Conference hall.

I attended the conference „New Values after the Lisbon Treaty“ today, 7 July 2010, organized by the Pázmány Péter Catholic University.

The conference began with registration and welcome buffet (Hungarian kitchen – food as part of identity), and was structured as follows:

14.00-14.10 Welcoming words by György Fodor, Rector of the Pazmany Catholic University

14.10-14.30 Message of H. E. László Sólyom, President of the Republic of Hungary (not read personally by the president)

14.30-15.30 Joseph H. H. Weiler: Values, virtues and vices of European Integration – what we can learn from Aristotle and Aquinas

15.30-16.00 Catherine Barnard: The implications of the phrase „social market economy“ for a new vision of the internal market after Lisbon

16.00-16.15 Coffee break

16.15-16.45 Damian Chalmers: Lisbon and a certain idea of freedom

16.45-17.05 Robert Schütze: Democratic deficit after Lisbon?

17.05-17.30 Petra Bárd: Rejuvenating The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice after the Entry into Force of the Lisbon Treaty

17.30-17.50 Marcel Szabó: International Responsibility of the European Union after the Lisbon Treaty

17.50-18.00 Closing remarks by Prof. Péter Kovács, Judge, Constitutional Court of the Republic of Hungary

György Fodor first stressed the foundational values of the EU, and the importance of political participation. The President’s message stressed the importance of integration, protection of fundamental rights, included the national minorities’ rights, values, Joseph H. H. Weiler talked about non-instrumental aspects of law. He brought clean air law as an example – we want policy issues into law. He reminded that law has always been in our culture, shaped by the culture and has itself shaped the culture. The EU has evolved from economic to political project. Weiler stressed the spiritual objective of the EU to bring people together in a „new way“, for what reason the EU’s success depends on how it looks empirically to and expresses the values. Weiler sees two trilogies of values: Peace-Prosperity-Supranationalism, and Democracy-Human Rights-The Rule of Law. Some more important remarks: If people believe in values, it means that they do not live in a community of hypocracy; (as common people do not understand values in the philosophical sense of ethics and morality); Value of honesty (how far could that go – should we monitor, what a man does in privacy?); Subsidiarity as meaning that people should be on the level of government; If there exist social problems and it is not the problem of NGOs to address social problems, who should address social problems; Voluntarism in Europe is the lowest in the world, being spread in church organizations; How do people experience universal human rights? Catherine Barnard talked about three values – social justice, solidarity, and social market economy, and analysed the cases Viking, and Laval, and the right to strike. Damian Chalmers started with the logical presumption that a government’s interest is to have healthy well-educated people, and therefore it guarantees rights to development (self-realization) and education. Still, some rights may seem illusory. For example, only 45 percent of people in the EU have mobile phones, the number of unemployed people is sufficiently big, and each year people get injured. We should take better responsibility for ourselves. Robert Schütze talked about creating democratic legitimacy in the EU. If government cannot do something properly, it can delegate some powers away. The same characterizes the European Commission that delegates powers. The question, then, is how to control that delegated legislation forming about 70 per cent of all EU legislation. Petra Bárd talked about mutual trust and mutual recognition in the framework of the Hague, Tampere, and Stockholm programmes, and fragmentation in the area. Marcel Szabó talked about the EU in the context of the 1996 Convention on the law of international organizations, he visualized the EU as a multi-layered entity, or Matryoshka, where the international law norms lie above, followed by the primary and secondary norms of EU law. He also talked about the case Kádi, in which case the CJEU allowed interpretation by it of the norms of a Security Council Regulation that have been incorporated in EU law norms, because the CJEU must have power to interpret EU law (even if basing on Security Council’s norms). Finally, Péter Kovács raised the question, whether a judge should interpret legal concepts „like that“, or should the interpretation base on philosophical basis.

The day was actually a very good example of how to gain political popularity and win, knowing human psychology, some economic and social facts, etc.

