L’Unione europea (UE), consapevole del proprio successo nel garantire pace e sicurezza tra i suoi membri, ha da tempo dichiarato la volontà di difendere la propria stabilità interna promuovendo pace, sicurezza, prosperità, stato di diritto attraverso le proprie relazioni esterne; ovvero proiettando all’esterno la propria stabilità. Ma cosa intende l’UE per stabilità? Molte politiche di cooperazione con i paesi terzi fanno riferimento al concetto di stabilità. Basti ricordare il Patto di Stabilità nei confronti dei paesi dell’Europa centro-orientale dei primi anni Novanta, la successiva iniziativa del Patto di stabilità per i paesi dell’Europa sud-orientale, il Processo di stabilizzazione e associazione con i Balcani. Altre iniziative quali il Partenariato Euro -Mediterraneo (PEM) e la Politica di Vicinato (PEV) hanno come obiettivo principale “la creazione di una zona di pace e stabilità”. Il termine stabilità è usato anche per pratiche diverse e che si indirizzano anche ad aree più lontane dai confini europei, come per esempio lo “Strumento per la Stabilità”, adottato nel 2006. La stabilità è il fine dei progetti di cooperazione regionale dell’UE nelle aree vicine: Europa centro-orientale, Mediterraneo, Balcani. Allo stesso tempo l’UE si impegna a diffondere il proprio modello di stabilità strutturale, anche ad aree lontane come strumento per la prevenzione dei conflitti. Nei discorsi dei policy-makers europei si menziona la stabilità interna, regionale, internazionale, strutturale ma anche sociale e politica. Il termine stabilità nei documenti europei viene spesso affiancato dai termini sicurezza, prosperità, rule of law, democrazia e diritti umani. Quale raggio di azione è più congeniale all’attore europeo? Obiettivo del presente contributo è proporre un framework analitico per analizzare le azioni di promozione della stabilità dell’UE. L’articolo è costituito da due parti: nella prima si definisce il concetto di stabilità utilizzando le prospettive della Scienza Politica interna e internazionale, nella seconda si esaminano i documenti dell’Unione Europea dedicati a tale tema e si analizzano le modalità di promozione della stabilità da parte dell’UE alla luce delle interpretazioni concettuali presenti in letteratura. The European Union currently has 27 Member States. The Western Balkan countries and Turkey may also join once they meet the conditions for membership. The aim of enlargement is simple: to extend the area of peace, stability, democracy and the rule of law, and prosperity and well-being throughout Europe. (Olli Rehn, Commissario per l’Allargamento) L’Unione europea (UE), consapevole del proprio successo nel garantire pace e sicurezza tra i suoi membri, ha da tempo dichiarato la volontà di difendere la propria stabilità interna promuovendo pace, sicurezza, prosperità, stato di diritto attraverso le proprie relazioni esterne; ovvero proiettando all’esterno la propria stabilità. Ma cosa intende l’UE per stabilità? Molte politiche di cooperazione con i paesi terzi fanno riferimento al concetto di stabilità. Basti ricordare il Patto di Stabilità nei confronti dei paesi dell’Europa centro-orientale dei primi anni Novanta, la successiva iniziativa del Patto di stabilità per i paesi dell’Europa sud-orientale, il Processo di stabilizzazione e associazione con i Balcani. Altre iniziative quali il Partenariato Euro -Mediterraneo (PEM) e la Politica di Vicinato (PEV) hanno come obiettivo principale “la creazione di una zona di pace e stabilità”. Il termine stabilità è usato anche per pratiche diverse e che si indirizzano anche ad aree più lontane dai confini europei, come per esempio lo “Strumento per la Stabilità”, adottato nel 2006. La stabilità è il fine dei progetti di cooperazione regionale dell’UE nelle aree vicine: Europa centro-orientale, Mediterraneo, Balcani. Allo stesso tempo l’UE si impegna a diffondere il proprio modello di stabilità strutturale, anche ad aree lontane come strumento per la prevenzione dei conflitti. Nei discorsi dei policy-makers europei si menziona la stabilità interna, regionale, internazionale, strutturale ma anche sociale e politica. Il termine stabilità nei documenti europei viene spesso affiancato dai termini sicurezza, prosperità, rule of law, democrazia e diritti umani. Quale raggio di azione è più congeniale all’attore europeo? Obiettivo del presente contributo è proporre un framework analitico per analizzare le azioni di promozione della stabilità dell’UE. L’articolo è costituito da due parti: nella prima si definisce il concetto di stabilità utilizzando le prospettive della Scienza Politica interna e internazionale, nella seconda si esaminano i documenti dell’Unione Europea dedicati a tale tema e si analizzano le modalità di promozione della stabilità da parte dell’UE alla luce delle interpretazioni concettuali presenti in letteratura.

