This book investigates the new challenges confronted by the EU as an international actor within the context of recent economic and political developments, with particular attention to common foreign and security policies; the appraisal of development-aid policies; EU sanctions in the post-Soviet space, as harder instruments complementing the toolbox of the EU “soft power” polity; preferential trade agreements as a key element of EU external trade policy; external relations of the EU; international aspects of the monetary policy of the ECB in the context of the financial and sovereign debt crisis; massive capital flows and the boom-bust cycle in the emerging Europe; and the macroeconomic modelling of the relationship between the EU and the rest of the world.

Thoroughly up-to-date, the contributions to this volume offer analyses of recent, tense global events, including EU responses to the uprising in Arab countries and the Ukrainian conflict.

The book concludes with the proposal of a unique macroeconomic model in which the EU is conceptualised as constituting a block “against” the rest of the world, but also a two country model in itself, made up of Eurozone and non-Eurozone members.