"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.
