Verhandlung und Mehrheitsentscheid in politischen Systemen (German Edition)

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A segregation of society along the boundaries of different platforms and their according policies seems to be a plausible scenario, and may well provide a lot more material for foreign net policy in future. The expression simply references a new form of war, conducted with digital means. That said, the core misunderstanding here is the assumption that cyber-wars primarily take place between nation states.

Even today, that is hardly the case. Almost without exception, a software or service provided by a specific platform is involved. Further, many attacks are directed at platforms as their primary target. Perhaps the most prominent case is the attack from China on the GitHub developer platform. GitHub is a popular website where software developers can store and synchronize versions of their code and share with other users. While it is not unheard of that China simply shuts off services it objects to by activating the Great Firewall, GitHub was a notable exception. But with a censorship infrastructure that lets millions of requests per second come to nothing, the Chinese came up with another idea: GitHub was hit by millions and millions of requests from all over China, pushing the website to its utmost limits.

Finally, platforms are not only the target of cyber attacks, but more and more frequently the last line of defense for other targets. His analysis of the attack revealed that the attack had been carried out mainly by Internet routers and security cameras. It was the largest bot army the world had ever seen. A platform operated, incidentally, by Jigsaw, the Google spin-off think tank founded by Jared Cohen. The platforms provide the infrastructure that comes under attack, and more importantly, they are increasingly becoming targets themselves.

Most importantly, the platforms are the only players with sufficient technical capacity and human resources to fend off these kinds of attacks, or prevent them to save the day. Platforms are already holding a prominent position within the social order, which in itself is becoming more and more digitalized. Platforms regulate critical infrastructure for the whole of society, and provide protection and order on the Internet.

Increasingly the platform is in direct competition with the state, which generates dependencies that could turn out to be a threat for nation states. Whether the state will maintain its independence and sovereignty in the long term or not, will depend on its ability to operate and maintain digital infrastructure on its own. In the long run, the state needs to become a platform provider itself.

Platforms, on the other hand, would be well advised to look at the democratic institutions of states that have evolved over time, to address their own domestic net policy issues. It should be noted that competition between the two might even be advantageous for the citizen or user in the long run. While the state is trying to protect me from the overbearing access of the platforms, platform providers are trying to protect me from the excessive data collection of the state.

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Denn diese Struktur ist weder beliebig noch neutral. Allerdings sind sie im Gegensatz zu den anderen vier Gewalten nicht national organisiert, sondern denken und agieren per se global. Vielmehr neigen Plattformen dazu, ihre eigene politische Macht herunterzuspielen und die Verantwortung nicht anzunehmen zu wollen. Sie sind politische Akteure wider Willen. Doch auch Plattformen generieren eine Form von Legitimation durch kollektive Entscheidungen, die allerdings leicht anders funktioniert. Die Macht dieser aggregierten kollektiven Entscheidungen ist nichts Neues.

Der soziale Druck geht immer von der ganzen Gemeinschaft aus und kann nicht von Einzelnen gerichtet werden. Sie glauben, es bei Google, Facebook, Apple und Co. Entsprechend greifen sie zum Rezeptbuch der politischen Regulierung, um dieser Macht entgegenzutreten. Anstrengungen der klassischen Politik, Plattformen zu regulieren, enden deswegen in einem Paradox. Das ist einerseits durchaus sinnvoll, weil Plattformen durch ihre Plattformmacht und tiefen, datenreichen Einsichten die logischen Ansprechpartner zur Regulierung des Digitalen sind. Wesentlich ist, dass das Netz immer als Gegenstand der Netzpolitik gesehen wird.

Nichtsdestotrotz scheint sich ein gewisses Problembewusstsein durchgesetzt zu haben. Nach dem eskalierten Nazi-Aufmarsch in Charlottesville haben viele Plattformanbieter gehandelt und rechtsradikale Accounts und Websites von ihren Services verbannt. Bisherige Ergebnisse geben wenig Anlass zur Hoffnung.

Doch die Beziehungen zwischen Plattformen und Staaten waren in der Vergangenheit nicht immer so schlecht. In ihrer bedeutenden Rede von zu Internet und Freiheit bezeichnete sie die Plattformberteiber als wichtige Partner, wenn es darum geht, Demokratie und Menschenrechte in die Welt zu tragen. Gemeint ist eine neue Form des Krieges mit digitalen Mitteln. Das ist bereits heute nicht der Fall. Fast immer ist eine Software oder Dienst betroffen, der von einem Plattformanbieter bereitgestellt wird.

Etwas, das sich nicht mal China leisten kann. Da aber China in ihrer Zensurinfrastruktur Millionen von Anfragen pro Sekunde ins Leere laufen lassen muss, kamen sie auf die Idee, die geblockten Anfragen stattdessen auf ein Ziel im Internet zu richten. Bei einer Analyse des Angriffs stellte sich heraus, dass der Angriff vornehmlich von Internetroutern und Sicherheitskameras ausgegangen war.

Sie sind es, die die Infrastruktur bereitstellen, die angegriffen wird.

Plattformen besetzen bereits heute zentrale Stellen der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung, die selbst zunehmend zur digitalen wird. Der Staat muss auf lange Sicht selbst zum Plattformanbieter werden. User sogar gewinnbringend sein kann. The Internet has always been my dream of freedom. By this I mean not only the freedom of communication and information, but also the hope for a new freedom of social relations.

Despite all the social mobility of modern society, social relations are still somewhat constricting today. From kindergarten to school, from the club to the workplace, we are constantly fed through organizational forms that categorize, sort and thereby de-individualize us. From grassroots groups to citizenship, the whole of society is organized like a group game, and we are rarely allowed to choose our fellow players. The Internet seemed to me to be a way out. If every human being can relate directly to every other, as my naive-utopian thought went, then there would no longer be any need for communalized structures.

