MEU Vienna 2015: Message from MEP Eugen Freund
MEP and frontrunner of the Austrian Social Democrats for the European Elections 2014, Eugen Freund has a message for all potential MEU participants.
By: Model European Union Vienna
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MEU Vienna 2015: Message from MEP Eugen Freund - Video
Putin Says Russia Will Drop South Stream If EU Does not Approve it
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday Russia could not carry on with the South Stream gas pipeline project if the European Union was opposed to it. Speaking at a joint press conference...
By: WochitBusiness
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Putin Says Russia Will Drop South Stream If EU Does not Approve it - Video
One of the political tides over here in the European Union is against the very idea of tax competition. That is, against the idea that different states, different nations, should have different tax rules and rates and that people can thus move around either themselves or their activities so as to pick and choose where and how much they pay in tax. This campaign against tax competition is a pernicious one but it looks like its going to be quite powerful. Its worth therefore laying out what is the point of having tax competition in the first place. We dont have to go all the way to the near paranoia of Mancur Olsen, who described government merely as being stationary bandits out to fleece the populace, either. We can be a lot more moderate than that and still justify tax competition.
Theres mainstream opposition to tax competition as this shows:
Our citizens and our companies expect us to cope with tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning. It is our common duty to meet their expectation by ensuring that everyone pays its fair share of tax to the state where profits are generated, Germanys Wolfgang Schuble, Frances Michel Sapin and Italys Pier Carlo Padoan wrote in a joint letter seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Since certain tax practices of countries and taxpayers have become public recently, the limits of permissible tax competition between member states have shifted. This development is irreversible.
And theres this new campaign from rather further over in left field, from the European Greens:
The aggressive tax competition between EU member states makes it possible for multinational corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid their tax responsibilities. The only winners of this are the wealthiest, whether individuals or corporations, and the losers are the vast majority of European citizens and smaller businesses. We want the EU and European governments to finally take action and we want your support to put pressure on them so they do.
Their declared end goal is that tax rates across the different nations of Europe must be harmonised: expressly with the aim of making tax competition impossible.
Now it is possible just to don our Mancur Olsen blinkers and view this as those bandits, predators upon the population, making sure that none of the sheep to be shorn manage to escape. But we dont have to go quite that far (despite my often agreeing with that view of government).
Think through what we like about competition in the first place. That Exxon, Total Total and Statoil Statoil all compete to provide us with oil is something we rather like. Not, of course, because it benefits Exxon, Statoil and Total. Rather, because it hampers them, hinders them, in their activities. If there was only one monopoly oil supplier in the world then we would be at their mercy. They could charge us as they wished for that gasoline to drive our cars, oil to heat homes and so on. Indeed, weve a large area of economics looking at what monopolies tend to do and we conclude that theyre destructive to the interests of us consumers. That competition between different suppliers acts as a brake on what they can do to us consumers. Thats exactly why we like competition. Because it protects us, the consumers, against them, the producers.
Government, governance, is no different. We here, as the citizenry, are the consumers of governance. And just like we pay for oil when we want it then we also pay for governance in the form of taxes (sadly, whether we want that governance or not). Government is the oil company, the provider of that governance funded by our taxes. And in exactly the same manner we think that competition here is a good thing. For competition limits what they may do to us.
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The Terrible European Union Campaign Against Tax Competition
To stay competitive on a global scale, the European Union needs to mobilize the untapped potential and talent of women in all spheres, write a number of women leaders, after launching the EU Women Caucus on Tuesday (2 December 2014).
The signatories of this op-ed are:Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, Board Member of the EU Women Caucus,Stefano Sannino, Permanent Representative of Italy to the European Union,Iraxte Garca Perez, Chair FEMM, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Helga Stevens, Vice Chair ECR, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Sophiein t'Veld, Vice Chair ALDE, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Lara Comi, Vice Chair EPP, MEP, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Maria Joao Rodrigues, Vice Chair S&D, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus,Dimitrios Papadimoulis, Vice-President of the European Parliament, Co-Chair of the EU Women Caucus.
When a new European Commission has to be appointed, and the European Parliament faces the electorate at the ballot box, the quest for female leaders to achieve a fairer representation within the European institutions is placed high on the agenda.
The problem has been how to keep it there once the elections are over and the new Commission is in place.
It is in response to this that the EU Women Caucus has been launched on Tuesday (2 November). This is a unique cross-party and inter-institutional platform for discussion between leading women in the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the representations of the EU Member States to the European Union.
While being resolutely informal in its role, the EU Women Caucus is a means of building a network between women in positions of influence enabling them to keep the issue of the quest for female leaders as high on the agenda as it is during election periods.
