Should bloggers get access badges for the EU institutions?

This question asked by the head of the European Parliament press unit earlier this month is as simple as it is difficult to answer (Stephen and The European Citizen have given their views already).

It is difficult to answer because it is actually a question about why certain people get privileged access to (EU) institutions.

Why does somebody who has a press card easily gets access to the institutions even when she or he doesn't even report about what she or he sees or when he or she reports only tiny bits without much actual research afterwards, or when s/he distorts a story to please a national audience, when s/he only reports about what can be sold for money instead of telling the public what the public should know?

Why can you register as a lobbyist and then have access to institutions like the Parliament without there being a proper definition of what a lobbyist actually is (long discussion, I know)? Why are those who can afford the process of registration better than those who can't afford it?

Why is there no special "scientist access badge" so that people like me who are studying EU politics could work more easily in the Brussels environment?

Why is privileged access to public institutions given only to two categories of people whose professions are in fact hard to distinguish from activities individual citizens or groups of citizens without a clear organisational background are able and willing to do today on their own, namely reporting (=journalism) about and advocating (=lobbying) on questions of special or general interest?

The reason is simple: Old institutions are used to communicate with organisational actors, they hate to deal with real individuals even though in the case of journalistic or interest groups they usually have to deal with a very limited amount of individuals representing these organisations.

Institutions prefer to deal with those who are willing to invest in bureaucracy and structures over those who actually want to do something, because the former are more similar to themselves. Institutions want to deal with institutions, organisations with organisations.

The question whether bloggers should have access to EU institutions is thus actually not the real question, the question is:

Should individuals have access to EU institutions? And if yes, under what conditions?

We have to ask the question like this because there is no clear categorisation of what a blogger is, what a blogger does, how it is done and when, why or with what purpose.

A blogger can be someone like me who writes a blog without the blog being directly related to his/her work, who writes because s/he has fun to write, who follows politics because s/he is interested, because s/he feels s/he can contribute to some discussions as an informed citizen.

Other bloggers may have a more professional interest in writing, using the blog as a medium to publish journalistic texts to earn money with this activity.

A blog can be used as part of the institutional communication, helping the outside world to understand what happens within an organisation beyond stereotype press releases or to influence opinions by being part of an environment of public discussions where you can only prevail if you manage to have your views publicly represented.

A blog can be just a private commentary, involving issues we come across every day, be it culture, society, politics or private issues we want to share and discuss with a smaller or bigger audience, just because we want to and because we can.

Somebody doesn't have to be an EU blogger to write about EU affairs, to the contrary, maybe a national expert in a certain policy field will add a more objective yet more informed view on his or her topic.

A blog can have 100 readers a day who are the ones concerned or the only ones interested or a blog may have 100,00 readers who don't come because they want to be informed but just because it is fun reading the blog.

Bloggers are different kinds of individuals with different kinds of interests and styles and means, and the only thing that is common to them is that they publish on the web in a more or less regular way.

So you won't be able to draw lines to decide on specific criteria to define what kind of bloggers should have access to the EU institutions, but it is still necessary to give individuals with the intent to report about EU politics access to the institutions for a limited time, no matter whether it is for a local school newspaper writer, an international blogger or a scientist who needs to observe certain activities within the institutions for her/his research.

You may need some kind of small-scale body (a "Citizens' Access Unit") in each institution where people can request access for specific purposes, and either this unit will decide on its own or, whenever possible, re-direct the request to other competent people/structures within the institution (e.g. a committee secretariat, a political group, a head of unit in the Commission etc.) to deal with the necessary formalities.

And if this is not possible due to conservative thinking, you have to make at least public what kind of occasions there are already where you can get easy access, e.g. in the case of hearings, seminars or public committee meetings in the European Parliament where any citizen can register and participate quite easily as I have noticed while being here in Brussels.

In the end this is about trusting citizens instead of distrusting them, openness instead of closed up public institutions. And yes there will be one or another case of misuse of this trust, but you also give access to stupid lobbyists or stupid journalists whom you have trusted and who misuse this trust in rare cases.

And beyond this citizen access, the institutions also have to widen the scope of what they call "journalism", allowing permanent access to people who can prove (through previous work, current work, income statistics etc.) that they pursue a journalistic activity.

