Moved by the conviction that any serious reflection on the future of European security should take into consideration Russia's contribution to it, the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) of Rome organized a Transatlantic Symposium on US-Europe-Russia security relations.
After a period of severe turbulences, the United States, Europe, and Russia seem willing to start out on a new course. 'Pushing the reset button', as suggested by US Vice President Joe Biden, is an alluring formula, but it is no guide for action. A new US and European arrangement with Russia is more likely to endure if all parties learn from the troubled experience of the last few years.
By its judgment of 30 June 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court cleared the way for the German ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. The reasoning of the Court, however, contains fundamental holdings on the current legal character of the European Union and on constitutional limitations concerning its possible development.
Topic:
Regional Cooperation, Treaties and Agreements, and Law
Italy is a medium-sized power that is heavily exposed to security risks from both the Mediterranean basin/Middle East and the Balkans. Making its territory particularly permeable to them is the deeply rooted presence of criminal organisations.
Controlling maritime borders and flows of illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean is an issue where sharp tensions have been evident for some months now at the national, EU and international levels. Tensions evidenced by the reactions and outcry provoked by operations involving Italian naval units which have intercepted boats carrying migrants and sent them back to their ports of departure, most notably in Libya. The migrants concerned were deemed to be illegal regardless of their possible asylum-seeker status. Such interventions have raised, and continue to raise, concerns over the fate of the persons involved, especially as regards the protection of their fundamental human rights.
Topic:
Maritime Commerce, Immigration, and Law Enforcement
On 7 May 2009 in Prague the European Union inaugurated its Eastern Partnership (EaP). The initiative is based on a Polish-Swedish proposal of May 2008, which was held in standby until 2009. It took a full-blown war for the EU to pull this proposal out of the closet, as the August 2008 Georgian-Russian conflict and the ensuing Russian recognition of independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia posed new challenges to European foreign policy.
The process of European integration has traditionally advanced through two distinct, although strictly interlinked processes: a) in institutional terms, either through a reform of the Treaties (formal deepening) or through pragmatic ways and ad hoc mechanisms (informal deepening), intended to consolidate and enhance integration among its members; b) via enlargement (widening), through the accession of new members into the EU and their integration of the policies and institutions of the Union. The impact of these two processes is not uniform and may actually greatly vary, according to the policy area that we consider. The aim of this report– that summarises the research work carried out within the framework of EU-Consent project, and notably within work package VII “Political and security aspects of the EU' external relations” - is to study the interplay between deepening and widening in the specific area of European foreign and security policy ( including both CFSP and ESDP) and more specifically the impact of widening on this area.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, and Regional Cooperation
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War struck the UN, as it struck the governments of its member states, like a bolt from the blue. It had not been predicted, nor anticipated; and no thought had been given to its possible consequences for the UN, which had been, since its establishment forty-five years before, a victim of the frozen certainties of bi-polar international diplomacy. There had been no consideration of what the post-Cold War world would look like and of what role the UN might be expected to play in it. It truly was a watershed moment, and therefore a sensible one to take as the start of any analysis of the Security Council in the twenty year period that has since followed.
Topic:
International Relations, Cold War, Diplomacy, and United Nations
Even if the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) seems for many observers a well-established field of activity of the European Union, it must not be overlooked that it is still a young and on many aspects quite unpractised endeavour of the EU. Only in 2003 – after a four-year period of institution building, strategic considerations and civil/military capability development – ESDP became officially operational, and started in Bosnia and Herzegovina its first field mission.
2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), formally launched at the Cologne European Council of June 1999 as an integral part of the European Union's (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Since then, political, civilian and military structures have been set up, capabilities development goals identified and we have witnessed a continuous evolution of the ESDP epitomised by the significant number of crisis management operations carried out by the EU since 2003. In these last ten years, the ESDP has become one of the most important instruments of European foreign policy. Indeed, the EU, thanks also to the launch of 23 missions in four continents, has built up its credibility as a global security actor.