Can the EU Spend Better?
Can the EU Spend Better?

Author: Renaud Thillaye

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-12-22

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1786602857

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The main parameters of the EU budget are decided upon every seven years when the MFF (Multi-annual Financial Framework) is negotiated. Before the end of 2016, EU institutions will undertake a mid-term review of the EU’s 2014-2020. This comes in a context of severe turbulences for the EU project: a difficult economic and social situation in most member states, huge migration pressures and new security threats stemming from an unstable environment, and the Britain’s decision to leave the EU. At the same time, EU countries need to face up to climate change and engineer a smooth transition towards an innovation-based sustainable economic model. The EU’s very survival depends on the ability to respond to these multiple challenges in the next few years. Making a smarter and more strategic use of the €960 billion MFF has become a necessity. Can the EU Spend Better? argues that the scope for a substantial revision of the MFF is limited in the short-term. At most, pressing issues such as terrorism and the deteriorated social situation will lead to greater flexibility in the use of existing envelopes. However, the debate starting in 2017 over the next MFF provides with the opportunity of more substantial shifts in four main directions: more investment- and performance-oriented spending; the expansion of climate conditionality to all spending areas; more targeted redistributive spending matched with greater reform conditionality; a more outward-looking budget.

Let's Explore Europe!
Let's Explore Europe!

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13:

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This book for children (roughly 9 to 12 years old) gives an overview of Europe and explains briefly what the European Union is and how it works.--Publisher's description.

Europe, Strategy and Armed Forces
Europe, Strategy and Armed Forces

Author: Sven Biscop

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1136639209

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This book examines how the European Union can pursue a grand strategy and become a distinct global actor in a world of emerging great powers. At the grand strategic level, its sheer economic size makes the EU a global power. However, the EU needs to take into account that many international actors continue to measure power mostly by assessing military capability. To preserve its status as an economic power, therefore, the EU has to become a power across the board, which requires a grand strategy, and the means and the will to proactively pursue one. The authors of this book aim to demonstrate that the EU can develop a purposive yet distinctive grand strategy that preserves the value-based nature of EU external action while also safeguarding its vital economic interests. The book analyses the existing military capability of the European Union and its bottom-up nature, which results in a national-based focus in the member-states, impeding deployment capability. A systematic realignment of national defence planning at the strategic level will enable each member-states to focus its defence effort on the right capabilities, make maximal use of pooling and specialization, and contribute to multinational projects in order to address Europe’s strategic capability shortfalls. A stronger Europe will therefore result, it is argued, a real global actor, which can then become an equal strategic partner to the United States, leading to a revitalized Transatlantic partnership in turn. This book will be of interest to students of military studies, European Union policy, strategic studies and International Relations generally.