Ukraine & Eastern Partnership

There shall be no war, at least not now. On Sunday, President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich agreed to hold early elections in September. In doing so, they halted the country’s slide toward violence, which began with Yushchenko’s dissolution of the Ukrainian parliament in April and culminated this weekend with a standoff between Interior Ministry troops (loyal to Yushchenko) and traffic police (controlled by Yanukovich). But even if the Sunday agreement holds – and law-makers from the prime minister’s side already dispute it – Ukraine has become an uglier place for it. In the end, it was political and military muscle that settled the differences. A conflict may have been averted but Ukraine’s tentative steps to build democracy based on rules and institutions were dealt a severe blow.

The EU's enlargement to the East has been an economic success. Trade between the old and the new members is thriving. Foreign investment by West European companies has helped to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Central and Eastern Europe, and it has generated multi-billion euro profits for the investing companies.

What has been the real choice in Ukraine's presidential election? To judge not only from the Russian media, but also from some western newspapers, Ukraine is the subject of a tug of war between Russia and the West.

With more than 14 million people out of work, unemployment is the EU's greatest economic problem. However, while EU policy-makers ponder Germany's 4.3 million unemployed, Britain's low labour productivity and Italy's greying workforce, they have missed one of Europe's key labour market challenges: eastward enlargement.
If the EU's labour market statistics...

With the 2004 enlargement, the EU will acquire many new neighbours, some of them unstable states with fragile economies. This working paper explains why the regions along the EU's new eastern border matter for Europe's security.