Social Europe: Belarus: toughness towards the regime, solidarity with the people

 As long as Russia, in particular, but also Ukraine, Kazakhstan, China, India and/or Brazil do not join, it cannot be assumed that the sanctions will lead to changes in Lukashenka’s behaviour. They represent a punishment for the regime and a signal of moral support for the opposition. They are right and important in view of the escalation Lukashenka is pursuing: his provocations require a firm response. But a continuous tightening of the sanctions screw will not change the balance of power, at least in the short term.[...]

The sanctions also have some undesirable side-effects. The disruption of air links makes it more difficult for ordinary people, including opposition members, to have contacts with foreign countries. Land routes to Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine were already largely closed for private citizens, under the pretext of Covid-19.[...]

As long as Lukashenka denies Belarusians the right to vote, Europe should give them the opportunity to vote with their feet. Nothing delegitimises a government more than when it loses its people. The exodus of specialists and skilled workers is also likely to have a greater and more lasting impact on the Belarusian economy than any other economic sanctions. At the same time, such an opportunity would offer protection to those living in constant fear of the security forces persecuting everybody who protests against Lukashenka.

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Social Europe: Tourism in Europe: a new model

Many skilled workers are leaving the industry, which risks emerging from the shutdown only to face the challenge of inadequate staffing. In France alone, nearly 100,000 employees are expected to be missing when business reopens. In the United Kingdom, one in ten hospitality workers are believed to have left in the last year. In countries, such as Spain, which rely extensively on tourism, temporary employment schemes have helped avert massive job destruction. [...]

EFFAT has asked EU member states to place hospitality tourism at the heart of their National Recovery and Resilience Programmes—to secure maximum jobs, support the sector and strive for swift, co-ordinated and safe travel. We call on the European Commission to assess these plans not just with an administrative mindset but with a strategic, 360-degree view, which recognises the recovery of tourism as functional to the revival of other sectors (including agriculture, food and beverages) and the economy at large.[...]

We must strive for a new model based on decent and secure employment, investment in human resources and reinvestment of profits, to ensure sustainable growth, visitor loyalty, diversification of the offer and a reduction of seasonality. We should promote proximity-based and domestic tourism—especially in countries, regions and cities where the sector upholds many jobs and businesses, offering a principal avenue for recovery, allied to lower environmental impact and support for communities and workers.

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Social Europe: A rail renaissance for Europe

 The momentum for a European rail renaissance is growing. A recent survey by the European Investment Bank revealed that 74 per cent of respondents intended to fly less frequently for environmental reasons, once restrictions were lifted, and 71 per cent planned to choose trains over planes for short-haul trips.

The rail system is not yet in shape, though. On average, rail accounts for only 8 per cent of passenger transport. The Achilles heel is cross-border rail: the European system is only a patchwork of national systems. Ask anyone who has ever tried to cross several European countries by train.[...]

EU funding makes up an important share of overall transport infrastructure funding and can be a lever for other sources. Yet too much goes into roads and airports, too little into rail. Much even of that is spent on mega-projects with exploding costs, long delays and sometimes only limited European value. The European Court of Auditors cautioned in 2018 that projects were often chosen on a political basis—not sound cost-benefit analysis—and lacked co-ordination across borders.

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BBC4 Analysis: Magic Weapons

 There used to be a romantic notion of globalisation that all countries would simply have to get along as we were all so interconnected. Why fight when your interests are aligned? It’s an idea that has made direct military engagement less likely. But something very different has emerged in its place.

We live in a new era of conflict, where states try to achieve their aims through aggressive measures that stay below the threshold of war. This is a strategy of statecraft with a long history, but which has a new inflection in our technologically charged, globalised world.

Now a mix of cyber, corruption and disinformation is employed to mess with adversaries. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has referred to political influence activities as being one of the Chinese Communist Party's 'magic weapons'.

In this edition of Analysis, Peter Pomerantsev looks at how political warfare works in a world where we’re all economically entangled - and what Britain could and should do to adapt.

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Wendover Productions: How China Broke the World's Recycling

 

Social Europe: Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty

 From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic centrality of fishing—which makes up less than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic, English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived. [...]

Even within global politics sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’, while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and interests of the population, not control.

The key feature of the ‘Westminster model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law. Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote; Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.[...]

Given all this, the European public can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central- and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous environment, in Europe and around the world.

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Social Europe: The rule of law: a simple phrase with exacting demands

 How is it then that two EU governments venture to prolong the anguish of some half a billion Europeans, harming their own populations, by refusing to subject themselves to rule-of-law requirements? This cannot be dismissed as the position of two unhinged autocrats, since their veto has significant popular support in these countries, including 57 per cent approval in Poland. [...]

