Qatar criticized the European Parliament for banning the Gulf state’s representatives at the institution, warning that this “discriminatory” move could harm broader EU-Qatari cooperation where the bloc is dependent on Doha, including with energy.
The Parliament last week barred Qatari representatives from entering the premises and suspended legislation related to the country that include visa liberalization and planned visits. The moves followed allegations of corruption involving attempts to influence officials at the Parliament.
“The decision to impose such a discriminatory restriction … will negatively affect regional and global security cooperation, as well as ongoing discussions around global energy poverty and security,” a Qatari diplomat said in a statement on Sunday reported by media. The statement added that the decision “demonstrates that MEPs have been significantly misled.”
“It is unfortunate that some acted on preconceived prejudices against Qatar and made their judgments based on the inaccurate information in the leaks rather than waiting for the investigation to conclude,” the statement said. The World Cup host “firmly” rejects the allegations “associating our government with misconduct,” it said.
EU countries have increasingly turned to Qatar in a bid to diversify energy supplies and make up for shortfalls amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Germany last month signing a 15-year contract for liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports. Doha provided a quarter of the EU’s LNG imports last year.
Belgian authorities have charged four people with links to the Parliament — including one of the institution’s vice presidents, Eva Kaili — with “criminal organization, corruption and money laundering” over allegations they accepted payments in exchange for doing the bidding of Qatar in Parliament. Kaili has since been stripped of her duties, while authorities have carried out raids on at least 20 homes and offices in Belgium, Greece and Italy in recent days.
Qatar also criticized Belgium for keeping the Gulf state in the dark about the investigation, which Belgian authorities said had taken more than a year before they made the first arrest this month.
“It is deeply disappointing that the Belgian government made no effort to engage with our government to establish the facts once they became aware of the allegations,” the diplomat said in the statement.
Watchdogs say it could be the “most serious,” “most shocking,” “most egregious” corruption scandal to hit Brussels in years.
A series of at least 16 raids by the Belgian federal police Friday netted five people they said had committed “alleged offenses of criminal organization, corruption and money laundering.” The morning searches yielded €600,000 in cash, plus phones and computers.
Initially, the culprits weren’t major names by Brussels standards: A former member of the European Parliament, a few parliamentary assistants, and a trade union boss, all allegedly on the take for World Cup host Qatar. But to what end, really? Some questioned whether — if the charges were true — Doha had really made a smart investment.
By the evening, however, it was clear this wasn’t just a story of some has-beens and wannabes lining their pockets. Eva Kaili, a vice president of the European Parliament and vocal defender of Doha, landed in police custody, according to the Belgian federal police. The case also centers around an NGO that, until recently, counted some of the biggest luminaries in left-wing politics among its board members.
“The State of Qatar categorically rejects any attempts to associate it with accusations of misconduct,” said a Qatari official in a statement e-mailed Sunday morning.
As this potentially superlative scandal continues to unfold, POLITICO answers all your questions about the controversy roiling the EU capital.
Q: Who is Eva Kaili?
As one of Parliament’s 14 vice presidents, Kaili is one of the institution’s most powerful players — and as a former news presenter with celebrity status in her native Greece, one of Brussels’ most glamorous figures.
But Kaili has also emerged as one of the most vocal defenders of Qatar. She recently called the country a “frontrunner in labor rights” after meeting with the country’s labor minister, despite deep international concerns about conditions for stadium construction workers. A member of the center-left Socialist & Democrat (S&D) party, her portfolio includes special responsibilities related to the Middle East.
Kaili’s partner and co-parent, Francesco Giorgi, has also been detained, according to police and people with direct knowledge. He’s an adviser on the Middle East and North Africa region in the European Parliament — and a founder of an NGO called Fight Impunity, which aims to promote “accountability as a central pillar of the architecture of international justice.”
Crucially, Fight Impunity’s president is Pier Antonio Panzeri, a central figure in the case.
Q: Who else is involved?
Panzeri, an Italian ex-MEP also from the S&D, was among those arrested Friday morning. By the evening, his wife and daughter were also nabbed by Italian police. A warrant for their arrest, seen by POLITICO, accused Panzeri of “intervening politically with members working at the European Parliament for the benefit of Qatar and Morocco.”
41 Rue Ducale in Brussels where both No Peace Without Justice and Fight Impunity have offices | Eddy Wax | Eddy Wax
Former parliamentary aides, especially those with ties to Fight Impunity, are also falling under scrutiny. In addition to arresting Giorgi, police also sealed the office of another parliamentary assistant who used to work for Fight Impunity, currently serving as an aide to Belgian S&D MEP Marie Arena.
Arena, who inherited the chairmanship of the human rights subcommittee from Panzeri and works closely with Fight Impunity, confirmed that her aide’s office was under seal. Arena said she herself has not been questioned by police.
According to Italian newswire Ansa, Niccolò Figà-Talamanca has also been detained. He’s the director general of another NGO, No Peace Without Justice. Focused on international criminal justice, human rights and promoting democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, the organization is officially based in New York and Rome. However, it has the same Brussels address as Fight Impunity, at 41 Rue Ducale.
Emma Bonino, a former liberal MEP and foreign affairs minister for Italy, founded No Peace Without Justice. She is listed as an honorary board member of Fight Impunity. She and Figà-Talamanca did not immediately respond to requests for comment through Peace Without Justice.
