Witnessing democracy in action at EU

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Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Muhd Shamin

Shamin making a presentation

After a long and hectic 14-hour flight from Singapore, I finally arrived at Brussels in Belgium where the European Union parliament is headquartered.

I was filled with both excitement and a tinge of fear as the plane touched down at the tarmac as it was my first visit to Europe. But the realization that I had reached the capital of Europe to begin a three-month internship to see and learn about how the EU parliament functions lifted my spirits.

Anxiety soon followed, however. The immigration officer refused to believe that I’d come for an attachment to the EU parliament until I’d to finally retrieve my contact details from my check-in luggage to convince him.

The following day, I reported to the EU parliament and was received by a staff of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), the third largest political group in the European Parliament, holding the balance of power between the left and right parties.

As the host, the ALDE secretariat went through the formalities, including my formal introduction to other interns, one each from Ireland, Spain, Lithuania, Germany, France, Belgium, Congo, and Italy. I'm the only intern from Asia.

Soon it was business. Together with the others, I attended a hearing for Humanitarian Aid. We were then taken to an EU group meeting on human rights where some resolutions were tabled.

...with fellow interns I had wanted to be assigned to a committee that dealt with human rights but because of all the places had been taken up, I was assigned to the Monetary Affairs and Economics (ECON) Committee.

The assignment offered me an opportunity to attend a public hearing on the present financial crisis in which the panelists presented its impact on financial systems and proposed solutions on how to manage it. I was tasked with preparing a summary report on the hearing.

The following is a summary of my report on the proposals as put forth by the panelists:

have a supranational financial regulatory body,
focus on the Green technology,
balance social security and cost of maintaining it,
have a coordinated intervention by member states,
reject financial speculations and focus on the real economy,
and re-channel young people in the education sector away from banking to science.

On the second week, I was tasked with assisting a seminar on “EU Anti-Cartel Policy”. This involved the preparation of a list of possible speakers, putting together a list of major anti-cartel cases, and summarizing notes on the OECD's proposals on taxation.

I also attended a session on the banking system whose objective was to look into creating an effective financial supervisory body at the supranational level. It was the lack of regulations and supervision that had led to massive speculation on Wall Street, resulting in the 2008 crisis. The debate centred on whether financial information should be made avaialble only upon request or whether they should be automatically available.

...at an EU Parliamentary session In the third week, I attended a series of meetings including a presentation by the Spanish Minister of Economy. Spain is the current president of the EU. The Minister put emphasis on balancing the social, economic and environmental progress of the EU.

There was also a hearing on the social impact of the financial crisis. One of the concerns raised was on youth employment and how this would affect their chances of getting a job and their future earnings.

Being in the ECON committee has been an eye-opener. At this historic moment in which the world is suffering form the repercussions of the financial crisis, being here has given me a wider understanding on the impact of the crisis and the lessons learnt from it. It has also given me a wider appreciation of the economic issues at the supranational level.

On an unofficial level, I had some discussions with the other interns from Europe who indicated that they were quite disappointed with the EU’s democracy. Unlike countries with citizens, Europe lacked a "European public" that causes citizens of the EU to be uninterested in European politics. Politics is still very much focused at the national levels.

Personally, I think democracy in Europe has advanced to a very high level, compared to the kind of politics that we have in Singapore. In fact EU as a supranational body is able to assert its influence in Europe and, through the various treaties and laws, is able to ensure that fundamental rights of the people of Europe prevail.

...having a discussion over drinks Compare this to ASEAN which is not able to even function as a coordinated body, let alone protect and defend the rights of its citizens.

Europe went through a few stages to achieve what it is today. The feudal age which ensured that only a certain class was able to enjoy privileges and that power was through inheritance. Then there was the French Revolution, which resulted in the spread of the concept of civil liberties and the ever decreasing role of the monarchy. Europe suffered two World Wars and the continent was in a mess. It was the desire to come together to achieve peace and prosperity that led member states to come together and work under a single body.

