State
of Juncker’s Union: What he has (and hasn’t) delivered
A
scorecard marking the Commission president’s address a year ago
against the situation now.
By
Ryan Heath
9/14/16, 5:30 AM CET
When Jean
Claude-Juncker gave his first State of the Union address in September
2015, he told MEPs it was “not the time for business as usual.”
In the year since, the EU has certainly seen little of that.
From continuing
political battles over how to address Europe’s migration crisis, to
terror attacks in several countries, to Britain’s historic vote to
leave the EU altogether, the bloc has faced a series of tests to its
political stability.
This year, Juncker
will enter the Parliament hemicycle in Strasbourg with a
fundamentally different challenge before him. Last year he offered a
statesman’s speech from the heart, weeks after the EU had stared
into the abyss over Greece, and as it was splintering over how to
manage refugees. Reviews were mixed.
Now he has
competition for lofty rhetoric about the future of Europe. Donald
Tusk has launched a continent-wide, leaders-level debate about how to
make the Union coherent again. The focus of EU leaders will be on
Friday’s meeting in Bratislava. It is Juncker’s task to help set
the stage for that ongoing debate, rather than stake out his own
singular vision of the Union.
Meanwhile, what
became of the vision in Juncker’s 2015 address? The Commission
president pleaded with Europeans to remember their history and open
their hearts and their doors to refugees, adding that difficulties
the Union faced meant 2016 would be a “time for honesty, unity and
solidarity.”
But he also made a
series of calls to action and and political promises. Here’s a look
at what he delivered on, and what got left on the drawing board:
Overall vision
Claim: “We need
more Europe in our Union. We need more Union in our Union.”
Reality: The U.K.
has voted to the leave the EU, meaning fundamentally that there is
both less Europe and less Union in the EU compared to a year ago.
Leaders have also mostly struggled to find common ground, leading
Tusk to push for an EU that does less but better, which is similar to
the rhetoric of Frans Timmermans’ “Better Regulation” agenda,
all of which hints at less Union.
Refugees and
migration
There has been
significant policy change at the EU level since the last State of the
Union — from Juncker’s original focus on relocating refugees
across Europe to a new emphasis on stopping them ever getting here.
The EU-Turkey deal was the most significant sign of that shift away
from Juncker’s and Angela Merkel’s 2015 open door policy.
Claim: “Cheap
ships are now harder to come by” and “the central Mediterranean
route has stabilized.”
Reality: Dangerous
crossings from Turkey to Greece have been greatly reduced; the number
of crossings from Libya to Italy is more or less the same but
casualties are higher in 2016 than 2015.
Claim: Juncker
wanted to create “a fully operational European border and coast
guard system.”
Reality: National
leaders have agreed to this vision and began work to make it fully
operational by the end of 2016, though that appears to be an
optimistic timetable.
The roaming
limits outraged consumers, members of the European Parliament and the
telecoms industry
Claim: “We need
more Europe in our asylum policy. We need more union in our refugee
policy … We have collectively committed to resettling over 22,000
people from outside of Europe over the next year.”
Reality: National
leaders agreed to a relocation and resettlement scheme, and about
9,000 of the 22,000 have been moved. The EU also agreed a deal with
Turkey to limit asylum seeker flows from
Turkey.
Claim: “The
Commission will come forward with a well-designed legal migration
package in early 2016.”
Reality: The
Commission did propose a reform of the EU-wide “Blue Card” system
to replace national skilled migration schemes as well as a permanent
resettlement framework.
Economy
Claim: That despite
its differences Europe could claim to be “by far the wealthiest and
most stable continent in the world.”
Reality: The EU
trades places with the U.S. for the biggest economy, depending on
global exchange rates. However, the EU has close to 200 million more
citizens, so its GDP per capita is much lower than in the U.S. When
Canada is added into the mix, it’s clear Europe is not the richest
continent. Over the last year the EU’s economic indicators have
been stable. Unemployment still hovers around 10 percent, inflation
is around zero, and economic growth is about 2 percent.
Greece
Claim: “The crisis
is not over. It has just been put on pause.”
Reality: Juncker is
correct. The situation in Greece is less urgent, and the economy has
experienced some improvement, but overall the Greek bailout remains
precarious. Few of the Syriza government’s promises have been
delivered, and many Greeks continue to suffer from the country’s
debt problems.
National economic
reform
Claim: “The
Commission will provide tailor-made technical assistance [to Greece]
… the main task of the new Structural Reform Support Service.”
Reality: The service
was created, with its own Director General Maarten Verwey. The
Commission proposed a budget of €142.8 million, but the European
Parliament and Council of the European Union have not signed off on
the plan. Greece is the top priority of the service and in February
Juncker gave it responsibility to “coordinate all the Commission’s
efforts in facilitating the process for the reunification of Cyprus.”
