The European Council on Foreign Relations

ECFR this week: 30th March 2012

Date: 30th March 2012  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: ECFR this week ,

As the people of Burma ready themselves for a historic election on 1st April, which will probably see Aung San Suu Kyi elected to parliament, we published a timely policy memo explaining how the EU can ensure that Burma’s reforms are more than skin deep. In ‘How the EU can support reform in Burma’, Jonas Parello-Plesner cautions against raising sanctions too quickly. Instead, he argues that Europe should tie the raising of sanctions to real signs of progress, use development aid to consolidate reforms, and create an environment for foreign businesses to invest in Burma in a sustainable and considerate way.

This last week also saw the second in our series of papers examining national debates over Europe, as part of our ‘Reinventing Europe’ project. Petr Drulak looks at the case of the Czech Republic, and argues that its truculence on EU issues is a logical response to its

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The Scorecard tour: Brussels

Date: 29th March 2012  |  Author: Andreas Mullerleile,

Categories: Scorecard,

This is the last blog post from our Scorecard tour 2012. This week we went to Brussels for an event held at the Permanent Representation of Poland to the EU.

A difficult first year for the EEAS?  

The first rule about Brussels is: talk about institutions. And the year 2011 was quite exciting for the connoisseurs of institutional development as it was the first year of the long awaited and much anticipated EEAS. But the second rule about Brussels is: It is all about cumbersome, slow-moving long term projects. So it was not surprising to hear that the EEAS is still in the first phase of its consolidation and that it may take years until it finds its ‘foreign policy niche’ and creates real added value. Somewhat ironically, the establishment of the EEAS coincides with what the authors of the ECFR Scorecard call the ‘re-nationalisation of foreign policy’. “The EEAS can only become a

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How the world views Europe: Atila Eralp on Turkey

Date: 29th March 2012  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: Euro Crisis, Europe and the world, Wider Europe, Reinventing Europe,

As part of our 'Reinvention of Europe' project, ECFR co-organised* a conference in Prague to examine how Europe is seen by other important global powers. Six eminent academics and thinkers gave their thoughts from the viewpoint of China, Turkey, India, Brazil, Japan and Russia. I recorded interviews with all six, which are being published as podcasts, and also gathering up the abstracts of the papers that each one presented in this short series of blog posts.

This third post is from Atila Eralp of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Here is a short audio interview, and here's an outline of his thoughts:

Is the issue of cooperation and integration with Europe turned now a preference for an instrumental partnership, rather than a normative goal or a strategic vision shared by Turkish policy-makers, civil society and the public?

An answer to this question is

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The Scorecard tour: Madrid

Date: 28th March 2012  |  Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: Scorecard,

I'm just on my way back from Madrid – the final stop on my Scorecard tour. We held a discussion with officials and think tanks at our new Madrid office just opposite the Prado, followed by a public event at the European Commission office, which included former NATO secretary general and High Representative for European Foreign Policy Javier Solana (a member of ECFR's  board), Jordi Vaquer of the Barcelona-based foreign-policy think tank CIDOB and El País columnist (and Scorecard Steering Group member) Lluís Bassets. If you read Spanish, you can read an account of the event by an El País reporter.

2011 was not a great year for Spanish foreign policy. Like Italy, Spain was inevitably focused above all on the euro crisis. José Ignacio Torreblanca, the head of ECFR´s Madrid office, wrote just before the general election last November elections that Spain's "dire economic situation" had

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How the world views Europe: Rajendra K Jain on India

Date: 27th March 2012  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: Euro Crisis, Europe and the world, Reinventing Europe,

As part of our 'Reinvention of Europe' project, ECFR co-organised* a conference in Prague to examine how Europe is seen by other important global powers. Six eminent academics and thinkers gave their thoughts from the viewpoint of China, Turkey, India, Brazil, Japan and Russia. I recorded interviews with all six, which are being published as podcasts, and also gathering up the abstracts of the papers that each one presented in this short series of blog posts.

This second post looks at the Europe from the point of view of India, with Rajendra K Jain of Jawaharlal University in New Delhi. Here is an outline of his thoughts:

With the end of the Cold War, Europe’s importance in India’s foreign policy calculus increased enormously as the West was deemed vital as a market, and for foreign direct investment, advanced technology as well as defence equipment and civil nuclear

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