Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
On June 24, 2008, the Carnegie Endowment hosted a discussion on EU and U.S free trade agreements (FTAs) in the Middle East with Riad al Khouri, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. While Europe has historically been active in negotiating FTAs in the Middle East, U.S. FTAs in the region have primarily been motivated by strategic concerns rather than economic impacts.
Washington insiders are calling for the establishment of a League of Democracies to tackle the world's problems. But the last thing people in other countries are looking for from the next administration is a high-profile initiative tying democracy promotion to the global U.S. security agenda.
While U.S. foreign policy continues to be formulated with an eye on short-term goals, European policies towards the Middle East, at both the national and EU levels, use the instruments of soft diplomacy and function in accordance with a multi-tiered approach that never loses sight of long-range strategies while allowing for alternatives that can be tried, tested and corrected along the way.
Recently signed economic partnership agreements between the European Union and African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries may represent a powerful new tool for development, strengthening regional integration and stimulating investment in signatory countries.
France has recently proposed a Mediterranean Union. To ensure this initiative’s effectiveness and avoid the pitfalls of the Euro-Mediterranean process, the EU must seriously review its linked aid and agricultural and immigration policies toward the region.
What happens when a 21st-century entity, the European Union, faces the challenge of a 19th-century power, Russia? Conflicts are already taking shape—in disagreements over Kosovo, Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia; in conflicts over gas and oil pipelines; in nasty diplomatic exchanges between Russia and Britain; and in a return to Russian military exercises of a kind not seen since the Cold War.
Since communism failed as an economic system, Russia and China have had to embrace free markets. But hopes that reform of communist economies would produce western-style democracies have been shaken.
The stepped-up harassment of the British Council in recent days signals a new low in Russia's post-Cold-War relations with the West and a further slide toward Soviet-style isolationism.
Since global change accelerated a decade or so ago, mentioning globalisation has tended to upset many people in the Arab world. Was 2007 the year that the region moved closer -- and more comfortably -- to the rest of the globe?
A major shift is taking place in the way decision-makers in the U.S. and major European countries view the political role of Islamic movements in the Arab world and also in the way they regard the perils such movements pose for Western interests.