Egmont papers

n°59 : The European Citizens'Initiative: Next Big Thing or New False Good Idea ?

One of the key innovative elements of the Lisbon Treaty was the creation of a European Citizens’ Initiative. Egmont Paper 59 evokes the main legal elements of the European Citizens’ Initiative, as well as the possible implementation problems. It endeavours to provide the electronic references of all existing procedures at the end of 2012.

n°58: Assessing the Single Supervisory Mechanism: Passing the point of no return for Europe’s Banking Union, Stijn Verhelst, June 2013.

With the aim of breaking the negative feedback loop between Europe’s financial and sovereign debt crises, the EU decided to create a common supervisory framework for the banking sector: the Single Supervisory Mechanism. This Egmont Paper assesses the new supervisory mechanism, its role in the Banking Union and the challenges ahead.

n°57: Money for Structural Reforms in the Eurozone:making sense of contractual Arrangements, Xavier Vanden Bosch, May 2013.

Both the Commission’s proposal for a ‘Competitiveness and Convergence Instrument’ and the ‘contractual arrangement’ presented by President Van Rompuy share a common concept:  associating EU money with national structural reforms under a binding arrangement between the Commission and the contracting Member State. Xavier Vanden explores the concept of such ‘contracts’, notably discussing what is meant by ‘structural reforms’ and what the ‘financial support’ could consist in. 

n°56: Preventing the rise of sovereign borrowing costs in the eurozone: what can the ESM and the ECB achieve?, Xavier Vanden Bosch, Nov. 2012.

résumé:
Crisis management instruments in the Eurozone have gradually evolved from an ‘ex-post’ perspective- where official financial support would only be granted once a country has lost access to financial markets – to an ‘ex-ante’ perspective- where ‘preventive’ assistance would aim at mitigating this risk. With the ESM’ precautionary financial assistance and the ECB’s ‘Outright Monetary Transactions’, Eurozone countries can now potentially benefit from preventive interventions in their sovereign bond markets. Such interventions can in principle prevent their sovereign borrowing costs from reaching unsustainable levels. This paper discusses the principles and implications of such interventions. The author argues that while the ECB suggested strategy –that of a combined interventions by the ESM on primary markets and the ECB on secondary markets – is certainly the most efficient and viable strategy available, it should nonetheless not justify complacency. For the initial positive market reaction would wane over time if insufficient efforts are pursued at national and EU levels.

n°55: Introducing more equity in the CAP : A difficult Challenge, Clémentine d'Oultremont, June 2012.

résumé: A significant objective of the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2014-2020 is the allocation of the funds in a more equitable way among Member States and farmers. Now that the transitional measures to integrate the new Member States into the CAP are coming to an end, greater convergence in the distribution of payments has been legitimately requested from these countries. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that the vast majority of the CAP’s budget is distributed to a small number of large and wealthy farmers, leaving the remaining funds for the rest of the farm population. Therefore, the main question addressed by this paper is how to reach a more equitable distribution of CAP’s payments pragmatically, politically and economically?

n°54: An Arab springboard for EU foreign policy?, Sven Biscop, Rosa Balfour & Michael Emerson (Eds.), Jan. 2012.

résumé: The EU has not been perceived as reacting very rapidly or effectively to the socalled

Arab Spring. Events do validate the underpinning idea of the European

Security Strategy and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP): only where

governments guarantee to their citizens security, prosperity, freedom and equality,

can peace and stability last – otherwise, people will revolt. But in practice,

in its southern neighbourhood the EU has acted in precisely the opposite manner,

so the Arab Spring is occurring in spite of rather than thanks to EU policy.

The ENP stands at a crossroads therefore: Can a new start be made? Which

instruments and, in times of austerity, which means can the EU apply to consolidate

democratization? And, finally, can the EU continue to wage an ENP without

addressing the hard security dimension, especially as the US seem to be withdrawing

from crisis management in the region – or shall it continue to leave that

to others?

In this joint publication, the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Egmont

and the European Policy Centre (EPC), address some of the key dimensions of

the EU’s engagement with the Mediterranean region.

n°53: The Reform of the EU Courts. The need of a management approach, Franklin Dehousse, with the collaboration of Mathilde Rouland, TEPSA-EGMONT, a view on the reform of the EU courts, Dec. 2011.

résumé: In 2010, the Lisbon Treaty entered into force, including some substantial

changes concerning the EU courts1. Meanwhile, their workload is progressively

increasing. Specifically, the General Court’s backlog has become quite substantial2.

In 2011, the Court of Justice has presented an important proposal regarding

this problem. It aims at adding 12 new judges (and consequently cabinets)

to the General Court. The Commission has given its support and proposed some

complex modalities concerning the appointment of judges.

