Regardless of where you live, the European Union not only affects your life, but may also transform it. By learning how Europe works, a new world will open up to you and discover new jobs you never heard of. The European Union has a large, yet often unnoticed, impact on many aspects of everybody’s life. We will analyze what the EU is doing for YOU regardless of where you live. We will also look at what YOU can do for and in Europe. Whether you are traveling, eating, working, doing business, shopping, surfing the Internet or breathing, all these activities are largely shaped by the EU. As a result no global citizen, business leader, lawmaker, lobbyist or student can effectively operate in Europe or in the world without a solid understanding of this unique laboratory of integration. While the EU is often depicted as a monstrous bureaucratic creature, condemned to irrelevance by the emerging economies, in 50 years it accomplished what other countries took centuries to realize. The EU remains the most accomplished experiment of economic, social and political integration in human history. Given its inherent complexities, this Course aims at empowering you on what Europe can offer and will enable you to discover jobs and opportunities you were not aware of. Indeed, throughout the whole course, participants will be confronted with real-life examples of EU action. EU affairs professionals will share their personal EU experiences and tell us about their EU jobs. You will also be able to interact with the instructor and other participants, share your opinions, question the instructor’s assumptions and hence shape the course’s content.
The EU Civil Society
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AH
Feb 26, 2017
An excellent course that will truly help you understand what the EU means.\n\nI highly recommend it!
MM
Jan 06, 2018
An amazing course! I was impressed by the tutors and the perfectly structured lectures! Thank you!
从本节课中
Who is the European Union?
Putting a face on the EU. Who is it? Who are its main actors? By whom is it composed? You will identify who decides in Europe and learn how to interact with its main actors.
教学方
Alberto Alemanno
Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law and Risk Regulation
[MUSIC]
Our last, but not least, category of players in the European game is composed
of organized groups constituting what is called civil society.
Big companies, unions, NGO, as well as religious groups,
often overlooked or blindly criticized when named lobbies,
they get to play an ever increasing role in our European game.
First, let's have a look at companies.
With more than half a billion consumers, the EU is not only the world's
largest trading block accounting for about 20% global trading goods and
commercial services, but is also its wealthiest marketplace.
Most consumers sit firmly in the middle class, with all that implies,
in financial terms.
As you can see in this graph, the European GDP is bigger
than that of the United States, two-and-a-half times bigger than China,
7 times bigger than Brazil, and nearly 10 times bigger than Russia.
Since size matters, access to the European marketplace is irresistible and
essential for any business seeking large pools of consumers and
potential profits, thus attracting thousands of corporations.
These companies operating in the EU are also subject to and
constraining their economic activities, but European regulations.
As a result, corporations are increasingly trying to influence the European
policy apparatus to shape the regulatory framework to their own advantage.
You remember my iPhone example in Lesson One?
Then let's be a bit more specific.
Take, for instance, the decision of the EU to force mobile phone manufacturers to
create a universal charger to reduce electronic waste and
make the lives of European customers easier.
The Korean manufacturer Samsung was strongly in favor of such a policy,
since their chargers are already compatible with other brands.
On the other hand, Apple was opposed.
These US firms makes profit from
selling new types of chargers with virtually every new model in time.
It is, therefore, trying to convince policymakers that imposing a universal
device would be going against technological improvements, and
it claims to bring in incremental innovations to its new chargers.
And, in the meantime, consumers keep happily buying iPhone products,
including myself.
And now, the decision has been taken following this
consultation with the industry and environmental groups.
The EU recently ruled in favor of a universal charger.
Now all manufacturers and their subcontractors are probably trying to
convince European officials that their models or charger is better, since the EU
will have to decide what type of charger will be chosen to be the universal one.
This is expected to look like a beauty contest.
The art of influencing decisions, instead of formally making them,
is generally referred to as lobbying, something you know by now.
As we will see in this course,
contrary to conventional wisdom, lobbying is not a perogative of big business.
While any actor playing the European game can and is entitled to lobby, including
NGOs and citizen organizations, it is the private sector who does a better job.
Focusing on the corporate world, there are basically three types of actors trying to
influence European decision making.
First, professional lobbying firms like Hill and Knowlton, Burson Marstellers,
Fleishman Hillard, and Cambre Associates are extremely busy in Brussels.
To give you a better idea what they do, you can watch the interview I've been
doing with Vinciane Patelou, one professional lobbyist based in Brussels.
Besides professional lobbying consulting,
also law firms do increasingly offer lobbying services and
often hire former top notch European officials as special advisors.
Given their extensive experience, network, and routine in European affairs,
they can provide useful and insightful advice on a broad variety of topics.
However, the decision of Brussels-based law firms not to abide by the code of
conduct imposed by the European Commission on all actors listed
under the transparency register, it attracted a lot of criticism.
Multinational corporations like BMW, Facebook, or
Google have all a team of lobbyists based in Brussels,
some of which have been members of the European Parliament themselves or
internal advisors in several European institutions.
