As requested by Dr. Birchfield, this blog will be related to our visit to the French foreign ministry. This was our second site visit in France. It was a fascinating visit in terms of finding out the French perspective on current issues especially Brexit! Both in my view and according to the recent lows of the markets in the UK and within member states of the EU go to prove that Brexit was probably the wrong decision. However on the other hand this is probably one of the most interesting times to be pursuing a minor in international affairs. The EU and its future could possibly never be more interesting. I fortunately also got the chance to travel to London on Saturday so my past three days have been Friday in Brussels, Saturday in London and Sunday in Paris. I’ve got a whole range of perspectives this past week regarding Brexit and the most crucial point I noticed which I will talk about later in this blog as well is “Uncertainty”.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs located on the Quai d’Orsay is the oldest French administration building. It handles a budget of approximately 4.5 million euros and has had some significant events that have taken place at this monumental location. We got a tour of the place before we started our visit and all of us could agree that the French are in another league of classiness. Room, bathrooms, doorways and almost everything you see is decorated with gold. Few of the rooms that we saw included the ground floor drawing room which is where the 1919 Peace Conference was held to bring an end to World War 1 and another important room was The Clock Room which was the setting for Robert Schuman’s declaration on Europe in 1950 and the signing of the ECSC the following year (the first stage in the road towards the present day EU).

A picture of the group taken in the Clock room which was the setting for the Schuman Declaration.

Our first speaker was Sophie Delet, a French official working with the French government since 2007. She shared with us her valuable knowledge regarding Brexit. Just like the general atmosphere around Brussels and the UK she too was uncertain about the future of the EU. According to her the possibility of Marine Le Pen winning the upcoming presidential elections in France is uncertain however the important part is that the French need to realize that being part of the EU is vital to both their peace and stability and their economic standards. It’s not at all surprising to see that after Brexit The French CAC closed around 8 percent lower on the day. The European Single market is a crucial part of the European Agreement and the French would find it hard to survive in a market without the EU. She clearly stated that she regretted the Brexit result as it’s going to take a lot of time and energy to deal with this matter and that due to this the EU will be a smaller player in the international field. All in all she wants the deal with the UK to be completed as fast as possible to reduce the amount of uncertainty whether its regarding the single European market, people’s jobs and healthcare, border checks, the Erasmus+ scheme we learnt about during our study abroad or something like roaming charges. It will all become clearer if the deal goes down quickly and I completely agree. I honestly believe that the UK should have not left but I do also feel that the UK could sustain the economic downturn if it reduces uncertainty. It was the best time to shop in the UK this Saturday, the pound was at a 35 year low and in my opinion its just stuck in “Limbo Land” and that the Pounds days are numbered and that it would fall further as long as this cloud of uncertainty hangs over the UK.

Three French officials conducted our following lecture. They were desk officers to the United States; one of them closely followed the elections in the States while the other two were studying French relations with all countries. Most of our talk with them surrounded the 2% pledge by all NATO member states. It was interesting to see how they defended what France is doing in terms of defense spending was adequate. According to the French officials the 2% was just a number and they value quality more then quantity so they are not worried about meeting the 2% of the GDP requirement on defense spending. They did mention that they already contribute way more then other member states and complained about the lack of political will other member states have to increase their defense spending in certain areas. My classmate Rad and I had opposing views on France’s contribution to European/NATO defense (I happened to agree with the French officials while Rad believed otherwise) that made me wonder how frustrated US officials would be with most NATO member states that rely heavily on the US for defense and just free ride without any sense of responsibility for sharing the burden for defense. On the other hand I being an Indian citizen felt like France is contributing heavily to many parts of the world especially in Africa and it is effectively using its military to help fight terrorism.

After our visit to the French foreign ministry the rest of the day we had some free time. So I took that opportunity to go watch the Italy vs Spain game that was being played in Paris. I went to the stadium without a ticket and I have to admit that I was really lucky to have gotten a ticket for the game at face value. It was a rather entertaining game that was quite unexpected given that both teams were tagged as defensive teams coming into the match. I am a huge soccer fan, I have probably missed out on just a couple of games in this euros and this Italy vs Spain game was my second ever football game I am watching live in a stadium. It was truly exciting! I’d like to throw in a quick word about the security at the stadium. It was extremely tight and in my opinion even though it took rather long to catch the train after the match, the guards handled the crowd really well. After all at our visit to the ministry that afternoon they did mention that around 90,000 personnel were added in France to protect everybody and I surely did feel safe and secure through the entire experience.

