Despite important differences that make deeper political integration comprising all members of the European Union unlikely in the near term, it is likely that a smaller group of EU members will continue towards deeper integration.

The ongoing conflict in and around Chechnya is helping to feed the wider international jihadi movement, and is endangering the West as well as Russia. The next “soft target” of North Caucasian terrorism could be a Western one. Mutual recriminations over the conflict have badly damaged relations between Russia and the West. While most of the blame for this lies with Russian policies, the Western approach to the issue has often been unhelpful and irresponsible.

In the fight against international terrorism, the European Union adopted a Regulation (n° 881/2002) in May 2002, permitting the freezing of assets belonging to Usama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaida network and the Taliban. Within its framework, hundreds of individuals, groups and entities have seen their assets frozen without any effective legal remedy for appeal.

This Policy Brief elaborates on the impact of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty on the preparation, formulation and adoption of the EU’s position in international climate change negotiations. The analysis focuses on how changes envisaged will affect the policy-making process and particularly on whether shortcomings identified in the current situation will be addressed.

This paper addresses economic values and dynamism in the context of general European values. More precisely, it discusses how the lack of dynamism in parts of the European economy is not explained, in the main, by a lack of technology or capital or natural endowment; it is not even explained by big government, high taxation and strong social protection per se. Rather, the main explanation is to be found in the way certain economic institutions influence or reflect our culture and our attitudes vis-à-vis change and risk-taking.

Abstract: The European Council meeting on 16-17 December took many decisions that will set the course for the European Union’s continuing enlargement process. These decisions concern in the first place Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Turkey, but they also contain some pointers for the nature of the process ahead that will concern other possible candidates, from the Balkans to Ukraine. This new Policy Brief explores the new language and concepts introduced into the discussion and their implications for the European Neighbourhood Policy.

The June 2004 EU summit failed to solve the enlarged EU’s decision-making problems. Although the Constitutional Treaty’s double-majority voting rules would have maintained the enlarged EU’s ability to act, the botched Nice Treaty rules will continue to govern the Council’s decision-making up to November 2009. This failure will have important consequences since the Council, Commission and Parliament must make many tough decisions in the next five years and this will be extremely difficult under Nice Treaty voting procedures.

In March 2000 in Lisbon, EU heads of state and government set the strategic goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. These goals were confirmed at the Barcelona European Council, which added that investment in European R&D should be increased to 3% of GDP by 2010.

The next few months are the last opportunity for Turkey to take steps that could influence the European Commission’s recommendation in October on whether the Copenhagen political criteria have been met, and therefore whether to open accession negotiations, with the European Council due to take the decision in December.