There is also the argument that blogging is on the decline because of twitter, tumblr and facebook. I am not sure whether blogging about politics  (as political arguments usually need more than 140 characters!) is actually affected by this trend although it is true that the EU twittersphere seems to be growing. OK, blogging is not for everyone and not everyone is motivated to blog regularly. However, if there was a bigger EU-blogosphere it would probably motivate more people to start blogging!

But how to create a bigger EU blogosphere? I don’t really have an answer for that but somehow I have the feeling that we should step up our efforts to ‘recruit’ more bloggers and to keep active bloggers motivated! Especially the community building aspect of bloggingportal.eu has been a success – albeit with a limited impact.

If we think about target groups there are several groups that spring to mind:

(1) I think students are an important target group  (especially in European studies, journalism, politics, economics, social sciences…). At the same time it would be good to have people from other more specialized subjects in order to strengthen the EU policy-blogging scene (for example energy, competition, single market, environment, fisheries, agriculture, standardization issues…). What I also would like to see is more local and regional blogs that could evaluate  EU funding projects from a non-Brussels perspective or provide a regional links to EU issues. What needs to be done to motivate students to start a blog? And even if students start blogging – how can they be motivated to keep blogging after they receive their degree?

(2) The second big target group could be the thousands of interns in Brussels and elsewhere. There are quite a lot of internships in the EU bubble. They should (on average!) have slightly more free-time than other people and could use the blog for job hunting if they manage to create some buzz in their field.  Especially in Brussels I think there could be a huge potential as many interns work in EU related jobs. Maybe blogging could give some of them the necessary extra qualification to succeed in the job market! But how to reach them and how to motivate them?

(3) Blogging should not be restricted to the younger generation. People that work  in a job that has something to do with the EU or linked to EU issues are missing in the blogosphsere. Private and professional blogs are also not present in the EU blogging scene. Lots of people that blog on national politics do it as a hobby – is the EU not a topic that can be a good blogging hobby? Generally, it seems that within this target group EU blogging is not seen as a very useful thing to do. But how to change this?

(4) Academics. This is another complex story and I have first hand experience with ideasoneurope.eu The main problem is that the academic community in Europe does not appreciate blogging. And there is also a lack of true European public intellectuals, which is surprising as the internet in particular would be the perfect arena, but again, it is not happening. Partly, because the concept of a “public intellectual” does not seem to be popular in Europe -  but also because a lot of  academics are not familiar with the internet. (I am not kidding!) So, if you are an academic and you blog instead of writing a journal article you are basically wasting your time and it does not seem to help your career. But what can be done to change this?

(5) Retired professionals. With or without a EU job background. Is it possible to motivate this age group to take up blogging as a new hobby?

(6) [Update] Civil Society. There are many NGOs that could use blogging and social media to get their points across. It is a cheap and rather effective tool to engage with the public.

(7) [Update] Think Tanks. I argued before that think tanks should start thinking about blogs and social media. Especially if a think tank wants to reach a wider or specialized audience. Only very few EU affairs think tanks write a blog or use any social media tools. CER or ECFR are good examples how a think tank blog could look like.

(8) Existing bloggers in national blogospheres. There a many bloggers that write about the EU in a national context but they do not engage with a wider European blogosphere.  They might just write a couple of posts a year about the EU. But nobody outside their national blogosphere takes notices. At the same time many bloggers writing in national context are not aware of the EU stuff. How can that be changed?

(9)  Existing Eurobloggers. This is the big question about motivation. What needs to be done to create a system to keep people motivated. For me it is the community aspect, meeting people in real life, doing projects, talking to people.If that is part of the answer, we need to create more possibilities to move the blogging experience into the real world. And what would be the role of the various blogging communities such as  bloggingportal.eu, ideasoneurope.eu, blogactiv.eu, cafebabel.com or 27etc.? Can we create better synergies and learn from each other?

There seem to be several interrelated problems (that also have not changed for the last years):

• How to motivate active eurobloggers and how to keep them interested?
• How can EU topics be integrated in national blogospheres? And how can the link between different national spheres and between the national and the European level be organised?
• How to get more people interested in blogging about the EU?

A post with more questions than answers. If you have any answers or any idea how to approach any of the issues raised in this post – just post a comment!

• The website of the Icelandic Modern Media Initative.

• Simon Head writes in the New York Review of Books about The Grim Threat to British Universities.

• The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story: The Shadow Scholar

• There is a Free Software Users Group in the European Parliament http://epfsug.eu

• Kovács and Kováts – The new blog of the spokespersons of the Hungarian EU Council Presidency.

• The revised list of EU Council preparatory bodies (via @ronpatz on twitter)

• Nominations are invited for the Reporting Europe Prize.

• RSS Is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried and a follow-up.

• And some more WikiLeaks pieces: Clay Shirky argues that wikileaks  has created a new media landscape and Evgeny Morozov thinks that the age of the WikiLeaks-style vigilante geek is over

• Another Clay Shirky essay: The Political Power of Social Media published in Foreign Affairs.

