Brix

DESERTEC European Strategic Aspe Brix

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,0, Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen (Global Governance), course: Politics, Polity and Policy, language: English, abstract: Dealing with the origins of and reasons for the development of political strategies one should not miss the opportunity to analyze the strategic dimension of the DESERTEC project from the European perspective. Both the worldwide discussion on energy supply and climate change as well as the urgent need for regional diplomatic and social stability builds the fundament for DESERTEC which is a project realizing the installation of solar power plants in the deserts of Middle East and Northern Africa and the export of produced energy as element of the European electricity supply. By implementing that project Europe would be able to affect three strategic problems simultaneously: The dependency on the fossil resources oil and gas and the countries supplying them, problems concerning the handling of climate changes as well as the strengthening of partnerships with states of the Middle East and Northern Africa and by that promoting regional stability. The European Union is in need of diversification of its energy supply portfolio in order to be prepared to fulfill international climate protection agreements and reduce the dependencies from Russian gas and Arabian Oil. Weak partnerships with the Middle East and Northern Africa but also problems concerning economic and social stability within these countries bear potential to endanger the European Union by threads like terrorism or especially refugee movements evolving out of these countries.