The college of commissioners has a collective talent; compare them, to say a board of an international company and, to put it bluntly, whatever other merits they may have, there is if nothing else a superior distribution of expertise in relatively obscure languages; a democratic spread, all bases covered. Bar one: Arabic, a language spoken by more Europeans than the populations of seven of the ten new member states.
In post-enlargement Europe, there is therefore a glaring gap of representation and
understanding here. The Estonians (1.5m), Maltese (0.4m) and Slovenians (2.3M) - or, to take a larger example, Finland (5m) all have their spokesmen at the top table in touch with domestic opinion and insinuate their particular national perspective:
They explain why the Maltese want a reference to God in the constitution; why the Swedes have an aversion to alcohol and a fondness for the oral, flavoured tobacco that isn't-quite-snuff.
And so on.
The 6m European Arabic-speakers - whose satellite channels ironically provide the only continent-spanning common media space- do not.
Big issue, a taboo issue.
And of course bound up with the Muslims in Europe question. (There are 18m, more numerous than the Dutch.)
The issue goes beyond that of democratic representation to pragmatism, since many of the problems Europe faces today require understanding of the Arab world, within Europe as well as beyond.
The truth is, the EU is still living in the past, because of the impact of the enlargement countries and their obsession with history. .At some point you’ve got to stop hearing the words “Yalta” and “Munich” emerging from the European parliament’s east European members and engage with the 21st century.
It’s also excessive to have yet another tranche of east European commissioners.
Here is why.
Tens of thousands of Africans have crossed into the Canary islands this
year, twice as many as last year, and hundreds more have died
trying.
Obviously better relations with Morocco and Algeria are a priority. A meeting this summer in
Barcelona was regarded a success, but the question is whether the planned
razor wire and sea patrols would work; the proposed development aid to Africans to
encourage them to stay at home is far less than the remittances they send back; so the Africans will keep on coming.
More and better dialogue is required with the Maghreb countries.
A second issue. The "sharpest end" of the immigration problem is the growth in numbers and violence of young Muslims in Europe's big cities. I know this might be a difficult thing to ask of the people ensconced in the EU institutions, but if you leave this psychologically hermetic world and move in the real Brussels environment, you will realise there is a lot fear and anger towards young North Africans, not all of it unjustified.
What about having a commissioner in touch with North Africans’ urban problems in the cities of the EU?
A third issue: freedom of speech. The EU was at sea when faced with the challenge to freedom of speech posed by the hostility towards the Mohammed cartoons. The commission could so with someone who speaks Arabic, knows what the satellite channels are saying and has read the Koran.
It is probably too late to deprive the Bulgarians and Romanians of their commissioner, but why not set up an extra post? Twenty-eight is not so different from 27. An Arabic speaking commissioner with the portfolio of relations with the Maghreb, urban lack of integration and with a joint communications-media responsibility, along with Margot Wallstrom, with a special remit for the Arab world? One possible candidate: Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French council of Muslims. . It could be that he is too French, but there must be others of his ilk, elsewhere.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Abortion could give birth to EU narrative
An abortion ban near you?
The interparliamentary meeting - involving the European parliament, and national parliaments - held recently in Brussels to discuss the future of Europe was not well attended by the press. I counted five on the press gallery, nt including myself. Three of those were evidently student journalists - from Austria, perhaps? - and one slept through the entire morning, sitting at the back, until shaken awake by his eager colleagues. Even the booming voice of James Allister, who upbraided president Borelles for not letting him speak "despite the fact I have been here since five past nine" - could not awake our friend.
The main issue of the debate, on Europe day, was that of the constitution; there was little on health, but the Austrian presidency had provided a useful briefing paper which allowed one to speculate. Namely, on the following.
Judicial cooperation in civil matters would, under the constitution, work on the basis of codecision between parliament and council, where the council has to act in a qualified majority. The exception is family law where there has to be unanimity among member states. With 25 member states of widely different cultural morals on marriage, cohibitation, abortion etc this is unlikeIy to happen. As MEP and constitutional expert Richard Corbett has noted "Abortion is not in the original treaties and is unlikely to be given thelack of consensus on these issues." But it is not impossible. If the constitution ever happened, article III-69 allows nominated areas of family law to be legislated on via parliament “if there are cross border implications”
Well, abortion has cross border implications, if two estranged partners come from different countries and the woman chooses to have the abortion in a more liberal country. In fact, abortion tourism is itself a cross border activity. So will that mean a harmonisation in the abortion laws? Well, there has to be unanimity among council first, so that is unlikely to happen.
Just as well perhaps. There has been since the end of communism a surge in conservatism on abortion across the east bloc, and also in Italy.