• More relevant than ever: Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

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EU-Russia relations are a thorny and controversial issue.And mostly debated in terms of energy and pipeline politics and/or within the human rights and democracy domain . However, having spent the last couple of years  debating EU-Russia relations with a number of academics/think tankers/policy makers I decided to post a couple of observations. For the sake of the argument I will have to use generalisations although I know perfectly well that there are exceptions on both sides. Moreover, I think, the argument does not only affect Europeans or Russians but also decision makers in the USA and in countries of the EU neighborhood/ Russia’s near abroad.  I should also mention that this mainly applies to policy-makers/ think tankers/ academics/intellectuals.

1) The “knowledge gap”

Surprisingly, there is quite a knowledge gap – on both sides.

Russian intellectuals and policy makers  do not know enough about the EU and how it works. They usually treat it as a something “state-like” but criticize it at the same time for not being a state. And something that is not a state cannot be efficient. Hence nothing to be taken too seriously. But I think the underlying problem is that many are not aware of how certain EU policies come into being. And that does not only include CFSP or ESDP issues but also the broader EU policy agenda.  It is actually striking how little decision makers in Russia as well as in the “EU neighborhood” seem to know about how the EU works in terms of agenda setting and lobbying. Questions about how to get something out of the EU machinery are not discussed. The only thing everyone seems to be thinking is: If the EU does not act we can ask member states. As if they were  not part of the EU. (Well, that member states are sometimes more receptive than the EU institutions is not helping either…) The problem here is that there is no understanding of how long decision-making in the EU actually takes and what needs to be done to influence it. It is not enough to only lobby for when there is a military conflict or when it is about energy and pipelines. Other policy issues also have an external dimension and can be shaped (at least to a certain extent) by outsiders! Moreover, by engaging permanently on a variety of substantial issues does increase trust!

The  creation of the EEAS  is a similar issue: Russians complain about the EU being ineffective without acknowledging the inter-institutional struggles within the EU. Nobody seems to understand the nature of the EEAS: why it is there and what it is supposed to do and especially what it is supposed to replace!  One example are the numerous complaints about the future of some the EU special representatives (Moldova, Caucasus) – in the past they have often been criticized of being not efficient enough because they have no links to the local EU delegation…

Europeans do not know enough about Russia’s political system and how it really works. Do we actually know who is influential? Do Europeans understand how the Russian elite ticks? What about the relation between business and politics? And how do they interpret (and teach!) the history since the end of the cold war. Can we actually grasp the idea of a country that spans 9 time zones and includes numerous internal conflicts? How do Russians perceive the USSR? And what does that mean for the “EU neighborhood”?

2) The “discourse gap”

Russians and Europeans work with different discursive models.

Russians think in terms of zero sum games. Realism is the only paradigm that seems to be acceptable for most commentators and policy makers. It is all about interests, power and geopolitics. Politics is about winners and loosers. The philosophical basis for any alternative approaches seems to be absent. Every theoretical idea outside realism (which is ironically an American model) is perceived as weak and is somehow denounced as being “western”. However, as long as Russian academics are not aware (or don’t want to be aware) of other philosophical traditions and methods of analysing politics, we will not see a change of politicians mindsets as they will be limited to the ‘realist’ options. The nature of realism is also not helping as it is quite easy to analyse everything as a zero sum game.

Europeans, generally speaking, are not that fond of thinking only in realist terms. Europeans think that realism is a lazy form of thinking. Russian commentators and policy makers are therefore perceived as being outdated and stuck in the cold war. Europeans think of “new forms of governance” that are embedded in “liberal norms” of democracy. But the underlying problem is how to deal with others that do not embrace this “governance” and “liberal” discourse  or do not not use it as a form of analysis? The clash of different methods of how to analyse politics seems to create problems how to deal with each other.

So what can be done about the “knowledge” and “discourse” gap?

So, what if political scientists covered EU news in newspapers in that way?

(no, unfortunately I don’t have time to write something…possibly something for my to-do list

What did the Belgian daily De Standaard write when the Treaty of Rome was adopted?

This could be something important…

And another classic EU quote:

there are two categories of countries: the small ones and the ones that do not realise that they are small (Max Kohstamm)

Let’s start with the EU foreign policy basics.

Other continents play chess, the EU plays ping pong…

… working without strategy has its merits but time is changing and it does not work anymore…

EU integration can then be defined as a “method of not having a strategy”

About the EEAS:

It looks like a Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is organised as a MFA, it works like a MFA but it is not called MFA? Well, it is still a MFA!

The future:

Did we learn the lessons to deal with “future Afghanistans”?

Enlargement has been one of the most defining characteristics of EU integration:

Enlargement a EU foreign policy tool?  No: enlargement is enlargement.  Foreign policy is foreign policy.

But remember:

EU enlargement can also happen by splitting up member states….

So, what is the European Union?

A super-Switzerland

EU geek fact of the day:

There are 19 references to the UN in the EU Treaties.

