The European Council on Foreign Relations

The Scorecard tour: Madrid

Date: 28th March 2012 | Author: Hans Kundnani,

I'm just on my way back from Madrid – the final stop on my Scorecard tour. We held a discussion with officials and think tanks at our new Madrid office just opposite the Prado, followed by a public event at the European Commission office, which included former NATO secretary general and High Representative for European Foreign Policy Javier Solana (a member of ECFR's board), Jordi Vaquer of the Barcelona-based foreign-policy think tank CIDOB and El País columnist (and Scorecard Steering Group member) Lluís Bassets. If you read Spanish, you can read an account of the event by an El País reporter.

2011 was not a great year for Spanish foreign policy. Like Italy, Spain was inevitably focused above all on the euro crisis. José Ignacio Torreblanca, the head of ECFR´s Madrid office, wrote just before the general election last November elections that Spain's "dire economic situation" had

The Scorecard tour: Warsaw

Date: 19th March 2012 | Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: Scorecard,

Hans Kundnani is one of the lead authors of the ECFR's Foreign Policy Scorecard. He's writing this series of blog posts as he attends a series of Scorecard events across Europe and beyond.

I had been particularly looking forward to discussing the Scorecard in Warsaw because of the interesting way that the role of Poland in European foreign policy is evolving. As Konstanty Gebert, the head of ECFR’s Warsaw office, has explained , Poland – which is the only member state that has not gone through a recession since 2008 and is expected to grow by three percent in 2012 – straddles several fault lines in Europe (e.g. between the eurozone and the euro-outs and between larger and smaller member states) and is increasingly close to Germany. We identified Poland as a “leader” on 8 components of European foreign policy in 2011 – more than Italy or Spain. In particular, it played a

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The Scorecard tour: Copenhagen

Date: 12th March 2012 | Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: Scorecard,

Hans Kundnani is one of the lead authors of the ECFR's Foreign Policy Scorecard. He's writing this series of blog posts as he attends a series of Scorecard events across Europe and beyond.

Does Europe need a foreign policy? That was the interesting question raised by at a discussion on the European Foreign Policy Scorecard we held in Copenhagen last week. It began with some introductory remarks by Danish Foreign Minister Villy Søvndal, who welcomed the Scorecard as a useful basis for a discussion European foreign policy. Next, former Danish climate change minister (and ECFR Council member) Lykke Friis raised some interesting questions about how to define foreign policy and suggested some ways in which she thought Europe could do better. But Bo Lidegaard, a former adviser to the Danish prime minister and the editor-in-chief of the Danish newspaper Politiken, wondered whether we

The Scorecard tour: Rome

Date: 8th March 2012 | Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: Euro Crisis, Scorecard,

2011 was a pretty bad year for Italian foreign policy: in the second edition of the European Foreign Policy Scorecard, we identified Italy as a "leader" on only 7 components of European foreign policy (less than Sweden or Poland) and as a "slacker" on 6 (less only that Cyprus and Greece). But, despite that, several of the speakers at the Scorecard event we held yesterday evening at the Polish embassy in Rome were surprisingly upbeat. In fact, they suggested, the way Italy had turned things around after such a bad year should give all of Europe hope.

Lapo Pistelli, the Democratic Party's head of International Relations (who was standing in for Massimo D'Alema, who had to cancel at the last minute) said he was worried by Europe's apparent loss of soft power ("the soul of what we can sell to the world") and the renationalisation of European foreign policy that we identified in the

The Scorecard tour: Berlin

Date: 16th February 2012 | Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: Europe and the world, Germany in Europe,

Hans Kundnani is one of the lead authors of the ECFR's Foreign Policy Scorecard. He's writing this series of blog posts as he attends a series of Scorecard events across Europe and beyond.

When ECFR published the first edition of the Foreign Policy Scorecard last year, Justin Vaïsse and I were looking forward to having lots of discussions about the methodology. Having had long internal discussions between ourselves, with other ECFR staff and other experts, and having made difficult choices, we were interested to see what other people thought. We were even hoping for criticism because we thought it might help us improve the Scorecard the following year.

Surprisingly, however, we didn't didn't end up having many discussions about the methodology at all. Whether because people found it convincing or just because they wanted to focus instead on the substantial issues the Scorecard

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