Individuals could finally counteract as peers and organize themselves. Communities would emerge as a result of individual relationships, rather than the other way around. Ideally, there would no longer be any structures at all beyond the customized, self-determined network of relations of the individual. The election of Donald Trump was only the latest incident to tear me rudely from my hopes. This refers to the massive support of the official election campaign by an internet-driven grassroots meme campaign.

And even though you can argue that the influence of this movement on the election was not as great as the trolls would have you believe, the campaign clearly demonstrated the immense power of digital agitation. It was the complete detachment from facts and reality unfolding within the Alt-Right which, driven by the many lies of Trump himself and his official campaign, has given rise to an uncanny parallel world.

The conspiracy theorists and crackpots have left their online niches to rule the world. In my search for an explanation for this phenomenon, I repeatedly came across the connection between identity and truth. People who believe that Hillary and Bill Clinton had a number of people murdered and that the Democratic Party was running a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington DC are not simply stupid or uneducated.

They spread this message because it signals membership to their specific group. New social structures with similar tribal dynamics have also evolved in the German-speaking Internet. And yet they are closely connected online, communicating constantly with one another while splitting off from the rest of the public, both in terms of ideology and of network. Fake news is not, as is often assumed, the product of sinister manipulators trying to steer public opinion into a certain direction.

Rather, it is the food for affirmation-hungry tribes. Demand creates supply, and not the other way around. For the study at hand, we analysed hundreds of thousands of tweets over the course of many months, ranking research question by research question, scouring heaps of literature, and developing and testing a whole range of theories. On the basis of Twitter data on fake news, we came across the phenomenon of digital tribalism, and took it from there. However, we will not be able to answer all the questions that this phenomenon gives rise to, which is why this essay is also a call for further interdisciplinary research.

In early March , there was some commotion on the German-language Twitter platform: Many users agreed that the silence was politically motivated. The bigger picture is that Sweden, like Germany, had accepted a major contingent of Syrian refugees. Ever since, foreign media, and right-wing outlets in particular, have been claiming that the country is in the grip of a civil war. Reports about the terrorism alert being kept under wraps fed right into that belief.

For proof, many of these tweets did in fact refer to the section of the German Foreign Office website that includes the travel advisory for Sweden. The website also notes the date of the most recent update: After some time, the Foreign Office addressed the rumors via a clarification of facts on its website. Several media picked up on the story and the ensuing corrections. But the damage was done. The fake story had already reached thousands of people who came away feeling that their views had been corroborated: What happened in early March fits the pattern of what is known as fake news — reports that have virtually no basis in fact, but spread virally online due to their ostensibly explosive content.

He wanted to know how fake news spread, and whether corrections were an effective countermeasure. He collected the Twitter data of all accounts that had posted something on the issue, and flagged all tweets sharing the fake news as red and all those forwarding the correction as blue. He then compiled a graphic visualization of these accounts that illustrates the density of their respective networks. In other words, the smaller the distance between two dots is, the more closely-knit the networking connections are between the accounts they refer to.

The result is striking: The disparity between the two is revealed both by the coloring and by the relative position of the accounts. On the left, we see a fairly diffuse blue cloud with frayed edges. Several large blue dots relatively close together in the center represent German mass media such as Spiegel Online, Zeit Online, or Tagesschau. The blue cloud encompasses all those accounts that reported or retweeted, which is to say, forwarded, the correction.

On the other side, we see a somewhat smaller and more compact red mass consisting of numerous closely-spaced dots. These are the accounts that disseminated the fake news story. They are not only closely interconnected, but also cut off from the network represented by the large blue cloud. What is crucial here is the clear separation between the red and blue clusters. There is virtually no communication between the two.

Every group keeps to itself, its members connecting only with those who already share the same viewpoint. I accepted, even though I was skeptical of the filter bubble hypothesis. At first glance, the hypothesis is plausible. A user is said to live in a filter bubble when his or her social media accounts no longer present any viewpoints that do not conform to his or her own. Eli Pariser coined the term in , with view to the algorithms used by Google and Facebook to personalize our search results and news feeds by pre-sorting search results and news items.

Filter bubbles exist on Twitter as well, seeing as that every user can create a customized small media network by following accounts that stand for a view of the world that interests them. Divergent opinions, conflicting worldviews, or simply different perspectives simply disappear from view. This is why the filter bubble theory has frequently served as a convincing explanation in the debate about fake news.

If we are only ever presented with points of view that confirm our existing opinions, rebuttals of those opinions might not even reach us any more. So filter bubbles turn into an echo chamber where all we hear is what we ourselves are shouting out into the world. Before examining the filter bubble theory, however, we first tried to reproduce the results using a second example of fake news.

This time, we found it in the mass media. The BILD story quickly made the rounds, mainly because it gave the impression that the Frankfurt police force had kept the incident quiet for more than a month. In fact, the BILD journalist had been told the story by a barkeeper who turned out to be a supporter of the right-wing AfD party, and BILD had printed it immediately without sufficient fact-checking. As it turned out, the police were unable to confirm any of this, and no other source could be found for the incident.

Even so, other media outlets picked up on the story, though often with a certain caution. In the course of the scandal, it became clear that the barkeeper had made up the entire story, and BILD was forced to apologize publicly. We needed a third category in between. We collected all the articles on the topic in a spreadsheet and flagged them as either spreading the false report red , or just passing it on in a distanced or indecisive manner yellow. Of course, we also collected articles disproving the fake news story blue. We also assigned some of the tweets to a fourth category: The mistake the BILD newspaper made sparked a broader debate on how a controversial, but well-established media company could become the trigger point of a major fake news campaign.

These meta-debate articles were colored in green. The cloud of corrections, superimposed with the meta-comments, is visible in blue and green, brightened up here and there by yellow specks of indecision. Most noticeably, the red cluster of fake news clearly stands out from the rest again, in terms of color and of connectivity. Our fake news bubble is obviously a stable, reproducible phenomenon. So we were still dealing with the theory that we were seeing the manifestation of a filter bubble. To be honest, I was skeptical. The existence of a filter bubble is not what our examples prove: The filter bubble theory makes assertions about who sees which news, while our graph only visualizes who is disseminating which news.