At Stade de France for Italy vs Spain

The trip in Paris has almost come to an end but I’ve enjoyed every bit of it from visiting all the different museums, our different site visits and lectures, to touring around Luxembourg gardens, Montmartre and obviously the Eiffel Tower. It’s definitely seems like it’s going to be really difficult to leave Paris however I look forward to see what else our study abroad has in store for us.

It was a harrowing weekend for us international affairs students here in Europe. The BREXIT (Britain’s decision to exit the EU) decision was released Friday morning (a.k.a. I was addicted to my laptop the entire weekend as I read the apocalyptic implications that most websites predicted, Tweets from devastated British people, and various statistics). As I stood inside a meeting room at the Committee of Regions in Brussels that day, realizing how many chairs would be left empty soon, I felt incredibly humbled by the gravity of the situation. One of the reactions to BREXIT that really drove home the impact of the vote for me was of Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer, who said that BREXIT is the biggest international political risk since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Finding out that 75% of young people like me had voted BREMAIN didn’t help the frustration that I felt. Needless to say, I was excited to take the Thalys train to Paris on Sunday to get a break from the stressful environment in Brussels.

a picture outside the Notre Dame on our first day in Paris!

Our first site visit in Paris was to IFRI, whose French acronym translates to the French Institute of International Relations. IFRI is a leading nonpartisan think tank that often advises the French government. Among the panel of speakers that visited us, the first to speak was a research fellow at IFRI’s security studies center. He started off by giving us a brief history of French dealings with terrorism: First came the Hesbollah attacks in 1985/1986, then the civil war in Algeria that spilled over in the 90s, then the relative calm in the ten years post-9/11, then the anti-Semitic Toulouse and Montauban shootings in 2012, and then the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the attacks on Jewish supermarkets a couple years ago, and finally, the most recent (and most deadly): the November 13, 2015 Paris attack that killed a staggering 130 people. I was concerned to learn that the Paris attacks did not come as a complete surprise: hundreds of French citizens had been traveling to Syria and Iraq to become radicalized for years, with a huge uptake in recent years. Many of these “travelers” are lower-class teenagers previously involved in petty crime, which is a phenomenon that has been well-documented by the media. However, the statistic that has caught IFRI by surprise is that around 30% of these radicalized people come from middle-class backgrounds, where they “get mostly radicalized online,” said the speaker. I asked the speaker about his thoughts on the Schengen Area, which Johnny Jones previously mentioned made it easier for terrorists to move freely between EU countries. He said that although the Schengen Area isn’t at fault here, the Belgians should have done much more to prevent the terrorists from entering Paris. He also mentioned that there are many problems with Europol and insufficient coordination with intelligence sharing among member countries.

Next, another speaker talked to us about the other side of the battle: the French government’s response to the the terrorist attacks. Since January 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, French authorities have improved upon military operations and homeland security, increased social education, and implemented judicial process reform throughout France. He talked about how the French army has been involved with homeland security for centuries—mass protests and riots were handled by the military because the police were not large enough a force. Unfortunately, this led to the wide use of military force for repression, so after WW1, the French government decided to create a new Parliamentary Police Core. However, after the rise of the Cold War, the army became re-involved in homeland security. This involvement increased tenfold after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when the president mobilized about 10,000 troops as part of a homeland security force. Unfortunately, the size of this force combined with a drop in training capabilities proves a real challenge. Moreover, there has been a growing morale drop in the army because its homeland security duties are not as exciting—patrolling the streets without having the power to arrest anyone isn’t the same as a battlefield. On the other side, there’s been growing militarization of police forces, so the inversion of roles of the police and military forces is interesting.

I wondered, is this very expensive ubiquitous military presence really needed for the safety of French citizens, or is it just being used to reassure them? France hasn’t even met its 2% GDP quota for NATO spending, so why should it divert this money for troops that seem like nothing more than intimidating “window dressing”? The speaker took a defensive stance on this position: “Their presence makes it much more complicated for a terrorist to carry out an attack efficiently. The question is, how much is our security spending affecting other areas—how can we be cost-efficient?”

IFRI’s logo

The speaker then moved on to the next issue: lack of cooperation in intelligence-sharing among governments. Although the cooperation level between major powers like the France, UK, and the US, is “good”, most intelligence-sharing is done bilaterally, not multilaterally. This needs to change, but member countries have to build trust: “You need trust to share intelligence, and there is a lack of trust among EU states, especially with the Baltic states.” He also mentioned how the Internet Jihad presence makes fighting terrorism infinitely harder. There have been three stages of terrorist presence on the Internet: 1. Top-down public websites in the 90s 2. Jihadist forums where passwords were required in the mid-2000s 3. Social media jihadists (which skyrocketed starting 2012): allowed terrorists to reach the vast public The first two stages were much easier to deal with than the third stage, where governments are now constantly clashing with companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple to gain access to social media accounts (which we heard a lot about previously at Google Europe and on the news with the Apple-FBI issue). Looking towards the future, it’s safe to say that the French government’s most pressing goals in this area are having a strategic vision for French homeland security, rethinking the army’s role in sharing resources with the police, and increasing cooperation between governments.

