EUROPEAN ELECTIONS 

The ALDE Logo

The new European Parliament will hold its inaugural session this July 15th. There is some interest in finding out what the parties look like on the inside. As a first step, let's take a look at ALDE.

With 83 seats, ALDE is the third largest group in the Parliament. The group is made up out of two parties: the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party (ELDR) and the European Democratic Party (EDP). Most ALDE MEPs belong to the ELDR, but some in the new Parliament including MoDem, Marian Harkin and the Lithuanian Labour Party belong to the EDP, which will probably continue to exist.

As you may remember, European Parties are all but united on their socioeconomic policies and their stance with regard to EU integration. There is some group likeness, but grouping is often more due to the historical lineage of parties than their agreement on current political issues.

For aid in finding out how sane the current ALDE is, we have the EU Profiler (also see An Electoral Compass for the European Elections). It neatly divides all European parties into 4 political quadrants (for and against the EU, and socioeconomic left and right).

See below the fold... afew

Better energy networks are an important part of a more sustainable future. They can enable a greater share of renewables, and more decentralised energy production. Last November, the European Union started a public consultation on energy networks. DoDo flagged this in a debate on eurotrib, and DoDo and I wrote some initial responses for the consultation.

You'll find a consolidated response after the jump, which was drafted by DoDo and edited by me. Please give us your feedback. We will have to submit our response by March 31st. That is, next Tuesday.

As a guide, the draft response first gives a general response and then answers the 11 questions in the consultation.

Bumped by afew

The pan-European blogosphere is among the more self-conscious. We have been aware of one another's existence for some time. I tried to create an overview back in 2006. And there were more successful efforts to that end by Nosemonkey. Euractiv has a running feature on euroblogs and started its own initiative with blogactiv. Jon Worth has a good post that brings all of this together. But the spark for more purposeful cooperation may also have been the research by Myra von Ondarza.

Myra's study analysed the euroblogosphere from the perspective of social movement research. She used a dual-pathway model, which holds that there is an element of identification and an element of calculation to social movement action. Her conclusion was basically that we eurobloggers aren't a social movement, but just a set of wonks who like to write about the EU and who have little more in common than a desire to see a better discourse.

Since then, eurobloggers are undertaking what I see as three broad strategies to become more active and relevant. We're trying to bring bloggers together, we're trying to grow the blogosphere and we're trying to improve our presentation. An example of the second is our involvement in the th!nk about it competition. But the main effort is the bloggingportal.

In the middle of December, the European Union passed a legislative package on climate change policy that should be understood in the context of this year's global negotiations on the topic. Because the package represents a minor step back from what the EU had promised to do unilaterally, it was lambasted by environmental groups. More surprisingly, some media organisations jumped in on the action.

Many of the objections of environmentalists to European climate change policy can be understood in the context of the 'Overton window'. Their criticism is harsher than would seem reasonable, but this is a design to shift the political centre towards their position.  The centre, in that context, is a social construction mainly formulated through the mainstream media. For more, read this post by Jamais Cascio.

As a perpetual concern troll, I worry whether this approach is overrated. The least that needs to be digested is that the original formulation of the Overton window is about advocating more extreme policies than you wish to see implemented in order to widen the spectrum of imagined solutions. Not just about kicking up noise.

promoted by afew

SPIEGEL ONLINE has posted a very intriguing article on Airbus that, on the surface, seems like superficial pro-corporate fluff. But it's either unintentionally revealing, or there's more to it. The relevant part:

Calm Skies: Airbus Flies in the Face of Recession Winds - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Airbus is counting on European export credit agencies -- quasi-governmental banks that help finance export deals -- to provide financing for about half of Airbus deliveries this year, twice the normal level.

At the same time, Airbus executives say that a two-year-old cost-cutting program, known as Power 8, has yielded benefits that make layoffs unlikely. The company has slashed annual operating costs by more than $1.7 billion and is on track for more than $2.5 billion in additional savings by 2012, Chief Operating Officer Fabrice Brégier said on Jan. 15. Already, the company's full-time workforce has been cut from 54,000 to 47,600, with some of those positions shifted to temporary workers or subcontractors.

Continued below the jump.

From June 4th to June 7th 2009 elections will be held in the second largest democracy of the world. That is, the European Union Parliament Elections. The elections will establish the mandates of 785 Members of European Parliament, and will also inaugur a new Commission to be approved by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.

The composition of the Council, made up out of national governments, is largely fixed after the recent elections in Romania, as long as there are no further government crises that prompt elections well before next June. The field is set.