On Monday night, a contested transatlantic counter-terrorism agreement jumped another hurdle. In an extraordinary meeting in Strasbourg, the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE Committee) accepted a recommendation suggesting that the plenum of the European Parliament (EP) should approve the revised EU-US Agreement on SWIFT bank data transfer. This Agreement has been one of the most contested transatlantic counter-terrorism tools. The LIBE Committee accepted the recommendation provided by rapporteur Alexandro Alvaro. Alvaro’s recommendation to the Committee members was to give consent to the Agreement, though he pointed to a few points which “should still be clarified when the precise modalities are chosen”. The committee approved with 42 votes in favour, 8 against and 2 abstentions.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a financial messaging company based in Belgium which operates a vast network containing personal information of thousands of financial institutions, mainly banks. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the US Treasury Department introduced its Terrorist Financing Tracking Program (TFTP) and started using data processed via SWIFT’s network in order to identify terrorist suspects, allow targeted searches for counter-terrorism investigations and pursue their providers of finance. SWIFT had some of its data mirrored on a server based in the US and the Treasury accessed data using subpoena powers. Since the end of 2009, all information concerning the European Economic Area and Switzerland remains stored in Europe. Thus, in order to ensure continuous access to SWIFT data, an agreement with the EU became necessary.

Within the EU, the Agreement quickly became subject to a power struggle between the Council and the EP. The Council agreed to an interim agreement with the US Treasury on the 30^th of November 2009 – one day before the Lisbon Treaty entered into force, which would have required including the EP in the decision-making procedure. The EP was then asked to give its consent to this Agreement in February 2010. However, the EP had serious concerns about the inadequate level of data protection. In addition, it felt pressured by the Council and Commission to give its consent. As a consequence, the EP flexed its muscles, withholding its consent on 11 February 2010. In his recommendation this week, Alvaro emphasised this point suggesting that the new Agreement marks “a new step in Parliament’s powers, ensuring European democratic oversight over international agreements.”

The inadequate level of data protection was a crucial concern for many MEPs. In particular, the EP criticised the SWIFT Agreement for providing an exchange of ‘bulk’ data rather than specific information. During the negotiation process this spring, the EP was granted that an EU body similar to the American ‘Terrorism Finance Tracking Program’ will be established within 12 months, which will allow the body to send only more specific, previously analysed data to US authorities.

The new agreement – the ‘EU-US Agreement on the processing and transfer of financial messaging data for purposes of the US Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme’ (TFTP) was signed by Spain’s Minister of the Interior – on behalf of the EU – and by the current Chargé d’affaires of the US Mission to the EU – on behalf of the US – on the 28^th of June. The Agreement is based on a Council decision and related declarations.

The plenum of the EP will discuss this week whether to agree to this draft Agreement which was negotiated by the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the US Treasury and the European Parliament in the last couple of months. If the EP votes in favour of the Agreement – only a simple majority of votes is necessary, the Agreement will enter into force on 1 August 2010, for an initial period of five years.

The new agreement provides for a surprising role for the European Police Office (Europol), which has been well described by Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor, in his recent Opinion concerning the Agreement. To ensure independent oversight, the Agreement calls for a judicial public authority which “should have the responsibility to receive the requests from the US Treasury, assess their compliance with the agreement and, where appropriate, require the provider to transfer the data on the basis of a ‘push’ system.” However, it turns out that the Agreement allocates those tasks to Europol “which is an EU Agency for the prevention and combat of organised crime, terrorism and other forms of serious crime, affecting two or more Member States. It is obvious that Europol is not a judicial authority.”

Neither is Europol an ‘independent’ body in this context. Under Article 10 of the Agreement, it “may request the US Treasury to carry out a TFTP search when there is reason to believe that a person or entity has a nexus to terrorism or its financing” under Article 10 of the Agreement.” Hence, Europol will be able to make use of the very same mechanism that it is supposed to oversee. That oversight of the handling of such sensitive personal data is left to an executive body stands in stark contrast to the Lisbon Treaty’s commitment to more democracy and accountability in the EU.

Khan, Ali (2003) A Theory of Universal Democracy: Beyond the End of History

I am revising one of my articles that I had proposed years ago to an Estonian social science journal. The article is about making of primary and secondary laws in the European Union in the context of universal and state-centred theories. Looking for the appropriate contextual framework, and hoping to bring clearly out distinction between human rights and rights, I found an interesting book on the notions of universal democracy and liberal democracy. Universal democracy as good for everyone’s value, something on which the idea of global governance bases, and liberal democracy as connected with single states and cultural traditions, private property, separation of powers, and separation of religion and state. (Khan, Ali (2003) A Theory of Universal Democracy: Beyond the End of History. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, inspired by Francis Fukuyama (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press.) Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=M7-I5cJF81AC&lpg=PP1&ots=s1umH1-p6e&dq=%22a%20theory%20of%20universal%20democracy%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false (The book is worth reading, as it, inter alia, brings in also the dimension of Islam; and is full of thoughtful sentences, such as at pp. 79-80: “… even democracy, when separated from universal values, can be brutal form of government” – that may bring up questions about who determines the values.)

