Europe Archive

The recent improvement in relations between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan could help remove a major obstacle to the exploitation of Caspian Sea energy reserves. When Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov arrived in Baku on May 19, he became the first Turkmen president in over a decade to visit Azerbaijan. The two countries severed ties in 1999 over an Azerbaijani decision to develop an oil and natural gas field that the Turkmenistan government also claimed. Until now, the unresolved dispute among the five Caspian states over how best to divide and manage the sea and its valuable subsurface natural resources has impeded efforts to exploit […]

Nikolas Gvosdev kvetches about Congress taking aim at the Indian and Russian 123 Nuclear Agreements. My understanding is that the Russian deal does a good job of cementing bilateral cooperation in an area where we have a vested interested in them not operating as a loose cannon. The Indian deal, meanwhile, presents some valid proliferation concerns due to India’s non-NPT status. But either way, the Congressional interference, which as Gvosdev notes, is based on unrelated policy issues, illustrates the need for some sort of strategic framework between the Executive and Congress on nuclear agreements. This is a sector that by […]

Hampton makes some really good points here. I’d quibble with the claim that globalization is about economic liberty, so much as economic deregulation. I’d also make a distinction between “Brussels” the idea, as opposed to Brussels the reality. How accurately the anti-democratic, technocratic image of the former matches the reality of the latter is subject to debate. But there’s enough truth to it to make it resonate strongly in public opinion, and resentment of it certainly drove opposition to the 2005 Constitutional Treaty, and is doing so with the Treaty of Lisbon today. I failed to make it clear in […]

A CHANGING WORLD — The Trilateral Commission is made up of top leaders in politics, foreign policy, and finance from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan — hence the “tri” in the name. The group has a reputation for secretiveness and behind-the-scenes power in shaping world affairs. Formed during the Cold War, it is traditionally Western in outlook, influential rather than powerful, and discreet more than secretive. The Trilateral Commission emerged into the limelight when president elect Jimmy Carter, himself a member, lifted his foreign policy team wholesale from its ranks, including the former director Zbigniew Brzezinski. Corridors has […]

The EU has a lot riding on passage of the Treaty of Lisbon by all its member states. The future of Europe as a strategic actor on the global stage depends on coming up with some sort of solution to the EU’s institutional crisis, and its unlikely that the consensus that Lisbon represents will be reproduced anytime soon. The problem, as with the 2005 Constitutional Treaty, is that in at least several countries, elite opinion on the matter is out ahead of popular resentment towards “Brussels” (the idea, more than the place). Twenty-six of Europe’s member nations have gotten around […]

On May 30, more than 100 countries meeting in Dublin agreed to the text of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which promises to vastly limit the use of weapons that have led to humanitarian suffering for decades. Spurred on by a February 2007 meeting hosted by Norway, the “Oslo” process has moved remarkably quickly to reach a consensus on dealing with bombs, rockets and artillery shells that disperse submunitions over large areas. These “bomblets” often fail to explode at first and later injure noncombatants, including children attracted to what look like golf balls or ribboned cans. Despite the agreement, short-term […]