Social Europe: The climate verdict of the German Constitutional Court

Legislators must therefore organise the path to zero emissions—which the court sees as required under constitutional and international law—in a way that is as forward-looking and freedom-friendly as possible. In doing so, each generation must do its fair share if there is to be a timely shift to zero fossil fuels—in sectors such as electricity, buildings, transport, cement, plastics and agriculture—and to greatly-reduced animal husbandry. In any event, following the ruling the Paris-agreement goal of keeping global heating within 1.5C above preindustrial times is on the way to becoming a constitutionally binding norm. 

The Federal Constitutional Court made it clear that legislators must not allow the entire remaining budget for greenhouse-gas emissions, as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be used up in the next few years as the German government planned more or less to do. Formally, the government has been obliged by the court to define the emissions-reduction targets for the period after 2030 more precisely. [...]

The Court of Justice of the European Union recently rejected a similar complaint. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), on the other hand—an institution of the Council of Europe—has relevant lawsuits pending. And it may also be that the complainants in our first climate lawsuit, just decided in Karlsruhe, will continue to the ECHR. Although we are very pleased with the ruling, it does not actually go far enough in terms of climate protection, given the above-mentioned criticism of the IPCC budget approach.

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Social Europe: Fewer Italians than Swedes hold anti-feminist views

Of the eight European countries included in the survey, which had 12,000 respondents, people in Italy were the least likely to blame feminism for men’s feelings of marginalisation and demonisation.

Meanwhile, in Sweden—long seen as a bastion of progressive gender-equality politics—more people (41 per cent) than anywhere else surveyed said they at least somewhat agreed with the statement: ‘It is feminism’s fault that some men feel at the margins of society and demonised.’

After Sweden, about 30 per cent of participants in Poland expressed anti-feminist views, followed by the United Kingdom (28 per cent), France (26 per cent), Hungary (22 per cent), Germany (19 per cent) and the Netherlands (15 per cent). Only 13 per cent of Italian respondents, however, expressed such views and 65 per cent said they either strongly or somewhat disagreed with them. [...]

According to the survey, the majority of respondents in Hungary hold negative views towards immigrants (60 per cent) and Muslim people (54 per cent). These numbers are about twice as high as they are in the UK, where 30 per cent hold such views of immigrants and 26 per cent of Muslims.

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City Beautiful: Can we make cities car free?

 Europe's cities could get there soon. The US? Maybe not.

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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Politico: Dutch courts to stop extraditing Polish suspects

 The Netherlands will stop extraditing suspects or convicts to Poland over concerns that the country's courts are no longer independent, an Amsterdam court said on Thursday.

The same court had already asked the Court of Justice of the EU in a similar case in July whether the extradition of Polish suspects must be halted considering that "the independence of Polish courts and thus the right to a fair trial have come under increasing pressure." [...]

Similar doubts about the independence of Polish courts from political interference have been expressed by courts in Germany, Ireland and Spain. [...]

The EU's top court ordered the suspension of a new judicial body created by the Polish government after the Commission expressed concern about its independence.

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Foreign Policy: It’s a New Europe—if You Can Keep It

 The lockdowns that stopped the virus in Europe have had a devastating economic impact. Again, the American habit of dramatizing data by means of annualizing rates of change disguises the fact that economic implosion in Europe has been every bit as bad, if not worse. The U.S. economy fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Germany’s contracted by 10 percent. In Spain, the collapse was twice as bad, at 18.5 percent. (If Spain reported its data in the American style, it would be down 65 percent on the year.) [...]

In the process, the more conservative voices of Northern Europe extracted serious concessions. Unfortunately, those came at the expense of some of the more progressive and innovative budget elements, including spending on joint efforts in the areas of health care and green investment. Thankfully, the package is up for debate in the European Parliament, which is, step by step, asserting leverage over Europe’s politics. Earlier in the crisis, the Parliament favored a far more expansive plan, and hopefully it will make adjustments to the July compromise. [...]

