European Union

Commission adopts multi-annual planning of financial assistance to the Western Balkans and Turkey The Commission has completed today the strategic planning of EU financial support for 2008-2010 to the candidate countries and potential candidates: Croatia, Turkey, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo[1]. This financial assistance aims to enhance political and economic reform and development to realise their European perspective. For 2008-2010, the overall indicative amount of EU financial assistance under the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) is €4.471 billion.

The victory of the Social Democrats in the general elections on Sunday (28 September) was overshadowed by the resurgence of the extreme right, with the two populist parties virtually holding a near-majority in the new parliament.

With 29.5% of the vote, the two far-right parties hold a virtual majority in the new parliament, putting them on an equal footing with the Social Democrats. Both parties have campaigned on anti-foreign sentiment, with Strache waging a campaign against Muslims and promising to pull Austria of the EU if he becomes chancellor.

- The main tasks of Kosovo's new embassy in Brussels will be to lobby the EU for wider recognition of the country's independence and to raise awareness of Serbia's attempts to sabotage the young state, Kosovo envoy Ilir Dugolli told EUobserver. "Negotiating the question for more recognition of Kosovo is the absolute priority. In the case of the EU, all the other steps go through this step. You cannot really make much progress in negotiating with the EU unless this hurdle is overcome," Mr Dugolli said. "That for some time will continue to exhaust a considerable part of our energies."

The Balkan country proclaimed independence from Serbia in February and has been recognised by 21 out of 27 EU members, with Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Portugal, Spain and Slovakia holding out for now. The partial recognition means that Kosovo cannot establish formal legal relations with the EU or launch a feasibility study for a future Stabilisation and Association Agreement.

Mr Dugolli also plans to keep the EU institutions informed about Serbian attempts to sow division in Kosovo. Belgrade is currently opening new "Co-ordination Centres" in ethnic Serb enclaves that could act as rallying points for anti-government opposition.

EU policies applied to the Western Balkans - such as a regional free trade area - are inspiring the "Eastern Partnership" with Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and "hopefully" Belarus, participants at a conference organized Wednesday (17 September) by the German Konrad Adenauer think-tank learned.

Initially a Polish-Swedish proposal endorsed in June by all member states, the Eastern Partnership is designed to deepen ties with the "European neighbours" to the east, balancing the 'Mediterranean Union' with the southern "neighbours of Europe," as Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski put it. The Georgian conflict sped up the process of drafting the eastern policy by the European Commission, with president Jose Manuel Barroso scheduled to sketch out the main features already at the EU summit on 15 October.

Serbia vowed Wednesday to press on and implement a European Union trade deal despite anger at a Dutch veto that came even though Belgrade arrested top war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.Bozidar Djelic, Serbia's deputy prime minister for EU integration, said in an interview with a local newspaper that he was "infuriated" by the Netherlands' refusal to unfreeze the EU trade and aid pact.

EU foreign ministers on Monday failed to convince their Dutch counterpart, Maxime Verhagen, to drop his country's objections to unfreezing the accord despite Belgrade's improved track record on war crimes.UN chief war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz had told the EU ministers there was "very clear progress" in Serbia's cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The European Union's Lisbon Treaty will not enter into force before the European Parliament elections in June 2009, as was initially hoped, and is unlikely to do so before 1 January 2010 either, Luxembourg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said in Brussels on Wednesday (17 September).

If the Lisbon treaty does not come into force in 2009, that will affect the composition of both the European Parliament and the European Commission next year. Both would have to be conducted under the EU's current set of rules, the Nice treaty, which would mean that there would be 785 instead of 751 seats, as foreseen in the Lisbon treaty, in the parliament. But it would also reduce the number of commissioners in the next commission - to be nominated by November 2009 - as under Nice, the number should be "less than the number of member states."

The French EU presidency is to put forward a security package at the December summit aimed at relaunching the European security and defence policy (ESDP) with strong links to NATO, many measures of which were outlined at a Brussels conference on defence on Monday (15 September).

