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 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.

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.

Site updates and the vote for ‘the European of the Year’

Today, the section ‘About’ has been updated and I have also added there some general information about the intended purpose of this blog, so some of the readers who are wondering whether there is any ‘purpose’ behind at all might want to check it out. Besides that, the link section ‘EU blogging community’ was expanded by some new additions and there is also a completely new link collection for blogs dealing with politics outside the affairs concerning EU, which I hope to expand in the nearest future. Any link suggestions are obviously more than welcome.

Besides that, you might find interesting that European Voice holds the vote on 50 individuals who have most influenced the European political agenda during the last year. There are exactly 9  categories, each having 5 candidates to choose from and one final category where you might select ‘the European of the Year.’ The most interesting category might well be the ‘statesmen of the year’ where are present probably the most renowned names. For me, the statesmen of the year is obviously the German Chancellor Angela Merkel who managed to successfully conclude the June meeting of the EU leaders by pushing the ‘Reform Treaty’ on the European Union’s political agenda.

Individualists and their Liberal friends

We would all probably agree that every individual is in some way or another unique. Everyone of us has inside a potential, a certain predisposition, both due to inborn and socially-given qualities. As formulated by the first conservative thinkers as Edmund Burke or even those more radical like Joseph de Maistre, the role of our peers, those closest to us, of our nearest community, is to help us understand and then to develop this potential. This does not serve only to the particular person whose qualities are discovered, but ultimately to the development of the particular community as a whole. An individual as such is ‘nothing,’ only in a process of interaction with his natural and nearest communities he gains the sense of himself. Each fulfills one’s role, each gives his best, according to his qualities, in order to ‘build’ and ‘create’ above himself. One participates in what is interchangeable called ‘society’ or ‘community’ (in a sense of daily, journalistic use, while in the academic literature these terms are distinguished, mainly as ‘negative’ in the first case, and positive in the latter – F. Tonnies, O. Spengler, S. Freud). This society or community to call it freely for the moment is truly an organism, as true conservatives rightly for decades pointed out – an intellectual, worker, teacher, politician – all have certain functions, ‘social roles,’ as it is in an organism where a brain, muscles, senses, instincts also fulfill certain duties without which the organism could not function. Even those less able are not condemned because they can find their purpose in being a part of a larger whole – in this higher creation of all called community.

This conservative view of the society (not the liberal mutation manifested in the so-called conservatism of Thatcher or Reagan) is opposed by liberalism. Liberalism argues that for atomized society – society of autonomous, self-serving, Benthamite ‘utility maximisers,’ who seek above all else ‘their own way to happiness.’

But is this liberalism really that liberal as it tries to convince by its very name? There is ‘liberal’ democracy, ‘liberal’ market and so on, but what is the real meaning, the real content behind these powerful and bold phrases?

Pavel Telicka discusses further European integration

Today I have discovered a new journal concerned with European issues – Europe’s World. To my surprise I have found there a very concise and sober analysis of the current progress of the European integration from Pavel Telicka, a former Czech Ambassador to the EU and Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister. I only note that this skilled diplomat would have been also the European commissar for the Czech Republic but he was ousted by my country’s political elite that needed a ‘cozy office’ for the former minister, Vladimir Spidla, a man who even did not speak English at the time. This was very unfortunate, because in my Eurosceptics-ridden country, he was on of a few men who possessed both skills and experiences to serve in this function.

Telicka praises in his article the German Chancellor Angela Merkel who is today, unfortunately, the only person with whom we can today associate the European leadership. Telicka also mentions that other ‘European’ PMs and presidents do not see any incentive why they should become less national and be more ‘European,’ since no clear threat against which they could assert themselves exists.

For such ridiculous populist duo like the Kaczynskis in Poland is therefore much easier to play on the nationalist sentiment of their people instead of explaining the clear benefits of the further European Union integration. Politicians as them, for their lack of a European vision and immediate political gain portray the European Union as ‘the coldest of all monsters’ instead of trying to form the Union through the skilled concerted leadership into what would benefit us all. The European Union can well become a hated supergovernment, but it can also become a harmonic community of European cultures and peoples in which we can overcome the concept of the overdue nation-state (which is today attacked both from above and rightly from below).

Also, there is a very good article from James Rogers on the suggestively called blog ‘Global Power Europe,’ which mentions many reasons why it will be necessary for Europe to unite, if its constituent members want to retain any influence on the international political scene in future.

A ‘historian’ from Daily Mail publishes a low-cost sci-fi story

Daily Mail has published a “historian’s” perspective on how Britain could look like if the  Reform Treaty enters into force. When you finally stop laughing after you read those primitive appeals to fear which the British people probably (justifiably) feel, you can read this sober analysis from EUlawblog which refutes the silly ‘arguments’ made in the Daily Mail ‘warning’ one after one.

As I have already noted in my previous articles, neither Britain nor any other contemporary European country can remain an isolated island when new global superpowers like the restored Russia, India and China emerge. European countries on their own have neither military nor economic resources to remain both culturally and politically sovereign.

Quite contrary, European Union is a possibility for long suppressed minorities like North Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Corsican, Basque, South Tyrol and many others to find their own face, values and way of life in the ‘Europe of thousand flags’ we might strive to build. The way is neither the ‘Europe of isolated nation-states’ based only on economic cooperation (as the British Conservative Party naively proposes), which would only retain the status quo and dispel any possibility for Europe of playing a larger role in international politics, nor the bureaucratic and distanced ‘Europe a nation’ that would destroy any cultural characteristics of European peoples.

Building Europe from below, ’organically,’ could allow various European cultural groups to organize their own life in their region, retain as much as political control over  as possible and cede their political decision-making rights only where absolutely necessary – that is, mainly in foreign and defence policy.