Suchergebnisse

It is common to criticize the State of Israel for its lack of strategy. This is true with respect to its foreign relations, and with specific reference to her relations with the EU. This criticism was reinforced during the five terms of Benjamin Netanyahu's premiership (1996–1999 and 2009–2021). Commentators expressed strong criticism of his leadership, blaming him for shaping and implementing Israel's foreign relations in a non-strategic, incoherent, and inconsistent manner. This article provides an alternative perspective, arguing that during his five terms Netanyahu and his governments adopted and pursued a calculated and coherent policy towards the EU, which was aimed at mitigating EU intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and at dismissing any manifestation of EU political criticism towards Israel. The article analyses his policy towards the EU and the main instruments adopted in order to promote it, through the prism of scholarship pertaining to speech-acts and Euroscepticism.
Foreign relations, Speech-acts, Euroscepticism, EU-Israel relations, Benjamin Netanyahu

The efforts invested by the EU to assist the resolution of the disputes over the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are long-standing and multifaceted. Yet, a dissonance exists between the EU's strong interest in the resolution of these conflicts, its firm commitment and its long-standing engagement to promoting such resolution, and its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Drawing on scholarship that analyses the factors that erode the effectiveness of the EU's contribution to conflict resolution in Georgia, this article seeks to identify and analyse various strategies and considerations that could render the EU's conflict resolution efforts more effective. These strategies and considerations will be classified into those pertaining to Georgia's political establishment, Georgia's civil society, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Russia, and will be linked to two broader themes, namely EU enlargement and the EU's commitment to strict observance of international law. The analysis conducted in this article including its conclusions relies upon literature on comparative conflict resolution.

This article contributes to the literature on the EU's conflict resolution efforts in general, and in the context of Georgia, in particular. First, it identifies a dissonance between the EU's strong interest in the resolution of the Conflicts, its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing, engagement with a view to promoting such resolution, and its actual, ineffectual contribution to achieving that goal. Second, it analyses various factors which contribute to this ineffectiveness.

Abstract: "This article contributes to the literature on the EU's conflict resolution efforts in general, and in the context of Georgia, in particular. First, it identifies a dissonance between the EU's strong interest in the resolution of the Conflicts, its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing, engagement with a view to promoting such resolution, and its actual, ineffectual contribution to achieving that goal. Second, it analyses various factors which contribute to this ineffectiveness."

This article analyses the European Union's (EU's) practice of funding of Israeli Human Rights NGOs. It argues that the pursuance of such a model of governance is a natural choice for the EU, yet such pursuance has encountered in Israel a bottom-to-top counter-strategy of delegitimization conducted against the EU, the NGOs and their collaboration. This counter-strategy was found to discredit the NGOs and the EU and render their mutual collaboration less effective.

The initial, ambitious agenda of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), coupled with its ten years of operation, raised expectations for comprehensive approximation with resultant significant socio-economic reforms. Yet the initial high hopes for a systematic regulatory and legislative alignment were not realized. The article's purpose is to offer a typology and analysis of the various factors that render it more difficult to attain this strategic objective of the ENP, underscoring the limits of the Law in serving a transformative role.

This article examines the EU's post-1967 conflict resolution policies pertaining to the dispute over sovereignty over Jerusalem. Analytically, it provides the first in-depth, genealogical analysis of the evolution of the EU policies, distilling four 'generations' of them, while normatively, it offers a critique of the consistency, coherence and legal cogency of such policies and their compatibility with international law. Yet the importance of this article lies beyond the particular case-study of Jerusalem, as it establishes that EU conflict resolution policies may, drawing on the work of Aggestam, be contextualized within the conceptual in the EU's self-perceived role, from 'what it is' to 'what it does', from passively representing 'power of attraction' to adopting the proactive role of an 'ethical power'. In such a role, international legal norms upon which the EU strives to premise its contribution to the resolution of disputes over sovereignty serve it in both a constitutive and an instrumentalist manner. However, and as the article has striven to demonstrate, the EU faces significant difficulties when attempting to assist in solving disputes over contested territories, based on rule-based diplomacy and strict commitment to international law, while having to face well-entrenched realities and accommodate realpolitik considerations. Consequently, the EU cannot ensure at all times its strict compliance with international law as such compliance ignores political realities and such ignorance mitigates, in turn, the already compromised centrality and effectiveness of the EU as a Normative Power in the Middle East and elsewhere. Thus, the EU will have to continue to seek the via media between international legality and political reality, strict observance of international law and effectiveness, lex ferenda and lex lata and between Constructivist-led, universalistic, value-based conflict resolution policies and more Realist-led, self-interest, security-based and hegemony-motivated policies.

EU-Israeli trade relations appear to be comprehensive and close. Yet these developed relations should not conceal the true colours of European-Israeli socio-political relations, relations that are characterized too often by ignorance, stereotyping, mistrust, and tension. This state of affairs adversely affects the ability of both the European Union (EU) and the State of Israel to fully realize the enormous potential of their relations. This article focuses, in abstracto and in concreto, on the means by which higher educational cooperation can alleviate that state of affairs to a certain extent, analysed through an International Relations (IR) perspective, drawing on the experience gained in intra-Community and inter-Community contexts. This article, however, also places emphasis on the limitations inherent in such cooperation in terms of forging regional, European-Israel affinity, limitations that are derived, inter alia, from the somewhat heterogeneous nature of the European higher education space.