Research

India joins the west

Mark Leonard
01 November 2005
Prospect
Last month saw a small geopolitical revolution: India backed the west against Iran.
One of the most significant geopolitical events of the decade has gone almost unnoticed in the west: at September's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, India joined the US and the EU in backing a resolution condemning...

The real crisis for Europe

10 October 2005
Newsweek
So, is Turkey to start membership talks with the European Union? The reception could hardly be more hostile. As the public sees it, the EU is big enough already. Political leaders from France's Nicolas Sarkozy to Germany's Angela Merkel are opposed.

Slow train from Istanbul

Katinka Barysch
27 September 2005
The Wall Street Journal
The talks on Turkey's accession to the EU are scheduled to start on Monday. But public support for Turkish EU entry continues to fall: less than one-third of voters in the "old" EU support Turkish membership, according to the EU pollster Eurobarometer.

United against Iranian nukes

Charles Grant, Philip H. Gordon is former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
14 September 2005
International Herald Tribune
Last February, a group of European and American foreign policy experts issued the "Compact Between the United States and Europe," a detailed proposal for trans-Atlantic cooperation on the key foreign policy issues of the day (IHT Feb. 17, 2005).

Turkey offers EU more punch

01 September 2005
European Voice
Rather than undermine the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy, Turkish membership of the Union could boost the bloc's power in trouble spots across the Middle East and Central Asia, argues Charles Grant.
Opponents of Turkish accession to the EU often claim that it would damage the cohesiveness of the EU's...

A beacon of liberty flickers: Observations on Georgia

18 July 2005
New Statesman
President Bush proclaimed Georgia a "beacon for liberty" when he visited Tbilisi in May. Georgia has certainly made great progress since people power overthrew the corrupt and incompetent regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003. Nevertheless, clouds are dimming the light of that beacon.
There is something amiss, for example, when none...

The road obscured

Mark Leonard
11 July 2005
Financial Times
It is pre-modern, the kind of scene that westerners visit and photograph or encapsulate for later conversation: on Hainan Island, off the Leizhan Peninsula and a 50-minute flight south from Hong Kong, Chinese peasants toil in paddy fields. They wear straw hats and use water buffalo to plough the fields.
Then,...

Staring into the abyss

01 July 2005
E!Sharp
Twenty years of progress towards a united Europe have come to an end with the French and Dutch votes against the constitution, with future expansion of the EU likely to be the biggest casualty, argues Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform.

Variable geometry

01 July 2005
Prospect
The end of enlargement would be a tragedy. Perhaps it can be saved by "variable geometry".
The French and Dutch referendums have halted both deepening and widening in the EU. The two ideas have always been intimately linked. The political elites in core countries such as France were reluctant to accept...

Europe - Don't write the obituaries yet. A new France could put Britain on the sidelines

Mark Leonard
06 June 2005
New Statesman
The gleeful obituaries are piling up, not just for the EU constitution, but for the country that torpedoed it. France is in a mess, we read; its politics are paralysed, its economy is over-regulated and it just can't accommodate itself to globalisation with an Anglo-Saxon face.
But before we gorge on...

Short Cuts: Reputations: Political song and dance

Mark Leonard
03 June 2005
The Guardian
"People have been texting saying: don't worry, it's all total politics." These words might have soothed a tearful Javine when she failed to rack up more than 18 points for the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest, but they were not much comfort to the beleaguered French and Dutch "yes"...

Europe - Did we make the right choice?

03 June 2005
Yorkshire Post
Though often criticised as being undemocratic, popular referenda have been pivotal in the history of the European Union. Recent events in France and Netherlands aside, perhaps none more so than the 1975 poll confirming Britain's membership of the then European Economic Community.

European democracy: Where now?

Aurore Wanlin
02 June 2005
Open democracy
The rejection by French and Dutch voters of the treaty establishing a European constitution has precipitated one of the deepest crises in the European Union's fifty-year history.

The UK should see enlargement as an opportunity to revive the Lisbon process

Alasdair Murray
01 June 2005
Progress online
At the Lisbon summit in 2000, EU leaders signed up to an ambitious economic reform programme: the Lisbon agenda, designed to close the economic gap with the US.

Europe must keep its 'soft power'

Carl Bildt
01 June 2005
Financial Times
In the aftermath of the French rejection of the European Union constitution, on the eve of the Dutch referendum and amid political uncertainty in Germany, there is a growing risk that the EU will start to backtrack on its commitment to continued enlargement.
Yet, in recent years, Europe has prided itself...

Tony Blair invite les Européens à réfléchir au non français

31 May 2005
Le Monde
Il faudra attendre lundi 6 juin pour savoir officiellement si le Royaume-Uni renonce à organiser son propre référendum sur la Constitution de l'Union européenne.

Un sale coup pour Blair

Daniel Keohane
30 May 2005
L'Express
Comment réagit-on outre-Manche au non du peuple français?
Beaucoup de Britanniques opposés à la Constitution s'en réjouissent! Chez les conservateurs, dans la presse de droite europhobe, même au sein du Labour, où tout un courant ne veut pas de ce traité. Pour Tony Blair et le gouvernement britannique, c'est au contraire...

The lure of Beijing

25 May 2005
The Guardian
China's foreign policy establishment likes the idea of the EU. In Beijing, senior ministers turn up to speak at conferences with titles such as "The Future of EU-China Strategic relations".

There is life beyond a European constitution

23 May 2005
Financial Times
A No vote in France's referendum on the European Union constitutional treaty could open up a period of confusion, uncertainty and recrimination.

Si le France rejette le traité, il ne se passera rien

21 May 2005
Liberation.fr
Si les Français votent non le 29 mai, la Constitution europénne est morte. Ni un second référendum en France ni une renégociation du traité ne sont plausibles. Dès lors trois options sont possibles.
La première est qu'il ne se passera rien. Les chefs de gouvernement vont se rencontrer, enterrer le traité...

Pages