This summer, there was certainly nothing inevitable about the way the deal was done. It did not seem likely. Credit goes to the European Commission for raising the stakes, upping the original suggestion by Merkel and Macron to an ask of 750 billion euros, on top of the regular 1.1 trillion euro ($1.3 trillion) multiyear budget. (It was the Commission’s officials who dug up the legal precedent that would allow the EU to justify massive borrowing.) Among national governments, one has to admire the Spanish and Italians, who began the long march toward a constructive European response back in March and suffered through the demeaning objections of Northern Europeans without walking away. The best that can be said for the Dutch and the Austrians is that they gave way in the end. Perhaps the shameless defense of the narrowest conception of national interest by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz will serve some useful purpose in dampening criticism from their domestic populists. [...]

It was not by accident that as the crisis deepened, the French government started its latest approach to Berlin not via the chancellery but by working its connections to the Social Democrats in the German Finance Ministry. In a desperate effort to revive the flagging political fortunes of the Social Democrats and his own chances of party leadership in 2019, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had become the leading German proponent of European reform, pushing ideas both for unemployment insurance and banking. Both had been met by stony disapproval from the CDU and a nein from the chancellery.

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UnHerd: How the Dutch invented our world

In recent years, however, bourgeois revolution has gone out of fashion and subjected to revisionist critique wishing to consign it to the dustbin of history. Part of what underlines this dismissiveness is a rather childish unwillingness to credit capitalism, and by extension, the bourgeoisie and liberalism, with any positive contribution to human development. The assumption is that because the bourgeoisie has been reactionary for so long, therefore it has never played a historically revolutionary role; because capitalism is now senile and decadent therefore it has never been historically progressive; because liberalism is now servile therefore it has never been emancipatory. None of which is true.[...]

For the likes of Goethe it was the struggle for liberty that made the Dutch revolt a subject of fascination, and his play in turn inspired Beethoven to compose Egmont. Friedrich Schiller, in his history of the Dutch revolt, extolled the “spirit of independence” of the Dutch people in their liberation struggle against the Habsburg Empire. [...]

The revolt was about religion but it was also about money, and the right of the bourgeois to make it. As Pepijn Brandon has argued, the revolt unconsciously, yet effectively, facilitated capitalist development, with Church lands confiscated and turned into large-scale commercial exploitation, and the political influence of the nobility and Catholic clergyman diminished. On top of this, the merchant class had way more control over state power where commercial interests usurped dynastic warfare.[...]

Because of this he was a firm defender of confessional toleration, the idea that state had no business concerning itself with the private beliefs of citizens no matter how heretical, unorthodox, crazy or immoral they seemed. Unlike his English contemporary John Locke (they were born just three months apart), Spinoza made no “special exceptions” for who did not deserve tolerance: Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists were all to be tolerated alike.

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Social Europe: An economic, as well as a monetary, union?

The significance of the five-day European Council is not simply the sheer size of the €1.2 trillion stimulus to be given the EU economy but the unprecedented scale of the collective borrowing the union will undertake on world financial markets, to finance that recovery strategy. Of the €750 billion to be invested in post-pandemic economic recovery, an unprecedented €390 billion will be in grants, not repayable loans. [...]

To pay for the collective-borrowing programme, the summit also agreed—in principle—to new common taxes. These include levies on plastics and polluting imports and a digital tax. Although details remain to be agreed, this is a radical step towards an EU fiscal policy. [...]

The logic of what was agreed may, though, demand still further and more radical changes in future. The union will also have to decide whether the wind of change must sweep through the forthcoming Convention on the Future of Europe—and lead to major reforms of the EU constitution itself.

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Politico: Pandemic has left Europeans thirsty for change, poll finds

According to the poll, a majority of respondents across all six countries said the COVID-19 pandemic has made them "more aware of the living conditions of other people" in their country, ranging from 56 percent in Poland and France to 73 percent in Italy. Beyond national borders, the crisis has triggered similar reactions, with about three-quarters of all respondents agreeing that "no matter where we are from, as humans we are fundamentally the same." [...]

The desire for a fresh start was particularly manifest with regard to questions about the environment. A Green New Deal "that makes large-scale government investments to make our economy more environmentally friendly," for example, resonated positively with 59 percent of German respondents, 71 percent in Poland, and 77 percent in Italy. [...]

Solidarity is not confined to national borders, however, with 48 percent of Dutch respondents supporting the idea of a European Reconstruction Fund and common debt, even though the government of the Netherlands is one of the so-called frugal four countries.

