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15922. Multi-annual financial framework and Next Generation EU, Review of an unprecedented, tumultuous European budgetary chapter
- Author:
- Anne Vitrey and Sébastien Lumet
- Publication Date:
- 10-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- Negotiations on the adoption of the multi-annual financial framework 2021-2027 and the "Next Generation EU" recovery fund continue. Although hope of an agreement allowing deployment from 1 January 2021 has not yet been lost, there are still many sticking points. This is illustrated by the strong tensions that have recently emerged between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, but also between Member States, themselves reluctant to question the precarious balance of the 21 July agreement.
- Topic:
- Budget, European Union, Finance, and Economic Recovery
- Political Geography:
- Europe
15923. Creation of a European Solidarity Funds: Directing Europeans’ savings towards their growth companies
- Author:
- Emmanuel Sales
- Publication Date:
- 11-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- Europe has an excess of savings and its companies lack equity capital. This diagnosis was made a long time ago and the crises the continent has been going through over the last 10 years have accentuated this gap. European growth companies are rapidly falling prey to large non-European firms that benefit from a deep and liquid stock market. Thus, despite the existing arrangements, Europe is unable to impose world champions that would allow it to build its sovereignty against the United States and China. The creation of a new category of UCITS funds open to all EU savers, the European Sovereign Funds, would help us respond to this challenge by providing medium-sized companies with the fresh capital they need to ensure their development and independence.
- Topic:
- Financial Crisis, European Union, Economic Growth, and Capital
- Political Geography:
- Europe
15924. The European Union and its model to regulate international trade relations
- Author:
- Danièle Hervieu-Léger
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- The European Union is one of the main promoters of free trade agreements (FTAs). This position is not new: since the mid-2000s, and even more so in the decade now ending, the Commission, supported by the Council and the European Parliament, has constantly sought to negotiate and conclude new trade agreements. This strategy has paid off. In 2018, almost a third of trade between Europe and the rest of the world was covered by the preferential provisions of an FTA, a figure that is expected to increase significantly in 2020, following the entry into force of the agreement with Vietnam, and to rise in the coming years to more than 40% if the agreements currently being negotiated with Mercosur, the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and possibly the United Kingdom come into force.
- Topic:
- International Trade and Finance, European Union, Free Trade, and Trade
- Political Geography:
- Europe
15925. Relations between the European Union and the United Kingdom: a final agreement in view?
- Author:
- Christian Lequesne
- Publication Date:
- 07-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- The United Kingdom officially left the European Union on 31 January 2020 following the signing of the exit agreement. This departure went hand in hand with the opening of a transitional period until 31 December 2020, during which the rules of the internal market continue to govern relations between the two sides. However, negotiations have not yet been completed, since the framework for the future relationship between the United Kingdom – which has now become a third country – and the 27 Member States of the European Union has yet to be established. The joint political declaration of 30 January 2020 accompanying the exit Agreement provides for : "an ambitious, broad, deep, flexible partnership in trade and economic cooperation – with a comprehensive and balanced free trade agreement at its centre –, law enforcement and criminal justice, foreign, security and defence policy, as well as broader areas of cooperation"[1]. Initiated in February 2020 the negotiations on the future Agreement have been hampered by the Covid-19 pandemic. The 27 Member States decided that the defence of their positions would, as with the exit Agreement, be entrusted to the European Commission represented by a single negotiator, the Frenchman Michel Barnier. On the British side, former diplomat, David Frost, is in charge of defending the positions of the British government led by Boris Johnson, however the former will be called to another post as Government Adviser for National Security from September 2020. Although face-to-face negotiations resumed in Brussels at the end of June 2020, in substance they have made very modest progress. Hence a legitimate question: can an agreement on the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union be reached by 31 December 2020, while Boris Johnson's government has refused to make use of the possibility offered of extending the transition period and thus the negotiations until 30 June 2020? Is there a risk of ending the year 2020 without a no deal and to have economic relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union governed by the common law of the World Trade Organisation?
