European Kaleidoscope - Final Exam

Council of Ministers

The Council of Ministers is where the actual legislative work of member states happens. Each member state sends its relevant minister depending on the topic being discussed - so when agriculture policy is on the table, it is the 27 Agriculture Ministers who meet; when foreign policy is discussed, it is the 27 Foreign Ministers. It meets in 10 different configurations:

• Agriculture and Fisheries
• Competitiveness
• Education, Youth, Culture and Sport
• Employment, Social Policy and Health
• Environment
• Transport, Telecommunications, Energy
• Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN)
• Foreign Affairs - meets every month; this is where international crises are discussed
• General Affairs
• Justice and Home Affairs

The Council is supported by COREPER (Committee of Permanent Representatives) - ambassadors from each member state who do preparatory work so that ministers can focus on the genuinely contested issues when they meet. The Presidency rotates between member states every 6 months, meaning each country takes a turn chairing all Council meetings and setting the agenda.

Key functions: negotiating and adopting EU legislation jointly with Parliament, adopting the EU budget, coordinating member state policies, concluding international agreements (like trade deals), and developing foreign and security policy.

European Parliament

The European Parliament is the only directly elected EU institution - MEPs are chosen by citizens every 5 years. The last elections were in June 2024, returning 720 MEPs. The Parliament's President is elected for a 2.5-year term; the current President is Roberta Metsola from Malta (serving her second term). MEPs meet in plenary session in Strasbourg for 3–4 days each month, but do most of their committee work in Brussels.

The Parliament's core power is co-decision: it adopts EU legislation jointly with the Council of Ministers - neither can pass a law without the other. It also approves the EU budget and can dismiss the entire Commission (this happened once under Commission President Jacques Santer, who resigned before a formal dismissal vote).

8 Political Groups

• EPP (European People's Party - centre-right): the largest group; includes CDU from Germany, Forza Italia, and Les Républicains from France
• S&D (Socialists and Democrats - centre-left)
• Renew Europe (liberals)
• Greens/EFA
• ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists - right)
• ID (Identity and Democracy - far right)
• The Left (GUE/NGL)
• Non-attached members

The Parliament also has 22 committees that do the detailed legislative work - on agriculture, the single market, foreign affairs, etc. - before it reaches the full plenary.

European Commission

The Commission is the EU's main executive body - it is both the initiator of legislation and the enforcer of it. It has the sole right to propose legislation; Parliament and the Council can ask it to propose laws, but they cannot initiate legislation themselves. This makes the Commission enormously powerful in setting the EU's agenda.

It is headed by a President (5-year term) plus 27 Commissioners, one from each member state, each with a specific policy portfolio (economy, environment, energy, internal market, etc.). Officially, Commissioners are completely independent of their member state - they represent the EU interest, not their country. The current President is Ursula von der Leyen, appointed in 2019 and reappointed in 2024. Previous presidents include Romano Prodi, José Manuel Barroso, and Jean-Claude Juncker.

The Commission is also the "guardian of the treaties" - it monitors whether member states are actually implementing and complying with EU law, and can take non-compliant member states to the Court of Justice. It manages the EU budget and negotiates international agreements (like trade deals) on behalf of all 27 member states. It has 28 Directorates-General and thousands of civil servants, mostly based in Brussels and Luxembourg.

European External Action Service (EEAS)

Created in 2010 to give the EU a genuine foreign policy capacity - essentially the EU's diplomatic service. It is headed by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / VP of the Commission. The current holder is Kaja Kallas (previously held by Josep Borrell). The EEAS operates 140 diplomatic missions (EU embassies) around the world, runs CSDP civilian missions (~11) covering rule of law and governance, and manages CSDP military missions (~6) including the EU training mission for Ukrainian soldiers. Internally, the EEAS is organised into 5 geographic departments covering different regions of the world.

Other EU Institutions

European Court of Justice (ECJ) - Luxembourg

One judge per member state plus Advocates General. Its job is to ensure EU law is correctly interpreted and implemented across all 27 member states. If a national court is unsure how EU law applies, it can ask the ECJ for a ruling. The ECJ's judgments are binding.

European Court of Auditors - Luxembourg

Ensures the EU budget is correctly spent and not subject to fraud. It audits EU institutions and member states' use of EU funds, and publishes annual reports.

European Central Bank (ECB) - Frankfurt

Manages the euro and monetary policy for the eurozone. President Christine Lagarde. Its primary mandate is price stability (controlling inflation). It also supervises the major banks in the EU. The ECB became enormously important during the 2012 sovereign debt crisis - ECB President Mario Draghi's "whatever it takes" statement effectively stopped the eurozone from collapsing.

European Investment Bank (EIB) - Luxembourg

The EU's bank for investment - it finances projects both within the EU (infrastructure, energy, innovation) and externally (development projects in partner countries).

Key EU Agencies

• Europol - coordinates police cooperation across member states on serious organised crime and terrorism
• Frontex - manages the EU's external borders and coordinates border guard cooperation
• Eurojust - facilitates judicial cooperation in criminal matters across member states
• CEPOL - EU law enforcement training agency
• FRA (Fundamental Rights Agency) - monitors and reports on fundamental rights across the EU
• EMCDDA (Monitoring Centre for Drugs), EASO (Asylum Support Office)

Competition Policy

The EU's competition policy exists to protect the integrity of the single market - to make sure that companies compete fairly and that no one actor (whether a company or a government) can distort the market. The European Commission must be notified of - and must approve - any major merger or takeover, State aid, or anti-competitive agreement between companies.

A famous example illustrates why this matters: Germany wanted to allow a merger between Siemens and another German train manufacturer to create a European champion that could compete with Chinese state-owned train companies. The Commission blocked it. The argument from the German side was that without the merger, no one would buy European trains and they would end up buying Chinese trains instead - but the Commission held firm on its competition rules, prioritising internal market integrity over industrial policy. This tension between competition rules and strategic industrial policy is now one of the EU's central debates.

Another major issue is State aid - while the EU prohibits member states from unfairly subsidising their domestic companies, China massively subsidises its own companies. This creates an uneven playing field that the EU is increasingly trying to address through trade defence instruments.

Trade Policy

Trade is an area of exclusive EU competence - meaning the Commission negotiates trade deals on behalf of all 27 member states, and individual countries cannot run their own trade policy. This gives the EU enormous bargaining power as the world's largest trading bloc. The Commission can cut customs duties, scrap quotas, open public procurement markets, reduce bureaucracy, and negotiate market access for European services.

The EU's most recent trade strategy (February 2021) introduced the concept of "Open Strategic Autonomy" - a notable shift in language. It signals that the EU wants to remain open to trade and investment, but not naively so. The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call: when masks and protective equipment were desperately needed in early 2020, Europe discovered it had almost no domestic production capacity and was entirely dependent on China. Similarly, Europe had become deeply dependent on Russian gas. These twin shocks made "reducing strategic dependencies" a central EU priority. Under Trump's presidency, the US also actively undermined the WTO, and China engages in state-led economic practices that don't play by market rules. The EU's response: be more assertive, use trade as a geopolitical tool, promote green and digital transformation, strengthen the WTO, and defend its own economic model.

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

The CAP was launched in 1962 and remains one of the most debated EU policies - it consumes about one third of the entire EU budget. Its core purpose is food security: ensuring that European citizens have a stable supply of food at affordable prices, and that European farmers can survive economically. Farmers receive direct income support payments regardless of what they produce, which stabilises farm incomes but has also been criticised as inefficient and environmentally damaging.

The CAP also funds rural development - important for regions like parts of Spain, Poland, or Romania where agriculture is still a major employer. The most recent CAP reform (December 2021) incorporated Green Deal ambitions - attaching environmental conditions to payments to push farming toward more sustainable practices.

Cohesion Policy / Regional Aid

Cohesion policy is the EU's main instrument for reducing inequality between regions. It operates through several funds:

• European Regional Development Fund (ERDF): Finances infrastructure, SMEs, digital connectivity, education, and low-carbon activities in less developed regions. The idea is to bring lagging regions up to the EU average - so money from wealthy regions (via the EU budget) flows to poorer ones.
• European Social Fund (ESF): Invests in people - helping workers retrain, helping young people transition from school to work, supporting vocational training. In an era of rapid technological change, this is increasingly important.
• Cohesion Fund: Specifically for member states with GNI per capita below 90% of the EU average - funds environment and transport infrastructure in the poorest countries.
• EU Solidarity Fund: Emergency support for major natural disasters (floods, fires, earthquakes) and major health emergencies like COVID-19.

Environment and Climate Change

The EU has set two binding climate targets: climate neutrality by 2050 and a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. These are the most ambitious legally binding climate targets of any major economic bloc. The lecturer was candid on this point: we will probably not fully succeed - the targets are real but the political and economic pressures pushing against them are also real. The policy package to achieve this (the European Green Deal) includes:

• Greener mobility: Phasing out combustion engine cars, investing in clean public transport and electric vehicles
• Clean technology markets: Creating demand for renewable energy, heat pumps, energy-efficient buildings
• Renewable energy and efficiency: Boosting wind, solar, and other renewables; retrofitting buildings to reduce energy use
• Nature restoration: Protecting biodiversity, restoring ecosystems, reducing use of pesticides in agriculture
• International cooperation: Using the EU's trade and diplomacy leverage to push its green transition agenda globally

Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ)

The AFSJ is the policy framework for managing the internal security and free movement dimensions of the EU. The core deal is: no internal border controls (Schengen) in exchange for common policies on external borders, asylum, and immigration. This is politically one of the most contested areas of EU policy - member states have very different views on migration and asylum, making a truly common policy extremely difficult.

The 2015 Paris attacks (Bataclan) exposed a serious tension in the AFSJ: the attackers crossed internal EU borders freely because Schengen removed passport checks. Radicalised individuals who had returned from Syria were able to move undetected. This forced a rethink of the balance between free movement and security - leading to calls for stronger external border controls and better intelligence sharing. The AFSJ also relies on the principle of mutual recognition: EU countries recognise each other's legal decisions, but this does NOT mean the same laws everywhere. For example, euthanasia is legal in Belgium but not in France - mutual recognition means each country's law applies on its own territory, but judicial decisions (like arrest warrants) are recognised across borders.

• Schengen Area: Passport-free travel across approximately 29 countries - 25 EU member states plus 4 non-EU countries (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein). Ireland has an opt-out and is not part of Schengen. A practical demonstration of European integration every time a citizen crosses an internal border without stopping. However, Schengen has been challenged by the reimposition of temporary border checks by several member states in response to the 2015 migration crisis and terrorism threats - a sign of the political fragility of this achievement.
• Frontex: The EU border guard agency - coordinates external border control but depends on member states for actual resources
• Migration and Asylum Pact: A new attempt (still being implemented) to create a fair system for sharing responsibility for asylum seekers across member states - highly contested politically
• Europol and Eurojust: Enable cross-border police and judicial cooperation on serious crime and terrorism

Research and Innovation

The EU's ambition is to create a genuine single market for research and innovation - the European Research Area (ERA). The main financial instrument is Horizon Europe, the world's largest publicly funded research programme. The EU's target is for member states to spend 3% of GDP on R&D - but in 2018 the average was only 2.19%, and many member states fall well short. Closing this gap is one of the EU's key competitiveness challenges against the US and China, both of which invest heavily in state-backed research.

Energy

Energy policy sits at the intersection of climate, security, and economics. The EU wants to reduce dependence on fossil fuels (oil and gas) - a goal that became dramatically more urgent when Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off gas supplies to Europe in 2022. The strategy involves diversifying to nuclear, biomass, solar, and wind, and reducing overall energy consumption through efficiency. Bringing down energy prices is also a priority - high energy costs directly damage European industrial competitiveness.

Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

Education is primarily a member state competence - the EU does not tell countries how to run their schools. However, the EU provides significant financial support through programmes like Erasmus+ (student mobility, researcher exchanges, multilingualism) and Creative Europe (cultural sector support). The EU's role here is to enable connections and mobility across borders, not to standardise education systems.

Digital Transition

The digital transition is one of the EU's two central transformation priorities (alongside the green transition). The EU is working to complete the digital single market - removing barriers to cross-border digital services and e-commerce. It has taken a globally significant regulatory role with the AI Act (regulating artificial intelligence based on risk levels), GDPR (data protection), the Digital Markets Act, and the Digital Services Act. The EU's approach is to regulate digital technology in the interest of citizens and fair competition - a very different philosophy from the US (where big tech largely self-regulates) and China (where the state directs tech for national goals). 5G network security is also a major issue, particularly regarding Chinese equipment manufacturers like Huawei.

