Introduction
When Romano Prodi, a former President of the European Commission, addressed the 6th World Conference of the European Community Studies Association in 2002, he reassuringly spoke of a new world “opening up new opportunities but also throwing up new challenges” (2002). His speech set aspirations for an expanding European Union (EU) and “its closest European neighbours, from Morocco to Russia and the Black Sea”, aiming to achieve “sustainable stability and security on the European continent” (Prodi 2002). Just over a decade on, this “new world” is a different place, having thrown open more challenges than opportunities. Today’s EU faces years of financial crisis, stagnant growth, rising levels of unemployment and illegal migration. Its borders have become a “ring of fire” rather than “a ring of friends” (Bildt 2015; Kasekamp 2016) stricken by instability and armed conflicts from Tripoli in the south to Luhansk and Donetsk in the east. In 2002, Prodi anticipated that the EU would become a “real global player [acting] as one”; instead, the EU of today barely scrambles to build consensus, let alone to project its vision and find solutions to multiple crises within and outside its borders.
What has gone amiss, especially in the EU neighbourhood? Part of the problem, this special issue contends, is the EU’s failure to imagine a new social order, which would give a relational value to the Other,1 for example, the outsiders, and become more accommodating of their diverse and different world, and not by way of disciplining it to the EU purported standards, but rather by way of aligning differences to a mutually agreeable “normal”. Over the years, since the inception of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2004, the EU has been developing a complex portfolio of means to reach out and to shape the outside by its own standards. This included: new financial and policy instruments with further policy regionalisation and focus; new agents extending to multilateral platforms and now embracing all levels of society; and new modes of governance, shifting from disciplinary to more cooperative modus operandi and emphasising joint ownership and commitment (Korosteleva, Natorski, and Simão 2014). However, the EU has been struggling during this period to understand the world beyond its borders – that is, the world as pari passu, and a stranger to the EU’s complex bureaucracy and its codified norms. The EU, as Edkins (1999, 2) would argue, has become too politics-driven, in an attempt to promote its own established order inside-out, having forgotten that “politics is not in any sense given” and that “it is the result of contestation” (Donald and Hall in Edkins 1999, 2). It is ideological and contingent on a particular social order, and when externalised, it requires winning the “hearts and minds” first, before replacing it by the rule of bureaucracy. It is a political process, whereby “politics” is only a small part of “the political”, with the latter serving as a moment of openness to allow for contestation, new opportunities and new circuits of power to emerge and re-align in co-existence. It is precisely “the political” that has been amiss in the EU’s imagining of this new world, thus reducing the boundaries of politics to the mere exercise of norm transference.
To be fair, the EU has been reflective of its policies and their effects. During its 10-year cycle, the ENP alone has received at least two major iterations. The 2009 iteration involved policy regionalisation into the Eastern Partnership Initiative (EaP) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) (European Commission 2009). In 2011, it received additional differentiation to accommodate changes both within the EU institutions after the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, and with instability and military conflicts escalating in the neighbourhood, especially in the south (European Commission 2011). At the same time, these iterations offered little in the way of expanding the boundaries of knowledge about the world outside. Rather, they have contracted “the political” even further by actually depoliticising – that is, removing the risk of contestation – it to the confines of roadmaps, regulations and technical solutions, which did little justice to solicit public support and commitment.
More recently, the ENP underwent its third major revision,2 to respond to the neighbourhood “on fire”, which in the Commission’s own words, has become considerably “less stable than it was ten years ago” and which “increase[s] the challenges faced by both the EU and its partners, aggravating economic and social pressures, irregular migration and refugee flows, security threats and leading to diverging aspirations” (European Commission 2015a, 2). The ENP’s third iteration, in the words of the EU High Representative, Federica Mogherini,3 should “switch from the idea that the European Union is at the centre, surrounded by the neighbouring countries, to the idea of a new partnership based on cooperation” – which underwrites the very process of positive othering, and which this special issue is set to critically unpack through the lens of differentiation and normalisation, two instrumental notions to make othering more effective and enduring.
