The Commission, of all people, may not have taken the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) very seriously. That could be the bottom line if the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issues a ruling today. A Munich resident had filed a lawsuit and is seeking €1,200 in damages.
This is the issue: The Commission had wanted to involve citizens in Ursula von der Leyen’s first mandate at the Conference on the Future of the EU. The Directorate-General Digit had commissioned a third-party provider to ensure digital communication, i.e. to rent the servers and provide the hardware for the corresponding Commission website.
In the “small print”, in the Data Protection Record, the Commission had promised that citizens’ data would not leave the EU. But that is what happened. A reply was sent to the plaintiff’s IP address, which had been delivered from a web server in the USA .
The background to this is that Digit had awarded the contract to a service provider that is a subsidiary of the US company Amazon. Presumably, when the contract was concluded, Amazon Web Services failed to ensure that the data would remain in the EU. If the proceedings turn out as observers expect, this would not only be an embarrassment for the Commission. It would probably also have to draw consequences and set itself new rules for communicating with Europeans.
I wish you a stress-free day with the GDPR.
The extension of the dispute settlement mechanism is one of the concessions made by the EU Commission to the South Americans, the consequences of which are difficult to predict. According to the negotiating text, the mechanism can now also be set in motion if a contracting party takes a measure that “nullifies or significantly impairs” the advantage that the other negotiating party derives from a provision of the free trade agreement.
The provision was included in the agreement primarily with a view to European environmental regulations. If, for example, it turns out that an EU environmental regulation would have such a strong impact on Mercosur exports to the EU that the additional import quotas for beef would be of no use to South American farmers, Mercosur could invoke the dispute settlement mechanism.
“In arbitration proceedings, it is then determined whether the rights of one party have been nullified or impaired by a commercial measure taken by the other party,” explains commercial law expert David Kleimann from think tank ODI Europe. If this is the case, the other party must offer compensation. “If no agreement on compensation is reached, the complainant may be entitled to take appropriate retaliatory measures.“
According to Kleimann, this part of the agreement corresponds to the provisions for non-violation complaints in the WTO’s General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). However, according to EU officials, the EU does not normally include these passages in its trade agreements.
The question now is whether this provision can also be applied to politically sensitive dossiers such as the Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
In their analysis of the negotiating text, Stéphanie Kpenou and Mathilde Dupré from the Veblen Institute, a think tank for ecological transformation, point out that the definition in the agreement explicitly includes measures that were “not yet fully implemented” at the time the negotiations were concluded. The Brazilian government also appears to interpret the text in such a way that EU regulations that were adopted after 2019 and whose implementation could have a negative impact on Brazilian exports fall within the scope of application.
In its official communication, the Commission argues: “The compensation mechanism only concerns the trade-related effects of measures that the applicant could not have expected when the negotiations were concluded.“However, the environmental NGO Client Earth, which specializes in legal issues, says that this is not in the text of the agreement. There is a “real risk” that trade-related effects of the deforestation regulation would form the basis of a dispute in the Mercosur agreement.
Commission officials admit that the extended scope of application was necessary in order to gain the approval of the Mercosur states for the agreement. However, the Commission assumes that it has nevertheless protected itself against lawsuits relating to the deforestation regulation. In the annex to the chapter on trade and sustainable development, the parties have spoken out in favor of preventing further deforestation.
According to the Commission, the deforestation regulation could only become a problem for Mercosur exports to the EU if the Mercosur states continue to deforest. However, this would contradict the Mercosur states’ obligations under the trade agreement. In the Commission’s logic, a complaint by the Mercosur states would have a difficult time due to this contradiction.
If the free trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur is ratified and enters into force, the dispute settlement mechanism will have to clarify the final scope of application. “Often the negotiating parties disagree on the interpretation of clauses and leave the final determination to the dispute settlement mechanism, especially when these provisions have been fought with considerable political pressure,” Kleimann told Table.Briefings.
Even if the legal clarification is still a long time coming: It is already clear that the so-called compensation mechanism will be one of the major political points of contention in the upcoming ratification debate.
