Activities

A seminar on 'The EU and Russia: a Security Partnership?', in association with the Russia and Eurasia Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, took place at the Institute on 25 March 2002.

The Madrid conference was organised in cooperation with the Real Instituto Elcano, under the aegis of the Spanish Presidency of the European Union.

The sixth meeting of the Institute’s task force on South-Eastern Europe took place in Paris on 8 February and addressed the so-called ‘Albanian Question’ with a number of prominent experts from the region as well as European policymakers.

A seminar entitled ‘Enlarging Europe: CFSP perspectives’, took place in Paris on 21 and 22 May 2001 (Antonio Missiroli). The aim of this seminar was to address issues which lie at the juncture between two policy processes that are still perceived, if not pursued, as separate and distinct, namely the enlargement of the European Union and the development of CFSP/ESDP. Such separation, or distinction, concerns especially the candidate countries, who still see the EU as a mainly economic organisation and its CFSP as a mainly declaratory policy, NATO remaining the main security provider on the continent. The discussion aimed precisely at filling this gap and focused on both the attitudes of current members and candidates vis-à-vis enlargement and CFSP/ESDP, and the possible interactions between the two enlargements. In fact, late next year, key decisions are expected on both fronts – at the North Atlantic Council in Prague and at the European Council in Copenhagen, respectively – and it proved interesting, during this seminar, to assess the state of affairs and the likely scenarios seen from the participants’ viewpoints.