Commission laments 'rising xenophobia' as Schengen unravels

The June summit of EU leaders has wrapped up here in Brussels – the blockades are being removed from the streets and the whirl of helicopters overheard is slowly starting to dissipate. As expected, the council voted to establish a "safeguard mechanism" in the Schengen passport-free travel zone that would allow member states to reintroduce internal EU border controls in exceptional circumstances.

The final text adopted today says the border checks should only be reintroduced "as a very last resort" in a "truly critical situation where a member state is no longer able to comply with its obligations under the Schengen rules as concerns the prevention of illegal immigration of third country nationals."

Such a mechanism was demanded by Italy and France earlier this year when the two got into a row over illegal immigration happening as a result of the Arab spring. France accused Italy of deliberately sending Tunisian migrants to France and issuing them bogus identity cards because they wanted to get them out of Italy as soon as possible. France said it should be allowed to set up border controls with neighboring countries who are failing in their duties to protect the EU external border. But existing rules forbid member states from imposing border controls at internal EU borders. Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi wholeheartedly agreed, as if to say "Yes, we're completely incompetent. Please allow France to set up protections against us."

US tells Europe 'we won't protect you forever'

Defence departments across Europe are bristling this week following the stern tongue-lashing delivered by outgoing US Defense Secretary Bob Gates last Friday. In a speech here in Brussels Gates lashed out at European nations for their weak military spending and their lack of troop commitments to the North American Treaty Organisation (NATO).

It was the clearest signal yet that the days of this military alliance, set up to defend Western Europe during the cold war, may be numbered. Gates implied the alliance may come to an end unless European countries agree to restructure it into an equal partnership rather than a US-led military fiefdom. Oddly enough, it is America that wants to see an end to the current state of US military dominance in Europe, and it is the Europeans who are resisting this.

"For the better part of six decades there has been relatively little doubt or debate in the United States about the value and necessity of the transatlantic alliance," he told the NATO dignitaries. "For most of the Cold War US governments could justify defense investments and costly forward bases that made up roughly 50 percent of all NATO military spending.  But some two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US share of NATO defense spending has now risen to more than 75%"

Belgium's rebel prince

The youngest son of Belgian King Albert II is in hot water again after conducting unauthorised diplomatic missions in Africa, including a secret meeting with a leader of the Libyan rebel forces and an audience with the president of Belgium's former colony the Congo, all without any diplomatic oversight. The King had explicitly told him not to go to the Congo.

It's not the first time that Prince Laurent has been in trouble, but it looks like this time he could be facing serious consequences. Even his father, who has defended himin the past, has let it be known that he is displeased with his son's actions. Yesterday Yves Leterme, Belgium's 'caretaker' prime minister while the country has no government, that he will prepare new restrictions on the prince which will mean that if he engages in such behaviour again the government can cut of his annual stipend of €300,000.

Europe leads on Libya, but divisions persist

We are only in day four of the Libya War, but it doesn't seem to have taken long for confusion to settle in over where we go next and who is in charge. As the aerial bombardment tapers off and the skies clear into a no-fly zone over the Libyan desert, questions are now being asked that are not only causing disunity within the European Union but also between Europe and the United States.

"In most of the foreign policy issues we've talked about for decades, the US has been the lead player," conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks noted on PBS Newshour a few days ago. "Here we're clearly not the lead player, it's the UK and France and we're following along on the caboose. Now we feel like the UK often feels, as the secondary player. So the question is how much is the president really supporting this and how much is he being dragged along?"

So far the Obama administration has seemed disinterested in the Libya situation, and this wasn't helped by the fact that at the time military action was launched the US president was on a trip to South America and had to give comments on the war's launch from a shared podium in Brazil. Over the past few days US politicians haven't even made an effort to try to convince the American public that this war is in America's strategic interest.

Can the EU rebuild the Arab world like the US rebuilt Europe?

Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has called on the West to create a new 'Marshall Plan for Arab states' in response to the current unrest. Such a plan, modeled on the wildly successful scheme launched by the United States in 1947 to rebuild war-ravaged Europe, would be designed to give new Arab governments the financial support they need to build stable democracies. More implicitly, it would provide a bulwark against Islamism in the same way that the Marshall Plan successfully provided a bulwark against Communism in Western Europe.

Europe is still still haunted by its failure to do anything to prevent the chaos that unfolded in its own backyard in the 1990s during the Balkan Wars. The calls for quick decisive action are coming from every corner. Most politicians now acknowledge that financial support is going to be needed, but there is disagreement about who should supply it. These thorny issues will be discussed tomorrow at a special summit of EU leaders in Brussels to discuss the crisis in Libya.

