Det här är ljusår från det öppna och toleranta EU som vi i C vill ha!

Bra att att både Expressen och DN uppmärksammar hans uttalanden.

I natt satt också Sveriges ambassadör med för första gången.  Se första genomgång o tidsplan nedan! Återigen en framgång….

          DIRECTORATE GENERAL INTERNAL POLICIES OF THE UNION

                              Committee on Industry, Research and Energy

- Secretariat -

Strasbourg, 23 March 2009

FEEDBACK NOTE ON THE SEVENTH AND FINAL TRIALOGUE ON

THE THIRD LIBERALIZATION PACKAGE ON ELECTRICITY AND GAS

Meeting held on Wednesday, 23 March 2009, from 19:00 onwards

The seventh and final trialogue meeting on the third liberalization package on electricity and gas package ended with a final agreement on the whole package.

Parliament and Council agreed on a compromise text on unbundling, namely ownership unbundling, ISO and ITO options applied for gas and electricity in the same way. In turn several provisions – inter alia – on consumer rights, smart metering, NRAs, role of Agency, and the gas and electricity regulations could be strengthened following EP calls. 

The five legislative compromise texts will be finalised in a technical meeting on Tuesday, 24 March. COREPER will have to endorse the compromise package on Friday, 27 March.

A Press conference on the package is to take place on Tuesday 24 March from 11:30 to 12:00 in the briefing room LOW N-1/201.

Vote in ITRE is scheduled for 31 March.

Geremek var en människa som förkroppsligade det moderna Europas historia, och som med stolthet förde Polen in i EU. Han tog stora risker för fred och stabilitet i Europa.

Förra året lanserades jag min bok ”Open Europe”. En av författarna var just Bronislaw Geremek där han skrev kapitlet ”European Foreign Policy and the Challenges of the 21st century” (Läs hans kapitel).

Release: Immediate

Strasbourg, 8th July 2008

Parliament to thoroughly control the nomination of Commissioners

The European Parliament has today adopted a report by Andrew Duff (LibDem, UK) modifying its internal rules with regard to the procedure of approval of the European Commission. By this move, Parliament has taken a step forward in this crucial question for EU democracy. The report tightens and codifies presently applied empiric practices, mainly those that became obvious in 2004 when Mr Barroso’s Commission was designated. Consequently, future Commission candidates will have to prove their European commitment and their independence. They will have to communicate their financial interests beforehand; at present, this obligation is complied with a posteriori. Should there be any doubts about an applicant’s integrity, from the side of the committee(s) responsible of the respective audit(s), a vote could be organised to possibly refuse the candidate. The new internal rules also foresee that Parliament, via its elected President, will be able to pronounce itself on the distribution of the portfolios.

”It is possible that the designation of the next Commission falls under the Nice Treaty provisions, and not under those of the Lisbon Treaty”, Andrew Duff, ALDE Constitutional Affairs Coordinator commented. ”It’s a pity for European democracy since the Council will feel less obliged to the outcome of the European elections. However, our citizens should at least know that their MEPs commit themselves to work out who is the best person for a post, or not nominate a person at all in case Member States stubbornly consider Brussels to be a place where to recycle incompetent or clearly eurosceptic politicians whose careers have been interrupted at home. The European Commission is neither a nursing home nor a recycling factory”, Mr Duff added.

For more information please contact:

