The European Council on Foreign Relations

ECFR this week: 8th February

Date: 8th February 2013  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: ECFR this week ,

This week we followed up the publication of our European Foreign Policy Scorecard with the first of a series of events across Europe examining the implications of our findings.

The event at ECFR’s London office featured Gideon Rachman, Spyros Economides, Heather Grabbe, and Scorecard 2013 author Susi Dennison, and focused on Britain and European foreign policy. Heather suggested that uncertainty over the future of Britain meant that its interests were already starting to be discounted in Brussels while Gideon Rachman argued that Britain's foreign policy could also thrive outside the EU. You can listen to the entire event on our website.

• Here’s a podcast featuring some of Heather’s contribution
• There is more about the complicated relationship between the UK and the rest of the EU on our 'Europe at the crossroads' website.
• And here’s the latest Scorecard video – a

Read more…

ECFR this week: 1st February

Date: 1st February 2013  |  Author: Andreas Mullerleile,

Categories: ECFR this week ,

This week we published the third edition of our European Foreign Policy Scorecard - a comprehensive evaluation of European foreign policy. The ECFR Scorecard analyses Europe’s successes and failures in 79 foreign policy issues -  and it looks at the performance of individual EU member states: On what issues and in which regions did Europe succeed in projecting power? Which countries were the foreign policy leaders, which were the slackers that held back the rest? And what was the impact of the euro crisis on Europe’s global influence?

Click here to visit our dedicated Scorecard website where you can also find a range of videos and podcasts exploring the findings of the Scorecard. You can also download the ECFR Scorecard as a PDF - or as an ebook for your Kindle or other e-readers. Feel free to send us feedback or tweet your comments using the #ECFRscorecard hashtag.

Elsewhere:

Read more…

ECFR this week: 25th January

Date: 25th January 2013  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: ECFR this week ,

The big news in Europe this week was David Cameron’s speech on the UK and the European Union. Reactions to the speech varied wildly across the continent, and our own analysis reflected this.

• Mark Leonard reflected that it was a miscalculation that misunderstood how Europe had changed and how much Britain needed Europe if it was to retain an influential global voice.

• From Madrid, Jose Ignacio Torreblanca argued that Mr Cameron had put himself into a very difficult corner with his speech.

• From here in London, I suggested that there were three important messages that the rest of Europe had to read into the speech, and that it wasn’t all bad for Europe. 

Our Middle East/North Africa programme had a busy week with the Israeli elections and the ongoing situation in Mali and Algeria:

• Here’s an audio podcast with Daniel Levy and Ron Pundak digesting the results

5 commentsRead more…

ECFR this week: 18th January

Date: 18th January 2013  |  Author: Andreas Mullerleile,

Categories: ECFR this week ,

This week we published “The new political geography of Europe” - a major essay collection that examines the impact of the eurocrisis on 14 EU member states. It shows how the reshuffling of Europe’s political geography is happening across four dimensions: Established elites are under extreme pressure, the division between core and periphery is growing, the core is fracturing and there seems to be no shared vision how to reinvent the European project.

We also recorded a podcast and a video with Nicholas Walton who explains the main findings of the report. You can download "The new political geography of Europe” as a pdf or as an ebook for you e-reader (epub) or kindle (mobi).

Events in Mali and Algeria have dominated his week’s foreign policy agenda. François Godement argues that the Mali conflict has caught the EU asleep at the wheel. However, with support from across the Union

Read more…

ECFR this week: 11th January 2013

Date: 11th January 2013  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: China, ECFR this week , Euro Crisis, Europe and the world, Madrid view, Middle East and North Africa, Scorecard, Wider Europe, Sofia view, Reinventing Europe,

As many of you have read (and tweeted about), our year kicked off with our predictions for the future in“Ten Trends for 2013.” Will the British debate about Europe become less toxic? How much is the single market being threatened by the euro crisis? Are small states the key to European foreign policy? Have a read and make your own mind up. 

Mark Leonard also wrote his latest column on issues discussed in “Ten Trends” – “In 2013, the great global unravelling.”

This last week we took a look at one of the key questions of European foreign policy – do sanctions work? We published a policy memo from Konstanty Gebert – “Shooting in the dark? EU sanctions policies” – that argues that if we don’t develop a better way of tracking the effectiveness of sanctions, then this key tool of European foreign policy is no more effective than shooting a gun in the dark. 

Elsewhere:

3 commentsRead more…