This election comes in interesting times, as the curse says. It could be a change election like the US elections last November, even if there is yet no systematic trust crisis across the EU. There's an outside chance of something really strange happening, a breakthrough, for which I am of course pining.

One major institutional obstacle to the possibility of anything ever breaking through in Europe, though, is the lack of public discourse on the European level. Now, you are supposedly a receptive audience for this sermon, because we're all talking on this level or beyond it. But most of the chattering goes on purely within a national context. And the European Tribune alone isn't enough to change that. Which is where the following plug comes in:

promoted by afew

The circus among the German Social Democrats (SPD) around prominent reformist Wolfgang Clement has ended with his resignation from the party. It has ended in one of the worse ways possible.

Wolfgang Clement speaking at the INSM. Source: 96dpi / creativecommons.org

Wolfgang Clement was a former minister of the economy in Schröder's second government, and a former state Minister President. He fell in disrepute among many in the SPD after he publicly warned against electing Andrea Ypsilanti in the German state of Hesse. Party members soon started filing applications to request his expulsion from the party. An expulsion procedure was eventually launched, and although the local SPD arbitration court decided to leave him with a reprimand, the State arbitration court - in his own state, North Rhine-Westphalia - decided to expel Clement from the party.

The party base wanted Clement to go, but the centrist federal leadership decided to make highly publicised efforts to reach out. And so this Monday we got the unfortunate news that the national arbitration court let Clement stay on as a party member, and gave him a reprimand.

Now the centrists have belatedly found out what they have been dealing with. It turns out that Clement had only been fighting his expulsion in order to keep the honour to himself, and publicly lecture the SPD one last time.

Promoted with slight edit by DoDo

Geoengineering describes a project of rapid, large-scale intervention at some points to alter the earth's surface temperature. It's been discussed in-depth in these two diaries on the European Tribune:

Cooling the Earth: CO2, SO2, and The Sunscreen Fix by technopolitical (Oct. 2006)
Geoengineering: basic principles, some thoughts, some questions by asiegel (Mar. 2008)

There may be large differences in how we think about geoengineering. In my opinion, it should be seen as both an extreme and transitional measure. But at least we seemed to agree that there is a need to research it and to set priorities. What I proposed was the following:

Planting trees and mechanical air capture of carbon are better than injecting SO2 into the stratosphere, which again is better than seeding the oceans with iron dust. In my opinion...

There are more interesting options beyond those, which you can find in asiegel's diary.

Now we have a bit more to go by, as some of the more common ideas about geoengineering have been studied and ranked in a Nature Geoscience paper by New Zealander Philip Boyd.

Promoted by afew

Today I had the hairbrained idea to plan for buying a new fridge / freezer with my flat-sharing community. As we only have old stuff, and I mean old as in fifteen to twenty years old, I suspect that it uses far too much power. Plus, it is my patriotic duty to consume when the economy goes down, or something.

Of course to get something that uses a lot less power you will need information. So I started a search for Energieeffizienz Geräte. The first page I got was the federal environment ministry. I later repeated the search for Energieverbrauch Geräte (energy use for appliances), which is a more habitual expression. The ministry's page was the top sponsored link, although not in the first ten search results.

It was a November day in 2006 when Horst Müller's telephone rang. The other side of the line had Michael Höhenberger, the bureau chief of Bavarian Minister-President Dr. Edmund Stoiber. Mr. Höhenberger had some questions about Gabriele Pauli. He wanted to know what reasons she had for her 'inexplicable' political behaviour. He further asked Müller about issues Pauli was rumoured to have with alcohol, and about her alternating contacts with men.

Müller was responsible for economics in the city government of Fürth, and Gabrielle Pauli was the administrator of the neighbouring rural district. As a friend, Müller told Pauli about this telephone call when the two met at a Christmas party.

Gabriele Pauli may not have held too high an office, but she was a prominent member of the Christian Social Union. Partially because of looks, partially because of intellect. Pauli was elected as a member of the executive board of the Christian Social Union in 1989, even before becoming District Administrator. The board has 45 members and governs the political direction of the party.

At a meeting of this board, shortly before Christmas, Pauli dropped a bombshell by accusing the Minister-President's office of spying on her. This was immediately derided as attention-seeking, paranoia, and hysteria by the party establishment. A media frenzy followed.

In the end, Höhenberger was asked to leave the Minister-President's office within a few days. And Dr. Edmund Stoiber would not be long to follow.

