Archive for April, 2009
Why I Don’t Criticise The Commission over Fishing Policy
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on April 28th, 2009
A week ago the European Commission published its Green paper ‘Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy.’ This has widely been interpreted as a confession of failure; an admission that years of subsidy to the fishing industry, matched by ever decreasing quotas, has left fish, fishermen and consumers worse off than before. Indeed, with 30 per cent of fish stock below safe biological limits, there are now real doubts whether fishing, as we know it today, will survive at all.
The Green Paper is perhaps our last chance to come to grips with these problems. The Commission is appealing to anyone who may have a view to voice it. And this time I sense that it means to listen.
Unlike most Commission papers, this one is not written in mid-Atlantic Cherokee; it is well-drafted and well-thought out. Here then in the Commission’s own words is the problem we face.
‘European fish stocks have been overfished for decades and the fishing fleets remain
too large for the available resources. This combination means that too many vessels
chase too few fish and many parts of the European fleet are economically unviable.
The outcome has been a continuous decrease in the amounts of seafood fished from
Europe’s waters: more than half of the fish consumed on the European market is now
imported. The high volatility of oil prices and the financial crisis have exacerbated
the low economic resilience of fishing.’
The Commission’s policies – agreed, let us not forget by national governments (although sometimes after amendment so that it cannot be said that what has been implemented, and still less what has been enforced, is what the Commission wanted to happen) have been widely criticised. The criticism has been strongest among those nations which, before the Common Fisheries Policies gave Europe a single sea, had decent enough seas of their own with sufficient fish in them to satisfy home demand. Among these, Britain, Ireland and France stand out.
The critics, almost universally, demand the scrapping of the Common Policy and replacing this with a series of national policies, primarily designed to keep out the fishing fleets of other nations. The British press has been particularly vociferous in this regard conveniently forgetting that when, in the 1970s, Iceland did just that and enforced an Iceland-only policy around her coasts, Britain not only complained but sent destroyers to interpose themselves between the trawlers and the irate Icelanders.
Nevertheless, scrapping the Common Fisheries Policy has become a talisman; if only the wretched CFP were destroyed, so the argument goes, and replaced by national policies all would be sweetness and light in the seas of Europe and even if it weren’t then why should we in Britain care anyway about the Baltic and the Mediterranean? But the problem is that those who advance a national policy don’t then follow their noses and address the difficult issues for which a national policy, no less than a common one, would need to provide.
These include: the problem of communities, often rural, dependent on fishing; the decline of fish stocks – caused not only by over-fishing, but also, so the scientists tell us, by pollution and by climate change – the enormously increased efficiency of the fishing fleet which can, by sonar and similar techniques, identify whole shoals of fish and hoover them all up – the financial pressures on fishermen that lead them to want to maximise their catch whatever maybe the longer term consequence to the marine environment by using techniques, such as beam trawling, that have a highly injurious effect on the nursery grounds on which fish breed and grow – the problem of enforcement when fishery protection has a low priority for most navies – the problem of historical rights of access and so on.
A national policy would have to deal with all of these. And by the time such a national policy was devised and the need for co-ordination with adjacent nations discovered, fish being inconveniently mobile creatures, we might well find that the nationalists were again arguing for some comprehensive and overarching policy that tackled these issues from Brussels, rather than leaving national ministers to shoulder the responsibility for putting communities of fisherfolk on the dole.
Balancing conservation, competing national interests and support for fishing communities is an almost impossible task; that is why I do not rush to criticise the Commission.
Besides even national policies can be remote and heavy-handed. I speak from experience having been, briefly, in nominal charge of the fisheries portfolio for Wales. With local fishermen I drew up plans to protect certain nursery areas and to to regulate fishing in others. But, of course, fishing was a UK responsibility. And at UK level officials were far too exercised with the problems of major ports like Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood to show the remotest concern about what might be happening in remote Milford Haven.
