The War on Iraq in has split the continent into ‘Old Europe’ and ‘New Europe’. On Iran, by contrast, the EU jointly acts in the context of a coordinated European foreign policy. The paper argues that both conflicts resemble an assurance game among the Europeans, in which the entailed...

This article argues that among all policy fields exhibiting externalities of a global scale, energy stands out on four dimensions: vertical complexity, horizontal complexity, higher entailed costs, and stronger path dependency. These structural attributes are at odds with contemporary key...