This has been evident in several instances—from lack of concern with the Silvio Berlusconi media monopoly in Italy to France’s semi-permanent state of emergency, Malta’s and Slovakia’s complacency with political murder and the Spanish government’s response to the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Often, the EU is content with narrowly reducing the remit of the rule of law to a simple matter of legality—ignoring routine violations of core values, such as the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech or even the right to liberty and life itself.

Has the EU not thereby set itself up for the current crisis, supplying the ammunition for autocrats to try to absolve themselves from compliance with the rule of law? In turning a blind eye, the European Commission has harmed the union’s very normative foundation, endorsing the blatant abuse of power by the leaders of several of its member states.

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Social Europe: Not part of Europe anyway?

 The comparative study of welfare states has long stressed British distinctiveness. While the continued collective provision of goods, especially health (the NHS), certainly differentiates the United Kingdom from the United States, the UK (sometimes with the addition of Ireland) stands alone within Europe as representing a liberal world of welfare, distinct from both social-democratic and conservative worlds. Today, in terms of the extent of income inequality and poverty, the UK is mostly an outlier within western Europe, while the movement from passive to active labour-market policies has taken a particularly punitive form. [...]

While the self-image of the US is that it is classless compared to Europe, in fact no country of old Europe matches its class divide—not even Britain. Yet in many ways the British social structure is now less European than before. This is not only a question of poverty and inequality. The degradation (and denigration) of its traditional working class has gone furthest and its management has become the most Americanised.

In the past Italy, with its north-south divide, was the European country with the greatest regional differences. Now the growing gap between London and the south on the one hand and the northern cities on the other means that Britain resembles a US slash-and-burn pattern of economic growth. [...]

As some social historians have noticed, the origins of this divergence lie in the de-industrialisation of the 1980s. While deindustrialisation was a common process across the democratic welfare states of western Europe, in the UK it was interwoven with the Thatcherite political onslaught on the trade union movement. Far more so than elsewhere, in the UK deindustrialisation constituted an explicit undermining of social citizenship.

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Notes from Poland: Polish cities switch off lights in protest against government’s EU budget veto

 Almost 50 Polish cities this evening turned off the lights at famous landmarks in protest against the government’s blocking of the European Union’s budget and coronavirus recovery fund, as well as against a bill that would reduce the share of tax revenue going to local authorities. [...]

All of Poland’s ten largest cities joined the blackout, including Wrocław, Łódź and Poznań. Among the smaller cities taking part was Sosnowiec, which switched off part of its EU-funded street light grid. [...]

Cities, which are mostly under opposition control, have also expressed concern at a move by the central government to cut the share of tax revenue allocated to local budgets. A bill to that effect was passed by the lower house of parliament on 28 October.

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Social Europe: Tax havens: patience is running out

 That’s no surprise. The OECD had certainly sought to legitimise its claim to speak for all by creating an ‘inclusive framework’ involving developing countries. However, of the 137 nations sitting around the negotiating table, only the G7—those home to the major multinationals and their lobbying teams—had a voice. As a result, the solutions advocated by the OECD would hardly limit financial flows to tax havens and the scarce resources recovered would mainly benefit rich countries. [...]

Estimating the loss of resources caused by corporate and individual tax abuse country by country, and the consequences for healthcare spending, this research is chilling. Globally, these diversions correspond to 9.2 per cent of health budgets, equivalent to the salaries of 34 million nurses. The impact is even more devastating in developing countries, where the shortfall represents 52.4 per cent of health spending. [...]

Of course, there is strong opposition within the EU itself, for one simple reason: if we readily point the finger at the small islands of the Caribbean, it is to make people forget that Europe has its own tax havens. The departing UK, together with its network of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies—often referred to as its ‘spider’s web’—is responsible for 29 per cent of the $245 billion the world loses to corporate tax abuse every year, according to The State of Tax Justice. And we have further examples inside the EU. Every year, for example, the Netherlands steals the equivalent of $10 billion from its EU neighbours. And it is not alone: Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta do the same.

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Social Europe: An effective corporation-tax system for the EU

The European social contract is broken. The largest companies are no longer contributing adequately to the provision of the public services and infrastructure they use. If the European project and single market are to survive and thrive, there has to be an effective EU taxation system. The small amounts paid in tax by some of the most profitable companies in the world are undermining citizens’ belief in government, in politicians and in Europe. [...]

