On the road towards a new EU-Central Asia Strategy
In the current issue of “Zentralasien-Analysen”, Katrin Böttger and Julian Plottka published an article on the update of the 2007 EU-Central Asia Strategy. The authors claim that such an update should be in line with current changes in global geopolitics. In doing so, attention must be paid to coherence between the strategy’s aims and the recently adopted Global Strategy of the EU as well as the funding instruments for the region. Against this backdrop, this article aims at stimulating a debate on the update of the strategy as it is envisaged by the EU Special Representative for Central Asia for 2019. To this end, the development of the EU’s strategic priorities for Central Asia since 2007 will be portrayed and the debate will be encouraged with regard to three different areas: keeping in mind the question whether Central Asia can be addressed as a single region, the article suggests to focus more on preconditions for regional cooperation than on specific cross-border problem solving. In order to put the Global Strategy’s “principled pragmatism” into practice in Central Asia, the authors advocate a shift away from the EU foreign policy’s belief in progress. Furthermore, the article shows that the focus on specific priorities below the strategic level, as requested during the previous review of the Central Asia Strategy, has already been established – a circumstance that should be reflected on in the new strategy.
No. 111 of “Zentralasien-Analysen” featuring the article (full text) can be downloaded here.