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Social Europe: Time to tackle the tax dodgers

In France, for example, half the CAC 40 index—representing the 40 top companies by market capitalisation—still decided to pay out between €35 and €41 billion in dividends, despite receiving state aid from the short-time-work scheme to compensate workers for reduced hours due to the pandemic. In Germany, the list is also extensive, with carmakers featuring prominently—Volkswagen has placed around 80,000 employees on short-time contracts, yet still plans to pay around €3.3 billion in dividends. And in the UK, the world’s largest chemicals company, BASF, which received £1 billion in support funding, voted last month to pay out more than three times that amount in dividends to shareholders. [...]

This is why, while keeping in mind that the US administration has just announced that it no longer wants to take part in negotiations to overhaul the international tax system, it is urgent for countries to introduce, regionally or unilaterally, at least temporary taxes on the digital giants. This is one of five main recommendations proffered last month by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT)—of which I am a member alongside economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman—to enable states to cope with the explosion in spending caused by the pandemic. [...]

We already know that, in normal times, it is not taxation that pushes a company to invest in a country: it is more about the quality of infrastructure, the workforce, market access or political stability. And while expansion projects are constrained by uncertainty and corporate overcapacity, tax cuts will not stimulate private investment anyway. But they would certainly deprive governments of valuable resources.

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The Guardian: Fast-growing mini-forests spring up in Europe to aid climate

Advocates for the method say the miniature forests grow 10 times faster and become 30 times denser and 100 times more biodiverse than those planted by conventional methods. This result is achieved by planting saplings close together, three per square metre, using native varieties adapted to local conditions. A wide variety of species – ideally 30 or more – are planted to recreate the layers of a natural forest.

Scientists say such ecosystems are key to meeting climate goals, estimating that natural forests can store 40 times more carbon than single-species plantations. The Miyawaki forests are designed to regenerate land in far less time than the 70-plus years it takes a forest to recover on its own. [....]

The higher biodiversity is due partly to the forests’ young age and openness, explained Fabrice Ottburg, an animal ecologist who led the Wageningen study. This allows more sunlight to reach flowering plants that attract pollinators. Diversity is also boosted by planting multiple species, which “provide more variety in food and shelter for a higher diversity of animals like insects, snails, butterflies, amphibians, bugs, grasshoppers”, Ottburg said.

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Social Europe: Keeping the promise of eurozone convergence

Fundamentally, they are political. Technical proposals for rendering the eurozone robust have been tabled time and again: a eurozone investment budget, a European deposit-insurance scheme, a proper eurozone unemployment-(re)insurance system, the issuance of joint- and several-liability eurobonds. And, time and time again, these have been discussed, diluted and typically disposed of in a drawer.

The truth is there is insufficient trust to move forward. Resilience requires risk-sharing; risk-sharing requires trust. Trust, however, has been eroded by disappointment—disappointment that a decade of austerity has failed to reduce debt, disappointment that two decades of the euro have failed to bring convergence. [...]

This promise has not been fulfilled. On the contrary, the eurozone has been drifting apart—since long before the current crisis. While in 1999, GDP per capita in northern Europe was around €2,000 above the eurozone average, by 2019 it was €4,500 higher. Conversely, Italy and other southern-European countries have lost ground, from about €4,000 below the eurozone average in 1999 to €7,500 below 20 years later. Instead of shrinking, the gap has doubled. [...]

A more promising approach is to even out the regional distribution of value added. Andalusia, the Uckermark and metropolitan areas such as Naples or Thessaloniki should be brought to similar levels of productivity as Munich, Milan or the Amsterdam metropolitan area.

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Social Europe: A federal budget for European citzens

In 1973, in the midst of an economic crisis, the EU founding father Jean Monnet proposed a ‘provisional European government’ to the French government—converting the European summits into a council, with regular quarterly meetings. He also proposed that that council adopt further reforms: direct election of the parliament, to give European citizens a voice, and abolition of the right of member-state veto, to enable the council to function democratically.

Developments since have shown that the council has become ‘permanent’ to all intents and purposes. Indeed, during the 2008 financial crisis, it acted improperly as the ‘non-democratic government of the union’. [...]

