day. There was a roundtable discussion on blogging on Monday that looked interesting – but they don’t seem to be archiving this stuff yet (I’ve emailed a question to the webmaster and will post the response in the comments thread if I get one soon enough.). Oh, and it’s available in 20 languages too.

I hope the EP can keep up the work to sustain this enormous but beautifully user-friendly website. It’s a huge step in keeping the institution closer to the people it serves. Next time you meet someone who says it’s all just too complicated and impossible to follow, give them this url. There are no more excuses for being unengaged.

Update: Oh dear, the English version homepage of the website is unavailable – teething problems, I presume. Deep links still work, so I’ve replaced the two links in this piece to the EP homepage with one to an internal page.

Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/04a67d56-f8da-11d9-8fc8-00000e2511c8.html on the Italian mafia in today’s _FT_ is a little impressionistic for my tastes. Its final paragraphs, however, have a nugget of insight about the pervasiveness of the Mafia in modern Sicily.

bq. “Mafiosita” lurks within me, and it came out powerfully last summer. I was at our family estate in Sicily. My grandchild cut his hand; while I was holding him in my arms, blood flowed copiously. I rushed to the telephone and called a friend: “Whom do you know at A&E?”, I asked. Had I been in London, I would have gone straight to the local hospital. I thought long and hard on that episode, and was shamed. Distrustful of the ability of the local health service to deliver services without an “introduction”, I had resorted to the “known ways”: personal contact. My friend is just a friend, but for people less privileged than I, the Mafia is always ready – at a price – to be the “best of all friends”, and it has friends in all places.

What she’s saying here is very reminiscent of Diego Gambetta’s “classic essay”:http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/gambetta158-175.pdf on the Mafia and trust. Gambetta argues that Mafia members have come to play a key role as interlocutors, purveyors of introductions and guarantors of relationships in a society, such as Sicily’s, where people don’t trust strangers readily. But mafiosi have a strong interest too in ensuring that individuals don’t come to trust each other independently of their contacts through the Mafia. Hence, they act not only to guarantee relationships, but to reinforce the social belief that unless you deal with the Mafia and are under their protection, you are liable to be rooked. The Mafia and the culture of _raccomandazioni_ (personal introductions and recommendations as an alternative to impersonal transactions) are intimately intertwined with each other. As Hornby notes in passing, there also appear to be close linkages between the Mafia and Silvio Berlusconi’s _Forza Italia_; one of the reasons why publications such as the _Economist_, which might otherwise have been expected to support a right-of-center party with a purported interest in liberalization, have such distaste for Berlusconi and his doings.

David Kopel mounts a “questionable defence”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_03-2005_07_09.shtml#1120802297 of the changes in gun law that “Silvio Berlosconi” is trying to bring through in Italy. Kopel likes the new law, which by his account allows people to shoot down burglars, even if the burglars don’t present any immediate threat. For him, this is superior to the current law, which requires that defence be “proportional” to aggression (Kopel provides us with a couple of abstract hypotheticals of how the proportionality test might be misapplied, but doesn’t tell us whether these hypotheticals reflect decisions taken by actual Italian courts; I strongly suspect that they don’t). Still, the truly distasteful part of the post is his closing line:

bq. Given Italy’s status as a prime target of al Qaeda, further reform of Italian laws, to enable decent people to protect themselves against sudden attacks, would be eminently sensible.

What exactly would laws of this kind do to stop the kinds of attacks that al Qaeda operatives actually mount in real-world Europe, as opposed to the abstract Europe which exists in the mind of American policy wonks with too much time on their hands? How precisely are they likely to deter terrorists who put bombs with timers on trains? This seems to me to be a rather bizarre and entirely gratuitous effort by Kopel to make his argument attractive by linking it to a current tragedy and future threat to which gun use law is more or less irrelevant.