At the December EU summit, France will present a series of concrete measures in order to address these shortcomings, including the launch of joint military European training courses modelled on the Erasmus Programme - the civilian university student exchange system.

EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday (15 September) failed to unfreeze the trade related part of a pre-accession deal with Serbia, following the Netherlands' opposition. "There is a very, very big majority saying that we [EU] should unfreeze [the agreement]. But there is no unanimity," French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, told journalists after the meeting.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was more optimistic, however, saying that the bloc's 27 ministers could agree to unblock the interim agreement during their next meeting in October.

By keeping Ukraine's EU accession prospects alive, European Union leaders yesterday (9 September) steered clear of creating a "damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't" situationby balancing a desire to encourage the country's pro-Western leadership with concerns not to further radicalise Moscow in the wake of the Georgia crisis.

The EU appeared to be divided at the summit, with France, Germany and Italy advocating a cautious approach to Moscow, while Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Baltic states expressed their wish to develop stronger ties with the EU's eastern neighbourhood after the Georgia crisis. 

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Serbia has overcome another hurdle on its path towards EU membership with today's (9 September) ratification by its parliament of a key pre-accession agreement offering the country closer trade relations and easier travel within the Union.

140 deputies from the 250-seat parliament voted in favour of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), with 26 rejecting it. This means that at least 13 members of the opposition - likely members of the Liberal block, who support EU membership and for this goal would even sacrifice Kosovo - joined the government on this issue.The biggest opposition group, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), collectively abstained. 

There is a plethora of studies on interest groups in the European Union. While these studies have generated a wealth of insights, it is not actually clear what they have accomplished. This Living Review seeks to identify those areas of interest group studies in which our knowledge is fairly consolidated and in which major research gaps or major controversies can be noted. I argue that these research gaps and controversies stem from both the empirical variance in the interest group landscape and the theoretical segmentation of EU interest group studies. These have been shaped by influences from Comparative Politics, International Relations, Policy Analysis, and Democratic Theory. I suggest that future research should engage to a greater extent in cross-cutting theoretical debates in order to overcome the pronounced demarcation of research areas and in more rigorous theory testing than has sometimes been the case. The article starts by discussing the problem of conceptualizing interest groups before moving on to the fissured theoretical landscape. Thereafter, major research themes are discussed. First, I review the relation between EU institutions and interest groups. Here, I look both into multilevel governance and Europeanization studies that focus on the vertical interaction and into analyses that stress the horizontal segmentation of the EU system in different institutions and sectors. Second, I analyze core themes of EU and comparative interest group studies, namely the issue of collective action, the access of interest groups to policy-makers and their influence on EU policymaking.

Durch den Zerfall Jugoslawiens 1991 und die militärischen Auseinandersetzungen in Folge der Unabhängigkeitserklärung einzelner Staaten rückte der Balkan einmal mehr in den Fokus der Weltöffentlichkeit. Dabei spielten sowohl Kroatien als auch Bosnien-Herzegowina eine elementare Rolle. Seit der Unterzeichnung des Friedensvertrages von Dayton haben sich beide Staaten jedoch sehr unterschiedlich entwickelt. Somit stehen beide auch auf einer anderen Stufe hinsichtlich ihrer Bestrebungen, der EU beizutreten: Für Kroatien scheint ein Beitritt bald Realität zu werden, Bosnien-Herzegowina hingegen ist noch weit entfernt. Die Studie geht der Frage nach, wieso sich beide Staaten in so unterschiedlichen Stadien hinsichtlich ihrer Beitrittsperspektiven befinden. Neben einer Analyse und dem Vergleich der Transformationsprozesse werden die von der EU aufgestellten Beitrittskriterien analysiert und hinterfragt. Die Publikation verdeutlicht, dass ein nachhaltiger Frieden auf dem Balkan nur durch eine realistische EU-Perspektive und eine intensive Kooperation der Mitgliedstaaten mit den südosteuropäischen Staaten zu gewährleisten ist.

