The Dutch Crisis and Recovery Act: Economic Recovery and Legal Crisis

In the Netherlands, the 2010 Crisis and Recovery Act aims at speeding up decision-making on a wide variety of activities, hoping that after the financial and economic crisis has passed, development projects can immediately be carried out without any delay caused by legal procedures in court or elsewhere.  The Act meets great criticism for many reasons:  it allegedly curtails citizen's procedural rights because it focuses almost exclusively on environmental standards as "obstructing" standards that need to be removed, and it infringes international and European Union law.  In this note, the legal critique on the Act is analysed.  The conclusion is that the sense of urgency surrounding the design of legal measures to address the economic crisis enables the legislature to implement innovations and long-time pending amendments to existing legislation.  Most issues have however not been fully or properly considered.  Many legal questions will arise when implementing the Act, which will retard rather than expedite projects.  It is difficult to predict whether the positive effects of the Crisis and Recovery Act would outweigh the negative aspects.  Much depends on the manner in which the authorities will actually apply the Act.  Should they implement the Act to its full potential, the effect of the Act in sum will be negative.  In that case, the Act may help the economy to recover, but it will bring about a crisis in the legal system.  It will, in all probability, also not contribute to sustainable development.   &nbsp

The Dutch Crisis and Recovery Act: Economic Recovery and Legal Crisis

In the Netherlands, the 2010 Crisis and Recovery Act aims at speeding up decision-making on a wide variety of activities, hoping that after the financial and economic crisis has passed, development projects can immediately be carried out without any delay caused by legal procedures in court or elsewhere.  The Act meets great criticism for many reasons:  it allegedly curtails citizen's procedural rights because it focuses almost exclusively on environmental standards as "obstructing" standards that need to be removed, and it infringes international and European Union law.  In this note, the legal critique on the Act is analysed.  The conclusion is that the sense of urgency surrounding the design of legal measures to address the economic crisis enables the legislature to implement innovations and long-time pending amendments to existing legislation.  Most issues have however not been fully or properly considered.  Many legal questions will arise when implementing the Act, which will retard rather than expedite projects.  It is difficult to predict whether the positive effects of the Crisis and Recovery Act would outweigh the negative aspects.  Much depends on the manner in which the authorities will actually apply the Act.  Should they implement the Act to its full potential, the effect of the Act in sum will be negative.  In that case, the Act may help the economy to recover, but it will bring about a crisis in the legal system.  It will, in all probability, also not contribute to sustainable development.   &nbsp

"Decision Making in Europe: Were Spain and Poland Right to Stop the Constitution in December 2003?"

This paper tries to explain why Spain and Poland stopped the Draft Constitution for the European Union in December 2003 and discusses whether this action was compatible with these countries long term interests. The author finds that the decline in power – measured by a power index – arising for Spain and Poland when going from the Nice Treaty to the Draft Constitution cannot explain their veto. While the two countries lose power when shifting from Nice to the Draft Constitution other countries’ power shrinks even more. Other measures - passage probability, blocking leverage and fairness - cannot explain the two countries’ opposition either. This paper contends that the Spanish and Polish rejection can be explained by the weakness of government in the Polish and the need for a reelection topic in the Spanish case. Furthermore this paper asserts that the Spanish and Polish government’s veto was against the medium and long term interest of their own countries. Poland and Spain must have been able to anticipate that the Nice Treaty would not last due to most EU countries’ dislike of it. An analysis of reasonable alternative voting schemes in the EU finds that Spain and Poland would not have been better off in any of these cases and worse off in most; under the voting rules agreed upon under the Irish presidency in June 2004 the two countries are weaker than under the Draft Constitution

"Understanding European Foreign Policy Cooperation"

[From the introduction] This paper examines questions about CFSP activity by studying it in the context of a random sample of world events. It asks to what kinds of events or issues does the Union respond, and compares the results with the Union’s Treaty-established interests. The results are somewhat surprising: the EU is not particularly sensitive to events in neighboring regions, nor is it particularly responsive to abuses of human rights. Human rights issues are actually much less likely to attract Union attention than almost any other type of issue, though this trend appears to decline with time. The impact of the 1995 expansion dissipates rapidly, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, the new members’ historic neutrality does not appear to have affected cooperation in any way. Two important conclusions emerge: first, cooperation does not appear to have expanded with time in either scope of issues addressed or volume of events addressed. At best, the development of the Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy has kept pace with the growth of world interactions. Second, characteristics of the state holding the presidency are insignificant predictors of CFSP activity, suggesting at least moderate support for a norm of presidencies working for the general interest

Politicizing Council decision-making: The effect of EP empowerment

Research on the intra-institutional consequences of differences in the EU’s inter-institutional rule configurations is rare. This study investigates the effect of the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) on the active involvement of ministers in Council decision-making. I argue that the empowerment of the EP increases the incentives for bureaucrats in the Council’s preparatory bodies to refer decisions on legislative dossiers to ministers. The empirical analysis examines this argument with data on more than 6000 legislative decision-making processes that were concluded between 1980 and the end of 2007. The analysis demonstrates a strong and robust association between the type of legislative procedure and different decision-making levels in the Council: a more powerful EP leads to more politicized Council decision-making. In terms of the legitimacy of EU decision-making, this finding implies that empowering the EP does not only create a direct link between EU lawmaker and ordinary citizens, but also contributes to strengthening the indirect link between Council members and their national electorates

