1 Introduction
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was initially intended to create what the former president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, called âa ring of friends surrounding the Union, from Morocco to Russia and the Black Seaâ (Prodi 2002). Today, however, the ever-worsening security situation in the region clearly shows that the aim has not been achieved. With wars and instability in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya, the Unionâs neighbourhood can therefore better be described as âa ring of fireâ. Does this means that the policy has failed and that an alternative policy towards the European Unionâs (EUâs) neighbours is needed? Or should these developments be seen as temporary setbacks caused by external factors beyond EU control? By comparing the EUâs approach to its eastern and southern neighbours, this volume seeks to answer such overarching questions. We find that the EU still has a potential role to play in providing regional security, but that this role also risks being increasingly undermined if it does not start to take into account the broader geostrategic realities in both regions.
The EU has been engaged in promoting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in its eastern and southern neighbourhoods since the 1990s. The approaches in the two regions have differed but have always been presented as instruments for stability. The underlying assumption is that there is a positive relationship between greater economic (and political) integration, on the one hand, and security on the otherâa logic central to the European integration process since the 1950s, and also the main reason behind the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU in 2012. While conditionality has been an important mechanism in the EUâs policy towards its neighbourhood, practice has varied. For instance, this policy has been most successful for candidate and potential candidate countries in the east, where prospects of full EU membership have been an important element. In this book, we ask how does this approach function also beyond these categories of countries, throughout the regions covered by the âEuropean Neighbourhoodâ Policy? While most studies have investigated the EUâs relations with partner countries in either the eastern or the southern neighbourhood, the chapters in this volume compare EUâs policy towards a selection of countries in both regions.
As the policy has been increasingly challenged in both regions since 2010, the EU has started a process of revising this policy. While the first revision was made in response to the Arab Spring in 2011 (European Commission/HR Foreign and Security Policy 2011), the second was done in response to the crisis in Ukraine and the migration crisis (European Commission/HR Foreign and Security Policy 2015). The recent fighting between Russian-supported separatists and Ukrainian government troops in the eastern part of Ukraine, as well as the conflicts in Syria and Libya to the south, with the fight against Daech or ISIS leading to massive numbers of refugees, shows clearly that the Unionâs neighbourhood is far from stable. The dramatic deterioration of the security situation makes it increasingly important to understand more about the functioning (or malfunctioning) of this policy from the EU side (Tocci 2014). Is the ENP equipped to meet the security challenges in the region today? What are the limits of this policy? And what is the potential for such a policy to succeed?
Much has been written about the ENP (see, e.g. Bosse 2007; Börzel and van HĂŒllen 2014; Dannreuther 2006; Freyburg et al. 2009; Kelly 2006; Lavanex 2004; Whitman and Juncos 2012). The recent and comprehensive volume edited by Whitman and Wolff (2012), for instance, offers a useful overview of the empirical aspects of this policy and some theoretical implications. What has been lacking, however, is systematic comparison of the implementation and impact in various ENP countries, in the east and in the south, to indicate what went wrong and why. This edited volume seeks to fill that gap.
Our ambition is to provide a better understanding of the functioning of the ENPâa specific regional policy developed on the model of EU enlargement process and also promoted as a policy that potentially might replace this process as the EUâs major instrument of security policy. Whereas Whitman and Wolff (2012) argue that the ENP has failed due to lack of substantial incentives like clear prospects of membership, the contributions to this book critically examine the widely held belief that the enlargement model is the best way of building a security community in these regions.
Our point of departure is the argument that successful integration between the EU and the neighbouring countries is a (pre)condition for successful security community-building in the southern and the eastern neighbourhoods. However, it has never been made clear exactly what kind of âintegrationâ is meant, or what the criteria for success would be. Does integration mean adaptation to the EU acquis, as required of the eastern partner countries? Or does it mean alignment to ENP norms, which has been the requirement practised for the southern partner countries? Or is it something in between? By comparing the EUâs policy towards its membership-aspiring eastern partners with its policy towards the southern partners where membership is not an issue and the focus has been on alignment to ENP norms rather than of adaptation to EU acquis, we may shed light on some little-recognized aspects of this policy.