Such a reform of the General Court will have systemic consequences for the EU

courts’ system. If it is implemented in 2012, the General Court will have gone

from 15 to 39 judges in only eight years. The Court’s and Commission’s proposals

thus require an analysis of the long term implications. Before that, they

require an analysis of the productivity aspects. These have been barely debated

until now. However, in the midst of a financial crisis, the legislative authorities

may have legitimate questions about the budget impact. This paper aims at

bringing some modest introductory comments (this is a new and complex topic)

regarding the managerial and financial aspects of the available options.

One will find here a brief description of the new context (§ 1), and of the possible

objectives of a reform (§ 2), some examples of productivity reforms that

could increase production with very limited costs (§ 3), and finally a more

detailed evaluation of the two possible structural reforms (§ 4), i.e. adding 12

new judges to the General Court or creating an Intellectual Property Court, limited

in a first phase to a specific aspect of trademarks and designs. From a management

point of view, reforms must indeed be divided into two categories.

Some of them are not too difficult to implement and require no huge regulatory

changes or additional means (the “productivity solutions”). Others, on the contrary,

require such changes and additional means (the “structural solutions”).

In synthesis, the structural solutions appear rather costly (especially the 12 new

cabinets) and should be considered as last resort ones. On the other hand, other

measures, with very little costs, could have a strong positive impact on the

General Court’s productivity. Furthermore, an immediate structural reform

would go against fundamental principles of management (and strategy). Before

pumping more resources in a system, it is useful to analyze in depth where the

existing problems come from. If a plane flies low because there are numerous

leaks in the motor, one can always push much more kerosene in the motor but

this is rarely seen as the optimal way to improve performance. Plugging first the

leaks is widely seen as more economical. Furthermore, it is always dangerous to

make immediate structural reforms with a long term impact under the pressure

of urgency. Finally, in the case of a sudden rise of judicial activity in the next

years (which is the working hypothesis of the debated proposals), the neglect of

the productivity measures could lead to an explosion of costs.

In the present hard times especially, each of us has to do his/her utmost to get

more bangs from the taxpayer’s bucks. This is possible here, but it means that

all parties involved (General Court’s judges and personnel, Court of Justice,

Member States, budgetary authorities, and legal counsels) have to accept some

limited efforts.

This modest contribution pays tribute to Peter Drucker, for whom the author

must confess a long, deep and always growing admiration. Drucker’s books

were seminal not only in the diffusion of the science of management, but also in

the reflection on the connections between management and different evolutions

of society. He should be mandatory reading in the present changing EU environment.

Most probably, his conclusion in this debate would have been a brilliant

and synthetic “it’s the people, stupid!”

n°52: Setting a Standard for stakeholdership. Industry Contribution to a strengthened Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, Jean Pascal Zanders (Ed.), Dec. 2011.

résumé: ?

n°51: Financing the answer to climate change: challenging but feasible, Clémentine d'Oultremont, Oct. 2011.

résumé: An agreement on climate finance is crucial to ensure an equitable approach between developed and developing countries in the fight against climate change. This report addresses the following question: How is it possible to secure a framework for mobilising, administrating and delivering financing on the necessary scale? Without a credible framework, the risk remains that developing countries’ actions to tackle climate change will be insufficient, inefficient, inadequate and delayed. The global costs would thereby increase and the path towards a low-carbon future would be jeopardized

n°50: Public access to documents: jurisprudence between principle and practice (Between jurisprudence and recast), Tinne Heremans, Sept. 2011.

résumé: -In this paper, the author critically evaluates the main tendencies in the case law on Public Access to Documents which should be read against the backdrop of the difficult ongoing review of Regulation No 1049/2001. In doing so, she hopes to raise policy-makers’ awareness of what is really at stake in this far from “marginal” dossier. Without questioning the necessity and value of transparency of legislative and administrative processes in a democracy, the author pleads in favour of ‘optimal’ as opposed to ‘maximal’ openness.

n°49 : Europe deploys towards a civil-military strategy for CSDP, Sven Biscop and Jo Coelmont (Eds), June 2011.

résumé:Why does Europe develop the military and civilian capabilities that it does? Why does it undertake the military and civilian operations that it does? And why in other cases does it refrain from action? The answers to these questions amount to a civilian-military strategy for CSDP. Without strategy, we can never be sure that the operations that we do are actually the most relevant and important that we could undertake. We cannot direct the operations that we do undertake to achieve the desired strategic effect. And we cannot focus capability development if we do not know our strategic priorities.

n°48: Worse, not Better ? Reinvigorating Early Warning for Conflict Prevention in the Post Lisbon European Union, John Brante, Chiara De Franco, Christoph Meyer and Florian Otto, June 2011.