If one in that context thinks about the European Union, one notices that EU law (which is supranational law) on the one hand contains human rights, but on the other hand contains property rights and separation of powers – the latter two are not solely connected with states’ laws any more. Which indicates also the universal dimension of property rights and separation of powers. That way, one can understand the EU as an entity in between universal and liberal democracies?

Since the polls first started to indicate that any election result other than a Hung Parliament was highly unlikely, politicians from the two major parties in particular have warned ominously of the inherent instability that would ensue if theirs was not returned with a clear majority.  Meanwhile, pundits and the “commentariat” have looked to our European neighbours for comparisons, with Germany and Italy perhaps the two most frequently cited examples of what coalition government might mean. 

Throughout these debates, there has been an undertone first that sharing power is something that is simply “not done” here (one commentator declared on Thursday night that coalitions are what they do “over in Europe”); and second that somehow having a smaller party in the position to make or break any potential new government is inherently illegitimate.  Why should the Liberal Democrats, with just 23% of the vote and 57 seats in the House of Commons (fewer, lest we forget, than they had in the previous Parliament) be able to somehow hold the country to ransom?

The reality, I would argue, is somewhat different.  If the last few elections in the UK have shown us anything, it is that the mass, tribal politics of old are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, while the 3-digit majorities delivered to New Labour in 1997 and 2001 are evidence simply of how anachronistic and inherently disenfranchising the ‘first-past-the-post’ system has become. 

Membership of the two big parties is in long-term decline.  Meanwhile, no party has won over 50% of the vote since the Conservatives in 1935 (with 53.5%), while the landslide victories of 1983 and 1987 for the Tories, and 1997 and 2001 for New Labour saw them receive 42.4% and 42.25, and 43.2% and 40.7% respectively – not the proportion of the vote that their massive Commons’ majorities would imply. 

Perhaps more importantly, as a consequence of devolution over the last 13 years regional governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland either are – or have been – governed by coalitions (indeed, in the case of Northern Ireland this has been a prerequisite for peace), elected using systems incorporating some form of proportionality.  The results may have been awkward and at times uncomfortable, but rather than leading to chaos and instability, they have been characterised by compromise, negotiation and the abandonment (or at least postponement) of parties’ more ideologically-driven or extreme policy positions – a situation, moreover, that would be recognised in many local councils around the country.       

So will 2010 be remembered as the election where the political system finally caught up with what the voters actually want?  Potentially, yes.  One of the main messages that the various party leaders sought to communicate over the last month was that the UK needed a new type of politics, and the electorate seems to have taken them at their word.  Against a back-drop of economic turmoil, rising unemployment and anxiety over the future, our political leaders find themselves in a position that many of their European counterparts will be only too familiar with: one where they have no choice but to talk to each other in order to govern, and to do so on the basis of consensus. 

Such a change should not be dismissed as merely the politics of convenience.  And while the more doom-laden predictions may yet come true that the new government is bound to collapse before its 5 years are up, with the Liberal Democrats cast into the outer darkness and two-party politics returning with a vengeance, such outcomes are not inevitable, particularly if a referendum on the Alternative Vote is successful.  Like it or not – and it may indeed be anathema to many of David Cameron’s MPs as well as to significant sections of the British media – May 6^th may be the day that British politics became a little more ‘European’.

Source: Europa - Press room

On 9^th March 2010, the European Commission proposed legislation that hopefully helps people exercise their fair trial rights anywhere in the EU when they cannot understand the language of the case: http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/news/intro/news_intro_en.htm

On 17th March 2010, the European Commission proposed negotiation directives for the EU’s accession to the ECHR: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/10/84&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

On 18th March 2010, Viviane Reding, the Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship introduced her priority steps for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship in the EU http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/10/108&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

For the vast majority of the European people secularism is one of the pillars of the society they live in.