This volume investigates the policy of the EU as such and provides less attention to the different views of the member states concerning the future of the ENP. While being aware of the fact that the EU members differ concerning how the ENP should develop, this book limits its analysis to the EU policy and the extent to which it actually contributes to security community-building in Europe.
Thus, this introductory chapter builds on the literature on security communities and tries to identify some necessary conditions for successful European security community-building. The argument is that the recent challenges and setbacks in the southern and in the eastern neighbourhoods are linked to the failure to meet one or more of these conditions in the EUâs relations to the individual ENP country. First, however, some background about the ENP.
2 What Is the ENP?
The ENP was developed in 2004, mainly to create a âring of friendsâ around the eastern and southern peripheries of the enlarged EU by incorporating the non-members into an EU-led economic region. The ENP presented a framework for developing new types of integration arrangements with the whole range of neighbourhood countriesâarrangements short of enlargement but beyond the association or cooperation templates then in place. The ENP covers a diverse group of 16 countries in total: Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, Tunisia, and Ukraine. Central to the ENP are the action plans and road maps which set out an agenda of political and economic reforms with short- and medium-term priorities, three to five years at a time. These documents build upon pre-existing agreements between the EU and the partner in question, such as Partnership and Cooperation Agreements (PCA) or Association Agreements (AA), but are more ambitious, offering political association and deeper economic integration, increased mobility, and more people-to-people contacts.
Within the ENP, the EU offers its neighbours a privileged relationship, based on a mutual commitment to common values such as democracy and human rights, rule of law, good governance, market economy principles, and sustainable development. How ambitious the relationship becomes will depend on the extent to which these rules and values are in fact shared. As Ć tefan FĂŒle, former commissioner for Enlargement and ENP, put it, âOur Neighbourhood Policy provides us with a coherent approach that ensures that the whole of the EU is committed to deeper relations with all our neighbours. At the same time, it allows us to develop tailor-made relations with each countryâ (FĂŒle 2010). Even though the intention is to be active towards all the ENP countries, the policy has not yet been fully activated for countries such as Algeria, Belarus, Libya, and Syria. Of the partner countries where the ENP is active, the agreements between the EU and Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia in the east and Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan in the south are especially worth noting. The other ENP countries are still far from these countriesâ level of cooperation/integration, either because they lack the political willingness or are not yet in accordance with the criteria set by the EU. While the ENP is primarily a bilateral policy between the EU and each partner country, it is also complemented by regional and multilateral cooperation initiatives, such as the Eastern Partnership (EAP) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), both launched in 2008. The former has become the main instrument for achieving the objectives of the ENP; the latter is more an initiative intended to give new impetus to the 1994 Barcelona Process.
3 Regional Integration and Security Community-Building
3.1 The EU as a Regional Security Actor
There is a sizeable literature on whether the EU is a global actor, and what kind of actor it is (see for instance: Bretherton and Vogler 2006; McCormick 2007; Moravcsik 2010). Oddly enough, much less has been written about the EU as a regional power or an institution for building a security community in its neighbourhood. While it may be questioned whether the EU member states are actually committed to building such a well-functioning security community in their neighbourhood, this was at least the stated ambition when the ENP was established in 2004.
The concept of âsecurity communityâ was developed in the 1950s by Karl Deutsch, who saw it as a form of international cooperation that, under certain circumstances, also could lead to integration (Deutsch 1957). He also argued that a security community was formed by participating actors when their people, and their political elites in particular, shared stable expectations of peace in the present and for the future. Later, in 1998, Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnettâs edited volume, Security Communities, investigated the development of such communities in various regions and historical periods (Adler and Barnett 1998). In his chapter on Europe in the work by Adler and Barnett, Ole WĂŠver states that Western Europe is a security community and adds that it has developed through processes of âdesecuritizationâ (WĂŠver 1998). However, both in this chapter and in later work, WĂŠver says surprisingly little about the potential of the EU as an institution for building security communities beyond its borders. In Regions and Powers (Buzan and WĂŠver 2004), he argues, together with Barry Buzan, that Europe must be understood as a Regional Security Complex with the integration process at its core. The argument is that security is ensured by th...