DEMOCRACY’S SPREAD: Elections and Sovereign Debt in Developing Countries

I carry out a power analysis of changes in voting weights and rules in the Nice Treaty of the EU on the widening and deepening of European integration, by applying methods that use Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices. Significant decrease in voting power of small countries makes widening of integration more acceptable to incumbent members due to small size of the applicants. Relative increase in the conciliatory power of smaller members, and relative increase in the independent power of bigger members make smaller members compromise more in the coalitions they form, and improve the position of large members for further deepening of the integration. Lastly, the fairness analysis reveals a more federalist face for the EU in the way votes are distributed in Nice.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39962/3/wp576.pd

The Arc and Architecture of Private Enforcement Regimes in the United States and Europe: A View Across the Atlantic

The United States and Europe have traditionally taken very different approaches to the regulation of harmful conduct. Previously, European nations relied almost entirely on the public enforcement of laws, whereas the United States relied on a mix of public and private actors. In the United States, private rights of action have played a central role deterring illegal conduct—and, in fact, provided greater deterrence than public enforcers in some areas of law. They have also allowed injured parties to obtain compensation. Despite their very different histories, the private enforcement systems in the United States and Europe are showing signs of convergence today. Since the 1970s, industry in the United States has waged a potent public relations campaign against private rights of action. This pro-business crusade has depicted corporations as victims of a litigation explosion and cast plaintiffs and their attorneys as unscrupulous mercenaries. This narrative has little, if any, empirical support. Nonetheless, based on this mythology, the Supreme Court and other federal courts have erected a number of procedural obstacles to effective private enforcement of law. While private enforcement is in retreat in the United States, the European Union seeks to strengthen private rights of action, with an emphasis on private enforcement of antitrust law. Recent EU initiatives established some of the foundations for private parties to protect their rights in court. European policymakers, however, have as yet declined to establish effective claims’ aggregation and litigation funding mechanisms, citing the business victimhood mythology spread by private industry in the United States. Encouragingly, a few EU Member States have rejected this paradigm and established some of the elements of strong private rights of action. In particular, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom have passed laws that are likely to foster effective private litigation. A comparative analysis of enforcement institutions on both sides of the Atlantic reveals a complex picture. American and European consumers, workers, and other large groups will generally face major obstacles to vindicating their rights. In cases generating larger individual claims, American and European plaintiffs’ lawyers may still be able to use aggregate settlement procedures to hold corporate defendants to account. When understanding its contribution to the deterrence of harmful conduct, private enforcement has to be viewed together with public enforcement. Because much of the enhancement of private enforcement in the European Union arises in the context of antitrust, it is an area ripe for cross-continent examination. With antitrust, the overall enforcement landscapes in the United States and European Union will likely be drastically different in the medium term. Due to limited public enforcement, a decrease in private lawsuits will severely compromise overall antitrust enforcement in the United States. In Europe, strong public enforcement will offset generally weak private enforcement and result in far more effective protection of consumer rights

Fair reweighting of the votes in the EU Council of Ministers and the choice of majority requirement for qualified majority voting during successive enlargements

This paper examines the system of Qualified Majority Voting, used by the Council of Ministers of the European Union, from the perspective of enlargement of the Union. It uses an approach based on power indices due to Penrose, Banzhaf and Coleman to make two analyses: (1) the question of the voting power of member countries from the point of view of fairness, and (2) the question of how the majority quota required for QMV should be determined. It studies two scenarios for change from 2005 onwards envisaged by the Nice Treaty: (1) no enlargement, the EU comprising 15 member countries, and (2) full enlargement to 27 members by the accession of all the present twelve candidates. The proposal is made that fair weights be determined algorithmically as a technical or routine matter as the membership changes. The analysis of how the quota affects power shows the trade-offs that countries face between their blocking power and the power of the Council to act. The main findings are: (1) that the weights laid down in the Nice Treaty are close to being fair, the only significant discrepancies being the under representation of Germany and Romania, and the over representation of Spain and Poland; (2) the majority quota required for a decision is set too high for the Council of Ministers to be an effective decision making body

Council Decision Rules and European Union Constitutional Design

In the recent past, the choice of adequate voting weights and decision rules for the Council of the European Union (EU) has been a highly contested issue in EU intergovernmental negotiations. In general terms, the selection of a threshold for qualified majority votes (QMV) in the Council constitutes a trade-off in terms of decreased sovereignty for individual governments versus an increased collective ‘capacity to act’. This paper compares the effects of the proposal tabled by the Convention on the Future of Europe with the Nice Treaty provisions and the Lisbon Treaty, in terms of both the efficiency of decision-making and the distribution of relative voting power within the EU of twenty-seven member states. In addition, the paper shows how with the current size of EU membership, the EU risks being unable to reach intergovernmental agreement. Accordingly, a challenging issue for the future of the EU is to move towards reasonable provisions that allow its own constitution – if ever adopted – to get amended.Council of the European Union, decision rules, constitutional design, capacity to act, power indices

Trade union membership and work councils in West Germany

The fraction of works councillors belonging to a trade union in Germany is much higher than union density among employees. If works councils represent the face of unions, union membership of employees should be related positively to the existence of works councils and their proximity to unions. Using data from the German Socio-Economic-Panel SOEP we find that (a) works councillors exhibit a higher probability of being a union member, (b) the mere existence of a works council within an establishment has no impact on union membership and (c) a 10 % decrease in the average share of unionised works councillors coincides with a 10 % fall in the probability of being a union member. Hence, the decline in the unionisation of works councillors and the fall in union density in West Germany are closely linked. --panel data,trade union membership,works council