The European Union and Its Eastern Neighbourhood

Whither ‘Eastern Partnership’?

Andriy Tyushka, Tobias Schumacher, Andriy Tyushka, Tobias Schumacher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367538989
• eBook ISBN: 9781000483659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume brings together some of the most important scholarly perspectives – in the form of both journal article reprints and original contributions – on the structure and dynamics of the EU's multi-layered relations with its Eastern neighbours within the Eastern Partnership (EaP) framework and beyond.

In May 2019, the EU's EaP – an ambitious and sophisticated policy framework, conjoining elements of cooperation and integration, with the EU's six eastern neighbours, i.e. Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – turned ten years. This anniversary, in conjunction with repeatedly voiced critique by scholars and policy-makers alike regarding the framework's effectiveness and utility, led the EU to submit the EaP to a fundamental auditing and revision.

Structured around both enduring and emerging issues in the broader EU-Eastern neighbourhood framework, this book provides a retrospective analysis of key structural and relational challenges, unfolding regional dynamics, distinctive forms of bilateral/multilateral engagement, whilst also offering a critical perspective on the contested future relations between the EU and its Eastern neighbours. Looking backwards and providing a critical and thorough assessment of the first ten years of the EaP in practice, this book thinks forward and gauges its many potential future avenues. This comes at a crucial moment, as the EU and its six Eastern neighbours are in search of new and mutually acceptable forms of association.

Part I The EU’s Eastern Partnership and regional dynamics Enduring issues and contending perspectives

The European Union’s ‘Ideal Self’ in the Post-Soviet Space

Cristian Nitoiu

During the last two decades, one of the cornerstones of the foreign policy of the European Union (EU) has been represented by the development of a strong presence in its neighbourhood (Raik & Dinesen 2015). The 2003 Security Strategy¹ and the recent 2016 Global Strategy² highlighted the need to show that the EU can play a major role in the international arena by first establishing a strong presence in the neighbourhood and proving the union’s effectiveness in the region. This broad aim has been translated in various initiatives towards the neighbourhood such as the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP),³ the Eastern Partnership (EaP),⁴ and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM).⁵ As part of the European neighbourhood, the post-Soviet space has thus received significant attention from the EU, which aimed to shape both the domestic and foreign policies of the countries in the region. However, the EU’s track record of shaping developments in the post-Soviet space has been at best mixed (Ademmer 2015), given the reluctance of some post-Soviet states to go beyond rhetoric in adapting their policies as well as EU member states’ unwillingness and lack of commitment to fully support the union’s approach to the region (Nilsson & Silander 2016). EU overtures have also been received with scepticism by some post-Soviet states, which tend to see EU policy towards the region as deeply unilateral, asymmetrical, and without regard for the specificities or needs of each country (Delcour 2010). Most of the findings from the open literature refer to the EU’s ability to promote its integration project in the post-Soviet states, that is, the range of rules, norms, and regulations that characterise its governance system (Schimmelfennig & Scholtz 2008). Less scrutiny has been directed towards the way the EU’s identity in world politics has informed its approach towards the post-Soviet space, and how this identity has been perceived by the states in the region (Gstöhl & Schunz 2017).

The EU’s identity in world politics is even more complex than that of nation states. As an economy-driven project, the EU has also sought to achieve a united foreign policy that would underpin a strong presence in the international arena. The literature tends to point to the fact that the EU’s identity has been, to a large extent, shaped by its self-perception⁶ rather than by interactions with other states or the structure of world politics (Checkel & Katzenstein 2009). The most notable exception here is the United States, as its attempts to portray the EU as a normative, civilian cosmopolitan or ethical power have aimed to place it as both a key transatlantic partner and as a viable and strong alternative in world politics (Rynning & Jensen 2010).

This essay focuses on the role of the perceptions of the self (the ideal self) in world politics in order to analyse the EU’s approach towards the post-Soviet eastern neighbours (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine). Moreover, the essay examines how the states in the post-Soviet space perceive and interpret the EU’s identity, and explain why they share or reject various aspects of it. More specifically, it explains similarities and differences between the EU’s ideal self and the perceptions of the post-Soviet states regarding EU identity in world politics. In broad terms, the ideal self is the benchmark that states aspire to and against which their actions are judged. Moreover, it is one of the main drivers that informs how states should behave ideally in international relations, in this way constraining the range of national interests, foreign policy strategies, or decisions that policymakers can adopt.⁷ Thus, the concept of the ‘ideal self’ allows us to identify how the EU frames its ideal behaviour, policies, and influence in the post-Soviet space. Identifying the EU’s ideal self in the post-Soviet space allows this essay to examine the way in which it is shared or embraced by the post-Soviet states. Consequently, this essay makes a twofold contribution to the literature. On the one hand, it sheds light on the way ideal self-representation (that is, the ideal self) informs the foreign policies of international actors. On the other, it contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the post-Soviet space by examining the way in which the EU’s ideal self is perceived by the post-Soviet states and informs their own foreign policies.

