EU Countries Trends

In the Western world, there is a constant debate about democracy. In the US the Democrats charge quite correctly that the House’s constituencies are gerrymandered against them. Then there’s the insoluble issue of the Senate’s anti-democratic bias where its numbers are tilted against the Democrats by the fact that rural, less populated, states which tend to be conservative, elect two senators, just as do the Democratic-inclined, heavily populated, states. In Britain, the country is riven by the Brexit debate. A referendum was held two and a half years ago when voters were given the choice of “Remain” or “Leave”. The “Leavers” won by a small margin and the country has been in political turmoil ever since. Now with Prime Minister Theresa May’s exit plans on the rocks the debate has become vitriolic. There are calls for a new referendum to reverse the previous vote. It’s likely to happen since Mrs...

The whole debate about Brexit has had a weird quality about it from beginning to end. Prime Minister Theresa May voted in the referendum two and half years ago to remain in the European Union but then as a quid pro quo for being made prime minister she has led the charge to implement Brexit.  Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, voted to remain but has made it clear that he too prefers out, albeit keeping the UK in the Customs Union. Mrs May muddied the waters even further when in a radio interview she was asked how she would vote if there was a second referendum replied that she didn’t know. Yesterday at the eleventh hour she postponed a parliamentary vote on whether to approve or not the treaty negotiated with the EU on Brexit. The former prime minister, Gordon Brown, writing in the Financial Times, has...

  Reacting to the radio interview by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to mark Armistice Day, in which he was reported as saying, “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America… We need a true European army”, President Donald Trump blew a fuse. He tweeted: “President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the U.S., China and Russia. Very insulting.” In fact Trump’s reaction was based on reading a false report of what Macron said. In that part of the interview he was talking about cyber attacks. Nevertheless, Macron was indeed angrily critical of Trump: “When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty which was formed after the 1980s Euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security”. The treaty...

  Is Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, responsible for Brexit? In a way yes she is because at the time of the great economic crisis of 2007-2013, counterproductively she insisted on austerity throughout the European Union. Austerity helped turn the poorer classes of the UK towards Brexit. But so also are the people in high places who lied to the British electorate and persuaded them to vote in a referendum for it. So are those who have fanned the anti-immigrant flames all over Europe. Angela Merkel, in this case, was the most heroic of all the leaders of the West in going the other way and taking in one million, mainly Syrian, refugees. Unfortunately, in the two years before the Brexit vote she made little effort to support the British government when it argued that it needed to be allowed to sharply reduce immigration from the EU. Yet in 2004...

  Concerning Sweden, perhaps you need a reality check? If judged by the opinion polls, Sunday could mark the end of an epoch in Sweden’s contemporary history. Not that long ago Sweden was talked about around the world for its progressive social policies, the welfare state, gender equality, freedom, justice, openness to refugees and for its neutrality, mediation in international conflicts, for its anti-nuclearism, anti-NATO, anti-war (the US in Vietnam in particular). It had a disarmament ambassador and it spearheaded visionary policies such as the Palme Commission’s common security and the Inga Thorsson (disarmament minister) Report on how to convert military industries to civilian for the UN. The Social Democratic party was a real internationalist party with others down through Europe and with a strong emphasis on equidistance to the Soviet Union and the U.S. and it had leaders who were clearly operating within the tradition of human socialism and international solidarity. Of course,...

  Jonathan Power  July 3, 2018 At last week’s European summit the leaders spent most of the time discussing immigration restrictions. Yet the Syrian rush through the Mediterranean is now a trickle. The African migration is down by 95%. No wonder that Emmanuel Macron, the young (40) president of France, was frustrated. Although he spent hours trying to liberalize the consensus on immigration restrictions he really wanted to spend most of the summit on reforming how the Eurozone works. An inner group of 19 members use the Euro as their currency. The heads of state went backwards, spending most of the summit’s time on yesterday’s problem. Macon wanted to focus on the future, to stave off a repeat of the near collapse of the Euro eight years ago. A month ago he and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany fashioned the Meseberg Declaration, an 8-page document. The two countries make up...

