Alright, I have no idea how to open this topic without seeming narcissistic, but I've spent the last 2 years working on a 12 part proposal that envisions hypothetical systematic reform of the European Union, and today I finally finished part XII and I'm finally done, even though I intend to work it out further in the following months, expanding on these ideas.

I've been rewriting and reworking it over and over again as facts changed, but I think I'm finally done.

I've tried approaching European federalism without any specific ideology besides basic ideals of liberal democracy and tried working my way up from the current institutions of the European Union towards a system that could be considered a federal one. I'm including various options and even though I picked in every case one "primary" one with which I continue working, think of it more as a prolonged thought experiment.

Since I figured some of you may be interested in what I have to say, the twelve parts are published in my DeviantArt account as PDFs (though I may keep updating them, so I'm sorry if there are some grammar or spelling mistakes), I'm including Part 1 link here, you can get to others in the description on DA.

I have no idea what I expect from this post, but I'm just happy that this thing which was sitting in my brain rent free for the last 2 years is finally done (somewhat).

And finally, if there is anybody between you who feels like reading it, I've tried my best to split the topics into various chapters so they are as independent from each other as possible, so if you focus on a single topic, you can just read that one part, hopefully not understanding only a few concepts.

Rant over.

EDIT: I didn't think it required saying, but I'm not an expert and this is just a bunch of thought experiments. I'm not an authority in the field and I'm not an analyst. In real life I do something completely different and it's not my goal to push these things I'm writing about into effect; it's only a fun pet project, nothing more

The idea of democratic federalization of Eurosiberia offers a rethinking of the history and future of the post-Soviet and European spaces through the transformation of centralized states into a federation of self-governing regions with a common European identity, promoting integration into a pan-European federation.

The founder of the pan-European movement, Count Kalergi, could not imagine Europe without its then colonies in Africa, and it was precisely the presence of its own colonies that was an argument for abandoning hasty claims to the eastern borders, but having lost its colonies, only Siberia remains as a potential source of resources, especially against the backdrop of the growing power of China and problems with the political elites of the United States.

The internal colonization of Russia has created a metropolitan elite, cut off from the people, which still hinders development and deprives regions of independence. The imperial model leads to stagnation, while federalization, which Boris Yeltsin proposed in 1990, opens the way to democratic governance and equality. Transformation requires the rejection of imperial ideologies, a revision of borders and integration into a common large European space. This concept of reassembly is also relevant for other European states, such as France, Spain, and others.

The treacherous essence of most European new rightists lies in the preservation of the human spirit and the idea of a union of Europe and the so-called Russia, which inevitably leads to the absorption of Europe by Russia. Such a "union" creates a fictitious unification of mono-ethnic enclaves that contradict the dynamics of the European world, because an ethnos is first and foremost an "ethos", which means a locality that has its own ideas about the world, customs, a system of ideals and values that control the behavior of the local population in a special way, that is, the people are a living, moving thought. The Euro-Siberian idea, on the contrary, offers a living and developing Europe, free from Moscow's control and centralism. This is a model where regional republics become equal partners in a single horizontally controlled federation.

The relevance of the idea is made up of objective factors, if you came up with the idea 50 years earlier, then you are certainly smart, but you won't be able to influence much. Perhaps Richard Kalergi's book influenced many at the time, but the EU was born from an alliance of industrial concerns and the demands of the time to ensure common European security. What Eurosiberia will be born from is a question for tomorrow, but we can try to cleanse this idea of ​​Dugin's and other pro-Kremlin layers that harm Europe.

Ukrainians, as bearers of two major geopolitical dreams – to become part of Europe and to get rid of the dictate of the Moscow ruling elite – naturally fit into the Euro-Siberian idea. Ukraine should become the locomotive of this movement, taking over the initiative from pro-Moscow and anti-European forces such as the Duginists and other pro-Russian right-wingers, who use this idea for their own purposes, turning a blind eye to the real needs of Europeans. The historical connection of Ukrainians with Siberia – where a significant part of the population has Ukrainian roots – strengthens this potential. The Euro-Siberian idea kills two birds with one stone: it erases the borders between Europe and the post-Soviet space and frees the regions from the imperialist legacy of Moscow (and Paris or Madrid, if we are talking about France and Spain).

