The author of the paper submits that EU foreign policy disputes can be attributed to the fact that Central and Eastern Europe was admitted into the European Union as a less developed part of Europe. As a result, particularly the Franco-German axis intended to run EU foreign policy in accordance with the rule “the West knows best”. This approach is based on the assumption that the new EU member states should be socialized into Western, superior values. EU foreign-policy problems were created mostly by the Franco-German axis when these two countries decided to support a multi-polar world trying to counter American dominance and forging close ties with the Russian Federation. This approach to EU foreign policy was not acceptable to the new member states for political, economic, military and historical reasons. In the context of the current economic and financial crisis, the new member states’ foreign-policy choices have been vindicated as it turned out that the European Union cannot distance itself from the United States due to its economic weakness and the organization was not able to change Russia by way of the policy of “Wandel durch Annäherung”.

The authoritarian regime of the president of Belarus A. Lukashenko makes the European Union’s policy towards Belarus completely different from the policy with regard to its other neighbours. The main aim of the paper is to show and analyze EU’s policy towards Belarus in the context of presidential elections in Belarus in December 2010. In the first part of the paper, the author very briefly describes the UE’s policy towards Belarus before elections. The following part is devoted to the most important events in the EU’s policy towards Belarus in the context of the last Belarusian presidential elections. The summary contains an analysis of reasons why the UE’s policy towards Belarus and its president A. Lukashenko is so difficult and, up to the present, rather ineffective.