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Malicious cyber activities are on the rise. States and other relevant actors need to constantly adapt to the evolving cyber threat landscape, including by setting up effective deterrence mechanisms. This is what the European Union (EU) has done through the adoption of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) Decision 2019/797, which allows it to impose targeted sanctions to deter and respond to cyberattacks that constitute an external threat to the EU or its member states. However, in contrast to other horizontal regimes of restrictive measures in force within the EU, foreign governments are not included as potential targets of cyber sanctions. Moreover, the recital of the Decision specifies that the adoption of restrictive measures does not involve attribution of international responsibility for cyber-attacks to a third State. This article aims at identifying the rationale behind the inclusion of these distinctive features. It starts by considering the legal uncertainty that surrounds attribution of international responsibility for cyber operations. Next, it explains why the EU is not well placed to invoke third-State responsibility, and the reasons behind its reluctance to do so. It will then illustrate the risks inherent in the lack of a clear legal framework to attribute the responsibility of cyber-attacks to third countries. This may have serious consequences in terms of legal certainty when a cyber-attack amounts to a breach of the prohibition on the use of force in international relations. Then, we explore recent developments in EU legislation in the area of cyber security and the possibility to strenghten the powers of the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). We draw two conclusions: first, the Union might develop the capacity to attribute cyber attacks to specific actors and there is an interest to do so. However, Member States are probably still reticent to take this step. Two, despite the advantages of establishing a reliable attribution mechanisms, it is submitted that the majority of States prefers to take advantage of a regulative gap that allows them to react to cyber incidents as they see fit.

This article explores the legalisation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU) and its increasing use of sanctions. It argues that the breadth and depth of the numerous sanctions regimes in place shows that EU foreign policy is not merely an aspiration but produces law and legal processes which share similarities with those in the rest of the EU’s legal order. Further, the article examines the extent to which non-EU Member States in Europe have aligned themselves with EU sanctions. The argument is made that this is evidence not only of Europeanisation, but also crucially of a legalised foreign policy which has allowed Europe-wide, EU-led foreign policy to emerge.

The study of maritime operations has generally been neglected in a European Security and Defense Policy debate that often focuses on political will, bureaucratic incoherence, and military interoperability. Nonetheless, maritime operations have played an increasingly important role in the last decade and deserve deeper analysis. First, they provide a valuable optic for identifying a dynamic change in policy priorities over time. Second, they suggest the conditions under which the EU can and cannot fulfill the Brussels leadership’s avowed role as a “global player.” Finally, they also illustrate the EU’s presiding tensions when it comes to external challenges: between rhetoric and behavior, institutionally with NATO, and of the shifting political priorities among national governments. In this article, we compare the EU’s two major maritime operations. The first, Atalanta, is a counter-piracy multilateral operation in cooperation with NATO and non-EU states off the Somali coast. The second, Sophia, has evolved from search and rescue to thwarting migrant flows in the Mediterranean. Among several conclusions, we suggest that the evolution of maritime operations demonstrates an increasing gap—between the EU’s rhetoric of having a global strategy and its regional operational security focus.

This study aims to present the perception of young officers, present within the international air force semester program, on what they consider a European-level military leader should be. The general perception of what they consider a military leader to be can be a starting point for designing an individual training/instruction path, which will help them in achieving the desired goal proposed by the international military educational community.

The end of the Cold War presented a major challenge to Western Europe and to the European Union. It led not only to a whole new set of countries seeking to join the EU, but also to a strong demand for a more intensive EU engagement in the broader regional context. This book assesses whether the EU has successfully faced up to this challenge and has adapted its policies towards its immediate neighbourhood in a coherent and strategic manner. This volume examines EU policy from all its major regional dimensions including assessments of:* the enlargement process to East Central Europe* the increasing engagement of the EU in conflict resolution, most notably in the Balkans, but also in the Arab-Israeli conflict* policies towards the countries of the former Soviet Union, such as Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus* the complexities of EU policy towards Turkey and the Middle East* the transatlantic dimensions of the EU's neighbourhood policies.