résumé: Executive summary

The number and lethality of conflicts has been declining significantly since the end of the Cold War, but five new armed conflicts still break out each year. While costly peace-making, stabilisation and reconstruction efforts have helped to end conflicts, no comparative efforts have gone into preventing them from

occurring in the first place. The international community appears stuck in the never-ending travails of managing crises, finding it difficult to act early to prevent new conflicts from escalating. Encouraging signs that this is changing include the United Nations (UN) promotion of the preventive arm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the United States’ efforts to improve its capacity to prevent conflicts and mass atrocities emerging from the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Similarly, since the launch of the Gothenburg programme in 2001, the European Union (EU) has embraced the case for

conflict prevention in policy documents as well as in the Lisbon Treaty itself, making it a hallmark of its approach to international security and conflict in contrast to conventional foreign policy. Yet, it has fallen significantly short in translating these aspirations into institutional practice and success on the

ground. It suffers from the ‘missing middle’ syndrome between long-term structural prevention through instruments such as conditionality for EU accession and development policy, and short-term responses to erupting crisis through military and civilian missions.

The Lisbon Treaty amendments – in particular the creation of the ‘double-hatted’ High Representative (HR) and the European External Action Service (EEAS) – are widely seen as major opportunities to make the EU more capable, active and coherent. We welcome these opportunities, especially the potential

for joint threat assessment and coherence in policy, the improved presence on the ground through EU delegations and the influx of experienced diplomats from Member States. At the same time, our paper draws on research into the warning-response problem to express two main concerns: first, key weaknesses of the old system are not sufficiently addressed such as, insufficient orientation

to longer-term forecasting and effective warning, privileging of crisis management against prevention and divergent dispositions among intelligence consumers. More worrying still, the new system could lead to lower receptivity and slower responses due to growing information noise, excessively hierarchical

relations as well as an even tighter bottleneck in information processing and decision-making at the top of the broader pyramidal structure. We argue that warning-response will always be a challenge and it is unrealistic to get it right all of the time. However, we advance a number of recommendations addressed

primarily to the EU, which could help to mitigate some of the problems obstructing warning for early action:

• to reinvigorate its commitments to conflict prevention and ring-fence institutional resources against competing demands from crisis management;

• to develop a strategic warning doctrine to deal with the uncertainties, overlaps and gaps the current system produces;

• to promote a so-called ‘customer-driven approach’ among warning producers and embrace a number of analytical techniques to improve analysis and warning impact;

• to make sure that the EEAS does not create a culture adverse to warning by replicating the overly hierarchical and formalistic culture pervading the European Commission;

• to devolve analytical resources as well as responsibilities for civilian preventive action to EU delegations and EU Special Representatives to avoid the bottleneck problem;

• to lend more financial and intelligence support to regional and local early warning systems/NGOs, particularly those which integrate warning and response under one roof.

Our paper also addresses the growing importance of the news media and nongovernmental organisations for alleviating the warning-response gap. NGO staff as well as journalists can offer excellent expertise of particular countries and can communicate warnings in some circumstances more effectively than

analysts within a bureaucracy. Moreover, early action sometimes requires public advocacy in order to challenge some of the disincentives to act on the part of governments and the EU. NGOs also play an important role in holding decisionmakers to account for failing to act despite early, clear and well-substantiated warnings. In order to enhance the role of NGOs and the news media we recommend

that:

• NGOs need to invest more time in understanding how their public communication is perceived by decision-makers and should become more alert to the reputational risks arising from ‘over-warning’, moralising and unrealistic recommendations;

• more efforts need to be made to sensitise ‘news decision-makers’ to biases, both geographical and topical, in their coverage and remind them that besides their obligation towards shareholders/owners, they have to fulfil a ‘responsibility to report’ about impending crises;

• the EU should explore how to support journalists in producing proactive and in-depth foreign affairs coverage, for example by funding organisations that could provide grants for reporting about regions under-represented in the media or issues the news media tend to overlook.

n°47: The Reform of European Economic Governance : Towards a Sustainable Monetary Union?, Stijn Verhelst, June 2011.

résumé: The eurozone sovereign debt crisis has vividly demonstrated the inadequacy of European economic governance and rendered a reform indispensible. Egmont Paper 47 discusses the causes of the crisis, as well as the economic governance reform. The paper finds that legislative changes go in the right direction in terms of fiscal sustainability, but it is more doubtful of the sufficiency of the macro-economic rules. Effective crisis governance remains another major, unresolved challenge.

n°46: Death of an Institution. The end for Western European Union, a future for European defence, Alyson JK Bailes and Graham Messervy-Whiting, May 2011.

résumé: Executive summary

On 31 March 2010 the ten Member States of Western European Union (WEU) announced that the last organs, staffs and activities of that institution would be laid to rest by 30 June 2011. Having resiled from the Modified Brussels Treaty (MBT) of 1954 which created WEU as a successor to the Western Union of 1948, these nations are now working to dispose of the staff, premises and archives at WEU’s Brussels offices and its Parliamentary Assembly in Paris. Little public interest has been shown in these moves, perhaps because WEU’s operational and political work had already been taken over by the European Union (EU), in the frame of its new European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), at the end of 1999.