The second side-effect would concern the European tax system. The need to implement a serious system of own resources would be an opportunity to resolve the current scandal of unfair tax competition. By definition, there is tax competition between states if one gains what another loses. In a resolution in March 2019, the European Parliament asked the Council de facto to include the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta and Cyprus in the list of countries classified as tax havens. The council naturally ignored this request.

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Vox: Why we're seeing mass layoffs in the US but not the UK

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs in the coronavirus lockdowns. But it didn't have to be that way -- and it's not too late for the US to change course. 

Few Americans alive today have ever seen jobless numbers as bad as they are right now. At the end of April 2020, economists estimated that between 13 and 18 percent of US workers were unemployed. It's the highest rate since the Great Depression. That figure can seem somewhat inevitable; the unfortunate but unavoidable cost of economic lockdown. It’s why, in response, Congress has prioritized shoring up unemployment insurance benefits.

But a handful of European countries have shown that mass unemployment isn’t a given in a situation like this.

It’s a policy choice. In this video, we explain how and why the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands chose a different path. With the help of economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, we explore whether the US can still avoid millions more job losses.

UnHerd: Can Emmanuel Macron reinvent himself?

If I had to sum up Macron’s argument in a few words, it would be these: there is no going back to the world before 2020. If we in the West want to preserve those things that we value most — democracy, openness, some level of prosperity, the environment — we must learn the lessons of Covid-19 and do things differently: more manufacturing close to home; more focus on people, less on finance; more national and European sovereignty; better, not less, multilateral or international cooperation. [...]

But all the same, Macron is extraordinary. Compare his willingness, and ability, to wrestle intellectually with the greatest crisis of our lifetimes with Donald Trump’s ignorance, narcissism and bluster; Boris Johnson’s evasive eloquence; and even Angela Merkel’s belief that Germany’s rigid, pre-Covid approach to Europe can be re-assembled Humpty-Dumpty-like without change. [...]

All the Macron achievements of the past three years — and there are many — look likely to be dwarfed or ruined by Covid-19. French unemployment had fallen sharply for the first time in a decade; there are suddenly nine million people on a temporary unemployment scheme (the most generous of its kind in the world with state funding of 80% of net salaries). How many of those jobs will survive the crisis?

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Social Europe: ‘Corona bonds’ and Europe’s north-south divide (13th April 2020)

The compromise agreed provisionally by the Eurogroup meeting of finance ministers on April 9th was a relief. For the Eurogroup to have broken up a second time in a week without a deal would have been a disaster. It would probably not have resulted in a bond-market panic—massive interventions by the European Central Bank have neutralised that possibility for now. But in political terms it would have sent a terrible signal of disunity.

The three-pronged package—with funding for health expenditure via the European Stability Mechanism, loans for businesses from the European Investment Bank and €100 billion for the European Commission’s unemployment fund—is modest in scope. It is disappointing to those of us who support the ‘corona bonds’ position. But it is a relief at least that it was a compromise, rather than a humiliating capitulation inflicted on the coalition of the nine advocates of corona bonds by the stubborn and short-sighted egotism of the Dutch and Germans. [...]

Of course, one should never say never. Sophisticated polling reveals an openness on the part of the German public towards corona bonds, which could be exploited by creative and brave political leadership. Expert opinion has shifted quite markedly; the broad-based calls for joint action from German economists are new and extremely welcome. Both in Germany and the Netherlands a large part of the public is frankly embarrassed by their government’s positions.

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BBC: American parenting styles sweep Europe

It’s generally acknowledged that raising a child has geographic variations. In 2009, for example, a study by an international group of academics looked at the way parents in different countries talked about the traits they wanted their children to have. The differences were fascinating. Dutch parents, for example, focused on the Three Rs: rust, reinheid and regelmaat (rest, cleanliness and routine). Italian parents preferred their children to be even-tempered, well-balanced and “simpatico”. American parents, meanwhile, were more likely to want their child to be “intelligent” or “cognitively advanced”. [...]

“[Intensive parenting] is a type of parenting that requires a significant amount of time and money,” says Patrick Ishizuka, a sociology professor at Cornell University who studies intensive parenting. It includes scheduling children for multiple extracurricular activities, as well as advocating for their needs and talents in communications with schools and other institutions. And it’s not limited to a small subset of parents. “I would describe it as the dominant cultural model of parenting in the US right now,” says Ishizuka. [...]