Slovakia and Bulgaria are also receiving support, and at least two
other countries have confidentially requested support according to a
Commission source.
Financial
transaction tax
Claim: That the
Commission would fight hard to finalize by the end of 2015 the
Financial Transaction Tax, to which a minority of EU countries agreed
to join in principle.
Reality: Despite
being a five-year-old voluntary proposal, the tax plan remains
stalled in Council discussions. The proposed tax faces collapse if
just one more country withdraws its involvement after Estonia backed
out and reduced the number of participating countries to 10.
Foreign policy
Claim: “Our
foreign policy must become more assertive.”
Reality: The EU
helped engineer the deal that brought Iran back into the global
economy, and sent a delegation of eight commissioners to Iran to
grease the wheels of future relations. Juncker himself traveled to
St. Petersburg to engage Vladimir Putin during the EU’s ongoing
sanctions against Russia, but there has been little progress in
Ukraine or the conflict in Syria.
African development
Claim: The
Commission will establish “an emergency Trust Fund, starting with
€1.8 billion” from the EU budget and matched by national funds.
Reality: The
Commission did create a fund, but has received only €82 million in
national contributions. Only the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and
Denmark have pledged more than €5 million, meaning the Commission
has allocated 20 times more than all 28 national governments
combined.
Climate
Claim: “To adopt
an ambitious, robust and binding global climate deal.”
Reality: The EU
succeeded in showing global leadership, alongside France, to seal the
Paris climate deal. It now faces the “nightmare scenario,” in the
words of climate commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, of the deal
coming into the force globally before slow-moving EU countries ratify
it.
European
commission president decries attacks on Poles in wake of Brexit vote
Jean-Claude
Juncker warns of splits and fragmentation across Europe during state
of the union address
The
president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has
condemned attacks on Polish people in the UK in the aftermath of the
Brexit vote.
Jennifer Rankin in
Strasbourg
Wednesday 14
September 2016 10.52 BST
“We Europeans can
never accept Polish workers being beaten up, harassed or even
murdered in the streets of Essex,” Juncker said in his annual state
of the union address to MEPs in Strasbourg. Five Polish people have
been attacked in the Essex town of Harlow since the EU referendum,
including one man who died from his injuries.
As he set out a
series of security and economic measures aimed at uniting Europe in
the wake of the Brexit vote, Juncker urged EU member states to take
greater responsibility for explaining the value of the European
project.
Declaring that the
next 12 months would be crucial for the EU, Juncker said a united
Europe could only be built if it was better explained and better
understood. He highlighted the British referendum as a warning that
the EU faces a battle for survival against nationalism.
“The European
Union doesn’t have enough union,” he said. “There are splits
out there and often fragmentation exists … That is leaving scope
for galloping populism.”
40-year-old
Arkadiusz Jóźwik died after he was beaten by teenagers in Harlow,
about 30 miles north of London, in late August. Essex police said
Jóźwik and a second Polish man who survived were apparently the
victims of an unprovoked attack. The motive is unknown, but one line
of inquiry is the possibility of it being a hate crime.
Three other Poles
have been attacked in the town, and there have been reports of
further incidents across Britain. Following the attack on Jóźwik,
the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, wrote to church leaders in
Britain asking them to help prevent attacks on Poles living in the UK
and combat a climate of “aversion and animosity”.
Juncker’s speech
in Strasbourg did not dwell on Brexit, though he repeated that
Britain could not have “à la carte access” to the single market.
The European
commission president has previously criticised the former British
prime minister, David Cameron, for failing to prepare the ground for
the Brexit referendum and launching the four-month campaign after
years of sniping directed at Brussels.
Juncker said he
would ask his team of 27 EU commissioners to increase the number of
visits made to national parliaments to discuss EU policies. “[Europe]
can only be built with the member states not against the member
states,” he said. “We do listen to our citizens and we would like
to do that more intensely.”
The 55-minute speech
amounted to a sprawling laundry list of subjects, ranging from
Europe’s contribution to 70 years’ of peace to roaming charges
and the price of milk. “I will not accept that milk is cheaper than
water,” he said, in a nod to Europe’s farmers.
Miloš Zeman: the
hardline Czech leader fanning hostility to refugees
Read more
The EU executive
hopes to find common ground with a plan to boost the EU’s
infrastructure fund by increasing its value to €500bn (£425bn) by
2020. Juncker also called for speedy implementation of a recently
agreed law to create an EU border and coastguard to ensure better
control of migrants and refugees arriving from the Middle East and
Africa.
In a tacit
acknowledgement that commission plans for refugee quotas were in
trouble, he said solidarity cannot be forced, but “must come from
the heart”. Hungary, Poland and other central and eastern European
countries have accused the commission of blackmail over proposals
that would oblige them to pay for not giving refuge to people fleeing
war.
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