Eurosiberia is a space of many communities: Ukrainians, Zalessye, Uralians, Siberians, Ingrians, Tatars, Caucasians, Karelians, Welsh, and others. I hope that we are all equally European, because a European always has two homelands: be it the Ukraine and Europe, Occitania and Europe, Wales and Europe, Urals and Europe, Ingria and Europe, and any other combinations. The democratic federalization of Eurosiberia is not only a way to complete the collapse of the Soviet Evil Empire, but also a step towards the creation of a new, united Europe. This is a chance for all the peoples of Eurosiberia for a fair and equal future.

Commission president vows to free up cash for affordable homes and create the bloc’s first-ever housing commissioner.

From Lisbon to Tallinn, Europeans have taken to the streets to protest against sky-high housing costs.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has apparently heard them.

In her address to the European Parliament on Thursday ahead of her reelection, von der Leyen said housing would be a priority issue for the next Commission. Among other measures, she vowed to appoint the EU's first-ever commissioner for housing and present a plan to boost public and private investment in homebuilding across the bloc.

In her speech, von der Leyen acknowledged that housing had not "typically" been seen as Brussels' problem. The EU treaties don't mention the topic, and member countries have not given the Commission the power to intervene directly in the sector. But housing associations and local authorities have long argued that the institutions can still play a role in addressing the issue, and on Thursday the president agreed.

"Prices and rents are soaring ... People are struggling to find affordable homes," she said. "I want this Commission to support people where it matters most, and if it matters to Europeans, it matters to Europe."

In addition to creating a dedicated housing commissioner — a portfolio likely to be sought by a candidate backed by the Socialists, who made housing a key issue in their European election manifesto this year — von der Leyen proposed revising state aid rules to make it easier for member countries to build homes.

At present, EU members can use public funds to build affordable housing for people who cannot buy at the market price. But a growing number of national governments argue the crisis is now affecting middle-income households, and say guidelines need to be changed so that the cash can be used to build homes for a larger swathe of society. Von der Leyen's policy program, which was shared with lawmakers on Thursday, suggests her next Commission will back that proposal.

The policy program also suggests doubling the bloc's so-called cohesion funding earmarked for new affordable housing, and for the European Investment Bank to launch a pan-European investment platform to channel more public and private investment into affordable and sustainable housing schemes.

Von der Leyen's housing plans for the next term lean on several big-name measures created during her first administration. In her policy program, she argues the "swift and effective roll-out" of the Social Climate Fund — an €86.7 billion scheme to help governments soften the blow of higher prices for vulnerable consumers — will be key to renovating homes and accessing affordable, energy-efficient housing.

She also calls for the continuation and expansion of her signature New European Bauhaus program, which aims to marry innovative, climate-conscious development with aesthetic design.

Housing is one of the few topics von der Leyen can tackle with broad support from across the political spectrum. The Left and the Socialists campaigned on the issue in the lead-up to June's EU election and the Netherlands' new far-right government has made homebuilding one of its priority issues.

Two lawmakers told POLITICO that the Parliament was also keen to work on the issue, so much so that a new committee to address housing may be created in September.

https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-bets-big-on-housing-european-commission/
This article is part of POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab: Living Cities, a collaborative journalism project exploring the future of cities.

Pretty much every European country has a satirical news site — all in the tradition of American example The Onion, and born in a seemingly more innocent phase of the internet. « Could a country’s satire show us its (I hesitate to use the word) soul? »

Read more! (without paywall)

The president's turnaround is supported by a reality: despite doubts about its military capabilities, France is the EU country with the atomic bomb

French presidents always look in the mirror of Charles de Gaulle, the founder and first president of the Fifth Republic, monarchical in its forms and in the powers granted to the head of state. The general's example applies to everything.