Social Regulation

The EU seeks to preserve what is often called the European Social Model - a model of capitalism that includes strong social protection, workers' rights, and public services. In an era of increasing inequality and social polarisation, the Commission has prioritised social fairness, reducing the gap between rich and poor, supporting young people entering the labour market, gender equality, and protecting minorities. The EU cannot force member states to adopt specific social policies, but it can set minimum standards and provide financial incentives through the ESF.

Successive Waves of Enlargement

Current Candidate Countries

For Western Balkan countries specifically, the EU uses a dedicated framework called the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP). Before a country can become a candidate, it must first sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU - a bilateral treaty committing the country to political and economic reforms in exchange for trade access and financial assistance (via the IPA - Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance). The SAP is therefore the entry point into the EU accession pipeline for the Western Balkans, distinct from the general Copenhagen Criteria process.

At the 2003 Thessaloniki Summit, the EU made a formal political commitment: the Western Balkans (Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo) have a European future - meaning EU membership is open to them if they meet the conditions. This was an important signal because it came just before the 2004 "big bang" enlargement, reassuring the Balkans they were not being left behind. The commitment has been reaffirmed many times since, though actual progress has been slow.

Negotiations Ongoing

• Montenegro (2012) and Serbia (2014): Western Balkan countries furthest along in negotiations - Montenegro is currently the closest to joining the EU. But progress is slow due to rule of law concerns and, in Serbia's case, its relationship with Russia and refusal to align with EU foreign policy positions.
• Albania and North Macedonia: Negotiations opened more recently; both must continue reform progress.
• Turkey (applied 1987, candidate 1999, negotiations opened 2005 - frozen 2018): Turkey applied for EEC membership in 1987 and a customs union has been in force since 1995. In 1997, Turkey was notably excluded from the Luxembourg enlargement process (while 10 other countries were invited) - a major diplomatic blow. Turkey was finally recognised as a candidate country at the Helsinki European Council in 1999. Full accession negotiations opened in 2005 but were frozen in 2018 due to serious backsliding on democracy, rule of law, and human rights under Erdogan - including the repression of Kurdish minorities, arbitrary detentions, and attacks on press freedom. Turkey is a key partner for the EU on migration, security, and counter-terrorism, but its democratic regression makes accession politically impossible for now. It has also intervened militarily in Cyprus's maritime zone, Syria, and Libya - all deeply problematic for an EU candidate.

Newer Candidates (Post-2022)

• Ukraine and Moldova: Were granted candidate status in June 2022 - directly linked to Russia's full-scale invasion. This was a political signal of EU solidarity, but actual accession will take many years and require major reforms in both countries.
• Georgia: Granted candidate status but then froze its own accession process in 2024 - the pro-Russian government decided to halt the path to EU membership, triggering massive protests from Georgian citizens who want EU membership.
• Bosnia and Herzegovina: Decision to open negotiations taken; still has significant governance and rule of law challenges.
• Kosovo: Potential candidate; Serbia does not recognise Kosovo's independence, complicating its EU path.

The Widening vs. Deepening Debate

This is one of the most fundamental debates in EU history: should the EU expand to include more countries (widening), or should it first deepen integration among existing members? The two can work against each other - more members means more diversity of interests, which makes deeper integration harder. A larger EU might be forced to work on a looser, more intergovernmental basis rather than deepening supranational cooperation.

On the other hand, enlargement has historically been the EU's most powerful foreign policy tool. The prospect of EU membership incentivises candidate countries to reform their institutions, strengthen the rule of law, and improve governance - a form of soft power that has worked remarkably well (look at the transformation of Eastern European economies and democracies after 1989–2004).

Enlargement as Soft Power

The EU uses conditionality - you only get membership (and all its economic benefits) if you meet the conditions. This gives the EU real leverage over candidate countries' domestic politics. This is the clearest example of the EU acting as a normative power that changes other countries' behaviour through incentives rather than military force.

Key Practical Debates

• Where are Europe's borders? Is Turkey European? Is Ukraine? Is Morocco? The EU has never formally defined its geographic limits.
• Institutional reform first: The EU's current institutions were designed for 15 members. With 27 (and potentially 35+), decision-making becomes unwieldy - especially with unanimity requirements in foreign policy and taxation.
• Budget reform: The CAP and cohesion funds were calibrated for a different union; adding Ukraine (a large agricultural country) would massively strain both.
• Pre-accession support: The Instrument for Pre-Accession (IPA) provides financial and technical assistance to help candidates prepare; the Commission publishes annual progress reports assessing each candidate's reforms.

Costs and Benefits of Enlargement

Enlargement is both a strategic opportunity and a political challenge. The balance of costs and benefits is a central question in the current debate about admitting Ukraine, Moldova, and the Western Balkans.

Commission Priorities 2024–2029

1. Sustainable prosperity and competitiveness: Making business easier (less red tape), developing the single market, building a strong industrial base, and bringing down energy prices - which requires reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports (oil and gas). Critically, this also means addressing the skills gap and labour shortages across the EU economy - without workers with the right skills, innovation and growth targets cannot be met.
2. EU Defence and Security - building a European Defence Union: This is genuinely new territory. Defence has always been a member state competence, and the EU had no formal role. But the war in Ukraine and uncertainty about US security guarantees has changed the calculus. The Commission is proposing to spend more - and spend smarter - on defence collectively. An important but often overlooked legal basis is Article 42.7 TEU - the mutual defence clause - which states that if one EU member state is attacked, the others have an obligation to help. In practice however, there is real uncertainty about whether member states would actually invoke this clause and intervene militarily, given that defence remains a national competence and political willingness varies enormously across the 27 member states.
3. Social model and supporting people: Social fairness, reducing polarisation, supporting young people, gender equality, protecting women, respecting minorities. European societies are becoming more polarised, and the Commission sees maintaining a cohesive social model as a political priority.
4. Food security, water and nature: Adapting to climate change while ensuring food security and fair incomes for farmers - a difficult balance given that agriculture is both a major emitter and highly vulnerable to climate impacts.
5. Protecting democracy - European Democracy Shield: The EU is under a hybrid war of disinformation. Russia runs systematic campaigns to undermine trust in EU institutions, spread false narratives, and amplify political divisions - combining cyberattacks on critical infrastructure with disinformation. The Democracy Shield is a package of measures to counter this and put citizens at the centre of democracy - strengthening civil society, media literacy, and electoral integrity across the EU.
6. A Global Europe: The EU's view is that Ukraine is not just defending itself - it is fighting for European freedom, which is why EU support is framed as a matter of principle, not just charity. Beyond Ukraine, the Global Europe priority covers enlargement as a geopolitical power strategy (Western Balkans, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine - not just integration for its own sake but to extend the EU's sphere of stability), a strategic neighbourhood policy covering both Eastern Europe and the Southern neighbourhood including the Maghreb and Middle East, and developing an economic foreign policy - using trade, investment, and sanctions as instruments to reduce strategic dependencies and project EU influence.
7. Preparing the Union for the future: Institutional reform, a new long-term budget with more resources, and enlargement readiness. The current EU decision-making system is too slow and too easily blocked - unanimity requirements mean a single member state can paralyse the whole Union. Reforming this before enlargement is essential.

State of the Union - Von der Leyen, September 2025

The annual State of the Union speech is the Commission President's moment to set the political agenda. In 2025, Von der Leyen addressed eight major themes:

1. Unity: The EU is deeply divided - on how to respond to US actions under Trump, on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and on trade conflicts. Member states disagree on whether to confront or accommodate the US, on whether to support Israel or condemn its actions in Gaza, and on how far to go in supporting Ukraine. This division translates directly into inefficiency - a divided EU punches far below its weight.
2. Ukraine: "Unwavering support" - the EU's continued political and financial commitment to Ukraine, despite war fatigue in some member states and pressure from the US to reach a deal with Russia. A key obstacle has been internal: Viktor Orban (Hungary) and Robert Fico (Slovakia) have repeatedly blocked or delayed EU financial support to Ukraine. Meanwhile on the ground, Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine's energy infrastructure - power stations, heating systems, the electricity grid - creating a severe humanitarian crisis especially heading into winter.
3. Gaza: The EU is deeply divided on the Gaza conflict - some member states support Israel strongly, others have recognised Palestine or called for a ceasefire. This division is a political embarrassment and a demonstration of the EU's limits in foreign policy.
4. Competitiveness: Invest in digital and clean technology. Complete the single market in energy, telecoms, and finance - sectors where fragmentation is still costing the EU competitiveness.
5. Green Deal: Continue reducing carbon emissions and reducing energy dependence - even if the green transition is politically contested.
6. Housing: An increasing number of Europeans - especially young people - cannot afford decent housing. Rising costs in EU cities have made this a serious social and political issue. This is notably the first time housing has appeared as an EU-level priority, despite the fact that housing is not an EU competence - it falls under member state responsibility. The Commission cannot legislate on housing directly, but can use investment instruments and regulatory frameworks to influence the market.
7. US Relations: Trump's tariffs and trade war threats would be devastating to the EU economy. The Commission is determined to negotiate but also to protect EU regulatory standards (particularly digital regulations) and not simply capitulate.
8. Migration: Implementing the new Migration and Asylum Pact - getting a real common EU return system working to send back those whose asylum claims have failed, and cracking down on smugglers and human trafficking networks that profit from desperate people attempting dangerous crossings.

Council Presidency - 18-Month Programme

The Council Presidency rotates every 6 months. Three consecutive presidencies (Poland H1 2025, Denmark H2 2025, Cyprus H1 2026) agree a joint 18-month programme to ensure continuity. Current priorities:

A Strong and Secure Europe

• Security and defence: Advancing the European Defence Union agenda; increasing defence spending collectively and more efficiently
• Migration: Implementing the Migration and Asylum Pact - politically one of the hardest tasks given diverging member state views
• Enlargement: Moving forward with accession processes while reforming EU institutions to prepare for new members
• External action: Maintaining coherent EU positions on Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and relations with major partners

A Prosperous and Competitive Europe

• Advancing competitiveness agenda - reducing bureaucracy, completing single market, supporting innovation
• Green and digital transitions - balancing climate ambition with economic competitiveness

A Free and Democratic Europe

• Upholding rule of law inside the EU - using EU budget conditionality to push member states like Hungary to respect judicial independence

Conference on the Future of Europe

The Conference on the Future of Europe was an experiment in participatory democracy - a major citizens' consultation exercise where ordinary Europeans discussed what they wanted from the EU. It ran in 2021–2022 and involved four panels of 200 randomly selected citizens each, with 15 working groups per panel. The topics were:

• Panel 1: Stronger economy, social justice, youth, culture, jobs, education, and digital transformation
• Panel 2: Democracy, values and rights, rule of law, security
• Panel 3: Climate change, environment, health
• Panel 4: EU in the world, migration

The panels produced hundreds of recommendations. The key outcome: citizens wanted a stronger, more democratic, and more capable EU - particularly on climate, health, and foreign policy. Some recommendations would require treaty changes (which are politically very difficult to achieve). The Conference reflected genuine public appetite for EU reform but also exposed the gap between citizen ambitions and political reality.

Key Exam Themes from Session 5

The lecturer identified four recurring tensions that run through all of Session 5 and connect to essay questions across the course.

1. Competitiveness is the #1 priority

Everything in the 2024-2029 agenda links back to competitiveness: innovation and R&D investment, lower energy costs, completing the digital single market, closing the skills gap, reducing bureaucracy. The EU is not just behind economically - if it falls further behind the US and China, it risks lower living standards for citizens and reduced geopolitical weight globally. 2026 has been formally designated the "year of competitiveness."

2. The security shift is a major turning point

For decades, the EU relied on the US security umbrella and NATO. Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Trump presidency's signals about reducing US commitment to European security have forced a genuine rethink. The EU is now moving - slowly and with great political difficulty - toward genuine strategic autonomy in defence. This is not a marginal adjustment; it is a structural change in how Europe thinks about its place in the world.

3. Constant trade-offs with no easy answers

• Competitiveness vs regulation: Business wants less red tape and lower costs; citizens and NGOs want social and environmental standards maintained. Both sides have legitimate points.
• Migration control vs human rights: Managing migration flows is a political necessity; respecting the rights of people fleeing war and persecution is a legal and moral obligation. These pull in opposite directions.
• Enlargement vs governance capacity: Admitting ~10 new members strengthens the EU geopolitically but risks making it ungovernable without deep institutional reform first.

4. EU under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously

External pressures: Russia's aggression, the weakening of multilateralism (UN, WTO), Trump's unilateralism, China's assertiveness, instability in the Middle East and Africa. Internal pressures: democratic backsliding (Hungary), political polarisation, far-right parties rising across the continent. The EU's challenge is to manage all of these simultaneously while maintaining internal cohesion among 27 very different member states.

