So, am I happy? I am not sure. He certainly highlights important problems and it is wonderful and rather exciting that more and more countries in the region are electing presidents that speak for the impoverished masses instead of the rich elites. That is democracy in action.

But once in office, those presidents have to be able to deliver by making at least some noticeable improvements to the lives of their citizens. Can Morales deliver? After his speech, I am not so sure. It lasted more than half an hour (and, said an admiring BBC, was delivered without notes), but it sounded more like an election speech than the inauguration address of a new president outlining his policies. It was chaotic, contained lots of promises on improving the fate of Bolivia’s poor, but most of the time did not get specific either on the improvements that would be brought or on the way to achieve them.

And where he did become specific, the analysis seemed simplistic, populist, and – worst of all – bound to lead to ineffective solutions. Take this classic example of taking a correlations for a cause-effect relation:

We were told 10, 15, 20 years ago that the private sector was going to solve the country’s corruption problems and unemployment, then years go by and there is more unemployment, more corruption, that economic model is not the solution for our country, maybe it is a solution for an European country or African but in Bolivia the neo-liberal model does not work.

Perhaps it is true that there is more unemployment now than 20 years ago. Perhaps it is true that the model proposed by the Washington consensus (which, by the way, no longer is the ultra-neoliberal beast it used to be) is more suitable for fully developed economies than for Bolivia. But the fact that corruption has risen in that period can hardly be blamed on the economic model, and rather indicates weakness of institutions and of the rule of law. A weakness that does not bode well for Morales’s plans to increase the state’s role in the economy…

Morales = Chavez II? Time will tell. If he is, he can at least count on the sympathy of that French senator who likes our new EU members so much (hat tip Largo Desolato, also read Tipota).

PS: On the claim that Bolivia could be richer than Sweden, read Martin Wolf’s “freakonomic” article in today’s FT. Bottom line: whether an autocracy becomes a democracy or not is an economic decision: a trade-off between the costs of keeping the masses quiet and the costs of privileges lost if the country becomes a democracy as far as the elite is concerned, and between the costs of organising a revolution and the benefits of getting a larger share of power and resources as far as the masses are concerned. As a result, countries with huge natural resources are likely to stay autocracies, particularly when the resources are in the hands of the state. Another bad omen for Bolivia’s future…

The Commission could however have decided to chance it, as software patent activists have a tendency to cry foul and overstate their case to such an extent that there is a real risk of backfiring. This would be a pity as at least part of the activists’ case (to what extent and under which conditions do patents, in general, promote or inhibit innovation) deserves serious consideration. That discussion, however, is for another time. For now, I will just try to add structure to the debate by providing a short outline of the legislative procedure at EU level in order to make clear what the next steps are.

So here we go: co-decision for dummies ;-):

1. For a proposal to become law, the consent of both the European Parliament and the governments of the Member States (united in the Council of Ministers) is, eventually, required. This is similar to the legislative procedure in most countries with bicameral parliaments.
2. As long as the EP and the Council disagree on the text of the proposal, it bounces back and forth between both institutions with each of them proposing amendments to the other.
3. There is a maximum of two of these readings by each institution. At the end of the second reading, there are three possibilities:
   • They agree. The amended proposal is adopted.
   • An absolute majority of the European Parliament (i.e. a majority of the members, not a majority of the members present at the vote) rejects the proposal. That is the end of it.
   • An absolute majority of the European Parliament still proposes amendments. A conciliation committee then is set up (this again is analogous to many bicameral parliamentary systems). The committee consists of 25 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), and 25 representatives of the Council (one for each Member State). They have a maximum of six weeks to negotiate a compromise text on which both a majority of the 25 MEPs and a qualified majority of the Council representatives agree.

   (Note that, here, the EP needs absolute majorities in order to change or reject the proposal, so the hurdle is slightly higher than a normal majority)

4. If, within six weeks of conciliation,
   • a compromise is reached, the text is passed on to the European Parliament’s plenary (number 5 below).
   • a compromise is not reached, the proposal is dead.
5. If, within another six weeks, an absolute majority of the European Parliament votes for the compromise, the proposal is law. Otherwise, the proposal is, again, dead. Naturally, a qualified majority of the Council must also vote for the compromise within six weeks, but this is a formality at this stage as all Member States were represented in the conciliation committee.

If (as there is still a chance to the contrary) and when the Council adopts its current common position on 7 March (as the Luxembourg Presidency is proposing), the phase reached is only halfway number 2 in the above: each institution has completed one reading.