In order to make the EU policies more sustainable for dealing with the outside as different and yet permeable to negotiation of the new boundaries for “politics” and “the political”, one can no longer afford to simply tinker around the edges with the policy contents and ignore its disputed rationale and limited legitimacy on the ground. Instead, one needs to problematise the very fundamentals of EU external relations, and develop more reliable methodologies for knowledge production and transfer, to make the EU more attractive to sustain its authority for promoting reform. The premise of this special issue’s inquiry is essentially threefold. First, in order to understand and make power relations more sustainable, we need to “move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of the technology of power” (Foucault 2007, 117) – that is, to engage in the process of positive othering (see note 2; and Korosteleva 2016a), as this volume critically contends. Second, we also need to move beyond the analysis of the EU “institutional functions” – in the ENP case, its instruments, agents and modes of governance – towards developing more understanding of the rationale, vision and strategies of the other actors afield in order to adequately respond to their specific needs and interests, in the process of relational power production – herewith, explored as a process of differentiation, a constitutive part of positive othering. Third, this kind of analysis requires de-centring of the subject, who “has no fixed, essential or permanent identity” (Edkins 1999, 22), with the intention to construct a mutually agreeable/optimal space of normality which could endure the “politics” of the “day-to-day decision making and ideological partisanship” (Dallmayr in Edkins 1999, 2), and which would be examined thereon as a process of “normalisation” (Foucault 2007).
At the heart of this project lies the need to acknowledge and understand the relational, ideological and contingent nature of power, which refers to “politics” in a narrower sense as a process of institutionalising and expanding the established order of things, part of “the political” but in a “smaller” way. On the contrary, “the Political”, with a capital “P”, represents an opportunity for contestation and openness, offering a wider frame of reference, “the moment of undecidability, when a new social order is on the point of establishment, when its limits are being contested” (Edkins 1999,126). This is where the EU neighbourhood policies, this special issue believes, are presently located: much of the EU politics in the neighbourhood to date has been essentially depoliticised, having taken for granted the need for continuing legitimation and instead focusing excessively on promoting pre-set EU normative governance over the region. By placing our revision of the ENP/EaP agenda within the conceptual frame of “the political”, this special issue argues that power could and should be exercised in many different ways, and their interface should be more nuanced than is currently understood. While daily politics is an important instrument for institutionalising an agreed political order “by a technology of expertise or the rule of bureaucracy”(Edkins 1999, xii), and making it more transactional and security-predicated, it generally affords no room for real political change, and thus becomes “depoliticised” and deprived of the opportunity to think “outside the box”. “The political”, on the other hand, allows to problematise, to re-imagine and to experiment with the emerging power arrangements, especially when such are deeply contested, as in the case of Ukraine. This may engender new and/or additional social space to help overcome the limitations of the existing political order, and avail new opportunities for dialogue and cooperation – that is, by bringing “the political” back in.
From the perspective of “the political”, the questions about how the EU should respond to the limited convergence and growing resistance and instability in the neighbourhood would invariably lead us to the need to understand the role of the Other, and not only of the partner countries but also of the other power contestants and populations of the region; and how they could be co-opted back in the process of regenerating a new social space. This volume argues that in order to rationalise convergence and understand the disconnects and reasons for resistance, the EU’s Self should engage with the Other as part of its cognitive nexus with the outside, and be vetted and contested by the normative discourses of the existing and conflating power modalities, to re-imagine it-Self in the neighbourhood. Furthermore, this volume renders a different reading to the oft-cited notion of differentiation, which in the context of “the political” is understood not as deviation from a sanitised version of the EU standards, but rather as an agreed new “normal” developed via contestation and inclusive of the expectations and historicity of the participating sides. Following from the above, this volume also advocates for the need to shift away from a prescriptive “normation” approach, which hitherto assumed third countries’ adherence to the EU’s interpretation of “normal”, to finding a new optimal space for the interplay of differing normalities, which could be understood as a new “shared normal” and jointly deduced through a relational process of “normalisation” (Foucault 2007).