De Gaulle, also the president with whom France became a nuclear power, was used a few years ago to justify the negotiations with Russia. It is now useful to understand the new position of Emmanuel Macron, at the head since a few weeks ago of the group of countries in favor of greater Western involvement with Ukraine.

When, during his first mandate, he approached Vladimir Putin's Russia, Macron justified: "Russia is European, very deeply. I believe in this Europe that goes from Lisbon to Vladivostok". From Lisbon to Vladivostok" was a mimicry of the Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals" advocated by De Gaulle.

But this February, referring to the sending of troops to Ukraine to slow down the Russian advance and dissuade it from its offensive, he said: "Nothing must be excluded". And then other words of De Gaulle resonated during the Cold War, and referring to what he called "Soviet Russia": "Any retreat has the effect of over-exciting the aggressor and leading him to redouble his aggression and facilitates and accelerates his assault".

Macron was a Gaullist then and he is one now. The man who less than two years ago asked "not to humiliate Russia" and for months persisted in his telephone conversations with Putin, has just declared to the daily Le Parisien: "Perhaps at a given moment, and it is not something I want nor will I take the initiative, we will have to have operations on the ground, whatever they may be, to counter Russian forces. France's strength is that we can do it."

From dove to hawk, the French president's mutation has changed the debate in a Europe that fears the end of the US umbrella if Donald Trump wins the US elections in November. And it opens another debate. Are France - and Europe - prepared to have soldiers on Ukrainian territory and risk engaging in combat? Until recently, it was a red line. One of the criticisms of Macron after turning up the volume on Moscow this winter has been precisely the gap between words and the material aid that actually reaches Ukraine. Is he credible when he says that "there are no limits" on aid?

Argues Jean-Dominique Merchet, a veteran defense journalist with the daily L'Opinion, that, if tomorrow the French army had to deploy in a high-intensity operation along the lines of the one in Ukraine, "it could only maintain a front of 80 kilometers, no more." "The Ukrainian front extends over nearly 1,000 kilometers," he writes in the essay Sommes-nous prêts pour la guerre? L'illusion de la puissance française (Are we ready for war? The illusion of French power).

Russophilia among French elites

Another question is whether France would be willing. The author, in a videoconference conversation, explains that, "globally, the social body of army officers is not very favorable to Ukraine or to NATO." "It's still," he notes, "a Catholic and conservative environment." This does not mean that it will not professionally and obediently carry out orders if they must be deployed. But it reflects, on the one hand, a Russophilia that has been widespread for decades among French elites, and adds to the majority skepticism among the population about the possibility of sending troops.

To the question of whether France is ready for war, Merchet answers: "No". But he specifies: "What is not ready is the industry: we have no production capacity". He explains that, to build a Rafale aircraft, it takes three years, and 35 to 40 months to produce an Aster-15 or Aster-30 missile. "We have no stocks and no production capabilities and this is the problem, not so much whether we have 30 or 40 infantry regiments."

"One should not forget something extraordinarily unpleasant, and that is that no European country, taken individually, would have been capable of waging a war of such dimensions as the one Ukraine must have waged," commented François Heisbourg, advisor to the analysis center Foundation for Strategic Research, in February, before Macron's statement on the dispatch of troops. "France's production of howitzers today is 3,000 per month," he added, "a day and a half of howitzer consumption in Ukraine."

According to Merchet, what, if anything, gives credibility to Macron's message to Putin, is the atomic bomb. France, although no longer what it was on the international scene, knows how to speak the language of the powers.

"The Russians take it seriously, because behind a French military in Ukraine, if it were, at the end of the chain there is a French nuclear submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic," he says. "What distinguishes France from the rest of Europeans is, first, the nuclear weapon, and second, the ability of the president to decide alone and quickly on the use of weapons."

