Amidst growing criticism over biofuels, over the weekend EU energy ministers discovered that they had misread a policy document from last March that outlined Europe’s targets for the controversial energy source. As it turns out, the target - previously understood to have 10 percent of the fuel for cars and trucks coming from biofuels by 2020 - actually only demands that the 10 percent come from renewable energy sources in general (including anything from hydrogen fuel cells to electric cars powered by clean electrical sources).

The new interpretation comes in the wake of growing protest and second thoughts regarding biofuels (see earlier post from May 13). Once seen as the green panacea for transportation emissions, biofuels have come under attack for releasing as many greenhouse gases as fossil fuels and for encouraging farmers to grow crops for fuel, not food, thereby contributing to the current food crisis. Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, directed a statement to the leaders currently at the G8 summit, “The US and Europe also need to take action to reduce mandates, subsidies and tariffs benefiting grain and oil seed biofuels that take food off the table for millions.”

Following this reinterpretation of the policy, on Monday the Environment Committee of the European Parliament recommended that the EU lower its biofuels target and instead work to emphasize other renewable energy sources for transport fuels. Coincidentally, Portugal will announce, later today, its plans to create a national network of charging stations for zero-emission electric cars, due to arrive from France in 2011.

See Also:

“Biofuel for thought,” Financial Times, 8 July 2008

“EU biofuels target ‘probably a mistake,’ France says,” EU Observer, 30 June 2008

“Slowing the biofuel bonanza,” BBC News, 7 July 2008

The twenty-first century has proved to be a rude awakening for European higher education. Despite the EU’s pledge to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010,” only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) managed to crack the top 20 in a list of the world’s top universities that the University of Shanghai published in 2007 (the U.S. landed seventeen).

In light of the rankings, European officials, at both the national and EU levels, are being forced to reevaluate the structure, financing and objectives of post-secondary education. As recently reported in Le Monde, President Sarkozy has charged his Minister of Education, Valérie Pecresse, with the goal of placing two French universities into the top 20 of the Shanghai list and twenty into the top 1,000. France also hopes to use its EU presidency to establish a “European Shanghai” system of rankings that would be more relevant to European universities.

In the latest edition of European Affairs, news editor Pascal Riché sat down with Richard Descoings, head of Sciences Po in Paris and an active proponent of educational reform, to discuss the rankings and the problems facing higher education in Europe (and France in particular). In the piece, Descoings states that the poor European showing in the world rankings stems from three failures:

“First, the lack of decent funding in continental Europe makes it very difficult to attract very good researchers and to produce sound scientific or technological research; second, the lack of autonomy [for individual universities], which means freedom to set your own strategy; third, late awareness of the intensity of the international competition.”

Evidence for Descoings’ statement about underfunding lies in a recent spotlight by the EU Observer on education. Philippa Runner points out that Europe invests far less money per capita in higher education than America does - in the EU, an average of €8,700 is spent per student, compared to €36,500 per student in the U.S. The difference between America and Europe is even more prominent in France where every high school graduate is guaranteed a spot at a university and the state pays the vast majority (if not all) of the tuition. As Descoings explains, it is due to this public stake in education that the French government has had the power to set the salaries of professors, (mis)allocate research funds and dictate the schools’ directions.

Another critique of European higher education has been that its structure and qualifications vary too greatly between countries, making it difficult for students and teachers to move between them; Critics complain that this should not happen within a supposedly “integrated” EU. And beyond their bureaucratic flaws, some European universities have been faulted for preaching an anti-market bias in their classrooms (in France and Germany in particular) and for not making the employability of their students a sufficiently high priority. EU Education Commissioner Jan Figel recently complained that Europe’s problem is that it has a “200-year-long tradition of Humboldt system where the academic world is quite isolated from the outside world.”

The good news for Europe is that efforts to reform higher education are now underway. In 1999, nearly all of the Member States voluntarily agreed to the Bologna Process, an initiative with three goals:

• Develop a common system of academic credit,
• Design a common degree structure,
• Gradually converge toward a European Area of Higher Education.