In a sign of Panzeri’s connections, former French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, former European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and former MEP Cecilia Wikström are also listed as honorary board members.
Mogherini resigned from the board on Saturday morning, according to a spokesperson for the College of Europe, where Mogherini is now rector. Avramopoulos said in an email Sunday morning that he, Cazeneuve and Wikström had also resigned “immediately when we were informed back on Friday.”
The list of staff at Fight Impunity has apparently been deleted; however, web archives show Giorgi and other current parliamentary assistants holding key roles in January.
Q: Is this limited to the European Parliament?
Nope. Also detained: Luca Visentini, who just last month became secretary general of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Before that, he was the longtime chief of the European Trade Union Confederation. (He didn’t have to move for the new role: Both the global and the European organizations are based at the same address in Brussels, on Rue Albert II.)
Builders’ unions have been some of the top critics of Qatar’s record on worker’s rights in the lead-up to the World Cup. But even before Visentini took over, ITUC was a notable exception. Sharan Burrow, the previous ITUC chief, urged external critics of the country’s labor laws to “go and have a look at a look at the change” in a video posted by the Qatari labor ministry in June.
Q: Why would Qatar want to lobby?
The Gulf emirate is hosting the World Cup, but rather than a public relations coup, the tournament turned out to shine a negative spotlight on the country. Accusations of bribery in the bidding process and slave-like conditions for foreign workers cast doubt on the choice, and liberal critics seized on the moment to attack the conservative Muslim country’s position on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.
Fans arrive prior to kick off of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 | Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Maintaining a good reputation is crucial, as Qatar works to hash out deals with EU countries for its natural gas. A proposal to give Qataris visa-free travel to the EU’s Schengen area is also moving forward in Parliament — at least, it was.
Q: How has Kaili advocated for Qatar?
Kaili has arguably been the dean of the (sizeable group of) Doha defenders within the S&D.
On November 24, for example, as the plenary passed a resolution “deplor[ing] the deaths of thousands of migrant workers,” Kaili took to the floor to praise the “historical transformation” of Qatar brought on by the World Cup. Similarly, 10 days ago, she showed up to vote in favor of visa liberalization for Qatar and Kuwait in the Parliament’s justice and home affairs committee — even though she’s not a member of the committee.
Kaili also alienated MEPs on a panel dedicated to the Middle East when she freelanced her own trip after Doha canceled the group’s visit. The Parliament’s Delegation for Relations With the Arab Peninsula (DARP) had been planning to head to Qatar just ahead of the World Cup in November, to visit tournament facilities and observe labor law changes.
With barely a month’s notice, however, Qatar’s consultative assembly, known as the Shura Council, asked to postpone. Instead, Kaili went to Qatar the week the full delegation was supposed to be there — and gave full-throated praise to the emirate’s labor reforms. According to local press, she said she was there representing 500 million European citizens who see the country’s progress as representing common values.
“She was somehow going behind my back,” said MEP Hannah Neumann, the German Green at the helm of DARP. Doha was “uninviting the group that would have had a balanced position” and “instead invited her, knowing that her statements would be less critical.”
Repeated calls to Kaili’s mobile phone Friday and Saturday went unanswered.
Q: How big a deal is this?
Watchdog groups agree on the superlatives. The Qatar scandal could be “the most egregious case” of alleged corruption Parliament has seen in years, said Transparency International chief Michiel van Hulten. Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at HEC Paris, called it the “most shocking integrity scandal in the history of the EU.”
German Green MEP Daniel Freund, co-chair of the Parliament’s anti-corruption intergroup, called it one of the “most serious corruption scandals in Brussels in recent decades.”
Van Hulten said the Parliament has created a “culture of impunity … with a combination of lax financial rules and controls and a complete lack of independent (or indeed any) ethics oversight.” Alemmano likewise predicted this would just be the “tip of the iceberg,” hoping a pile-up of scandals would create political momentum for an independent ethics system.
Freund argued that countries that are not part of the EU should have to follow the “relatively good lobbying rules already in force” in Brussels. At the moment, countries don’t have to register in the EU’s transparency register of interest groups, for example, and MEPs don’t need to report those contacts. “The EU must improve this immediately,” Freund said.
Incidentally, Panzeri’s NGO, Fight Impunity, is not listed in the transparency register. That’s an apparent violation of the existing rules for EU-based groups that want to make their case in Parliament. Under the latest transparency register guidelines, NGOs are required to include extensive details about their funding.
Arena, the current chair of the human rights subcommittee, has worked closely with Panzeri and Fight Impunity, including the NGO in press conferences and traveling with Panzeri for discussions on civil liberties.
Even as she defended her own independence, Arena predicted that more revelations would come out. “If Qatar is doing so, I know that others are doing exactly the same,” Arena said. “And so we have to really prevent this kind of capacity to influence.”
Current chair of the human rights subcommittee Maria Arena | EP
Q: How’s it going now for Qatar?
The blowback from these accusations is already coming fast.
The S&D has called for the visa liberalization proposal to be put on hold, and the Green rapporteur said he would vote against the measure if it comes up for a vote next week.
Separately, Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee planned to head to Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the coming weeks. Now the latter part has been canceled — meaning a top rival of Doha gets all the attention.
