CYPRUS FOREIGN MINISTER - GYMNICH

Cypriot Minister of Foreign Affairs Marcos Kyprianou, who participated in the two-day informal session of the EU Ministers of Foreign Affairs (Gymnich), held in the Czech Republic, has expressed Cyprus` support to the European prospects of the Western Balkans.

The main topic of the meeting was developments in the Middle East and the Western Balkans, as well as the development of the EU`s non-military capacity, in the framework of the European Security and Defence Policy.

During the first part of the meeting, the EU Ministers reviewed developments in the broader region of the Middle East and exchanged views on current developments in the peace process, expressing their support to the solution of two states. They also discussed the relations between the EU and Syria, in the light of positive developments in relations between Syria and Lebanon.

During the second part of the meeting, a broad meeting and working lunch were held, with the participation of candidate for EU accession countries and the Western Balkans. The aim of the EU Czech presidency was to hold an open discussion, focusing on the EU`s future approach and strategy regarding enlargement to the Western Balkans. Kyprianou expressed Cyprus` support to the European prospects of the Western Balkans, noting that this would secure stability and prosperity in the region and the EU itself.

( Retirado do jornal CYPRUS NEWS AGENCY - 29.03.09 )

CYPRIOT FINANCE MINISTER

Minister of Finance Charilaos Stavrakis said President of the Republic Demetris Christofias, the government and the ministers were doing much to limit the consequences of the global financial crisis, noting that figures spoke for themselves.

Addressing a trade union meeting, Stavrakis said that "in the last quarter of 2008 we had the highest growth rate in the Eurozone, in 2009, according to official European Commission projections, we are again expected to have the highest growth rate among the old members of the Eurozone."

Stavrakis pointed out that "the higher the growth rate, the less pressure you have towards unemployment."

"It has been estimated that we will have a growth rate of about 2.5% to 3%, taking into consideration the increase of inflation. Unemployment remains stable," he said.

( Retirado do jornal CYPRUS NEWS AGENCY - 29.03.09 )

ECB vice-president says governments should clean up banks more quickly

EUROPEAN BUSINESS SUMMIT 2009

By Simon Taylor

26.03.2009 / 14:48 CET

Lucas Papademos calls for measures to help banks get rid of bad assets

Lucas Papademos, a vice-president of the European Central Bank (ECB), said today that governments should speed up measures to help banks get rid of bad assets.
“A lot has been done. What is important is to implement at greater speed what has been decided by governments,” he said. "Huge commitments have been made, but actual implementation has been rather slow.”
The EU and US have agreed approaches to help banks get rid of impaired assets in a bid to get banks lending again.
The ECB had provided “unlimited liquidity” to the financial sector by expanding the balance sheet of the euro system by 70%.
“The economic and financial situation are characterised by synchronised decline in economic activity associated with collapse of world trade and growing signs of an adverse feedback loop between the real economy and the financial sector,” he said.
Papademos also defended the reluctance of EU governments to agree additional economic stimulus measures. He said that eurozone countries had agreed a stimulus worth 2% of gross domestic product in 2009 and 2010 which he called a “substantial fiscal stimulus”.
He pointed out that automatic stabilisers, increased public spending on unemployment benefit as the number of jobless rose in a downturn, were stronger in Europe than in the US. “An appropriate fiscal stimulus need not rely so much on additional discretionary measures as elsewhere,” he said, referring to calls from the US for the EU to provide a greater stimulus.

( Retirado do jornal holandês EUROPEAN VOICE - 26.03.09 )

By Jennifer Rankin

27.03.2009 / 14:37 CET

WWF accuses EU leaders of breaking international agreement; Environment commissioner defends targets.

Stavros Dimas, the European commissioner for the environment, insisted that Europe was still a global leader on climate change after a stinging attack on the EU by the campaign group World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) at the European Business Summit in Brussels today (27 March).

In a testy exchange, Dimas defended EU policy after WWF said that Europe had broken its promise to developing countries and weakened its own carbon reduction targets.

Stephan Singer, director of global energy policy at WWF's European policy office and a veteran climate change campaigner, said the campaign group was “deeply disappointed” in the EU. He accused EU leaders of breaking an international agreement reached in Bali in 2007, when rich countries promised to transfer funds to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change. Last week, EU leaders agreed that they would do their “fair share” for developing countries, but did not name an amount of money. Singer said this showed that the EU had “empty hands” and was “breaking the Bali mandate”.