What follows next is a brief discussion of the conceptual framework which unpacks the nexus of “politics” and “the political” in a dialectical manner, and explores the key tenets of this volume – differentiation and normalisation as conceptual tools of positive othering. A subsequent section then introduces the reader to the structure of the volume and its major contributions, which endeavour to rethink some crucial aspects of the EU-neighbourly relations ranging from security contestation to its institutional (European External Action Service (EEAS)), normative (bargaining power) and instrumental (border management) forms of application.
Re-examining the boundaries of “politics” and “the political”
In her seminal work, Jenny Edkins (1999, 2) argues that “much of what we call ‘politics’ [today] is in many senses ‘depoliticised’ or ‘technologised’”, thus missing an essential element of intellectual debate and contestation by differing and proliferating subjectivities. Instead, often forgetting about the relational nature of power politics, we tend to objectivise the outside world as a simple extension of our own Self, at the expense of the rationalities and subjectivities it has to offer. While this view of the outside is perhaps natural to a human desire of “governance” inferring “control” and “coordination” (Börzel 2010), or as Foucault terms it, of “governmentality” implying the composite of power institutions and their need to dominate and regulate the outside (2007, 108–109), this logic is nevertheless potentially perilous.
The principal caveat of this kind of projection of the Self is that it is invariably unilateral, perpetuating a parochial cycle of knowledge production that centres on the Self (no matter how worthy it may be), and reduces the boundaries of knowledge to a simple transmission and acceptance of the Self’s standards by the outside. This is what “politics” seems to have become in present-day international relations, as Edkins argues – deprived of contestation, and displaced by a technology of expertise and bureaucracy, in the promotion of an unreciprocated and seemingly agreeable order. Foucault however reminds us that at the heart of “governmentality” with its inherent need to regulate is an understanding that power can only work through the practices of freedom (a calculated rationality) and as a process of interacting with the Other. For Rose (1999, 4), by example, “to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed”, while Miller and Rose (2008, 53) argue that “power is not so much a matter of imposing constraints upon citizens” but rather “making up citizens capable of bearing a kind of regulated freedom”. Hence, the task of this volume is to radically rethink the rationality of the ENP in the eastern neighbourhood while clearly distinguishing between “politics” and “the political” in an attempt to bring the “dialogue” and “openness” back in.
Edkins argues that “politics” is in essence the outcome rather than the process of contestation: it is the debate that occurs within the limits set by the new order (1999, 126), when a legitimate authority emerges, to exert “a bureaucratic technique of governance elaborated through recognised expertise and endorsed … through a regular, ritual replacement of the placeholders of authority” (1999, 4). It does not account for how power “establishes a social order and a corresponding form of legitimacy” (Edkins 1999, 3) or explains how “one social form rather than another emerges from a period of contestation and struggle”. To achieve this understanding, one needs to examine “the political” as a process of struggle and mutations of one social order into the next. “What takes place thereafter … is not ‘the political’, but a technology of governance, and ironically, this technology of governance is what we call ‘politics’” (Edkins 1999, 5). As Edkins contends further, when a new social order is legitimated, it then “sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics” (1999, 2). Politics, therefore, is more concerned with the social rather than the political space, in the intention to institutionalise new structures of governance and make them sustainable. “The political” in this case becomes removed, and politics – “depoliticised” representing a closure of an ideological debate, a moment of forgetting of “the political” and making history.
From this perspective, it is precisely the analysis of “the political” in a deeply contested ideological environment of the eastern region, rather than the EU “politics” as a set of instruments, capabilities and budgets, that should give this revision a new meaning. A decade-long struggle of the ENP’s application in the eastern region, which Huntington (1991) argued is located on a fault line of differing civilisations, demonstrates the dangers and the consequences of such premature ideological closure that promote power at the expense of freedom (Taylor 2009, 6), in a situation when political space still requires “winning-over” and canvassing for reciprocal future and course of reform.
Instead, as the practice attests, the ENP has found itself locked in EU-centric “politics” of norm transference rather than the contestability of “the political”. Consequently, all policy revisions that had taken place to date focused just on that – modification of policy instruments for more effective norm transmission and diffusion. Therefore, instead of addressing the root cause for resistance and ideological struggle which risks opening up the political space...