“Any association of the Qatari government with the reported claims is baseless and gravely misinformed,” said the Qatari official statement issued Sunday. “The State of Qatar works through institution-to-institution engagement and operates in full compliance with international laws and regulations.”
Q: What’s next in the Parliament?
Late Saturday, Parliament President Roberta Metsola suspended all of Kaili’s “powers, duties and tasks” related to being a vice president. To revoke the title completely would require a decision by the Parliament’s conference of presidents, and then a vote in the plenary.
When the plenary gathers in Strasbourg this week, MEPs are likely to revoke Kaili’s parliamentary immunity. The Left has already formally called for a debate about the incident to be added to the agenda, with a vote slated for Monday evening.
Kaili has also been suspended from the S&D group and her domestic party in Greece, Pasok.
Eddy Wax, Nektaria Stamouli, Hannah Roberts and Vincent Manancourt contributed reporting.
Europe, the world’s biggest consumer of chocolate, and West Africa, the leading grower of the cocoa beans used to make it, share a common goal to make the sector sustainable.
But they have opposing views on how to put an end to the social, economic and environmental harms caused by satisfying Europe’s sweet tooth, heralding a showdown over who will bear the costs of complying: Big Chocolate or cocoa farmers.
The EU is finalizing regulations that seek to ensure that chocolate entering the market is free from deforestation and child labor. At the same time, Ghana and Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producers, are demanding higher prices. That’s vital, they say, to make sustainable chocolate a possibility — and not a pipe dream.
The stakes are high: For the EU, cocoa is a test case for how companies and producers react when the bloc tries to impose higher standards. For producers, the push to set up a cartel could drive up prices in the short term — but also risks stimulating oversupply and ultimately causing a price crash that would deepen the poverty already suffered by most cocoa farmers. Chocolate makers, facing rising costs and greater scrutiny, may reroute supply chains to other cocoa-producing countries seen as less risky.
Doing nothing is not an option, said Alex Assanvo, who heads the joint West African initiative to support cocoa prices.
“We are not asking to pay them more, we are asking to pay them a fair price,” Assanvo told POLITICO in an interview. “If we believe that this is going to create oversupply, well then I don’t know, maybe we should stop eating chocolate.”
Bittersweet taste
Chocolate may be sweet but the industry that makes it is not. Most of the beans used to produce the world’s supply are grown by impoverished West African farmers; all too often from trees planted on deforested land and harvested by children. One problem drives the others. Poverty pushes farmers to chop down forests to produce more beans and profits and to put children to work as they cannot afford to pay wages to adult laborers.
To address this, Ghana and Ivory Coast, which produce 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, formed an export cartel in 2019 modeled on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). They introduced a $400 per ton Living Income Differential, which aims to bring the floor price up enough to cover the cost of production.
In public, big chocolate manufacturers and traders, including Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Ferrero, Hersey, Lindt, Mars, Mondelez and Nestlé, welcomed the initiative.
Yet behind the scenes many of the firms — which between them account for about 90 percent of the industry’s $130 billion in annual profits — have done everything possible to avoid paying the premium and to drive prices back down, according to the Ivorian Coffee-Cocoa Council (CCC), the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) and their joint Initiative Cacao Ivory Coast-Ghana (ICCIG).
The companies that responded to requests for comment from POLITICO said that they have paid the Living Income Differential (LID) since its introduction. The Ghanian and Ivorian trade boards and the ICCIG claim, however, that they have negated the LID’s value by forcing down a different premium, the origin differential.
Fed up, these countries boycotted the World Cocoa Foundation Partnership Meeting at the end of October in Brussels. They then gave the companies a deadline: commit to the premiums by November 20 or the countries would ban their buyers from visiting fields to carry out harvest forecasts and suspend their Corporate Social Responsibility programs – which sell well with ethically-minded consumers.
More harm than good?
Another proposed remedy comes from Brussels. Cocoa is one of the products to which the new EU legislation on due diligence — Brussels speak for supply-chain oversight and compliance — would apply.
Under this, large firms operating in the bloc will be forced to evaluate their global supply chains for human rights and environmental abuses, and compensate injured parties. In theory, this should reduce deforestation and child labor and improve the lot of farmers.
Yet, as European ambassadors thrash out the terms — and big players like France push for them to be watered down — concerns are growing that the legislation could turn out at best to be ineffective in practice, and at worst do more harm than good.
Cocoa farmers, and the NGOs that support them, have reason to be skeptical: Back in 2000, a BBC documentary exposed the widespread use of child labor on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast and Ghana. The resulting media pressure led to a proposal for legislation in the United States forcing companies to certify chocolate bars free of child labor.
Companies pushed back hard, Antonie Fountain, managing director of cocoa NGO coalition The Voice Network, told POLITICO. The proposal was dropped and companies committed instead to a voluntary plan to solve child labor, he explained: “And that turned into a two-decade failure of policy.”
The resulting patchwork of pilot projects failed to transform the sector. Despite an initial decline, nearly 20 years after the framework was introduced 790,000 children in Ivory Coast and 770,000 in Ghana are still working in cocoa, with 95 percent of them exposed to the worst forms of child labor, according to a 2020 report.
Deforestation has meanwhile accelerated.