The campaigner also said that the EU's goal to reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 would generate only 4-5% real cuts in emissions. The EU has already cut emissions by 8% compared to 1990 levels. Much of the remaining 12% needed by 2020 would come from carbon offsets, said Singer, which he dismissed as a way to “cheat the atmosphere”.

In an especially painful attack on EU policymakers, Singer said that the US goal to stabilise emissions at 1990 levels by 2020 “on paper could be a more aggressive target” than the EU's efforts.

Visibly irritated, Dimas accused WWF of “politicking” and said that the group was “undermining our ability to negotiate in Copenhagen” (at the United Nations' climate change conference, to be held in December). He said “everyone accepts that Europe is leading the fight against climate change”, adding that “other countries have not even talked about what they are going to do”. And he said that the EU would be pressing the US to make comparable emission-reduction targets, going further than a commitment to “stabilise” emissions.

Business leaders urged the EU to reach an international agreement in Copenhagen to ensure “a level playing-field” for industry. They worried that failure to get an agreement would damage European industry. Werner Schnappauf, director-general of the Federation of German Industries, said that “energy-intensive industries needed to have a future in the European continent”. Rudi Huber, of aluminium producer Alcoa, said that the EU's environmental laws were a “burden” on companies and that the emissions trading scheme had increased the cost of electricity. He said that without an international agreement that could be monitored and checked, “we needlessly condemn energy-intensive industries in Europe”.

Joan MacNaughton, senior vice-president for power and environmental policies at the power company Alstom, called for public subsidies to be spent on testing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The EU has promised to build 10-12 demonstration projects by 2015, but there is a shortfall in money needed to build them. MacNaughton said that she expected seven CCS demonstration projects would be agreed at the end of the year and another five in 2011.

( Retirado do jornal EUROPEAN VOICE - 29.03.09 )

Open access to EU documents essential to connecting Europe to its citizens - Kelly

Labour MEP Candidate Senator Alan Kelly today backed calls for a speedy introduction of open access to EU documents and legislation. Kelly believes the EU could learn much from Ireland's Freedom of Information Act which was introduced by the Labour Party when it was last in Government.

The Senator was reacting to a report by British Labour MEP Michael Cashman which proposes greater openness and transparency in EU matters.

Senator Kelly believes that any move towards greater transparency at EU level would be good for Ireland particularly in the wake of the Lisbon Vote and in the light of the need to make Europe more understandable to the electorate.

He said: "A lot of people find Europe a bit of a turn-off with the amount of jargon and the complexity of how laws are made. It's important that people know that Labour and its sister parties are working to make the system more open and transparent. At least if NGOs and journalists can get documents and draft laws they can then explain them to the public.

"It is still worrying that 36 per cent of complaints to the EU Ombudsman are in relation to transparency issues. I very much welcome the report by Labour MEP Michael Cashman which has set out how EU documents could be made more accessible and transparent. However I would like to see this whole area dealt with as soon as possible. These proposals would also have the effect of letting Irish people know what position our Government took in negotiations and deals which is not public at the moment. The current system allows the Government blame Europe for things it has often supported, like charging schools for water! There is a need of course to have some restrictions and I think the original Irish Freedom of Information Act as introduced by the Labour Party got this balance right with certain exemptions. That was before Fianna Fail filleted the Act, and reduced its effectiveness by undermining many of its provisions.

"What we need now is a Europe-wide Freedom of Information regime. We also need better regulation of lobbyists who are very influential in Brussels. It is Labour and its allies that are working for this transparency at European level and I hope to be part of such a movement if elected to the European Parliament in June.

( Retirado do jornal Waterford Today - 29.03.09 )

Queda do governo tcheco põe em risco Tratado de Lisboa

Voto de desconfiança contra governo da República Tcheca, país que exerce a presidência semestral da União Europeia, poderá afetar ratificação do tratado de reformas da UE.

O Parlamento tcheco aprovou nesta terça-feira (24/03) uma moção de censura contra o governo do primeiro-ministro da República Tcheca, Mirek Topolanek. O premiê de 52 anos chefiava um governo de minoria formado por três partidos. Ele aceitou o resultado da votação e disse que apresentará sua renúncia.