Values vs. Interests - The Central Tension

The EU officially promotes certain values in its external relations: human rights, democracy, rule of law, and market economy. But the EU also has concrete interests: the security of its citizens and the prosperity of its economy. These two do not always align - and this creates a structural tension at the heart of EU foreign policy.

The clearest example is China. China is not a democracy. It violates human rights (Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet). And yet China is the EU's second-largest trading partner. The EU cannot simply cut ties with China without severe economic consequences. So the EU is forced to maintain a relationship with a country that contradicts its stated values - while trying to manage that tension through dialogue, conditionality, and strategic positioning.

The same tension appears in EU relations with Gulf monarchies (important for energy and investment), with authoritarian governments in the neighbourhood (Turkey, Egypt), and with any country where economic or security interests conflict with values. Foreign policy will always have contradictions between pursuing values and pursuing interests - recognising and managing this tension, rather than pretending it doesn't exist, is the mark of a mature foreign policy.

Why the EU Struggles as an International Actor

The Three EU Security Needs

To ensure EU security, three things are necessary: (1) defence capability - the EU has no army of its own, only member state forces; (2) counter-terrorism - coordination between all 27 member states against threats on EU soil; (3) energy security - the EU is heavily dependent on imported hydrocarbons. Energy security requires two parallel strategies: diversification of supply sources (not depending on one or two countries), and reducing dependence on hydrocarbons altogether through renewables (wind, solar, biomass) and nuclear energy. On nuclear: there is no EU consensus - France is strongly pro-nuclear, while Germany and Italy have moved away from it.

Weakness 1 - No Armed Forces

Member states have armies, the EU does not. They are not always well coordinated between themselves. When someone comes with a tank, soft power - norms, standards, values - is not enough to stop them. You need a tank to stop a tank. This is why Xi Jinping and Putin do not care about EU soft power: for them, international relations is about the balance of power and nothing else.

Weakness 2 - No Common Strategic Culture

Member states have different perceptions of threats, making common positions almost impossible on key issues. Two examples from class:

• Gaza: Spain, Ireland, and France say the EU must take a position against Israeli killing of civilians and consider freezing the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czech Republic say Israel has a right to self-defence and can do whatever it wants. The EU cannot agree on a common position.
• Russia/Ukraine: Poland, Baltic states, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland say stand firm - if we don't arm Ukraine and sanction Russia, Putin will move against Moldova, Georgia, and the Baltic states next. Others say Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine and we must maintain economic cooperation and dialogue, not perceive Russia as a threat.

The Hungary Problem and Article 7 TEU

Hungary under Orbán (in power 16 years) has repeatedly blocked EU positions on Ukraine, Russia, and migration. Orbán's stated view is that to be European you must be "Christian and heterosexual" - directly contrary to EU values. The treaty mechanism to deal with this is Article 7 TEU: if a member state is shown not to respect core EU values, the other 26 can remove its voting rights. In practice this requires all 26 to agree - but Robert Fico (Slovakia) is close to Orbán and will never vote against him, blocking the mechanism. Mingarelli's view: if Hungary doesn't share EU core values, it should leave the EU. But unlike Brexit (the UK was a net contributor to the EU budget and could argue it would be richer outside), Hungary receives billions from the EU every year and will never voluntarily leave.

Main EU Actors in International Relations

European Council

Sets the overall political direction of EU foreign policy at the level of Heads of State. When there is a major international crisis, the European Council meets and issues political conclusions that set the EU's collective position.

Foreign Affairs Council (FAC)

The 27 Foreign Ministers meet every month in Brussels, chaired by the High Representative (Kaja Kallas). This is where the day-to-day management of EU foreign policy happens - discussing crises, coordinating sanctions, agreeing diplomatic positions.

Political and Security Committee (PSC) and COREPER

The FAC is prepared by two bodies that both meet every week in Brussels. COREPER (Committee of Permanent Representatives - ambassadors from each member state) and the Political and Security Committee (PSC) (permanent representatives overseeing CFSP and CSDP). Together they filter and prepare the dossiers so ministers can focus on genuinely contested decisions.

European External Action Service (EEAS)

The EU's diplomatic service - effectively a foreign ministry. The EEAS is responsible for activating the EU crisis response system through its dedicated crisis response department, which follows all crises and proposes EU responses. It also runs the CSDP missions: approximately 11 civilian missions (rule of law, police, governance) and 6 military missions (including the mission training Ukrainian soldiers). The EEAS also monitors disinformation through its dedicated Strategic Communication Task Force - a team that analyses the press daily and tracks Russian disinformation campaigns.

European Commission

Manages humanitarian aid (the EU is the world's largest donor), development aid, and international trade. Crucially, the Commission is also responsible for connectivity - the EU's external relations in the fields of energy, telecommunications, transport, and digital cooperation. It also negotiates all bilateral agreements between the EU and foreign countries.

European Parliament

Scrutinises the CFSP and can take initiatives on external policy. However, the Parliament has no decisive role in foreign policy decisions - it can comment and pressure, but cannot block or mandate EU foreign policy positions.

EU Strategic Frameworks

European Security Strategy (2003)

The first ever EU security strategy. It identified five threats: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, failed states, regional conflicts, and organised crime. Its common objectives were to support the UN system and build security in the EU's neighbourhood - particularly the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Written in the context of the Iraq War, it was notably multilateralist in tone.

EU Global Strategy (2016)

Updated the security strategy after a decade of crises (financial crisis, Arab Spring, Russian annexation of Crimea). Five priorities: preserving the security of the Union (cybersecurity, counter-terrorism); strengthening resilience of neighbouring states; an integrated approach to conflicts (addressing root causes, not just symptoms); promoting regional governance; and upholding a rules-based global order.

EU Strategic Agenda 2019–2024

The European Council's political roadmap for the 2019-2024 institutional cycle - the 4th strategic framework in the EU's sequence of guiding documents. It focused on protecting citizens and freedoms, developing a strong and vibrant economic base, building a climate-neutral, green, fair and social Europe, and promoting European interests and values on the global stage. It set the political context for the von der Leyen Commission's first mandate and the Green Deal.

EU Strategic Compass (2022)

Adopted just one month after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - the most significant EU security document in years. It addresses the new security environment directly: threats from state actors (Russia, China), conflicts in the neighbourhood, and the need to build genuine EU defence capabilities. It set a target of creating a rapid deployment capacity of 5,000 troops.

New European Security Strategy (forthcoming)

The European Commission and the EEAS are currently working together on a new European security strategy, to be presented to member states in the coming months. It will include an analysis of the main threats and crises facing the EU, and a set of recommendations for how the EU can improve its position as a security actor. This will be the most up-to-date strategic document when it appears.

Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)

The CFSP is the overall framework for EU foreign policy coordination - covering everything from diplomatic statements to sanctions to political positions on international crises. Its fundamental weakness is the unanimity requirement: every member state must agree before the EU can act. This gives enormous veto power to individual countries, and has been repeatedly exploited (most famously by Hungary, which has blocked or delayed multiple EU decisions on Russia and Ukraine).

The debate about moving from unanimity to qualified majority voting (QMV) in foreign policy is one of the most politically charged reforms on the EU's table. It would make the EU more decisive but would mean member states could be outvoted on foreign policy - which many see as touching their core sovereignty.

Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)

The CSDP allows the EU to run civilian and military operations abroad. Currently there are approximately 11 civilian missions (training police, supporting rule of law, building governance capacity - in countries like Moldova, Georgia, Kosovo, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Iraq) and 6 military missions (including the EU Military Assistance Mission training Ukrainian soldiers, advisory missions, and border assistance missions). These missions are not an EU army - member states contribute personnel voluntarily.

Notable current missions: the EU-Rafah mission at the Gaza-Egypt border crossing point; and Operation Aspides - an EU naval mission in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden protecting freedom of navigation against Houthi (Iranian-backed) strikes on commercial shipping passing through the Suez Canal route.

Strategic Autonomy - What It Means and Why It's Hard

Strategic autonomy is the EU's goal of being able to act independently in its own security and strategic interests - without being entirely dependent on the United States, or on any other external power. It has become the defining concept of EU foreign and security policy over the last five years.

In practice, strategic autonomy means: developing EU defence capabilities so Europe can defend itself; reducing economic dependencies on potentially hostile states (China for critical raw materials, Russia for energy); building European technological sovereignty (not depending on US or Chinese platforms); and developing the political capacity to take decisions and act without waiting for Washington.

Why is it hard? Because it requires:

• Building a common strategic culture across 27 countries with very different histories and threat perceptions
• Overcoming the unanimity requirement that allows one member state to block collective action
• Investing massively in defence - which requires either new EU-level funding or increased national budgets (both politically difficult)
• Accepting that defence, which member states have always seen as their core sovereign competence, needs to be partially shared at EU level

European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP, 2004)

When the EU did its "big bang" enlargement in 2004, it suddenly had new neighbours - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Belarus - that were not in the enlargement queue but with whom the EU needed a structured relationship. The ENP was designed to build these relationships: values-based (rule of law, democracy, economic development), differentiated by country, and covering security and migration. The ENP offered closer ties with the EU - but not membership.

Association Agreements

Starting in 2007, the EU began negotiating deeper Association Agreements with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia. These went further than the ENP - they included a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) that would gradually integrate these countries' economies with the EU single market. The agreement with Ukraine was completed in 2012.

Then came the Euromaidan in 2013 - also known as the "Revolution of Dignity". Ukrainian President Yanukovych, under Russian pressure, refused to sign the Association Agreement at the last minute. This triggered massive pro-EU protests in Kyiv's Maidan square. Security forces and government-backed snipers killed over 100 protesters in the final days of violence. Yanukovych fled to Russia, and a pro-EU government took over - triggering Russia's annexation of Crimea and destabilisation of eastern Ukraine in response.

Eastern Partnership (2008)

The Eastern Partnership was launched to provide a framework for EU relations with six former Soviet states: Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus. It offered political association, economic integration, and people-to-people contacts - but, crucially, stopped short of offering membership. This ambiguity was both its strength (it was politically feasible) and its weakness (it didn't offer enough incentive for the most difficult reforms).

EU Membership Perspective (post-2022)

Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 fundamentally changed the calculus. The EU granted candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova in June 2022 - a historic and politically significant decision that confirmed the EU's commitment to these countries' European future, even in wartime. Georgia was also granted candidate status, though it subsequently froze its own accession process.

Conflicts in the Eastern Neighbourhood

Transnistria (Moldova)

A breakaway region of Moldova, backed by Russia, which has hosted Russian troops since 1992. It is a "frozen conflict" - no active fighting, but no resolution either. As Moldova moves toward EU accession, Transnistria is a tool Russia can use to destabilise the process.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia)

Russia recognised these two Georgian regions as independent states after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. No other UN member states recognise them. Russia maintains military bases there, and they are effectively occupied territories. This is the template Russia later applied in Crimea and Donbas.

Nagorno-Karabakh

A disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan. After decades of frozen conflict, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in September 2023 and re-took full control of the region. The Armenian population fled. This shifted Armenia closer to the EU and away from Russia (which had been Armenia's security guarantor through the CSTO but failed to intervene).

Crimea and Donbas (2014)

Following the Euromaidan revolution, Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and backed separatist movements in the Donbas (eastern Ukraine) - creating a low-level war that killed 14,000 people between 2014 and 2022. The EU responded with sanctions but not with weapons. This was criticised as insufficient deterrence.

Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine (February 24, 2022)

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 - the largest land war in Europe since World War II. The EU's response was unprecedented: the largest sanctions package ever imposed on any country, financial and military support to Ukraine (including providing weapons for the first time through the European Peace Facility), temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees across the EU, and granting Ukraine candidate status. The war has fundamentally transformed EU foreign and security policy.

The Limits of EU Influence in the Eastern Neighbourhood

The EU's experience in its eastern neighbourhood is a case study in the limits of soft power. The EU spent decades trying to build stable, democratic, market-oriented neighbours through conditionality, financial assistance, and the promise of closer integration. The results were mixed at best:

• Conditionality only works when partners want to reform. When governments in Ukraine, Georgia, or Moldova were captured by oligarchic or pro-Russian interests, EU conditionality had little effect. The incentive had to be strong enough - hence the argument that offering actual membership (rather than just "closer ties") is necessary.
• Russia actively countered EU influence. Through economic pressure (energy prices, trade embargoes), political interference (supporting pro-Russian parties), and eventually military force, Russia consistently undermined EU efforts to build a liberal, pro-European neighbourhood.
• Member state divisions weakened the EU response. Hungary's pro-Russian stance, Germany's long insistence on maintaining energy ties with Russia (Nord Stream), and different threat perceptions across member states meant the EU never spoke with one strong voice.
• Hard strategic action was off the table. Without military capabilities and without the political will to use force, the EU could not deter Russia from using force in the region.