Big election day this Sunday in Europe, with Belarus, Austria and the German state of Bavaria. Over 30 million people, altogether.

I too get a chance to cast a vote, in Berlin, though tactically, I'd probably be better adviced not to.

There's a referendum in Berlin Mitte on the extension of zones in which parking fees are levied. The machines are already operating, but a citizen's initiative has gathered enough votes to get a referendum.

As this is in a district of Berlin and not in the entire state, all EU citizens that have residency can vote.

Update [2008-9-28 10:49:29 by nanne]:Results here.

Update [2008-9-28 14:42:27 by nanne]: Preliminary results after all votes have been counted: 79,4% for eliminating parking fees; 20,6% against; participation at 11,7%. Referendum fails to overturn the extension due to not meeting the participation threshold.

Austria is up for a snap election on the 28th of September. The 'grand' governing coalition between the social-democratic SPÖ and the conservative ÖVP collapsed in July. And the reasons for that collapse were interesting in the context of Europe. One of the disagreements was over a statement by the Chancellor, Alfred Gusenbauer of the SPÖ, who promised a referendum if an amended version of the Lisbon Treaty would have to be passed again. But however tempting it is to think that the European Union has become an important item of political contention, the coalition's collapse had been coming for a long time.

'Gusenbauer's SPÖ costs trust'. That was the slogan of the ÖVP in the last Austrian elections (see this youtube diary). Negative campaigning against Gusenbauer didn't pay out immediately for the ÖVP. They lost the election by 34 to 35 percent, and because it was the only possible option, had to get in as the minor party of a grand coalition. The ÖVP had led the government for seven years prior to that election, including one highly controversial coalition with the far-right FPÖ, then led by Jörg Haider. The Chancellor in those seven years, Wolfgang Schüssel, did not take up a position in the government, but remains influential as the leader of the ÖVP in Parliament.

Whether or not as an effect of the ÖVP's negative campaigning against him, Gusenbauer proved to be an unpopular Chancellor. In part this seems to have been due to not being able to hold some of the promises he made during the 2006 electoral campaign. More than anything, this indicates poor public relations on Gusenbauer's part. He should have been able to pin the blame for that on the ÖVP, which was nearly as strong a party.

Promoted by DoDo

So Eurostat has drafted a news release for its new population statistics, which has been picked up by the Beeb and several blogs, as they show the UK becoming the largest European country in terms of population in 2060.

The UK allegedly is to grow to a population of 77 million by then, and will be bigger than France (72 million in 'Metropolitan' France) and Germany (71 million).

Never mind Turkey...

European countries apparently want to have these numbers, as they have asked Eurostat in a Council resolution to produce them. Still, Eurostat's methodology leaves a lot to be desired.

(crossposted from the DJ Nozem blog)

Front-paged by afew

A breakthrough by the MIT in generating hydrogen through electrolysis has spurred an astounding bout of wildly off-base reporting. It was heralded as a breakthrough in solar power, and even credited with knocking some dollars of the oil price by excitable, uncritical reporters.

Electrolysis does not discriminate as to the source of the electrical current. Anyone covering science or green innovation should immediately recognise this.

The new procedure generated this amount of coverage because the scientist responsible (Daniel Nocera) framed it effectively in the context of a powerful myth: the myth of the autonomous, self-sufficient, energy-producing home. This myth is ubiquitous in talk of a hydrogen economy.

It starts with the MIT Press Release:

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.

Promoted by afew

There is a lot of interesting discussion in the European blogosphere about issues related to the Irish referendum. Like the list of demands of Sinn Féin. Like the speculation about funding of Libertas by the American defence establishment. The latter is typical 'undernews' that is, for now, being ignored by the mainstream media.

But let's not lose sight of the big picture.

The Lisbon Treaty did not fail the Irish referendum due to evil American defence corporations, rich Irish corporate hacks, or because it had some elements that irked a small post-marxist Irish party. It failed because it failed to take into account basic emotional responses that any European electorate would have had. If put to a referendum, it would fail in the vast majority of European Union Member States.

(based upon this post over on my blog)

If the process of drafting, approving and ratifying the Lisbon Treaty has shown anything, it is that the normal treaty procedure which the European Union requires for institutional changes is broken and should be replaced by something better.

Due to a series of dilemmas that tie into one another very much like the clichéd Gordian knot (1), chances of getting something better across are slim. Still, this is an attempt to set some goals.