For thousands of Bulgarians, Christmas was not a very pleasant occasion. Snowfall caused trees to fall on power lines in the western regions of the Balkan country. The regional electricity grid operator Elektrohold had too few emergency services to restore the power supply quickly. As a result, many Bulgarians experienced the turn of the year without electricity. The situation was precarious in villages in the Balkan Mountains, where electric pumps ensure the water supply.
In situations like this, regional electricity suppliers are usually criticized. The accusation is that they invest too little in the modernization and reliability of their electricity grids. For their part, they point to the fact that electricity market liberalization has been delayed for years for political reasons. They argue that the regulated electricity prices for private households only allow limited investment in the energy infrastructure.
Although the state “Commission for the Regulation of Electricity and Water” (KEWR) increased the price for private consumers by almost nine percent at the beginning of the year, it is still one of the lowest in the European Union. Following the fall of the last regular government in spring 2024, Bulgaria’s MPs postponed the six-month transitional period scheduled for July 2024 to liberalize prices for private households by a further year for electoral reasons.
For many years, Bulgaria was considered the leading electricity supplier in the Balkans; however, following the shutdown of some coal-fired power plants and due to insufficient rainfall for the generation of electricity from large hydropower plants, it became a net importer itself last year and purchased some of its electricity from Greece.
“One of the external factors harming the whole of Europe is Russia’s brutal attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,” explained KEWR Chairman Ivan Ivanov at the end of 2024, justifying the increase in electricity prices for private consumers. “The destruction of Ukrainian capacities,” he argued, “is unbalancing the markets, which is leading to price increases in the Eastern European countries of Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Hungary due to the weak links between Western and Eastern Europe. As a result, the forecast market price of BGN 173 (approx. €88) now needs to be corrected to BGN 220 (approx. €114)”.
The Bulgarian Energy and Mining Forum (BEMF) had previously warned of a “possible electricity regime in the coming winter” if Ukraine is no longer able to cover its growing deficit with electricity imports from its neighboring countries and instead needs electricity from the Balkan region. This refers to controlled power cuts.
After more than a thousand days of war, Ukraine’s energy system is considered half destroyed. Russia last targeted Ukrainian power plants and grid infrastructure with missiles and drones in November and December 2024. According to the Kyiv-based consultancy ExPro, Ukraine increased its electricity imports more than fivefold last year to 4.4 terawatt hours (TWh). In December 2024, it purchased a good two and a half times more electricity from abroad than in the previous month.
Even in Greece, which has transformed itself from a net importer to a regional electricity supplier by commissioning modern gas-fired power plants, Ukraine’s foreseeable import requirements are raising fears of exorbitant and sometimes barely rationally comprehensible increases in electricity prices. Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of a “regional crisis in the Balkans” in a letter back in September 2024 and called for countermeasures through more European powers to supervise competition in the electricity sector.
The Greek head of government also called for a “push for new power lines” to better connect the south-eastern European power grids with the central and western European grids and to enable “sufficient electricity transfers within the EU” so that the effects of electricity exports to Ukraine “are not only felt by some countries”.
In October, however, the then Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson stated that the problems in Ukraine were not the cause of the sharp price rises in south-eastern Europe in the summer. Due to the severely damaged pipelines, exports had even fallen in the weeks leading up to the Energy Council in October, Budapest’s State Secretary for Energy, Attila Steiner, had said on behalf of the Council Presidency. With Manuel Berkel
German politics, on the part of the established centrist parties – because it is easier and requires no action to remain in the role of victim – is engaged in detective work for disinformation bots and evil troll factory powers in order to indignantly denounce them. Fringe parties such as the AfD and BSW even see the traditional media in the role of disinformation slingers.
Security cannot be established in this way, and self-confidence in the ability of a defensive democracy to find solutions looks different in any case. Trust in state institutions collapses when there is much lamentation about the corrosive power of fake news, but no recognizable pattern of political action to counteract this. Instead, citizens are urged to finally come of age and believe the “truth” again, preferably with the help of the Tagesschau.
The German parliamentary election campaign offers us as a society the opportunity to change the way we deal with disinformation and to shift the focus of security policy. Perhaps a look at the context of successful communication management will help us to better understand the problem. Then we would no longer have to spend time on the Sisyphean task of an endless search for bots, trolls and fakes, but could actually work on the democratic resilience of our democracy.