2014 is a key time for the creation of such a platform. As an election year, it has offered a chance to put the EUs commitment to gender equality to the test. While managing to avoid scoring the lowest grade, the results are far from impressive. After the EU elections in May, just 37% of the Members of the European Parliament are women; there are also only nine women among the 28 European Commissioners.
This is, of course, a big step forward from when the European institutions were founded some decades ago. But far from the ambitions of 2010 when the European Commission issued a declaration upholding the idea that gender equality is a fundamental right, and reaffirming its commitment to pursuing the "fairer representation of women and men in positions of power in public life and the economy."
Much remains to be done to advance female leadership and to increase the number of women in top EU positions. And as an example, we can look no further than the EU Parliament itself: from the previous 2009-2014 parliament the number of women MEPs has risen by less than 2%: at this rate, it has been suggested, it will take 50 years to achieve full gender balance.
In a similar vein, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has stated it was pathetic that he had been unable to appoint more than nine women to the Commission despite his having urged national governments to put forward more. We wholeheartedly agree with him. The question is, though, what is to be done about it?
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Female leadership is a must, not an option
If the European Union lacks somewhat in terms of popular legitimacy, the electoral procedure of the European Parliament must have something to do with it. Fortunately, Parliament is itself responsible for initiating electoral reform, although like all parliaments it must overcome the vested interests of serving deputies that provide an in-built bias towards thestatus quo, writes Andrew Duff.
Andrew Duff is a European policy expert and was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999-2014. Tomorrow (December 4), Andrew Duffwill be presenting a paper in the European Parliament Committee of Constitutional Affairs Hearingon Electoral reform.For a fuller discussion of these and other issues, see his forthcoming publication (John Harper) Pandora, Penelope, Polity: How to Change the European Union.
Since the introduction of direct elections in 1979, Parliament has only managed one serious reform - the introduction of proportional representation across the Union.Parliament has two obligations to fulfil under the terms of the Treaty of Lisbon. Article 223(1) TFEU says that it shall draw up a proposal either for a uniform electoral procedure or one which meets principles common to all member states. Article 14(2) TEU says it shall propose to the European Council a draft decision on the apportionment of seats according to the (ill-defined) principle of degressive proportionality. To complicate matters, Lisbon also changed the designation of an MEPs mandate from that of representing the peoples of the states to the Unions citizens making more absurd the monopoly held by the member states and national political parties on the selection of candidates, the conduct of the election campaign and the distribution of seats.
The Spitzenkandidat experiment in 2014 was one attempt to make the elections more transnational. Its success notwithstanding (surprising even its authors), it is agreed that further reform is needed to improve the process by which President Junckers successor is to be elected in 2019. The logical next step is to put the party champions at the head of transnational lists from which a certain number of MEPs will be elected for a pan-European constituency. This will galvanise the federal level parties into campaigning gear and give the electorate a welcome second ballot to use at its discretion in the European dimension of politics. Fortunately, the Constitutional Affairs Committee in the last mandate made a good stab at such a proposal.
There was also progress made in the last Parliament towards finding agreement on an arithmetical formula on seat apportionment among the states in order to put to an end the much criticised, unseemly process which has up to now seen seats bartered at the end of every IGC. The system explored, called the Cambridge Compromise (CamCom), would be equitable, explicable and durable, a two-stage variant of which would ensure that no state lost more than two seats at the next election. Amazingly, even the European Council, after struggling to find 11 seats to give Croatia, has now agreed to establish a system which will in the future make it possible, before each new election to the European parliament, to allocate seats between member states in a fair, objective and transparent manner.
If the apportionment of seats in the first chamber of the legislature is to be made more proportional, it is unavoidable that the weighting of votes in the second chamber is also reviewed. The entry into force last month of the Lisbon system for QMV that is, 55% of states representing 65% of the population favours both the larger states (in terms of population) and the smaller states (in terms of the number of states needed to reach a majority). It will only be fair to compensate the middling size states, which stand to lose their over-representation in the Parliament, with more clout in the Council. Happily, a scheme exists, known as the Jagellonian Compromise (JagCom), based on the square root of population which accords voting power in inverse proportion to size. A combination of transnational lists, CamCom and JagCom would provide a rational and comprehensive solution to a number of interrelated constitutional problems. Electoral turnout would be likely to improve and democratic confidence in the Union grow.
Of course, these important democratic reforms require amendment to both the primary and secondary law of the Union. The institutional treaty changes will find their place within a larger package which includes the installation of fiscal union, a new financial system and a settlement of the British problem. There will also be the chance to rectify some of the less good features of Lisbon as well as to modernise certain common policies. A Convention is certainly necessary to craft such a shift in the balance of power between the EU institutions and among the states. A European Parliament dedicated to its own reform should aim to play a leading role in this Convention, in the closest collaboration with the Commission. MEPs should act now to prepare to use to the full their powers of initiative.
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MEPs face loss of legitimacy if they fail parliamentary reform