Only last year, the so-called “Nagorno-Karabakh war” flared up again, leading to almost 7000 deaths. Unfortunately, two of the three Caucasus states, Armenia and Azerbaijan, have been involved in conflict for years now. “EU ‘ring of friends’ turns into ring of fire” Only a few weeks ago, the European Commission decided to increases financial assistance for these Eastern Partnership countries from 40 million euro to 75 million euro to ‘deploy safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines and speed up the vaccination campaigns.’ This comes on top of the Covax support these countries receive and is only a part of the large sums of European taxpayers money transferred over there, in the hopes of improving the situation on the ground. The three countries there, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, are together with Belarus, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine part of the so-called “Eastern Partnership”. ![]() However, why would Albania make an effort to improve rule of law standards, when it can witness all kinds of crony governments receiving EU cash without much conditionality?Īnother region where the EU is able to exert some proper influence, is the South Caucasus. ![]() To have the EU providing these governments with direct budget support weakens the EU’s leverage in places where it can actually have any influence, such as Albania, where the government has consented to allowing EU magistrates to veto the appointments of judges at all judicial levels. All of them are guilty of significant human rights abuses. Governments on the receiving end of EU budget support are the likes of Egypt, Laos, Morocco, Myanmar, Rwanda, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Uganda, and Vietnam. The EU remains wedded to the use of direct financial assistance to partner governments around the world”, as according to EU Commission estimates, budget support “accounts for about 40 percent of national cooperation programmes with partner countries.” The Carnegie report highlighted how “in 20, just over 84 percent of EU funds went to authoritarian and hybrid regimes, up slightly from the previous five-year period. A 2021 report by Carnegie Europe lambasted the EU for its foreign policy spending, stating that “its current funding of various authoritarian-leaning regimes overseas sits uneasily with the EU’s internal efforts to condition funds on political values and clashes with the union’s goals for international development and foreign policy.”ĭirect EU budget support to crony governments Still, even here, things are not going swimmingly. Therefore, one may think, perhaps, “Europe” should focus its efforts closer to home or where it can actually exert some influence. Often, if not always, the way for the EU to exert foreign policy influence is by throwing around cash. ![]() seems impotent to influence events on the ground in that “graveyard of empires”, EU failure should come as no surprise. The EU has struggled to exert the remotest foreign policy influence over the Afghanistan debacle, despite the efforts by the legion of eurocrats employed by the EU’s Foreign Policy bureaucracy, the “European Union External Action Service”.
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