Energy Policy between Multilateral Governance and Geopolitics: Whither Europe? KIRSTEN WESTPHAL Introduction The beginning of 2006 witnessed intensified and increasingly hasty activ­ities on the part of the European Union and its member states to secure external energy supplies for the eu energy market: The Austrian eu pres­idency put energy security on its agenda, the eu Commission issued a new Green Paper on»A European Strategy for Sustainable, Competitive and Secure Energy«( com (2006) 317), and an energy summit was orga­nized on March 23, 2006. All this happened in the aftermath of the Rus­sian-Ukrainian gas dispute of January 1 to 4, 2006. Why has this bilateral dispute had such an effect on eu policies and will it result – as intended – in a new multilateral governance structure as promoted by the eu Com­mission? This contribution will focus first on the new proposals and review them in terms of their»novelty.« This will be done, second, by reviewing the development of European energy markets and the governance struc­ture that has emerged in the last decade. We shall argue that the eu has undertaken initiatives to multilaterally govern and cooperatively regulate energy trade over the last 15 years and in doing so has responded to new developments in the international energy system. However, as we shall describe, these attempts at»multilateral governance« have faced serious limitations in terms of efficiency. The reason is that energy trade has been widely dominated by geopolitics as analyzed in neo-realist terms by Klare (2001 and 2004), Yetiv(2004), Umbach(2003), Kalicki and Goldwyn (2005) among others. This contribution takes another approach and asks why this policy field – closely related to such policy fields as trade, envi­ronment, and climate, where multilateral global governance efforts are concentrated – is scarcely governed cooperatively, despite the growing necessity for multilateral governance. As the German Minister of Foreign Affairs wrote recently:»Energy security will strongly influence the global security agenda in the 21st century[and] we need a cooperative energy 44 Westphal, European Energy Policy ipg 4/2006