Besides the ecological crisis in fishing is now so acute that this is not the best time to root up the foundations of policy. To see what risks happening to some of our fish species like the cod, 93 per cent of which catch is made up of immature fish that have not had the chance to breed, we have only to study the demise of the N. American bison whose numbers fell in a few decades from an estimated 50 million to virtual extinction through unlimited hunting; and even more telling, the passenger pigeon, used to feed pigs and slaves, whose numbers fell from an estimated 136 million to zero in a similar period. The stories from those times of hunters locating the ‘last major roost’ in this locality or that, and going after it because who knew (or cared) about what might happen tomorrow are frighteningly similar to some fishing stories of today.
If there is one thing we can learn from these sad tales it is that those who work to manage and conserve a wild resource must be responsible for licensing and controlling its hunting. Moreover, that the profits of the hunt or fishery must in part be ploughed back into conservancy. And because the sea is not like some great bath, but is an environment as varied and differently fertile as the land, it must be managed locality by locality, sea by sea, by those who know it intimately. There need to be local rules, closed areas, restrictions on the type of fishing and the type of fishing gear allowed. Above all there needs to be adequately funded local enforcement.
The environmental problem of managing the great resources of our seas must be de-coupled from the social problem of providing a living for fishing communities and put into the hands of some independent agency that would work through local conservancies managing the different European seas and parts of seas.
So I congratulate the Commission for recognising the seriousness of the problem. I only hope that the member states of Europe have the sense to recognise its seriousness too. We could take twice as many fish from the sea as now if only we could stop all fishing for a few years. The solution may be cold Turkey if we want to enjoy fish in the future.
Democracy is About People: We Need Both
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on April 20th, 2009
It is curious how the idea of political leadership at the European level seems to throw otherwise sensible people into a spin. Nor does it matter whether they are madly europhile or madly eurosceptic or any grade in between. Indeed some of the archest opponents of the idea of appointing a charismatic leader as President of the European Council – the Council is the body that brings together the heads of state or government from the European Unions 27 member states – are to be found deep within the ranks of the European institutions.
They fear anyone who might have a popular appeal; preferring instead a senior and probably superannuated figure who would be a dignified bureaucratic compromiser of 27 individual national positions. Someone who wouldn’t rock the boat or disturb the existing institutional power balance.
In passing we might note that in the last ten years we have already seen this institutional power balance shifting. There is little question that the European Commission has seen its power of political leadership slipping away to the European Council. If I may simplify for the sake of argument, in the early days of the European Union member states virtually nodded through most of the Commission’s proposals. Today, the reverse is true: the Commission has maintained its administrative role, but in terms of political initiative it has been reduced to little more that a secretariat for the Council.
Some might add that even its enforcing power of making member states respect the treaties is waning. In his blog the BBC’s European Editor Mark Mardell draws attention to the absence of any Commission response to the blockade of the Channel Ports by French fishermen. The reality is that whatever may be written in the treaties the Commission’s real authority has slipped away.
But if the Council has gained more power at the expense of the Commission, the European Parliament has voluntarily given it up – through sheer greed, timidity and ineptitude. On paper the Parliament is considerably more powerful than it used to be; indeed, there have been a few occasional victories, here and there, but most ordinary people have very little idea of how European life would differ if the Parliament were to depart en masse for a year’s sabbatical.
As they approach the June elections what the folk of Europe do remember, however, is not the few occasions when the Parliament made a difference, but the many occasions when it didn’t. Above all they point to the absurd carbon consuming circus of the monthly shuffle between Brussels and Strasbourg; something that the Parliamentarians could change tomorrow by the simple expedient of sitting on their hands in Brussels and thereby forcing the member states to amend the Treaty of Amsterdam that decrees where and when they sit.
Folk remember the Parliament for the stories of greed and secrecy over pensions and expenses and the expenditure on vacuous initiatives such as EuroParlTV and the current awareness raising exercises, ably debunked by my blogging colleague Bruno Waterfield, that only show how out of touch are Parliament’s administrators.
Above all, the folk cannot understand, since we have a European Parliament, why its members cannot arrange themselves in European political parties, with European political leaders putting forward European political programmes and a slate of candidates for Commission President, Foreign Minister and, of course, President of the European Council.