This information, however, is also encoded in the Twitter data, and can simply be extracted. For any given Twitter account, we can see the other accounts it follows. In a second step, we can bring up all the tweets sent from those accounts. Once we have the tweets from all the accounts the original account follows, we can reconstruct the timeline of the latter. In other words, we can peer into the filter bubble of that particular account and recreate the worldview within it. In a third step, we can determine whether a particular piece of information penetrated that filter bubble or not.

In this manner, we were able to retrieve the timelines of all accounts that had spread the fake news story, and scan them for links to the correction. The result is surprising: Almost all the disseminators of the false terrorism alert story — So we repeated that test for the Fressgass story, too. In our first example, This finding contradicts the filter bubble theory.

It was obviously not for technical reasons that these accounts continued to spread the fake news story and not the subsequent corrections. At the very least, the filter bubbles of these fake news disseminators had been far from airtight. Without expecting much, we ran a counter-test: What about those who had forwarded the correction — what did their timelines reveal?

Had they actually been exposed to the initial fake news story they were so heroically debunking? We downloaded their timelines and looked into their filter bubbles. Once again, we were surprised by what we found: This result does suggest the existence of a filter bubble — albeit on the other side.

In the case of the Fressgass story, the figure is even lower: So these results do indicate a filter bubble, but in the other direction. To sum up, the filter bubble effect insulating fake news disseminators against corrections is negligible, whereas the converse effect is much more noticeable. No, according to our examples, filter bubbles are not to blame for the unchecked proliferation of fake news.

On the contrary, we have demonstrated that while a filter bubble can impede the dissemination of fake news, it did not inoculate users from being confronted with the correction. We are not dealing with a technological phenomenon. The reason why people whose accounts appear within the red area are spreading fake news is not a filter-induced lack of information or a technologically distorted view of the world. They receive the corrections, but do not forward recurring topicsthem, so we must assume that their dissemination of fake news has nothing to do with whether a given piece of information is correct or not — and everything to do with whether it suits them.

His theory was that people tend to have a distorted perception of events depending on how much they clash with their existing worldview. When an event runs counter to our worldview, it generates the aforementioned cognitive dissonance: Since the state of cognitive dissonance is so disagreeable, people try to avoid it intuitively by adopting a behavior psychologists also call confirmation bias — this means perceiving and taking seriously only such information that matches your worldview, while disregarding or squarely denying any other information.

In this sense, the theory of cognitive dissonance tells us that the red cloud likely represents a group of people whose specific worldview is confirmed by the fake news in question. To test this hypothesis, we extracted several hundred of the most recents tweets from our Twitter user pools, both from the fake news disseminators and from those who had forwarded the correction, and compared word frequencies amongst the user groups.

If the theory was correct, we should be able to show that the fake news group was united by a shared, consistent worldview. We subjected a total of In descending order, the sixteen most important terms were: The word size corresponds to the relative frequency of the terms. Certain thematic limitations become obvious at first glance. The narrative being told within this group is about migration, marked by a high frequency of terms like Islam, migrants, refugees, Pegida, Syrians. A manual inspection of these tweets showed that the recurring topics are the dangers posed by Islam and crimes committed by individuals with a migrant background, and refugees in particular.

A second, less powerful narrative concerns the self-conception of the group: This new law regulating speech on Facebook and Twitter is obviously regarded as a political attack on freedom of speech on the right. The extent of thematic overlap amongst the spreaders of fake news is massive, and becomes even more apparent when we compare these terms to the most common terms the correction tweeters used:. First of all, what is noticeable is that the most important terms used by correctors are not politically loaded. It is more about media brands and news coverage in general: Nine out of 16 terms are but a general reference to news media.

The remaining terms, however, do show a slight tendency to address the right-wing spectrum politically. Donald Trump is such a big topic that both his first and his last name appear in the Top All of this would seem to confirm the cognitive dissonance hypothesis. Avoidance of cognitive dissonance could explain why a certain group might uncritically share fake news while not sharing the appropriate correction. When comparing the two groups in both examples, we already found three essential distinguishing features:. In short, we are dealing with two completely different kinds of group. Whenever differences at the group level are so salient, we are well advised to look for an explanation that goes beyond individual psychology.

Cognitive dissonance avoidance may well have a part in motivating the individual fake news disseminator, but seeing as we regard it as a conspicuous group-wide feature, the reasons will more likely be found in sociocultural factors. This again is a subject for further research. In fact, there has been a growing tendency in research to embed the psychology of morals and hence, politics within a sociocultural context.

Drawing on a wealth of research, Haidt showed that, firstly, we make moral and political decisions based on intuition rather than reasoning, and that, secondly, those intuitions are informed by social and cultural influences. Humans are naturally equipped with a moral framework, which is used to construct coherent ethics within specific cultures and subcultures.

We have a tendency to determine our positions as individuals in relation to specific reference groups. Our moral toolbox is designed to help us function within a defined group. When we feel we belong to a group, we intuitively exhibit altruistic and cooperative behaviors. With groups of strangers, by comparison, we often show the opposite behavior.

We are less trusting and empathetic, and even inclined to hostility. Haidt explains these human characteristics by way of an excursion into evolutionary biology. From a rational perspective, one might expect purely egoistic individuals to have the greatest survival advantage — in that case, altruism would seem to be an impediment. Ever since humanity went down the route of closer cooperation, sometime between Or perhaps we should say, it was tribalism: The basic tribal configuration not only includes altruism and the ability to cooperate, but also the desire for clear boundaries, group egotism, and a strong sense of belonging and identity.

These qualities often give rise to behaviors that, as members of an individualistic society, we believe we have given up, seeing as they often result in war, suffering, and hostility. However, for some time there have also been attempts to establish tribalism as a positive vision for the future. From punk to activist circles, humans feel the need to be part of something greater, to align themselves with a community and its shared identity. In the long run, Maffesoli argued, this trend works against the mass society.

