After years of limited progress, the EU-Brazil partnership may be inching towards a new level of cooperation. Trade, investment and security are key areas.
This ESPO report looks at EU partnerships with Brazil, China, India and the US and finds that bilateral relations struggle to engender convergence at the global level on macroeconomic issues.
The EU strategic partnerships with BASIC countries can prove critical to make progress at bilateral level in curbing emissions and unlock stalemate on the multilateral stage.
The September summit between the EU and South Africa marked some progress on the political dialogue and confirmed the importance of the economic partnership.
The September summit between the EU and China took record of progress but also registered regrets and divergence on important economic and political issues.
In terms of values, Brazil and the EU are close partners. Nevertheless, they hardly ever adopt common positions on the international stage. How can this distancing be explained and how can the strategic partnership be deepened?
With Putin back in power and the EU mired in crisis, the future of the EU-Russia partnership is uncertain.
The partnership between the EU and Russia remains a contested one despite some recent steps in the right direction.
EU strategic partnerships serve multiple purposes in an uncertain global context. Bilateral relations should be mobilised to enhance international cooperation.
The China-EU summit last February has improved the atmospherics of mutual relations but the partnership’s potential remains unfulfilled.
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 EU-India Summit made progress on the bilateral compact of the strategic partnership. More needs to be done for convergence on the multilateral level.
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.
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.
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.
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.