At the European Union level, there has now been begrudging admittance that the union's approach to its Southern neighbours has until this point been a misguided failure. Valuing stability and protection of Israel above all else has led to the European Union and the United States ploughing billions of dollars into despotic regimes over the past decades, earning them the enmity of the Arab street. For the EU, most of this aid was distributed through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which gives financial and political assistance to the EU's neighbours.

€2.8bn in assistance has already been pledged to the Middle East and North Africa over the next three years through the ENP. Now that it is clear that a much larger amount than this is going to be needed to support budding Democracy movements, there are questions over whether the ENP is the best tool to use. Southern European countries have long complained that the ENP was always more focused on the EU's Eastern neighbours than those to the South. Why not give the Southern Mediterranean its own new, dedicated assistance vehicle?

Chaos in EU backyard causing panic

The situation in Libya continues to spiral out of control, and EU foreign ministers are scrambling to figure out what to do about it. After the bloc spent days hemming and hawing about whether it would organise an evacuation of EU citizens, Libyan airspace was closed yesterday trapping thousands of EU nationals in the country.

Now there are fears that the country's erratic and defiant leader Colonel Gaddafi will use the trapped Western foreigners as hostages in what is developing into a tense stand-off with the EU. Over the weekend Gaddafi threatened that if the EU criticised his crackdown on protests he would "unleash a flood" of refugees across the Mediterranean to Italy.

The past few days have seen incredible bloodshed in Libya, where Gaddafi's forces have killed as many as 519 protestors. The Libyan air force is even reportedly bombing the protestors from the skies. Yesterday two Libyan pilots landed in Malta seeking asylum, saying they had been ordered to bomb civilians in the protests.

Tunisian refugees overwhelming Italy

Egypt may have stolen the spotlight from the revolution in Tunisia, but the situation there is still in chaos. Since the uprising that overthrew long-time President/Dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali there have been strikes and clashes on the streets and a state of lawlessness still exists as many police officers have abandoned their posts.

Amid all of this Italy said this weekend a flood of Tunisian refugees coming across the Mediterranean Sea have overwhelmed the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, just off the Tunisian coast. More Tunisian immigrants have arrived on the island in the past week there are residents of the island, they say.

But the situation seems to be mired in confusion and perhaps not a small amount of exaggeration. Though the Italian foreign minister claims that he asked for EU help in stemming the flow of migrants on Saturday, today a European Commission spokesperson said there has been no such request from Italy. In fact, he said, the EU offered Italy assistance but the Italian government refused it. So they were "surprised" by the foreign minister's comments, he said.

Libya and the Devolution Discord

Over the past few days Brits have been approaching me in hushed, frightened voices to ask the question that seems to be occupying everyone’s minds here right now – “Are they really going to boycott us?”

It would seem everyone is terrified of ending up like France, which was on the receiving end of a notorious boycott campaign (not to mention the renaming of “freedom fries” and “freedom toast”) when they refused to participate in the Iraq war in 2003. But beyond the fact that the 2003 France boycott was actually not economically significant in the slightest, I can assure you that the level of anger in the US about the premature release of the Lockerbie bomber isn’t anywhere near the height of vitriol against France in the run-up to Iraq. Still, the anger is real, and the incident has really gone a long way to illustrate the very deep gulf that exists between Americans and Brits on issues of criminal justice and punishment.

People here in the UK have tended to have mixed opinions about the decision to release the only person convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie airplane bombing, with most people I know defending the decision to release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi on compassionate grounds - because he is suffering from terminal cancer and has three months to live. My Scottish friends in particular have been insisting that Scottish law has a long tradition of compassion, and that it shows how civilized they are as a society that they would let him go. But you’d be hard pressed to find one person in the US who agrees with this analysis. They are, quite frankly, enraged. Most Americans probably don’t understand why he’s even still alive at all (Texas would have killed him 6 times over by now). Even Chuck Schumer, one of the most liberal members of the US senate, was railing against the decision on Meet the Press on Sunday, calling it a "disgrace".

I must confess maybe it’s the American in me, but I also find myself perplexed by this decision by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill. Megrahi was given a life sentence, not a ‘life sentence unless you get sick’. Even if MacAskill felt that it would be cruel to make the convicted terrorist die in prison, surely there was a hospice or hospital in Scotland he could have been taken to. Why on earth did he have to be taken to Libya?

As with most big decisions, you know there’s got to be some more complicated factors at work here. I have no doubt that MacAskill probably genuinely believes it would have been cruel to allow Megrahi to die in prison, but the fact is this probably has more to do with two larger issues – Scottish nationalism and Britain’s diplomatic relations with Libya.

Devolution D'oh!

