This is the crowing achievement of almost 5 years of research on history of EU sanctions under the supervision of Jeff Checkel and @stephofmann.bsky.social. A massive thank you as well to the two other jury members @drclaraportela.bsky.social and Niklas Bremberg.

The first part of the discussion revisits some of the arguments made in my recently published article.

@eui-sps.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Big thank you to @stephofmann.bsky.social for organising the Forum, as well as to the editors of International Politics and the two very helpful anonymous reviewers.

Keep an eye out for the Forum, lots of very interesting contributions in there on the futur of European Security 👀

It's all very 'inside baseball' on how 🇪🇺 foreign policy is done. But ultimately it's about power, about who gets to organise Europe's foreign and security policy and to what aim.
www.politico.eu/article/eu-g...

Big Q moving forward is wether it was :
(i) an exceptional reaction to an exceptional challenge
(ii) the latest iteration of a double trend of the de-targetization of EU sanctions and the increasing role of the Commission in EU foreign policy.

Or more bluntly put: the post Feb2022 de-targetization of EU's 🇷🇺 sanctions empowered the European Commission and its presidency, at the expense of the EEAS, the Council, and thus the Member States. Quite the departure from both existing practices and the spirit of the 🇪🇺Treaties.

The gist of my argument is that the 🇪🇺 turned this time to much more comprehensive forms of sanctioning (vs the very targeted sanctions we see in most EU sanctions regimes), and in doing so it changed the 🇪🇺sanctions-making processes, and crucially who's in control.

The Forum investigates how the full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed the 'who', 'what' and 'in what way' of the European security architecture. My contribution looks more specifically at how the invasion of 🇺🇦 affected sanctions-making processes inside the 🇪🇺.

Thanks, would love to be included

One of the reason we spend little on defense compare to the rest of the world is that whereas US/RUS/CHN defense spending is spent in the country (and partly on blue collar jobs), European 💶 often goes abroad.

Thus, most EU Defence spending is targeted towards collaborative projects across MS.

I think an important argument for EU spending on defense a bit overlooked here is: consolidate and integrate the European Defense Industrial Base (DIB).

Rightly or wrongly, EU defense spending is thought to try to tackle the fragmentation and bad inventive structure of European defense spending.