A common policy without capabilities and will to implement it: a fair a characterization of ESDP?

This article argues that the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) fails to provide the EU necessary capabilities that would allow it to stand up to the challenges of the 21^st century. In doing so, it suggests that this failure can be explained when considered on a two-level scale. First, the EU member states lack the will to build a truly common security and defence policy, which translates into their inability to create a coherent institutional structure with a (qualified) majority vote as the decision-making principle. Second, it is primarily this ‘first level failure’ that leads to a series of second level failures: the lack of necessary military capabilities, which are here especially conceptualised as a limited amount of rationalisation of the EU military forces with the accompanying factor of high, but ultimately duplicate military spending.

Is European Economic Prosperity Dependent on Mass Immigration?

The purpose of this article is to overview the issues and arguments surrounding the question of mass immigration to Europe. Its analysis is conceptually and in the use of available data focused on the last decade of immigration to what is now the European Union of 27 member states. In doing so, it takes a critical stand on those arguments suggesting that Europe, for various reasons related to the economic growth, needs large-scale immigration in order to preserve its wealth and way of life to the future. Our analysis shows that when taken in the overall perspective, that is, when the immigration of low- and high-skilled workers is calculated together with public expenses with which the issue of immigration is connected and with tax gains that immigrants bring, the net economic gain is very low or none. However, although not being the focus of our present text, the underlying theme of this work is also to suggest that immigration needs to be consider also from other then economic terms and the results of our analysis cannot be taken as sole factor for providing political decisions on immigration to European countries.

In approaching our topic, we first make an overview of immigration trends to Europe. This overview provides both empirical and theoretical background information required for our subsequent evaluation of the arguments of official EU bodies and commentators, who claim that mass immigration is economically beneficial, and indeed necessary, for Europe.

Althusius’s Societal Federalism: A model for the EU?

Many supporters of the European integration strongly believe in a kind of federalism that would be closer to European citizens, more transparent, and more representative of Europe’s plurality of communities than is the case under the current form of the European Union. The problem obviously arises in the moment when it is necessary to pin down these abstract proposals to a more concrete federal model that would embody them. This article will try to show that when approaching this task, we can gain much if we explore the very roots of the federalist thought as they are found in the work of an early modern political thinker Johannes Althusius. As we will discover below, Althusius’s federalism presents a ‘bottom-up’, dynamic, participatory, consensual, and solidarist alternative to that static federal model, which is popular in our modern times.

Let us first briefly start with the life of Johannes Althusius (1557-1638) himself. Besides being a jurist and prolific Calvinist political thinker, Althusius was engaged in active politics of the city of Emden. As a syndic of that city, he had become the main instigator of the arrest of the city’s provincial lord, count of Eastern Frisia, by Emden’s city councillors that transpired on 7 December 1618. Althusius vigorously defended the councillors’ decision as a ‘legitimate act of self-defence and resistance’ against the provincial lord’s infringements on the city’s rights, considering it an ultimate resolve ‘warranted under every natural and secular law’.[1] As will become apparent with the discussion of his work, the right of resistance to tyranny of a government that does not respect the rule of law is a key part of his federal thought.[2] His most famous work Politica Methodice Digesta (Politics Methodically Digested, first published in 1603), which will be taken here as the main source of Althusius’s federal thought, in a similar vein justifies the right of the Dutch provinces to secede from the crown lands of the Spanish ruler.

The Czech Nation and Its Past and Present Identity

The purpose of this short work is to give the reader a brief exposure to the issues that are at stake in the problematic of correctly understanding and using the past by the modern nation-state. It approaches this subject by examining the case of the Czech Republic, as one of the nation-states of the post-Soviet ‘new Europe,’ by comparing its contemporary idea of the “Czechness” to the self-understanding of the Czech people in the period before the emergence of nationalist movements in Europe (up to the late 18^th century). In doing so it is argued that the modern concept of homogeneous nation to which the contemporary Czechs subscribe is, notwithstanding the belief of the Czechs to the contrary, exactly that – a modern ‘invention’ that cannot stand up to a more closer historical scrutiny.

More precisely, the purpose here is not to proceed in the steps of Ernest Gellner or Benedict Anderson by alleging that the 19^th and 20^th century ‘awakeners’ of the Czech nation are guilty of a deliberate attempt to construct a new historical entity,[1] but to show that the critical understanding of the past is always to some extent limited by the (tacit) understanding, traditions and problems of the present. It will be therefore claimed that the 19^th century group of Czech thinkers, who in the so-called period of National Revival set as their task to avert the progressing germanisation of the Czech crown lands, were trapped in what Martin Heidegger called ‘metaphysics of subjectivity,’[2] as they believed that the Czech identity they were defending was an atemporal and ahistorical entity. In other words, this nationalist movement was implicitly positivist in its assumptions about historical objectivity, in a similar way as the Marxist historiography of the French Annales school in the 20^th century.[3] The nation was for them adopted as the unit of analysing the past. The historicity and timeliness of the concept of nation was denied, and the whole history was reinterpreted according to its prism, without acknowledging that in the past the Czech identity might had been perceived differently. This essay thus both briefly overviews how the modern concept of the Czech national identity and then counterpoises it to an older, more territorial and political, and less ethnic understanding of the “Czechness.” By making such comparison it thus also shows the limits to the efforts to critically perceive history through the (narrow) scope of nation and nation-state.