There are more radical visions as well. In his grand critique bearing the programmatic title Beyond Civilization, the writer Daniel Quinn appeals to his readers to abandon the amenities and institutions of civilization entirely and found new tribal communities. In , Seth Godin pointed out how well-suited the Internet was to the establishment of new tribes. Indeed, his book, boldly titled Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us , was intended as a how-to guide. With a little luck, his or her possibly quite daring proposition will attract followers, who may then connect and mobilize via the Internet.

These tribes, Godin argues, are a potent source of identity; they unleash energies in their members that enable them to change the world. Digital tribes have traded their emphasis on kinship for an even stronger focus on a shared topic. This sense of heresy produces strong internal solidarity and homogenization, and even more importantly, a strict boundary that separates the tribe from the outside world. This in turn triggers the tribalist foundations of our moral sentiments: AfD, Pegida, the Alt-Right etc.

They feel they are victims of political persecution and oppression. Our assumption so far is that the red cloud of fake news disseminators is a digital tribe, and that the differences setting it apart from the group of correction disseminators result from its specific tribal characteristics.

Our tribe is manifestly right-leaning: Negative stories about refugees go largely or entirely unquestioned, and are forwarded uncritically, even when very little factual reporting is available and the story is implausible. Some users even forward stories they know to be untrue. However, none of this shows the non-existence or impossibility of very diverse digital tribes within the German-speaking Twitterverse.

In this sense, our identification of this particular tribe based on its circulation of fake news is inherently biased. The fake news events function as a kind of flashlight that lets us shine a light onto one part of the overall network, but only a rather limited part. Right-wing fake news reports let us detect right-wing tribes. Assuming that our theory is correct so far, we should similarly be able to discover left-wing tribes by flashing the light from the left, that is to say, by examining left-wing fake news reports, if they exist. To cut a long story short: This is interesting to note, especially since the last U.

This was during the peak of the Pegida demonstrations, which had been accompanied by acts of violence on several other occasions before. With the official investigation still ongoing and the authorities careful not to speculate, many Twitter users and primarily leftist media implied that the homicide was connected to the Pegida demonstrations.

We applied the same procedure as in the first example, again coding the fake news reports or, let us say, incorrect speculations in red and the corrections in blue. The meta-debate, which played an oversized role in this example, is green. At first glance, the resulting visualization looks quite different from our first graph.

Still, some structural features seem oddly familiar — only in this case, they seem to have been inverted. For instance, the division into two clusters that appear side by side, and the relative proportions of those clusters are instantly recognizable. This time, though, the spatial arrangement and distribution of colors is different. Once again, we can distinguish two groups, represented by a cloud and a knot respectively. This time, however, the cloud appears on the right and the knot on the left.

Again, the smaller group is far more homogeneous in its coloring. But instead of red, it is now predominantly green and blue. These findings did not match our expectations. We thought it would be possible to detect a leftist tribe, but this rather unambiguous answer to our question took us by surprise. We could not detect a leftist tribe similarly driven by fake news; a tribal structure like before could be identified, but this time it was populated by accounts that had forwarded the correction.

The cloud does include fake news disseminators as well, but there is no self-segregation, so the disseminators of the fake news are still interspersed with the correctors and the meta-debaters. The news spread like wildfire, not least due to the fact that conditions at the LAGeSo in Berlin had been known to be chaotic since mid Many social media accounts took up the case and scandalized it accordingly.

The media also picked up on events, some of them rather uncritically at first. Over time, however, when no one else confirmed the story and the author of the original Facebook post had not responded to inquiries, reporting became more and more sporadic. The same day, the news was also officially debunked by the police.

In the following days, it turned out that the helper had made up the entire story, apparently completely bowdlerizing it under the influence of alcohol. We proceeded as we did in the Khaled case, with the difference that we used yellow as a fourth color to distinguish impartial reports from more uncritical fake news disseminators. The example confirms our findings from the Khaled case. Once again, the spreaders of fake news are dispersed far and wide — there is no closely-connected group. Again, a segregated group that is particularly eager to spread the correction is recognizable. This supports our thesis that this is exactly the same group as the one that was so susceptible to right-wing fake news in the previous examples: To put it mildly, if we had introduced a color for malice and sarcasm, this cluster would stand out even more from the rest of the network.

Even if the tweets include corrections or meta-debate, the gloating joy about the uncovering of this fake news story is unmistakable. Here are some examples from the LaGeSo case:. What the press believes immediately: How desperate does one have to be to invent a dead refugee to prop up this web of lies? Then everything will be alright again. Do-gooders cried a river of tears.

By exposing left-wing fake news, the tribe seems to reinforce one of its most deeply-rooted beliefs: To sum up our findings: Based on leftist fake news about refugees, we were unable to detect a leftist equivalent of the right-wing tribe. On the contrary, it turns out that disseminators of leftist fake news are highly integrated into the mainstream. Everything comes together in this great speckled cloud. By contrast, the right-wing tribe is recognizable as such even in the context of leftist fake news. Again, it appears as a segregated cluster that is noticeably homogeneous in color, though this time on the side of the correction disseminators.

But that does not mean that leftist tribes do not exist at all — they might be visible when investigating topics other than migration and refugees. The latter in fact is quite probable. Some findings of our study of leftist fake news are unexpected, but that only makes them even more compelling as confirmation of our hypothesis concerning the right-wing tribe.

The latter tribe is real, and it is hardly surprising that it is involved in the dissemination of all those news reports concerning refugees, be it in the form of fake news or of subsequent corrections. People like to band together, people like to draw lines to exclude others — this is hardly a novel insight.

