Notes on EU Politics

I don’t think myself as an apologetic European Union supranationalist or even federalist. What I am is a fierce opponent of intergovernmentalism. And the creation of the EUNAVFOR med mission is the EU – and EU intergovernmentalism – at its worst.

The EUNAVFOR med is a mission “to disrupt human smugglers in the Mediterranean” instead of a mission to save humans, and it is the child of the intergovernmental method:

(1) It is an act of traditional nation states. Those states define themselves as military and economic powers first who cooperate against a common enemy instead of starting from the premise of humanist democracy in which all people are created equal.

(2) It is an act of minimal compromise. Instead of creating a complex mission to help refugees that would require a bold agreement and philosophical reasoning about the future of the EU, intergovernmental negotiations lead to the minimalist option: If we destroy the boats, the problem will disappear. As if!

(3) It is an act of intransparency. It is the nature of EU intergovernmental negotiations with their diplomatic codes of secrecy that we, the European public are not supposed to understand the reasoning that led to this horrible compromise. We will learn about the detailed preparations and real goals of the EUNAVFOR mission only through pseudo-public press conferences and not through public deliberations, leaving us in the dark why our militaries are going to war against refugees.

(4) It is an act we cannot vote against. Yes, you can question the legitimacy of a supranational Parliament or Commission. But at least there would be a realistic chance to run a Europe-wide campaign against an anti-human, non-ambitious, and intransparent EP – and against the Commission elected by the EP’s majority – to get rid of them on a single European election day. Try to do this over a period of 4-5 years to change each and every national government represented in the Council through national elections, when negotiations in the intergovernmental method, different to those in the European Parliament, aren’t even public. Intransparency in the intergovernmental method and the staggered membership in the Council thus prevent democratic accountability.

Did anyone ever calculate the full costs of a single European Council meeting, including all salaries of top leaders and their entourages needed to prepare and take part in the meeting, all the travel costs, interpretation, catering, printing, police and security?

I’m asking because, today, European Council President Tusk called for an emergency European Council summit on Thursday to tackle the horrors of masses of refugees dying in the Mediterranean (see video below).

The Mare Nostrum mission the Italians organised until last year cost about 9 million € a month according to press reports, i.e. 300 000 € a day.

I was just wondering what it costs to organise a European summit to talk about refugee deaths and how many lives could be saved if that money was used for actually saving lives instead of (again) talking about it.

PS: And, yes, I know this is populist. Maths can be a quite populist at times. But interestingly, I could not find a single calculation of the actual costs of a European Council meeting. Would be interesting if somebody ever did one.

Today, there are reports that up to 700 people may have died in an accident involving refugees trying to travel from the shores of northern Africa to Europe. The European Commission is rather speechless. Its press statement on this incident reflects this speechlessness by inventing of a new phrase: “The European Commission is deeply chagrined by the tragic developments in the Mediterranean”.

Now I’m no native speaker, but it’s a fact that the term has never before been used in an official EU statement (at least according to Google). When the Germanwings plane crashed some weeks ago, the phrase used was “deep sorrow”, and the statement was much more personal. The current statement is rather a bureaucratic response, not one of sorrow for human lives lost.

I’m not even sure that chagrin is a term that one would actually consider to fit in this context. Definitions for “chagrin” in the English language include “a feeling of being frustrated or annoyed because of failure or disappointment” or “Distress of mind caused by a failure of aims or plans, want of appreciation, mistakes etc; vexation or mortification”. Not sure that this is what the Commission wanted to say.

And I wonder whether an international public authority such as the Commission can actually be ‘chagrined’ - which is a human feeling, not an institutional sentiment. Yet, using the word is an admittance that those in charge of writing the public statement did not actually have a better for word.

Why this inability of finding the right word?

Well, maybe because the EU Commission (and the member states) have preferred to spend money on border protection (e.g. fence) and surveillance technology than to address “The human cost of Fortress Europe”.