There are two basic requirements for a new institutional solution. First, it needs to be presented as a short, readable text. That is easier than it might seem. Second, it needs to set a framework that can self-adapt. In other words, it needs to do away with the current problem that all major changes in the powers, institutions and objectives of the European Union require a cascade of national parliamentary ratifications.

(This diary is one outcome of a chat with Migeru on the EU. More should follow.)

While the foreign press has been rambling on about the latest stunt of Geert Wilders, the peroxide-dyed agitator from Limburg, a far more potent force on the right has emerged in the Netherlands.

Rita Verdonk, a former minister from the second Balkenende cabinet and deeply involved in the fall of that cabinet over the Ayaan Hirsi Ali citizenship controversy, has launched her 'political movement' Trots Op Nederland (proud of NL).

Verdonk and her Americophile campaign manager Kay van der Linde launched the "it's not a party, it's a movement!" in the bombastic style of a US party convention.

(x-posted)

Promoted by Migeru

Maybe I'm stealing Euan's schtick here, and maybe Piebalgs blogging is getting repetitive. But the energy Commissioner has written another blog post in which he takes the opponents of biofuels to task:

Commissioner Andris Piebalgs - Blog - Biofuels Good or Evil?

[Statements opposing biofuels] have been widely reported and set the dominant tone on the biofuel debate. Contrary views are hardly heard. Yet, these statements are misleading or plain wrong. I myself drive an ethanol-powered Saab 9-5 and certainly I would not even think of it if I had the slightest suspicion that I'm contributing in any way to global warming, or, even worse, to an international genocide. This is why I consider that it is essential to regain a sense of proportion in this debate and try to have a discussion on this issue that is less intemperate and one-sided. I'm confident that this blog can be a good place to do this, and I plan to have a number of entries on this issue, and of course, your comments to them will be extremely welcome. 

Increased attention to the pitfalls of biofuels is most welcome, and I do not think that views supporting biofuels have really been drowned out. Having bought in to biofuels personally, moreover, can hardly be an argument. Ethanol car drivers should take a page from Alan AtKisson instead of presuming that they could not have made a mistake.

Promoted by Colman

I tried to get out of the atheism debate, but they keep pulling me back in.

The small band of people who are now referred to as 'the new atheists' finally lost the last bit of my respect when a few years ago, they were trying to re-label themselves as 'brights'. To be honest, I never cared all that much for Dawkins, but I had expected Dennett to know better. At the time, I was more sympathetic to the notion of developing a fitting label for philosophical naturalists than I am now -- but not something that self-evidently stupid. The entire episode made me cringe.

If you want a reasoned take, read Chris Mooney.

Upon first hearing of the 'new atheists', then, I must admit I had a preconceived idea about Dawkins and Dennett. I also had a preconceived idea about Christopher Hitchens, based upon Hitchens doing a joint tour of the UK with David Horowitz, and reading oh, dozens of his columns on Slate either spewing bile and unsupported allegations on Bill Clinton or claiming that there really were WMD in Iraq. Hitchens is a polemicist for the sake of polemics and I feel I've quite saturated the empirics to make that determination without reading his latest column or book. It just is not worthwhile anymore.

So you have this group of people (including Sam Harris, whom I don't know much about and thereby won't comment upon) who go into the media with each to his a book with a provocative title, talking about how they are no longer going to be quiet in the face of the widespread societal intolerance engendered by people of faith! It doesn't take much to think that these people are just being confrontational. I used a common pejorative to describe that, which I shan't repeat in this rejoinder.

(This diary is a response to Ted Welch's 'On misunderstanding Dawkins', which was in turn sparked by ThatBritGuy's diary 'On not understanding Religion')

Eager to shore up its relations with the public, the European Commission has launched a slick website boasting 10 achievements the European Union has made for you in 2007. The Commissioner for Communication, Margot Wallström, writes:

The EU is there for the citizens and its aim is to respond to their needs and concerns. In 2007, its 50th anniversary, the Union has again taken concrete actions leading to concrete results. These range from measures to combat climate change to providing the European consumer with a wider choice of goods and services at lower prices.

In 2006, when the Commission was still at a loss at what to do about the stranded Constitution, it launched a "citizen's agenda", which focused on "delivering results for Europe" through concrete policy drives. The focus on implementing policies that will benefit citizens in order to increase the popularity of the EU was deliberate, as the Communication (.pdf) testifies. The promotional website and folder on "Europe and you in 2007" have to be seen through this lens.

(Originally posted as 'EU Achievements for Its Citizens 2007' on the Atlantic Community and 'The State of the Citizen's European Union' on the Atlantic Review

Diary rescue by Migeru