Search

The Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the point of no return of the transition of order in world politics. The first three sections of this article address the implication at the heart of this topic, that is, the reconfiguration of world coalitions at the initial stage of the transition phase. The next three sections analyse the impact of the Western coalition reconfiguration on the EU. Based on the analysis of CFSP texts published before the war in Ukraine and after the start of the war, the article assesses the consistency of the actions of EU countries with the position expressed by the EU texts. The objectives and interests of the EU institutions and member states' governments are rarely perfectly homogeneous and normally not fully consistent with each other in the face of a serious external challenge. Sharing how to respond to the Russian invasion proves difficult because the implications of the invasion are broader than violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a non-EU European country. Many praise the level of unity achieved by the EU, but the conclusion of the present analysis shows that sharing strong Western coalition ties might represent a temporary undertaking of EU countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper2 is a study of the response of the EU institutions and leaders to the inflow of irregular migrants from 2011 to 2016. The first section is the synthetic presentation of the migration drivers of our times at the global and local level. In section two, the citizens' perception of the migrants as a threat is briefly discussed, and the border control and immigration policies of the EU are reviewed. In section three, the 'Trans boundary crisis management' model opted for analysing the EU migration crisis management is presented. Section four presents the analysis of the four scenarios of the European management of the current migration crisis. In the concluding section, the results of the analysis are summarily discussed. The analysis demonstrates that the EU leaders have been late in detecting the characteristics of the phenomenon and have not conceded to reconcile their conventional view to the features of the current migration. They have been unable to make response decisions well timed and acceptable to all. Lastly, they have been unable to stand firm on those management decisions they agreed on with difficulty and failed to formulate a shared message about the crisis and communicate credible messages to citizens about their ability to manage it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the coherence of the aid to countries in need of humanitarian and civil protection assistance given separately by ECHO and the EU Member States, with an emphasis on Italy that appears as an eccentric case. Section one is about the humanitarian aid burden of the EU and the major European donor countries in the years 1999-2012. The analysis draws attention to the existing coherence at the world level and also to the diference existing in the aid to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. Section two analyses and shows the consistency of Italy's aid with the ECHO's. In the Conclusions, the coherence of the EU's and states' aid and the consistency of Italy's aid are shortly discussed in view of the existing shared powers in the humanitarian and civil protection policy area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws the attention of the EU foreign policy professionals and researchers community towards the aid policy of the European Union and the major Member States towards the countries affected by humanitarian emergencies and disasters. The determinants and vertical coherence of this policy are put under observation. In particular, by measuring and comparing financial aid to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, the MENA region, the present study assesses the importance of the aid policy vertical coherence. The analysis of the data supports the mainstream view about the common values and goals of the foreign aid policies of the Union and the Member States but warns about coherence between the Union and the state level as the European countries' aid allocation to the MENA countries is apparently driven by different priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses financial aid given by the richest countries of the European Union and by ECHO (European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department) to six geographical groups of countries. It aims at advancing existing knowledge about the relevance of enabling conditions and the importance of general interest and self-interest to emergency aid. In political science, explanation focuses on economic power and political interest as, respectively, the enabling condition and the contingent reason for aid. The paper analyses the ECHO/EDRIS dataset which weakly supports the enabling conditions explanation and disconfirms the geopolitical interest explanation. The large similarity of the data of the emergency aid policies of the most rich EU MSs requests further study about the EU countries' preference for funding assistance directly to a larger extent than through the EU's programs, and about keeping foreign assistance as shared competence in the EU system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]