Or, maybe because Jean-Claude Juncker has preferred spending most of his political capital on his investment plan an not on helping to prevent that thousands of people die within a matter of days.

In a fresh information note, the administration of the EU Council of Ministers reports to member states that it is participating in a pilot project with open data from Council decisions, including voting results. The data set (and API) can be found on the EU Open Data Portal and on the Council website.

It’s no news that the European Commission uses Euronews as the outlet to produce journalism that is of interest to the European Commission. However, the European Commission these days is becoming the single largest source of revenue of the Euronews – EUR 26 million or 36% of Euronews revenue according to the minutes of a recent meeting of the College of Commissioners.

Say what you want about mechanisms to editorial independence that may exist within Euronews, but from a financial perspectives this effectively makes Euronews the official European Union state media, including for outreach outside the borders of the European Union.

It’s quite remarkable that the College of Commissioners, the highest level of the European Commission spent scarce time during one of its meetings to actually discuss this topic. And it’s quite remarkable how the European Commission wants to defend “editorial independence” when it is, as a state administration, the main funder of Euronews these days.

The figures obove are reported at a time when a non-EU businessperson wans to buy a majority of shares of Euronews, where in the past national public televisions were majority owners. The Commission is afraid that Euronews loses its editorial independence and sees itself as the defender of an "independent" news channel. Commissioner Oettinger during the College meeting highlighted “the importance … of maintaining both the impartiality and editorial independence of Euronews and the European perspective of the news that it provided".

Sure, the Commission may not be a formal shareholder of Euronews, but if it provides more than 1/3 of annual finances, then maybe something is going wrong for a news channel that nobody really seems to watch inside the European Union. The channel claims to have quite massive reach. Yet, those figures are only theoretical reach. It doesn't actually say anywhere what market share it has, and according to the few figures I found for Germany it seems to be close to 0% market share in the largest EU country.

Three weeks ago, this small tumblr pointed to the fact that the mandate of the Secretary General of the EU/European Council was running out, asking what would happen afterwards. At 21:56 on 19 March 2015, European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted: “Congratulations! #EUCO has unanimously agreed that my candidate Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen succeeds Uwe Corsepius as SG of #EUCouncil”. Let’s hope this was a good choice!

In the Council press release on his nomination that contains a CV, one can see that Tranholm-Mikkelsen has over 20 years or EU experience, interrupted mainly by his time in China. In May 2012, European Voice ran a piece on Tranholm-Mikkelsen (H/T @sdalferth). And in 1991, Tranholm-Mikkelsen himself wrote an academic essay “Neofunctionalism: obstinate or obsolete”, showing that it’s not just since he arrived in Brussels as EU ambassador that he thinks about the EU (H/T @tineurope).

This all went pretty fast now, since my first post three weeks ago. Last week, German media announced that the incumbent Uwe Corsepius, a coup by Angela Merkel back in 2009, was leaving to go back to Merkel’s chancellery. First tweets about the new name appeared yesterday evening. And this morning, Danish media report (Google translated) that Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen, the current EU ambassador of Denmark, would replace Corsepius.

According to the news report, this choice is due to Tranholm-Mikkelsen’s good management of the Danish EU Council Presidency in 2012. You can discover him in the video message below and in this video with him at the final press conference at the end of the Presidency. But maybe he also gets the post because Helle Thorning-Schmidt lost to Donald Tusk in the race for European Council President (H/T @Agatagostynska). Which is a reminder that with Tranholm-Mikkelsen, yet another man in an EU top job, though.

My hope would be that different to Uwe Corsepius who seemed to have preferred a secretive, closed-up Council, the new Secretary General from a Nordic country will start transforming the Council into a modern second chamber that acknowledges its role as a law-making body that should be accountable to the public, not just in piecemeal approaches but comprehensively and convincingly.

Tranholm-Mikkelsen may have already been too long in the machine to actually appreciate that the Council could and should change, but let’s put at least some hope in him. 

