Europe

The offer of active military support to France in Syria or in the Sahel by several European member states is likely to overshadow the absence of meaningful commitment from others. On balance, the picture will not be too disheartening for supporters of the EU: its foreign and security policy apparatus will not come out damaged, but only because it has not been properly tested.

This new episode of the Building Bridges Conversation Series is part of the "Building Bridges" project, which aims to foster debate on the future of the European Union and offer top quality analyses on how each member state perceives the EU. In this video, Vivien Pertusot, coordinator of the project, discusses with Maja Kluger Rasmussen from Think Europa (Denmark) and Antoinette Primatarova from the Centre for Liberal Strategies (Bulgaria).

France has been ambivalent on the British renegotiation campaign. The general mood is to keep the UK in, but messages are going in different directions. Some are shrugging off the UK’s calls for reform and are not trying very hard to accommodate Westminster. Others seem keener to find an acceptable deal for Britain.

John Seaman answers questions from the China Daily on the recently concluded negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and their consequences for China and for Europe.

Read the interview, in Chinese

Supporters of Germany's anti-immigration Pegida movement were back on the streets of Dresden Monday to protest against the government's plans to take in refugees.

Without real and profound change in Greece's dysfunctional state, it is almost irrelevant whether the country reaches a short-term deal with its creditors or not, say analysts. "Greece cannot perform economically well in the long-term without major structural reforms. These need to address the size and quality of public administration and the fight against corruption," says Vivien Pertusot, of the French Institute of International Relations, a Brussels think tank.

Ideally, the impetus for reform needs to come from inside Greece, says Pertusot. "It's one thing to impose these reforms on yourself, quite another to have them imposed from outside, which makes it difficult for a government to own the reforms. It is possible to prioritise improving the quality of public administration, and decreasing its size, but it will take years to see concrete progress."

Long-entrenched vested interests will likely prove an obstacle to change, says Pertusot, and government will still need to function while reforms are enacted. "To revamp an entire system without smashing it is a complicated and delicate task. It requires the right leaders at the right time, willing and able to fight against an established system."

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This first episode of the Building Bridges Conversation Series is part of the "Building Bridges" project, which aims to foster debate on the future of the European Union and offer top quality analyses on how each member state perceives the EU. In this video, Vivien Pertusot, coordinator of the project discusses with Ana Benje from Comenius University (Slovakia) and Nathan Dufour from PISM (Poland).

• Le 8 juin, lors du G7 en Bavière, Barack Obama invitait ses partenaires européens à trouver un accord rapide pour résoudre la crise grecque. 
• Mercredi, c'est le secrétaire d'État au Trésor, Jack Lew, qui s'est inquiété des « chocs extérieurs » qu'entraînerait un échec. 
• Hier, les États-Unis ont dépêché un membre du département d'État à Athènes en pleine négociation avec ses créanciers.

"Past year has been marked not only with the Ukrainian crisis and unprecedented tensions in political relations between Russia and the West, but also with somewhat radical change of Moscow’s approach to international energy affairs. Widely promoted new energy partnerships with countries like China and Turkey were supposed to demonstrate that Russia has a choice of alternatives for mass-scale international energy cooperation, as compared to previous domination of European dimension, and if West wishes to cut ties with the Kremlin, Russia has somewhere else to go.

Does Russia really have an option of developing new international energy partnerships comparable in scale and significance to those with Europe as the consumer of energy, and with Western IOCs as key agents helping to secure further exploration and development of Russian oil & gas resources?"

L'Allemagne a annoncé qu'elle allait publier en 2016 un nouveau Livre blanc sur la défense. Cet exercice pourrait illustrer que les signaux positifs, mais dispersés, lancés par l'Allemagne depuis un peu plus d'un an auguraient d'un réel changement de posture stratégique, gage d'une reprise sérieuse de la coopération franco-allemande en matière de sécurité et défense et d'un éventuel co-leadership franco-germano-polonais pour la défense européenne.