Este foi o quinto voto de desconfiança contra Topolanek desde que ele assumiu o governo, em janeiro de 2007. A moção de censura recém-aprovada pelo Parlamento foi apresentada em decorrência de acusações contra um conselheiro do premiê suspeito de exercer pressão contra a televisão estatal. Além disso, Topolanek voltou a ser alvo de críticas por causa de sua política frente à crise econômica.

O fato provocou apreensão em Bruxelas, pois o país ocupa a presidência semestral rotativa do Conselho Europeu até final de junho e Praga ainda não ratificou o Tratado de Lisboa, que prevê reformas no bloco de 27 países.

A oposição social-democrata tcheca anunciou que pretende tolerá-lo à frente do governo até o final do mandato na presidência europeia. Segundo a Constituição do país, o presidente Václav Klaus dispõe de tempo para convocar um novo governo.

UE espera continuidade

Em declaração, a Comissão Europeia demonstrou a confiança de que, apesar da queda do governo, Praga possa concluir seu mandato na presidência da União Europeia (UE) de forma efetiva. O eurodeputado democrata-cristão alemão Elmar Brok manifestou ao jornalFinancial Times Deutschland a preocupação de que a República Tcheca não ratifique o Tratado de Lisboa.

"O eurocético Václav Klaus pode derrubar o projeto de reformas de uma vez por todas", opinou Brok. Antes de o país assumir a presidência da UE, Klaus havia dito que seria desnecessário seu país ocupar o posto, pois as decisões só seriam tomadas pelos grandes países do bloco.

O tratado só pode entrar em vigor após a ratificação em todos os 27 países-membros da UE, mas ainda está em aberto na Irlanda e ainda precisa da aprovação parlamentar na República Tcheca. Segundo Brok, o premiê perdeu um instrumento para pressionar seus parlamentares a votarem a favor do documento.

Liderança enfraquecida

Logo após tomar conhecimento do resultado da votação, Topolanek declarou que sua derrota não afetará a presidência da UE. Mesmo assim, observadores acreditam que sua autoridade estará enfraquecida não só na chefia do bloco em busca de soluções para a crise, como em eventos importantes na agenda da UE. Um deles é o encontro dos chefes de Estado e de governo do bloco com o presidente norte-americano Barack Obama, marcado para 5 de abril, em Praga.

O governo tcheco é o terceiro no antigo bloco do Leste Europeu – após Letônia e Hungria – a cair por causa da crise econômica. Não é a primeira vez que um país na presidência rotativa do Conselho Europeu passa por uma mudança de governo.

No primeiro semestre de 1996, na Itália, a coligação dirigida por Romano Prodi venceu as eleições e substituiu o governo de Lamberto Dini. No primeiro semestre de 1993, isto já havia acontecido na Dinamarca, com a queda de Poul Schlüter e a eleição de Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.

Retirado de Deutsche Welle 28/03/2009

Letter From London: One Market, Many Peoples

Will the Crash Scuttle the European Project? 

Summary -- 

 

In the United Kingdom, backlash against workers from other countries in the European Union is growing. Any measures to limit foreign labor, however, may threaten the future of the European common market.

Anger against foreigners in Shepherd's Bush, my slightly seedy neighborhood of West London, is not hard to find. A late-night visit to a convenience store or a kebab shop often presents the spectacle of angry natives -- usually drunk and probably unemployed -- cursing at the lack of fellow countrymen working in the neighborhood. Their language is crude, but their analysis is hard to dispute: the store on my corner has Poles behind the cash registers and Pakistanis sweeping the floors.

Such workers are increasingly becoming targets for xenophobic wrath in the United Kingdom. The ongoing global economic crisis has hit the British employment market hard, with 278,000 native-born workers losing their jobs in the last year. At the same time, jobs for foreign-born workers rose by 214,000, and immigrants now represent nearly 15 percent of all workers in the United Kingdom. Many sectors, particularly the very visible construction trade, are dominated by foreign labor. This January, the revelation that the builders of a refinery in Lincolnshire had refused to consider British workers, instead hiring only Italian and Portuguese applicants, spawned a wave of wildcat refinery strikes across the country and blockades of power stations by outraged British energy workers. The famously anti-European British tabloid press decries the invasion of foreign labor and insists that Prime Minister Gordon Brown make good on his 2007 promise to find "British jobs for every British worker," even if that means reserving jobs for British workers.

