Energising the ring of friends : the energy community and its implications for the EU's neighbourhood strategy

The Energy Community is a unique international organisation. Its Parties are the European Union and nine Contracting Parties of the Western Balkans and to the east of the EU. Its objective is the extension of the EU's Internal Energy Market to non EU countries. Such a venture entails a variety of legal issues to be considered. Thus, the central part of this thesis will be dedicated to analysing the legal set-up of the Energy Community in detail. As a second step an appraisal of the Energy Community's potential as an EU integration model for countries currently embedded in the European Neighbourd Policy is presented; its result is ambigous, as expected.