ABSTRACT
The EU Central Asia Strategy,1 put forward by the German EU Presidency and adopted by the European Council in June 2007, has triggered a remarkable increase of activity. This activity, as well as the Strategy paper providing the guidelines for EU action in Central Asia, has been driven mainly by hopes to increase the visibility of the EU and enhance its political momentum in a region which until recently has been quite distant from Europe in terms of geography, history and culture. The following chapter summarizes the EU’s main policy goals as outlined in the Strategy and analyses the EU’s enhanced efforts during the first two years of the Strategy’s implementation. Subsequently, light will be shed on some blind spots in both EU self evaluation and expert assessments, which as a rule ignore the internal dynamics of EU decision making and the limited scope for action in Third State contexts such as Central Asia.