Since mid-2010s, two concomitant processes have been going on in terms of the EU's perspective on its foreign policy: The EU's relatively proactive inclusion into some particular conflicts (and its deliberate self-exclusion in some others) on one hand and the rise of the geopolitical tone of the EU foreign policy and neighbourhood policy on the other. This recent \"geopolitical turn\" challenged the Union's predominant position in crisis situations as well as its broader self-representation about its own foreign policy actorness. On top of this, there has been many question marks about the EU's actorness in terms of its involvement in protracted conflicts. Despite good intentions and progressively improved capabilities, it is intriguing why the EU had been selective in the management of some territorial conflicts in its neighbourhood. The main argument of the paper is that current mainstream theoretical approaches of the European foreign policy, such as \"normative power Europe\", are overly optimistic and do not allow to put in focus certain dynamics the understanding of which are crucial to understanding the shortcomings of the EU's actorness in terms of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, where the actorness is captured throughout the paper in terms of the EU's effectiveness and coherence.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered a major shift in the EU’s external policy. The scope and brutality of the aggression, as well as the systemic looting and destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, prompted a paradigm shift in the EU’s approach to international cultural relations. For the first time, cultural issues were addressed through EU sanctions adopted under the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Between 2022 and 2025, several sanctions packages introduced restrictive measures targeting three key areas related to culture: individual sanctions on Russian oligarchs – art collectors, restrictions on trade in cultural goods, and efforts to prevent the illicit export of Ukrainian heritage. The EU’s restrictive measures include sanctions against the Russian officials responsible for cultural appropriation and a museum involved in appropriating Ukrainian heritage in occupied Crimea.Drawing on case studies and open-source investigations, the study examines the application of these sanctions and reflects on their emerging impact. While the freezing of assets (works of art) belonging to sanctioned oligarchs has proven difficult to enforce due to legal loopholes and opaque ownership structures, the trade sanctions have begun to limit Russian influence within the European art sector. The European art market has had to adjust to the absence of wealthy Russian clientele, and museum institutions have also reacted to the loss of Russian patrons. The economic and transport sanctions put a halt to European museums’ cooperation with their Russian partners, including inter-museum loans. The ban on trade in Ukrainian cultural goods of unclear provenance, in turn, was an important step for the EU in developing systemic solutions to help safeguard Ukraine’s cultural heritage. It also reinforced the Union’s mechanisms for combating the illicit trade in cultural property. Its effectiveness will rely on sustained legal development, international cooperation, and consistent application across Member States.

The arrival of populist political parties to power in several member states and the increasing politicisation of EU foreign policy has made intra-European consensus more difficult to reach in the past decade. This article examines the impact of populist contestation on EU foreign policy negotiations in the Council, a policy area governed by unanimity. This decision-making mode makes the policy especially vulnerable to the impact of contestation and, at the same time, gives power to those willing to use their veto. Drawing on the idea of unpopulist politics, this study shows how Hungary and, to a lesser degree, Poland have contested the established formal and informal norms (such as consensus-building or reflex coordination) through discursive and behavioural non-compliance. The “domestication” of EU foreign policy has meant that, in general, populists show less willingness to compromise and resort to non-decisions to demonstrate the EU’s weakness. However, there are exceptions, and it is possible to see variations in populist strategies when faced with similar challenges, as exemplified by the EU’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. By testing the scope conditions under which unpolitics might be activated, we show that the same crisis situation did not lead to a uniform response amongst populist governments. This is because both the nature of the crisis and perceptions of risk/gain were understood differently (and actively constructed as such) by populists in power. This finding emphasises the social, relational, and multi-level nature of unpolitics as a phenomenon.

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2024 9(3), 1424-1436 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. – II. Member States as custodians of the Union’s public order. – II.1. The concept of “European public order” in Council Decision (CFSP) 2022/351. – II.2. The Foreign Direct Investment Regulation: procedural and substantive obligations on Member States’s assessment of FDI that affect public order and public security. – II.3. The progressive “Europeanisation of public order” in the context of the proposal of Regulation on the screening of foreign investments in the Union and repealing Regulation 2019/452. – III. Conclusions. | (Abstract) This Article examines two legal instruments, in the fields of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Commercial Policy, to inquire on whether the concept of “public order” has been “Europeanised”. The first measure is Council Decision (CFSP) 2022/351 prohibiting operators to broadcast the content of selected Russian media outlets. In this context the notion of “European public order” is used to justify the adoption of restrictive measures. Yet, it cannot be maintained that as a result of this Decision Member States have lost their ability to invoke public order on their own. It is too early to conclude that the EU has “Europeanised” public order. Any future development of this notion will depend on whether it will be invoked again by the Council in the practice. The second instrument is Regulation 2019/452 establishing a framework for the screening of foreign direct investments into the Union. In this context, the Union cannot act through the Commission to autonomously protect European public order by preventing a Member State to accept a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that concerns critical technologies and infrastructures. However, the view is taken that this act is leading to a soft ‘Europeanisation’ of the concept of public order. The recent Commission’s proposal (COM(2024) 23), repealing the mentioned Regulation, is a step forward towards the recognition that FDIs in certain areas may be the object of restrictions in case they affect “Union public order and security”.