- Topic:
- Regional Cooperation, European Union, and Trade
- Political Geography:
- United Kingdom and Europe
15926. Emerging from the political crisis in Belarus: with or without the intervention of external actors?
- Author:
- Ekaterina Pierson-Lyzhina
- Publication Date:
- 10-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- The protests against Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, which have continued beyond the August 9 presidential election, have been surprising in terms of their scale and level of politicization. The protest promises to be long-lasting bringing together people of all ages and professions, but the authorities are refusing to recognize it and are not satisfying any of its demands: to organize new this time democratic elections, to stop repression, to release detainees and political prisoners, to investigate crimes committed by the representatives of law enforcement agencies. Quite the opposite is happening: the crackdown orchestrated by Lukashenka’s regime, after a certain lull between August 12 and 16, is intensifying with hundreds of arrests per day, the repression against the emerging leaders and journalists (from the private media) who report the facts. What are the scenarios of the development of this crisis which seems to have reached an impasse? Can Belarus emerge from it without resorting to foreign mediation? What role could the European Union play?
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Authoritarianism, and Protests
- Political Geography:
- Eurasia and Belarus
15927. Challenges facing the CAP over the next decade
- Author:
- Bernard Bourget
- Publication Date:
- 02-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will enter the next decade relieved by Brexit of its fiercest opponent but weakened by the external pressures to which it has been subjected, and disrupted by the enlargement of the European Union. In the 2020s, it will have to take full account, in conjunction with the European Commission's Green Deal, of the environmental and climate issues that are so important for agriculture. It will also have to improve the management of climate, health and market risks, which global warming could aggravate, and strengthen the negotiating capacity of producer organisations with their powerful buyers in the food industry and supermarkets. Budgetary pressure may lead the European Union to distribute direct payments, (which account for three quarters of CAP expenditure), more fairly by placing the burden rather more on large farms, in order to spare the medium-sized family farms, which are still numerous in the western part of the continent. Finally, the CAP should be coordinated with other European policies, particularly trade policy.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Climate Change, Budget, European Union, and Trade Policy
- Political Geography:
- Europe
15928. Mediterranean Sea: a paradigm of contemporary conflicts
- Author:
- Admiral Jean Casabianca
- Publication Date:
- 06-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- Looking back at my military career, during which I sailed and battled above and below so many oceans, I am struck by the duality of the Mediterranean Sea. It is indeed for me as well a familiar environment as an area of perpetual uncertainty, which contributed to define me as a man, a sailor and a military leader. Predicators say that the Mediterranean, stage of the first major clashes between civilizations, will not be anymore the international centre of gravity and that the Pacific Ocean will take over this role. It remains however a major hub for the interactions of key strategic competitors.
- Topic:
- Security, Defense Policy, Military Affairs, and Conflict
- Political Geography:
- Mediterranean
15929. European solidarity in times of crisis: a legacy to develop in the face of COVID-19
- Author:
- Yves Bertoncini
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- Now more than ever, the fight against coronavirus encourages an analysis of the foundations and limits of solidarity between the Member States of the European Union, just as the 70th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, often cited for its call for "concrete achievements that first create a de facto solidarity".
- Topic:
- Development, European Union, Solidarity, COVID-19, and Health Crisis
- Political Geography:
- Europe
15930. Coronavirus: globalisation is not the cause but the remedy
- Author:
- Blaise Wilfert
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Robert Schuman Foundation (RSF)
- Abstract:
- While the Covid-19 pandemic is unfolding in all its violence, "globalisation", to read more than one, is said to be the great culprit for what is happening to us, whether it has been the lightning speed of the virus' spread, the impotence of States to stop its progression, the inability of "capitalism" to produce medical equipment or the madness of stock market speculation. The logical consequence of this has been the repeated call, with some pathos, urgently to invent the time “after”, after the follies of globalisation. The magnitude of the shock that Covid-19 represents provides an ideal sounding board to replay a tune that is in fact an old one, familiar to us since the 1990s at least, or even the 1980s, but with an incomparable and therefore particularly disturbing echo. Defined both as liberalization - the triumph of the borderless market economy - and as planetarisation - the unification of the planet through flows of all kinds, information, migrants, ideas and representations, tourists, religious practices - globalisation is said to have become a form of disease fatal to the world. Hence to deglobalise[ 1]. Yet, it has to be said again, more than twenty years after Paul Krugman, globalisation is not to blame, and those who currently claim the opposite, with a communicative passion, pretending to draw conclusions from a lucid analysis of the recent past, rely on biased historical narratives to impose a political agenda, whether explicit or implicit. So, let a historian try to say a word about it, since understanding the times we are in requires understanding the times from whence we have come.
- Topic:
- Globalization, Markets, Coronavirus, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus