The Eastern Partnership, a Polish-Swedish proposal put forward to balance the Union for the Mediterranean in neighbouring countries to the East of the EU’s borders, was the central theme of a conference organised by the Konrad Adenauer think tank in Brussels mid September.
Gunnar Wiegand from the European Commission (director for Eastern Europe, Southern Caucasus and Central Asia) suggested that the experience of the Western Balkans with its regional free trade area could inspire the EU’s ‘Eastern Partnership’. He said that such experience showed that ‘countries which perhaps didn’t work so well together in the past, will do so in specific areas.’
The conflict in Georgia has helped to speed up the EC’s drafting of the eastern policy despite the ‘substantial political resistance’ from some EU member states on issues such as visa facilitation agreements with Ukraine.
The chair of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, pointed out that the funding for the region (€2 billion is available for the entire neighbourhood region) is currently ‘insufficient’. He underlined the need for the EU to anticipate, rather than simply react to, situations resulting from frozen conflicts in the area by, for example, supporting better infrastructure and implementing other ‘pragmatic’ solutions.
Links:
- EU Observer: Balkans model to underpin EU’s Eastern Partnership http://euobserver.com/15/26766
- Konrad Adenauer Stiftung events http://www.kas.de/proj/home/events/9/2/index.html
Information provided by Rebecca Steel, TRIALOG
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