Last week, relatively unknown Herman van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton were chosen by the EU’s Heads of State over dinner as the EU’s president and foreign minister, respectively. Or that’s how the media story is spun.
In reality, the media and most commentators have got it wrong. The EU has worked exactly how it is supposed to work, and having flashier or more popular (or populist) persons chosen would have been the exception, not the way things worked out. The fact is that Lisbon treaty did not change all that much, it was evolutinary, rather than revolutionary development. Even when it was still called the Constitutional Treaty, it was never intended to usher in a new era of a different EU. Things that needed fixing were fixed and fine-tuned and the world will not be much different from 1 December 2009. With Lisbon there has been an added layer to the already existing foundation, nothing more.
I think that van Rompuy and Lady Ashton are perfect because they are not so well known. The EU is not about simplistic populist slogans or strong figureheads, but it is about concensus and being able to make the multi-layered and multi-level governance system work. And for that those two are good candidates.
The EU is not, and does not work like a state. That’s why the EU’s “president” (actually the President of the European Council) and “foreign minister” (actually the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) are not like presidents or foreign ministers of countries. It is also why the European Parliament is not like state parliament or why decision-making process is completely different of that of a state. However, this complexity is not easy to explain.
I think this deterioration needs to be addressed as soon as possible, and I see three large issue.
i) Productive capacity needs to be increased substantially. This means increasing the labour force, and this means (as outlined in the World Bank Report, From Red To Grey) facilitating large scale inward migration. Given the serious political implications of encouraging ethnic Russian migration into your country, I see only two viable source regions, the Central Asian Republics in the CIS, and Sub. Saharan Africa. Possibly this solution will not be widely popular with Latvian voters. Well, they do have the right to choose. Your country can take the measures needed to become sustainable, or you can watch it die, as the economy shrinks, and the young people leave. That, I think, is your choice.
The other two measures you need to take are contingent on the first being implemented, since without the first measure you will simply not dispose of the economic resources for the other two.
ii) A serious policy to support those Latvian women who do wish to have children. But with major financial advantages, not half measures, and propaganda stunts. You need policies that can work, and I know plenty of demographers with ideas.But this needs money. Important quantities of money. And gender empowerment, right across the economy, at every level. We have formal legal equality in the labour market, but evident biological and reproductive inequality, in that only one of the parties gets to bear the children. The institutional resources of the state need to redress this imbalance.
iii) Major reforms in the health system to address the underlying male life expectancy problem. You can only seriously hope to raise the labour force participation rates at 65 and over if people arrive at these ages in a fundamentally healthy condition. In economic terms, simple investment theory shows why this is the case. A given society spends a given quantity of resources on producing a given number of children, those who have citizens who live and work longer evidently get a better return on their investment. If you want to raise Latvian living standards, you have to raise the life expectancy. And this apart from the evident human issues.
I think all of this applies to Estonia as well. The last two are already somewhat handled in Estonia, there are programs which support young families and although male life expectancy is still rather low, more effort is being put in sport promotion programmes for general public, healthy lifestyles are promoted etc. The nordic nature of Estonians (and the Finnish role-model) might also contribute to helping Estonians live longer, although at the moment it looks rather bleak.
I tend to agree with Edward Hugh that many of the problems of Estonia’s economic crises have been caused by lack of people. This was true during the boom times (the labour force shortage helped to push the salaries up quickly) and is even worse now that many truly skilled people move abroad where they are offered better salaries and ways of self-improvement, leaving in Estonia a mass of former construction workers and factory workers who have been laid off and who are probably unable neither to leave Estonia nor re-qualify for another job. Meanwhile, it is still difficult to find well-educated people in many areas, regardless of the growing unemployment rate.
A part of the solution is to train those people at our universities. Fortunately, Estonian public policy of pushing people to go to professional education and not to universities has failed and people are still going to universities en-masse (this year’s admissions has been the highest in recent years). It seems, however, that the funds used for the ill-fated push for professional education could have been used better at supporting universities. It is questionable if the big public universities themselves, still bureaucratic behemots with Soviet-era legacies, can provide the skills, knowledge and values required to educate them. The universities could do more with continuing education as well, offering a range of specialised courses for those seeking to update or refresh their skills and knowledge, but not willing to spend time (and money) on full Master or Doctoral programs.
The second part of the solution is increased immigration of unskilled workers from other non-EU countries. This means a change of paradigm in mainstream politics and suppression of strong nationalistic moods prevalent in the society. None of the major political parties in Estonia recognises or debates is the need to increase immigration. Walking around even in Tallinn’s streets it would be very difficult to spot any people who are non-ethnic Estonians or Russians and are not tourists. This is probably due to the effecient work of the Citizenship and Migration Board, which seems to pride itself on keeping the foreigners (at least those not from EU or US) out. One only needs to look at the low numbers of accepted refugees and asylum seekers for this.
Where should the new immigrants come from? The most obvious (and easiest to stomach politically) might be immigrants from Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other countries which many Estonians have compassion to. I am not so sure that a large scale inward migration from Africa will be as welcomed, although sooner or later there will also be more ethnically diverse mix of people in Estonia as well.
In order to have a long-term and sustainable solution instead of the race to the Euro at all costs, immigration policies must be reviewed and inward immigration increased gradually.
