Winds of Change for US and EU Relations with Cuba. CEPS Commentary, 21 March 2016

The visit by President Obama to Cuba this week marks a new and dramatic phase in the relations between the US and its next-door island neighbour just 90 km off its coastline. It will have taken almost 90 years for an American President to cross the Florida straits after the previous visit, by President Calvin Coolidge, who arrived not by air but on a battleship.

Why EU promotion is at odds with successful crisis management: public relations, news coverage, and the Aceh Monitoring Mission. EU Centre in Singapore Working Paper No. 10, September 2012

The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its accompanying Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions can be tools used to increase the international profile of the European Union. Nevertheless, CSDP missions garner little news coverage. This article argues that the very nature of the missions themselves makes them poor vehicles for EU promotion for political, institutional, and logistical reasons. By definition, they are conducted in the middle of crises, making news coverage politically sensitive. The very act of reporting could undermine the mission. Institutionally, all CSDP missions are intergovernmental, making press statements slow, overly bureaucratic, and of little interest to journalists. Logistically, the missions are often located in remote, undeveloped parts of the world, making it difficult and expensive for European and international journalists to cover. Moreover, these regions in crisis seldom have a thriving, local free press. Using the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) as a case study, the author concludes that although a mission may do good, CSDP missions cannot fulfil the political function of raising the profile of the EU.

The Legal Status and Influence of Decisions of International Organizations and other Bodies in the European Union. College of Europe Research Paper in Law 01/2014

Introduction. The European Union’s external action is not only defined by its influence on international developments, but also by its ability and the need to respond to those developments. While traditionally many have stressed the EU’s ‘autonomy’, over the years its ‘dependence’ on global developments has become more clear.2 International law has continued to play a key role in, not only in the EU’s external relations, but also in the Union’s own legal order.3 The purpose of this paper is not to assess the role or performance of the EU in international institutions.4 Rather it purports to reverse the picture and focus on a somewhat under-researched topic: the legal status of decisions of international organizations in the EU’s legal order.5 While parts of the status of these decisions relate to the status of international agreements and international customary law, it can be argued that decisions of international organizations and other international bodies form a distinct category. In fact, it has been observed that “this phenomenon has added a new layer of complexity to the already complex law of external relations of the European Union”.6 Emerging questions relate to the possible difference between decisions of international organizations of which the EU is a member (such as the FAO) and decisions of organizations where it is not (irrespective of existing competences in that area – such as in the ILO). Questions also relate to the hierarchical status of these decisions in the EU’s legal order and to the possibility of them being invoked in direct or indirect actions before the Court of Justice. This contribution takes a broad perspective on decisions of international organizations by including decisions taken in other international institutions which do not necessarily comply with the standard definition of international organizations,7 be it bodies set-up by multilateral conventions or informal (transnational / regulatory) bodies. Some of these bodies are relatively close to the EU (such as the Councils established by Association Agreements – see further Section 5 below); others operate at a certain distance. Limiting the analysis to formal international organizations will not do justice to the manifold relationships between the European Union and various international bodies and to the effects of the norms produced by these bodies. The term ‘international decisions’ is therefore used to refer to any normative output of international institutional arrangements.

Ties That Bind? The Parapublic Underpinnings of Franco-German Relations as Construction of International Value. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 02.4, 2002

Beneath the relations among states, and distinct from the exchanges of an autonomous regional or global civil society, there is another set of international practices which is neither public nor private but parapublic. The Franco-German parapublic underpinnings consist of publicly funded youth and educational exchanges, some two thousand city and regional partnerships, a host of institutes and associations concerned with Franco-German matters, and various other parapublic elements. This institutional reality provides resources, socializes the participants of its programs, and generates social meaning. Simultaneously, parapublic activity faces severe limits. In this paper I clarify the concept of “parapublic underpinnings” of international relations and flesh out their characteristics for the relationship between France and Germany. I then evaluate the effects and limits of this type of activity, and relate this paper’s findings and arguments to recent research on transnationalism, Europeanization, and denationalization.