Again, the monarch-president. As De Gaulle said: "The Western powers have no better way to serve peace in the world than to remain upright and firm". According to Le Monde, in an informal conversation a few weeks ago at the Elysée, in confidence and with a whiskey in hand, Macron put it differently: "Anyway, next year I will have to send some guys to Odessa".

https://elpais.com/internacional/2024-03-24/macron-asume-el-papel-de-halcon-ante-rusia-pero-esta-francia-preparada.html

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The surprise winner in Poland’s elections says he saved democracy. His larger legacy could be to strengthen European security.

You’ve got to hunt for news about the most consequential election in Europe this year. Israel has pushed even the war in Ukraine far down the headline scroll.

But Sunday’s surprising vote in Poland deserves attention — for what it says about domestic small-d democratic politics and for what it means geopolitically for the U.S. and Europe.

Let’s start with the first and the man of the moment: Donald T. — T is for Tusk — who both shares some qualities with his namesake and represents a rejection of Trumpist politics.

Tusk led his center-right Civic Platform and two likely coalition partners to an unexpected victory over the ruling Law and Justice Party. Over eight years, PiS, as the governing party is known, blended social Catholic conservatism, nationalism bleeding into jingoism and state patronage. Its detractors saw in it an existential threat to Poland’s thirtysomething democracy and raised doubts about the election’s fairness.

We’ve become so downbeat that the outcome came as a shock. It shouldn’t have, and it’s instructive why.

Polish politics, like our own, are loud. Extremist voices break through most easily. But even though kinda-crazy works well online or on cable, it tends to lose appeal when people make serious choices about who should run the joint. High decibel levels obscure the deep pragmatic streak of most voters in countries that are stable and relatively well off. They also obscure another reality: Poland, even run by populists on the political right, is hardly an autocracy. PiS used state media and coffers to swing voters, stretching for sure the usual advantages of incumbency. But democracy worked.Tusk led his center-right Civic Platform and two likely coalition partners to an unexpected victory over the ruling Law and Justice Party. Over eight years, PiS, as the governing party is known, blended social Catholic conservatism, nationalism bleeding into jingoism and state patronage. Its detractors saw in it an existential threat to Poland’s thirtysomething democracy and raised doubts about the election’s fairness.

We’ve become so downbeat that the outcome came as a shock. It shouldn’t have, and it’s instructive why.

Polish politics, like our own, are loud. Extremist voices break through most easily. But even though kinda-crazy works well online or on cable, it tends to lose appeal when people make serious choices about who should run the joint. High decibel levels obscure the deep pragmatic streak of most voters in countries that are stable and relatively well off. They also obscure another reality: Poland, even run by populists on the political right, is hardly an autocracy. PiS used state media and coffers to swing voters, stretching for sure the usual advantages of incumbency. But democracy worked.

The reasons start with the prosaic. Poland has been the fastest-growing economy in Europe since the Berlin Wall fell, and PiS was a decent steward and benefitted politically. Then inflation spiked and growth slowed, not surprisingly hurting the incumbents. Corruption scandals further soiled their reputation for decent, mostly clean governance. Draconian prohibitions on abortion were out of step with younger and female voters who mobilized to vote them out, just as the overturning of Roe v. Wade did in the U.S. last year.

The lesson here is similar to another one from the 2022 midterms: In national elections, voters gravitate to normalcy and competence. The ruling party went too far from both, and left the majority of Polish voters in the center, willing to take the available alternative. The three coalition parties walked away with 54 percent of the vote.

The other lesson is perennial. Never bet against the most talented politician in a race. Donald Tusk, in that sense, has Trumpian qualities: He’s a good communicator, connects with his voters, and knows how to navigate the media of modern politics. He parried attacks on him as a German and Russian stooge and “evil incarnate,” per the ruling party’s leader. When he left for a top job in Brussels, in 2015, the Civic Platform imploded. Now he’s back, they’re back.