This kind of professional blogger or independent journalist may be defined by the intention to make a living out of this activity but institutions should end the need to demand that people are registered with some journalistic cartel organisations whose only interest it is to protect newcomers from entering a profession that is undergoing changes, being afraid of loosing to those who are better adapted to today's environment than they are. Journalists should be defined by what they do, not by the fact that they are registered as such with some national or European organisations.

Now this was more some kind public brainstorming than an argued blog post, but my main message is that the institutions need to find a way to allow access to those who are interested in dealing with these institutions, in particular when they do so with the interest of analysing and reporting their work to the outside world, making European politics accessible to new audiences or making European topics public and understandable that have remained in expert circles so far, out of the range of journalists or institutional communication.

The answer how to do that is not easy to give, but EU institutions that are able to decide about budgets of billions of Euros should be able to decide how they will allow individual access to their premises - but it seems it is easier to deal with big money than with human beings for them.


Picture: I took this photo in a European Parliament hearing for which I simply applied with an email sent to the political group secretariat. With the badge I received I was able to walk around freely in the European Parliament. Many of the participants seemed to have permanent badges (EP staff, permanent representations, lobbyists, not much press).

Finding official EU information & documents

The EU is a messy place.

But: There is nothing better than the list of official document registers from EU institutions, agencies and other bodies on the Europa.eu website to start with when you are looking for the raw stuff, the originals, the backgrounds, the hidden treasures, the lovely bullshit language produced by administrators, diplomats, politicians, and lawyers to make our life better (and theirs, because they make a living on producing all these documents).

I promise, you will love it!

Footsoldiers & Generals in European Communication

Martin Westlake, the Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee, has written a blog post titled "Young communicators and the shape of future communication".

We have met earlier this week in his office to talk about this topic, and so it is great to see that he continues the discussion online and connects it to projects like "The Hub" here in Brussels.

Martin is, to my knowledge, the only high-ranking EU official who writes a true personal blog, one that is set up not on an EU platform and one that connects his reflections on work-related issues with stories of cultural events he has participated in or more personal issues that he comes across in his life outside the (usually black) box of EU bureaucracy.

Here is what Martin finds in his article on young communicators (my highlights):

"I have often written about the decline in the paradigm of mass membership party politics in our democracies but increasingly I realise that those democratic forces are still ‘out there’ – they just express themselves in different ways, ways made possible in large part by rapidly evolving net-based applications.

What I find fascinating about these developments is that they are ‘messy’ – by which I mean that they are organic and their evolution is unpredictable and uncontrollable (think of ‘viral’ videos).

They are thus the antithesis of what public administrations like."

And this brings him to one question:

"Young, committed Europeans like Julien and Jon and Polly are the footsoldiers of the European ideal but, the thought occurs to me; in such a world, is there any place or role for generals?"

I think there is a role for generals. There is a role for generals because, without proper co-ordination, our societies, whether manifested offline or online, will not be able to keep up social achievements and social structures that are worth protecting, worth preserving.

We need generals who can channel good ideas. We need experts who are good in what they do and who can guide others to make the right choices in order sustain what is existing, to re-construct what has been destroyed by accidents or to build new what can change the world for the better.

We need trusted people and institutions who can take responsibility for certain tasks, e.g. European institutions - not necessarily governmental - to keep up or to foster European conversations on topics that would otherwise be ignored or that would be held in separate spheres although they concern all of us.

The major change might be to ask how we chose these persons, how we build these institutions, what democratic or popular, organised or viral mechanisms we can accept to let certain persons or groups of persons to be our generals, generals for a day, for a month or for 10 years depending on the task they fulfil in our society's communication(s).

The question is rather: Do we need all the majors, the captains, the lieutenants and all the other middlemen and middlewomen who often don't add value to our society?

Do we need command chains that take days for what direct communication can do in an hour? Do we need committees full of highly-paid experts discussing solutions for a problem for one year who then just come up with the conclusion that there is a problem but that one cannot agree on the means to solve it?

Do we need people who co-ordinate the co-ordination of co-ordinated efforts to solve a small problem where one direct question to the right person - which is made possible by modern communication - could bring the solution without delay and with much less costs for society?