Here are a few examples
In March, the centre right government in Slovakia collapsed after a conflict between the two major governing parties over a draft agreement with the vatican that could restrict abortions. The SKDU and the KDH, which are both parties that have the name Christian in them, had worked out a draft agreement with the Vatican that the Slovak government would not insist that hospitals run by the Catholic church has to perform artificial abortions or assisted fertilisations”.
The SKDU wanted to postpone the issue until September, but the more conservative KDH wanted a resolution immediately. New elections will be held in June.
This is a cultural sea change in Slovakia arguably related to the end of the secular communism. During that era, abortions were quite freely performed. Indeed, it used to be the main form of birth control since contraceptives were scarce. But since then the number of abortions has plummeted from 70,000 a year to about 20,000. Part of the reason is of course freer access to contraceptives: another reason could be - more church teaching, as the country turns against the loose morals of western culture that have swept through the country; and this time, unlike during communism, the church is not suppressed.
Slovak conservatives against abortion will find an ally in Poland’s ruling coalition, where the Justice and Law party’s president, the appalling Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is a staunch foe of abortion, a view shared by his twin brother president Lech. Poland has long had one of the most restrictive laws in Europe on abortion. This law will soon be examined by the European Court of Human rights, as Alicja Tysiac, a Polish mother of three who is nearly blind, has brought a suit against the Polish government - increasingly loathed across Europe - after doctors refused to terminate her third pregnancy even as they warned that giving birth would further damage her eyesight.
According to a recent report in the Associated Press, the laws could tighten even further. Both the Vatican and the US administration has given support to eastern Europe's anti abortion movements, the report says.
In Italy the recent election stirred up the abortion issue, as more and more hospitals refuse to carry out abortions for conscientious reasons. A recent documentary by the BBC said women are now having to go to Barcelona to have abortions before it is too late. Ireland and Malta have long banned abortion.
Perhaps it is just as well that these issues are legislated nationally, and set to be so for the forseeable future. But here is a thought: abortion as a pan European issue - and indeed other values - would pretty quickly create a single European political space. However unresolved and unresolvable, value politics and intese debates around it is what sets America apart from Europe. If after a serious threat to impose common abortion standards across the continent - countries agree to disagree, as the US states do - it might be unifying. Those who want a United States of Europe, for what it is worth, might start here.
The debate would be carried out a volume capable of keeping awake even student journalists.
The interparliamentary meeting - involving the European parliament, and national parliaments - held recently in Brussels to discuss the future of Europe was not well attended by the press. I counted five on the press gallery, nt including myself. Three of those were evidently student journalists - from Austria, perhaps? - and one slept through the entire morning, sitting at the back, until shaken awake by his eager colleagues. Even the booming voice of James Allister, who upbraided president Borelles for not letting him speak "despite the fact I have been here since five past nine" - could not awake our friend.
The main issue of the debate, on Europe day, was that of the constitution; there was little on health, but the Austrian presidency had provided a useful briefing paper which allowed one to speculate. Namely, on the following.
Judicial cooperation in civil matters would, under the constitution, work on the basis of codecision between parliament and council, where the council has to act in a qualified majority. The exception is family law where there has to be unanimity among member states. With 25 member states of widely different cultural morals on marriage, cohibitation, abortion etc this is unlikeIy to happen. As MEP and constitutional expert Richard Corbett has noted "Abortion is not in the original treaties and is unlikely to be given thelack of consensus on these issues." But it is not impossible. If the constitution ever happened, article III-69 allows nominated areas of family law to be legislated on via parliament “if there are cross border implications”
Well, abortion has cross border implications, if two estranged partners come from different countries and the woman chooses to have the abortion in a more liberal country. In fact, abortion tourism is itself a cross border activity. So will that mean a harmonisation in the abortion laws? Well, there has to be unanimity among council first, so that is unlikely to happen.
Just as well perhaps. There has been since the end of communism a surge in conservatism on abortion across the east bloc, and also in Italy.
Here are a few examples
In March, the centre right government in Slovakia collapsed after a conflict between the two major governing parties over a draft agreement with the vatican that could restrict abortions. The SKDU and the KDH, which are both parties that have the name Christian in them, had worked out a draft agreement with the Vatican that the Slovak government would not insist that hospitals run by the Catholic church has to perform artificial abortions or assisted fertilisations”.
The SKDU wanted to postpone the issue until September, but the more conservative KDH wanted a resolution immediately. New elections will be held in June.
This is a cultural sea change in Slovakia arguably related to the end of the secular communism. During that era, abortions were quite freely performed. Indeed, it used to be the main form of birth control since contraceptives were scarce. But since then the number of abortions has plummeted from 70,000 a year to about 20,000. Part of the reason is of course freer access to contraceptives: another reason could be - more church teaching, as the country turns against the loose morals of western culture that have swept through the country; and this time, unlike during communism, the church is not suppressed.
