The Independent Commission on Turkey boldly defends Turkey’s ailing bid to join the EU and rebuffs the stiff opposition to its full membership from the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and some other EU leaders
Due to the economic crisis in Portugal, since the beginning of the new century many of its former immigrants have moved to Spain and other European countries, in parallel with the increase in Portuguese emigration.
While EU member states have been reluctant to harmonise their policies for managing legal immigration, cooperation for the prevention and control of irregular migration has progressed.
The EU has a democratic deficit and some reforms have been proposed to increase the involvement of national parliaments in its political system.
Since the 1990s the EU has increasingly succeeded in developing a role in the internal security domain. However, this is constrained by the limitations imposed by the Member states in this regard.
Turkey has a growing strategic role in its overlapping neighbourhood with the EU.
Germany is a country of immigration, but its society and political leaders still seem reluctant to accept this.
The European Union’s international representation under the primary law now in force, and the way this has been put into practice both by the EU and the European Community before it, are clear reflections of the institutional complexity and partial integration – by sectors and in different phases – that the bloc has suffered from since its creation.
The Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, has proposed a comprehensive review of the so-called ‘European Security Architecture’. The goal, according to the Russian President, is to negotiate a new wide-ranging Pact in the form of a Treaty to cover the Euro-Atlantic Area.
Turkey and Armenia, backed by the US and Russia, agreed a framework on 23 April 2009 to normalise their relations and end one of the most intractable disputes left from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in support of its ally Azerbaijan, which was in conflict with Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
This paper analyses various European issues –the Irish referendum, transatlantic relations after President Bush, the financial crisis and challenges of global governances, the French EU Presidency and the prospects for ENP and enlargement after ‘Georgia’, among others– from a Spanish perspective.
The aim of the eighth edition of the survey is to provide a full comparative picture of debates on European issues in the EU's member states and two candidate countries (Croatia and Turkey). The project is coordinated by the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) and Institutes from all 27 EU member states –including the Elcano Royal Institute- as well as Croatia and Turkey.