Iran after the presidential elections The aftermath of the June presidential elections in Iran marks a further deterioration of systemic human rights violations in Iran. The numbers of those protesting the official results and their ability to mobilize despite having harsh censorship and a state media boycott imposed against them have confirmed that at least on a regional level, Iranian society is relatively strongly emancipated.
What agreements were not reached at the EU-China summit? Many visits by important state officials took place during the Czech EU presidency. However, few of them brought about any significant changes for the future of the EU’s external relations. The EU-China summit in Prague will not be recorded in history as having been a breakthrough, or even as significant.
"Eastern Partnership: Towards Civil Society Forum" The EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative is off to a bad start. Presented by Sweden and Poland with much fanfare in 2008 as a new forum for the EU to engage the eastern neighbourhood, its recent launch in Prague proved, on the contrary, to be a major disappointment. The list of EU leaders that decided the summit wasn’t worth their time was embarrassingly long interest and political will are clearly lacking in this new initiative. As such, the chances that the European Union will sooner or later consign the EaP to the same historical dustbin as its predecessors are high. But so are the EU’s stakes in the region.
Beyond zero-sum thinking in the EU’s Eastern Partnership The European Union’s energy security has been severely tested over the past year. August’s Georgian conflict underlined the possible dangers of diversification into the post-Soviet space, with bombs landing in the vicinity of several crucial gas and oil pipelines including South Caucasus and Baku-Supsa, while the Russian-Ukrainian gas stand-off sent shivers across Europe in January.
Eastern Partnership and the Caucasus With its new Eastern Partnership (EaP), the EU has opened a new chapter in European Eastern Policy, and from the very beginning it aims to involve civil society. The Eastern Partnership was initiated by the Polish and Swedish governments in the spring of 2008, and on December 3, 2008 the EU Commission presented its proposal for an EaP that would consist of a set of bilateral and multilateral initiatives seriously stepping up relations between the EU and its Eastern neighbours.
Barack Obama in Prague: “Human destiny will be what we make of it.” Barack Obama visited Prague on 4 and 5 April as part of his first European trip as US president. The visit was transformed into an historical event occurring at a moment that was thoroughly awkward for the Czech Republic: Shortly before Obama’s arrival the Czech government, currently holding the EU presidency, had to resign due to a vote of no confidence. Both Czech PM Mirek Topolánek and Czech President Václav Klaus welcomed Michelle and Barack Obama to Prague.
What has the conflict in Gaza shown? After 23 days of fighting in the Gaza Strip, it is now possible to ask whether the moribund Middle East peace process can be successfully restarted and result in a solution to the decades of ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The peace process languished over many months prior to the intensifying of the conflict in Gaza. Israel continued to build settlements on the West Bank, one of the greatest obstacles to resolving the conflict. The Palestinian leadership was once again irreconcilably divided and the radical Hamas movement refused to respect the results of the negotiations led by the leading representative of the Palestinian Administration, Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah movement.
Schwarzenberg’s Mission to the Middle East The Czech EU Presidency has evidently begun more abruptly than the Czechs ever wanted. At the very moment the country took up the “scepter” of the presidency, the conflict between Hamas and Israel in Gaza was in full blaze, and the Czech Republic immediately had to engage in one of the most closely-followed world conflicts ever. It later proved that Czech politicians were not able to adopt the EU diplomatic language as their own immediately. Unlike the majority of Western European politicians, who stressed the opinion that Israel’s reaction was disproportionate, the first statements by the Czech Prime Minister and the Czech Foreign Minister clearly labeled Hamas as to blame for the conflict.
Missile defense: Postpone and re-evaluate The European (or “third”) pillar of missile defense is a planned component of the American national missile defense system, tasked with protecting the United States of America (and indirectly, their allies) from possible ballistic missile attack. The American missile defense system has been in development since the 1950s in various modifications, but it was not until the administration of the Republican President George W. Bush that it was expanded (President Clinton only supported a project for missile defense in combat - TMD). In 2001, the United States increased funding for missile defense and withdrew from the Soviet-American Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (the ABM treaty). That treaty, signed in 1972, restricted the distribution of missile defense capabilities.