Slovak conservatives against abortion will find an ally in Poland’s ruling coalition, where the Justice and Law party’s president, the appalling Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is a staunch foe of abortion, a view shared by his twin brother president Lech. Poland has long had one of the most restrictive laws in Europe on abortion. This law will soon be examined by the European Court of Human rights, as Alicja Tysiac, a Polish mother of three who is nearly blind, has brought a suit against the Polish government - increasingly loathed across Europe - after doctors refused to terminate her third pregnancy even as they warned that giving birth would further damage her eyesight.
According to a recent report in the Associated Press, the laws could tighten even further. Both the Vatican and the US administration has given support to eastern Europe's anti abortion movements, the report says.
In Italy the recent election stirred up the abortion issue, as more and more hospitals refuse to carry out abortions for conscientious reasons. A recent documentary by the BBC said women are now having to go to Barcelona to have abortions before it is too late. Ireland and Malta have long banned abortion.
Perhaps it is just as well that these issues are legislated nationally, and set to be so for the forseeable future. But here is a thought: abortion as a pan European issue - and indeed other values - would pretty quickly create a single European political space. However unresolved and unresolvable, value politics and intese debates around it is what sets America apart from Europe. If after a serious threat to impose common abortion standards across the continent - countries agree to disagree, as the US states do - it might be unifying. Those who want a United States of Europe, for what it is worth, might start here.
The debate would be carried out a volume capable of keeping awake even student journalists.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Commissioner to side with drinkers in EU strategy
Calling time
As Europe dances and drinks the summer nights away, a debate is going on at Brussels’s DG Sanco, the EU’s health ministry: how far should the new alcohol strategy aimed at curbing Europeans’ drinking go?
Due to be published after the rentree in the post-summer cool of September, the strategy follows on from a hard-hitting report on Europe’s “growing alcohol problem”written in June on behalf of the commission by London’s Institute for Alcohol Studies.
Given that the IAS has close links to the temperance movement, its tough recommendations should have come as a surprise to no one, and suggests that some among the professional busybodies in the directorate who ordered the report secure in the knowledge of its perspective favour opening a broad new front in the war against unhealthy lifestyles. Perhaps EU officials are flush with a sense of success in the battle against that other addiction, tobacco. In recent years, EU law has set maximum limits on tar and nicotine yields, imposed new and larger pack warnings, and most recently, effected a tobacco ad ban in press, internet and radio across Europe. Germany, with its large tobacco industry and libertarian instincts, uniquely did hold out against the ad ban for much of this year, but in June caved in and said it would comply, having been threatened by European court of justice action by health commissioner Markos Kyprianou, who has taken up the tobacco hostility baton of his predecessor David Byrne with relish. Smokers’ stronghold Germany is also weakening under EU peer pressure to limit smoking in public places. (A great deal of the money behind smoking bans comes from major pharmaceuticals – namely Glaxo, Novartis and Pharmacia and Upjohn in Europe and Johnson & Johnson in America – all of whom want to earn much money from expensive smoking cessation products; but that is another story.)
The IAS report, by World Health Organisation stalwart Peter Anderson, notes that, while drinking has dropped greatly in southern Europe, it has grown enormously in northern Europe in the last two decades – almost doubling in the UK. Growing personal wealth is one cause. Another important factor is the freedoms of the single market to import large amounts of alcohol from cheap countries for personal use. In Scandinavia they talk of the domino effect, where each state monopoly engages in downward price competition with its neighbours who in turn are competing with low-tax Estonia and Germany.
The total health cost of alcohol to EU countries in 2003 was $125 billion, about the same amount as tobacco. There are dozens of ailments attributable to alcohol, and more are being discovered – the connections between alcohol and the transmissions of HIV for instance.
Showing clear inspiration from Nordic alcohol policy models, the report recommends a ban on alcohol advertising, warning labels on wine bottles, a minimum licensing system for alcoholic products across Europe, a minimum buying age, a standardisation of blood alcohol limits for driving, and four other recommendations.
The question to be asked now, though, is: how many of the Copenhagen-based Anderson’s recommendations will be reflected in the strategy. As silence descended on DG Sanco – there was no press release to accompany the IAS report – insiders report “strong and varied opinions” inside the DG as to how to frame the strategy.
While there are some zealots inside the DG, the boss is not one of them. During his confirmation hearings in 2004, Kyprianou made ambivalent noises about the fight against alcohol, and insiders report that he remains far less keen at pursuing drinking than smoking..
He is reportedly wary of taking on the drinks industry, which has lobbied heavily against targeting “the product instead of targeting the heavy drinkers themselves” and which questionw the scientific credibility of the report.
As the commissioner for one of the smallest and least powerful DGs, Kyprianou could also be wary of the way the report’s recommendations transgress on to the territory of other, bigger DGs, such as DG taxation, DG transport, DG internal markets, all of whom jealously guard their competences.