This paper aims to explore the performance of the European Union in its external action by focusing upon the Mediterranean area. It combines two levels of analysis. First of all, the Putnam’s model of the two-level game will be applied to understand the elaboration of the EU Mediterranean policy. It seeks to identify the major determinants of EU Mediterranean action in terms of: a) key actors (EU institutions versus EU member states); b) EU goals and objectives in the Mediterranean (pursuit of member states’ interests versus defence of EU values). Secondly, a theoretical interpretation of EU Mediterranean action will be provided in order to better understand EU performance in the area. Is the EU pursuing a regionalist project in the area? What kind of regionalist patterns can be found in the Med? The launching of the Union for the Mediterranean in July 2008 seems to have frozen the broad regional cooperation plans identified with the EuroMediterranean Partnership and initiated a narrower neo-functionalist technical project. According to a list of technical priority areas indicated in the Paris Declaration, specific cooperation projects have to be elaborated and implemented also with the involvement of private actors and non-regional actors. The paper seeks to demonstrate that if the EU action in the Mediterranean is currently following a neo-functionalist approach, EU’s role as regional-integrator in the Mediterranean conceived in the mid-1990s has been currently weakened.

It is widely acknowledged that the ‘legalization’ or ‘judicialization’ of the world trade regime brought by the creation of the WTO in 1995 has had a profound impact on the trade-related interests of domestic actors in WTO members. Little attention, however, has been devoted to investigating how legal vulnerability and the prospect of litigation affects these actors’ propensity to deepen and widen cooperative agreements already undertaken in the WTO framework. This paper seeks to shed light on these dynamics by analyzing the politics of preference formation of the EU in two areas of negotiations in the Doha Round: agriculture and trade-and-environment.

In the early 1990s, a widespread belief appeared regarding the diffusion of democracy all around the world and, in particular, in former communist countries. This belief proved sound for former communist countries in Central and Central- Eastern Europe that were now members of the European Union. However, in European post-Soviet republics that have not yet been admitted into the EU, faith in democratisation remains uncertain. Today, some of these countries (in particular Russia, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia) are considered to be hybrid regimes at best. Others, such as Belarus, are clearly authoritarian countries. There is a multiplicity of reasons for the different results in political transformation in the two areas. However, the influence of European Union and the effects of conditionality (democratisation as a must for admission in EU) are very important. On the other hand, the lack of membership perspectives may only partly explain the failure of EU pressures for democratisation in certain former Soviet countries. Some of them suffer the influence of a Russian political trend towards authoritarianism. This is the reason why these countries are sometimes called ‘double periphery’. In spite of the relevance of external influences, internal elements also matter. Transition from communism in these countries has meant the contemporary creation of market economies and democratic political regimes. The interaction of the two processes has led to the rise of hybrid regimes. As a consequence, the future of these regimes and the possibility of democratisation in European post-Soviet republics remain uncertain. Based on the results of research funded by the European Union in 2006–2008, this paper analyses in a comparative perspective the internal dynamics and the key elements that have led to the establishment of hybrid or authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia. It also discusses the perspectives of democratisation or authoritarian regression in these countries and the elements that may help or hinder transition to democracy.

It is a matter of fact that EU-Russia relations represent an urgent question to be properly addressed in order to guarantee stability and security in the post-soviet space; particularly, the Russian-Georgian war of summer 2008 and the Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis of early 2009 have shown the necessity to rebuild these relations on a new basis through a mutual recognition of roles: while misunderstanding and mutual distrust sometimes override between the two actors, a clear and unitary strategy which regulates any agreement on contractual basis still lacks, reflecting the uncertainty of intentions from both sides. The paper is firstly aimed at inserting EU-Russia partnership in a temporal perspective, in order to account for the main factors which have shaped the relation during the last years: from one side, it is suggested, the change in elite patterns, which become strikingly apparent when comparing Eltsin and Putin administrations, has significantly influenced Russian priorities in its external behavior, reflecting the claim to act as a global player in the international arena together with the dismissal of democratic model as a priority for modernization. From the other side, the EU strategy, aimed at guarantee stability in its periphery, has gradually overlapped with the post-soviet space, thus confronting more and more with Russian interests in the same area. Considering these premises, the paper also wants to evaluate the performance of EU external action towards Russian Federation, in the light of both actors’ different priorities and interests at stake: by using some analytical tools borrowed from the recent literature on the role of external factors in domestic democratization processes, such as political conditionality and socialization, it intends to emphasize the limits and potentialities of EU approach to Russia and the need to go beyond the methodology used towards other neighboring countries.

