Recently, EU leaders have repeated the message that the Union needs to be more “geopolitical”. What does this mean? Richard Youngs, professor of International Relations, analyses this ambition by questioning its underlying assumptions. Without a modern and innovative form of geopolitics, he writes, the EU’s international identity risks becoming more uncertain and ambiguous – a risk that the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to reinforce. (2020:5epa)

China’s economic development and global impact are tilting the economic, political and military balances that have shaped the world since the end of the cold war. One fundamental step in China’s global strategy is the infrastructure project BRI. In this report, Svante E. Cornell and Niklas Swanström analyse its impact on the EU’s neighbourhood as well as on the European project. (2020:1)

On 1 December 2009, the Lisbon Treaty entered into force, aiming at making the EU more democratic, more transparent and more efficient. In this volume, four scholars discuss whether the Treaty has strengthened the EU during the past decade, a period marked by several crises for the European Union. With contributions from Luuk van Middelaar, R. Daniel Kelemen, Anne Thies and Eleanor Spaventa. (2019:2op)

The reconciliation of France and Germany has been central to European integration. Today, the two countries are seeking to strengthen the EU in a new context of external and internal pressures.

The Treaty of Lisbon introduced a mandate for the EU to develop a special relationship with its neighbouring countries. How has this mandate impacted, if at all, the so-called European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) which the Union had developed in the wake of its eastern enlargement? And more generally, how has the ENP evolved in view of the new realities on the ground? These are some of the questions that Professor Steven Blockmans explores in this tenth report which SIEPS publishes in the context of its research project The EU external action and the Treaty of Lisbon.

The Common Commercial Policy (CCP) is perhaps the most expressive incarnation of the EU external action. The Treaty of Lisbon considerably revised this policy, both in substantive and institutional terms.

Foreign affairs have always involved a degree of secrecy and the EU external action is no exception. Out of security concerns and to protect the confidentiality of international negotiations, EU foreign policy actors such as the Council and the European External Action Service (EEAS) manage access to information by classifying documents as ‘secret’.

For some developing countries, the compensation for fisheries agreements with the European Union constitutes 30–50 per cent of the total government budget. In this report, Johan Blomquist, Cecilia Hammarlund and Staffan Waldo (AgriFood Economics Centre) analyse the effects of the EU’s partnership agreements with countries in Western Africa, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

The relation between the EU and Belarus through the Eastern Partnership framework is complex. The country's domestic authoritarian character as well as its foreign policy balancing act between the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union hinders the implementation of major reform packages.

Finding ways to boost Europe’s economic growth in today’s post-crisis world is more important than ever. In this European Policy Analysis, the authors investigate which factors drive productivity across Europe’s regions.