The problem of European communication as organised by the EU institutions today is that these chains of commands don't work at the speed of 21st century communication.

Our European "generals" are eaten up by co-ordinating the co-ordination of the co-ordination and the chains of command have evolved into circles of command in which no one needs to feel responsible for failure, where the circle of communication has become the true nature of daily activity, not the question how to identify problems and to solve them.

Those who are experts in solving problems are forced to spend their life talking to hierarchies about the fact that the problem exists instead of actually being allowed to spend the same time in building solutions. They could be our generals, but they are made wheels of a machinery that is best in building more wheels, but not in moving the machine forward.

"Young communicators" as Martin has called us cannot stand this kind of machinery and we use modern communication to circumvent the hierarchies.

We are not necessarily the ones who would be good generals. We are even ready to let ourselves guide by generals who have our trust as long as we have the feeling that we are trusted by our generals, too.

But as long as we have the feeling that we need to talk to a lieutenant who will then talk to his captain who in a month might address a major who later on will maybe write a letter to the general to ask whether the lieutenant should be allowed to talk more in detail with us, we prefer spending our precious footsoldier's lifetime with different activities than waiting for the general to give an order that would probably just make us walk in circles.

Modern communication has allowed us to directly find like-minded people and to live an important share of our lives without generals and their hierarchies. We try to solve little problems on our own or through small, self-coordinated efforts, and we have more fun spending our time like this.

But there will be the day when we will need the generals again to co-ordinate the solution of the big problems of our societies - and either the present generals and their institutions have changed until then and are ready to actually support us, or we will replace them, including their bureaucracies.

And since the EU's institutional system uniting European and national bureaucracies is the archetype of a "modern", command-cycle bureaucracy that slows us down more than it makes us move forward, it may be the one we will start with if it doesn't change very soon...

Picture: © gilderic / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

German President Köhler resigns - Will it impact German EU policy?

Today, the German President Horst Köhler has resigned over a controversial interview he gave 9 days ago.

In the interview he said that an export-heavy economic power like Germany would need to be able to use the military to defend its economic interest, inter alia by keeping international trade routes free or by preventing regional destabilisation.

Because of the context these remarks are made, they have been interpreted as related to the German presence in Afghanistan (very unpopular in Germany) and may sound close to support of unconstitutional use of military forces (the German constitution only allows defensive use the army or actions within the UN framework).

Köhler feels that he has been misunderstood and that the public criticism regarding his remarks is damaging his office. I don't agree and rather think that his resignation is more of a damage than his remarks or the debate.

It shows that Köhler, in office since 2004 and re-elected in 2009 by the Federal Assembly, a joint body of the German Parliament and the representatives of the 16 federal states' parliaments, has never been a politician used to public debate. He went through a largely bureaucratic career that lead until his function as Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) before becoming German President.

How will this affect German EU policy?

In principle, the president doesn't have strong constitutional powers except for external representation and the signing of laws or the ratification of international treaties. These functions will now be taken over by the (rotating) President of the Bundesrat, the second chamber in which the governments of the federal states are represented. This is, right now, the mayor of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, the social democrat Jens Böhrnsen. The Constitution foresees a maximum 30 day period until the Federal Assembly has to elect a new president, so the transition will not be very long.

The resignation will thus not have much substantive influence on anything Germany does on the European level.

But the resignation means that, during the next month, Germany will be heavily dominated by an internal debate over who will be Köhler's successor. So far, Merkel's governmental coalition also holds a majority in the Federal Assembly, so the prospect for a Christian Democrat (Merkel's party) are not bad. But the question who will get this semi-political but still highest German office will lead to internal and public struggles within the political parties and within the governing coalition.

This may not be totally favourable to a concentrated German leadership in European and international fora, but I don't expect that this will pose real problems beyond the diversion of political and media attention from certain issues that may seem more important internationally or for the EU.

In summary, my conclusion is that we have seen a not-so-important German president resign unnecessarily over remarks that touched a very sensitive area in the German political system - international military presence - which, in my opinion, will lead to a short perturbation of the German political landscape but no to a political shift or mayor problem with European relevance.


Picture: tgoldkamp (flickr) / CC BY-NC-SA

The joke: Part 2 of the story

Tracing back viral stories (like a joke) to their origin is not very easy, but one can at least try.