Neil Corlett: +33-3-88 17 41 67 or +32-478-78 22 84

e-mail: neil.corlett@europarl.europa.eu

Yannick Laude: +33-3-88 17 27 76 or +32-495-22 78 37

also consult: http://www.alde.eu

Dear Colleague,
A number of female MEPs were brought together last week in Strasbourg as a result of a dinner invitation by Commissioner Wallström. Some of us have already been involved in making statements or taking initiatives concerning the visibility of women in the EU institutions, particularly concerning the so-called EU ”top jobs” (Presidencies of the European Parliament and European Commission, High Representative, and, the Presidency of European Council which was foreseen by the Treaty of Lisbon). The wheeling and dealing of our male colleagues concerning these posts has clearly both irritated and indeed motivated many women to a conclusion that something has to change.
At our dinner discussion it was felt that if women across the EU institutions, MEPs, Commissioners and national Ministers were seen to be acting together, it could be seen as a critical signal to influence both the outcome in respect of any top appointments, but also in particular the wider issue of female participation in the 2009 European Parliament elections. Women need to be represented at all levels and particularly at all levels in politics.
One of the possibilities discussed was a networking conference in the autumn; one has only to imagine the possible ‘family photo’ of all influential European women to see how powerful this could be. We had thought of having a first meeting in Strasbourg before the summer break to gauge interest. However we have no idea of how many colleagues might turn up, so even the first step of booking a room is problematic. So this mail is to sound out whether you are interested in such an initiative and would be in principle prepared to support it. We look forward to receiving your answer as soon as convenient (you can reply directly to this email).
We are attaching a copy of the statement from Vice President Wallström agreed by us all following our dinner, where we all found it great to be working on a cross-party basis.

Diana Wallis – Karin Riis-Jørgensen – Zita Gurmai – Doris Pack – Catherine Stihler – Anneli Jäätteenmäki – Luisa Morgantini – Monica Frassoni