In principle, we might suspect that tribalism is the foundation of every informal or formally organized community. But when we make that claim without carefully examining the communities in question, we risk broadening the concept to such an extent that it no longer adequately captures our observations. Worldview and group affliation seem to coincide. This is the defining characteristic of tribal epistemology. In recent years, a growing body of research has further inspected the connection between group identity and the psychology of perception. Kahan and his team at the Cultural Cognition Project have made important contributions in this field.

In one study, Kahan presented four versions of a problem-solving task to a representative group of test subjects. In the first version, the data indicated that the new cream helped reduce rash in patients; in the second version, it showed that the medication did more harm than good. In the two other versions of the task, the same numbers were used, but this time to refer not to the effectiveness of a skin cream, but to the effects of a political decision to ban the carrying of concealed handguns in public.

In one version, the data indicated that banning handguns from public settings had tended to decrease crime rates; in the other, it suggested the opposite. Before being given the problem, all subjects were given a range of tests to measure their quantitative thinking skills numeracy as well as their political attitudes. Sie stellt sich quer zu dem, was auf Grund eines Primates funktionaler Differenzierung innerhalb der Funktionssysteme an 17 Ebd. Individualistisch ist diese Sichtweise aber nicht nur mit Bezug auf die epistemische Frage nach dem Kriterium.

Auf die Frage des ihn in seiner Zelle besuchenden Emerson: Politische Essays, Ham- burg , S. Political Theory 9, 1 , S. An dieser Stelle wird auch die Spannung zwischen Liberalismus und Demokratie virulent. Yale Law Journal , S. Ziviler Ungehorsam und radikale Demokratie Das republikanisch-demokratische oder besser: Vielmehr geht es um die Initiierung bzw. Wiederaufnahme der politischen Auseinandersetzung. Nicht dass das Ergebnis politischer Willensbildungs- und Entscheidungsprozesse bestimmten Normen und Werten widerspricht, sondern dass diese Prozesse selbst durch mehr oder weniger strukturelle Demokratiedefizite verzerrt werden, stellt den Einsatzpunkt der radikaldemokratischen Konzeption des zivilen Ungehorsams dar.

Po- litical Theory 29, 5 , S. Allerdings steht das liberale Modell aufgrund dieser Staatsfixierung anders als das radikaldemokratische Modell in Gefahr, soziale Faktoren — wie hegemoniale Diskurse — gar nicht erst in den Blick zu bekommen. Ein grundle- gendes Kriterium besteht allerdings darin, wie demokratisch bzw. Statt des individuellen Protests gegen Rechtsverletzungen sei- tens des Staates oder einer Mehrheit stellt das radikaldemokra- tische Modell jene antioligarchische Politik der Insurrektion und der Kontestation in den Mittelpunkt, die gegen die sei es staatliche und administrative, sei es privatwirtschaftliche Usurpation oder Einhegung demokratischer Selbstbestimmung politische Partizipa- tion dort erzwingt, wo die Entscheidungsfindung im Namen des Gemeinwohls, des Expertenwissens oder der Regierbarkeit mono- polisiert oder privatisiert wird.

Impact of the global food crisis on children. Legal action against the credit ratings agency for public expenditure caused by their ratings. External representation of Spain's autonomous communities. EU water monitoring provisions in relation to groundwater in Korneuburg. Turkey to carry out exploration within Cyprus' exclusive economic zone. Turkish threats directed at Cyprus and Greece. Monitoring of the use made of the EU's Emergency Fund. Recognition of the Italian sign language. Switzerland's intention to limit the number of Portuguese immigrants. Lengthening the maturity of loans from the Troika to the bailed-out countries.

EU-USA free trade area — data protection. Framework provisions for assessment of environmental, climate and energy issues so as to facilitate the safe and secure extraction of non-conventional hydrocarbons. EFSA risk assessment of neonicotinoids. Youth unemployment on the rise in the euro area. Invoking the precautionary principle for the health impacts of wind turbines. Discrimination against older people in the job market.

Payments by the Commission to lobbyists. Approval under state aid rules for tax relief on energy products. Protecting of European citizens' computer data against attempts to access them from the USA. Retirement of EU officials due to invalidity. Investigations concerning officials or other staff members of the Commission.

Officials having their main residence in Luxembourg. Access for service providers to the Commission's premises. Offices for service providers on the Commission's premises. Cost of employing external consultancies. Duty-free limit on goods sent through the forces' post by soldiers stationed abroad. Human rights violations in Turkey: Revision of the timeline of the Package Travel Directive. Private health insurance packages in Ireland. Use of direct and indirect funds by the municipality of Pisa Tuscany.

Rules on plug and socket systems in Denmark. Intercalibration under the Water Framework Directive. Taxation of cross-border passenger transport services in Poland. Risk posed by groundwater contaminated with pesticides in the Danube. Contamination of groundwater in Korneuburg. Co-funded programmes for youth unemployment in Greece. European investigation into products containing horsemeat. Food safety in times of economic crisis. Review of guidelines applied to national regional aid.

European fund for medical research on contagious diseases. Improving the system of checks in the food industry in the wake of the horsemeat scandal. Migratory pathways for European eel stock. Merkies to the Commission. Free trade agreements involving fishery or aquaculture products. Community support for sports facilities and promotion of sporting activity in Lisbon. Closure of the factory operated by the German company Steiff in Oleiros Portugal. Commission investigation of Portuguese banks. Commission compliance with the principle of multilingualism. Impact of austerity on women workers — OECD report.

Fraudulent labelling of products containing horsemeat. Promoting a bi-national State Garden Show. Clarifications about the ban on the cultivation of fibre hemp in Greece. Stage reached in implementing the directive on clean and energy-efficient vehicles. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from maritime transport. Desperate state of public healthcare in Greece. Concerns about the rise of extreme political forces in Europe. Cost of NCT tests roadworthiness tests in Ireland. Roadworthiness testing in Member States. Availability of mileage information for second-hand cars. Elephant poaching and illegal ivory exports to China.