The essay presents an overview based on a larger research project that looks in detail at the way the foreign policies of the post-Soviet states interpret the EU. As such, this essay does not provide in-depth analyses of individual states, but rather maps the way the ideal self of the EU is perceived by and reflected in the foreign policies of post-Soviet states. Nevertheless, the essay focuses on individual post-Soviet states in order to substantiate claims about how the EU’s ideal self is perceived in the region. More broadly, the validity of this approach is underlined by the fact that these states have faced similar challenges in developing their foreign policies in the post-Soviet era: they have had to balance between the interests of multiple powerful external actors (United States, Russia, EU), while the EU’s policies towards them have generally remained consistent (Boedeltje & van Houtum 2011; Beauguitte et al. 2015; Gnedina 2015). This approach also provides space for both comparisons between the post-Soviet states and a series of generalisable insights. This research uses official documents and statements, secondary data from media and academic reports, together with participant observations from interviews conducted with experts and policymakers between 2011 and 2016 in Brussels, London, Berlin, Moscow, and across the post-Soviet space. The essay proceeds by presenting the concept of the ideal self in the next section and then applying it to the EU’s approach towards the post-Soviet space. The following section evaluates how the EU’s ideal self is perceived by the countries in question and how these perceptions inform the different processes of foreign policymaking. The essay’s core argument—namely that which postulates that the post-Soviet states have an instrumental view of the EU in their foreign policies—can be explained both by how the EU’s ideal self is constructed and the traditional multi-vector foreign policies of the countries in the region. The last section outlines and discusses the findings of the essay.

Perceptions of the self (ideal self) in world politics

The identity of a state in world politics is conceptualised here as encompassing an intersubjective and a self-referential dimension. These two dimensions are inherently interlinked and inform each other. The intersubjective dimension draws on the constructivist approach to international relations, whereby interactions with other actors in the international arena play a key role in shaping states’ identities in world politics (Lebow 2008; Schoen 2008). In the same vein, interactions with the structure of international relations—primarily the ideas, rules, norms, and values that originate from this structure—share (as some would argue) equal weight in influencing a state’s identity (Zehfuss 2006). In this sense, the literature tends to point to various mechanisms through which the intersubjective character of identities is performed in practice: for example, socialisation, learning, and recognition (Checkel & Katzenstein 2009). Examining the intersubjective aspects of identity is important as it highlights how interactions in the international arena, with other states or various norms, rules, and processes, change state identities and behaviours in world politics (Nabers 2011). This essay is interested in the self-referential aspects of states’ identities in world politics. The main reason for the focus on self-referential aspects, as pointed out in the literature, is that the EU has been generally unresponsive to external pressures or realities when constructing its foreign policy in the last 25 years and has developed a narrative that, in many interpretations, seems devoid of political reality (Korosteleva 2016; Youngs 2017). While the intersubjective aspects are more outward-oriented, the self-referential ones are more inward-oriented and imply a greater openness on the part of the actor when it comes to the evolution of identity in world politics. The self-referential aspect (or the ideal self) is the narrative that states create in order to portray to other actors an idealised image of how they behave in and interpret international relations. Conversely, in this essay, the ideal self is also considered to serve, in broad terms, as a benchmark for states themselves. While the ideal self tends to be stable, changes appear due to long-term intersubjective aspects of identity that incrementally spill over and influence perceptions of the ideal self, or in the case of crisis or windows of opportunity where actors within the state have the ability or are forced to alter the narrative of the ideal self (Harnisch 2011).

In their ideal self-representation, states and other international actors perceive themselves as promoting (and embodying) a certain model or set of values. The ideal self sets the broad parameters within which a state’s foreign policy is formulated and executed. The ideal self also contains expectations regarding the roles that an actor should play in the international arena. More generally, according to Harnisch ‘roles are social positions (as well as a socially recognised category of actors) that are constituted by ego and alter expectations regarding the purpose of an actor in an organised group’ (Harnisch 2011, p. 8). Besides roles, the way international actors ascribe meanings, frame, and understand various key concepts in international relations—the international system, status in world politics, the nature of power, legitimacy, re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables, chart and figures
• Citation information
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: The European Union, its Eastern Neighbourhood and an Evolving Structured Engagement within and beyond the Eastern Partnership Framework
• Part I The EU’s Eastern Partnership and Regional Dynamics: Enduring Issues and Contending Perspectives
• 1 The European Union’s ‘Ideal Self’ in the Post-Soviet Space
• 2 Between the Eastern Partnership and Eurasian Integration: Explaining Post-Soviet Countries’ Engagement in (Competing) Region-Building Projects
• 3 “The transformative power of Europe” beyond enlargement: the EU’s performance in promoting democracy in its neighbourhood
• 4 The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Eastern Partnership
• 5 The Unintended Consequences of a European Neighbourhood Policy without Russia
• 6 Bringing “the political” back into European security: challenges to the EU’s ordering of the Eastern Partnership
• Part II The EU’s Bilateral Engagement with Eastern Neighbours: A Growing Menu of Choice
• 7 State building and European integration in Ukraine
• 8 When Goliath meets Goliath: how Russia and the EU created a vicious circle of instability in Moldova
• 9 The Politics of Flexibility: Exploring the Contested Statehood–EU Actorness Nexus in Georgia
• 10 Armenia and Belarus: caught between the EU’s and Russia’s conditionalities?
• 11 The European Union and Belarus: democracy promotion by technocratic means?
• 12 From ‘Unilateral’ to ‘Dialogical’: Determinants of EU–Azerbaijan Negotiations
• Part III Looking Backward: The EU, the Eastern Neighbours and the ‘Eastern Partnership’ a Decade Past
• 13 Looking Backward: Deliverables and Drawbacks of the Eastern Partnership during 2009–2020
• Conclusion: The EU and its Eastern Neighbourhood – whither ‘Eastern Partnership’?
• Annexes
• Annex 1 Content Analysing the Joint Declarations of the Eastern Partnership Summits in 2009–2017
• Annex 2 Studying EU-Eastern Neighbours Relations Within and Beyond the Eastern Partnership in 2009–2020: A Bibliometric Perspective
• Index