Assessing the EU’s commitment to multilateralism CSDP and Member States’ propensity to participate in peace missions

This paper analyzes the contribution of the CSDP operations to the peace building tasks of the peace operations of the global system, and examines the different levels of participation of EU Member States. Section one presents the scenario and considers the growth and expansion of practice of peace operations in the last twenty years. Section two reviews the main attributes of the CSDP operations. Section three explores the contribution of the old and new Member States to CSDP by examining the number of operations these countries participated in. The concluding section summarizes the research findings, and points to the current challenges faced by the EU’s peace missions

Европа, Средиземноморье и влияние мировой политики

Since the European Union began to play a growing role in the relationships between the Member States and the Non-EU Mediterranean countries, the policymakers in Brussels have devoted a great deal of attention to devise and implement actions and programmes aimed at promoting peace, stability and growth to the area. The effects of such involvement have been not as significant as expected but not even insignificant. Tension has almost always floated over the Mediterranean waters because crises and violent conflicts have followed one another though never breaking all relations down. The present paper takes a cue from this feature of the Mediterranean area and proposes to watch the territory from a different angle of view. Contrary to the prevailing view of the Mediterranean as an area unaffected or scarcely affected by the dominant world policies, the paper analyses the impact of the world policy-making institutions and policies on the Mediterranean area. It also draws the readers’ attention towards the participation and, in significant cases, the non-participation of the governments of the area in the world institutions and policies. Accordingly, the first section highlights the concepts useful to analyze the world as the political space in which policymaking institutions have been established for building policies that respond to world-scale problems. The second section outlines the significant security and economic world policies that have been established for responding to world problems and, consequently, for bringing order to the world, the Mediterranean area included. In the third section, the focus is on forecasting the world and Mediterranean politics of the coming years by drawing the readers’ attention to the confrontation of three big powers, the USA, China and Russia. The difficulty to keep unaltered the Western coalition could not impede the renewal of the US hegemony should disorder be unsustainable to loads of countries. The Chinese model of economic openness and the non-interference of the investing companies may not work in all the Mediterranean countries. By acting as a troublemaker and game-changer in security complex settings like the Mediterranean area by bolstering authoritarian regimes, Russia mostly wants to create a situation in which the United States and the European countries find it impossible to make any decisions without its participation. Accordingly, the paper’s conclusions call for building knowledge about the reconfiguration of the world coalitions and the change of the existing order and institutions. Especially the revisionism of the three states competing for world leadership requires careful investigation. Research on the influence of such a global process on the wider Mediterranean area and the involvement of the Mediterranean countries in such a process is of paramount importance.С тех пор, как Европейский союз стал играть растущую роль в отношениях между государствами-членами и средиземноморскими странами, не входящими в ЕС, политики в Брюсселе стали уделять большое внимание разработке и реализации действий и программ, направленных на поощрение мира, стабильности и развития в регионе. Эффект от такого участия оказался не столь значительным, как ожидалось, но, тем не менее, ощутимым. Напряжение почти всегда витало над водами Средиземного моря, потому что кризисы и жестокие конфликты следовали один за другим, но никогда не разрушали все отношения. Настоящая статья основана на этой особенности Средиземноморья и предлагает взглянуть на этот регион под другим углом зрения. Вопреки преобладающему мнению о Средиземноморье как о зоне, не затронутой или почти не затронутой основными мировыми событиями, в работе анализируется влияние международных институтов и действий, влияющих на Средиземноморский регион. Автор также привлекает внимание читателей к активной, а в некоторых случаях — к пассивной позиции правительств региона в мировых институтах и международной политике. Соответственно, первый раздел предлагает вниманию читателей концепции, пригодные для анализа мира как политического пространства, в котором были созданы институты для проведения политики, реагирующей на проблемы мирового масштаба. Во втором разделе излагаются основные международные подходы к безопасности и экономической политике, которые были разработаны для реагирования на мировые проблемы и, следовательно, для наведения порядка в мире, включая Средиземноморский регион. В третьем разделе основное внимание уделяется прогнозированию мировой и средиземноморской политики ближайших лет с учетом противостояния трех великих держав — США, Китая и России. Препятствия для сохранения в неизменном виде западной коалиции не могут помешать возобновлению гегемонии США, если беспорядок окажется неприемлемым для большого числа стран. Китайская модель экономической открытости и нейтральности компаний-инвесторов может работать не во всех странах Средиземноморья. Нарушая спокойствие и изменяя правила игры в сложных условиях безопасности, таких как Средиземноморье, поддерживая авторитарные режимы, Россия стремится создать ситуацию, в которой Соединенные Штаты Америки и европейские страны не могли бы принимать никаких решений без ее участия. Соответственно, выводы статьи призывают к накоплению знаний о реконфигурации мировых коалиций и изменении международного положения. Особенно тщательно следует исследовать политику ревизионизма трех государств, соревнующихся за мировое лидерство. Первостепенное значение имеют исследования влияния такого глобального процесса на более обширный район Средиземноморья и на участие средиземноморских стран в этом процессе