Last Wednesday I wrote about the EU joke that Ashton told at the LSE in London, and according to the press and the moderator at LSE this joke was first told by Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb.

I wrote to Mr. Stubb to ask whether this was true, and via his secretary he told me that he heard the joke from Māris_Riekstiņš, who was the foreign minister of Latvia until March.

Does anyone know what Mr Riekstins is doing now or how one could contact him? Since he is no longer foreign minister, it's kind of difficult to address him.

Because the question now is: Was he the originator of the joke?

Picture (from the left: Stubb, Riekstins, Bildt): © latvianmfa/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

UK elections: What's at stake for the citizens of the EU?

We, Europeans from other EU member states, may not care who wins the elections in the United Kingdom but we will be affected anyway.

Whether or not there will be significant policy changes - which can be the case if the Liberal Democrats will gain enough seats to be part of a coalition government and which will be the case if the Conservatives win an absolute majority - these elections determine how and by whom the UK is represented in the EU institutions.

You don't think it is important who represents the United Kingdom and which policy programme is advocated by these personalities in the EU Council and the European Council?

Well, then you don't think that the regulation of financial institutions is an issue that concerns you. You don't think that it is relevant whether the UK will push for reforms in the Common Agricultural Policies of the EU or not.

You don't think that it makes a difference whether a Labour government, a Conservative government or a coalition of one of the two other with the Liberal Democrats will determine the new EU internal security strategy or the shape of the EU's External Action Service, including the precise nature of its tasks (e.g. regarding military capacities).

All these are issues which are discussed right now in the different EU institutions, and the British government is an important part of these discussions. And all these policies have direct impact on the lives of all EU citizens.

In short, if you don't care for the election results in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, you don't think that the EU has any impact on your life.

Different to how some might want to frame the debate, the question of these elections is thus not so much about staying in the EU or leaving it. It is not the question: Will the Royal Union stay a Loyal Union to the European Union?

No, it's more profane: The UK elections partially determine the outcome of concrete future policies of the European Union. British citizens vote for the direction of their country today, but they also vote for a fraction of the direction the EU will take in the years to come.

So, EU citizens, take a look to the UK today and notice who will win - because this will affect your lives in the years to come!

Picture: © prasenberg / CC BY-NC 2.0

Lavrov's visions for the Greater Europe

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has been speaking in front of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe today, laying out Russia's visions for the European political and security architecture.

The speech is pretty long and loaded with history*, but there are a number of important political points that come up in the last third.

Lavrov repeats, directly and indirectly, what is the Russian position for years on what he calls "Greater Europe", a Europe that includes Russia and other non-EU member states of the Council of Europe as well as (some?) countries that are members of the OSCE.

A short summary on how I interpret the Russian position:

The Russian government wants that the Council of Europe takes on the "soft" issues into which he includes social and economic well-being, intercultural dialogue and a little bit of human rights. Like an intergovermental European Union light, just with Russia as a member state.

And the OSCE should become the organisation that deals with hard, military security, replacing NATO and getting rid of the OSCE's elements that promote democracy and human rights. Since the other OSCE members are not happy about this, they have directed these discussions into the so-called "Corfu Process".

In both organisations, Russia is trying to play down the roles of human rights and democratic freedoms. It is remarkable that in front of an organisation like the Council of Europe which has the European Convention on Human Rights as one its basic documents, Lavrov mentions the term "human rights" only three times (plus one time "rights") while stressing the issue of "security" 20 times throughout the speech.

And he doesn't even mention once the European Court of Human Rights, which belongs to the Council of Europe and has more than once ruled on severe human rights violations in Russia.

There are three particular quotes that caught my attention.

The first one:

"[W]hy do not we encourage in the context of the Corfu process all the OSCE members to adhere to the law of the Council of Europe?"

This is a very strange proposal given that the OSCE countries that are not members of the Council of Europe are either definitely non-European (like the USA) or they clearly do not respect the values of the Council of Europe - human rights, democracy, and the rule of law - (like Belarus, the Central Asian countries, the Vatican).

