The EU is about to adopt a comprehensive strategy for the Baltic Sea region. While intuitively attractive, the idea of the strategy nonetheless gives rise to a set of critical questions.

The report summarises the results from a SIEPS funded research project on the EU as an actor in the field of global development. The authors analyse three specific policy areas; trade and economic cooperation, international development cooperation and security and conflict management.

When changes to the Lisbon Treaty are discussed it is often mentioned of the more forceful formulation in the area of EU external actions and the new posts created within the EU's institutional structure that is expected to lead to greater coherence. An equally important but less noticed policy that has also been written into the Treaty is that of consistency between internal and external policies.

Two years after the historic enlargement of the European Union, the attraction of membership is manifested by the long line of new applicant countries. This report studies the role of the EU in the domestic policy processes in the former and current applicant countries of Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on the dynamics of the legal approximation process.

The increased influence of the European Union in world politics has sparked a lively debate on what influence it actually has, its degree of coherence and on the qualities that characterise its behaviour. This report assesses how the EU is perceived by other states in international multilateral negotiations.

International agreements are one of the principal foreign policy tools of the European Union. The use and scope of agreements have increased over the last decades resulting in a highly complex situation not least due to the different level of cooperation and integration between the EU and its neighbours entailed in these agreements.

This report traces the origins of the EU decision to set up battlegroups, describes the underlying political and military concepts and analyses the challenges that the EU and its member states face in realising the Headline goal 2010, the plan adopted by the European defence ministers in June 2004 with the aim of improving European military capabilities. It also discusses the broader question of whether or not a military capability allows the EU to better achieve its goals.

The last decades have been characterized by deep regional integration in Europe as well as the emergence of new integration agreements in other parts of the world. This process has spurred an extensive debate about what the economic effects of integration are, both on insiders and outsiders.

This paper looks at the key political dynamics involved in the process of Turkish accession to the EU, on both the Turkish and the EU sides. It asks: whether Turkish political reforms will be successfully completed and what are the main challenges; what will be the most important issues in negotiations and how the political dynamics around the negotiation process may develop, and what political impact Turkey will have on the EU, given its size, location, and its ongoing and radical political, economic and social transition? The report was presented at the seminar The Political Implications of Turkish Accession to the EU and is a part of the research project Borders of the new EU - possibilities and challenges.

Transatlantic relations have seen the most dramatic crisis ever, over the issue of how to deal with Iraq. The author argues that the various transatlantic quarrels of recent years are rooted in different developments during the past decade concerning the notion and effect of the concept of national sovereignty.