Nel 2004 l’Unione Europea ha sviluppato una “politica europea di vicinato” (PEV), concepita come “the EU’s newest foreign policy instrument” (Ferrero-Waldner, 2006). Attraverso una serie di documenti strategici e piani di azione bilaterali, l’Ue si propone di rafforzare la stabilità, la sicurezza e la prosperità dell’area, offrendo ai paesi vicini relazioni privilegiate sul piano politico ed economico, a patto di un reciproco impegno al rispetto di alcuni valori: democrazia, good governance, rule of law, economia di mercato, sviluppo sostenibile, rispetto dei diritti umani, inclusi i diritti delle minoranze, promozione di buoni rapporti di vicinato (European Commission, 2007, Attinà e Rossi, 2004). L’Unione, inoltre, specifica che “il livello di ambizione della relazione dipenderà dal grado di effettiva condivisione di questi valori” (http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/enp/index_en.htm). Il paper intende focalizzare l’attenzione su due specifici paesi coinvolti nell’attuazione della PEV: Israele e i Territori Palestinesi Occupati. Qui, infatti, non solo le dinamiche interne all’Unione, ma soprattutto fattori legati al contesto internazionale rendono problematica la coerente attuazione delle politiche europee, mettendo in dubbio la stessa definizione dell’Ue come “attore normativo di politica estera” (Manners, 2002), capace di realizzare obiettivi normativi dichiarati attraverso mezzi normativi (Tocci, 2007). L’obiettivo del paper è indagare in chiave comparata la PEV verso Israele e Palestina focalizzando l’attenzione sui temi della sicurezza e della democrazia. Dopo aver ricostruito le posizioni ufficiali assunte dall’Ue nei confronti del conflitto mediorientale, si proverà a definire l’idea di sicurezza che l’Ue intende perseguire nell’area, individuando gli strumenti e gli obiettivi di fondo e verificando se esistano o meno delle differenze sostanziali nell’approccio verso i due Paesi che emerge negli Action Plans. In stretta relazione con la sicurezza, la democratizzazione dell’area viene concepita come un prerequisito per una maggiore stabilità: su questo aspetto vi sono almeno due elementi problematici che vanno affrontati, dal momento che l’Ue li assume come premesse della sua azione. Il primo è che Israele sia uno Stato pienamente democratico (Mchenry e Mady, 2006), il secondo è che la democratizzazione della Palestina possa avvenire in assenza di uno Stato palestinese. Entrambe queste asserzioni verranno discusse in maniera critica.

“Common activities in Africa can represent another very valuable litmus test for the cohesion and political responsibility of the many countries involved in Western European Union (WEU) in undertaking peacekeeping missions in a geographic area where their solidarity cannot be misinterpreted“. These words come from a pioneering paper published in 1996 by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) of the WEU (now ISS of the European Union (EU)). In spite of the assumption, widespread during the 90s, that Euro-African relations were losing relevance and being “normalised”, they have assumed a renewed significance in recent years. In parallel with the development of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the birth of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), Euro-African relations have expanded to encompass the fields of security, conflict management and peace-building. One of the most significant steps has been the decision in 2003 to choose the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as the destination for Artemis, the first peacekeeping mission of the EU carried out beyond the geographical boundaries of Europe. Initiatives such as Artemis stem not only from a concern for peace and human security in Africa but they also serve the ambitions of the EU to affirm itself as a global actor. Indeed, CFSP and ESDP activities in Africa have often been judged more in terms of their relevance for “testing” the EU’s new instruments for external action than for their effective contribution to conflict management in Africa. My aim is to assess the impact of such activities by drawing on the experience of the EU’s intervention in the crisis in the DRC between 1996 and 2006. I also consider other forms of intervention, such as development and humanitarian aid, with the aim of evaluating the capacity of the EU to integrate these various tools within a coherent policy framework.