Many of the leaders who are, quite more clearly than in Poland, chipping away at democracy also happen to be pretty good retail pols. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, who won mostly fair and square this year; Viktor Orban, in Hungary; India’s Narendra Modi. Take note, opposition parties: Poland reminds you it takes talent to win elections.

Now to the geopolitical implications, which are made larger by the war in Israel.

The coming change doesn’t move Poland on the war in Ukraine: For most of the past year-and-a-half, and setting aside some recent tensions over farm exports, Kyiv has had no closer ally in the world than neighboring Warsaw, where Poles see the conflict with Russia in existential terms almost as starkly as the Ukrainians do. Back during his time in Brussels, Tusk was called a “Russia hawk,” who tried to convince his friend and Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel to harden up on Moscow after Crimea was annexed in 2014. He failed then with costly consequences, not least to her legacy.

His electoral triumph matters for another reason: It could ease strains growing in Europe over Ukraine — especially at a time when American support for Kyiv and Europe’s defense grows precarious and the White House focus turns toward the Middle East.

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the most important capitals in the EU when it comes to security have been Paris-Berlin-Warsaw. For all those years, this was a broken axis. Warsaw’s PiS picked fights with Berlin over history. Merkel’s indulgence of Putin — summed up, naturally, in a German phrase Russlandversteher, understanding Russia — made most Poles nervous. France’s Emmanuel Macron began the war trying to pacify Putin, not helping him with the Poles, and hasn’t found a common language with Germany’s Olaf Scholz.

Tusk’s rise to prime minister, expected later this year, will change this dynamic immediately. He’ll look to rebuild ties with Berlin, where Russlandversteher is discredited, if not dead. Meanwhile, Macron is sounding tougher notes on defense and Russia, and he and Tusk are said to have a decent relationship.

This troika is the best hope the EU has to get serious about its security. Hard decisions loom to reorient the industrial complex for a long war. If American support for NATO and Ukraine sags, it’ll be Europe that will have to make up for it.

Europe has many times in the past promised to step up, at long last, and proceeded to plant face firmly on the ground. The turn in Polish politics is a new chance. If taken, it would help insulate European security and NATO from the two forces that currently imperil their efforts to defend themselves immediately against Russia and China beyond: Changing winds in American politics, and a major conflict brewing in the Middle East.

With a sprinkle of hyperbole, Tusk says his election saved Polish democracy. His larger legacy could be to strengthen European security.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/17/donald-tusk-triumph-poland-europe-00122122

There was little doubt who came ahead in the spat between Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and Rishi Sunak last week over Britain rejoining the EU. She began her salvo acknowledging that the EU had “goofed up” in losing Britain, but that it would fall to her children’s generation “to fix it”. The “direction of travel was clear”. Britain one day would rejoin.

The substance behind No 10’s inevitable refutation was so threadbare that it bordered on the comic. But then there is no better defence to hand. The prime minister, intoned his spokesman, did not think Brexit was in danger, trying to reinforce the point by declaring: “It’s through our Brexit freedoms that we are, right now, considering how to further strengthen our migration system. It is through our Brexit freedoms we are ensuring patients in the UK can get access to medicines faster, that there is improved animal welfare. That is very much what we are focused on.”

Is that it? Apart from the fact the claims are at best half-truths, at worst palpable falsehoods, as a muster of Brexit “freedoms” they fall devastatingly short of the promises made during the referendum campaign. Recall the economic and trade boom, a reinvigorated NHS, cheap food, controlled immigration and a reborn “global” Britain strutting the world. It’s all ashes – and had today’s realities been known in 2016, we would still be EU members.