Barcelona Process (1995)

Launched under the Spanish EU Presidency, the Barcelona Process was the first comprehensive EU framework for the southern neighbourhood. Its ambition was to create an area of peace, stability, and prosperity across the Mediterranean. It brought together the then 15 EU member states and 12 southern Mediterranean countries in a framework based on UN principles: rule of law, democracy, territorial integrity, and regional security. The long-term goal was a free trade area between the EU and the Arab world, and strong civil society engagement across both shores of the Mediterranean. The results were mixed - some economic cooperation advanced, but the political and security dimensions remained largely unachieved.

European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP, 2004–2005)

The ENP was initially designed for the eastern neighbours, but was extended to southern countries after 2004. It offered bilateral Association Agreements with individual countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel - but notably not Libya or Syria due to their political situations). Each agreement had the same three components: political dialogue, trade and economic cooperation, and cultural cooperation including student and researcher exchanges.

Union for the Mediterranean (2008)

French President Sarkozy's initiative to give the Mediterranean framework a stronger institutional structure. A Paris summit brought together 15 southern countries (Albania, Algeria, Bosnia, Egypt, Mauritania, Lebanon, Jordan, Monaco, Montenegro, Palestine, Tunisia, Turkey, Libya as observer). A permanent Secretariat was established in Barcelona, financed more than 50% by the EU Commission. Despite the structure, the Union for the Mediterranean has had limited effectiveness - many southern partner countries lack the democratic standards required for deeper cooperation, and regional conflicts (particularly the Israel-Palestine situation) have repeatedly blocked progress.

Pact for the Mediterranean (2025)

A new EU initiative launched in 2025, reflecting a more pragmatic and comprehensive approach. Its three pillars are: people as the driving force for change (innovation, connection, civil society), more sustainable and integrated economies, and security and migration management. Additional priorities include fighting climate change, protecting cultural heritage, and promoting human rights and democracy.

Arab Spring - The 2011 Uprisings

In December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in protest at police harassment, triggering a wave of popular uprisings across the Arab world. Citizens in multiple countries took to the streets demanding dignity, democracy, and an end to decades of authoritarian rule. The EU was largely caught off-guard.

Tunisia

President Ben Ali fled the country - the first domino to fall. Democratic elections followed and an Islamist party (Ennahda - an independent Tunisian Islamist party inspired by, but not a formal branch of, the Muslim Brotherhood) won legitimately. This created a dilemma for the EU: support democracy even when Islamists win? Tunisia then went through further political instability, with Kais Saied elected President in 2019 and then consolidating power in 2021 - dissolving parliament, rewriting the constitution, and becoming increasingly autocratic. Tunisia is now widely seen as a democratic backslide.

Egypt

President Mubarak was forced out after massive protests. A free presidential election followed, won by Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. The military then staged a coup in 2013, General Sisi took power, and Egypt returned to a military regime - arguably more repressive than Mubarak's. Mohammed Morsi died in prison in 2019, during a court hearing, in circumstances criticised by rights organisations as the result of mistreatment and inadequate medical care during his imprisonment.

Libya

Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011 with NATO air support (France and UK led the intervention). But no stable state emerged - Libya fragmented. There is an official government in the capital Tripoli in the west, while in the east (Benghazi), Marshal Haftar controls territory and refuses to recognise the Tripoli government - claiming to be the legitimate authority. This split has made Libya a failed state, a route for massive migration to Europe, and a theatre for competing foreign intervention by Turkey, Russia, UAE, and others.

Syria

The Assad regime used overwhelming force against protesters, triggering a civil war that lasted from 2011 to 2024 and killed hundreds of thousands. Assad's regime finally collapsed in December 2024 when rebel forces (led by HTS) took Damascus. Syria's future remains highly uncertain.

Second Wave (2019)

A second wave of popular uprisings hit Algeria (the Hirak movement successfully removed long-time president Bouteflika), Iraq, and Lebanon.

Recent Developments

• US withdrawal from the region: The US has progressively reduced its engagement - from Iraq to Syria to the broader Gulf. This creates a power vacuum that Russia, Turkey, China, and Iran are filling.
• Russia, Turkey, China moving in: Russia has military bases in Syria, influence in Libya, and is present in the Sahel. Turkey has forces in Syria, Libya, and strong influence in North Africa and the Gulf. China is investing heavily and brokered the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement - a remarkable diplomatic coup that shows China's growing Middle East influence.
• Algeria-Morocco tensions and Western Sahara: The two countries have no diplomatic relations and tensions over Western Sahara (a former Spanish colony - Morocco claims it as autonomous territory under Moroccan sovereignty; Algeria supports the Polisario Front's independence claim). A UN-mandated referendum on self-determination for Western Sahara has been promised for decades but has never taken place - Morocco consistently blocks it. This unresolved conflict complicates EU efforts to build a coherent North Africa policy.
• Rise of salafi movements: Across the southern neighbourhood, salafi and Islamist movements have grown significantly, filling political and social vacuums left by failed states and ineffective governance. This is directly relevant to EU security - radicalised individuals from these movements have carried out attacks in EU member states.
• Yemen: Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula is engulfed in a war between the Houthi movement (linked to Iran) and other factions. The Houthi have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea, threatening freedom of navigation through the Suez Canal route - directly prompting the EU's Aspides naval mission. This is a direct link between the southern neighbourhood and EU security interests.
• Lebanon and Hezbollah: Lebanon's governance model divides power between religious communities (Christians, Sunni, Shia). The Shia are represented by Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by the EU. Despite this, Hezbollah holds political power and refuses to disarm - the Lebanese President and Prime Minister have asked Hezbollah to disarm but it refused. Lebanon's overall institutional collapse has been compounded by Israeli military action against Hezbollah positions in 2024.
• Israel-Hamas conflict: On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people. Israel's response devastated Gaza - killing over 40,000 people, destroying hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. The EU is deeply divided: some member states (Germany, Austria) emphasise Israel's right to self-defence; others (Ireland, Spain, Belgium) have called for ceasefire and recognised Palestine. This division is a major embarrassment for EU foreign policy unity.
• Israel/US bombing of Iran: Military escalation involving Iran has added another layer of instability to the region.

EU Relations with Regional Organisations

League of Arab States

The EU engages with the Arab League as a regional interlocutor - for political dialogue on crises, coordination on development, and joint statements on regional security. However, the Arab League's institutional capacity is limited and member states often have conflicting interests, making it a difficult partner for structured cooperation.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

The GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman) is strategically important to the EU for two reasons: energy (the Gulf states supply significant volumes of LNG and oil to Europe, particularly important after the cut in Russian gas) and investment (Gulf sovereign wealth funds invest heavily in European companies and infrastructure). EU-GCC dialogue covers trade, energy, and increasingly geopolitics.

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)

The EU maintains dialogue with the OIC on humanitarian issues, conflict prevention, and cultural exchange. The relationship is largely soft diplomacy and has limited practical impact on specific crises.

EU-African Union Partnership (2000)

The formal institutional partnership between the EU and the African Union was established in 2000. The AU has 55 member states covering the entire African continent. The EU-AU partnership is structured around: heads-of-state summits (held every three years), ministerial-level meetings, and working-level meetings between the European Commission and the AU Commission. The AU's headquarters are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Joint EU-Africa Strategy (2007)

In 2007, the EU and the African Union adopted a Joint Africa-EU Strategy in Lisbon - moving from a donor-recipient relationship to a genuine political partnership between two continental organisations covering 27 EU member states and 55 African nations.

2022 EU-AU Summit: Joint Vision for 2030

The most recent summit (Brussels, 2022) produced a joint vision for 2030 with four major deliverables: (1) the Global Gateway Africa-Europe Investment Package - the EU's alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative, financing infrastructure, health, education, and green energy; (2) migration management cooperation; (3) a joint commitment to multilateralism and a rules-based international order; (4) peace and security cooperation. The summit reflected a new tone: Africa as an equal partner, not an aid recipient.

EU Toolbox / Instruments for Africa

The EU has a range of tools it can deploy in African partnerships - the mix depends on the context and country:

• Civil protection and humanitarian assistance: The lecturer identifies this as the most important EU tool - emergency response to conflicts, natural disasters, and health crises. The EU is the world's largest humanitarian donor, and this role gives it genuine operational presence and credibility in conflict and post-conflict settings.
• Mediation and diplomacy: The EU can play a neutral mediator role in conflicts, offering good offices and political support for peace processes
• Technical assistance: Sending European experts to advise on governance reform, judicial system development, security sector reform, economic policy
• Financial assistance (budget support): Direct contributions to African government budgets, tied to governance conditions and reform benchmarks
• Trade and investment: Economic Partnership Agreements and bilateral investment frameworks that give African countries preferential access to the EU market
• Communication and culture: Soft power tools to build relationships and promote shared values

Main Challenges Facing Africa

Mingarelli explicitly raised these as the overarching challenges that make development and stability so difficult:

• Corruption: Pervasive across governance, extractive industries, and security sectors - the single biggest obstacle to effective institutions and service delivery
• Poverty: A large part of the African population still lives in extremely difficult conditions - poverty is both a cause and consequence of conflict and instability
• Security: The proliferation of conflicts, jihadist movements, coups, and criminal networks makes sustained development almost impossible in affected regions
• Climate change: An existential threat for many African countries - threatening food security, water access, and displacing populations. Mingarelli noted that young people should be acutely aware of this threat.
• Digital transformation gap: Africa risks falling further behind if digitalization of the economy is not accelerated - digital infrastructure, skills, and connectivity are all lagging.

Horn of Africa Strategy

Coverage: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan

The Horn of Africa is one of the world's most conflict-affected regions - with civil wars, inter-state conflicts, jihadist movements (Al-Shabaab in Somalia), massive displacement, and a major migration corridor to North Africa and Europe. The EU strategy (launched 2011) focuses on achieving peace and stability through a counter-terrorism action plan, radicalisation prevention, and migration management. The EU also runs a naval mission (EU NAVFOR Atalanta) against piracy off the Somali coast. Effectiveness has been limited - the underlying governance and economic failures that drive instability are not easily addressed from outside.

Gulf of Guinea Strategy

Coverage: Benin, Togo, Nigeria coast

The Gulf of Guinea faces specific maritime security challenges: trafficking of drugs, human beings, and arms; piracy and armed robbery at sea; oil theft; and illegal fishing. These criminal networks destabilise coastal states and fuel broader instability. The EU strategy focuses on building coastal states' capacity to police their own waters and reduce criminal activity.

Sahel Strategy

Coverage: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad

The Sahel is where EU Africa policy has faced its most serious failure in recent years. The EU's strategy focused on economic development, good governance, security, and countering violent extremism - all reasonable goals. But the region was overtaken by events: rising jihadist movements (linked to Al-Qaeda and ISIS), three military coups (Mali 2021, Burkina Faso 2022, Niger 2023), and the arrival of Wagner Group (now Africa Corps) offering Russian military assistance with no governance conditions attached. France, which had been the main Western military presence through Operation Barkhane, was expelled. The EU's training missions and aid were also wound down. The three coup governments formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) - explicitly positioning themselves against Western influence. This is a significant geopolitical setback for EU influence in the region.

Current Conflicts in Africa

Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger)

Three military coups in three years. Wagner Group/Africa Corps providing "security" in exchange for mining concessions and political alignment with Russia. Jihadist movements (JNIM, ISGS) continue to expand. French forces expelled. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) formed as an anti-Western bloc. A major strategic setback for EU and French influence.

Nigeria - Boko Haram

The jihadist movement Boko Haram (and its splinter group ISWAP) has operated in the Lake Chad Basin region for over a decade, conducting attacks, kidnappings, and controlling territory across northeast Nigeria, western Niger, northern Cameroon, and western Chad. It remains a major source of instability despite years of military counter-operations.

DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Eastern DRC has been at war for over 20 years. The core of the conflict is control of the region's extraordinary mineral wealth - cobalt, coltan, cassiterite, gold - minerals that are essential for electric vehicle batteries and electronics. Rwanda backs the M23 rebel movement (despite denials) which has seized significant territory including the city of Goma. In 1994, Rwanda's genocide killed approximately 800,000 Tutsi people, and Hutu perpetrators fled to eastern Congo - creating a refugee crisis that evolved into a proxy war. The EU has CSDP missions in DRC and is the largest development donor, but has been unable to end the conflict.

Sudan

In April 2023, a conflict erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF, led by General Al-Burhan) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF, a paramilitary led by General Hemedti). The conflict has created one of the world's worst humanitarian crises - millions displaced, famine conditions, and massive atrocities particularly in Darfur. The EU has responded with humanitarian aid but has limited leverage.

Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique

Ethiopia fought a devastating civil war in the Tigray region (2020–2022), with a fragile peace deal holding since November 2022. There are also ongoing tensions between Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea. Somalia continues to battle Al-Shabaab, which controls significant rural territory despite years of AMISOM/ATMIS military operations. Somalia also has a separatist region called Somaliland in the north - which has its own functioning government and institutions, but is not recognised by the UN or the EU. It is notable that Israel has recognised Somaliland, though most countries have not. Mozambique's northern Cabo Delgado province faces a growing jihadist insurgency around its offshore gas fields.

EU-Canada Relations

Canada is one of the EU's closest partners - sharing democratic values, rule of law, and a broadly similar worldview on multilateralism and international order. The relationship is anchored by the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which entered into force provisionally in 2017 and is one of the most comprehensive free trade agreements either party has. It covers trade in goods, services, investment, and public procurement. The relationship also includes a Strategic Partnership Agreement on political and security cooperation. Key areas include: international peace and security, digital innovation, the green transition, and people-to-people ties (student exchanges, cultural agreements, travel). With the US becoming a less reliable partner under Trump, Canada and the EU have both been investing more in their bilateral relationship as a shared anchor of Western democratic values.

EU-Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

The EU has maintained strong relations with Latin America and the Caribbean since 1991, with summits every two years and regular foreign ministers meetings. The relationship is built on shared democratic values, trade, and cooperation on global challenges. Key areas: multilateralism and global governance, trade and investment, the green and digital transitions, justice and the rule of law, and democracy.

The most significant recent development is the EU-MERCOSUR Trade Agreement (covering Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). After over 20 years of negotiations, a deal was agreed in principle in 2019 and finalised in 2024. However, it remains deeply controversial, particularly in France. French farmers argue that importing South American meat will undermine European farmers who face stricter environmental, animal welfare, and food safety regulations - creating an unfair competitive advantage for MERCOSUR producers. The agreement is in temporary implementation while the full ratification process (requiring approval from all EU member states) continues.

EU-China Relations - The Triple Characterisation

The EU's official framework for China policy is a triple characterisation - China is simultaneously three things, and the EU must manage all three simultaneously:

• Cooperation partner: On issues like climate change and global governance, the EU and China have shared interests. China is essential to any global climate agreement - without Chinese buy-in, the Paris Agreement's targets cannot be met. The EU needs China to peak its emissions before 2030.
• Economic competitor: China has become a direct technological competitor - seeking leadership in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and clean energy technology. China also dominates the supply of critical raw materials (cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements) that are essential for the green transition. The EU is heavily dependent on China for EV batteries, solar panels, and other clean technology products. China also has severe overcapacity in steel, meaning Chinese steel floods global markets at below-cost prices, threatening European steel producers.
• Systemic rival: China actively promotes an alternative model of governance - authoritarian, state-led, without democratic checks or human rights protections. It uses its economic power to build political influence worldwide, particularly in the Global South. This is a direct challenge to the EU's normative model and its belief that democratic governance is the right system.

EU priority actions include: reinforcing cooperation on climate; engaging on peace and security (particularly Ukraine - China has significant leverage over Russia); applying existing trade agreements more robustly; promoting reciprocity (demanding the same market access in China that Chinese companies get in the EU); securing 5G networks against Chinese equipment vulnerabilities; and carefully managing the Taiwan situation.

EU-India Relations

India is the world's most populous democracy and an increasingly important strategic partner for the EU. Both share a commitment to multilateralism, the rules-based international order, and peace and stability. The EU and India have been negotiating a Free Trade Agreement for years (with significant gaps remaining on goods, services, and investment protection). Relations have deepened recently, partly because India is positioned as a strategic counterbalance to China in the Indo-Pacific - the EU wants to deepen ties with India for strategic as much as economic reasons.

EU-ASEAN Relations

ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) was founded in 1967. The EU-ASEAN dialogue is one of the oldest in EU external relations. ASEAN covers 10 Southeast Asian countries and is strategically important as a region experiencing rapid economic growth and sitting at the centre of global trade routes. The EU-ASEAN dialogue covers free trade (ongoing FTA negotiations with individual member states), democracy promotion, and development cooperation.

EU Indo-Pacific Strategy

The EU launched its Indo-Pacific Strategy in 2021 - a recognition that the EU's future depends significantly on how the Indo-Pacific region develops. The Indo-Pacific is home to more than half the world's population, generates over half of global GDP, and is the site of the most significant geopolitical competition of our era (US-China). The EU's priority areas are: sustainable and inclusive prosperity; green transition; ocean governance; digital governance; connectivity (transport, energy, communication links between Europe and Asia); security and defence partnerships; and human security.

Key challenges include: managing China's increasingly assertive behaviour; deepening partnerships with like-minded democracies (India, Japan, South Korea, Australia); supporting the Afghan people under Taliban rule; helping Rohingya refugees return to Myanmar; and North Korea's nuclear programme. The EU wants to be seen as a credible security provider in the region - not just an economic actor. On North Korea: the EU maintains a limited engagement policy - unlike the US, the EU believes in keeping some channels of dialogue open with Pyongyang, on the rationale that total isolation produces no leverage and that engagement (on humanitarian issues, human rights, denuclearisation) at least preserves the possibility of influence, however small.

Central Asia

Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) is part of the EU's broader Asia engagement. It is strategically important for energy transit, connectivity between Europe and Asia, and as a buffer zone between Russia, China, and Afghanistan. The EU has been deepening its Central Asia strategy in recent years, partly as an alternative connectivity route that bypasses Russia.

The European Union's enlargement process represents one of the most ambitious political projects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — a deliberate strategy to extend a zone of peace, democracy, and prosperity outward from its original six-member core. Assessed on balance, enlargement is best understood as a genuine foreign policy success story that has transformed much of the European continent, though the process now faces serious strains as candidate countries multiply and internal disagreements deepen. The tension between these two dimensions — enlargement as an instrument of transformation and enlargement as a source of internal strain — runs through the entire history of the project.

The founding logic of enlargement was inseparable from the EU's core missions of peace and solidarity. The ECSC was created in 1952 precisely to bind France and Germany together, making future conflict structurally difficult. From that six-member base, successive waves of enlargement extended these guarantees across the continent. The 1973 accession of Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom brought in northern Atlantic democracies. The 1981 and 1986 accessions of Greece, Spain, and Portugal were explicitly political decisions: these countries had only recently emerged from dictatorship, and the EU used the membership prospect as a tool to consolidate their democratic transitions. Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar had been excluded, but once both dictators fell and democratic governments emerged, accession followed. This pattern — using the membership perspective as an incentive for reform — became the defining feature of EU enlargement as a foreign policy instrument.

The 2004 and 2007 enlargements to include ten Central and Eastern European states, including Poland, Czechia, Hungary, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, and others, represented the most dramatic single expansion of the EU's geographic and political scope. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991, these countries stood in what was described in class as a political and security vacuum. The accession process gave them a structured path toward European norms through the Copenhagen Criteria, established in 1993, which required stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and minority rights, as well as a functioning market economy and the capacity to absorb EU obligations. Croatia's accession in 2013 completed this post-Cold War wave. From a foreign policy perspective, the transformation was remarkable: countries that had spent decades inside the Soviet bloc became law-governed market democracies integrated into the world's largest single market.

Nevertheless, the same enlargement waves that produced these successes have also generated significant internal tensions. Hungary, which joined in 2004, has become a central example of democratic backsliding within the EU itself. This creates a particular paradox: a country that entered the EU in part because it met the Copenhagen Criteria now, according to the course notes, exemplifies the erosion of those very standards from within. Hungary's opposition to the opening of accession talks with Ukraine is a concrete example of how internal instability can paralyse the enlargement process itself. Similarly, Turkey's accession negotiations, opened in 2005, were frozen in June 2018 following sustained backsliding on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, as well as Turkish interventions in the Eastern Mediterranean affecting Cyprus and Greece. Turkey remains a key partner on migration, security, and counter-terrorism, illustrating the characteristic tension between values and interests that the course identifies as structural to EU foreign policy. Meanwhile, Serbia's alignment with EU foreign policy remains a concern, as does the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethnic and political tensions persist.

The current enlargement agenda involves Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans countries including Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia, and potentially Kosovo. These represent a qualitatively different challenge from earlier waves. Ukraine's candidacy in particular emerged from the geopolitical shock of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 and is deeply intertwined with security calculations rather than primarily governance readiness. Georgia's decision to freeze its own accession process and the complex situations in several Western Balkan states — including Serbia-Kosovo relations and tensions in Bosnia — signal that the transformative power of the membership perspective is not uniform. The EU itself acknowledges that institutional reform, including of the budget, decision-making processes, and the ability to integrate new members, will be necessary before major new accessions can occur. The requirement for unanimity in many EU decisions, including foreign policy, means that a single member state can block progress, as Hungary has done on Ukraine.

On balance, the enlargement process has been far more of a foreign policy success story than a source of instability, particularly when measured over decades and across the full sweep of the continent. The consolidation of democracy in Southern Europe in the 1980s, the peaceful integration of post-communist states in the 2000s, and the ongoing structural leverage the EU retains over candidate countries through annual progress reports and the Instrument for Pre-Accession are achievements without parallel in international relations. Yet the current moment tests whether those instruments remain effective when the candidate landscape is more fragmented, the EU is internally divided, and geopolitical urgency competes with the careful conditionality that made earlier enlargements work. The enlargement process remains the EU's most powerful foreign policy tool, but sustaining its transformative logic requires internal coherence that is currently in short supply.

The EU's relationship with its eastern neighbourhood has passed through several distinct phases over the past three decades, moving from cautious technical cooperation in the 1990s through a succession of deeper political frameworks, and culminating in the acute crisis of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This evolution is not simply a story of progress; it reveals fundamental limits in what the EU, as a particular kind of actor, can achieve when the strategic environment is hostile and when the tools available — essentially soft power, financial assistance, and the promise of association — encounter determined resistance from a revisionist power.

The EU's earliest engagement with the post-Soviet east was shaped by the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the difficult transition that followed. During the Yeltsin period in Russia, the EU provided technical assistance through the TACIS programme, deploying experts in areas such as the nuclear sector, financial services, agriculture, transport, and vocational training. The Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, signed in 1992 and completed in 1994, established a framework for political dialogue, trade, and social cooperation. The EU's ambition was to support the democratisation of Russia and the stabilisation of newly independent states. The shock therapy programme designed by Gaidar and Chubais, inspired by American economist Jeffrey Sachs, was implemented too rapidly, leading to rapid privatisation, fast liberalisation, and widespread poverty, which ultimately discredited the Western reform model in Russian public opinion. This was not directly the EU's failure, but it illustrates the structural difficulty of promoting liberal democratic transformation when economic conditions are chaotic and domestic actors are not fully committed.

The beginning of the Putin era from 1999 onward fundamentally changed the strategic context. The concept of sovereign democracy articulated by Kremlin ideologist Surkov explicitly rejected political pluralism and press freedom, and Russia reasserted a sphere of influence encompassing Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. The EU nonetheless continued to pursue engagement: it launched a common strategy for Russia in 1999, explored the idea of a Common European Economic Space from Lisbon to Vladivostok in 2001 and 2002, and launched the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2004, in part driven by the recognition that the 2004 enlargement had created what was described in class as a political and security vacuum along the new eastern border of the EU. The four Common Spaces concept covered political cooperation, trading cooperation, transport, and communication. A modernisation partnership was proposed in 2007. Yet each of these initiatives operated within the same structural constraint: the EU could offer incentives and frameworks, but it could not compel Russia to pursue democratic governance, and Russia ultimately chose a different path.

With the non-Russian eastern neighbours — Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia — the EU developed a different and in some respects more promising instrument: the Association Agreement, negotiations for which began in 2007 and which included political dialogue, trade and economic cooperation, and cultural cooperation including student and researcher exchanges. The 2012 completion of the agreement with Ukraine seemed to mark a breakthrough. But the pivotal moment came in 2013, when President Yanukovych refused to sign the agreement, triggering the Euromaidan protests. This episode encapsulates both the power and the limits of EU foreign policy in the region: the association perspective was sufficiently attractive that Ukrainian civil society mobilised massively in its defence, but the EU was unable to prevent a Ukrainian president from refusing to sign under pressure from Moscow, and it had no effective instruments to manage the subsequent Russian annexation of Crimea or the conflict in Donbas.

The Gerasimov doctrine of hybrid warfare — disinformation, cyber attacks, political interference, sabotage, and the weaponisation of migration — posed a further challenge to the EU's soft power model. The EU's traditional instruments of norm-promotion, financial assistance, and trade incentives were structurally ill-suited to responding to active hybrid aggression. The EU Global Strategy of 2016 acknowledged this by identifying the strengthening of resilience in neighbours as a priority, and the Strategic Compass of 2022 addressed the new threat environment more directly, but the fundamental tension remained: the EU as an actor relies primarily on civilian power and incentive structures, not on hard security guarantees.

