Europe

On 18 October, the European Council failed to agree on starting membership negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia. The vote showed that, when all is said and done, it is the vision of what the European Union should look like rather than its impact that matters most to some of its member states.

In the short-term, Turkish politics are unlikely to experience radical change, as Erdoğan has created a system for himself that will not be easily pried from his grasp. In the long-term, however, the cracks in his grand design will become too numerous to handle.

Germany wants to set the agenda in Europe, yet it does not commit financially and support a modernisation of NATO through fair burden-sharing.

While the European Union worried about Russian involvement in the Western Balkans, China has been taking advantage of the last few years to quietly become one of the big players in the region.

The UK House of Commons Defense Committee has today published its report into the termination of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, with evidence from the Human Security Centre featuring prominently.

Regardless of whether or not an event of Balkan Spring proportions is coming to the region, it is beyond evident that continuity is no longer an option – and that, one way or another, the present state of affairs will be coming to an end.

Even if the current protests fail to achieve their goals in the short-term, they are yet another signal that the status quo is unfeasible in the long-term. With European Union candidate status come Western-level demands and expectations – and the Serbian people's tolerance for a self-serving leadership has reached its limit.

HSC Senior Fellow, Rowan Allport, has had a comment piece looking at the potential impact of the termination of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty published in Foreign Policy magazine.

The House of Commons Defence Committee has published the HSC's evidence to the committee's inquiry into the potential end of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

An HSC Senior Fellow, Dr Rowan Allport, has had a comment piece published by UK Defence Journal. In it, he gives his analysis of the UK Government's recently published Modernising Defence Programme report - a document intended to point the way ahead for UK defence policy.