Ivory Coast has lost up to 90 percent of its forest in the last half century. Between 2000 and 2019 alone 2.4 million hectares of forest was cleared for cocoa farms, representing 45 percent of the total deforestation and forest degradation in the country, according to Trase, a data-driven transparency initiative.
The government’s attempts to safeguard what remains are half-hearted and often undermined by corruption: In 2019 a quarter of Ivory Coast’s cocoa production was in protected areas and forest reserves, the Trase study found. This left the EU exposed to 838,000 hectares of deforestation from Ivorian cocoa. Commodity trader Cargill leads the pack, according to Trase, with its 2019 exports exposed to 183,000 hectares of deforestation.
Over the last decade companies have proposed corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that aim to tackle both ills. For instance, Mondelez, the maker of Cadbury and Toblerone, recently committed $600 million to tackle deforestation and forced labor in cocoa-producing countries, bringing its total funding for environmental and social issues to $1 billion since 2010.
These sums are, however, puny by comparison with the profits earned by those firms, said Fountain. Mondelez returned $2.5 billion to investors in the first half of 2022.
Mondelez is “excited” about its investments, the firm said in a statement. But it is calling for more sector-wide actions and rethinking its incentive model. Cargill did not respond to a request for comment.
Social responsibility
The big numbers that companies cite about their CSR programs’ reach often boil down to one-off training sessions on productivity for farmers, Uwe Gneiting, senior researcher at Oxfam, told POLITICO. This was the case for 98 percent of the 400 farmers interviewed for research recently carried out by Gneiting and others from the charity into the impact of sustainability programs over the last decade in Ghana on farmers’ incomes.
The research finds that CSR initiatives, which companies use to tout their sustainability credentials to European consumers, have not meaningfully increased farmers’ productivity or profits, pointed out Gneiting. In fact, farmers end up shouldering the associated costs, because companies offer the training but do not pay for extra labor or the fertilizer that farmers need to put it into action.
Instead, Ghanian and Ivorian farmers have been hammered by the soaring cost of production and of living over the last three years, finds the new Oxfam research. Fertilizer costs have increased by more than 200 percent, said Gneiting, along with labor and transportation costs. That in turn has contributed to a decline in yields that have also been hurt by climate change, with weather patterns becoming increasingly unpredictable.
All of this has meant incomes have declined close to 20 percent since 2019, said Gneiting, which for farmers already living on the poverty line is “existential.” The decline would have been much worse, he added, if it hadn’t been for the Living Income Differential. Nonetheless, 90 percent of the farmers interviewed say they are worse off than three years ago.
Over the same period, as cocoa prices have fallen, companies have made “windfall gains,” said Isaac Gyamfi, director of Solidaridad West Africa. “The raw material became cheaper for them. But the price of chocolate didn’t change.”
Can Brussels sort it out?
To what extent the new due diligence directive will make a difference depends on the final text that was put to a meeting of EU trade ministers on Friday.
When the European Commission first came up with the draft it was seen as a game changer, but subsequent wrangling over the regulation’s scope has raised doubts. Last week, ambassadors from France, Spain, Italy and some smaller countries voted down the text in the European Council, seeing the value chain and civil liability provisions as too wide and too ambitious.
Two-thirds of Ivorian cocoa is exported to the EU and the U.K. | Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images
A European diplomat told POLITICO that France supported the proposed directive “very strongly,” and its view that it was important to concentrate on the “upstream” part of the supply chain was shared by a majority of EU member countries.
NGOs take the view that, while it’s positive that the EU is proposing broad legislation, there is a risk that it ends up replicating the mistakes that undermined the voluntary initiatives. One of these is the potential limitation of the companies’ due diligence obligations to “established business relations.”
“What you’re going to get is a whole bunch of companies that are going to try to have as few established business relations as possible, which just makes supplying commodities more precarious, rather than less,” said Fountain.
Analysis from Trase finds that 55 percent of Ivorian cocoa, two-thirds of which is exported to the EU and the U.K., comes from untraceable sources. NGOs working on cocoa and on other sectors due to be impacted by the new directive are calling for it to be applied to business relationships based on their risk rather than their duration.
The civil liability mechanism, which should guarantee compensation for people whose rights have been violated, has also come under scrutiny. The latest compromise proposal debated in the Council, seen by POLITICO, reduces the risk of companies getting sued by stipulating that a company can only be held liable if it “intentionally or negligently” failed to comply with a due diligence obligation aimed to protect a “natural or legal person” — not a forest, for instance — and subsequently caused damage to that person’s “legal interest protected under national law.” But, it states, a company cannot be held liable “if the damage was caused only by its business partners in its chain of activities.”
Earlier this year, the EU, Ivory Coast and Ghana and the cocoa sector all committed to a roadmap to make cocoa more sustainable, which, they agreed, includes improving farmers’ incomes. Yet it remains unclear whether this will be mentioned in the final draft of the due diligence directive.
“Sustainability cannot exist without a living income,” said Heidi Hautala, Green MEP and chair of the European Parliament’s Responsible Business Conduct Working Group. Hautala, who is among those pushing for the reference to a living income to be included in the final text, added that responsible purchasing practices are “a prerequisite for respect of human rights, environment and climate.”