The next part of our panel discussion was of French involvement in Africa. To me, this was the most surprising part of our visit to IFRI. It showed me that despite France’s failure “on paper” to meet the 2% GDP spending requirement on NATO, it is actually a huge leader (where the U.S. is not) in leading anti-terrorist operations in Africa. I assumed that French media coverage, like in the U.S., would be heavily biased towards terrorism in the Middle East. However, according to the IFRI panel, terrorism coverage in Africa and the Middle East is more balanced due to France’s operations there. One of these operations is named Operation Barkhane, which started in 2014 and represents a new approach for French military operations in Africa, with troops in five countries including Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Its main tenet is partnering with local militaries and multinational institutions (like the UN) in order to combat terrorism and reduce freedom of movement in those five countries. However, there are many challenges in working with African armies in combating terrorism, including limited military capacity, human rights violations, corruption problems, and disastrous human resources management within those armies. This really demonstrated the danger when it comes to only focusing on increasing militaries when fighting terrorism—a regional, long-term, multifaceted strategy needs to be developed instead. “You need to understand the African way of doing things—you can’t just imply that the 1st world countries ‘know best’,” the Africa expert said.

Operation Barkhane, in 5 countries in Africa

Because media coverage in the U.S. tends to be so Eurocentric and Middle-East-centric, it was fascinating to learn how much of an investment France has in Africa. I realized how much I had been in the dark when it came to terrorist groups like Boko Haram and AQIM. It was also interesting to make comparisons between U.S. involvement in Iraq and France involvement in Operation Barkhane—while the U.S. made the mistake of pulling out of Iraq too quickly, France seems to have taken note of that mistake and doesn’t look like it will be leaving Africa anytime soon. Then again, it is very scary to think of Boko Haram growing into the quasi-state that ISIS has become.

All in all, French military operations and anti-terrorism efforts seem to be much stronger than I previously thought. Although when I visited NATO in Brussels I got the impression that France was not pulling its weight, after being on the other side of the coin I learned that quality is much better than quantity when it comes to defense. In that, France is well-prepared strategically despite its strained forces. I suspect that France, which has already surpassed the UK economically in days since BREXIT, will take greater leadership in the European defense space now that the U.K. has left the E.U.

(Side note: one of the few positive and uniting things about being in Europe has been football. After our long days we went to sit at a café and watch the Euro 2016. Your economic policies and voting histories didn’t matter—only the team you were rooting for. I had several conversations with people all over the world in that café just because they were also rooting for Belgium! If only fighting over international affairs was as simple as fighting over a football!)

A picture of a view of the Eiffel Tower from the boat tour of the Seine we took that day–it has a football hanging from it because of Euro2016, whose fanzone is on the Eiffel Tower’s lawn. 

Following a ten-day visit to Scandinavia, the first day of our brief return to Brussels included two of the most fascinating site visits of the program thus far. While today was quite busy and detail heavy, to summarize the subject matter in a few words would actually be quite a simple task: “data privacy”. The reality of this seemingly simple idea is ceaseless debates and complications with significant implications on citizens of the EU and worldwide. In a world where data has become such a valuable commodity, tensions surrounding international data policy are particularly high in current times. The site visits presented two distinct viewpoints on data privacy, the first from Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld and the second from Marc van der Ham, a legal consultant at Google Europe. Both visits offered valuable opportunities to analyze the issue of data privacy with leading experts on the subject while also allowing for detailed discussion of the current state of data policy.

After watching an impassioned Sophie in ‘t Veld speak fervently about data flows during our visit to the Parliament a few weeks ago, I immediately recognized her as an exceptional politician who fought tooth and nail for her beliefs. Listed in the top 40 most influential MEPs by Politico Magazine, in ‘t Veld works as the leading advocate for data privacy in the European Parliament. The opportunity to meet with such an esteemed MEP was not taken lightly by our group as we all arrived at the session eager for the dialogue with stimulating questions prepared. Ms. in ‘t Veld wasted no time as we immediately began a question and answer session that covered issues ranging from data privacy to counter terrorism measures. She spoke at length about the uphill battle she faces in fighting for data privacy and blocking mass surveillance. These topics included two key points of discussion: transatlantic relations and counterterrorism.