Summer 2008 Europe’s World | 35
Capitalism’s uncertain future
What will the world economy look like 25 years from
now? Daniel Daianu says that sovereign wealth funds
have major implications for global politics, and for the
future of capitalism
Investment by sovereign wealth funds
(SWFs) last year reached a record $50bn
or so, and in the first quarter of this
year accelerated further. In the deepening
financial crisis, and after their severe losses
in the sub-prime debacle, Citigroup, Morgan
Stanley, Merrill Lynch and UBS all sought
liquidity injections from SWFs by selling
them equity. These transactions took
place against the background of the SWFs’
growing visibility in the world economy. Last
October, the G-7 finance ministers invited
international organisations, notably the IMF
and OECD, to consider the role of SWFs
– and the IMF, in co-operation with fund
owners, is now developing an SWFs code of
conduct, and the OECD is identifying best
practices for recipient countries. The EU,
too, has taken up the whole issue seriously.
SWFs are not new. Decades ago, several
countries (Kuwait in 1953, Singapore, Norway,
the United Arab Emirates) established
SWFs to manage their substantial foreign
exchange reserves – essentially oil and gas
revenues that couldn’t be fully invested in
their own economies without endangering
stability. Investing abroad was therefore
the logical way forward. The rapid and
durable rise in energy prices of recent years,
together with the exceptional performance
of the Asian economies, led to significant
growth in the number of SWFs. Currently,
SWFs are estimated to control assets
worth somewhere between $1.5 trillion to
$2.5 trillion, and with rising commodity
prices it is thought that this figure will by
2015 have risen to $12 trillion.
The rise of the SWFs looks likely to
have an increasingly significant impact on
international politics. The reason for this
is simple – some of the SWFs belong to
countries that had since World War II been
ideologically opposed to the western world.
China’s foreign exchange reserves, for
example, had reached more than $1,400bn
by late 2007, while those of Russia exceed
$400bn – and both are nations with large
SWFs. It’s therefore possible to place the
SWF phenomenon in a broader context of
global competition and of diverging national
interests – indeed, it is possible to consider
this issue in terms of a clash of capitalisms.
36 | Europe’s World Summer 2008
In the wake of the fall of communism
some analysts focused on a form a
competition amongst capitalist systems
within the wealthy western world. The
influential French economist Michel Albert
in the early 1990s wrote a book called
“Capitalism versus capitalism” in which he
viewed global economic competition as
essentially a struggle between the Anglo-
Saxon economic model and the
continental model in France,
Germany and elsewhere.
Over the past decade, the
concept of “fortress Europe”
has also gained currency, and
the European economies
appeared to be successfully
reducing their productivity
gap with the US. MIT’s Lester
Thurow saw a tri-polar world
economy emerging, with Japan
as the third pole. This vision of
economic power in the world
shared between America,
Europe and Japan was glaringly illustrated
by the composition of the Trilateral
Commission, whose meetings group leaders
from all three.
Nowadays, though, a new global
competition between different models of
capitalism can also be seen. This reflects
momentous changes in the world economy,
and underlines their geopolitical implications.
China’s formidable economic ascent in the
last two decades, and India’s more recent
rise along with that Asia in general, all
signal tectonic shifts in the global economy.
These economies are characterised by
dynamism, and that in turn is reflected
in their economic growth, their soaring
exports, the size of their foreign exchange
reserves and not just their absorption of
modern technologies (ICTs) but increasingly
their own generation of new technology.
China and India each graduate over half a
million engineers a year, and the presence of
their scientists in top professional journals is
more then eye-catching. Both countries are
also making big inroads into reshaping the
world institutional order that
has regulated international
affairs since the end of
World War II. The debate
on reforming International
Financial Institutions (IFIs),
as well as the causes behind
the stalling of the Doha trade
round, are examples of this.
It is no longer realistic to
pursue any real issues of
global governance without
involving China and India.
Chinese and Indian
companies can boast global outreach and are
now acquiring significant stakes in companies
around the world, including in the west.
India’s Tata group is to begin production of
an extraordinarily cheap car that could be a
global phenomenon, and it has bought the
two famous brands of Land Rover and Jaguar
from Ford, the American giant which, like GM,
is going through hard times.
China, along with India and Brazil, is
increasingly present in regions of the world
where it’s strategically important to control
scarce, exhaustible resources ranging from
industrial minerals to oil and gas. China uses
international economic aid as a means of
bolstering its credentials in poorer countries,
Nowadays a new
global competition
between different
models of capitalism
can be seen. This
reflects momentous
changes in the
world economy,
and underlines
their geopolitical
implications
Summer 2008 Europe’s World | 37
external supplies of energy, and its lack of a
common energy policy.
Asia’s remarkable economic progress
is re-landscaping competitive hierarchies
around the world, and is reducing the west’s
ability to set the rules of the game. This
redistribution of world economic power is
notably in Africa, that have major natural
resources. This poses a challenge to both the
US and the EU. At the same time, Russia is
staging a comeback on the international scene
precisely because of the enormous scale of its
natural resources. Lukoil and Gazprom have
been expanding their operations in Europe
by capitalising on EU’s high dependence on
MATTERS OF OPINION
How economic outlooks vary worldwide
Europeans are more pessimistic about their economic
situation than people in any other part of the world.
On average, only three out of 10 people questioned
for a recent Gallup poll in 36 European countries
reported that their national economy was in good
shape. Slightly more – four out of 10 – said that it
was getting better.
European opinion varies. The wealthier countries of
western Europe were more likely to say the economy
was good today, but held out less hope for the
future. The converse was true for many of the former
communist countries that are now part of the EU.