Why get rid of WEU’s last vestiges precisely now? This study addresses the question, and seeks to assess WEU’s achievements and legacies by reviewing its 57-year career from cradle to grave. Modest though WEU’s own role may have been, it has been intimately linked with one of the great policy challenges of the post-war world: the search for a distinct and effective form of ‘European defence’.

The original Brussels Treaty of 1948, creating a permanent guaranteed defence relationship between the UK, France and the Benelux countries, was a vital step towards the realization of the North Atlantic Alliance. When the attempt to create an even more deeply integrated European Defence Community including Germany broke down in 1954, WEU was created as a self-confessed pis aller. Its treaty, the MBT, still contained absolute mutual guarantees but from the start WEU left the operative work of defence to NATO. It fulfilled useful tasks in cementing the post-war order, but then sank into slumber until the mid-1980s. When first reawakened, it became a talking-shop for a core group of West Europeans, helping them cope with the trans-Atlantic strains of the time and developing some sense of Europe’s shared and distinct security interests.

During the 1990s, WEU had to reinvent itself in face of demands for post-Cold War enlargement and new-style crisis management operations. It was further steered by the evolving needs of the EU and NATO, for whom it came to serve as intermediary. Its low profile and flexibility let it bring the enlargement candidates and European non-Allies, as well as non-EU members of NATO, closely into its work from an early date. It invented a definition (‘Petersberg formula’) for crisis management tasks that could realistically be carried out by Europeans alone; and it built intricate partnerships with both NATO and the EU that in theory allowed NATO’s military assets to be borrowed for missions under an EU political lead. However, the only operations actually launched under a WEU flag were loosely coordinated naval ones, and police and other civilian actions. WEU never enjoyed the political status or trust in capitals to be seriously considered for more demanding military tasks, even when European coalitions were in the lead.

Frustration with this situation, and with the weak show made by European capabilities under a NATO flag, drove Britain and France in 1998 to propose giving the EU its own military arm. The formula adopted for this in Helsinki at end-1999 limited EU actions to the ‘Petersberg’ crisis management and humanitarian spectrum, thus avoiding a direct clash with NATO and allowing the EU’s non-Allied members to participate fully. The non-EU European Allies, however, lost status compared with WEU and this led to Turkish blocking tactics for the first years of ESDP, delaying the first ESDP operations (in Former Yugoslavia) to 2003. Nevertheless the bulk of WEU’s functions were transferred to EU equivalents, leaving a residual secretariat to guard the MBT. The WEU Institute for Security Studies and Satellite Centre became EU agencies and a few years later, the two WEU-linked armament cooperation bodies WEAG and WEAO were superseded by the EU’s European Defence Agency.

Economy-minded nations were pondering a final close-down of WEU as early as 2004, but the decisive move came in February 2010 following entry into force of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty. This text contains (Article 42.7) a pledge by all 27 EU members to assist each other against military attack, but – contrasting with the MBT’s clarity – the language is heavily qualified by references to NATO’s primacy and respect for the non-Allies’ status. Prompted by the UK with arguments for cost-saving, the WEU powers nevertheless agreed in March 2010 that this development made the MBT redundant. Behind their decision seems to lie an acceptance that the European defence idea can be pushed no further in the EU framework, at least for the foreseeable future. NATO still plays the beau rôle in ‘hard’ peace missions as well as territorial defence, and commands more attention even from the French military than a European Union handicapped by German (and other) misgivings. The Franco-British defence treaty of November 2010 signals a certain impatience with all institutional constraints, as well as the severity of post-2008 budget pressures.

An initial post mortem on WEU’s achievements could give credit for its role in early post-war consolidation; for its political services both to a European security identity and to trans-Atlantic harmony from the 80s onwards; and its help in cementing common approaches especially to crisis management missions across the wider Europe. Its ‘Petersberg’ formula has stood the test of time and remains at the heart of EU Treaty provisions on practical defence cooperation. The WEU Institute and Satcen have discovered wider horizons under EU ownership, while WEAO in particular showed a way forward in the still problematic field of defence industrial collaboration. In the military and operational sphere WEU’s acquis was drawn upon extensively and usefully, where appropriate, during ESDP’s formative period, though for obvious reasons this was not highlighted at the time. This acquis included planning in the operational, logistic, command and control, communications and force generation fields; the construction of intelligence and situational awareness capabilities; the design of crisis management, exercise and training procedures; and the experience of mounting the first (modest) Petersberg-style operation – MAPE in Albania.