In the true sense of the word, communicative resilience means that destructive strategic communication remains ineffective, especially if it can penetrate people’s minds, i.e. if there is no protective shield to fish populist slogans out of the social media bubble. Resilience means an inner, cognitive-affective resistance, not one imposed from the outside through discourse bans.
Schema theory and the minimal group principle show us that people form their opinions and beliefs based on simple but effective narratives. Social identity theory emphasizes the importance of group membership and identity in shaping our political attitudes. We humans crave belonging. Therefore, we need to tell stories that are engaging, relatable and contain the hope of a good, desirable “ending”. This is about preventative credibility, not absolute truths produced reactively by means of fact checks.
Reality is created through communication. If our own story is told strongly and powerfully, using all legitimate means of dramaturgy across relevant channels in formats that people can understand, there is no need for a panicked reaction to every disinformation campaign.
This can be achieved with a coherent, attractive and credible program for shaping the future of all – in the sense of a grand social design of where “we” are and where “we” want to go. Last but not least, it also helps if government action is functional and geared towards people’s needs. In other words: The supply must be right, and then demand will also increase.
The upcoming Bundestag election is not only a choice between different political programs, but also a choice between different narratives of Germany and Europe. We have the chance to offer a strong, democracy-promoting narrative that makes us resilient to the attacks of disinformation campaigns and creates security. The enemies of the open society are only successful because politicians have forgotten to focus on this gravitational field.
There is no question that bots and troll factories are real and they are trying to exert a massive influence on the reality of our lives. However, the fact that they are successful is our own fault. It’s not called “target group” and communication “impact” for nothing. So we don’t have to “shoot” our opponents, shut down botnets or close down troll factories – we have to “hit” them better ourselves.
Prof. Dr. Natascha Zowislo-Grünewald has been Professor of Corporate Communication at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich since 2010. Her research focuses on cognitive warfare, resilience and communication in the field of tension between politics, media and society.
The Commission, of all people, may not have taken the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) very seriously. That could be the bottom line if the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issues a ruling today. A Munich resident had filed a lawsuit and is seeking €1,200 in damages.
This is the issue: The Commission had wanted to involve citizens in Ursula von der Leyen’s first mandate at the Conference on the Future of the EU. The Directorate-General Digit had commissioned a third-party provider to ensure digital communication, i.e. to rent the servers and provide the hardware for the corresponding Commission website.
In the “small print”, in the Data Protection Record, the Commission had promised that citizens’ data would not leave the EU. But that is what happened. A reply was sent to the plaintiff’s IP address, which had been delivered from a web server in the USA .
The background to this is that Digit had awarded the contract to a service provider that is a subsidiary of the US company Amazon. Presumably, when the contract was concluded, Amazon Web Services failed to ensure that the data would remain in the EU. If the proceedings turn out as observers expect, this would not only be an embarrassment for the Commission. It would probably also have to draw consequences and set itself new rules for communicating with Europeans.
I wish you a stress-free day with the GDPR.
The extension of the dispute settlement mechanism is one of the concessions made by the EU Commission to the South Americans, the consequences of which are difficult to predict. According to the negotiating text, the mechanism can now also be set in motion if a contracting party takes a measure that “nullifies or significantly impairs” the advantage that the other negotiating party derives from a provision of the free trade agreement.
The provision was included in the agreement primarily with a view to European environmental regulations. If, for example, it turns out that an EU environmental regulation would have such a strong impact on Mercosur exports to the EU that the additional import quotas for beef would be of no use to South American farmers, Mercosur could invoke the dispute settlement mechanism.
“In arbitration proceedings, it is then determined whether the rights of one party have been nullified or impaired by a commercial measure taken by the other party,” explains commercial law expert David Kleimann from think tank ODI Europe. If this is the case, the other party must offer compensation. “If no agreement on compensation is reached, the complainant may be entitled to take appropriate retaliatory measures.“
According to Kleimann, this part of the agreement corresponds to the provisions for non-violation complaints in the WTO’s General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). However, according to EU officials, the EU does not normally include these passages in its trade agreements.