Signatory states - which now include many outside of the EU - have already made substantial progress on the first two goals, creating the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) and agreeing to adopt the 3-cycle (BA, MA, PhD) Anglo-American system of degrees by 2012.

And in order to diversify and internationalize its universities, the EU increased its efforts to encourage students to study under the ERASMUS program (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) and established an international counterpart - Erasmus Mundus - that creates the opportunity for joint post-graduate degrees at linked universities.

But problems and criticism remain. Some complain that efforts to internationalize schools will merely result in “scholarship tourism” - that is, students attending a foreign university, using its educational resources and then returning to his/her home, thus not “giving back” to the host country. And students at the Helsinki University of Technology claim that the Bologna Process turns universities into nothing more than “diploma factories” that encourage students to value credits over academic discussion and experience.

Commissioner Figel points out that educational reform will remain difficult because education lies firmly under national - not EU - sovereignty. He plans to work to persuade both governments and students to make university studies more “relevant” and to establish better links between campuses and science and business. With these initiatives, he hopes that European universities will be better able to prepare EU citizens for an increasingly global and competitive society.

The difficulties of maintaining a common transatlantic front against Iran were on display last week when European officials suddenly voiced concern about Barack Obama’s public pledge to open talks with Tehran. A U.S. initiative of this sort, the officials said, could undercut the work they have done to make the Iranians suspend nuclear enrichment as a precondition for a full dialogue.

In the past, the so-called “EU-3″ - Britain, France and Germany - had chafed at the Bush administration’s refusal to envision direct talks with Tehran, complaining that Washington needed to be more directly involved in supporting the EU trio in trying to negotiate with Tehran. Last year, a common front emerged behind a Western demand that Tehran suspend nuclear enrichment as a precondition for the EU to move forward with its “carrots” and for Washington to lay down its “stick” to the degree of exploring direct high-level contacts with Tehran.

Now European governments worry that the position taken by Obama in the presidential primary campaign - in which he advocated sitting down with adversaries without preconditions - goes far past the negotiating position that Europe has been taking in tandem with Washington.

The transatlantic split came to light in an article by Glenn Kessler that appeared in the Washington Post on June 22 reporting the unease felt by Europeans in regard to Obama’s promise to open diplomatic talks with Iran without any preconditions. François Heisbourg, a Paris-based strategic analyst, was quoted saying: “Dropping a unanimous Security Council condition would simply be interpreted by Iran and America’s allies as unconditional surrender, and America’s friends would view this as confirmation of America’s basic unreliability.”

The EU has adopted a dual approach - a carrot-and-stick policy, if you will - for dealing with Iran. On the “carrot” side, they recently joined Russia, China, and the US in offering Iran an incentive package that included the promise of diplomatic talks, trade agreements and aid in developing a civilian nuclear program in exchange for the suspension of its uranium enrichment. However, after Tehran failed to give an answer on the incentive offer, the European states came together and issued a set of new sanctions on Monday, June 23.

Based on measures previously agreed upon by the U.N. Security Council, the sanctions target businesses and individuals believed to be connected to Iran’s nuclear programs. Iranian senior experts and officials such as Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar and Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, will be denied visas to the EU and the assets of Iran’s largest bank - Bank Melli, which has branches in Paris, Hamburg and London - will be frozen. The US imposed similar sanctions on Bank Melli’s activity in America last year.

Despite the EU’s hard line, officials maintain that the incentive package is still on the table if Iran agrees to halt its enrichment.

Iran has repeatedly refused to suspend its uranium enrichment, arguing that it is intended for civilian uses such as electricity generation. Western capitals suspect that Iran’s nuclear-energy program is merely a cover for making nuclear weapons.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini condemned the new EU sanctions as “illegal” and warned that they could hurt future diplomatic efforts. It remains to be seen whether these latest sanctions will affect Iran enough to push them to halt the enrichment. Past sanctions by the U.N. Security Council and the United States have failed to do so thus far, and skyrocketing oil prices may cushion the economic impact of the latest sanctions in Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter. Some also predict that the sanctions will merely continue to push Iran’s focus away from the West and closer to China and other areas of Asia. After the EU announced the new economic sanctions, Iran’s new parliamentary speaker - Ali Larijani, the former Iranian nuclear negotiator, who seems to be a political moderate — warned that the sanctions could push Iran away from diplomacy.