But compared to the Americas, Asia and Africa,
Europe has the least confidence in its economic
outlook. In the World Poll, more Africans than
Europeans thought their current economic situation
was good: 43% compared to 30%.
When it came to predicting the future, people in
the Americas were the most pessimistic of all: just
one in three people thought that their economy was
getting better.
d Summer 2008
is developing between China and India
on which the US could capitalise. In any
case, when it comes to reforming IFIs and
international trade, India would clearly side
with the other emerging economies.
The western world is and will remain
the most powerful bloc, economically and
militarily, for the foreseeable future. But
the US has been weakened
by its external deficits and
by military overstretch in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Its
deepening financial crisis
also raises major concerns
over business governance,
with under-regulation and
inadequate supervision
and America’s blind belief
in the self-regulating
virtues of markets – market
fundamentalism – becoming
increasingly problematic.
How ironic all this must seem to Asians, given
the western world’s preaching at the time of
the Asian financial crisis a decade ago.
The EU too is struggling to manage
its growing organisational complexity while
tackling various forms of institutional and
policy incoherence. China and the other
Asian countries, meanwhile, are progressing
economically and technologically at a very
fast pace – a trend that’s likely to continue
in the next two decades or so, even if some
of their economic momentum is temporarily
eroded by the economic woes of the US and
Europe. And Moscow is using the Russian
Federation’s energy-based financial muscle
to play once more at global power politics.
All these dynamics look more salient still
also having geo-political effects – these
concern regional political and economic
dynamics, security alliances, the reform
of IFIs, global governance structures, and
competition for strategic resources.
This geo-political perspective suggests
that the title of Michael Albert’s 1991 book
could perhaps be paraphrased. In Asia,
with the exceptions of India
and to some extent Japan, the
prevailing form of capitalism
has an authoritarian shade
and relies on state structures.
This type of capitalism hinges
on corporatist structures, on
industrial policies and selective
protectionism. It operates in
Russia too, where the state
controls the major energy
groups. Clearly, economic
rationality has to be reconciled
with other factors when the
state’s wider interests have to be taken into
account. That’s especially true in a world
increasingly worried about the scarcity of
non-renewable energy resources and in which
global warming is creating very complicated
trade-offs for policy-making, and where food
looks like becoming less plentiful because of
climate change pressures.
Not even India, the world’s largest
democracy, sees eye to eye at a geopolitical
level with either the US or the
EU. That India and the US have come to
an agreement on energy and on the major
issue of nuclear weapons does not radically
change the scope for competition between
these different types of capitalism, even if
it is possible to argue that a growing rivalry
The deepening
of the financial
crisis is bolstering
pragmatism and
policies that do not
confuse free markets
with completely
deregulated ones
Summer 2008 Europe’s World | 39
Reforms that could bring greater vitality to
the western economies are also very important.
The EU’s Lisbon agenda is a vitally important
policy response, yet seems already to have
been overtaken by the new focus on global
warming and energy security. Now the need
is to update the Lisbon agenda, and improve
industrial and economic performance.
To sum up, the relative decline of the
economic power of the US and EU seems
inevitable, in terms of their share of global
GDP, industrial production and world trade.
But this relative decline, described by the
political scientist Nicole Gnesotto in the
Summer 2007 issue of Europe’s World as “the
growing powerlessness of the West”, may be
accompanied by a rise in its so-called soft
power – especially if new countries join the
family of liberal democracies. This would be
very much in tune with American political
scientist Samuel Huntington’s idea of the
“third wave of democratisation”. The expansion
of the west’s soft power would involve more
concern for global issues, such as global
warming and international trade, the greater
involvement of emerging global powers like
China and India in tackling the world’s “hot
spots” and, not least, a reappraisal of the
moral values which have brought economic
prosperity and political empowerment to
ordinary citizens during modern history. This
reappraisal would include paying genuine
attention to the concerns of the rest of the
world.
Daniel Daianu is a member of the European Parliament
and professor of economics at the National School
of Political and Administrative Studies (SNSPA) in
Bucharest. He is also a former Finance Minister of
Romania.
when placed against the backdrop of
the worldwide contest for scarce natural
resources, the intricate situation in the
Middle East and the rivalries in the Caspian
Sea region and in Africa.
Authoritarian techniques like direct state
involvement in the economy and society are
even finding a degree of favour in liberal
democracies. This reflects fears of terrorism,
along with the need to cope with global
warming while securing energy supplies. The
debate in the US on the implications of the
Patriot Act, and its echoes in the EU’s member
states is quite telling, and the rise in economic
nationalism should also be seen in this light.
Throughout the world we are witnessing
the resurrection of a policy paradigm that
sees state intervention as an optimal means
of achieving results. Policymaking of a type
normally associated with a war economy
is therefore likely to proliferate, especially
when quick responses and the immediate
mobilisation of major resources are needed.
The deepening of the current financial crisis
is also vindicating those who have long
cautioned against market fundamentalism.
This is a crisis that is bolstering pragmatism
and policies that do not confuse free markets
with completely deregulated ones.
Capitalism won the Cold War and defeated
the communist system. But it is by no means
certain that this guarantees the victory of liberal
democracy – to use Fareed Zakaria’s term for
describing the western world. Competition
between different types of capitalism has a
major geo-political dimension, and, just how
the transatlantic relationship in particular, will
be managed in the future is a key concern.