Medieval European societies were most of the time organized and ruled by the combined authority  stemming from the clergy (temporal and moral power) and the monarchs (sovereign authority). Local princes or kings would need to get recognition from the clergy in order to fully consolidate their authority upon the populace in a widely fragmented Europe. A few centuries and numerous religious wars later the idea of multi-confessional kingdoms worked its way through (for instance the Edit of Nantes signed by Henry the IV^th in France which granted religious freedom rights to Protestants to appease the country after the numerous massacres – XVI^th century). By the end of the XVIII^th century the first French Republic and its constitution encompassed the right to religious freedom along with the Human Rights. It was only slightly more than a century later that the law of 1905 in France officially set apart the church and the state: religion is an affair which must remain that of the private sphere. Religious freedom is a right and the state institutions must remain neutral to guarantee this right. Each European country has its own history and its own set of laws (and exceptions) to reflect secularism in daily life but the core of the ideal which is about “religious freedom” is a common ground to most Europeans.

It’s important to get familiar with the development of secularism in our societies and realize that what we nowadays take for granted was a lengthy, sometimes bloody and complex achievement across the continent as many wars, intellectual enlightenment and revolutions had to take place before the ideal could expand and soaks in the intricate mosaic of European peoples’ minds and traditions.

Since the end of the XIX^th century the visible practice of religion in Europe (practice of liturgies, dressing codes, impact of the religious moral on daily life ethic etc…) has been consistently diminishing while the industrial revolutions were shaping up the modern societies of standardized production and mass-consumptions where the place of the religious would drastically dwindle. As a result, secular post modern European fellows of the XXI^th century are sometimes at shock when observing a more visible spirituality of its fellow Muslim citizens who only immigrated lately to European countries.

Opportunists far right parties across the continent, give their own revisited definition of secularism (most of the time to highlight their own ignorance) to use it as an argument to justify the impossibility to integrate the Muslim populations within the European frame. They usually dangle the threat of shocking visible Islam and present the argument ad nauseam that Muslims cannot integrate in Europe because their religion is too pervasive and because the Koran precepts prevail on our “traditions and culture”. They like to point out the Muslims dressing codes, the fervor of the prayers or whatsoever that might appear exotic and scary enough to appall their constituency (not to mention all the stereotypes and the confusion about the Jihad, the terrorists and the “backwardness” of certain Muslim countries). The recent referendum in Switzerland which called on people to vote for or against the construction of new minarets was an appalling reality check of how malleable the public opinion has become in such fearful context to the point where they end up voting against one of the very basic principles that made up their nation (isn’t Switzerland made of confederations of different people and linguistic entities?).

The discussions in France (home to the largest Muslim population in Europe) and some of the voices around it about whether or not the “Niqab” (the veil that entirely covers the head except for the eyes) and the “burqa” should be forbidden or if the pupils should be able to wear headscarf at schools reveal the divergences on the interpretation of secularism. Some also tend to mix these problems with issues such as the national identity. These are the marks of the profound failure to understand the true social problems of our societies when the religious becomes the scapegoat of the failed social policies of our leaders. When one turns secularism into an ideology against Islam (or any other religion) he is turning his back to the philosophical work of our forefathers and chooses to forget (or ignore) history. When politicians or even intellectuals find it peculiar that some ordinary fellow citizens beg for some considerations which could make it easier for them to live by their religious precepts in the private sphere this is sheer hypocrisy or intellectual dishonesty. Don’t we have private Catholic or Jewish schools? Haven’t we been running separate swimming pools for men and women before the Muslims ever asked for it? Irony is that before the infamous students’ riots in Paris in May 1968 men and women were usually separated in schools and the French society was still predominantly patriarchal.

No, secularism is not asking Muslims to become non Muslims or less visible. Secularism is not about alienating people and their religious belief on behalf of the new natural religion called secularism which screams: “be like me and follow my truth, the unique truth”. The state via its inherent social contract is effective and viable when it facilitates the “vivre ensemble” (living together) based on universal values as opposed to creating disparate communities which share nothing in common and therefore legitimately feel disconnected to the res publica. By discriminating and by relentlessly pushing the Muslims to the fringes of our society we certainly risk more of creating resentful people and nurture fundamentalists who will only feel at odds with our culture than if we were capable of properly applying the very same universal principles that we have been applying to the different confessions on our continent since a few centuries be it the Jews, the Christian Orthodox, the Catholics or the Protestants. Islam has its place in Europe’s religious mosaic and the spirituality has its place in the Europe of the XXI^th century.