A universal quote for every decision maker:

I fully understand that political decisions are time consuming, but…

EU in 2010:

It has been a very bad year for the European Community: it was totally replaced by the European Union

If you need a good name for a committee you are about to set up what about:

EGFA = Expert Group for Further Action

Some quotes by José Manuel Barroso (the keynote speaker) who  does not like “the intellectual glamor of pessimism”:

this academic conference reminds me of the time when I still had the time for reflection.

EU is not a federal state. Comparisons with federal states will be disappointing. Good results if compared to international organisations  or other regions regions

We are a non-imperial empire.

Realists are wrong most of the time. Realism is the closest thing to cynicism.

If Europe does not get more united it gets more dis-united.

Foreign policy starts at home.

I quote the Lisbon treaty because I believe that the Member States have read it before they signed it…

The EU interest is more than the sum of the national interests.

The Top 10 Craziest Things Ever Said During a U.N. Speech

David Mitchell:

If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.

Richard Laming

It is ironic that the people who complain most about the complexity of the treaty are the very same people who would complain if it was simple,…

Vaclav Klaus

The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it’s so far that it can’t be stopped or returned, no matter how much some of us would want that.

Silvio Berlusconi

“I’m doing what I do with a sense of sacrifice. I don’t really like it. Not at all,” (…) “Very often there is a lot of dirty dealing; there is really the gutter press, worse than that, the shameless and sickly. It’s a difficult life to be responsible for leading the government in a country like Italy.”

“I never made any gaffes, not even one, every gaffe is invented by the newspapers.”

American official (asked about Cameron’s ECR group in the EP)

I do not see any upsides in the new grouping. I can only see downsides. In life it is normally best to do things when they have an upside.

I will be blogging here and there – but without too much cross-posting (ok, once in a while I might post the link to a new post here). But, don’t worry: I will not close down kosmopolito.org.

My first post on ‘Ideas on Europe’  is a blogging introduction for academics. I thought it as a first post in a little series that aims at convincing  (and teaching) academics how to blog. If you have any ideas what I should cover next time, let me know in the comments!

Ideas on Europe aims to invigorate current discussion on Europe by providing an impartial, unbiased online platform where individuals can engage in informed analysis, comment, dialogue and debate.

The organisation behind the projects is the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) a membership organisation with “over 1300 academics, practitioners and research students”. The aim is to get UACES members to contribute to the new platform.  At the moment the new page (beta!) is pretty basic and not much content can be found (except a post by nosemonkey), they are in the process of recruiting bloggers  (or better: motivating academics!) to open a blog on Ideas on Europe. So if you are interested, you can apply here.

In my opinion, the idea behind Ideas on Europe is quite good: Providing the (missing) link between academics working on EU topics and the public. However, working in (EU-) academia myself it could be quite difficult to get scholars to blog and read blogs regularly.

First obstacle: Among academics the knowledge of blogs and web 2.0 is not as widespread as one would assume. (= not worth trying)

Second obstacle: Blogs (not EU blogs – nobody knows them!) are often regarded as second class media. (= not worth reading)

Third obstacle is a sentence you will hear a lot in universities: “I only publish in peer reviewed journals – only this is useful for my academic career.” (= not useful)

It is really necessary to address these three (possibly more) obstacles in order to get an academic audience.  I hope UACES will also  manage to motivate enough scholars to blog regularly about their research (in a readable style!). Only if they manage to get a critical amount of (new) bloggers and a (new) audience the platform will be successful. Another danger is  academics who will only post the abstracts of their journal articles on the platform (or even the whole article…).  Publishing posts with ”call for papers’ and ‘conference announcements’ will also not do the trick…

As a bloggingportal editor (and a feedreader addict!) I hope cross-posting bloggers will be in the minority. (so, UACES please check babelblogs and blogactiv before admitting bloggers!).

Nye writes in his article that “not too many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory.  (…) The fault for this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics.”

If you are interested in that topic, here is a nice video featuring Daniel Drezner in a online debate with Joseph Nye on Blogginheads.tv.  The debate and the issue are rather typical for the US and  its  academic tradition in political science- so it would be intersting to see whether this debate has any significance for European political scientists…

(1) Everything that relates to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP)? (second pillar for EU geeks)

(2) “External relations” which include the Common Commercial Policy, trade relations as well as  development issues? (first pillar for EU geeks)

(3) Something else? (Please specify)

(4) What about the individual foreign policies of the member states? Are they part of EU foreign policy? EU foreign policy could be seen as an aggregation of different national foreign policies. Do people outside the EU make the difference between the French/German/British … approach or do they think it is part of the European approach. and ultimately a EU foreign policy?

(5) It does not exist!

(6) A mixture of all the issues above?

Of course this seems to be a politically motivated move of the Russian authorities especially since the University has close connections to the USA and EU. Moreover, the university runs a programme funded by the European Commission to improve the monitoring of Russian elections which has been criticized by Putin on a number of occasions. Read more about it here, here and here.

A petition of support is available for signing here. The least we can do, I suppose.