Helmut Schmitt von Sydow on "Energy Union" for the European Union

Helmut Schmitt von Sydow, Professor in Parma & Lausanne, and former Director & Chief Legal Advisor at DG Energy, European Commission. At the EU Energy Law & Policy Conference, 9 February 2016, Jean-Michel Glachant, Director of the Florence School of Regulation, talks with Helmut Schmitt von Sydow, about the formation of the European Energy Union. “At first sight it seems like old wine in new bottles” “For some items, it’s just revigorating the policy and giving it new drive… the main new thing in the energy union is the security item, and that’s in reality foreign policy” “[The European Commission] have already come up with a lot of progress on the external front, in the past the European Union did not dare to deal with external relations with member states… The first step was they had to take account of the existing agreements, instead of going right away to the Court of Justice and speaking of external competences and so on, trade commercial policy, they did it in a slowly normal community method, to take stock, and then by taking stock of the different agreements see that we need a common approach because competing to get a better deal than my community neighbour is not the right approach”