Finally I would like to end this second part with a quote from Henri Pena-Ruiz (French Philosopher):

“Secularism is a core value which by essence conveys the ideas of freedom of consciousness and equality of all men may they be religious, atheist or agnostic. The secular ideal is not that of resentment against religion. Interpreting the ideal as any sort of hostility toward the principle of religion would be the greatest misunderstanding of secularism. It is a positive ideal stressing freedom of consciousness and putting the religious and atheist people on an equal foot with the idea that the Republican law must aim at the common good instead of the particular interests. This is called the principle of the public sphere neutrality.”

Translated from the French : “La laïcité est une valeur essentielle, avec ce souci de la liberté de conscience et de l’égalité de tous les hommes, qu’ils soient croyants, athées ou agnostiques. L’idéal laïc n’est pas un idéal négatif de ressentiment contre la religion. C’est le plus grand contresens que l’on puisse faire sur la laïcité que d’y voir une sorte d’hostilité de principe à la religion. Mais c’est un idéal positif d’affirmation de la liberté de conscience, de l’égalité des croyants et des athées et de l’idée que la loi républicaine doit viser le bien commun et non pas l’intérêt particulier. C’est ce qu’on appelle le principe de neutralité de la sphère publique.”

In the British media and political discourse, the recently appointed President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, is often poked as a figure of fun. He frequently gets called ‘Rompuy-pumpy’; the British Broadcasting Corporation produced a humorous video about him; and Nigel Farage, the anti-European UKIP MEP created a storm when he called him a ‘damp rag’ and a ‘low-grade bank clerk’ in the European Parliament. While many of these attitudes smack of British arrogance, it is fair to say that President Van Rompuy lacks the aura of power or charisma of someone like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or Tony Blair.

However, these slights aside, Mr. Van Rompuy has battled on. Yesterday, he gave his first major speech – called ‘The Challenges for Europe in a Changing World’ – on foreign and security policy since he assumed his presidency, choosing the College of Europe as his venue. And actually, it was quite impressive. The President began his speech by looking into the changing global balance of power, which has begun to have a profound impact on the place of Europeans in the world: on their own, the Member States are no longer strong enough to have much influence on the key issues. This, he says, should not turn Europeans into ‘declinists’; rather, he points out, the only way forward is for the Member States to work together to project their power – yes, power – across the globe through the European Union.

As such, he outlined two key objectives for his presidency:

1. Reforming the European economy, because this will provide the means to remain relevant and provide an incentive for Europeans to remain heavily involved in world politics;
2. Transforming the European Union into a global power, because it is only through having influence and the means to enforce it, that Europeans will get their way and protect their social and economic well-being in the twenty-first century.

As he put it:

As you have learned here at the Collège, Europe started as a market, with a unique working method. We can be proud of what it achieved. However, building a market is different from being a power. “L’Europe-puissance”, as the French like to call it. [. . .] At the Copenhagen Summit we experienced that Europe can no longer shine by the “force of its example” only. You need more than the conviction that your proposal is the best, to win them over. To get in the deal-making game, the Union needs to assert itself politically.

President Van Rompuy’s approach seems to be informed by the approach taken in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which was a seminal book by Paul Kennedy published in the late 1980s. Professor Kennedy argued that a country’s geopolitical power can be correlated to its financial dynamism, economic productivity and industrial might; successful powers are those most able to project themselves economically and geopolitically, without over-extending themselves. In this respect, Mr. Van Rompuy’s approach suggests a good dose of critical strategic thinking on his part, which is a breath of fresh air for those of us who often deplore the wishy-washy mumbo jumbo so frequently pumped-out by Europeans on foreign affairs.

So is Herman Van Rompuy a ‘Rompuy-pumpy’, or is he a closet Machiavelli? Is he a ‘damp rag’, or is he a quiet but clever strategist, working tirelessly behind the scenes to flesh out and project the European interest? Only time will tell. But his first speech on foreign and security policy certainly shows promise, and demands that Europeans should have more respect for their new president, and pay him more attention.

• Credit to Luc Van Braekel on Wikipedia for image.

Although Soviet-style regimes are long dead, it seems that an anti-communism frenzy is still with us. At the European Parliament, a witch-hunting exercise is underway by some of its right-wing members against some newly-appointed members of the Commission. It wasn’t only the political background of Commissioner Stefan Füle that irritated them (and with good reason some might say, as his former Communist Party membership might justifiably still raise an eyebrow here or there), but also the political connections of other appointees, such as those of Catherine Ashton. Ashton was accused of being a Soviet spy for her role as an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

This witch-hunting exercise constitutes an important falsification of the history of the progressive European movements. Since when is the fight against nuclear weapons seen as negative? What is wrong with participating in the CND, one of the biggest democratic social movements in Western Europe? After the revelation of her CND affiliation, I personally felt more in favour of the appointment of Ashton. There seemed to be far more to her character than the low-profile figure she was presented to be.

