European Institute

By Michael D. Mosettig, former Foreign Editor of PBS News Hour

For two decades its 2,800 employees have toiled in relative obscurity, working on projects from democracy building to press freedom in the outer reaches of Europe and Central Asia. Now, thanks to the Ukraine crisis, the  Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) with a budget of 144.8 million Euros finds itself playing a key role in trying to defuse Europe's most dangerous confrontation since the end of the Cold War.

In the U.S. press there has been an undertone of commentary that missteps by the European Union helped provoke the Ukraine crisis that has now engulfed the trans-Atlantic alliance. The gist of the criticism is that the EU leadership, handling accession negotiations with Ukraine, failed to foresee how its accession offer would provoke an aggressive Russian response.

By James D. Spellman, Principal, Strategic Communications, LLC

Europe’s highest court has strengthened privacy safeguards by requiring Google to remove when requested Web links for individuals, setting a precedent that gives credence to the “right to be forgotten” on the internet, a right the European Commission wants to introduce explicitly into law.^[1]