Suchergebnisse

Facing increasing internal and external threats, the Member States of the European Union are moving closer together in ensuring the Union's security. The European Council endorsed the Strategic Compass, developed over 18 months, on 24 March 2022. The document, divided into four priorities: 'Act', 'Secure', 'Invest', and 'Partner', should represent the common strategic vision for the EU's role in security and defence in an increasingly complicated environment of international relations marked predominantly by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Within the four main priorities there is the first-ever agreed EU threat assessment and a long list of security and defence deliverables, which implies that that there are many issues that still require clarification. This article will take a closer look at potentials and limits of the Strategic Compass in order to show throughout the glace of the document more precisely where the limits of the European Union's and Member States' action are within the European security and defence realm, both legally and politically. Finally, this article will try to detect if the Strategic Compass is an appropriate answer for transformation of European security after Russia's military escalation at the EU's eastern flank.

This article examines the impact of the process of Europeanization on the consolidation of political systems and on the pace of European Union (EU) accession in very difficult transitional environments like those of Croatia and Albania. Croatia, a post-socialist and a post-conflict state, and Albania, heavily burdened with the consequences of its recent isolationist history (which is unprecedented among other post-socialist states), were intentionally selected for this research as atypical cases. Acknowledging the lack of consensus about the Europeanization phenomena in the academic community, the authors decided to rely on indicators that focus not only on institution-building and policy-making processes in the technical sense, but also in the processes of construction and diffusion of formal and informal rules, procedures, styles and shared beliefs, norms and identities that are being transmitted from the European to the national level.
Based on qualitative research comparing the two countries – that is, Albania and Croatia – and using a number of indicators, the authors conclude that while Europeanization is an important part of European politics in general and the EU accession process in particular, it does not result in having a uniform impact on different candidate countries. On the contrary, the pace of integration depends on the specific domestic political context, on the role of the institutions, and on the processes of adaptation to the European political environment.

With the rise of creative industries, culture in international relations achieves strong competitive economic advantages. At the same time, it is often a fertile tool in reconciliation between connected communities and long-term consolidation of their relations. Economic peace theory claims economic interdependence as being the key factor in achieving peace between communities. Starting from this premise, this paper analysed the success of specific EU funding within cross-border cooperation schemes between Croatia and Serbia in enhancing social relations between the two states and their cooperation, as indirect effects. Adapted Conflict Management and Mitigation Matrix (CMM) served as a basis to con rm the assumption that international relations are enhanced if direct economic bene ts for the communities are involved. e research confirmed this assumption and provided recommendations for future EU financial instruments.