What the evolution of the EU's eastern neighbourhood policy ultimately reveals is that EU foreign policy is most effective when the domestic political environment in the target country is broadly receptive to European norms, the strategic competitive environment is permissive, and the membership prospect is credible. When any of these conditions is absent — as in Russia under Putin, or in Georgia after its decision to freeze accession, or in Ukraine during the Yanukovych presidency — EU instruments struggle to deliver transformative change. The granting of candidate status to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia after 2022 represents an acknowledgement that only the most powerful instrument in the EU's toolkit, the membership perspective backed by the full Copenhagen conditionality framework, retains credibility in a neighbourhood where Russia's revisionism has made all softer frameworks inadequate. Whether that prospect remains persuasive enough depends in part on whether the EU can show that it will actually deliver on the promise — a question that itself depends on the EU's own internal cohesion and capacity for reform.

The question of whether the EU can pursue long-term structural reform under competing pressures is in many ways the central question about the viability of the European project in the 2020s. The course materials make clear that the EU faces an unusually dense convergence of challenges simultaneously: a competitiveness gap relative to the United States and China, the ongoing green and digital transitions, a major war on its eastern border, migration pressures, and rising internal political polarisation. The record suggests that the EU possesses real capacities for structural reform but that these capacities are exercised unevenly, often depend on crisis conditions to unlock the necessary political will, and are constrained by the inherent tensions between supranational ambition and member state sovereignty.

The deepest structural reform challenge for the EU in the current period is economic competitiveness. As noted in the Session 5 materials, the EU's Commission priorities for 2024 to 2029 explicitly identify the need to develop plans to strengthen competitiveness, make business easier, develop a cleaner industrial base, bring down energy prices, and complete the single market in energy, telecommunications, and finance. The 2026 period is described as a competitiveness year. Von der Leyen's State of the Union address in 2025 called for investing more in digital and clean technology and completing the single market across key sectors. These are not new ambitions — the Lisbon Strategy of the early 2000s had similar goals — and their recurrence over two decades raises the legitimate question of whether the EU institutional architecture can actually deliver on structural economic reform or whether member state resistance, institutional fragmentation, and competing priorities consistently slow progress.

The economic and monetary union provides perhaps the clearest case study in the EU's capacity and limits for structural reform. The Delors Report of 1989 set out a plan that led through the Maastricht Treaty convergence criteria in 1992, the Stability and Growth Pact in 1997, the creation of the European Central Bank in 1998, and the introduction of the euro in 1999. This was an impressive sequence of institutional construction spread over a decade. However, the sovereign debt crisis of 2012 exposed a fundamental incompleteness in the EMU architecture: the EU had a monetary union without adequate fiscal union, economic union, or a fully developed banking and capital markets union. Reform plans in 2012 and 2015 proposed three pillars — economic union, financial union, and fiscal union — but the financial and fiscal pillars remain incomplete, with capital markets and banking union still described in the course notes as fragmented, causing capital to flow toward the United States rather than being retained within the EU economy.

Geopolitical pressures add a further layer of complexity. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has forced a major rethinking of EU security and defence, which was previously almost entirely a member state competence. The Commission's priorities for 2024 to 2029 identify the need to build a real European Defence Union, to spend better and together on defence, and to reduce dependency on the United States, whose security guarantee was explicitly questioned in the post-2025 Trump period. Building defence capacity at the EU level requires overcoming the fact that defence remains a member state competence, meaning that any progress requires consensus among 27 governments with divergent strategic cultures and different perceptions of threat. This is a structural constraint that the unanimity requirement in foreign and security policy makes more acute.

The green transition illustrates both the EU's capacity for ambitious structural reform and the political resistance it generates. The European Green Deal — with its targets of 55 percent emissions reduction by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, and climate neutrality by 2050 — represents a genuine long-term structural commitment embedded in EU law. The new CAP adopted in December 2021 incorporated Green Deal ambitions. Yet Von der Leyen's 2025 address also emphasised the need to continue implementing the Green Deal while managing the economic consequences for farmers and energy-intensive industries, reflecting the political pushback from constituencies that bear transition costs. The fact that the Council presidency programme for 2025 to 2026 reaffirms the green and digital transitions as priorities, alongside security and migration, shows that these long-term agendas are not being abandoned, but they must constantly compete for political and budgetary space.

The overall picture is that the EU is capable of pursuing long-term structural reform, but the process is slow, depends heavily on crisis-driven political impetus, and leaves significant gaps between ambition and implementation. The single market was a genuine structural achievement. The monetary union was a structural achievement that was left institutionally incomplete. The Green Deal represents an ambitious structural commitment that faces political turbulence. What the EU consistently struggles with is the final step: delivering the integrated fiscal, financial, and defence architecture that would make existing reforms fully coherent. The competing pressures identified in the question — economic, political, and geopolitical — do not prevent the EU from launching structural reforms, but they consistently erode the political will needed to complete them.

Migration has become one of the most politically contested policy areas in the European Union, and the EU's record in managing it reflects a deep structural tension between three values and interests that the course materials identify as pulling in different directions: the humanitarian obligations that flow from the EU's own Charter of Fundamental Rights and from international law, the border security imperatives that have grown in urgency since the large migratory flows of 2015 and after, and the insistence of member states on retaining sovereign control over migration and asylum policy. Understanding the EU's approach requires examining both the institutional framework that has been constructed over decades and the ways in which that framework is persistently strained by political and operational realities.

The legal and institutional foundation for EU migration policy sits within the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice, which is committed to the removal of internal border controls, a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, and a high level of security against cross-border threats including trafficking and organised crime. The key operational agency is Frontex, which manages external border control. The Asylum Support Office provides technical assistance to member states with particular pressures. The Migration and Asylum Pact, noted in the course materials as challenging to coordinate among member states, represents the most recent attempt to create a comprehensive common framework. Von der Leyen's State of the Union address in 2025 identified migration management as a priority, calling for an effective return system to send failed asylum seekers back to their home countries and for stronger action against smugglers.

The tension between member state sovereignty and common EU policy is the foundational structural problem. Migration touches directly on questions of national identity, labour market policy, welfare systems, and public order — areas where member states guard their prerogatives jealously. The EU has struggled consistently to build genuine burden-sharing mechanisms that would distribute asylum seekers more evenly across member states rather than concentrating pressure on frontline states like Italy, Greece, and Malta. Far-right parties, which the course notes identify as particularly hostile to open migration policies, have gained ground in multiple member states, further complicating the political space for common solutions. The Session 5 materials note that one of the current EU priorities is to set up a new approach to migration precisely because far-right parties strongly oppose existing frameworks. This itself illustrates how electoral politics at the national level effectively constrains what is achievable at the supranational level.

The humanitarian dimension of EU migration policy is also complicated by the geographic realities of where migration pressure originates. In the southern neighbourhood, migration flows are shaped by the collapse of the Libyan state following the 2011 conflict, the Syrian civil war, the economic and political crisis in Lebanon, and poverty and instability across Sub-Saharan Africa. The EU's engagement with Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey on migration management illustrates the trade-offs involved: Turkey is described in the course notes as a key partner on migration despite its backsliding on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. This is a direct example of the structural tension the course identifies between EU values and EU interests. Partnering with authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states to manage migration flows may be effective in limiting arrivals, but it undermines the EU's credibility as a promoter of human rights.

In the eastern neighbourhood, migration has been weaponised deliberately as a tool of hybrid warfare, as identified in the discussion of the Gerasimov doctrine in the Session 7 materials. The use of migration as a geopolitical instrument by state actors further complicates the EU's approach, because effective migration management then becomes inseparable from security policy, intelligence, and diplomatic engagement with hostile states.

The Africa strategy outlined in Session 9 represents an attempt to address the root causes of migration rather than merely managing flows at the border. The Samoa Agreement of 2023, the EU-Africa partnership frameworks, and the regional strategies for the Sahel, Horn of Africa, and Gulf of Guinea all include migration and mobility management as explicit priority areas, alongside economic development and security. The logic is that addressing the underlying drivers of displacement — poverty, conflict, climate change, poor governance — is more sustainable than border enforcement alone. However, the course notes acknowledge that several of these regional strategies have not been efficient, particularly in the Sahel and Horn of Africa, where jihadist movements, the Wagner Group's expansion, and the displacement of French forces have destabilised areas from which migration flows originate.

Overall, the EU's approach to migration has achieved some real institutional progress — Frontex has grown significantly, the common legal framework for asylum exists, and the new Mediterranean Pact of 2025 reflects a more integrated approach. But effectiveness in the fullest sense remains elusive. The persistent failure to agree on binding burden-sharing, the reliance on partnerships with governments that do not share EU values, and the political veto that far-right national governments exercise over common solutions all constrain what the EU can deliver. Migration policy illustrates, perhaps more clearly than any other area, the fundamental tension at the heart of the European project between the ambition to act as a single coherent entity and the reality of twenty-seven member states with divergent interests and domestic political imperatives.

The concept of EU strategic autonomy — the idea that Europe should be capable of acting independently in security and defence matters rather than relying on the United States — has moved from the margins of European political debate to its centre. The evolution of the transatlantic relationship, especially under the Trump administration from 2025 onward, has made strategic autonomy not merely an aspiration but, in the view of many EU leaders, a near-term necessity. Yet the gap between aspiration and operational reality remains substantial, and assessing how realistic European self-reliance truly is requires examining both what has changed in the strategic environment and what structural constraints continue to limit EU defence capacity.

The transatlantic partnership has been the bedrock of European security since 1945. As the course notes make clear, the United States provided a nuclear umbrella and maintained more than 70,000 soldiers on European soil within the NATO framework. This arrangement allowed European states to invest relatively little in their own defence for decades, relying on collective defence under American leadership. The EU Global Strategy of 2016 had already identified the need to strengthen EU defence and security as one of five priorities, but the ambition was largely framed as a complement to NATO rather than an alternative. The concept of strategic autonomy appeared, but it was not yet treated as urgent.

The Trump administration's approach changed the strategic calculus fundamentally. According to the Session 10 materials, after Trump's inauguration, the political relationship became strained, the United States told Europeans to take care of their own security, and NATO became more fragile. The nuclear umbrella, which had been taken as given for eight decades, was called into question. The economic dimension added a further rupture: US tariffs and the risk of a trade war were described in class as potentially devastating for the EU economy. The Commission's priorities for 2024 to 2029 accordingly include a commitment to building a real European Defence Union, spending better and together on defence, and reducing dependency on the United States.

What has emerged in EU policy is a recognition that strategic autonomy has multiple dimensions. The security dimension — building European military capacity — is the most visible, but it is accompanied by an energy security dimension (reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports, a vulnerability exposed dramatically by the reliance on Russian gas), a technological dimension (reducing dependence on non-EU suppliers for critical raw materials like cobalt and lithium, electric vehicle batteries, and solar panels, areas where China's dominance is a strategic vulnerability according to the Session 10 notes), and a digital dimension involving 5G network security and data governance. The 2021 trade strategy of open strategic autonomy was explicitly the first time the EU articulated this concept in trade policy, committing the EU to being more assertive globally while maintaining openness.

However, the obstacles to genuine strategic self-reliance are formidable. Defence remains primarily a member state competence, meaning that the EU has no standing army and that any common defence capacity must be built through voluntary cooperation among 27 governments with different strategic cultures, different threat perceptions, and different political constraints. The unanimity requirement in EU foreign and security policy — which means that a single member state can block a common decision — further impairs collective action. As the course notes observe, different countries have different points of view on global political situations, making it hard to build consensus. The experience of the Common Security and Defence Policy missions — approximately eleven civilian and six military missions ongoing — shows that the EU can mount operations, but these are limited in scale and depend on voluntary national contributions.

The comparison with the United States and China on competitiveness, identified in Session 5 as the central economic challenge, is directly relevant. The EU's relative weakness in digital technology, the dominance of American platforms, and its dependence on Chinese components for the green transition all represent structural vulnerabilities that cannot be resolved quickly. The Von der Leyen address in 2025 acknowledged the difficulty of the EU-US relationship, noting that despite the trade disputes, the EU cannot abandon its digital regulations in exchange for economic concessions, illustrating the complex trade-offs involved.