The Idea of Europe in the work of Denis de Rougemont and the French non-conformists

Denis de Rougemont was a main thinker of the so-called non-conformistes des années trente, a movement of young intellectuals that appeared in France at the beginning of the turbulent 1930s, in opposition to both the individualism of liberalism and the collectivism of the Soviet Russia. [1] The main bulk of their work was published between 1930-34 and was concentrated around three separate currents:

• The founders and members of L’Ordre nouveau. An intellectual movement established by the Russian migrant Alexandre Marc (born in 1904 in Odessa as Aleksander Markovitch Lipiansky), its goal was to prepare the conditions for a ‘spiritual rebirth’ of the European culture. Its effort was concentrated on going beyond such dualistic divisions as nationalism-internationalism and capitalism-communism. Its inspirations came, among other sources, from the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard, the federalism of Proudhon, the great critique of Modernity Nietzsche, or from the historicism of Péguy. The thinkers who were a part of L’Ordre nouveau also included Robert Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops, Jean Jardin and finally Denis de Rougemont.
• The Catholic revue L’Esprit of Emmanuel Mounier, founded in 1932. From the beginning it evolved in tight collaboration with L’Ordre nouveau. In reaction to the events of the Second World War it radically shifted to the political left , in order to slowly move back to more moderate positions of the ‘New Left’, under which it still publishes to this date.
• Young thinkers of Jeune Droite, who were mostly dissidents of the French reactionary and monarchistic right Açtion française. These thinkers included Jean de Fabrègues, Jean-Pierre Maxence and Thierry Maulnier.

Cosmopolitan Democracy and Its Failure in Providing a Political Identity

The political theory in the 1980s was marked by the ‘struggle’ between communitarians and liberals. This debate was waged in the name of local social embededdness in the first case and in the name of certain universal moral standards applicable to all human beings equally in the case of the latter (1). Cosmopolitanism, as one of the strands of liberal thought, also possibly falls under the communitarian attack. However, this essay does not focus on the evaluation of normative claims made by these two opposing sides, but rather questions cosmopolitan democracy in its capability to create a viable political system. The nationality will be considered here as one of the possible political identities that a political community can take, not as the one which is somehow required for a properly functioning society. The argument which we will try to defend here will be that cosmopolitan democracy is not able to provide a political identity to its citizens because of its aspiration towards the universal political membership. The greatest problem with cosmopolitanism comes precisely from this failure to realize that the practice of politics is necessarily contradictory to political all-inclusiveness. Or in other words, we will argue that the political membership encompassing all ‘humanity’ cannot provide the political identity for a political community of any form, whether the community is democratic or not. This criticism will be based on the definition of politics which we will try to promote here and which claims that one of the fundamental dimensions of the political is having an enemy. Since the cosmopolitan democrats claim to provide the political membership to everyone, they deny the possibility of having a political enemy and hence also rhetorically deny their political nature. We will try to show that what is the result of cosmopolitans’ effort is not the universal political inclusion, but merely the inability to admit that some persons are again in fact excluded.

O Canada!

This is an old signoff of the Canadian CBC TV – an excellent example from which we should inspire in how to promote the unity of the European Union in the future!

Sovereignty: The History of the Concept

What is sovereignty? In general, it might be said that the sovereignty is always either ‘internal’ or ‘external’, or de facto and de jure [1]. My primary concern in this essay will be to shed some light on the first of these – internal sovereignty. Indeed, it is entirely correct to say that sovereignty cannot be so easily labelled into two separate categories and it should be acknowledged that the ‘external’ sovereignty, in the light of the Westphalian peace treaty, could be regarded as nothing else but placing a last piece of the puzzle of sovereignty into its place – granting the internally acknowledged sovereign entity also the external recognition of its legitimacy.

John Hoffman suggests that most often, the contemporary view considers sovereignty to be a ‘unitary, indivisible and absolute power concentrated in the state’ [2]. However was it always so? If not, when did the idea of sovereignty as supreme power, as Weberian ‘monopoly on the violence in a given territory’, first appear? My suggestion will be that the concept of sovereignty in its fullness is a very modern phenomenon, whose emergence can be traced back no deeper than into the early modern period [3], but which, nevertheless, remains with us almost intact even today – still being necessarily thought of as ‘absolute and indivisible’.

A new European Treaty

In the night from 19th to 20th October, the leaders of the 27 European countries agreed the proposed draft of the ‘Reform Treaty’ which was being finalised in the preceding months after the heated July conference.