Living income “needs to be a part of it because otherwise you’re in trouble,” agreed Fountain.
“If you don’t look at what does a farmer need in order to comply, if you don’t make sure that a farmer actually has the right set of income, then all you’re doing is pushing the responsibility for being sustainable back to the farmer. And this is what we’ve done for the last two decades.”
A lobby group backed by Elon Musk and associated with a controversial ideology popular among tech billionaires is fighting to prevent killer robots from terminating humanity, and it’s taken hold of Europe’s Artificial Intelligence Act to do so.
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) has over the past year made itself a force of influence on some of the AI Act’s most contentious elements. Despite the group’s links to Silicon Valley, Big Tech giants like Google and Microsoft have found themselves on the losing side of FLI’s arguments.
In the EU bubble, the arrival of a group whose actions are colored by fear of AI-triggered catastrophe rather than run-of-the-mill consumer protection concerns was received like a spaceship alighting in the Schuman roundabout. Some worry that the institute embodies a techbro-ish anxiety about low-probability threats that could divert attention from more immediate problems. But most agree that during its time in Brussels, the FLI has been effective.
“They’re rather pragmatic and they have legal and technical expertise,” said Kai Zenner, a digital policy adviser to center-right MEP Axel Voss, who works on the AI Act. “They’re sometimes a bit too worried about technology, but they raise a lot of good points.”
Launched in 2014 by MIT academic Max Tegmark and backed by tech grandees including Musk, Skype’s Jaan Tallinn, and crypto wunderkind Vitalik Buterin, FLI is a nonprofit devoted to grappling with “existential risks” — events able to wipe out or doom humankind. It counts other hot shots like actors Morgan Freeman and Alan Alda and renowned scientists Martin (Lord) Rees and Nick Bostrom among its external advisers.
Chief among those menaces — and FLI’s priorities — is artificial intelligence running amok.
“We’ve seen plane crashes because an autopilot couldn’t be overruled. We’ve seen a storming of the U.S. Capitol because an algorithm was trained to maximize engagement. These are AI safety failures today — as these systems become more powerful, harms might become worse,” Mark Brakel, FLI director of European policy, said in an interview.
But the lobby group faces two PR problems. First, Musk, its most famous backer, is at the center of a storm since he started mass firings at Twitter as its new owner, catching the eye of regulators, too. Musk’s controversies could cause lawmakers to get skittish about talking to FLI. Second, the group’s connections to a set of beliefs known as effective altruism are raising eyebrows: The ideology faces a reckoning and is most recently being blamed as a driving force behind the scandal around cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has unleashed financial carnage.
How FLI pierced the bubble
The arrival of a lobby group fighting off extinction, misaligned artificial intelligence and killer robots was bound to be refreshing to otherwise snoozy Brussels policymaking.
FLI’s Brussels office opened in mid-2021, as discussions about the European Commission’s AI Act proposal were kicking off.
“We would prefer AI to be developed in Europe, where there will be regulations in place,” Brakel said. “The hope is that people take inspiration from the EU.”
A former diplomat, the Dutch-born Brakel joined the institute in May 2021. He chose to work in AI policy as a field that was both impactful and underserved. Policy researcher Risto Uuk joined him two months later. A skilled digital operator — he publishes his analyses and newsletter from the domain artificialintelligenceact.eu — Uuk had previously done AI research for the Commission and the World Economic Forum. He joined FLI out of philosophical affinity: like Tegmark, Uuk subscribes to the tenets of effective altruism, a value system prescribing the use of hard evidence to decide how to benefit the largest number of people.
Since starting in Brussels, the institute’s three-person team (with help from Tegmark and others, including law firm Dentons) has deftly spearheaded lobbying efforts on little-known AI issues.
Elon Musk is one of the Future of Life Institute’s most prominent backers | Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images
Exhibit A: general-purpose AI — software like speech-recognition or image-generating tools used in a vast array of contexts and sometimes affected by biases and dangerous inaccuracies (for instance, in medical settings). General-purpose AI was not mentioned in the Commission’s proposal, but wended its way into the EU Council’s final text and is guaranteed to feature in Parliament’s position.
“We came out and said, ‘There’s this new class of AI — general-purpose AI systems — and the AI Act doesn’t consider them whatsoever. You should worry about this,'” Brakel said. “This was not on anyone’s radar. Now it is.”
The group is also playing on European fears of technological domination by the U.S. and China. “General-purpose AI systems are built mainly in the U.S. and China, and that could harm innovation in Europe, if you don’t ensure they abide by some requirements,” Brakel said, adding this argument resonated with center-right lawmakers with whom he recently met.
Another of FLI’s hobbyhorses is outlawing AI able to manipulate people’s behavior. The original proposal bans manipulative AI, but that is limited to “subliminal” techniques — which Brakel thinks would create loopholes.
But the AI Act’s co-rapporteur, Romanian Renew lawmaker Dragoș Tudorache, is now pushing to make the ban more comprehensive. “If that amendment goes through, we would be a lot happier than we are with the current text,” Brakel said.
So smart it made crypto crash
While the group’s input on key provisions in the AI bill was welcomed, many in Brussels’ establishment look askance at its worldview.
