The European Council on Foreign Relations

ECFR this week: 29th June 2012

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

Categories: ECFR this week ,
Tags: euco, euro crisis, human rights, spain, syria

Ahead of the EU summit that is occupying the continent’s leaders as we speak, ECFR published a preview looking at what some of the countries in the Union wanted to get out of the meeting, and what they feared. ‘The EU summit: the view from the capitals’ included contributions from Germany (Ulrike Guerot), Spain (Jose Ignacio Torreblanca), Italy (Marco de Andreis), Poland, (Konstanty Gebert) and France (Francois Godement). We also distributed this as a press advisory to our journalist contacts and will do something similar whenever there is a big event or issue to look at from a pan-European perspective (journalists can sign up here for our press releases).

This week also saw the publication of a short paper by Jose Ignacio Torreblanca and Jose M. de Areilza, examining the euro crisis from the Spanish perspective. The paper is part of ECFR’s ‘Reinvention of Europe’ project, and complements our series of papers on how the euro crisis is affecting individual countries – we’ve already looked at Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, with several others in the pipeline.

Elsewhere:

• Ulrike Guerot wrote ‘Hurray, the banking union is coming!’, looking at what might be achieved at the EU summit.
• Jose Ignacio also wrote about the euro crisis in a ‘Madrid view’ blog post, portraying it as a three-way game between firefighters, architects and pyromaniacs.
• Dick Oosting wrote about the recent spate of ‘German bashing’ in ‘Europe’s chicken run’.
• Our Madrid office produced two Spanish language podcasts (part 1 and part 2) on the future of EU foreign policy, with Ana Palacio, Lluis Bassets, Cristina Manzano and Ignacio Molina.
• Will Turkey go to war against Syria in the wake of the shooting down of a Turkish jet over Syrian airspace? Dimitar Bechev offers his analysis in this blog post.
• Dimitar also wrote about Montenegro’s steps towards EU membership, ahead of a paper that he is writing on EU enlargement in the Western Balkans in this time of crisis.
• Anthony Dworkin examined the EU’s new human rights strategy and weighed up its possible impact in an op-ed.
• The latest ‘China Analysis’ was also published this week, looking at issues of security and Beijing’s system of managing growing tensions within Chinese society.
• Finally, here are the thoughts of Jonas Parello-Plesner about whether Europe should fear ‘the Pacific century’.