Leo van Doesburg

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Poland and Sweden have in a joint strategy paper indicated the EU is unlikely to invite any of its post-Soviet neighbours to join the bloc in the next 10 years. Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski and Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt set out their vision for the EU's future relations with neighbouring countries in a letter on 6 October to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and neighbourhood commissioner Stefan Fuele. The letter noted that Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine could one day become EU members, unlike countries in north Africa and the Middle East. "Some [countries bordering the EU] are European and thus enjoy special status in accordance with the treaties, others will remain neighbours of Europe," it said. But the four-page-letter nowhere said the EU should give the group 'an enlargement perspective.' It instead set out an everything-but-enlargement vision in which the six gradually adopt the E...

On 20th April, Easter Monday, I left Romania again for an exciting new trip. This time I was to visit Armenia in preparation for the ECPM congress; Georgia to visit the Christian Democratic Movement and to learn more about the political situation and how the ECPM could play a role to promote the Christian democratic values in this country; and to visit the meeting of the Eastern European Bureau for Christian Democracy that would take place during the Annual Congress of the European Popular Party in Warsaw. This is the first report, with impressions of the trip to Armenia. Monday evening I left Timisoara and went via Vienna to Yerevan. In the airplane I noticed that in Armenia it was three hours later in Vienna and so I arrived in the middle of the night in Yerevan but not at alltired. Accommodation was arranged by an old friend of mine, Levon Bardakjian, who offered to let me stay with his family. I arrived at his place, a nice house on a hill where I had a marvelous vie...