Tegmark and other FLI backers adhere to what’s referred to as effective altruism (or EA). A strand of utilitarianism codified by philosopher William MacAskill — whose work Musk called “a close match for my philosophy” — EA dictates that one should better the lives of as many people as possible, using a rationalist fact-based approach. At a basic level, that means donating big chunks of one’s income to competent charities. A more radical, long-termist strand of effective altruism demands that one strive to minimize risks able to kill off a lot of people — and especially future people, who will greatly outnumber existing ones. That means that preventing the potential rise of an AI whose values clash with humankind’s well-being should be at the top of one’s list of concerns.
A critical take on FLI is that it is furthering thisinterpretation of the so-called effective altruism agenda, one supposedly uninterested in the world’s current ills — such as racism, sexism and hunger — and focused on sci-fi threats to yet-to-be-born folks. Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher whose acrimonious exit from Google made headlines in 2020, has lambasted FLI on Twitter, voicing “huge concerns” about it.
“They are backed by billionaires including Elon Musk — that already should make people suspicious,” Gebru said in an interview. “The entire field around AI safety is made up of so many ‘institutes’ and companies billionaires pump money into. But their concept of AI safety has nothing to do with current harms towards marginalized groups — they want to reorient the entire conversation into preventing this AI apocalypse.”
Effective altruism’s reputation has taken a hit in recent weeks after the fall of FTX, a bankrupt exchange that lost at least $1 billion in customers’ cryptocurrency assets. Its disgraced CEO Sam Bankman-Fried used to be one of EA’s darlings, talking in interviews about his plan to make bazillions and give them to charity. As FTX crumbled, commentators argued that Effective Altruism ideology led Bankman-Fried to cut corners and rationalize his recklessness.
Both MacAskill and FLI donor Buterin defended EA on Twitter, saying that Bankman-Fried’s actions contrasted with the philosophy’s tenets. “Automatically downgrading every single thing SBF believed in is an error,” wrote Buterin, who invented the Ethereum blockchain, and bankrolls FLI’s scholarship for AI existential risk research.
Brakel said that the FLI and EA were two distinct things, and FLI’s advocacy was focused on present problems, from biased software to autonomous weapons, e.g. at the United Nations level. “Do we spend a lot of time thinking about what the world would look like in 400 years? No,” he said. (Neither Brakel nor the FLI’s EU representative, Claudia Prettner, call themselves effective altruists.)
Californian ideology
Another critique of FLI’s efforts to stave off evil AI argues that they obscure a techno-utopian drive to develop benevolent human-level AI. At a 2017 conference, FLI advisers — including Musk, Tegmark and Skype’s Tallinn — debated the likelihood and the desirability of smarter-than-human AI. Most panelists deemed “superintelligence” bound to happen; half of them deemed it desirable. The conference’s output was a series of (fairly moderate) guidelines on developing beneficial AI, which Brakel cited as one of FLI’s foundational documents.
That techno-optimism led Emile P. Torres, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy who used to collaborate with FLI, to ultimately turn against the organization. “None of them seem to consider that maybe we should explore some kind of moratorium,” Torres said. Raising such points with an FLI staffer, Torres said, led to a sort of excommunication. (Torres’s articles have been taken down from FLI’s website.)
Within Brussels, the worry is that going ahead, FLI might change course from its current down-to-earth incarnation and steer the AI debate toward far-flung scenarios. “When discussing AI at the EU level, we wanted to draw a clear distinction between boring and concrete AI systems and sci-fi questions,” said Daniel Leufer, a lobbyist with digital rights NGO Access Now. “When earlier EU discussions on AI regulation happened, there were no organizations in Brussels placing focus on topics like superintelligence — it’s good that the debate didn’t go in that direction.”
Those who regard the FLI as the spawn of Californian futurism point to its board and its wallet. Besides Musk, Tallinn and Tegmark, donors and advisers include researchers from Google and OpenAI, Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (which in turn has received funding from FTX) and actor Morgan Freeman.
In 2020 most of FLI’s global funding ($276,000 out of $482,479) came from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a charity favored by tech bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg; 2021 accounts haven’t been released yet.
Brakel denied that the FLI is cozy with Silicon Valley, saying that the organization’s work on general-purpose AI made life harder for tech companies. Brakel said he had never spoken to Musk. Tegmark, meanwhile, is in regular touch with the members of the scientific advisory board, which includes Musk.
In Brakel’s opinion, what the FLI is doing is akin to early-day climate activism. “We currently see the warmest October ever. We worry about it today, but we also worry about the impact in 80 years’ time,” he said last month. “[There] are AI safety failures today — and as these systems become more powerful, the harms might become worse.”
Delegates landing in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh for U.N. climate talks this week are a global elite bent on tearing down national borders, stripping away individual freedoms and condemning working people to a life of poverty.
That dark view is held by a range of far-right or populist parties — among them Donald Trump’s Republicans, who are seeking to retake control in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections. Some of these radicals are rampaging through elections in Europe while others, such as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro last week, have been defeated only narrowly.
Republican and Trump acolyte Lauren Boebert derides the environmentalist agenda as “America last;” Britain’s Brexit-backing Home Secretary Suella Braverman says the country is in thrall to a “tofu-eating wokerati;” and in Spain, senior figures in the far-right Vox party dismiss the U.N.’s climate agenda as “cultural Marxism.”