Raw European political power, for once democratic, is hanging like a ripe fruit above the heads of our well-paid Parliamentarians, who, for some reason, haven’t the nous to reach up and grab it.
To be fair, we have one such European party – Libertas – though,so far as I am aware, it has no members who have eschewed their former parties to become Libertas MEPs. I fear that its efforts in June will be doomed, if only because the turnout for and the interest in these elections looks like proving an all time low. Establishing support for a new political party is also a notoriously long and rocky road. Libertas also carries the incubus of opposing the Lisbon Treaty, something that continues to confine their voyage to the shallow waters of the political fringe.
Yet the one thing we can say about Libertas is that if people vote for it they get Mr Declan Ganley. Whether he himself is elected in Galway a vote for Libertas, wherever in Europe it might be cast, is a vote for Ganley and for the policies that he has largely been instrumental in shaping.
You cannot say the same thing about any other party and certainly not about the three main groups of Right, Left and Liberal. There is no party, there is no leader, there is no manifesto couched in everyday practicalities. Not surprising then that in only 2 out of the EU’s 25 member states (where voting is not actually compulsory) will more than half the electors be going to the polls.
At the end of the day people vote for people, they trust or distrust them, admire them or revile them. What we need in Europe is visible leadership. Whether we are talking of the European Parliament or the President of the European Council.
In the latter case this does not mean someone to reconcile the different positions of member states and find the lowest common denominator. Any half-competent senior civil servant can do that. No, leadership is about something more.
If under Barack Obama’s the US Democratic Party were to field candidates in these European elections, it would win by a mile. Europeans like Obama, what he stands for, his approach; they trust him. Were his double to be appointed President of the European Council he could act knowing that (even if unelected) he nevertheless enjoyed widespread popular support. That sort of personal authority would bring the member states together. It should not be beyond our European capabilities to bring about something similar.
Would this undermine national democracy? Up to a point, yes. Just as the President of the USA undermines the democracy of California if that is how you want to look at it. But what is the alternative? A strong America, a strong China, global markets and communications also undermine national democracy (or at least the national sovereignty it purports to defend). No one should be frightened of more democracy. Better a more democratic Europe than the confused noise of 27 we have now.
Will the Irish Vote for Blair?
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on April 8th, 2009
The vexed question of who should become the first semi-permanent President of the European Council has raised its head again. And again Tony Blair has been content to let it be known that he stands ready to lay aside his lucrative speaking engagements to take up the reins of government, this time on the European level.
Admittedly, there is the little, and even more vexed, question of a second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty to be negotiated first. The Irish may simply rehearse their opinions of last summer throwing out the Lisbon proposals for a second time. But the economic and political climate has changed so greatly in a twelve month that it is unsurprising that the opinion polls are giving the Treaty’s supporters reasonable cause for optimism.
The full ratification and deposition process has also to be completed in the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland, any one of which could provide a stumbling block, whatever the Irish do. But the probability is now that the Lisbon Treaty will be ratified and in the late autumn of this year Europe’s member states (for a moment I was tempted to write ‘we’) will be choosing the person whom the Press will call ‘President of Europe.’
It has always seemed to me that this presidential creation will have a far greater effect on ordinary folk than any other measure embodied in the Treaty. European folk, or at least their journalists, will at last have someone visible at whom they can throw their shoes – both literally and metaphorically.
They will also have someone potentially to inspire them, to pull them together and stand for them alongside the United States, China, Russia on the world stage. Europe’s ‘President’ will not be elected democratically, of course; but then the cobbler’s children always are the worst shod.
You might think that there would be no shortage of candidates for this plum job – that there would be plenty of politicians forged in the heat of their own national politics who would be able to represent Europe as Barack Obama, say, represents the United States – that is with vision and calling, setting the agenda for the future.
But sadly Europe’s cupboard is bare. Those politicians who have the potential – Sarkozy and Merkel spring to mind – are deeply enmeshed in domestic politics. Which is why ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s name has bubbled to the surface again, faute de mieux, as being someone with the skills, charisma and chutzpah to represent Europe beside an American President.