Updates:

“US considers sending envoys to Iran,” Financial Times, 25 June 2008

“The Europeans Step Up,” New York Times, 28 June 2008

“New US Nuclear Sanctions on Iran,” BBC News, 8 July 2008

The Irish “no” to the European Union’s modernization blueprint has fueled a new round of skeptical American commentary about Europeans’ real ambitions. “In Europe, a Slide Toward Irrelevance” was the title of an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, a foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “The danger of this latest blow to European confidence is that our allies, including Britain, could gradually sink into global irrelevance,” Kagan wrote.

This view dwells on an alleged pattern in which European voters seem to shun opportunities to gain unity for EU action. Further, it appears as if Europe’s governments have been unable to put together the political clout necessary to match the EU’s economic weight. This new negative view among some analysts about the EU’s lack of ambition is the opposite of the prevailing concern in recent years in Washington about the risks of seeing the EU seek to become a counter-balancing power to the United States in international affairs.

Nowadays, according to Kagan, Europeans seem hesitant to gird themselves to face a growing array of challenges. The outcome of the Irish ballot has left the EU less equipped to deal with Western economic slowdown, the increasingly competitive Asian sector, mounting European dependence on imports of monopolized Russian energy, and immigration and assimilation issues. The Treaty of Lisbon – now in limbo – was intended to address a number of these problems, notably by restructuring the EU’s leadership institutions to provide a stronger voice on the international level.

Now the proposed treaty is threatened with unraveling. Ireland was the only country where it was put to a popular vote, and European leaders say privately that it would have been rejected in some other EU nations that chose to avoid putting it to vote by sticking to the formula of parliamentary ratification.

Such questions about Europeans’ deepest – and perhaps unconscious – attitudes are not confined to Washington. Gideon Rachman, a leading commentator of the Financial Times in London, seems to concur in Kagan’s skepticism about Europeans’ political will, writing recently that Europeans may actually prefer a kind of “nirvana” based on weakness rather than having to shoulder the burdensome responsibilities of a global political and economic power. Europeans, Rachman said, may ultimately want nothing more than to become a kind of super-safe Switzerland, with no real voice in world power politics.

Hubert Vedrine, the former French foreign minister, expressed similar questions about Europeans’ collective political will in an interview with European Affairs to be published next week.

“Of all the foreseeable poles in the multi-polar world, it is the European pole whose future is the most uncertain; I question whether Europe truly has the will and motivation to become a full player. Maybe Europeans will prefer becoming a huge Switzerland – a well-protected zone with a very high standard of living and great liberty, but without the responsibility of power. European public opinion seems to suggest a desire for this condition of being detached from responsibility.”

Kagan famously created the figurative comparison that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus” in his book Of Paradise and Power, which argued that Americans are more inclined than Europeans nowadays to see force as a solution to international crises. His subsequent book, Dangerous Nation, described America’s historical readiness since independence in the 18the century to undertake international intervention. (It was reviewed in European Affairs by James Steinberg, who has been named to Obama’s panel of foreign-policy advisers. Kagan has spent the last four years in Europe, and his return to Washington was marked by the publication of his new treatise, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. This book warns about possible new threats to global stability from autocratic powers, notably Russia and China: it will be noted in the forthcoming issue of European Affairs.

The European Parliament approved new EU-wide regulations with tougher measures against illegal immigrants – a population thought to number eight million (compared to an estimated 12 million in the US). The EU law, a “return directive,’ is intended to harmonize laws and policies on the politically explosive issue in all 27 member states by providing a common framework for each country’s national laws. A central point in the directive is a provision in which illegals that refuse to go home can be detained for up to 18 months and then deported – with a ban on them from reentering the EU for five years.

Parliamentary assent marked the final step in instituting the new set of regulations.

The rules in the return directive exempt asylum-seekers. But they apply to foreigners who have overstayed their visas.