Right-wingers of various strains around the world have co-opted climate change into their culture war. The fact this is happening in countries that produce a large share of global greenhouse gas emissions has alarmed some green advocates.
“Reactionary populism is now the biggest obstacle to tackling climate change,” wrote three climate leaders, including Brazil’s former Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira, in a recent commentary.
In the U.S., Republicans are eyeing a return to power in one or both houses of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Many at the COP27 talks will be reliving the first week of the U.N. climate conference in Morocco six years ago when Trump’s election struck the climate movement like a hurricane.
A Republican surge would gnaw at the fragile confidence that has built around global climate efforts since President Joe Biden’s election, raising the specter of a second Trump term and perhaps the withdrawal — again — of the U.S. from the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal.
“I don’t want to think about that,” said Teixeira’s co-author Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat who led the design of the Paris Agreement and who now leads the European Climate Foundation.
Some on the American right are pushing a more conciliatory message than others. “Republicans have solutions to reduce world emissions while providing affordable, reliable, and clean energy to our allies across the globe,” said Utah Congressman John Curtis, who will lead a delegation from his party to COP27.
Tubiana and others in the environmental movement are trying to put on a brave face. They argue Republicans won’t want to tamper too much with Biden’s behemoth Inflation Reduction Act, which contains measures to promote clean energy.
“You might see railing against it, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of political talk and rhetoric, but I don’t expect that would be a focus for the Republicans,” said Nat Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a green NGO based in Arlington, Virginia. Nevertheless, if Republicans take both houses, “we certainly won’t make any progress,” Keohane said.
Trump’s first term and the presidency of Brazil’s Bolsonaro — which ended in a narrow defeat in last month’s election — now look like the opening skirmishes in a struggle in which the planet’s stability is at stake.
In parts of Europe, the right present their policies as sympathetic to the risks of climate change while dismissing internationally sanctioned action as sinister elitism that threatens their voters’ prosperity.
“The Sweden Democrats are not climate deniers, whatever that means,” Swedish far-right leader Jimmie Åkesson told a crowd days before a September election that saw his party win big. But Sweden’s current climate plans, Åkesson said, were “100 percent symbolic” rather than meaningful. “All that leads to is that we get poorer, that our lives get worse.”
This is the gibbet on which the far right are hanging environmentalism: depicting them as the witting or unwitting cavalry of global elites.
“We consider it to be a globalist movement that intends to end all borders, intends to end our freedom, intends to end our freedom for our identities,” Javier Cortés, president of the Seville chapter of Spain’s far-right Vox party, said in an interview with POLITICO. “We are not in favor of CO2 emissions. On the contrary, we want to respect the environment. All we are saying is that the European Union has to clarify that it wants to sell us a climate religion in which we cannot emit CO2, while we make our industries disappear from Europe and we need to buy from China.”
To describe this as climate denial — a common but often inaccurate charge — would be to miss the point that this is now just another front in the culture wars.
Online disinformation about the last U.N. climate talks was largely focused on the hypocrisy and elitism of those attending, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). The main spreaders weren’t websites and figures traditionally associated with climate denial, but culture war celebrities such as psychologist Jordan Peterson, Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
Populist attacks on globalism “rely on a well-funded transnational network,” said Tubiana. “It warrants serious scrutiny.”
But while economic interests may be powering parts of the movement, there is also a sense of political opportunism at work. Huge changes to the economy will be needed to lower emissions at the speed dictated by U.N.-brokered global climate goals. There will be winners and losers — and the losers may gravitate toward populists pledging to take up their cause.
“Far-right organizations are recognizing this as a potentially lucrative topic that they can win votes or support on,” said Balsa Lubarda, head of the ideology research unit at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.
Loving the losers
The far right’s focus on the losers has been “turbo charged” by the energy crisis, said Jennie King, head of civic action and education at ISD, which populists have wrongly argued is the fault of green policy. The European Parliament’s coalition of far-right parties has grown and capitalized on the energy crisis by joining with center-right parties to vote down environmental legislation.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson — newly elected with Åkesson’s support — aims to dilute the country’s ambitions for cutting some greenhouse gas emissions, a move center-right Liberal Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari justified in familiar terms: “That is a reaction to the reality people are facing.” And in Britain, Brexit leader Nigel Farage retooled his campaign to become an anti-net zero mouthpiece.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says she wants to reclaim environmentalism for the right | Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
Strains of right-wing ecology may also mean that not all groups are actively hostile to the climate agenda, said Lubarda. Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a huge fan of the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, which center on the Shire, an idealized bucolic homeland. Meloni says she wants to reclaim environmentalism for the right, but the protection of national economic interests still comes first.
“There is no more convinced ecologist than a conservative, but what distinguishes us from a certain ideological environmentalism is that we want to defend nature with man inside,” she said in her inaugural speech to parliament last month.
While Meloni has announced that she will attend COP27, she has also renamed the Ministry for the Ecological Transition the Ministry for Environment and Energy Security. The governing program of her Brothers of Italy party includes a section on climate change, but it strongly emphasizes the need to protect industry.
It’s this broad sense of demotion and delay that alarms those who are watching these ideas grow in stature among populists on the right. They say that while it may not sound like climate denial, the result is effectively the same.
