An Assessment of the Commission’s 2011 Schengen Governance Package: Preventing abuse by EU member states of freedom of movement? CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe No. 47, 26 March 2012

The Schengen system has been at the centre of sharp controversy throughout 2011 and the early months of 2012 arising from attempts by several member state governments to challenge the right to the free movement of persons and the abolition of internal border checks. The speech delivered by Nicolas Sarkozy early this month (March 2012), as part of the French presidential campaign, in which he threatened to suspend France’s participation in Schengen illustrates this phenomenon. This paper examines the European Commission’s response to the Schengen controversies, namely the Schengen Goverance Package published in September 2011 and currently under negotiation in Council and the European Parliament. It assesses the scope and added value of the Package’s two new legislative proposals (a new Schengen evaluation mechanism and revised rules for restating internal border checks) by looking at the origins and features of the debate surrounding liberty of circulation in the Schengen area. The paper addresses the following questions: first, are these new rules necessary and appropriate to effectively respond to unlawful security derogations and restrictions to liberty of circulation? Second, would their adoption provide an effective response to current and future political tensions and national governments’ policies against free movement, such as those evidenced in 2011 and 2012 and for them to expand to other member states? And finally, is the Schengen Governance Package well designed to safeguard the free movement of persons, or is it rather oriented towards further strengthening the security apparatus of Schengen

Perceiving Pain in Others: Automatic and Controlled Mechanisms

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The European Union’s Multi-Level Cultural Diplomacy vis-à-vis the United States of America. Working Paper Series W-2018/7

This paper examines how, to what extent and why the EU engages in cultural diplomacy vis-à-vis the US. While providing an empirical review of and conceptual reflection on the current state of the EU’s (including key member states’) efforts at employing cultural diplomacy vis-à-vis the US, the paper also strives to explain the forms of this activity. It argues that a multi-level EU cultural diplomacy in the US does exist, but that its potential is currently underused. As could be expected, the EU Delegation to the US seems to be most willing to pursue EU cultural diplomacy, whereas the extent of EU cultural diplomacy at the level of coordinated activities between the EU and the member states, as well as at the member state level remains low. This finding can be explained primarily with a latent competition between member states. While the general motivation to engage in cultural diplomacy can be interest- or value-driven – and is in the case of EU cultural diplomacy vis-à-vis the US arguably both –, it is undeniable that, in a country like the US, the interest-driven soft power competition that is often a key incentive for actors to engage in cultural diplomacy activities at all plays out negatively inside the EU. These findings are corroborated by a brief discussion of the potential acceptance of EU cultural action in the US, which highlights how, despite positive perceptions of European culture as such, the EU is hardly recognized as an actor in the field of culture

Tackling the spread of disinformation Why a co-regulatory approach is the right way forward for the EU. Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Paper 12 December 2019

In recent years social media platforms have led to an unprecedented increase in the spread of disinformation. Concerns about these new and dynamic ways to spread falsehoods have brought politicians and regulators onto the stage. In this paper Paul-Jasper Dittrich proposes a European co-regulatory approach to tackle disinformation on social media instead of the current self-regulatory approach or direct regulation

The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative's work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Self-Organization of Speech Sounds

The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be formed prior to the existence of linguistic interactions? Moreover, the human speech code is discrete and compositional, shared by all the individuals of a community but different across communities, and phoneme inventories are characterized by statistical regularities. How can a speech code with these properties form? We try to approach these questions in the paper, using the ``methodology of the artificial''. We build a society of artificial agents, and detail a mechanism that shows the formation of a discrete speech code without pre-supposing the existence of linguistic capacities or of coordinated interactions. The mechanism is based on a low-level model of sensory-motor interactions. We show that the integration of certain very simple and non language-specific neural devices leads to the formation of a speech code that has properties similar to the human speech code. This result relies on the self-organizing properties of a generic coupling between perception and production within agents, and on the interactions between agents. The artificial system helps us to develop better intuitions on how speech might have appeared, by showing how self-organization might have helped natural selection to find speech

Love thy neighbour? Coronavirus politics and their impact on EU freedoms and rule of law in the Schengen Area. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security in Europe No. 2020-04, April 2020

Restrictions on international and intra-EU traffic of persons have been at the heart of the political responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Border controls and suspensions of entry and exist have been presented as key policy priorities to prevent the spread of the virus in the EU. These measures pose however fundamental questions as to the raison d’être of the Union, and the foundations of the Single Market, the Schengen system and European citizenship. They are also profoundly intrusive regarding the fundamental rights of individuals and in many cases derogate domestic and EU rule of law checks and balances over executive decisions. This Paper examines the legality of cross-border mobility restrictions introduced in the name of COVID-19. It provides an in-depth typology and comprehensive assessment of measures including the reintroduction of internal border controls, restrictions of specific international traffic modes and intra-EU and international ‘travel bans’. Many of these have been adopted in combination with declarations of a ‘state of emergency’

If citizens have a voice, who’s listening?

This is the paper for the class of "EU Politics", Monday, 9 nov. 200

If citizens have a voice, who's listening? Lessons from recent citizen consultation experiments for the European Union. CEPS EPIN Working Paper No. 24, 12 June 2009

Are European Union institutions, as they claim, really listening to citizens thanks to more ‘deliberative’ consultation tools? The European Commission and the European Parliament in particular have committed themselves to engaging in a dialogue with citizens in recent years. But to what effect? This paper notes how official policies have adopted language borrowed from the deliberative democracy school of thinking, but denounces the lack of clarity in the role assigned to deliberation with citizens in EU policy-making processes. It also invites EU policy-makers to think more critically about recent and future experiments that present themselves as ‘deliberative’. It does so by highlighting areas for improvement in recent initiatives. Finally, it makes a number of recommendations for the future of dialogue with citizens, suggesting in particular the creation of a European Observatory for Democracy and Opinion, as well as a list of criteria to assess the design and role of such activities, and the concentration of efforts on one high-quality, high-impact initiative per year