Eastern Partnership: A New Opportunity for the Neighbours?

Elena Korosteleva

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415847209
• eBook ISBN: 9781317984832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume offers a collective assessment of the development and impact of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Eastern Partnership Initiative on its eastern neighbours - Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova in particular, with Russia's added perspective. Founded on extensive empirical and conceptual research, the volume uniquely bridges the perspectives of all parties across the EU's eastern border, in an attempt to understand advantages and problems related to the effective implementation of the EU policies in the eastern region. The undertaken research points to the prevalence of the top-down and conditional governance approach in EU treatment of the outsiders, which is not only Eurocentric and prescriptive in nature, but also falls short of the declared partnership principles. Without the understanding of partners' internal dilemmas and needs, which could only be achieved through the equivalence and reciprocity of partnership, the EU would struggle to make the policy effective and legitimate in the region, and to buttress its reputation as a 'credible force for good' on the international arena.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics.

The Eastern Partnership Initiative: A New Opportunity for Neighbours?

Elena Korosteleva

The European Union’s (EU) relationship with its neighbours to the east has long been founded on the aspiration to build a kind of partnership that does not automatically offer the prospect of membership to former Soviet republics apart from the Baltic States. The mechanism for this was initially the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), embracing a wider range of countries, which has been further buttressed by the Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP) in an effort to revitalize the partnership-building process in the east. Although more differentiated and versatile, the EaP has nevertheless inherited the Neighbourhood Policy’s original conceptual limitations, especially concerning the ill-defined nature of partnership. Practical limitations, on the other hand, include the policy’s lack of coherence and management, as well as its low visibility and public appreciation on the ground across the board. The East European response to the EU’s initiative reveals further tensions and contradictions, especially pertaining to partner countries’ geopolitics and cultural and civilization differences. It is clear that the EU’s ‘politics of inclusion’ needs further conceptualization in order to shift the balance away from the EU towards the partner countries themselves. Only in these circumstances of decentring can the notion of partnership become true and effective.

The European Neighbourhood Policy was launched in 2004 in response to the eastward enlargement of the European Union. Given its unprecedented geographical and political expansion into the former socialist bloc, the policy sought to address two critical strategic issues: ‘to avoid drawing new dividing lines in Europe and to promote stability and prosperity within and beyond the new borders of the Union’.¹ Despite these commendable aims, the ENP, however, had from the outset a conflicting logic embedded in its rhetoric and action, which subsequently prevented its successful realization in the neighbourhood. The policy found it difficult to reconcile its ‘idealist’ rhetoric of creating ‘a ring of friends’² around Europe with its ‘realist’ security-predicated need to protect its borders and encircle itself with ‘well-governed countries’.³ It also struggled to adapt suitable means to incentivize the neighbours into adopting painful and costly reforms in exchange for a less-tangible promise of economic integration in the future. ‘Special’ or ‘privileged’⁴ relations, devoid of EU membership, carried limited appeal. The vision of the future, the so-called finalite for the neighbours, has been an ´obstacle equally for EU policy-makers and for the recipients, as the conflicting descriptors, ‘European neighbours’ and ‘the neighbours of Europe’,⁵ applied to the outsiders, tacitly suggest.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that the ENP received a mixed and delegitimizing response from the eastern neighbours who were either hesitant or indeed rejective from the outset. To respond to the policy’s unintended consequences,⁶ the Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP) was launched on 7 May 2009, at the Prague summit of EU member states and EU officials. A joint declaration with six East European partners - Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan - was signed to facilitate closer co-operation with the region. The EaP was declared an essential step towards creating ‘the necessary conditions to accelerate political association and further economic integration between the EU and interested partner countries’.⁷ The policy’s added value was unambiguously seen in the realization of ‘a more ambitious partnership’ with neighbours, based on mutual interests, shared ownership and responsibility.⁸