David Glenn has an “interesting article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i44/44a01201.htm today about Glyn Morgan’s new “book”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8082.html on the justifications for EU integration. I’ve just started reading the book (it begins very nicely). Morgan sets out to discomfit both euro-skeptics and most euro-enthusiasts by making a straightforward argument for an European super-state rather than the sort of post-sovereign multilevel fudge preferred by many pro-EU types.

bq. Mr. Morgan invites his reader to imagine that foreign-based terrorists someday launch large-scale attacks in Europe, and that the United States cannot offer much help, because its own military is bogged down in China or Iraq or elsewhere. Without a unitary state and a unified military, he writes, “there would be little that European leaders could — other than fulminate about U.S. isolationism — do about it.” … “Europeans need to confront this brutal choice,” the British-born Mr. Morgan says. “Are they going to remain weak and dependent and maintain their decentralized government units, or are they going to try to become players in the world? And if they’re going to become players in the world, they need to centralize. I think presenting that brutal choice is profoundly annoying to both sides of the debate.”

Morgan will also be doing an “online colloquium”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/07/europe/ at the Chronicle on Thursday. I’ll be posting on this more when I finish the book.

An indubitable Airmiles “classic”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/opinion/01friedman.html?ex=1277870400&en=342cb2bd52a44f4e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss :

bq. There is a huge debate roiling in Europe today over which economic model to follow: the Franco-German shorter-workweek-six-weeks’-vacation-never-fire-anyone-but-high-unemployment social model or the less protected but more innovative, high-employment Anglo-Saxon model preferred by Britain, Ireland and Eastern Europe. It is obvious to me that the Irish-British model is the way of the future, and the only question is when Germany and France will face reality: either they become Ireland or they become museums. That is their real choice over the next few years – it’s either the leprechaun way or the Louvre.

Now those familiar with leprechauns will recall that they’re untrustworthy little bastards, inclined to evaporate along with the pot of gold when given half a chance. The same is true of dodgy generalizations constructed around trite metaphors, especially when they’re employed by someone who clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’ll leave aside the basic claim that a small post-industrial economy provides the right model for two largish economies with large industrial bases, and concentrate on the glaring material errors in Friedman’s account. Point One: Ireland is _not_ an exemplar of the “Anglo Saxon model.” For evidence, take a look at this recent “paper”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/institutionalcoherence.pdf by Lane Kenworthy, which argues convincingly that Ireland doesn’t fit well into either the Anglo-Saxon ‘liberal market economy’ or Rhenish ‘coordinated model economy’ models. Point Two: Ireland is an _especially_ poor fit with the Anglo-Saxon model in the area of labour market policy, a fact which rather undercuts the argument Friedman is trying to make. Again, Dr. Kenworthy:

bq. beginning in the late 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s, [Ireland] has had a highly coordinated system of wage setting (Baccaro and Simoni 2004). In addition, Ireland has higher levels of employment and unemployment protection than other liberal market economies and longer median job tenure (Estevez-Abe et al. 2001, pp. 165, 168, 170).

Finally, there’s a very strong argument to be made that it is _exactly_ the non-Anglo-Saxon features of the Irish economy – and in particular the “systematized concertation”:http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/cwes/papers/work_papers/ODonnell.pdf between trade unions, management, government and other social actors – that was at the heart of Ireland’s economic success in the 1990’s. This system, unbeloved of free market economists, set the broad parameters for wage and income tax policy, and provided Ireland with the necessary stability for economic growth. It’s now coming under strain thanks to growing inequality in Irish society, but that’s another story. As already noted, Ireland isn’t necessarily the best example for big industrial economies to follow; but insofar as it does set an example, it isn’t the kind of example that Friedman thinks it is.

From Slugger O’Toole comes the news that “corporate France appears to be unaware that Ireland is an independent nation”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/archives/2005/06/ireland_barely.php , and has been since 1922. Regular readers of CT will, of course, be aware that Ireland is indeed separate from Britain, although Irish people who achieve sporting excellence become “British” even faster than “Zola Budd”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zola_Budd .

This exchange between “Ivo Daalder and Jolyon Howorth”:http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/22/163115/566 is the most interesting thing I’ve seen on the TPM _America Abroad_ blog so far. The various contributors to the blog are perhaps a little too well-used to the “we must get serious about aspect _x_ of our foreign policy” class of op-ed to take easily to the more freewheeling and dialogic medium of blogging; Daalder is much more lively when he’s engaged in a bit of conversational give-and-take. The subject is a serious one; whether the EU is losing its _raison d’etre_. Daalder is worried that it is; Howorth pooh-poohs these fears. I’m worried that Daalder has the better of the argument.
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According to “a report in Libération”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=305543 , French blogger Christophe Grébert ( “MonPuteaux.com”:http://www.monputeaux.com/ )is being pursued through the courts for defamation by his local authority. His crime? To have set up a blog which centred around the domination of local government in Puteaux (at the edge of Paris) by a single family and their hangers-on and which documented anomalies such as the approval of the budget for a small garden at a cost of 600,000 euros. Grébert seems to have withstood a campaign of personal harrassment, but legal action seems to be the latest means of silencing him. It will be interesting to see how this goes. Grébert appears to have decided (almost certainly correctly) that blogging is a more effective method of pursuing political change than attending section meetings of local Socialist Party. His opponents seem to think he has been all too effective. An interesting case, and one that may set precedents for political blogging in France at least.

“Katia Papagianni”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/11f7ca46-decc-11d9-92cd-00000e2511c8.html has a great letter in today’s _FT_ responding to the “Andrew Moravcsik”:http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/works_well.doc article that I “criticized”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/not-frightening-the-horses/ yesterday. Key section:

bq. The European Union constitutional crisis demonstrates, as Prof Moravcsik writes, that debates over institutional reform do not generate an engaged public because citizens respond only to salient ideals and issues. However, EU debates do not only address opaque institutional reforms, but also salient issues that EU citizens care about such as immigration, foreign policy, development and humanitarian assistance, in addition to monetary and competition policy. The fact that European-level politics has not engaged the public so far and has nevertheless progressed successfully does not mean that the public’s engagement is impossible or detrimental to the EU’s future. The EU’s citizens were asked late to join the constitutional process and to participate briefly in an abstract debate as opposed to engaging in meaningful discussions on concrete policy issues over a long period of time. Europeans should not be asked to decide whether they feel European or whether they aspire to a federal Europe. These are not relevant questions. Europeans should rather be asked what types of policies, combing national and EU-level responsibilities, they prefer.

This is exactly right – and what has been missing from the debate so far. The answer isn’t to shroud the processes of the EU still further in technocratic gobbledygook, or to engage in publicity stunts designed to make European citizens ‘identify’ with a process in which they aren’t making the choices. It’s to have real debate on the fundamentally _political_ choices underlying the specifics of EU integration.

Andy Moravcsik had an article in the FT yesterday which provides an interesting counter-argument to Chris’s – claiming, in effect that the French and Dutch should never have been asked to decide upon the technicalities of EU decision making (FT version with sub required “here”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/1a3fac54-dc39-11d9-819f-00000e2511c8.html, Word version on Moravcsik’s home page “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/works_well.doc ). But Moravcsik goes further even than Giscard – he claims that the very idea of asking people to vote on the text was naive:

bq. The convention, the constitution and the invocation of European ideals were tactics explicitly designed to increase public legitimacy. Enthused by the prospect of re-enacting Philadelphia, Europeans were supposed to educate themselves, swell with idealism, back sensible reform and participate more actively in EU politics. In retrospect, this grand democratic experiment seems naive. Abstract constitutional debates and referendum campaigns gave anti-globalisation, anti-immigrant and anti-establishment discontents of every stripe a perfect forum. EU policies already ratified by national parliaments, such as the recent enlargement, drew fire. Add the suspicion of voters unsure why a new constitution is required at all, and the enterprise was doomed.

Still, he thinks that the voters made the right choice, despite themselves.

bq. In rejecting the resulting document, reasonable though it is, French and Dutch voters may be wiser than they know.

Why? Moravcsik believes that the recent votes demonstrated the impossibility of a ‘political’ integration process. EU leaders should return their attentions to the bread-and-butter business of the European Union, and to incremental, unflashy integration based on technocratic bargains among the big member states.