The question now is whether this provision can also be applied to politically sensitive dossiers such as the Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
In their analysis of the negotiating text, Stéphanie Kpenou and Mathilde Dupré from the Veblen Institute, a think tank for ecological transformation, point out that the definition in the agreement explicitly includes measures that were “not yet fully implemented” at the time the negotiations were concluded. The Brazilian government also appears to interpret the text in such a way that EU regulations that were adopted after 2019 and whose implementation could have a negative impact on Brazilian exports fall within the scope of application.
In its official communication, the Commission argues: “The compensation mechanism only concerns the trade-related effects of measures that the applicant could not have expected when the negotiations were concluded.“However, the environmental NGO Client Earth, which specializes in legal issues, says that this is not in the text of the agreement. There is a “real risk” that trade-related effects of the deforestation regulation would form the basis of a dispute in the Mercosur agreement.
Commission officials admit that the extended scope of application was necessary in order to gain the approval of the Mercosur states for the agreement. However, the Commission assumes that it has nevertheless protected itself against lawsuits relating to the deforestation regulation. In the annex to the chapter on trade and sustainable development, the parties have spoken out in favor of preventing further deforestation.
According to the Commission, the deforestation regulation could only become a problem for Mercosur exports to the EU if the Mercosur states continue to deforest. However, this would contradict the Mercosur states’ obligations under the trade agreement. In the Commission’s logic, a complaint by the Mercosur states would have a difficult time due to this contradiction.
If the free trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur is ratified and enters into force, the dispute settlement mechanism will have to clarify the final scope of application. “Often the negotiating parties disagree on the interpretation of clauses and leave the final determination to the dispute settlement mechanism, especially when these provisions have been fought with considerable political pressure,” Kleimann told Table.Briefings.
Even if the legal clarification is still a long time coming: It is already clear that the so-called compensation mechanism will be one of the major political points of contention in the upcoming ratification debate.
For thousands of Bulgarians, Christmas was not a very pleasant occasion. Snowfall caused trees to fall on power lines in the western regions of the Balkan country. The regional electricity grid operator Elektrohold had too few emergency services to restore the power supply quickly. As a result, many Bulgarians experienced the turn of the year without electricity. The situation was precarious in villages in the Balkan Mountains, where electric pumps ensure the water supply.
In situations like this, regional electricity suppliers are usually criticized. The accusation is that they invest too little in the modernization and reliability of their electricity grids. For their part, they point to the fact that electricity market liberalization has been delayed for years for political reasons. They argue that the regulated electricity prices for private households only allow limited investment in the energy infrastructure.
Although the state “Commission for the Regulation of Electricity and Water” (KEWR) increased the price for private consumers by almost nine percent at the beginning of the year, it is still one of the lowest in the European Union. Following the fall of the last regular government in spring 2024, Bulgaria’s MPs postponed the six-month transitional period scheduled for July 2024 to liberalize prices for private households by a further year for electoral reasons.
For many years, Bulgaria was considered the leading electricity supplier in the Balkans; however, following the shutdown of some coal-fired power plants and due to insufficient rainfall for the generation of electricity from large hydropower plants, it became a net importer itself last year and purchased some of its electricity from Greece.
“One of the external factors harming the whole of Europe is Russia’s brutal attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,” explained KEWR Chairman Ivan Ivanov at the end of 2024, justifying the increase in electricity prices for private consumers. “The destruction of Ukrainian capacities,” he argued, “is unbalancing the markets, which is leading to price increases in the Eastern European countries of Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Hungary due to the weak links between Western and Eastern Europe. As a result, the forecast market price of BGN 173 (approx. €88) now needs to be corrected to BGN 220 (approx. €114)”.
The Bulgarian Energy and Mining Forum (BEMF) had previously warned of a “possible electricity regime in the coming winter” if Ukraine is no longer able to cover its growing deficit with electricity imports from its neighboring countries and instead needs electricity from the Balkan region. This refers to controlled power cuts.