Undetected donkey meat in food products. Improper use of EU funding in Bulgaria. Clarifications on the EU-Turkey readmission agreement. Use of EU funding for anti-corruption projects in Romania. Limitations placed on the free movement of workers by Switzerland. Internal height of means of transport for animals. Authority to issue entry bans in Schengen Area countries. Legal certainty considerations in connection with DNS blocking.

German inventory of ammonia gas emissions. EU requirements for anti-terrorism measures at ports. Compliance by Microsoft with EU competition rules. Scale of unemployment in Spain, Portugal and Greece. Circulation booklet for travellers contrary to the free movement directive. Sales of wine to private individuals in the EU. Proportionate, differentiated budgetary consolidation to boost growth.

Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Austria. Democratic legitimacy of the Commission's policy guidelines on growth. EU action on abusive registration of cars from Italy in Romania. EU action against counterfeit fashion goods. Consequences of amendments to the Tobacco Directive. Surcharges levied in individual EU countries.

Levelling out the standard of living in the EU. Unemployment among the unders in Europe. Corruption problems in the Member States. Elimination of regular size cigarettes. Importance of health warnings on tobacco. Abusive use of delegated acts in tobacco legislation. The Erasmus programme is facing a budget deficit. Russian oligarch funds held in Cypriot banks. Uncontrolled rise in unemployment in Greece.

Greek households on the verge of bankruptcy. EU budget — Net contributors and net beneficiaries. EU budget, programming period — Net contributors and net beneficiaries. Beefburgers adulterated with other types of meat: Frozen lasagne containing horsemeat: Legislation on accessibility in the European Union. Fluorescent light bulbs and their harmful effects on skin. Halting the growth of tumour cells and limiting side effects: Study on urbanisation and hydro-geological risk.

Eco-friendly glue for Italian shoes with low environmental impact. Consumer protection and processed food products. Standards on Chinese food for health protection purposes. Monitoring by the Commission of the economic and social situation in Zimbabwe. Protection of resident students' rights.

Call on the Commission to protect Pinar Selek. Protection of genuine Italian mozzarella. Commission inspection requirements, especially in respect of lamb. Hezbollah's possible involvement in attack. European Citizens' Initiative — state of play and perspectives. Commission Work Programme — energy and climate. Commission Work Programme — a step change in the economy.

Commission Work Programme — European semester. Antibiotics — risk of loss of effectiveness. Commission work programme — obstacles to mobility.

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Applying for European funding — publicity and sample applications. Commission work programme for — public procurement and intellectual property. Commission work programme for — social market economy. Commission work programme for — innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Commission work programme for — Galileo. Commission work programme for — Single Market and European networks. Commission work programme for — education systems. Authorisation for sale and breeding of GM salmon in the EU.

Is Europe shelving its space ambitions? Killings in Paris and terrorism in Europe.

Presence of horsemeat in a range of foodstuffs: Prevention of tachometer fraud involving L-category vehicles. Publication of the EFSA list of claims made in food labelling. Breach of EU directives through the discharge of groundwater contaminated with pesticides into the Danube. Traceability and monitoring in the food supply chain. Preservation of antiquities uncovered during work on the Thessaloniki Metro. Potential negative impact on UK fruit importation businesses of a proposed EU ban on imports of South African citrus fruit. Turkish exploration work in Cyprus's EEZ. According to the information available, the subsidies are aimed in particular at supporting marketing measures carried out on the markets of the Member States Germany, France, the Czech Republic and Sweden.

What steps is the Commission taking to prevent EU funds being used to benefit individual Member States to the detriment of many others? The Commission services are currently analysing this complaint and are aware of the fact that the measure in question is based on ERDF support. As part of the assessment, the Commission services requested information from the Polish authorities, which it recently received. If the Commission finds that incompatible aid has been granted, it orders the Member State to recover the incompatible aid from the beneficiaries.

In such a hypothesis, beneficiaries would then be required to pay back to the Member State's budget the amount of the state aid received together with the applicable interests. So wurden in den letzten beiden Jahren 2,4 Mio. Im Rahmen der am Shortages are expected again in , requiring fresh intervention by the Commission.

How does the Commission expect global market prices to develop in future, given the increasing global demand for foods that are high in sugar and the demand for biofuels and bioenergy? The Commission expects that the Union imports from these countries will continue to increase in the future because of EU sugar market attractiveness, due to EU prices higher than world prices. For the Commission the end to the quota system is the most appropriate option for providing the sugar sector with a long-term perspective.

According to media reports, Spanish company Navantia has suspended its plans to build a floating dock in the Ferrol estuary Galicia after objections were raised to them at EU level. Navantia had planned to use the dock to moor large ships sent in for repairs at the Fene-Ferrol shipyard. Has the Commission been presented with or notified of any plans to build a floating dock in the Ferrol estuary where large ships undergoing repairs at the Navantia shipyard could be moored? The Spanish regional authorities and SEPI informally discussed this project with the responsible state aid services of the Commission.

The project was not formally notified to the Commission for assessment under EU State aid rules. In the three years , i. According to reliable information, within three years approximately one thousand such businesses were established. This is a phenomenon that has its roots in the deep economic recession painfully affecting Greece and Greek citizens. Given that the financial crisis and the major recession, and their harmful consequences, affect not only Greece but also an increasing number of other Member States, particularly in southern Europe, will the Commission say:.

Is it monitoring with due attention the rapid growth and expansion of this phenomenon and, if so, is it worried about this development? What data does it have about what was happening in Greece and other European countries in this area during the period ? Does it believe that it is necessary to have specific European legislation regulating at European level the conditions of establishment, operation and control of enterprises of this specific type, which often function as unofficial banks, thereby forming a parallel banking market at the expense of the citizens and state tax revenue?

The activities carried out by pawnshops, i. In the absence of any prudential requirements at European level specifically targeting pawn shops, national autorities are in principle competent to restrict such activities in compliance with the Treaty. In some Member States, pawnshops activities are indeed limited to entities subject to prudential regulation and supervision. The Commission published a Green paper on shadow banking last year. The Commission will further detail its intention regarding shadow banking later this semester.