Strategic autonomy is a realistic goal in the long term if understood as reducing excessive dependencies rather than achieving complete self-sufficiency. Building a European Defence Union, completing the energy transition to reduce fossil fuel dependence, diversifying supply chains for critical materials, and developing European digital and technological capacity are all realistic incremental goals. What is not realistic in the short or medium term is complete independence from both the United States and other major partners. The EU-Canada relationship, described in the course notes as built on strong shared values and comprehensive economic and security cooperation through CETA and the Strategic Partnership Agreement, illustrates that strategic autonomy does not mean isolation — it means having the capacity to make strategic choices rather than having choices dictated by dependence. This more nuanced version of autonomy is both realistic and genuinely in construction, though its pace will depend on whether the EU can maintain the internal cohesion that ambitious collective defence and industrial policy requires.

The tension between deepening integration and accommodating member state sovereignty is not an accident or a failure of EU design — it is constitutive of the European project itself. The EU is neither a federal state nor a classical intergovernmental organisation, but something in between, and the institutions, decision-making rules, and policy architecture that have developed since 1952 reflect continuous negotiation between these two poles. Whether the balance currently struck is sustainable is one of the most important questions facing the EU, and the course materials suggest an ambiguous answer: the balance has been creative and productive across decades, but recent pressures — internal and external — are straining it in ways that earlier periods did not.

The institutional architecture established by successive treaties — from Rome through Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, and Lisbon — represents a series of choices about where to give the EU genuine supranational authority and where to leave competence with member states. The European Commission holds the exclusive right to propose legislation, the European Court of Justice ensures that EU law takes precedence over national law in areas of EU competence, and the European Parliament is elected directly. These are elements of genuine supranationalism. At the same time, the Council of Ministers, which adopts legislation alongside the Parliament, is composed of national ministers, and many decisions — particularly in foreign and security policy — require unanimity, effectively giving each member state a veto. The current president of the European Council, António Costa, chairs a body that sets political direction for the EU but consists entirely of heads of state and government: it is simultaneously an EU institution and a meeting of national leaders.

The substantive record shows that deepening has been most successful in areas where member states accepted that common action served their interests better than separate action. The single market — which ensures the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital across 27 member states — is the clearest example. The customs union was achieved as long ago as 1968. The Schengen Area extended free movement to persons. The euro, adopted by nineteen member states, is a profound deepening of integration that transfers monetary policy entirely to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt under Christine Lagarde. These achievements are real and durable. However, the course notes also identify areas where integration has stalled: the Banking Union and Capital Markets Union remain incomplete, causing capital to flow out of the EU toward the United States. This is a direct consequence of the resistance of national financial systems and governments to full integration of their financial markets.

The deepening versus widening debate — which the Session 4 materials identify explicitly as a structural tension — becomes especially acute in the context of the current enlargement agenda. Adding Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and multiple Western Balkan countries to the EU would increase the membership to perhaps 35 or more states, with very different levels of economic development, different administrative capacities, and different political cultures. This would require institutional reform of the budget, the decision-making process, and the policies themselves. Enlargement without institutional reform risks diluting the effectiveness of EU decision-making further, while institutional reform — particularly moving from unanimity to qualified majority voting in foreign policy and other sensitive areas — requires member states to give up vetoes they are reluctant to relinquish.

The Brexit experience, however it is assessed, illustrates both the strains within the integration project and the costs of exit. The UK's departure from the EU removed a large, economically significant, and historically integration-sceptic member state, but it also demonstrated that the EU is not irreversible and that national sovereignty arguments retain powerful political traction. The rise of far-right parties across multiple EU member states — noted in Session 5 as a political reality that shapes the migration agenda and other policy areas — reflects a broader political mobilisation around national identity and sovereignty that the EU institutions must take seriously.

The Commission's priorities for 2024 to 2029 reveal an awareness that institutional sustainability requires actively demonstrating value to citizens. The proposed European Democracy Shield against disinformation, the commitment to social fairness and protecting citizens from the affordability crisis in housing, and the ambition to make the EU a coherent actor in a more dangerous world are all designed to make integration politically legitimate, not just technically efficient. The Conference on the Future of Europe engaged panels of citizens on questions ranging from economic reform to democracy, values, and EU global roles.

The balance is sustainable if the EU continues to show that it delivers in areas where common action is indispensable — security, competitiveness, climate, and the management of a dangerous neighbourhood — while genuinely respecting member state preferences in areas of national identity and governance. What is not sustainable is a model in which the unanimity requirement paralyses foreign policy responses, democratic backsliding within member states erodes the shared values that give the Union its coherence, and the institutional architecture remains calibrated for a smaller Union than the one that may be created by the next wave of enlargement. The balance is under stress, but it has survived greater challenges before.

The EU presents itself as a normative power — an actor whose foreign policy is fundamentally oriented toward promoting democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, not merely advancing narrowly defined security and economic interests. The course materials support this self-presentation to a degree: the values listed in the EU's international objectives include human rights, market economy, rule of law, and democracy, and these are embedded in the Copenhagen Criteria for candidate countries, in Association Agreements, in the Barcelona Process, and in the Samoa Agreement with African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. However, the course also identifies a structural tension — explicitly described by the lecturer — between values and interests. An honest assessment shows that while democracy promotion is a genuine EU objective, security and economic considerations routinely constrain, qualify, and at times override it.

The most compelling evidence for genuine democracy promotion is the enlargement process itself. The Copenhagen Criteria, established in 1993, made stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, rule of law, human rights, and minority rights a necessary condition for accession. For countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, the membership perspective was a powerful anchor for democratic consolidation. Spain's Franco dictatorship and Portugal's Salazar regime had kept both countries outside the European community until their democratic transitions; their 1986 accession validated the democratic transformation. Similarly, the conditionality attached to Association Agreements — which include political dialogue on rule of law and democratic governance as a formal component — reflects a genuine institutional commitment to these values. The Instrument for Pre-Accession provides financial support precisely to help candidates meet democratic governance standards, and the Commission's annual progress reports assess reform implementation in detail.

Yet the limits of this normative commitment become visible when security or economic interests are at stake. Turkey is the most striking example. As the course notes acknowledge, Turkey remains a key partner on migration, security, and counter-terrorism and has a customs union with the EU dating from 1995. Despite sustained backsliding on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, and despite accession negotiations being frozen since June 2018, EU-Turkey relations have not broken down because Turkey's cooperation on migration management and security gives it leverage that many EU member states are unwilling to sacrifice. The structural logic is clear: when EU interests are sufficiently dependent on a partner, the democracy and rule of law conditions are effectively suspended.

The southern neighbourhood reveals the same pattern in a broader regional context. The Barcelona Process, launched in 1995, explicitly based EU-Mediterranean relations on UN principles including rule of law, democracy, and territorial integrity. Association Agreements with Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt all contain political dialogue components. However, EU support for authoritarian stability in the region was widespread before the Arab Spring: the EU maintained cooperative relations with Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt, and other authoritarian governments on the grounds of migration management, counter-terrorism cooperation, and energy security. When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, the EU found itself associated with the regimes being overthrown. The aftermath was equally instructive: in Egypt, the military government that replaced the elected Muslim Brotherhood government was gradually re-accommodated by EU partners, partly because of regional security concerns and the perceived instability of electoral democracy in the country. Tunisia's democratic period ended with Kais Saied's consolidation of autocratic power, and the country is described in the course notes as having returned to autocracy — with limited EU response.

In the eastern neighbourhood, the EU's genuine commitment to democratic values is illustrated by the Eastern Partnership, the Association Agreements, and the granting of candidate status to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia after 2022. The Euromaidan protests in 2013, which were triggered by Yanukovych's refusal to sign the Association Agreement, showed that EU norms had genuine popular traction within Ukrainian society. At the same time, the EU's inability to prevent or adequately respond to Russian annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Donbas illustrated how security limitations constrained democratic promotion: the EU could articulate values but could not enforce them against a military power.

The relationship with China, discussed in the Session 10 materials, offers the clearest statement of the values-interests tension. China is simultaneously a cooperation partner on climate change, an economic competitor in technology and industrial goods, and a systemic rival promoting a non-democratic governance model. The EU explicitly identifies all three dimensions. The systemic rivalry does not prevent extensive trade and investment relations, because economic interdependence is too deep and Chinese cooperation on climate is too important to sacrifice for the sake of values consistency.

In sum, the EU genuinely promotes democracy and the rule of law — this is not merely rhetorical. But it does so instrumentally and selectively, constrained at every turn by the strategic context. The promotion of democratic norms is most sustained and effective when backed by the prospect of membership or deep association. Where those incentives are absent or where the costs of conditionality are too high, security and economic interests generally prevail. This is not hypocrisy so much as the predictable result of a foreign policy conducted by an actor that must simultaneously be a normative power and a responsible strategic actor in a world where values-based and interest-based imperatives frequently diverge.

The EU's economic policy challenges in the 2020s are substantial and interconnected, combining structural weaknesses that have built up over decades with acute new pressures from geopolitical disruption, the climate transition, and the accelerating technological competition with the United States and China. The Commission priorities for 2024 to 2029, the State of the Union address by Von der Leyen in 2025, and the 18-month Council presidency programme all identify competitiveness as the central economic challenge of the period. Whether EU institutions are addressing it effectively is a more contested question, and the course materials suggest a picture of ambitious intent constrained by structural limitations.

The first and most fundamental challenge is the competitiveness gap with the United States and China. As the Session 5 notes make clear, the EU's companies face significantly greater competitive pressure than their American and Chinese counterparts, partly because the EU single market remains incomplete in key sectors. Capital markets and the Banking Union are identified as still fragmented, causing capital to move from the EU to the United States rather than being invested productively within the European economy. The Von der Leyen 2025 address explicitly called for completing the single market in energy, telecommunications, and finance. The EU also faces a technological dependence on China for critical raw materials — cobalt, lithium, and other inputs — as well as for electric vehicle batteries and solar panels, areas central to the green transition. In digital technology, American platforms dominate European digital markets, and the EU has not produced globally competitive equivalents.

The energy challenge is both an economic and a strategic problem. The EU's heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels — gas and oil — has been identified in the course notes as a major economic vulnerability, particularly when prices increase. The energy price shock associated with the conflict in Ukraine exposed how severely high energy costs could constrain European industry. The Commission's 2024 to 2029 priorities include bringing down energy prices as an explicit goal, alongside building a cleaner industrial base. The Green Deal's targets — 55 percent emission reduction by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050 — represent the long-term structural response, but the transition period involves continued vulnerability to energy price volatility, and the costs of transition fall unevenly across industries and member states.

The business environment challenge is addressed through commitments to reduce bureaucratic obstacles for companies, promote a business-friendly environment, and ensure that EU companies must respect social and ecological standards without being so burdened by regulation that they cannot compete internationally. The EU's competition policy has historically been oriented toward preventing monopolies and ensuring fair competition within the single market, but the course materials note a tension here: the blocking of the Siemens merger because it would have created a dominant European train manufacturer left the EU without a company large enough to compete with Chinese state-supported rail companies. This exemplifies the structural dilemma between applying internal competition rules and building competitive European champions for the global market. State aid is prohibited under EU rules, while China actively supports its companies through state aid — a systemic asymmetry that the 2021 open strategic autonomy trade strategy began to address.

The EU's institutional response to the competitiveness challenge has several components. The Horizon Europe programme, which funds research and innovation across the EU, addresses the research and development gap, given that the EU has set a target of investing 3 percent of GDP in research while the 2018 figure was 2.19 percent. The digital transition agenda includes AI regulation, 5G network security, data governance, and digital single market completion. The cohesion funds — the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, and the Cohesion Fund — redistribute resources from richer to poorer member states and regions, which contributes to internal economic solidarity but cannot by itself address the macro-level competitiveness gap with the US and China.

The EU's trade policy, explicitly designated an exclusive EU competence, is another instrument. The 2021 trade strategy introduced the concept of open strategic autonomy — promoting the green and digital transformations internationally while strengthening multilateralism and being more assertive about reciprocity. The EU-Mercosur trade agreement, the CETA with Canada, and ongoing trade relationship management with China and India are all part of this agenda. However, as the course notes observe, the US under Trump has been willing to undermine the WTO itself, making the multilateral framework on which EU trade policy has long depended more fragile.

The overall assessment is that EU institutions are addressing the competitiveness challenge with greater urgency than in previous periods, and the analytical diagnosis — incomplete single market, energy dependence, technological lag, regulatory asymmetry with China and the US — is reasonably accurate. But the gap between diagnosis and delivery remains significant. Completing the Capital Markets Union requires political agreement among member states that guard their financial sovereignty carefully. Reducing energy dependence requires massive infrastructure investment over many years. Developing competitive digital and clean technology industries requires the kind of patient, large-scale public and private investment that the fragmented European capital market does not easily mobilise. The EU has the frameworks and the ambition; what is genuinely uncertain is whether the political will and institutional coherence exist to execute them at the speed the competitive challenge requires.