Critics of the new measure brand it as an abuse of migrants’ human rights, arguing that the length of detention is disproportionate and unwarranted. But proponents retort that the directive will actually improve immigrants’ protection in EU countries where the laws currently allow indefinite detention of illegal immigrants. In a statement issued, the European Parliament said that “member states will be banned from applying harsher rules to illegal immigrants, but allowed to keep or adopt more generous rules.” It adopted the legislation as a step forward in EU integration that will help governments cope with the threat of a rising tide of illegal immigrants, notably from Africa. Human-rights activists warned that the new law will be exploited by some EU countries alarmed by inter-ethnic tensions as Europe’s demographic make-up shifts as Muslims arrive from the Middle East and Africa, and Eastern Europeans move west.

Flak has also come from Latin America about the new directive. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, threatened to disrupt oil exports to Europe over the issue. Some Latin American countries apparently are afraid they might lose remittances from their emigrants to Europe. The EU Observer notes, “last year immigrants in Europe, the US and Japan sent money back to their families in Latin America and the Caribbean amounting to just under €43 billion, more than the region receives from foreign direct investment or development assistance combined.”

The US is wrestling with similar problems of immigration without yet finding a national consensus. Many American business sectors depend heavily on immigrants, some of them illegal.

Analysts predict that immigrant labor will be increasingly important to Europe given the pejorative economic effect of its aging indigenous populations. Additionally, it has become increasingly evident that the EU lacks the skilled migrant labor it needs in order to stay competitive in the global economy. Europe needs help filling the void left by the highly educated workforce that has emigrated – primarily to the US. Using Census data on education and income, French economist Gilles Saint-Paul of Toulouse University explained to The Wall Street Journal that “a disproportionate number of European immigrants in the US were among the brightest prospects in their fields…the people who are most important for innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The European Chemicals Agency, which started operations in June in its Helsinki headquarters, marks the latest chapter in the European Union’s efforts to address consumer needs and concerns though market and business regulations. (Similar programs already in place have included antitrust regulation in the computer industry and rules imposing greater consumer privacy.) With its corresponding regulatory legislation, known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals), the new EU program requires companies to prove that a chemical is safe before they put it on the market.

This approach is the exact opposite of current US policy in which regulators have to prove that a chemical is harmful in order for it to be pulled from the market.

The EU initiative has aroused transatlantic controversy. But now that it has been pushed through in Europe, it is causing American companies with markets in Europe to take into account the new requirements, often across their whole production, in everything from processed food to household furnishings and beauty products.

Supporters defend the step as helping the environment and protecting the health of individuals, Daryl Ditz, senior policy adviser at the Center for International Environmental Law, believes that the new regulations will “compel companies to be more responsible for their products…they’ll have to know more about the chemicals they make, what their products are and where they go.”

For example, any chemical suspected of causing cancer or other health problems will be placed on a new list of “substances of very high concern” and all of this data will be made accessible to the public for the first time via the internet. Supporters hope that by making information - such as the “high concern list” - available to the public, consumers will shirk from certain products and the subsequent decline in demand will pressure manufacturers to halt production of dangerous chemicals.

American chemical manufacturers and the Bush administration have strongly opposed the new EU measures because they believe that they will hurt manufacturers and offer minimal benefits to the consumer. In order to continue selling to the EU market of nearly 500 million people, US manufacturers like DuPont Chemicals will have to spend “tens of millions” of dollars to register chemicals and also pull major products that contain chemicals placed on the list of “substances of very high concern.”

In the absence of similar strong federal regulations for chemicals in the US, individual states have taken it upon themselves to address consumer concerns. Last month, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reintroduced the Kid Safe Chemical Bill to Congress. The bill proposes that all chemicals used in baby bottles, children’s toys and other products are proven to be safe before they are put on the market - a philosophy that echoes the EU approach invoking the “precautionary principle” favored in Europe and gaining ground in some quarters in the US.