Sometimes, corporations active on very different markets have similar
interests and group together in alliances, what we call lobbying alliances, and
work together by trying to focus on the very same institutions,
including national governments and parliaments.
For instance, companies like Arsalon Mital, within the trade association for
the steel sector, In la Farge through CEMBUREAU, the trade association for
the cement industry, have been joining with the oil and
gas industry to lobby against the imposition or cap on carbon emissions.
A significant area of lobbying intervention today is the current and
ongoing Transatlantic Trade Association,
the TTIP, between the European Union and the United States.
These negotiations aim to harmonize the regulatory system
of the European Union and the United States so
that companies can meet a single standard, and, of course, this agreement is worth
hundreds of millions of Euros in savings for businesses.
Particularly, if lobbyists are gonna be able to persuade negotiators
to accept their own rules into the process.
More often, however, companies do not ask the European Union to take action, but
rather strive to persuade it to slow down its regulatory action,
which is perceived as an obstacle to their commercial freedom.
A very recent example is the European reform of its regulations for
tobacco products by imposing stricter rules on the manufacturing,
presentation, and sale of tobacco products.
One of these rules pertains to the introduction of mandatory health warnings
on the cigarette packs, as a result of which, all packs will no longer offer
a marketing opportunity to grab the consumer's attention.
Instead, they would look all the same,
carrying a set of scary, large images, what we call pictorial warnings.
The tobacco industry vehemently opposed this measure and
numerous others of this kind by influencing the various policymakers.
The revision of this directive,
amid assorted lobbying affair resulted to the resignation of the Commissioner,
the then Commissioner for Health and Consumers, John Dalli.
During the negotiations of this directive,
the tobacco companies stood united in the defense of their industry,
opposing associations of physicians and patients, victims of tobacco.
Groups who, in reality, belong to another category of civil society organizations,
that of NGOs, health group in the associations.
Nongovernmental organizations acting and
playing the European game are very numerous, yet less powerful,
and, therefore, vocal than those representing the corporate world.
Their names are probably quite familiar to you.
They are Greenpeace, Amnesty International,
Transparency International Caritas, WWF.
They mostly operate in the field of human rights,
consumer, environmental and in the protection, as well, of social justice.
There are non-profit organizations who lobby to support views from which they
have no direct financial interest and for groups who are under-represented.
They are mainly funded by their supporters, donors, and
more often by public money from the member states or the European Union directly.
As opposed to corporate lobbies, these groups prioritize awareness and
educational campaigns over legislative advocacy.
They are particularly skilled in picking individual fights and
bring them to the attention of the general public.
Just think about how successful the environmental lobbies and
environmental groups have been in heightening the salience of the marketing
of GMO products in the European market.
Some NGOs also regularly organize demonstrations or
public events to try to attract media attention and public support.
In this picture, you can see how European NGOs have successfully mobilized
the public opinion against the most widely used pesticides
by raising the spectrum of their adverse effect on bee's population.
This shows that, although they tend to be less vocal,
NGOs are not entirely out of the European game, and sometimes,
despite their limited means and expertise, they succeed and advance their agenda.
Note, that people supporting that is European Catholics,
are also formally heard at the European level like all other believers'
organization within the dialog that the EU is conducting regularly with
the main churches, religious groups, and also other philosophical organizations.
A special place among civil society's organizations is that of trade unions.
These may be placed somewhere between NGOs and industry groups as they lobby for
the interest of their workers they do represent,
sometimes adopting views similar to corporate lobbies, sometimes to NGOs.
The European Trade Union Confederation represents most national unions,
which can follow very different models.
Professional branches are also represented in Brussels, like the European Federation
of Public Service Union for workers working for public services.
Social dialog, that is well-framed negotiations between workers and
employers, can formally take and are at the European level, it can take important
agreements and decisions, which are then applicable across the member states,
like the 2002 European Framework Agreement on telework, workers working from home.
For all these civil society's actors, ranging from corporate lobbies to
environmental NGOs, law firms and, unions, the European Commission and
the European Parliament together have established a transparency register.
This public register has been created to monitor the activity
that lobbyists operate in Brussels, and
also to provide to the general public information about their structures,
their goals, and their funding, and trying to prevent conflict of interest.
You will hear more about this project from my clinical students,
who will soon present you their proposal for reforming such a system.
Finally, representatives of workers, employers, and
other various interests sit together in the European Economic and
Social Committee, which together with the Committee of the Regions,
is one of the two consultative assemblies of the European Union.
As a conclusion to this long and
very demanding class, I would like to highlight a couple of things.
First of all, be assured the next class will be more fun and
slightly less demanding, but there's also a takeaway I would like to stress.
If today you are dissatisfied with what is happening in the European Union,
don't necessarily blame the game.
Blame the players instead.
This class will also show you a better alternative than becoming a player of
the European game, and this is something you can do yourself.
By now, you know who are these actors.
You've learned how to interact with the different institutions and players.
You're thus able to make your voice heard in the European game.
I will show you how to do that in the following classes.