This proposal is thus pretty non-sense and seems to be a position that Russia just takes to counterbalance the rather hesitant position that the EU and the USA have on its proposals regarding the OSCE reform. Russia proposes to "outsource" the human issues away from the OSCE to strengthen its proposal to make the OSCE a pure hard security or defence organisation.

And the second quote is clearly a critique to the European Union countries (27 of the 47 Council of Europe members are EU countries) that want the Council of Europe to focus on its core tasks as defined by the last Summit in Warsaw in 2005:

"The proposals to diminish the mandate and competence of our Organization are inadmissible, as well as the attempts to limit its independence, transform the Council of Europe into a subsidiary body of the other European structures. The Strasburg Organization must be the leading European lawmaker in the proper sense of the word."

However, Lavrov finishes with a note that I could sign without problems, except for the doubt that the Council of Europe can actually deliver this vision:

"Owing to a more effective Council of Europe, our continent will have every chance to become truly integrated space with human rights promoted according to unified standards, where every citizen of the Greater Europe would benefit from real mobility realized in the free movement of ideas and people. It is quite hard to understand that the "visa iron curtain" is drawn, unlike during the Cold War, on the opposite side."

In summary, the speech is in clear continuity of the Russian position with just some refinement and adaptation in the argumentation that reflect discussions in other fora - a sign that we won't see much development in the political landscape of the "Greater Europe" in the near future.

* PS.: Lavrov was reading really quickly - the poor translator... (see the video of the speech).

Picture: © utenriksdept / CC BY-ND 2.0

Navigating the Social Media Space: What the EU can learn from Eurocontrol

I wasn't one of those concerned by the recent ash and airspace crisis, which didn't prevent me from noticing the incredible success of Eurocontrol in the social media sphere, especially since many people whom I follow on Twitter were directly and indirectly concerned.

EU institutions apart from the the great people at the European Parliament are very hesitant to move forward in their social media efforts. One of the lucky exceptions these days seems to be EU Careers. But other EU institutions, organisations and sub-units can learn a lot from what Eurocontrol was able to do these days.

Eurocontrol is not an EU institution but a European intergovernmental organisation working on the development of a single European sky. However, it is still a European organisation that has to work with obvious problems such as multilingualism and quite different stakeholders: State and public authorities, larger and smaller businesses and now also individual citizens, all having their own communication styles, working rhythms, and information needs.

Nevertheless, in of the largest airspace crises in the history they were able to manage a huge increase in communications with just one employee - Aurelie Valtat (who has already been interviewed and profiled by El Mundo).

Just one social media communicator - the second team member was stuck in Spain due to the crisis as Aurelie told me five minutes after I asked her the question on Twitter earlier today - was able to connect both to professional organisations as well as to individual citizens with their individual problems. She transmitted both official information coming from inside Eurocontrol and from relevant national authorities but she was also quickly answering diverse questions coming directly from citizens and stakeholders on Twitter and on Facebook.

On Mashable, Shashank Nigam qualified the work of Eurocontrol as "probably the best effort [he had] seen in aviation crisis management through social media". And the BBCblog concluded that the success of Eurocontrol's communication effort came because:

• They were open to conversation
• They were quick with answers
• They had a loud & clear communication
• They were consequent in hashtags
• They sounded like a person
• They were nice in the right way

How many EU officials and social media channels could you mention that would qualify for all these six points?

In the meantime, the Twitter account of Eurocontrol has over 7300 followers (after 300 before the crisis according to El Mundo) and the Facebook page has 3200 "Likes", a base that they will be able to use for communication when the crisis is over but also whenever a new crisis may arise.

The combination of first-hand knowledge (i.e. working within the institution) and the ability to interact with a diverse public seems to be a major asset for social media communication of institutions. It is also trust in an employee (or several) to handle the communication efforts in the name of the institution, being allowed to answer without hierarchic authorisation of every little answer and thus being able to react at the speed of social communication, not of institutional communication.

And Eurocontrol also had the ability to work only in English, relying on the linguistic capabilities of followers and translation efforts of major stakeholders and of the social web that is able to get message translated into any language when needed, as we have seen in our Bloggingportal.eu experiment recently.