Several I spoke to agrees there will be something: the one that would get the biggest consensus support in the council and parliament under a Finnish presidency that is strongly pro-restrictions is reportedly a lower maximum blood alcohol concentration limit for young and public vehicle drivers; 0.2 permille, contrasting with 0.5 for other drivers. (0.8 in the UK) “This is one piece of legislation everyone could rally around,” notes Lisette Tiddens-Engwirda, head of the European doctors’ union CPME.
The alcohol strategy comes only shortly after, elsewhere in the institutions, DG agriculture’s attempts to get European producers to tear up their vineyards in return for compensation, because currently too much of the wine goes unsold and has to be turned into biofuel at great expense. In short, some restrictions, but no full-out war, as on tobacco.
As Europe dances and drinks the summer nights away, a debate is going on at Brussels’s DG Sanco, the EU’s health ministry: how far should the new alcohol strategy aimed at curbing Europeans’ drinking go?
Due to be published after the rentree in the post-summer cool of September, the strategy follows on from a hard-hitting report on Europe’s “growing alcohol problem”written in June on behalf of the commission by London’s Institute for Alcohol Studies.
Given that the IAS has close links to the temperance movement, its tough recommendations should have come as a surprise to no one, and suggests that some among the professional busybodies in the directorate who ordered the report secure in the knowledge of its perspective favour opening a broad new front in the war against unhealthy lifestyles. Perhaps EU officials are flush with a sense of success in the battle against that other addiction, tobacco. In recent years, EU law has set maximum limits on tar and nicotine yields, imposed new and larger pack warnings, and most recently, effected a tobacco ad ban in press, internet and radio across Europe. Germany, with its large tobacco industry and libertarian instincts, uniquely did hold out against the ad ban for much of this year, but in June caved in and said it would comply, having been threatened by European court of justice action by health commissioner Markos Kyprianou, who has taken up the tobacco hostility baton of his predecessor David Byrne with relish. Smokers’ stronghold Germany is also weakening under EU peer pressure to limit smoking in public places. (A great deal of the money behind smoking bans comes from major pharmaceuticals – namely Glaxo, Novartis and Pharmacia and Upjohn in Europe and Johnson & Johnson in America – all of whom want to earn much money from expensive smoking cessation products; but that is another story.)
The IAS report, by World Health Organisation stalwart Peter Anderson, notes that, while drinking has dropped greatly in southern Europe, it has grown enormously in northern Europe in the last two decades – almost doubling in the UK. Growing personal wealth is one cause. Another important factor is the freedoms of the single market to import large amounts of alcohol from cheap countries for personal use. In Scandinavia they talk of the domino effect, where each state monopoly engages in downward price competition with its neighbours who in turn are competing with low-tax Estonia and Germany.
The total health cost of alcohol to EU countries in 2003 was $125 billion, about the same amount as tobacco. There are dozens of ailments attributable to alcohol, and more are being discovered – the connections between alcohol and the transmissions of HIV for instance.
Showing clear inspiration from Nordic alcohol policy models, the report recommends a ban on alcohol advertising, warning labels on wine bottles, a minimum licensing system for alcoholic products across Europe, a minimum buying age, a standardisation of blood alcohol limits for driving, and four other recommendations.
The question to be asked now, though, is: how many of the Copenhagen-based Anderson’s recommendations will be reflected in the strategy. As silence descended on DG Sanco – there was no press release to accompany the IAS report – insiders report “strong and varied opinions” inside the DG as to how to frame the strategy.
While there are some zealots inside the DG, the boss is not one of them. During his confirmation hearings in 2004, Kyprianou made ambivalent noises about the fight against alcohol, and insiders report that he remains far less keen at pursuing drinking than smoking..
He is reportedly wary of taking on the drinks industry, which has lobbied heavily against targeting “the product instead of targeting the heavy drinkers themselves” and which questionw the scientific credibility of the report.
As the commissioner for one of the smallest and least powerful DGs, Kyprianou could also be wary of the way the report’s recommendations transgress on to the territory of other, bigger DGs, such as DG taxation, DG transport, DG internal markets, all of whom jealously guard their competences.
Several I spoke to agrees there will be something: the one that would get the biggest consensus support in the council and parliament under a Finnish presidency that is strongly pro-restrictions is reportedly a lower maximum blood alcohol concentration limit for young and public vehicle drivers; 0.2 permille, contrasting with 0.5 for other drivers. (0.8 in the UK) “This is one piece of legislation everyone could rally around,” notes Lisette Tiddens-Engwirda, head of the European doctors’ union CPME.
The alcohol strategy comes only shortly after, elsewhere in the institutions, DG agriculture’s attempts to get European producers to tear up their vineyards in return for compensation, because currently too much of the wine goes unsold and has to be turned into biofuel at great expense. In short, some restrictions, but no full-out war, as on tobacco.
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