Europe

TTIP og Norge: Virkninger og handlingsvalg

New Momentum for European Defence Cooperation

For better or for worse, the politics of Brexit, in combination with the implementation of the new EU Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy, have generated renewed momentum for European defence cooperation. EU member states have tabled a range of proposals. Some consolidation will be necessary, especially if effective defence integration is the aim – and that is the way to overcome current fragmentation. National forces can cooperate and be made interoperable with other forces in various formats simultaneously, but they can be integrated only once. Two levels of defence cooperation and integration must be addressed. At the level of the EU as such, and using EU incentives such as Commission funding for R&T, largescale projects for the development and acquisition of strategic enablers can be mounted, with the European Defence Agency acting as manager. At the level of state clusters, large deployable multinational formations can be created (such as army corps and air wings), with fully integrated maintenance, logistics and other structures in support of the national manoeuvre units that each participant can contribute. By pooling all-too-limited national military sovereignty in this way, defence cooperation and integration can revive sovereignty, understood as the capacity for action, at a higher level.

Russia's Europe 1991-2016: Inferiority to Superiority

Emissions trading and climate diplomacy between Europe and China

Non-allied states in a changing Europe: Sweden and its bilateral relationship with Finland in a new security context

Swedish security policy has experienced dramatic developments in recent decades. With the end of the Cold War, Swedish security policy could not identify any military threat to the country’s security, and so the armed forces were dramatically reduced. What remained of Swedish defence shifted the focus to international peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations. At this point it was said that Swedish security started in Afghanistan; the doctrine of Swedish security policy was accordingly referred to as the ‘Afghanistan doctrine’. But in 2008 the Swedish Parliamentary Defence Commission (För­svars­beredningen) presented a report which, for the first time in many years, recognized what might become a new security context. The Defence Commission argued that the litmus test of Russia’s choice of future path would be how it came to behave toward former members of the Soviet Union over the coming years (Försvarsberedningen 2007: 36). Accordingly, many Swedish politicians and commentators saw the Russian–Georgian war later that same year as proof of a more assertive Russia (see Brommesson 2015). After 2008, tension levels in Sweden’s neighbourhood have risen – including what the Swedish Armed Forces have deemed to be violation of Swedish territorial waters by a foreign power, confrontational behaviour in the airspace over the Baltic Sea and reports of heightened levels of espionage in Sweden. Against this background, the Swedish security policy has gradually refocused and has once again defined the defence of Swedish territory as its first priority. Military spending has increased, various types of bilateral and multilateral cooperation within the defence area have gained momentum and there is now lively discussion on what Sweden’s future secur ity policy should look like. In this debate one central issue concerns the character of Sweden’s future security policy cooperation. In particular, two forms of cooperation have featured in discussions in the past decade: Sweden’s extensive cooperation with NATO, which now includes almost all aspects of NATO membership except the core of such membership: the mutual defence assurances under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty; and Sweden’s equally extensive bilateral cooperation with Finland. This Policy Brief discusses these two forms of security policy cooperation as points of departure for alternative paths for Swedish security policy. In particular this policy brief focuses on the idea of the bilateral relationship between the two post-neutral Nordic states, Sweden and Finland, as a potential solution to cut the Gordian knot of the Swedish security dilemma.

Leaving the European Union, the Union way : A legal analysis of Article 50 TEU

The outcome of the UK referendum on membership of the EU prompted a considerable interest in the modalities of a state’s withdrawal from the Union. This policy analysis examines the specific provisions governing this process, viz. Article 50 TEU, and its function in the European integration process.