Suchergebnisse

The Council of the EU is the primary institution through which ministers of member states can express their positions on Commission proposals and vote upon legislation. This article first examines the extent to which ministers actually attend Council meetings before moving toward investigating the determinants of ministerial participation in over a period covering almost thirteen years between May 2004 and December 2016. It aims to identify determinants of why ministers from the Visegrad countries participate at some meetings and are absent from others. Using an original data set containing information about 940 Council meetings as well as several country-specific characteristics, we show that, on average, at about four out of every six meetings, ministers are absent. The results of our regressions indicate a pattern in which holding the office of the EU's rotating presidency, the number of b-points on the agenda, and the size of the government increase the likelihood of ministerial participation in meetings. In contrast, high levels of popular support for Eurosceptic parties and holding of national legislative elections decrease the probability of ministerial attendance. Moreover, meetings of Council formations related to policy areas with a low level of EU competence are significantly less likely to be attended by ministers.

This article analyses the outcome of the 22nd
osce Ministerial Council (mc) meeting, held in Belgrade on 3 and 4 December 2015, the year that the osce celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, its founding document. The article argues that the mc meeting was characterized by entrenched positions and that it illustrated the distrust and deep divides among the 57 osce participating States. The article explains that the negotiation process was overshadowed by the ongoing Ukraine crisis and by a number of bilateral conflicts between states. The author specifies some of the bilateral conflicts and shows how they took direct influence on the negotiation process and how they led to the fall of important draft documents. As a result, the Belgrade mc adopted only 5 declarations, among them on combating violent extremism and radicalization and on combating illicit drug trafficking.

Das OSZE Ministerratstreffen von Vilnius (6. und 7. Dezember 2011) erbrachte nur wenige konkrete Beschlüsse, die politisch zudem kaum Gewicht besaßen. Damit zeigte sich, dass die OSZE-Teilnehmerstaaten von der Überwindung ihrer Interessendivergenzen bzw. von der Bereitschaft zu wechselseitigen Kompromissen weit entfernt waren. Die "reset-Initiative" des US-Präsidenten Obama sowie die multilateralen Gesprächen innerhalb der OSZE im Rahmen des sog. Korfu-Prozesses waren offenbar nicht geeignet gewesen, die gegensätzlichen Haltungen der Russischen Föderation und der USA/EU besonders hinsichtlich Fragen der menschlichen Dimension und der Sicherheitspolitik dauerhaft positiv zu beeinflussen. (IFSH/Pll)