The European Commission is currently formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the EU’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014, and much more than money is at stake.
BRUSSELS – The European Commission is now in the process of formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the European Union’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014 – and much more than money is at stake.
The debate over the next year will be significantly influenced and constrained by national interests. Member states, facing serious fiscal problems of their own, are unlikely to agree to pay more to the EU budget, which will thus probably remain at 1% of EU-wide GDP, as in the previous MFF. But this is no excuse to give up on overhauling the budget’s role in EU governance.
The EU budget is unlike any other. First, size is not everything. The budget’s potential goes well beyond its face value. For example, under the Medium-Term Financial Assistance (MTFA) facility, the EU provides liquidity to non-eurozone members in balance-of-payment difficulties and, more recently, also to eurozone countries. It does so by using implicit EU budget guarantees to raise capital on financial markets. Thus, indirectly, the budget has enabled leveraging of financing in order to support crisis countries – an expression of European solidarity that has gone fully unnoticed.
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While facing an uphill political battle at home, Turkey’s recently re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan handily won the diaspora vote. He did so by capitalizing on the resentment and alienation felt by second- and third-generation Turkish immigrants who often feel estranged in the countries where they were born.
explains how displacement can make expatriates and minorities more susceptible to extremist ideologies.
Calls at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore to improve military-to-military communication between the US and China, especially in light of increasingly aggressive encounters at sea and in the air, fell on deaf ears. Despite the best efforts of the US and its allies, China is in no hurry to re-engage.
considers the implications of the complete collapse of defense diplomacy between the US and China.
To think that technology will save us from climate change is to invite riskier behavior, or moral hazard. Whether a climate solution creates new problems has little to do with the solution, and everything to do with us.
offers lessons for navigating a field that is fraught with hype, unintended consequences, and other pitfalls.
BRUSSELS – The European Commission is now in the process of formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the European Union’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014 – and much more than money is at stake.
The debate over the next year will be significantly influenced and constrained by national interests. Member states, facing serious fiscal problems of their own, are unlikely to agree to pay more to the EU budget, which will thus probably remain at 1% of EU-wide GDP, as in the previous MFF. But this is no excuse to give up on overhauling the budget’s role in EU governance.
The EU budget is unlike any other. First, size is not everything. The budget’s potential goes well beyond its face value. For example, under the Medium-Term Financial Assistance (MTFA) facility, the EU provides liquidity to non-eurozone members in balance-of-payment difficulties and, more recently, also to eurozone countries. It does so by using implicit EU budget guarantees to raise capital on financial markets. Thus, indirectly, the budget has enabled leveraging of financing in order to support crisis countries – an expression of European solidarity that has gone fully unnoticed.
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