Many people, of course, are deeply opposed to Blair on account of his role in the Iraq war. Some even believe he should be indicted, along with George W. Bush, as a war criminal and brought before the International Court. That unpopularity, indeed revulsion, might well be considered a clear reason to put a red line through his dossier, before even turning to the undesirability of Europe’s President being drawn from the semi-detached ranks of a country that has opted out of, or delayed joining, more European projects than any other.
Against this it is still worth reading Blair’s speech to the European Parliament in June 2005
in which he sets out his personal agenda for European reform. Whatever view one may take of the man, the arguments in this speech about how Europe should change and develop, remain powerful. Indeed, it is a sign of how Europe has languished politically in the past four years that he could make virtually the same speech today and still be thought forward looking. Overlook his history and Blair makes an entirely credible candidate.
But if not Blair, then who? Who is capable of articulating the European project on the world stage? Obama’s recent tour of the old Continent, with one summit tumbling on the heels of another and major set piece speeches defining a whole global agenda merely showed how desperately weak and divided is European leadership in the foreign policy field.
For instance, his active support for Turkish membership of the EU highlighted Europe’s disarray towards its eastern neighbour. Turkey is a candidate for membership; indeed, Turkish entry is the formal policy of all 27 of our member states. Nevertheless, full Turkish membership remains deeply controversial, especially among some of the biggest and most influential countries in Europe. Obama’s support for Turkey merely underlines the fact that we Europeans are facing both ways.
In Prague – in the heart of Europe – Obama delivered a speech which to all intents and purposes might have been made by a European President. The themes of nuclear disarmament, climate change, reconciliation between peoples, leadership of the global effort – and the language in which he expressed them – were European.
That is the Obama style, of course. The fact that such European aspirations are now shared by the United States is something we welcome. And of course we want the American President to deliver that message clearly across the world. But it does highlight the vacuum, the silence, the emptiness of our present European polity when it comes to international affairs.
It has been left to the unlikely figure of Joaquín Almunia, the European Commissioner in charge of Monetary Affairs, speaking in a seminar in Brussels earlier in the week, to point out how threadbare we are here.
“The EU is the largest economic power in the world. We represent half a billion people and our GDP and trade flows surpass those of the United States. We are the issuer of the world’s second most important currency. And we are a key player in international financial markets: our regulatory activity in the financial sphere influences standards and practices around the world,” he said.
And he goes on to conclude, “Europe not only has the right, but the responsibility, to take a more active role in international affairs. Probably, everybody will subscribe this point. But action does not follow. Why?”
To which I would respond, because there is no political leadership in Europe capable of taking 27 different countries in a coherent international direction. As Tony Blair said in his European Parliament speech “ The people of Europe are speaking to us. They are posing the questions. They are wanting our leadership. It is time we gave it to them.” Indeed!
Photograph of Tony Blair is courtesy of the European Council
The G20 Show Too Much Zeal
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on April 1st, 2009
A lesser known fact about the Congress of Vienna (which sat from November 1814 to June 1815) was that it never actually ‘congressed.’ Despite Jean-Baptiste Isabey’s 1819 painting above, it never actually met in plenary session. It never became a G10 or even a G20. All the work of negotiating a new European order after the first fall of Napoleon was done in small groups, bilaterals and trilaterals.
It also worked very slowly. I suspect that this may have been the cunning plan of that old fox, Talleyrand*, who thus managed to ensure that France came out of the Napoleonic wars with more territory than when she embarked upon them, despite having twice been beaten. No matter, the Congress was generally held to be a success, keeping belligerent Europe largely free of internal strife for the next hundred years and thereby allowing a new industrial age to dawn. Zeal, Talleyrand used to argue, was the enemy of diplomacy.
A lot of current folk seem to hankering after a ‘new age’ at the moment and trusting in a blind surge of hope over expectation that the current (and especially zealous) G20 summit of world leaders will produce it. In fact one could say, to paraphrase Churchill, that never in the field of human endeavour had so much been expected by so many of so few.