Another target for the mud-slinging tactics of the right-wing reactionaries was the Greek Commissioner Maria Danamaki, former leader of the party of the Progressive Left, – a small Left-wing party that had continuously rejected the brutal policies of the former Communist bloc. Damanaki, along with a number of university students, played an active role in the protests of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in 1973, a riot which led to a bloody attack by the Dictatorship of the Colonels and the loss of many student lives. The Polytechnic Uprising became one of the reasons for the downfall of the dictatorial regime and a symbol of the fight for democracy.

There is a current danger of putting all sorts of people (from hard-core Stalinists to the most progressive elements within Euro-communism and social democracy) in the same bag in order to demonise the entire “Left” spectrum. It is not the first time that reactionary MEPs have used such tactics. However, the categorisation of varying strands of leftist ideology under a Soviet banner is a dangerous populist move. Not only it distorts the contributions of social movements, its people and the history of the democratic left, but human history in general.

Vasilis Margaras is a Visiting Research Fellow at CEPS. The views expressed in this article are personal.

Although Erdogan on the 14th December said his AKP (Justice and Development Party) will not give up on finding a political solution to the problem, exclusion of the DTP- from the Turkish Parliament and therefore from this national unity project on the basis of having close ties with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) – will make it rather impossible for the government to accomplish an united and peaceful Turkey. In fact, the riots and protests against the Constitutional Court’s decision in different parts of Turkey are evidence to this point.

First of all, the DTP should have not been closed, but the Constitutional Court should have warned the DTP. In this way both the DTP could have been given a chance to survive in Turkish politics and learn from its mistakes and the Turkish authorities would have looked welcoming towards the Kurdish politicians. And its Kurdish citizens – who Turkish authorities downgraded and ignored for many years by calling them as “Mountain-Turks”- would have felt as a valued, listened to, and respected segment of the Turkish society. I think a decision of this sort could have also contributed positively to Erdogan’s democratisation initiative launched to resolve the long-standing Kurdish problem

Instead, in addition to closing down the DTP, the Constitutional Court banned 37 members of the party from participating in politics for 5 years, including two members of parliament, party chief Ahmet Turk and Aysel Tuğluk. Furthermore, on the 14th December, the 19 deputies of the now-defunct DTP decided to resign from the Turkish Parliament. Once again, the most trusted body/organisation among the Kurdish people, expressing the Kurdish people’s view, interest, and future aspirations was eliminated from Turkish political scene, and the Kurds were treated as the “outsiders”.

There are couple of questions: how democratic is Turkey, since this is the 28th political party have been shut down in the history of Turkish political system? How democratic is it that a bunch of unelected and illegitimate 11 members of the constitutional court decides on the closure of a political party that was home to 20 democratically elected Deputies? Who or which political party/body/organisation would be representing the Kurdish people in Turkey from now onward? And most importantly through whom the AKP is going to reach the Kurdish people in Turkey? How is it possible to resolve the Kurdish problem without involving the Kurdish people and their representatives into this process?

However as any bright student, EU’s main challenge is not only to think to what it could do, but most likely to what it wants to do. The Lisbon Treaty even though could significantly improve the governability of the EU, it fails in giving Europeans a definition of what the European Project is. More importantly little effort has been put in drafting such definition in an open pan-European debate.

Since the early days of its existence the ECC has moved incrementally to new competences but while obtaining major results in a wide range of areas, it has failed in sharing them with its citizens. If it is true that what make democracies strong is their legitimacy, and that what makes democracies work is public participation, both cannot live without citizen’s awareness of a shared vision and of its past achievements. These are the seeds of individual engagement in the management of the res publica. In this sense EU’s effectiveness cannot escape from these dynamics. On the other hand Member States’ ability to achieve their promised goals locally are challenged by their limited capacity to influence global outcomes, which require additional legitimacy at global or regional level. The management of this vicious circle which is set to affect both citizens’ participation and the very same concept of democratic governance is without doubt the main challenge that the EU need to face in the coming years.

Background Information: the Reflection Group on the Future of Europe was established under the Conclusions of the European Council; its work started in December 2008 and it is due to complete its report by June 2010.