The European Strategic Partnerships Observatory (ESPO) provides information and analysis on the EU’s relations with its strategic partners and on the connection between bilateral partnerships and multilateral cooperation.

Philip Jägenstedt/Flickr

The China-EU summit last February has improved the atmospherics of mutual relations but the partnership’s potential remains unfulfilled.

The Council of the European Union

Strategic partnerships have not delivered strategic results yet. They should be made more effective with a focus on the guidelines outlined in this policy brief.

The Council of the European Union

The EU-India Summit made progress on the bilateral compact of the strategic partnership. More needs to be done for convergence on the multilateral level.

Canuck85/Wikipedia

This mapping exercise offers the first comparative overview of the EU's strategic partnerships with ten countries of systemic importance, including the US and the BRICS. Based on a wealth of data, it shows that the EU still struggles to engage effectively beyond trade and economics.

Nicola Corboy/Flickr

The EU and its ten strategic partners have very different understandings of multilateralism and of concrete issues on the international agenda such as development, trade, security and climate change. In the short and medium term, the group of strategic partners is too heterogeneous to ground a collective answer to multilateralism.

Europa Pont/Flickr

The EU has established ten Strategic Partnerships (SPs) with a highly unequal group of countries. The widening or deepening of SPs will decide if the EU’s partners benefit from a special treatment or if they are instrumental in shaping its own collective profile on the global stage.

Photocapy/Flickr

Strategic partnerships with key players in the world are at the forefront of the EU foreign policy debate. EU leaders and institutions should seek to build on the distinctive features of the Union and connect bilateral relations with multilateral frameworks.