In the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis, the ongoing debate concerning the best course of action that the West should take in order to better handle Russia still sparks the academia and the decision-makers. Thus, the European continent is once again divided, bringing back chills from the Cold War era. Although the current adopted measures, namely the economic sanctions on Russia's energy and financial sectors, have undoubtedly exerted considerable pressure on the Russian economy, isolating it from the Western world, they have not changed, at least for now, President Putin's overall strategic vision. Within this context, the current paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the EU and Russia relations, in order to shed some light over the current deadlock. Overall, the research aims, through an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the complex relations between the two actors, based on an evaluation of their economic interdependence and culminating with the exploration of its significance for their international political ties, considering the current economic and political context.
The last decade has seen the concept of resilience gradually positioned at the centre of the way the European Union (EU) seeks to deal with endogenous and exogenous challenges, threats or risks. Originating primarily from natural sciences, resilience has provided an elegant and attractive option for the EU to revise its agenda. The so-called 'resilience turn' has come to permeate almost every aspect of the EU's discourse. In this context, the article aims to analyse the nature of the policy change underlined by the way the concept of resilience has permeated the approach developed by the EU towards the eastern neighbourhood and foreign policy more broadly. Change evaluated by focusing on two key aspects that underpin the EU's foreign policy: the scope of the EU's foreign policy, EU's understanding of the world order, with a particular focus on the role of geopolitics. The main finding of the article is the emphasis on resilience has induced only limited transformations in the EU's practice and ideas, leading to the transition to a new business as usual.
The emergence of the current global crisis induced by the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic brings about an urgent need to rethink and reshape recovery strategies adapted to this specific challenging context. Neglecting this reconfiguration could lead to system lockdown, affecting all sectors, both on medium and long term. The coronavirus has penetrated various countries with different degrees of intensity, thus being spatially diversified; even within the same country, with the same lockdown measures, an enormous variety in cases is encountered. Subsequently, even if crises may manifest heterogeneously and the long-term impact of implementing recovery policies cannot be accurately known ex ante by governments, institutions could adapt themselves to changing circumstances and respond promptly and appropriately to emerging shocks only if their functioning framework had been well set up by the outbreak of the crisis. Considering these aspects, the main questions that this paper aims to answer are: How effective have governmental measures in European countries been in combating the COVID-19 crisis?; Could the solutions offered by the European states’ governments have an influence on diminishing the intensity of negative effects of a possible more serious return of this health crisis? What more could national authorities and international actors do to control the epidemiological evolution of SARS-CoV-2? Is a generic European Union policy helpful or should there be a case for local policy? Based on these issues, a comprehensive picture of the differences between the East and the West of Europe in terms of some medical, socio-economic, institutional and cultural factors will be outlined, in order to emphasize which of the two groups better-handled the COVID-19 situation in the first wave, covering the lockdown period (March 1, 2020 – June 1, 2020) and the relaxation period (June 1, 2020 – September 1, 2020); at the same time, some policy recommendations on how governments should more effectively manage future similar crises to generate a higher resilience of the systems will be provided.
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