EU institutions should study what Eurocontrol and Aurelie Valtat - a single qualified and talented employee - were able to do during these days, how much their image profited from the way they were handling communications in this crisis, and how much added value European public institutions can have for citizens and for other stakeholders if they employ the right social communications strategies with the right people in the right way.

Picture: © anguskirk / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Reflections on the EU citizenship consultations

Until 14 June 2010, the European Commission is holding a "Consultation on how to strengthen the rights stemming from Union Citizenship".

But what do they want from us? Can't they see on their own that there are so many obstacles of moving around freely that they just need to start doing something? Just read the comments to a recent euroblog post and you already know where to start.

Instead of spending their time trying to find solutions, they present us a bureaucratic questionnaire that is already so introduced so boringly that I as a citizen want to stop reading after the first lines.

What if I fill in the 9 questions and send them to "Unit D2 of the Directorate General for Justice, Freedom and Security"?

Will they go to my local administration to explain that it is ridiculous that I need an expensive official translation of an English letter of reference in order to acknowledge that I have been working in another European country? Will they go to my health insurance and tell them I get the same medical protection in every EU country? Will they make my pensions or my unemployment insurance transferable wherever I live? Will they talk to the UK bank telling them that they can't refuse to give me a bank account just because I'm not a British citizen? Will they allow me to just go wherever I want in the Union, tell the local authority that I'm there and then let me live and work there like anybody else?

I don't think so. The Commission will write another report that no citizen will ever read and then start another decision-making process that no citizen will follow and then come to the conclusion that the best thing they can do for us citizens is to regulate how much we pay for mobile roaming (instead of promoting true European mobile phone contracts).

So many problems are known, and what these consultations will do is just bring them up again, but they won't be given by those concerned but by some European organisations who earn their money pretending to speak in our name.

And something about the coherence of the consultations:

What do the questions about obstacles to free movement have to do with voters' participation in the European Parliament elections? Not much. Participation in the European Parliament elections is so low because European and national parties give a shit, because they run campaigns that pretend it's about national topics while it's actually about European issues. But that is is not the problem of the Commission, that is the task of the politicians who sit in the European Parliament or of their parties back home and in Brussels.

Why can't the Commission at least focus on a proper consultation that focuses on obstacles to free movement or political participation or consular protection instead of mixing up totally different subjects? And why do they already give possible answers after each consultation question? If they think they know what we should answer, why don't they just take their own answers and do something?

Sorry, but for me the main task is easy: I am a European Union citizen and I want to move around freely in the Union without state bureaucracies, big corporations and other social institutions putting all kinds of smaller or larger stones in my way. Now figure out what needs to be done.

Picture: © loungerie / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Leaking Union

The "dark hole of Brussels" with its "obscure institutions" and its "opaque political processes" has become a powerful if not the main image to characterise the political system of the European Union.

A lot of what is going on in the political capital of our Union remains unnoticed by a wider public, not just because old and new media do not show enough interest but also because a lot of the relevant political interaction and documentation is confidential or not easily accessible if you are not located in Brussels.

Leaks to the outside world are seldom and the institutions work to prevent them:

"The Secretariat is examining ways of marking the electronic version of all official documents automatically sent to each delegation to allow identification of the source of any leaks." (EU Council 2006)

During the presentation of Wikileaks by spokesperson Daniel Schmidt at the re:publica 10 social media conference in Berlin yesterday I was asking myself whether we might soon see a change.

I knew Wikileaks before they published the now globally watched video shot from an Apache helicopter in Iraq, but I didn't really care about Wikileaks because I wasn't aware of the size and the complex mechanisms that the platform has established to secure the leaking of thousands of documents from Kenya over Iceland to the USA.

I realised that I had never considered searching for EU documents that had been leaked to the platform, and I suppose many EU journalists haven't either.

Right now, the Wikileaks archives are offline, but as soon as they are back on track, European bloggers and journalists should start searching for the hidden treasures we haven't seen yet. I suppose we will be able to find one or another scoop, and if not it won't take long until those in or around the EU institutions who have access to important documents will start leaking them.

The advantage of the complexity of the European Union is that it is not just one large black hole but that it has so many possible access points that it offers so many little holes, so many brilliant opportunities for leaks. And there are so many diverse interests that one or another side will be willing to make certain developments public.