Oberg comments directly after the EU Summit on a series of issues, among them also defence and security. Here is the document from the European Council and nobody seem to contemplate the link between EU/NATO armament (arms exports), military intervention and NATO/EU countries ravaging one country after the other and the refugee flows. So, there is no end in sight unless the EU/NATO fundamentally changes interventionist and war policies which they are not likely to do (see the document) – and that may spell the end of the EU itself. Like terrorism, Europe’s refugee “problem” will be a perpetuum mobile until somebody has the moral and intellectual courage to stop and think and ask: What are the basic reasons we face these problems? That is why the discussion is now about borders, border control and reception centres far away – and not about refugees, asylum seekers (but ‘migration’ which is...

  By Nikolaj Nielsen and Damiano Bacci Brussels, June 27, 2018 Originally published by euobserver here Five years ago, Italian and EU leaders stood in silence as they watched coffins pile up in a warehouse on the island of Lampedusa. “Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child that was born just at that moment. This is something that profoundly shocked me,” Jose Manuel Barroso, then EU commission president, said following his visit. It was early October 2013, when some 373 people had drowned off Lampedusa’s coast in their efforts to seek help, asylum, and opportunities in Europe. The European Commission then quickly announced big plans to curb the deaths. Border surveillance would be stepped up, boats rescuing people would not face sanctions, regional protection, resettlement and legal ways to access Europe would be offered, and diplomatic channels stepped up with African countries. A similar refrain would be...

  Personally I’m a coward. I’m unlikely ever to be a hero. (I have rescued on different occasions three young children from drowning, but I didn’t risk my life.) I certainly would never have done what Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, the French policeman, did. He asked the terrorist who had taken over a supermarket if he could substitute himself for the female hostage he held. The terrorist agreed and then murdered him. Last Wednesday Beltrame was given a state funeral. The Moroccan terrorist who appears to be a supporter of ISIS is in jail, awaiting trial. Islamic terrorism has hit France particularly hard. In the last few years it has claimed over 300 lives in France and neighbouring, French-speaking, Belgium. Compare this with the US where murders committed by Islamic-minded terrorists were only eight in 2017 yet white men murdering schoolchildren en masse has almost become a sport. In Britain where...

By Roberto Savio Human Wrongs Watch • Rome, Dec 27, 2017 – On 20 December, Europe’s 28 Ministers of Environment met in Brussels, to discuss the plan for reducing emissions prepared by the Commission, to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change. Well, it is now clear that we have lost the battle in keeping the planet as we have known it. Now, of course, this can be considered a personal opinion of mine, devoid of objectivity. Via human-wrongs-watch.net Therefore, I will bring a lot of data, history and facts, to make it concrete. Data and facts have good value: they focus any debate, while ideas do not. So those who do not like facts, please stop reading here. You will escape a boring article, as probably all of mine are, because I am not looking to entertain, but to create awareness. If you stop reading, you will also...

By James Fitzgerald • This paper examines how the politics of state, border, and biological control affect the journeys and experiences of asylum seekers and “irregular” migrants who are, at once, the victims and recipients of care and security. Building on fieldwork carried out at the “migrant aid centre” in Porte de la Chapelle, Paris, the harsh realities of the indefinitely displaced in supposedly-liberal democratic spaces reflect not only a disintegrating duty of care, but also the very conditions—and political logics—that make such moves possible. It exposes these practices in terms of biopolitics, the state of exception and humanitarian government; an assemblage of domination that seeks not to provide adequate security to those subjects seeking refuge, but to instead “enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations“ (2017, p. 809) which must be innocultated from them. It has long been argued by political theorists and philosophers of a certain...

• Multiple and more frequent crises have been taking place in consolidated democracies where governments fail to solve problems, politics takes extremist directions, and entire institutional systems perform poorly. In a few words, the performances of democracy have been disappointing, and these conditions of dissatisfaction and distress risk to undermine the legitimacy of our institutions. Despite the many differences between countries, this phenomenon is mainly related to both the European states and the United States of America. As Russell J. Dalton’s researches show us: “the cross-national breadth of this pattern suggests it is a general feature of contemporary politics in advanced industrial democracies, not the specific experience of only a few nations.” (Dalton 39). Dalton was correct when publishing this research more than ten years ago. Today, we observe the emergence of a new type of contemporary policies, which represents a challenge for the stability of our institutions and their...