One area of investigation could be the identification of entities proposing bank-like activities, but remaining outside the scope of the banking licence. In this case, a fact-finding exercice could be organised to identify these entities and the associated risks. Des renseignements utiles figurent sur le site.

More specifically, given that the European Social Fund and the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund could play a significant role in safeguarding jobs in this crisis-hit sector, two questions arise: Provided that the redundancies were caused by trade related globalisation, Belgium could apply to the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund EGF to support the workers made redundant to find new jobs as quickly as possible. At this stage, the Commission does not possess indications that the current situation in the steel sector could prompt the enforcement of Art.

Under certain circumstances, the EGF can support the re-integration into employment of workers in areas, sectors, territories, or labour market regions suffering the shock of serious economic disruption. The relevant details can be found on the EGF website. We kregen al diverse reacties en opmerkingen over de vragenlijst. Veel consumenten vinden de vragen te technisch bijvoorbeeld vraag 3 , te tendentieus soms zeer opvallend, bijv. Meerdere vragen vereisen een nuancering, maar hier is geen ruimte voor zeer vergaand op dat vlak is 4.

Er is nauwelijks ruimte voor eigen inbreng, dat moet dan via een apart mailadres. Dit lijkt niet bepaald een aanmoediging om echt je mening te kunnen geven. Soms is het alsof de biowetgeving alle problemen moet gaan oplossen, terwijl andere wetgeving misschien logischer is, maar ook daarvoor is geen ruimte om dit aan te geven bijv. De herziening betreft de wetgeving over biologische landbouw, maar niet het wetskader over genetische gemodificeerde organismen. De diensten van de Commissie hadden deze belangstelling verwacht en precies daarom is geopteerd voor een vragenlijst met gesloten vragen: De Commissie heeft reeds dergelijke bijdragen ontvangen.

Uit respect voor de vele mensen die de vragenlijst al hebben beantwoord, is de Commissie niet van plan de lijst te wijzigen of te verwijderen. De Commissie is van mening dat een goed evenwicht is bereikt: Hoe dan ook zullen de resultaten zorgvuldig worden geanalyseerd. De Commissie heeft al met meer dan 90 belanghebbende partijen gesproken en pleegt geregeld overleg met de raadgevende groep biologische landbouw. We have already received various responses and comments on the survey questions.

Many consumers find the questions too technical for example Question 3 , too tendentious sometimes very much so, e. A number of questions require a qualified answer, but there is no scope for this 4. There is hardly any opportunity for respondents to add their own contributions: This will hardly encourage people to genuinely state their opinions.

Sometimes it seems as if legislation on organic farming is expected to solve all the problems, while other legislation is perhaps more logical, but here again there is no space to indicate this e. Will the Commission improve the survey, or — if not — remove it until a new, less oversimplified and more user-friendly list of questions is available?

The review covers the legislation on organic farming but not the legislative framework related to genetically modified organisms. Such interest had been anticipated by the Commission services. This is the reason why it was decided to propose a questionnaire with close questions, for which the replies can be automatically analysed thanks to a statistical software. More qualified answers can easily be adressed to the Commmission services by simple e-mail. More than of these contributions have been received so far. In full respect to the numerous people who have already replied to the questionnaire, the Commission does not intend to modify or to remove it.

The Commission considers that the right balance has been found to ask the opinion of the public on technical issues without excessive simplification. In any case, the results will be cautiously analysed. The public consultation is only one part of the consultation process. The Commission has already interviewed more than 90 stakeholders and regularly consults the advisory group on organic farming.

Had it not been for the vigilance and exceptionally high standards of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, this act of food fraud would not have been detected. After a thorough investigation on the part of the Irish authorities, a Polish plant has been indentified as the source of the equine DNA content in certain beefburgers. The Polish plant is an EU-accredited supplier of meat products and, given that it asserts that it does not use horsemeat in its manufacture process, could the Commission outline how its regulatory system for food safety and traceability had failed in this regard? What immediate measures will be taken to address this significant breach of food safety and transparency standards?

As the company involved takes beef product from about five different slaughtering facilities in Poland, will the Commission give details on how it will improve standards so as to avoid a repeat of this fraudulent situation? The operation of this system is the responsibility of the food business operator.

The role of the competent authority of the Member States is to verify the functioning of this system randomly. The horse meat fraud referred to by the Honourable Member revealed lack of compliance to existing rules. The Commission therefore focuses currently on ensuring compliance. In addition to that the Commission recommends that Member States test every 50 tonnes of horse meat on the presence of phenylbutazone which is a frequently used anti-inflammatory veterinary medicine in horses that can adversely affect human health. Both control actions are currently being carried out. The survey, which looked at over 1.

According to the abovementioned survey, The Commission is addressing the difficult access to finance situation for SMEs through a variety of financial instruments. The programme is responding to the shift in demand for various types of financing in some Member States like Spain by providing substantially more guarantees for working capital. For the period , the Commission has put forward proposals for a new generation of financial instruments. This ratio, of two subscribers to each beneficiary, is considered by numerous experts as the critical threshold for the stability and viability of a distribution system.

The Commission agrees that high unemployment increases the risks for the sustainability of social security systems. It is of crucial importance to restore as soon as possible conditions that allow Spain and other Member States that are hard-hit by the crisis to recover a level of economic activity and growth that will create jobs. This entails in particular the implementation of structural reforms and actions established in the Employment Package and CSR.

The aim of the group was to map and analyse existing systems in the Member States and propose better ways of combating the problem. What conclusions did the thematic group reach in terms of combating the problem of early school leaving? What were the conclusions for Greece? Has the Commission mapped how earlier school-leavers have fared in social terms, as we have repeatedly called on it to do?

The report will be based on peer learning activities, mapping exercises and studies. It will focus on data collection and monitoring of ESL processes and on cross-sectoral cooperation to reduce early school leaving. The report will address typical problems encountered across EU Member States and will address the situation in individual countries only to a limited extent.