See Also:
“Chemical Law Has Global Impact,” Washington Post, 12 June 2008
“European Chemicals Agency: Turning REACH into Reality,” Speech by José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, 3 June 2008
“Lautenberg, Solis, Waxman Introduce Legislation To Protect Americans From Hazardous Chemicals In Consumer Products,” 20 May 2008

Seven NATO members signed a pact in late May formally establishing an alliance-wide “center of excellence” in Estonia to combat the growing threat of cyber-terrorism.  Officially called the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, the center will be operational later this year and officially open its doors in early 2009.  It will have an initial staff of 30 experts, half of whom will come from the seven founding countries.  The U.S. will participate as an observer alongside the seven: Germany, Italy, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Estonia. Other alliance states are expected to join the project as it moves forward.

The centre’s purpose is to improve preparedness and inter-operability within NATO on cyber-defense, officials said, adding that allied experts also want to draw up an alliance-wide cyber-defence doctrine, including legal mechanisms. The center will also provide training, assess threats and steer research projects.

The choice of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, as the site for the center is significant and appropriate.  Just more than a year ago, Estonia - which has a high degree of computer infrastructure - became the first victim of an all-out cyber assault on the nation’s on-line electronic services in a string of network attacks that apparently originated in Moscow.  The Estonian government had moved a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier-a reminder of the USSR’s former dominance of the country-from a prominent spot in central Tallinn to a military cemetery. 

The current issue of European Affairs carries a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the “cyber war” on Estonia a year ago. Kertu Ruus, an Estonian journalist (who is a member of our quartely’s editorial board) tracks exactly how Estonian government and private networks were attacked by massive “botnets,” which are huge networks of so-called “zombie” computers that are hacked into and made to access targeted networks.  Ruus’s article also details the NATO allies’ response to the attacks, and the call by some to invoke Article 5’s rule that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.

The U.S., for its part, has also stepped up its efforts to defend against cyber crime.  As noted here last month, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has compared the risks presented by cyber terror to the impact of 9/11.  Addressing a group of IT professionals in Silicon Valley last month, he implored the industry to “send some of your brightest and best to do service in the government.

Meanwhile the European Observer  says that EU has launched a public consultation on how to combat high-tech crime and warfare, but predicts that Brussels will move  cautiously on the possible legislative remedies and instead stress strengthened cooperation between EU states.

The debate over biofuels has heated up on both sides of the Atlantic in recent weeks, with the current prime biofuel - ethanol made from corn - now being blamed as a contributing factor to the dramatic rise in the price of food around the world.

Until recently, it was seen by many as a silver bullet for cutting dependence on oil, thus helping energy security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Not everyone agreed with the idea. In the winter 2006 issue of European Affairs, John Ritch, head of the World Nuclear Association, pointed out that it remains to be seen whether “biofuels” actually constitute a long-term contribution to a sustainable strategy for clean energy. In the climate crisis, a not insignificant factor is the shrinkage of “carbon sinks” as the world’s forests get converted to farm land. So the limited amount of farmland is a constraint. And “clearing woods to plant these crops actually heightens our vulnerability to amassing more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he wrote two years ago.

Now, the impact in terms of displacing food crops to raise ethanol has emerged as another, more immediate drawback for biofuels. In the U.S., for example, Congress increased incentives for ethanol production designed to raise output from seven billion gallons a year to 36 billion by 2022, with 15 billion of that coming from corn. The remainder will be derived from “next generation” sources such as prairie grasses and wood chips, but it could be years before this advanced ethanol will be available on a commercial scale. This mandated, subsidized biofuel uses corn as its main foodstock and last year absorbed a quarter of the U.S. corn harvest. When combined with surging demand for corn abroad fueled in part by the cheap dollar, the effect has been to displace other crops, reducing their supply and raising prices for other foods from bread to beef that depend on wheat. By next year, as much as one-third of U.S. corn production is expected to go into ethanol.

Another source of consternation (and transatlantic frictions) are biodiesel-production subsidies in the European Union and in the United States. The U.S. government provides a $1 subsidy for every gallon of biodiesel that is blended in the U.S. for export. Europeans complain that this has given American producers an unfair advantage in EU markets, where “artificially cheap” American products are putting EU producers out of business. Many European nations and the EU also provide somewhat less generous subsidies to biofuel producers, but there has been pressure for them to eliminate such support. Some have said that a high demand for biofuels in Europe has made subsidies unnecessary.