Of course, there are national interests, ideological differences, and differences in language and culture. But the EU, through democracy, manages it problems through the ballot rather than through dubious means to justify oppression of the people.

My three-month internship which ends in April is exciting. I will be flying to Strasbourg, France to attend a EU Parliamentary session which has 722 members from 27 states and assist the policy advisors of ALDE ECON Committee.

Shamin is currently attending an annual internship programme organised by ALDE and the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats (CALD) of which SDP is a member and its current chair. Shamin is a member of the SDP's Young Democrats.

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Comments (2)

Thu 18 Feb 2010 1:43 PM | seebeng - Great work, SDP

Great work SDP. Looks like your party is engaging and guiding our youth in the right direction. Keep it up.

Wed 24 Feb 2010 11:25 PM | quantum - The Downfall of Human Rights

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233914/output/print

The Downfall of Human Rights

By Joshua Kurlantzick | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

Touring Asia in November, Barack Obama hit all the usual presidential themes, including free trade, investment, and strategic alliances, except for one: human rights. During a scripted press conference in Beijing, Obama barely mentioned it. In Shanghai he offered only mild criticism of China's Internet blocks, saying he was a "big supporter of noncensorship." Obama's nonstatements amount to a clear break from nearly three decades of U.S. policy. From its engagement with the brutal Burmese junta to its decision to avoid the Dalai Lama when he first visited Washington during Obama's tenure to its silence over the initial outbreak of protests in Iran, Obama's administration has taken a much quieter approach to rights advocacy than his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "Conceding to China upfront doesn't buy you better cooperation further down the track," says Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

Obama's waffling was hardly unique. Across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, many democracies have abandoned global human-rights advocacy, trotting it out only for occasional speeches or events like International Human Rights Day. With the prominent exception of Canada, the developed world has fallen mum. Earlier this year European nations handed the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, one of the major organizations tasked with promoting human rights in Eurasia, to Kazakhstan, a country accused by human-rights groups of arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture. In Japan, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has promised a new dialogue with North Korea, rather than pressuring Pyongyang to first release alleged Japanese abductees. In contrast to predecessors such as Junichiro Koizumi, Hatoyama prefers a soft approach to China as well, calling for far closer ties while all but ignoring the growing climate of repression under the government of Hu Jintao. The Australian government, once known for stinging critiques of China, Burma, and other autocratic regimes, now collaborates with Indonesia and other neighbors to prevent refugees from Sri Lanka and elsewhere from entering the country, instead detaining the migrants in a Guantánamo-like camp on remote Christmas Island. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has refrained from criticizing China, even for the arrest of an Australian mining executive on what many observers see as a trumped-up spying charge. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has failed to deliver on his campaign promise to champion human rights and end the country's old ties to African dictators. Instead of the "new relationship" with Africa that Sarkozy promised, his government has backed the new ruler of Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba, despite widespread claims of fraud in his election, and offered a state welcome to Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the general who launched a coup in Mauritania. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, the cofounder of Médecins Sans Frontières, a unique kind of human-rights organization, admitted in an interview, "There is a permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state."

In the developing world, too, young democracies that once seemed ready to stand up for human rights have beat a retreat. After apartheid ended, many activists had high hopes for South Africa's ruling African National Congress, which had benefited from a global pressure movement when it was fighting white rule. Yet the ANC has used its influence at the United Nations to protect not only the brutal regime in Zimbabwe—where South Africa has security and economic interests—but tyrants as far afield as Burma. In December, Thailand, which during the Vietnam War era sheltered tens of thousands of Indochinese refugees, forced some 3,000 Hmong back to Laos, where they could face persecution. Cambodia deported a group of Uighurs back to China, despite the fact that Uighurs previously returned to China have been executed.

