The European Union Battlegroups (Caroline Henrion)

During its 2009 Presidency of the European Union, Sweden re-launched the debate on the usability of battlegroups, a European military instrument conceived to facilitate the EU’s involvement in global security. Despite their full operational capability since 2007 and the different crises that arose in the past two years, the battlegroups were never deployed. The failure to use this tool stems from the lack of sufficient political will by Member States to act in a common way. As a result, the analysis of this instrument reveals the difficulties to which European defence’s integration is confronted. The political debate on the use of battlegroups started a few months ago but is not finished yet. Some solutions to its improvement were found during the Swedish Presidency, but the subsequent Presidencies of 2010 should revisit the question.

Collection of articles on the external policy of the EU (Federico Santopinto)

Composed of 413 articles, 37 protocols and 65 declarations, for a total of more than 400 pages, the new European treaties amended by the Treaty of Lisbon are not easy to read. Besides, the fact that these articles do not have any title helping to identify the topic treated is another factor which complicates the reading. In order to face these difficulties, GRIP has decided to collect all the dispositions of the European Treaties which regards the external policy.

The collection is not limited to the articles which specifically address the external policy of the Union. It includes also several other dispositions scattered among the articles, protocols and declarations, which are essential to understand the EU competences outside its borders.

As a consequence, the document is long, but complete. In order to facilitate its reading, the following structure has been adopted:

• A title indicating the content of each articles has been inserted between brackets;
  
  
• A table of contents including all articles of the collection (with their title indicating their subject) has been inserted at the beginning of the document, in order to help the reader to guide its research in a more efficient way;
  
  
• When an article also concerns other subjects, the part concerning EU external relations is underlined. On the other hand when the articles exclusively concern the EU external relations, their numbers and titles are underlined.