This subsidy was intended to help the American biodiesel industry, but it seems that foreign companies have discovered a way to take advantage as well. Biofuel producers from Europe and elsewhere ship their biodiesel to the U.S., where they add a “splash” of regular diesel, qualifying their product for American subsidies. The fuel is then shipped back to Europe for sale, where it is also eligible for EU subsidies. This loophole, which has been a cause of public complaints since late last year, ironically results in even higher carbon emissions from the back-and-forth transatlantic shipments.

Another objection to biofuels among environmentalists is the high demand for water at big ethanol-production facilities. This has added to strains on the water table in Florida and other localities in the U.S. There are growing concerns, too, that ethanol was oversold as a product that would reduce greenhouse gases. Some new U.S. ethanol plants are powered by coal, and truck corn from hundreds of miles away, gobbling up fossil fuels. Acreage displaced for energy crops here may be replaced by plowing virgin lands in Africa and South America, causing major releases of carbon. And although corn ethanol plants that are built after next January 1 will have to show they are reducing carbon, most plants needed to meet the 15 billion gallon mandate will already have been built by then.

The new attention to ethanol’s downside has prompted statements in Congress about rolling back federal support for biofuel production in the face of rising food prices. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer suggested on May 1 that he favored moves in this direction. At the urging of the livestock, poultry and hog industry, the governor of Texas and 28 Senators have asked the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to set aside ethanol requirements at least temporarily to help ease corn prices. The New York Times published an editorial on Sunday calling on Congress to roll back subsidies and rethink its support of ethanol. But the ethanol boom has brought windfall profits to farm states, so there are doubts about whether this policy can be changed fast, especially in an election year.

In the EU, fingers are being pointed at the U.S. on this issue. EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson did so in an op-ed published in the Guardian (UK). “We can already see that large-scale biofuel production, especially in the U.S., may be one of the factors pushing up food prices,” he wrote. “The race to grow maize for ethanol subsidies in the U.S. reduces the supply of food crops on world markets and drives up the cost of this important staple.” (”Maize” is the grain that Americans call “corn.”) Despite the EU’s mandate that biofuels account for ten percent of transport fuel by 2020, Mandelson argued that European biofuel production is having “only a minimal effect” on food prices.

Amid these recriminations, there is talk in the EU of scrapping biofuel subsidy programs, Already, these is increased pressure on EU officials to lower or abandon the ten percent target, especially in Germany where at least one-tenth of the nation’s cars do not have engines adapted to run with a significant admixture of ethanol. In the UK, all petrol and diesel sold at pumps is now required to contain at least 2.5% biofuels. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown signaled a retreat from biofuels last month, acknowledging the global food crisis and saying that Britain must be “more selective” in its support for biofuels.

See Also:
Editorial: Rethinking Ethanol, New York Times, 11 May 2008
Nuclear Rising on Both Sides of the Atlantic, European Affairs, Winter 2006
U.S. Biodiesel Subsidies Anger Europeans, National Public Radio, 10 April 2008
Biofuels: EU plans to scrap ‘needless’ farmer aid, Business Report, 15 April 2008
Demands for crackdown on biofuels scam, The Guardian (UK), 1 April 2008
Biofuel Boondoggle: US Subsidy Aids Europe’s Drivers, Christian Science Monitor, 8 June 2007
Congress’ ethanol affair is cooling, Washington Times, 1 May 2008
Op-Ed: Keeping the Crop in Hand, The Guardian (UK), 29 April 2008
Pressure Grows on EU to Abandon Biofuels, Der Spiegel, 16 April 2008
Petrol must now include biofuels, BBC News, 15 April 2008
Brown’s biofuels caution welcomed, BBC News, 22 April 2008

Correction: This post was edited on May 13 to better reflect the different subsidies allocated for biodiesel and ethanol.

Parliament’s Marek Siwiec does Q&A with European Affairs

Marek Siwiec, 53, is a Polish politician who is a vice-president of the European Parliament, where he belongs to the European Socialists faction. Between 1997 and 2004, he was the chief of the Polish National Security Office under President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a key international policy post in the presidency. Siwiec visited Washington in May with a delegation of the European Parliament and spoke with European Affairs during a brief Q&A session.