The age of global human-rights advocacy has collapsed, giving way to an era of realism unseen since the time of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. In the West, the failure of George W. Bush's moralizing style of democracy promotion, combined with the pragmatism inspired by the global financial crisis, has made leaders far more reticent to assert a high profile on rights issues. In private, Obama officials say that they deliberately took a humbler tone because of the global rejection of Bush's claim that he was fighting in Iraq to advance the cause of democratic rights. But such a strategy, initially appreciated by countries tired of Bush, can go too far. "The administration wanted to send the message that the U.S. is listening to the world again, that they are the anti-Bush," says one former senior State Department official, who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing his old colleagues too harshly. "Rather than saying, 'OK, we have made some mistakes, but we are correcting them, and that doesn't mean we are going to ignore what's going on in Russia, or China, or Iran,' instead they've just gone silent."

And in hard times, human-rights advocacy starts to look like a luxury, particularly when some of the countries whose cooperation is critical to rebuilding the global economy, such as China and oil-rich Kazakhstan, also rank among the worst human-rights abusers. In the flush early 2000s, Tony Blair could afford to make improving governance in Africa a British government priority, but his successor, Gordon Brown, spends most of his time trying to fix Britain's debt morass. In the U.S., the Obama administration's domestic agenda makes it leery of alienating potential partners abroad. As Hillary Clinton said during her first visit to China as secretary of state, "Our pressing on those issues [human rights] can't interfere with the global economic crisis."

The changing global balance of power may now prevent human rights from ever gaining the international attention it did in the 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, leaders and techno-evangelists argued that new technologies would give human-rights campaigners an edge over repressive governments. President Clinton warned Beijing that controlling the Internet would prove as tough as "trying to nail Jell-O to a wall." Well, consider the Jell-O nailed: even though Twitter, Facebook, and other tools have helped Iranian protesters bring their stories to the world, authoritarian governments have figured out how to monitor and block the Internet and other new tools. China's "Great Firewall" is now so extensive that many Chinese Internet users have no idea how much information they are actually missing out on, and countries such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam have brought in Chinese Internet specialists to learn how to build their own Great Firewalls. And in a tough business climate, few Western technology companies—or Western governments—seem willing to stand up to this Internet censorship. Google's public condemnation of Beijing's alleged hacking drew headlines, but another story got far less notice: no other Silicon Valley giant publicly supported Google's stance.

Many current world leaders also happen to have strongly realist instincts, low-key demeanors, and little inclination to push the cause. Brown, Hatoyama, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh do not have the idealistic instincts and charisma of a Blair or Koizumi. While Bill Clinton's dynamism helped him make a strong case for human rights in places such as Vietnam and China—the likes of the dour Brown cannot follow that act. In the office of the U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon is no Kofi Annan. He cuts a retiring pose, meekly leaving Burma last July after the regime refused to allow Ban to meet opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The one leader who has the popularity and flair to press the case for human rights does not have the inclination. Obama's desire to be a consensus builder, even when dealing with brutal governments, also pushes him toward nonconfrontation. He seems to think he can find common ground with anyone, even Sudan's Omar al-Bashir and North Korea's Kim Jong Il. As the historian Walter Russell Mead notes in a lengthy essay in Foreign Policy magazine, the president falls into the Jeffersonian tradition of American leaders, in that he wants to "reduce America's costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments." He believes "that the United States can best spread democracy and support peace by becoming an example of democracy at home." In contrast, the heirs of Woodrow Wilson, such as John F. Kennedy, Paul Wolfowitz, and, in many ways, Bill Clinton, believed that promoting democratic values abroad helps global stability.

In most democracies, the public has also become far less interested in global human rights. In 2005 crowds around the world attended the Live 8 concerts designed to increase support for aid to Africa; though aid is not solely a human-rights issue, the concerts were a sign of the rich world's international engagement. Don't expect to see any Live 9. With unemployment skyrocketing, the residents of democracies have turned inward, fighting against immigration, rethinking free trade—and paying far less attention to what happens in Iran or Sudan or North Korea. One poll by the Pew Research Center, released in December, found that 49 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. should "mind its own business" internationally, leaving other nations to work out their problems themselves. That was the highest percentage of Americans expressing isolationist sentiment in four decades.
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