“You can say that you are climate friends,” said Belgian Socialist MEP Marie Arena. “But in the act, you are not at all. You are business friends first.”
Jacopo Barragazzi, Charlie Duxbury and Zack Colman contributed to this report.
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Europe is waking up to a troubling reality: It may soon lose its NATO benefactor in Ukraine.
With conservatives poised to make gains in the upcoming U.S. elections, NATO’s most generous donor to Ukraine’s war effort may suddenly seem much more parsimonious in 2023.
The possibility has put the spotlight on the gap between American and European aid.
Already, it’s been a tough sell to get all of Europe’s NATO members to dedicate 2 percent of their economic output to defense spending. Now, they are under increasing pressure from the U.S. to go even further than that. And that comes amid an already tough conversation across Europe about how to refill its own dwindling military stockpiles while simultaneously funding Ukraine’s rebuild.
Still, the mantra among U.S. Republicans — whom polls show are favored to take control of one of two chambers of Congress after the November elections — has been that Europe needs to step up.
“Our allies,” said Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “need to start addressing the problem in their own backyard before they ask us for any more involvement.”
While European governments have opened their wallets and military stockpiles to Ukraine at record levels, Washington’s military assistance to Kyiv still dwarfs Europe’s efforts. It’s a disparity Republicans are keen to highlight as they argue Russia’s war in Ukraine is a much greater threat to Europe than it is to the U.S.
The result could be a changing tenor out of Washington if Congress falls into conservative control.
“It’s horrible what the Russians are doing,” Burchett added, but said he sees China and drug cartels as “more threatening to the United States of America than what’s going on in Ukraine.”
2 percent becomes the baseline
Since Moscow launched its assault on Ukraine, European capitals have pledged over €200 billion in new defense spending.
NATO allies pledged in 2014 to aim to move towards spending 2 percent of GDP on defense within a decade, and an increasing number of governments are taking this promise seriously. But the Biden administration wants them to go even further.
The 2 percent benchmark is just “what we would expect” from allies, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said earlier this month. “We would encourage countries to go above that 2 percent because we’re gonna have to invest more in expanding industrial bases and making sure that we’re doing the right things to replace” some of what was provided to Ukraine.
“As we step up our own sizable contributions to NATO capabilities and readiness,” the document says, “we will count on our Allies to continue assuming greater responsibility by increasing their spending, capabilities, and contributions.”
It’s an aspiration that will be hard for many European policymakers, who themselves face economic woes at home. The U.K., for instance, has committed to hitting a 3 percent defense spending target but recently acknowledged the “shape” of its increase could change as recent policy changes roil the economy.
The Biden administration has taken a path of friendly encouragement toward Europe, rather than haranguing its partners.
But Republicans are not as keen to take such a convivial tone. And if they take control of Congress, Republicans will have more of a say over the U.S. pursestrings — and the tone emerging from Washington.
“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy told Punchbowl news earlier this week.
“There’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically,” he added. “Not doing the border and people begin to weigh that. Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do and it can’t be a blank check.”
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said earlier this month that the benchmark of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense is what is expected from allies | Omar Havana/Getty Images
Republicans are likely eyeing the polls, which show a slim but growing chunk of Americans saying the U.S. is providing too much support to Ukraine. The figure has risen from 7 percent in March to 20 percent in September, according to a Pew Research Center poll. And it now stands at 32 percent among Republican-leaning voters.
So while President Joe Biden continues to ask Congress to approve more Ukraine aid packages, observers say there could be more skepticism in the coming months.
“It’s becoming harder because the sense is that we’re doing it all and the Europeans aren’t,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
And while noting that “in some ways, that’s unfair” due to the economic cost of the war to Europe, he said that on the military side aid for Ukraine and spending on defense industrial capacity is now “the new 2 percent.”
In European capitals, policymakers are watching Washington closely.
“For Europeans, the idea that U.S. politics matters — that what happens in the midterm election will have implications for what will be expected of us from [our] U.S. ally — is something that is taken more and more seriously,” said Martin Quencez, a research fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Paris office.
The Brussels view
But back in Brussels, some officials insist there’s little reason for worry.
“There is broad, bipartisan support for Ukraine,” said David McAllister, chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
Indeed, while the more Donald Trump-friendly wing of the Republican Party is opposed to continuing aid to Ukraine, more traditional Republicans have actually supported Biden’s aid for Kyiv.
“If there was a Republican majority in congressional committees, I expect an impact on debates about which weapons to supply to Ukraine, for example,” McAllister said in an email. “Ultimately, though, the president maintains considerable control over foreign policy.”
McAllister, a member of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, said Europe is already increasing its defensive investments and aid to Kyiv, pointing to an EU initiative to train Ukrainian soldiers and a recent bump up for an EU fund that reimburses countries for military supplies sent to Ukraine.
Polish MEP Witold Waszczykowski, the Foreign Affairs Committee’s vice chair, also said in an email that he doesn’t expect a Republican-dominated Congress to shift Ukraine policy — while urging Washington to put more pressure on Europe.
“Poland and other Eastern flank countries cannot persuade Europeans enough to support Ukraine,” said Waszczykowski, a member of the conservative ruling Law and Justice party.
The “smell of appeasement and expectations to come back to business as usual with Russia,” the Polish politician said, “dominates in European capitals and European institutions.”