In an article in the Guardian, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer offers a rather insightful analysis of the realities of a new Russia – EU relationship. He suggests the EU to take specific steps to counter Russia’s power politics:
This requires several measures:
A new political dynamism vis-à-vis Turkey to link this country, one crucial for European security, permanently to Europe;
Putting a stop to Moscow’s divide-and-conquer politics by adopting a common EU energy policy;
Serious initiative for strengthening Europe’s defence capabilities;
A greater EU commitment to Ukraine to safeguard its independence;
A greater freedom of travel for all the EU’s Eastern neighbours.
I do not think any of these suggestions are especially difficult to agree upon in the EU, so the initiative should start now.
Technically, Estonia seems to be in a recession, as our GDP growth has been negative for two quarters in a row. There are some important factors that do not make this a regular recession:
1. Unemployment rates are 4% (which is 0,2% below last quarter and 1% less than last year’s same quarter). So people still have jobs and the incomes of people actually should be growing at a normal rate. People seemed to have been scared off by the media’s talk about a possible recession and the rising prices and simply stopped spending as much as they used to.
2. The real estate market has not collapsed. In July actually the number of transactions rose slightly, which might (or might not) be an early indication of a recovery in that sector and the economy as a whole.
3. The statistics are always behind the times. As we live in August, we get the picture of the state of the economy in the quarter ending 30 June. It is important to see what are the numbers for this quarter, if it is going to be more than this quarter’s growth, the worse will be over.
4. The external factors are looking better as well. Oil prices are falling, euro is weakening slightly (helping exports).
So the thought should be do not panic, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
There are a large number of areas in a large number of countries where there is a dominant ethnic minority (vis-a-vis the majority nationality in the main part of the country). In Estonia for example North East Estonia, where there are 95% ethnic Russians living in the city of Narva. The same applied for Kosovo and Serbia to a certain degree and the same applies to South Ossetia and Abkhasia in Georgia, Transdnistria in Moldova. This also applies to Scotland and Wales in the UK, parts of the Netherlands, the Basque country in Spain, etc etc.
The current doctrine of international law does not allow for independence for these regions. This principle was breached in the case of Kosovo, and this has also fueled Russian resolve to attack Georgia and try to take South Ossetia and Abkhasia. It is clear that the agressor in Georgia’s case is Russia which has embarked on a development route, which can be described as a neo-Fascism with neo-Soviet crust. However, things should not have been made so easy for them by allowing Kosovo to become independent.
In the EU the role of the Member States is diminishing, there are common values, common principles regarding rule of law, democracy, human rights, etc, which are respected in all of these states. Thus is does not matter much where you live or which nationality you are. The same situation must be strived for in other countries with conflict situations as well. The international law and principles should be strong enough to guarantee a minimal level of protection for all human beings, regardless of where they live.
If we were to accept the example of Kosovo and agree now also to the “right” of South Ossetians to become independent (and merge with Russia), there will be no end for conflicts, both internal and full wars. The world has become a much more dangerous place and it is the job for the community of democratic countries to act decisively to guarantee the peace. Otherwise who knows which country will be next…
Now that my active participation with TEN and EYP is over, I have been focusing my activities on human rights issues. Namely, I am working to establish in the long-term an Estonian Human Rights Centre, the first step has been to create the Human Rights Centre at International University Audentes.
One of the projects I have undertaken is to give expert advice on human rights as one of the legal experts for the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency. One of the first tasks for our team was to complete a Study on Homophobia and Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation – Estonia (download PDF) which was one of the basis for FRA’s comparative report “Homophobia and Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation in the EU Member States Part I – Legal Analysis” (full report in PDF, press release).
In the fall, the Human Rights Centre will publish its own report on Human Rights in Estonia in 2007.
In an interview to the Associated Press on board the flight back from Khanty-Mansiisk president Ilves explains why he walked out of the Fenno-Ugric Congress, and gives his thoughts on Russian developments. Nice balanced reporting from the AP, including the final quote from Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission:
“The EU is completely against all kinds of totalitarianism,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. “We reject totalitarianism, including Soviet totalitarianism.”
I wrote an article on the Irish No vote to EU, in which I make the rather unpopular argument that EU treaty modifications are so complex that they are not suitable for referenda. The Irish no-vote is an indirect consequence of the 1987 decision by the Irish Supreme Court, requiring Ireland to always put all EU treaty modifications to a referendum.
If we started the EU from scratch today, it would be much different, but we have to look at the historical context in which it developed and make best of the system we already have in place. The voters are indirectly represented in two ways, the Lisbon treaty has been approved by the European Parliament, which consists of representatives of EU citizens, and it has been represented by 18 member state parliaments, which have also been democratically elected by the people.
It is interesting to note the comments section for my article, where there is actually quite a lot of meaningful debate on what is the meaning of democracy in today’s world (along with the usual name-calling and personal insults).
It appears that the best hope for a more integrated Europe has gone. The Lisbon Treaty, already a Plan B after the failure of the Constitutional Treaty has been rejected by the voters in Ireland, the only country where a referendum was held. It is a sad day for Europe, as it appears there is no Plan C.
Populist rightwingers can continue their lies and misinformation about the European Union.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights, abolishment of the pillars and streamlining lawmaking process are now all on hold.
I do not understand who say that this was a democratic vote. It was not. 3 million Irish people decided to hold back 500 million Europeans. The No campaign was based on misrepresenting, fearmongering and unashamed populism, which muffled the Yes vote. The whole situation is absurd.
Recent Comments