This agreement is a victory for all pro-Europeans, not because of the content itself, but mainly because it will allow it to proceed towards possible more radical changes in its structure. If the treaty would not have been accepted, the EU might had been plunged into another ‘depression’ even deeper than that which followed the French and Netherlands ‘NO’ to the European Constitution. As I have mentioned in my previous article, the treaty strengthens the power of Brussels as against national governments, which is in areas outside tremendously important common foreign and defense policy something I cannot agree with, yet it is better than to stand still or even to question the very necessity of the European integration.

The more integrated Union will mean that the politicians will have to engage even more with the European affairs and we will have more opportunities to restructure the Union to our bidding.

(the draft document approved in October is available to download from here)

 

The new European treaty in short:

• the current fundamental treatises establishing the EU will not be supplanted by the new Treaty (as was planned with the rejected European Constitution)
• the EU will receive the full legal personality and will thus be able to sign international treatises
• the current post of ‘President-in-Office‘ of the European Council (held by the head of government of the country that actually has the presidency of the EU for half a year) will be exchanged by a post of the ‘President of the European Council’ elected by the new qualified majority voting system for two and half years.
• there will be a common representative on foreign affairs for European Union, although he will not be called the ‘Union Foreign Minister‘ but ‘High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy’ and the current post of ‘European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy’, also the High Representative will become the European Commission’s vice-president and have his or hers own diplomatic corps
• the number of Euro-commissioners will be decreased from the current 27 to two thirds of the number of the member states as of 2014
• the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (formerly a part of the rejected European Constitution) is moved to the appendix and will be legally binding for all members except Britain (one of her ‘red lines’ – opted out) and Poland
• the current Nice Treaty voting system will be replaced by the qualified majority voting system as of 2017 (from 2014 to 2017 there will be a so-called ‘transitory phase’, where officially the new qualified majority system will be put into effect, but the states will be able to use the old Nice Treaty system whenever they wish)
• the Treaty does not have a ‘constitutional’ character – i.e. there is no notice of common anthem or flag
• the rights of the members’ national governments will be enlarged, so they can appeal the European Commission to reassess their decisions

Beauty of European languages

By the title I do not want to express any ‘ethnophilic’ sentiment towards the languages of the old continent, I merely want to point out to the document  recently published by Brussels Studies and reported *here* by an excellent weblog A Fistful of Euros. The Brussels Studies’ document considers an interesting trend that recently appeared in Brussels, and by extension, in Belgium as such; English is becoming the city’s lingua franca and Dutch and French are only the second and the third most spoken language, respectively.

This trend might not be unexpected, as the similar development might be seen in Europe at large, yet the question whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ still remains. First, ‘good or bad’ from which perspective? The whole continent being able to communicate in one language seems to be something we all desire – the idea is that people and statesmen would be able to better understand each other and many issues of our social life would be much faster to solve as the necessity to translate from one language to another would almost diminish. Thus, our beloved politicians would be able to better cooperate (and a sceptic might add, deceive), people themselves might become more benevolent and understanding to their other European neighbours, pro-European socialists would be happy that this would promote a sense of belonging to the ‘society Europe’ as such and they would have free hands to fully employ their welfare-policies at large.

‘Utility’ of having European lingua franca (or lingua britannica as suggests A Fistful of Euros) evidently seems to never end. I fully accept this and I also fully embrace the necessity to have a language, or languages, which are understood by all people in Europe, especially when taking the further integration of the Union in mind. Yet, one has to ask a question whether people are only simple automatons choosing their actions and considering ‘the best choice’ only in terms of efficiency and utility, as many liberals thinkers and economists suggest. To consider the embrace of a language which would be spoken by all European peoples as ‘a good thing’ only because its undeniable utility – that is, that it would make the operation of the Union more efficient – is, I believe, a mistake. Even more, it is an abstract kind of thinking that reduces individuals to automatons as mentioned above.

To understand this, one has to ask: ‘what is this language?’ First of all, a language is not only a means of communication, it is not only some ‘utility’ to use to get other goods. A language also contains a part of its people’s thinking – its history, its myths, its way of life (consider for instance various colloquial terms which are used in one language and compare them to another – you might even encounter such that would be completely incomprehensible without knowing the content – without living in that particular country!) and it has a substantial socializing effect on every child, which through learning a language also forms an understanding what he or she is – what is the child’s place in this large world, what happened in his or hers country before and what had an impact on his or hers surroundings and family the most. One’s mother tongue is simply not ‘a tool of communication’ – it is a part of the identity ‘me.’ My language is a part of what I am, and to start to speak in a second, or a third language, does not simply mean to find an equivalent for a word in my mother tongue to that in a foreign language, but to also find in what context this word is being used, what history the word has behind it. A seemingly innocent world ‘leader’ is, as everyone knows, directly translated to German as ‘führer,’ which has obviously much more livid images associated to it than its English counterpart.