So far, the possibilities for those holes to be tapped were limited, but Wikileaks and other comparable platforms will allow to build the tubes that transport the leaked content to those who try to uncover the hidden, to show what is discussed and decided in our names behind closed doors, paid by our taxes and legitimated by our votes.

I am looking forward to the day when Wikileaks goes back online to see whether the Leaking Union is already a reality or whether it will become one very soon.

(updated with the citation in the 3rd paragraph on 20 April 2010)

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilianov/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Olli Rehn interview makes big news in Germany

http://www.flickr.com/photos/primeministergr/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Olli Rehn, Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner of the EU, is making big news in Germany with this interview published in the Sunday newspaper WELT am SONNTAG.

The main point of Rehn (on the right on the photo, sitting with Greek prime minister George Papandreou) in the interview is that he wants the EU to be involved already at the planning stage of the establishment of national budgets to prevent excessive deficits. He also criticised Germany's budget plan for 2010.

What is not clear from the interview is which legal consequences this proposal would have. The only consequence Rehn mentions for bad budget plans is that this would result in "very serious discussions" in the Eurogroup - whatever that means.

This interview has received wide attention in Germay, including the top online news platform Spiegel Online, the top TV news Tagesschau (video of the 14:00 edition), national newspaper platform Süddeutsche.de, economic newspaper Handelsblatt and others (e.g. here, here). The Austrian newspaper Der Standard has also taken up the matter.

The Greek crisis has made EU politics hard news, and European politicians like Rehn are apparently using this opportunity to strengthen the public agenda setting power of the Commission - let's see where his proposal will lead.

Europe 2020 - USA 2015 - China Now?

It's not fair to compare the US and the EU system, but the world isn't fair.

While the EU thinks in 10 year terms, US president Obama has proposed a five year plan to double US exports in 5 years.

If Obama doesn't get his country on track over the next three years, he won't be re-elected. If Europe 2020 is no success, most governments and top EU-officials won't be in office anymore, and their successors will make a new plan for 2030.

And I don't talk about China, but just because re-election is not such a big topic over there...

The EU budget procedure under Lisbon

The Commisssion has issued the "Draft Interinstitutional Agreement between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission on cooperation in budgetary matters" which, in its Annex (from page 14), contains a clear procedure for the setting-up of the EU's yearly budget under the Lisbon Treaty.

• Until April: The three institutions meet to discuss the priorities for the next year.

• Last week of April/first week of May: The Commission passes the draft budget.

• Until mid-June: Council and Parliament inform the Commission about possible amendments.

• June/July: The three institutions meet to discuss the draft budget.

• Until the end of July: Council decides on the draft budget.

• Until early October: The Parliaments budget committee votes on the budget (in the version of the Council).

• Until mid-October: The Parliament plenary votes on the budget.

• Until mid-November: If the Parliament has amended the budget in the Council version in its reading, the institutions have 21 days to come to an agreement in the "Conciliation Process" (which is described at length in the draft document)

Interestingly, there are no provisions about what happens when the Council and the Parliament don't come to an agreement.

Visualising EU law

It's just a thought that I had a minute ago because I am working on images in politics right now: Why not try to visualise EU law?

Earlier this morning, via the EU Law (Wordpress) blog, I came across the newly published Rules of Procedure of the European Commission.

I don't think many people outside the institutions will actually read this. It is boring. It is interlaced. As most EU law.

But the rules of procedure (or the Lisbon Treaties), if you read and understand them, produce a visual image of personalities and interactions in your mind, simplified representations of the legal provisions translated into simple pictures or simplified real-life situations.

This should be translated into visual laws.

I am not a very artistic person. That is why I cannot come up with a visual solution myself. But some of you might.

What I am thinking of is an iconographic way of re-writing pieces of law: One could use existing images or invent icons for each and every institution, procedure, document type etc. On can use arrows and other meaningful symbols to show relations of hierarchy, co-operation etc.

When one replaces major parts of existing legal text with these icons and images, one could quickly go through a law and see the connections between its parts through the same or similar visual representations. Complexity of language that is made for and by legal professionals could be reduced to images that can be understand by non-professionals.

And with a click on every image one would get an explanation explaining for what it stands, and, maybe, what other images are directly linked to this image.

