- Macron wants EU debt for defense
- REPowerEU: these are the next steps
- New battery regulation: Europe’s sustainable re-industrialization
- Sanctions monitoring
- EU adopts fourth sanctions package
- IfW: US oil embargo against Russia only symbolic without EU
- EU states work on cyber shield
- EU electoral reform: transnational lists to come
- Johannes Schraps – the team athlete
The EU special summit begins today in Versailles. For one thing, the security and defense strategy “Strategic Compass” must be updated. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “whole passages on Russia would have to be completely rewritten,” said an EU Foreign Service official. Second, plans for European defense and military capacity building would have to be improved. French President Emmanuel Macron wants to build up a substantial defense fund for this purpose – but not all countries are going along. Eric Bonse asked around in the run-up to the summit in Versailles.
Energy security remains the focus of the EU Commission’s current efforts. By the summer, the Commission and member states want to flesh out the announcements made in REPowerEU. Manuel Berkel gives an overview of the planned measures.
The war in Ukraine is also influencing the new battery regulation. By 2030, global demand could increase 14-fold. The EU does not want to make the same mistakes as with solar technology, but wants to cover a good part of the demand. The regulation is now increasingly not only about sustainability, human and environmental protection, but also very specifically about strategic raw material security, writes Christian Domke Seidel.
The innovations agreed by the European Parliament on Tuesday in the course of the EU electoral law reform flew somewhat under the radar: Transnational lists are to be introduced as early as the election in two years, as is the gender quota for electoral lists. The introduction of a 3.5 percent threshold for Germany was met with criticism. Read more about this in today’s News section.
Lisa-Martina Klein
Feature
Macron wants EU debt for defense
Update and upgrade: At the special EU summit in Versailles on Thursday and Friday, security policy and common defense will be at the top of the agenda. Due to the war in Ukraine, this topic, which the current EU Council President and host Emmanuel Macron wanted to push anyway, has once again gained massive importance, according to EU circles in Brussels.
Specifically, this involves an update of the “Strategic Compass”, i.e. the new security and defense strategy. It is to be finalized at the Foreign Affairs Council on March 21 and adopted at the subsequent regular EU summit. The passages on Russia would have to be completely rewritten after the invasion of Ukraine, said an official of the EU’s External Action Service.
Lively discussions on this are expected in Versailles. The draft summit declaration calls the Ukraine war a “tectonic shift.” EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell told a debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg that the EU must be ready to defend its values and its interests better than before. “Putin’s war” had proven that great power politics, which had been thought to have been overcome, had returned . The EU strategy must take this into account.
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