What follows is a second reading by the EP (in which it will probably reiterate its stance of the first reading), followed by a second reading by the Council. Unless the Council changes its view (which it might), a conciliation will follow (phase 3, 4, and 5 in the above). See also this useful flow chart or read all about it in article 251 of the EC Treaty.

Even then there is still plenty of space for the European Parliament to have the last word, or to get the proposal off the table by:

• either, not reaching a compromise with the Council within six weeks during the conciliation procedure (though this depends strongly on the will and the political colour of the individual MEPs in the conciliation committee)
• or, not adopting the end result of the conciliation procedure (note that the absolute majority required is even a slightly higher hurdle than an ordinary one)

Both the Commission and the Council know all this, of course. So they have every interest to cooperate with Parliament and incorporate its views.

[Update 7 March 2005: EU ministers back disputed software patent proposal (requires Financial Times subscription). "European Union ministers on Monday endorsed a disputed proposal for the patenting of computer-related inventions that critics say could stifle software development, a European Commission spokesman said." This means that the political agreement reached by governments almost a year ago was formally passed as an A point (i.e. without debate) after all, in accordance with usual Council procedures. What this does not necessarily mean is that the Council still supports the proposal in its current form. In fact, several governments that approved the political agreement a year ago have since come under fire from their national parliaments (notably in Denmark and the Netherlands) and have been forced to change tack. Also, the original agreement was reached in an EU still consisting of the 15 old Member States, whereas several of the new ones (notably Poland) are strong critics of the proposal. So the Council's position is likely to change.
Next step: the second reading in the European Parliament.]

In a desperate effort to undo some of the damage wrought by the stupidity of the Common Fisheries Policy, a complete ban on fishing in some parts of the North Sea is being proposed.

Unfortunately he is right: the Common Fisheries Policy is such a disaster that drastic measures like these have now become a necessity. I also agree with what I think is the basic idea of his post, namely that our best chance of returning to sustainable fish stocks lies in combining the ownership of fishing rights with responsibility for the same stock: The Icelandic shrimper whose boat I once sailed on had no issue whatsoever sticking to his quotas, because he knew that if he caught too many shrimp in his fjord this year, there would be fewer next year.

However, I am not convinced of what seems to be the other basic idea of EU-serf’s post, namely that this combination of fishing rights with responsibility must be achieved by returning fisheries policy to the national level. Cod levels in the North Sea, for instance, have been depleted by the joint efforts of local fishermen from mainly the UK, not (yet) by evil Spanish trawlers using the EU rules on “common fishing waters” to empty “our” sea before moving on to the next one. And local cocklers in the north of the Netherlands have succeeded in doing great damage to the ecosystem in their own tidal sea (while, for the time being, maintaining cockle production levels), without the help of any foreigners.

Saving cod

The problem is not so much the government level at which policies are made, but who is involved in making them. In general, if a certain problem transcends national borders, it makes sense to tackle it at a supranational level, which could be the EU. Likewise, if the effects of a problem are only felt at a smaller than national level, it makes sense that a regional or local government determines the rules. But it does make a difference which interests they take into account. The Icelandic shrimper observed his quotas because his fjord was an almost closed system as far as shrimp were concerned and because the fishing community there was tiny: any free-riders predating on their colleagues’ future income would be spotted easily. The Dutch cocklers were heavily involved in (national) rule-making for their fishing waters, but perhaps too heavily: whether it was general short-sightedness, the fact that they were damaging mussels and other life forms rather than the cockles they depend on, or maybe a certain attitude among (elderly) fishermen of “après nous le déluge” – fact is that, until very recently, sustainability considerations did not prevail.

As for cod, it is therefore unlikely that national governments would be less sensitive to sector lobbying than the European Commission (if anything, you would expect impartiality to improve as government gets less dependent on a specific stakeholder). The point with cod and many other fish is that they move around and do not respect the boundaries between territorial waters, so it does make sense to regulate cod fisheries at a transnational level. The point with fishermen though, is that they move around as well, especially if you have common fishing waters established by the EU. In that sense, nationalising fishing policies could sound like the right thing to do, as countries would be able to prohibit foreign fishermen from fishing in their territorial waters.