Due to data’s transnational nature, one of the most addressed topics in in ‘t Veld’s work has been the United States and its policies regarding data privacy. She believes that the EU has been too soft and willing to negotiate with the United States due to their close relationship with the EU and subsequently encourages the EU to take more resilient measures during negotiations. As an MEP, in ‘t Veld has voted against agreements including the Privacy Shield as she considered it to serve as an insufficient safeguard against mass surveillance. She has worked tirelessly to prevent the reduction of European data privacy and admits that politicians are to blame for the continued forfeiture of privacy for EU citizens. While pro mass surveillance policy has been a point of contention throughout in ‘t Veld’s fight for privacy, the largest underlying problem that continues to have negative effects on data protection legislation is counterterrorism and the preemptive detection of perpetrators of acts of terror.

In recent years, terrorism has become the most significant security issue worldwide, with organizations like ISIS recruiting countless members to train and commit attacks in the name of the organization. While often the idea of mass surveillance seems as though it could offer a way to catch potential terrorists prior to any violence occurring, in ‘t Veld believes this idea is ludicrous and simply will not work. To back up this ideology in ‘t Veld cites information including that governments almost always identify potential terrorists prior to their attacks and additionally that most of those radicalized by terrorist groups are weak individuals with troubled pasts. She argues that since warrants must be obtained to monitor people in the real world, then there is no reason to grant the government search rights without these same measures digitally. While there was somewhat of a consensus amongst the group on these issues, Ms. in ‘t Veld struck a controversial chord when she spoke of the recent shooting in Orlando.

Warning of overzealous fear of Islam and general xenophobia, in ‘t Veld challenged our group to make an effort to determine the true definition of terrorism. She stated that political motives were necessary in terrorist attacks and that people were too eager to label certain acts as terrorism. MEP in ‘t Veld was adamant that the act of heinous murder in Orlando in which fifty people lost their lives was not an act of terror, but was rather a hate crime carried out by an individual with a troubled past. This controversial opinion caused a rift to form between the MEP and our group. This view seemed to me to be inconsistent with other views held by in ‘t Veld. With this logic, I question whether or not she would consider events like the Jewish Museum attack acts of terror. Although I agree with in ‘t Veld that people are quick to label any attacks by Muslims terroristic in nature, I do not believe this was one of those times. To minimize one of the deadliest attacks in recent history due to the fact that the shooter had a troubled past seems to me to bogus and improper. This disagreement aside, I believe that Sophie in ‘t Veld’s work and stances on data privacy are crucial to the development of global cyber law and have immense respect for her as a politician.

Following this passionate discussion with Sophie in ‘t Veld, we made a visit to private sector giant, Google Europe. Marc van der Ham briefed the group in the sleek office-bar area of the modern office space. With a background in law and previous work experience in The EU Parliament, van der Ham offered us an excellent alternative to the first briefing of the morning. He spoke in length about topics focused around the legality of data flows and barriers to digital trade in which he included an interesting dialogue on data privacy. Additionally, van der Ham discussed the method Google used to rise to success and the future direction of Google.

During this interesting speech and the question and answer session that followed, van der Ham discussed the issue of data privacy and the international implications that accompany it. Perhaps the topic that struck me as most interesting of the discussion was The Commission’s attempts to limit Google’s power over the market. As a company Google uses a great deal of data to make suggestions to users and this has lead to concern over Google’s near monopoly on user data. Google has been fighting in court to prove that is a benevolent company and that it does not misuse user’s data. The outcome of this legal battle has yet to be seen; however, one thing is certain. Data is a valuable commodity that will continue to receive a great deal of legal attention in the years to come.

Ensuing our two stimulating site visits, our class debriefed at a local restaurant and discussed what we had spoken about with van der Ham and in ‘t Veld. The main point of contention was the comment made about the nature of the attack in Orlando. As American citizens, the majority of the class believed that this attack was an attack on terror and disagreed with in ‘t Veld on the point. Other than this one issue, it was evident that the class agreed with most of the positions in ‘t Veld presented. Mass surveillance is an issue that concerns all citizens of the digital world and it seemed to be the shared stance of the class that mass surveillance was not the answer to the security threat of terrorism. In addition to discussion about data privacy, another interesting dialogue occurred concerning the nature of the company of Google. The question as to whether or not Google is an “American” company interested me the most of the topics of this conversation. Although as a class there was a great deal of disagreement, I personally believe that Google is indeed an American company with global aspirations as it attempts to capture more of the global market. So far Google’s strategies have been wildly successful and I believe they will continue to be due to the ability to adapt and the widespread global use of its services. From data privacy to tech giants, today was a day full of detailed discussion that was by and large open ended. What will happen in the coming years regarding technology and data policy is yet to be seen; however, in such a digital world, developments in these areas will have great significance for people worldwide.