Blaming foreigners for hard economic times is hardly a new phenomenon, even in ultra-cosmopolitan London. The United Kingdom, like much of Europe, has a long tradition of importing workers during good times and then struggling to respond to popular demands to send them home during downturns. This current recession, however, offers an additional complication: the single European labor market. A series of EU rules that have slowly come into place over the last 20 years now mean that the national governments of EU member states cannot make laws that discriminate against workers from other EU countries. Back in 2004, when ten countries (including eight from Eastern Europe) joined the EU, existing member states had the option of taking up to seven years to adopt a nondiscrimination policy against workers from the new member states. But Britain as well as Ireland and Sweden -- which all faced domestic labor shortages at the time -- chose to accept laborers from those countries immediately. Now there is no going back. During the boom years, workers from Eastern Europe, who were barred from countries such as Italy, France, and Germany, flocked to London, and many still continue to follow their friends and relatives to the United Kingdom. The result is that a neighborhood such as Shepherd's Bush is now a good place to find Polish delicacies and a bad place to find a plumber fluent in English. 

Unlike the United Kingdom, most other EU countries have opened very slowly to labor from the East and thus do not yet have many intra-EU migrants in their labor forces, making the situation in the United Kingdom fairly specific. In most other EU countries, rage toward immigrants remains focused on workers who come from outside the EU -- Turkish guest workers in Germany, for example, or North African immigrants in France -- against whom national politicians are relatively free to discriminate.

The dilemma facing the United Kingdom does, however, parallel similar problems that other EU countries are having with the rules of the common market. The national governments of France and Italy, for instance, want to channel state subsidies to support national companies in strategic industries, a serious challenge to EU competition rules. In six EU countries -- Ireland, France, Greece, Latvia, Malta, and Spain -- national governments breached EU rules by allowing their budget deficits to exceed three percent of GDP, the limit set as part of the movement toward a single European currency. The European Commission is instituting legal proceedings against five of them, and it forecasts that by next year 16 of the 27 member states will exceed the limit. Across the EU, governments are trying to insert "buy national" provisions into their bank and industrial bailouts or simply urging consumers to "buy local." Although such actions violate the spirit and often the letter of common market rules, they are a necessary political concession to assure constituents that their tax money won't be spent creating jobs in other EU countries.

This resistance to EU common-market rules is evidence of a deeper problem -- namely, the absence of a European identity. New Yorkers do not complain that workers from Michigan are taking their jobs or driving down their wages. But many Londoners and Parisians view Polish plumbers as a foreign threat to national prosperity. 

The EU has tried for decades to create a sense of continental solidarity that might underpin the single European market in hard times. It now has a flag, an anthem, and a celebrated new Internet domain (.eu). In 2005, European leaders even attempted to establish a constitution. But as the decisive rejection of the constitution in referendums in France and the Netherlands showed -- and as seen in reactions to the economic downturn throughout Europe -- bureaucrats in Brussels have not managed to create much of a sense of European identity. For the most part, European public opinion remains resolutely national in its outlook. 

Europe, then, has a single market without a single identity, which means that people who feel little communal tie to one another are now legally bound together in a seamless economic community. This situation creates a political paradox, which in a serious recession, acts to constrain leaders such as Gordon Brown, who faces calls from the British public to protect it against foreign threats but is no longer legally allowed even to acknowledge those threats as foreign, let alone satisfy the demands for protection. When a head of state does attempt to accommodate a frightened public -- such as when French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that French car companies would have to bring their factories back to France as a condition of an auto-industry bailout -- these efforts are quickly met with moralistic rebukes from other European states, public lectures from Brussels bureaucrats, and in some cases, legal proceedings from the European Commission. 

Although EU rules may help to prevent counterproductive protectionism, one has to believe that, in the end, democratic politics will bend to popular will. In Britain, anger against migration is growing and, for the first time, is focusing more on intra-European migrant labor than on workers from former imperial domains. The resolutely Euro-skeptical Tory party is expected to win next year's general election, a prediction made more certain with each outburst of anger against European workers. If the economic downturn continues and the Tories do emerge victorious, they will probably use their mandate to call into question much of what the EU has built in recent years. In that case, many other European countries that are trying to cope with similar political dilemmas may follow the British lead in abandoning single-market restrictions. The greatest experiment in history of creating a single market larger than the nation-state may be at risk because it contains too many foreigners. 

Jeremy Shapiro, March 12, 2009
JEREMY SHAPIRO is Director of Research at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/letter-from-london-one-market-many-peoples