Although the fate of the EU's Reform Treaty was not officially discussed at the bloc's extraordinary summit on Georgia on 1 September, it proved to be a highly topical issue, with various top-level European politicians highlighting the importance of its entry into force if the EU is to become a more powerful global player.

Political analysts have underlined that the EU was lucky to have a country as big as France at its helm during the Georgia crisis as this tempered the lack of real EU leadership.  "The EU was lucky France held the EU Presidency, because Russia agreed to engage with Mr. Sarkozy on the ceasefire. But they may not have engaged with the EU if a smaller country such as the Czech Republic were EU president, especially with its difficult bilateral relationship with Moscow as a result of its decision to host US missile defence," said Antonio Missiroli, the director of the European Policy Centre, quoted in The Irish Times. 

Even the Polish President, who in the recent past called the Lisbon Treaty "pointless" and said he would not sign it (EurActiv 01/07/08), spoke a very different language after the summit.  Asked by EurActiv if he was now more in favour of the Lisbon Treaty, Kaczynski conceded that indeed, several EU leaders had mentioned informally that the Lisbon Treaty would have given the EU better instruments to deal with challenges such as the current Georgia crisis. He then added that Ireland should hold a second referendum. 

The EU is expected to demonstrate "leadership" in assuring Bosnia and Herzegovina's transition to a viable state that could one day join the 27-member bloc, the international community's high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina said in Brussels on Tuesday (9 September).

Mr Lajcak said the security situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina was currently stable, but stressed that the country is still facing numerous political challenges, the solving of which requires the EU to play a role. One strategic issue, he underlined, is constitutional reform in Bosnia. There is currently no united approach to such reform, not only domestically, but also within the international community. "The international community and the EU in particular needs to define what it expects from any agreement" on constitutional reform in Bosnia, he said.

A compromise package aimed at convincing the Irish to return to the urns and agree to the Lisbon Treaty seems to be taking shape as Dublin considers opt-outs on defence. Meanwhile, EU countries appear to be leaning towards retaining the current system of one commissioner per country in response to Ireland's concerns that it may lose its commissioner.

According to the source, keeping the present system of one commissioner per country may not only serve to give the Irish a sense of having accomplished an important goal with their negative vote. Such a measure could also be easily adopted (by means of a brief intergovernmental conference) because other countries are starting to have second thoughts about reducing the number of commissioners, the source added. 

In a visit to Brussels on 5 September, Macedonian Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Bocevski showed no sign of flexibility regarding his country's name dispute with Greece, accusing Athens of obstructing talks and calling on Brussels to be more generous regarding Skopje's EU and NATO membership aspirations.

The Macedonian deputy prime minister also dismissed advice that his country should concentrate more on its EU prospects than its NATO ambitions. As a former Communist country, Macedonia does not see any strategic difference between EU and NATO, he explained. 

While Brussels is home to an estimated 15-20,000 lobbyists, who daily and doggedly attempt to win lawmakers to their clients' point of view, up to now, only around 300 lobbying organisations have signed up to the European Commission's voluntary registry.

None of the major lobbying firms have registered, and only three think-tanks have done so. "I do not see yet the big professional public relations consultancies, nor many law firms - only two have registered so far," Ms Rampi noted. "However, I want to stress the importance of being cautious about the numbers that could be used to measure the 300 figure against," Ms Rampi said. "The figure often quoted in the media of around 15,000 individual lobbyists is an external estimate, which the commission does not endorse," she added, pointing out that this is an estimate of the number of individuals, whereas the commission's register lists organisations.

The final shape of an EU security mission to Georgia and broader EU-Russia relations will top the agenda of an EU foreign ministers' meeting in France this weekend. The possibility of relaxing sanctions against Belarus and prospects for a new Ukraine treaty will also come up for debate.

It remains uncertain if the unit will be composed of EU-badged policemen or soldiers however, if it will stand alongside OSCE monitors or be part of an OSCE-led team and if it will have access to the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The Avignon meeting will also examine if the EU should relax sanctions against Belarus, which last month released three political prisoners and promises to hold its free and fairest-ever parliamentary elections on 28 September.