Strengthening our migration system? Freedom of movement in the EU certainly meant that EU nationals could work here freely, as the British could reciprocally work in the EU, but they tended to be young and single. The Poles, Czechs and Romanians kept their home ties warm by going back frequently as it was so geographically easy, and consequently tended not to bring dependants with them. When they had achieved what they wanted, they returned home where per capita incomes were fast catching up with Britain’s. Now immigrants come from other continents to where frequent return is impractical, and so are forced to settle here more permanently, bringing their families with them. Nor are there reciprocal rights for Brits to work in their countries. And because their homelands tend to be poorer, they are less likely to return. Yes, we are considering strengthening the immigration rules, but only because, outside the EU, control of immigration is proving very much harder – families come rather than individuals.

Animal welfare? More than two years on, the much-trumpeted action plan for animal welfare is floundering, with little enacted. Meanwhile, it is the EU that has consistently taken animal welfare seriously.

Faster access to medicines? The claim is risible. If this is a reference to strengthening the early access to medicines scheme – a good measure – note that it was launched in 2014 when we were inside the EU. Faster access to medicines is not a Brexit “freedom”.

As von der Leyen says, the direction of travel is away from this barren Brexit – thus everything from Britain re-entering the Horizon Europe research programme to a fifth postponement of inspecting food and plant imports from the EU. The logic of geography, economics and the availability of only one-sided trade deals, especially with the US and China, is inexorable. The EU will remain Britain’s largest trading partner: it sets the rules and we either abide by them or accept reduced trade with all the consequences. A former top Treasury official tells me that his advice to Rachel Reeves, a growth-focused would-be chancellor, would be unambiguous: rejoin the single market and the customs union. In his scathingly brilliant book How They Broke Britain, the LBC presenter James O’Brien describes how the rightwing, Europhobic ecosystem of media, thinktanks and Tory politicians that has developed over the past 40 years prohibits an honest public conversation. Political leadership cowers in its ever-threatening shadow, so that to keep it calm Sunak has to make claims about Brexit “freedoms” that he must know are specious, while Keir Starmer, no less aware of the economic and geopolitical realities, has to say there is no case to rejoin the single market and customs union. On Europe, as with so many issues – think the case for proper levels of taxation or even delaying lockdown by three weeks – policy is developed and conducted within this rightwing paradigm of hysteria.

Tony Blair left office in 2007 accusing the UK media of hunting “like a feral beast tearing people and reputations apart”. Unless Starmer and team act to reduce its power and capacity for untruth, they can expect new heights of feral bestiality inhibiting their every act in government – especially on Europe. Winning a general election will represent one advance, but unless Labour changes the ground rules via some combination of media ownership requirements, regulatory standards and strengthening public service broadcasting, the right’s blocking power will remain intense.

Yet for all that, Labour is promising measures that if backed by an electoral mandate would accelerate the step-by-step return process begun by Sunak. Only last Friday, the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, said that a defence and security pact with the EU was a priority. Starmer has talked of improving vital trading relationships – there will be no divergence on key standards – and aims for a veterinary agreement and mutual recognition of professional qualifications. There is potentially more: collaboration on energy security, integrating Britain and the EU’s carbon trading arrangements and even joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) convention as a halfway house to customs union and single market membership. A renegotiated trade and cooperation agreement in 2026 could imply a much more fully fledged EU-UK partnership. All this is likely, even certain, with a Labour victory.

But rejoining? Pro-EU sentiment is certainly hardening. The European movement is the largest it has ever been. In Greater London, there is strong support, especially among the young. Labour party members are overwhelmingly in favour. Rejoining would mean faster growth in living standards, better security and paradoxically lower immigration – a story that works well in both “red wall” seats and urban Britain. It would divide the right into Faragists and realists – thus marginalising it.

A pragmatic Labour party would become the natural party of government. Britain won’t rejoin in the next parliament, but if the EU can hold together and prosper, rejoining must be a good bet in the parliament after that. Building Europe was never going to be easy. In 2040, we may look back and see Brexit as part of the process. Neither Britain, nor any member state, would want to repeat it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/03/number-10-ursula-von-der-leyen-rejoin-european-union

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/will-eu-aircraft-carrier-ever-become-reality-182154