This paper aims at assessing the dynamics of policy convergence in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. It aims at giving a response to the following research questions: what are the factors and mechanisms at play in processes of energy policy convergence across the Mediterranean? How does the EU perform when pushing for convergent policy changes across countries? To what extent do Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries (SEMCs) shape the different degrees and levels of convergence? Drawing on the new institutionalist literature, the study firstly concentrates on the causal factors for energy policy convergence. Within a rational choice institutionalist model, ‘opportunity structures’ (such as incentives, differentiation paths based on the progress done, tailor-made policy) are conceived as the key explaining factors; while sociological institutionalist approaches emphasise the role of ‘cognitive factors’ (such as socialisation, persuasion, lesson-drawing). Secondly, the analysis focuses on the relationships between the EU’s energy interdependence with SEMCs and the processes of policy transfer at play. Against the background of the EU being the rule maker and the SEMCs being the passive importer of rules, this paper looks at the different patterns of “interaction” as to explain how the EU performs and when the SEMCs are able to influence the processes of energy policy convergence. One the one hand, strategic interaction may explain outcomes as the results of congruent interests and bargains; on the other hand, normative interaction may account for indirect dynamics of policy convergence such as imitation. I present a comparative case-study of Turkey and Morocco: both are key energy transit countries towards Europe, which are involved in different cooperation schemes with the EU and achieved different results so far. Concretely, the inquiry will examine the convergence/divergence in the policy objectives and instruments concerning the current energy policies of each country.

This paper analyzes the growing participation of European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in ESDP operations. By engaging themselves in the European Union actions of crisis and conflict management, the civil society organisations contribute to the European Union efforts to respond to composite humanitarian emergencies. Therefore, the analysis of European NGOs’ participation in peace operations is an important contribution to the objective of assessing the impact of EU’s presence and intervention in areas like the Balkans and Africa. In addition, this analysis contributes to the study of the general phenomenon of the specific role of civil society organisations in peace missions. In first section, the change of the role played by the main civil society organisations in peacekeeping is analyzed, and this change is compared to the evolutionary phases of the European political and economic integration process. Section two examines the state and form of the relations existing between humanitarian NGOs and the EU institutions that are competent in the fields of security and foreign policy as well as humanitarian intervention. In third section, the Artemis mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo is shortly presented as a test case. Lastly, brief remarks are made on the NGOs potentialities in reducing violence and managing humanitarian emergencies in conjunction with the role played by the EU as a global actor.

Since the end of the Cold War, a universal consensus has appeared on the desirability of pluralist democracy and this implied a heavy emphasis on multi-party elections to promote democratization. International actors now play a prominent role in democratization processes also through the engagement in electoral process throughout the developing word. While scholars and policy makers admit how complex and multi-faceted the problem of democratization is, in practice, policy measures were strongly focused on elections. Implicit in this emphasis on multi-party elections is the assumption that elections are pivotal for democracy and democratization. Western countries and international organizations as the European Union pressure governments to hold democratic elections by the mechanism of political conditionality, by providing founds and technical assistance and by sending thousands of international electoral observers. The European Union, in its external action, uses election observation as one of the instruments of EU external policy to promote democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Actually, international observation of elections is one of the more diffused forms of democracy promotion. Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid to the effectiveness of electoral observation missions in detecting fraud and, to the best of my knowledge, few empirical works have tried to discover whether electoral observation missions can bring more “free and fair” elections, as proponents of this democracy-promotion instrument claim. Following the valuable work of Susan Hyde, one of the few scholars dealing with electoral observation, I will propose a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the work of European Union electoral observation missions in Africa relying on a subnational level of analysis, since any cross-national study trying to address this issue will be inundated by endogeneity problems.

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of the restrictive measures that the European Union (EU) has imposed on the leadership of Transnistria and presents the results of an empirical investigation that will be carried out in the summer of 2009. The doubts cast on the utility of international sanctions by many studies are not aligned with the growing role of this foreign policy tool in the larger framework of EU conflict resolutions strategies. The paper is divided in three parts. The first part focuses on the international role played by the EU to solve conflicts. The second part describes the role of international sanctions within larger strategies and lay down the conditions for determining success/failure of international sanctions. Finally, the case of Transnistria is investigated in details since the first imposition of sanctions in 2002. The objective of the paper is twofold: first, the paper contributes to the debate on assessing the effectiveness of an unexplored aspect of the common foreign and security policy, namely the sanctioning policy of the EU. Secondly, the paper analyzes the role of international sanctions in the twenty-first century and reaches an unconventional assessment of their utility in foreign policy both as a foreign policy and a conflict management tool.

Some years after the conclusion of eastern enlargement, it is necessary to address the problem of the evaluation of EU’s impact, in the short term and especially in the post-accession phase, on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper therefore addresses the question of the evaluation of the impact of enlargement on institutional and administrative capacity of the candidate countries. In the first part I will try to expose the relevance of the theme, with a reference to the relevant literature: the enlargement’s studies and the studies of democratisation processes. In the second part instead I will deal the methodological aspects of this type of research, with some proposals on the methods to use, the research strategies to follow and the assumption to check.