Q: How well does Washington understand trends in the European Union?

A: Like any superpower, the United States has a tendency of over-simplify foreign problems. It tends to ignore trends that emerge quietly, without dramatic developments that compel attention among U.S. policy-making elites. This applies to the EU, which is still not well understood in Washington.

Q: What do U.S. policy-makers grasp?

A: Americans understand the Schengen accord and our customs union because they are familiar with free travel and free trade. But they often don’t understand our approach to juridical issues or internal-security problems. The EU cannot really be understood by comparisons with any other system.

Q: Is this damaging?

A: U.S. policy-makers still tend to operate with the cold war era’s reflex of preferring to build bilateral policies with each individual European country. Take the visa-waiver question: the regime should be the same for all EU member states in the EU but it isn’t. Of course, it doesn’t help that we in the EU have not managed to develop a cohesive foreign policy of our own yet.

Q: Do you see any positive trend?

A: Transatlantic trade and direct investment are spectacularly large, so the EU and U.S. have a responsibility to work together on a broad range of global policies. I counted eight or nine European Commissioners who have given speeches in Washington in the last few months talking about cooperation on a whole list of subjects: justice, anti-trust, accounting standards, economy, environment, open skies and so on. Very slowly, the EU is gaining credibility in Washington.

Q: How is the Parliament evolving?

A: It is not yet the legislative body it is supposed to be, but it is changing. It started as little more than “democratic window-dressing.” Many parliamentarians were people who had not been very successful politically in their own countries. That’s changed: now there is two-way traffic between being an MEP and a foreign minister or vice-premier in a national government.

Q: Is this change affecting your role?

A: The parliament has a dramatically more energetic role, and it is actively looking for policy areas where it can make an effective difference. Right now, we’re involved in roughly 40 areas of EU policy, but once the Lisbon treaty takes effect, that number will more than double, to about 90.

Q: What about your impact?

A: We are getting more powers. Recently, we forced multinational phone companies to reduce roaming charges for their mobile-phone subscribers in Europe – a change that affected several hundred million people in their daily lives. There was no other institutional set-up ready to tackle this problem, so we did. Looking ahead, I expect to see the parliament doing more and more of this sort to thing, in being responsible to the voters who now put us into office by direct elections.

Q: What sort of issues do you have in mind?

A: Look for us to be increasingly active on questions that interest the European electorate: human rights, environment, consumer issues – a whole range of these questions. Take the example of the U.S. program to operate secret “rendition” flights through airfields in Europe. No government involved in this practice has acknowledged publicly what happened. We took it on with parliamentary methods. In trying to push into such an area protected with high-level laws and secrecy, we had only limited success. But something important happened. I am convinced that as a result of our efforts such things will not happen again in the future.

Q: What did the matter tell us about the parliament?

A: It showed we had enough courage to tackle such a sensitive issue, and it was an important sign of our special role. The European Commission gets its mandate from the EU’s Council of Ministers, which represents the governments of the member states. That set-up implies some limits on what those bodies are going to do. In contrast, the parliament can operate outside that mandate of governments because we are the voice of the people. It was a milestone when the parliament succeeded in putting enough pressure on the Commission to block the appointment of an Italian nominated to be a Commissioner and get him replaced. (Incidentally, the successor, Franco Frattini, has just gone back to Italy as a cabinet minister in the new government.)

Q: What is the biggest change you think the parliament should push?

A: The Parliament has enough status to help bring about constructive discussion about big changes in the Common Agricultural Policy. The time has come. Those subsidies usefully maintained our agriculture when crop prices were low. Now food prices have risen enough for farmers to stay in business, comfortably, on a free-market basis. We need to start making the point that the money spent on price supports should go on other forms of help to farmers. Right now. There is a big “civilization gap” between rural and urban areas in many of our countries – for example, in Poland. We have large populations living far away from access to culture, health care and many other benefits. So I would say, “dear farmer, let’s talk about spending the money not on your potatoes but on other things that can benefit you in other ways.”

