Category: ESAANZ Blogs

Since March 2020, following the Turkish government opening its border with Greece, mainstream media has suddenly discovered the existence of migrant pushbacks from the Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG) and various European border agencies.

It is undoubtful the role that the United States (U.S.) played and is still playing in shaping the integration process on the other side of the Atlantic: the creation of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation to manage Marshall Plan aids; the push towards the Economic and Monetary Union after the collapse of Bretton Woods…

With the EU-Vietnam FTA entering into force on 1 August 2020, Vietnam’s GDP and exports are expected to rise by 2.4 percent and 12 percent respectively by 2030. The agreement will lift 99 percent of tariffs on goods traded between the EU and Vietnam. Vietnam is the EU’s second largest trading partner in ASEAN after…

Stupide. So much so that with Covid-19 the fiscal rules for the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the EU have been suspended. After almost twenty years, that hardly institutional attribute expressed by one of the most institutional figures in the EU still echoes. The then President of the European Commission Romano Prodi had criticized,…

The world is currently watching the protests across Poland in response to a new constitutional court ruling that effectively amounts to a legal ban on abortion in that country. This conservative ruling should not surprise those with an interest in European studies because recent government reforms have seen Polish courts stacked with allies of the…

Contrariamente a quanto avvenuto di fronte alla crisi economica e finanziaria del 2008, nel caso della pandemia del COVID-19 l’Unione europea ha saputo dare una risposta in modo veloce e sostanzialmente unitario. Tra gli interventi più significativi vi è la creazione del SURE, lo strumento di sostegno temporaneo per attenuare i rischi di disoccupazione in…

Since 2018, the European Union (EU) and New Zealand (NZ) have been undertaking Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations (in parallel with the EU-Australia FTA negotiations). A small trading state on the edge of the Pacific, until 2015 the European Union had categorically ruled out the possibility of a bilateral FTA with NZ. Subsequently, the negotiations…

Over the last half millenium, this region, situated at the crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe, has changed hands many times; with each transition the identity of Belarusians – a Slavonic peoples distinct from modern day Russians and Ukrainians – has been forced to adapt to a new form. After the collapse of the Soviet…

The post-election protests in Belarus and the poisoning of Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny are cemented together by something greater than cause and effect. Certainly, what is unfolding in Belarus is a reminder that the collapse of the USSR is an ongoing affair. Yet while it has the hallmarks of other post-Soviet revolutions, what is…

Although the Covid-19 pandemic knocked Brexit of its long-held Number 1 spot on the UK government’s to-do list (EU representatives always liked to pretend they had bigger fish to fry, but it was pretty important to the EU too), negotiations over the UK’s withdrawal from the EU are continuing up until October. This is the…