He believes that the rise in inequality, including in Europe, makes parents feel they need to help drive their children’s education, a view shared by Matthias Doepke, a researcher living in the US and co-author of the book Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. “If inequality is very high, that means from the parents’ perspective, it’s becoming very important for the kids not to be left behind. And so parents will assume a parenting style that is more intense and that is more success-oriented,” Doepke explains.

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Associated Press: Dutch inventor unveils device to scoop plastic out of rivers

A young Dutch inventor is widening his effort to clean up floating plastic from the Pacific Ocean by moving into rivers, too, using a new floating device to catch garbage before it reaches the seas. [...]

Slat’s organization has in the past drawn criticism for focusing only on the plastic trash already floating in the world’s oceans. Experts say 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flows annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, endangering marine life in the oceans, including whales . [...]

The vessel is designed to be moored in rivers and has a shaped nose to deflect away larger floating debris like tree trunks. The interceptors work by guiding plastic waste into an opening in its bow, a conveyor belt then carries the trash into the guts of the machine where it is dropped into dumpsters. The interceptor sends a text message to local operators that can come and empty it when it’s full.

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TLDR News: Europe's Top 10 Richest and Poorest Places - Data Dive (Sep 11, 2018)

The is a lot of difference between rich and poor areas all over the world, and Europe is no exception. We run down the richest and poorest areas in Northern Europe and discuss the issues which arise from income inequality in Europe.

Failed Architecture: The Far Right’s Obsession With Modern Architecture

Today, this traditionalist tendency is gaining renewed momentum in various corners of the European Right. In the Netherlands, far-right nationalist politician Thierry Baudet frequently derides the “ugly architecture” that is, in his mind, corrupting Dutch society. And in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has spawned a movement of revivalist architecture by individual practitioners obsessed with Saxon mythology and pitted ideologically against the metropolitan built environment. Amid the rising tide of populism in Europe, Western chauvinists and white supremacists are attempting to re-valorise traditional Western architecture in order to advance their reactionary and exclusive politics. [...]

The motley crew of right-wing architecture critics owes much to the work of Roger Scruton. Scruton positions himself as part of an older conservative philosophical tradition and a stalwart supporter of all things traditional. His gentlemanly demeanour is frequently played up by the British media, including the BBC, who allowed him to host the documentary Why Beauty Matters in 2009. In the documentary, Scruton repeatedly refers to the “crime of modern architecture”, and in one scene argues sardonically that the architects of a dilapidated office block were as much vandals as those who later graffiti-tagged the place. The argument of the documentary more polemically restates the general thesis of his 1979 book The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in the Age of Nihilism — where “nihilism” may as well be an indeterminate synonym for “left-wing”. Here, Scruton argues that architecture lost its way somewhere in the early 20th century by attempting to forge a new aesthetic style less dependent on classical and gothic features.[...]

The aim of the architectural aspect of such a war is to herald a ‘return’ to aesthetic order. This can mean two things. On the more moderate edge, the ‘return’ signifies the aesthetic move to a bygone era that divorces a building from its social context. This is visible in how Scruton’s commission suggests that the housing crisis is a problem solely of aesthetics, and that we can house more people if we build in an architectural vernacular more accustomed to a specifically-conceived ‘public’. This is a ridiculous claim, which ignores the bigger, structural problems of land, wealth, inequality and systemic oppression and exploitation that right-wing governments of the day at best wish not to address and at worst actively encourage. [...]

The proposal of Baudet and other right-wing thinkers to return to vernacular building traditions is as historically ill-informed as it is deplorable. This comes across in the form of basic errors. Watson, for instance, makes no distinction between the opposing styles of modernism and postmodernism. It also manifests in their lack of understanding of why the traditionalist style they favour took hold in the first place. During the nineteenth century, neoclassical, gothic and renaissance styles frequently masked the squalid living conditions and poor construction quality of newly-erected tenement houses in Europe’s industrial cities. Meanwhile, in places like Paris, the introduction of grand, classically-influenced architecture to the city’s centres was predicated on the displacement of millions of working-class people, and the destruction of centuries-old medieval buildings, much to the chagrin of contemporary conservationists.

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