CEPS Policy Briefs


211 - 240 of 287
01 June 2005

In this provocative new Policy Brief, written in the immediate aftermath of the French and Dutch emphatic rejection of the Constitutional Treaty, Professor Richard Baldwin outlines a simple, viable ‘Plan B’ in four steps and advances five key fallacies that he feels are critical to the debate. ‘EU watchers’ who are deeply discouraged over the future of the European project will find his analysis reassuring.

01 June 2005

In the view of Richard Baldwin, Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the failure of the European Council to agree the last-minute compromise on the 2007-2013 Financial Perspective may have been a blessing in disguise. In this new CEPS Policy Brief, he argues that things might have been even worse had they agreed, given the draft budget’s serious inadequacies and inequities.

01 May 2005

Despite important differences that make deeper political integration comprising all members of the European Union unlikely in the near term, it is likely that a smaller group of EU members will continue towards deeper integration.

01 April 2005

The ongoing conflict in and around Chechnya is helping to feed the wider international jihadi movement, and is endangering the West as well as Russia. The next “soft target” of North Caucasian terrorism could be a Western one. Mutual recriminations over the conflict have badly damaged relations between Russia and the West. While most of the blame for this lies with Russian policies, the Western approach to the issue has often been unhelpful and irresponsible.

01 March 2005

In the fight against international terrorism, the European Union adopted a Regulation (n° 881/2002) in May 2002, permitting the freezing of assets belonging to Usama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaida network and the Taliban. Within its framework, hundreds of individuals, groups and entities have seen their assets frozen without any effective legal remedy for appeal.

01 February 2005

This policy brief investigates the decision-making impact of admitting Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Croatia into the EU-25, focusing on the EU’s ‘capacity to act’ and the power distribution among the member states. The enlargement is projected to have relatively little impact on the EU’s capacity to act, as long as the Constitutional Treaty (CT) voting rules come into effect, but if the CT is rejected, enlargement would cripple EU decision-making. Turkish membership is calculated to have a big impact on the power distribution among member states.

01 February 2005

This Policy Brief elaborates on the impact of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty on the preparation, formulation and adoption of the EU’s position in international climate change negotiations. The analysis focuses on how changes envisaged will affect the policy-making process and particularly on whether shortcomings identified in the current situation will be addressed.

01 February 2005

This paper postulates ‘Ten Commandments’ governing the behaviour of the European Union, as drawn from either explicit or implicit references in the new European Constitutional Treaty. After a brief introduction to each one, author Michael Emerson ranks other global actors – the US, Russia and China –on the basis of the same criteria, since this could be a guide for the EU to the possibilities for harmonious foreign policy or to the difficulties that have to be managed.

01 February 2005

This paper addresses economic values and dynamism in the context of general European values. More precisely, it discusses how the lack of dynamism in parts of the European economy is not explained, in the main, by a lack of technology or capital or natural endowment; it is not even explained by big government, high taxation and strong social protection per se. Rather, the main explanation is to be found in the way certain economic institutions influence or reflect our culture and our attitudes vis-à-vis change and risk-taking.

01 February 2005

The current EU budget is not an effective instrument to implement the priorities of an expanding and deepening Union. Over 40% of EU spending is dedicated to support for agriculture, a declining sector; spending for research and innovation, the main driver of productivity growth, is too small; and there is no room in the budget for the new public goods of internal and external security.

01 December 2004

Abstract: The European Council meeting on 16-17 December took many decisions that will set the course for the European Union’s continuing enlargement process. These decisions concern in the first place Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Turkey, but they also contain some pointers for the nature of the process ahead that will concern other possible candidates, from the Balkans to Ukraine. This new Policy Brief explores the new language and concepts introduced into the discussion and their implications for the European Neighbourhood Policy.

01 November 2004

In a new Policy Brief submitted this month to the Monetary Committee of the European Parliament, CEPS Director Daniel Gros and two of his fellow Macroeconomic Policy Group members find that the case for consolidation of government finances against the background of present and prospective demographic changes remains very strong. They argue that the Commission’s recent proposals for reform of the SGP risk watering down the Pact, resulting in an erosion of fiscal discipline.

01 July 2004

The June 2004 EU summit failed to solve the enlarged EU’s decision-making problems. Although the Constitutional Treaty’s double-majority voting rules would have maintained the enlarged EU’s ability to act, the botched Nice Treaty rules will continue to govern the Council’s decision-making up to November 2009. This failure will have important consequences since the Council, Commission and Parliament must make many tough decisions in the next five years and this will be extremely difficult under Nice Treaty voting procedures.

01 July 2004

In March 2000 in Lisbon, EU heads of state and government set the strategic goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. These goals were confirmed at the Barcelona European Council, which added that investment in European R&D should be increased to 3% of GDP by 2010.

01 April 2004

The next few months are the last opportunity for Turkey to take steps that could influence the European Commission’s recommendation in October on whether the Copenhagen political criteria have been met, and therefore whether to open accession negotiations, with the European Council due to take the decision in December.

01 April 2004

It has long been known that enlargement would have dramatic implications for EU decision-making: a structure designed for six would simply collapse under the weight of 25 or more members. This is why EU leaders have been searching for a viable voting-system reform, which will be discussed again in June 2004. This policy brief studies the many options facing EU leaders. Using the Normalised Banzhaf Index, it provides quantitative estimates of the decision-making efficiency and distributions of power for the various schemes proposed.

01 February 2004

This paper advances and elaborates on three theses concerning the incoming European Commission:
1. The President of the incoming Commission needs to have a strong profile as a ‘technocrat politician’.
2. The new Commission needs to base its work on a multi-annual mission, agreed with the European Council, and that gives priority to the development of EU strategies in the fields of economic governance and of justice and home affairs.