Foreign policy & defence

In January 2006 Russia interrupted gas supplies to Ukraine and triggered a short, sharp shock to Europe in its ever-growing dependency on Russian gas.

'We're fed up with empty gestures', the Israeli prime minister told a high level delegation from the EU. Several foreign ministers and EU officials had come to the Middle East to try to help end the war raging in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, which has killed over 700 Palestinians and 10 Israelis in the twelve days since it started.

Until the war in Georgia in August 2008, the EU had taken stability beyond its eastern border for granted. Now it will need to become more active in this volatile region, in which Ukraine is the largest and most important country.

Barack Obama was the preferred candidate of most Europeans. He will have Europe's goodwill and with it, a window of opportunity to restore transatlantic co-operation on key security issues. Whether he succeeds will depend in part on the president-elect's willingness to try out new approaches to key foreign policy challenges.

During a trip to Israel in August, the only optimists I met were French diplomats. The reason for their upbeat mood? Ambitious plans by President Sarkozy for the EU to advance the Middle East peace process – including a controversial proposal that the EU should take the lead in creating an international peacekeeping force which could replace the Israeli army in the West Bank as part of a peace deal. But in the current inauspicious environment, can France, which currently holds the EU presidency, really help to move things forward and allow the EU to play a bigger role in the peace process? ...

When the EU expanded its membership in 2004, the UK was one of only three EU countries – Ireland and Sweden were the others – fully to open its borders to migrants from the ten new member states.

Ukraine is heading for an economic crash. At least that was the message I picked up in the Crimean resort of Yalta earlier this month, at the 'Yalta European Strategy' conference.

The Czech government floated proposals in May that would see the EU take a more active role in solving frozen conflicts in eastern Europe. The Czechs hold the EU’s rotating presidency next year, so their wish may become reality.

Earlier this month, the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) presented its first report on the state of democratic reform in the Arab world. ARI is a consortium of a dozen leading Arab research institutes which try to promote peaceful democratic reform across the Middle East (CER and a few other non-Arab think-tanks are associated with the initiative).