After more than a thousand days of war, Ukraine’s energy system is considered half destroyed. Russia last targeted Ukrainian power plants and grid infrastructure with missiles and drones in November and December 2024. According to the Kyiv-based consultancy ExPro, Ukraine increased its electricity imports more than fivefold last year to 4.4 terawatt hours (TWh). In December 2024, it purchased a good two and a half times more electricity from abroad than in the previous month.
Even in Greece, which has transformed itself from a net importer to a regional electricity supplier by commissioning modern gas-fired power plants, Ukraine’s foreseeable import requirements are raising fears of exorbitant and sometimes barely rationally comprehensible increases in electricity prices. Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of a “regional crisis in the Balkans” in a letter back in September 2024 and called for countermeasures through more European powers to supervise competition in the electricity sector.
The Greek head of government also called for a “push for new power lines” to better connect the south-eastern European power grids with the central and western European grids and to enable “sufficient electricity transfers within the EU” so that the effects of electricity exports to Ukraine “are not only felt by some countries”.
In October, however, the then Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson stated that the problems in Ukraine were not the cause of the sharp price rises in south-eastern Europe in the summer. Due to the severely damaged pipelines, exports had even fallen in the weeks leading up to the Energy Council in October, Budapest’s State Secretary for Energy, Attila Steiner, had said on behalf of the Council Presidency. With Manuel Berkel
German politics, on the part of the established centrist parties – because it is easier and requires no action to remain in the role of victim – is engaged in detective work for disinformation bots and evil troll factory powers in order to indignantly denounce them. Fringe parties such as the AfD and BSW even see the traditional media in the role of disinformation slingers.
Security cannot be established in this way, and self-confidence in the ability of a defensive democracy to find solutions looks different in any case. Trust in state institutions collapses when there is much lamentation about the corrosive power of fake news, but no recognizable pattern of political action to counteract this. Instead, citizens are urged to finally come of age and believe the “truth” again, preferably with the help of the Tagesschau.
The German parliamentary election campaign offers us as a society the opportunity to change the way we deal with disinformation and to shift the focus of security policy. Perhaps a look at the context of successful communication management will help us to better understand the problem. Then we would no longer have to spend time on the Sisyphean task of an endless search for bots, trolls and fakes, but could actually work on the democratic resilience of our democracy.
In the true sense of the word, communicative resilience means that destructive strategic communication remains ineffective, especially if it can penetrate people’s minds, i.e. if there is no protective shield to fish populist slogans out of the social media bubble. Resilience means an inner, cognitive-affective resistance, not one imposed from the outside through discourse bans.
Schema theory and the minimal group principle show us that people form their opinions and beliefs based on simple but effective narratives. Social identity theory emphasizes the importance of group membership and identity in shaping our political attitudes. We humans crave belonging. Therefore, we need to tell stories that are engaging, relatable and contain the hope of a good, desirable “ending”. This is about preventative credibility, not absolute truths produced reactively by means of fact checks.
Reality is created through communication. If our own story is told strongly and powerfully, using all legitimate means of dramaturgy across relevant channels in formats that people can understand, there is no need for a panicked reaction to every disinformation campaign.
This can be achieved with a coherent, attractive and credible program for shaping the future of all – in the sense of a grand social design of where “we” are and where “we” want to go. Last but not least, it also helps if government action is functional and geared towards people’s needs. In other words: The supply must be right, and then demand will also increase.
The upcoming Bundestag election is not only a choice between different political programs, but also a choice between different narratives of Germany and Europe. We have the chance to offer a strong, democracy-promoting narrative that makes us resilient to the attacks of disinformation campaigns and creates security. The enemies of the open society are only successful because politicians have forgotten to focus on this gravitational field.
There is no question that bots and troll factories are real and they are trying to exert a massive influence on the reality of our lives. However, the fact that they are successful is our own fault. It’s not called “target group” and communication “impact” for nothing. So we don’t have to “shoot” our opponents, shut down botnets or close down troll factories – we have to “hit” them better ourselves.
Prof. Dr. Natascha Zowislo-Grünewald has been Professor of Corporate Communication at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich since 2010. Her research focuses on cognitive warfare, resilience and communication in the field of tension between politics, media and society.