Probably this is not very innovative, it must have been thought before. Probably it is not doable because it might have been used already if it was. Probably it's just a thought.

A flag

We were walking up a snowy mountain on this cold Sunday morning in a small town in western Germany.

Half way up the mountain, there was a blue flag with 12 stars waving on a silver pole in front of a private home.

The sun was shining brightly. And in the valley, church bells were ringing.

German flags almost never wave in front of private homes in Germany.

Is Greece a natural disaster?

Two years ago, Stephen Colbert wanted to convince the US to join the EU, but now he is happy "about the self-destruction of Europe". And he knows why P.I.G.S is a perfect acronym on our continent.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Greece's Economic Downfall - Scheherazade Rehman
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

For those of you who have watched the full seven minutes: Yes, you heard correctly - a satirical American news show dares to quote from an actual article of the Lisbon Treaty, something European news don't even consider doing (not even as a joke)...

The Non-Political System: A Short Comparison of the EU and the USA

The EU is in a leadership mess. So is the US.

But while the insulted non-country non-President of the European non-Union gets defended by non-institution officials or supported by bloggers of non-spoken EU languages, the non-United States of America are debating the nonsense of public healthcare and the best coverage is in a non-news show.

And their non-American non-expert John Oliver has a solution for all the non-problems:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bipartisan Health Care Reform Summit 2010 - Government Unity
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Vancouverage 2010

Illusions, nothing but illusions.

ACTA attacked by European Data Protection Supervisor Hustinx

Today, Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), has attacked the ACTA negotiations with a 20-page opinion (PDF) that is absolutely harsh and absolutely clear.

This probably follows yesterday's leak of the (alleged) present Draft Internet Chapter of the ACTA that has caused an outcry in the web community (e.g. here & here) that is already very critical towards the secretive nature of the ACTA negotiation process.

One example of the secrecy is this recent refusal (PDF) of the EU Council to disclose ACTA negotiation documents.

And now the EDPS concludes inter alia:

The EDPS strongly encourages the European Commission to establish a public and transparent dialogue on ACTA, possibly by means of a public consultation, which would also help ensuring that the measures to be adopted are compliant with EU privacy and data protection law requirements.

and

Insofar as the current draft of ACTA includes or at least indirectly pushes for three strikes Internet disconnection policies, ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the protection of personal data and privacy.

What is also notable is that the EDPS complains that he has not been consulted so far - a clear attack on an institution that is meant to protect us citizens against misuse of our private data.

Altogether, Peter Hustinx paints a picture that shows that the measures apparently foreseen infringe our rights to privacy and to freedom of expression - and the Commission and member states continue as if nothing is happening.

(found via Der Schockwellenreiter)

Migrants at Sea

The EU is considered by some as the stronghold against outsiders, especially those whose fishing grounds we have emptied with our trawlers and whose agriculture we have held small with cheap products thanks to excessive agricultural subsidies.

With one post on the film "Welcome" last week and yesterday's posts on the number of people entering the EU legally and on the Frontex feasibility study it now only seems natural to point to the blog

"Migrants at Sea"

that focusses on the topic of illegal migration via sea from Africa to the EU/Europe on a permanent basis. Apparently it needs an American scholar to write such a blog.

Most appreciated that some don't just write occasionally on that topic, after they have been startled by a film!

The Irresponsible Union

I wanted to write a blog post about the irresponsibility of the EU system.

About the fact that whenever something goes wrong, there is nobody to blame for. About the fact that you may find a scapegoat for concrete mistakes, but nobody who is able to correct systematic problems.

I thought I'd mention that the reason why I cannot imagine working for an EU institution is that my experience with national and European governmental organisations was that you can work a lot but that there is almost no way to complain internally about things that go wrong, routines that are useless, communication paths that are inefficient.

Very few people feel responsible for the whole thing, everyone is focused on day-to-day work. Day-to-day problems. The machine has to work, but it doesn't matter where it goes. Your own cogwheel needs to turn quicker and quicker, even when it slows down the whole machine. And if you notice, there is nobody to talk to, at least nobody who could change this.

But I decided not write a blog post about this topic because that is a well-known problem and writing about it won't reach anyone, at least no one who can do anything about it.