Spain ends 'invisible' EU presidency under post-Lisbon rules
Andrew Rettman - EUObserver.com
Spain's EU presidency will be remembered for its "messy" foreign policy and the invisibility of Spanish Prime Minister Jorge Luis Zapatero. It began with a hacker putting the face of a TV character, Mr Bean, a comic bumbler who bears a passing resemblance to the Spanish leader, on the Spanish presidency website at the moment of its launch in January. US President Barack Obama's decision in February to skip an EU-US summit in Madrid later in the year, to have been the jewel in the crown of Spain's EU chairmanship, made the Spanish premier again look silly.
The European Commission, the European Parliament and the Spanish EU Presidency yesterday (21 June) reached a compromise in Madrid regarding the organisation and operation of the European External Action Service (EEAS). The EU institutions expect the Union's diplomatic service to become operational in the autumn.
Spain says Mediterranean Union summit postponed
inform.com
A meeting to bring together European and Middle Eastern governments has been postponed to give Israeli-Palestinian talks time to achieve results, officials said. Israel on Friday called the reason for the delay ridiculous. The summit of the Union for the Mediterranean was going to take place June 7 in Barcelona. Now, it has been pushed back to November, Spain's Foreign Ministry said Thursday night.
La crisis económica pone a Zapatero bajo presión
Michael Psotta - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung via eurotopics
A medida que decrecen la credibilidad crediticia y la solvencia de España, aumenta el riesgo de que el país se hunda en la recesión. El periódico conservador Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung analiza las razones del traspié de la economía española: "Un cierto grado de descuido, unido a una desmedida confianza en sí misma, hace que sea comprensible por qué la crisis ha pillado desprevenida a España.
Spain speaks of 'new deal' for Western Balkans at Sarajevo event
Andrew Rettman - EUObserver.com
Spain's top diplomat on Wednesday (2 June) in Sarajevo promised EU visa-free travel and future accession to "all the people of the Western Balkans," despite deep-rooted political problems in the post-war region. "We have welcomed the European Union's intention to extend visa liberalisation to all the people of the Western Balkans," the Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, said at a high-level EU-Balkans conference in the Bosnian capital.
La Cumbre América Latina-Caribe/Unión Europea y las difíciles relaciones biregionales
Carlos Malamud - Infolatam
".... Son muchos los que se cuestionan la posibilidad de seguir avanzando en una alianza estratégica que cada vez más aparece como un sueño imposible. No es sólo que América Latina llega más dividida que nunca a una cita como la presente, sino que resulta difícil establecer alianzas con quienes te descalifican por imperialista y depredador, o denuncian posibles invasiones europeas al suelo patrio, o reniegan simplemente de los valores occidentales y de la democracia representativa."
EU-US summit: A surfeit of summitry
Stanley Crossick - Euractiv.com
"The European Union holds too many bilateral summits too often, sometimes with unclear agendas," writes Stanley Crossick, founding chairman of the European Policy Centre, in a February post on Blogactiv.
New Treaty for E.U., but Same Jostling for Power
Stephen Castle - The New York Times
When the European Union brought in a new treaty in December, its aim was to scrap rules that rotate stewardship of the bloc among its nations and end the E.U.’s carousel of constantly changing leaders.