Moravcsik’s arguments stem both from his basic theoretical claims about the processes driving EU integration (he’s the best-known academic advocate of the argument that the EU is little more than a set of bargains among states) and from his belief that the debate over the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is a chimera (see “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/deficit.pdf for the best short version of his arguments). He claims that the kinds of policies that are delegated to the European Union are the kinds of policies that national governments usually delegate – decisions over cross-border trade issues, interest rates, judicial decision making and the like – so that we shouldn’t be especially concerned when they’re delegated to a transnational rather than a national authority. In any event, there are checks and balances that allow for some degree of democratic control (the European Parliament, national parliaments and so on). These arguments can be challenged on both empirical and normative grounds. There’s a lot of evidence that EU decision-making processes do escape the control of nation states (something I’ve posted on frequently before). But more pertinently, the fact that many aspects of economic decision making are delegated and removed from direct democratic controls is by no means necessarily a good thing on normative grounds. Indeed, you could turn Moravcsik’s argument on its head – a fair amount of the animus that led to the “No” votes was less specifically directed at the constitutional text, or even at the EU, than at the general feeling that economic decision making is slipping away from democratic control, and that the EU is one manifestation of this. Indeed, I suspect (and hope) that the ‘No’ votes are the beginning of a wider challenge to the notion that vast areas of economic decision making should not be subject to political control. While I’m broadly in favour of an integrated Europe, I’m not especially keen on a EU like the one we have today, in which the imperative of the free market usually overrides national level social protections.

A remarkable admission from “Valery Giscard d’Estaing in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/europe/15france.html?hp :

bq. A crucial turning point for the fate of the constitution in France came last March, Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said, when he phoned Mr. Chirac to warn him not to send the entire three-part, 448-article document to every French voter. The third and longest part consisted only of complicated treaties that have already been in force for years.

bq. He said Mr. Chirac refused, citing legal reasons. “I said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’ ” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said. “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text.”

EU Foreign ministers decided today in Luxembourg to recognise Irish as an official language of the European Union. Why, oh why? I won’t rehearse last year’s arguments for how pathetic and grasping this makes us look. But I will ask; how many of our MEPs now plan to change from using English to Irish in the European Parliament?

The only sensible part of the Fine Gael press release – which mostly gloated that a concession made by Fianna Fail in 1972 had been won back – was the following; “We must not be deflected from the challenges and difficulties facing the Irish language, as indicated by recent surveys and reports, and regardless of its status at EU level, preserving the language has to begin at home.”

Pity they didn’t think of that before chomping rudely into this piece of overdone pork.

I’ve just spotted via Fistful of Euros‘ blogroll that Richard Corbett, a Member of the European Parliament, has a “blog”:http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/blog/. While this will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of CT readers, Corbett is one of the most interesting figures in EU politics. Over the last twenty years, the Parliament has been extraordinarily successful in “grabbing new competences”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/governance.pdf – often in the teeth of opposition from the Council (which represents the interests of the member states in day-to-day law making). Corbett has been one of the key figures in the Parliament’s ascent to power – he’s got an extraordinarily keen sense for how dull-sounding procedures can be manipulated to produce substantive political gains. His blog, unsurprisingly, is vigorously in favour of more European integration – but he makes points that nicely undermine some of the common wisdom on the EU in the English speaking world. For one nice example, see his post arguing (correctly) that “France”:http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/blog/2005/05/common-wisdom-has-it-that-france-has.html has never been as pro-European as it’s to be; by and large, it’s only been in favour of those bits of the EU that directly benefit French interests. For another, see this “one”:http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/blog/2005/06/adam-smith-institute-is-right-leaning.html, which links to a report from the frothing right-wingers in the Adam Smith Institute arguing in favour of “dumping UK business regulation”:http://www.adamsmith.org/publications/pdf-files/Deregulation.pdf in favour of a reliance on EU Regulations (which they also propose to reform to make more business friendly). There’s a widely spread belief in the US and UK that the EU is a vast, all-devouring Socialist Moloch. In fact, its primary goal over the last twenty years has been to build a single marketplace and dismantle national regulation (often, in so doing, weakening the ability of member states to maintain traditional forms of social-democratic control of the market). If you’re interested in EU politics, this is definitely going to be a very useful blog.

The BBC News website has “a piece on the role of bloggers in the French referendum”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4603883.stm, and especially that of a “non” “manifesto by law professor Etienne Chouard”:http://etienne.chouard.free.fr/Europe/ .