The G20 talk may be of economic stimulus, of tough financial regulation and of an end to tax havens (les paradis fiscaux as the French exotically term them). But the expectation one hears both from ordinary people and the more clunking politicians is that the summit will (or certainly should) herald a New World Order in which the lion of capitalism will somehow be tamed sufficiently to lie down with the lamb of poverty under the benign gaze of a new global banking order.
Yes, there will be nods in the direction of international development. The Millennium Development Goals in particular, designed among other things to halve world poverty by 2015, will no doubt be newly emphasized. There will be nods in the direction of climate change. But the focus of the summit will not be anywhere near as radical as ushering in a New World Order. Rather the focus will be how to restore the Old World Order with the minimum of fuss. As if all would be well again if only more people would buy more cars.
Indeed how could it be otherwise? No one demurs from Barack Obama’s comparison of the world’s economy to an ocean liner. Real change will take time. The G20 may well secure final agreement on a few semi-technical decisions, mapped out in advance by officials and finance ministers. Robust declarations against protectionism and in favour of the environment may also be solemnly signed.
But to expect that this frenetic coming together of the 20 leaders of the world’s richest economies in a four hour jet-lagged plenary will actually make much of a lasting difference seems futile. Futile because of the divergence between so many of the key players and the absence of any well-rehearsed political ideas of what sustainable economic life might look like post-recession.
Thus the Anglo-Saxons (Britain and the United States) have a different approach to the Lower-Saxons, represented by Germany and much of Western Continental Europe, which in turn finds itself at odds with its (mostly non G20) partners to the East. Rich and poor countries reach different conclusions as to the cause of the world crisis and whose responsibility it is to do something about it. Indeed, the Brazilian President, Lula da Silva, blames the whole mess on the Anglo-Saxons and wonders why Brazil should be asked to help. He may well have a point.
The European Union, the world’s greatest trading bloc, the world’s biggest donor to poor countries, is itself split – and indeed in disarray – unable to finalise its constitutional arrangements and now effectively leaderless following the fall of the Czech government that holds the Presidency. There is therefore no single weighty European voice to raise at the G20. If we cannot resolve our differences at the continental level what hope is there to resolve them at the global?
As to the future – elections to the European Parliament are but two months away, but who knows, or cares? There are no leaders stepping up the rostrum, representing the great historic political movements of our Continent, outlining their post-recessionary visions and holding audiences in rapt attention.
Such is Europe’s shameful political vacuum that the aspiring anti-Lisbon candidate and leader of Europe’s as yet only genuine pan-European political party, Mr Declan Ganley, has this field entirely to himself. Sadly, he doesn’t seem to have a great deal to say on the matter.
If we liken the global financial crisis to some species of cardiac infarction that has laid the world’s economies low, then the G20 summit is in the nature of urgent surgery – expensive, hi-tech, mechanical, and symptom relieving. It may well bring an immediate improvement. Let us hope so. But will it bring the change in lifestyle that heart patients require for long life?
“Humanity will not survive in the 21st century if it continues to employ the ethics of the 20th,” said the Nobel Peace Prize winning former President of Costa Rica in a lecture that I was privileged to hear in 1999. And he is right. Our ethics, philosophy, outlook lifestyles need to change if like the heart patient we are to see our grandchildren grow up.
This is not going to happen quickly and certainly not as a result of a zealous four hour meeting of 20 world leaders. It will only happen slowly and over time. In bilateral and trilateral meetings between leaders with vision. Small groups of countries agreeing and working together, followed by larger groups.
The European Union started this process long ago. We may have fallen, sadly and temporarily, into disarray and so be unable to present an agreed and united front to the rest of the world at this G20 meeting, but we can work together for acknowledged common ‘European’ position for a sustainable future. Calmly and thoroughly negotiated.
One would like to think we could achieve this. If we are not too zealous, of course.
*Talleyrand is the only person in Isabey’s painting who is shown actually watching the artist: a nice touch you may think. Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