The battle over the new Juncker investment plan is ongoing between the EU institutions, and the timeline for getting it agreed by summer as pushed for by the Commission President is tight. One of the major issues is where the seed funding for the European Fund for Strategic Investment should be coming from.

On the surface, the member states in the Council agree with Juncker to cut spending in infrastructure and research. Yet, in a statement added to the CORPER minutes of 5 March 2015, Belgium stated that it “regrets that the budget lines related to grants in both Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and Horizon 2020 are subject to the reallocation/redeployment during the period between 2015 and 2020 in order to provide the necessary payments to the EU guarantee fund that shall be established under EFSI ” (p.15).

Over the past months, there has been a series of meetings inside the Council of the European Union to discuss the future working methods of the Council itself and of the European Union institutions more general. They’ve produced this final report, which ranges from subsidiarity and better regulation to the stricter application of the rules of procedure of the Council.

I just stumbled over this non-public EU Council document titled “EU Internet Referral Unit at Europol - Concept note”. I tried to find what this EU IRU will be, and found a short description in this Council document (p.4) published by Statewatch.

Basically, this seems to be a Europol unit responsible for checking the internet for online terrorist content, or, if it follows the UK model, it is a unit that receives (and forwards) hints to terrorist content online. The EU IRU follows a previous project called “Check the Web” (since 2007) and is expected to be operational by July 2015.

You’ll often read that there are an estimated 15-30,000 lobbyists in Brussels. That figure has become truth simply by repeating it over an over again. But can we get some more robust figures?

Looking into the actual statistics of the voluntary (!) EU lobby register of persons who have requested and received an access badge to the European Parliament as lobbyists, we see that as of today (13 March 2015), you will find 5524 people who are accredited (see screenshot below).

To get to the figure of 15,000, you would simply have to assume that only 1 in 3 actual EU lobbyists (or however you want to call people working to represent interests) works for a registered organisation AND has requested an EP badge, while 2 in 3 either work for unregistered organisations or don’t have an access badge.

Maybe 1 in 6 to get to the 30,000 figure might not sound fully realistic counting only people who go and meet EU politicians directly, but if you count all the research and communications staff who also do or support lobbying, the figure doesn’t sound awfully unrealistic.

Two weeks ago I asked who will be the next Secretary General of the (EU and European) Council. Now, two weeks later, we learn from German news Süddeutsche that the incumbent Uwe Corsepius will not continue for another term but will return to what he was before: EU advisor to Angela Merkel.

The big question: Who will be Corsepius’ successor in June? Somebody close or dear to the new Polish European Council President? Or maybe Catherine Day (Irish), the now-Secretary General of the European Commission? Or somebody the member states want to keep better control of the (European) Council? Or a post for a Brit to keep them happy with the EU? Or somebody from a new member state who haven’t had that many top posts so far?

While speculations on the successor of the Secretary General of the European Commission, Catherine Day, are already under way, another question for 2015 will be whether her homologue in the Council, Uwe Corsepius, will stay in office beyond June.

Corsepius, former EU advisor in the Chancellery of Angela Merkel, became Secretary General of the EU and European Council in June 2011 following the French Pierre de Boissieu.

According to the respective Council decision from 2009 - Corsepius was nominated soon after the package deal on Ashton and van Rompuy - Corsepius' term in office ends on 30 June 2015.

This post is quite important as the Council's Secretary General does not only run the whole administration of this institution, but he also is one of the few EU officials who participate in all meetings of the European Council, alongside the heads of state and government

Four years ago, I started this Tumblr as "Notes on EU (in)transparency", but as you can see in its history, I didn't come very far. In the future, I'll use it for "Notes on EU politics" (and related) that are too long for my Twitter account but too short for my PolSciEU blog.

Consequently, the Court (Full Court) gives the following Opinion:

The envisaged agreement creating a unified patent litigation system (currently called ‘European and Community Patents Court’) is not compatible with the provisions of the EU Treaty and the FEU Treaty.