On April 12^th, 2021, the Commission launched the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) proposal to promote ‘trustworthy AI’ in the European Union. The new proposal intends regulating the development, marketing and use of high-risk AI systems uniformly across the EU. Ensuring a well-functioning internal market for AI systems implies the possibility of placing a high-risk AI system on the market, which is imported outside the EU. In cases of non-compliance, Article 26 of the AI Act proposal provides that importers shall bring into conformity any high-risk AI system with this regulation before placing the system on the market. The provisions of the AI Act proposal will thus have some extraterritorial impact, meaning they will affect the development and deployment of many AI systems around the world and should possibly further inspire similar legislative efforts.

“European” values regarding the restriction of certain AI systems may find however less acceptance in dissimilar global markets such as China or Russia. In China, for example, a new regulation designed to rein the use of recommendation algorithms in applications went into effect in March 2022, representing Beijing’s latest effort to curb the influence of Big Tech companies in shaping online views and opinions throughout AI algorithm manipulation. While there are parallels between China’s regulations and the proposed EU legislation, particularly on informing users and letting them opt out of targeting. European lawmakers tend to think in terms of fostering markets and individuals’ rights, while China emphasises on societal wellbeing.

This paper explores the external factors capable of affecting the effectiveness of the EU’s external regulatory power to world regions dissimilar to the EU. Doing so, the paper uses the process tracing analysis for conducting small-N comparison and aims at opening thus the “black box” of causation through deep within-case studies and small-N comparison. This paper focuses on the causal mechanism of the “Brussel’s effect”, as developed by Anu Bradford in 2020, and explains how the constraints of the international environment impact third countries to respond to European Union’s regulations by adapting to them. The restrictions upon high-risk AI systems will serve as a case study for this article. While the states compared here are the United States, China, India and Russia, two typical cases and two deviant cases which are ahead in the AI competition.

This paper seeks to analyse how the European Union’s understanding of reconciliation in Croatia has been developing from the early beginning of Croatia’s European integration process to this day when Croatia is already an EU member state. EU included national and regional reconciliation processes among the other enlargement requirements for post-conflict Croatia and Western Balkans. However, during Croatia’s accession process, the EU has provided neither a clear definition nor a detailed explanation of what reconciliation is. The role of the EU in the reconciliation process of Croatia has usually been analysed through instrumental assessment of the short-term effectiveness of the applied policy. Such studies mainly focus on what reconciliation should ideally be and avoid examining how reconciliation has been understood by the EU or local actors involved in the reconciliation process. Literature on reconciliation provides a range of different definitions, so not knowing how the EU has perceived reconciliation in Croatia makes it difficult to properly assess the role of the EU in the reconciliation process because we do not fully understand what kind of reconciliation was intended to be developed in Croatia. Based on a qualitative content analysis, this paper seeks to uncover what vision of the post-conflict reconciliation in Croatia EU has been developing in its documents. The extensive content analysis of 267 primary EU documents indicates the overall perception and the main reconciliation elements applied to Croatia. Moreover, the findings reveal that the EU’s perception of Croatian reconciliation was slightly inconsistent and experienced notable changes over time. Finally, this paper considers that the academic ability to reliably analyse external actors’ contribution to national or regional reconciliation highly depends on the precise assessment of how external actor understands reconciliation in a particular state or region.

The geopolitical situation that has developed through the European continent today is largely determined by the opposition of the Russian Federation, on the one hand, and the spread of the ideology of liberal democracy and the influence of the EU, on the other. An example of a fairly successful implementation of the ideas of democratic governance, civil society, rule of law, as well as the introduction of such concepts as stable development and good-governance can serve as some countries of the so-called post-Soviet space. It can be argued that the EU uses a certain cultural script in its actions.

By actively supporting and developing the Eastern Partnership policy, the EU has achieved significant success in the states that were part of the former communist bloc: some of them (Bulgaria, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania) became EU members while others successfully interact with the EU in various socio- economic spheres (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova). And although the actual enlargement — through the inclusion of new member states in the EU — does not take place in relation to the states participating in the Eastern Partnership program, the EU has become an active player in the post-Soviet space.

Similar attempts — the spread of European values — are taking place in other regions, in particular, on the Caucasus: the EU has become an interested party in this territory, based on energy, political and social security for itself.

This paper intends to explore the missions of election observation sent by the EU around the world and to identify the factors explaining the decision of sending such missions in some countries and not in others. Given budget and logistic constraints, the EU cannot send missions of election observation to every single country and types of elections and need to decide whether (or not) send a mission to this country. Based on a quantitative analysis of all EU missions of election observation since 2000, this paper intends to test a series of hypotheses for explaining of this decision, such as the quality of democracy in the host country, its size, its trade and diplomatic relations with the EU, the type of elections or the presence of previous observation missions.