Addressing the root causes of migration and instability is perhaps the most ambitious and difficult foreign policy task the EU has set itself. Unlike border management, which is a relatively discrete operational challenge, root cause reduction requires transforming the economic, governance, security, and climate conditions that drive people to flee their homes in the first place. This is inherently a long-term enterprise that engages nearly every dimension of EU external policy — development cooperation, trade, diplomacy, security missions, climate action, and governance reform. The course materials document both the scale of the EU's engagement and the sobering limits of its effectiveness.

In the southern neighbourhood, the EU's foundational framework was the Barcelona Process of 1995, launched under the Spanish presidency with the explicit objective of creating an area of peace and stability through social and economic partnership with the twelve Mediterranean countries. The ambition was to accelerate social and economic development, improve living conditions, and move toward a free trade area between the EU and Arab countries. Bilateral Association Agreements with Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Israel followed, each containing components of political dialogue, trade and economic cooperation, and cultural exchange including student mobility. The Union for the Mediterranean, launched in 2008 with a secretariat in Barcelona and co-financed significantly by the EU Commission, aimed to generate concrete joint projects. Yet the course notes assess the Union for the Mediterranean's effectiveness critically, noting that not many initiatives were effective, partly because many partner countries did not have sufficient democratic standards and governance capacity.

The Arab Spring of 2011 demonstrated the limits of the EU's stabilisation strategy. Despite three decades of engagement, the conditions for social explosions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria had not been fundamentally transformed. Tunisia, initially a democratic success after Ben Ali's fall, subsequently elected an Islamist party and then moved back toward autocracy under Kais Saied. Egypt returned to military rule. Libya descended into prolonged conflict. Syria's civil war lasted from 2011 to 2024. These developments were not simply failures of EU policy — they reflected deep structural conditions in the region — but they do suggest that EU instruments of economic cooperation and governance promotion had limited penetrating power when confronted with entrenched political economies, regional rivalries, and the collapse of state authority.

In Africa, the EU has built an extensive architecture of development cooperation spanning the Lomé Convention of 1975, the Cotonou Agreement of 2000, and the Samoa Agreement of 2023, which covers 27 EU member states and 79 countries and will govern relations for the next 20 years. The Samoa Agreement covers six priority areas: human rights and democracy, peace and security, social development, sustainable economic development, environmental sustainability and climate change, and migration and mobility. The EU also has regional strategies for the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Gulf of Guinea, each targeting specific drivers of instability. However, the course notes are candid about the results: the strategies for the Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa are assessed as not efficient. In the Sahel — covering Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad — the EU strategy focused on economic development, good governance, regional security, and countering violent extremism, but the actual trajectory has been one of deepening instability, with Wagner Group forces providing military assistance and displacing French forces, while jihadist movements have expanded across the region.

In the eastern neighbourhood, the EU's programmes of technical and financial assistance — including TACIS for Russia in the 1990s, the Eastern Partnership from 2008, and the Association Agreements with Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia — represented genuine investments in governance reform and economic modernisation. The EU's support for Ukraine before and after 2022 has been substantial, but the fundamental destabilising force in the neighbourhood — Russia's revisionist foreign policy and its use of hybrid warfare instruments including disinformation, cyber attacks, and the weaponisation of migration — is beyond the reach of EU development instruments.

A critical cross-cutting observation from the course materials is that the EU is the world's largest provider of humanitarian assistance and development aid. This is a real and significant contribution to addressing immediate suffering. But humanitarian response addresses consequences rather than causes. The structural drivers of migration and instability — climate change and its agricultural consequences, governance failures and corruption, youth unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, armed conflict sustained by regional power competition — require decades of sustained engagement to address, and often involve dynamics, such as Russian and Chinese geopolitical interference in Africa, that EU instruments cannot directly counter.

The EU's new Pact for the Mediterranean of 2025 represents a fresh attempt to integrate the various strands of engagement — people, sustainable economies, security and migration management — into a coherent framework. The commitment to fighting climate change and protecting cultural heritage alongside security and migration management reflects a more integrated understanding of what stabilisation requires. Whether this represents a genuine step-change in effectiveness or another well-designed framework whose implementation will be constrained by partner country politics, EU member state divisions, and resource limitations remains to be seen. The honest assessment is that the EU has invested enormously in addressing root causes, has genuine instruments, and has achieved real results in specific cases, but that it has not yet found a model that reliably transforms the conditions generating migration and instability at the scale and speed the challenge demands.

The EU defines itself, in part, through its values: human rights, market economy, rule of law, democracy, and multilateralism. These are not merely rhetorical commitments — they are written into the treaties, embedded in the Copenhagen Criteria for enlargement, and structurally present in the mandates of EU institutions. Yet the EU must also maintain productive relationships with major powers — Russia, China, Turkey, and others — whose political systems, strategic ambitions, and governance models diverge significantly from these values. How the EU navigates this tension across its most important external relationships reveals a great deal about the practical limits of normative foreign policy and the conditions under which interests consistently override values.

The relationship with China provides the most explicit acknowledgment of this tension in the course materials. China is characterised in a three-part framework: as a cooperation partner on issues such as climate change and global governance; as an economic competitor with technological leadership, dominance in critical raw materials like cobalt and lithium, and a structural overcapacity in sectors like steel; and as a systemic rival that promotes an alternative non-democratic governance model. This triple characterisation is significant because it refuses to reduce the relationship to any single dimension. The EU cannot treat China purely as an adversary because common interests in climate governance and trade are too important. It cannot treat China purely as a partner because the competitive and rival dimensions are real. The practical result is a relationship that maintains substantial economic engagement while building hedges against dependence — such as the effort to secure alternative supply chains for critical materials and the reinforcement of 5G network security — and occasionally raising governance concerns without allowing them to dominate the relationship.

The relationship with Russia, before its deterioration into open conflict, exhibited a similar structure. During the Putin era, the EU attempted a series of cooperative frameworks — the Common European Economic Space concept, the four Common Spaces, the modernisation partnership proposed in 2007 — while simultaneously criticising Russia's drift toward sovereign democracy, the suppression of political pluralism, and the restriction of press freedom. The EU's soft power instruments — technical assistance, trade incentives, diplomatic dialogue — proved unable to alter Russia's domestic political trajectory, because Putin's government had made a deliberate choice to reject the European governance model. The Partnership and Cooperation Agreement and subsequent frameworks were sustained not because they were transforming Russian governance but because both sides valued the economic and strategic dimensions of the relationship. The interests — in trade, energy, and regional stability — consistently led the EU to accommodate the values gap rather than confront it.

Turkey illustrates the same dynamic in a neighbourhood context. The EU-Turkey customs union has been in place since 1995 and accession negotiations were opened in 2005, making Turkey the country with the longest formal EU accession process. The negotiations were frozen in June 2018 following what the course notes describe as backsliding on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Yet Turkey remains characterised as a key partner on migration, security, counter-terrorism, and economy. Turkish interventions in the Eastern Mediterranean involving Cyprus and Greece, and in Syria and Libya, create direct tensions with EU interests and values, but the practical dependence of EU migration management on Turkish cooperation means that the EU cannot afford to treat Turkey as an adversary. This is a near-textbook case of interests systematically moderating the application of values-based foreign policy.

The tension is not simply one of calculation. The course materials note that foreign policy will always have contradictions between pursuing values and interests, and give China as the primary example. This framing suggests that the lecturer views this as a structural feature of EU foreign policy rather than a failure or hypocrisy. The EU is not unique in this respect — all major foreign policy actors face similar trade-offs — but the EU is distinctive in having values so formally embedded in its institutional identity that the gap between aspiration and practice is particularly visible.

What does this reveal about the EU as a global actor? First, it confirms that the EU is not a purely normative power. Interests — particularly economic interdependence, energy security, and migration management — consistently constrain the application of values-based conditionality. Second, it suggests that EU normative instruments are most effective when they are backed by genuine leverage, particularly the membership prospect or deep association agreements, and least effective when the major power has its own significant leverage over the EU in return. China's market and supply chain centrality gives it leverage. Turkey's migration management role gives it leverage. Russia's energy exports gave it leverage before the Ukraine war. Third, it shows that the EU's credibility as a values-promoting actor depends on consistency, and that credibility is damaged when the EU maintains cooperative relations with authoritarian states while simultaneously claiming that democracy and rule of law are foundational. This tension has not been resolved and cannot be fully resolved within the current structure of the EU's external relationships. Managing it intelligently — neither sacrificing all interests to values nor abandoning values to interests — remains the central challenge of EU foreign policy.

The EU's responses to major security crises — including Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the collapse of the Libyan state, the Syrian conflict, terrorism, and hybrid warfare — provide some of the most revealing evidence about the limits and capabilities of the EU as a security actor. The EU has developed an increasingly sophisticated institutional architecture for security and defence, including the Common Security and Defence Policy and the European External Action Service, and has articulated successive strategic frameworks from the 2003 European Security Strategy through the 2016 Global Strategy to the 2022 Strategic Compass. Yet the structural constraints on EU security action — particularly the absence of standing military forces, the requirement for unanimity, and divergent threat perceptions among member states — mean that the gap between ambition and effective response has been a recurring feature.

The EU's institutional apparatus for security is extensive on paper. The European External Action Service, created in 2010 and now led by Kaja Kallas, manages EU diplomatic responses to crises and supports approximately eleven civilian CSDP missions and six military missions. These include EU military training missions for Ukrainian soldiers, advisory missions, and border assistance missions. The European Commission is the world's first provider of humanitarian assistance, a role that gives the EU genuine operational capacity in conflict and post-conflict settings. The Political and Security Committee meets regularly to follow crises, and the Foreign Affairs Council meets monthly to discuss international issues. The Emergency European Threat Framework monitors disinformation related to conflicts. These are real institutional assets.

However, the EU's response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine — the most acute security crisis in Europe since 1945 — reveals both genuine capability and significant constraint. The EU was able to mobilise substantial political solidarity, impose a series of sanctions packages on Russia, and provide financial, material, and political support to Ukraine. The Strategic Compass of 2022 was adopted and addressed the new threat environment directly. The EU has provided development and humanitarian assistance and maintained diplomatic pressure. These are not trivial contributions. But the EU could not prevent the invasion, could not mount a military response of its own, and depended heavily on NATO — and specifically on US leadership within NATO — for the collective defence response. The course materials note that the EU does not have army forces; only separate EU states have them, making coordination hard. This is the fundamental constraint: security ultimately rests on the military capabilities of individual member states, and the EU's ability to direct and coordinate those capabilities is limited.

The 2003 European Security Strategy identified five threat categories: weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, failed states, regional conflicts, and organised crime. The response to subsequent crises in Libya and Syria, which produced failed states and enormous migration flows toward Europe, illustrates the EU's soft power limitations. The EU supported the diplomatic process in Libya and Syria, provided humanitarian assistance, and deployed civilian missions, but it could not stabilise either country. The course notes acknowledge that EU instruments work best through soft power — memoranda, norms, standards — but that these are hard to implement during active phases of war. This is a candid self-assessment of the structural mismatch between the EU's available tools and the nature of modern security crises.

Terrorism and hybrid warfare represent additional challenges. The Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice framework provides for police cooperation through Europol, judicial cooperation through Eurojust, and law enforcement training through CEPOL. Frontex manages external borders. These are genuine contributions to internal security. On hybrid warfare — the Gerasimov doctrine of disinformation, cyber attacks, political interference, and sabotage — the EU has developed responses including the Emergency European Threat Framework and the proposed European Democracy Shield described in Session 5. The recognition that the EU faces a hybrid war with disinformation is explicit in the course materials, and the response is institutional but still developing.

The Commission priorities for 2024 to 2029 identify building a real European Defence Union as a key goal, and the 2025 Von der Leyen address called for spending better and together on defence. The shift from unanimity to qualified majority voting in foreign policy, which would significantly improve the EU's ability to act coherently in security crises, is debated but not yet implemented. Hungary's ability to block common positions — demonstrated in its opposition to opening accession talks with Ukraine and in its more general resistance to common Russia policy — illustrates why unanimity is such a significant constraint.

The picture that emerges is of an EU that has built real but partial capacity as a security actor. It is effective at civilian crisis management, humanitarian response, sanction regimes, and soft power engagement. It is less effective at military crisis response, hard deterrence, and rapid coherent action when member state interests diverge. The 2022 Strategic Compass and the current Commission priorities represent a genuine ratcheting-up of ambition in the security domain, driven by the seriousness of the threat environment. Whether this translates into sustained capability will depend on whether member states are willing to make the political concessions — including on unanimity and on sovereignty over defence — that genuine European defence integration requires. The trajectory is upward, but the destination remains uncertain.

17 cross-cutting examples — each usable across 3–4 essay themes. Broad enough to sprinkle into almost any essay question.

Every key fact from all 10 sessions — organised for last-minute review. All content from course materials only.