Yesterday the BBC24 presenters were speaking with a Time Magazine reporter in Washington about the threats of boycotts against the UK, and one of them asked her in seeming expasperation something like, ‘Surely the Americans realise that this is the Scottish government taking this decision, not the UK.’ The Time reporter seemed a bit bemused (or maybe actually confused) by the question. Brace yourselves for a shock, but most Americans aren’t too versed in the latest news on Scottish devolution – which, after all, is a recent development.

So for my American readers – a bit of backstory. Scotland is obviously part of the United Kingdom, but through a kind of curious accident of history it has always been a separate entity from England and Wales, with its own separate civic institutions – most notably its legal system. The Act of Union in 1707 shut down the separate Scottish parliament and merged it with that of England, but Scotland’s separate institutions persisted. In the early 20th century there were calls for Scotland to be granted home rule along with Ireland, but in the end it didn’t get its own parliament again until 1997, when Labour leader Tony Blair campaigned with a promise to give Scotland a semi-autonomous status through a system known as devolution. Wales and Northern Ireland were eventually also given their own parliaments through devolution, though they have considerably less independence than Scotland. Devolution has led to the bizarre situation today where every ‘country’ of the UK has local parliaments except England (effectively giving every Scottish, Welsh and Irish UK citizen double the representation of any English citizen).

So who is this Kenny MacAskill, and why is Gordon Brown claiming the British government has no control over what he does? MacAskill is a member of the Scottish National Party, which advocates for the complete secession of Scotland from the UK. The SNP was elected into a majority in the Scottish Parliament (known as ‘Holyrood’) in 2007 – an election result largely seen as a rebuke to New Labour. Therefor all the Scottish ministers are now SNP members - beyond the control of the Labour government in London. The comparable US analogy would be if Texas were to be granted semi-autonomous powers and was not subject to the final authority of Washington. The ‘Texas Independence Party’ could then be elected there and make decisions (in some areas) that Washington would have no control over. In Scotland, law is one of those areas.

(it should be noted that the centre-left Scottish National Party should not be confused with the far-right British National Party, which bans membership for nonwhites and won two seats in the European Parliament in the British Euroelection in June).

In theory, areas of foreign policy and diplomatic relations shouldn’t be at all under the authority of the Scottish government. But in this particular case the area of law had a huge impact on foreign relations, something Labour perhaps didn’t anticipate when they set this up in 1997. Washington sees this as a UK decision, and Gordon Brown’s silence on the issue has been seen as, if not callous, downright incompetent. Yet in actuality, because of devolution, there was nothing Brown could have done about it.

Back Room Deal?

Of course, that’s just one way of looking at it. But there is a much more nefarious theory making the rounds in the US – that the release was part of a secret deal to secure lucrative business contracts with Libya. Only time will tell if that allegation is true, but at the very least it is certain that the detention of Megrahi was a festering sore in relations between Libya and the UK.

The fact is, the majority of people and governments in the Middle East and North Africa believe Megrahi is innocent. Megrahi himself has all along insisted on his own innocence, and his conviction for the terrorist act was both controversial and razor thin. His co-accused was found not guilty, and the evidence against Megrahi was anything but airtight. He was in the middle of a long process appealing the decision when he was released last week. You’d be hard pressed to find any Libyan who thinks he’s actually guilty, and most have viewed him as a political prisoner. It is feasible to believe that there are those in the Libyan political and business community who were refusing to do serious business with the UK until the Megrahi question was settled, particularly as he is so popular in his home country.

Many British people share this view. In fact a number of the Lockerbie victims’ families believe Megrahi is innocent, saying theyblieve that the US and UK governments railroaded through a false conviction in 2002 out of embarrassment at not being able to figure out who was really responsible. Many in Scotland are defending MacAskill’s decision on the basis of their belief that Megrahi is “probably innocent” and therefore doesn’t deserve to die in prison.

Of course if he is indeed innocent, the appeals process is the appropriate venue to prove that case. MacAskill’s decision not only leaves open the question of who actually perpetrated the Lockerbie bombing, it also appears to circumvent the proper exercise of justice.

It’s a mess all around, and now there is even speculation that the controversy could bring down the SNP government. An emergency session of the Scottish Parliament was called yesterday, bringing MSPs back from their summer recess early, so that members could demand that MacAskill explain his actions. He and his fellow party members were defiant, couching the decision in 'Scottish values' and appearing to hope that by presenting this as an ‘us versus them’ question of Celts versus the Anglo-Saxon English and Americans, they can stave off a revolt that would bring down their government. But considering their majority technically rests on just one seat, this strategy may not work. One thing’s for sure, it’s going to be an interesting week in Edinburgh.