The new initiative indeed offers the whole range of original projects, tools and resources. It has innovatively launched a dual-track approach to the region, which envisages both deepening EU’s bilateral relations with the interested parties, and also, through a multi-lateral dimension, developing new relations with those that hitherto lacked structured relations with the EU (for example, Belarus) and one another. In principle, the dual-track approach seeks to pursue greater differentiation towards the front runners (such as Ukraine and Moldova), and also to provide more opportunities for the less experienced partners, with the ambition of creating a joint Neighbourhood Economic Community in the future.⁹ The initiative also outlines four thematic platforms of good governance and democracy, economic convergence with EU legislation (the acquis communautaire), energy security, and people- to-people contacts, to be embedded through new association agreements, and a range of specific projects to bring the partners into ‘ever closer’ union. It also envisages five flagship initiatives to be developed on a needs-serving basis, and through intensive engagement with the region’s civil society.

In summary, the EaP appears to be timely and potentially capable of reinvigorating the ENP’s appeal and its legitimation in the area. In the words of Stefan Füle, the Commissioner for Enlargement and the ENP, the EaP is better equipped ‘to support democratic and market-oriented reforms in partner countries, consolidate their statehood and bring them closer to the EU’.¹⁰

A year after its launch, the EaP was slowly beginning to demonstrate its visibility for the partner countries: a number of concrete projects had received financial endorsement; the ENP/EaP budget for 2010–13 had increased by a third of a billion euro; and a string of meetings concerning inter-parliamentary and civil society activities were under way, along with negotiations on the new Association Agreements.¹¹ Could this suggest that the EaP may finally become the desirable and successful EU foreign policy needed for the neighbour-hood? Will the initiative be capable of regaining and revitalizing the ENP’s appeal in the region? Is it really a new opportunity for the neighbours, a sort of a ‘reset’ moment in their relations with the EU?

In order to address these and other questions, an extensive empirical investigation was conducted during 2008–10 under the aegis of the ESRC-funded project, ‘Europeanising or Securitising the “Outsiders”? Assessing the EU’s partnership-building approach with Eastern Europe’ (RES-061-25-0001).¹² The project focused on examining the ENP and EaP’s effectiveness in the neighbourhood, and on the difficulties associated with its implementation in the four East European countries - Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia.¹³ Over a hundred interviews with officials in Brussels and Strasbourg and across the eastern neighbourhood were conducted, in addition to comprehensive nationwide surveys, focus-groups and a study of school essays in the Eastern region.¹⁴ The members of the cabinet of the commissioner for enlargement and the ENP¹⁵ noted that taking stock of the ENP/EaP’s realization in the region and monitoring the extent of the acceptance of the policy by the partners has proved useful for the review of major instruments and EU actions in the eastern neighbourhood.

Our research, however, has revealed a rather mixed picture. On the one hand, the findings clearly point to a greater Europeanization of the general public, and growing knowledge of, and interest towards, the EU. Younger, educated and professional members of the East European societies evidently demonstrate stronger interest in or awareness of their western counterparts; whereas policy-makers and government officials generally welcome the opportunity of closer co-operation and economic assistance. On the other hand, this positive experience is counter-balanced by the increasing anxiety in relation to the choice the partner countries feel they have to make: a closer integration with the EU or with Russia? They also seem confused by the joint-ownership rhetoric, which appears to be asymmetrical and heavily dominated by EU priorities, and equally disheartened by the uncertainty of the finalite for their efforts and commitment to reform. The policy continues to be fraught with misconceptions and expectation gaps across the eastern border, still falling short of the desired credibility and leverage to facilitate reform in the region.¹⁶

This collection offers an analytical excursion into the realities and rhetoric of the EU and four partner countries, each aspiring to different treatment and end-products of co-operation, and each presenting a varied range of dilemmas and challenges for the EU. The present introduction will offer a general overview of the conceptual and practical limitations of the policies (ENP/EaP), stemming from a theoretical examination of policy documents and official discourse in the EU and Eastern Europe. It will then conduct the reader through the corpus of differences and expectations presented by individual case studies, and explain the nature of contributions to the volume by the teams of national researchers.

