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Energy & democracy / Working Paper

Europe's external energy policy: between geopolitics and the market

23/11/2007 By Richard Youngs

During the last three years the EU has agreed a series of policy papers and new strategies in the field of energy security. European governments and European Commissioners routinely stress their belief that Europe’s energy predicament is acute and cite energy security as a priority issue for the Common Foreign and Security Policy.

Policy commitments stress that energy strategy is to move beyond the internal sphere and become systematically a part of EU external relations. The Commission’s pivotal 2006 Energy Green Paper promised “a better integration of energy objectives into broader relations with third countries”.

And indeed a plethora of new energy agreements, partnerships, dialogues and treaties have been forthcoming. The EU has signed agreements on energy cooperation with Ukraine in December 2005, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in 2006 and has offered a similar partnership to Algeria and Egypt.

In October 2005, the Energy Community South East Europe Treaty was signed, with the aim of incorporating Balkan states into the European regional market for gas and petroleum products. A Commission-led Black Sea and Caspian Sea energy cooperation initiative is also taking shape. EU-OPEC dialogue has deepened. An EU-Africa energy partnership is being developed.

Energy is now a prominent issue in nearly all the EU’s external political dialogues, whereas it barely appeared on the agenda five years ago.

But do these new energy initiatives amount to much? Has energy really been fully and coherently integrated into EU foreign policy? Has the EU adopted qualitatively new approaches to energy security or simply piled one formal strategy on top of another without meaningful change?

This paper makes four arguments that follow in sequence. First, the EU’s stated approach to energy security can be described as revolving around the concept of a ‘market-governance’ nexus.

Second, European governments and EU institutions espouse this approach while harbouring concerns that in practice a more geopolitical approach is required.
Third, such concern is amplified by the increasing resistance to the EU’s "market-governance" model on the part of several key energy producer states.
Fourth, despite inching towards a more geo-strategic approach, the EU remains insufficiently engaged with the political issues that impinge upon energy interests in producer states.

In sum, the EU currently hovers ineffectively between markets and geopolitics, where it needs more effectively to conjoin these two necessary strands of energy security.

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Keywords

CFSP Energy Security EU Foreign Policy European Union

Related publications

• Europe and Russia, Beyond Energy
• Europe's energy policy: economics, ethics, geopolitics
• European Energy Security: Balancing Priorities

Bio author: Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Democratisation programme at FRIDE. He also lectures at the University of Warwick in the UK. He studied at Cambridge (BA Hons) and Warwick (MA, PhD) universities.