But, just like the EU’s common fishing waters are accessible to all fishermen from the EU, any nation’s territorial waters are “common fishing waters” for any fisherman from that country. That still raises the question which nation’s territorial waters are the “right” size for keeping fisheries sustainable: Belgium’s? Denmark’s? The UK’s? And if the answer is that territorial waters the size of, say, Belgium’s are ideal, why don’t we chunk up the entire north sea in bits that size, instead of leaving fisheries policy to national levels which are obviously too large, like the UK’s?

All in all, considering the mobility of fish, the mobility of fishing vessels (which can and do move to international waters to deplete stocks there when they find their usual fishing grounds emtpy or prohibited), the need to involve multiple stakeholders and not only the fisheries sector, and the fact that the ideal size does not exist, I still think that fisheries are better regulated at a supra-national level. For the time being, that would be the EU, although even a global level would be necessary if we really want to save cod from extinction. While it is true that the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy is pretty much a disaster, it remains to be seen whether national policies would have been more successful or less susceptible to lobbying. And it has to be recognised that something is, finally, changing at the EU level – thanks to reforms introduced in 2003 by Austrian (!) Fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler. Member states no longer succeed in blocking every attempt by the European Commission to set stricter rules (would that have anything to do with the EU’s enlargement?). And the idea to tackle the problem by its cause, by abolishing subsidies that stimulate building more and larger vessels, is basically a good one – in any case, much better than “end-of-pipe” measures like current quotas and TACs.

Meta-discussion: Red herrings

On a meta-level, the newspaper article refered to by EU-serf has something odd about it which touches on a discussion started by Nosemonkey about the EU debate itself. EU-serf writes:

Despite this headline, the push for the ban is not coming from Brussels.

The headline in question, reading “EU orders fishing ban in parts of North Sea”, comes from the Daily Telegraph. Money quote:

Fishing will be banned in parts of the North Sea under proposals to be announced by Brussels today after a Royal Commission called for 30 per cent of the sea to be closed to protect fish stocks and the environment.

The article goes on mentioning only the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and quoting its chairman saying that urgent action is required. The suggestion here is that it took a British advisory committee to boldly go where no other scientist in Europe had gone before, to finally talk some sense into the European Commission and to save (well, hopefully) the cod. Rule Brittania!

This struck me as rather odd: what about the Commission’s own scientists, was the British Royal Commission standing alone in its analysis? Of course not. Read the European Commission’s own press release on the matter:

Today, the European Commission tabled a proposal (~940 Kb) on fishing possibilities and attendant measures for 2005 (see table (~101 Kb)). The objective is to rebuild severely depleted stocks and protect those in sound biological state while maintaining, as far as possible, the economic activities of the fleets concerned. The proposal takes account of the latest scientific advice from the independent International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and the Commission’s own Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee on Fisheries (STECF), as well as input from stakeholders.

Science is probably the most globalised profession of all, so one has to assume that the Commission’s STECF has taken the Royal Commission’s very sensible reports into account as well. But as it turns out it is not the Royal Commission which was behind the Commission’s decision, nor does the STECF take a different stance. The Telegraph has probably combined two events which happened to occur within the same limited time frame, but which are not necessarily causally related. The Royal Commission may have been asked by the British government for advice on the position to take when fisheries were debated in Brussels, other scientific committees including STECF will have advised other governments, the Commission and each other, and the result of all that is this decision.

The Telegraph has only seen the British part of this story and the EU’s decision, and therefore wrote it down in the way it did. This is the problem with many national media: they are so used to looking at the world through a national periscope, that they do not see how decisions are taken which involve more than just the own government. EU knowledge is still astonishingly rare in most editorial offices, as they are mainly populated by journalists used to writing about national politics. Articles written by correspondents in Brussels are usually well-informed, but as soon as a national newsroom or a journalist not specialised in EU matters picks up the story, interpretation problems often arise.

The problem is that it is easy for people with an agenda to misuse this lack of knowledge for their own goal. So government Ministers implementing impopular decisions put the entire blame on Brussels while obfuscating the fact that they were themselves part of the decision-making and may even have voted in favour. Or reversely, when it is a popular EU measure, they take the full credits without mentioning the involvement of Brussels, as the Dutch government did when it implemented the EU’s anti-spam Directive. Most journalists simply lack the knowledge to see through such spin and confront politicians with their real responsibilities.

Many a euro-myth was born in this way. And, who knows, maybe the EU’s impopularity as well.

——
update: Bugger…

The decision was made after opposition from the UK and other EU member states with a North Sea coastline.

Now let’s wait and see how the Telegraph will report about this development…