The European Union has made feasible tax-reform proposals and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has developed corporate-tax reforms for the world, through its ‘base-erosion and profit-shifting’ process. Both are making progress but this is far too slow in terms of agreement among states. Europe needs fair taxation of companies now, when revenue is so urgently needed. [...]

It is not the rate of tax which is the issue but the actual tax paid. The EU should move from seeking ‘harmonised’ tax rates to co-ordinated rates within bands—say between 15 and 25 per cent. This would allow peripheral and poorer countries to set lower nominal rates if they wished. What is needed is to close gaps between nominal and effective rates and eliminate tax breaks. [...]

Europe should establish a well-funded European tax agency, ‘Eurotax’, with wide powers of investigation into tax evasion and avoidance by wealthy individuals, companies and criminals. Eurotax would implement tax policy, including the co-ordination of tax assessments and collection. With a single market, the EU needs one tax body to oversee taxation in this globalised world.

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The Prospect Interview #153: America in the world, with Stephen Wertheim

 How did America become the world’s predominant power? Historian Stephen Wertheim joins the Prospect podcast this week to discuss the short history of America as the world’s policeman, which he outlines in his new book, Tomorrow the World. He also talks about what might happen next—and what a foreign policy under Joe Biden might look like.

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Social Europe: China takes the climate stage

The online exchanges were, by all accounts, meatier than expected. But that was no preparation for what happened next. On September 22nd, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, made a surprise announcement: China would aim for carbon neutrality ahead of 2060. 

Xi has done big climate policy before. In November 2014 he appeared alongside the then US president, Barack Obama, to declare that China—despite its status as a developing country and although the climate problem was the historical responsibility of the west—would make commitments to curb its emissions from 2030. That declaration opened the door to the Paris Agreement. [...]

For the mass of the Chinese population, the threat of catastrophic flooding this summer was a far greater concern than fear of Islamism in Xinjiang or troublesome student protests in Hong Kong. Authoritarian environmentalism under the banner of ‘ecological civilisation’ is one of the watchwords of Xi’s regime.

Increasingly, climate is being inserted into a vision of great-power rivalry, rather than co-operation. In the US there are already voices calling for the establishment of green energy policies on the basis of a bipartisan national-security front against China.

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Social Europe: Minimum-wage directive: yes, but …

 On October 28th, the European Commission published its proposal for a directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union. It’s a watershed in the history of European social and economic integration: for the first time, the commission is initiating legislative action not only to ensure fair minimum wages but also to strengthen collective bargaining in Europe. [...]

Without a clear and common definition of wage adequacy at EU level, there is a clear danger that some member states will apply a very restrictive definition, which will fail to foster real improvement of minimum-wage levels. In its impact-assessment report, the commission has calculated that an increase of national minimum wages according to the double decency threshold—60 per cent of the median and 50 per cent of the average wage—would improve the wages of around 25 million workers in Europe. This estimate should be the decisive benchmark to measure whether or not the directive is a success: either it will genuinely contribute to the improvement of wages or it will remain a political symbol with no discernible impact. The inclusion of a more precise definition of adequate minimum wages in the legal provisions of the directive will thus be a core issue in the debates on its adoption. [...]

The proposed directive certainly has the potential to improve the wages of millions of Europe’s low-wage workers and strengthen their collective-bargaining position. To ensure its effectiveness however requires recognising there is much room for improvement, especially on more precise and binding criteria for adequate minimum wages and more practical tools for the promotion of collective bargaining.

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Politics.co.uk: The break-up of the UK is coming - but will it be violent or peaceful?

 Contrary to the current talk of the British empire and the nostalgia around it, they are not Powellites. Their overriding concern instead is the restoration of the Westminster system. For them, our EU membership has been an historical parenthesis. Westminster is all. A century ago, ceding part of Ireland was a price worth paying for keeping the Westminster system intact. So was the loss of India, and the loss of the colonies in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, next year, whenever, Northern Ireland will follow.

The more troubling question is whether the Brexiters see Scotland in the same way, and whether their view of Scottish independence is the same as that of Unionists south and north of the border. Scotland is a nation of the United Kingdom, not a province that can be snapped off and tacked on to another state. It can only become separate by becoming independent and sovereign. [...]

That project's mode of governance is not the centralised one the less intellectual Brexiters constantly moan about, but actually about subsidiarity - decisions being made at the most local feasible level. By contrast, the heart and distinctiveness of the Westminster system is centralisation. Scottish nationalists believe Scotland would be freer to act autonomously within a federal, decentralised European Union than they are with devolution inside a unitary state.

