The Cuban "Centro de Investigacion sober Politica Internacional" (which is attached to a small University which is itself in close contact to the Cuban foreign ministry) has recently organized an international conference in Havana. The subject was the "geopolitical transformation between cooperation and conflict". Peter Stania and myself representing the Vienna International Institute for Peace (IIP) were invited to actively participate. I was given the task to speak primarily on the role of Europe and specifically of Central Europe in that context. In the following you find a summary of my talk. A more extensive report on my visits to Mexico and Cuba will follow in due time.

In the past, especially after some neutral/non-aligned countries joined the EU and especially after the breakdown of the Eastern Block and the Warsaw Pact, neutrality was seen as an outdated concept. Furthermore it was often seen as immoral. The neutral countries were seen as free-riders who would benefit from security guaranteed by members of military alliances. If I mention alliances in the plural, this is not quite correct. Because there is only one fixed alliance and that is NATO.

The European Union wanted to decrease the influence of mere power and increase the role of values internally and in international relations. Not everybody was happy about the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and its inclusion into the Lisbon Treaty. But the majority view was, that these rights were the basis of the EU's internal development and of extending the EU or of integrating our neighbours into the EU. And as the European rights and values were also taken for universal rights and values - they were in fact based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights- it was obvious to have them as foundation for the Common Foreign and Security Policy including the neighbourhood policy.

Nobody can deny that the relations between the West, especially the EU and Russia are not in good shape. Maybe some on both sides are happy about it. Some regarded the pragmatically good relations of the times after the break down of the Sovietunion always with mistrust and skepticism. And you could find them amidst the nostalgic dreamers of the Russian empire and the Sovietunion as well as amidst those, especially in some new member countries, for whom the Russian imperialism is "genetically" founded. For some of them, Putin's Russia was and is the same as the Sovietunion and therefore Putin was and is another Stalin.