Conceptual and Practical Limitations of the ENP/EaP

New Wine in Old Wineskins?¹⁷

In his seminal article of 1996, Michael E. Smith raised a number of critical issues related to defining the nature of the relationship between the EU and the changing European order.¹⁸ He noted that one of the most striking and remarkable developments in the 1990s was a paradigm shift away from a ‘fixed set of boundaries’¹⁹ to a ‘politics of inclusion’, necessitated by the EU’s growing internal complexity and its interdependency with the outside world. In contrast to the ‘politics of exclusion’ which dominated much of the European Community’s existence, the new ‘politics of inclusion’, he argued, was seen as more advantageous for responding to radical changes of the new European order.²⁰ The core assumptions of the EU’s new politics directly challenged the traditional notions of statehood by viewing boundaries as more porous; of security which precipitated ‘a multilayered conception of political and security space’²¹ going well beyond the borders of Europe; of culture and identity, and finally of EU institutional and legal scaffolding requiring redefinition.

The ‘politics of inclusion’ demanded diversity of method and paths of development: it prioritized internalization of external disturbances over their containment, and sought to gain access to rather than control over its exterior. This has become known as a discourse of ‘negotiated order’, which amalgamated both exclusiveness and inclusiveness of the EU, making the latter a centre, a pole of attraction for its external milieu, and a ‘shaper of [the] normal’ in international relations.²² The EU’s centrality to its external environment offered a new social construction of order, premised on the politics of malleable boundaries, which are there ‘for crossing rather than defending’.²³ By ‘boundaries’ Smith implied distinct differences between sovereign subjects, which would demarcate insiders from the outsiders. He singled out four critical boundaries that would define a polity as unique: institutional and legal, transactional, geopolitical and cultural. Smith advocated the continuing re-drawing of boundaries by the EU, as they would help to shape the EU’s normative status and legitimate its strategies beyond its borders by positively transforming the realities affected by them. He clearly perceived EU boundaries as those that are necessary to shift and expand in order to ‘accommodate new political and other realities’²⁴ and to face the challenges associated with them.

In designing the neighbourhood policy, the EU in a way followed Smith’s argument of ‘inclusion’, which aimed to blur the differences between the insiders and the outsiders, without necessitating their amalgamation. In order to prevent new dividing lines that would emerge between a more prosperous Europe and its less stable ‘backyard’,²⁵ the EU sought to offer to the latter an inclusive policy of partnership - a kind of partnership that would push EU boundaries to the limits of interconnectedness by proffering political association and economic integration to the neighbourhood, but nevertheless would prevent neighbours’ physical accession to the EU: ‘to share everything with the Union but institutions’.²⁶ The notion of partnership was to be based on ‘shared values’, ‘common interests’ and ‘joint ownership’, whereby ‘the EU [would] not seek to impose priorities or conditions on its partners. There can be no question of asking partners to accept a pre-determined set of priorities’.²⁷ In an actual fact, the EaP went even further to make ‘a more ambitious partnership’ central to its relations with the neighbours.

In reality, however, this approach proved difficult to sustain. The notion of partnership devoid of a membership perspective caused a number of tensions, which have been widely analysed in scholarly literature.²⁸ Bechev and Nicolaidis argue the principal tensions, which may be hard to reconcile, include (i) hegemony versus partnership: embedding the asymmetry of EU power politics in the relations with neighbours from the start; (ii) conditionality versus ownership: questioning compatibility of the logic of coercion and order with that of cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Eastern Partnership Initiative: A New Opportunity for the Neighbours?
• 2. Contested Neighbourhood, or How to Reconcile the Differences
• 3. Ukraine and the Eastern Partnership: ‘Lost in Translation’?
• 4. Belarus in the Context of the Neighbourhood Policy: Between the EU and Russia
• 5. Moldova Under the European Neighbourhood Policy: ‘Falling Between Stools’
• 6. Russia–EU Relations, or How the Russians Really View the EU
• 7. Russia, the European Union, and the Lands Between
• 8. What is a ‘Neighbourhood?’
• Index