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TLDR News: How Will the EU Vaccinate 446 Million People? Europe's COVID Vaccination Plans Explained

 COVID is clearly one of the greatest challenges any country has faced in decades, so it's unsurprising many are praying for a Coronavirus vaccine. The problem is that even when a vaccine's ready it takes a whole lot of work to actually get people vaccinated, especially 446 million people in 27 member states. So in this video we explain the EU's vaccination strategy, who will get vaccines first and what it means for Europe.

Social Europe: Covid-19 and a new social Europe

 Initially, there was a prudent consent towards stronger government involvement in policy responses to the rapid spread of the virus, albeit with reticence from the social partners, whose participation depends on the different traditions of social dialogue across Europe. But lockdown exit strategies have been marked by the absence of involvement by social partners and the wider civil society. [...]

The European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker attempted to rekindle Social Europe with the European Pillar of Social Rights agreed in 2017. These latter included, for example, fair working conditions and prevention of atypical and non-permanent work relationships. [...]

In the current ‘rebuilding’ dash, however, the commission has taken on a role of ‘funding entrepreneur’, implementing instruments such as Next Generation EU rather than acting as the guardian of common social and employment standards. This shift risks relegating the promising pillar of rights to a non-vital, dependent component of a larger economic-recovery project, led by market forces.

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The Prospect Interview #150: Hard Brexit now?

 The Times journalist Rachel Sylvester joins the Prospect Interview to get us up to date about the state of Brexit talks. She also introduces the man behind Britain’s negotiating table, David Frost. Is a hard Brexit inevitable, and what can Frost’s little-known background reveal about where Britain goes next?

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Social Europe: Intersectionality: time for a rethink

 The term intersectionality was first used by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. But the intersectional approach is rooted in the social movements of the US in the 70s and 80s, as a critique of feminist and anti-racist struggles. The general experience of black women was that in feminist activism the interests of white women were at the forefront, whereas in anti-racist struggles men predominated.[...]

First, the current practice of the intersectional idea presumes that those who experience the most oppressions will understand best the nature of the oppressive system and pursue the least particularistic politics. But one cannot simply add (or multiply) such positions in the manner of an oppression Olympics—who has more points in the oppression race, in how many dimensions one is standing on the losing side of the Excel sheet. [...]

If the main issue becomes recognition of individual uniqueness or an identity mix, then not only is it an ad absurdum extension of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’—to only the personal is political. This also renders particular identities inscrutable—which means that groups so constituted can neither show solidarity with each other nor formulate a common goal. They can then fit in with the individualistic neoliberal spirit of the era, which delegitimises all systemic critique, for instance concerning its categories of class and gender. [...]

The focus should not be on ahistorical intersections of differences and repressed groups of identities, but on examining how distinctions and hierarchies are established between them. Identities should not be interpreted as some kind of inner, intimate, unquestionable substance, but as a personal experience of a relative position in a system of social relations.

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Vox: The 4 simple reasons Germany is managing Covid-19 better than its neighbors

 Germany gets a lot of favorable Covid-19 press — and for good reason. Its daily new cases per million people have been persistently lower than any of its Western European neighbors, and its death rate, from the beginning of the outbreak, has been among the lowest in Western Europe: currently 0.15 deaths per million people, compared to France’s 1.15 and Spain’s 2.19. [...]

What’s often cited is an effective deployment of technology, such as a contact tracing app, to fight the pandemic. There’s the frequently praised mass testing program, which rivals South Korea’s, and the oversupply of ICU beds — controversial before the coronavirus, now lauded. It also helps that Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry and heads a country that treats scientists, like the Berlin-based virologist and podcaster Christian Drosten, like superstars. [...]

It wasn’t just Munich that had tests ready. In Berlin, scientists created the test kit the World Health Organization and many countries ended up using even before China released the sequence of the virus. But Fröschl points out that if that first patient had shown up in a less prepared part of the country, the outcome may have been different — perhaps something more like what happened in Italy, where cases went undetected for weeks and then overwhelmed the health system. “I’m always emphasizing,” Fröschl says, “we were just lucky.” [...]

There was also learning from other countries. “We tried to take the strategy of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan — all good examples of how a quick and fast response can reduce the number of positive cases,” said Nicolai Savaskan, the chief medical officer of a local health department in Berlin. One part of that fast response: Germany’s mass testing program. While Germany was quick to lock down, it also scaled up testing from the start of the pandemic, and then repeatedly adapted the program to respond to changes in the epidemic dynamics.

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