Time to Strike

On the 1st of July 2010 the European Presidency will travel from Spain to Belgium, a country which is just after elections, without a government and with some signs of a desperate desire not to be a single state anymore. This same Belgium, however, has all the potential to finally show that Europe has one phone line(paraphrasing the famous line of Henry Kissinger).

When the European Presidency was given to Spain on the 1st of January 2010, the Spanish administration was very well prepared. In fact they were over-prepared. The Spaniards were expecting to be given presidency of the EU under the Nice Treaty conditions, meaning that their Prime Minister would be the President of the European Council and their foreign affairs minister would be the High Representative of the EU for foreign affairs. Alas, quite unexpectedly quickly the Lisbon Treaty was finally fully ratified and entered into force one month before the Spanish presidency, resulting in an appointed President of the European Council and appointed High Representative. In order not to offend Spain and its preparation the EU gave Spanish presidency an ‘in-between’ status, resulting a collaborative presidency of Spain and the newly appointed European leaders.

In the case of Belgium situation is much different. As mentioned above the country is still to elect a new government and it seems it is also quite heavily involved in its own conflict of whether or not to split and cease to exist as a single country. This is the chance the the European leaders who wrote the Lisbon Treaty were waiting for. Belgium is quite simply not fit to preside over the European Union. Actually, I take that back. There is one Belgian who certainly should be fit to preside over the EU. His name is Hermon van Rompuy, the first ever appointed President of the European Council.

It is quite ironic that the former Belgian Prime Minister should fully take up the reigns of the European Union after electoral turmoil in his own country. However, irony or not it is an opportunity that cannot be missed. If van Rompuy isn’t seen pushing the EU forward by himself, as the holder of the one phone line to which any other world leader can call, then when the time comes for Hungary and its populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, they will insist to enjoy the same privileged as Spain did and show off Orban as the European leader, making any changes that Lisbon made in this regard useless.

Israel changing Ashton

Amidst the huge international controversy that was created by the Israeli attack on the Free Gaza ships two days ago something new was born. That little something, so little indeed that it has not been picked up by the commentators, is the reactions of the European Union and its member states to the attack. The reaction that was uncommonly unilateral and without any delay.

For many years the European Union’s reaction to various incidents were usually divided up between individual member states. Thought the Single European Act did envisage a common foreign policy, the situation was that member states would meet, discuss the incident and the EU would then make a statement on the issue with each member state also commenting on the issue. Sometimes, and this was usually the case for the difficult and controversial issues, the EU would even allow its member states to make their own comments and statements with the EU not getting involved (this could be seen in the reaction to Kosovo).

The reaction to the Israeli attack has been quite different. Almost as soon as the White House made a press statement regarding it, the spokesperson for Cathrine Ashton also called in a press conference and expressed Baroness Ashton’s deep grief over the loss of lives and called for an independent investigation. Later on that day the Baroness herself repeated these words on behalf of the European Union and today during an EU-Russia summit Sergei Lavrov and Cathrine Ashton signed a joint statement condemning the attack. No Council of Ministers meeting, no lengthy negotiations.

One can read this as Baroness Ashton getting comfortable with her job half a year after her appointment.  It seems she is fueled by the success of her vision for the EU’s diplomatic service that is praised by the member states, the European Commission and the European Parliament. This fuel maybe allowed her to take the unorthodox step by simply stating the Brussels’ line as she is supposed to as the High Representative of the EU for foreign affairs (amongst other things).

This marks a change in the way the EU institutions are run, suddenly we have an official taking an EU stance without being controlled by the member states. In turn one can interpret the EU as no longer being a group of member states that with a name but rather a sovereign organisation with its own decision making.

What is striking about this, is that the member states themselves seem to be ok with this interpretation. No other nation has made its own press statement regarding the incident (maybe with the exception of Ireland, but that is acceptable as Irish citizens were directly involved). Germany, France, Italy…they all stayed silent and thus implicitly approved of the Brussels-based policy. True one can argue that Merkel has to worry about the German President resigning, that Berlusconi must rather try to concentrate on selling the austerity measures to the public or that Sarkozy is a die-hard eurofederalist, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of action all of the 27 member states.

The Israeli attack is tragic and condemnation worthy, but while the eyes of all the commentators are focused on Israel they are missing the great change in the way the European institutions are ran. A change that we can only hope will continue.

Good Neighbors

The world nowadays, under international law, should strive to be one of good connections and friendships between states. Especially in Europe the idea of co-operation and friendship has lead to a great many organisations being set up to ensure these goals are achieved (the EU, the Council of Europe and OSCE to name a few). That is why it is particularly worrying to see two member states of these various European institutions treating each other with hostility. And this has certainly been the case with regards to Hungary and Slovakia.

There’s no need to go into the history of the relations between the two countries. It is sufficient to say that since Slovakia’s independence in 1993 the relations were tense. A turnaround came after 1998, when a party representing the Hungarian minority in Slovakia was one of the parties in the new coalition government. However since 2006 the relations have dropped steadily, eversince the nationalist party and the populist social democrats got into power in Slovakia. To add the the already bad situation in Hungary the opposition party FIDESZ saw this as a way to gaining mass support against the weak socialist government in Hungary and so began to spread nationalist populism, just like the two governing  in Slovakia. Over the four years of this carry on many incidents occurred, such as not allowing the Hungarian President to enter Slovakia to celebrate with the Hungarian minority because of the alleged failure of the Hungarian diplomatic service to give sufficient prior notification (2 weeks, apparently was not sufficient).

The history only shows how bad the situation is. However, it seems to be getting worse again. The newly elected FIDESZ government plans to pass a bill allowing a dual-citizenship for anyone who had Hungarian ancestors at any point in their family tree. Thus, all of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Slovakia could ask for this dual-citizenship. However this is not through anything like naturalization or marriage but simply because of ancestry. The bill provides for a few more perks with regard to the dual-citizenship, but there is no need to get into them.

The Slovak government opposes this, quite vehemently. In fact it plans to call the parliament to meet to discuss counter-measures. One of the proposed ones on the table is even to make any Slovak citizen who applies for citizenship of another country lose his/hers Slovak citizenship, another proposal is to limit this to just applying for the Hungarian citizenship. Either of the two proposals is, however, fundamentally flawed. If the former is adopted it effectively means an end to dual citizenships for Slovak citizens (and I wonder what knock-on effect it would have on the EU citizenship, which all EU country citizens hold as well as their country’s citizenship). If, on the other hand, the latter is adopted this would be an unjust discrimination and a court case should, hopefully, follow.

We can thus see two extremes on both sides. But how is one to remedy this situation? The answer to that question is very hard to figure out. At this point the conflict is not only between the populist parties on both sides of the border. In Hungary the opposition is also backing the controversial bill, while in Slovakia the opposition tried to make themselves look better by offering to enter negotiations with FIDESZ under the guidance of the the European People’s Party.

The reason behind this are the elections. While in Hungary the elections took place not even a month ago in Slovakia the elections are set to take place in two weeks time. Thus the parties on both sides, knowing that drastic public finance cuts will need to be made soon to make the the public finances stable yet again, try to simply overshadow this forcing out a problem like this and the voters, full of anger from the job losses and pay cuts believe every bit of hatred the parties spread.

So yet again we can ask ourselves how to solve this situation? It’s simple really, once people stop believing, politician’s will stop playing.