A corridor through thorns: EU energy security and the Southern Energy Corridor

摘要

The Southern Energy Corridor (SEC), which aims to link Caspian Basin and potentially Middle East gas supplies to Europe, is one of the EU's six priority axes of energy infrastructures. Drawing on the external governance literature, the article provides an analysis of the EU's efforts in the wider Black Sea area to increase its energy security. It concludes that despite difficult domestic and geopolitical obstacles, the EU is pushing forward its objective to establish the SEC. However, the EU's institutionalised governance, with the incentives derived from close cooperation, has been a necessary condition of impact, but not sufficient. The SEC builds upon the east-west pipelines supported by the USA in order to prevent the Russian control over the Caspian Basin supplies. If the SEC is possible it is mainly because of the path-dependent processes created by those pipelines, which linked the international position of Azerbaijan and Georgia to their transit role between the Caspian Sea and Europe.