Toby Vogel

Brussels, Belgium

Writer on international affairs, Brussels.

Toby Vogel

Brussels, Belgium

Writer on international affairs, Brussels.

Libya: The strategy that wasn't
As a failed state in the European Union’s immediate neighbourhood that serves as a base camp for terrorists and a conduit for irregular migration to Europe, Libya is precisely the kind of place for which the EU’s foreign policy instruments were designed, or so one might think. Since the NATO intervention that helped oust Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the EU has deployed most of its crisis response approaches and instruments in the country, including new procedures set out in the 2013 review of the European External Action Service (EEAS), most notably a Political Framework for a Crisis Approach (PFCA). Yet, almost nothing in Libya has followed the liberal peacebuilding playbook, which assumes an improving security situation followed by reconstruction and sustained democratic political transformation. Instead, the EU has struggled to make any impact while the ongoing chaos in the country has deepened divisions among member states, with migration control emerging as the lowest common denominator for EU action.
CEPS Commentary
EU’s Own Credibility is at Stake in Macedonia
In its approach to Macedonia, and the Balkans, the EU has neglected democratisation in the name of stability - and has so betrayed its own values and empowered local autocrats.
Balkan Insight
Yesterday’s policies, today’s problems
“Immigrant Nations” is arguably the best study in many years of the effects that mass immigration has had on the countries and cities of western Europe and north America.
European Voice
Gefährliches Desinteresse am Balkan
Mazedonien bietet Anschauungsunterricht darin, wie Krisenbewältigung nicht geht. Die EU und die Nato müssen alles daransetzen, den Frieden auf dem Balkan zu wahren – aber nicht auf Kosten der politischen Weiterentwicklung und Demokratisierung.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Blacklisted but unbowed
One of the few heroes of Conor Gearty's “Liberty and security” is Miguel Poiares Maduro, a young Portuguese lawyer who in 2003-09 served as one of eight advocates general at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Maduro was asked to provide a non-binding expert opinion in the case of Yassin Abdullah Kadi, a Saudi national who had challenged his blacklisting by the United Nations, and later by the European Union, as an alleged supporter of al-Qaeda.
European Voice
Out from the shadows
Two interesting, but flawed, books on Kosovo's recent history.
European Voice
A high-stakes game in the Balkans
While the EU wants to change how it deals with Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fragile peace in the country is rapidly deteriorating. For close to 16 years, Bosnia and Herzegovina – the country that gave the world the term ‘ethnic cleansing' – has been at peace. Now the EU wants to remove those two pillars and replace them with a ‘reinforced presence'.
European Voice
In Germany's shadow
The world is a complicated place, Ulrich Beck, a German sociology professor, tells us in his latest book. Particularly complicated is the current state of the European Union and of the eurozone. “What are we to make of the fact that nobody understands what is happening?” he laments early in this slim volume.
European Voice
America should ditch its tyrant friends
WASHINGTON — During her recent Senate confirmation hearing, Karen Hughes said her mission to improve America's image abroad will require "helping others understand our policies and values." The incoming under secretary of state for public diplomacy did not acknowledge that the two sometimes clash.
The New York Times
Reaching A Breaking Point Over Srebrenica
There is growing concern among international policymakers that the constitution that came as part of the Dayton peace accords has outlived its usefulness.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Dayton's ambiguous legacy
Ten years ago today, on 21 November 1995, a set of accords were signed at an airbase in Dayton, Ohio that brought an end to three and a half years of war and horrendous violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet a decade on, the country is no nearer to a resolution of the issue that lay at the heart of the war: the shape of the Bosnian state.
openDemocracy
In Bosnia, War by Other Means
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- "I'm not anti-Serb," Slobodan Popovic said. "I'm just trying to be a normal Serb." The difference is important to Mr. Popovic. He's a senior lawmaker in the parliament of the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia's two "entities" that were put under a very thin federal roof by the 1995 Dayton peace accords. His Social Democrats are Bosnia's only truly multiethnic, countrywide opposition. In Sunday's elections, they are campaigning against a Serb Republic government that nominally is from the same camp -- fellow members of the Socialist International.
Wall Street Journal
Gunned Down in Sofia
Bulgaria's and, by link of fate, Romania's accession hopes take a hit.
Wall Street Journal
EU facing a challenge in the Balkans that is largely of its own making, writes Toby Vogel
The sources of the latest crisis lie in the EU’s unwillingness to confront nationalist leaders determined to cement their power by wrecking the progress the region has made since the end of various armed conflicts in the 1990s Source: Alamy Toby Vogel is
The Parliament Magazine
Enlargement: a missed opportunity
The European Commission missed an opportunity with its new approach to managing EU enlargement, adopted on Wednesday (5 February). Instead of taking a hard look at why the current procedure for admitting new members is failing, the commission has tried to
EUobserver
Why Miroslav Lajčák is the wrong choice for EU envoy
The European Union could commit a major strategic blunder in its immediate neighbourhood with the appointment, expected in March, of Slovak foreign minister Miroslav Lajčák to lead the negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo on a final normalisation agreem
EUobserver

About

Toby Vogel

Writing

Editing

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Reporting

Policy

Politics

International affairs

Toby Vogel is a writer on foreign affairs based in Brussels, Belgium. In 2007-14, he was a staff writer on political and home affairs with European Voice, the Economist's EU affairs newsweekly. Previously, he was a contributing editor of Transitions Online and a writer on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s daily Newsline, with a focus on the Balkans.

He was educated at the University of Zurich (MA, philosophy, 1995), completed his PhD coursework in politics at the New School for Social Research (MA, 1998), and was a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research fellow on security and humanitarian action at City University of New York (2003).

Vogel worked in New York for the Open Society Institute and the International Rescue Committee. In 1999-2002, he was head of monitoring and evaluation for the IRC's $20m refugee return and reintegration program in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and subsequently worked as a consultant on refugee and governance issues with the UN Development Programme and other organisations in Bosnia and Kosovo. He has since worked with a variety of UN agencies and offices.

Vogel is a regular reviewer of current-affairs titles for the TLS and has publ;ished opinion and analysis pieces in Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, and EUobserver.

Vogel is a co-founder and senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council in Washington, DC, and Berlin.