Security culture and the construction of security partnerships : the European Union and China compared

Important transformations are taking place in the security of states. Among these transformations, the formation of a new security culture at the single state and group-of-state level and the construction of a new generation of regional security arrangements are of great importance. The new security culture is based on the concepts of co-operative and comprehensive security. The new generation of regional arrangements is based on the substitution of military alliance alignments with security partnership agreements. In this paper, the focus is on the new security cultures of Europe and China and on the role of the European Union and China in the present state of the construction of the regional security systems of Europe and Asia.peer-reviewe

Diversity in Unity. The European Union and Member States Emergency Aid to the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region

This paper draws the attention of the EU foreign policy professionals and researchers community towards the aid policy of the European Union and the major Member States towards the countries affected by humanitarian emergencies and disasters. The determinants and vertical coherence of this policy are put under observation. In particular, by measuring and comparing financial aid to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, the MENA region, the present study assesses the importance of the aid policy vertical coherence. The analysis of the data supports the mainstream view about the common values and goals of the foreign aid policies of the Union and the Member States but warns about coherence between the Union and the state level as the European countries’ aid allocation to the MENA countries is apparently driven by different priorities

MULTILATERALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF ‘MINILATERALISM’ IN EU PEACE OPERATIONS

In recent years, the multilateral practice of peacekeeping and peace support operations has been growing as legitimate instrument to interrupt violence, strengthen security, and protect against gross human rights violations. Invented by the United Nations, peace operations have passed through a process of change that has given new features to multilateral security. Since the late 1980s, the number of UN-authorized peace operations has been growing. Also regional organisations have engaged themselves in an unprecedented number of peace support operations. Recently, the European Union has entered into the practice of peacekeeping, and put multilateralism at the centre of its presence in the world political system. This paper reviews political science knowledge on peace operations (especially, the legitimacy and efficacy issues), and examines the hypothesis of the appearance of minilateralism as the consequence of the engagement of regional organisations and actors, like the EU, in peace operations. The hypothesis is tested by comparing the data of the peace missions of three European organisations (EU, OSCE, and NATO) with those of the United Nations. The paper conclusion is that the European states are developing a preference for selective engagement (i.e. minilateralism) in peace operations, and the EU is capable of playing both as multilateral and minilateral security provider

Forced, irregular migrants and the EU performance in trans boundary crisis management

The article presents the findings of a research on the EU response to the crisis caused by the growth of the inflow of irregular migrants in Europe in 2011 and the following years. The first section examines the causes of the current migration flows in general terms and explains why many European citizens and political leaders are hostile to the arrival of migrants most of whom are forced to leave their home. In the second section, the management of the migration crisis by the EU leaders is analysed with the concepts and tools of the TransCrises project, an H2020 research about managing trans-boundary risks and crises. In particular, this section reviews how the EU leaders have operated the seven management tasks that experts deem as important to bring a crisis to not harmful consequences. In the concluding section, the EU management of the migration crisis is assessed and advices are given for upgrading the management

EU’s Humanitarian and Civil Protection Aid. Italy’s Eccentric and ECHO-consistent Policy

This paper analyses the coherence of the aid to countries in need of humanitarian and civil protection assistance given separately by ECHO and the EU Member States, with an emphasis on Italy that appears as an eccentric case. Section one is about the humanitarian aid burden of the EU and the major European donor countries in the years 1999-2012. The analysis draws attention to the existing coherence at the world level and also to the difference existing in the aid to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. Section two analyses and shows the consistency of Italy’s aid with the ECHO’s. In the Conclusions, the coherence of the EU’s and states’ aid and the consistency of Italy’s aid are shortly discussed in view of the existing shared powers in the humanitarian and civil protection policy area

Migration Drivers, the EU External Migration Policy and Crisis Management

The present paper is a study of the response of the EU institutions and leaders to the inflow of irregular migrants from 2011 to 2016. The first section is the synthetic presentation of the migration drivers of our times at the global and local level. In section two, the citizens’ perception of the migrants as a threat is briefly discussed, and the border control and immigration policies of the EU are reviewed. In section three, the ‘Trans boundary crisis management’ model opted for analysing the EU migration crisis management is presented. Section four presents the analysis of the four scenarios of the European management of the current migration crisis. In the concluding section, the results of the analysis are summarily discussed. The analysis demonstrates that the EU leaders have been late in detecting the characteristics of the phenomenon and have not conceded to reconcile their conventional view to the features of the current migration. They have been unable to make response decisions well timed and acceptable to all. Lastly, they have been unable to stand firm on those management decisions they agreed on with difficulty and failed to formulate a shared message about the crisis and communicate credible messages to citizens about their ability to manage it