There was little hint of spring left of the Arab uprisings in 2012. The civil war in Syria was the headline issue and by the year’s close up to 60,000 Syrians had been killed. For much of the year, the EU focused on agreeing new sanctions on the regime of Bashar Assad, closing loopholes in old ones and reaching out to the opposition. By the end, though, the unity was fraying, with France and the UK pushing for more robust action – perhaps with less interest in intervening militarily (public pressure has been limited) than in positioning themselves for the post-Assad era. 

It was symptomatic of the EU’s broader problems in its southern neighbourhood that when the EU unveiled the new basis of its relationship with Egypt in November, this big initiative was immediately relegated to a footnote by President Muhammad Morsi’s attempt to seize additional powers.

The EU made a bigger impression in other parts of the Middle East. In November, it isolated Israel by almost unanimously ignoring its calls to reject Palestine’s bid for upgraded status at the UN. And when international talks with Iran resumed on Tehran’s nuclear programme, the EU led the way, adding to that influence with increasingly crippling sanctions.

The signs are that, having won re-election, US President Barack Obama will now take a more visible role in policy towards Iran. The US elections also set the tone for a quiet year in US relations with the EU, though a scoping exercise to determine the value of a potentially hugely significant free-trade deal was completed.

A similar hiatus was evident in relations with China, which changed the vanguard of the ruling Communist Party in November. Several EU-China summits have proved thorny in recent years; the summit in September was limited to a low-key farewell.

The last of the year’s summits – with Russia – was superficially equally uneventful, with the leaders of Russia and the EU describing it as a ‘stock-taking summit’. In private, though, there can have been little disguising that points of frictions have grown in size and number since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in May. The European Commission launched an anti-trust investigation into the Russian energy giant Gazprom in September, and in December it warned that it may ask the World Trade Organization to rule on trade restrictions imposed by Russia. Both issues should come to a head in 2013.

The EU also spent the year in a face-off with another eastern neighbour: Ukraine. The jailing of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister, and members of her cabinet led to Ukraine’s diplomatic isolation for the best part of the year and ensured that Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU, initialled in March, was not ratified. That dispute, and Ukraine’s elections in October, eclipsed flawed elections in Belarus in September and the year’s most photogenic crisis, Belarus’s retaliation against Sweden after a Swedish public-relations company dropped teddy bears over Belarus. The spat prompted EU foreign ministers to hold their only extraordinary meeting in the summer.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – like energy-rich Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – pose early challenges to a strategy unveiled by the EU in July to weave human-rights considerations (including democratic rights) into every aspect of EU foreign policy.

A competitor for the good news of the year was that the humanitarian crisis in Mali did not become a catastrophe, in part thanks to early aid efforts by the Commission. That gained less coverage, though, than the EU’s preparations to contribute trainers to a UN-led military effort in 2013 to counter Islamists in northern Mali.

Mali has become the ‘new Somalia’ in security circles – a byword for violent chaos. But Somalia is tentatively turning into a good-news story, as it completed a political transition in August. Even piracy is being curbed, thanks in part to the EU’s naval patrols.

There was also a breakthrough in Myanmar, with the EU (and the US) easing trade as a reward for the military regime’s opening up of its political system (and labour reforms). A decision to end a decade-old restriction on aid to Zimbabwe was less significant – more a carrot for reform than a reward for progress – and the continuing struggle to agree a constitution does not augur well for elections in March.

Against the sombre backdrop of the EU’s troubled relations with its eastern and southern neighbours, the start of accession talks with Montenegro in June and the granting of candidate status to Serbia in March were bright spots. But the EU’s bigger achievement was to persuade wartime allies of the late Slobodan Miloševic? to engage in talks with Kosovo after they won elections in May.

This was a difficult but generally quiet year of incremental advances in a few areas and reverses in others. It may also come to be seen as a preparatory year for 2013, when in many areas – including Syria, Iran, the US, Russia, Mali, and the eastern neighbourhood – the EU may be required to be more active and creative.