The situation of young people after dropping out from education and training has not yet been addressed in detail. By way of comparison, overall youth unemployment stands at The Commission has launched a literature review to be finalised in summer on costs of early school leaving which will also provide information on the social situation of early school leavers; and a large-scale research project on early school leaving final results only in , which will also address the career trajectories of early school leavers.

In addition, the Commission proposes to include in the future LFS additional questions on the transition from education to work, thus providing more evidence on the difficulties of early school leavers to enter the labour market. In order to achieve this, every Member State with land and maritime external borders must operate a national coordination centre for border surveillance which exchanges information with other national coordination centres and with Frontex via a secure communication network.

Given that the Commission issued a communication in laying down a roadmap for the development, testing and rollout of the system and requiring the Member States to establish national coordination centres for border surveillance:. Does the Commission have any information as to whether all the Member States have national coordination centres for border surveillance which are ready to operate?

The Council and the European Parliament are currently negotiating on the Commission's proposal for a regulation establishing Eurosur, according to which the national coordination centres NCCs should apply this regulation in two stages:.

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A number of NCCs seem to be already fulfilling the Eurosur requirements, whereas the NCCs in several other Member States including Greece still need to be technically upgraded or to be properly installed. The Commission hopes that the draft Regulation will soon be adopted by the co-legislators. Is the Commission in a position to advise how many children in Europe fail to develop properly due to poor diet?

Which Member States face the worst problems? The EU seeks to tackle all aspects related to poverty and hunger and to support sufficient access to and availability of safe and nutritious food for all, including by helping countries establish and operate social protection mechanisms to support women and children and ensure they have access to food.

It highlights that 4. In October, the Commission proposed creating the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived in order to support the distribution of food or basic goods to children suffering from poverty. The crisis is having a huge impact in Europe. All of this has resulted in widespread public intervention, which ultimately passes on the problem to taxpayers and to those citizens most affected by the budget cuts. Does the Commission intend to support some form of legal action at European level or to coordinate claims action taken by Member States with a view to demanding that credit rating agencies be made accountable for the damage to public finances caused by their malpractice?

Margallo respeta los principios de subsidiariedad y proporcionalidad? Spain is not alone in this: The question whether, and, if so, to what extent, these principles also govern the internal polticial organisation of a Member State is a matter of national constitutional law. It is therefore not for the Commission to comment on the internal structures of a Member State. EU-Wasseraufsichtsvorschriften betreffend Korneuburger Grundwasser.

Der Kommission sind die Einzelheiten dieses konkreten Falls nicht bekannt. The contamination involved the pesticides clopyralid and thiamethoxam and was caused by the Kwizda Agro Austria company. The Global environmental organisation reports that the authorities responsible failed over a period of two years to identify the contamination; then, when news of the incident became known, local people were given insufficient information about possible risks.

The Commission has assessed the River Basin Management Plans of the Member States in and published a detailed implementation report on the findings per Member State. In respect of monitoring and public consultation the assessment found that Austria established the required system and procedures, though it identified some shortcomings that will be followed up with Austrian authorities.

For the present, the Commission sees no reason to doubt the validity of the monitoring provisions of the Water Framework Directive.

The Commission is not aware of the details of the specific case. As mentioned above the Commission will raise all necessary shortcomings in the implementation of the Water Framework Directive with Austrian authorities in the context of the follow-up to the assessment of the River Basin Management Plans. The vessel will also be conducting investigations within the EEZ of the Greek island of Kastelorizo, just off the Turkish coast.

What action will the Commission take in response to this announcement by Turkey, of its intention to encroach on the territorial integrity of Cyprus and Greece which are EU Member States? The Council also expressed once again serious concern, and urged Turkey to avoid any kind of threat or action directed against a Member State, or source of friction or actions, which could damage good neighbourly relations and the peaceful settlement of disputes. The Commission in its contacts with the Turkish authorities repeatedly conveys this message as appropriate.

Dit geld is gedeeltelijk rechtstreeks door de eurolanden betaald en gedeeltelijk via het noodfonds EFSF uitgekeerd. De Rekenkamer stelt dat er over dit geld geen controle is. Waarom is er ook na geen controle uitgeoefend op de eerste tranches aan noodsteun? De Europese Commissie levert geen commentaar op artikelen in de pers. De resultaten van deze controles zijn publiekelijk beschikbaar en kunnen via de website van de Europese Commissie worden geraadpleegd. Part of this money was paid directly by the eurozone countries, and part of it via the emergency fund EFSF. The Court of Audit states that the use made of this money is not monitored.

Why was there no monitoring of the use of the first instalments of emergency aid after either? What action will the Commission take in the light of the failure to monitor emergency aid? The European Commission does not comment on press articles. The financial assistance provided by the EFSF and the Greek Loan Facility is subject to a comprehensive macroeconomic adjustment programme with strict conditionality, the monitoring of which takes place on a quarterly basis.

The results of this monitoring are publicly available and can be accessed through the European Commission's website. More specifically, the results of the reviews of the Greek, Portuguese and Irish programmes can be found at the following weblinks. Can the Commission explain why EFSA has used guidelines that have not yet been approved and authorised? Can the Commission ensure that any decision on policy will be based solely on technical assessments of the products in real conditions of use?

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Can the Commission ensure that it will carry out a thorough comparative impact assessment, based on the substitution principle, of the use of alternative plant protection products that may result in restrictions on use of neonicotinoid pesticides? The Commission has no reasons to believe that the current authorised uses, as supported by industry, would not represent the actual conditions of use. Comparative assessment is exclusively done by the Member States and only for substances listed as candidates for substitution.

The Commission has no obligation to carry out a comparative assessment and the review of approval undertaken is not meant to classify neonicotinoids as candidates for substitution. What does the Commission intend to do if countries such as Malta continue to fail to prevent the illegal hunting of protected birds?

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