Q: Looking outside the EU’s borders, what foreign issues are on the front burner in the parliament?

A: Like other EU institutions, we’re trying to assess some broad international geopolitical issues such as the Middle East problem. One of the reasons for my visit here to Washington is to address the American Jewish Congress on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s foundation. Right now, Washington is trying to establish a balance sheet for its eight years in office, and it’s a complicated question in the Middle East. But taken from the angle of Israel’s security, I think the outcome has been negative. Many new phenomena have emerged: Hama’s control in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah gains in Lebanon. This cannot be blamed entirely on Washington, I think, but things are moving in a bad direction and the lame-duck administration cannot do much. So the question is: Where was the mistake? What policy changes are needed? Can the EU change its future role? It is not the right time – and should not be the time – for Washington to try any spectacular action, so the EU should try to be present in a way that encourages positive trends in the region (precisely the trends that are not dominant right now). I think we can see that our approach to exporting democracy can backfire by bringing to power factions – like Hamas – that gain a mandate for their dangerous regime. Above all, the EU has to have ambitions to become not just a payer but a player.

Q: How can the EU ever have political leverage in an area where one side of the conflict, Israel, mistrusts you?

A: We have to get beyond a situation where our policy is being set by CNN and other television networks that constantly focus on showing violence and often violence shown as attacks on Palestinian civilians. We have to think more carefully about defining our long-term vision for this part of the world. We need to convince our societies to focus on the need for long-term stable peace in the region. I think a particularly helpful contribution is coming from the so-called “new Europe,” where countries, particularly Poland, are friendly toward Israel. It’s time for Europe to stop thinking of Israel just as a troublemaker and start to recognize Israel as a democracy that can be an attractive partner for us in many ways. For this, we need to move beyond a pattern that consists only of commemorating the holocaust and the rest of the past and move toward a vision of Israel and Europe in the 21st century. When Poland got back its freedom 20 years ago, we discovered some ugly truths about our past and Polish people’s relations with Jews. We faced these difficult facts and had tough discussions among ourselves coming to terms with them. We had the freedom to do it, and the truth we now come to hold has reinforced our authentic freedom. This new situation could give us a new attitude in the Middle East.

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* Answers have been edited for clarity.

Another coordinated cyber attack - this time on the websites operated by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) - was launched over the weekend that marked the one-year anniversary of the “cyber war” offensive against Estonia. That three-week internet barrage on Estonia’s civil electronic portals occurred amid ire in Moscow about Estonia’s decision to move a Soviet war memorial out of the city center in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. Labeled the world’s first “cyber war” by some observers, the episode is recounted and analyzed in depth in Kertu Ruus’s article in the newest issue of European Affairs.

This time, the principal targets were RFE/RL’s sites in Belarus, which were put out of action for several days until the attacks were publicly reported - and then abruptly ceased. April 26, the day the attacks began, was the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and RFE/RL had been planning live internet coverage of a large rally that day protesting the plight of uncompensated Chernobyl victims - many of whom lived in Belarus and were in the zone of heavy radioactive fallout from the reactor that suffered a meltdown in neighboring Ukraine. At the time, in 1986, both those countries were part of the Soviet Union and ruled from Moscow.

The recent cyber attacks came just days after the so-called “Hackers Panel” convened in London at the annual InfoSecurity Europe conference. The panel includes “white hat” hackers, who help companies tighten up their digital security by searching for flaws in their defenses. This year the hackers, who for the first time broke their usual custom of anonymity, warned that major nationwide British shopping chains were likely prime targets for future cyber attacks. “If someone wants to have a pop at the UK, they are unlikely to go for the government web servers,” said Steve Armstrong, an expert in hacking and a member of the panel. “They will go for the lower hanging fruit - companies which are seen as good representatives of the country.”

Related Post:
Lessons from Estonia: Homeland Security Chief Says Cyber Threat “on par with 9/11″, 18 April 2008

See Also:
RFE/RL Websites Hit By Mass Cyberattack, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 28 April 2008
Radio Free Europe says it’s under cyber attack, Associated Press, 28 April 2008
Hackers warn High Street chains, BBC News, 25 April 2008